[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBJxBWwdQ2E&rel=0]
single-story
capitalism
Here’s the thing. We tend to talk a lot about what it does:
private enterprise
advertising, stocks and bonds, the market, but we talk a lot less about the WHY.
What is the deep logic that makes capitalism tick?
It all comes down to one golden rule. The purpose of capitalism is to grow more capital.
That’s it.
And where does capital come from? You have to choose to squeeze it out of the world.
Choose to squeeze it out of the land and the seas; out of the human bodies and the other living creatures
Wring it out of time itself.
Politicians have a cuddly sounding euphemism for this
They just call it growth, and they tell us it needs to be 3% Every year the system starts to break down.
That doesn’t sound like much but 3% per year actually means doubling the size of the global economy
every 20 years
Doubling the cars, the smartphones, the air miles, the plastics.
It doesn’t take a genius to know that we can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet
We’re already taking far more than can be replaced and we can see the consequences all around us: climate change,
deforestation, soil depletion, perpetual war, the mass extinction of species. . .
It’s got so bad that we’re now threatening the foundations of all of life itself
It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, it can’t stay this way. We have a choice to make
Prioritize growth, or prioritize life. We can’t do both
There are so many different options out there from new types of money that undercut the drivers of growth,
to regenerative farming to rebalance our food systems, to new ways of measuring progress and well-being
One thing is clear:
the era of treating capital as more important than life is coming to an end one way or another. If
we are going to survive the Anthropocene it will be because we create post-growth economies that allow us to
flourish on this beautiful and generous planet we call home