CAPITALISM WILL KILL OUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN

Humans in the past have had to deal with factors that threatened their survival. A few adapted and survived, but most did not. Our civilization is no different. It will not survive either.

UCLA Professor Jared Diamond in his 2005 book Collapse list 12 different causes of the inevitable fall of civilized life on our planet home within 30 years. They will cause our children and grandchildren to live in the Stone Age, with the law of the jungle, and to die. They are real. They are imminent. They all must be solved. If we solved 11, but left one unsolved, Diamond says our civilized life would still be over.

There are some obvious things we humans could and should do right now to adapt and survive.

1. Stop all pro life policies and flood the world with free contraceptives.
2. Stop cutting trees immediately, everywhere.
3. Stop all pollution of our rivers and lakes and halt all discharge of sewage and pollutants into the oceans.
4. Require all engines everywhere to have zero emissions within 1 year.
5. Stop using water and soil to feed cattle, chickens and pigs. Humans must learn to eat corn, beans, and squash and soy bean products.
6. Stop all flood irrigation in agriculture and compel the use of drip irrigation. Seriously conserve topsoil everywhere, and prohibit building or paving on tillable top soil.
7. Establish and enforce planet wide regulation of fishing to prevent over fishing and destruction of species.
8. Make a massive transition to solar cooking, solar water heating, solar power, wind power, wave power, and current power. Adopt all energy conservation strategies.
9. Recycle and reuse everything. Compost all human excrement and garbage.
10. Study and copy what Cubans have done with organic farming and worm culture to get food without oil, and oil based fertilizers.
11. Put a huge tax on gasoline.

In our denial and our addiction to comfort, we are maintaining a political economy that will aggressively cause the death of our children and grandchildren! We do not have a political economy based on wise planning and community action. We have capitalism, a political economy whose sole obligation is to earn as much short term profit as possible. The capitalist system brings vast wealth to the top 1% of us, but it does no planning, has no responsibility to the planet or to humans, and actively opposes all that we should be doing to solve the problem.
Our struggle with capitalism and the money it produces for the very rich is about a lot more than justice, equality, freedom and self-governing democracy. It is about our civilized survival. Marxists like to say that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. It is much more than that. Capitalism aggressively fuels the destruction of civilized life on this planet and death for millions.

Unfortunately, we need to do a lot more than look at Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth. We must reduce capitalism’s awesome power by refusing to buy its products, refusing to work within it, and by denying its legitimacy.

November 11, 2007

Douglas R. Page dougpage2@earthlink.net