Anxiety is rising and no wonder. The lack of economic prospects, the social dislocations resulting from capital’s penetration of the whole world and its expulsion of ever greater numbers of people from actual production and jobs, the wars over possession it engenders, with their merciless slaughter of civilians, whether through air bombardments or suicide attacks, the many millions of refugees fleeing horror and hopelessness, the climate disturbances… it is indeed a potent cocktail.
People try to make sense of it all. Politicians and other ideologues capture the discussion within their particular spectrum, which varies all the way from Islamophobia and other expressions of racism and warmongering, to empty promises based on the illusion that taking money from the rich and spending it on the poor will solve it all. What they all have in common is that they cannot imagine a world beyond capitalism. All things change, but capitalism, in their minds, is eternal. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism,” environmentalist Rob Nixon wrote in a November 2014 New York Times Book Review assessment of Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything.
But the end of capitalism must be imagined if the end of the world, or something close to that, is to be prevented, because all the above mentioned expressions of worsening crisis have their roots in the crisis of capitalism itself.
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