Dumbo, Brooklyn
The End of Capitalism
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The End of CapitalismCapitalism 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.
