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Episode Summary:
Opening Audio: Alan Watts highlights the flawed role of money in inhibiting technology’s ability to improve lives, suggesting that technology could eliminate drudgery, but money, as a misguided information network, obstructs progress. He critiques how technological advances lead to unnecessary jobs and consumer products, driven by the need to sustain the economic system rather than meet genuine human needs.

Peter Joseph builds on Watts’ critique in Revolution Now! Episode 27, arguing that capitalism’s growth imperative is structurally inevitable. The system drives endless consumption and labor to maintain economic momentum, even at the expense of well-being and sustainability. Joseph highlights how technological efficiency, instead of reducing work, fuels unnecessary production and “bullshit jobs,” perpetuating economic inequality and environmental destruction. He stresses that capitalism’s nature makes it impossible to achieve a balanced, steady-state economy.

Both Watts and Joseph contend that the system prioritizes profit and growth over human needs, creating a cycle where technology and consumption feed back into maintaining the system, rather than liberating humanity from needless toil.

Transcript:
Allan Watts:
One of the reasons that our technology is impeded and prevented from feeding the world properly is the failure of one of our networks. It’s an information network and it’s called money. About which we have the most unbelievable superstitions. Money is a major obstacle to a proper development of technology, enabling it to do what it is supposed to do, that is to save labor and to produce goods, services and so on adequately. I’m not an economist, but any fool can see certain extremely fundamental principles about this whole situation. That money is a circulation of information and in itself has no value. What happens then when you introduce technology into production? You produce enormous quantities of goods by technological methods.

But at the same time, you put people out of work, you can say, oh, but it always creates more jobs. There will always be more jobs. Yes, lots of them will be futile jobs. They will be jobs making every kind of frippery and unnecessary contraption. And one will also at the same time have to beguile the public into feeling that they need and want these completely unnecessary things that aren’t even beautiful. And therefore an enormous amount of nonsense employment and busy work, bureaucratic and otherwise, it has to be created in order to keep people working. But the basic principle of the whole thing has been completely overlooked. That the purpose of the machine is to make drudgery unnecessary.

Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning, everybody. This is Peter Joseph and welcome to episode 27 of Revolution Now. The date is August 13th, 2021. This podcast is usually uploaded every Wednesday Pacific time, but upload dates tend to bounce around a little bit these days. And I appreciate everybody’s patience in that regard. The opening audio was from Alan Watts, a Western philosopher from the 1960s. Who had wise intuitions in regard to many social phenomenon. Definitely a counterculture icon. And when he looked past some of the vague fluffy language and institutional associations, when it comes to free creative thought, Watts is always delightful to read and listen to. Very in tune with what has been happening in the world in many ways. And he touches upon a few things that are a good setup for the main purpose of today’s podcast, which is about the endogenous nature of capitalism as a system, and why the system seeks to expand or grow, like effectively cancer by force of its very structure, combining procedural cultural and psychological incentives.

Meaning when people speak today about economic growth, as is very common in the news media, reports on jobs and GDP performance have served as barometers of economic health. Fortunately, at least at a minimum, there is an emerging subculture in the sustainability community that does see GDP as a false correlation for social wellbeing and progress. And I guess that’s a step in the right direction. But the observation isn’t acute as such analysts tend to not understand what they’re talking about when it comes to why growth is of interest at all in the deepest structural sense. Some even imply that our growth based economy is a kind of social decision, and we can just kind of change our attitude and change that process within the structure of capitalism, the de-growth movement as it were, which of course is completely delusional. You can’t have market economics without the drive for cancerous growth on the system level. It’s inherent or endogenous to it.

One fallback is well, okay population keeps growing therefore the economy must keep growing, and there’s your connection. But that’s actually a very small attribute on it. Even if population did not continue to grow, the growth imperative of market economics would still prevail. And generally not to jump ahead, we see the pattern of seeking growth mainly because of the circular nature of the consumption to labor cycle. If there’s no demand, there is no job. And if there’s no job, there’s no way to get a purchasing power to spend back into the system, keeping everything going in an infinite loop. I’ve always referred to this as the “cyclical consumption” process by which the entire economy of global capitalism is powered. And again, I’ll talk about that a bit more in a moment, in combination with many other forces, which push for expansion and growth. In contrast, to what’s really required in all systems that exist that persist:

And that is a steady state equilibrium. A steady state economy that is strategically organized, not only to meet the needs of civilization, but also maintain homeostatic balance with the ecosystem. While also of course, maintaining balance with our shared needs and basic nature. There is such a thing as a toxic sociological condition, even though people like to look the other way. A condition that harms people on average on the population level, in that from an epidemiological public health perspective, you have to pay attention to the average conditions that add or detract from public health. I know I’ve talked about this before, but it’s worth pointing this out in context here. A population with great socioeconomic inequality is one with a destructive precondition that leads to many negative health outcomes. We sacrifice the positive and stabilizing health attributes we could have if we had a more egalitarian society, and provably so, literally for the sake of economic growth, resulting in great imbalance due to the lack of access and deep inequity spread across both domestic societies and across nation states. And this produces instability.

Overall, as this podcast has repeatedly emphasized the two greatest concerns facing us as a species are the continued growth of socioeconomic inequality, which results in a spectrum of destabilizing disorder, coupled with a synergistic link to the second concern. Which is the ecological crisis, which has shown its cards quite clearly in recent times with the acceleration of pollution driven destabilization in the atmosphere, which is just, mind you, one of the many ecosystem breakdown points humanity is faced with. However, because of the grandness of this kind of destabilization, it will no doubt create systemic acceleration of the other problems such as topsoil loss, resource overshoot, biodiversity loss, and a litany of other issues.

Other market externalities, to be accurate. All of this once again is to highlight the fact that there’s something intrinsically wrong with the very nature of our economy when it comes to its ability or inability to create balance. And there are all sorts of general equilibrium theories associated with market behavior that I’m sure you’ve heard of. And most all of them are wrong. Idealized and abstracted utilitarian equations that consider “rational” models of human behavior along with based dynamics between say supply and demand. Abstractions literally existing in a vacuum like a feather falling with a bowling bowl in a Newtonian void. The real world requires real world analysis. Hence, the role of systems science and understanding the nature of complex adaptive systems in life, which is what our economy is. True systemic understanding is real-world understanding. And the true nature of markets has proven itself time and time again on many men levels.

It is empirically obvious, not to mention formally calculable, the true model of the capitalist system can only gravitate toward destruction. It only moves toward imbalance, on almost every single level. It can’t, self-regulate in a way that even approaches basic balance. And hence it is invalid as a system. It is not viable. Take the very idea of supply and demand itself. One of the most upheld ideas of self-regulation and ostensibly balancing feedback mechanism that should limit abusive resources in terms of scarcity at a minimum, if you use too much of something, the stock becomes scarce, the price will rise against demand and that rising price will slow resource use, and hence equilibrium is sought. It follows in theory, that price should find a balancing point between supply and demand and the balancing price should mirror the Earth’s natural regenerative state, right? But of course that’s not even close to the reality, and there are many reasons that’s for that.

But one of the more interesting ones has to do with the emerging plutonomy. Plutonomy meaning in a society where wealth is mostly controlled by a small few with great opportunity, where economic growth becomes dependent on the same wealthy minority. This inequality allows for behaviors that completely thwart the already weak effectiveness of the latent supply and demand phenomenon. If we deplete say the world’s tree resources with prices rising to levels of the average person can’t afford, the rich still have the capacity. The rich have the capacity to override scarcity, driven price, voiding the purpose. And they do, hence there is a connection between wealth inequality and lack of equilibrium in a feedback relationship. If society was more egalitarian. Yeah, the supply and demand equation would create a more useful outcome. And you know, one of the things that amused me a little while back here in Los Angeles is during a severe drought years ago, people were fined for watering their grass and outdoor plants.

Logical, right? We’re trying to preserve water. So what did the rich in Beverly Hills do? They continued to water their gardens and they just paid the fines like another utility bill. Moreover supply and demand is also subject to interference with state subsidies, such as with the endless oil industry and this constant feature of state capitalism exists to preserve existing institutional power under the guise of “too big to fail.” That is another form of overlapping influence. Some see it as an interference, of course, but it is just as consequentially normal and to be expected on the system level. Which is far larger in the scope of dynamics than the theorists of free markets choose to recognize. Sorry for the tangent, but the state is not a separate system, is exactly part of the economic system we have by extension. First in the form of needed management. Management, of course, which is also influenced by markets, forever making management and policy subject to special interests.

And hence it’s utterly cronyistic, if you will, but that is not a corruption. That is simply the natural dynamics of the way the system works. And on that note, as an aside, I’m sure many have run into people who say something like, oh, but we just don’t have capitalism and only if we did… very common on the libertarian side or modern libertarian side of the spectrum that supports free markets and sees any interference by way of regulation and government as the core inhibiting social problem. If only the markets were allowed to self-regulate without interference, everything would work out: the laissez faire approach, which is absolutely preposterous. But it is true that from a certain perspective, at least we do not have “capitalism” in that regard. We do not have capitalism because we do not have an open, pure free market, which is the foundation of the ideal, regardless of what the free market would do in the end. Which leads me to the other side of the perspective, say a more Noam Chomsky-esque perspective as he has commented in many interviews on the issue:

Yes, we do not have capitalism. We have to have a regulatory support for it that nullifies its definition in theory, because it’s impossible to have pure capitalism or pure free markets, given the entire thing will gravitate toward self-destruction through unmanaged growth and complete and utter imbalanced exploitation, and diminishment of resources and destruction. All of the unmanaged market externalities would be a free for all, if there was nothing to counter them. And that’s where the state comes in on one side. So those are the two polarized perceptions that share a common thread with the abstracted truth that, yeah, sure. We don’t really have capitalism. And of course the Chomsky view is most accurate. In the end, it’s best to just put all the ideological stuff aside and look at what the system’s actually doing through the lens of system science. Again, the state institution and state power exists to regulate markets through laws and agencies, not as a separate system, but as they required method of management born out of the system to preserve the market economy and all of its lack of self-regulation, it’s lack of viability once again.

And I wish to reemphasize the punchline of the whole thing. And that is the method of management. Political power is invariably and inherently subservient to the internal dynamics of market behavior. The government is run through market behavior and all the actors become agents of those who have achieved market-based power. Corporations are a priority in the system, not people. This is by far the most inconvenient political revelation for those who are motivated and believe in the agency and potential radicalness of the political movements in their interest to seek relevant change. No one wants to hear that the various system or regulatory democratic control is flawed inherently and will continue to be systemically compromised by these special interest dynamics and incentives born from the market economy and the group-ism and competitive nature of it.

Some may remember a short little story in my book, the new human rights moment, it was called The True Free Market. Which is the freedom to restrict the freedom of others; the freedom to buy legislation and effectively own politicians; to use the state as a tool for competitive advantage. In the United States, which is by far one of the most exacerbated expressions of this inherent characteristic of global society, lobbyists from the business world, don’t just give money to politicians for favors and que bono. They actually sit down and write many of the laws. It is that entrenched. And once again, it’s not corruption.

Corruption means something’s gone wrong in the system. This is what the system does. It’s objective unfolding. The system is what the system does, not what we hope or think it should do. And needless to say, that is not a perspective you will find in any mainstream political discourse out there. I had a conversation, not that long ago, with a notable political figure. I really tried to get this point across to no avail. It’s very hard to communicate how the system manifests its own agenda through mass behavior of actors unwittingly following the rules and incentives. And that agenda is actually counterproductive to the advancement of public health. Everyone seems to be aware of how corrupting money has been. Even in the Bible, the love of money is the root of all evil and whatnot.

Yet it’s still been assumed that we can just legislate this thing out and control it like a caged beast. And that attempt has not worked. At least not on the level that’s required. In fact, things have gone the other direction and notoriously so. Over the past century with epidemic inequality, and of course the collapse of our habitat, all due to the imperative of economic growth. And to drill this home just a little bit farther from the political perspective, you know, progressive’s often hold up accent points such as the United States is ruling “Citizens United” that basically declared corporations as people and have similar rights as people, which is just hilarious. And folks say, well, we just need to reverse that ruling. And then we can get back on the right path. That is the most common reactionary pattern and reasoning, if you pay attention to the Progressive’s in the political sphere. “If we can just reverse some of these things, everything will be fine.”

Not observing those patterns as an actual evolution, as an adaptation, we see policy shifts like what was set in motion to help social welfare in the United States with FDR years ago. And we say, “oh, well, we did that. That means we can do anything.” We were able to make these counter moves against the system for better social health. And what we don’t see is that there’s a constant natural gravitation of the system to erode such counter capitalist policies in favor of free market determinism. And that is a constant, as long as the system is there. And it will do just that, erode over time, anything that gets in its way. It might take a year, it might take a century, but the natural gravitation, the flow of that river remains the same. And that is a serious problem.

And sorry to belabor that point as I’ve covered it a few times, but it’s very, very important to keep in mind because of how traditionalised the political establishment has become and how it’s simply presupposed that this is the only method that can work and the system is fine and we just have to engineer a better moral people within it and all of that noise. And as an aside, I find it kind of interesting that the root of the word, corporation, is Corpus. Which means body. And we refer to the leader of corporations as the “head” of the company.

So Citizens United is kind of spooky in that sense that this sort of evolution of the very concept of this business entity has been attempting to mirror life itself, which I find a little traumatizing, frankly. Anyway, etyomology always kind of fun. Now, sorry for being a little all over the place here. I apologize. But back to the Alan Watts quote. One question that arises that hasn’t been given enough consideration regards to the industrial revolution and that increased ability to create a relative surplus as has been talked about before with the rise of mechanization and an almost exponential increase in production efficiency. And the question becomes why didn’t things go a different direction when it comes to how we think about labor and general social support?

In 1930 economist, John Maynard Keynes wrote a very unique essay called “Economic possibilities for our grandchildren.” In it, he put forward a common sense, ideal trajectory, where a hundred years from his time of writing, which is basically the time we’re in right now, people would likely only work 15 hours a week; three hours a day, and other adjustments where effectively things would become free in life, but less reliance on markets and money. He observed, as Alan Watts did, that the fruits of technological efficiency through mechanization and beyond, born from the industrial revolution, would be about the abundance capacity and strategic nature of that efficiency as the defining socioeconomic attribute. And in time people’s need to constantly work to gain money through labor would be offset by lowered costs, driven by heightened efficiency and so forth.

I’ve spoken about all this before, and you might be familiar with it because it’s also a very common fodder for the techno capitalist apologists. Techno capitalist apologist, meaning people that think market capitalism will evolve on its own without any need to organize it or guide it or stifle it into a more egalitarian and balanced system because of the rise of dematerialization and other characteristics where the need for monetary exchange and trade becomes increasingly obsolete.

Again, this relates around the rise of computer technology, information technology that applies to many, many disciplines through effectively Moore’s Law as sort of a foundational concept of exponential unfolding, doing “more with less,” Buckminster Fullers ephemeralization. Or from a different angle, the Jeremy Rifkin market-based idea of “zero marginal cost,” which then leads to a kind of theoretical demarketization, whereby you can theorize that kind of evolution in our economy where people are getting their needs met with great efficiency in design and production, and they don’t have to work much. Higher wages, cheaper goods, et cetera. And it’s common sense that this should have been the trajectory if the interest was to take care of everyone. Once again, while reducing stress and removing that need to submit to a job to survive. But that’s not the reality that we’ve seen, of course.

Today, people work more than ever. And for what, artificial innovation? No. For economic growth. We have not solved, say for example, the global poverty problem. We have simply generated short-term improvement because of the overall industrial efficiency happening in the system, including the improvement of communication and market networks. That quote “raise all boats,” if you will. The boats of the poor, of course, at the very end of the spectrum to be raised, do so ever so slightly. And then give the illusion that somehow the system is self-correcting, resolving the poverty that it actually created to begin with. Anyone that tells you that capitalism has taken X number of people out of poverty doesn’t understand where poverty came from, nor did they understand the temporal nature of what has occurred. It has been a grace period of sorts, an optical illusion, a mirage. The reduction of poverty over the past 50 years has been a positive side effect of rampant and destructive consumer production for the sake, once again, of economic growth.

And it’s not going to last, it’s going to reverse because the walls are closing in, and it has to, it has to reverse. Because the trend can’t be sustained, but that’s for another conversation. So as I did tell in my book, upon the industrial revolution, the need for increased consumption became evident in order to keep money, moving to power jobs. The system has no use for surplus. The game rules are set. This then resulted in a huge PR campaign that many are not aware of, to associate buying, consuming with personal identity, creating consumer culture around self-worth, social status and a diluted sense of personal freedom. The American dream, In fact. John Maynard Keynes, his idea and the rhetoric of the techno capitalist apologists today, engage in mythmaking through a lack of understanding of the resilience of the market as a system. Resilience coming in the form of constantly seeking new things to buy and sell, expressing the anti-human antithetical nature of the system, where to meet needs, to have people happy, to make people free, is to be thwarted in favor of keeping the system busy with more and more production and consumption.

It is not going to tolerate in the fundamental endogenous growth ethic the reduction of economic turnover, which of course would be a wonderful thing as we meet human needs directly without the perpetual need for endless competitive trade, growth and submission to labor, once again. And it’s an excellent turning point to highlight this transition point where things really could have moved in a very rational direction, in terms of meeting human needs and becoming sustainable. But once again, it goes against the very nature of the economic system. Yes, we could have made water, food, energy, free. Transport, free. We could have done things to relieve stress and exponentially increase public health and create a more egalitarian and healthy society. But the system had to go another direction. Why? Because, that’s what the system does. Technical efficiency is the enemy of market efficiency. Market efficiency has no interest in abundance because it reduces engagement. There is simply nothing within the organic system structure that wants de-growth or balance.

Now, moving onto the final section of the podcast. Why is all this? Aren’t we in control? What are the dynamics that take mass human behavior and continue to produce this broad system level outcome? What the hell is going on? Back to the Alan Watts quote once again, he predicts what David Graber called, the rise of “bullshit jobs” for those that are familiar. Occupations that are so relative to themselves and contrived, they are technically pointless. And even his analysis was rather conservative. Literally every kind of paper pushing, insurance companies, banks, those huge glass buildings you see, when you walk down around any downtown area, buildings that don’t produce anything, but they just kind of serve as grease for the market economy. Dealing with the results effectively of financialization, which, as described prior, is an evolutionary adaptation of the system to replace tangible work with something else, and hence nonsensical work.

More money being made on Wall Street, investment schemes and actual good production and so forth. Again, this is part of the system’s resilience. It refuses to make itself obsolete. More nonsense jobs, more social psychology perversion to get people to activate their social nature, to want to be more acquisitive and so forth. Nullifying the social advantage potential gained from the incredible increase in efficiency that we have achieved. “Hey, look, we can create an earthly abundance now based on a reasonable standard of living, solve poverty and so forth, you could reduce the workweek..” “No, no, fuck that. I want a new iPhone that can make my pancakes and jerk me off in a much more efficient way.” So let’s just keep innovating into the ether, infinitely as if it’s something to be proud about and ignore the potentials that we have in any given moment, all focused on that constant infinite drive to effectively succumb to the infinite growth paradigm.

And looking at the time here, you know what, I’m going to come back this Wednesday, the 18th and finish this podcast as a part two. Because it’s too much detail to go into based on my notes regarding the major attributes in the system dynamics that create economic growth. I will just comment in foresight that you not only have first the interest in debt system, which I talked about before, both domestically and internationally. Which is extremely pivotal in fostering economic growth constantly. And the infinite growth paradigm, which is also endogenous to the system and not some contrivance, as many people have argued. Extending to the second issue, which is very, very intricate, which is about the dynamics of market competition itself, not only amongst individuals and companies, but also nation states, and this sort of constant feedback and antagonism between parties that forces an infinite growth ethic.

And then third, returning back to the subject I’ve covered many times in this podcast, and in prior writings. The phenomenon of “cyclical consumption.” The core root, the fixed nature of our system, which is labor for income. And in that there’s a compulsory innovation process. Innovation, once again, not necessarily being a good thing, that literally extends market interest and activity into infinity. Because, literally everyone is sitting around trying to figure out how to get somebody else to buy something from them.

Long story short, going back to my original premise, you can’t take out the soul of the system, and the soul of this system is the constant infinite drive towards growth, which is literally a cancerous phenomenon. All right, folks, I’ll talk to you this Wednesday for part two. I appreciate everybody’s support. This program is brought to you by my Patreon. And to update, my lecture is still in development, but it’s getting better and better. I’m glad I’ve taken the extra time and I’ll be updating everyone with that as well. And thank you again for your patience. All right everybody, take care out there, be safe. Talk to you soon.