CAPITALISM: And how it can only be this way. Until it can’t.

Fans of capitalism in its latest neoliberal iteration – and they are all over the place in Europe and the USA, at least among elites and the middle classes – tend to shut their eyes tightly against its latest horrors and the very real fact that the planet’s majority are not enjoying capitalism’s spoils, nor can they ever do so, although they may be unaware that capitalism is a zero sum game. The fans point with great determination at socialism’s failings, pinpointing the worst horrors of communism, many imagined, mostly dredged up from a decades-old past carefully not compared with other decades-old pasts.

Capitalism’s historical horrors are also, well, horrific. A thousand years ago, life expectancy, once childhood was overcome, was around 60 or even 70, especially if one had survived past 30 years of age. Studies of the skeletal remains of affluent people from over 2000 years ago paint the same picture. Childhood and war brought very grave dangers and, without them, healthy life expectancy was not dissimilar to our own. However, at the height of the industrial revolution, life expectancy for the poor in England’s major industrial cities was shockingly low, around 15-17 years in the 1840s.

In the 1960s, Russian life expectancy was above 64 for men, and 73 for women, similar to that of France. Current life expectancy in Cuba is over 78 years (80 for women; 76 for men). For China it is 79 years.

 

The point is that capitalism’s successes are extremely variable. The US, our capitalist hegemon has an overall life expectancy just below that of Cuba, a small and poor country that has suffered crippling sanctions imposed by its mighty rival, the US, for the best part of a century. Geographical differences are reproduced between the 1% richest and the 1% poorest in the USA, where a massive 15-year difference in life expectancy exists. Healthy life expectancy in the US is a mere 64 years.

Why can capitalism not be improved?

Because it is extractive. It extracts resources from poorer or weaker nations and does not pay the real price for them. France’s current economic woes and political unrest are in large part due to 14 African nations joining together and refusing to allow their former colonial powers to continue to steal resources without paying for them and without paying for the environmental damage. These countries are also attempting to put an end to the French imposed currency – the CFA franc - that keeps Paris in control and, from the start, has ensured that wealth is automatically transferred to France. The CFA franc was pegged to the French franc, and is now pegged to the euro. France demands that those 14 African countries maintain 50% of their foreign exchange reserves with the French Treasury.

Another factor is uranium mining. This is incredibly damaging both to the environment and to those who mine it, and Niger is no longer handing it over virtually for free. Thus, France’s historically low nuclear energy prices are a thing of the past and consumers have suffered significant increases. The future cost of decommissioning the nuclear plants and the extremely long storage problems associated with the spent fuel are also unresolved.

The “Green Revolution” is based on filthy lithium mining, unrecyclable wind turbine blades (often full of asbestos) and solar panels, rare earths, unresolved technology and has nothing to do with improving the environment and everything to do with the creation of a new boom. It has hit a snag, however, in that hydrogen cells need iridium which is extremely rare (although Russia has a lot of it), lithium deposits are in places like Afghanistan, Bolivia and Australia (and the latter needs the Chinese to process it), and everything else needs rare earths which are also, well, rare and mostly to be found not in the EU nor the USA, but in African and China, and need costly (both economically and environmentally) and complicated processing. The current wars promoted by our elites as being all about democracy and human rights – killing thousands of innocent civilians as collateral damage – have cut off the tap to the cheap Russian gas that our industries and computing rely on. The problem is that, while we had all the money, they (the “others” in the world) had all the resources (and all the time).

Capitalism’s second inbuilt feature is that it is debt-based. Its extraordinary ability to out-produce other systems is because it relies on money taken from future output. Compound interest means constant and exponential growth and rising populations among which to spread the ever-increasing debt, faster and faster, until the entire Ponzi scheme collapses, as it inevitably will in the cyclical systemic crises faced every few years. Meanwhile, more GDP, more destruction, more construction, more, more, more. Until our modern-time day of reckoning, the Great Reset, in which almost everything we own will be stolen from us. Remember “You will own nothing and be happy”? The first part looks set to be on the way really soon; the second part, never. As a cautionary tale, when the USSR collapsed, life expectancy there fell 10 years over a decade and rampant corruption, crime and murders soared. Our own economic collapse promises to be imminent and no less terrifying.

National debt is nothing but debt that others will have to pay, mostly future generations, but also precisely those who received almost nothing from the billions borrowed. This inbuilt feature leads to political corruption and excruciatingly bad uses of the incoming money today, which is generally not used to build infrastructure, nor useful technologies but for vanity projects and to line the pockets of our elites.

Capitalism also builds up personal debt. The 80s smashing of union power and the opening up of work to foreign competition, and low wages, together with significant immigration and preference for technology over workers, meant that downward pressure was put on salaries and, for consumerism to continue to rise – in order for the products to be sold -, personal debt was actively encouraged.

However, the most damning feature of capitalism is that everything, absolutely everything has a price put on it. The only value is monetary. Surrogacy, unnecessary surgeries, trans mutilations, dubious psychiatry, opiate crises (yes, in Europe as well), sex “workers”, Only Fans, AI pornography, illegals picking fruit without labour protections, unnecessary caesareans and induced births in private clinics, the purchase of babies, “assisted” dying (in other words the assisted murder of the economically useless), the theatre of democracy with the only choice between Team Blue and Team Red, both funded by the same corporations, two-tier justice…; you name it, it’s all for sale. People on disability pensions due to mental illness have tripled over the last 35 years. Why? For the combined reason that our society is alienating, hard to do well in for the 99%, ruthlessly competitive and, to top it, mental health is seen as an individual problem, requiring psychopharmaceutic remedies that are highly profitable for Big Pharma and of almost no use for solving the problem even were it an individual, rather than a social one.

In the chilling documentary The Alabama Solution you can see how the logic of capitalism results in excessive sentences, overcrowded prisons, scarcity of guards, poor personnel selection, lack of rehabilitation, shocking mistreatment of prisoners…, all of it making perfect business sense. Modern-day slavery. In Alabama the mostly white and filthy-rich elites distract the white and black uneducated poor with cheap pageants and other spectacles.

Capitalism's successes rely heavily on unpaid and underpaid labour, that of the illegal immigrant fleeing from countries whose economies have been devastated by the very countries the immigrants go to, “volunteer” firefighters and other workers from among the incarcerated, unpaid overtime… Indeed, fire protection units are being defunded just at the same time as climate change narratives should logically dictate that they should be a priority. Immigrant labour works for peanuts, without proper legal protection, accrues no sick leave nor pension rights, especially if the immigrant is then deported; and, more importantly, it exerts downward pressure on all salaries being competed for. The immigrant who does not return to his or her original country will inevitably further weaken social and ideological cohesion in Western countries. Historically, such weakening has always resulted in rapid civilizational decline. 

Additionally, capitalism traditionally relies on women’s unpaid labour, in the home, bringing up the next generation, and as carers and as workers in many of the badly paid professions (which are ironically many of the utterly vital professions).

But the very worst feature of capitalism is the lack of empathy it engenders in its populations. It belittles all moral value. From the 1980s film Wall Street, Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” has so permeated our consciousness that we cannot see how grotesque it is. A social system without moral values is not worth saving. Morality requires courage, itself an intrinsic value, in juxtaposition to our societies’ fetishist competitiveness, hustle, greed and grift. War, famine and pestilence stalk us in the West as we chug down our cocktails on the deck of the Titanic, and we are currently not worth saving.

THE TROLLEY DILEMMA

 

The train or trolley dilemma is basically the following:

 

A runaway trolley is speeding down a track towards five people who are for some reason unable to move or unaware of their impending fate. You are standing next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different track. However, there is one unwitting person on that sidetrack.

 

You have two options:

1. Do nothing: The trolley continues on its path and kills the five people.
2. Pull the lever: The trolley switches tracks and kills one person, but the five people are saved.

The dilemma forces a choice between two outcomes, centring on whether it is better to actively intervene to cause one death to save five, or to passively allow five deaths to occur by not acting. The core issue is whether you should actively maximise the number of lives saved.

 

The philosophical question presented by the philosopher Alex O’Connor in one of his videos is basically two dilemmas:

 

1)      Many people are reluctant to pull the lever and intervene to save 5 people and kill just one, feeling that killing a person is always bad, even if you have saved more people at the same time. Alex asks then, if you have inadvertently already pulled the lever (maybe by falling over) – and yet feel that this should not have been done on purpose –, whether you would be happy putting it back to its default 5-people killed position, or – more whimsically – if you could go back in time would you choose to do so and then not pull the lever (and go back to killing 5 instead of one).

2)      The philosopher Peter Singer’s problem: at what point are we no longer required to give up some of our money/comfort/time to help others worse off than ourselves. If you see a drowning child are you under an obligation to dive in and save it and maybe spoil your new suede shoes? Or if you might endanger your own life? Do you have to keep on diving in to save other children? The extrapolation is then done to whether you should give to charity and save other people’s lives which you cannot see but are no less real for it. Should you keep on giving to charity until you are as poor as those you are helping?

 

Both these problems are utilitarianism ones. We look at the different outcomes and are inclined to compare them. This is partly because we live in utilitarian times, where our default position is based on comparable outcomes, and generally viewed in a very short timescale. Governments typically make calculations based on cost and utility, taking on board that some members of society will end up not having resources designated for them in order for other initiatives to be funded.

 

However, it has not always been like this. Historically, there have been times when the default position would have been based on a certain view of morality and absolute values. Despite what is often erroneously said, utilitarianism is not valueless. By sleight of hand, it seems to be the logical way to go, but it does in fact have itself an absolute value: it typically elevates the value of aggregate human happiness (or welfare) above others. It also has a big problem with when exactly the outcome is to be measured and over what period of time (not to mention why it typically only takes into account human happiness).

 

For example, you might be given the choice in a plane hostage situation to kill one passenger so that the rest are not killed. But, apart from the effect this might in the long term have on your personal morals and wellbeing, it might also make future hostage situations more frequent, or might normalize the random killing of one innocent person with the aim of potentially saving others, and who knows if the others will then actually be saved? You might even find that you have just killed the one person who would have stopped a figure like Hitler from gaining power; or the one person who also knows how to fly the plane when the pilot suddenly dies of a heart attack. You might pull the lever to divert the trolley to kill only one person and then find that the 5 who were saved then had a fatal car crash going home. Had you not pulled the lever, one person at least would have been saved.

 

Utilitarianism is what makes Alex O’Connor’s questions so puzzling. In the first instance utilitarianism is colliding with an alternative value, that of simply not killing anyone on purpose (i.e. not playing God). In the second, utilitarianism would suggest one must keep on giving and giving until one has just enough to survive; or keep on jumping into the pond to save one child after another, eternally; or at least until one is exhausted enough to be in danger of drowning oneself. There is, alternatively, an absolute value in self-sacrifice, but not perhaps to the point of martyrdom. Utilitarianism is also, maybe, what has led us to the very situations that it is so maddingly unable to resolve. In the plane hostage situation, adopting the absolute value of never killing an innocent person on purpose might make such situations disappear in the future as hostage taking would become a futile activity and, thereby, not obeying the terrorists would be the right thing to do in the long term. The problem of perspective and over which timescale is one that is not really solved by adopting an arbitrary point of view or length of time.

 

Utilitarianism in fact makes our societies transactional and calculating, and maybe – happier or not happier, who knows? – worse for it. If one person after another sees little overall benefit in helping others – we are, after all, rarely presented with a pond full of drowning children –, people in general  will start not to act in accordance with moral virtue and this will put a larger burden on the few who will intervene whether overall happiness increases or not. If someone is drowning in a pond because they are suicidally depressed, should we rescue them, endangering our life – or ruining our new shoes – when they will probably be more depressed if we do, and may well try to kill themselves later? Is anyone else going to jump in (in which case on a utilitarian basis we would personally be absolved from doing the same)? Should we expend our energies on trying to get someone else to take the risk, if the end result is the same? (Which doesn’t sound like a nice thing to do.)

 

Western countries are bringing in laws enabling euthanasia (although the reality is a far cry from the “good death” that the word conjures up) under the guise of kindness and allowing individuals to “choose dignity in death”. (We have euthanised our pets for decades, blissfully unaware of what the procedure means in practice behind the vet’s closed door.)

 

Apart from the real questions over whether the new euthanasia laws will be misused – and it is notable that palliative care budgets are being drastically reduced at the same time –, perhaps there will be other effects: making people less resilient, making family members less prepared to care for their old and ill members, making doctors care less about curing/caring and more expedient and eugenicist, making us less stoical and resistant when faced with pain or bad outcomes, making governments more able to dispose of people according to their future monetary worth, and enabling lucrative but dubious medical processes during life that may well be actively making people ill. Will the calculation that killing the old and ill will save money mean that the old and ill themselves will be ruthlessly eliminated (along with their respective costs)? We can easily envisage that AI utilitarian cost-benefit calculations could easily lead to horrible results. Why would the same calculations carried out by humans differ?

 

Utilitarian arguments have enabled warmaking in distant lands under the guise of bringing democracy and freedom to other peoples that, often, have shown scant interest in our notions of democracy. Arguments over political expediency have justified different versions of the “first past the post” electoral method, giving us a pseudo-democracy in which we get a choice between the Team Red and the Team Blue, both of which are funded by the same donors, are corrupt at the top, and give society a shockingly low utilitarian value.

 

Utilitarianism has nothing to say about the intrinsic value of truthfulness, almost encouraging euphemisms and current misuses of lexicon, which is making some discussions almost impossible to bring to a useful termination, and are often permitted under a misguided notion of inclusiveness or kindness. (“Transwomen are women” comes to mind, given that “transwomen” are in fact men; or “safe and effective”, still promoting the covid and flu “vaccines”, when “safe” is not a medical term and “effectiveness” has to be in relation to a specificity.) Are utilitarianism and the current quest for equity stopping the few talented people that typically are produced by every generation from appearing? Will the quest for equity (an equal and supposedly happy outcome for everyone) make us lazier, more useless, more stupid, more depressed and more cynical in the long term?

 

So, going back to the original problems, maybe one shouldn’t pull the lever to save 5 and kill one on purpose, nor to save a million at the expense of one. And, if one tripped by mistake and fell on the lever without wanting to, even if one had the choice of going back in time, one should not do so either. Once again, one should not pull it because the end is irrelevant to morality in behaviour, and not because long-term outcomes cannot be clearly measured.

 

In the same light, one should rescue a drowning child so long as one is not horribly inconvenienced by doing so, because one has a duty to help others, within reasonable parameters. One does not have a duty to die or lose one’s only livelihood trying to help others, although self-sacrifice can be highly laudable. The utilitarian argument would maybe suggest that one has less of a duty to give to others the less one earns. In this way perhaps a person could become a better person merely by earning a little less. This is absurd.

 

As a side note, my personal view is that the existence of high earners who choose to give to their charity of choice does not remotely solve this question, even if many did so. Society should establish a progressive taxation system on wealth and establish a relative maximum permitted that does not allow a few to own more than half of humanity, not just for reasons of fairness but also because no system can benefit most of its citizens if there are a few who can literally buy up economic and political power.

 

Capitalism itself is an economic system praised because the majority of the populations of broadly capitalist countries have an affluent lifestyle. Without having to delve into the question of whether these countries are broadly affluent because they syphon off the monetary and resource wealth of poorer nations and future generations, there is another problem: people in capitalist countries are encouraged to deify wealth and monetary success, becoming less empathetic and more value-free as time goes on. Indeed, our broadly utilitarian-based governments have brought a crisis of identity and belief to large parts of their populations. Worse still, a significant number of people in affluent societies ingest detrimental amounts of drugs and alcohol, and are very often not happy.

 

If you dive into a pond to rescue a drowning child and then drown yourself, the utilitarian would regard this as a very bad act, with negative utility. But there is intrinsic value in trying to save a child and in personal sacrifice for the greater good. The end does not justify the means. Rather, the means justify the end. A completely different trolley dilemma would be if one could personally throw oneself in front of the trolley in order to save 5 further down on the tracks (rather than sacrifice an innocent bystander). In this case, the right course of action would be to do so, all other things being equal. It is so much easier to think of sacrificing another individual than oneself!

 

And maybe the question is not whether you should be diving in to rescue an endless number of drowning children, but rather what caused those children to be in the water with no one else around to stop them getting into trouble in the first place. Maybe once we’ve reached the point where hapless workers on a trolley track will needlessly die whatever one does, we’re already on the wrong track.