Liberal capitalism is not the ultimate form

The following Slavoj Žižek video is only one minute long. In it, he explains that we need another system simply because the one we have is so utterly inadequate to the tasks before it.

…on why he is a communist, but not a socialist by Slavoj Žižek (YouTube)

“I remain a communist. In what sense? My good friend told me he was there, as part of some delegation, two days after Fukushima. He told me that, for a couple of hours, the Japanese government was in total panic. It looked that they will have to evacuate the entire Tokyo area: 30 million people. Then, maybe, they didn’t have to, maybe they hushed up some data and didn’t care […]

“It’s clear that we are facing problems where neither market nor state—the way we have it today—will be able to do it. And, that’s, for me, the space for something that I prefer to call communism, not socialism. Because, today, everybody is a socialist. I read an interview—Bill Gates is a socialist! Socialism means, today, yeah, not too much egotism, we should take care of each other, and so on and so on.

“Don’t forget that we lack cognitive mapping, kind of a global narrative—never a postmodernist; we need big global narratives. Liberal capitalism is not the ultimate form. It will not work.”

I was reading one of Ars Technica’s Rocket Reports, which reminded me that our system has no idea how to use resources and energy efficiently. We don’t share information between space programs because they are all at-odds with each other. The ESA, NASA, SpaceX, India, Japan, China, Russia—they all do their own thing, probably chortling when others fail, and just generally inefficiently wasting resources and energy replicating each other’s mistakes, as well as getting an occasional success. Imagine if nation-states cooperated instead of squabbling.

I was talking to someone this morning and he was wondering how Los Angeles would get everything done that it needed to do by 2028, for its Olympics. He said that he’d heard that they were going to add so many new bus lines for the Olympics that they would ban cars during the Olympics and never allow them again. If only! There is literally no way that the U.S. will be able to pull its thumb out of its ass to do anything approaching something that consequential. I posited that it was unlikely that the Olympics would even happen as hoped since everything would get mired down in negotiations over whose beak should get wet on the deal, instead of focusing on how to do things. By the time they’ve agreed how to carve up the money pie, still no-one would have any idea how to actually get the work done—or where to find the people to do it. This is not a system that knows how to do anything but strip-mine financialized markets.