The Case for Green Plenty

Grey ooze

The big problem we all face is that capitalism is killing us. It's moribund, it's dead, and we need to get rid of it.

Capitalism is actually the grey ooze that people who are afraid of nanotechnology claim one day may overtake the world. But we already live in that world. This is the problem - it's easy, and in fact quite trivial, to point to how ridiculous the system we live under is, and how damaging, how foolish, you would have to be to keep working with it. It's really easy.

So this anger is righteous and there's nothing wrong with it. But what do we replace capitalism with? The problem with things like the Green New Deal, which everyone keeps pushing, is nobody knows what it means. That is very convenient for the political class; you can't say they were lying if what is said is so ambiguous. If we carry on with the capitalist system, we're just going to have the same old nonsense, which is about profit and creating wealth for a very small number of people. But they're going to paint it green, hence the phrase green washing, which is ultimately no use to anybody.

But what do we replace it with?

Behind the curtain

In the old story The Wizard of Oz the protagonists eventually meet the wizard who appears to be a being with big flashing eyes and quite frightening. Then Dorothy's dog (Hollywood cliché, it's always the dog) pulls away the curtains and we see a man pulling levers to make the apparition of the wizard appear. We live in a world that all curtain: what passes for normal is never the best for us, it's always a way for some entitled clown to make money from our suffering.

There's a few things we need to understand about the world we live in now. The first one is we've been sold a complete lie, that there's a scarcity of resources, that there isn't enough to go around, and we need to fight each other for what there is. A very quick example is we make enough food for between 11 and 12 billion people, and there's just under 8 billion people on the planet. But we're told people have to starve. We're told there isn't enough to go around. It’s a self-serving lie.

The problem isn't with making stuff. At a technical level the problem isn't with anything other than distribution. The real problem lies in the profit above all else mentality of the capitalist. The capitalist wants to make a profit and will not give food away. The capitalists will not distribute food to people who need it. Capitalist logic and human being logic are completely different things. This is why you see stuff in the world and the way things are done looks completely crazy. On a human level not feeding people is abhorrent and disgusting, it looks mad because capitalist logic and the human logic of people who have a heart and some empathy, are completely different.

Capitalism is about profit. It's about maximising the profit they can make, which involves driving down your wages, ripping people off in the global south, creating commercial empires that steal resources and murder environmental and indigenous activists, all sorts of disgusting stuff, none of which anyone with any sense or empathy thinks is a good idea. Under capitalism feeding people only works if someone can make a profit out of it, preferably a huge amount. Often the product or service being provided is a poor afterthought after profit has been secured.

So we live in a society which is predicated on scarcity, which is predicated on having to work, which is predicated on the fear of starving. Basically most of us are three paycheques away from being homeless.

Then you get all their talk about freedom, but what are they talking about? They're talking about the freedom to own the means of production and seize the products of other people's work, which is the only freedom that matters to them. All the rest of us have is the freedom to work for them or starve. Those are the only freedoms we actually have if you get down to the bottom of it.

I live in the global north. A couple of generations ago there was a massive battle between the working class and the capitalist class, and we managed to acquire things like education and a benefit system which stops people starving to death, but don't have any illusions. If our rulers could take those things away from us, they would, and they are. Let's not have a fantasy about that. The false scarcity and actual poverty is necessary in order to create wealth, and the blood of the people living in the global south is lubricant to their world-killing machine.

It was pointed out by Marx and others that capitalism has unleashed enormous productive power. It's one of the reasons we can support nearly 8 billion people on the planet. One of the reasons we can feed them, even though our owners make it difficult, is because we have this power. We have massive productive power that emerged during the creation of capitalism and has grown beyond what people thought possible.

To create the conditions that allowed capitalism to be born we had our means of subsistence taken from us. Our peasant ancestors had their livelihoods stolen from them so they could be turned into modern working class, forced to become landless people who own nothing but their own labour and had to go and earn a wage for 12 or more hours a day in unimaginably bad conditions. They did this because otherwise they would starve. If you read what happened to those people and how the common land that they had was stolen from by what is now the capitalist class, now the owners of society, who needed to impoverish the rest of us so they could become fabulously wealthy. These are people who like to masquerade as our betters, we're supposed to look up to them, but really they were just a little bit lucky, amoral and ruthless.

People wouldn't voluntarily work under what were appallingly bad conditions. If you read about how people lived under in the 15th and 16th centuries, the early days of capitalism, and then into the 18th to 19th no one would voluntarily live like that. The average lifespan in Liverpool dropped to 17, in Manchester it was 22. The same pattern is being repeated in the global south today.

We were forced. Our ancestors were forced to live like that, live under those terrible conditions because it was that or starve and the ancestors of today’s owners, the ancestors of the capitalist class, were quite happy sitting on top of the pile. You may get the odd person who screws up and ends up with the rest of us. But generally, you look who owns the place all the way back to the Norman Conquest and who still owns it it's the same people. The same disconnected privileged idiots.

If you understand that history you know that we don't owe them anything, not a jot. The good fortune they have today is built on the suffering of our ancestors. This is one of the reasons why we have to be very pushy and cynical about privilege. It wasn’t earned, it was stolen.

Taking back control

So where do we go from where we are? Firstly, the enormous productive power of capitalism came from taking processes that were originally done by one person with one pair of hands and then splitting them up and discovering and using science and knowledge and thinking to change things so that instead of one item being produced by one person every day, every week, whatever, we suddenly have hundreds of times more items produced by a group of people working together. This is what we talk about when we talk about socialising production.

We changed it from an individual activity to a group of people together, socially. Well, the problem we now have is the ownership of the commodities created socially remained instead in the capitalist’s hands. We didn’t follow through when we got rid of kings, we didn’t take it right to its logical conclusion.

We now have many pairs of hands making the world together, but the world we live in is the wrong way up. We still have one individual or tiny group of individuals who keep the results of our work and own everything. Those individuals are the ones we are beholden to. They're the ones who control our livelihoods with fear, whose ancestors stole the livelihoods from our ancestors. They force us to work for them. They proletarianised us and their needs, their wants, are based around keeping the system with themselves in charge. Despite the things they say there is no we and we have nothing in common with them. Their control and ownership are based on keeping us down, keeping us hungry, keeping us afraid.

Capitalism is riven with contradictions and has been slowly falling apart over the last 40 years or so. They need more wars, more suffering, more cheap materials stolen from people who can't defend themselves, and profit itself is becoming harder and harder to find as they run out of options. It's becoming harder and harder for them to make profit, or accumulate value, which is the more technical way of looking at it. So what are they doing? They're playing all kinds of tricks, but we actually have a world where potentially everybody can have everything they need. As said earlier, there's actually enough food being manufactured to service between 11 and 12 billion people, but because of profit, because of accumulation, many of them will starve.

Food isn't distributed it and won't be given to people who are hungry, they spray bleach over it before they throw it away to stop people trying to eat it, indeed, because they can't make a profit with it. It is stupid on a human level, with human logic. Capitalist logic is perfectly happy with this. This is one of the things people need to understand. Capitalist logic and human logic are not the same thing. Capitalist logic is what’s killing us all. In the Great Depression in the 1920s food was thrown in the sea because no-one had the money to buy it. This is capitalist logic.

What the capitalist needs and what we as human beings need are actually most of the time completely unrelated. They run a little bit in parallel because the capitalist must meet some human needs so we survive and reproduce. Otherwise, they can't sell their products. But underneath it all, we have this society which is just built on a false sense of what is important for our survival. We have a society that's built on very vague surfaces and self-serving lies.

The reason for scarcity is because you need poor people to create wealthy people. If we didn't have poverty, we wouldn't have billionaires. It's one of those things. We also live in a peculiar society where, on the surface, everything seems to be kind of fairly rational, but if you look underneath it’s capitalist logic and people's actual needs don't figure. We have all these laws and so on to protect us, but first they have to be enforced, and second you have to be able to afford to use the law if someone does you wrong.

The emptiness of capitalism

For example, we have food that doesn't feed you. Typically, poor people eat food that makes them ill. It keeps them alive and stops their hunger because it's full of cheap calories. But it's not very nutritious. It’s cheap and easy to manufacture.

We have clothes that don't clothe you. They quickly wear out. They cost very little to buy because they're made by people in the global south in terrible conditions out of shoddy material that will only last a few months, or maybe even weeks. So they're very inexpensive, which in turn makes us cheaper to employ because we can afford to live, but the goods are almost landfill before they even get to the shops.

We have education that doesn't educate you. Essentially, you're still being trained to be a drone in a factory. In the global north most of the factories have gone even though more people work in factories than ever have in human history. So maybe instead you're learning something more interesting, like philosophy or linguistics. But where do you go with that kind of learning? If you study something like that, will you probably end up going back into the workplace on some kind of minimum wage job unless you're privileged and mummy or daddy finds you a job with one of their wealthy friends?

So they generously allow us food that doesn't feed us, clothes that don't clothe us, education that leaves us ignorant and lost, and that’s just three examples of the ridiculous situation we find ourselves in. We have houses that don’t keep the rain out, we have shoes that let the rain in, the list is endless. Their profits are preserved and the cost of keeping you alive, at least for now, is low enough for that minimum wage job you took in desperation not to seem impossible.

If you look at the tide of ignorance in our society, the very large number of people constantly fooled and bamboozled by our owners into believing whatever nonsense they come up with, it's very obvious that a for lot of people their education was completely inadequate, which isn't to look down on them. Of course it's inadequate. Why would our owners seek to educate us in critical thinking? The first thing we would do is start questioning why we allow them to do what they do to us, which is not a question they want asked.

There is no need to despair

The coming eco disaster and general impoverishment is causing a huge amount of despair.

Firstly, we're told that we can't do anything about the eco disaster, and secondly, that essentially we're prisoners of our rulers who keep changing the rules and charging us ever more for the thing we need to live. It looks like they can decide and do what they want to us without us being able to do anything about it.

Remember scarcity is bunk. It's designed to create fear, which is designed to keep us conforming and designed to keep us from challenging the system. Remember we outnumber our owners by hundreds to one. When we work together we can force rents down, we can get proper pay rises and so on. If we allow ourselves to be isolated then we will lose. They have the whole bureaucracy of their state behind them while we have each other.

One of the most deceitful slogans of the Brexit campaign was taking back control. Yes, we should, but not from some imaginary European enemy. We need to take it back from the parasites who pretend to be in charge, who stole our ancestors’ livelihoods to create wage slavery, who are still abusing and murdering people in the global south, whose incompetence and venality has killed tens of thousands in places like the UK and all over the world. Doing nothing while pensioners, the disabled and others freeze through poverty is violence. Quiet violence is being done to us all the time, whether it's high prices or underfunding health services we need to live.

Who owns industrial society's cornucopia?

In Greek mythology the infant Zeus was fed with a cornucopia, a magic horn that gave him all the food he needed, this is also sometimes called a horn of plenty. For the first time in human history there is a cornucopia within the grasp of everyone. Walk down any high street, smell the bread from the baker, look at the buildings around you, listen to the vehicles moving, there is no scarcity. The mental damage, the fear and isolation, the hatred of others, that scarcity causes must be pushed aside: for the first time in hundreds of years we can all live happy and fulfilling lives without having to exploit others. This will be a wonderful time to be alive once we have removed the parasites that feast on our broken hearts.

So what else have we got because of the power of the industrial system which capitalism helped invent? Despite what people say the systems aren't capitalism itself. We have a way of doing things. Capitalism is who ends up with the rewards, who ends up with the money, with the resources, capitalism is about ownership. It’s the relationships between people. It’s nothing to do with the systems we use to feed and clothe ourselves. The systems left when ownership and theft are removed are something we created, we own those systems. Our sweat and toil went into their creation. The fact that a thief from a long line of thieves claims to own all the resources and wealth created by people like us is beyond irrelevant. We can stop those systems being destructive and short sighted if we are in charge.

We actually live in a time of great abundance, but they sell us this idea that there is nothing, or not enough, because they need us to be afraid: of being hungry, of changing things because it could get worse. But there is enough food, and shelter, there is enough of everything to feed and clothe all of the human beings many times over and do it in a way that does not destroy the environment. They need artificial scarcity to keep the system running the way it is and justify what they are doing to the world. What we don't need is wealthy people. We can all live extremely comfortable lives without a very small number of people owning a ridiculous amount of resources that they will never, ever, be able to use.

For a start, there's an awful lot of jobs for which the late David Graeber coined the term bullshit jobs. Jobs people are doing that don't need to be done so we should stop doing them. These jobs make profits for capitalism but do nothing for the good of the rest of us. There's an awful lot of jobs that do need to be done, but a profit can't be made out of them, basically making sure your neighbour, your friends, or anyone with needs, have enough to eat, decent clothing, somewhere decent to live, education, health care they need, and also that they can defend themselves from things that go wrong in the world, workable contingencies against disasters.

There's more than enough of everything to make that happen without having an eco disaster. But the problem is we live in a world that's not ours. There's a very large number of people who make everything, but who have been taught, who have been fooled, who believe that they are unable to make things work without their supposed masters.

For example, if you're British, former clown Prime Minister Johnson is on record saying that he thinks inequality is a good thing, and of course he does because he's on the top of the pile. If you look at him, I believe he's technically a cousin of the Queen. He's from a long line of extremely privileged, privately educated, inbred buffoons whose ancestors had sharper swords than ours did. That doesn't make him particularly special. Privilege means you get things as a result of who you are, not anything you actually did, they like to talk about merit but the only merit is who your parents were. It means being useless doesn’t stop you being in charge, whatever harm your incompetence may cause.

We don't have to take any notice of this nonsense, and Johnson isn't any kind of a hero either. He has rivers of our blood on his hands.

The open handed world

So human beings have this productive power. We now have the tools to thrive and protect ourselves against adversity. Our society has a few shortsighted idiots whose outlook is completely about keeping what they have and making sure that they can't lose. So they fix markets, they murder people, they pollute, they wreck ecosystems, all for short term gain and they never face any consequences.

Their world looks like a closed fist, where they have control, punching us endlessly in the face forever. Instead the world needs to look like an open, generous hand.

The people who make and create systems and services that the rest of us survive with should base those services on what people actually need, and the people whose needs are being met need to participate in the decisions. So instead of a world based on hierarchical greed we need a system based on social need.

There's an old song from the time of the English Revolution called the World turned upside down. I think it’s about the Levellers, who were a group of people who tried to take the land back after they were driven off by the new capitalist owners who enclosed the land and stole it from the ordinary folk.

The world turned upside down is what they were talking about. They were talking about a world where the ordinary people control their destinies and feed themselves. Well, we currently need to turn our world upside down. We need to create a world where what we need, what we want, what we desire is what we have. There's more than enough of everything in the world for everybody.

But we don't need to create an eco disaster to do it.

The Levellers’ world is the right way up. The world we live in now is the world that's upside down.

The other thing about this metaphor is this is an open hand. We want to live in a world where whatever anybody needs to survive and thrive is there for the taking whether there isn't lack of housing, where there isn't lack of health care and education and all the other things. A society made by and for decent, intelligent, adult human beings that has everything each needs to carry on and grow.

There are generations of Einsteins who got brain damage because there wasn't enough nutrition in their diet when they were children. We need those people. We need their brilliance, and we need to get rid of the system that holds the control and holds all the privilege that keep us all hungry, cold and afraid. We need to unlock the human potential that’s being destroyed over and over again.

All across the world we are governed by privileged idiots. Wherever we look, privileged idiots who like to tell a lot of lies.

So where do we go? Well, we socialise. We turn the world the right way up. Socialise is the root of the word socialism. We create a world for and of the open hand. We don’t wait for permission.

If you need it, you can have it. No questions, no judgment: it's yours. There's plenty for everyone, you only have to ask.

So what do we replace capitalism with?

We replace capitalism with Green Plenty. We will find green ways of feeding and clothing and housing everybody.

We already have a lot of the technology, but our owners don't want to use it because they can't make a profit. They can't accumulate. We need to get them out of the way as fast as we can.

No more green washing, no more what Greta Thunberg called business as usual, blah blah blah. We need our world to become the open handed world. The world of Green Plenty.