When I was a kid and wanted something and would whine about it, my dad would say, ‘go bang your head on the wall’, the inference being, that I’d feel a lot better after I stopped banging. Well I sometimes feel the same way about the state of politics here in the so-called developed world, perhaps if I stopped banging away, I’d feel a lot better. No doubt.

That’s not to say that there are not a lot of people who care a great deal about the state of things and would like to see change happen, but let’s face it, for most of us, things are just too comfortable. In spite of the daily injections of ‘reality’ via the telly, it’s ‘us’ and ‘them’. In fact, if anything, the daily doses do more to put distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Exposure divorced of context and history reinforces the alienation and the sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’.

There are those who contend that television destroys our critical abilities, destroys the ability to actually think, we become passive consumers of sensations but then a society based upon nothing else but consumerism reduces everything to acts of passive consumption.

I’m not sure how fundamental this is to our inability to bring about real change but I’m sure it plays a major role in the lack of consciousness and our inability to put ourselves in someone’s else’s shoes.

I’m the kind of person who makes eye contact with people on the street, so understandably, people are always hitting me up for cash, or sometimes, in this alienated and fucked up culture, reacting, let’s say rather negatively to my connecting with them.

Being able to empathise with our fellow life forms is, it is said, what makes us human. If this is true, then great swathes of us have had our humanity removed, destroyed, buried.

My reading of history has taught me that those who write with passion about our lives and how we got to be where we are, are people who have the ability to empathise. This doesn’t mean I necessarily always agree with their interpretation but that’s not the point.

Being able to empathise also explains why, regardless of where I’ve lived in the world, I’ve never had a problem connecting to the culture I’ve adopted. Without the ability to empathise, you’re fucked. You’ll always be on the outside, looking in, if you bother to look at all.

I mean look at the millions of Brits who go to places like Spain every year, hundreds of thousands even ‘live’ there, but they’ve created a clone of British ‘culture’ on the Costa del whatever, replete with pubs and cafes, the same god-awful food, the same alienation, the same indifference to their surroundings. Damn, they can’t even get it together to learn a little Spanish! ¡Puneta!

Is there some kind of inverse square law operating here – the more comfortable we get, the less we’re able to empathise? But I think it goes much deeper than mere comfort.

Those who rule us, also despise us, smug and secure in the knowledge that as long as we refrain from getting involved except in the most perfunctory manner, they are able to get on with ordering the world according to the needs of those own the means of production.

For generations we have been persuaded that the accumulation of things is the same as freedom, that the ‘good life’ is the be-all and end-all of democracy. In fact, that ‘democracy’ is all about maintaining the ‘good life’. A vast machine of persuasion has been constructed to make this all possible and to maintain the rule of capital.

But as the disastrous effects of this endless production for nothing other than private profit is now visibly threatening the future of life on our planet, the question is, are we going to do something about it or go down with the ‘ship of fools’ who run things?

Trying to explain the fundamental economics of this process is probably the most difficult thing a socialist has to do, after all, only the most myopic amongst can fail to see that the pirates who run things are crass and self-serving fools, so why is it so difficult to make the connection between the politics of power and the economics that underpins the entire process?

In part, I think the explanation lies in the fact that economics, the means whereby we survive, is sold to us as an act of nature over which we have little or no control. The corporate media, the education system, the ruling political class reinforce this illusion through the relatively simple process of asserting that for all its faults there is no better way of organising things. Every act, every event is presented to us via a set of false assumptions about how things work and why.

Furthermore, they maintain that all attempts at developing alternatives have been abject failures and that the capitalist system has been around so long simply because it is such a success. But a success for whom and at what cost? A cost, we now know that the entire planet is paying dearly for.

The genius of Karl Marx was how he unpacked the nature of capitalist production revealing that by transforming everything, including work into commodities, transformed not only the nature of production but the relationship between human beings, a process he called alienation. By making relationships between people nothing more than a commodity transaction, broke the bonds between us, reducing us to nothing more than individual atoms, forever at the mercy of the ‘market’. Our labour is bought and sold in exactly same way as a packet of detergent is and depending on the vagaries of the ‘market’, our labour is either utilised or discarded. We are, according to this analysis, no more than arbitrary units of production.

The ‘market’ it is assumed, is a process that eventually ‘levels things out’. The forces of the ‘market’ sorts the ‘men from the boys’. Competition it is asserted is a basic force of nature. Look at how the natural world operates, the fittest survive and so on. Yet as we know, the natural world is a single, integrated process. Animals don’t compete with each other in order to ‘level things out’; there are no ‘market forces’ that determine which organisms will survive and those that won’t. Moreover, it is not a conscious process, it obeys laws determined by physics and chemistry and ultimately, by the very nature of life itself, a force we can only guess at and perhaps never really comprehend simply because we are a part of it.

By making a false connection between the infinitely complex world of nature, where everything is connected to—and hence interdependent on everything else—and the world of capitalist economics, creates the illusion that capitalism is somehow a natural process, it is after all, allegedly a process based on competition between ‘organisms’, or if you like, between commodities. We, the consumers determine which commodities will survive by making choices about which commodities to buy or to sell, including ourselves, well anyway that’s the theory.

But if we too, are also commodities, then it follows that according to the ‘laws of the market’, we are also bound to be divided between those who ‘succeed’ and those who don’t. Some of us succeed, the ‘fittest’ and the rest are ‘failures’ because we are not fit, because we failed to adapt to the rigours of the ‘market’. All sounds remarkably simple and straightforward and indeed, it does explain how capitalism operates but not much more. It doesn’t explain why we should consider capitalism the ‘best of all possible worlds’, nor how capitalism can allege that it favours human rights or justice, for where do these concepts fit into the capitalist scheme of things?

Concepts like human rights and justice have no place in the dog-eat-dog world of competition—hey it’s a tough place out there, only the fittest survive. Of course we have these concepts not because capitalism gave them to us but because like all the other rights we have, we fought tooth-and-nail to get them. It should surely be apparent therefore, that the mere fact that millions of people over generations of struggle fought for these rights, gives the lie to the alleged natural order that capitalism purports to express.

And indeed, the fallacy of ‘rights’ under capitalism is exposed by the way the state and the media attempt to justify taking them away under the guise of a ‘threat to democracy’, the ‘war on terror’ and so forth. It tells us, ‘yeah but there are limits, there’s no such thing as absolute freedom, you have responsibilities’. Suddenly, it’s not such a tooth-and-fang world after all; suddenly, it claims that it’s us who have responsibilities! Quite a turnaround for system that claims that it’s a survival of the fittest world.

It’s right to ask how does it pull off this stunt? Remarkably—or perhaps not—it claims that it’s the state’s ‘right’ to do this in order to defend the state. So it seems that unlike the workings of the economy, which we are told, obey ‘natural laws’, the state it appears, obeys laws made by human beings, in which case, we have to ask which human beings? The answer of course, is those ‘fittest’ to rule. Go figure. It’s a circular argument, for on the one hand the state claims that we are bound by ‘natural laws’ and on the other, laws that clearly benefit only the ‘fit’, the rest it seems can go to hell.

You may well ask how this all relates to flushing the toilet and the melting of the ice caps. The answer is quite simple. In order for capitalism to survive, it has to continually reproduce capital and in order to do this it has to continually expand which means producing an endless stream of commodities. Markets get glutted, you can only sell so many toilet cleaners, so ‘new’ ones have to be created, or the old ones reinvented.

So in the first place, you used to pour some bleach down the bog but then the market for bleach gets saturated, at this point all that can be done is to replace bleach with more bleach. Profits stagnate therefore the company has to get us to buy a ‘new’ product which has, as the saying goes, more ‘added value’ in it, or go bust. The ‘added value’ comes in the form of greater consumption of materials, more complexity, so instead of just bleach, now it’s a device that releases bleach a little at a time. The device is made of a range of raw materials, mostly oil or its derivatives, that when used up get thrown away and we have to go out buy a replacement.

The company which used to make bleach now makes mains and then battery-powered air fresheners, toilet bowl cleaners, disposable brushes, air-fresheners for every occasion and location, the list of products keeps on expanding as the company figures out new ways of reproducing capital. It’s an endless process but one dependent on us endlessly consuming them and in order to do this we have to be persuaded that our lives would be poorer without them.

The logic is impeccable and at the same time, insane. Reproduce this process to the point whereby capitalism is producing literally billions of products, most of which are entirely useless and do nothing to enrich our lives and you have a recipe for disaster. Even during Marx’s time, the insanity and inhumanity of it was apparent to the inhabitants of Industrial England; pollution, destruction of the natural environment, poverty and exploitation on a global scale.

So insatiable is the process in its consumption of raw materials and its destruction of the natural balance of things, that we have now reached a tipping point; the production of energy simply to make toilet bowl cleaners has pumped so much heat and gases into the atmosphere that we are now have a system which has been a few billion years in the making, completely out of whack and there is probably nothing we can do to alter it, at least in the short term.

But we could make a start by dumping capitalism and reorder our priorities, we’d all be better off for it. The ingenuity and energy lavished on toilet bowl cleaners could be used to right the wrongs of generations and begin at least, to prepare us to deal with the disasters that capitalism has created.

No more head-banging, it’s time to rediscover our common humanity, it’s time to reconnect to the human race, to the 80 percent who still haven’t discovered the joys of disposable toilet bowl cleaners.