Will humanity survive capitalism?
If it were merely the fall of capitalism and/or of the government, there would be many ways around that. Collectivism of various kinds springs to mind. We would not automatically lose the skills we need to keep ourselves going--growing food, making and doing things for each other, etc.
We could develop local currencies, as many places have already done. An hour of my gardening buys an hour of your carpentry, etc. I don't doubt that we could readily invent a better system of government and a better basis for an economy ("better" meaning more responsive to human needs) than the mess we have now.
In many ways it would be a blessing for the wealth of the super-rich to be wiped out. It would destroy their unholy dominance over everything.
Unfortunately, all of this would be happening in a world that is not like the world in which humanity has spent all of recorded history and most of archeologically known prehistory.
We are faced with the collapse of the ecosystem: climate change of disastrous proportions, destruction of the aquifers, an atmosphere that is becoming increasingly unbreathable, increasing dependence on petrochemicals for the very food we eat, just as the petrochemicals become rarer and require increasingly destructive processes for their extraction.
To the extent that the capitalist system prevents us from responding appropriately and adequately to the survival challenges it has brought upon us, its effect will be to intensify the oncoming disaster. There is in my opinion no chance that the super-rich will remain on top. The time will come when there will be nothing for their money to buy. Those with the capacity to produce food will be eating it, or trading it for locally made products that supply basic needs.
The super-rich will no doubt believe that they can continue to buy whatever they want or, failing that, send their armies to confiscate it. I think this is delusional. They have nothing to give their armies but money. But money is nothing but an implied contractual system, a lubricant for trade. When people have nothing to trade, who will honor the money contract? In a time of universal famine, where will they get the food to feed their forces? What will keep the armies loyal to them?
Ultimately, deprived of his little electronic markers in a computer file somewhere, what does a stock trader have to offer the world?
We are going to go through a rapid shrinkage of population. Depending on how far the disaster proceeds before our interlocked world culture collapses, we may lose half our population or more. Possibly we will bring ourselves to species extinction.
I keep thinking of the Toba event of about 70,000 years ago. A volcano erupted on Sumatra that threw enough particulate matter into the atmosphere to cause a global winter that lasted perhaps 10 years, followed by a thousand-year mini-ice age. By the end of this catastrophe, the entire human population may have been reduced to about 15,000 individuals in total.
Ultimately, capitalism is doomed; the question that remains in my mind is, How many of us will it take with us when it crashes?
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The rich know this is where we're headed. They're plundering as fast as they can, to build a cushion as big as they can, erroneously believing that a cushion of any size will make a difference. Civilization as we know it is going down. It's too late to pull our collective head out of our collective ass. We've lived unsustainably for too long. Our Mother is about to smack us down a couple of pegs.
