Our unwillingness to think about how to change our reality may simply be the noise of capitalism speaking through us.
The original iPhone on display under glass at the January 2007 Macworld show. (ArnoldReinhold /Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
We are on the brink of a series of catastrophes of our own making that humankind will be exceptionally lucky to survive. There is a path ahead, but being able to see it and where it leads will require — at least from most Westerners — a difficult feat of imagination. We will need to cast aside many of the things we have been taught to most closely identify with. It will demand of us a realisation that our most cherished values are actually harmful.
That is a tall order, indeed.
I am reminded of a question posed in 2014 to critics of the status quo by Sunny Hundal, once the poster-boy of centrist liberalism. Hundal asked readers of his then-influential Liberal Conspiracy blog:
“If you want to replace the current system of capitalism with something else, who is going to make your jeans, iPhones and run Twitter?”
Notably, Hundal soon mothballed his blog and became a spokesperson for the corporate energy sector.
Nonetheless, it is revealing in itself quite how quaint liberal arguments from only 12 years ago sound now. It’s like taking a peek back into the Victorian mindset.
Today, Twitter is called X and run not by some nice bloke named “Jack” but by a sometime trillionaire named Elon Musk. That is the man who expects one day to use his personal rocket programme to colonise space. In the meantime, he believes Muslims and their “liberal” allies need to be driven from the West to avoid a civil war he seems intent on inciting.
Similarly, liberals are no longer as excited by mobile phones as they were back in 2014, when the iPhone was widely viewed as the ultimate proof of humanity’s progress through technological innovation.
Now liberals want young people protected from their screens — possibly because those screens often show all too graphically how our leaders, liberals and conservatives alike, have been actively assisting a genocide and are hellbent on destroying the planet.
Jeans … well, liberals presumably still find it impossible to imagine a good life without a pair of 501s.
The Western liberal, of course, cannot grapple with the idea that jeans or iPhones could be made independently of capitalism, let alone the suggestion that owning six pairs of jeans and disposing of your iPhone every other year may not be the best use of the planet’s limited resources.
Table Crumbs
July 2014: The Lost Hills Trailer Park in the San Joaquin Valley of California where at least 244 wells had been fracked in the nearby Lost Hills Oil Field just down the road. (Sarah Craig/Faces of Fracking, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The truth is that democracy — of the liberal variety — is not an inherent feature of political life in what we like to call “the West.” There is nothing inevitable, or irreversible, about liberal democracy.
Indeed, the West has only been superficially democratic — in the sense that everyone gets a vote — for the last century or so. Even then, democracy has been highly restricted and controlled: the public usually gets a choice between two capitalist parties, one more extreme than the other, following a lifetime of exposure to opinions crafted for them by the ultimate beneficiaries of capitalism — the billionaires who own the mass media.
And, of course, “democracy” on these terms has operated only at home. The West’s colonial “adventures” — subduing and asset-stripping the Global South — never really ceased.
For a few decades of the “post-colonial” era, we installed compliant local dictators to do our dirty work. For the past quarter century, our default behaviours have returned: we openly threaten, invade and plunder states that do not submit quickly to our diktats.
In a world of rapidly decreasing resources, our rulers have decided that they need to tear up the very rules of war they themselves formulated after the Second World War. The law of the jungle is back.
In fact, Western “democracy” is not an artefact of our culture. It is an artefact of time and circumstance. With kings and princes giving way to a new breed of merchant and entrepreneur, the early capitalists showed they were even more proficient at theft.
An enlarged middle class, feeding off crumbs from the table, were trained to espouse liberal values justifying large disparities of wealth as the corollary of a supposed meritocracy.
Inherent contradictions in the theory and practice of liberalism culminated in a brief experiment last century: the working class and women were given a symbolic vote — to elect one of the ruling class’ loyal representatives — in return for becoming devotees of free-market consumption.
But in an era of decline, those contradictions have become harder and harder to contain. As surpluses disappear, so have the liberal values to which our “democratic elites” once paid lip service.
Craving Power
A villager of Goi in Ogoniland in the Niger Delta shows the crude oil that has eroded the banks of the creek through cracks in the pipeline installed by Shell Oil, May 2019. (Milieudefensie, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The ruling class understands the tide is turning. The world’s resources are finite and running out. Capitalism’s model of mass consumption can only hasten the end. Consumption pollutes the planet. It fuels climate chaos. It decimates other species that sustain a living planet.
But, like a crack addict, the billionaire class cannot renounce the very thing that gives them what they crave: wealth and power. Their excuse is that, were they ever to stop, others — led by China — would take their place. Their one consolation is that, cocooned by their wealth, they expect to survive a little longer than the rest of us.
Our consolation, on the other hand, is to imagine that we can win because we are the many.
History suggests it may not be that simple. Saddam Hussein, for example, enforced a brutal system of rule over Iraqis — propped up by the West — for many decades, until we changed our minds and toppled him. So did Muammar Gaddafi. So did innumerable despots.
Understanding you are being oppressed is not the same as liberation. That requires much more: leadership, organisation, collective will, a sense of a better alternative.
The billionaire class, therefore, make it as difficult as they can for leaders to emerge, for the public to imagine an alternative and to organise. Any Jeremy Corbyns will be vilified. Any student campus protests, Extinction Rebellions or Palestine Actions will be criminalised.
The role of the media, from The Guardian and BBC to the Daily Mail and The Telegraph, from The New York Times to Fox News, is to so clog up our minds with propaganda extolling jeans and iPhones that we choose to continue worshipping at the altar of capitalism, even as the walls of the temple visibly crack and crumble.
Victims of Abuse
Nearly 20 years ago, eco-philosopher Derrick Jensen memorably explained how this sense of identification with our oppressors works. He compared us to victims of serial domestic abuse.
If your experience is that food comes from the grocery store and your water comes from a tap, you will defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on it.
If on the other hand, your experience is that the water comes from a stream … and that your food comes from a land base, you will defend to the death that stream and that land base because your life depends on it.
We’ve got messed up and mixed up in this system, where our lives actually depend on the system that is exploiting us.
And, we should add, a system that is evidently now killing us.
The danger for the billionaires, now that North America and Europe are burning both figuratively and literally, is that we — the many — are starting to wake up. We see the images of genocide and of forest fires on the very iPhones the billionaires made us so addicted to.
Might we soon start to understand that our survival depends more on identifying with streams, trees and soil than with factories, superstores and Elon Musk?
Like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, the billionaires have the means of coercion. They still have the media pumping out “entertainment” to make us identify with factories and superstores (even if Musk himself is now a harder sell).
And if that fails, they have the police and the army.
Technology — from weaponry to surveillance and AI — is being purposed further to the ruling class’ advantage. Those killer robot dogs of dystopian movies are already here. Hollywood isn’t just making up fanciful, entertaining stories; it is imagining imminent futures.
Time of Monsters
Antonio Gramsci’s prison notebooks. (Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain)
If the ideology of greedy individualism is exposed as utterly hollow (and suicidal), where might disillusioned iPhone and Twitter/X fans choose to head next?
In the opposite direction.
If individualism is shown to bring only ruin, we are likely to prefer collective ideologies. If greed brings only death, we are likely to prefer cooperation and solidarity. Hope of salvation resides not in iPhones and jeans but in the resurrection of the commons — of public good, of shared wealth.
The Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci famously wrote in 1930 of the moment we are currently in:
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek popularised these “morbid symptoms” as a “time of monsters.” But our monsters aren’t a Cyclops, a Hannibal Lecter or even an Adolf Hitler. Our morbid symptoms are Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, the exemplars of a dying Western capitalism, the men who can tap directly into our minds and those of our children.
The greatest danger is that, with climate chaos accelerating, Gramsci’s new world will not be born at all. It will be stillborn. It may turn out that the proof needed to incentivise change comes too late to affect the outcome.
But if some of us do make it through the next decades, if survival is possible, one thing is certain: the society that emerges will look nothing like the one that worshiped jeans and iPhones.
It will draw on other, older trends in our history. It will prioritise community over the individual, cooperation over competition, mutuality over ownership — the very principles capitalism seeks to eradicate.
Nation-states, the incubators of capitalism, will have to be dissolved. Organised religions, competing over whose God is supreme, will need to be replaced by more ancient, spiritual ideas rooted in living with nature, not seeking to conquer or subdue it.
If all that sounds implausible or impossible, remember this. Your disbelief may only be the noise of capitalism speaking through you. It may be that the problem is yours, for being unable to imagine more than a new iPhone or pair of jeans.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years. He returned to the U.K. in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict: Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006), Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East(2008) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). If you appreciate his articles, please consider offering your financial support.
This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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A major issue is that, in the West, we have no “poor people”, Just “Temporarily embarrassed millionaires”.
With great respect and gratitude I would add these thoughts: Democracy is a deeply flawed means of governance. An alternative: Sociocracy. Like any elegant tool or instrument, it can be demeaned and altered by those who pretend adherence while diligently undermining its very principles. Nevertheless, decisions arrived at by consent requiring the absence of any/all concerns that must be fully and satisfactorily addressed, has great merit. Along with other aspects.
[Recommended, there is] a handbook designed for small groups wishing to learn about, study and consider Sociocracy.
As mentioned by others: Coop business co-owned and managed by (and only by) the employees. Mondragon is an excellent example. It is my understanding that they adopted/used sociocracy as their form of governance/decision making/organizing.
De-centralization: I envision – Israel dismantled, no longer existing, no military, no weapons, the residents who are zionists dispersed around the globe. The US, complicit in its formulation, existence, genocide: divided into four segments – NW, SW, NE, SE. Each a separate country with its own form of governance. No military or weapons at all, anywhere in the world. All US military disbanded, forever not allowed to exist. All US overseas military bases closed, reparations as requested by ‘host’ countries. All European countries de-militarized, de-weaponized. UN reformed: abandon Security Council, abandon the veto. Adopt Sociocracy. ICC, ICJ reformed and provided with humane, effective means of carrying out true justice.
Guaranteed annual income world wide. If this worked in a city in CA, it can work world wide.
Disband all corporations and companies. Create a culture of stewardship. Stewardship of the land, the water, the air, and of everything that exists as precious and finite. That true needs are met for all sentient beings.
Environment & ‘Renewables’ – Neither industrial wind turbines not solar arrays are benign nor sustainable. I [recommend] “Green Illusions, The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism” by scholar, researcher, professor Ozzie Zehner. Fully and thoroughly annotated.
Religions, like political parties, many having caused so much harm and misery over the centuries be circumscribed by law in ways that limit (extinguish?) the possibility that any among them become a political means/method of gaining power and influence beyond whatever comfort they may provide for those who choose to be members/participants.
Some good ideas there Deborah.
Do you have a website/blog ?
I could not agree more ^^
I hate to say it, but the Liberals, Socialists, Communists, Progressives are just as “lost” as the Capitalists. While blaming billionaires is easy and understandable, it may not really be the deeper problem. The “deeper” problem is lack of (democratic) world federal government. We must have a geopolitical system that can end war, not continue wars. This principle is not optional.
Until we replace the United Nations with Earth Federation government under the Earth Constitution, the world will never be good enough. Why? We won’t be able to stop wars and we can’t eliminate nukes and other weapons of mass destruction. Billionaires and/or “we, the people” will continue to mess up the world. Please Liberal, Progressive and Capitalists friends — read “Einstein on Peace.”
Ask not what humanity can do for you. Ask what you can do for humanity.
It’s the greed and the excesses of our Crony Capitalism that make Socialism and Communism so appealing to the masses. Wherever you find man you find corruption.
“If you want to replace the current system of capitalism with something else, who is going to make your jeans, iPhones and run Twitter?”
That’s easy: worker owned enterprises can do anything and everything the current mostly (but not exclusively) privately owned model can. Capitalism is about who owns the production means, which can be incentivized to be the workers.
Are ‘we’ talking about more generalized first steps cooperation globally, a la Basque country (Spain’s) Cooperative movement, Mondragon Corporation; one of the strongest and most successful cooperative movements in the world which, only a couple of years ago spun Spain around to the core of its humaneness?
Note: MONDRAGON Corporation, world leader in the co-operative movement, is the largest business group in the Basque Country and the tenth largest in Spain; fully operational in 2026.
[It remains the world’s largest group of worker cooperatives, employing roughly 70,000 to 71,000 people across finance, industry, retail, and knowledge sectors, with a multi-billion-euro annual turnover]:- AI data collaborative collective.
What those who will not see, willfully do not know.
I agree totally. Democracy isn’t just a form of government, it’s a form of living and needs to be thought of in that manner. It isn’t enough to achieve government of, by and for the people, since history shows governments can and will be bought. It is also necessary to achieve an economy of, by and for the people in order to avoid domination by an economic oligarchy. A democratized economy can achieve more than a capitalist one, once capital is freed from the chains of short-term profits and monopolistic behaviours.
Going back to a flip top phone. The new IPhones have all kinds of features that are of no interest to me.
The only problems are (a) finding one which will operate on 5G networks and, (b) which will be free of corporate operating systems and their controls. A better solution perhaps is to use a ‘privacy phone’ which operates on a freeware based system, without corporate controls, and a VPN.
“If individualism is shown to bring only ruin, we are likely to prefer collective ideologies.”
I too would like to think so.
Sadly, far too many green liberals – who profess deep concern about the already unfolding raft of environmental catastrophes – are not prepared to give-up their first world luxuries which are some of the main drivers of the future which motivates their individualistic responses.
The EV being the most prolific and observable example; a clear favourite by the likes of the Guardian commentariat whose espousal of ‘green capitalism’ is positively nauseating.
Jason Hickel, certainly no climate-denier, asks
“once we have 100% clean energy, what are we going to do with it?
Unless we change how our economy works, we’ll keep doing exactly what we are doing with fossil fuels: we’ll use it to power continued extraction and production, at an ever increasing rate, placing ever-increasing pressure on the living world, because that’s what capitalism requires.
Clean energy might help deal with emissions, but it does nothing to reverse deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion and mass extinction.
A growth-obsessed economy powered by clean energy will still tip us into ecological disaster.”
A concept which evades the thinking of the private-use EV lobbists.
In 2017 the UK Commons Science and Technology Committee noted that
“In the long-term, widespread personal vehicle ownership does not appear to be compatible with significant decarbonisation.”
Yet we still get the media outlets listed by Jonathan, EV lobbyists and so-called ‘environmentalists’ proclaiming that electrified private transport is the way of the future. Obviously individuals struggle to dislodge themselves from the great american suburban dream, one that’s clearly anti-environment.
It’s not “capitalism” that is requiring the exploitation of nature … the Soviet Union and China was and is at least as exploitive of nature’s resources and as uncaring of future consequences as the west has ever been.
It’s about people and our demands for a better, easier, richer life. That is, for example, what’s destroying the ocean life: our unending appetite for seafood. You think the consequences would be different in a different economic system?
But thankfully, increased social welfare seems to lead to less than replacement child birth rates in all societies. So the real solution, a smaller global human population, will come through and save us eventually, though not in our lifetimes.
Caliman
the Soviet Union and China are indeed capitalist economies, the first with a helping hand from Jeffrey Sachs, and especially the latter.
Perhaps not resembling what exists within the US sphere, but capitalist, nonetheless.
What they don’t have interfering are tawdry notions of what passes for democracy.
Capitalism is the antithesis to empathy. And the death of empathy is the death of humanity. (individually and group) There are lots of calls to end capitalism, but very few to build empathy. Which I believe is the most potent weapon we have. Coming together to fight our opressors is needed, but when that coming together in rooted in kindness for the other, it is much stronger.
Excellent analysis. What we need is the exact opposite of what Elon Musk has intended for us.
Excellent! Exactly what we must think about and address now. Who do we choose to be? What do we choose to do at this point in our evolutionary journey? Our continued existence depends on this. Thank you, Jonathon!
what is the book where Jensen “memorably explained how this sense of identification with our oppressors works. He compared us to victims of serial domestic abuse.”
Victor.
At a guess
‘A Language Older than Words’ : hxxps://derrickjensen.org/language-older-than-words/
&/or
‘Endgame’ (in volumes) : hxxps://derrickjensen.org/endgame/
His ‘Myth of Human Supremacy’ is also one which shakes the pillars of accepted thought : hxxps://derrickjensen.org/myth-of-human-supremacy/
I guess it all depends on one’s definition of “accepted thought”. Many literary and religious traditions run counter to the myth of human supremacy. Even in the canon of U.S. literature, Melville (‘Moby Dick’), Henry David Thoreau (‘Walden’), James Fenimore Cooper (the ‘Leatherstocking Tales’), Mark Twain (‘A Connecticut Yankee …’), F. Scott Fitzgerald (‘The Great Gatsby’), Faulkner (‘Go Down Moses’) or Pynchon (‘Gravity’s Rainbow’) and more all attest to the existence and perseverance of a distinctly pro-environmental viewpoint, often passionately expressed.
According to Sheldon Wolin, we are now in inverted totalitarianism where one major characteristic is citizen apathy and another is Big Corp, Inc is running “our managed” democracy for its own profit.
A Dying West…
A Dying West Indeed.
I like the caption, Cook!