OPINION

How scarcity necessitates a more ecologically sustainable global community and digital technology makes that feasible

By Charles Posa McFadden 2021-02-03

Essentially, capitalism itself has created the conditions that both necessitate and make possible its replacement by a new system for making our way through nature.

While appearances may be deceiving, capitalism has turned natural abundance into scarcity. A nature denuded by an increasingly destructive capitalist system can no longer be relied on to provide a surplus to be drawn upon to meet our collective survival needs. The impoverishment of once forested land, soil fertility, potable water, fecund oceans, lakes, and rivers, and the loss of natural diversity have each now surpassed their rates of renewal by natural processes. Instead, capitalism only survives by ignoring the rights of younger generations to an equally supportive natural environment. The present is purchased by the capitalist class at the expense of the future.

Not only does capitalism waste what nature reproduces. It also wastes much of the human labor it employs. These wastes include resources exploited for the primary purpose of securing and promoting the capitalist class in the face of its increasing loss of social legitimacy. These wastes include the resources consumed and destroyed in the so-called War on Terror and other expenditures on war and war preparations, policing and incarceration. To sell themselves, the ruling capitalist class and its agents waste fortunes on commercial advertising, public relations, and media propaganda. Even worse, their control over education diverts the attention of teachers away from the development of their students’ creative and critical thinking abilities, making them captive to fact-recall testing, test preparation and other forms of time-serving without meaningful learning. Fascism is the face of this destruction of human imagination and capacity.

In its competitive drive for private profits, capitalism has also created the conditions which make a global alternative possible. These include a global majoritarian population without significant personal property to rely on for meeting their personal needs, in other words, a majority working class, a potentially revolutionary force for the transformation of capitalism into an ecologically sustainable, and therefore classless social system.

But wealth concentration has created an increasingly isolated and vulnerable ruling class. Most of the world’s wealth is now in the hands of no more individuals than could be accommodated by a single secondary school auditorium. If they resist the necessary transformation away from exploitative social relations, any large resort on a suitably tropical island should provide a welcome opportunity to them for living out their remaining years in reasonable comfort, where they would no longer interfere with the creative labor of the rest of humanity.

The real wealth of the capitalist class can readily be turned over to their workers to manage in the public interest. As to financial management, this form of wealth now circulates daily through a digitally connected global network of financial institutions. All that is needed is to make these institutions global public utilities.

The only significant obstacle to the needed social transformation is a cultural one, namely, learning to make decisions cooperatively within the framework of human rights and their enforcement. Most of the rights needed are now recognized by the United Nations and other international bodies. What is needed, therefore, is to replace the capitalist class and its political representatives at every level of government and enterprise management. Digital technology has already demonstrated human capacity for discussion and cooperative planning at every geopolitical scale, from local to global. And the capitalist class has proven itself capable of forcing upon humanity this logical response to its growing illegitimacy.