IS HUMANITY ****ED?

Barry Boyce - We need new ways of thinking to deal with systemic problems like climate change through creating a post-capitalist economy that doesn't depend on unending growth through consumption of finite and depleting resources and a race to the bottom in wages and work standards for its existence.

The starting point for getting to the new is abandoning the idea that simply tweaking capitalism, greening it slightly, even internalizing all the externalities (like carbon pollution) into prices, is enough. We can't do the same old thing, but better.  We have to go beyond the approaches that got us there in the first place.

George Monbiot - Neoliberalism is not the root of the problem. It is the ideology used, often retrospectively, to justify a global grab of power, public assets and natural resources by an unrestrained elite. But the problem cannot be addressed until the doctrine is challenged by effective political alternatives.

In other words, the struggle against climate change – and all the crises that now beset both human beings and the natural world – cannot be won without a wider political fight: a democratic mobilization against plutocracy. This should start with an effort to reform campaign finance – the means by which corporations and the very rich buy policies and politicians. Some of us will be launching a petition in the UK in the next few weeks, and I hope you will sign it. But this is scarcely a beginning. We must start to articulate a new politics, one that sees intervention as legitimate, that contains a higher purpose than corporate emancipation disguised as market freedom, that puts the survival of people and the living world above the survival of a few favoured industries. In other words, a politics that belongs to us, not just the super-rich.
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