Nina-Bytes: No Half Measures

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Truth and Ineffective Mitigations

I think if you put a gun to my head and asked me to name my favorite Guardian columnist, which in itself is a lot like asking me to name my favorite contagious disease, I’d probably have to go with George Monbiot in the end. Despite this however, I always find reading his work to be somewhat maddening because while he is clearly a writer who sees virtually all of the same problems I see with an ultra-wealthy ruling class, and maintaining a capitalist society on a planet being boiled to death by capitalism itself, our proposed solutions for actually solving these existentially important problems couldn’t be further apart. Where I believe that the malevolent greed and intractable nature of capitalist security states clearly points to the necessity of uprising and revolutionary action to overthrow capitalism and replace it with something more egalitarian and sustainable, George typically settles for milquetoast tax reforms targeting the wealthy and convincing billionaires that burning the planet to a crisp will cost them more in the long run. This probably explains why he’s a Guardian columnist and I’m an angry internet anarchist, but I would also argue that only one of us is being honest about what it’s actually going to take to accomplish the staggering degree of change our society requires to save our habitable biosphere before billions of people die in an ongoing climate catastrophe.

I bring this up not to mock Monbiot, but rather to point out that his most recent article is once again an excellent argument for a revolution against capitalism, that somehow still finds a proposed “solution” that is not a revolution against capitalism – in this case, Brazil’s extremely modest proposal of a global 2% tax on the wealth of billionaires.

 

Who is brave enough to back Brazil’s global tax on billionaires? The answer will define our future

“I think we are all either vaguely or painfully aware that, regardless of changes of government, our needs will be met only if they coincide with the demands of capital. If they run directly counter to those demands, however great and consistent our wishes might be, they scarcely stand a chance.

The response to the pandemic was one test of that proposition. Now the world’s governments face another. Last week, Brazilian climate minister Ana Toni explained a proposal put forward by her government (and now supported by South Africa, Germany and Spain), for a 2% global tax on the wealth of the world’s billionaires. Though it would affect just 3,000 of the super-rich, it would raise around $250bn (£195bn): a significant contribution either to global climate funds or to poverty alleviation.

Radical? Not at all. According to calculations by Oxfam, the wealth of billionaires has been growing so fast in recent years that maintaining it at a constant level would have required an annual tax of 12.8%. Trillions, in other words: enough to address global problems long written off as intractable.”

 

Look, there’s nothing at all wrong with Monbiot’s argument that billionaire oligarchs should bear a greater taxation burden than they do now because it’s going to cost a lot of money for the human species to solve the problems primarily created by the capitalist activities of, you guessed it, billionaire oligarchs. It’s just that when George’s article goes on to explain that those very same oligarchs operate with impunity on a global scale, have enough money to literally buy the governments of our nation states, and clearly have no intention of ceasing to push our species right off the ecological cliff for profit, it becomes incredibly obvious that not only will they never agree to pay such a tax, but even if they did it wouldn’t do enough to address the fatal power imbalances he’s talking about here; facts that Monbiot himself more or less concedes in this very article.

All of which is to say that while I of course support the idea of clawing back as much wealth as possible from the ultra-rich in our predatory, seemingly-genocidal ruling classes, it’s going to take a lot more than that to get us out of the mindbogglingly awful crisis capitalists and capitalism have created for our species here. I’m glad George Monbiot is still working hard in the mainstream media to describe the outlines of the problem, but he’s absolutely fucking delusional if he thinks tax reform under the very same capitalist order that’s killing us represents an actual solution. What it’s going to take is ending capitalism, and the murderous extraction that fuels it, while pooling our collective resources together to save a biosphere habitable by over eight billion human beings. Given that the cult of capitalism, and the ultra-wealthy ruling class that runs our society, are highly unlikely to do that willingly no matter how many people it kills to maintain their stranglehold, the facts strongly point to revolution as the only viable alternative to extinction.

 

– Nina Illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.

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