Every human being grows we grow through childhood,
then when we hit adulthood we reach a plateau.
Our body has a regulating system which stops growth beyond a certain point.
Occasionally that system breaks down and a cell begins to multiply,
and to grow without regulation and we call that cancer.
Cancer is basically infinite growth within a finite living system,
which is the human body.
That is exactly what is happening with capitalism,
capitalism is dependent on infinite growth,
within a finite living system which is the planet.
Capitalism is the planets cancer,
and just like cancer in the human body we have to cut it out.
All through my adult life have been railing against corporate capitalism,
and consumer capitalism, and crony capitalism,
these are the real problems.
and it's taken a long time for the penny to drop.
Maybe the problem isn't the kind of capitalism
maybe the problem is capitalism.
So let's look at the planetary disaster:
We're losing the soil, we're losing the fresh water, we're losing the insects,
we're losing all the other astonishing species that we share this planet with.
We're losing the coral reefs, we're losing the rainforests,
we're losing everything and it's all going at a phenomenal rate.
What's causing this?
The driving force is economic growth.
A global economy growing at 3% a year doubles every 24 years.
And then it doubles again, and then it doubles again,
that's the trajectory we're supposed to be on.
That's what governments want where it just keeps doubling and doubling.
Which would be just fine if the planet was growing at the same rate,
but we live on a finite planet,
and infinite growth on a finite planet is a recipe for catastrophe.
The only way it's been done so far is to use ever-increasing,
areas of the world as places we effectively steal from.
Where the most powerful parts of the world extract materials and cheap labor,
from the weaker parts of the world.
And then ever greater parts of the world have to be used as a dump,
to dump our waste until basically the whole world,
is an extraction zone and a dump.
The whole atmosphere is the dump for carbon dioxide,
our cities are a dump for air pollution, our land is a dump for all the junk,
that we use for a day or two and then get bored of and pass on.
Which you have to do if economic growth is going to continue.
If you've got enough money you can buy a piece of land.
You can buy the right to pollute the atmosphere with your private plane.
You can buy a bluefin tuna steak despite the fact,
that you're driving a species into extinction.
You can buy mahogany furniture,
whose extraction is causing massive destruction in the Amazon.
Money translates into a right to natural wealth.
Why, what's the just principle? There isn't one.
And yet that unjust assumption is at the heart of capitalism.
And those who are able to accumulate or inherit or grab enough money,
Can then use that money to grab a huge chunk of our common treasury,
our common resources the stuff we all depend on to survive,
then they act like they have a natural right to do whatever they want with that.
If everyone tried to live like the very rich today we would need multiple planets,
5 planets, 10 planets, 100 planets, but we've only got one.
But if instead you say let's have luxury but make it public luxury.
Let's have fantastic public swimming pools, brilliant public parks, great tennis courts,
great art collections, great museums, great community centres,
great youth centres, great playgrounds.
All those wonderful things that we try to accumulate for ourselves,
but let's do it publicly.
Then in creating that space you don't take space away from other people.
You create space for other people.
You don't need to multiply those resources again and again and again,
as everyone tries to do it privately.
By doing it publicly you need far fewer resources.
You can have a really rich fulfilling life with very high standards of human well-being.
but without the environmental destruction and in so doing we create community,
where community has been smashed apart by capitalism.
I don't think there's another way we're gonna get through this century.
If we carry on believing that people who are rich today,
can live like the oligarchs,
and people who poor today can live like the rich,
and everyone can just expand and expand and expand,
and accumulate and accumulate which is what capitalism tells us to do.
And that we can just keep on multiplying GDP and we can double economic activity,
every 24 years like we're doing at the moment.
Then the only possible outcome is catastrophe.
We need a whole new economic system.
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