The Case for Green Plenty

Note: This was originally published on the Green Plenty substack on the 8th of November 2021. https://greenplenty.substack.com/p/the-case-for-green-plenty?s=w I will be republishing some of the articles from there over the next few weeks

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Why go marching in the rain?

I was at the COP 26 March on Saturday in Liverpool, and there were a lot of people speaking and talking using the megaphones and whatnot. I think the thing that came across more strongly than anything else is that people understand perfectly well that the problem is capitalism and we need to end it. People understood that capitalism is killing us, there was a lot of righteous anger at the way third world debt, for example, is being used to force poor countries to essentially give their resources away for nothing to a bunch of parasites to make warehouses full of fidget spinners and other dross.

The big problem we all face is that capitalism is killing us. It’s moribund, it’s dead, and we need to get rid of it.

Capitalism is actually the grey ooze that people who are afraid of nanotechnology claim one day may overtake the world. But we already live in that world.

I heard a speech from an acquaintance of mine who is a firebrand revolutionary, which actually I am too, but I try to use a more gentle voice. He was so angry at the injustices in the world, but what do we replace capitalism with? This is the problem — it’s easy, and in fact quite trivial, to point to how ridiculous the system we live under is, and how damaging, how foolish you would have to be to keep working with it. It’s really easy.

So this anger is righteous and there’s nothing wrong with it. But what do we replace capitalism with? The problem with things like the Green New Deal, which everyone keeps pushing, is nobody knows what it means. That is very convenient for liars like Boris Johnson and most of the rest of the political elite. If we carry on with the capitalist system, we’re just going to have the same old nonsense, which is about profit and creating wealth for a very small number of people. But they’re going to paint it green, hence the phrase green washing, which is ultimately no use to anybody.