Jason Hickel and Yanis Varoufakis
Capitalism cares about our species’ prospects as much as a wolf cares about a lamb’s. But democratise our economy and a better world is within our grasp
We have an urgent responsibility. Our existing economic system is incapable of addressing the social and ecological crises we face in the 21st century. When we look around we see an extraordinary paradox. On the one hand, we have access to remarkable new technologies and a collective capacity to produce more food, more stuff than we need or that the planet can afford. Yet at the same time, millions of people suffer in conditions of severe deprivation.
What explains this paradox? Capitalism. By capitalism we do not mean markets, trade and entrepreneurship, which have been around for thousands of years before the rise of capitalism. By capitalism we mean something very odd and very specific: an economic system that boils down to a dictatorship run by the tiny minority who control capital – the big banks, the major corporations and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets. Even if we live in a democracy and have a choice in our political system, our choices never seem to change the economic system. Capitalists are the ones who determine what to produce, how to use our labour and who gets to benefit. The rest of us – the people who are actually doing the production – do not get a say.
And for capital, the purpose of production is not primarily to meet human needs or to achieve social progress, much less to deliver on any ecological goals. The purpose is to maximise and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. This is the capitalist law of value. And to maximise profits, capital requires perpetual growth – ever increasing aggregate production, regardless of whether it is necessary or harmful.
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We urgently need to overcome the capitalist law of value and democratise our economy, so that we can organise production around urgent social and ecological priorities. After all, we are the producers of the goods, the services, the technologies. It is our labour and our planet’s resources that are at stake. And so we must claim the right to decide what is produced, how, and for what purpose.
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