The System of the World

[degringolade]

 

Post-Impressionism / Bertalan Por/ Bull I

There is one big fucking gorilla that no one really wants to pay attention to.  Capitalism.  The core religion of mankind.  The system that brought us to the heights and will escort us to the lows.

Now, everyone seems to hate the damn thing, your humble correspondent included.  But the thing has some legs.  I cannot recommend strongly enough a thorough read of Braudel’s “Civilization_and_Capitalism, 15th-18th Century”.

So, Keith the other day took a spot of umbrage at Archie Greer’s description of politics as a theatre of interests.  Understandable.  Sorry Keith, but while you are right, you are also wrong.  Politics in modern countries is all about interests.  But the mass media and the powers that be have realized (quite correctly) that us proles don’t want to pay for their interests.  Us proles paying for the powers interests is the totality of the kabuki theatre that is politics in the modern world.  

Mike has been pounding at the idea of profit as the source of all evil.  Can’t really find anything wrong with that idea either.  Have to say that I agree strongly.

But the truth of the matter is that we are past the point of no-return right now.  There are eight billion of us and every single one of us is in some way dependent on capitalism and the attendant and intertwined self-interests that make the world society.  Keith is a teacher in an industrial school in Oklahoma, Mike is a retiree from one of the biggest industrial defense firms in the world, I am working for a corrupt and venal federal bureaucracy that patches together the victims of the industrial wars that we cause.  All of these things are dependent on the continuing health of the corrupt system.  All of us have made concessions to the weltschmerz that allows us to live a life within a failing system.

Because in the long run the system has to fail.  Infinite growth on a finite planet was never in the cards.  We are just making hay while the sun shines.

I will work on this more tomorrow.  I am not depressed by this epiphany, but it sure as fuck doesn’t cheer me up.  

The world will make the requisite changes.  That is what the world does.  Whether we or our offspring make the changes is in question and there is only one way to see the answer.

Comments

[mschmidt]

I agree that nobody should expect the demise of capitalism any time soon. I consider capitalism and desire for profit the same thing; so nobody should expect the demise of desire for profit any time soon.

The other possibility to consider is that capitalism is another word for human-ness and pragmatically no system could be better suited to the species. We start by assuming that we as a species are great - better than what we do not like about capitalism. Maybe capitalism is as good as the human species gets. In other words, everybody is safe, as long as they do not interfere with your right to earn a profit. If people cannot manage to follow this simple rule, for example if they try to ruin your low labor cost business plan by outlawing slavery, then they will get a civil war and people will get hurt.