Sustaining Capitalism

By Saad Sultan Goraya-Islamabad

In 2015, most of the world leaders committed to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) envisioning a just world where nobody will be poor and go hungry. Everybody must get equal education and best health facilities. The infrastructure should be more sustainable and global carbon emissions must be reduced to zero. These rhetorical futuristic “SDGs” (Total of 17) have stemmed from collective conscience of Global Humanitarian Elite shaping development agendas around the world, especially a little more vehemently in developing parts of the world.

The mixture of Globalization and Neo-liberalism has equipped International Organizations like United Nations, World Bank and World Economic Forum with attractive buzzwords and unrealistic agendas to keep the conferences running. These unreal goals packaged with marketed hope oversimplify complex social phenomena like Poverty, Inequality, Climate Change, as mostly, they are being discussed in isolation and without a social or geographic context.  “Youth Advocacy” is a new brilliant move to substantiate and streamline these superficial discussions into academia and general public discourse. While taking liberty of dramatizing what “youth advocacy” means, I would like to sum up.

“Hello ..youth of the world !!, we are sorry we missed out at including your opinion while we ran the world like a one way market (whose rules are always set by Global Elite). Now we are in a little bother while earth resources are depleting and life under earth is choking on plastic. Please use paper straws instead of plastic and reproduce less and start travelling by foot or buy bicycles because you literately won’t be able to afford new electric cars in the future. Also, now we have websites for you on which you can chose flight with lowest carbon footprints, and you can also buy 100% organic shoes because we made sure that no animal was harmed during its manufacturing and the source of energy used is also totally renewable”.

The internet is also helping the cause as intelligently designed social media applications and their algorithmic ability (Artificial Intelligence) give us an illusion that world is changing with technology and sustainability at the forefront. But in actual, there is a systematic investment going on reducing the vision of incomprehensible and complex world through “revolutionary” development slogans like “Green Transformation”, “Just Transition”, “Climate Reparations”, “Financial Inclusion”, “Gender Equity” , “Green Jobs” and what not. Interestingly, “Gen Z” seems to be the most potent segment for marketing of these fresh terminologies prepared by those very capitalists who have brought the world on verge of collapse in the first place. No wonder, this year’s biggest conference on Climate Change (COP27) has been partially sponsored by the Coca-Cola Company that has been incontestably termed as one of the biggest polluters of our planet earth.

“Gen Z” (which is another reductionist term used to squeeze diverse global youth population into some woke and revisionist generation leading the global change) refers to the population born between 1996 and 2010. They gained consciousness when the world was recovering from post 9/11 shocks and have witnessed Global Financial Crises (2008) in their adolescence and are ready to step into professional work system in post COVID World after being the first ever generation to go through online education. They were always born into the technology and it is difficult for them to imagine a world without internet and that’s why they are also called the digital natives. With an abundance of information on their fingertips and limits of binaries in their minds, undoubtedly, they are the future runners of the world. This, of course, is a very readily available picture of Gen Z in the market (on internet) which may vary according to their individual as well as national financial condition but it is convenient enough for the new generation of the capitalists who are busy in repackaging the “truths” for them.

An article published by the World Economic Forum this year in March with a title “Gen Z cares about sustainability more than anyone else -and is starting the to make others feel the same” highlights how Gen Z cares more about sustainable buying decisions than brand names (many other similar articles can be found on internet). Forbes, around the same timeline, published “Gen Z and sustainability: The disruption has only just begun” explaining how companies for the sake of Gen Z have to change their entire operations because Gen Z is bent upon changing their consumption patterns. There are dozens of articles touting the same theme recurrently publishing on the mentioned news websites along with other international and local news outlets.

Not only Gen Z, but everyone should be cautious of incapacity of such “Goals” and “Post-Truth” Developmental slogans. The world is rightly going through a massive transformation but it has nothing to offer for the crisis ridden population of the world.  The educated middle class will be compensated here and there with incentives like “work from home”, “online money-making opportunities” and “flexible working hours” but in reality, majority of benefits will be reaped by big corporations. There is a shift, and at some level, even possible rift and friction between the new and old stakeholders of this capitalist system but theory of profit maximization and unjust world order is almost untouched.  The new breed of capitalists has learnt to offer and appreciate their own critique which is attractive to youth. One thing about globalization that must be appreciated is recommendation of the fact that change should be led by a collective global consciousness but current custodians of international organizations seems to be more inclined towards sustaining capitalism more than anything else which is the ultimate cause of human misery and destruction of our planet earth. This means that hope and truth is somewhere else waiting to get unveiled apart from these cosmetic discussions of “goals” and “agendas”.