Richard Swift's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-commons"
SOS:Alternatives to Capitalism.
SOS Alternatives to Capitalism
FROM THE INTRODUCTION OF MY NEW BOOK SOS:ALTERNATIVES TO CAPITALISM PUBLISHED BY NEW INTERNATIONALIST PUBLICATIONS (OXFORD) AND BETWEEN THE LINES (Toronto)
introduction: A sad and
beautiful world in peril
It is pretty obvious that our world is in trouble. Well, maybe not the earth itself or even the global ecosystem that calls it home. These are likely to survive in one form or another so long as their star (the sun) doesn’t burn out. It is more the place occupied by
the human species that is in question as we destroy the ecological conditions necessary to support us in the numbers and style to which we have grown accustomed. That’s right – we are doing it to ourselves. Species suicide.
‘Oh, here we go,’ you might say,‘another one of those “end-of-the-world-is-nigh” books.’ Well, it’s true nonetheless. We are doing it incrementally, by stealth, like one of those new bombers you can’t detect until it’s too late, or like the drones that blow you up when you think you are safe hanging out with your family on the rooftop. We think we are OK but the evidence is mounting that we are not: increasing instances of often deadly extreme weather; stultifying urban environments like those of Beijing and myriad other Chinese cities that are choking on coal smoke; our sad dependence on the oil economy with its toxic spills; explosions of all kinds as we heat the climate to cooking point. Renewable resources – fresh water, fertile soil, global fish stocks – are fast being rendered non-renewable by greed and wasteful misuse. Then there is the human cost in lives of precarious labor, huge refugee populations and fully one in six of humans barely able to survive on pennies a day. I could, of course, go on but I don’t want to discourage you at this early stage.
That’s the sad part – so what about the beautiful? The list is almost endless. A Canadian lake during a misty dawn; a walk in the fields of the English west country; the sounds of a jungle
at night; dolphins playing in the waves; the bounty of colorful fish that inhabits any coral reef – and that’s just the natural world. Then there’s the idiosyncratic human species – from
your children embarking on their wonderstruck discovery of life in all its diversity and glory right through to that odd fellow in Montreal who dresses up in a panda suit to protect student demonstrators from police violence. When our best natures aren’t suppressed, we can be loving, funny, carefree, courageous, thoughtful and capable of wondrous acts of generosity.
Of course, we won’t always be this way. Sometimes we will be small-minded and mean, narcissistic and self-serving
– downright nasty. We will always have these competing traits. So what we need to do is to organize the world in such a way as to encourage our better selves and discourage our narrow-minded
and nasty side. Our current system of capital accumulation (known as corporate capitalism) does just the opposite. This
champions and fosters narrow-minded self-interest and greed as the cornerstone of all that is human. It also fosters inequality and powerlessness on a massive scale and is driving us in the direction of eco-destruction – including of the aforementioned lakes, reefs, jungles and dolphins.
FROM THE INTRODUCTION OF MY NEW BOOK SOS:ALTERNATIVES TO CAPITALISM PUBLISHED BY NEW INTERNATIONALIST PUBLICATIONS (OXFORD) AND BETWEEN THE LINES (Toronto)
introduction: A sad and
beautiful world in peril
It is pretty obvious that our world is in trouble. Well, maybe not the earth itself or even the global ecosystem that calls it home. These are likely to survive in one form or another so long as their star (the sun) doesn’t burn out. It is more the place occupied by
the human species that is in question as we destroy the ecological conditions necessary to support us in the numbers and style to which we have grown accustomed. That’s right – we are doing it to ourselves. Species suicide.
‘Oh, here we go,’ you might say,‘another one of those “end-of-the-world-is-nigh” books.’ Well, it’s true nonetheless. We are doing it incrementally, by stealth, like one of those new bombers you can’t detect until it’s too late, or like the drones that blow you up when you think you are safe hanging out with your family on the rooftop. We think we are OK but the evidence is mounting that we are not: increasing instances of often deadly extreme weather; stultifying urban environments like those of Beijing and myriad other Chinese cities that are choking on coal smoke; our sad dependence on the oil economy with its toxic spills; explosions of all kinds as we heat the climate to cooking point. Renewable resources – fresh water, fertile soil, global fish stocks – are fast being rendered non-renewable by greed and wasteful misuse. Then there is the human cost in lives of precarious labor, huge refugee populations and fully one in six of humans barely able to survive on pennies a day. I could, of course, go on but I don’t want to discourage you at this early stage.
That’s the sad part – so what about the beautiful? The list is almost endless. A Canadian lake during a misty dawn; a walk in the fields of the English west country; the sounds of a jungle
at night; dolphins playing in the waves; the bounty of colorful fish that inhabits any coral reef – and that’s just the natural world. Then there’s the idiosyncratic human species – from
your children embarking on their wonderstruck discovery of life in all its diversity and glory right through to that odd fellow in Montreal who dresses up in a panda suit to protect student demonstrators from police violence. When our best natures aren’t suppressed, we can be loving, funny, carefree, courageous, thoughtful and capable of wondrous acts of generosity.
Of course, we won’t always be this way. Sometimes we will be small-minded and mean, narcissistic and self-serving
– downright nasty. We will always have these competing traits. So what we need to do is to organize the world in such a way as to encourage our better selves and discourage our narrow-minded
and nasty side. Our current system of capital accumulation (known as corporate capitalism) does just the opposite. This
champions and fosters narrow-minded self-interest and greed as the cornerstone of all that is human. It also fosters inequality and powerlessness on a massive scale and is driving us in the direction of eco-destruction – including of the aforementioned lakes, reefs, jungles and dolphins.
