When the SOYMB blog comes across an insightful analysis by a non-member or another organisation it will re-post, to widen its audience. This 2015 article by Neil Faulkner is worth quoting excerpts from.
Climate change, poverty, and war are tearing our world apart. These are not separate issues; they are not ‘single issues’. They are connected. They are part of a system of rival states and corporations. The driver of the system is competition for profit.
The world is now more class-divided than ever before in history.
The fast growing gap between rich and poor is driven by a profit machine. Corporate power, privatisation, and austerity are tearing societies apart to enrich a tiny minority. Everything from housing to health to urban space is being commodified – turned into new sources of profit.
Today’s wars – all fed by the same global arms conglomerates – are of two kinds. Some are imperialist wars waged by great powers for control of resources, especially oil and gas. Others are sectarian wars waged by right-wing militias filling the vacuum when societies are torn apart by poverty and violence. Both types of war are rooted in the same system: the war machine – like the carbon machine and the profit machine – is hard-wired to the engine of capital accumulation.
Capitalism is a system of self-expansion. No bank or corporation invests without expecting to make a profit. Capital investment is always about making money: getting more out than you put in. It is therefore about uncontrolled, unlimited, unending growth.
There is no such thing as ‘steady-state’ capitalism. The idea of ‘green capitalism’ is therefore a pipedream.
What drives the engine of growth is competition. The world is divided into competing banks, corporations, nation-states, and armies. The struggle between them is a struggle for energy, minerals, markets, and contracts. It is therefore a struggle for power.
Competition drives the engine of growth. And that engine powers the carbon, profit, and war machines. We live in a joined-up world: one system, one crisis.
The system cannot concede either social justice or climate justice without imperilling its own existence. The profiteers and warmongers who run the system will not allow change which threatens their wealth and power.
Time has now run out. Catastrophic climate change is imminent. The rulers of the world are rearming to fight new wars. And they and their system are plunging the mass of humanity ever deeper into poverty.
We need to build a united mass movement against war, poverty, and global warming; a movement for total system change; one big movement fighting for equality, democracy, and sustainability.
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