The End of Capitalism

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The End of Capitalism
Capitalism contradicts the inherent human instinct to share. Sharing was the only guarantee of survival in prehistoric times. Our tribal ancestors developed language and civilization in the process of building a society to ensure the survival of the tribe. This past comprises almost 99% of our history.
Imagine a group of women going out to gather berries and running as fast as they can to get to the berries first, grabbing as much as they can and even grabbing them away from others if you can, eating them all at once even if you’re not hungry just to make sure no one else gets any. That is Capitalism.
Cooperation is a fundamental principle of evolution, from the attraction of particles to the co-existence of cell groups in an organism to the cohesion of society. Capitalism is in conflict with this evolutionary principle, emphasizing the victory of one person over the others, a lonely victory that destroys the social bonds on which our survival still depends.
This is something we have forgotten in choosing Capitalism as the main denominator of our society. Society is like an ant colony where each ant is dependent on the survival of the colony to insure its own survival. We have forgotten that society is a functioning organism. Capitalism is like one organ in the body suddenly cutting off the blood supply to the others or poisoning major arteries. So the whole body dies. One organ grows uncontrollably at the expense of the others. Capitalism is a deadly cancer.
Capitalism is sawing off the branch we are sitting on, but worse, they are sawing down the whole tree. We do not know what will be left when Capitalism is finished ravaging the earth. Will humanity die? Or will we be able to salvage our ecosystem in time?
The basic principle of Capitalism rewards unbridled greed and the reckless rule of wealth at the expense of the common good and the future. Obviously when the water is poisoned and the air tainted, the climate balance and the environment destroyed, our life on the earth is not worth much.
The population, reduced to mindless consumers, lulled into complacency with idiotic entertainment, blind to the facts of the immanent dangers of criminal Capitalism. Manipulated by invasive advertising to keep buying and consuming, new cars, new appliances, new gadgets, new fashion although it is becoming apparent that our luxuries are at the cost of future generations. Do we really want to be remembered as the greedy and selfish generation that ruined the earth?
While the public is being primed to buy new cars, the roads are left to deteriorate. Infrastructure, roads, bridges, water supply, all public amenities are decaying at an alarming rate, while big business and finance rakes in the money. Capitalism has no responsibility towards society whatsoever. On the contrary, lobbied legislation allows them to pump pollutants into our air and water without restrictions. The private sector gets the profit and the public sector is dismantled. That is the very goal of cannibalistic Capitalism, to destroy and dismember any remnant of public-owned facilities, poison the public water supply and then sell water in bottles. Close schools, cut police and firefighters, privatize and capitalize, creating a society where only the rich can afford to live.
The prevailing of the money-making schemes of Wall St. over actual production in U.S. and world economy demonstrates the success in creating and manipulating markets to pump money into the financial sector and into the hands of the wealthy. The mad rush to the feeding troughs of debt in the last decades created an economy built on the empty promise of eternal economic growth. The crash of the Debt Bubble is a violent awakening for the American middle class who blindly followed the temptations and delusions propagated by the Fed and the big banks.
The rich are proud of their financial advantage, even if they inherited their fortunes. Most rich have never questioned the validity of their status. They take it for granted that they have a right to the extravagance and luxury that is part of their class entitlement. Like the English Royals, you must live up to your standard. And that means a private jet and a garage with an elevator.
They accept that there are rich and poor, just like there is sun and rain. It would never occur to them that there is anything morally wrong with spending 2 million for a yacht, while most of the people they share the earth with have less than $2 a day to live on.
Capitalism transforms the rich into monsters without a soul, without a conscience, destroying the environment in their insatiable thirst for profit, more money and more and more.
In Capitalism where everything is determined by profit, people’s thinking is deformed by judging everything according to its market value, human qualities like honesty and friendship become irrelevant.
Along with compassion and humanity, all sense of responsibility towards society and the environment is conveniently thrown out the window.  Industry and corporate lobbies spend billions every year to bribe our elected representatives to guarantee their freedom of pollution. Don’t these people have children? Aren’t they afraid like the rest of us of environmental poison, air pollution, global warming? How do these lobbyists and politicians sleep at night knowing they have driven one more nail into the death of our planet?
In Capitalism the biggest polluter is the winner. The company that dumps the most deadly waste into the environment without restrictions can rake in the most profit. Government has the mandate of protecting the environment which is why Capitalism  would like to further deregulate and weaken government authority under the auspice that “big government “ is socialism, or un-American for some reason.
We are all for reducing government spending. But that does not mean reducing public services which is what we are paying our taxes for: roads, schools, public safety, fire protection. What should be abolished is the corruption in the government, not the services that protect us and our families. Why  isn’t anyone asking about the billions that ”went missing”  in Iraq, about the unsavory connections between Cheney and Halliburton,  trillions spent in wars prolonged by companies earning off them.
They want to reduce teachers although our school system is already failing. What do the wealthy care, they send their kids to private schools, let the public schools rot. Then privatize them, sell them off and close them down. Now that’s a plan.
They close down the public parks, they have their own huge private estates.
They close down public swimming pools leaving kids to swelter in the cities. Who cares, they have their own private pools, or they jump in their private jet and fly to their private resort in the Bahamas.
They close down public libraries, worsening the already rampant illiteracy. People who can’t read are easier to dupe. So the public is dumbed -down with a constant stream of meaningless drivel, what tattoos the stars are getting, the latest style of shoes, new fad diets. Young people grow up thinking that the most important thing is how your hair looks. What they don’t realize is: it’s not what’s on your head, it’s what in it that counts.
The obesity epidemic is fine with the rich.  At least the poor can’t crawl through the windows of our mansions, and they can’t run away so fast. Why are the rich afraid to talk about class warfare, the one thing they fear the most.
If Capitalism continues to scourge the planet, our future is not bright.
A future dominated by hoards of starving homeless, driven to mass crime to survive, pitted against the high tech  defense systems of the wealthy? The total breakdown of society means lawless gangs, scavenging in the garbage heaps of the rich. The rich will need private arsenals and fortresses to defend their wealth.
This future in Fortress World is no fun for anyone and not for the wealthy, trembling behind their high walls. A chain is as strong as the weakest link, and society is a chain connecting people and allowing them to co-operate and thrive. When the wealthy realize that they can only be as happy as the thinnest starving child in Africa, we can overcome the grab-and-run mentality and start working together.
We are seeing the last spasms of a deadly system that is imploding from within its rotten heart. This is the end of Capitalism, it has been unmasked and the leering grimace of abysmal greed will be a warning to future generations. We are in an advantageous position to be able to watch it go down with flying colors, the sinking of the Titanic. We realize that this is a necessary and immanent development, a logical historical sequence that follows the cyclical evolution of humanity.
To live in the decline of Capitalism foments clarity as the systems flaws conflagurate and the construction wobbles. Advertising appears lurid in the news next to the War Dead. The reality of unemployment, poverty and misery behind the scenes of Hollowood.  The total breakdown of the American Dream.
What can we dream about now? We must stop dreaming and act to create a society that can unite the earth in an effort to guarantee a sustainable and productive life for all inhabitants.
Government is one hope to maintain a level of civil and humane existence. One quick fix alternative to tearing down the whole system is the option of leveling the playing field. It is not too late to employ the instrument of fair laws requiring the wealthy and corporations to do their part and give back to society. The self-destructive stupidity we now observe in Capitalism could be re-directed into responsibility for society and the environment.
However, our corporate-owned government is an unlikely hero in the story.  The more probable outcome is a slow and painful death to Capitalism, trying to grab out parts of the world without realizing that the whole world belongs to everyone born here now and in the future. You can’t grab out a part and say that’s mine, since everything is part of the whole. Capitalism is shitting in its own nest.
We will see the natural development of a parallel society without the need of a bloody revolution. Capitalism will wither and die like the Wicked Witch of the West. It will try to stop the growth of a new paradigm by destroying the environment. But the new paradigm is unstoppable, manifested in political movements all over the world at this turning point in history.



Art in Society

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1. The Role of Art in Society
Must art be concerned with social problems?
To demand social or political reactivity from art may be asking too much.
Art in our times is usually called upon to compensate us for the unbearableness of reality, a substitute for lost pleasures and the medial promise of imagined fulfillment.
Opium for the people, but not for everyone.
In the modern art world, art is enjoyed as a collusive luxury, the sacred hybrid flowers of the white cube, the fin de siècle excrescence of a remote art world.
Art as the sycophantic parasite of the wealthy cannot unfold its game, its potential to break through the miasma of obtuseness that blinds us.
Should art be reduced to distraction, entertainment, like a Hollywood movie, the galleries resembling low budget theme parks? McArt?
We are looking to art to help us see our situation more clearly, not to obfuscate it. We are looking to art to help us find new ways to interpret and transform reality.
2. Street Art and Public Space
Street art seemed to be a viable alternative to private art, however this attempt of artists to escape the tyranny of the art market and to reclaim public space has been countered with devastating force by the police.
Street artists are subject to criminalization and extreme jail sentences (Posterboy is presently serving 11 months).
New York is practically expunged of what used to be one of its trademarks, top-quality artistic work in public space.
Why are the regulations for graffiti enforced so vehemently whereas littering and idling are not?
The selling of public space is a huge business that our tax money is used to defend.
The right of commercial business to invade our field of vision with their advertising is sovereign.
This right is challenged by street artists and by a movement called culture jamming, which is also subject to persecution.
3. Art and Advertising
Throughout history, civilizations have relied on visual art to convey and spread their ideas, often producing art of timeless quality.
Unfortunately in modern society, advertising has taken over the two-dimensional surface and harnessed art’s mind-shaping potential for commercial purposes.
The damage to human thinking has been inevitable, using this powerful medium to instil brands or consumer behaviour in people’s brains. The result is a population who think in brand names. They define themselves as consumers.
The education of free-thinking individuals goes beyond the freedom of choice of which brand to buy, beyond the “educated consumer”.
Freedom of thought is the ability to associate between many pieces of information in your brain, but it is only possible when these things are there to connect. The more knowledge, the more freedom.
Freedom of speech without freedom of thought is not an option.
The difference between art and advertising is art is not in the service of a commercial product. Art is in the service of a deeper understanding of life.
4. The Power of Art
Visual art is a high-power medium.
It attacks the optical nerve at the speed of light, bombarding the brain with images that become deeply imbedded in the subconscious with long term effects on the receptor’s thinking.
It is a gut medium, appealing to the pre-language part of the brain. You feel a picture without being able to explain it.
Your description of your dream the next morning may seem pale compared to the wild intensity of the dream which language barely expresses.
That is the power of a picture.
Destroy the Pharaoh’s image and you destroy his power. Thou shalt not make a picture of the Lord, the picture may become more powerful than the idea and we will have idolatry, or even American Idol.
Once the political power of imagery is recognized, it becomes understandable why there is a tight control on public art, and why radical art is outlawed.
The power of art to present new ideas and to introduce a new way of seeing things makes art predestined to be a means of changing people’s thinking.
5. Art and Money
Art must be free from monetary interests.
An artist that is trying to conform to the market or appeal to some specific audience will not have the freedom she needs to speak the unspeakable.
Art must be separated from material aspirations in order to applicate its consciousness-changing attributes.
Art in the service of financial gain defeats its purpose. Art in the service of business is will only provide a smokescreen for corporate interests.
So if big business is not to have a future role in sponsoring art, who will?
Art that is subsidized by the government is just as prone to be ingratiating to its sponsors.
So must radical artists live on the edge of starvation?
The solution can be found in the form of a few radical-minded galleries that are willing to give art its freedom, and to support artists in creating an art form that offers more than just a respite from everyday life, that opens new channels of thought and enables new insights into the future of our society.