SUMMARY
OF LEARNERS INTRO &
VOCAB
Any self-respecting capitalist would ask for nothing better than to run his most profitable version of the Rolls Royce Company. If he had any sense at all (and he didn’t achieve his position by being stupid), he would rather offer the highest quality product or service at the best price the market could bear. That would include the best benefits package for his elite workers and their families, superb educational facilities, healthy communities with low crime, and low prices for survival necessities. All the benefits Learners would seek, this wise capitalist would adopt for his workers and consumers in order to make the best product and the maximum profit.
Despite his desire to excel in this manner, he must take into account weapon taxation. Either the quality of his product must suffer or he must find some other way to short-change his customers and workers, so as to defray mandatory weapon taxation that offers him no economic gain. The greater the value of his product and the higher his profits, the more war taxes he will be expected to pay and the more they will distort his cost-benefit analysis. He will be forced to reduce the quality of his product and use the savings to defray his weapons expenses. His employees, clients and competitors will have to do likewise, in direct proportion to their success.
This distortion is inevitable in every so-called free-market enterprise.
It is only on PeaceWorld that this self-respecting capitalist could satisfy his topic of passion and build the Rolls Royce Company of his dreams. It is only there that cost-cutting would be business suicide if it reduced the quality of his product or service. The race would go to the highest quality manufacturer or service provider, not to the lowest cost cutter at the expense of quality. On WeaponWorld, he would betray his topic of passion—as we must, our own.
There is nothing wrong with Capitalism, per se.
However, it can adopt one of two forms of growth. Once it shifts from one to the other, it poisons any society that tolerates its presence, much less its control.
The first form of capitalist growth could be called the Garden. In it, the resources of Capital are invested in areas lacking those resources to begin with. A passionate gardener cultivates the soil, supplements its nutrients and waters it as required. He or she plants trees, shrubs and flowering plants to suit his taste; rips out weeds and unwanted plants, and leaves a clear field for the growth of favored ones. This is the work of capital at its best: superior to any other method of economic growth.
In the second form, the gardeners walk away or are otherwise indisposed. They no longer tend their garden, and weeds proliferate. Weeds can be seen as the second wave of capitalism. All the nutrients, soil and water carefully gathered to further the growth of beneficial plants is sucked up by the other kind. They smother the old growth and propagate themselves with sole goal of self-propagation. Everything else suffers while they thrive.
This process cannot be reversed except with tremendous labor and care. As time goes on, the garden will require more and more labor merely to keep it weeded, fertilized and watered, for very little additional return. After all, a garden is a garden: no more and no less.
Another analogy would be between healthy cells of a growing body and the viruses attacking it. The first form of capitalism would consist of the body’s careful regulation of clean water and nutrients to nourish its cells and allow them to grow, whereas the second would consist of an invasive virus whose sole intent was its replication at the expense of the host. It would take over every cell it found, convert that cell’s growth machinery to produce new viruses, then explode the invaded and starved cell to release its virus load among the remaining cells of the body, and so on. That would illustrate the second form of capitalism.
Nowadays, the richest, most powerful and influential capitalists have learned that viral or weed growth is much more profitable in the short term, than that of the garden or the body. They have abandoned long-term growth in favor of the weed variety: more profitable in the short run but ruinous in the long. What’s more, they are more and more intoxicated by this form of growth, at the expense of the earlier kind.
Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Co., New York, 2007, describes this transition quite clearly. She reviews a succession of synthetic and/or natural disasters followed by tyrannical takeovers that allowed international financiers to cannibalize the economy of entire nations.
According to the Chicago School of Economics, proclaimed by Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and other fanatics of so-called “laissez-faire Capitalism,” a psychological and philosophical analogy could be drawn, between the annihilation of a psyche considered pathological by means of electroshock and crushing doses of drugs (even though those treatments never worked), and the annihilation of a people’s will considered too progressive, by means of natural catastrophe, a newly installed tyranny or both in succession.
“Loyola’s new style of obedience was induced by rigorous training, which began with a two-year novitiate. One year would have been normal. The purpose of these twenty-four months was to dismantle a young man’s will into its component parts in order to isolate within those parts anything undesirable. The idea was not to change the man’s ideas or beliefs but simply to eliminate the troublesome elements. The training then went on to purify what was adaptable and useful and to cement it all back together with the structure of the [Jesuit] Society.” John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Vintage Press, A Division of Random House, 1991, p. 113.
In carrying out this philosophy, Chicago School economists took the first opportunity (and every one thereafter) to silence the voice of the People. Once they had succeeded, they could strip out public services, savings accounts and retirement funds; multiply unemployment dramatically by ruining local commerce and dismantling factories; and burden the People with enormous loads of debt, so that it could never regain its original vigor and promise, won so painfully in the recent past―all to the profit of these economists’ high-finance bosses.
From Iran and South America in the 1970’s, through Poland and Russia in the 80’s, the Asian Tigers in the 90’s, New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and the annihilation of Iraq, followed by the massive bankster and financial industry bailouts of today; each new disaster brought greater profits to their coffers over shorter and shorter intervals of time, with less and less effort on their part.
All they had to do was silence anyone who intended to benefit the People and enforce the Law; something they could accomplish by paying off the worst local white-collar criminals to do their bidding, backed by well-funded military to come down hard on the remaining dissidents. This combination required a small fraction of their funds to finance and brought them enormous returns.
Naomi Klein’s image of an alternative to this kind of Capital can be found at http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-take/.
Actually, this pattern can be traced to the inception of Capitalism and even further back, to the origin of mass societies. Each of them grew up by enslaving as many individuals on the periphery as they could get away with, by destroying other societies and looting them, and by exterminating “primitive” societies that stood in the way. Nothing new there.
The best example I can find in history is that of Tamerlane (Timur the Lame, or the Conqueror, 1336-1405). He built up his capital city, Samarqand, into one of the wonders of the world, decked it with vast riches, magnificent parks and monumental architecture; he filled his court with musicians, artists, scholars and pious men. He did so by turning every other city on the Silk Road into a pile of ashes and a pyramid of rotting skulls. Needless to say, the commercial network of the Silk Road withered along with his capital city after his death, since there were no way-stations left to accommodate itinerant merchants. Even centuries later, even today, the Silk Road has never fully recovered.
Too bad: those who were once Gardening Capitalists are now permanent addicts of the Weed variety. Each new disaster they engineer must be more traumatic and destructive of a nation’s collective psyche (and now the whole world’s), for them to get away with it and profit in proportion to the amount of damage they inflict.
Marx deplored the fact that capital will inevitably run out of worthy targets for investment. As societies mature, the margin of growth of various commercial enterprises become smaller and smaller, as they compete with equivalents of equal value and output. In the long run, Capitalism’s only alternative is to destroy more or less completely any rival entity and then invest in whatever is left. This is the only way it has found to maintain its margin of profit over time.
Given an economically closed (globalized) planet in which commerce and industry have been just about equalized everywhere, there is nowhere left for Capital to invest and expect rates of return superior to those of the past. Only by systematically smashing various economies in turn, then investing in the ruins, can Capital surpass its historic profitability.
This can be seen as a kind of slash-and-burn agriculture, where farmers burn down parcels of lush forest and cultivate their crops in the ashes. Once the ground loses the fertility it picked up through that burning, they move on to the next plot of forest to burn.
As long as they are not too numerous and as long as great forests grow back and fill in the blank spaces, this form of cultivation works quite well. However, once the farmers grow too numerous and the forest shrinks proportionately, that becomes a formula for desert waste and starvation among the people.
Having spent the last few centuries (long before the World Wars) suffering from the slash-and-burn habits of Capitalist investors, the Earth has reached the point where what is left after each of their ‘bigger and better’ forest fires, has lost its ability to provide compensatory growth. We have reached a stage where the world economy resembles a desert waste in that place where a thriving forest once stood. As a perfect illustration and warning, the natural world has reached a similar state of petroleum and mineral resource depletion.
As raw materials grow more expensive to extract and process, the only economic basis left to draw upon will be the basic sustenance of world populations. The prevalent example is the conversion of food crops into biofuel. As this sustenance is stolen and adulterated in greater and greater volume to satisfy the demands of Capital, and as those profits are shifted to a smaller and smaller clique of billionaires and their direct beneficiaries, the People will rise up to oppose this theft by force of arms. Since weapons have become so deadly, that fight will just aggravate the problem, destroying many more resources, infrastructures and lives than would be nurtured and/or grown back in the process.
Essentially, the only place left for Capital to invest in is outer space. Earth must be seen as homeground which may no longer suffer the destruction and exploitation that Capital requires. Its governors must treat Capitalists who attempt to maximize their profits at the expense of the People, any people, as enemies of mankind who must be ruthlessly criminalized and regulated into more civilized behavior.
The world economy is not quite ready to exploit outer space and its virtually unlimited resources. That project will require a few decades of intensive development of mankind’s basic needs. Only then will sufficient intellectual and infrastructure resources be available to take on this task. In the meantime, any reduction of them for short-term profit must be criminalized, and capitalist financiers must be regulated to within an inch of their financial lives.
This will be a very difficult task, since Capital can call on almost unlimited cash to hire criminals and con-men (disguised as politicians, the military, the press and other social agency leaders) to do their dirty work. It will require a combination of fanatical devotion and revolutionary purity on the part of world leaders, plus an information network of certified purity. The only framework within which such people and things could grow, would be PeaceWorld. Any other would offer trivial returns in exchange for the self-sacrifice and devotion required.
Since this policy will be very painful for Capitalists, dragging them to the edge of bankruptcy and economic suicide, they will be the only ones qualified to determine how rigorously we may apply it without killing the Golden Goose, to the microscopic limit of their tolerance.
I call on Capitalists themselves to recognize the corner into which they have painted us. They must understand, with an awareness deeper than greed, what is at stake for themselves, for their dependents and for the rest of humanity. It is they and they alone who may form the world leadership required for this undertaking; only they can regulate themselves and check the worst among them and their slimiest deeds.
Short of this transformation, the world economy is doomed to spin out of control at the hands of its most sociopathic profiteers. The toll of murder and destruction would stagger the imagination and probably not be survivable by civilization.
Those are the choices we face: we, the People and those peculiar ones who play with Capital.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld