Capitalist Realism

I was reading some stuff on Capitalist Realism today. I guess 50 years old must be a standard epiphany moment for many people who have experimented with alternative systems and socio-environmentalism. You get to 50 and nothing you do is working out the way you hoped; it kind of means its never going to work. I guess for me my main loss of faith is mainly due to just far too many 'betrayals' and lack of support but perhaps more so the realisation that keeping up high energy commitments which add or maintain natural and social capital over long periods of time just cannot compete with value extraction systems and it has nothing to do with 'educating' people or lack of choice (more or less everyone in the Beddington Farmlands project choose supporting value extraction and they were all highly informed of all the details).  It simply requires too much effort to avert value extraction so we are faced with a very frightening realism- capitalist systems will push us all to the brink of extinction and before anything fundamentally changes, we will have to nearly 'touch the sun' first. At some point the energy inputs to attempting to extract value will be higher than the energy inputs to regeneration e.g. if farmland is depleted so much that crops become increasingly more difficult and expensive to grow, it becomes cheaper and easier to use regenerative methods. There are plenty of examples were i.e. fish stocks have become depleted and local industry collapses which has led to quotas and sustainable fishing systems being introduced. 

So this is Capitalist Realism- value extraction, environmental decline and transfer of wealth into smaller and smaller group of elites (those who take the loot from destroying the planet facilitated by everyone who engages in the systems they govern)  is inevitable, disaster is inevitable and if there is any chance of recovery, disaster must come before recovery. 

Indeed there will always be examples that buck the trend of e.g. well managed nature reserves and parallel structures but these exceptions to the rules simply prove the rules and are also held together very weakly by trade offs and compromises (e.g. the way that the RSPB and Wildlife Trusts are mainly funded by blood money i.e. money earnt from the main Capitalist system e.g. Viridor funding these NGOs).  These exceptions are valuable in that they may well inspire recovery after disaster models but ultimately they are more likely to be out competed if ever main stream systems adopted some of their principles (like we have seen with natural capital companies like Foresight, L'Oreal funded Rewilding Estates and millionaire led nature conservation like Knepp etc suddenly exploding onto the scene challenging the NGO model as the ecological emergency intensifies and the first signs of mainstream change hoves into view) .  

In short, things have to get worse before they get better. However that short sentence means immense suffering and immense loss at global scale, possibly, probably, inevitably the greatest period of human suffering in all our history as we push our planetary life support systems to breaking point. At that breaking point there will be (if we project current population growth trajectories) maximum numbers of us living (fighting) to survive. The cracks are already appearing, the writing is on the wall and very few people are treating this emergency like an emergency. I'm not talking about a teenager fantasy held by the likes of Greta Thunberg appealing to those elites to stop this disaster (of course they fucking won't- they are engineers and designers of it, they are loving it all coming together as planned) but I'm talking about cretins like you and me. We can all see it coming but very few people are actually preparing adequately for it. Indeed plenty of people are using the threat of the emergency to gain political power or followings by sowing the seeds of false hope  i.e. capitalising on the threat as their way of surviving it. However if that's not your thing but surviving is then a bit of realism is helpful. 

Capitalist systems will push us all to the brink of extinction and there is nothing that can stop that. Hope is for fools.  That is Capitalist Realism. You are fucked, your kids future is fucked, nature is fucked, everyone is fucked (including the looters eventually and they know that which is why they are trying to stay on top of the collapsing pile, have multiple homes around the world with panic rooms and bunkers and private security forces and hoard as much as possible to last as long as possible) and very soon  we will all be fighting to the death (literally and metaphorically). Here’s the World Economic Forum saying that with a bit more class Here  

There is very little anyone can do about the situation but there is a lot that anyone can do to increase their chances of survival and helping to drive the evolution of the new sustainable systems. The only hope is in the hopelessness of Capitalism . 

Here's a little ditty from Thee Bryans about Capitalist Realism: The bubble will burst

Peter Alfrey/Thee Bryans · The Bubble Will Burst Sample