Tuesday, November 20th, 2018
Stephan: I am leading today's edition of SR with this essay for two reasons. First, I am beginning to see a trend in which capitalism as a system is being called into question in a way it has not been in some decades. I take this as an early symptom of coming social unrest. Second, because this line of argument makes the same mistakes earlier alternatives like the thinking of Marx, and Engels made. Why? Because the alternatives presented are still expressions of a worldview based on materialism.
Democracy is the best social organization system, in my opinion, because it is the one that most closely reflects the nonlocal consciousness domain and the formation of the collective intention that creates the illusion we call reality. So how do we deal with capitalism? It actually isn't that complicated, I think. It gets down to social values. A society that makes fostering wellbeing its first priority can use capitalism and its encouragement of innovation and entrepreneurship so long as profit is always subordinate to wellbeing from the individual, to the family, the community, the state, the nation, and the planet itself. How do we do that? By exercising the power of the quotidian choice. I describe it in detail in
The 8 Laws of Change.
It may seem too simple to be true, but this is how Gandhi got independence for India without a war, and Martin Luther King created the civil rights movement.
Climate change is the greatest existential crisis facing humanity today. Capitalist industrialization has led us to the edge of the precipice, and avoiding the end of civilization as we know it may require the development of a view in direct opposition to the way in which capitalism “values” nature, according to John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of the socialist magazine Monthly Review.
C. J. Polychroniou: We live in a period of massive environmental disturbance, such that it has led to the claim that we are no longer in the Holocene epoch but instead in the midst of the Anthropocene era. Assuming that this claim, popularized in the West by the atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, is scientifically correct, to what extent can economic growth itself be blamed for the catastrophic effects of human activities on the environment, including influencing the climate by burning fossil fuels, cutting down rainforests and farming livestock?
John Bellamy Foster: It is worth noting that the Anthropocene concept originated in the early USSR. It first appeared in the English language in the translation of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia in the 1970s. This arose out of discussions of anthropogenic change and the biosphere […]
Difficult to imagine ignoring population growth as a driver of consumption, climate change and the economic systems that serve it.
My experience as a capitalist tells me the consumer is at the core of the problem and solution….Yes they are manipulated to want more (beef, electronics, etc) but they are also open to education to want less. The next economic failure might well be quite large and open many avenues for change.
I see no mistakes in Marx’s thinking. His Dialectical Materialism states that “history is a process not driven by the interplay of ideas but by conflicts engendered by money, greed, and power.” This idea seems to be true, especially in our Capitalistic Oligarchy which we are forced to live in. Even though we live in a “so called democracy”, it is not a true Democracy at all. We are not equal partners, or equal voters, and The Military/Industrial/Corporate complex will not change because we, as individuals change.