Print this post.Note: This builds upon some of the compelling points that Tesha Miller, Xavier Otero, Wolf Lacey and other people have made on this Facebook thread.
CAPITALISM HAS OUTLIVED ITS USEFULNESS
BY PATRICE GREANVILLE
BY PATRICE GREANVILLE
Hardly hyperbole any longer.
Hard as it may be for Americans to stomach—born and bred in a culture that reveres individualism and “free enterprise”—there will be no peace and justice and no respect for animals, nature and the planet until we get rid of capitalism as the chief socioeconomic paradigm not only in this nation but around the world. Sounds difficult if not impossible? It is. But it’s also indispensable. It’s either that, or civilization, and much of the natural world, as we know it, will die.
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Capitalism as a historical system has more than spent its original welcome. At one point, when it replaced feudalism, it signified a broader enfranchisement for many (chiefly the rising merchant middle class–the “bourgeois”); it introduced the idea of republican democratic government (but not the practice); pushed the churches back and sometimes out of government altogether (as in France and US), and secured other improvements over the old model. In that sense, as a younger system, and for a relatively short period of time, it had a balance sheet with more pluses than minuses.
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But the dynamics of all social arrangements follow inexorably the weight of their power distributions, and capitalism was born profoundly unequal, albeit from the start hiding that ugly fact behind an elaborate curtain of semi-conscious propaganda (it has since become fully conscious, professional, and far more cynical).
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With the new breed of industrialists, bankers, and merchants at the helm, capitalism soon began to show its toxic features. For one thing, as mentioned above, despite the French and American revolutions’ glorious refrains, it was never a system that meant to insure true freedom, equality, or, least of all, fraternity for all, since it quickly embraced the old order’s deep class divisions as the norm, with all their awful consequences. I won’t belabor the point because I’m sure everyone here knows the rest of the sorry story—the constant wars, the deepening inequality, the disintegration of the remnants of communalism (one of the few things that the old world had over the new) and the long and difficult uphill struggle of workers, women, African people, and other races and sectors of society to gain a foothold in the “promised land”— a struggle that is by no means finished, and which may have been restarted in earnest by the world plutocracy when Ronnie Reagan and his “merry freemarketers” rode into town in 1980.
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So I won’t bore you with more details, but let’s mention just one central thing that dooms capitalism as a viable matrix for humanity’s and the world’s future: Capitalism is on a clear and incorrigible collision course with nature. (For more on this, see Joel Kovel’s The Enemy of Nature)
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Some of you may immediately think, well, the “commies” did a pretty lousy job themselves of caring for the environment, and, yes, if by “communism” or “socialism” we understand the systems that Russia and China and other nations had for most of the 20th century (China still claims to be communist), you’d be formally right, so why then must we single out capitalism for opprobrium when there is “no alternative”?
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This is not the place to discuss at length (as it must be discussed) a topic as loaded with propaganda, prejudice, and ignorance as the real history of the capitalist and non-capitalist nations, and their relative superiority or inferiority, but suffice it to say that while socialist nations—operating in a historical context of constant attack by the much more powerful, older, and richer capitalist nations, an assault that eventually deformed them beyond recognition of their own original blueprints—did indeed commit many environmental atrocities, they did so mostly as a result of external war and strategic pressures, while the capitalist nations did so as a result of capitalism’s core dynamic of always putting profits ahead of everything else. The outcomes may seem terribly similar, but the historical contexts are different. In the socialist case we may speak of homicide or manslaughter. In the case of capitalism, we speak of murder.
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SELFISHNESS MAKES THE CAPITALIST WORLD GO ROUND
In capitalism, selfishness rules; in socialism, it doesn’t. Now, why does this matter? Because capitalism doesn’t only have selfishness and the Darwinian jungle as its main engine, (denials to the contrary) which is bad enough. It’s also a system that—like a voracious cancer— seeks to constantly expand—ad infinitum, until it devours its host. Anyone honest enough and with a passing knowledge of the sociology of capitalism (the corporate suite, etc.) knows that modern executives live and die by the mantra of perennial growth. Politicians, media prostitutes, willful ignoramuses, and battalions of other systemic apologists of course repeat the same nonsense because that’s the social paradigm that rules this nation (and most of the world now), and people, wittingly or unwittingly, accept it as a given. Plus, no one ever told the truth when his job depended on not telling it.
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But think of it for a moment: how can you ever have a stable —let alone globally healthy—system if you choose one that seeks with ever increasing ferocity (given the impact of industrial methods) to grow nonstop on a very finite and in some places already utterly devastated planet? It doesn’t add up because it defies logic. The relentless growth dynamic of capitalism is not a passing whim of an executive generation; it’s part of its unbendable, non-negotiable nature. The obsession with growth reveals capitalism’s carefully hidden insanity and, for all the conceits about organization and efficiency, its underlying irrationality. Any other system you can conjure up (leaving fascism aside, which is capitalism’s bastard and monstrous child) doesn’t have to have that kind of lethal trait.
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I do not speak as an idealist, but as a realist contemplating the current situation.
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SEEK RADICAL SOLUTIONS
One last thing in a post already much too long (for which I hope you will forgive me). Some people are afraid of “radical” solutions. It makes them uncomfortable. The word strikes something akin to fear in their hearts. A little clarification is in order.
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“Radical”, “socialism”, and “radicalism” are terms that have been criminalized in America by the folks (and their retainers) who brought you this wonderful status quo. But ‘radical” is an honorable word. And just like the local public library, emergency room, fire department, and even the police, are socialist institutions in our midst, most GOOD doctors are—in practice— radicals. They have to be, or else they’d be killing more patients than they already do ( just joking, folks )…
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First of all, radical is not the same as “extremist”, another loaded word that has so many interpretations—all of them biased and subjective—as to be almost useless. As Churchill himself might have said, someone’s “extremist” is probably another’s “freedom fighter.”
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So what is “radical”? Just someone who goes to the root of a problem. Defenders of the status quo hate radicals because radicals are not appeased with cosmetic reforms that leave the disease festering or raging underneath. Consider the following parable:
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A man with syphilis is seeking a doctor.
He first goes to see a “Conservative” doctor. The man examines him and pronounces him well, in no need of any medicine or special regime. “Go about your business,” he says. “What you got is not serious and the lesions will disappear in a short time.”
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Time passes and the man gets only worse. He now goes to see a “Liberal” doctor. The liberal doctor examines him, and wails in despair. “My God,” he says, “I feel your pain. You got Syphilis! These chancres show that the disease has made serious progress. We gotta do something at once.” He gives the patient a pomade to apply to each lesion, and some aspirins to take in case pain manifests itself. He sends him home with no further instructions.
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Time passes and the pomade, of course, doesn’t have any real curative effect because the disease is in the blood, in the deeper tissues and organs. And the aspirin, well, you figure that one out.
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Disheartened, the patient again sets out in search of a good doctor. This time he finds a radical doctor. The radical doctor examines the man, runs a blood and other tests and immediately diagnoses him correctly. “You got first stage syphilis,” he informs him. “It’s a disease in your blood, caused by a microbe—an organism we can destroy with penicillin, an antibiotic.” He proceeds to inject him at once, sketching out a program for further treatment. In a few weeks, the patient is on his way to a complete cure.
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So there you have it. The radical doctor went to the root cause of the disease and cured it, for only by dealing with the actual causes of a disease—whether it be social or organic—can we ever hope to get rid of the symptoms it’s generating.
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If you were gravelly ill, which doctor would you choose?
—Addison (Patrice Greanville)
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PD/ Those of you who haven’t read ANTHONY MARR: The Methane Bomb Will Wipe Out All Life as We Know it, would be well advised to do so.
Also, if you still have some energy:
ALBERT EINSTEIN: Why Socialism?
https://www.greanvillepost.com/?p=6954
2 comments
A truly great article and very much what I feel and think. Actually reading C. Wright Mills, he writes that because there was no feudalist nobility in this country (and I would add with their militarist base of chivalry and courage), the bourgeoisie had free rein to rise in capitalism and with their inhuman materialism made the faceless oppression so much more unbearable. And not only is nature mined to exhaustion but so are humans because capitalism is an equal opportunity exploiter. Also in my mind feudalism and capitalism are of the same kind and quite interchangeable with the gradated domination of the many by the few, so humanity remains under capitalism factually in an indentured state.
If it’s good enough for Einstein it’s good enough for me! Amazing how the fact he was a socialist never came to light in the US. I suppose I know how that happened. Most American journalists are ignorant people, conditioned to report (“cover”) a celebrity on the more titillating aspects, leaving aside the more interesting and fundamental features that tells us much more, like where that person stood in terms of overall morality. For most Americans Einstein is just a “brainiac” whose claim to fame is simply that—but they miss all the other dimensions.
Nice essay on K. And I really like the parable of the doctors! :)