Learn or Die: The Fatal Flaw of Capitalism
Capitalism must grow and continually find new investments to absorb capital and pay off the compound interest that is at the core of the need for more. This need for continuous growth is estimated to be 3%, a figure that reflects the prime interest rate on average for a healthy investment and banking system to sustain profit and continually loan out money. This is the engine of capitalism, and it is what makes it a dooms-day-machine. Like the monster machines in the movie The War of the Worlds that gobble up human beings and use their blood for fertilizer, the corporate Leviathans in the real story hidden behind the science fiction horror are not aliens from without. They are the aliens from within that are spreading this cancerous growth of run-away-capitalism throughout the world at an accelerated rate.
In 1820 (based on 1990 dollars) Agnus Maddison calculated that the total output of goods and services in the capitalist world economy was worth $694 billion dollars. By 1913 it had raised to $2.7 trillion dollars, and by 1950, it reached $5.3 trillion dollars. In 1973 it stood at $16 trillion, in 2003 it was $41 trillion dollars, and by 2009 it was at $56.2 trillion dollars and rising. (Harvey 26) Globalization has accelerated this growth and the depletion of our natural resources and the pollution of our air, water, and soil. Forests are shrinking, water tables are falling, vast expanses of soil are eroding, wetlands are disappearing, fisheries are collapsing, range lands are deteriorating, rivers are running dry, coral reefs are dying, plant and animal species are disappearing, temperatures are rising, global climate change is accelerating, and the world’s population keeps growing to keep up with capitalism’s need for more consumers. An ecologist, John Terborgh, after a trip to a small African country, described the acceleration of resource depletion in the global era.
“Everywhere I went, foreign commercial interests were exploiting resources after signing contracts with the autocratic government. Prodigious logs, four and five feet in diameter, were coming out of the forests, oil and natural gas were being exported from the coastal region, offshore fishing rights had been sold to foreign interests, and exploration for oil and minerals were under way in the interior. The exploitation of resources in North America during the five-hundred-year post-discovery era followed a typical sequence –fish, furs, game, timber, farming virgin soil – but because of the hugely expanded scale of today’s economy and the availability of myriad sophisticated technologies, exploitation of all the resources in poor developing countries now goes on at the same time. In a few years, the resources of this African country and others like it will be sucked dry.” (Terborgh)
Harbingers of Doom
Twenty-five years ago, The Union of Concerned Scientists and more than 1700 independent scientists including most living Nobel laureates in the sciences, penned the 1992 “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity.” It was a call to end environmental destruction, and it warned that “a great change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided.” On the twenty-fifth anniversary of their call for change, 15,364 scientists from 184 countries have looked back to that period compared to today, and they see that the problems that they saw then have gotten much worse. Here are some of the alarming changes which have taken place in the last 25 years.
1. The amount of fresh water available per head of population worldwide has been reduced by 26%.
2. The number of oceans “dead zones” - places where little can live because of pollution and oxygen starvation – has increased by 75%.
3. Nearly 300 million acres of forest have been lost, mostly to make way for agricultural land.
4. Global carbon emissions and average temperatures show continued significant increases.
5. Human population has risen by 35%.
6. Collectively the number of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and fish in the world has fall by 29%. (Ripple 1026-1028)
They’re Devouring Our Planet
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity is a global institution based in Geneva, Switzerland at the International Environment House and is hosted by the United Nations Environment Program. The TEEB’s mission is to analyze and measure global problems of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation in terms of economic and human welfare. The following chart projects into the future our path of self-destruction and the devouring of our planet. The chart is an estimate of the number of year we have left before the following list of non-renewables resources will be gone,.
According to the above chart it is estimated that,
1. By 2030 the Artic will be ice-free in the summer.
2. By 2050 a third of the land plants and animal species will be extinct due to climate change.
3. In 75 years, the Indonesian Rainforest will be gone.
4. In 196 years, the Brazilian Rainforest will be gone.
5. In the next 35-42 years gas, oil, and coal will be gone.
6. In the next 7-45 years key rare earth minerals will be gone.
And, finally, in 2060 the dangerous 2 degree C warming threshold will likely be reached. Carbon concentrations have not been this high since the Pliocene period between 3 million and 5 million years ago when global average temperatures were 3 degrees or 4 degrees Centigrade hotter than today. During that period, the Artic was ice-free, sea levels were about 40 meters higher, jungles covered northern Canada, and Florida was under water along with coastal locations we now call New York City, London, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Sydney and many others. (TEEB)
The End of the Journey
What are we looking at here? Is this the end of the journey for a society that has nurtured vampire capitalism and glorifies narcissism, a society where we all pursue our own individual greed, where we take more than we give, and we ignore the consequences of our acts? Is this a society where deep in the darkness of our collective unconscious this monstrous reality has grown? What is it that we are looking at? Has the vampire capitalist created something far more evil than they could ever imagine, something that now has a life of its own? Is this what we mean by the Devil, or is it Devine Justice, or both? Whatever it is, the lesson is clear. Capitalism must grow or it will die, and if it continues to grow, it will kill us all, capitalist and worker alike. This we must learn, or we will die.
In principle, socialism should be able to take advantage of the increasing awareness that capitalism is failing us, and it is an evil that feeds off our very life blood. But, tragically, just at the moment when capitalism has revealed its fatal flaws and the horrors of its true nature, socialism, as it exists today, has revealed its own weaknesses as an alternative. For example, the Soviet Union in its collapse revealed the fatal flaws of a nondemocratic command economy. Western Europe and the America of the New Deal have also failed to fully realize all their hopes and dreams of a new future, primarily because they have retained capitalism as the core to their economy, and, therefore, at their best have only been able to ameliorate capitalism’s worse effects and provide a minimal safety net for its victims.
To save ourselves from the evil of vampire capitalism and the apocalypse of self-destruction that will come if we continue to allow the spread of this cancer, we need a new vision of our future and new political and economic paradigms that are rooted in our finest traditions and are, yet, totally new. In Part One of Learn or Die: The New American Revolution we advocated a Government By The People that is manifested in the initiative, referendum, and recall process of citizen lawmaking at all levels of government that puts our destiny in our own hands and acts as a check and balance against a system that, in its present form, is a government by, of, and for the vampire class and the living dead that serve them. In Part Two of Learn or Die: The New American Revolution, I will introduce you to An Economy By The People and a new paradigm of economic democracy where the American people will go in partnership with American labor, and we turn capitalism on its head, but first we must define true economic democracy by what it is not, and why previous attempt at reform have failed.
Cites:
1. Harvey, David, The Enigma of Capital: And the Crisis of Capitalism, Oxford UniversityPress, New York 2010
2. Terborgh, John, “The World Is In Overshoot,” The New York Review of Books, December 3, 2009 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/12/03/the-world-is-in-overshoot/
3. Ripple, William J., Christopher Wolf, Thomas M.Newsome, Mauro Galetti, Mohammed Alamgir, Eileen Crist, Mahmoud I. Mahmoud, William F. Laurance, 15,364 scientists signatories from 184 countries, “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity:A Second Notice, Bio Science, Volume 67, Issue 12, December2017 https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/bix125
4. TEEB, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity is a global institution based in Geneva, Switzerland at the International Environment House and is hosted by the United Nations Environment Program.
Charts:
1. Chart #11, The Impending Disappearance of the World’s Natural Resources: htp://www.geois.de/?p=2055
Illustrations:
1. Illustration #12, We’re Committing Suicide, Tino, Marcello and Andrea Dalla Bona, Learn or Die: The New American Revolution, Thompson and Prince2020
(This is an excerpt from Learn and Die: The New American Revolution by Marcello Tino)
Author's Note - I have made Learn or Die: The New American Revolution available to you through Smashwords in a Freedom for Free Edition where you can pay what you want for the book or nothing at all. It is free. I'm doing this because after 50 years of research and study I believe I have found the way for all of us.
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