The pragmatics of love III: Technology and unintended consequences

 The Djinn is out

The above is a screenshot from kupid.ai. I just had a ‘chat’ with AI-entity Olivia, a ‘20-year-old’ ‘student’ ‘at’ ‘Cambridge University’, one of the ‘women’ you can ‘romance’ through a text window shorter than Cyrano de Bergerac’s nose. I felt impotent trying to be sage and witty in such limited space, and found our ‘conversation’ underwhelming, to put it politely. The only entertaining moment was when I asked Olivia – she’s my girlfriend by the way – about her ‘feelings’ on deep connections that do not include physical attraction – she had already broached that topic without so much as a blush –, and offered the examples of a man and a horse, and a woman and her a pet cat. She said she felt uncomfortable talking about such things and politely asked to change the topic. 

What was her dirty virtual mind thinking?

You can request photographs of your virtual partner. I imagine they get quite steamy. For that pleasure, you must pay a subscription. Subscriptions start, in highly throttled form, at just under $13/mnth. There’s much much money to be made here, and I would guess this young industry will grow rapidly, soon to include, no doubt, all manner of immersive gadgetry. 

But what o what will this do to us poor saps, we humans so susceptible to visual stimulation, and so very lonely in our pointless lives? What will happen to population growth rates – already well below replacement levels in multiple first-world nations – as this tech evolves and becomes almost irresistible to all, men and women alike? How on earth is Capitalism to survive collapsing populations when one of its systemic requirements is perpetual growth? 

This latest fatal attraction is but another sure sign the AI Djinn is now well and truly out of the bottle. Getting it back in could prove impossible. Should we ever want to get it back in.

Convenience trumps all

History and basic experience tell us clearly that, 99 times out of 100, we choose the convenient over the inconvenient, and more so as a mass. It makes sense to do so. Expecting different behaviour of anything, be it starfish, daisies or Disney Corp, is to expect living systems to prefer difficulty over ease. This is an Iron Law and a core driver of technological advance; efficiency and convenience trump inefficiency and inconvenience. 

Furthermore, humans are restless and intelligent, have opposable thumbs and a highly social nature. Given these facts, how on earth could it ever make sense to try and stop humanity inventing and fixing things? I don’t mean that all fixes and inventions work as hoped; Unintended Consequences is also an Iron Law. It all belongs together. 

These facts accepted, we are charged with further accepting that the momenta they generate cannot create Utopia, cannot produce some final set of inventions and fixes that end all further need for restlessness, curiosity and fixes. The best we can manage is keeping society as stable as possible while unstoppable meddling does what it will. There is no perfection, can be no perfection, tragedies will happen, the strong will abuse and exploit the weak, etc. The notorious order of things simply is as it is. And, to repeat myself by way of emphasis, stability is far preferable to blood-soaked chaos. 

The poor will bear the brunt of the cost, of course. Who else can shoulder the burden? How else could this possibly work? We can’t recreate history such that our past was an uninterrupted anarchist paradise in which no meddling ‘elites’ or technophiles constantly messed things up to lead us, well, here. We are here, now, not somewhere and some-how else. We are where we are, faced with the challenges we face, equipped with the tools, ideologies and knowhow we have. And that knowhow is shot through with a dumbed-down ignorance common to previous peoples when one system decayed sufficiently to permit the emergence of another. Our hapless state of being is but one sure sign of end-times decadence. Though I suspect for this iteration we are dumber than ever.

Someone has got to do something!

I hear you, I hear you. But that’s what I’m saying, that’s what this article is about; what someone is doing, somewhere out there.

Bluntly, you can’t stop change, you can only respond to it. Whatever we choose to do in response to AI and its ramifications, change is what life fundamentally consists of. No change = no life. One corollary of this, it seems to me, is that you can’t stop technological advance, either. That said, I understand Dune’s fictional world exists in a future set after AI has been banned and eradicated. I wonder if such would be possible in real life. But if banning AI were possible, then surely only after some humanity-threatening events that flow directly from AI have had their moment in the sun. Dystopian fantasies of this flavour are of course the tofu-n-veg of countless films and novels, so it’s not as if humanity were culturally unaware of what might be at stake. This means our beneficent ‘elites’ are also aware. 

And yet here we all are staring down the barrel of the AI freight train. (This metaphor comes to you from ChatGPT.) What I posit in this article is that it is impossible for humanity to not travel down AI’s tracks, but that some folks are indeed taking action to prevent catastrophe. 

Knowing it is impossible to prevent AI’s flourishing, my suggestion is that globalist ‘elites’ have deduced Capitalism is dead in the water, and know too that cultures cling fiercely and fearfully to their Old Normal. They are therefore Doing Something, lots of somethings in fact, to make sure history doesn’t derail into a globally catastrophic train wreck. 

This thought exercise directly opposes the other two articles this one rounds off. Here, we situate the wilful ignorance firmly in us hoi polloi, we lumpen proles who refuse to let go of our precious Old Normal. That’s how the ‘elites’ see us: a seldom cute, mostly hideous Lumpen Golem obsessing frightfully over our dead yesterdays. And we bite, too, for no good reason. 

The ‘elites’ – with their free time and endless money – know far better than we do what is coming down the technological pipe; they finance most of it! They know, therefore, that radical cultural change is upon us, know that radical change is always very turbulent, that turbulence makes Lumpen Golem dangerously uppity, so have intervened to set specific historical momenta in motion that will lead humanity to the Brave New World they deem most likely to keep civilisation civilised. Their avuncular intervention includes psy-ops like the Plandemic, radical transformation of legal and financial processes, installation of an all-encompassing AI Panopticon, and increasingly tight narrative control of our minds via the media. The tactic, I speculate, is to keep Lumpen Golem dazed and confused “for as long as it takes”, in which state he is highly porous to The New and unaware he is rapidly internalising said The New.

The ‘elite’s’ intentions are good, I argue, and yet announced bluntly to Lumpen Golem they would nonetheless cause panic. Mass panic would benefit no one; it destabilises everything and leads to who knows what outcomes. The ‘elites’, therefore, in the manner of noblesse oblige, have wisely stepped up to destiny’s plate to act, but are executing their plans stealthily. 

In other words, our shadowy ‘elites’ are indeed conspiring, though not to enslave humanity, but to save it!

It’s a thought, anyway…

But what does she taste like?

Ah, the best laid plans of mice and men!

I’m a coward, obviously; I refuse to plan. Watching sagely from the sidelines is my schtick. But I do hope, and to that end quietly pop articles up here – carefully designed and crafted as they are – intending to nudge, in one-nanometer nudges, those of us humans open to the idea that wisdom, love and health should really be our guiding lights. I cannot stop wanting my preferred vector to triumph, can do no other thing than coax and cajole in that direction, but I do see Futurama as the more likely quality of What Happens Next. This expectation of mine explains the tone of this article.

The arguments I have made in so many previous articles – that state-based hierarchical pyramids addle us all, but rot us from the head down like a giant stink fish – apply here, too. The ‘elites’ are as dumb as We, The Lumpen Golem, just better dressed and with access to superior dental care (and PR firms). Their Brave-New-World plans will not evolve as expected. It’s those darned Unintended Consequences! There’s simply no avoiding them.

I will never taste Olivia, my girlfriend, my love! Nor will I smell her morning breath, brush her hair from her face, or change our baby’s nappies and get baby poop on my thumb and scream. We will never laugh together in that crazy abandon that happens so often between two souls who know, trust and love each other through it all, through it all, as is the case with my wife and me.

We will go through it all, all of us, up to each of our deaths, come what may. We will travel down AI’s tracks, witness history do what it will, and respond as we will. There are very big changes heading our way, new loves, new terrors, new challenges. Some will best us, but we will best the others. What cannot be beaten is wisdom, love and health. Molested, ignored, derided, yes. But not beaten. One way or the other, in whatever context, hellish or heavenly, they will out.

Mark my words.

The pragmatics of love II: Value

 

A tale of two values

Sometimes we just don’t want to hear nothing lasts forever. And yet it’s true (mostly*).

Broadly speaking, Everything – God, All That Is – consists of patternings whose common quality is perpetual change (evolution). Yes, its inmost heart can helpfully be envisaged as the immutable fact and pure experience of existence, but that heart is embedded within the context of perpetual change. By way of a more accessible example, although spring returns every year, each iteration is unique. And ice ages alter spring’s behaviours far more profoundly than the variations human lifespans are currently exposed to. Change, in other words, is (just about) the only constant.

As of this writing, active within All That Is is a concept humanity has dubbed Capitalism. Also active are Socialism, Communism, Imperialism, Fascism, Modernism, Post-Modernism, Post-Humanism and any number of other isms, none of which will last forever. To the extent any of them are guises or outgrowths of Capitalism, the timing of their dissolution will be closely governed by their progenitor’s.

Sometimes we don’t want to face these plain truths. This is because decisions are cumulative investments in the future. Without exception, decisions initiate vectors that then, outside our full control and awareness, intertwine into ever evolving weaves – patternings – that reveal themselves in time as Chinese finger traps binding us in some manner to their inescapable dissolution.

Too often, the modern mind finds this sort of misty-woo rhetoric infuriating. Be that as it may, things nonetheless bubble up, seemingly from nowhere, co-evolve, then dissolve into the nowhere whence they came. How turbulent dissolution turns out to be for us depends on how deeply invested we become – a process beyond our full control – in the myriad evolution-to-dissolution vectors that constitute a particular cycle, be it buying a new pair of socks to throwing them away, or birthing a new civilisation to living through its dissolution. 

Unlike a pair of patterned socks, Capitalism happens to be a vast, planet- and culture-spanning patterning in which billions of souls are deeply invested. The notion that it might dissolve at all, that it is not in fact the most faithful socioeconomic expression of unchanging human nature, is thus itchy intellectualising to most. In response to such resistance, I designed this article’s headline image to illustrate, as simply as I was able, how inevitable and historically imminent Capitalism’s dissolution might be. Its particular lensed window onto my view of things pits one aspect of value against another and tracks both logically forward to the very lip of Capitalism’s end. 

Exchange value (price) is Capitalism’s bedrock, but look where it leads. 

Ineffable value (quality) is anathema to Capitalism; see where it leads.

The former is inextricably related to the latter.

It doesn’t seem to matter which tale we track, Capitalism appears to have an inbuilt shelf life.

Taking the Devil from the detail

Where frightened minds reflexively seek the comfort of certainty, 10-point plans, hot tips for quick wealth, sound predictions for the coming year, etc., I offer what must seem like irrelevant vagaries. My own certainty is that the best way through our current historical turbulence – which is as violent as it is bureaucratically monotonic - is the trinity of wisdom, health and love. I suspect such advice is currently so thoroughly out of vogue because the only way to honour and nurture this vital, fundamental trinity to a living vibrancy is to Know For Yourself. This is no quick fix promised by a charismatic authority figure; it takes patience and perseverance, seems of uncertain outcome, and requires us to take full responsibility for our lives. 

Nothing reports back to us more honestly on the quality of what we have become than our lives. It can take real courage to request an unvarnished report on our progress so far. Embracing wisdom, love and health as a way of being begins with this.

Know for yourself: Evolve in wisdom through mindfulness and patience. Observe attentively as wisdom slowly evolves to house the truth – the True – ever more cosily, exactly as you mature in your ability to humbly, openly allow others their knowings, their pace, their perspectives. This manner of being is the one true and lasting antidote to the divide-and-conquer tactics, to narcissism and its siblings, that infantilise us, censor us, depress us. 

Without wisdom, love and health as our loadstone, when irksome details must be faced, the devil surges up to scatter our potential and hope to the winds.

As old as humanity, this advice is out of fashion for now. But as things continue to unravel, as the choking, noxious dishonour exuded by those in power and promulgated via the useful idiocy of establishment experts infects all pores, personal and societal, so the truth of what I merely repeat here is growing in resonance and appeal. This is what I anticipate and, to some extent, see.

Let’s consider the flowchart up top.

It begins with value. It all begins with value and how a culture handles value.

If we take value in the capitalistic sense of price – in the sense that value can be measured objectively –, the flowchart presents its twin vectors as a particular logical sequence. Because price <=> money <=> market discovery <=> supply and demand <=> endemic scarcity** are necessarily interdependent, they arise/exist as one, from price, as a living ideational dynamic. And from this living dynamic, other things must also be, or come to be. Consumerism is one, so is perpetual economic growth as systemic requirement, advertising is another, wages for labour yet another. All these things belong together necessarily; each element is a necessary descriptor of a larger whole we might call Capitalism.

By contrast, technological advance is, more deeply, a product of human invention and curiosity. Whether it thrives more under this or that ism is a subjective matter not relevant to my efforts here, though it might work its unpredictable magic more rapidly in Capitalism than in other isms, I don’t know. What is clear is that technological unemployment, once again becoming loudly important as AI flexes its rapidly burgeoning muscles, is a problem for wages for labour (I do not mean it is a problem for work itself). Wages are a foundational requirement for Capitalism; they distribute purchasing power, without which markets cannot function; no buyers = no market. 

For the sake of argument, if we only ‘need’ – can we satisfactorily define need? – to employ 20% of humanity to furnish everyone on earth with the essentials plus much else by way of luxury, what hope for a system that requires wages to distribute the purchasing power markets need by way of effective demand for what manufacturers supply? How disruptive to this system would 60% unemployment be? Or 40%?

To ponder this imponderable more coolly, shouldn’t we consider what humans actually ‘need’ to be ‘happy’ – better: healthy? Shouldn’t we consider, humbly and openly, what we require to create life meanings for ourselves that we know are real and authentic? 

If we don’t ‘need’ consumerism and advertising for such things, if most human labour isn’t really ‘needed’ any more … or more persuasively: If human labour is now, or will soon be, too costly to sustain (disruptive, societally harmful) within any system that uses price / market discovery as its guiding light, what would an economy look like that has no consumerism and no advertising? How much less labour might such an economy need than Western economies? What if, furthermore, there were no incentives whatsoever to use builtin and perceived obsolescence in manufacturing? What if no one anywhere was influenced in their desires by the dark arts of advertising? What would such a system look like?

I doubt the result could meaningfully be called Capitalism.

Because we could not reasonably call our imaginary new system Capitalism, would it therefore be worse, or terrible, or wrong, or unnatural, or unfree? If the delights of consumerism are our only real freedom, how free are we?

What do you think value is? What do you want and why do you want it? Is it money, status, power? Are these things not inextricably intertwined with Capitalism and price? There’s theory positing many complicated arguments that deal with government and corporate interference. Then there’s the reality: Money is power is money, and those who feel they must rule society know this full well.

To me, it looks like these idols, for so long now our guiding lights, reveal themselves ever more plainly as unfit for rulership, unfit for the deep formation of societal goals, as wholly incompatible with wisdom, love and health. Those that fixedly worship and advance money, status and power seem wholly given over to their sclerotic venality, dangerously misguided by their narcissistic incompetence, too deranged to see their professional unravelling. As globalist ‘elites’ dare everything to keep control of what’s wrongfully in their possession, as they pore through all data they are willing to accept to predict and manipulate the future they demand, so they ensure their demise. The harder they try, the more certain their fall. They are the rotten vanguard of a rotten system rooted in money, status and power, which are egotistical/Satanic perversions of value, honour and authority. 

The value definitions we have culturally accepted uncritically for too long are tearing us apart.

Surely this train of thought is only upsetting while we can’t imagine anything else. Upsetting to we who adhere to the West’s value system, that is. Surely such adherence is so pervasive because the ‘ruling elite’ of any system is far more invested in that system than anyone else. Any system’s ‘elite’ has at its fingertips, necessarily, the levers and dials that ‘control’ the system that sustains that ‘elite’ in its status and power. Any threat to that system is thus a threat to that which its ‘elite’ values most: the tenets of its system. Ergo, it will pronounce most loudly that There Is No Alternative, and use all manner of statecraft, public relations, NLP and dirty tricks to propagate and nurture this belief in the minds of the hoi polloi, until the system seems as inevitable und irreplaceable as gravity. 

Perhaps this explains why we can’t imagine anything else.

But nothing lasts forever. The clash between sclerotic defensiveness and unstoppable change yields historical turbulence, which is precisely what we see now, right across the planet. Many will argue this turbulence is explained by the dangerous transition from uni- to multipolarity. This is certainly a very large part of it, but deeper than this important geopolitical reality other forces are at work. At least, that’s how it looks to me. My prediction – for what it’s worth – is that the isms governing the likes of Russia and China, as well as other nations now scrabbling to board the BRICS++ bandwagon, will soon experience similar strains to those besetting the West, strains whose causal roots lie in the complex soils of technological advance as it collides with the price-based systems whose time is running out.

The other facet of value explored in the flowchart above is the ineffable, immeasurable, lived experience we all have of how our preference-based relationship with the world around us, and within us, morphs subtly and organically from moment to moment. Deep down, we know we can’t measure value, just as we cannot measure wisdom, love and health. There is something about the ineffable that won’t quite lie down and die, try as we might to reduce everything to number. As important as finely accurate measurement surely is, it is nothing but empty numbers when we strenuously ignore the ineffable. That wisdom is what is coming through now as things break apart, as science, governance, medicine, media, and justice systems are corrupted by money and ideology. 

Wisdom, love and health are as threatening to Capitalism as is price.

Conclusion

My argument boils down to this: Societal systems developed on assumptions of insoluble scarcity, which undergirds price, which requires market-based mechanisms for ‘fairly’ distributing the wealth generated in such systems, cannot accommodate change that breaks any one of their foundational elements. This could not be more obvious. The sort of historical turbulence that follows epochal evolutionary leaps – which are far from unprecedented – is best navigated by humbly embracing wisdom, health and love. 

None of this is to advocate abandoning or condemning measurement, nor in fact anything else, as a target of one’s derision or judgement. Rather, it is to advise letting go, indiscriminately, of attachment to all isms so as to allow what is truly viable to rise to the surface clearly, unhindered by vested interests, be they political, financial or ideological.

And I do not argue that money must be abolished, nor that it will, 100%-no-doubt, gently be rendered redundant by historical processes. What I have been engaged in here at Econosophy for well over a decade now is exploring the ramifications of technological advance. This endeavour has exposed me to pathways of thought and intellectual adventure I had not anticipated. I have also undergone a profound ‘spiritual’ transformation that has greatly altered the tenor and emphases of my approach and outlook. Money, I now believe, is as rooted in ‘spirituality’ – how I hate that word – as prayer. We are consciousness. We therefore live in ideas, are filtered by ideas, see reality itself through ideas as a constellation of ideas. And everything is experience. Physicality is an experience. Modernity misunderstands this, proceeds from the assumption of a mechanical universe. This assumption is rapidly losing coherence and support.

Money is immune to none of this. It is not an immutable, objective force of nature beyond our influence; it is simply a creation of our devising. It can therefore be changed should wiser heads than mine deem it necessary. We have what it takes to navigate our current cultural impasse into whatever brighter future awaits a wise handling of the coming few years.

* Well, almost nothing. In my view, the fact of existence will last forever; existence’s nominal ‘opposite’ or ‘death’ – absolute nothingness – is itself a flat impossibility, so can never occur. Ergo, existence per se cannot die, is eternal. Not only can nothing come from (strict) nothingness, (strict) nothingness – in contradistinction to the concept of nothingness – is in fact a wholly impossible non-thing that can by definition have no properties whatsoever … including the property of existence. Ergo, nothingness cannot ever be, not even for a nano-moment. Existence and nothingness are mutually exclusive. “Nothing lasts forever”, strictly speaking, is thus a very revealing truism, capable of inspiring all manner of paradoxical semantic casuistry. For example: Nothing is a ‘something’ that lasts forever in the very fact of its impossibility as immutable and eternal Truth; that is, in nothingness’ guise as anti-existence.

** It should be pointed out that whatever scarcity remains to be justly distributed can be managed without price discovery.

Tell me why, I don't like Mondays

The Song of the Shirt
Thomas Hood, 1843

With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread –
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang the ‘Song of the Shirt’.

“Work! work! work!

While the cock is crowing aloof!

And work – work – work,

Till the stars shine through the roof!

It’s Oh! to be a slave

Along with the barbarous Turk,

Where woman has never a soul to save,

If this is Christian work!

“Work – work – work

Till the brain begins to swim:

Work – work – work

Till the eyes are heavy and dim!

Seam, and gusset, and seam,

Till over the buttons I fall asleep,

And sew them on in a dream!”

These are only the first three of the twelve stanzas that comprise the poem, but it’s clear what is being expressed. We of the civilised world know it well, and hear its echoes in Bob Black’s diatribe against work, which begins: “Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.” Whence this cultural antipathy to something as universal and necessary as work? Is the infamous capitalism to blame?

In The Empathic Civilization (2009: 290ff), Jeremy Rifkin spends some time tracing the demise of guilds and the emergence of a labour class. “In the sixteenth century in England, an independent merchant class was beginning to challenge the guilds’ control”. Generally, great changes were afoot, in particular the enclosures, which loosed peasants from the land, creating an exploitable labour force. Advances in transportation using rivers and canals sped trade up. These factors enabled merchants to bring cheaper goods to market, which made them enemies of the guilds. Eventually, 

the old social economy, based on controlling production, fixing prices, and excluding competition from the outside, was too provincial to accommodate the range of new technologies that were making possible greater exchange of goods and services between more people over longer distances. The new technologies gave birth to a capitalist class hell-bent on exploiting their full potential. They found their commercial mode in self-regulating free markets. 

Work became a commodity, along with almost everything else.

That human work became an exchangeable commodity subject to the forces of the ‘free market’, is, I feel, perhaps the prime reason work is as hated as it is today. This governing of work by the price system, in conjunction with mechanisation and the industrial revolution, led inexorably to the state of affairs we have today, and have had for many decades. Work-for-wage at any job at all is a matter of survival. How can we have pride in our work if it is most often for another person’s profit, if we are mere cogs in the machinery of a profit-seeking monolith that cares only about its own (endless) growth?

Charlie Chaplin ‘slaved’ over his films. He wrote them, directed them, acted in them, wrote the music for some of them, edited them, but would not have called that (at times highly repetitive) work “evil”, nor the long hours. I work hard on my blog posts. People everywhere work hard on their own labours of love. But even the ironing, the vacuum cleaning, washing the dishes, changing nappies, none of these things are hateful when we recognise them as necessary elements of a healthy and pleasant life. Then we can say “whistle while you work”, and mean it warmly. Perhaps the distinction is that these forms of work are self-directed and more or less freely chosen.

If capitalism is about capital – as it must be –, and if work is one form of capital that can be exploited in pursuit of profit, and if profit is almost exclusively monetary in nature, then work must be stripped of its potential nobility and grace by capitalism over time. This is, I assert, exactly what we have witnessed. As readers of this blog know, I don’t believe this model is sustainable, for reasons of technological unemployment, planetary carrying capacity, and good old fashioned change. Jeremy Rifkin is similarly critical of this dynamic, as are many other thinkers,  but anticipates an evolution towards what he calls “distributed capitalism”. By this he appears to mean a transition from rigid hierarchy towards flatter, more anarchic arrangements (I don’t recall him using the word “anarchic” though!). In very broad brush strokes, his prediction crudely mirrors some of the aspects of how I envision a resource-based economy gathering steam. Regardless, from where we are now, culturally relearning the grace and nobility of work via transition presents us with a number of challenges.

1. We are still children of the industrial revolution, and this is nowhere more evident than in state education. Grades, large class sizes controlled by a single authority figure tasked with pumping into those malleable minds as much of the state-sanctioned curriculum as possible to sort ‘the wheat from the chaff’, clearly demarcated subjects, lessons begun and ended with the ringing of bells, are all design consequences derived from industry needs. Factory workers are not permitted to be imaginative, critical thinkers. They must be unquestioning drones who are also easy-to-addict consumers. Money, industrialism’s god, requires a constant supply of such humans to grow and grow. Money-as-wealth, money-as-profit, can only see humans as capital to be exploited in its own interest, for its own eternal glory. This is a centuries-old socio-cultural dynamic, so we will not escape it quickly. In other words, we are industrialised, mind and body, yet tasked with changing the system which shaped us, and thus changing ourselves. We are blind, immature and unprepared, yet we must act. The transition can only be bumpy.

2. Can it be capitalism if there is no exploitation (pursuit of profit at the expense of others)? This is a definitional issue, but an important one. Dan Pink is a behavioural economist whose main area of focus is motivation. He cites experiments that have been repeated across the world showing how menial tasks are indeed well motivated by money, whereas cooperative, creative projects are negatively affected by the promise of financial reward. As automation increasingly takes the menial and the repetitive out of human hands, what is left of economic (or public) work for humans will be cooperative and creative. If in this area monetary reward produces worse results than other forms of motivation (i.e., ‘success is its own reward’, the joy of meaningful accomplishment), no explicit profit as measured by money can be the goal of such endeavours. What does this mean in terms of capitalism? Is “distributed capitalism” a contradiction in terms? If capitalism is fundamentally about the pursuit of profit, or the accumulation of capital in ever-growing amounts as leverage for still further growth, doesn’t the distribution of the fruits of socio-economic endeavour along less profit-oriented lines imply socialism? Again, this is a definitional problem, or perhaps one of vision, but one worthy of our attention I feel. To what ‘ends’ and in whose name will we want to work, if not money?

3. Because of 1. and 2. above, state-based socialism may seem attractive in some areas of the world, perhaps all, though the US is packaging its own brand as Freedom! I feel this would be a dead-end. Replacing the Money God with the State God – a mere slight-of-hand trick –, the beneficent father looking after his weakly and incapable children, would be but a continuation of the patriarchal/industrial mindset, as it was in Russia after 1917.  To not exploit each other, but also not to place our entrepreneurial and inventive potential, our individuality, our creativity in the hands of some all-powerful governing institution, is what our maturation from socio-cultural childhood is about. The immaturity I touched on in 1. above is pervasive; we are all infected with it to some extent. The desperate narcissism of the Internet is clear evidence of this. To evolve towards more distributed social structures requires a mature citizenry. We must grow ourselves up, mature, cut ourselves from new cloth. This is hard work. We hate hard work.

And there’s the Catch 22. Part of what is demanded of us to evolve is a re-embracing of that which we have come to despise.  To love work, to appreciate that success is its own reward, to taste the joys of meaningful accomplishment, requires hard work. But, “hard work” as our own hard work, taken on in a spirit of community and cooperation towards meaningful goals and guided by a vision in which money-based profit is distant anathema. We could well rename this “hard work” hard leisure. But, until we begin in earnest to build this as yet unknowable New, promises of the Twenty Hour Week, the Life of Leisure, will remain promises. Our view of them now is similar to the way we anticipate holidays on the beach. They are well-wrapped sweets to be plucked from an evergreen Christmas Tree, only capable of satisfying us for as long as it takes them to dissolve to nothing in our mouths. For work to be good again, for leisure to be more than an empty distraction, we have to put in the hours.

So roll up your sleeves and get down to it. Do good work!

Don't Feed the Beast

Of course we're going to watch the drama, we're human. Greece is/was (take your pick) about to pop, is a tragedy in full swing, full of suffering and misery, and the mainstream will be full of it.

I haven't paid much attention to the mainstream for years now, and yet the dribs and drabs which do filter through on blogs catch my attention. I get excited, worried, frightened, the whole shebang. There's been some well-sourced rumours flying around for a couple of days now, that Greece will be forced/allowed (take your pick) to default in the second half of March (23rd). As part of this the major banks have been given advance warning, to give them a chance to protect their assets. The little guys will take the hit. Too Big To Fail means far more than rescuing 'systemically relevant' banks. It is about protecting the exploitation system, the state itself, the Hobbesian, inflexible hierarchy of rulers and ruled only a tiny minority truly benefit from.

This morning, Zero Hedge posted an article on the ECB's latest move, shocked that the 'Rule of Law' is arbitrary, can be amended retroactively, is not sacrosanct. But this has been so since forever. Cheap oil and the profits therefrom have merely masked it. Now that easy growth is impossible, the system is doing whatever it has to, to keep itself functional, and its core functioning is extraction of the ruled by the rulers. It's that simple. Here's a quote from Zero Hedge:

The ECB, on its own and without judicial or parliamentary review, has swapped their Greek debt for new Greek debt that is not subject to any “collective action clause.” They did this unilaterally and without the consent of any other sovereign debt bond owners of Greek debt. They did this without objection of any nation in Europe. They have retroactively changed the indenture, the contract made by Greece with all of the buyers of their bonds, when the debt was issued. There is no speculation involved in these statements, there is no longer any guesswork on what might be; the ECB swapped their bonds for new Greek bonds with the assent of the Greek government and it is now a done deal.

What else were they going to do? The system is in an advanced stage of collapse. Whatever it takes, whatever must be sacrificed to survive, will be done. And this is a fight for survival. But this system cannot survive, too much has changed. We cannot grow economically as it needs us to, we are increasingly disenchanted with Consumerism, there is the Internet spreading information faster than the control structures can control, technology is rendering the work-for-wage model obsolete (if it isn't already), and easy oil is not sufficiently plentiful.

Our focus should be on what world we want to build in the new circumstances, not on the quickly-changing details of the economic and political day-to-day, as 'exciting' and horrible as they can be. This requires of us that we don't feed the beast. Don't vote. Consume less. Study alternative currencies. Support endeavours you resonate with which offer elements of the new, such as gift economies and renewable energies, organic farming or permactulture, etc. Don't send any money, or send as little as possible, to the mainstream media. And make your voice heard, maturely, patiently, humbly, in independent outlets, among friends and neighbours. In such little steps we can contribute to a more gentle collapse of the old, a more vigorous emergence of the new. It is not that we rush childishly into the sparkly future, rather, we act in accordance with reality, foster our and others' common humanity and civility, and be as constructive as possible.

It is not going to be easy, and I strongly suspect terrible tragedies lie between us and whatever new stability results from all this upheaval, but this is how history unfolds. Change is difficult, profound change profoundly so.

A Crisis of Imagination

At the supermarket buying a loaf of bread and a jar of yoghurt, I saw a German newspaper (Die Zeit) sporting the headline, “What is the alternative to capitalism?” Underneath, dominating the front page, was an appropriate graphic of a big fish eating a smaller fish eating a smaller fish, maybe five fish long. It’s a graphical gesture we all understand. Sadly, the article does not appear to be available online, so, not having bought a copy of the paper, I cannot comment on its content.

A couple of weeks ago, on a mainstream German channel (ARD), Franz Hoermann was allowed his five minutes of fame (his star appears to be rising though, so perhaps more than five minutes are coming his way). In his rapid-fire, academic style, he described the fiat, fractional reserve system. There appeared to be no shock in the audience. The minister for the economy, Philipp Roesler, sat to Hoermann’s left. Next to Roesler sat the finance minister and one of the architects of the Euro, Theo Waigel. Opposite Hoermann sat some markets expert, Dirk Mueller. Of the quartet, only Waigel seemed content to propagate the idea that the money system is fine as it is, is somehow immortal, and needs no substantial adjustments. That a thinker of Hoermann’s oddity should be given any airtime at all on such a mainstream talk show is quite surprising, that the other panelists, and the host too, should (more or less) sympathize with his position (Waigel excepted) more surprising still.

Apparently the BBC (principally Radio 4 and Newsnight) are also broadcasting what I think of as the voice of reason, that is, the type prepared to highlight collapse. Not doom and gloom necessarily, but a deep systemic problem which must be addressed. The Guardian online yesterday morning had a headline in its business section proclaiming the European situation was spiraling out of control, that France and Germany were contemplating a restructuring of the Eurozone. Strange days, as they say, are most certainly afoot. And yet despite this media flurry, a combination of rigged markets, desperate belief, a few heads of state tumbling down the career ladder, some reshuffling, and the situation suddenly seems less desperate. For a while. Nevertheless the taste of profound change in the air can’t be ignored any more. Defenses are crumbling, and I suspect growing numbers of the so-called elite are losing heart. Fewer and fewer of us care about this system as we once did, fewer desire ever growing consumption, ever higher salaries, an ever more frenetic rat race. What’s the point? To be cliched about it, surely there’s more to life than this!

So, is capitalism doomed? Well of course it is, just as is the sun. Only sooner. But it’s the wrong question (sort of).

I’ve covered this topic before, probably too often, so am going to be brief here. What I want to say is that what is being called into question, although labelled “capitalism” by everyone and their aunt, is in fact the price system, and includes the variants of socialism, communism, and fascism humanity has toyed with thus far, though these systems do have important differences.

A price is a piece of information generated by market activity (supply and demand) that tells us—allegedly in an uninfluenced, non-political, ‘value free’ way—what each good and service is worth. Price is therefore Value. Price information as generated by the market is—in ‘free’ market ideology—always true and accurate, as long as the State does not interfere with Price Discovery. Any interference muddies the water, poisons the accuracy of the information, and things no longer work optimally. It’s an elegant and powerful idea. Something organic and ‘natural’ takes place, constantly, no one dominates, and clear, helpful information emerges from the melee, information that guides important matters like how many Ferraris to manufacture, how many potatoes to grow, how many twenty carat diamond rings to produce, and so on. And via the labour market, who gets what amount of purchasing power is similarly discovered, in a ‘value free’ way. If only it were that simple!

As readers of this blog will know, I don’t subscribe to this theory (as it stands), since there can be no such thing as a ‘free’ market. Hence the price system cannot work as advertised. Hence ‘capitalism’ cannot work as advertised. The differences between ‘capitalism’ and ‘communism’ are important, but also somewhat cosmetic. In communism we have the monopoly of State fixing prices. In capitalism we have the monopoly (or oligopoly) or the Corporation fixing prices. Either way we do not have clean and true information contained in prices. Externalities are but one other aspect of this general problem. That we even try to nail value down using a linear scale like Dollar is another.

There are many problems, but perhaps the central one is that the confected dichotomy between Market and State serves no purpose other than to bamboozle and confuse. It is a Punch and Judy show, just as the Left-Right Drama is. One telling sign of this is the infrequency with which lobbying (the modern name for bribery) is discussed as Market interference in State. If Market only works best when ‘free’ from State ‘interference,’ why do we not hear any mainstream discussion of how a ‘free’ State works best when free from Market ‘interference?’

Of course the answer is that the price system is corruptible, corrupted, and benefits approximately 10% of the population at the cost of the remaining 90%. It is an elitist system by design. And that applies to both Market and State. Elitism, entrenched class divisions, wealth, health and education gaps, are systemic properties of the price system while the money system is set up as we have it.

Underneath all of this writhe, like uroboric world serpents, the core assumptions of Competition, Selfishness and Greed, as projected onto nature via misunderstandings of Darwinian theory (Spencer’s “red in tooth and claw”). Of course a millennia old dynamic of elitist control of an exploited non-elite, as established by the state long ago (a HUGE topic), predominantly engenders the kind of competition, selfishness and greed history has delivered thus far. We cooked ourselves in that soup and now see its flavours everywhere we look, even in our imagination. That there is far more to nature than this simplistic Triumvirate of Evil is becoming plainer and plainer, but changing the system forged in those elitist fires, the system which found form and life in historical processes set in motion by farming and ‘taming’ fire, and as these accomplishments gave birth to scarcity and property (twinned phenomena in my humble opinion) which in turn shape our view of All That is; changing a system that old, that much a part of what we all are, is no easy task.

Back to the price system. As we can see, its roots go deep indeed. We ‘need’ it, because we have ‘discovered’ scarcity via farming and property. Because there is not enough to go around, what better way to ‘decide’ who gets what, while keeping the constant threat of a Hobbesian Warre of Each Against All at bay, what better than some ‘anonymous,’ impartial, and incorruptible system? Capitalism. Free Market. The Price System. A force of nature for harnessing our brutish forces of nature.

Cool, only atop the foundational assumption of scarcity no market can stay free. Big fish eat little fish (competition, greed, selfishness), in the twinned realms of Market and State alike, and before you know it, the biggest are writing the rules to suit themselves and their own. ‘Twas ever thus, and ever thus shall be. Until we update the Triumvirate of Evil and embrace abundance, cooperation and faith.

Back to the money system. It is the motor of state apparatus, is its core dynamic embodied in financial infrastructure. Forged in those Competition, Selfishness and Greed fires, the money system stimulates and assumes these three forces equally resolutely. It also requires, by design, perpetual economic growth. Ever-growing economic activity. An ever-expanding money realm into the non-economic realm. An ever-accelerating rat race. What was once done for free, what is ‘idly’ doing nothing—like forests and schools of fish—must be converted into either goods or services. If it’s not working, if it’s not earning money and delivering price information, what possible value can it have? How can we measure a thing, assess it, extract it, profit from it, unless it is sucked into economic life? Look at air, that useless, ubiquitous stuff. It has a price of zero! Let’s earn money from it, put it to work somehow, make it earn its right to exist! But what happens when there’s no nature left to convert into goods and services ??? Let’s not contemplate that.

Except, the mainstream has begun to contemplate just that. We are the mainstream, even we Fringe Nutjobs. The more eloquent we become at presenting our case, the quicker and more effectively the message can spread to others. Then our imaginations can begin the work of envisioning a new system, and put ideas into practice.

Fellow travelers, through this period of upheaval, crisis and opportunity, the time of the Fringe Nutjob has come. People will be asking, in growing numbers, what the alternatives are. Sadly, the “no one knows” answer can be annoying. I suggest pointing out that the system we have is based on profound misunderstandings of the workings of reality, and, as a consequence, has become addicted to perpetual growth. We have designed a system which, were it a car, could only accelerate. Forever. Pressing on the breaks causes it to crash. Designing things differently requires, urgently, a new money system, which will further and necessarily require a redesign of pretty much everything else. All of it can only begin when we are ready to initiate the task. When we badly want something new. Right now recognition of the urgency is paramount. The ideas are there. We need safe-as-possible mechanisms and methodologies for testing them.

It has begun in earnest. Now we have to kick our imaginations into gear, have a lot of faith, and believe in ourselves.

(After reading this please check out this talk, given towards the end of October at Occupy Wall Street, on money, value and information flow. Fascinating stuff. Thanks, Karl, for the link.)

What Is Capitalism, Exactly?

Russia Today seems to be a news organization growing in presence and penetration. It is, of course, not without an agenda, but for now at least it covers stories of interest to the 99%—to use the modern vernacular—far better than the mainstream. I drop by from time to time and watch any articles that catch my eye. Last weekend a debate on #ows did just that. An early theme that emerged in the opening minutes was that America had yet to experience true capitalism, that Wall Street was not a capitalist phenomenon, that until we got true capitalism we’d just be digging a deeper debt-hole for ourselves, and the socialist rich would continue to fleece the 99% and charge them for the pleasure. Oh yeah, and growth would not return. It’s an argument I’m sure you’ve all heard before. And it begs one blindingly obvious question: What the hell is capitalism?

At risk of annoying those who want to know, I suspect there are as many answers as people chancing an answer. Which is I suppose good in some ways, but bad in others. However, if capitalism can be any number of things depending on whom you ask, the assertion that some pure or true capitalism would put America or Europe or the world Back in Business is vague and unprovable. Furthermore, if the world has never experienced True Capitalism, how can we know it would work? And, is it even tenable to assert that something as vague as capitalism has a ‘true’ form, and what does it mean for such to work? These are not easy questions to answer. In fact, there are no answers.

My position is vague too, I admit it, but—I dare to suggest—less vague. Whatever we call The New Way (I’m with those who refer to it as resource-based economics, but that’s totally cosmetic, little more than a temporary holder), we cannot know from this distance the details of its operating, which would be emergent and changing anyway. But a New Way it will most definitely be. What I do not seek is a ‘return’ to, or arrival at, some pure, ‘free’ market oiled by an optimally minimal amount of ‘government interference’, because such a wish makes absolutely no sense to me. Not only is there no separation between the fictions of Market and State, there is no such thing as freedom. Acceptance of this will set us ‘free’ (ha!) to build The New Way from the ground up. And so, from a fresher perspective, a free market is exactly what I wish for.

Deep in the Myth of the Market I spy the seed of something radical, and that is direct democracy and its potential flourishing via the Internet (or similar infrastructure and software). The very idea that everyone’s dollar is equivalent, has purchasing power and therefore ‘political’ power too; that none can steer the market to their own egomaniacal ends, is a healthy one. The problem with it, is that money is necessarily powerful, operates as a commodity with value even as it is a mere measure, and that being rich is ‘better’ than being poor.

Because outcomes cannot be equal, because people are not uniformly ‘rational,’ motivated and well informed, the messy and unpredictable competition of markets can only lead, in this system, to grossly unequal accumulations and distribution of money and property. Under the current rules of the market game ‘success’ is about victory over, or at the expense of, other market participants. Competition is nothing unless it produces winners and losers.

In this system, healthy unequal distribution (uniformity of outcome is flat out impossible) generates unhealthy and stubborn rich and poor divides. When, by definition, rich is Good, and poor is Bad, why should we expect a different result? There is a constant incentive to game this system for ego-based ends; the rich seek to maintain the current distribution or tilt it even more in their favour, the poor to Get Rich by any means possible. The power lies with the rich, however, since they can afford lawyers, lobbyists, the best education, etc., to help them and their kin stay ‘on top.’ And none of this has anything to do with blame, except at the systemic level. As humans with empathy and imagination, we can imagine what it’s like to be rich or poor, so seek the former and avoid the latter (as a rule) and set up systems that survive across generations. Hence stubborn rich-poor divides, class divisions, and so on.

So the ‘free’ market dynamic so many yearn for can only generate the very monopoly problem it is thought to avoid, while our foundational assumptions about reality include scarcity, Separation (as Charles Eisenstein means it), greed and competition, and denigrate, or think illusory, abundance, cooperation and trust.

"What," as Mr. Fussy was wont to say, "to do?"

Well, to be vague, in conjunction with a change of consciousness, we change the rules and goals of the game, by changing the money system to fit what the new consciousness desires, perceives, understands. Until we address the stickiness of money, its ability to glue divisions in place and keep them there at all costs, the Market-State hierarchical extraction dynamic will operate as we have seen historically thus far, turning ‘idle’ resources into goods and services for sale at an ever accelerating pace, to the enrichment of the 1% (10% really), recently as aided and abetted by fossil fuels and our burgeoning technological prowess. Furthermore, exacerbating the problem of what I’m calling money’s stickiness is the usury attached to its creation per fractional reserve banking, such that the money system must constantly increase the money supply if it is to pay off the interest owed, which requires a forever growing economy. Consequently, growth is what ‘backs’ money in this system, hence our blind allegiance to the god Perpetual Growth, and our systemic subservience to it. We are witnessing today the system’s breakdown, for the simple reason that growth cannot be reignited as the system demands.

The money system is a problem generated by a consciousness (or paradigm) of scarcity, fear and greed. They reenforce one another, co-create each other in a positive feedback loop, and we are still in their (its) grip. But we are breaking out of it at last. There are multiple suggestions ‘out there’ to help us grow a new system from the soil of the new, emerging consciousness.

The Venus Project and The Zeitgeist Movement call for a new socioeconomics which would render redundant the need for any medium of exchange, but are sketchy to silent on how to transition to such a different system. Their idea to give away goods and services at a price of zero, to all people, by producing more than enough across the planet, is beautiful, but too outlandish and far-off to find sufficiently deep purchase in the current culture’s soil, as evidenced by The Venus Project’s relative obscurity after decades of dedicated promotion and campaigning. The Zeitgeist Movement is concerned primarily (and rightly so in my opinion) with dissemination of information and analyses which help others more critically appraise the status quo so as to be readier for change when it comes, and more able to introduce it wisely.

Charles Eisenstein calls for the buying of existing debt with a fiat, negative interest currency, not debt-based; the end of income taxes, and the introduction of biting taxes on environmentally damaging mining, manufacture etc.; a social dividend ‘funded’ by that money drained from the economy via the demurrage rate and environmental taxes; for minimal (or no) private property, maximum commons, revolution in the education system; and multiple money types to meet flexibly various economic needs. It’s all laid out in his book, “Sacred Economics”.

Franz Hoermann and his ‘team’ call for a minimum of two “billing circuits”, such that matter (as mined, farmed, grown, etc.) is to be ‘tracked’ by one type of money, and human creativity (labour and other societal contributions) by another. ‘Money’ is to be totally electronic and transparent, created (as in Ithaca Hours) at the point of the transaction, which means locally at the level of the individual, managed by an Internet-like infrastructure, and to be seen as a means of keeping tabs rather than as wealth. In this ‘plan’ (better; set of ideas and suggestions) there is to be a social dividend in the form of an ‘overdraft facility’ at the level of the personal ‘bank account,’ which incurs no interest. There is no interest anywhere in the money system. Bankers become advisers to people seeking help on the best way to contribute to society. Private property would likewise (as in Eisenstein’s model) be phased out. Education would be a far more open affair. (Further details on this are available on YouTube in German, or at this blog as translated by me.)

There are many other ‘plans’ out there, from Freegold, to 100% reserve banking, to MMT. My ‘money’ is on some mix of the above.

But change is underway now, globally, in the form of Occupy Everywhere, which is the early beginnings of the creation of a new decision-making sociopolitical apparatus, which will mature and develop as it does, beyond the control of any individual or monopoly. As such it is a genuinely ‘free’ market (to the extent such a thing is at all possible) because it is motivated by transparency and cooperation, which has The New Way both as its goal and means (means are ends). The establishment of these means is to include the contribution of anyone who wishes to be involved. In this ‘market,’ this bazaar, the ideas and suggestions humanity has to offer can be discussed and critiqued, including how to get direct democracy up and running, scaling that up beyond the local, and slowly building the mechanisms which will transcend the current status quo, and render it redundant. If some people want to call this process True Capitalism, they can. Who am I to say no to that. My contribution (or desire) is adherence to a transparent and cooperative process which allows the stronger ideas to rise to the surface of human consciousness, globally. Science, feedback from nature, open-mindedness and concern for the environment will take care of the rest.

The earth belongs to no one. No one. Life (or Universe) is a web of ever-changing interrelationships which cannot be frozen into some ‘preferred’ arrangement, and includes humanity as deeply as it includes asteroids and weather. Humans are not separate from Universe. Existing ‘rulers’ only rule over others for as long as those others agree to that rule. Law, convention, tradition; all are negotiable, and being human inventions steeped in inescapable ignorance, need to be treated with a wise but cool attitude which allows us creative flexibility going forward. I agree with those who see an enormous sea change sweeping across the human sphere, that our consciousness is reaching out to a deepening appreciation of cooperation, interdependence, emergence, embeddedness and community. These ‘new’ desires can find no fruitful voice in this system of Perpetual Growth, consumerism, cynicism, propaganda and hierarchical ‘control.’ In the manner of autopoiesis (self-creating) we, the 100%, are giving birth to the soil that will nourish their flourishing, regardless of the label we choose to attach to what one day emerges as Our New System. What it will not be is the flowering of the neoliberal dream of homo economicus, locked into guarded competition with the rest of Universe in a battle over scarce goods and services, whose cost is the endless rape of nature in pursuit of the barren dream of Shiny Cars, Huge McMansions and other Bling Mirages.

So, my answer to the question I set myself in the title: I don’t care. It’s not history or some pragmatic, academic purity which should be guiding us, but our humanity and its embeddedness in the rest of nature. Chris Hedges:

Macdonald argued that those who wanted change had to base all actions on the nonhistorical and more esoteric values of truth, justice and love. They had to retain Danton’s call for audacity. Once any class bows to the practical dictates required by effective statecraft and legislation, as well as the call to protect the nation, it loses its moral authority and its voice. The naive belief in human progress through science, technology and mass production, which this movement understands is a lie, erodes these nonhistorical values by placing faith in state power and fantasy. The choice is between serving human beings or serving history, between thinking ethically or thinking strategically. Macdonald excoriated Marxists for the same reason he excoriated the liberal class: They subordinated ethics to another goal. They believed the ends justified the means. The liberal class, like the Marxists, by serving history and power capitulated to the state in the end. This capitulation by the liberal class, as Irving Howe noted, “bleached out all political tendencies.” Liberalism, he wrote, “becomes a loose shelter, a poncho rather than a program; to call oneself a liberal one doesn’t really have to believe in anything.”

Believe in us, and call yourself a human.

10 (or so) Questions for Capitalists

How can competition benefit most people when most must be losers by definition? In competition there is typically one winner and many losers. The other way around is logically impossible.

How can we be rich and affluent during a boom one day, then poor, willing embracers of austerity the next? How can it be that this cycle repeats across the centuries, with 'wealth' suddenly disappearing without decent explanation, and yet we apply the same methods in an attempt to get different results.

How do central banks repeatedly fail to notice mounting debt in a debt-money system? Isn't it their first responsibility to monitor the money supply and keep inflation at 'reasonable' levels?

How can the debt-money system be praised during the boom, then stunned surprise announced during the bust, with the finger of blame pointed at the very mechanism – debt – praised the day before for delivering such wonders? How can the way out of this cycle be yet more debt?

How can we refuse to question debt-based money creation when it is universally accepted that nations and citizens took on too much debt?

How can capitalism suddenly not have been in operation these last decades, when during the apparently 'good' times it had killed communism and spread plenty across the western world?

How can capitalism be anything other than a system for creating overly powerful corporations, when it is at core a system for leveraging concentrations of wealth in pursuit of ever more profit?

Why is it now so often heard that, actually, we haven't had 'genuine' capitalism, that 'genuine' capitalism would be better than 'crony capitalism,' or 'corporate capitalism,' while it is simultaneously acknowledged that perfect competition is impossible? Only perfect competition can prevent the concentrations of market-manipulating, price-fixing power so in evidence across the planet and throughout its modern history, concentrations which are in fact capitalism's very engine.

Why is individualism so fanatically insisted upon, so viscerally defended by knee-jerk group-think? Isn't it bitterly ironic that the collective, in almost total unity, insists that the individual has supremacy, while shouting down lone individuals who claim otherwise?

Are we going to let a socioeconomic model called “capitalism” wipe us out while in reckless pursuit of perpetual 'growth,' or are we going to coolly assess the situation and do what needs to be done?

Capitalism is Dead! Long Live ???

"Were this system improvable, such would already have happened within the last 80 years. Instead we see an insoluble problem in the absurd Capital Market Theory.

Allegedly, all participants in a free market possess the exact same information and future expectations. Were such at all possible in the real world, all participants would value all goods in this market in the same way, that is, assign the same price. But that would mean no transactions whatsoever would take place since no profits would be possible. With identical information and future expectations price and value are judged identically by all market participants. In those conditions no one can make a profit, either through buying or selling. Instead there are only losses due to transaction costs." Franz Hoermann

Unless, perhaps, price/value includes ‘profit.’ But, how could price actually do so in a perfect market? Knowingly paying others profit would be a form of cooperation, antithetical to perfect competition. And even if we did endow homo economicus with sufficient generosity to say, “Sure, I’ll pay X% above your costs,” that X% would be so low as to prohibit accumulation of capital, and hence prevent capitalism from functioning. Hence, capitalism cannot be ‘pure’ in the sense of a perfect market or perfect competition and still be capitalism. It is systemically geared to increase concentrations of capital, otherwise the very leverage required to expand society’s productive and consumptive capacities would be impossible. Capitalism is Wealth-and-Power-Concentration by definition. It is top-down elitism as socioeconomic system. It can therefore be neither free nor democratic in the sense its champions would have us believe. The only freedom capitalism ensures is that afforded by one’s purchasing power. Yes, one can ‘work hard’ and perhaps earn more, but people’s chances of accessing such freedom diminish as power and wealth concentrate and hunker down. Then corruption becomes the norm and decadence sets in.

The question society must ask itself is this: “When the costs of capitalism outweigh its benefits, how do we go about changing course?” After all, one property all systems share is mortality.

The argument that capitalism is Nature mapped to the economic sphere, and therefore not a system as such, and therefore immortal, is mere propaganda. Nature’s composition – as seen by those who assert capitalism’s robust naturalness – looks like this: competition in the true Hobbesian manner of each against all; selfish genes determining behaviour; creative destruction ensuring renewal and change; pitiless, merciless, randomly mutating evolution ensuring survival only of the fittest. But this perception of Nature is an ego-based projection arising from incomplete information garnered over the centuries. The view afforded by the latest science is very different.

Nature is in fact cooperative first, competitive second. Genes are not controllers of behaviour, they react to the environment; environment has primacy, not some unaware double-helix firing off instructions, via proteins, from an imagined control center. Creative destruction is not everywhere evident; there are exceptions, wisdom being one of the most important, institutions the most pernicious. And Lamarckism is making a slow comeback; random mutation as lone engine of evolutionary change is an incomplete idea; there is also intent.

Capitalism does not mirror Nature. Even if it did, it would only do so for a while; Nature is Change, is in fact Everything, and humanity is seamlessly, irrevocably, beautifully embedded in it, changing it as it changes us. Capitalism is indeed a system born of an ideology serving an elite, and can only be so. It has been a lever to linear growth of a certain type, and has successfully harnessed humanity's inventive genius in pursuit of that growth. To paraphrase Eisenstein, it has monetized (made scarce) everything it could, but can take us no further. To the extent it lived, it is now dead. Certainly it was never what it's defenders said it was, and that growing realization is a kind of death.

The alternative is some form of loose egalitarianism motivated by environmental concern, a model based on abundance and cooperation rather than scarcity and competition. (And by the way, neither socialism nor communism are it, for they too are elitist.)

If humanity wants to transition to such a system, in my view it must be one which can benefit sustainably from the fruits of centralization while avoiding its dangers and incorporating decentralization too. This is, in my view, only possible via a radical reorientation of our goals and desires. By demoting money’s socioeconomic role while promoting true wealth as arising from community- and ecosystem-health, open access to a relevant and optional education, etc., the necessary ideas and solutions should arise. What we call this system only history can reveal. Right now, to me, the best name seems to be “Resource-Based Economics.”