What will replace capitalism as we currently know it? (Photo: Wolf-Ulf Wulfrolf / Flickr)
As we automate more jobs and continue on a road to scarcity of resources, whither capitalism? The following is the Truthout interview with Peter Frase, author of Four Futures.
Mark Karlin: Your very first sentence in your introduction describes contextual forces that shape your book: “Two specters are haunting Earth in the twenty-first century: the specters of ecological catastrophe and automation.” Can you, in a paragraph or two, describe the potential impact of ecological catastrophe on economic systems in general?
Peter Frase: One of the distinctive peculiarities of capitalism is the way it inverts the logic of scarcity and abundance. That is, it tries to impose scarcity where none need exist, while at the same time treating truly scarce things as though they are actually unlimited.
Artificial scarcities are imposed wherever landlords are allowed to charge exorbitant rents, where drug companies charge enormous rates for drugs that cost virtually nothing to produce, where people are sued for thousands of dollars for downloading a few music files, and so on. Yet when it comes to our ecosystems, businesses will, wherever possible, extract resources with no regard to their potential exhaustion, and dump their waste into our air and water.
People are increasingly recognizing the limits of that strategy, as can be seen in everything from the depletion of ocean fish populations to lack of access to fresh water to the accelerating impact of climate change due to atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions. However,…