Rethinking Capitalism: A Radical Shift

Speaker 3
Question number one. Hello. My question really relates to some of the examples that have been given of the countries, whether it's Finland or Norway. I mean, frankly, in the great scheme of things, rather small in terms of population. If we look at the very large populous economies of Asia, of India, and of Africa, and ask the questions of how you end capitalism or end consumerism in those societies. Some are democratic, some are not democratic. That just doesn't seem to be addressed. We also have the other major economy of the United States, which seems to have gone off on a sort of private and rather peculiar mission of its own.
Speaker 5
Okay. Let's have the second question, number two over there. So
Speaker 4
I had a question to both sides, which was the pro side said that if we
Speaker 1
continue with economic growth in order to let people out of poverty, we're going to go straight into, that's going to hugely overshoot the planetary um our resources and our environmental boundaries how do we practically bring beyond poverty while also um while not having economic growth and then to the against side how do we bring people out of poverty with economic growth growth while not growing our current emissions in the global north thank
Speaker 5
you very much so, George, do you want to go first? Sure.
Speaker 3
I mean, it's interesting, you know, picking up the contrast between the US and Finland, as you say, the US far more powerful. I mean, overall, globally, capitalism is becoming more extreme, not less extreme. We've moved away from the social democratic era of capitalism, the Keynesian version of capitalism, towards this extreme neoliberal market fundamentalist version of capitalism. And the reason for that is that capitalism generates its own momentum. People gain power under the system and they play the system with the use of that power. Are we seeing any of the things we want to see happening? No, we're not. Nothing, nowhere near the scale that we need to see them on. Because, to go to the second question, because of the sunk costs already invested by large capitalist enterprises, be it Exxon or BP or whoever it might be, they have got their investments which they are trying to protect and they use political means like funding Donald Trump or Scott Morrison or Jair Bolsonaro in order to protect those investments and they gain control over the system as a whole. So for years and years all four of us on this panel you know and I applaud and salute Adair and Tony for all their efforts. We've been trying to fight this system from within. Are we winning? No. We are failing spectacularly because you cannot fight it from within because it generates its own power. This is why we need to be pressing, and this is an effort of global persuasion, to say we have to fight this from without by demanding and creating a new system.

To Stop Climate Collapse, We Must End Capitalism

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