Capital is the accumulation of government, or public, debt. Every transaction in our world depends upon the successful transfer of abstracted debt. The inefficiencies of this system will naturally lead towards inequalities, causing the disproportionate distribution of this debt, which is ultimately the root cause of every social and economic problem that is present upon our planet. Money, truly, is the root of all evil.
However, many argue that trade is vitally necessary, something without which would reduce our quality of life to an unspeakable poverty. This is true but not to the extent of enslaving the planet as it has. The answer lies in the nature of capitalism, in the nature of humanity itself.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs has long interested me, something about it has rang strongly in my mind and it has been a potent force for the catalysis of my world view. It was not until today that I realised why it has wormed inside my brain and tortured it for so many years. This hierarchy of needs isn't important because it is a hierarchy, but because it is as complete of a list of human needs, wants and desires as can be possibly assembled. When you look at our existence solely through the lens of our biology and the complex interactions that are a product of our biology, you begin to understand where you must start to change the world.
If you want to truly destroy capitalism, what you need to destroy instead is debt, inefficiency, and dependency.
Inefficiency represents every cost inherent to our system that has no bearing or relation on the energetic cost of the process. When shipping food halfway across the world is cheaper than growing it at home, when moving cars 150 kilometers from the United States to Canada and back again is “economically sound.” Then you can see the inherent contradictions which plague capitalism to this very day. If an alien observer ever glanced upon our planet, to see passenger sedans manufactured in Canada which are then sold to the US, and passenger sedans made in the US and sold to Canada, they would consider this phenomenon to be the height of insanity. Not only because of the manufacture, transport and sales, but every level of bureaucracy in between, taxes, duties, tariffs, people who are paid full wages to rubber stamp disposable paper. The very definition of waste.
Inefficiency is the disposable nature of capitalism. This nature is due to the nature of debt and human productivity. The problem with debt is that humans can be productive enough to eventually work the debt off. Now, ancient tyrants understood this, so they imposed heavy taxes and such things as wars, slavery and bondage in order to introduce new debt whenever the workers seemed to be reaching a point of prosperity.
Conveniently, the latest tyrants learned from history and have constructed a new debt system whereby the nature of debt is not tyrannically imposed, but it is a byproduct of the system itself. This is the evil of disposability. The concept of use once and discard is the great triumph of capitalism and the great downfall for humanity. The ubiquitous use of paper and plastic in our culture underscores this point. However, capitalism has not stopped at material goods, but has attempted to promote the disposability of culture and entertainment, even of the human mind, in the final attempt to fully enslave us all. Through debt.
How do you improve inefficiency then? The question is so simple that a hunter-gatherer could answer it. What do you do if your tools break? Do you go to the store and buy another? No. You make your own. Unfortunately, many of us do not have the skills required to replace every consumer item in our culture, however we do have one other option. We can buy things that do not break. We demand that things be made to last, and in turn we are opting out of the disposable culture. True poverty isn't purchasing power, it's being required to be continually re-indebted to the same items over and over again. Think of every consumer good you have, and how it has not been designed to last, then think of the monetary consequence of that. The oil driller in the gulf of mexico harvests the oil from under the sea floor. The oil is shipped to processing facilities at the expense of yet more oil. This oil is then turned into plastics, medicine, tv dinners, tall lattes and electricity. Just like the incentive of a pharmaceutical company is to sell a treatment instead of a cure, so too does this sickness spread throughout all of society.
If you want to destroy the -isms, if you want to cripple a capitalistic society, then do it from the inside out and build things that last. Teach people to make it for themselves, teach people to fix things for themselves and teach them to throw the 21st century yokes of slavery off of their backs.
This applies not just to consumer goods, but every interaction and transaction, every system and process within our society. How do we consider our entertainment, where we live, how we eat, the construction of our buildings, our roads and infrastructure? Build things to last and you will kill the rich surer than with a bullet.
The last issue is then dependency. The fundamental tenet of being dependent upon society and therefore continually indebted to it. The great fear of every imperialist power is that the host country will realise that they can be self-sufficient. When coercion of the elite fails, then simply fund a coup to overthrow the elite. It was the same methods that were used to enslave half of Africa. Divide and conquer the populace, create an elite who can stand upon stilts in their mudhole and always there will be hungry poor, submissive and compliant, who can replace the elite whenever the real owners so desire it.
What then? The list of needs then comes into play. What do humans need? Food, Water, Clothing, Shelter, Space, Medicine, Social structure, and the divers requirements of human nature. Chief among them is hope. What then to address these needs? The answer lies in self-sufficiency. The decentralisation of energy production is integral to self-sufficiency and if allowed to progress as it should, then a new age of civilisation will rapidly dawn.
Provided a person has enough space, a place to lay their head, a source of water and raw materials, then combine that with energy, and then the great social arbiter of wealth, debt, becomes of much less importance. With energy comes the potential not just for technology, but food production in the form of greenhouses and hydroponics, micro manufacturing and a host of other hopes for self-sufficiency.
The key again is for people to produce goods that last. In order to be truly free of debt, houses and dry goods will have to be designed to not last a year, but a thousand years. Do it once, do it right.
Design infrastructure that is self-maintaining. Good enough will never allow us to be free of the cycle of debt, it has to be done correctly the first time, to the very best of our ability.
Up to this point, people are required to bring certain value to society, skills and knowledge that are the sum of their worth. Effort and strain, time and production. It has always bothered me that I do not yet have the full complement of skills to be a highly valued member of society. I know that there are always low level jobs available that would ensure survival, at the very least, but it has always been my goal to enter the realm of the elite or semi-elite as the middle class has been shown to be, so I may have some chance at self-determination, self-sufficiency and perhaps a small measure of control over my surroundings. These are things that our hunter-gatherer forebears took for granted, but are antithetical to the capitalistic way of life. That is why they do not teach these skills in school, why high societal interdependence is pushed in every media outlet. The more people buy in, the more indebted they are.
So what is a man to do in this day and age? I say man because even despite the great advances in gender equality, it is still obvious where the control of money and power still lies. Whether this is genetic, behavioural or simply learned is out of the scope of this article but I say the following to stress what must be done: the craziest among us, the hermits and the nutcases, the loners on the hill, they have one thing most of you only can dream of, something that is illusory to even the best worker in a capitalistic society. Self-determination, self-sufficiency and control. Without these things, is life even worth living? Living in this new world order you are no longer a man, master of your domain, but an opiated labouring consumer, bred and trained to salivate at the whim of your master, debt.
Feel it keenly with this recession, the greatest depression. Unemployment in the double digits, permanent salaried jobs replaced with temp work and part time. The security of your life constantly threatened economically, terroristically, and existentially. When the buggy whip manufacturers lost their jobs because of the automobile, would it have been nearly as tragic if they could have still fed, clothed and maintained themselves through their own effort? The tragedy is not that they could not adapt to changing economic conditions, but that they were so maladapted to reality that they were unable to really address the issues at the core of our society.
When our society no longer has use for individuals within it, then they are discarded as easily as a used napkin. There are few alternatives for the unfortunate people who are affected by this. Taking jobs at lower pay, retraining and finding another job, early retirement. The worst part is that these people then essentially become wasted, a tragic loss of human potential that often results in depression, divorce, murder and suicide. The reasons for this aren't that the person has lost their job, but that the bare facts of their existence have been laid out and they see for the first time that society has denied them the opportunity to survive, to control their own lives, and to flourish in their own way.
Some people see this and alter their behaviour in the system. They make themselves indispensable to society, they obfuscate their contributions and distance the reality of their jobs from any but those in their class. This merely makes the problems worse, because they are working with the system, not against it.
It is difficult to not say this tritely, but the evil of the system can be blamed on almost every social ill. Depression, crime, homelessness, murder, suicide, alcoholism, drug-dependency, broken families, because these social ills are SYMPTOMS of the disease. The disease is capitalism, it is the disease of dependency and hopelessness and it must be cleansed from our culture before the damage destroys not just our souls, but our planet.
How to crush capitalism.
Buy clothes, tools, and goods that last and are not disposable. Demand that the products be designed and manufactured to last hundreds of years. Do not throw things away but reuse them, give them to those who need it. Trade and share. Every factory produced product on our planet has an energetic cost and the only way to really save our planet is to use less.
Learn how to make your own goods, tools, clothes. Buy locally if possible and encourage the development of a local self-sufficient economy. This cannot be stressed enough. How could a farmer in a third world country ever escape the trap of poverty if you do not stop perpetuating it?
Avoid anything disposable. Paper, plastic, anything that has been transported a distance. Every morning think about the energy that has been used to produce, package and transport the things that you need and try to minimise your use.
Study what you eat. Avoid food that has been packaged and processed. Eat locally, eat fresh. I do not recommend going vegetarian, energetically maintaining a vegetarian diet is no better for us or the environment. Meat is healthier and more filling, it is nutritious and is the reason why our ancestors, the hunter-gatherers, became the dominant life form on this planet. Without meat we would not have evolved our advanced brains and behaviours, so do not discount this vital source of nutrition. Think about the intelligence and activity of vegetarian animals and how they would relate to a person slaving in a capitalistic system. If you cannot see the similarities between a dairy cow and a wage slave then you should spend more time thinking about it.
Produce whatever you can to meet your own needs. Solar panels and wind power are rapidly becoming more accessible to the general public. With power generation comes the need for power storage. Push for a hydrogen economy, but one that you control. The power and energy you generate should be used and stored for yourself. The less you spend, the more you damage those who would own you.
Participate in making a free and accessible society. Use open source software, learn how to play an instrument and make your own music. Build a stage and record your own movies. Create your own culture, free of cost, easily transferable and non-disposable.
If you have technical skills, donate your time to producing free, efficient systems that help eliminate capitalistic excesses. Make open source software for every platform, use your skills in open and sustainable ways. Make things that last. Remove waste inefficiencies from your jobs and lives because it is a waste of energy, resources and time, not just money.
The key to any free society is that every member must be participating with their full informed consent. There is no consent when the only alternative is to starve to death. When there are no livable alternatives to this society then there is no consent present and everyone is instead a part of a massive indentured servitude.
The elite and powerful are those who have either gamed the system well enough to defeat it, or those who have inherited their status. Either way, the people at the top have no incentive to see the uplifting of the bottom, since those at the top are there due to their very natures of elitism. You will see the people at the top acting generously against the symptoms, but never will they attack the disease inherent in the system, because then their powers would be diminished entirely.
