Beyond the Empire of Chaos: Building Ecology into the Economy. Life Capital Value, Base and Measure
By:
Prof. John McMurtry
Global Research, April 18, 2016
Ecological and social science research increasingly demonstrate that ‘globalization’ is not what it seems. It does not produce more prosperity and reduce poverty for the world, but just the opposite. Ever more powerful transnational corporate money sequences multiply through organic, social and ecological life hosts looting and polluting them.
But what can the social alternative be?
Philosophers across schools reject any ultimate common value, and no political party has any unifying solution. Meanwhile a Hobbesian imperative rules – that all must compete harder in this end-game to survive. The cumulative consequence is that common life capital bases are increasingly depredated and stripped to further enrich the corporate rich. Business statistics themselves show that the poorer half of the world has lost over 40% of its wealth in the last five years, while less than one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population has multiplied its private wealth. Yet the World Bank still claims ‘global poverty reduction’, elite voices blame ‘overpopulation’, and games spectacles capture most attention.
With even the opposition repeating masking slogans of “neo-liberal”, policy drivers to reclaim the life capital of humanity are not conceived. ‘Liberal’, ‘Conservative’, ‘Keynesian and ‘Marxist’ theories lack any life capital base or measure. All acceptable economic schools assume priced commodity-cycles as an end in themselves. So-called ‘neo-classical economics’ has no life coordinates, while political leaders assume this economics in a world of invisible-hand rule.
Even ecological economics remains confined to raw material replacements so that board-foot plantations and biodiverse forests are not distinguished in value. One welcomes counter-evidence to this profile across parties and schools, but none is shown. As in the past, few in favorable positions want to move out of the value system that rules. There is fiddling at the margins, but the ruling paradigm works ever more systemic oppression and ruin on the ground.
Keynesianism is the favorite alternative of progressive economists in the press, but it too is life-capital blind. Keynes himself only questioned the Supply = Demand equation, arguing it could also be the reverse with Demand leading the productive cycle (ie., by government spending, even if it were only “holes in the sand”). This is about as far as the ‘alternative’ goes, with military, PPP, green-wash schemes and bank handouts spending trillions of public wealth to keep the big corporate money-sequences going.
‘Growth’ is the panacea, that is more priced commodities. The life-coherent idea that the demand of the economy is ultimately the demand of life systems for life goods is completely repressed. Money-exchanges alone compute even if the ice-caps melt, more billions are malnourished and ever more species go extinct.
Read the rest of this extraordinary article in the link below:
Comments