When an animal is mortally threatened, there is usually a "fight or flight" reaction, where either the animal tries to alleviate the threat by fleeing it or combating it. If the animal is cornered and cannot flee, the "fight" option is generally chosen even if it wasn't the animal's first choice, and any combat in this situation is not necessarily well-orchestrated but instead quite chaotic. Such a reaction is filled with panic since the animal may sense its inevitable demise forthcoming, and any resistance it can muster, no matter how ill-advised, is believed to be better than the finality of the alternative.
The animal of Capitalism is no different. Having now consumed nearly all it can, and being trapped by its confines on Planet Earth, it is cornered with nowhere else to go. And so it fights, regardless of consequence.
More on the flip.
There is a metaphor very prevalent in modern culture that we're all quite familiar with by now, and that's the metaphor of Man vs Machine. We see it all over our sci-fi films of the past several decades, and it remains popular because it represents some of our most pervading horrific fears. The threat comes from an enemy, a machine (which may be biological if the behavior is the same) which follows its programmed course of action without care or concern of the outcome, without fear or hesitation, without any empathy or remorse. The threat is made all that more palpable in the understanding that if you are against it and cannot win, any attempt to plead to altruism or compassion has no hope of success, because the enemy simply does not care.
What many people now realize (and what I'm trying to promote in this diary) is that Capitalism itself is just such a machine, and that up until recently we as human beings have been able to semi-peacefully coexist with it, in a parasitic but nonetheless cooperative relationship. That cooperation is now ending, as Capitalism is finding itself confronting a threat to its survival, and being a machine it will not hesitate to consume us if it has to, even if that still means its own death in the end.
It is important to make the distinction here between general "Free Enterprise" and Capitalism specifically. There is nothing inherently wrong with money itself (which is merely a finely-grained abstraction representing arbitrary things of real value) nor of free enterprise or commerce as a whole. But the investment-based, profit-based, growth-based motives of Capitalism itself are nowhere near as benign.
The blood of the animal of Capitalism, is Growth. It's not money, nor any other concrete asset. It is Growth. In a system based on investment and profits, the economy is fueled not by goods, but by the exchange of those goods and the profits made as a result of those exchanges. The most basic of these exchanges is the loan with interest, where the mere possession of an asset (money) by someone other than its owners is sufficient to create profit. Where interest exists, money is literally created out of nowhere, and hence in order to keep the system stable, other assets must be created to balance out the system, hence necessitating constant Growth. A constant supply of money or assets, no matter how huge, is still insufficient for the animal of Capitalism. It must always grow to survive. A small amount of growth is a wound to the animal, and negative growth is effectively incapacitation that the animal generally only survives with non-capitalist help (such as from government programs that are social in nature rather than purely economic; this is like life support that keeps the animal alive and nurses it back to health until it can resume its previous normal behavior).
I'm mixing metaphors here (calling Capitalism both an animal and a machine) because they both fit, especially if one combines the two analogies by thinking of it like a parasite. But maybe another analogy would be more appropriate from this point forward. Something more basic, more ancient, more at the core of the advancement of our species over the past many millenia. Something that would really help to bring the point home.
Something like.... Fire.
Fire is one of the classic four elements. Along with the Earth, Air, and Water, it represents one of the four most basic requirements for survival (Earth for food, Water for water, Air for breath, Fire for essential light and heat). It is also the element that our Western culture has built its entire civilization around. It gives off energy and consumes whatever is fed to it in order to do so. We need it, we revere it, and we can wield and manipulate it, but we can never fully control it. And no matter how much reverence we give it and how much energy it gives back to us, it will still happily consume us in a moment's notice if we fail to give it its due respect. Alternatively, if we fail to keeping feeding it, it will simply die, and while it will no longer threaten to consume us it will also no longer give us what we need from it. Whatever happens though, will happen, because Fire is one of the basics, and whether it kills us or not, whether it thrives or fades, Fire makes no apologies.
Just as Fire is intrinsic to our technological advancement, the relationship is reciprocal, as Western Man has literally become like Fire itself, in the form of Capitalism. Unlike other cultures on this planet, we were not content to stay where we were. We had to grow, explore, expand. There had to be perpetual "progress". Imperialism and Capitalism go hand in hand. When the Fire begins to fade, more growth is needed, and the empire must expand. When growth is no longer possible, the fire dies, and the empire along with it, feeding the last of the fire by consuming itself. The recorded history of the Western world is littered with this tale, over and over again, countless times. The fire often gets close to going out; we only keep the essential hot core of the fire burning by switching up what we feed it with.
But now we've reached the twilight of this fire. With the decline of fossil fuels, we no longer have a more efficient food for the fire waiting in the wings. It is no surprise that this occurs around the same time that we've now explored all over the Earth, where nearly all the lands waiting to be discovered have been discovered, and nearly all the resources and people to be exploited, have been exploited as far as they are willing to tolerate. The only real place to go for more growth is out into space, something that at this point uses up far more resources than it provides. If our energy situation is what we now suspect it is (with the upcoming oil peak and all), then we are probably not destined to leave this planet any more than our fingers are destined to leave our hands (of their own accord, at least).
These death throes of Capitalism are not happening in the future, they're happening Now. The system survives by both production and consumption. Over the past several decades, the necessity for Growth pushed the system into its path of least resistance. The most ravenous consumers were here in the U.S. (the hot burning core of the great Fire of Capitalism), and there was plenty of opportunity for more production to feed the fire through international sources (both in terms of oil, and in terms of labor. To the Fire, it's all "production", and people don't matter any more than any other resource). From a social perspective, it makes more sense to curtail some of this expansion and allow both production and consumption to occur in a more stable manner here in the country... but that wouldn't be the kind of growth that the Fire desires, and the path of least resistance pointed to other avenues.
But the consumers in this hot core have been consuming themselves in the process (hence the debt), and once that process is complete, the Fire here will die. In order to survive, it will have to move elsewhere (by turning other producers into consumers; both are required to create the Growth that fuels the Fire). The mechanism for this is, of course, the international corporation. But of course now that true massive growth is no longer possible on this planet, such moves are akin to burning the last of the firewood, even the piece that you may have been using to stoke the fire.
All of this mixed-metaphor rambling above does have a point, which I'm about to get to.
Much of our legal structure for corporations is built around them being treated like people. But unlike people, corporations have no sense of altruism or empathy, and are legally obligated not to. Corporations are obligated by their shareholders and the legal system to pursue profit, and that means that any surface altruism is simply a varnish on top of an intrinsically greedy underbelly. In some non-critical situations this may be acceptable, but in a survival situation, the varnish disappears. If a corporation is a person, it is the worst kind of person imaginable; the kind who would kill their own mother to satisfy their greed. Whereas humans sometimes make the ultimate sacrifice by giving themselves up for something greater than themselves, no corporation is capable of doing so of its own accord. If they are people, they are soulless people.
And this is why it's time we stop thinking of them as people, and start thinking of them as what they are: agents of the Fire. These corporations, and the soulless people who run them so greedily that they identify themselves with the actions of their companies, are Western civilization's big Creation, one which is now actively trying to destroy us to keep itself going when there is now nowhere else to go and no other option remains. Humanity started this Fire, and if the fire is not abandoned to fade away then we will die by it, because the Fire can be wielded and killed but never fully controlled.
Every person who works themselves to death every day nonstop with no end in sight, is being consumed by the Fire. Every person who thinks the endless acquisition of material possessions is all there is to life and cannot find any alternative to truly satisfy them, has been blinded by the Fire. Every soldier killed who is sent to fight imperial wars and is wounded physically or psychologically, has been devoured by the Fire. And every rich man or woman with more money than they know what to do with but no end of greed for more of it and no qualms about destroying their fellow human beings to satisfy that greed, is still a slave to the Fire.
When global warming is ignored because the threat to our economy is put on a higher pedestal than the threat to our very existance, that is the Fire. When black gold is put on a higher pedestal than hundreds of thousands of lives, that is the Fire. When an entire civilization has lost its belief that there is nothing more to life than endless consumption followed by retirement and death, that is the Fire.
But the Fire is about to fade, and if the above trends continue, we will fade with it. We will only survive this if we remember that the Fire is not Us. It is our Creation, not our Identity. And now that Creation is reaching for us, trying to pull us in. Either we walk away, or we will burn.
Capitalism must not just be casually replaced by another system "once we find something better". It must be completely and utterly annihilated, immediately. But this annihilation is not done through combat, because that will only feed it. This fire will only stop when we let it extinguish itself by confining it and abandoning it. The Rich and Powerful at the top of the governmental and corporate hierarchies have no power at all in this context; they are abject slaves to the Fire and don't know how to be anything else.
The Fire is going out. It will go out with or without us. But before this happens, we will either choose to live by walking away from it, or die by jumping inside of it. All of the big battles of Good vs. Evil going on right now, all of the wars, all of the challenges, even all of the popular metaphors and myths representing our greatest fears, really come down to this: a complete masochistic devotion to one element, or a balanced harmony with all four of them.
The tension is palpable, and the hammer is about to fall. It's time to walk away from the Fire.
It's time to Walk Away.