Dear capitalist,

You can go on forever about how business is supplying us with wonderful products, choice, the chance to be ‘little kings’, rampant consumers – it’s not sustainable.

Bottom line: There’s no way the exponential population growth and resource use of the industrial revolution and its aftermath can continue. There’s no way. The planet is not built to support it. Its climate systems, its air and water, its top soil – all are dangerously near the breaking point of their ability to renew themselves. Remember, every time we lay a stretch of tarmac, or release CO2 into the air, we are killing something, changing something, forever.

The planet has an amazing, wondrous ability to restore and renew itself, but its capacity to do that is limited in both extent and in timeframe. And a population of 6.3 billion people, and the kind of industrial activities which are going on right now are stretching or overloading that ability.

These are simply the facts, from an overview perspective. The capitalist view that our lives are improved by greater choice of products and the other benefits of business is simply looking at the same world but from a narrower, less overhead perspective — limited in time perhaps to our phase where we have enjoyed a growth in prosperity, powered by cheap oil, before the unfactored-in costs come back to us — and limited in place, to the prosperous world.

Perhaps you might agree that national and global economic growth, increased consumer choice, business success, even international development – all must come second to the survival of humanity and the environment. We should be prepared, if it’s required, to tear up anything which threatens the latter – as it is currently threatened.

Business must in effect be saved from itself. Markets and business, like money, like religion, like any other human artefact, can be good or bad. Corporatism – a particular legal structure, a particular configuration of business and markets, which actually works significantly to distort the working of markets – which consists in extended, vastly extrapolated wealth, deployed with enormous world-changing effect purely to further and advance itself, is dangerous.

Our current phase of economic growth without concern for the consequences, elsewhere in the world or even for our own children, will be looked back on if at all as an anachronism, as the prevailing of a strange, reductionist, materialist mindset – that of the economists.

Still – give it a pop, eh? Kilroy-bashing’s always fun.

Is he a notably litigious person? I can’t say. But unless the tanning salons of Brussels have internet access, you can surely take a risk and let me have a crack at him…