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4. Capital accumulation has infinite man-made limits The present international system of capital accumulation has developed over centuries, with no current competitor at satisfying individual wants and needs. Its economic description is mercantile and industrial capitalism; its political form is parliamentary democracy. 'Progress' is the self-interestedly sponsored mythology that this system can develop evenly and unfettered forever. It is not so much that industrial growth will be stopped by natural limits, when a universe of new resources awaits exploration and mining, but that the unregulated pace of industrial growth draws this moment ever nearer. This anarchic, competitive process has no conscious human moderation, being driven aggressively instead by aquisitive animal instincts. The system is dynastically rooted in sybaritic ancient Rome, where social stability rested upon the combination of bread provision, circus entertainments, and military export. The system makes us humans our own worst enemies, and species evolution must see this motivation set change. The capitalist system has faults built in at every level. But it chugs along as the greatest liberator we have ever known - through the best specialised divisions of labour and technology - for as long as it can, outputting and accumulating ever-greater blocks of capital, for increasingly individualised benefits. Whether plodding or racing it is a legacy of time, beyond any collective control, until ready by dint of impact failure. Any single unconsciously evolved fault serves as a potential brake on the entire system. For example the financial subsystem, which circulates profit from the exit point of the production cycle back into resource investment inputs at entry, has to remain liquid and afloat for the overall system to keep working. Yet we know that national, corporate, and individual credit keeps inflating this speculative bubble, extending and testing its bursting point. Sufficient damage at any minor industrial zone of the capital accumulation cycle will bring this major component - and then the entire system - down again, as in 1929. But because of the system's unplanned nature, its recurrent failure is historically presaged and fully predictable. With the Bretton Woods Agreements of July 1944 refinements were made to streamline and better sustain a world financial system, but no substantive change was made to its underpinnings. Global finance remains no less endangered by innumerable unmanaged risks, such as energy crises including the losses of irrigation water, fertile topsoil, healthy genetic variety, and fish and other protein stocks to feed producers, to name but a few threats to capitalism's workers and living environment. Yet these are the very same harsh conditions capitalist production increasingly imposes upon itself. It is advised against, and called 'shitting in your own nest'. Capitalism's undoing, and its primary fault, is its contradictory campaign against rationality. |
Green Future offers a practical programme for connecting the Green politics of today with a salvaged, surviveable ecosystem of the near Future. Two words provide sufficient evidence of capitalism's imminent redundancy - 'Intelligent Design' - but there are a welter more. Capitalism's success concatenated a range of important revolutions - the humanist or intellectual rationalist, the scientific, the bourgeois, and the American revolutions - into one, assuming authority to then constrain them all. Capitalism's revolutionary latency merely needs completion, and it needn't be violent - as capitalism's excess surely is. Primarily, capitalism's successor culture will be the first to outmode competitive violence, evolving mental and spiritual realisation for all over animal, physical prowess. Capitalism took its economic and political crown from feudal order. It consists in the monopoly of coercive force now vested in the secular state, instead of in an ordained monarch ruling through territorial gangster families. The transitional system's mortal limitation is most apparent in its ongoing dependence on feudal vestages for stability - monarchical in parts of originator Europe and colonies, and deist fundamentalist in its Midwest US heartland. Evidentially, the mirror enemy 'Christian capitalism' now does battle with externally is deist fundamentalism within 'Islam'. Continuing 'Crusade' is contemptible anachronism: both causation mythologies are obfuscatory remnants of weakening feudal or semi-feudal orders. Science, democratically maintained, is the evolutionary successor to both. Only democratic science can deliver the ultimate promise of both religions: world peace. The means is the end. Stand down George W. Bush and the religious right. Stand down American firepower and hegemony. You have no legitimacy beyond brute force. You have twisted logic. The world's independent peoples will be self-organising. You are welcome to volunteer logistic support, and participate as an equal. But obstruct evolutionary, international realisation of human potential, in your own interests, no longer. Do not defend the global decay your cultured ignorance is breeding. There is a better way. "The arguments of tyranny are as contemptible as its force is dreadful" -- Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution, 1790, paragraph 184. |