Evolutionary Jump or Exit Capitalism cannot survive Climate Catastrophe, the Human Species Can

Opinion

The impression that the current mode of production runs into an impasse is all around. For the large majority of the global population there are more signs of rapidly deteriorating living conditions every year, every month now. The global production system, the capitalist mode of production, is enforcing an ever more unequal split between a small, extremely wealthy group and an often hardly surviving majority of people. As a consequence, the central production decisions are made by a small group of rulers following what can be called the capitalist algorithm [1]. This algorithm in the essence boils down to choose actions, which maximize expected, short-term profit. The determinants for these choices are all monetary variables, they typically hide mid-run and long-run consequences in the physical environment behind the veil of money with which they are argued. To justify them, an almost religious belief in the Cunning of Reason [2] is put forward by the proponents of capitalism: A kind of survival of the fittest capitalist will ensure that these survivors chose actions that can overcome every problem. As history now has shown that evolution singled out a survival of the fattest corporations, which increasingly produce problems, which they do not even recognize. They remain hidden behind a veil of money, which only lets them see the problem that profit opportunities due to the finiteness of the world and the hardly more extendable exploitation of workers and nature are decreasing.

The historical mission of capitalism now is achieved: It has raised labour productivity and in the last hundred years even initiated the attempt to construct a global institutional framework for global democracy [3]. In the last decade several of these successes broke down and gave room for a new type of profit making: war. Of course, wars are zero-sum games, the gain of one military-industrial complex is equal to the loss of the opponent. The real loser is the ordinary working population with its dramatically deteriorating living conditions. But the current mode of production is caught in these death throes of capitalism.

To escape the exploited classes constituting the majority of the species clearly need leadership. A leadership that is able to tear down the veil of money and to find out how the physically threatening shortages and pandemics can be overcome. This group of so-called ‘organic intellectuals’ [4] might be a globally organized class of scientists. They are the indispensable core of a surviving future mode of production.

To escape the exploited classes constituting the majority of the species clearly need leadership. A leadership that is able to tear down the veil of money and to find out how the physically threatening shortages and pandemics can be overcome. This group of so-called ‘organic intellectuals’ [4] might be a globally organized class of scientists. They are the indispensable core of a surviving future mode of production.

The climate collapse certainly will pose a broad variety of problems. Starting with famines and resulting mass migration, new types of pandemics, revolutions in energy supply (technically and politically), dramatic changes in local and global mobility, and the like. All this will happen in front of a world characterized by multiple local wars, populated by families confused and distorted by mass media manipulation, compare [7]. Mass media being mainly in the hands of private global media corporations and nationalist government’s agencies. This does not look good for a network of progressive organic intellectuals that aspires to become the central nervous system of a future, democratic mode of production.

First, some central concepts have to be clarified. To name just a few:
1. What is ‘consciousness’, the central nervous system of a social entity [6]?
2. How can the tailored democratic mechanisms for coordinating the needs between different parts and levels of the global system look like [7]?
3. How can the creative potential of repeatedly evolving contradictions be understood and used [8]?
4. In many scientific domains preliminary answers have been elaborated already, but today ‘synthesis’ has to be the name of the game.

The chances for survival of the human species are not zero, its potential is not exhausted yet. Returning to a main insight of Spinoza: Mankind is nature, is part of the evolution of life in general. Even though our own developments will produce obstacles for further evolution, the special gift of this species – enhanced social knowledge development – can carry it to a further evolutionary jump [9,10].

Acknowledgement

None.

Conflict of Interest

None.

References

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2. Gramsci A 1930 (1999) Prison Notebooks In: Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Electric Book Company.
3. Hanappi H (2013) Money, Credit, Capital, and the State, On the evolution of money and institutions In: Buenstorf G, et al. (eds), 'The Two Sides of Innovation. Economic Complexity and Evolution, Springer: pp. 255-282.
4. Hanappi H (2022) Corona in Vienna, working paper with official health data and policy evaluation.
5. Hanappi H (2020) A Global Revolutionary Class will ride the Tiger of Alienation. Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 18(1).
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8. Hiesinger PR (2021) The Self-Assembling Brain: How Neural Networks Grow Smarter. Princeton University Press.
9. Koch Ch (2019) The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed, The MIT Press.
10. Taylor L, Rezai A and Michl Th (2013) Social Fairness and Economics: Economic Essays in the Spirit of Duncan Foley (Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy), Routledge Publishers.