Noam Chomsky: Can Civilization Survive Capitalism?

[marmar]

AlterNet / By Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky: Can Civilization Survive Capitalism?
Capitalism as it exists today is radically incompatible with democracy.

March 5, 2013 |


There is “capitalism” and then there is “really existing capitalism.”

The term “capitalism” is commonly used to refer to the U.S. economic system, with substantial state intervention ranging from subsidies for creative innovation to the “too-big-to-fail” government insurance policy for banks.

The system is highly monopolized, further limiting reliance on the market, and increasingly so: In the past 20 years the share of profits of the 200 largest enterprises has risen sharply, reports scholar Robert W. McChesney in his new book “Digital Disconnect.”

“Capitalism” is a term now commonly used to describe systems in which there are no capitalists: for example, the worker-owned Mondragon conglomerate in the Basque region of Spain, or the worker-owned enterprises expanding in northern Ohio, often with conservative support – both are discussed in important work by the scholar Gar Alperovitz. .......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-can-civilization-survive-capitalism

[NightWatcher]

1. When Capitalism grows unchecked, I'm reminded of this quote

"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell". Edward Abbey said this about the spread of civilization into his wild untamed West.

If Capitalism continues devouring everything in its path towards more profit while not being held accountable for anything else, it will just like the cancer, kill the host.

[marmar]

4. D'accord.

[tavalon]

2. Answer=No

See the quote from a previous poster. Capitalism is a cancer upon civilization. Left unchecked, it will murder its host.

[ananda]

3. Agree.

Cancer is essentially the disease of "too much."

[Rex]

5. Yes. Can it survive a plutocracy?

Results are mixed, but not encouraging.

[Starry Messenger]

6. The pedant in me is going to be persnickety--

RECD is capitalism. A system with no capitalists is not properly capitalist, although worker-owned systems under capitalist societies still have to deal with the vagaries of that system. But Mondragon weathered the crisis of 2008 with far far less devastation than other companies, because it is not capitalist. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19213425


Capitalism isn't shorthand for "business and trade and anything to do with money in a society". </tedious Marxist>

And the answer is "No". Civilization cannot survive what we are presently faced with. The earth is reaching the real limits of what abuse it can take. Wealth disparity isn't just killing opportunity for a just society, it is also killing the planet.

http://www.politicalaffairs.net/beyond-imperialism-have-we-reached-a-new-stage-of-capitalism/

<snip>

The emergence of stark environmental limitations on capitalist production and accumulation, limitations for which it is difficult to imagine easy or quick fixes arising from new technologies, is the most sobering characteristic of the current stage of capitalism. What was once a rhetorical flourish in the words of Rosa Luxemburg – socialism or barbarism – now presents itself as an existential question for the human species as environmental limitations on capitalism itself reveal themselves.

Global climate change and peak oil are two such limitations which carry with them profound implications for the future of capitalism. Global climate change – the climatological effects of increased radiative forcing produced by massive increases in anthropocentric production of greenhouse gases – and peak oil – the point in history at which the world production of crude oil reaches its maximal level and begins to decline as petroleum supplies are exhausted – are scientific facts. Peak oil has likely been reached already between 2005 and 2011, as reported by various trade analysts and official projections of oil-producing country governments. The definitive U.N. study of the current state of global climate change science, The Fourth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), has amassed a wealth of evidence which refutes deniers once and for all.

All the predictions arrived at by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show an increase of nearly 2º to nearly 4ºC in global surface warming (the worst case model, A1FI, assumes that anthropocentric production of greenhouse gases remains unabated), shown in Figure 3:4

<snip>

IPCC Predictions of Global Climate Change: Global Surface Warming