After the Deluge

from Capitalism to Mutual Aid

Watching the Vice Presidential debate last night, and reading reports of the devastating flooding in North Carolina, Poland, and other parts of the world, I am reminded, once again, that the current system is on its deathbed. We need a radical alternative. In what follows, I want to explore what that is, from my perspective. I also have ideas on how we can enact it.

While researching How Soon Is Now: From Personal Initiation to Global Transformation (2016), I realized the political and economic systems are not separate things. I see them, instead, as completely meshed together. Our current form of hyper-individualized, entrepreneurial Capitalism is directly linked to the liberal nation-state that evolved after the revolutions of the 18th Century. The modern State gave people a limited form of participation through elections. We shifted from feudal monarchies and aristocracies — similar to autocracies and Right Wing dictatorships, but with flouncier clothes and fancier rhetoric — to systems that respond better, albeit imperfectly, to the popular will.

Because the level of chaos in the world is intensifying, while the promise of material progress is receding for many people, we see a shift back toward authoritarian leadership or dictatorship in many countries. Out of fear, many people seek a “strong man” to defend their private interests. This is, I would say, a short term solution, at best. What, then, is the long-term solution?

What makes my work as a communicator difficult is that I conceive of many factors of our situation as totally meshed together. This includes how we handle our material resources; how we understand the nature of reality (ontology); how we conceive of love, family, community; how we educate people; and so on. I tend to believe we need a profound shift in civilizational paradigm, which will transform all of those areas, to avert social breakdown and eventual extinction.

Personally, I am persuaded by the anarchist models of mutualism, mutual aid, and social ecology found in thinkers like Murray Bookchin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Peter Kropotkin. I also love Oscar Wilde’s essay, The Soul of Man Under Socialism, which I find shockingly relevant to our present moment, when we consider the potential of Artificial Intelligence to eliminate many forms of human labor. Over a century ago, Wilde proposed, we need machines to eliminate human drudgery. This will allow people to pursue their true purpose, which he called “cultivated leisure.” AI might kill us all, but if it doesn’t, it makes this conceivable.

I believe we are approaching a threshold where we will be forced to abandon our belief in Capitalism and private accumulation of wealth as the way we organize society. I realize this ideology is so entrenched that many people will prefer to defend it to the death. I think near-term extinction is entirely possible. If we don’t bring about our annihilation, the next social system will be rooted in different ideals and principles, particularly, social ecology and mutualism.

Our current Capitalist system requires constant growth and development to pay back debts. On a planet that is running out of finite resources, growth is no longer possible. Adding on to this is the economic impact of super-storms and other natural disasters which increase in frequency, year by year. Even if we were to stop putting CO2 into the atmosphere today, we will still see warming increase over the next decades. And in fact, CO2 levels are still rising quickly, as many environmental feedback loops engage, increasing the dangers we face.

This means we will continue to have more — and worse — hurricanes, droughts, and so on. This will also lead to increasing numbers of refugees, and failed states. Ironically, since Gross Domestic Product (GDP) refers to the total amount of financial transactions with no relationship to the longterm health or capacity of the Earth to sustain life, GDP can keep going up for a time, while the level of material wealth degrades. The most severe threat will be shortages of food and fresh water, which many developing countries are already facing.

Soon, we will be unable to hide the stark reality of systemic failure we are facing collectively. It won’t matter if our government, on a federal level, is run by smooth-talking sociopaths like Vance or avuncular “regular Joes” like Walz. Our current economic system, as a whole, is doomed. Our economic model is also linked to various ideological constructs — such as hyper-individualism, libertarianism, and consumerism — destined to fall along with it.

Let’s consider, for example, the economic impact of Hurricane Helene. According to Fox Business News, current estimates of the economic damage caused by Hurricane Helene range between $20 billion to $34 billion. This makes it one of the costliest hurricanes in U.S. history. Property damage alone is estimated at $15 billion and $26 billion, while lost economic output from disruptions like school and office closures adds another $5 billion to $8 billion. These billions upon billions upon billions eventually add up to a somewhat significant sum — and this is just what is required to restore what has been lost, in this one instance.

These kinds of “once in five hundred year” superstorms have become annual events. Eventually, we will see a failure of the insurance industry, as is already happening in Florida, where many insurance companies will no longer insure coastal dwellings. Insurance is one of the underlying pillars of the economic system as a whole. When people cannot get insurance policies for their homes, it amplifies the insecurity and the accelerates the breakdown of the current system.

Because they are puppets whose strings are pulled by the fossil fuel companies, Republicans still won’t admit that global warming — accelerated climate change — is caused by human industry and CO2 emissions, even though the science is unshakable. During last night’s debate, JD Vance maintained skepticism about the scientific consensus on climate change, referring to it as "weird science." He questioned the idea that carbon emissions drive climate change, stating, "Let’s just say that’s true, just for the sake of argument.” As Vance lied his way through the debate, I felt almost sorry for him. It is pathetic to want power to such a degree that you will use your intelligence to sell out humanity’s future and that of the Earth, only to be Donald Trump’s lackey.

Perhaps I am wrong, but I sense the rejection of basic sense, fact-based logic, and compassion we find in Vance, Trump, and other Republicans cannot go on for much longer. The entire edifice is already sinking and may collapse at some point.  I wrote, a while back, on the generally unacknowledged pleasure, the dark jouissance, of purposefully doing evil: “Villains will continue their wickedness and cruelty as long as they get away with it. They will keep upping the stakes because they get off on it. The pleasure they receive from cheating the system or inflicting harm is psychologically addictive. Like all addictions, it requires bigger hits over time to get the same dopamine release.” I find this in the Right’s ongoing cascade toward Fascism, which requires demonizing minorities, controlling women’s bodies, and so on.

I realize it is difficult to imagine a world without ownership or private property, which we have come to associate with patriotism, “individuality,” and “freedom.” But in fact, indigenous and nomadic societies lived without any concept of private property for tens of thousands of years, and they lived much freer lives than we do, in many respects. They did have the concept of something like “usufruct,” which means that people have the right to continue to use something in their possession as long as they keep using it productively. That makes sense.

Wilde wrote: “With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”

In The Conquest of Bread, Kropotkin wrote:

The abolition of private property and the institution of collective ownership is not simply a matter of justice—it is a matter of necessity. The resources of the earth are abundant enough to provide for all, and it is only the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few that has led to the artificial scarcity that we see today. In a society based on mutual aid and cooperation, the goods of the earth will be freely available to all, and the artificial distinctions between rich and poor will be abolished forever.

In The Ecology of Freedom, Murray Bookchin declared that we need to end the “private ownership of the planet by elite strata” if we want to survive. He proposed, as an alternative, establishing “a fully participatory society literally free of privilege and domination.” Bookchin expressed suspicion of partial “solutions to the ecological crisis, like green consumerism, renewable energy, or carbon taxation.” He believed these reformist initiatives only concealed the deep-seated nature of the crisis, and “thereby deflect public attention and theoretical insight from an adequate understanding of the depth and scope of the necessary change.” I remembered Bookchin’s ideas during Climate Week, where government officials, tech entrepreneurs and financiers played the tired old game of pretending that innovation and market mechanisms can save us from ruin.

What can we do instead? That was the core question I explored in How Soon Is Now. I will explore my answer in subsequent essays, as this has gotten long.

Do you agree that Capitalism is a moribund system, destined to fail, and we should get to work designing an alternative based on principles of social ecology and mutual aid? How do you imagine this would work, in practice? How can we “deprogram” people from their fixed beliefs in the current system?

Or perhaps you have a totally different idea of what we should do?

Let’s discuss in the comments.