The UK is experiencing some of the worst shortages of oil. One contributing factor is that the old strategic reserve of oil was privatized, then when it was considered unprofitable to keep it running (repairs and maintainence were needed) most of it was gotten rid of.
A totalizing principle, or system, reduces every part of society to one value, or relationship.
In capitalism, the principle is profit.
In capitalism the assumption is that if something is making a profit, it’s also providing value. You should only do things that provide value and the more money something makes the more value it has. So, the strategic reserve wasn’t providing profits, and had to go, since it provided no value.
The next piece of logic is that someone who is making a profit obviously knows how to provide value. The more money someone has, the more control they have, and the more money they should have. The tendency of capitalism to lead to money concentrating in a few hands is good: those are the people who know how to create money and thus value.
Capitalism, like other totalizing systems, works best when it’s kept in check by something else: religious values, democratic values, enlightenment values, or whatever, backed up by forces powerful enough to resist totalization: governments or churches, for example.
When it doesn’t it tends to destroy the conditions for its own functioning: all the wealth goes to the top, for example, and you get a Great Depression due to a demand crash, as happened in the 30s.
Or capitalism makes massive profits based on damaging the environment, and you have an environmental collapse — ongoing and upcoming.
Capitalism tries to reduce all relationships to monetary ones. When you privatize trains, or healthcare, you’re following the profit motive. When you make everyone work, then have their childrens raised by strangers (daycare, and to an extent school) you’re totalizing it. When people say domestic and emotional work should be paid, they’ve bought into a totalizing system: since they’re creating value, money should pass hands.
Capitalism thus reduces everything to money: if it has value it should involve money, and if it pays little or nothing it obviously doesn’t have value. So if you’re low paid, and you want to be seen as valued, you want money.
Even when we try to fix the problems of capitalism we try to do so thru money: so we have carbon offsets (paid), and there is a movement for a carbon tax, and so on.
It doesn’t seem to occur to us that some things just shouldn’t be allowed: don’t dump more than X amount of carbon into the atmosphere, period, or you go to prison. Or make sure that insulin doesn’t cost $400, or you, yes, go to prison.
In properly functioning societies there are sacred objects: things which money is not allowed to control. Perhaps this is our relationship with God; perhaps it is “don’t cut down all the forests”, perhaps it is access to healthcare for all no matter how little money they have; or perhaps it is access to law, so we provide lawyers to those who can’t afford them (and not overworked lawyers who can’t represent well.)
Perhaps we have public financing of election and limits of private spending to influence elections, since we value democracy and don’t think that rich people should control the government.
When a totalizing systems destroys other values, and degrades sacred goods and values and items, it destroys the circumstances required for its own existence, but in so doing it also brings catastrophe upon the society is totalizing.
You can see this today, not just in the shortages (cause by over-optimizing supply chains to increase profit), or in the environment, or the lack of access to law for most of the population, or in huge prices for health care and a refusal to share vaccines throughout the world, but in almost everything that is causing our societies to degrade. Since nothing is sacred except money to us any more, nothing survives unless it makes maximum profits for the rich.
But the things we need most, like clean air and water, a liveable climate, affordable healthcare, healthy food, and loving family relationships not destroyed by the stress of overwork and poverty, are more valuable for short to mid term profits when sacrificed than when protected and strengthened.
The “solution” of trying to give everything a price and micro-managing incentives doesn’t work. The problem isn’t so much incentives, it is that some things have non-monetary value which cannot and should not have a price put on them. Some things are sacred: democracy, love and unspoiled nature, among many others.
Treated as sacred, these things allow markets to work. Treated as part of markets, their degradation eventually destroys the very environment capitalism needs to continue, and to be more beneficial than harmful.
A world where nothing is sacred, and where no value stands above profit, is a world that will be destroyed.
As it is being.
someofparts
Bob Dylan said something about that long ago. Something along the lines of seeing that nothing is really sacred.
Trinity
Excellent essay, Ian. I had to look up the word totalizing, just to be sure. My ipad dictionary defines it as “treating disparate parts as having one character, principle, or application”. A logical fallacy, in one sense, like saying all Americans are greedy, or all children like chocolate ice cream.
Monbiot has another excellent post as well:
https://www.monbiot.com/2021/10/11/fire-front/
“We are recruited as both consumers and consumed, burning through our life support systems on behalf of oligarchs who keep their money and morality offshore.”
Astrid
The USSR peacefully gave up when their system couldn’t compete with the West economically. What they then got was 10-15 years of demographic and human disaster only matched by their WWII experience.
The moneybags sitting atop our system won’t give up so easily. They can’t even sacrifice a small fraction of their obscene wealth to correct a clearly sinking society. Even their PMC servants appear fully deluded, swimming in an ocean of false economics. Amazing how we heard so much reporting about Evergrande, but so few media stories about people’s rents in US and Canada going up by double digits, sometimes as much as 50 or even 100 percent, in the last 6 months. Stirring up war with China is profitable. Keeping a pandemic going and forcing plebs to work through it is profitable. Letting normal people lead decent lives is “money left on the table”.
So is anything short of complete social collapse, up to and likely including (hopefully just) limited nuclear war going to stop the maniacs in the driving seat from burning up the world in search of more meaningless digital tokens?
Synoptocon
The principle is not profit – it’s *risk adjusted* profit. The worst problems aren’t primarily driven by pure profit, they’re driven by systematic and significant mis-pricing of risk.
Plague Species
He’s right, not even Bob Dylan is sacred. Rockers are some of the most profound hypocrites. They, most of them at least, live an existence in stark defiance of their pretentious disingenuous lyrics. Dylan epitomizes that with this commercial for Cadillac.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X3Bcmf3ckQ
Plague Species
And here I thought oligarchs had no morality. I guess I was wrong. Monbiot surely knows better than I know.
Eric Anderson
Also, for those who lose sleep over this subject like I do, you’d do well to check out:
“In the Absence of the Sacred” by Jerry Mander.
Eric Anderson
Ian, I’d encourage you to read a little book called “Community and the Politics of Place” by Daniel Kemmis. He does a wonderful job of showing how our mechanistic madisonian system encourages, neigh enshrines , atomization of any public debate to establish what values are “sacred” to community. There is no “coming together” of voices to debate, only the pushing apart of community members so that administrators can determine where the “value” is.
This post also seems to track well with the old democratic socialist economic organizing principle:
Socialize the necessities. Privatize the luxuries.
But, as Kemmis book drives home the point, the major problem is the lack of a forum to debate what precisely the “necessities” are due to our mechanistic political system pushing conflicting parties as far from one another as possible, instead of sitting them at a table together to hash out their own differences.
Preston
In “Neither Wolf nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads with an Indian Elder” by Kent Nerburn, the Elder states more than once that if something is truly sacred it can’t be “For Sale.” He railed against tribes selling artifacts while calling them sacred.
And on another note, I was taught in economics classes that capitalism allowed money to flow to its best and highest use. So the millions it’s costing to send William Shatner and his giant ego into space is the highest and best use for those millions? Perhaps so if they don’t bring him back.
Hugh
What is missing from whatever kind of capitalism we currently have is the notion of the common good. Or if it gets mentioned at all it is treated as something quaint from an older less advanced time. Or it is reduced and twisted to equate whatever capitalism does as being that good. I say a lot that the primary measures of an economy are not themselves economic. They are what we want an economy for. They help create the society we want to live in. All this gets excised or trivialized in most economic discussions because there is no way you can reconcile billionaires and great concentrations of wealth with the common good or creating and maintaining a society we want to live in. So the rich who own the economists simply leave all that out. They say we need such concentrations of wealth to maximize production, but leave out why such wealth should be allowed to be inherited by their unproductive sons and daughters, or even kept by the original founder of the fortune once they get older and less productive. Economics, their economics, is a myth to justify and perpetuate their wealth over the well being of the rest of us. That’s it. That’s the point. But just because this is what they are selling doesn’t mean we have to buy it.
Trinity
PS, you could start by looking up the definition of “morality”.
Then you could try parsing the meaning of what Monbiot said, including its context. That would require reading the article, however.
Or, you could just keep being you. I’m down with that.
Plague Species
Here’s the definition of morality.
I don’t have to read the article or even know the context. It’s clear on its face that Monbiot asserts oligarchs have morality but withhold it like they withhold their blood money in offshore accounts.
I submit oligarchs are amoral or immoral beings. They are incapable of morality. It’s the key to their success, or one of the keys — if you can call it success.
Either way, George is doing well for himself fighting the good fight. It;s a great gig if you can manage it.
Purple Library Guy
This is definitely true. And mixed capitalism, with checks on it that stop it from eating everything, does work fairly well (although people in the Third World might have some contrary positions on that).
The problem is that capitalism is a very POWERFUL totalizing system, perhaps the most powerful the world has ever seen. It strenuously resists all attempts to limit it; it grows all over every check and balance and sacred opposing force. Not instantly, it can take time, but we can see it happening, at different speeds, around the world. This is nothing new, Marx pointed it out back in the day.
That’s a major reason why in my opinion something else is needed–in theory, capitalism with checks and balances, “sacred” ones if you like, can/could work fairly well. But capitalism is ultimately incompatible with those checks and balances. It consumes the sacred. So capitalism will always in the end, and not a very distant end as a rule, become the really bad kind. Just like one of those weeds that spread like crazy, you can’t “control” them, you have to get rid of them.
Trinity
PS, I would argue that they have a morality, but it is relative, and one that many of us couldn’t stomach or even understand.
PLG, yes. To use a computer analogy, we need to hit the reset button, load a different BIOS and definitely a different operating system as well. The one we have has major bugs that can’t be fixed, because the BIOS contains a virus.
And I can definitely recommend the Mandos book. I should probably re-read it myself.
NR
Synopticon: This is further exacerbated by the fact that in our society today profit is privatized while risk is socialized. See bailouts, etc.
Chipper
There have been a few times in my life when a complete stranger has done something to help me and I’ve wanted to do something to express my gratitude other than just thanking them, but since they weren’t people I was ever going to see again, the only thing I could think of was offering them money. I didn’t, though, because it seemed so wrong — my take was that they were helping because they wanted to help, not because they wanted to get paid. As soon as you give someone money, it becomes a transaction “What? Jumping your car in a blizzard was only worth 20 bucks to you?!?”
It’s hard to explain this to people if they don’t already understand it.
bruce wilder
Not “profit” precisely. Seeking to combine factors in producing value in excess of cost is, in principle a good thing, absent fraud, coercion blah, blah.
Capitalism is more precisely profiting from 1.) externalizing costs and privatizing benefits and 2.) insurance against risks the capitalist exacerbates.
The economist Michael Pettis I think it was wrote a book titled, The Volatility Machine. It was about how the financial sector tended to corrupt its own institutional systems to generate financial volatility when nominally finance ought to be dampening volatility and spreading risk. In order to make selling insurance in various forms more profitable and to focus risk onto actors like governments that would to bail out bad actors to protect victims or valuable activity, the private financial sector in various countries has tended to pursue the opposite of what ought to be the social, public purpose of its business activity. And they generate lots of bs about competition and innovation to cover what they are doing.
Jeff Wegerson
This post is exceptional. It stands out from even many of your best posts. The whole notion of valuing apart from money sadly needs reminding. Minding the store is more than a business practice. Especially when the store is the planet. Yes. Thanks.
Prison Planet
They went and destroyed art, or subsumed it, without anyone even noticing. That’s how effective all this is. Think about who is allowed to be famous now: actors, sports stars, politicians, pop & rap musicians, media heads, a select few billionaires, especially the tech billionaires, and Gabby Petito.
But can anyone name, now that we’re one-fifth of the way through it, a household name-famous 21st century:
novelist,
painter that isn’t George Bush or Hunter Biden,
sculptor,
poet,
composer,
Architect?
Nope, you can’t, and it will be the same in 2025, one-fourth of the way through, and 2033, etc. Pop stars and the rest are made household names the same way Gabby Petito was: they shovel them at you nonstop. No grassroots anything. They do not shovel artistic genius at anybody, and everybody should wonder why. It’s related to why we’re told not to take “liberal arts” in school.
Hugh
I agree the financial sectors serve the rich. I would say both the private and public sides do. The Fed certainly does to the tune of trillions and to the action it backs tens of trillions.
NL
What we call capitalism is our way of life. It is our sacred. We can not escape it. When it ends, we end as a people. But let’s take the premise — if money is not sacred, then what is? What do you want to be the sacred? If the ‘good life’ is not a life of accumulating money and consuming, then what is the good life? If we are not valued and are not gaining in status by achieving exceptional money wealth, then how do we gain in status and social respect? Can someone point me to a new measure? In the old England, it was all about aristocracy. An aristocrat had greatness by definition. We freed ourselves from Christianity, and our religions are now all dead and lifeless, offering us no alternative to capitalism. We have nothing similar to Confucianism – we kick our children out as soon as they are 18 and let them go into deep debt paying for college and buying their first houses, we are also lousy children and put our parents in the nursing home, cause we can’t fathom a multi-generational adobe. The classic Greek with their philosopher kings — we despise philosophy and unprofitable undertakings. Our feudal kings were all about expending their domain and maintaining order among their subjects – but we executed our kings, assumed invented identities and started living in something called ‘nation states’, which are sort of like loose agglomerations of capitalists going at one another and the outsiders in a ruthless struggle for resources, living space and money. We have eliminated a lot to crystalize what we really care about. Why and how should we change our values now?
Hugh
“I agree the financial sectors serve the rich.”
Astrid
“The moneybags sitting atop our system won’t give up so easily.”
What nonsense, our money are private money, the financial sector is ‘the rich’, because it is the source of money. The economy is directed and organized by allocating money by the major financial institutions. When money are used this way, it is called capital. You want to change this, make money to be public, empower a state bank to issue loans and create currency. There is an easy answer. Anyone is supporting this?
Inequality is necessary so that private individuals have enough money to achieve new technological heights and to continuously transform and advance our society. The wealth that the capitalists had accumulated prior was used to transform our society to a consumer society in the “New Deal”. Look at our recent achievements. For the first time ever in the history of humanity, private individuals built rockets and sent other private individuals in space. Going to space is no longer reserved for governments and state-supported actors. It is now a space race between private enterprise and the state, and as we all know very well, state planning is inefficient and profligate, our best and wealthiest pioneers of space exploration will win this race. Our capitalism enables this to happen. We should be proud of this and should all aspire to great wealth.
different clue
Umm . . . I realize I am not always the sharpest bulb in the cupboard , but should I understand NL’s comment to be a lengthy bit of satire?
bruce wilder
like all good satire, its bite is its truth
Ché Pasa
On a driftwood log on the beach at Carmel last week, sitting zazen moment to moment, the sea and sand and sky brilliant above, below and around me, I was surrounded by money (the profane) and within the sacred simultaneously.
Dolphins frolicked in the water; sandpipers piped the sand chasing after the surf coming in and going out; pelicans swooped low over the waves. Golfers golfed and giggled on the Pebble Beach golf course high above. Strollers now and then passed by on the soft sand, nodding sometimes in my direction, mostly oblivious to anything but their dogs and the sounds playing in their earbuds.
Obliviousness seemed to be the order of the day. But I don’t know that.
My assumptions could be and probably were way off base.
Exploitation and profit may have put most of the ones I saw there in their current positions; one doesn’t live in Carmel without a lot of money. On the other hand, have they killed the sacred? Or merely claimed it as another possession? Is possession of the sacred the death of the sacred? And in truth, though I wasn’t alone, there weren’t a lot of other people around on the beach at Carmel.
That’s something to keep in mind. Despite the extreme levels of wealth on display, there aren’t a lot of people in that category. We so greatly outnumber them, and we possess so much untapped (potential) power.
Hugh
So much of that power is turned against itself. I wrote for years that the primary weapon of class war was distraction. Turn attention away from the looting and abuse of the rich and powerful and foment conflict among everyone else. The Trumpers who rail against anyone and anything that might help them is just the most obvious example. But everyone knew that the Democrats were going to cave on their spending plans for ordinary Americans, settle for crumbs, call it a banquet, declare victory, and assume the rubes are too stupid to notice.
Hvd
So Hugh, now that you acknowledge that everyone knew that the Democrats would pull the old switcheroo, how do you reconcile that with your support of the party all last year?
Now back to the topic at hand there is nothing more obviously sacred than our time. “Time is money” is probably the greatest curse of a money driven culture.
Hugh
Hvd, I live in a complex non-binary world. I have always thought the Democrats were pretty useless. This has never gotten in the way of my seeing that the Republicans are flat out malevolent. Evil and useless are not equivalent. So when the closet Trumpists acted as if Republicans and Democrats were the same, I called them on it. I have no use for fascists. So I will continue to do so.
As when the schools in Southlake, Texas, an upscale community rebelled against critical race theory because A) it was about black people, B) unlike My Old Kentucky Home, it portrayed the “darkies” as not gay, and C) hearing this might offend the ears of sensitive white folk. Now a Southlake school official followed up on this by saying , “And make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust, that you have one that has an opposing — that has other perspectives.” You can not make sh–t like this up. It’s racist and fascist, and those who oppose them are not equivalent to them.
Willy
When did anybody ever have a problem with inequality? Somebody invents something useful for the rest of us, nobody cares if the inventor gets rich.
What people seem to care about is when the rich inventors invention fucks up peoples health, the environment, the culture, other kids futures… and the inventor uses his wealth to buy up enough power, government and influence to get away with it.
Hugh’s right. Malevolence is all about the diversion.
bruce wilder
Evil and useless are not equivalent.
You seem awfully sure of that.
You remember the old saw, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men doing nothing.”
“Useless” is the handmaiden to evil. The whole “Lucy promising to hold the football for Charlie Brown” thing is a distraction, a veal pen to trap opposition to political evil in various forms and shapes. Admittedly, a lot of people who like to feel virtuous identify as Democrats to satisfy that ulterior motive and really could hardly care less about actual political evil (like medical bankruptcy or perpetual war). But some people do care and many of them keep coming back to the Democrats for deep historical reasons that have nothing to with Democratic politics of the last fifteen years, say.
The Democrats — some Democrats mouth the words — favor raising the minimum wage. That’s better, arguably, than Republicans who could care less and certainly better than Republicans — more radical — who would abolish the minimum wage. But, feeble efforts and a leavening of blue dogs do not actually work to raise the minimum wage or even persuade those who might be open to argument.
I oppose “fascism” by which I mean authoritarianism. I am certain many Republicans are pretty authoritarian in the old-fashioned sense that they are the party of petty bosses and think labor unions should have no rights to organize or strike, for example. Ordinary, Republicans are OK with one giant business corporation suing another in a dispute over contract terms or intellectual property claims, but believe common people should have no right to participate in class-action lawsuits against business corporations that harm millions of people on a massive scale.
The Democrats are different, but are they better? The Democratic Party seems to have made an alliance with the so-called Intelligence Community and with some of the Silicon Valley giants and the finance sector. Donald Trump looked (and looks) to me to be pretty shady, but instead of going after him for an actual scandal, they made up Russiagate and gaslit the country, with no consideration of the consequences: you know, fomenting unnecessary hostility and fear in a nuclear power, for example, or undermining Americans’ faith in the integrity of the electoral process. (How’s that working out for ya, Democrats?) The ethics of Russiagate for Democrats in the Party establishment and in Congress and the Democratic-leaning Media make me question how trustworthy they are in anything they say. It is not just that they would lie, lie and keep lying, but they would care so little that they were making stuff up or about the possible consequences for peace, domestically or internationally — the carelessness of it all!
Hugh
Putin seems to have no problem “fomenting unnecessary hostility and fear in a nuclear power.” This is what I don’t get. If one person or group acts stupidly, there seems to be a complete lack of awareness that the other or another individual or group can be acting as stupidly or even more stupidly. The same goes with equating “Russiagate” with Trump’s Big Lie.
It seems so convenient to forget Trump’s cringeworthy performance at his Helsinki summit with Putin where Putin denied any election meddling and Trump so obsequiously agreed: “(Putin) just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Trump got a ton of flak for that. So the next day, Trump tried to recover by saying he misspoke and meant to say he didn’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia interfering. It like the old legal query, Were you lying then or lying now? So when Trump was with Putin there was no Russiagate, but when he did it in such a lame fashion, he quickly pivoted to there was. Just as when the heat faded he went back to no Russiagate.
But as I was saying, we get the false equivalence of the closet Trumpers that Trump’s completely nutso nonstop efforts to undermine the integrity of the election process is just the same as the Russia, Russia, Russia cries that Trump criticized, then accepted, then criticized again.
Astrid
I tried to read Hugh’s comment since he was responding to Bruce’s well argued points. Could not follow at all. Even as a strawman argument it was just throwing random unsupported thought projectiles at no discernable anything. Maybe this is what a parapet in a thought stopper fort looks like.
I am certainly not completely innocent of this myself. Ian’s latest repost about Mr. Newell is a good reminder to check myself.
But I think I am going to have to continue to scroll past Hugh (and a few others). My brain hurts from the exertion of trying to follow 3 paragraphs.
Plague Species
How many times can you say you are going to scroll past Hugh’s posts? Every thread you and your yahoo friends who haunt this space tell the world you are going to scroll past Hugh’s posts and/or my posts. Enough already. Just shut up and do it. In fact I implore you, please scroll past my posts. They’re not for you.
Hugh
Astrid is a fascist at heart with her thing for little-Hitler wannabes like Xi strutting his stuff about threatening his neighbors and his undesirables, and invoking his version of a Greater China with its historical imperative for more and more Lebensraum. Cross her or her Master Race puts you beyond the pale. She’ll even defend another little dictator like Putin or the Baby Trumpster to score points though neither can compare to her incomparable Führer Xi.
Kyle W. Elsbernd
Rene Guenon’s book title says it all: “The Reign of Quantity.” We are living in an age of numbers. People are too stupid to see value if it’s not quantitized. Go to an art museum, people ask, “How much is that painting worth?” Capitalism is a euphemism for “moneyism.” Stupid modern world!
Sweet Kenny
Just ran across this site. Found it amusing that the same foolishness exists here of bashing Trump while ignoring Democrats like Pelosi with her millions is the same – corrupt. McConnell? Corrupt. Biden? Corrupt. AOC? Corrupt. All of them yet here you are taking sides that one is somehow worse than the other and berating each other about it. Ignorance rampant here like everywhere.
Jim Harmon
How is AOC corrupt?
Hugh
It’s not about AOC. It’s about false equivalence. Trump has been a crook and liar all his life. So the object of the exercise is to try to tear down Democrats to make Trump look less small. It’s just another upside down defense of Trump: they all do it so Trump’s not so bad.
different clue
I just had a thought . . . .
We aren’t witnessing the ” death of the Sacred”. We have witnessed the historically-speaking recent emergence of a new religion. We could call it Moneyolatry, Moneyism, Moneyistianity, or whatever we want to call it. But it is a new religion. And money itself is its prime object of worship, its Holy Water, its Sacred Sacrament.
Behold how deeply offended the Moneyistians are if anyone interferes with cutting down the last Ancient Forests to offer up the wood as an offering upon the altar of money. Behold how deeply offended the Moneyistians are if anyone tries to interfere with wage theft, keeping the sub-minimum wage sub-minimum, and any other effort to prevent the human-sacrifice of wage-working people as a burnt offering upon the altar of money. Behold how offended the Moneyistians are when other people try to stop them from sacrificing the land of Alberta in order to extract the Alberta Tar Dreck and send it to the Sacred Markets to offer it as a Burnt Offering upon the Altar of the Moneyistians’ God of Markets.
President Calvin Coolidge said way back in the 1920s that ” The man who builds a business builds a temple. And the man who works there, worships there.”
That is the Creed of Moneyistianity.
If we view Moneyistianity as a religion, and its Church Militant project of converting everyone and everything to the worship and service of Moneyistianity, then we can understand its actions as a long running Crusade against the sacreligious and heathen Unbelievers against the Holy Sacrament of Money. And if that view is even somewhat correct, we are in a Religious War against the Moneyistians who are waging a holy war against the non-worshippers of Money.
different clue
Or perhaps the religion is Marketistianity or Capitalistianity. And maybe Money is not the religion itself, but rather a Holy Sacrament of the religion.