Get smart about capitalism as the core culprit

Changing humanity's mind as the core solution

May 21, 2024

With our essay contest looking to the world working in 2050, this animation is the other bookend of how it could be if the world isn’t working by then:

Today, I’m shining a spotlight on a particularly cogent presentation last Tuesday about capitalism as what’s causal to what ails us, where philanthropy just moves the deck chairs in a return-on-capital world. It’s daunting when you think about ending capitalism, but an illuminating conversation, between Jeremy Lent and Marjorie Kelly, who wrote WEALTH SUPREMACY: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises, lays out a path.

In a world where there are two major wars and Trump’s Republican Party, and where global warming is cooking us, we need to deal with what’s causal to our paralysis. This Zoom gave me so much better a grasp than I had on the matrix we are in, and gave me confidence that conversation, my advocacy, is what needs to happen. Also that “the way” will be catalyzed be small pockets of understanding -- islands of coherence – seeding a move to a humanitarian base instead of an economic one. That’s echoed by Margaret Mead’s delivery of what could be the most widely shared quote of this era: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

In the quest for what to do now, how about it becoming fashionable to write essays about how the world could be made to work? Not only did ideas emerge from our essay contest, but an unexpected result was that people who felt helpless were stimulated to become activists. If essays like the ones in our contest flooded the net, the thinking people would do about a positive future, and conversation they would have about their thoughts, could create our shared understanding. Also, how about Fireside Chats, where people everywhere, from unknowns to celebrities, would post videos calling us to love? Any influencers out there who could spark these things? Or billionaires who would become saviors instead of exploiters by promoting such things?

Excerpts from Jeremy Lent’s Zoom with Marjorie Kelly:

If we want to change our civilization's trajectory we have to transform it at the deepest level, basically all the way to capitalism's operating system. The problems are really systemic and it's not about bad people; it's about a system that is on autopilot.
It's not enough to build the positive. We have to discredit the core operating system that is now in charge of the planet and in charge of civilization. Let's begin by seeing. Let's see clearly the nature of what has us in its grip and that will guide us as we move forward.
For examples of what you might call false solutions, one of them is corporate social responsibility. Inside companies where they have community relations and they want to give donations and talk about being responsible, it never goes to, ‘well let's change the core purpose of the corporation which is to maximize returns to shareholders.’ It’s ‘let's not change who actually is on the board and let's not change our metrics of success, but we'll talk a good game.’
Capital bias is how the system is designed to favor capital over labor, over the environment, over the community. Who has a vote inside corporations is the board. Capital workers don't vote. You can work somewhere for forty years, you can make the products, you can answer the phone, you can run the place, and you have no vote, you have no claim on the wealth you create.
Moral capitalism is as impossible as moral racism, and once you recognize it's a system of bias through and through you need another system. You need a democratic economy that's designed from the ground up.
Capitalism is really a continuation of imperialism, where Europe controlled 85% of the land mass of the planet for the benefit of an elite. These nations were basically plantations where the wealthy of Europe grew things and basically took the minerals. America is a slightly different story, but similar. We pushed off the Native Americans and took their land. World War I was perceived as the end of the world, which was the world of aristocracy and monarchy and imperialism, and neoliberalism arose out of the breakdown of Empire where the neoliberal economists were horrified by the upsurge of democracy around the world.
Society long ago democratized government but we never democratized the economy. And financial wealth has grown so large it completely dwarfs the real economy. It dwarfs the planet and it's in charge. Empires now are portfolios of assets. I mean Bill Gates is the largest owner of agricultural land in the U.S.
Empires existed for thousands of years in different ways, but this is the first time there was basically this worldview that arose in Europe of separation. This is a worldview of seeing everything as objects to exploit or extract, and capitalism was the first economic system that was the manifestation of this worldview.
Myths at the heart of our economic system really hold it together and sort of normalize it, and the first one is the myth of maximization, that no amount of wealth is ever enough. I do use the example of Bill Gates, that he at one point had $30 billion and that's a ludicrous amount of money. Hundreds and hundreds of families could create dynasties for untold years with that kind of wealth. But he invested it, and within a decade or two he had $130 billion. In what world does that make sense? And yet, investment portfolios continue creating wealth even after death, so it is like no amount of wealth is ever enough. It goes on forever and it has no limits.
Returns to capital matters and nothing else matters, so basically give me your money and I have license to destroy the world on your behalf. I can throw workers out of work, I can trash the Amazon, I can capture government, whatever, it's my fiduciary duty to maximize returns to my investors and everything else is irrelevant. Exxon's share price was up 80% last year and that was when fires were burning in forests, New York City was flooding, but Exxon was doing what the system tells it it's supposed to do.
I think the first thing that we do is we talk to each other, like this. This reminds me so much of feminists in the ‘70s. You have to recognize how pervasive the bias is that's working against us, and it's in us as well as everyone else, so talking to each other, seeing clearly, I think that's the first thing. It was Donella Meadows who said to intervene to change a system the highest point of leverage is mindset, the mindset out of which system arises.
Another kind of economy is possible. It's not only possible but it's superior if the outcomes are something besides maximum gains to shareholders. Marblehead, the next town over, has a municipally owned electric company, so the people in the city own the electric company. You can actually go talk to somebody. We need more worker owned firms.
We don't know what lies ahead, but getting together, getting clear, talking to each other, this is what we can do. Yes, that's the great place to begin exactly.
You know the integration curve about how new ideas get adopted? They begin with early adopters right before they become dominant and mainstream, and I think that we're very early on the innovation curve. We are a growing group but I think it's still a relatively small group, and coming together and sharing ideas and developing common language and common vision I think that's where we are and that's where it begins.
It should be taboo to be a billionaire and we definitely need to tax wealth. We tax our homes, we tax property, we should tax wealth. The end point of the system is there are too many billionaires and they shouldn't exist, but what's the system-design that drove toward that? It's a little bit like with climate change – yes there are forest fires, yes there's flooding, but what's the system that drove toward that? It's burning fossil fuels, and you need to work at both ends. Alexandria Casia Cortez famously said every new billionaire is a system failure.
I think what we can hope for is that we have a kind of a series of rolling crises that allow us to respond rather than a single massive crisis. The 2008 meltdown was a missed opportunity. The federal government owned General Motors. At one point we had control of banks and we could have created public banks. We could have created a new kind of social enterprise out of General Motors, but this idea that new kinds of corporations, new kinds of fiduciary duty, wasn't yet there in our mind so this is where transforming mindset really matters so that we know what to do when the next crisis comes.

The essay contest stimulated Zooming with some of the writers, looking at what we could do. Have a say in the comments if you would like to be part of that.

Suzanne Taylor’s Now What?

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