Humanocentricism vs. Sustainability
The fundamental problem with the concept of Capitalism itself is that it’s a completely humanocentric economic system based on the trading of goods and services. That means that goods and services are not economically valuable until they are traded. (Or at least, they have the potential to be traded.) A forest is valuable for any number of reasons, beginning with the service it provides of turning carbon dioxide into oxygen. But nothing needs to be traded from one person to another to make that happen. That renders a healthy forest invisible to the Capitalist economic system. Until someone decides to cut it down, that is.
Currently, the impact humanity is having on the global environment is about 20% more than the world can sustain. That means that all of the resources in the world are needed by somebody—including our descendants who haven’t been born yet, who need them to keep the global environment working. Every single thing in the world is valuable for something, because it’s a part of some natural cycle of the environment. If we change our economic system sufficiently to make it recognize everything in the world as inherently valuable, we would no longer have a Capitalist economic system. We would have a Use-Value economic system.
The economy is a product of the environment. In the 21st century, humanity’s economic relationship to the global environment is going to change forever. The only choice we have in the matter is how it’s going to change.
Politics is a product of economics. Our economic relationship to the environment changing forever in this century is necessarily going to require—or cause—our political systems to change forever. The anti-Capitalist movement is a revolution now. But soon enough, it will be a tidal wave.
Unfortunately, a revolutionary anti-Capitalist tidal wave would be a disaster if nobody figures out how to win the revolution. At the very best it’ll turn into, “They’ve got the guns but we’ve got the numbers,” and the global revolution will turn into a global riot. And once all the office buildings in the world are burning, what do we do then? In the post-revolutionary society, whose political ideology do we use to solve the problems the Capitalists were causing?
Solving global problems will depend on people all over the world figuring out how to solve their local problems and working together to solve global problems. That depends on solving local problems in ways that all the solutions will fit together and make solving global problems possible. That depends on getting information to people who need it, and on fighting off the Capitalists far enough to give people the space they need to start solving their local problems.
Anyone who learns what I know can act as the intellectual military of the anti-Capitalist revolution. You can mount a sustained, full frontal assault on Capitalism easily, because you have the laws of physics on your side. In order for the Capitalists to win, they have to hide physical reality from everyone. They’re doing a good job of that in America at the moment. They can put advertizements on TV, politicians can make a lot of empty promises, they can corrupt the public school system to try to prevent anyone from learning what’s going wrong with the world, and they can use our police and our military to try to make everyone accept the Capitalist version of the truth at gunpoint. All you need to fight against all of that are some books you can check out from your local public library. If they try to pit their political system against fundamental laws of the universe, the universe is going to win in the end.
In the 22nd century, we will not have a Capitalist economy. The question is: Will we still have a civilization?
If Capitalism destroys itself without anyone figuring out a new economic system to replace it with, Capitalism will be replaced by regional warlordism, which is the kind of economy people always end up with when more complicated economies break down for good. If Hurricane Katrina happened all over the world, our food distribution infrastructures would all break down, just like they did in New Orleans. Then we’d have a world full of hungry people with guns. A human economic system is “how people get the things they need to live”. In a world full of hungry people with guns, the ones who get the most to eat will be the ones with the most guns. And what do you call that besides regional warlordism?









