I don’t want to turn this into a mere tit-for-tat argument between the two of us having this discussion on here, but I value the input of people who comment on my blog, so I’m going to address something here which has been bugging me for a long time. It’s to do with the nature of utopia.
Obviously, being left-wing I believe in a socialist utopia, but beyond that I believe it’s an urgent necessity. To clarify that, I should be more precise about what I mean by “believe”. I believe that utopia is desirable. That doesn’t mean I believe it’s realistic. That said, I should also explain what I mean by “realistic”. In fact, I might not even be talking about utopia, depending on how low the bar is set. I believe in a fundamental right to food, clothes and shelter. To me that’s basic good sense, following from the idea that there is a human right to life. If that isn’t self-evident to someone who isn’t psychopathic or sociopathic, I can only imagine that they’ve been conditioned in some way to believe something completely against good sense, and of course that happens a lot because there are such things as religious fundamentalism and believers in a flat Earth. However, that doesn’t mean it can actually happen given our current position.
If you confine your actions to achieving aims you feel completely confident can be reached, you’ll be confined to what the rich and powerful are willing to concede, which isn’t very much. One way to achieve a target is to aim beyond it. Hence utopianism has a role in that respect. However, this isn’t utopianism. It isn’t utopianism to expect people to be fed, clothed and housed in the world’s richest countries where most of the billionaires live. The question also arises of how those people have come to have so much money. If a worker deserves to be paid according to the usefulness of her work, there would appear to be a limit to how much someone can literally speaking earn, and the usefulness of the work done by the people concerned seems to be rather limited. For instance, Bill Gates is a billionaire but most of his software was bought from other people – he last wrote software in 1983. Moreover, there are free equivalents to all of the software I can think of that Microsoft sells. And yet, he is a billionaire. A philanthropist for sure, but this is not about the character of this particular billionaire. Moreover, we have the myth of the self-made “man”. In reality we all rely on each other for our existence and all ideas, including business ideas, are built on other people’s. Someone might have a good and fairly original idea, and it feels like they should get credit, perhaps financial, for that, but on the whole it isn’t the people who have the ideas who profit from them because they’re likely to be working somewhere their intellectual property is claimed by others, and those others may simply be those who inherited enough money to be more adventurous with their entrepreneurship.
Capitalism is basically cancer. When I was training to be a herbalist, I used the idea of capitalism as a mnemonic for the characteristics of tumours. Tumour growth is unregulated, purposeless and not related to the needs of the body. So is capitalism. I would like there to be some kind of mystical link between capitalism and cancer, but sometimes the link is all too real, for instance the exposure of factory workers to industrial chemicals or asbestos. But it hardly needs saying that capitalism has the same effect on the human race and the biosphere as cancer has on the body. It kills you. Capitalism literally kills people by starving them in the midst of plenty and freezing them to death while luxury properties lie empty and are even rendered inaccessible deliberately. It also kills people by poisoning them and so forth. And it’s poisoning the planet by its very nature. Well under 1% of ocean plastic pollution is from plastic straws. Most of it is from trawler nets, which are designed to kill sea life and will go on killing it even when they’re no longer used. Any difference consumers can make in terms of boycotting and trying to use sustainable products, while obligatory, is a drop in the ocean compared to what multinational corporations do. And it isn’t even their fault. They’re economically determined by the capitalist system to continue to function in that manner. They cannot help but be mass murderers and destructive to life as we know it on this planet.
Therefore it is an urgent necessity to overthrow capitalism if we’re to continue to exist. That is, unless those at the top do have a plan, and if they do it’s probably even more worrying as it’s likely to involve the death of billions more people and convincing the rest of us that it’s either a good idea or unavoidable. And maybe it is unavoidable. This is the problem.
I do indeed harp on about the necessity of achieving utopia, and let’s face it, it’s quite a limited utopia because it’s only about people having their basic needs satisfied universally and unconditionally, but there’s one point I can’t emphasise too strongly. The issue is not that I’m utopian but that if this isn’t done, we will all die, and it’s personal because that “we” includes our descendants. Family members. And maybe it is impossible, but if it is, we’re confronted with the certainty that we will all die horribly, or people we care about will. Some of us have already done so. The pandemic is caused by capitalism, and before you say China is a communist country, it has a stock market and millionaires, so it isn’t. It is literally impossible, by definition, for a capitalist society to have a stock market because that just is commodification. This could of course mean that communist societies degenerate into capitalist ones, but a common view is that both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China evolved from primarily agrarian rather than industrial societies. In any case, global capitalism is responsible for the emergence of pandemics in the form of both Covid-19 and HIV, because deforestation and the consequent mixture of wildlife viral reservoirs leads to the evolution of new pathogens, and that takes place due to the various pressures placed on the environment such as the growth of cash crops and the rearing of cattle.
One of the notable things about the discussion of capitalism is that it’s often referred to as “late capitalism” nowadays, which seems to imply that it will be replaced by a different system. Whereas it doesn’t follow that this will happen, it’s true that it’s unsustainable. This will result in something like the extinction of humankind if it doesn’t end, but of course that extinction is practically the same as the end of capitalism. Once again I feel the need to remind you that the Doomsday Argument appears to show that the last human birth will occur early in the 22nd century CE, although the argument has its flaws and doesn’t predict what will cause this even if it’s valid. If it doesn’t happen, good, but if it does, capitalism failing to be replaced is a probable cause, and there is some evidence that this won’t happen, and therefore that this will be the cause of our extinction.
Hence it is indeed entirely feasible that even a limited utopia sufficient to preserve the continued existence of the human species is impossible to achieve from the current state of affairs, or perhaps it’s better to state that it cannot arise from it at any point because it may not be down to human agency. But let’s not shrink from what this means. It means that we’re about to become extinct. Nothing is being done to prevent this because the system is fundamentally incapable of doing so. It’s based, for example, on economic growth and the rapid replacement of products, the inefficient production of necessities and the manufacture of artificial scarcity. The world economy produces enough for everyone and yet people still starve and die in other ways of neglect of existing goods and services which are unavailable to them because of the way money is made to work under capitalism. Not that money necessarily works as a system anyway, but it existed before capitalism so it could possibly have been less dysfunctional in the past, for instance before usury.
One thing I’m not sure about is whether “they” have a plan. It’s undoubtedly inevitable that if capitalism continues it will murder most of the world’s human population as well as continuing the current mass extinction, but it isn’t clear if there are any ideas about how to save the elite. It may simply be that they believe their own propaganda and think there will be some kind of solution, or even that there is no problem. I find that plausible because of the extent of climate change denial that exists, which seems to be genuinely held to be so. There’s also the issue of the complexity of the problem. We’re not just talking about pandemics, but also climate change and its associated disasters and the number of products which rich people also encounter which are too dangerous to be fit for purpose. If you’re a rich CEO being driven down Wall Street and a vehicle’s brakes fail because of the manufacturer skimping on standards and it crashes into your limousine and kills you, you’ve become a victim of capitalism, just as you would if no antibiotics are available to treat a superbug you picked up because of the non-profitability of developing new antibiotics or using phage therapy. You’re still going to be dead either way, and the number of increasing threats is legion. But as I say, maybe they do have their own answer, but it won’t matter to 99% of the world’s population because we’re all still going to die because they’ve destroyed the environment for profit.
This, then, is what I’m trying to drive home. It is absolutely feasible that this limited “utopia” cannot be achieved, and I realise I’m repeating myself at this point but I can’t emphasise this strongly enough. If that is the case, we’re all going to suffer horribly and die, and not just abstract people out there living thousands of miles away but us, our friends, neighbours, relatives and the people we care about who are close to us. So you’d better make damn’ sure utopia is practical and do everything you can to achieve it because otherwise you can kiss goodbye to your great-grandchildren not suffering agonisingly tragic deaths, which could’ve been prevented. And I’m not even blaming you because it’s the system, not the people.
Sorry, this has been a bit of a rant. And yes, extinction may be the plan, but it’s more likely to be the expectation and it won’t be the rich who will die out, at least at first, but even they’re vulnerable.
A Box Of Chocolates 