I read an especially tragic headline today. Koalas are apparently going functionally extinct. "Functionally", meaning their numbers are now already maybe too small to probably go on surviving. Like me, perhaps you grew up thinking of koalas as little and beautiful things. If you want to split hairs, there's some debate about it, mostly because nobody has the resources to really count how many koalas there are…but that's telling in itself. Let's say simply that koalas are in profound trouble, and their numbers are declining swiftly.
It's a tiny example of the stakes we face, my friends. We human beings have to make an epic shift to taking care of the world all around us. We need to become a nurturing species now, not just a predatory one. And our whole politics and economics must reflect that. How are we to do that?
I'm the furthest thing from a tree-hugging green radical. I've never cared much about the environment or the planet, on some kind of intense personal level. But when extinction becomes the stuff of everyday headlines…I think any sensible person has to conclude: something has gone badly, badly wrong. With our politics. With our economics. With our culture. But what, exactly? How did we get here?
Another way of asking that is: what would it have taken to have saved the koalas? I want to answer that question backwards. (And I don't think "but the koalas aren't alll the way extinct yet!" as in any way an appropriate defense, except to someone with the moral fibre of a Zuck. I mean: "to have saved all those which died needlessly?") By the way, I'm going to put the following in unfamiliar terms, which might feel strange and even outlandish to you. That's because I want to reduce the challenge before us to its simplest and truest essence.
Climate change caused brushfires, which wiped out their habitat and food. Koalas became casualties. Imagine all those poor creatures..wandering a desolate, burned out landscape, their homes ashes, starving, thirsty. Imagine all that suffering. The terrible suffering of a whole species. Mothers watching their children die. Whole families watching each other perish. Really try to feel it. Can you? Isn't even a tiny lashing of it unbearable?
So why doesn't any of that immense suffering matter to our institutions and systems? Why don't our systems value the koalas as beings of intrinsic worth, just for existing?
Well, they don't even value us as beings of intrinsic worth — so why would they care about koalas? To our systems and institutions — to capitalism — we have no intrinsic worth. Hence, we don't deserve much of anything, from healthcare to retirement to education to housing. We are only "worth" what we earn. In fact, if you want to nitpick, not even what we earn — merely the portion of it that we can somehow manage to keep for ourselves.
To our systems and institutions, nothing has any intrinsic worth. Not you. Not me. Not the rivers, reefs, trees, forests, oceans. And not the koalas, either. So there is no reason to "save" anything. So we didn't save the koalas, in economic terms, for a pretty simple reason. Because they had no intrinsic worth, nobody invested much in them. Or at least not enough. Of course conservation efforts were made. But they were a pittance, in economic terms.
What our systems and institutions really exist is to do is this.
- Take life. Take a koala's life. Take a human life. Take their energy, bodies, creativity, beauty, time, dsapotential, possibility.
- Turn it all into "money."
- That "money" is then "owned" by those who have "made" that transformation, of life, time, and energy, into numbers, bits, paper.
Do you see how all that works? Hence, together, Bezos, Zuck, Jack, Sergey, Larry are worth about a trillion dollars. That's enough to pay off the entire American student debt, a hundred times over. It's enough to have saved the koalas maybe a million times over. Hence, a few hundred ultra-rich people are "worth"…as much as…the entire rest of the world.
Nobody bothers to invest in anyone or anything else more and more, because nobody has the "money." Nobody has the money because all the money belongs to multi-billionaires. They "own" that "money" because they have created systems and institutions which are the most effective at turning life itself into money. But money is a dead thing. Those are the rules of capital, and the world we live in is the world capital made.
Marx would have called all that "exploitation." But exploitation today — entire species vanishing like dust, fresh water going dry, a planet on fire — goes far beyond what he foresaw. The means we now have to "make" "money" by turning life into it are now surreal and catastrophic. An Amazon can deliver billions of parcels a day. A Google can return trillions of searches a day. A Facebook can network billions of people per second. But none of these things can save or nurture a single instant of a life. They can do nothing — nothing whatsoever — to affirm, expand, and elevate life, in hard and concrete terms. All that they really do is to chew up the world around us, its resources, and turn them into (things which are sold for) money. That "money" is then "owned" by the billionaires who have "made" it, which leaves no one else enough to invest in anyone or anything, from themselves to koalas.
Let me summarize.
This — now — is what a world run by and for capital looks like. It's a grim, dystopian place, in which global systems of exploitation exist and operate at maximum efficiency by the microsecond — but not a single global system of care for any living being exists on any scale whatsoever.
Think about that for a second. Why is that we have global "markets" which operate 24 hours a day, but not a global anti-extinction system…healthcare for every life on earth…education for every child on this planet?
Our challenge this century is reversing all of that. We must build global systems and institutions of nourishment and nurturance, that reverse and heal and undo the damage centuries of exploitation— turning life into money — have done. They must do the following.
- Restore life
- By investing in it
- So that it can be nurtured, nourished, tended, and cared for
- So that every life reaches its fullest possibility
Capital turned life into money. Our next wave of political, economic, and social systems must turn money back into life. You can think of those principles applied on many levels. A healthcare system does such a thing. So does an education system or a retirement system. But our challenge goes way beyond all that — way beyond us. Imagine the koalas. Imagine that we'd build systems and institution to really apply those principles in their case — to restore life, by investing in it, so that it could be nurtured. What would such institutions and systems look like?
One of them would probably be a Global Green Investment Bank. Another might be a Declaration of Rights to Protect All Life. Another might be a Pact to Protect Species Against Climate Change. Another still might be a Global Climate Extinction Agency. Another might be a Global Climate Change Tax Agency. I could go on. It's not an exhaustive list — it's barely even a tiny beginning. Here is the point.
Do you see how different and radical these are from the institutions and systems we do have? We don't have anything like the above, really. We have a World Bank, and a Wildlife Fund, and a smattering of conservation groups and charities. What we don't have are global systems built to invest in life, so it can be nourished, restored, protected, and be free to realize itself — because every single being on this planet has intrinsic worth, whether you and me, or those little koalas.
We don't have planetary systems of nourishment and restoration. But we need them right now — and we need them more badly, by the day. That is the real challenge for those who see themselves as "innovators" and "leaders" — on that scale, in that context, the Elon Musks and Bezoses of the world are somewhere between a joke and a disgrace. Want to really change the world? That's your challenge.
I'm not just talking about the koalas. I'm talking about you and me, too. Increasingly — and Australia itself is an example — we don't have functioning social systems. Australia is following the American and British example, and ripping up its social contract. Bad move. The point is that people are increasingly left to fend for themselves — in a time of catastrophe, crisis, and calamity. Of course, nobody can do that very well, and so, for example, in America, life has simply fallen apart.
Instead of expanding our local systems of human care to global and all-life-level scale…we're diminishing them, letting them fall apart, ripping them to shreds. It's not very smart. And there need to be a generation of leaders and innovators now who are wiser and truer and more radical than accepting that.
Because without planetary systems of nourishment and restoration — banks, pacts, agreements, contracts, organizations, bottom lines, jobs, roles, titles, careers, new measures of well-being — American collapse will increasingly become the norm, at the planetary level. It is all there is in a world run by and for capital. It is the abyss at the end of the rainbow. Capitalism turns life into death, by way of money. Hence, societies collapse — just like America is.
America never built systems to care for anyone or anything because billionaires hoarded all the money. Those are the rules of capital, remember? You "own" the "money" that you've "made", by turning life into numbers, paper, bits, dead stuff. American capitalism is one long transformation of life into death — and it's no surprise that a planet run by and for it is beginning to die. It's entire purpose is to create suffering, to "make" money, if you really understand that last sentence — because no one has any intrinsic worth.
You can think of the solution to all that as" eudaimonic" systems. Systems whose job it is to create a good life. For every being. Not just you and me — also the koalas and insects and fish and reefs. Every tree should be free to reach towards the sky. Every fish in every river should be safe to reproduce. You should become that great novellist, artist, scientist you always wanted to be — and have a family, and be happy, and full of love and grace, too. And so on.
There's a way to put that that's a little more full of grief.
No little koala should have wandered a burnt-out desolate hellscape of ashes, searching for its mother, crying for its father, alone, thirsty, hungry. It should never have happened. Suffering like that isn't just a moral crime of negligence — it's an abomination. Why should any life suffer so terribly?
Future generations will regard moments like these as holocausts. And they will think of the people who allowed them to happen as something very much like fascists. If that isn't who you want history to think of you as — then I suppose you have a job to do.
Umair
November 2019
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