Insider Trading
Remember Lance Parkin’s Big Finish audio ‘Davros’? It’s quite good, isn’t it… if far too long. But he does some interesting stuff with Davros’ backstory, subverting your expectations a bit. (It’s got really good music too.)
Interesting stuff in it. The Doctor is depicted as wanting to stop the fall of the corporations. And, actually, I can see his point. At the moment, anyway. And as long as we’re talking about a sudden, instant fall.
Simply remove capitalism at the touch of a button today and human civilisation as it stands would fall, and the human race might die out… for much the same reason that the animals in a battery farm would all die if you murdered all the farm workers and the crime went undiscovered for weeks. As bad as it is, it is currently how things work. The system doesn’t function efficiently, or for human benefit, but it does basically function, and it relies upon keeping a sufficient number of people alive, and a sufficient level of social wellbeing going, simply because it lives off its human livestock. So it keeps the livestock alive by propping up the support systems that keep them alive, at least as a mass.
On the other hand, isn’t the continuation of capitalism itself a kind of slow-mo apocalypse? Is the damage currently being wrought upon the planet’s ecosystem not going to add up to the end of the world? Does not the system as it stands condemn millions to death every year, and billions more to an alienated and impoverished living death? There’s a case for saying that quotidian reality itself is a crisis, that our day-to-day world is not only leading us to armageddon but that, even if we survive it, that would not automatically for the best? Couldn’t we reasonably say that the fall of the system, even in flames and mass-starvation, would not be inherently worse than allowing it to continue?
It’s tempting to not only appreciate the aesthetics of apocalypse, but to go beyond such an appreciation as an asesthetic statement and turn it into a political one. As cold-blooded as this sounds, isn’t it possible to see the end of the world – millions of deaths and all – as a price worth paying for the end of capitalism? The end of the world… I mean the end of the world as it stands economically, politically, culturally, structurally… would at least be general. As the man said: “the thing about chaos is it’s fair”. It could be seen as having greater moral integrity to say ‘let it all come down’ as opposed to ‘prop it up at all costs until we can change it piecemeal and as peacefully as poss’. Propping it up doesn’t have such terrible consequences for me and a lot of other comfortable Western leftists and liberals. I’m not personally all that harmed by day-to-day capitalism. I don’t like it, but my outrage is mainly on behalf of others, and on behalf of humanity generally. …
