Capitalism death cult

The sooner we come to terms with some uncomfortable truths, the better. It must seem surpassingly strange to most of us to hear this, but capitalism is a literal death cult. There are many other ways to describe it, which are equivalent, but possibly less harsh sounding. For example, it is a process in which we build ever more complex, man-made structures while bringing about the radical simplification of the natural world. Put another way, it’s a process that entails mass death and destruction of biological life, whether as direct and intentional killing, or as an indirect yet predictable and inevitable byproduct of our activities, in exchange for creating ever more complex taxidermies of dead matter, which appear to have many advantages and conveniences associated with them, obeying the much simpler and more predictable dynamics of physics and chemistry, instead of the vastly more complex and unruly dynamics of biology.

Yet, in the process of building these complex taxidermies, we soon discover that even dead matter can be manipulated into forms and arrangements sufficiently complex that their own dynamics eventually become unpredictable even to us, their authors.

We are capable of developing elaborate risk management schemes in response to the problem, but the cost of mistakes remains too high. The designers of the Fukushima reactors relied on risk analysis that put the probability of a catastrophic failure in the range of a once in one thousand to once in ten thousand year event, far, far beyond the operating life of the plant. They concluded all was well, but we all see they were wrong, and the awful consequences will now unfold over countless generations.

And yet, as in a cycle of addiction, although the evidence of our senses ought to be unmistakeable, we can no longer help ourselves. We continue in the laborious work of converting living things into dead matter as rapidly as possible, not knowing any other way to live anymore.

(I am being inexact, of course, and could well have said "industrial civilization" instead of capitalism. We know that the Soviet Union had more than its share of catastrophes similar to Fukushima, of course, so different ownership arrangements can still lead to similar results. But given that capitalism has largely inherited the mantle of industrial civilization at this point, it's pretty fair to say that, in some sense, they are now conjoined as one. Radical changes to both are therefore required, if we care to survive much longer.)

When "inverted totalitarianism" finally turns right side up in front of our very eyes

Dictatorship and fascism are immanent in the structures of our entire economy and government.

A matrix of total control and domination has been established which tends to be mostly cloaked by an outward appearance of independent institutions (city and state governments, courts, media, etc), rendering it invisible to most people. Author Sheldon Wolin referred to this as "inverted totalitarianism".

A notable centerpiece of this regime is corporate globalization and its "distributed value chains". Combine these "distributed value chains" (which have expanded exponentially even over the course of a mere twenty years) with the body of law around the Interstate Commerce Clause of the US Constitution, and a weapon of mass destruction results against which any democratic institutions are virtually impotent.

How does this work? In the course of time, the courts have expanded the scope of the Interstate Commerce Clause to grant, by default, essentially unilateral power to the executive branch to rule by decree on any subject considered to affect "interstate commerce", and to override practically any decision of local or state governments on any subject considered to touch on it. Absent an explicit safe harbor (eg, California's expanded authority under the Clean Air Act), the scope for action on a state or local level on practically any important aspect of our economy or society has radically diminished, and only grows weaker over time.

Open your lunchsack. Are any of the items inside it (the packaging, the ingredients, etc) from outside your state? Interstate commerce.

The expanded power of a totally unaccountable executive to rule by decree has grown over the course of decades, and is the real "Enabling Act" that gave us a monster like Trump, not fantastic "Russian hackers". And we can and should expect far worse yet.