“THIS SUCKER COULD GO DOWN.” – George W. Bush, 9/25/08 (2)

What is Capitalism?

By Alex KNIGHT

Hi, I’m Alex Knight.  I’m a teacher, writer, and activist. I manage endofcapitalism.com and I’m writing a book called The End of Capitalism. I was born on July 4, 1983. I was raised an All-American boy in a working class family in a small town outside of Philadelphia. Alex Knight is an organizer, teacher and writer in Philadelphia. Alex has been developing the theory of the end of capitalism since 2005, when he was studying at Lehigh University. The theory argues that the global capitalist system is breaking down due to ecological and social limits to growth and that a paradigm shift toward a non-capitalist future is underway. Alex graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering, and a Master’s degree in Political Science. He began organizing students in college on anti-war and environmental issues. From 2006-09, he helped build the new Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), organizing at the campus, city, and national levels. Alex was present for the first day of Occupy Wall St. and has been instrumental in facilitating the General Assembly of Occupy Philadelphia.

“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.” — Kenneth Boulding, economist.

“This sucker could go down.” – George W. Bush, 9/25/08

Capitalism is the name of the power structure that currently dominates all human society, and which has done so for the last 500 years. It is a system based on ecological and social exploitation for the profit of the wealthy few. I sometimes refer to it as a “global system of abuse” because our relationship with capitalism is based on violence and submission, even though the system would like us to believe that it has our best interests at heart.

Capitalism puts tremendous pressure on all of us to make money in order to survive. Hospitals, schools, prisons, “non-profit organizations,” and every other institution must conform to the profit motive, or be swallowed up.

American people were the first to be defeated and enslaved during 60's and 70's by the corporatism and globalists aggression. Decades later the descendants of those defeated, corrupted and reintegrated, rise their heads in protest. An 'Occupy Wall Street' protester in Liberty Plaza Park, N.Y., in 2011  

In the process, life under capitalism is increasingly one of work, consumption, debt, isolation, and emotional and spiritual emptiness. We are losing connection with the two most vital sources of meaning in our lives: community with other people, and communion with nature.
Since 2008, capitalism has suffered a shock, as the system rams up against the ecological and social limits to growth. Ecological limits to growth include peak oil, other resource scarcities from water to uranium, and the effects of global warming. Social limits reside in the rebellious actions of people all over the world, most visibly manifest in last year’s Arab Spring and Occupy Wall St.
Quite simply, the sustainability of capitalism is being directly challenged, both by the Earth and by the efforts of millions of people who demand a better world. Like a shark, capital cannot survive without constantly moving, and motion requires growth. But growth, in this world of unmovable limits, is history.

The adversary is clearly spotted and precisely targeted. Occupy Wall Street protesters demonstrating in Freedom Plaza in Washington D.C., October, 2011. 

So, while we live under a capitalist order, we likely will not for long. In fact, capitalism may have already died, and transformed itself into a zombie-capitalism which is content to cannibalize its own support structure in a self-defeating effort to produce short-term profits. We can see this zombie behavior through the austerity measures facing us right now – cutting social services and budgets, laying off employees, destroying public sector unions, closing schools and hospitals, and generally destroying any possibility for consumption to stay at its currently high levels.
As the economy decomposes, the good news is that new worlds which are currently closed to us may indeed open up. It may become possible to build on a larger scale what the Occupy movement attempted to do in city squares this past Fall – create spaces for people to come together, feed one another, house one another, and decide our fate democratically.
The future may be better than capitalism, or worse, but it will most certainly be different. I hope for a world where people and ecosystems matter more than profit. To get to that world, we first need to understand how capitalism structures our world currently, and how we can overcome it.

The End of Capitalism 
A new world is on its way. We are building it, one day at a time. 

Next: Part 3. Why is Capitalism Breaking Down??