Capitalism is dead.

For most of my adult life, I was divided against “corporate capitalism”, <x2-capitalism consumer” and “corrupt capitalism”. It took me a long time to realize that the problem was not to name [corruption/consumers] but to the very name [capitalism]. Many people have hastily and gladly rejected capitalism, but I have made it slowly and dreary. Part of the reason was that I didn't see a clear alternative: unlike some anti-capitists, I've never been enthusiastic about state communism. I have also been restrained by his religious condition. To say “capitalism is failing” in the 21st century was like saying “God is dead” on the 19th: it's secular blasphemy. It required a degree of confidence that I did not possess.

But as I refused, I was able to get to know two things. One, that's the system, more than any version of the system, that's driving us inexplicably into disaster. Second, that you shouldn't produce a definition alternative to say capitalism is failing. The statement is on his feet. But it also requires further and varied efforts to develop a new system.

Capitalism coughs up without growth, yet permanent growth on a limited planet leads to inevitable environmental catastrophe.

Capitalism's failures stem from two of its defining elements. The first is permanent growth. Economic growth is the aggregation effect of research to accumulate capital and extract profit. Capitalism coughs up without growth, yet permanent growth on a limited planet leads to inevitable environmental catastrophe.

Those who protect capitalism argue that while consumption passes from good to services, economic growth can be cut off from use of material resources. Last week, an essay in the New Political Economy newspaper by Jason Hickel and Giorgos Kallis examined this premiere. They found that although a relative break occurred [from material resources] in the 20th century [the level of material resources increased, but not as fast as economic growth], there has been an increase in the 21st century: raising resource consumption has so far been linked or oversized economic growth. The absolute disruption needed to avoid environmental disaster [reducing the use of material resources] has never been achieved, and it seems impossible as economic growth continues. Green growth is an illusion.

The system based on permanent growth cannot function without periphery. There must always be an extract area from which materials are extracted free of charge and a retail area, where costs are thrown into the form of garbage and pollution. As economic activity increases until capitalism affects everything from the atmosphere to the bottom of the ocean, the entire planet becomes a sacrificial area: all of us populate the suburbs of the pro-creative machine.

This leads us to cataclysm on a scale that many people cannot even imagine. The threatening Kolapsy of basic systems for our lives is far greater than war, hunger, pestilence or economic crisis, although it is possible to include all four of these. Societys can recover from these apocalypse events, but not from earth's loss, adequate climate, and abundant biosphery.

The second definition is that a person is right in the world's natural resources as much as his money can buy. This misuse of common goods causes three further shifts. First, fighting for exclusive control of unproductive assets, which imply either violation or restraint. Second, immigration other people from an economy based on robbery of time and space. Third, translating economic power into political power as control over economic resources leads to controlling social resources that accompany them.

Refugees on the border between Macedonia and Greece. “in the 21st century increased resource consumption has reached and even exceeded the growth rate.” Photo by Dimitar Dillkoff/ A FP/Getty Images

In the New York Times on Sunday, Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz sought to distinguish between good capitalism, which he called creative “wealth” and poor capitalism, which he called “looting property”. I understand the difference he makes. But from an environmental point of view, creating wealth is a robbery of wealth. Economic growth, essentially related to increased use of material resources, means robbing natural assets from current systems and future generations.

Your emphasis on such problems involves inviting a host of charges, many of which are based on this promise: capitalism has saved hundreds of millions of people from poverty now you're looking for poverty again. It is true that capitalism, and the economic growth that promotes, has radically improved the prosperity of a very large number of people, while at the same time destroying the prosperity of many others: those lands whose jobs and resources are robbed to stimulate growth elsewhere. Most of the wealth of the rich countries was ʹ and it's built on slavery and colonial expropriation.

Like coal, capitalism has brought much good. But like coal, he is now causing more bad than good. Just as we have found tools for energy that are better and less damaging than coal, we need to find tools to generate prosperity for people who are less harmful than capitalism.

Soviet Communism has more in common with capitalism than that defenders of each system would accept.

There is no turning back: the alternative to capitalism is neither fedalism nor state communism. Soviet Communism has more in common with capitalism than that defenders of each system would accept. Both systems are [or were] obsessed with creating economic growth. Both were willing to cause great damage to their goal. Both promised the future in which we had to work only a few hours a week, but instead demanded brutal work, with numerous demands. Both are inhuman. Both are absoluteists, insisting that they and only they are the only God.

Well, what does a better system look like? I don't have a final answer, and I don't think anyone does. But I think I'm seeing a fragment of this system until it comes to light. Its parts are from the ecological civilization proposed by Jeremy Lent, one of the greatest thinkers of our era. Other elements come from others with environmental thinking, in the notion of private subx0> and public luxury”. Another part then comes from establishing a perception of justice based on this simple principle: every generation, everywhere, should have equal rights to taste natural resources.

I believe our job is to identify better proposals by many different thinkers and form them into a consistent alternative. Because no economic system is just an economic system. It intervenes in every aspect of our lives, and therefore we need a lot of minds from different areas of our economy, environment, politics, culture, society, and logistics to work together to create a better way of organizing our needs without destroying our home.

Our choice is this. Should we stop our lives from capitalizing on or prevent capitalism from continuing? /Periscope

The title is Periscope, author of The Guardian