Tom Ellis
1 min readApr 17, 2022

--

It might be useful to move beyond "isms" and schisms altogether. Capital"ism" isn 't really an ideology at all--it is simply what happens when you create a zero-sum accounting system (money). And you are quite right that, for a while, a "rising tide" of growth in investment, innovation, production, and consumption of commodities "lifts all boats" by creating greater general affluence for the population as a whole. Up to a point. And that point arrives when the system of endless expansion bumps up against the limits of its resource base, its biological support system, the living Earth. At that point, the exact same dynamic of the money game turns into a global Monopoly game --a simple model of a free-market economy on a finite surface. And Monopoly has only one possible outcome: one player (the super-rich and most successful) owns everything while everyone else owns nothing, and is deeply in debt to the winner for their houses and hotels. Then the game is over, and everything collapses into chaos. Welcome to the real world,

--

--

Tom Ellis
Tom Ellis

Written by Tom Ellis

I am a retired English professor now living in Oregon, and a life-long environmental activist, Buddhist, and holistic philosopher.

Responses (1)