Well, for one thing, there's human nature. I suspect that Capitalism is a
product of it, rather than the stimulus for it. It's a chicken and egg puzzle
thing. Whatever the system, some humans want power, to control other humans.
But then, we ended up with Capitalism, which tends to metastacize unless you
have a Theodore Roosevelt stopping monopolies, or an FDR imposing social
welfare legislation on his rich compatriots. Eventually technology develops to
the point where it becomes easy for power elites to control people's minds and
allows police and military forces to easily kill protestors. I've read that at
every football game and baseball game, there are military exhibitions, planes
flying overhead in formation, and, of course, always our national anthem. The
old adage is, "Never discuss religion or politics at social gatherings". That
keeps the peace and teaches people not to disrupt the status quo.
When I was raising my children, there were a very few people who refused to
have a TV in their home because they believed that watching TV would be harmful
to their children's development. I sort of agreed, but my children already
resented feeling different from other children because they had blind parents.
I didn't want to make things worse for them by preventing them from having the
same experiences as other children. Now, I think I regret that decision. They
grew up in a world, totally different from the one in which I grew up, and they
developed different values and a different way of functioning, all because of
the TV. It provided a vew of the world, a set of values, a consumer mentality,
and a submission to mass thinking, none of which the radio forced on my
generation. The next generation was taken over by the computer. Then the smart
phone came along.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2019 3:15 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Capitalism versus Life on Earth
If we can't get the attention of the working class, we're probably headed for
the showers.
I use that analogy because over the long Thanksgiving weekend, my Son,
Son-In-Law, and three grandsons were all busy on their Smart Phones, tracking
their fantasy football teams.
And when the TV's were not blasting football games, our 12 year old grandson
and our 11 year old great grandson were fighting space monsters and blasting
them out of the skies, protecting Corporate America. And the redundant
pounding "music" went on and on and on, to a point where I came to believe it
has hypnotic powers.
Except for our youngest daughter and her husband, everyone of voting age were
anti Trump. But any effort to engage in conversation about world affairs was
met with grunts or statements like, "I don't get involved in politics."
Americans have been turned off, turned away from involving ourselves in the
most critical part of our future.
While we all scream and cheer for "our team", the nation's leaders are gathered
at the planning tables plotting the nation's future.
And so far, they've done a very expensive, bungled job of it.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/4/19, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
https://socialistaction.org/2019/12/04/capitalism-versus-life-on-earth
/
Capitalism versus Life on Earth
Socialist Action / 2 hours ago
??Image by The All-Nite Images via Flickr
By IAN ANGUS
Climate & Capitalism editor Ian Angus spoke at an educational
conference organized by Socialist Action Canada in Toronto, on November 16,
2019.
His talk has been edited for publication.
These sentences are from a recent report on the consequences of
climate
change:
???Sea level rise, changes in water and food security, and more
frequent extreme weather events are likely to result in the migration
of large segments of the population. Rising seas will displace tens
(if not
hundreds) of millions of people, creating massive, enduring
instability.??? Salt water intrusion into coastal areas and changing
weather patterns will also compromise or eliminate fresh water
supplies in many parts of the world???. A warming trend will also
increase the range of insects that are vectors of infectious tropical
diseases. This, coupled with large scale human migration from tropical
nations, will increase the spread of infectious disease.???
Many reports have made such points. What makes this one significant is
that it was commissioned by the Pentagon, by the General who is now
chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The authors are senior officials
of the US Army, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and NASA, and it was
published by the United States Army War College.
Their report recommends strengthening the US military, already the
biggest war machine on Earth, to protect the US empire from the
consequences of the environmental chaos. They call for a
???campaign-plan-like approach to proactively prepare for likely
conflict and mitigate the impacts.??? As we know, when the US military
embarks on a campaign, the result is always devastation and
destruction for the poor and oppressed.
As this report shows, the US Army, unlike the US president, knows that
climate change is real, and that the consequences may be catastrophic.
The generals recognize that something has gone terribly wrong in the
relationship between human society and the Earth.
Planetary Boundaries
Climate change is the most extreme example of the crisis, but it is
not the only one. Earth System scientists have identified nine
planetary boundaries ??? global environmental conditions that define
???a safe operating space for humanity.??? Crossing any one of those
thresholds could have deleterious or even disastrous consequences for
civilization.
Seven of the nine critical planetary boundaries are close to or
already in the danger zone.
Such research leads irresistibly to the conclusion that modest reforms
and policy shifts are not enough. We confront not individual problems
that can be tackled separately, but an interlocked set of disruptions
of Earth???s life support systems. Fundamental natural processes that
have evolved over millions of years are being shattered in just a few decades.
Radical remedies are obviously required, but we won???t find a cure
unless we identify the underlying cause, the systemic disease that is
attacking our planet.
Why Growth?
Many environmentalists identify the underlying problem simply as growth.
And indeed, as many books and articles show, the drive to extract,
produce and grow ever more stuff is filling our rivers with poison and
our air with pollution. Oceans are dying, species are disappearing at
unprecedented rates, water is running short, and soil is eroding
faster than it can be replaced ??? but the growth machines push on.
Corporate executives, economists, bureaucrats and politicians all
agree that growth is good and non-growth is bad. Unending material
expansion is a deliberate policy promoted by ideologues of every
political stripe, from social democrats to conservatives. When the G20
met in Toronto they unanimously agreed that their highest priority was
to ???lay the foundation for strong, sustainable, and balanced
growth.??? The word growth appeared 29 times in their final declaration.
Uncontrolled growth is clearly a central issue, but that raises a
further question ??? why does it continue? Why, in the face of massive
evidence that expanded production and resource extraction is killing
us, do governments and corporations keep shoveling coal for the
runaway growth train?
In most environmental writing, one of two explanations is offered ???
it???s
human nature, or it???s a mistake.
The human nature argument is central to mainstream economics, which
assumes that human beings always want more, so economic growth is just
capitalism???s way of meeting human desires. For our species, enough
is never enough. That view often leads its proponents to conclude that
the only way to slow or reverse the pillaging of Mother Earth is to
slow or reverse population growth. More people equals more stuff; so
fewer people would equal less stuff.
That claim is fatally undermined by fact that the countries with the
highest birth rates have the lowest standard of living, own the least
stuff, and produce the least pollution. If the poorest 3 billion
people on the planet somehow disappeared tomorrow, there would be
virtually no reduction in ongoing environmental destruction.
The other common explanation for the constant promotion of growth is
that we have been seduced by a false ideology. The drive for growth
has been described as a fetish, an obsession, an addiction, or even a spell.
Greens often use the term growthmania.
Such accounts present the drive for growth as a choice that
politicians and investors make, under the influence of a bizarre
obsession. As British Marxist Fawzi Ibrahim says, this ???must be the
first time in history that a necessity has been described as a fetish.
You might as well describe fish having a fetish for water as
capitalism having a fetish for growth. Growth is as essential to
capitalism as is water to fish. As fish would die without water, so
would capitalism drown without growth.???
Growth ideology doesn???t cause perpetual accumulation ??? it justifies it.
Uncontrolled growth is not the root cause of the global crisis ??? it
is the inevitable result of the profit system, of capitalism???s
inherent drive to accumulate ever more capital.
Personifications of capital
As individuals, the people who run the giant polluters undoubtedly
want their children and grandchildren to live in a clean,
environmentally sustainable world. But as major shareholders and
executives and top managers they act, in Marx???s wonderful phrase, as
???personifications of capital.??? Regardless of how they behave at
home or with their children, at work they are capital in human form,
and the imperatives of capital take precedence over all other needs
and values. When it comes to a choice between protecting humanity???s
future and maximizing profit, they choose profit.
As a case in point, consider the nitrogen oxide gases, nitrogen
monoxide and nitrogen dioxide, which are produced by burning petroleum
fuels, especially by diesel engines. They don???t get as much media
attention as carbon dioxide, but they are powerful greenhouse gases,
and they are directly harmful to human health. They cause throat and
lung diseases, and they increase the severity of diseases such as asthma.
In 2009, regulators in Europe and North America introduced strict
limits on automobile nitrogen oxide emissions. All automakers had to
submit their cars for testing. That was a big problem for the
world???s second largest automobile company, Volkswagen, because much
of their profit came from vehicles with diesel engines that did not meet the
new standards.
But, as we are often told, capitalism encourages innovation. Just in
time, VW announced that its engineers had solved the problem. They had
invented technology that fully met or exceeded the new standards. They
promoted it very heavily under the slogan ???Clean Diesel,??? and it
was hugely successful. Between 2009 and 2016 Volkswagen sold over 11
million Clean Diesel cars worldwide.
That???s pretty impressive?? ????? a giant corporation was doing well
by doing good, making huge profits while protecting the environment
and human health.
Or so it seemed.
In 2016, thanks to investigations by some dedicated engineers, we
learned that Clean Diesel was a hoax. Volkswagen had not invented new
emissions technology. Volkswagen had invented software that cheated on
the tests. When the software detected that a test was being conducted,
it reduced the engine???s power and performance. Under laboratory
conditions, VW???s Clean Diesel cars met the emission regulations. On
the road, they emitted up to 40 times more nitrogen oxide than the legal
limit.
Senior executives have been fired and the company has paid heavy
fines, but that???s after the fact. Seven years of Volkswagen
pollution and seven years of big Volkswagen sales illustrate two
fundamental characteristics of capitalism ??? short-term gains are
always more important than long-term losses, and profit is always more
important than protecting human health.
Volkswagen???s owners and executives are personifications of capital,
and capital must grow, no matter who gets hurt.
Machines for accumulation
The reason is very simple, although its implications are complex and
profound. Big banks and money funds and multimillionaires invest in
corporations like Volkswagen in order to get more money back. They
really don???t care if Volkswagen makes cars or clothes and candy
bars, so long as they get a return on their investment.
Corporations are giant social machines for turning capital into more
capital. That???s what shareholders expect and want, and that???s what
managers and executives must deliver.
A person who is unwilling to put the needs of capital first is not
likely to become a major corporate executive. If the screening process
fails, or if a CEO has an inconvenient attack of conscience, he or she
will not last long in that position. It has been called the ecological
tyranny of the bottom line. When protecting humanity and planet might
reduce profits, corporations will always put profits first.
Capital has only one measure of success. How much more profit was made
in this quarter than in the previous quarter? How much more today than
yesterday? It doesn???t matter if the sales include products spread
disease, destroy forests, demolish ecosystems, and treat our water,
air, and soil as sewers. It all contributes to the growth of capital,
and that is what counts.
Each corporation seeks to ensure that its products produce an
attractive profit on invested capital. A corporation with lower costs
or more attractive products can drive its competitors out of business.
There is constant pressure to expand physically, financially, and
geographically.
If nothing stops it, capital will try to expand infinitely, but Earth
is not infinite. The atmosphere and oceans and forests are finite,
limited resources, and capitalism is now pressing against those limits.
Capital must grow. A zero-growth capitalist economy simply cannot exist.
As Marx wrote, the historical mission of the bourgeoisie is
???accumulation for accumulation???s sake, production for
production???s sake???. production on a constantly increasing scale.???
Of course, the fact that capital needs to grow does not mean that it
always can grow. On the contrary, the drive to grow periodically leads
to situations in which more commodities are produced than can be sold.
The result is a crisis in which immense amounts of wealth are destroyed.
Individual corporations can and do go out of business in such
situations, but over the long term, the drive for profit, to
accumulate ever more capital, always reasserts itself.
That is the defining feature of the capitalist system and the root
cause of the global environmental crisis. Mass opposition and public
pressure can slow down or hinder the drive to expand more and faster,
but it will always reassert itself in some form.
Metabolic rifts
The anti-ecological results of such a system were first analyzed in
the nineteenth century, when the productivity of English agriculture
was in decline.
In the mid-1800s, the German scientist Justus von Liebig showed that
in its natural state, soil provides the essential nutrients that
allows plants to grow, and replenishes nutrients from plant and animal waste.
But when crops are produced for distant markets, as they increasingly
were in 19th Century England, soil fertility suffers because food
waste and excrement do not return to the soil. Liebig called this a
robbery system, because nutrients were being stolen from the soil and not
returned.
Karl Marx studied Liebig???s work carefully. He seized upon the
then-new scientific concept of metabolism, of biological and physical
cycles that are essential to life, and made it central to his analysis
of the relationship between humanity and nature. He viewed the shift
away from using human manure as an important example of capitalist
society???s alienation from the natural world on which human life depends.
Marx integrated Liebig???s explanation of the soil exhaustion crisis
into his historical and social analysis of capitalism, concluding that
???a rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system,???
because the imperatives of capitalist growth inevitably conflict with
the laws of nature.
He described the separation of humans from food production, this break
in an age-old nutrient cycle as ???an irreparable rift in the
interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed
by the natural laws of life itself.???
Marx???s analysis of nineteenth-century British agriculture provides
the theoretical starting point for what is now known as metabolic rift
theory, which is used by many radical ecologists to analyze and
understand modern environmental crises.
The concept of metabolic rift expresses society???s simultaneous
dependence on and separation from the rest of nature. Like an
auto-immune disease that attacks the body it dwells in, capitalism is
both part of the natural world and at war with it. It simultaneously
depends upon and undermines the Earth???s life support systems.
An incurably short-term horizon
Capital???s ecologically destructive impacts are driven not just by
its need to grow, but by its need to grow faster. The circuit from
investment to profit to reinvestment requires time to complete, and
the longer it takes, the less total return investors receive.
Competition for investment produces constant pressure to speed up the
cycle, to go from investment to production to sale ever more quickly.
That???s why it took sixteen weeks to raise a two-and-a-half pound
chicken in 1925, while today chickens twice that big are raised in six weeks.
Selective breeding, hormones, and chemical feed have enabled factory
farms to produce not just more meat, but more meat faster. The
suffering of the animals and the quality of the food are secondary
concerns, if they are considered at all.
But most natural processes cannot be manipulated that way. Nature???s
cycles operate at speeds that have evolved over many millennia ???
forcing them in any way inevitably destabilizes the cycle and produces
unpleasant results.
Fertile land is destroyed, forests are clear-cut, and fish populations
collapse, all because of what Istvan M??sz??ros calls the incurably
short-term horizon of the capital system. There is an insuperable
conflict between nature???s time and capital???s time ??? between
cyclical processes that have developed over hundreds of millions of
years, and capital???s need for rapid production, sale, and profit.
The metabolic rifts that Liebig and Marx knew of and wrote about were
initially local or regional, but they have grown along with capitalism.
Colonialism extended the damage by transporting products and nutrients
from distant places.
Ireland was the first victim of the global robbery system. Describing
how England imported food from poverty-stricken Ireland, Marx wrote:
???England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even
allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of
the exhausted soil.???
Since the middle of the 20th century, capitalism has caused
unprecedented changes in the entire biosphere, Earth???s lands,
forests, water, and air. In its endless search for profits, it is
massively disrupting and destroying Earth???s life support systems
????? the natural processes and cycles that make life itself possible.
Metabolic rifts have become metabolic chasms.
Ecosocialist revolution
That???s why the environmental crisis can???t be just a talking point
for socialists ??? it???s a planetary emergency that we must treat as
a top priority. We need to initiate and join struggles for immediate
environmental aims. We need to participate, not as sideline critics,
but as activists, builders and leaders. And at the same time, we need
to find the best ways to patiently explain how those struggles relate
to the larger fight to save the world from capitalist ecocide.
As Simon Butler and I wrote in Too Many People?, ???in every country,
we need governments that break with the existing order, that are
answerable only to working people, farmers, the poor, indigenous
communities, and immigrants?? ????? in a word, to the victims of
ecocidal capitalism, not its
beneficiaries and representatives.???
Such governments will have two fundamental and inseparable characteristics.
First, they will be committed to grassroots democracy, to radical
egalitarianism, and to social justice. They will be based on
collective ownership of the means of production, and they will work
actively to eliminate exploitation, profit and accumulation as the
driving forces of our economy.
Second, they will base their decisions and actions on the best
ecological principles, giving top priority to stopping
anti-environmental practices, to restoring damaged ecosystems, and to
reestablishing agriculture and industry on ecologically sound principles.
Such a profound transformation will not just happen. In fact, it will
not happen at all unless ecology has a central place in socialist
theory, in the socialist program, and in the activity of the socialist
movement.
In short, in the 21st century, socialists and greens must be
ecosocialists, and humanity needs an ecosocialist revolution.
Republished, with permission, from Climate & Capitalism,
https://climateandcapitalism.com
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___
Carl Sagan
???Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an
open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or
somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the
literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings
involved????
??? Carl Sagan