There’s a nice article on Dissident Voice that gets to some of the basics of why the world is so unbelievably screwed up.

Under capitalism, the only measure of success is how much is sold every day, every week, every year. It doesn’t matter that the sales include vast quantities of products that are directly harmful to both humans and nature, or that many commodities cannot be produced without spreading disease, destroying the forests that produce the oxygen we breathe, demolishing ecosystems, and treating our water, air and soil as sewers for the disposal of industrial waste…. In short, pollution is not an accident, and it is not a “market failure.” It is the way the system works…. The devastation is caused by the global capitalist system, and by the tiny class of exploiters that profits from capitalism’s continued growth. The great majority of people are victims, not perpetrators.

Yet the people who say these basic and obvious things seem like tiny voices in the wilderness. Even left leaning news and opinion blogs tend to expend all their energy battling minutia. Of course the mainstream press is reprehensible. Of course the openly right-wing press is even more so. Why bother to give them any importance by discussing them at all? The reason why billions of people are struggling and the earth is becoming despoiled is not because of something Rush Limbaugh, or someone else of his ilk, said or did. He’s monstrous, but if he and his blowhard cronies were somehow eliminated, the system would continue its path of destruction utterly unfazed. Those chattering people and the manufactured issues they bring up are just a distraction.

I don’t entirely agree with the premise of even this article, but I won’t go into a critique that would be in any case out of my depth. I don’t entirely think that socialism is the solution, though it’s far and away preferable to what we have now. But its indictment of capitalism is, it seems to me, right on the money. The environmental destruction it brings is only its most tangible and quantifiable manifestation. The exploitation of not just nature but also of humans is perhaps harder to quantify. In wealthy nations, in particular, people are not only the exploited but also the exploiters. Globally, the vast majority of people are undoubtedly victims of the capitalist system. In rich countries, it seems to me, it’s not as cut-and-dried. The relatively, moderately well-off are in the paradoxical position of being both victims and perpetrators. The planet is reeling from our own collective consumption. And while it’s true that we are all, except for the ruling class, living within a system not of our own making, the only people who can overturn that system are us. And as maligned as the idea of creating different, less consuming, lifestyles, individually and collectively, is, I still see it as a viable road. And I suppose I’ll keep on talking about it, as the tiniest of voices, even if I’m only talking to myself.