We are all used to fighting in individual campaigns – whether
it is for BDS and the Palestinians, or the NHS or against fascism or austerity
in its many manifestations. But what is the string that ties all this
together. What is it that makes this appalling system of imperialist
robbery and exploitation tick? That one word is capitalism, a society
based not on human need but on the making of profit. Of course by
dividing us into separate campaigns and movements capitalism ensures its own
survival. Divide and rule. Racism, is one of its primary weapons.
It is because Jeremy Corbyn is perceived as being
anti-capitalist in his own small and muddled way, that he is treated as the
enemy within. That is why all the bile is directed against him, not just
by the mass media but by members of his own party too. Whether it is John
Mann or Joan Ryan or Hilary Benn - Corbyn's real problem is his attachment, in
a fleeting and hesitant, manner to the idea that there is an alternative to
capitalism.
Of course many people will say that its the best system there is, but is
it? When trillions of dollars are spent on weapons and yet perhaps half the
planet is in perpetual hunger? When a handful of individuals can own as much as
whole states put together? When an increasing proportion of the world’s wealth
is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands what possible justification is there
for a society which is based on the subjugation of other nations?
The dominant power today is the United States. The two main parties,
Republican and Democrat are pro-capitalist.
Both agree that the USA has a right to intervene in other states to
enforce its will. The US has hundreds of bases around the world and they are not for ‘peacekeeping’.
Indeed the only virtue of Donald Trump is that he doesn’t
hide behind niceties such as the ‘war for democracy’ or platitudes about defending
human rights. As he has shown over the
Khashoggi Affair, all he is concerned about are weapons sales to vile dictatorships.
As the planet is approaching the point of no return on climate change it
is, or should be obvious that capitalism is responsible for our inability to
mount any challenge to global warming. The interests of profit directly contradict
the needs of humanity and yet the existing Green Parties, in Britain and internationally
believe that they can Green capitalism.
This is what is most pathetic about our own Green Party and
its desperate attempts to be seen as part of the Establishment rather than a
threat to it. That was and is why Caroline Lucas has refused to come out
in opposition to the IHRA definition of 'antisemitism'. The IHRA is an
Establishment formulation and she, for all her day trips to the left, is part
of that political establishment. The same is true of the 11 Green Councillors
in Brighton, led by erstwhile Republican Liam McCafferty who also demonstrated
that when Greens are in a position to make a difference buckled under and voted
for the IHRA.
Capitalism is a system not only based on commodity production
but the blind accumulation of capital. It is, in George Soros’s words,
amoral. British oil companies think nothing of working with tyrannical
governments in Nigeria and elsewhere to sustain death squads and armies that
will act against any assertion of power by the indigenous peoples affected by
the production of oil for example the Ogoni people.
American
multinationals have always done this in Central and South America. Human Rights directly contradict the needs of capital but it is something that groups like Amnesty International refuse to recognise as they have backed the US war on Afghanistan..
Fracking in this country is another example of where the needs of
capital supersede the interests of humanity.
That is why anyone who is seriously opposed to the destruction of the environment or in fighting global warming and
climate change must also be anti-capitalist.
Although the British Labour Party has elected a left-wing MP, Jeremy
Corbyn it has met with fierce resistance by the Right whose main purpose,
stripping aside all the nonsense about anti-Semitism, is making Labour safe for
capitalism. That is what this is all
about really. Israel is a symbol for all that is rotten and corrupt in world politics.
It is one of the major weaknesses of the pro-Corbyn campaign that many
people see the task as being to reform capitalism whilst leaving the beast
unchanged. In many ways that is the
weakness of the whole strategy of Corbyn and McDonnell . They wish to
tame the beast rather than challenge it.
The task of socialists is to use the present battles to radicalise
people and create a genuine
anti-capitalist movement inside and outside the Labour Party.
Tony Greenstein
Labor Are You Ready To Consider That Capitalism Is The Real Problem?
November 19,
2018 Jason Hickel and Martin Kirk
 |
| Fifty-one percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 no longer support the system of capitalism. , Illustration: Kseniya_Milner/iStock |
In February,
college sophomore Trevor Hill stood up during a televised town hall meeting in
New York and posed a simple question to Nancy Pelosi, the
leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. He cited a study by
Harvard University showing that 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 no longer
support the system of capitalism, and asked whether the Democrats
could embrace this fast-changing reality and stake out a clearer contrast to
right-wing economics.
Pelosi was
visibly taken aback. “I thank you for your question,” she said, “but I’m sorry
to say we’re capitalists, and that’s just the way it is.”
The footage
went viral. It was powerful because of the clear contrast it set up. Trevor
Hill is no hardened left-winger. He’s just your average millennial—bright,
informed, curious about the world, and eager to imagine a better one. But
Pelosi, a figurehead of establishment politics, refused to–or was just unable
to–entertain his challenge to the status quo.
It’s not
only young voters who feel this way. A YouGov poll in 2015 found that 64% of Britons believe that capitalism is unfair,
that it makes inequality worse. Even in the U.S., it’s as high as 55%. In
Germany, a solid 77% are skeptical of capitalism. Meanwhile, a full
three-quarters of people in major capitalist economies believe that big
businesses are basically corrupt.
Why do
people feel this way? Probably not because they deny the abundant material
benefits of modern life that many are able to enjoy. Or because they want to
travel back in time and live in the U.S.S.R. It’s because they realize—either
consciously or at some gut level—that there’s something fundamentally flawed
about a system that has a prime directive to churn nature and humans into
capital, and do it more and more each year, regardless of the costs to human
well-being and to the environment we depend on.
Because
let’s be clear: That’s what capitalism is, at its root. That is the sum total
of the plan. We can see this embodied in the imperative to grow GDP,
everywhere, year on year, at a compound rate, even though we know that GDP
growth, on its own, does nothing to reduce poverty or to make people happier or
healthier. Global GDP has grown 630% since 1980, and in that
same time, by some measures, inequality, poverty, and hunger have all
risen.
We also see
this plan in the idea that corporations have a fiduciary duty to grow their
stock value for the sake of shareholder returns, which prevents even
well-meaning CEO’s from voluntarily doing anything good—like increasing wages
or reducing pollution—that might compromise their bottom line.
Just look at
the recent case involving American Airlines. Earlier this year, CEO Doug Parker
tried to raise his employees salaries to correct for “years of incredibly
difficult times” suffered by his employees, only to be slapped down by Wall
Street. The day he announced the raise, the company’s shares fell 5.8%. This is
not a case of an industry on the brink, fighting for survival, and needing to
make hard decisions. On the contrary, airlines have been raking in profits. But
the gains are seen as the natural property of the investor class. This is why
JP Morgan criticized the wage increase as a “wealth transfer of nearly $1 billion” to workers. How
dare they?
What becomes
clear here is that ours is a system that is programmed to subordinate life to
the imperative of profit.
For a
startling example of this, consider the horrifying idea to breed brainless chickens and grow
them in huge vertical farms, Matrix-style, attached to tubes and
electrodes and stacked one on top of the other, all for the sake of extracting
profit out of their bodies as efficiently as possible. Or take the Grenfell Tower disaster in London, where dozens
of people were incinerated because the building company chose to use flammable
panels in order to save a paltry £5,000 (around $6,500). Over and over again,
profit trumps life.
It all
proceeds from the same deep logic. It’s the same logic that sold lives for
profit in the Atlantic slave trade, it’s the logic that gives us sweatshops and
oil spills, and it’s the logic that is right now pushing us headlong toward
ecological collapse and climate change.
Gains are
seen as the natural property of the investor class.
Once we
realize this, we can start connecting the dots between our different struggles.
There are people in the U.S. fighting against the Keystone pipeline.
There are people in Britain fighting against the privatization of the National
Health Service. There are people in India fighting against corporate land
grabs. There are people in Brazil fighting against the destruction of the
Amazon rainforest. There are people in China fighting against poverty wages.
These are all noble and important movements in their own right. But by focusing
on all these symptoms we risk missing the underlying cause. And the cause is
capitalism. It’s time to name the thing.
What’s so
exciting about our present moment is that people are starting to do exactly
that. And they are hungry for something different. For some, this means
socialism. That YouGov poll showed that Americans under the age of 30 tend to
have a more favorable view of socialism than they do of capitalism, which is
surprising given the sheer scale of the propaganda out there designed to
convince people that socialism is evil. But millennials aren’t bogged down by
these dusty old binaries. For them the matter is simple: They can see that
capitalism isn’t working for the majority of humanity, and they’re ready to
invent something better.
What might a
better world look like? There are a million ideas out there. We can start by
changing how we understand and measure progress. As Robert Kennedy famously
said, GDP “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their
education, or the joy of their play . . . it measures everything, in
short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
We can
change that. People want health care and education to be social goods, not
market commodities, so we can choose to put public goods back in public hands.
People want the fruits of production and the yields of our generous planet to
benefit everyone, rather than being siphoned up by the super-rich, so we can
change tax laws and introduce potentially transformative measures like a
universal basic income. People want to live in balance with the
environment on which we all depend for our survival; so we can adopt
regenerative agricultural solutions and even choose, as Ecuador did in 2008, to
recognize in law, at the level of the nation’s constitution, that nature has “the right to exist, persist, maintain, and
regenerate its vital cycles.”
Measures
like these could dethrone capitalism’s prime directive and replace it with a
more balanced logic, that recognizes the many factors required for a healthy
and thriving civilization. If done systematically enough, they could consign
one-dimensional capitalism to the dustbin of history.
None of this
is actually radical. Our leaders will tell us that these ideas are not
feasible, but what is not feasible is the assumption that we can carry on with
the status quo. If we keep pounding on the wedge of inequality and chewing
through our living planet, the whole thing is going to implode. The choice is
stark, and it seems people are waking up to it in large numbers: Either we
evolve into a future beyond capitalism, or we won’t have a future at all.
[Dr. Jason
Hickel is an anthropologist at the London School of Economics who works on
international development and global political economy, with an ethnographic
focus on southern Africa. He writes for the Guardian and
Al Jazeera English. His most recent book, The Divide: A Brief History of Global Inequality and Its
Solutions, is available now.
Martin Kirk is cofounder and director of
strategy for The
Rules, a global collective of writers, thinkers, and activists
dedicated to challenging the root causes of global poverty and inequality. His
work focuses on bringing insights from the cognitive and complexity sciences to
bear on issues of public understanding of complex global challenge
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