Now That End-Stage Capitalism Has Arrived

Is It Time for Women to Step Up?

I haven’t paid much attention to the field of economics, what Yuval Harari calls the first “universal order” that humankind created. Taking care of my own finances was enough of a chore. Yet in this new war that men are waging against women, against nature, and against our democracies, which also seems to be universal, I am having to learn whole new subject matters. We are fighting a multi-pronged enemy. One of its names is Capitalism.

I’ve had a bias against it since I first entered university, but it was an unexamined gut reaction more than anything. To me it was just so … male. Men chased money and women did more interesting, creative things.

It didn’t escape me, though, that left-wing anti-capitalism was also all about the men. One couldn’t be alive and breathing even in the prosperous post world war west without having been exposed to the ruinous horror of Soviet-style communism and the grim desolation of Maoism. In America women left the sexist misogyny of left-wing movements in droves in the 1960’s to create the Women’s Liberation Movement.

So while I am questioning the basis, function and utility of Capitalism,  I’m not under any delusions about communist alternatives. True communism – a system where the collective makes economic as well as social decisions and reaps the consequences together – is incompatible with patriarchy, which requires a “ladder of success”.

Patriarchy is the unacknowledged totalitarianism that has eaten the ideals of communalism, aka community. Capitalism is the glove it wears in the west, but I do wonder if there is any other kind of economic order with fewer downsides than broken bodies at the bottom of a status and wealth hierarchy. Has anyone noticed yet that Capitalism is not compatible with democracy?

Another word for capitalism is usury, which is the lending of money at interest. Money that’s lent at interest is called capital – to distinguish it from money that’s used simply to buy things. Karl Marx pointed that out, but he quoted Aristotle who had pointed it out a few thousand years earlier. Most of us have money, at least enough to pay for shelter, food and clothing. Only some people have capital, which is money left over that you can invest in something that might provide you with a profit.

It might surprise some people that it was illegal in the west’s early form of Christendom.

The laws of Moses, sacred to both Jews and Christians, had this to say about lending for the sake of acquiring more money than you lent:

“If any of your kin fall into difficulty and become dependent on your, you shall support them …Do not take interest in advance or otherwise make a profit from them” (Leviticus 25:35-6).

“You shall not charge interest on loans to another Israelite, interest on money, interest on provisions, interest on anything that is lent” (Deuteronomy 23:19).

Christians who might have wanted to claim the rights of non-Jews to charge interest were admonished by Jesus to “lend, expecting nothing in return” (Luke 6:35). In one of his few recorded fits of anger Jesus threw the moneylenders out of the temple.

As the AI helping in my internet search helpfully noted, the church’s ban on lending for profit prevented the establishment of credit systems and may have delayed economic development. No shit Sherlock. What we have to investigate is, what does “development” mean?

Usury is also forbidden in Islam. I lived in Iran for a short period where I discovered that when people buy houses or apartments there, they pay cash up front. Housing prices in Tehran at that time were relatively on par with prices in Canadian cities. How did they do it?

I would like to ask that question in a more abstract way: what would our world look like if money had never been transformed into capital, if people who had more than they needed lent it without interest? If acts of kindness or mutual benefit were not transformed into financial transactions?

Capitalism, then, is usury sanitized and regulated. The industrial revolution could not have happened without it. Nothing that western civilization has created could have happened without huge amounts of capital. Western civilization itself rests on a foundation of capital.

And what is the problem with capital?

It should be obvious, as it’s not hidden. Capitalism, involving more money coming in than had gone out, is all about growth. You “grow your money” when you invest it. We constantly hear financial analysts discussing “economic growth.” Has the GDP grown this year? Has the economy grown? If the answer is yes, all is well.

For years after the end of the last world war, industrial growth was spectacular.  In the 1970s that growth slowed. Instead of creating new industries, the system consolidated. And we saw the true modus operandi of capitalism, which is not competition but monopolization.

As globalism and neo-liberalism have increasingly shown us that Capitalism works by sucking everything that’s not nailed down in the world into one giant maw, it is also showing us that there is a looming problem, the growth that capitalism needs has just about overtaken the host – the workers and consumers -- that this growth feeds on. Deprive a cancer, or a parasite, or even a beneficial protein of fuel and it will shrivel up and die.

Capitalism requires things to invest in. It needs the introduction of new products, factories to produce them, workers to operate the machinery of production, consumers to buy the goods produced.

The world has a glut of things.

 Economists noted this in the last decade of the 20^th century but then the tech revolution of the aughts created whole new industries. The mobile phone became the smart phone,  dial-up internet became wired, became wireless. Plugged in headphones became earbuds, became wireless earbuds. Microchips shrank and television screens ballooned. And that’s just to mention a few adult toys.

That communications-centred tech industry has just about run its course. And the arc of invention is leaning to biotechnology and artificial “intelligence”.  Like so many other human (I should say “male”) inventions, biotech – the merging of natural beings and manufactured objects -- promises heaven. Who can complain about artificial limbs that can be moved merely by thought? How about animal hearts that can be modified to serve as replacements for human ones? The human body is so subject to illness, injury and defect that anyone might ask if it might not be better to replace it all with silicone and microchips. Wouldn’t it? The techprenuers are drawing up the blueprints already. When it does, hell will have arrived.

Those of us fighting for organic reality, including the reality that humans come in two sexes, need to realize that the problem is not just one entrepreneur, say a pharmaceutical manufacturer, willingly selling a product, say Lupron, to a child to permanently stunt his development – the problem is that entirely new industries are required to keep capital circulating, to keep it growing. Capital without a place to invest is just money.

This is why whole governments are pushing gender ideology on their citizens – not to protect the rights of a few individuals who’ve been tricked into believing they can become the sex they’re not, either by invasive drugs and surgeries, or just by saying the magic words. That is why ILGA has sent scouts into every country on the globe documenting the legal situation of “transgender people”, preparing the legal challenges to implement all the demands of the Yogyakarta Principles, why the WHO and EU are carrying the battle lines forward, why laws are being enacted in country after country making dissent from gender ideology illegal. It’s why there must be no exceptions, not in sports, not in prisons, not in rape crisis centres. It’s why the littlest children have to be led to believe only their gender id matters, and their sexed bodies are irrelevant.

And this is the problem with Capitalism as it has metastasized. It is cannibalizing the people it relies on to be workers and consumers. We are all that’s left as raw material.

And it’s why we have to find another economic system. Capitalism has to be replaced before it replaces us.

We’d better start thinking of alternatives.

Who better than women to take the lead? Men squandering their intellectual capital on computer games and porn are simply not capable of imagining an engaging natural world anymore.

Men have themselves been stunted by their need to justify their lives in ways that women don’t. As the less important sex, they justify their lives in three interrelated ways: war, games and invention. Games are necessary preparations for war and inventions are necessary to stay ahead of the enemy. Often the inventions are useless – who needs home theatres and video games? And sometimes they are destructive. But this is how men have wrested control of humanity away from women, how they have centred themselves and even succeeded in downgrading women out of humanity entirely. Women, of course, don’t need to justify their existence. In addition to being able to do everything the other humans, the non-women, can do, women create the next generation.

Maybe it’s the lack of need to justify their lives that makes women less aggressive and self-assertive than men.  Maybe the male need to constantly prove his worth is something for the evolutionary psychologists to consider. In that case they should view all male inventions from that perspective and begin a process to evaluate them in terms of how beneficial they are to women and children, who are the core of any society. Maybe everything that men do should be thus evaluated. Does war serve women and children? Does a nuclear bomb serve women and children? Does sterilization and castration of children serve women and children? How about gestating babies in plastic jars?

It is the job of women who have learned again to centre themselves and children to answer these questions. Would it be so bad if women were the overseers of everything men wanted to do?

Elon Musk thinks people need to colonize Mars to save civilization. I think his imagination has been stunted by the video games he plays. Imagine if all the money he spends on a boy’s wet dream went to revitalizing this planet and the creatures who live on it. Would you rather live in a climate-controlled glass bubble on a barren red rock, or in the environment we evolved in – lush with plants and animals, oxygen-rich breezes and cleansing rains?

Skin is the largest of our organs. The experiences that make us human are all mediated through it. It is the site at which end-stage capitalism has begun to devour us. And maybe so many are willing because they are already living in conditions that deprive the skin of contact with anything but indoor air, indoor light. Nothing to make it tingle.

Alternatives to an economic system that privileges the demands of capital must exist. Some people are already considering the idea of a universal livable (or basic) income. Not welfare, but dividends payable to the humans without whom money cannot circulate.

What sorts of societies would be created if adults could prioritize the things that would make civilization welcome and safe for women and children, and pleasant for men too? People -- both women and men -- want purpose and meaning and we all have so much potential that is not used in the meaningless jobs so many of us have. Really, is there meaning in selling shoddy clothing to women whose closets are already full? In selling nutrient-free food to people too overworked and poor to cook a bowl of stew?

A society could prioritize emotional and psychological and social well-being rather than financial status. Imagine if people devoted their time to activities they felt passionate about, or that served others in real ways, if children were taught to search for and develop their unique interests and talents, to create community at the same time as they sought personal fulfillment through being the best human they could be.

I’m trucking in utopias now I know. Is there any other choice though? We can have the dystopia of mutilated, sterilized eunuch populations and robot “intimacy”. Or we can learn to live again as multi-dimensional beings in a natural world.

It took 2500 years to successfully wrestle humanity away from women and centre men in all its concerns.

Will we need another 2500 years to stop sucking at the man tit of patriarchy?