End Capitalism to Save the Earth?

Shall we try it?

A regenerative urban future vision, courtesy of AI

It is rare, these days, for people to openly denounce Capitalism or to stridently reject Neoliberalism as the underlying cause of the ecological emergency and the reason we have the barbaric extremes of wealth inequality and injustice that make American society, particularly, close to unbearable. It seems people have been indoctrinated and “over-swarmed” to the point where they simply can’t be bothered to think about any of this. That is my experience, anyway. Let me know yours in the comments.

I was reminded of this while reading Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger where she writes:

After two and half decades of covering the crimes of our oligarchic elites, I go through periods when the impunity of it all gets the better of me. The sweatshops and oil spills. The Iraq invasion. The 2008 financial crisis. The coups that threw a generation of idealists out of helicopters in Latin America. Washington’s coordinated attack on Russia’s nascent post-Soviet democracy that created the oligarchs and paved the way for Vladimir Putin. I simply cannot bear what these people have been able to get away with. No one paid. Everyone gets a reputational rebrand. Henry Kissinger keeps advising presidents. Dick Cheney is hailed as a reasonable Republican. Robert Rubin, one of the men who personally helped inflate the derivatives bubble that melted down the global economy in 2008, now gives advice about how we can’t move too fast to prevent catastrophic climate change. My throat constricts. My breath becomes shallow. On bad days, I feel like I might explode. Impunity can drive a person mad. Maybe it can drive a whole society mad.

To prepare for Building Our Regenerative Future (which starts tomorrow - please sign up here), I have been reviewing books I am grateful for, such as Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Buckminster Fuller’s Operation Spaceship Earth, Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, and Clive Hamilton’s Requiem for a Species. I’ve also been reading Ben Taroff’s Internet for the People, an excellent new book on how the privatization of the Internet impacted all of us. Taroff writes:

The internet started out in the 1970s as an experimental technology created by US military researchers. In the 1980s, it grew into a government-owned computer network used primarily by academics. Then, in the 1990s, privatization began. The privatization of the internet was a process, not an event. It did not involve a simple transfer of ownership from the public sector to the private but rather a more complex movement whereby corporations programmed the profit motive into every level of the network. A system built by scientists was renovated for the purpose of profit maximization. This took hardware, software, legislation, entrepreneurship. It took decades. And it touched all of the internet’s many pieces…

In the 1970s, the government invented the universal language of the internet. In the 1980s, it made this language the basis of a cutting-edge communications system and spent heavily on plugging more people into it. Thanks to this avalanche of public cash, the internet became widely available to American researchers by the end of the 1980s. Then, in the following decade, this internet abruptly died, and a different one appeared—one we would recognize today. The 1990s is when the internet became a business. The government ceded the pipes to a handful of corporations while asking nothing in return.

This is one of the most important stories of our time. Most people are not even aware of it at this point. The enormous wealth of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sergei Brin, and so on, stems from this completely negligent privatization of the commons. I haven’t finished Taroff’s book yet. He argues for a movement back in the other direction, toward “deprivatization,” and outlines how we could make this transition.

As I survey the calamitous ecological projections yet again, I find myself toggling back toward radicalism: For our collective survival, we need to transition to a new social design, based in direct democracy and participatory socialism (I prefer anarchism, but it might take a while to get there), where the State guarantees everyone what Bastani calls Universal Basic Services (UBS) such as food and shelter. As Oscar Wilde noted, “The State is to be a voluntary association that will organize labor, and be the manufacturer and distributor of necessary commodities. The State is to make what is useful. The individual is to make what is beautiful.”

Writing in the 1890s, Wilde was very prescient about the potential of machines to alleviate, eventually, all forms of drudgery. With AI and robotics, Wilde’s vision is now tangibly available:

There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labor at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labor are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such… All unintellectual labor, all monotonous, dull labor, all labor that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure—which, and not labor, is the aim of man—or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work.

I have no idea how this radical shift could take place, particularly at a time when, as I mentioned, people seem utterly discombobulated, indoctrinated and conditioned by hyper-predatory Capitalism and its deceptions, and when we live under an invasive regime of corporate control and technopoly. However, strangely, the possibility of this alternative has never been closer to us, even as it seems farther and farther away.

In Doppelgänger, Klein shows how our murky conspiracy culture fills the void left by the absence of a truly systemic critique, satisfying people’s biases. On the plus side, people know they are being robbed and their future forfeited to parasitic interests. Unfortunately, grifters like Steve Bannon and Naomi Wolf misdirect their rage and frustration in order to profit off them. One problem with the human mind is that it easily gets trapped by rhetorical and ideological structures that then make it difficult to think clearly and coherently. Once we have identified with a particular team or one side or an idea, we tend to stick with that identification.

In Requiem for a Species (2010), Hamilton already realized we were not going to interrupt CO2 emissions to prevent a catastrophic two degrees Celsius rise over pre-industrial temperatures. We are now looking at three to five degrees warmer temperatures by the end of this century — and emissions have not been curtailed. Hamilton writes:

In the twenty-first century, climate disruption will increasingly push all utopian visions and ideological disputes into the background. Abandoning the pursuit of utopias, including the last great utopian vision of endless growth, our task will be to avoid a dystopia…

Climate change represents a failure of modern politics. Elected government should execute the people’s will yet, in this greatest threat to our future, governments around the world have not represented the interests of the people but have allowed themselves to be held in the thrall of a powerful group of energy companies and the ideology of growth fetishism they embody…

If it is too late to prevent climate disruption there is still much we can influence. Any success in reducing emissions is better than doing nothing, because warming and its effects can at least be slowed down. Resisting those who want to capitulate is a fight worth having. And we can begin preparing for the impacts of climate disruption not by self-protection but by vigorous political engagement aimed at collectively building democracies that can ensure the best defences against a more hostile climate, ones that do not abandon the poor and vulnerable to their fate while those who are able to buy their way out of the crisis do so for as long as they can. For we should remember that once the dramatic implications of the climate crisis are recognised by the powerful as a threat to themselves and their children they will, unless resisted, impose their own solutions on the rest of us, ones that will protect their interests and exacerbate unequal access to the means of survival, leaving the weak to fend for themselves. This is how it has always been. We must democratize survivability.

I am not, actually, “anti-Capitalist,” “anti-Neoliberalism,” or anti-anything. I tend to see historical and social processes as inevitable. The rapid rise of industrial and post-industrial civilization over the last centuries seems, to me, an evolutionary process that was going to occur at some point. This led to hyper-consumerism, hyper-individualism, and hyper-financialization: Transitional expressions of this social system as it mutates according to its own internal logic, before reaching its evolutionary cul-de-sac.

As I noted last time, I am fascinated by the idea that what is actually going on is a kind of initiatory threshold or birthing crisis that could catalyze the emergence of humanity’s next expression: The existential, planetary crisis we have unleashed could be the precondition for a collective awakening — a “cosmic trigger,” if you will.

Another book I have been peeking at is The Economics of Arrival by Katherine Trebeck and Jeremy Williams, with an introduction from Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economics. The authors make a very simple point which I have also often considered: Modern, developed societies have reached a kind of maturity where a basic level of material satisfaction, medical care, and so on, could be guaranteed to all. Once this is achieved, the authors propose, as a goal, to extend the “economics of Arrival” to everyone, worldwide:

The idea of Arrival does not imply that all problems are solved. It does not suggest that everything is resolved and everyone has what they need. Rather, it is the idea that a society collectively has the means for this. Growth has reached a point at which a decent standard of living could, theoretically, be universal. It is a possibility, not a promise. We’re using a journey metaphor, but you could also consider Arrival to be a process of maturing or reaching full size. What does the economy want to be when it grows up?

As part of the Western capitalist “game,” we are enmeshed in the entrepreneurial mindset that demands constant innovation, change, and development — we are supposed to always seek something new, waiting to be destabilized by the next glitzy techno-shock. There is something very external, inorganic, about this. The shocks have become repetitive, dissatisfying. Reconstructing local, organic communities might provide a different kind of initiatory shock, a much healthier one.

If we anchored this idea of an Arrival Economy, found our way to a form of participatory socialism, “deprivatized” the Internet so we could use it as a dashboard for authentic connection, democratic cooperation, and mutual aid, we might find ourselves reaching a much superior quality of life, even in a period of deepening resource constraints. Obviously, the obstacles to this — plutocracy, technopoly, oligarchy — are severe. Still, it feels good, at least, to envision a sensible direction.