Quickshot Quotations: Sacrifice and Greed

NinaIllingworth November 14, 2022 Alanis Obomsawin, anticapitalism, blog, CA4, Can't You Read, Canada, capitalism, capitalist ideology, capitalist realism, CC3, class war, climate catastrophe, Climate Crisis, colonial capitalism, colonialism, conservation, decolonization, extractivism, Indigenous environmentalism, Indigenous thought, longtermism, Nina Illingworth, Paul Hawken, pillage, Quickshot Quotations, Quotes, Socialism, ST2, the end of capitalism, Theory, WD7

Editor’s note: Featured weekly on NIDC and Can’t You Read, our Quickshot Quotations post combines a relevant quote, and short analysis about a current issue; presented from a left wing perspective

Recently on NIDC, I wrote about the ways in which fully embracing capitalist ideology is facilitating an openly fascist future in Pig Empire society. Furthermore, I’ve also written about the intimate connection between this fascist turn, and a reactionary ruling class running headlong into the reality that we’ve run out of planet to exploit; either capitalism dies, or the human species perishes instead. Taken together, these arguments represent two sides of a deadly triangle driving us all to the brink of extinction. Today’s quote, which comes to us from Indigenous filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin, helps fill in the third side of that triangle by highlighting the foundational relationship between capitalist ideology, and climate catastrophe.

The quote itself is often misattributed as “Cree prophecy” by racist Americans, but in reality Obomsawin’s prescient critique is actually a profound repudiation of the capitalist way of life. Rooted firmly in Indigenous conservational thought, this haunting passage touches on short term profiteering, the prioritization of profit over even life itself, and the institutionalized looting of the commons represented by extractivist capitalism. Although Obomsawin was talking about Canada specifically, the reality is this genocidal economic system reigns supreme across literally the entire Pig Empire; for the benefits of much the same people, at the expense of us all, regardless of borders.

Naturally then, as I was sifting through economic report after economic report about the catastrophic long term effects of climate catastrophe on global economics, it was this underlying socioeconomic critique in Obomsawin’s words that sprung to the forefront of my thoughts; because she’s right. On a theoretical level, nothing in the quote above is news to Pig Empire economists today; as celebrated entrepreneur and economist Paul Hawken has famously noted, “at present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product.” On a tangible level, robbing the future to enrich a billionaire ruling class is already reaping a very real harvest of corpses.

Of course, it’s hardly breaking news that capitalism is built on ruthless exploitation and an inhuman disregard for life itself; maybe it shouldn’t be surprising when the fallout from this ideology scales with the vastness of its influence. What is perhaps more instructive, is examining the obvious reality that capitalism cannot stop killing the planet even when that fallout threatens the very existence of capitalism itself! None of this is theoretical either; top financial institutions, economists and scientists all say that climate crisis is as much a threat to capitalism, as it is a product of it. Capitalist ideology in the present, is demonstrably an existential threat to capitalism in the future.

Folks, this goes way beyond the snake eating its own tail here. We’re talking about a ruling class actively boiling the planet to death to accumulate piles of money so large no one human being could spend it all, and to what end? The truth is, not even the billionaires know; for all their rhetoric about longtermism and running away to Mars, back here on Earth they’re preparing for bunker life in the coming apocalypse. The horrifying reality is that Obomsawin’s statement isn’t some hokey prophecy, it’s a social analysis of capitalism itself; it’s not a mystical warning, it’s a studied prediction – and fifty years later, we’re all living in the evidence that she was correct.