At the crossroads

Sometimes one must step back from the minutiae of existence and orient with respect to the bigger picture. The world faces some serious problems which are not receiving due attention in the main stream media. To the extent the problems are mentioned there is an absolute failure of clearsighted analysis of the cause. So this is my lightning survey of the real situation, its causes, and what might be done about it. Painting such a big topic with such broad brushstrokes, I’m outlining my viewpoint without providing the detail of evidence or the shading of levels of certainty and overlapping motives and truths.

What’s wrong?

  1. Much of the world lives in conditions which range from poverty to extreme desperation. The injustice and avoidable suffering and death which this represents constitutes an ongoing moral outrage.
  2. We are seeing global warming, deforestation, and extinction due to overharvesting and habitat loss, along with worldwide destruction of soil and water quality. This environmental degradation appears certain to lead to a catastrophe of a magnitude which can hardly be overstated.

These two problems are likely to be exacerbated and accelerated by the depletion of good quality accessible oil reserves over the next 5 to 10 years.

We nevertheless have the knowledge and capacity to reverse the situation, providing all the world’s people with sufficient and sustainable livelihood. What prevents this from being done is primarily the entrenched and institutionalised greed of the planet’s ruling cliques. In particular these are the people who run the governments of the US, China, Germany, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and France, as well as the people (very much the same people) who run the 200 or so largest global corporations.

These few people make nearly all the decisions affecting the lives of the planet’s 6.5 billion inhabitants, and their primary motivation is not to care for the welfare of their fellow human beings or the planet, but to maintain and extend their power and control at whatever cost.

The democracies of the west have a smattering of politicians (Bob Brown and Oldfogey spring to mind) who are not at the beck and call of the power brokers and industrialists, however the media and party machines contrive to prevent the people from knowing and demanding what is in their best interests. Fears and desires are manipulated and exploited to ensure that the public is more or less accepting of the direction they are led.

These governments and corporations, the global ruling elite which I call the Plutocracy, by and large have more to gain by cooperation than competition. Over the last century we have seen the consolidation and extension of their power and the generally peaceful adoption of a unified mechanism for its operation. At an international level this looks like neo-colonialism. The powerful government players use military and diplomatic pressure along with outright bribery and assassination to install and support regimes around the world which will grant relatively free access to the large corporations. The corporations exploit these new “markets” for cheap labour and resources, and in return they bring much of the wealth home to the country which leveraged access for them – but more importantly they repay the political parties and the politicians who instigated the process, both in their country of origin and in the target country. The developing country ends up run by a small highly corrupt elite backed by the military and political might of the first world but indisposed to protect their people from the rapaciousness of the transnationals.

This is called “development” because it strip mines the resources and the environment of the third world, whilst moving the majority of the population from subsistence farming to low paid cash cropping and industrial labour. Resources in the ground and growing on the hillsides are given no value in economics. Mined and felled for far less than their true value they nevertheless show up on the positive side of the ledger. Likewise a subsistence farmer is an economic non-entity even though she may have a stable if basic livelihood. Once turned into a cash cropper she is dependent on world commodity and resource prices and must compete against the subsidised agriculture of the first world. Nevertheless the country’s GDP increases while the environment and food security of its people decreases. Sometimes it even works out for the better, at least so long as the petrochemical based fertilisers and pesticides that must now be used haven’t finished their process of destroying soil quality. Many countries are now “mining” their soil nutrients and bacteria by unsustainable farming practices to the point where they will soon reach the situation in the west – effectively outdoor broadacre hydroponic monocultures entirely dependent on petroleum.

The flipside of this illusory development is huge foreign debt, which effectively grants ongoing control of policy, as well as the lion’s share of revenue, to the bankers and corporations which own the debt. It’s no accident that the World Bank and the IMF continue to pursue policies which create poverty and hardship in the third world with misguided large scale infrastructure projects: these projects as well as the debt they engender are designed to benefit the transnational corporations. The interest and the restructuring and privatisation which follow from the loans is the purpose of the exercise.

The plutocracy has been able to buy off the citizens of the first world with shiny toys, stupefy them with television and bad food, and terrify them into compliance with a series of external threats – the most recent of which is the War on Terror. Meanwhile it has concluded a death grip on the democratic process, extending its power and influence to every aspect of life and eroding the sovereignty of government in favour of legal and corporate privilege. Bureaucratic legal and even police interference in every aspect of life is now accepted in much of the west to a degree unprecedented even in wartime. The ability of people to control their democracies has become a sham, and in a final irony the United States economy has itself been hollowed out by debt to military, and oil corporations and to the other large national players, especially the EU and China.

What can’t be done?

First of all, why doesn’t the plutocracy allow or even encourage the development of a sustainable agricultural and energy economy in the poorer nations? I believe there are two reasons, of which the second is predominant:

  1. Although the plutocracy will conspire to defeat immediate threats, its long term planning against situations which require cooperative solutions is poor. Short term advantage with respect to other corporations and governments takes priority simply because of the structure of the plutocratic system: individuals and individual organisations have a Darwinian relationship with one another even though their interests usually coincide; the people who make up the plutocracy are concerned with their own short term advancement and power; and it’s simply a “tragedy of the commons” in that the individual corporate and national actors will not trade short term personal loss for long term group advantage.
  2. More importantly, unfettered access to resources and cheap labour requires a poor, ignorant population and a corrupt government. Maintaining this situation would be problematic in a country with the economic independence and self-awareness created by food and energy self-sufficiency. The power balance which allows exploitation would be irreparably changed.

Secondly, the plutocracy cannot be relied on to solve or even tackle environmental and climate change issues. This is entirely outside their “reward matrix” except in so far as it affects their operations in a technical way. Individual companies and governments will react to these difficulties as they occur but not to their causes, simply because this approach is cheaper in the short term and doesn’t give away advantage. The failure of significant emission controls in response to greenhouse is a clear indication of what we can expect, as is the belated move towards another centralised and controllable energy source (nuclear) rather than decentralised renewables. So the plutocracy itself does not contain the solution to either of the two major problems I outlined at the beginning.

Finally, a philosophical and strategic consideration. The capitalist system and it’s cancerous growth the plutocracy have not arisen by accident. Rather, they are an inevitable consequence of greed and selfishness. But they’re unlikely to be the only possible consequence of this condition of human interaction. Pulling down the plutocracy and the financial system which supports it would simply leave a power vacuum in which another rapacious and deadly beast would have space to grow, in the same way that Stalin grew in the space left by the Russian revolution.

What can be done?

What follows are dreams and hopes. I don’t pretend to know the answers but that shouldn’t be a reason not to make suggestions. The short answer to “What can be done?” is that the people of the world must give up their greedy and selfish desires and work together to find small as well as large scale solutions. In fact that makes it sound harder than I believe it is. The situation as it currently stands is untenable, and the hollowness of the plutocracy’s promises and threats is becoming obvious. Meaningful change is then able to spread quickly as people’s values change.

Since the plutocracy will not solve the problem it must be sufficiently weakened so that it cannot impede a solution. One of the reasons its methods are so cruel is that it’s power is in the end an illusion, and the cruelty is a necessary distraction from this fact, like a conjuror’s flourish. Both in the west and the south it has weaknesses, although they are different in each case.

Most importantly, however, the methods and the motives of this struggle must be fundamentally orthogonal to the principles and ethos of modern existence. This is the seismic shift necessary to change the ground such that an entirely new and more humane existence can be constructed. Greed must be replaced with community, and selfishness with a longterm and altruistic vision. No one is really very far from this: respect for the earth and love for one another.

In the south, the developing world so called, the first step is a re-establishment of sustainable subsistence farming. Then at a community level true development becomes possible. But for this to be achieved corruption and corrupt government must become unacceptable. An extremely difficult problem which must be solved locally but which requires help from the people of the west to prevent the interference we’ve always seen in the past.

In the west the political structure is not without hope. Democracy is possible if good information is available and people can see past their greed and fear to insist upon it. In the past they have only insisted to the extent of their own materialistic benefit, but this time it must be different. Nations and national interest are as out of date as fossil fuels, and the west could achieve a lot if it did not spend its energy on soldiers and baubles. Mostly it needs to rebuild a sustainable agriculture built on living soils, and it needs to stop interfering in the south. That means stop stealing resources, corrupting governments, and selling arms.

I don’t know if I’m really hopeful, but success isn’t quite the issue you might think. Going about this the right way – by non-violent, inclusive, compassionate means – is more important than victory. It’s the only way to avoid becoming the evil you fight. What I hope for is a start, an example, for each small step to be in the right direction. I hope to change one heart at a time.

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