Thread by @caitoz

The Unspoken Premise Of Modern Capitalism Is That The World Will Be Saved By Greedy Tech Oligarchs

"The plutocratic class are not good custodians of our world. They are not good people. They are not wise. They are not even particularly intelligent."
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-unspoken…

Psychopathic neocon Nikki Haley is greasing the wheels for her 2024 presidential campaign by screaming that America has been taken over by socialism.

https://twitter.com/NikkiHaley/status/1343607059569401856?s=20

Ah yes, America. The country where Republicans spend all day screaming that socialism is happening and Democrats spend all day making sure it never does.

We live on a finite planet of finite resources with a finite ecosystem that has a finite capacity to absorb punishment without becoming uninhabitable. Science tells us we are fast approaching the breaking point. Could be a few decades, could be way sooner.
consortiumnews.com/2019/07/24/onl…

Capitalism, the predominant driving force of human behavior in our world right now, offers exactly two potential solutions to this dilemma.

Which means the only answer capitalism has for the plight of our species is the belief that the world is about to be saved, any minute now, by a handful of union-busting tech billionaires who choose every single day not to use their vast fortunes to end world hunger.

I should clarify that what I mean by capitalism is the current system dominating our world today wherein human behavior is driven as a whole by the pursuit of capital. The current system of profit-seeking and competition as the primary determining factor of what humans do here.

Profit-chasing as the driving factor in human behavior is what got us here. As long as it remains profitable to destroy the environment and human behavior is driven by profit, then humans will continue destroying the environment. Inevitably. This will have to happen.

So, again, the only argument for continuing capitalism is the belief that some anti-union plutocrat like Elon Musk is going to promote new technologies which make it unprofitable for any humans to destroy the environment, and do so quickly enough to evert ecological disaster.

The plutocratic class are not good custodians of our world. They are not good people. They are not wise. They are not even particularly intelligent. They're just a very profitable sort of clever, and have a willingness to crush anyone who gets in their way.

We're never going to compete and consume our way out of the existential crisis we've competed and consumed our way into. Capitalism will never make it more profitable to leave a tree standing than to cut it down, to leave fuel sources in the ground rather than dig them up.

The only way humanity survives the looming existential threats of ecological collapse and nuclear war it now faces is if it radically transforms from a competition-based model to a collaboration-based model.

Even if you want to make the extremely debatable claim that socialism has failed everywhere it's been tried, an earnest reckoning with our situation will force you to admit that capitalism has failed too.

Our system of insatiable profit-seeking to the detriment of our world has led us to the brink of extinction, which is as spectacular a failure as any system could possibly manage. How much of a failure is a system that gets everyone killed? All of it. All the fail.

So it's kind of a nonsensical position to argue that a movement away from competition and profit-seeking is untenable because it's never been done before, because our current disastrous situation is the direct result of everything we have already tried.

Everything we've done led us to this point. If we are to survive as a species, we're necessarily going to have to do something that is entirely unprecedented. We're going to have to transcend our old patterning and do something completely new.

A world where human behavior is driven by collaboration in the interests of humanity and our ecosystem instead of competition and profit seeking would indeed be wildly unprecedented. Our current crisis is itself also wildly unprecedented. This is evolve-or-die time.

We are living in unprecedented times, and unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures. We need to stop clinging to our old failed ways of doing things and find the courage to step into an entirely new way of being.