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I don’t care how tough things are, do not eat that.
There are so many powerful forces arrayed against the survival of industrial economies that people often find it comforting to focus on only one — global climate change, for example — brandish a sword at it and vow to fight to the death. But to act as if there were only one existential threat to our current way of life is as uninformed and irresponsible as pretending there are no threats at all.
Consider just some of the accumulating catastrophes of the modern world in addition to global warming:
- The end of cheap energy. It has become almost impossible to extract fossil fuels profitably. The amount of energy gained for the energy invested in drilling and mining has declined steadily, and for some operations — fracking and tar sands, for example — is approaching parity. When it gets there, the Industrial Age is over.
- Exhaustion of food sources. Industrial agriculture has depleted and polluted its water supply, exhausted its soil and poisoned its surroundings to the point where there is no reasonable expectation that it can continue to feed the world’s already-swollen population.
- Explosion of debt. The great majority of people, companies and governments are being slowly strangled by great pythons of debt coiling around them, restricting their activities and constricting their futures. In many cases, the size of the debt is greater than can possibly be repaid, and the ever-rising interest payments have become more than the entities can afford.
- Paralysis of government. Since the 1980s in this country, since Saint Ronald Reagan delivered the gospel of “government is not the solution, government is the problem,” government at every level has failed to repair infrastructure, to regulate powerful economic forces, to protect its citizens from harm, in short to do just about anything it was invented to do. Industrial democracies around the world are reeling in the face of bizarre election results (see Trump, Donald), crippling strikes and massive, often violent demonstrations by people who cannot endure more exploitation.
There is no way out of this. We can only go through it and see whether a greatly reduced and severely traumatized few of us can figure out a way to organize ourselves in a less suicidal manner. I would hope those people would have in hand or at least in memory a truly remarkable essay by Craig Collins, recently published by Counterpunch. Titled “Catabolism: Capitalism’s Frightening Future,” the essay is a kind of unified field theory of everything that is falling apart.
Its central concept is of catabolism, a word borrowed from biology to describe the last stages of capitalism during which the system’s relentless dedication to the pursuit of profit — to the exclusion of every other value — causes it, when all other sources of profit have been hollowed out, to begin consuming itself.
One example of this is the common practice of wealth managers who take over a company — Sears and ToysRUs are recent examples — sell off its most valuable assets, reduce its workforce, cheapen its products, borrow massively against its remaining assets (the wealth managers taking exorbitant fees for every step) and then bankrupt the company or sell off whatever it has left as scrap. The company and it employees are destroyed, the wealth managers are more wealthy.
This is capitalism consuming itself at a profit. Any rational, moral person can readily see that this process is destructive, even immoral, but to understand that, you have to be able to grasp that there are reasons to do things, and not do things, other than monetary profit, and such a statement makes a true capitalist look at you blankly and say, “What?”
Capitalists, like sharks, have no morality when it comes to eating, because eating is all they do and all they can do. So eating themselves makes as much sense as anything else. Capitalists will not — indeed they cannot — cease trashing the planet so long as it’s profitable.
The snake has swallowed its tail. It will be fine, for a very short while.
Photo: “Sunbathing” by Janos Krnak is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
re: “unified field theory”
It is indeed. Young Socialist! You are no longer required to wade thru three volumes of Das Kapital! If you want to understand the true nature of “the evil,” simply read the Craig Collins piece.
Note: You left out nuclear war. I’ll say it again, MAD is why we are still here, and MAD was based primarily on response times, and response times at present, specifically on the Russian end, have been whittled down to the zero bound.
So, the next time false blips show up on a Russian radar screen, as they have several times in the past, the operators will not have 10 to 15 minutes to ascertain their true nature, and in so doing, save the world, they will have seconds.
In accordance with what I will term ‘the general paradigm of material existence’ catabolic capitalism is merely an inevitable manifestation of the way things are. Natural Selection is the process of eliminating those biological entities (individuals, packs, populations, entire species) that, for whatever reason, are more prone to being eaten than to eat. Entropy affects the non-living in much the same way – pebbles, mountains, planets, etc. – all perish. Societies, no matter how enlightened, are subject to like forces.
I try to stay sane by avoiding value judgements where such huge and comprehensive systems are at work.
PS: Enjoyed the Collins article.
Yet the “prey” species persist. Mice and rats are eaten by nearly every carnivore in North America, yet they’re in no danger of going extinct. The “eaters” evolve in tandem with their prey. When all the deer are gone, the wolves die shortly thereafter. Eventually new herbivores evolve or migrate in. All beings eat something and will eat until it’s gone. You’re right we can’t attach a value judgement to that.
Great observation; but, of necessity, I am writing in very general terms. While it is true that mice and rats are devoured in great numbers, it is also true that they manage to out-eat their predators – or a least out-reproduce them, thereby achieving a tentative* balance.
As you know, the basic premise of Natural Selection is quite simple, that is, until you get into the bloody details. Then things get real complicated real fast.
* For whatever reason all of existence seems to be so damned tentative. Humans seem uncomfortable with this fact. I know I am.
Whereas I agree that animals that exist in a state of nature are not to be blamed for the brutalities they inflict in the course of predation, humans are an entirely different species and matter. We no longer exist in a state of nature, though we once did. We now exist within a global civilization, which is manmade. (For words such as artificial, unnatural, and manmade to have any meaning at all, they must not be subsumed under nature as “natural” outcomes of our existence on the planet.) Moreover, human exhibit certain executive functions in our cognition that make value judgments absolutely necessary, such as when we destroy nature to build parking lots or mine/extract resources with the full knowledge that such destruction displaces other living things and leads ultimately to our own detriment and demise. Locusts don’t “know” that they their swarms are paths of immense destruction; humans do.
‘Knowing’ doesn’t change the nature of the beast. Cognition at the human level – impressive though it may be – is quite recently evolved and acts more as a tool of achieving instinctual motives (typically rather short-sighted) than as a primary driver of human behavior. Nothing could be more evident if one studies human history. Horror stories about the actions of tribal peoples abound as well – environmental destruction, genocide, slavery…you name it!
It seems as natural for a human to build a skyscraper as for a beaver to build a dam or a female mantis to eat her mate after sex — all rather odd undertakings, but all meeting some survival imperatives, past or present. Extinction happens when the environment coughs up a new set of survival demands but the plodding pace of natural selection fails to keep up.
Yes, I’ve seen this argument before. It excuses every awful thing humans have done as an extended outgrowth of our own inherent “nature,” thus everything is natural. As I already pointed out, under this rationalization, nothing can ever be unnatural.
Nondualists make similar arguments that the self doesn’t exist so “you” or “I” have no actual agency but are merely responding kinetically like pinballs. No good, no evil, just being stripped of value judgment. They’re both rather elaborate philosophical arguments, but I reject them on their faces as over-intellectualized nonsense.
…at it’s twilight, such a system becomes essentially a ‘make work’ project… but indeed — for a very short while.
The alchohol in the solution is nearing 18%. Adding more sugar is carrying coal to Newcastle.
Gregg, Liz and Brutus – Darwin is being revisited, much to the chagrin of the established order.
“Revisited” – How so?