This is one of the better editorial pieces I’ve seen in a major publication in awhile.

And now the members of Israel’s oldest kibbutz, that last best hope of egalitarian socialism, have voted to introduce variable salaries based on individual performance. Karl Marx would be turning in his grave. Or perhaps not, since some of his writings eerily foreshadowed our era of globalised capitalism. His prescription failed but his description was prescient.

Good to see someone pointing out the fact that even though Marx and Marxist analysis is rather flawed in regards to some of its proposed remedies to the diseased social conditions that are, if not products of, then egregiously inflamed by the unbridled anarcho-capitalist system, he had some very important and prescient things to say in describing some of the more virulently negative aspects of that system.

…There is the inescapable dilemma that this planet cannot sustain six-and-a-half billion people living like today’s middle-class consumers in its rich north. In just a few decades, we would use up the fossil fuels that took some 400 million years to accrete - and change the earth’s climate as a result. Sustainability may be a grey and boring word, but it is the biggest single challenge to global capitalism today. However ingenious modern capitalists are at finding alternative technologies - and they will be very ingenious - somewhere down the line this is going to mean richer consumers settling for less rather than more.

Marx thought capitalism would have a problem finding consumers for the goods that improving techniques of production enabled it to churn out. Instead, it has become expert in a new branch of manufacturing: the manufacture of desires. The genius of contemporary capitalism is not simply that it gives consumers what they want but that it makes them want what it has to give. It’s that core logic of ever-expanding desires that is unsustainable on a global scale. But are we prepared to abandon it? We may be happy to insulate our lofts, recycle our newspapers and cycle to work, but are we ready to settle for less so others can have more? Am I? Are you?

I would question the use of ‘capitalism’ at times here, whereas the more accurate term should be ‘consumerism’, or even perhaps ‘corporatism’, which to the article’s credit is pointed as well. The whole piece is a refreshingly lucid take on the fundamental problems facing our society today. The opening lines here may themselves qualify as the money shot lines in the whole article.

Our planet cannot long sustain the momentous worldwide embrace of the manufacture of desires.

Our multi-multi billions of dollars advertising industry at work.

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