Two Extinction Rebellion activists joined the speakers today at an Auckland protest over Israel’s genocide and ecocide in Gaza and occupied Palestine, condemning the “apocalyptic” assault on both people and their living environment.

Caril Cowan, a de facto coordinator of Extinction Rebellion Tāmaki Makaurau, spoke of the climate crisis this month in Aotearoa New Zealand to provide an insight into the Gaza emergency.

“One of our climate scientists, says this is normal – get used to it. We are going to have killing storms over, and over, and over …

“As we are saying, ‘We are all Palestine’, I just think of the people of South America, I think of the people of Africa, I think of Europe, where people are dying now because of the climate.

“They are dying of heat exhaustion, they are dying from floods, they are dying from landslides, like we have been having, not just a few. It’s happening. It is here now.”

After the rally, the protesters marched around the corner from Te Komititanga Square to the US Consulate in Auckland for a “Blood on your hands “ protest over the US role in funding and enabling Israel’s atrocities in Gaza.

Cowan was among those protesters who symbolically raised blood on their hands over the “shameful” US role under President Donald Trump and previous presidents.

US pays part UN dues
This week in Washington, a UN spokesperson said the United States had paid about US$160 million (NZ$268 million) of the more than US$4 billion it owes to the UN, just as Trump hosted the first meeting of his so-called “Board of Peace” initiative over Gaza that critics say could undermine the United Nations.

The US is the biggest contributor to the UN budget, but under the Trump administration it has refused to make mandatory payments to regular and peacekeeping budgets, and slashed voluntary funding to UN agencies with their own budgets.

Washington has also withdrawn from dozens of UN agencies.

Another speaker at today’s rally, Adam Jordan, from both Extinction Rebellion and the Palestinian movement, talked about the “connection” between the Gaza genocide and anthropogenic climate breakdown.

“As is so often the case with colonialism, and the capitalist system more generally, ecological destruction has always been inherent to the Zionist, settler-colonial project,” Jordan said.

“From contaminated soil and groundwater to decimated farmland and burning down centuries old olive groves that had been lovingly tended by countless generations of Palestinians.

“Rather than ‘making the desert bloom’ as they often claim, the colonisers are engaged in a process of ‘desertification’ — transforming once fertile and active farmland into an area devoid of both vegetation and biodiversity.”

Damage visible from space
Jordan said that destruction of both people and the land itself in Gaza had reached such “apocalyptic proportions that the damage is visible from space”.

“The people who have not yet been killed by the bunker buster bombs, the forced starvation, disease, sniper fire and autonomous killer drones live in a wasteland of undrinkable water, unexploded munitions, overflowing landfills, contaminated soil and toxic debris, with orchards and fields reduced to dust in which life itself is being rendered impossible for the long term,” he said.

Gaza pollution environmental threats                Video: Al Jazeera

“Ecocide here fuses with genocide in a manner never seen before.”

But where was the real connection between Palestine and the climate crisis?

“Despite all the rhetoric from governments and corporations about how they’re taking climate change seriously, the 2020s have so far seen an accelerated expansion of fossil fuel production, just when it had to be reined in and inverted into a sustained dismantling — for the world to avoid a warming of more than 2°C, and ideally no more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial baseline.

“Currently we’re at 1.6°C above that baseline, and this is already proving to be absolutely catastrophic. In fact it’s proving again and again to be deadly,” Jordan said.

“The destruction of Gaza is of course executed by tanks and fighter jets, sending their projectiles that turn everything into rubble — but only after the explosive force of fossil fuel combustion has put them on the right path.

“All these military vehicles run on oil. As do the supply flights from the US, UK and Germany.’

Emissions burden
One study had estimated that from October 2023 to January 2025 the emission burden of the Gaza genocide by Israel and the West to be 32 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

“That’s more than the annual emissions of many countries,” Jordan said.

“It has generated more than 36 million metric tonnes of debris from buildings being either severely damaged or completely destroyed. It would take as long as four decades to remove and process all of this debris.”

Jordan said what was happening in Gaza was not just a transnational effort, but “a stain on the so called ‘international law’ that cannot be washed clean”.

“For over two years now we have watched as the corrupt corporate media has dehumanised the victims and attempted to humanise those committing this genocide,” he said.

“We have watched as academic institutions, politicians and governments all over the world have denied or justified the unspeakable horrors taking place in Gaza, just as they deny the severity and the consequences of the climate crisis and justify the continuation of business as usual, no matter how destructive it is to our environmental life support systems.

“But this is just business, this is just how the capitalist system works. Both people and the environment are seen as expendable, here only for the purposes of wealth extraction by the ultra wealthy ruling class — or as I prefer to call them, ‘The Epstein class’.”

New flotilla plans
Among other speakers, Rana Hamida spoke about the new Global Sumud Flotilla plans to break the military siege of Gaza in April.

The flotilla has announced plans to send more than 100 boats carrying up 1000 activists, including medics and war crimes investigators, to the besieged enclave.

Hamida appealed for more volunteers from New Zealand to join the fleet.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

I sat in a cafe listening to one man telling another how to get more out of his workers — “his team”, kind of the way people talked about workhorses until some of us read Black Beauty and learned that sentient creatures have feelings, both animals and people.

I hope that people will wake up to the need to unite, to pull together. The best decluttering is decolonising.

Maybe Zohran Mamdani’s win is a sign that will herald a new era, an era when socialists can beat “the money men”. Maybe it’s time when we will all wake up to a different possibility. Maybe other values will be recognised.

Virtues do not come from wealth. Capital, capitalism (the key is in the word) is a system of exploitation. It was designed by merchants to make some rich and keep others poor. That’s the system.

Maybe you were not taught that? Of course you were not taught that. Think about it.

I listened to William Dalrymple being interviewed by Jack Tame last Sunday and I thought Jack — who I used to respect a lot before he failed to tackle genocide with Israel’s representative for genocide here in Aotearoa — I thought he, Jack, looked like a possum in the headlights when Dalrymple said that Donald Trump had a precursor in Benjamin Netanyahu and called genocide a genocide.

I like to think Jack and others like him (because I have been like them too) will learn to learn about the history of all people and not view history as an inevitable story of winners and losers.

Winners are exploiters
The winners are exploiters and if we want to save the planet we need a massive game change.

The legacy of colonisation.      Video: TVNZ Q&A

Look at the stats of the land that was taken for expansion and how that expansion was used to justify the extermination of one people to prop another people up. The stats, the real statistics show who was there before, show people lived on the land with the land and the waters.

Capitalism is a system of expansion and exploitation. It flourished for a while on slavery and it flourished for a while on settler colonialism, and it flourished for a while on keeping workers believing the story that they were working for greater glory when their take home pay did not equal the value of their labour.

And there is a difference between guilt and remorse. We can learn from the latter. The former, guilt, stagnates, it leads to defence and offence.

We need to recognise that we don’t need to prop up a dying system that flourishes on making some weak and others stronger.

We need to learn to change — those of us who were wrong can admit it and go forward differently. We can realise that they system was designed to make us fail to see the threads that connect all people. We can wake up now and smell the manure among the roses.

Good shit helps things grow, bad shit is toxic contaminated waste that turns things inwards, makes them gnarly.

Monsters are connected
Unfortunately, those who behave like monsters are connected not just to some of us but all of us.

We need to open our minds and our hearts to a different our value system. We need to decolonise our senses.

If you defend a bad system because right now you are one of the few on a decent pay scale then you are part of the problem. You are the problem. You have been conned. A system is only fair if it is fair for all people.

Learning history gives us a map said Dalrymple (author of The Golden Road which tells the story of how great India was BEFORE it was stolen by Britain — how that country gave the world numbers and so much more) and we need to learn how the map was drawn.

As someone who reads history to write history, I encourage us all to read widely and deeply and to research so that we do not stop thinking and analysing, and so we can tell wrong from right.

Do not be neutral about wrongs as some historians would suggest. It is more than OK to call a wrong a wrong. In fact it is vital. Take a new lens into viewing history, not the one the masters have given you.

We miss seeing the world if we look fail to think about who drew the map, how it was drawn up by men who carved up the world for the Empires intent on creating a golden age by enslaving most of the people to prop up those at the top.

World map’s curling edges
We need to look under the curling edges of the world map drawn up by the exploiter. We need to find find the stories of those who were exploited and who had been part of the creation story of this planet before they were exploited.

Those of us who are descendants of colonisers also — many of us — descend from those who were exploited.

The stories of British workhouses, of the system of exile via banishment, of the theft of women’s rights, of the extreme brutal forms of punishment, the stories of the way the top class pushed down and down on the people of the fields and forests and forced them to serve and serve, these real stories are less well known than the myths.

Myths like the story of King Arthur are better known.

Some myths have been created as a form of propaganda. We need to unpick the stories that were told to keep us stupid, to keep us ignorant.

It is time to stop following the trail of crumbs to Buckingham Palace, or at least to see where the trail really leads — to pedophiles who preyed on others, to predators — not just one but many, to people brilliant at reconstructing themselves — creating some fall guys and some good guys and making some people villains.

That story is a lie that protects and processes dysfunction.

Acting on the truth
Blaming one part of the system prevents us from realising and acting on the truth that the whole system is one of exploitation.

This was always a horror story disguised as a fairy story. One crown could save so many poor. The monarchy is not a family that produced one disfunctional person it is the disfunction.

It promotes the lie that one group of people deserve wealth because they are better than another. What a sick joke.

So let’s back away from societies made by men who want to profit from others and get back to nature.

Let’s look on nature as a sister or mother — a sister or mother you love.

Let’s look at the so called natural disasters like climate change. Look at how they have been created by “noble men” and “noble women” and ignoble ones as well. Disasters that can be averted, prevented.

Who suffers the most in a natural disaster? Not the rich.

How do we heal?
So how do we hope and how do we heal? We see the change. We be the change.

I like listening to intelligent insightful people like Richard D Wolff and Yanis Varoufakis:

Mamdani beats the money men.      Video: Diem TV

Personally, for my mental and physical health I’ve been sea bathing, dipping in the sea. I join a group of mainly women who all have stories, and who plunge into nature for release and relief, to relieve ourselves from the debris. Uniting in nature.

I’ve learned that every day is different. The sea is always changing. No two waves are the same and they all pull in the same direction.

We are part moon, part wave, part light, part darkness. We are the bounty and the beauty.
I do have hope that we will all unite for common good. Sharing on common ground. The word Common is so much better than Capital.

If you are working for the kind of people that are discussing how to get more out of you for less, then unite.

And if you know people who are being exploited in any way at all unite with them not the exploiter. Be the change.

By helping each other we save each other. And that includes helping our friend and exploited lover: Nature.

Saige England is an award-winning journalist and author of The Seasonwife, a novel exploring the brutal impacts of colonisation. She is also a contributor to Asia Pacific Report.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Since the attacks on the United States by 15 Saudi Arabian Islamic fanatics on 11 September  2001 — now known as 9/11 —  the world has been divided by a “war on terror” with any protest group defined as “terrorists”.

New anti-terror laws have been introduced both in the West and elsewhere in the past 20 years and used extensively to suppress such movements in the name of “national security”.

It is interesting to note that the 9/11 attacks came at a time when a huge “global justice” movement was building up across the world against the injustices of globalisation.

Using the internet as the medium of mobilisation, they gathered in Seattle in 1999 and were successful in closing down the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting.

They opposed what they saw as large multinational corporations having unregulated political power, exercised through trade agreements and deregulated financial markets, facilitated by governments.

Their main targets were the WTO, International Monetary Fund (IMF), OECD, World Bank, and international trade agreements.

The movement brought “civil society” people from the North and the South together under common goals.

Poorest country debts
In parallel, the “Jubilee 2000” international movement led by liberal Christian and Catholic churches called for the cancellation of US$90 billion of debts owed by the world’s poorest nations to banks and governments in the West.

Along with the churches, youth groups, music, and entertainment industry groups were involved. The 9/11 attacks killed these movements as “national security” took precedence over “freedom to dissent”.

Dr Dayan Jayatilleka, a former vice-president of the UN Human Rights Council and a Sri Lankan political scientist, notes that when “capitalism turned neoliberal and went on the rampage” after the demise of the Soviet Union, resistance started to develop with the rise of the Zapatistas in Chiapas (Mexico) against NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and culminating in the 1999 Seattle protests using a term coined by Cuban leader Fidel Castro “another world is possible”.

“All that came crashing down with the Twin Towers,” he notes. “With 9/11 the Islamic Jihadist opposition to the USA (and the war on terror) cut across and buried the progressive resistance we saw emerging in Chiapas and Seattle.”

Geoffrey Robertson QC, a British human rights campaigner and TV personality, warns: “9/11 panicked us into the ‘war on terror’ using lethal weapons of questionable legality which inspired more terrorists.

“Twenty years on, those same adversaries are back and we now have a fear of US perfidy—over Taiwan or ANZUS or whatever. There will be many consequences.”

But, he sees some silver lining that has come out of this “war on terror”.

Targeted sanctions
“One reasonably successful tactic developed in the war on terror was to use targeted sanctions on its sponsors. This has been developed by so-called ‘Magnitsky acts’, enabling the targeting of human rights abusers—31 democracies now have them and Australia will shortly be the 32nd.

“I foresee their coordination as part of the fightback—a war not on terror but state cruelty,” he told In-Depth News.

When asked about the US’s humiliation in Afghanistan, Dr Chandra Muzaffar, founder of the International Movement for a Just World told IDN that the West needed to understand that they too needed to stop funding terror to achieve their own agendas.

“The ‘war on terror’ was doomed to failure from the outset because those who initiated the war were not prepared to admit that it was their occupation and oppression that compelled others to retaliate through acts of terror.” he argues.

“Popular antagonism towards the occupiers was one of the main reasons for the humiliating defeat of the US and NATO in Afghanistan,” he added.

Looking at Western attempts to introduce democracy under the pretext of “war on terror” and the chaos created by the “Arab Spring”, a youth movement driven by Western-funded NGOs, Iranian-born Australian Farzin Yekta, who worked in Lebanon for 15 years as a community multimedia worker, argues that the Arab region needs a different democracy.

“In the Middle East, the nations should aspire to a system based on social justice rather than the Western democratic model. Corrupt political and economic apparatus, external interference and dysfunctional infrastructure are the main obstacles for moving towards establishing a system based on social justice,” he says, adding that there are signs of growing social movements being revived in the region while “resisting all kinds of attacks”.

Palestinian refugee lessons
Yekta told IDN that while working with Palestinian refugee groups in Lebanon he had seen how peoples’ movements could be undermined by so-called “civil society” NGOs.

“Alternative social movements are infested by ‘civil society’ institutions comprising primarily NGO institutions.

“‘Civil society’ is effective leverage for the establishment and foreign (Western) interference to pacify radical social movements. Social movements find themselves in a web of funded entities which push for ‘agendas’ drawn by funding buddies,” noted Yekta.

Looking at the failure of Western forces in Afghanistan, he argues that what they did by building up “civil society” was encouraging corruption and cronyism that is entangled in ethnic and tribal structures of society.

“The Western nation-building plan was limited to setting up a glasshouse pseudo-democratic space in the green zone part of Kabul.

“One just needed to go to the countryside to confront the utter poverty and lack of infrastructure,” Yekta notes.

”We need to understand that people’s struggle is occurring at places with poor or no infrastructure.”

Social movements reviving
Dr Jayatilleka also sees positive signs of social movements beginning to raise their heads after two decades of repression.

“Black Lives Matter drew in perhaps more young whites than blacks and constituted the largest ever protest movement in history. The globalised solidarity with the Palestinian people of Gaza, including large demonstrations in US cities, is further evidence.

“In Latin America, the left-populist Pink Tide 2.0 began with the victory of Lopez Obrador in Mexico and has produced the victory of Pedro Castillo in Peru.

“The slogan of justice, both individual and social, is more globalised, more universalised today, than ever before in my lifetime,” he told IDN.

There may be ample issues for peoples’ movements to take up with TPP (Transpacific Partnership) and RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) trade agreements coming into force in Asia where companies would be able to sue governments if their social policies infringe on company profits.

But Dr Jayatilleka is less optimistic of social movements rising in Asia.

Asian social inequities
“Sadly, the social justice movement is considerably more complicated in Asia than elsewhere, though one would have assumed that given the social inequities in Asian societies, the struggle for social justice would be a torrent. It is not,” he argues.

“The brightest recent spark in Asia, according to Dr Jayatilleka, was the rise of the Nepali Communist Party to power through the ballot box after a protracted peoples’ war, but ‘sectarianism’ has led to the subsiding of what was the brightest hope for the social justice movement in Asia.”

Robertson feels that the time is ripe for the social movements suppressed by post 9/11 anti-terror laws to be reincarnated in a different life.

“The broader demand for social justice will revive, initially behind the imperative of dealing with climate change but then with tax havens, the power of multinationals, and the obscene inequalities in the world’s wealth.

“So, I do not despair of social justice momentum in the future,” he says.

Republished under Creative Commons partnership with IDN – In-Depth News.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Democracy and inequality are two of the most contentious political issues of our era. Across the globe there is growing discontent about political systems not working well, while the rich are getting richer and the poor get poorer.

Declining democracy and increasing economic inequality are usually seen as linked, with the popular notion taking hold in many countries that the super-rich elite have hijacked the political system and are using it to entrench their wealth and power. Here in New Zealand, for example, a 2017 survey showed 64 per cent of the public believed that “the economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful”.

And it’s a global phenomenon, with politicians, political movements, populists, and elections centring around concerns about political elites and “the 1 percent”.

An important film has just come out that contributes to debates about the state of democracy and inequality – and it’s been made by New Zealanders Justin Pemberton (directing) and Matthew Metcalfe (producing). The film is an adaptation of French economist Thomas Piketty’s best-selling book “Capital in the 21st Century”.

Currently screening as part of the New Zealand International Film Festival, it’s already had showings in Auckland, and it’s about to open in Wellington and then the rest of the country. You can watch the film’s trailer: Capital in the 21st Century – Official Trailer.

Inequality researcher Max Rashbrooke provides an overview of the film for the festival programme: “Pemberton relays this story in saturated, pop art-style colours. He also blends archival footage with film sequences, both old and new, into an almost hallucinatory cocktail, as if the bizarre excesses of wealth defied realistic description.”

The film adaption is very different from the economics text book: “Piketty’s thesis is crisply and engagingly presented in a documentary purposefully light on graphs and numbers, and heavy on top-notch talking heads (Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, the Financial Times’ Gillian Tett, et al.), visuals of the rich and famous, and stylised historical recreations.”

The reviews for the documentary so far have been full of praise. TVNZ’s Miriama Kamo wrote on Facebook this week that “It’s an incredible achievement to turn economist Thomas Piketty’s 800-page book into a visual feast and provocative thought piece about capitalism and the perils of inequity, in 90 minutes”.

Similarly, another view of the film says that director Pemberton succeeds in translating Piketty’s book into film: “it is a brilliantly accessible, panoramic introduction to his ideas. Pithy and sensual, it is essential viewing: Pemberton’s magnificent achievement” – see John Hurrell’s A Thin slice of NZIFF 2019 so far. The review states that it’s a film that “despite its extremely alarming content, you don’t want to end.”

And documentary film-maker Bryan Bruce declared that Capital needed to be watched by those in and around the New Zealand political system: “I would really like to see a screening of this film in our parliament – or perhaps have it projected onto the walls of it this summer” – see: Capitalism in the 21st Century.

Bruce sums up the film, saying it “delivers an excellent overview of 400 years of Capitalism and reveals why, if we don’t close the widening gap between the rich and the poor, history tells us there will be violence and revolution.”

Although the film is about the past, present and future of capitalism and democracy in global terms, it has plenty of relevance for the New Zealand situation. This is made especially clear in Danyl Mclauchlan’s excellent review of the film, which thoughtfully considers the themes of both the film and Piketty’s original book, and how it applies to this country – see: Piketty’s Capital comes to the big screen, urging us to make the world less terrible.

Mclauchlan explains how global capitalism appears to be reverting back to something akin to its earlier period of the 18th and 19th centuries, in which wealth dominates, and there’s very little capacity for the system to deal with inequalities.

In terms of New Zealand, he’s somewhat pessimistic: “The capital gains tax and KiwiBuild were supposed to attenuate this wealth transfer [of recent years] but failed, so it’s still ongoing; locked in no matter who is in government. That’s what real transformative political change looks like. Given its nature and who it benefits, how hard it is to overturn – we can’t even put a price on carbon – it’s difficult to feel optimistic about Piketty’s invitation to recapture our democracy and fix the system from within.”

But Mclauchlan’s conclusion is the same as Piketty’s – that it’s important to keep on struggling against the power of business: “we know the problems, we know the solutions; we have no other credible options. And we have an obligation to the generations who’ll be born into capitalist systems of the 21st century to try and make their world less terrible than it was in the 19th, or most of the 20th.”

In one interview about the film, Pemberton illustrates the power of business in contemporary democracy with reference to when film industry bosses got the John Key-led National Government to change some important laws to suit them: “One of the clearest examples for me was when one of the world’s wealthiest film companies, Warner Bros, lobbied the NZ government to change our labour laws and provide them with generous tax breaks in exchange for making the Hobbit movies here. It really showed the power of capital and its desire to weaken the position of labour—along with the inability of governments to resist such pressure” – see Steve Newall’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century director explains his NZIFF doco.

In this interview, Pemberton also discusses the role he wants the film to play in encouraging people to fight back against the lack of democracy: “The goal is to stimulate composed and clear conversations around capital, to illuminate the forces of capital and to show how it moves, acts and reacts.  In many democracies, capital has become the tail that’s wagging the dog, which is creating outcomes that are worst for most of us—as two-thirds of people in developed economies are now on track to be poorer than their parents. But the future is not written. One of the reasons Capital In The Twenty-First Century takes such a long-view of capital is to highlight how our relationship with capital can and has changed over time. I’m also sure it will again.”

But like Piketty, in many ways the filmmaker seems very pessimistic about the uneven relationship between capitalism and democracy, saying “I think capital is damaging democracy… And this is why we can’t address issues virtually all of us are concerned about – like climate change, like housing costs, like tax havens.”

Pemberton is still optimistic about the power of politics and democracy to fix big problems in the world. He told RNZ’s Kim Hill: “There’s no reason why tax havens can’t be solved. I mean, that’s just so simple. The only thing that stopping us solving the issue of tax havens is capital and the way that capital is dominating politics. It is really that basic; rich people, wealthy people, like them and they put pressure on governments to maintain them.” And “Fixing democracy and wrenching it back from the wealthy is the only way to rein in capital, Pemberton says.”

You can listen to his very interesting 26-minute interview with Hill here: Justin Pemberton – Capital in the Twenty-First Century. And in this he also talks about other intractable problems, such as climate change: “when you’re thinking about climate change, the reason it’s not being sorted is because of capital, is because of capital and politics. It’s not because most people don’t believe this is an urgent thing that needs to be dealt with. It’s the capital that’s getting in the way.”

The film has just screened in Australia and the Australian Financial Review, not normally known for its sympathy for the plight of the poor and exploited, gave the film a strong review, saying the “doco is essential viewing for anyone who sees the cinema not as an escape from the workaday world on a rainy day, but as a tool that helps us understand the strange days in which we live”.

The Australian Financial Review’s New Zealand counterpart, the National Business Review has also published an in-depth video interview with Pemberton about the making of the film and it’s subject matter – see: Nathan Smith’s Kiwi director breathes new life into Piketty’s ‘Capital in the 21st Century’ (paywalled).

The NBR reports that the Piketty analysis and film “was a ‘warning call’ that if the conditions of today’s global economy, funnelling the world’s capital into fewer and fewer hands (particularly to the owners of the giant tech companies), then a return to the inequalities of previous centuries is ‘inevitable’.”

In the interview, Pemberton singles out tech companies for special mention: “Global capital is now one big beast, represented in its purest form by the big tech companies. They create far fewer jobs than did the companies of the past and make vastly more amounts of money but pay no tax… This is breaking the social contract we all signed up to as democratic countries. I know Facebook, Google and Apple want their workers to enjoy roads or the justice system and reasonable education but they’re not going to pay for it”.

He concludes: “I think 99.99% of the planet would be better off if we looked at renegotiating our relationship with capital”.

So, how did the film come to be made by New Zealanders? For an explanation of this and other aspects of the film, see Metro Magazine’s Q+A: Auckland-based director Justin Pemberton on doco Capital in the 21st Century.

Finally, the movie is next screening in Wellington as part of the New Zealand International Film Festival. And as part of the screenings on Sunday and Monday, I’ll be holding post-screening question-and-answer sessions with director Justin Pemberton – for details see: Capital film screenings in Wellington and elsewhere.

Most of us realise that there is something wrong with capitalism as we know it. We also accept that capitalism is here to stay; the only practicable alternatives are evolutions of capitalism, not from capitalism.

For most of its history we have experienced capitalism as processes of inequality and contradiction. Capitalism as we know it exhibits the growth dynamics of a runaway train for which both stopping and not-stopping spell present or future disaster. We opt for future disaster. Economic growth is understood as the process of making money at an accelerated rate.

This is primitive capitalism. And it is the manifestation of a ubiquitous mode of modern thought that I refer to as liberal mercantilism. The principal metaphor of liberal mercantilism is gold, which in turn is the principal metaphor for money. Liberal mercantilism is the belief that the economic purpose of life is to make money, that the amount of money each of us makes is a measure of our success in life, and that the amount of money a country makes is the measure of its success.

There are two main strands of liberal mercantilism; conservative liberal mercantilism (which, in the past few decades, has embraced both neoliberalism and neoconservatism) and progressive liberal mercantilism (which embraces both social democracy and socialism). Progressive liberal mercantilism is about making money, taxing it, and governmental spending of it; conservative liberal mercantilism is just about making money. Progressive liberal mercantilists argue that you have to make money before you can spend it. Conservative liberal mercantilists argue that you have to spend (invest) money in order to make money. Both emphasise making money, and economic growth..

Liberal mercantilism is underpinned by a primitive capitalism that only acknowledges private property rights, or public property rights (as in state capitalism; government ownership) that are equivalent to private property rights. Primitive capitalism has no public hemisphere. It’s analogous to a single-hemisphere brain.

Liberal mercantilism represents a wrong path; indeed a false path, much as Ptolemaic astronomy and alchemy have represented false paths in the history of science. In another sense, however, it is a real path, in that liberal mercantilism is truly the existential path that modern humanity is on, and uncritically so.

The alternative to liberal mercantilism is economic capitalism. Economics began as a project to rid capitalism of mercantilism, the crude belief that the economic purpose of countries was to operate ongoing trade surpluses. (Donald Trump is an unreconstructed mercantilist; in his way of thinking, countries wage trade wars, seeking victory through ongoing trade surpluses.)

Economics both succeeded and failed; in economics, wealth is utility (and the sources of utility), not money. Economics, though liberal in its origins, is not a part of liberal mercantilism. But most economists are, to a greater or lesser extent, infused with the liberal mercantilist belief system; especially those economists who, through specialising in finance, clearly equate wealth with money and monetary derivatives.

Capitalism – proper capitalism, full capitalism, economic capitalism – represents a balanced economic order that draws on both private and public property rights; that has private and public hemispheres that complement each other. Private income sources are both private equity (property) and labour; what individuals (and groups of individuals) own, and what they make and sell. Public income is sourced from public equity (the essence of capitalism’s inchoate public hemisphere); it may be retained by public organisations (governments) to be spent on collective goods and services, or distributed, principally as benefits (using the proper capitalistic meaning of that word), to individuals (as economic citizens).

Most ‘capitalists’ are not proper capitalists; they are liberal mercantilists. Most people who advocate for capitalism as we know it are primitive capitalists. And many people who run businesses are mercantilists, drawn in the main by wanting money as an accumulating store of wealth, and not simply by wanting the means to acquire the consumer services that represent the actual purpose of market economic activity.

In economic capitalism, money is a means, not an end. It is not wealth; rather it is a social technology; arguably our most important social technology. Money is important as a technology, not as wealth. Wealth is the services that give us utility; wealth is whatever has value because of the happiness that such wealth enables us to enjoy. The economic purpose of life is to survive and prosper, where ‘prosper’ means to attain the higher forms of happiness.

Capitalism must evolve. Embrace that evolution.