Industry Is Doomed I Think

The fundament of capitalism is exploitation — let us divorce that word from its connotations for a moment and simply discuss what it actually means. Exploitation means taking what is available and using it for your benefit. The word has negative connotation because of a zero-sum perspective, exploited material was taken from someone else. But even this framing has some inherent flaws. If we take this as being the reason exploitation is bad, then exploitation of public resources is framed as its acceptable opposite. What I mean is that capitalism tries to establish a dichotomy between fair and unfair exploitation, and frame all problems as being the result of the unfair exploitation — a corporation that poisons a nearby population (exploiting their area as a dumping ground), a government that fights a war over resource generating terrain, a person who makes their money through a financial scam, et cetera — and in creating this image of exploitation we successfully distance the idea of stepping back a considerable distance and determining whether exploitation of public resources is also inherently troublesome.

The situation is actually quite Malthusian. Much discussion has been had about topics such as the "tragedy of the commons" and "social traps", how people enriching themselves can destroy shared resources when left to their own devices. But I think there is a critically underexamined element here. People destroy shared resources to enrich themselves. Our economic perspectives are often driven by this idea that enriching oneself without limit is such a fundamental and natural action that people will do it in any situation. But I can't help but wonder whether such perspectives are flawed.

I am not trying to say that greed is a recent invention, that is obviously foolish. Many pre-capital societies have radically transformed their ecosystem and caused the rapid extinction of organisms they utilized as a resource. Nor am I trying to say that humans do not desire power or that life's natural drives don't guide humanity towards expansion. Rather, I am stating that by writing off the human urge to exploit resources as a natural tendency that cannot be mollified, we give the elements of our system that encourage exploitation a free pass.

I wrote a few days ago about how one of the main ways capitalism itself functions being that it reduces your value to how much you possess. More specifically, it creates a situation where if you have no money, everyone will leave you to die. There is no security except money, so anyone who desires security must be striving to find money wherever they can. This creates an "incentive" for people to protect themselves and those they care about by doing whatever makes them money, regardless of whether what makes them money hurts people in some direct or indirect way. Most people don't like doing work that directly hurts others, but many people work jobs that indirectly hurt everyone in a very small way - industrial work that poisons the atmosphere, etc.

What I find interesting is that this creates a fundamental interest in locating everything that can possibly exploited and becoming as efficient at exploiting it as possible. When it became apparent that we were running out of traditional oilfields, humanity figured out how to start using nontraditional ones. "Urban mining" and the intensive recycling of spent metal has always been possible, but there is "no money in it" so it was not heavily researched or performed. There are many positive goals that humans could theoretically perform for the benefit of us all, but if there's "no money in it", what that really means is that the exploitation of public resources is still more efficient if the goal is to make money.

That is to say, the only means by which a capitalist-industrial system eventually stops exploiting its public environment is for it to eventually become so completely impossible for it to do so that there is nothing profitable left to sell. Difficult recycling is simply not profitable in comparison to collecting raw resources, so there is no large-scale pressure to start recycling until there is nothing left to consume.

The incentive also means that while many people may feel strongly about these problems and would probably, in theory, be totally willing to do the difficult work of recycling or whatever other unprofitable stability-focused goal we may have, they don't have time to spend their life doing it because they are too busy helping other people extract resources because that's the only thing they are allowed to do to survive. The only people who can do something unprofitable under capitalism are people who already have enough money, perhaps because they hold "reliable investments", or because they are being supported by someone else who does work.

So all I really mean here is, it is abundantly obvious to anyone who actually walks through the societal precepts that it industrial capitalism is based on the idea of processing every natural resource that isn't nailed down, and the only internal mechanism for eventually trying to recycle unnatural resources is when the natural resource is rendered extinct and it has nothing else to sell. It cannot save itself from this fate, and those within who might seek to stop it are trapped as gears within its framework because that which is unprofitable dies. Somewhat unfairly, anyone trying to create a rival system is in a bind because their industrial neighbor will eventually determine that the only unspoiled resource is whatever the person not exploiting their own environment is living on, and calculate that the most efficient strategy is probably killing them for it.

I'm not entirely sure what can be done about this, and it is ultimately just thought experiment. But it has been on my mind as of late...