We are on the brink of a series of catastrophes of our own making that humankind will be exceptionally lucky to survive. There is a path ahead, but being able to see it and where it leads will require – at least from most westerners – a difficult feat of imagination. It will need us to cast aside many of the things we have been taught to most closely identify with. It will demand of us a realisation that our most cherished values are actually harmful.
That is a tall order, indeed.
I am reminded of a question posed in 2014 to critics of the status quo by Sunny Hundal, once the poster-boy of centrist liberalism. Hundal asked readers of his then-influential Liberal Conspiracy blog:
If you want to replace the current system of capitalism with something else, who is going to make your jeans, iPhones and run Twitter?
Notably, Hundal soon mothballed his blog and became a spokesperson for the corporate energy sector.
Nonetheless, it is revealing in itself quite how quaint liberal arguments from only 12 years ago sound now. It’s like taking a peek back into the Victorian mindset.
Today, Twitter is called X and run not by some nice bloke named “Jack” but by a sometime trillionaire named Elon Musk. That is the man who expects one day to use his personal rocket programme to colonise space. In the meantime, he believes Muslims and their “liberal” allies need to be driven from the West to avoid a civil war he seems intent on inciting.
Similarly, liberals are no longer as excited by mobile phones as they were back in 2014, when the iPhone was widely viewed as the ultimate proof of humanity’s progress through technological innovation. Now liberals want young people protected from their screens – possibly because those screens often show all too graphically how our leaders, liberals and conservatives alike, have been actively assisting a genocide and are hellbent on destroying the planet.
Jeans … well, liberals presumably still find it impossible to imagine a good life without a pair of 501s.
The western liberal, of course, cannot grapple with the idea that jeans or iPhones could be made independently of capitalism, let alone the suggestion that owning six pairs of jeans and disposing of your iPhone every other year may not be the best use of the planet’s limited resources.
Crumbs from the table
The truth is that democracy – of the liberal variety – is not an inherent feature of political life in what we like to call “the West”. There is nothing inevitable, or irreversible, about liberal democracy.
Indeed, the West has only been superficially democratic – in the sense that everyone gets a vote – for the last century or so. Even then, democracy has been highly restricted and controlled: the public usually gets a choice between two capitalist parties, one more extreme than the other, following a lifetime of exposure to opinions crafted for them by the ultimate beneficiaries of capitalism – the billionaires who own the mass media.
And, of course, “democracy” on these terms has operated only at home. The West’s colonial “adventures” – subduing and asset-stripping the Global South – never really ceased.
For a few decades of the so-called “post-colonial” era, we installed compliant local dictators to do our dirty work. For the past quarter century, our default behaviours have returned: we openly threaten, invade and plunder states that do not submit quickly to our diktats.
In a world of rapidly decreasing resources, our rulers have decided that they need to tear up the very rules of war they themselves formulated after the Second World War. The law of the jungle is back.
In fact, western “democracy” is not an artefact of our culture. It is an artefact of time and circumstance. With kings and princes giving way to a new breed of merchant and entrepreneur, the early capitalists showed they were even more proficient at theft.
An enlarged middle class, feeding off crumbs from the table, were trained to espouse liberal values justifying large disparities of wealth as the corollary of a supposed meritocracy.
Inherent contradictions in the theory and practice of liberalism culminated in a brief experiment last century: the working class and women were given a symbolic vote – to elect one of the ruling class’ loyal representatives – in return for becoming devotees of free-market consumption.
But in an era of decline, those contradictions have become harder and harder to contain. As surpluses disappear, so have the liberal values to which our “democratic elites” once paid lip service.
Craving power
The ruling class understand the tide is turning. The world’s resources are finite and running out. Capitalism’s model of mass consumption can only hasten the end. Consumption pollutes the planet. It fuels climate chaos. It decimates other species that sustain a living planet.
But, like a crack addict, the billionaire class cannot renounce the very thing that gives them what they crave: wealth and power. Their excuse is that, were they ever to stop, others – led by China – would take their place. Their one consolation is that, cocooned by their wealth, they expect to survive a little longer than the rest of us.
Our consolation, on the other hand, is to imagine that we can win because we are the many.
History suggests it may not be that simple. Saddam Hussein, for example, enforced a brutal system of rule over Iraqis – propped up by the West – for many decades, until we changed our minds and toppled him. So did Muammar Gaddafi. So did innumerable despots.
Understanding you are being oppressed is not the same as liberation. That requires much more: leadership, organisation, collective will, a sense of a better alternative.
The billionaire class, therefore, make it as difficult as they can for leaders to emerge, for the public to imagine an alternative and to organise. Any Jeremy Corbyns will be vilified. Any student campus protests, Extinction Rebellions or Palestine Actions will be criminalised.
The role of the media, from the Guardian and BBC to the Mail and Telegraph, from the New York Times to Fox News, is to so clog up our minds with propaganda extolling jeans and iPhones that we choose to continue worshipping at the altar of capitalism, even as the walls of the temple visibly crack and crumble.
Victims of abuse
Nearly 20 years ago, eco-philosopher Derrick Jensen memorably explained how this sense of identification with our oppressors works. He compared us to victims of serial domestic abuse.
If your experience is that food comes from the grocery store and your water comes from a tap, you will defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on it.
If on the other hand, your experience is that the water comes from a stream … and that your food comes from a land base, you will defend to the death that stream and that land base because your life depends on it.
We’ve got messed up and mixed up in this system, where our lives actually depend on the system that is exploiting us.
And, we should add, a system that is evidently now killing us.
The danger for the billionaires, now that North America and Europe are burning both figuratively and literally, is that we – the many – are starting to wake up. We see the images of genocide and of forest fires on the very iPhones the billionaires made us so addicted to.
Might we soon start to understand that our survival depends on identifying more with streams, trees and soil than with factories, superstores and Elon Musk?
Like Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, the billionaires have the means of coercion. They still have the media pumping out “entertainment” to make us identify with factories and superstores (even if Musk himself is now a harder sell).
And if that fails, they have the police and the army.
Technology – from weaponry to surveillance and AI – is being purposed further to the ruling class’ advantage. Those killer robot dogs of dystopian movies are already here. Hollywood isn’t just making up fanciful, entertaining stories; it is imagining imminent futures.
Time of monsters
If the ideology of greedy individualism is exposed as utterly hollow (and suicidal), where might disillusioned iPhone and Twitter/X fans choose to head next?
In the opposite direction.
If individualism is shown to bring only ruin, we are likely to prefer collective ideologies. If greed brings only death, we are likely to prefer cooperation and solidarity. Hope of salvation resides not in iPhones and jeans but in the resurrection of the commons – of public good, of shared wealth.
The Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci famously wrote in 1930 of the moment we are currently in: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek popularised these “morbid symptoms” as a “time of monsters”. But our monsters aren’t a Cyclops, a Hannibal Lecter or even an Adolf Hitler. Our morbid symptoms are Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, the exemplars of a dying western capitalism, the men who can tap directly into our minds and those of our children.
The greatest danger is that, with climate chaos accelerating, Gramsci’s new world will not be born at all. It will be stillborn. It may turn out that the proof needed to incentivise change comes too late to affect the outcome.
But if some of us do make it through the next decades, if survival is possible, one thing is certain: the society that emerges will look nothing like the one that worshipped jeans and iPhones.
It will draw on other, older trends in our history. It will prioritise community over the individual, cooperation over competition, mutuality over ownership – the very principles capitalism seeks to eradicate.
Nation-states, the incubators of capitalism, will have to be dissolved. Organised religions, competing over whose God is supreme, will need to be replaced by more ancient, spiritual ideas rooted in living with nature, not seeking to conquer or subdue it.
If all that sounds implausible or impossible, remember this. Your disbelief may only be the noise of capitalism speaking through you. It may be that the problem is yours, for being unable to imagine more than a new iPhone or pair of jeans.
[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]
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This article really sums up how I have been feeling lately but can not put together with words. I hope many people will read this and pause to look around and see what's happening. Very well written Jonathan.
Amen. Shedding our attachments stings. At least it did for me. When WaPo wasn’t permitted to endorse VP Harris, I cancelled Prime video and stopped shopping at Amazon. I also dramatically changed my spending habits. Whenever possible (and it almost always is) I buy from local ads, so the money goes into the wallets of neighbors instead of ICE-supporting oligarchs. Finally, I stopped all social media except substack. All of this pinched for a while. I was used to buying anything I wanted at the lowest possible price and having it delivered in two days. But after a little time, I realized that I was happier and more serene without all that new stuff. My home was less cluttered. And there was more money leftover at the end of the month to support worthwhile causes. It was a teachable moment for me.