Capitalism is a sinking ship
The capitalist system is a sinking ship, and unless we fight for a better world, it will take us down with it.
Just like the Titanic, capitalism is presented as an unsinkable, stable system that will never collapse. However, just like the Titanic, it will soon sink in ways that will shock the world to its core.
The capitalist system has created a world with plenty of wealth but plenty more poverty and want. Food rots, uneaten, as food corporations would rather the food be destroyed than distributed freely, lest their profits suffer. Clothes, cars, furniture, electronics; all produced constantly in greater and greater number to be sold in international markets that can barely accommodate the volume. The atmosphere becomes full of carbon dioxide and harsh pollutants, as sea levels creep higher and higher. Things aren’t produced to serve human need – but to serve businesses aiming at selling everything that isn’t nailed down (including the nail gun).
Capitalism became the dominant system on Earth by sweeping away the old, backward social orders. Capital broke the chains of feudalism, freeing the serfs and peasants from absolutism and drudgery, but shackled them with new chains: wage labour and the market. All things became a commodity: items made to be bought, sold, exchanged, hoarded jealously in international markets. People become economic units, detached from the very world they work to build. This monstrous machine continues to poison the rivers, parch the land, and pollute the air, all in spite of the cries of workers and toilers across the world.
The chaos of the market pushes society to cycles of destruction and reconstruction. The constant need for the system to reproduce itself, often by cannibalising itself over and over again, creates crisis after crisis. Such a crisis is a feature of the system, not a bug. Commodities must continue to be produced, even if they can’t be sold, or else companies will lose profit, and spiral into bankruptcy. Commodities are produced even when people can’t afford them. Eventually, this causes a crisis in itself, and the system will once again eat itself alive to stay afloat, at the expense of workers and toilers.
This is a social order in rapid decay, which lives in spite of its own death drive.
The Pacific is a region at the forefront of the system’s slow, but destructive, decay. The climate crisis, accelerated by rampant mineral extraction and pollution by the imperialist countries (often outsourced to peripheral countries), is causing increasing sea levels to engulf the pacific island countries. For example, the government of Tuvalu made a deal with the imperialists in Canberra to allow Tuvaluans to emigrate to Australia and become permanent residents: such a deal is only necessary because the Canberra regime acts as a bodyguard for the capitalist system in the Asia-Pacific. While Australia pollutes and extracts, it is the tiny pacific countries that must pay the price, in particular the working people of these countries. By no means do the nobles and elites need to struggle as much as the rest of us. This treaty between Australia and Tuvalu signals the beginning of Australia’s consolidation of its control of the pacific: it is not hard to imagine that countries at risk of sinking, such as Kiribati, would want to pursue similar deals. Such deals offer nothing in terms of recompense or reparations for impacts Pasifika peoples – only wage slavery in the imperialist countries.
The struggle to overcome the capitalist system becomes more and more important each day, as the sea levels rise and the system threatens greater and greater crises. It is a system which perpetuates itself by keeping control over production in the hands of an increasingly shrinking class of business owners and administrators: if working people held control of production, they could restrain extraction, redistribute surplus based on need, and provide recompense to those impacted by the worst of climate change. The capacity to educate, feed, provide for, and ensure the prosperity of every person on Earth exists: it is simply kept away from us by the ruling class.
Capitalism can’t be allowed to continue. It must be fought by a mass movement of working people across the world, fighting for the emancipation of all the oppressed. Crisis after crisis has shown that capitalism is a sinking ship, and we would be better off abandoning ship, instead of trying to bail water out as more holes appear. Working people across the world have the power to transform society for the better, creating a world governed by free association, cooperative, peace and democracy, and the free development of all peoples. ■
