Capitalism Is A Planetary Pyramid Scheme

And the 'developing' world is holding the bag

Capitalism is a planetary pyramid scheme. The entire defence of capitalism is that it works, that it delivers wealth, but so do pyramid schemes. They work for a while, delivering wealth for a few, then they collapse. This is precisely what capitalism is doing to the entire Earth. Capitalism is bringing the whole planet down, and we're all left holding the bag.

In a pyramid scheme, early 'investors' are paid out with the resources of late suckers. It can only go on for so long before the wealth has all been siphoned up and it collapses. In our planetary pyramid scheme, early capitalists have gotten paid by siphoning up the planetary resources of every future generation on Earth. They've made suckers out of children that haven't even been born. They've made suckers of us all.

As I've discussed before, the developed' countries are actually poor. If you subtract their assets minus their climate liabilities, they're worth less than nothing. Their wealth is in fact fraud, looted from the planet, stolen from other people, and borrowed against the future. Their billionaires are just the hucksters at the top of a pyramid scheme. They've bilked billions of people and sold them a lie. It's not just the oil barons and 100 companies profiting from most of this collapse, entire countries and populations have bought the idea that endless growth is good, sustainable, and attainable and not, in fact, planetary cancer.

The penultimate suckers here are western consumers, who have accepted consumer culture as a substitute for a culture and consumer goods as a substitute for good. They've bought the idea that resources are inexhaustable, greed is good, and that anyone saying otherwise was just a dumb communist.

Western people have accepted ever-increasing inequality and irresponsibility since at least the 1970s as just the only 'workable' way to get ahead. Degrowth is still considered magical thinking by even rebel economists. The idea that GDP wouldn't just keep increasing is economic sacrilege (and economics is just a bad religion). They have prioritized endless growth (which does not benefit human beings after a point) over public goods. Then they have exported this idea abroad as neoliberalism, and bombed or couped most alternatives to death.

'Developing' countries are just the ultimate suckers in this pyramid scheme. If we followed the actual western model we'd invade our neighbors, steal their shit, and sell them into slavery. Instead we were sold some bullshit about institutions, fiscal austerity, and 'freedom' that the west never followed in their own development.

The actual western development model is colonization, war, and debt peonage, but they've sold us some neoliberal bullshit that really just amounts to us doing all their work. So we stay on their passport plantations and make them richer, on the promise that we can move up the pyramid someday. But it's all bullshit. We were given a check we cannot cash by people who were taking real cash and resources from us the whole time.