The Rules of Capitalism

by Allister J. Marran

The philosophical theologian Paul Tillich once wrote, ‘The fundamental virtues in the ethics of a capitalist society are economic efficiency, developed to the utmost degree of ruthless activity.’

The rules of capitalism put profit over everything else. Everything else. Nothing is sacred or taboo.

It is a complex man-made set of rules, it does not exist in nature, and requires its servants to ignore common sense and its obvious dangers and pitfalls.

It is a giant pyramid scheme of investors and producers at the top, and consumers down below, that requires the base to constantly grow, which is why we now have eight billion plus people on a planet that has very limited resources. It demands infinite growth cycles when raw materials are in short and finite supply.

To ensure its ongoing sustainability, we have constantly to create hype about new products that nobody wanted or asked for in order to make another sale, with built in obsolescence so that we can sell a new model again tomorrow.

Marketing costs for products and services often far exceed R&D and cost-of-production budgets, in order to convince you to fill your house to a large degree with, call it ‘trinkets’, ‘junk’.

The over-mining, over-fishing, over-production, and mass pollution is not sustainable. That's simply a fact.

While every scientist on earth is predicting doom and gloom for future generations, the economist disagrees, and tells us to put out heads in the sand, and ignore the signs. Keep calm and keep spending.

There is another thing. In its appetite to compete, capitalist economics has now become the science of scarcity.  In order to compete, we need to optimize—and optimize everything we possibly can. We strive for less wastage, smaller margins of error, faster turnover.

This means that we sail ever closer to the wind. Let one thing go wrong—a computer hack, a bacterial contamination, a military invasion in a faraway place—and millions of people’s livelihoods and even lives may be imperilled.

As capitalism multiplies the dangers, so it multiplies our vulnerability.

This generation, our generation, the ones who were told by the scientists and experts to just look around and heed the obvious warnings, will be known as the idiots who could have stopped it but chose greed over life, profit over common sense.

We have no water where I live, because the rains haven't come for nearly 10 years. The world is cooling where it's hot, and heating up where it's cold. Smog sits over the cities, and poison infects our water sources. Landfills are full, and growing fuller every day. Our oceans are being fished to extinction, and good farming land is being paved over and cleared for urban development and new roads and highways.

Having stuff, and being able to read and write, and exploit a man-made system, does not make a person smart. If people can't see beyond their basic, immediate, satiating needs and zoom out to see the bigger picture of an exhausted ecosystem with resources heading to zero, and the only world we will ever have struggling to cope, then perhaps we were never that smart or evolved in the first place.

We do not have a divine right to rule this planet. We are just the next animal to over-evolve and get to the top of the food chain. It's an awesome responsibility which sees us on a perilous perch which can be toppled if we do not proceed with caution and humility.

Just ask the previous mantle holders, those fearsome and magnificent dinosaurs, how tenuous that grip on the top dog spot is.

We can’t ask them, of course. They are extinct.

Poem: Laughing at the Milky Way

by Chengde Chen *

There was a chicken, who lived his life happily

Every morning, someone opened his coop and fed him

Day by day, month by month

he believed that this was the law of the world

so he never thought of escaping

Until New Year’s Eve

he found a kitchen knife at his neck

The ‘law’ disappeared

and it was too late for regrets!

 

It is laughable for man to worry that the sky might fall

but not laughable for the falling sky to worry about man

The destruction of civilisation cannot be ‘known’

Only mathematics, standing aloof from the world **

can sense the storm from the ancient Milky Way

Those who have felt it should ponder deeply over it

Those who have realised it should issue a cry loudly

Be a madman, letting others laugh

Laughing is better than being oblivious

for those who are laughing are no longer sleeping!

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* Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today, Open Gate Press, London. chengde@sipgroup.com

** See Chengde Chen's The Non-linear Mathematics of History

A Syntocracy

by Thomas Scarborough

Leonardo da Vinci wrote, ‘Realise that everything connects to everything else.’ In recent decades, this has become increasingly important. We have come to see, in fact, that it is vital to humanity’s survival. With this in mind, the chief end of political systems ought to be the healthy inter-relatedness of all things.

Democracy is often said to be the best available political system. It is, to put it too simply, a system of government by the whole (eligible) population. Even in non-democratic states, governments typically give some approval to the idea.

In terms of the healthy inter-relatedness of all things, democracy goes some way to guaranteeing this. In a democracy, one elects those persons to democratic office who are broadly representative of the people—so that, when they assemble, they may (ideally) bring all of society into healthy relation.

We need democracy as a political system, therefore, not merely for the sake of popular sovereignty, or political accountability, or individual rights, or a host of other things which populate descriptions of democracy. We need it first because, properly conceived, democracy is important to the healthy arrangement of society, and the world. If a political system fails to achieve this, then we are all imperilled.

However, when we think on democracy in these terms, it has, at the same time, some serious shortcomings.

While democracy rightly guarantees a broad participation in the national debate, it does not deliberately prioritise broad and healthy relations in society: for instance, between rich and poor, the built and natural environments, or the present and the future. One sees major imbalances in such areas the world over, and these are potentially disastrous to all.

Democracy as a political system has in many places failed to create an egalitarian society, preserve the whole over the parts, prevent environmental crisis, or create social cohesion. All these things, and more, speak of defective arrangements of our world, where the healthy inter-relatedness of all things ought to be the without-which-not. As humanity’s influence on the planet grows, we are no longer able to absorb such mistakes.

Not only this. In a democratic state, people are often prioritised over the healthy inter-relatedness of all things—and so democracy, too, is prone to the weaknesses one typically associates with people: populism, personal loyalties, polarisation, fleeting fears, vested interests, prejudices, and short-sighted thinking, among other things. For good or for bad, democracy is a people-focused enterprise.

Which then is it to be? Is supreme power vested in the people, or is it, so to speak, vested in relations between things?

The goal of democracy must be, not democracy as an end in itself, but the healthy arrangement of society, and the world. While democracy means ‘power to the people’, such power must be vested not merely in the people, but in the arrangement of society. Further, the law code which a democracy produces, which is the complete system of laws, needs to be developed to prioritise the inter-relatedness of all things.

While such an idea has much in common with with democracy, it differs in principle from the democracy that we know. For the sake of a name, we shall call this form of government a ‘syntocracy’—from the Greek and Latin syn, ‘together with’, and the Greek krites, ‘power’—a form of government in which all things are brought together in balanced relation, through the people.

Syntocracy rests, therefore, on relations which are balanced and broad. This simple principle shifts the emphasis of democracy as we now know it, and potentially transforms our political life.

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Image credit: VA Network for Democracy and Environmental Rights.

Picture Post #53 Buckled Rails

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'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Buckled railway line near Glasgow, 25 June 2018.

The thermal expansion of railway lines is governed most simply by the formula

Δ L ≈ α L Δ T

This formula failed near Glasgow on 25 June 2018, when railway lines buckled in the heat. In fact they buckled in heatwaves all across Europe in the 2010s.  Why?  The answer is simple.  This formula, and versions of it, failed to include environmental factors—at least, not those which mattered.

It is not only railway lines which buckle.  Oceans are polluted, glaciers retreat, bees are poisoned, toads go blind, groundwater is poisoned, people suffocate—in fact, thousands if not millions of things go wrong besides—all without their being included in the formulae.

Here is the problem.  We take at face value that physical laws are true of this world.  It is the heresy of Plato.  Ordinary things, held Plato, imitate forms.  We hold up forms to reality, which is formulae: 'This is how it is!'  It is not.  And so the world is continually bedevilled by negative consequences.

Advantages of Ecological Socialism

Image courtesy of Clariant. 
Today, companies like the speciality chemicals company
Clariant say that they are working to reposition
themselves as sustainable solutions providers

Posted by Andrew Porter*

Today, there is much greater awareness of the threat of Climate Change. Yet species loss, disruption of planetary systems, and widespread environmental degradation are allowed to continue. Over millennia, we have been very good at developing ways to respond to the environment; now the imperative is to develop the sharpness and capacity to respond to ourselves.

Surely it is apparent now that modern industrial overreach needs to be scaled back significantly. A number of systems might be devised for remedy, but the only ones that have any real chance of success revolve around human ecology and sustainability. Can large swathes of society rally around a call to protect ecologies and promote sustainability? Because underlining such a solution is the question ‘What's in it for us?’ I think that this question itself must be transformed by a new ecological attitude, what we might call an 'inner ecology.'

One ‘system’ that might guide a large set of cultural and societal factors toward a much better relationship between humankind and the Earth is what I call ‘ecological socialism’. It would require a re-orientation of society towards an integration of human needs and what is necessary to afford the natural world its sustainability. The ‘socialism’ of the idea means equal possession of the opportunities and limitations inherent in living within the governance of natural principles. It is both ethical and ecological to distribute limitations and opportunities equally: who could argue otherwise?

An integration of the planet’s health (preservation of biodiversity and habitat, clean water and air, soil conservation, and respect for the earth's climate mechanisms) and people’s lives maximises care of one for the other. Nature has its goals and man has his; unless they are integrated, sustainability will remain out of reach. Two primary principles that we might work into to guide and animate environmental preservation are:

1) Streams, trees, bays, animals, mountains, oceans, and so on, should have standing as holders of legal rights because they have moral rights in our mind. We are in this together, nature and man, and if we are a lame and destructive partner, this joint venture remains unviable.

2) Natural systems maintain health and balance as a core feature, and should become a core feature of our lives. This involves development and implementation of human ecology models. The process as well as the result is – rather than a frittering away of human capacity – a kind of wholeness.

Surely the present is the crucial time to address this. George Monbiot makes the point well in a March 15, 2019 article in The Guardian newspaper entitled ‘Capitalism is Destroying the Earth. We Need a New Human Right for Future Generations’.

‘At the heart of capitalism is a vast and scarcely examined assumption: you are entitled to as great a share of the world’s resources as your money can buy. You can purchase as much land, as much atmospheric space, as many minerals, as much meat and fish as you can afford, regardless of who might be deprived. If you can pay for them, you can own entire mountain ranges and fertile plains. You can burn as much fuel as you like. Every pound or dollar secures a certain right over the world’s natural wealth.’

Ecological socialism—moving away from current assumptions and forms of exploitation—seeks the sustainability of the natural world and also aims to sustain man, in some form, within this. A principal standard of ecological socialism is that human burdens on the planet are kept well below the Earth's carrying capacity for them.

Ecological socialism attempts to genuinely represent all life forms and natural systems as equals in its sphere of obligation, caring, and set of rights. Ecological socialism models human governance and society on the appreciation of ecological balance and advantages. It seeks to make organic goodness human as well as natural. Ecological socialism recognises that humans must be integral with natural ways for both humans and the Earth to thrive.

Some specific choices are clear. Industrial society must be phased out. Strategies must be found to bring human numbers down and encourage small-scale simplicity. I believe that ecology-centred education, with good assistance from the humanities, helps pave the way. The belief that the individual and society are supported best by harmony with and not antagonism with nature is the vital one.

The exploitive way of life, denying costs, is over. Ecological socialism integrates man and ecologies, making the human path forward one of integrity itself. This is a value worth crafting human life around. Currently, culture and societies seem not to mind demise. But ecological socialism aims to help people understand that a citizen is not a citizen unless responsible to oneself and to the Earth.

Citizenship is best defined as this dual responsibility—to help oneself and one’s circle thrive, and also to bolster the optimal flourishing of the ecosystems and planetary systems of Earth through non-interference. Ecological socialism is the best way to ensure this.

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Andrew Porter is a philosopher and educator who lives near Boston in the United States