A dying West devours its children

JONATHAN COOK

We are on the brink of a series of self-inflicted catastrophes, from which humanity will be exceptionally lucky to survive. There is a path ahead, but being able to see it and understand where it leads will require—at least for most Westerners—a great leap of imagination. It will force us to let go of many of the things we have been taught to identify with. It will demand that we realize that our most cherished values ​​are, in fact, harmful.

Without a doubt, it is an arduous task.

I'm reminded of a question that Sunny Hundal, once a leading figure in centrist liberalism, posed to critics of the status quo in 2014. Hundal asked the readers of his then-influential blog, "Liberal Conspiracy":

If they want to replace the current capitalist system with another, who will manufacture their jeans, their iPhones, and manage Twitter?

It is worth noting that Hundal soon abandoned his blog and became a spokesperson for the corporate energy sector.

However, it's revealing how outdated liberal arguments from just 12 years ago sound now. It's like stepping back into the Victorian era.

Today, Twitter is called X and it's not run by a nice guy named "Jack," but by a self-made billionaire named Elon Musk. That's the man who hopes to one day use his personal rocket program to colonize space. Meanwhile, he believes that Muslims and their "liberal" allies must be expelled from the West to prevent a civil war he seems determined to provoke.

Similarly, liberals are no longer as enthusiastic about mobile phones as they were in 2014, when the iPhone was considered the ultimate proof of humanity's progress through technological innovation. Now, liberals want to protect young people from their screens, possibly because those screens often depict all too graphically how our leaders, both liberal and conservative, have been actively collaborating in a genocide and are bent on destroying the planet.

Jeans… well, I guess liberals still find it impossible to imagine a good life without a pair of 501s.

The Western liberal, of course, cannot conceive of the idea that jeans or iPhones can be manufactured independently of capitalism, let alone the suggestion that owning six pairs of jeans and getting rid of the iPhone every two years is not the best way to make use of the planet's limited resources.

Crumbs from the table

The truth is that democracy—of the liberal variety—is not an inherent characteristic of political life in what we usually call "the West." There is nothing inevitable or irreversible about liberal democracy.

In fact, the West has only been superficially democratic—in the sense that everyone has the right to vote—for the last century. Even then, democracy has been highly restricted and controlled: the public typically has to choose between two capitalist parties, one more extreme than the other, after a lifetime of exposure to opinions shaped by capitalism's biggest beneficiaries: the billionaire media owners.

And, of course, “democracy” in these terms has only worked at home. The West’s colonial “adventures”—the subjugation and plundering of the Global South’s resources—never truly ceased.

For a few decades of the so-called “postcolonial” era, we installed compliant local dictators to do our dirty work. In the last quarter of a century, we have reverted to our usual practices: openly threatening, invading, and plundering states that do not readily submit to our dictates.

In a world with increasingly scarce resources, our leaders have decided they must break the very rules of war they themselves formulated after World War II. The law of the jungle has returned.

In fact, Western “democracy” is not a product of our culture. It is a product of time and circumstance. With kings and princes giving way to a new generation of merchants and entrepreneurs, the early capitalists proved to be even more adept at theft.

An expanding middle class, living on scraps, was indoctrinated to defend liberal values ​​that justified the great inequalities of wealth as a consequence of a supposed meritocracy.

The contradictions inherent in the theory and practice of liberalism culminated in a brief experiment in the last century: the working class and women were given a symbolic vote — to elect one of the loyal representatives of the ruling class — in exchange for becoming fervent advocates of free-market consumption.

But in an age of decline, these contradictions have become increasingly difficult to contain. As surpluses disappear, so do the liberal values ​​to which our “democratic elites” once professed verbal loyalty.

Lust for power

The ruling class understands that the situation is changing. The world's resources are finite and are being depleted. Capitalism's model of mass consumption can only hasten the end. Consumption pollutes the planet. It fuels climate chaos. It decimates other species that sustain a living planet.