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Episode Summary:
In Revolution Now! episode 34, Peter Joseph critiques the myth that capitalism equals freedom, exploring its contradictions and societal impacts. He argues that true freedom—defined as the ability to live without coercion—doesn’t exist under capitalism, which instead promotes the freedom to exploit others through competitive dynamics, artificial scarcity, and wealth inequality.

Joseph highlights how the current system, framed as a free market, is actually a series of private, undemocratic hierarchies that stifle true choice and democracy. He critiques libertarian ideas like voluntarism, showing how external pressures distort supposedly “free” market exchanges. He further argues that capitalism’s freedoms are reserved for the wealthy, who disproportionately harm the environment and limit opportunities for the majority.

Joseph advocates for a post-capitalist system based on sustainability, public health, and economic democracy, where true freedom means not having to struggle for basic needs. In this system, human well-being and ecological balance are prioritized over profit and competition, enabling a society where people can thrive rather than merely survive. He concludes by framing opposition to capitalism as part of a broader abolitionist movement, not just against economic inequality but the structural oppression that limits resources and opportunities for all.

Transcript:
John:
So how’s this organized then? Tracking demographics and mechanisms?

Simon:
We are. As you’ll notice, conditions related to absolute poverty in the third world countries account for about 40% of all premature deaths.

John:
And I see you’re also tracking poverty related illness and violence in the industrialized nations.

Simon:
With heart disease, cancer, and diabetes remaining at the top, while suicide, inner city gang warfare and drug overdoses coming a close second.

John:
What about deep systemic relationships? Lack of education, childhood stress?

Simon:
Correlated as well. Actually, very consistent. Regional cycles of deprivation are like clockwork. Poor families continue to produce more poor families, even in the richest states.

John:
And the mechanisms?

Simon:
Standard class war stuff. Only difference now is the ecological and climate crisis which has rapidly increased mortality in poverty stricken desert and coastal regions, but the same story otherwise. The rich get richer with disproportional opportunity and capital. The political establishment favors business and wealthy interests over social support programs, and the banking system keeps a solid stranglehold on social mobility by saturating the lower class in insurmountable debt.

Simon:
Same on the global level through international finance institutions, structural adjustments, austerity, sanctions. In fact, the financial system is really the glue that holds all this together. Keeping constant downward pressure on the impecunious masses.

Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning everybody. This is Peter Joseph and welcome to Revolution Now! Episode 34, December 24th, 2021. The opening audio was from my 2020 film InterReflections, where Simon, our cliche antagonist explains to John, our cliche protagonist what the Malthusian mandate is.

For those familiar with the film, the work is built around debate related to philosophical mythology put forward by Thomas Malthus, and by extension proponents of social Darwinism. These philosophies are embedded and characterized by the Simon character in this “great debate” structure, linking things back to the opening credit scene of the film with R. Buckminster Fuller, explaining why we don’t take care of the poor on this planet.

Reason being because it’s tacitly assumed that there simply isn’t enough to go around, and the poor will always exist, and will always suffer and die due to inherent scarcity, even though there’s no qualification. Hence also motivation for constant war, because if you believe in scarcity, you automatically assume conflict with again, no nuance.

And Fuller coined the term, “Livingry,” in this context, as opposed to “weaponry,” to highlight the clear and obvious global interest at this stage of our cultural evolution, to do more to buttress means of conflict and warfare, as opposed to actually providing the necessities of life for the entire human population, which is actually the true resolution to war and conflict overall.

In fact, even though I try to stay away from temporal subjects on this podcast, current events- in the United States right now, a bill was passed for some $800 billion for the military, and another bill for about half of that, for general social interests, and even that continues to be greatly disputed. So we can afford massive warfare, but we can’t afford basic social safety nets. Just another example of the sickness of society’s motivations, always exaggerated in America, no doubt.

Anyway, back to the film’s context, the Malthusian mandate concept also serves as a direct response to conspiratorial thinking, something that has gone far off the cliff today in conspiracy culture, as I’ve talked about before. So much delusion out there, usually centered around opposition to some invisible group pulling all the strings. Hence the phrase earlier in the film, “No conspiracy required.”

Rather, the Malthusian mandate is a belief in the market God, allowing market self-regulation, if you will, to continue to harm the species through structural violence, particularly those that are poor. And while the Malthusian mandate is something of an exaggeration, it is indeed close to the truth, very close to the truth philosophically. In the film, the GSA or the satirical Global Security Agency, has a secret unknown mandate to respect market outcomes in a neoliberal practice, including the destruction of the ecosystem, because that destruction is going to harm the poor first, as well, as a kind of mechanism to continue downward pressure on the poor, so they die off more quickly.

Hence the true reality of our world isn’t that some individual sits around and says, “Ah, we’re going to ignore this poverty stricken region over here, just so people can get sick and die as the earth requires,” as per the philosophy, of course. Rather, the structural violence is systemic to the system, and all power really has to do is just let the market unfold naturally in its true system reality, not per the principles of free markets, which gets into delusional territory on its own.

The most detrimental form of harm that we see affecting the world’s population are the market externalities, which disproportionately harm the poor more, once again, showing classism, a violent death cult classism. And as I said last podcast, there’s a moral imperative to this observation, which I hope will take root in some people. We are all not necessarily perpetuators of structural violence, but we all are enablers by force of our very participation in the system itself.

That stated, I’m now going to, with great discipline, purposefully sideline any more opening tangents and move directly into this ongoing list of capitalist myths and propaganda, started a number of episodes back. We have covered four of these so far, if anyone wishes to review. And since dissemination has been a bit disjointed over many episodes, I will put all these things together in one podcast as just a supplemental organization, so all of these can be laid out and listened to in one shot.

Overall, what you find with all of these myths are themes surrounding a fundamental ignorance of what economics is, along with an enormous amount of cultural assumption and subjective interpretation, usually associated to group identity in a kind of ideological conformity. It’s always fascinating to me, how really poor folks living in restrictive environments, highly coerced because of their poverty, still gravitate toward supporting market propaganda, even though it is systemically at the core of their destitution.

People that truly don’t understand the mechanisms of their own oppression, and then fall back on delusional symbols of hate, casting blame on things such as socialism, as if that’s a definable term, state interference, government and other distractions. The Conservative Parties of the West in a way, don’t even believe in government, if you pay attention to their rhetoric.

And this leads us now to the fifth myth, that market economics or capitalism is all about freedom. It’s all about freedom and personal choice. Didn’t you know that? That’s what we’re taught, isn’t it? I think of all the general propaganda floating out there that pollutes people’s minds, this just might be the most persistent. And I’ve organized this into four counters, if you will.

First, we’re going to define freedom in basic principle. Second, we’ll cover the historical roots of this political assumption because the true context of the word is not actually operational. It’s simply political and relative to history.

Third, we’ll cover how the very notion of freedom becomes internally contradicted by market structure itself. And fourth, we’ll step back and ask what freedom truly means from an economic and social perspective, and ponder what kind of economic structure would actually support freedom.

All right. So first, what does this horribly abused term freedom actually mean? As the late Jacque Fresco would say, “When someone comes up to you and starts talking about freedom and democracy, watch out.” How many wars have been initiated by the American Empire and British Empire before inevitably promoting the idea of spreading freedom across the land to tame the heathens?

So what is freedom? Well, in basic principle, it’s about doing what you choose without inhibition, coercion or limitation, right? Yet while I may have the freedom to stand up and wander around my apartment right now, I’m still restricted to the floor. I can’t just decide to walk on my wall and defy gravity up to the ceiling and hang out there. So obviously, we don’t have any kind of pure freedom.

Socially, the same goes for safety preserving constraints. Do I have the freedom to just randomly go up to somebody on the street and kill them and have no recourse? No, I don’t by social contract because such behavior poses a threat to everyone. We devise social norms in an attempt to limit the degree of harm one person can inflict upon another for the sake of social integrity, and necessarily so.

It isn’t just a moral issue. It’s an issue of social stability once again. This is why intolerance of people’s freedom of speech, such as racists and bigots, any group of people that think they can exist and another group should not exist, is not a viable disposition for species sustainability. Hence, society comes down on those concepts and necessarily so. Like why is it illegal, forbidden for a person to drive a car intoxicated? It would be one thing if only the irresponsible person was in danger, but if you’re surrounded by the public in a city, obviously a drunk driver puts everyone else in danger.

Likewise, we have the COVID reality, and there is no end to people today that take issue with simply wearing masks or even getting a vaccine, not due to viable concerns, which are arguable and exist, but simply because it’s an imposition on one’s liberty. “How dare you tell me what to do?”

Bill Burr had a funny joke describing mask hesitancy, saying something to the effect that people aren’t willing to wear a mask for two minutes to go into a convenience store, to buy a beef jerky without thinking they’re living behind the Berlin wall. In fact, COVID is kind of a case study in bringing out notoriously awful selfish tendencies that people have.

It’s as if people have no idea what an infectious disease even is. People say things, “Well, it’s my body. It’s my choice.” But that very statement doesn’t realize that everything we do is causally linked systemically, and that very notion of detachment, separation is a fundamental example of how individualism has ruined the psychology of the West to a large degree, creating a kind of religion out of personal choice, ignoring all social consequences, as if people’s behavior doesn’t automatically by force of that behavior, affect others. And this is not an opinion. It’s basic system science, and people’s communication and speech, and actions, or lack thereof, always have a social consequence. It might be minor. It might be severe, but it’s always there.

Anyway, enough of that, and back on point. So obviously, when people say freedom today, they are referring to something culturally specific, because most intuitively understand that they don’t have absolute freedom on any level. They can’t override the laws of nature or ignore general social safety.

So freedom is really a kind of political and economic concept, with a deep philosophical history. Modern libertarianism probably best embraces all of this. Vague ideas like voluntarism or just being generally opposed to state power, loyal of course, to free markets in the assumption that the system can properly self-regulate. And it’s like a religion once again, like God knows all. “It self-regulates efficiently. It takes care of everything. It sees everything. It can of course, adapt to changing environmental conditions.” And of course, all of that is false.

When people say freedom in the sociopolitical economic context here, they are basically referencing a lack of authority or imposition. No coercive force coming from other people or institutions. And that framework alone is a powerful breeding ground for superficial defensiveness, a one-stop shop to deter any kind of uncomfortable necessity.

“Oh, we got to do something about the economy to combat climate destabilization.” “Fuck that. I believe in freedom.” We’ve created slogans in our society, which form a kind of mantra of ignorant childlike stubbornness, reinforced of course, by the economic system’s terrible incentives.

If we expect to live peacefully and coexist as a species sustainably, everything becomes a compromise between what you wish to do, and what is socially appropriate. Hence, respecting others’ health and well-being. That’s simply being responsible, as ridiculous as it is for me to have to point that out.

But once again, the incentives go the other direction. There’s a reason businesses are deterred from engaging more sustainable practices or reducing pollution. It’s because it affects their bottom line, of course. So what does the company do? Well, they’re going to naturally gravitate towards a philosophical disposition that allows them to justify that negative behavior.

So it’s no surprise or coincidence that these huge leaders are very much against state interference, hiding behind free market philosophy. Even Elon Musk, if you notice how he reacts to impositions upon his wealth, he takes an anti-socialist stance because in his interpretation of all this, he thinks that as a capital allocator, he is smarter than everyone else, and he should be allowed the freedom to do whatever he wants, and of course, create infinite wealth for himself if he wants to do that too.

Speaking of which, we can extend this logic to the very existence of the wealthy. We are told that a person has the freedom to accrue and purchase whatever they want. They can hoard billions, if not, trillions, have endless mansions, fly around in countless private jets, and no one can say a thing because, freedom.

Yet the wealthy have an enormous disproportional ecological footprint because of their materialism and status seeking behavior, so much so that a very small percentage of these folks are responsible for a substantial percentage of greenhouse gas emissions, among other problems.

Pollution that will actually roll over and affect billions of normal people. Do the rich have the freedom to engage this behavior, even though it’s causing systemic harm? Are they free to engage this behavior when we understand that markets are a fundamentally zero sum game, and for some to be rich, others must be poor?

There are endless examples of this kind of relativity. Selfishness versus social consciousness. In fact, let’s explore one notion of this in libertarian philosophy that I mentioned prior, voluntarism. In market behavior, the act of voluntary trade is considered the ultimate moral priority. The idea is simple, as with all these ideas. As long as no one is being perceived as coerced by someone else into an act of trade, that trade must be an act of freedom for mutual benefit. End of story.

So a woman has a ring. She goes into a pawn shop and sells it. From this perspective, the exchange is considered to be mutually beneficial to both parties since the woman willfully sold the ring and the shopkeeper willfully bought it. This simple idea of exchange, mutual beneficial exchange, is held up by a microeconomic theorists to argue that trade always serves the best interests of both parties in that moment, since they’re both just exchangers, maximizing their utility or personal benefit, hence the negotiation between parties, and so forth.

Now, the problem with this view is that it ignores all other systemic pressures that distort the will of the individuals making the trade. From a voluntary perspective, it doesn’t matter why the trade occurs. As long as it appears, once again, both parties are acting in their free will without coercion in the exchange.

But therein lies the myopicness, because what if that ring being pawned was the woman’s dead husband’s who had recently been in a fatal accident, leading his family with no income or means? So in distress, with bills to pay and no social safety net in the region she lives, the wife sees no alternative, but to sell off an extremely highly sentimental personal item because there’s no choice.

Can we still call it voluntary? Again, in the abstraction of the snapshot of trade, sure. But in reality, the circumstance cannot be dismissed as simply voluntary, just as we can’t view as simply voluntary, the choice of an impoverished, drug addicted, mentally handicapped prostitute to exchange sex, to get more drugs.

Life is a sea of complex coercive pressures and external forces occurring both consciously and subconsciously. Hence, this snapshot of voluntary exchange. Voluntarism is a dangerous free will illusion as it distorts social perception of causality. In effect, it masks, it hides the fundamentally coercive nature of the system itself.

Yeah, you can choose between a bunch of different corporations in your field, but guess what? You’re going to have to submit to one of them, if you want to survive. Furthermore, that reductionist myopicness has been compounded by vast historical propaganda that relentlessly likes to make comparisons between the USSR and communism, when faced with any criticism of the market model of economics.

It’s weaponized rhetoric, where anything that isn’t capitalism can only be totalitarianism, and so forth. And while there is certainly something to be said for understanding what has happened historically, today there is very little constructive understanding about what occurred during the time of the Soviet Union, in the West, when it comes to arguments in favor of the current system, it’s just a giant political correlation through vague association, which is perhaps the most powerful propaganda technique.

You always work to discredit something by association when you have no actual argument against it. I’d say 90% of the people that argue with me about the necessity of capitalism, reference historical communism as a point of debate, which is truly sad because there’s no argument being made whatsoever in reality.

Think back to the McCarthy era of the early 20th century, and this constant search for people that basically had an identification with a value system that wasn’t cutthroat individualism and selfishness, and suddenly, they were evil communists because of those values. The whole thing would be comedic if it wasn’t so absurd. Even the classic movie, It’s A Wonderful Life was once considered socialist propaganda by the FBI.

And most importantly here, just around this subtopic out, as I’ve stated repeatedly, it doesn’t matter what happened historically. It doesn’t matter if Soviet communism existed or not, because it doesn’t change anything in regard to understanding the need and reasons to evolve out of the current economic order, not just because we have assumed that we can do better by some kind of comparison, as is implied by the false duality between capitalism and communism, but simply due to the lack of integrity itself, the lack of fundamental system integrity in and of itself. The engine doesn’t work, doesn’t matter what you compare the engine to, it still doesn’t work.

The question is what is the system doing and why? And is it acceptable? And the overwhelming answer to that is no. So what are our options, otherwise? Once you remove the political and philosophical lens, you’re faced with a series of goals such as being sustainable. And you look through the lens of system dynamics and modeling, and you begin to see that there is no alteration of the current system that’s really going to create a sustainable and humane course. It has to be changed.

Political and democratic influence is actually no match for the total system feedback loop power. In other words, it only goes in one direction like a river, and it will maintain that flow because it’s more powerful than the political management mechanisms. Doesn’t matter how many barriers you put up to try and stop the current, it will overcome them in time.

That stated, let’s now move on to the third sub issue, which is the structure of business itself, and how the very notion of this freedom actually becomes internally contradicted by market structure. And let me just say in overview, that there is indeed a defining characteristic, aspect of freedom in the market system, and that is the freedom to inhibit the freedom of others.

Put another way, the most notable element of financial freedom in business is to inhibit the freedom of others by the creation and exploitation of artificial scarcity in a top-down, undemocratic, competitive hierarchy that produces constant inequity and inequality. It is the freedom of power to maintain itself without recourse as well. It is the freedom to not care about how your economic actions or your actions in general, affect other people or the habitat itself.

In this kind of economic system, one that lacks all democratic equality, one that has no equal opportunity, which is another myth, you are only as free as your purchasing power will allow you to be. And those with more money than you are not only more free to do things that you will not be able to do because of affordability, or other related limitations. But those with more money also have more power to restrict your freedom, as money equates to power.

Class war exists for a very critical structural reason, it’s built in. The notable freedoms enabled by market capitalism are so deeply slanted in favor of the already rich and already powerful, it’s cartoonish to say that the system itself represents freedom for everyone. Hence, the American Dream mythology, as a way to confuse the issue to say that true freedom is the freedom to rise up across the socioeconomic hierarchy, so you too can be rich and powerful yourself, right?

What that myth does is validate those that are already rich and powerful, ultimately creating a contrary pressure as it’s mathematically impossible for everyone to rise up and be rich. In fact, if I was a totalitarian social planner, the most clever thing I could ever come up with as a ruse to ensure the vast majority of people are subservient to me, to enrich me, would be the theory of free market economics.

It’s one giant philosophical fraud that implies one thing, but operates in the exact opposite manner. Nothing more powerful than slaves that don’t realize they’re slaves. Capitalism is one of the most effective systems of social control ever created.

And for fun, building upon this prior subject of Soviet Communism, if that prior system is to be understood as characterized by top-down, dictatorial control, a totalitarian bureaucracy of central planning, well, what is a corporation then? If you remove the profit system and basic network of the corporation, and just look at how it engages control and decision-making itself, in its own hierarchy, it’s very difficult to find differentiation from basic totalitarian principle and form.

Businesses, once again, are dictatorships pure and simple. And ironically, that is where the notion of freedom is actually born – uninhibited freedom of the business dictatorships. Let’s imagine for a moment, say Amazon continued to expand at will without antitrust laws, and was able to acquire every single company on the planet, for the sake of argument.

Amazon becomes a giant planetary corporation to meet all the needs of the world, remaining of course, a private company, meaning the public still has zero democratic input as to its policies, its practices, its methodologies, and so forth. Is that the kind of institution you want running the economic ecosystem, or in fact, the world by extension, given everyone’s reliance on this one institution? Is that the character of a society that you appreciate? I hope you see the problem there.

How can capitalism be an expression of personal freedom, when the very structure is literally the opposite of participatory choice? And sorry for redundancy here, as I know I touched upon some of these issues in the prior podcast, which dealt with the fallacy of capitalism relating to democracy itself. But as, as George Carlin comedically pointed out years ago, your freedom in consumer capitalist society seems to be the ability to choose between 40 different kinds of cereal or toothpaste, which are ultimately made by just a handful of companies anyway.

You certainly don’t see that level of choice in say political parties. And obviously, the point I’m trying to make here is that replete within this economic structure are numerous characteristics that are fundamentally totalitarian. The only difference is that the mechanisms of control and dominance are coming from private institutions as opposed to state power.

Consider freedom of speech issues. Instead of a state mandate that certain things can’t be said, you have Twitter and Google, and Facebook, that comprise a kind of monopoly over what kind of data can be disseminated on the internet or not. And we’re seeing a rapid acceleration, basically capitalizing on fear over COVID and misinformation, coupled with a completely degenerated conspiracy culture, spearheaded by the Alex Jones style community.

Along with levels of propaganda now, surfacing on the internet that are truly unprecedented, creating basically a self-reinforcing feedback loop for more censorship. But that complexity aside, you’re still dealing with private companies deciding what you can and cannot say. And that framework alone is very problematic because the public should have a say.

At the end of the day, what you see is that capitalism is comprised of a litany of mini dictatorships, privately owned with the illusion of freedom, granted only because there appear to be many of them. Hence, because there is some choice, the wage slave feels more free, even though fundamentally coerced by the system in total, to submit for survival because there’s no other option.

Overall, in order for the system’s illusion to persist, it’s important to keep all the mini dictatorships fighting with each other for market share as the system desperately needs such diversity to keep up this appearance, even though there is a constant gravitation for power consolidation, concentration in the dynamics of market warfare, which once again, always contradict the theory of this sort of open free enterprise system, where equilibrium is maintained through various diversity, when that is actually not the natural gravitation.

Monopolies and cartels are not anomalies in the system, they are end game organic goals, as companies attempt to infinitely grow, expand their market share, and conquer competitors. All of this is to say that the structurally induced institutional and general social outcomes born from the system are far more inclined toward restrictive totalitarian posturing than anything else. I call the whole phenomenon “structural classism” in my book, The New Human Rights Movement, which of course, relates back to the opening audio from InterReflections as well.

In this system of oppression, which is exactly what it is, a series of overlapping feedback loops ensure that the majority remain constrained, with a lack of social mobility and a lack of democratic power in favor of ultimately oligarchs. The intention of the structure as empirically and formally obvious, is to stifle the majority in favor of the minority.

The clever thing is it does so in a completely Orwellian way with this entire body of philosophy surrounding freedom, that claims the opposite of reality. The very statement free market is hilariously Orwellian, because once again, it’s the freedom to inhibit the freedom of others through competitive dynamics.

And finally, moving on to the fourth subsection, let’s pose the thought exercise of what actually constitutes freedom? Freedom in an economy, freedom in society, and how does this fundamental principle of democracy apply as well? And by the way, when I say democracy, I’m not referring to the Representative game that we’ve conjured in the modern day.

It’s the core principle that there should be some kind of self-determination driven by consensus, which I think everyone would agree with. Of course, that assumes certain things like an educated population and all of that, but that’s for another conversation.

Now, it’s important to highlight that if there’s any pattern that we have seen throughout cultural evolution, it is the slow move away from conditions of civil oppression in general, working to generate equal rights between once oppressed groups, such as the American Civil Rights Movement and Black society, or women’s liberation, LGBTQ, and so forth.

In this general quest, slow march toward equality, you’ll notice something interesting, and that’s that everyone just stops short when it comes to the economy. Any kind of economic equality is suddenly taboo, hence this fraudulent philosophy that you can only get what you work for. And all of those foundational myths that we’ve talked about before. The poor are responsible for their own poverty and so forth.

Yet, the trend is still there. What happens if we simply follow this evolutionary pattern and arrive finally at the most critical factor related to human rights and public health? Which is of course economic engagement, participatory economic democracy.

Now, what that looks like is still an ongoing conversation. Again, I talk about it in my book. Generally, decentralized, autonomous organizations utilizing peer to peer networks in a collaborative fashion, empowered by development in science and technology, and efficiency, carves out a basic concept of what the new system would look like.

So I’m going to conclude this issue today without going into detail about technical organization, and simply talk about the most obvious fundamental principles from a public health and ecological sustainability standpoint, because that’s the purpose of an economy, to sustain and improve public health while maintaining homeostatic balance with the ecosystem. While of course, manifesting a condition of actual freedom, responsible freedom, a freedom that respects fundamentally, the rights of others in a humane way, along with a freedom that respects the natural laws of our ecosystem in order to remain sustainable.

In these basic constraints that are required for our survival, how do you envision your life? Do you see freedom as having to get into a car every day and drive into traffic, into smog, to go into some contrived glass office building that doesn’t produce anything, and push paper around for 40, 50 hours a week? Is that freedom?

Is it the freedom to be able to walk into a store, if you have money, and buy the food that you need to survive, or is more freedom attached to the idea of not having to purchase anything, and having the necessities of life provided through structure. So instead of having to earn a living in high stress your entire existence, you can actually live your life.

Markets psychology and hence philosophy has created a contrived idea of freedom that has nothing to do with resolving problems in your life, but rather assuming diversity in how you service those problems by way of submission to labor and consumer expression. Real freedom is living in a society that recognizes everyone has shared needs, working efficiently to meet those needs as a prerequisite for existence, to allow people to actually flourish, as opposed to just getting by.

Again, this is all deeply entrenched in that Malthusian socially Darwinistic sickness that we still carry forward. It seems to me, true freedom is the freedom not to have to worry about where your next meal comes from, or whether you’re going to be able to pay your rent next month. And as alluded to prior, when it comes to sustainability, aside from the fact that everything I’ve just mentioned is the most ideal for elevated public health, because obviously, if you provide the necessities of life, people are going to be more individually healthy, their behaviors are going to be more amiable. You’re going to see a reduction in crime, and so forth and so forth.

But when it comes to sustainability, integration is always more efficient than dispersion. One system is going to operate more efficiently than a bunch of disparate systems that are not properly linked. The technical task of say, feeding a civilization directly through democratic choice processes, participatory economics, not top-down totalitarianism, but efficiency through networks, not stratification, is always, by technical reality, going to be more efficient than the contrived game of market participation and competition.

Market capitalism is once again, just a proxy system, a system that doesn’t need to exist. It’s an interference, in fact. A proxy system of engagement by which all other things are allowed to arise. Get rid of the proxy system, look at what needs to be done technically; get feedback from the general public through advanced mechanisms that again, I’ll be talking about in future works, and the level of efficiency possible would be catastrophically higher than any kind of market-based engagement.

So not only would a post capitalist, post scarcity system improve sustainability and public health, it would also create an almost stunning level of true human freedom. Something people have literally never known yet, because we are still stuck in basically a slave rooted system. And I’m not saying that to be hyperbolic. This is how it’s evolved.

Wage slavery came right out of abject slavery as a natural transition. And those of us who are opposed to this system, really are part of a longstanding abolitionist movement against group oppression. Only this time, the oppressed group doesn’t have to be a particular minority or ethnicity, or even gender. All of those things are actually consequential.

At the root, the most oppressed group of people are those with limited resources and capacities. And the goal of the system is to keep those people limited and oppressed, hence the term “class war” once again.

And that does it for me today folks, I really appreciate you listening. This is brought to you by my Patreon and I will see you all in the new year. So 2022, let’s hope it’s not a goddam nightmare like 2021 and 2020. All right folks, take care out there.