The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
We will “die [buried by garbage]” because of Capitalism - not the best card
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We will “die [buried by garbage]” because of Capitalism - not the best cardPadilla ’21 [Luis-Alberto; 2021; president of the board of the Guatemalan International Relations & Peace Research Institute (IRIPAZ), member of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), former Secretary General of the Latin American Council on Peace Research (CLAIP), Director of the Diplomatic Academy, Former Vice Minister, former ambassador in Chile, former permanent representative to the United Nations at the Vienna International Centre, former ambassador to Austria, former ambassador to the Russian Federation, former ambassador to the Netherlands, permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, and professor of the Seminar of World Geopolitics at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Catholic University Rafael Landivar (URL) of Guatemala; Sustainable Development in the Anthropocene, “Jared Diamond: Unsustainable Systems and Sustainability,” Ch. 4.9, p. 202] SPark Even worse, the capitalist system itself operates in such a way that the purpose of production (the well-being of people) is no longer the value that guides it. It is all for the sake of a productivity or competitiveness that does not seek to fulfil social needs, but is concerned exclusively with increasing profits and the accumulation of capital. What is of interest to transnational corporations is that the technocrats at their service should remain committed to the constant renewal of products, from mobile phones to computers, software, and electronic devices of all types, including automobiles. The commitment to this is required to be so great that concern for the environmental impact disappears, among other reasons because they do not worry about the damage that industrial waste causes to the environment. The interests of big capital are always very short term: to retain the decision-making power within companies, to stay competitive, and to accumulate capital to satisfy the shareholders, who, in turn, usually waste their sumptuous income on sumptuary consumption without caring about the sustainability of the ‘model’ in the long term, and still less about its long-term sustainability, i.e. about the conservation of the environment and terrestrial ecosystems in the framework of human needs, understood according to the matrix of Neef, Elizalde and Hopenhayn reproduced earlier in this chapter. The most concerning aspect is that this type of attitude and behaviour (along with the consumerist ideology that justifies it), is rooted not only in the rich classes but also in the middle classes - including the middle classes of developing countries across the world - something largely due to the demonstration effect that is transmitted by advertising and the media in general. Diamond cites, as a paradigmatic case of this ‘contagion’ of consumerism social pathology, the custom of discarding in the Dominican Republic. This example can be applied to most middle-class sectors that have been emerging in the whole world, as it demonstrates that failure to take the appropriate measures could lead to an apocalypse that will not take the form of a devastating planetary earthquake, a new ice age or a gigantic tsunami like the catastrophes in movies, but will simply be that “we will all die buried by garbage”, as a Dominican citizen told the distinguished Californian professor. Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
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