If cats have nine lives, how many lives does capitalism have?
Nobody ever builds or buys corporations in order to maintain their wealth;
but only to increase it. The wealthiest of Western society keep getting
wealthier, yet money doesn’t grow on trees. Money is still just points on a
ledger; a share in a finite system. The rich can only get richer through growth
within a limited pool. Capitalism is a pyramid scheme and the base of that
pyramid maxed out the realm of North American productivity a long time ago, when
our particular manifestation of capitalism (be it pure or perverted) should
have asphyxiated.
Yet this ghost of capitalism keeps feeding the elite.
What are these bonus lives which keep money flowing uphill? I see it as
this:
1 – Waste. Though the workers of society cannot collectively afford to
purchase all the products they collectively produce, we keep on producing too
much, and we stockpile shelves and warehouses and destroy “non-fresh” food and
imperfect-looking produce and breed billions of livestock to eat far more food
quantity than what they eventually return to us in meat. We advertise
everything to death which addresses no consumer need, which convinces our dull
brains to buy outrageous shit we don’t need (and which in fact harm us) and redundantly pits brands
against each other for no greater purpose but just to fight one another in the
pursuit of growing faster than the other guy grows. And best of all, we produce
enormous volumes of weapons, ammunition and war machines and outrageously phony
excuses to declare enemies and blow things up so as to then have to manufacture
them again, along with all the pretty coffins.
2 – Globalization. We drag poorer nations into the capitalism game by
lording power over them, inflicting world
trade conditions upon them in drag as charity and forcing them to bid for
the privilege of being our slaves and producing our groovy swag at the lowest
possible cost, thus unavoidable: child labor, slave labor, compromises in
safety, compromises in environmental protection. A lovely boon: we outsource
our pollution and divert blame for global warming when truly it is squarely ours.
3 – Oil. We destroy critical components of the biosphere in order to
dig up millions of years worth of liquid sunshine (and other fossil fuels),
releasing those toxins into the air and powering machines, the sub-slaves which
give we elite slaves; you and me, a privileged life. For as long as oil lasts
(a mere blip of time by any real perspective) it is the machines harnessed to
the grindstone instead of us.
4 – Matricide. North American natives have always understood Mother
Earth; have always known that it is she who gives us life. We feed the Western
Imperialist machine beyond the capacity of our own labour by mortgaging the
Earth with no means to repay. Already we’ve destroyed more than half of fresh
water sources, more than half of the world’s topsoil and more than half of the
critical wetlands and rain forests. We have literally crippled the biosphere to
the point that it is no longer a game of rampant subtraction. We are into
exponents now because we have triggered massive feedback loops in the system. We
have drawn down the Earth’s capacity to support life to the point that it is already
tail-spinning.
5. Financial buggery. When the pros from various financial corners try
to explain their little vistas of the ever-increasing complexities around the
thousand-and-one ways we’ve concocted for money to change hands without any
product or value of any kind materializing, I quickly run into acronyms or
jargon which I do not understand and I wonder if there is a human being
anywhere who has a handle on the whole entire picture? I suspect there is not
one. It’s just becoming clear that our capitalist system of the rich skimming
off the labour of the not-rich is growing and complexifying to allow greater
means and layers of skimming and re-skimming.
6. Population explosion. Do I need to explain why seven-point-something
billion people on a planet with as limited a biosphere as ours is an obscene
perversion? I am going to assume that I do not need to explain why seven-point-something
billion people on a planet with as limited a biosphere as ours is an obscene
perversion.
7. And here I will concede. I’m not going to get to nine. Winner: cats.
The obvious problem with all of these bonus lives is that they are all
very swiftly drying up. Oil reserves, all other natural resources, opportunities
for global imperialist frontiers; all of it is currently maxing out as we
speak. We’re heading into crash mode.
And as everything crashes; water, food, social stability, the viability
of individual nations and the U.N., unraveling slowly at first and gathering
momentum, the global hatred toward Europe and North America and (fairly or
unfairly) especially toward the United States of America, will rapidly
increase, not just out of blame but from desperation, as elite nations
(generally the least affected by climate disaster thanks in part to wealth and
in part to geographical irony) maintain slower depletion of privileges, as
other societies descend more swiftly into unavoidable hunger and violence.
As America draws even more hatred and is targeted for its rarefying
assets, it will require more and more justification for privilege and exclusion
and militancy and will need more and more delusional reasons to hate back. Hate,
however deluded, will literally become the essential ingredient to the new
dwindling version of the American Dream/Nightmare.
I don’t presume that Trump understands this or that perhaps his people
do; his elite cohorts who usher him down this path. More likely, I suspect, understanding
only exists in the collective insanity of their instinctive minds. In any event
Trump is serving as a shock absorber. Just as gas prices spiked hugely in the
early millennium, taming our reaction, soothing our outrage, falling back down
before soon migrating upwards again, Trump is normalizing hatred of the other and getting killed by the backlash that some of
us are still capable of.
Trump won’t win this presidency, I suggest, because it’s still too
early for hate to overtly and unapologetically rule, but later, when the
essential wave of hatred must roll into the realm of normal, it will not be so
noticeable. And the media will be bored of it. Perhaps Trump is a martyr to his
people, perhaps a sacrificial lamb.
He may be scum. But at least he’s taking one for his team.
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