Capitalism as Scheduled Disaster: Paul Street's newest

This is the picture of the capitalist system given us in Paul Street's most recent salvo, Capitalism: The Nightmare. I'd recommend a read before going further.

Capitalism was and is a catastrophic problem that was created intentionally so that the whole world could be organized toward the sacred goal of investor profit, so in this sense Street is correct, and one can see this in the history, as the ground-clearing for capitalism in the New World was the mass death of millions of native peoples for the sake of the Conquistadores' pursuit of gold (and, more prominently, silver). What's fun about this piece, though, are his examples, which are enjoyably up-to-date. Houston, for instance. Street characterizes Houston as a disaster waiting to happen, and part of this disaster has to do that Houston uniquely has no zoning laws:

W]ithout a zoning code, [Houston is] a case study in urban sprawl. Houston was built on a dry (read: low-lying) lakebed that’s laced with bayous. The bayous are lined with concrete, steel and sheet metal, which is functional when it rains a little, but a contender for the luge event when it rains a lot, even in posh neighborhoods like River Oaks. Doing what it takes to prevent flooding, widening bayou channels, managing growth, putting in green space, might impede the only truly important flow: money. Houston’s city fathers have resisted any effort to plan for climate change, because, well, it doesn’t exist. As if that weren’t enough, parts of Houston are sinking, some as much as 2.2 inches a year.

It’s an epitome of the deadly “free market” chaos favored by arch-capitalist political actors such as the right-wing billionaire Charles Koch and his friend, the “libertarian” Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.

No wonder the situation in Houston is still so bad. Our capitalist disaster narrative shifts rapidly to Arizona, visited briefly by arch-neoliberal Milton Friedman:

We picked him up at the airport, and while we were driving to a suburb of Phoenix we went through what could only be described as suburban sprawl. Someone in the car with us, remarking on this landscape, said, ‘Man, it looks like there was no planning at all.’ Friedman just nodded his head and said, ‘Yes, isn’t it beautiful?’ … [I]t wasn’t government coercion that had brought it into being. It was the invisible hand of the free market.

Unfortunately when dealing with climate change Street's writing becomes a bit excessive. Here's what he says:

The warming is fueled by capital-captive humanity’s excessive release of carbon dioxide resulting from the profit system’s rapacious extraction and burning of fossil fuels and its reliance on animal agriculture. Carbon accumulates in the atmosphere, trapping heat and melting the world’s glaciers and permafrost, which holds vast reserves of carbon-rich methane. As the ice caps retreat, less sunlight gets reflected back into space and more of it heats the planet toward a point where it becomes uninhabitable.

Extreme weather is just the tip of the melting iceberg. If not reversed, global warming will destroy the human species through famine, dehydration, overheating, disease and resource wars. It has us on the path to hell.

Given the powerful presence of paid-off climate change deniers in the political landscape of 2010s America, it's important to be precise about what climate change will do. Mora et al. (2013) suggest a point of "climate change departure from recent variability" in which the seasons no longer matter because global climates enter a period of continual change.

At some future point in that process agriculture will become impossible over large stretches of the Earth, and the human population will consequently shrink to a point supportable by the agriculture which remains. Earth's human population is maybe about 7.5 billion at present -- imagine a world in which half of them die of starvation, while remembering that world human population has for most of human existence been far lower than it is now. Do you really want to live in the world where they die off, and human population "resets" to a more "manageable" level?

So no, we're all not going to die. There will be lots of gruesome death, however, billions of people, and that will be bad enough. The rest of Street's essay is in securing capitalism as the culprit for all of this, and in showing that capitalism is basically undemocratic, that the capitalists decide upon this great and even more forthcoming murder for us with our acquiescence but without our permission.

Street concludes with a reminder as regards the consequences of this acquiescence:

Can environmental catastrophe be averted under capitalism? Not likely. Shifting from fossil fuel reliance and other unsound environmental societal habits and practices—built-in obsolescence, mass consumerism and the endless pursuit of quantitative economic growth, accumulation and “cheap nature” resource appropriation—requires a level of coordinated social and public intervention so extreme that it is incompatible with continued capitalist control of the means of production, investment and distribution.

This set of practices needs to be sorted out of course, because Street represents it as a great jumble of words to describe what it is that needs to be phased out if the opportunities for survival are to be maximized. The fossil fuel companies must be phased out of business. Great human machines currently dedicated to investor profit must be reoriented to group survival on ecological terms. "Economies" must be reinvented upon cooperative grounds, to benefit all participants rather than mere classes of stockholders. Hierarchical organizations such as the US military must be obliged to abandon their paranoid ends.

Good luck everyone!

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thanatokephaloides's picture


The System Is Working

Like so much else in U.S. government policy, Trump’s anti-environmental actions are contrary to majority-progressive public opinion. Who cares? It’s one more in a long line of examples showing that “We the People” are not sovereign in the failed, arch-plutocratic and militantly capitalist state that is the 21st century United States.

This!

Diablo

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

thanatokephaloides's picture

If you want to read Paul Street's article without going to the "ecosocialist" website (read: sold out to Facebook and Zuckerberg), you can get it from Street's own website:

https://www.paulstreet.org/eco-cidal-madness-moronic-farce/

Better preservation of Street's original formatting (including blockquoting of the Trump quotes), too. And no chance the site's publishing without permission, either!

Smile

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"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

The Aspie Corner's picture

These rich bastards keep whining and bitching about how we can't afford to get the hell away from fossil fuels, but they know fully well it's all a lie.

They're milking this shit for all it's worth even while disaster is happening. Oh but don't worry, these same dickheads all use alternative energy sources on their multi-million dollar homes just because they can. Free-riding fucks.

"We can't afford it"? More like we can't afford them.

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Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.

Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.

@The Aspie Corner

..."We can't afford it"? More like we can't afford them.

Right there, you've just nailed it all!

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

Song of the lark's picture

going to stop it. Hardly anyone can wrap their heads around degrowth and the rich and politicians are the worst. But pretty soon financialization will abruptly end and global meltdown will happen. a lot of over priced assets, paper of various sorts... ( bonds, stock, mortgages, pensions, etc) and mal investments will vaporize. We will have a step down into deflationary swoon until assets reprice. Then real wealth, like food, water, land will be fought over.
"Extreme weather is just the tip of the melting iceberg. If not reversed, global warming will destroy the human species through famine, dehydration, overheating, disease and resource wars. It has us on the path to hell." Already happening.

Until the financial meltdown of epic proportions the status quo of capital destroying the world continues.

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Wink's picture

at C-99, it seems, this is another "something" that those not yet woke need waking to. Without 150 million of us, or so, aware - and active - about this it won't matter, and any possibility of change won't happen.
The Ubers and Filthys (rich / 1%) know this, of course, and why they're not all that worried. They know the chance of "activists" educating the masses is Very Unlikely and, hell, if they take the planet down with their excess... pffffff... it's going to be a Great ride on the way out!!

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the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.

Cassiodorus's picture

@Wink maybe that's why the millennials prefer socialism -- they'll have to live with everyone else's capitalist concept of society.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama