Dare to declare capitalism dead - before it takes us all down with it (George Monbiot)
From George Monbiot in The Guardian:
The economic system is incompatible with the survival of life on Earth. It is time to design a new one.
Full story: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/25/capitalism-economic-system-survival-earth
femmedem
(8,201 posts)I would hate to have missed it.
safeinOhio
(32,675 posts)A must read.
femmedem
(8,201 posts)"...A system based on perpetual growth cannot function without peripheries and externalities. There must always be an extraction zone from which materials are taken without full payment and a disposal zone, where costs are dumped in the form of waste and pollution. As the scale of economic activity increases until capitalism affects everything, from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making machine.
This drives us towards cataclysm on such a scale that most people have no means of imagining it. The threatened collapse of our life-support systems is bigger by far than war, famine, pestilence or economic crisis, though it is likely to incorporate all four. Societies can recover from these apocalyptic events, but not from the loss of soil, an abundant biosphere and a habitable climate.
The second defining element is the bizarre assumption that a person is entitled to as great a share of the worlds natural wealth as their money can buy. This seizure of common goods causes three further dislocations. First, the scramble for exclusive control of non-reproducible assets, which implies either violence or legislative truncations of other peoples rights. Second, the immiseration of other people by an economy based on looting across both space and time. Third, the translation of economic power into political power, as control over essential resources leads to control over the social relations that surround them.
In the New York Times on Sunday, the Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz sought to distinguish between good capitalism, which he called wealth creation, and bad capitalism, which he called wealth grabbing (extracting rent). I understand his distinction. But from the environmental point of view, wealth creation is wealth grabbing. Economic growth, intrinsically linked to the increasing use of material resources, means seizing natural wealth from both living systems and future generations..."
Locrian
(4,522 posts)"Capitalism collapses without growth, yet perpetual growth on a finite planet leads inexorably to environmental calamity."
3Hotdogs
(12,375 posts)appalachiablue
(41,131 posts)figures and institutions will take charge. They're already all over this issue.
Important article by Mobiot, and urgent!