“The End of Capitalism: Reflections on Ulrike Herrmann’s Book and the Urgency of Climate Change”

Imagine your time is running out. Roughly the following scenario: Your family doctor tells you that you have only two months to live because you have a terminal illness. The image is dramatic, even drastic (and will remind some of the fate of the newspaper you are reading), but the drasticity is intentional. And real. What to do with the remaining time that is left?

These are thoughts that come to mind when reading Ulrike Herrmann’s book “The End of Capitalism”. It’s not a secret. On the contrary: the work’s cover is adorned with a sticker “Spiegel Bestseller Platz 1”. And that is possibly the highest award that audiences in German-speaking countries can give. Voting took place at the bookstore tills and via Amazon. The subject of Hermann’s book is not a cheerfully populist one: the end of the world as we know it. Where “world” is represented here by the synonym of capitalism, a system that has permeated all facets of our lives. But that, according to the German publicist Ulrike Herrmann, has no future. At least if we are all to have a future.

That sounds pathetic, of course. But Hermann’s battle is not one fought argumentatively for its own sake. Or even to climb the bestseller lists. It explains in very clear, simple (but not infantile) language what the state of the art is on climate change. And what we can brush off – a word that dangerously encompasses everything and everyone, but is necessary – in terms of expectations, hopes, possibilities. Mainly of a technical nature. Because the message just popped up that the oceans of this planet are showing unusual warming and experts are extremely concerned: As a reader of the book mentioned, this does not surprise me at all. Or how would you evaluate the fact – which I encountered here for the first time – that mankind “have fed the seas with the heat of 3.6 billion Hiroshima bombs over the last 25 years”. No read error: That corresponds to about four atomic bombs per second.

So I will use the rest of my time and epistles here to reflect and pass on messages like those of Ulrike Herrmann, who for her part condenses messages from the past and present of research. In short, the status quo on this planet is the result of about three hundred years of capitalism (which hasn’t always brought bad things with it). Like a cancer cell, capitalism requires constant growth. However, unlimited growth is impossible with limited resources. “Green growth” is also an illusion. Technical innovation, digitization and belief in progress will not be able to save the climate. The industrialized countries will therefore have to say goodbye to capitalism and strive for a different form of economy. Which? I don’t want to spoil things, but there is a roughly outlined positive perspective.

Frighten you because you have become so used to the consumer paradise of capitalism? No: there is no Plan B (or even Planet B) in sight.