“Jason Hickel and Martin Kirk: These are fast-changing times. Old certainties are collapsing around us and people are scrambling for new ways of being in the world. As we pointed out in a recent article, 51% of young people in the United States no longer support the system of capitalism. And a solid 55% of Americans of all ages believe that capitalism is fundamentally unfair.
But question capitalism in public and you’re likely to get some angry responses. People immediately assume that you want to see socialism or communism instead. They tell you to go and live in Venezuela, the current flogging-horse for socialism, or they hit you with dreary images of Soviet Russia with all its violence, dysfunction, and gray conformity. They don’t consider that you might want something beyond caricatures and old dogmas.
These old “isms” lurk in the shadows of any discussion on capitalism. The cyber-punk author William Gibson has a term for this effect: “semiotic ghosts”–one concept that haunts another, regardless of any useful or intended connection.
There’s no good reason to remain captive to these old ghosts. All they do is stop us having a clearheaded conversation about the future. Soviet Russia was an unmitigated social and economic disaster; that’s easy to dispel. But, of course, not all experiments with socialist principles have gone so horribly wrong. Take the social democracies of Sweden and Finland, for example, or even postwar Britain and the New Deal in the U.S. There are many systems that have effectively harnessed the economy to deliver shared prosperity.But here’s the thing. While these systems clearly produce more positive social outcomes than laissez-faire systems do (think about the record-high levels of health, education, and well-being in Scandinavian countries, for example), even the best of them don’t offer the solutions we so urgently need right now, in an era of climate change and ecological collapse. Right now we are overshooting Earth’s carrying capacity by a crushing 64% each year, in terms of our resource use and greenhouse gas emissions.
The socialism that exists in the world today, on its own, has nothing much to say about this. Just like capitalism, it relies on endless exponential GDP growth, ever-increasing levels of extraction and production and consumption. The two systems may disagree about how best to distribute the yields of a plundered Earth, but they do not question the process of plunder itself.”
Så kommer en del med mange løsningsforslag, men la oss innskrenke det hele til Bongards selveierdemokrati, som er det aller beste alternativet og endemålet for vår sivilisasjon.
“Capitalism has become a dogma, and dogmas die very slowly and very reluctantly. It is a system that has co-evolved with modernity, so it has the full force of social and institutional norms behind it. Its essential logic is even woven into most of our worldviews, which is to say, our brains. To question it can trigger a visceral reaction; it can feel like an attack not just on common sense but on our personal identities.
But even if you believe it was once the best system ever, you can still see that today it has become necrotic and dangerous. This is demonstrated most starkly by two facts: The first is that the system is doing little now to improve the lives of the majority of humans: by some estimates, 4.3 billion of us are living in poverty, and that number has risen significantly over the past few decades. The ghostly responses to this tend to be either unimaginative–“If you think it’s bad, try living in Zimbabwe”–or zealous: “Well, that’s because there’s not enough capitalism. Let it loose with more deregulation, or give it time and it will raise their incomes too.”
One of the many problems with this last argument is the second fact: With just half of us living above the poverty line, capitalism’s endless need for resources is already driving us over the cliff-edge of climate change and ecological collapse. This ranges from those that are both finite and dangerous to use, like fossil fuels, to those that are being used so fast that they don’t have time to regenerate, like fish stocks and the soil in which we grow our food. Those 4.3 billion more people living “successful” hyper-consumption lifestyles? The laws of physics would need to change. Even Elon Musk can’t do that.
It would be a sad and defeated world that simply accepted the prebaked assumption that capitalism (or socialism, or communism) represents the last stage of human thought; our ingenuity exhausted. Capitalism’s fundamental rules–like the necessity for endless GDP growth, which requires treating our planet as an infinite pit of value and damage to it as an “externality”–can be upgraded. Of course they can. There are plenty of options on the table. When have we humans ever accepted the idea that change for the better is a thing of the past?Of course, transcending capitalism might feel impossible right now. The political mainstream has its feet firmly planted and deeply rooted in that soil. But with the pace of events today, the unimaginable can become the possible, and even the inevitable with remarkable speed. The path to a better future will be cut by regular people being curious and open enough to challenge the wisdom received from our schools, our parents, and our governments, and look at the world with fresh eyes.
We can let the ghosts go. We can allow ourselves the freedom to do what humans do best: innovate.”
Et meget bra innlegg som oppfordrer oss til å være entusiastiske over kapitalismens implosjon. Den skandinaviske velferdsmodellen allierte seg med den gamle formelen kapitalisme+vekst=demokrati. Dette fungerte i etterkrigstiden, hvor profittratene var skyhøye. Nå dør fundamentet vårt demokrati er bygd på, og det er på høy tid å erstatte dette med et nytt fundament bygd på atferdsøkologien!
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