Professor John McMurtry
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.
Life Capital, not Marxism is the Solution
 For
Marx, productive forces are the ultimate driver of history and the base
of human evolution, with the environment as instrumental value for
human production re-creating the world to serve ever more empowered
stages of productive development. In these respects Marx’s position and
orthodox techno-economics today are alike in principle. They argue for
opposite outcomes – working-class revolution versus capitalist-system
growth – but both are forms of technological determinism. Neither has a
life capital base – the missing ground and link of received economic
thought.
Close examination reveals that productive-force determinism is the ultimate driver of society for Marx with no grounding life-value base to control or direct it – Stalinist growth being an extreme example of the problem. My own long research through these issues has concluded that life capital
is the underlying ground long eluding us – the ultimate base of human
society and development, and the only concept which unifies across
social, ecological and organic systems. It is the unseen foundation of
the unifying alternative, and applies across domains.
Defining Life Capital as Universalizable and Objective Value through Time
Life capital is an objective and quantifiable process whose criterion is life wealth/capacity that produces more life wealth/capacity without loss and with cumulative gain through generational time
(e.g., a society’s public hydro infrastructure, its literacy
development, or an individual’s organic fitness through age stages).
Yet it is crucial to emphasize that life capital does not presuppose a
private possessor of it. Nor does it require a private profit. But both
these false presuppositions have become instituted as akin to physical
laws in the reigning ‘economic’ paradigm.
At the most comprehensive level, life capital denotes the collective
life bases of the planetary ecosystem and all the socially constructed
conditions of humanity’s provision of life goods which are reproduced
and gain through generations. In any form, macro or micro, life capital
is always that which enables life capacities to reproduce and advance
through time. Life capital, at any level, however, can be run down by a
life-blind economic system such as ‘globalization’ today. The collapse
of the Easter Island culture is a paradigm example of this hollowing out
of a society’s life capital bases in life-blind devotion to its system
constructions as an end in self. We follow this pattern on a global
scale today.
How Life Capital Applies to our Daily Lives
Life capital is all that we continuously depend on to live and live
well – breathable air, potable water, everyday knowledge, energy
infrastructures, and life-protective laws and regulations. There is no
good of our lives not dependent on it to stay alive and well, but the
current ruling system increasingly despoils it across sectors. This is
the essential problem of our world.
 On
the individual level, each one of us is a bearer of life capital which
we manage better rather than worse by developing rather than wasting or
depleting it. On the micro as well as the macro level, our life capital
is far deeper in value than what can be sold in the market. Yet we lack
the concept for what ultimately matters to us, that without which every life is reduced, malnourished and dies.
This is especially true for social and ecological life capital on which
we depend without knowing it – for example, effective societal norms
and infrastructures ensuring clean air, water, stable climate, civil
safety, electricity infrastructures, education, healthcare, income
security.
All this becomes self-evident with testing inspection. But nothing is
less comprehended in the reigning ‘Economics’. Its paradigm is
decoupled from life means and substance in principle, with money demand
for them as their only worth. If it is not priced for exchange and
purchase, it has no value in this value system. There is no life-value
in the calculus. If a natural resource or beauty does not make money,
it is ‘wasted’. If a corporation kills people by its negligence, the
value of their lives is the income to replace them.
It may seem that life capital has already entered into progressive
economists’ vocabulary with concepts of ‘ natural capital’, ‘social
capital’, ‘human capital’ and ‘knowledge capital’ which have become
familiar in recent decades (beginning with ‘human capital’ from 1960’s
onward applied to people who increase their own market value by earning
university degrees). Yet these seeming forms of life capital reverse its
meaning. They mean only what can be equated to a money value in the
market, and so rule out life capital value itself – the value in itself and for life of nature, society, and knowledge. Life value, all real value on earth, cannot be conceived within the instituted blinkers.
Since only what increases revenues/reduces costs in money
transactions and sequences is a “cost” or “benefit” to this value
calculus, polluting, depleting and otherwise destroying life capital is
built in as more “efficiency” because it reduces cost inputs. Thus a
contradiction arises across the oceans and forests of the world. Life
capital is perpetually despoiled as ‘natural capital’ to maximize
money-value profit however natural life capital is in fact destroyed,
moving from one site to the next as ‘globalization’. What is called
‘development’ and ‘growth’ cannot distinguish between this ‘investor
value adding’ and the cumulative destruction of life systems.
What Has Gone Wrong at the Most Basic Level
As money becoming more money for transnational private possessors has
become the ruling value system of the planet, the moral disorder is not
examined or represented as it behaves. Rather it is auto-venerated in
stock epithets of ‘freedom’, ‘prosperity’, and ‘new wealth’. In reality,
a triad mechanism of media indoctrination, transnational treaty
commands and armed force have imposed the system step by step. The
global money-sequence system operates in accordance with three internal
laws not discussed. It selects for more priced commodities without life
standards, multiplies money demand to the richest, and – mot deeply –
depredates life capital across social and ecological life support
systems.
 That
this system cumulatively entails eco-genocidal effects is taboo to
raise within official society. Most people have no idea of the inner
logic of the reigning assumptions. Orthodox theory is instead devoted to
perfecting the models of money-sequence ‘value adding’ with arcane
mathematics leading devices for the rich to slip between the cracks of
the law. Wall Street has in this mode modelled control of the buyable
water and land in the world for future profit to its ‘investors’ with
anything else that can be bought and sold to spike private money
sequences.
While every plane of existence from which more money-value can be
extracted is in the cross-hairs, no effectively binding protection for
life capital bases has been allowed since the mildly successful Ozone
Layer Protocol of 1988. The planet is systemically converted into
private money sequences to the top depriving and destroying organic,
economic and natural life support systems. The crowning irony is
‘austerity programs’ for society to keep the meta program going. At the
same time, corporate-rights treaties are backed by severe punishments of
taxpayers for any profit-reducing deviation by democratic laws – for
example, to reduce neuro-toxins in the air, or stop toxic dumps,
proscribe dolphin meat, or prohibit slave labour products. All is
enforceable by financial and armed embargo in the last resort, and
corporate state politicians are pervasively lobbied with electoral
financing and post-office wealth to serve the new world order.
The emergence in the 2016 American presidential primaries of
candidate policies to reverse these transnational corporate rights
expresses a growing political resistance of the US population – even if
the issues are obscured in the corporate media. It has been a long time
coming. Thomas Berry long ago observed that “corporate profit is the
deficit of the Earth”. Yet in the more exact words of Wall Street
analysis: “With captive customers, the cash flows are virtually
guaranteed. The only major variables are the initial prices paid, the
amount of debt used for financing, and the pace and magnitude of price
hikes – easy things for Wall Street to model.”
‘Freedom’ here consists in no recourse left for society to stop or
limit the hollowing out of life capital to maximally profit
transnational ‘investors’. In pretence of ‘free trade’, peoples are
deprived of what ultimately matters to them without knowing what has
happened. This is why in the end people feel increasingly helpless and
meaningless in a world run out of control.
Primary Implications for Public Policy and Recovery
Re-grounding begins with a first principle. Real economic value is not created
by the global market or by money exchanges. This ruling delusion has
been promoted by neo-economics since the turn of the 20th
century when it reduced economics to dyadic money exchanges with no life
coordinates or bases – a system in which the best of possible worlds is
a money-price gain for the exchangers. In life-capital understanding,
the economic ground begins with reproduction of the planetary atmosphere
itself, the oceans, hydrological cycles, soil cover, forests, fellow
species, and all such life bases now erased from accounts by the
reigning model.
Yet life capital includes far more than the planet’s physical
resources on which life depends. It denotes all real goods that are
reproduced and/or cumulatively advance through time, including
scientific knowledge, life protective norms, and accessible energy
sources. These are all measurable life capital formations along with the
human-made bases of the real economy of producing goods otherwise in short supply.
Orthodox economics, in polar contrast, eliminates all life capital
from view, and all commodities are ‘goods’ by definition. Only what can
be privatized to yield more money counts as ‘economic’ or ‘competitive’.
Thus a system of taking more than is put in every cycle with no limit
becomes the supreme law of ‘value creation’ with all its profitable
produces as ‘goods’, never bads.. Behind the scenes, the, the ‘masters
of the universe’ create money by ever rising debt-issues and service
charges which create nothing, but propel margin feeding in ever greater
multiples.
 No
step is possible without the guarantee and force of corporate states.
“My administration”, said President Obama to his Wall Street audience on
April 3 2009, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks”.
Governments’ servant economists and stacked committees, double-standard
tax policies, escalating subsidies, armed force protections,
privatization of public knowledge, and foreign wars are further
dimensions of this transnational corporate system at work.
Life capital is opposite in nature. Whether our own lives or family,
our bioregion or the planetary life-host – or the tree, garden or
birdlife, vocation or vocabulary at hand – there is one underlying
formula of life substance and flourishing across al of them. Life
capital produces more life wealth/capacities without loss and with
cumulative gain through time in all its variations, the law of true
human evolution. Securing our life capital base to live by is its first
moral axiom across cultures and tastes. This underlying first principle
entails, in turn, policy and regulation to prevent any life capital
being run down, wasted or destroyed – as almost all are now. Our
collective and individual life capital of ecological, social and organic
life hosts are all at risk.
Solution follows from recognising the problem. Moral and policy
deciders collectively reclaim human purpose by binding life-capital
standards to regulate production, trade and investment- as we already do
now with water and sewer standards and enforced laws against criminal
attacks.
How the Mass Media Paralyse Societies within the Life-Blind Money Mechanism
The mass media are advertising vehicles which sell media spaces to
the wealthiest corporations. They are operationally structured as a
propaganda system for the corporations buying the spaces and the system
they are embedded in. This is an analytic description confirmed by
examining their electronic and hard-copy operations across formats.
It follows that the mass media promote and idealize the corporate
operations and wealth sustaining them. But what is not recognised is
that these corporations collectively depredate the life capital bases of
societies with no connected media investigations. With no life capital
standards governing, a global market race to the bottom forms without
alternative.
All the while, trillions of dollars/Euros/pounds of public money go
to big banks and corporations to keep them going. A staggering $5.3
trillion (U.S.) of public money by IMF calculation is given to
fossil-fuel corporations alone, even as the climate destabilization they
lead reaches cataclysmic proportions. Despite finally known emergency,
even all ecological life support systems together do not receive a small
fraction of what subsidizes the big banks and oil/motor industries
propelling their collapse.
What is not seen is not responded to. The mass media are, in fact,
structured to divert attention from the system’s degenerate trends to
sell priced commodities as their law of motion. Endless images, gossip
and tales of appetite, fear and projection hold populations in thrall
disconnected from their common life-ground. The latest Enemy of the
US/EU is then cast as the real threat to global life security –
presented, for example, by intermittent hate messages on Vladimir Putin.
What is actually occurring in tidal trends – the acidifying oceans,
rising climate instability, species extinctions, and youth without
meaningful life vocations –dissolve out of view.
The system remains auto-assumed as the best of possible worlds by the
media, economists, formal economic models, and academic mainstreams.
And why not? Human slavery too was thought optimal for centuries – in
fact, it was the first major commodity of ‘global free trade’. Mass
homicide by system starvation and ecocide are still called ‘costs of
development’ with no challenge of the term. As knowledge and information
themselves become proprietary monopolies, we come to see that the
world’s deepest problem is the instituted mind-lock of the reigning
paradigm beneath consciousness of it. its life blind logic.
From Sports to the Academy: Life Capital Bases Blocked Out A-Priori
On the system-wide level, the dominant mass media are governed by
three implicit goals – selling corporate ads, validating money power,
and blocking out life capital bases. Professional sports
exemplify the system as its ultimate site of transnational market
propaganda. They draw increasing mass audiences round the world with no
competitor to mobilize public attention and commitment. The inner logic
of the ruling value system is imprinted beneath notice.
The more money sports stars get, the more money take is glorified,
the more ads are sold, the more public attention and wealth are diverted
from profound public issues like the degrading life capital bases of
society and the planet. In this way, the ultimate struggle for better
life on earth is displaced by commercial contest spectacles and logos
competing for private money pay-offs for the few. Free time itself is
subjugated by the corporate money system.
Mass spectator sports are an allegory and a linchpin of the system’s
hold (and I say this as a former professional player). Battle cries of
‘everything is at stake’ drive ersatz-tribal passions to displace what
really matters to life on Earth. Even if a public issue comes into the
spectacle-sales agenda, it too is converted by corporate ads into sales
images of concern and action. The rising catastrophic storms, sea-rises
and weather extremes are euphemized as ‘climate change’ with only market
solutions promoted.
In the US, the most popular sports are linked to military displays,
bands and metaphors, with few noticing the US military is the biggest
killer and greatest polluter in the world. Again we see the many levels
at which life-blind aggression and attack is built into this system. The
destruction becomes part of the excitement with, for example, pristine
nature as a favorite scene of beauty to sell fossil-fuel super engines
ripping up the life terrain. Reduced to ad vehicles, the mass media
follow one underlying law of meaning. The truth is what sells. Parallel
to the games spectacles, marketed personalities are the centre of
elections too. Collective life capital bases as the proper concern of
nations and democracy do not compute within the reigning mind-set.
The academic world has been taken over by corporate self-maximization
in less visible ways. University administrations have become corporate
fund managers accountable to no academic standards in their multiplied
spending on their own offices, salaries, and corporate-ladder culture.
Their essential function is partnering with leveraged corporate research
funds necessary to replace underfunding by corporate states – a 25 year
planned process in North America.
At the same time, commercial publishers have bought up
once-independent scholarly journals across the academic world,
multiplied their prices to libraries, and imposed corporate procedures
of refereeing with corporate forms ruling out critical autonomy of
evaluation. Throughout, the externally profiting transnational
corporations exploit university scholars’ need to be published with no
payment for their services. In fact, the publishing corporations pay
nothing for the entire life-capital infrastructure of advancing learning
and disseminating knowledge, an extremely costly affair for advanced
facilities and world-level expertise. All educational costs are borne by
taxpayers and student fees, exerting mounting downwards pressure on
public capacities of research and teaching. Ever more cuts follow from
corporate states and administrations so that, for example, casual labour
with no research support does most of the teaching and instruction.
Throughout research for new commodities for the global corporate market
becomes the dominant objective of funding sciences themselves.
Every step of these systemic degradations and front-line
dispossessions dismantles the life capital evolution of public learning
and higher research leading the species’ evolution.
Lead Philosophies Decoupled from the Life-Ground Too
In the background, the most lauded thinkers block out the advancing
corporate occupation and its life capital alternative in principle.
Martin Heidegger seems to sense the great hollowing out in his signature
idea of our “forgetfulness of Being”. Yet he has no life-ground to go
on but the “home of language” rooted in pre-Socratic conceptions.
Wittgenstein and others follow with “language games” and “linguistic
philosophy” in the English-analytic tradition, but again with
life-ground and social structure bracketed out as if they did not exist.
Today’s leading social philosopher-scientist, Jurgen Habermas, reduces “life-world” (Lebensvelt)
to background assumptions, and rules out any alternative economic order
a-priori. The dominant justice/moral theories of John Rawls and Robert
Nozick have dominated normative philosophy over half a century, but
cannot get beyond self-maximizing agents in a social void with no
collective life capital bases imagined across industries of literature.
‘Communitarian’ philosophy moves underneath liberal atomism to social
institutions and traditions as common bearings of persons and social
reality, but has no deeper test or validation of them in universal life
needs or life capital ground. Even socialist theory and doctrine
provides no unifying life foundations integrating ecology, economics and
life-value choice space.
Throughout the evolved life ground is lost – the life capital bases
of humanity and nature as ground and measure of all life value through
time in process of reproduction, loss or gain. We already have the
basics in any working public health system where every one of these
parameters can be known down to the finest detail of life capacity
performance and well-being, but joining the dots into unifying concept
and common thread across domains is the missing meta step.
The Postmoderns Revolt Against Any Common Life-Ground At All
Many celebrate post-modern with thinkers like Foucault, Baudrillard,
Derrida and Lyotard who are believed to expose the inhuman and the
repressive in our institutions and language by a liberation from
metaphysics of duality and deep structures. Less noticed, the
postmodernists implicitly repudiate any unifying life-ground whatever.
Life capital does not exist. Like the global market, postmodernism
proclaims the free, the particular and the disruptive without any life
base, while ignoring the actual global command system’s attack on
planetary life itself. Some like Deleuze may loathe capitalism. But they
have no conception of humanity’s universal life bases and necessities
to ground agreement or alternative to what destroys them.
Organising principles which bridge from the past through the present
to the future by objective common life interests are, yet again, ruled
out. The economists’ life-blind paradigm of liquid mechanics goes on
being mapped onto the living world, unquestioned even by the
self-conceived subversives of totalizing structure.
Life Capital Meaning Steers Humanity’s Underlying Evolution
A simple example is herds of livestock. Their life capital continues
so long as they reproduce or gain in collective life capacity of yield
in meat, milk-production, pull-power, manure, and hide material, all
quantifiable through time. The same can be said of socially constructed
and regulated life capital formations – public literacy and health
systems, clean air and water, electric-light access, recycling garbage
and sewage systems, life security in body and speech, book and film
libraries, ecological integrity including noise bylaws, biodiverse
pathways and surroundings. We find life capital meaning most inclusively
and incisively when we consider our lives without any of them.
In polar contrast, public spending is now increasingly diverted to
subsidize the private money-sequence system in trillions of dollars to
dominant corporations leading the depredation of life capital bases –
for example, ‘quantitative easing’ to the destabilizing and
non-productive speculations of big banks and the massive subsidization
of the armaments, oil and luxury motor industries. But the most built-in
appropriations of public wealth and collective life capital bases are
by corporate lobbies feeding on public services and the public purse
directly by privatization schemes. To cite British MP John McDonnell:
“Privatization over the last four decades has been a history of
snatching up public assets to print private money. From the earliest
privatizations of water, energy and rail to the PFI [Private Financial
Intitiatives] from the last decade, it has been one long confidence
trick.”
The same covert raiding of public life capital to feed private
corporate profits has been imposed by captive states across the world – a
systematic eating away of social life support systems and services
accompanying the looting of ecosystems and natural resources as ‘the
last frontier of easy money’. Collective life capacities and capital
are the victim, but no measure of their losses exists. In fact, every
overloading, depletion, pollution, abandonment, reverse liability,
under-investment in infrastructures, and price-gouging of
‘privatization’ programs follows the reigning paradigm’s primary axiom
of rational choice. In its abstract form, the rule of self-maximizing
preference in all things is the overriding law of modern reason with no
proof or question of it in even the inner sanctums of high theory.
Life-coherent reason is missing – consistency with life capital requirements.
Consistency with evidence and other statements provide empirical and
logical validity, but not life validity – the lost life-ground of
knowledge. It is already at work without the name in valid
life-protective and safety regimes across sectors, and in medical
science, public health and infrastructures and requirements of life
necessity across domains. The underlying meaning is the evolution of
human society itself towards ever more life-coherent rule systems of how
to live on the planet. Life capital defence and advance is the missing
link and guiding thread across domains.
Public money is properly investment flow of society into life
capital. But much goes immediately to paying off private banks which
create the money as unlimited debt issues with permanent service
demands, a distinguished from central bank loans with no such
private-profit issue and claws on the public purse – as in successful
economies like China and in Canada’s before 1974 when its great social
and physical infrastructures were built. Another US $26 trillion today
goes offshore to evade public taxation. At every level, the life capital
bases of society are invaded by private money-sequence demands adding
costs and degrading them so that most are in cumulative decline. This is
the macro pattern of life capital dispossession and common wealth
destruction by the transnational money-sequence system until a public
life capital turn steers us.
The Unifying Alternative follows from the Logic of the Problem
In the degenerate trends identified above, the private market system
lacks life capital coordinates and binding standards to guide it. Yet if
we consider human advances made through generational time, we find the
underlying principle of public life capital always at work in some form –
from language development by agreed-on conventions enabling more
meaningful communications to protection of community water supplies and
waste-recycling separation to knowledge criteria and storing across the
lines of death to the ecological protection systems that ultimately
decide the rise or fall of civilisations. Seek any exception to this
evolutionary pattern so far as humanity advances. It is the unseen moral
vocation of the race.
Steering is life-coherent through time by life-capital measure and
principle at all levels – as already being achieved in life-coherent
energy and trash conversion systems, still-working public health
systems, open knowledge centres of dissemination and learning, and
ecological understanding dissolving life-blind ignorance. The life
capital base of developed societies has already evolved beneath market
phenomena, but without second-order understanding or even a name.
Thus the global money-sequence system continues to seek ‘growth’ that
cumulatively despoils life capital and support systems without a
connecting concept of the problem and solution across domains. Life
capital provides this missing concept and common ground as the set-point
of life-coherent policy deciders across jurisdictions. It is always
what ultimately matters to human and fellow life – that without which life capacities are destroyed over time.
Its measure invariably enables an objectively unifying meaning of
life-value gain or loss throughout – of life security in need, of
housing and nourishing food supply, of adequate clean water and sewage
cycles, of accessible learning and knowledge, of public facilities and
structures of production and art, and of the environmental integrity of
our life-host – in short, the true goods of life which are now
everywhere at risk without a life-value ground and compass to guide
choice and action.
John McMurtry is an elected Fellow of
the Royal Society of Canada and his work is published and translated
from Latin America to Japan. He is the author and editor of the
three-volume Philosophy and World Problems published by UNESCO’s
Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), and his latest book is The
Cancer Stage of Capitalism/from Crisis to Cure.
|
Posts
All of these revelations (especially the good general’s) are an indication that the 9/11 Truthfloodgates are sure to open soon. Quite obviously, the sooner those gates fling wide open the better for the electorate. For 9/11 Truth is the ultimate litmus test. There is nothing under the Sun like 9/11 Truth that
possesses the inherent power to expose those who are guilty of treason
and terrorism against the American people. And that especially includes
the mainstream media across America.
