Capitalism Has No Solution To Ecocide

by Caitlin Johnstone | Sep 4, 2022

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible get to just stay in power indefinitely and suffer no meaningful consequences of any kind.”
~ John F Kennedy (paraphrased)

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Ecocide will continue as long as ecocide is profitable. No possible iteration of capitalism can address this problem. This, in and of itself, is a sufficiently strong argument that capitalism must be abandoned.

No model where human behavior remains driven by profit can address the problem that ecocide will continue as long as ecocide is profitable. That’s why so many capitalism proponents are reduced to simply pretending that ecocide isn’t a problem.

Eco-consciousness and anti-capitalism go hand in hand, but the liberals are dominating environmentalist discourse while the commies frequently neglect it. This is a strategic and moral error. This is the strongest argument against capitalism, and it’s one which needs to be made.

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It can take a while for a principled antiwar leftist to learn that in the big picture they have very little in common with so-called progressives who mostly ignore US imperialism and just want the empire to forgive their student loans. The difference between a leftist who opposes capitalism and empire and your average Bernie Sanders progressive is considerably greater than the difference between your average Bernie Sanders progressive and your average MSNBC Clintonite.

None of this means progressives can’t be worked with on points of convergence, it just means they’re ideologically different and it serves no one to pretend otherwise. The same is true of antiwar right-libertarians. Ultimately there’s commonality wherever class interests align.

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I’m as distrustful as anyone of the new mainstream UFO narratives, but when congress is saying UFOs are a threat that is “expanding exponentially“, it probably deserves attention. I don’t know why they’re saying it, but they’re not saying it for no reason. There’s an agenda here, whether it’s weaponizing space or running cover for new military technology or just securing more money for the military-industrial complex. I’m not willing to commit to any position on what exactly they’re up to, but they’re clearly up to something.

Not many people from my sector of the political fringe are looking at this, and I think that’s partly because there’s so much uncertainty and partly because it doesn’t really fit into any of our models for understanding the world. But whatever it is, it’s worthy of at least some attention.

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The more information that comes out about the effectiveness of psychedelics in treating psychological trauma the more outrageously criminal it looks that these medicines have been suppressed for generations while the world was being destroyed by a highly traumatized species.

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We’ve all had the experience of wanting to change something undesirable about our behavior but not being able to. This happens because the forces driving that behavior are not yet conscious. This is what’s happening with the self-destructive behavior of humanity as a whole, too.

There’s a misconception in our society that people stop their self-destructive behavior when they apply “willpower”, which is really just empty head noises. Actually people change when there’s an expansion of consciousness. That’s what we’re waiting on with the human species too.

That’s ultimately why we’re destroying our planet despite knowing it’s bad for us. We can talk all we want about capitalism, corruption, empire and ecocide, but underneath it all what we’re really looking at is the struggle of a thinking species to become a conscious species.

So for me the answer to the “what can we do?” question is usually, expand consciousness. Spread awareness of what’s going on in the world, expand our consciousness of what’s going on in ourselves, anything you can do to bring awareness to previously unconscious important matters.

And people are already doing this. That’s all healthy activism generally is: people working to spread awareness of an important issue. That’s also what real journalism is, it’s what real political dissent is, and what authentic spirituality is. It’s all about expanding awareness.

Working toward a healthy humanity is essentially the task of strolling through the dark hallways of our collective unconscious and flicking on the lights, one by one. It’s not easy, but the more lights get switched on the more awake people there will be helping us switch on the rest of them.