"Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalized, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism."
[*Karl Marx*, *1867*, */Das Kapital/*, his doctrine of the theory of surplus value]
"Carina this is some pretty cool interesting stuff actually, Marxist theory of education I like it. The interesting thing about the Marxist theory of a "hidden curriculum" that somehow instills these supposed corrupt values of capitalism into us (which I see instead as meritocratic and good) is that the Marxists also want a "hidden curriculum" that advances their aims instead: which really are of boring, robot-like conformity. Ever read "Animal Farm"? - if you have, think about the "Four legs good, two legs bad" chant.The really scary one is the Marxist idea of education - whatever their pretences at wanting this vague, undefined "equality", the fact is that Marxist theory teaches subservience to the State and to authority, demanding you surrender your individuality and your liberties for the good of the "collective" that the all-powerful government of Marxism purports to represent - which, of course, merely establishes a different hierarchy: one in which the government and everyone who works within it is better than you and holds higher favour with the powers that be. At least in a capitalist system, you can gain power, influence, fame, prestige, a good living, a nice house, a nice car, whatever, but for yourself and based on your merits, talents, skills and education, and yes, to an extent luck, but isn't that was life is all about? This is what I mean by "meritocratic". Of course, it doesn't always work that way - in a capitalist system, the powerful can and often do extend their power unfairly, through the media, through exploiting government corruption, but isn't this better than a system in which the very notion of individuality and entrepreneurship is suppressed for an elusive notion of social or collective good? The "greater good" that countless tyrants and murderers have used to justify genocide and oppression.
We even see it today in our country's own socialised education. In subjects like Modern Studies or History a subtle but disctinctive pro-Labour, pro-socialist, pro-NHS, pro-war-in-the-name-of-human-rights etc etc. You never hear questions asked, well, what about all the damage Labour have done under Blair and Brown? What about our privacy and our individual rights, which have been stamped all over? Why does no one ask, well, has the welfare state perhaps gone too far, and made far too many adults into the government's children? Is our healthcare really better socialised? Wouldn't we really be better off keeping our noses out of other country's businesses as opposed to discussing the pros and cons of trying to bomb Mugabe out of office?
But no - these questions aren't asked, because there is a stagnant intellectual orthodoxy in this country, ingrained into us from "the cradle to the grave" perpetuated by things like our National Curriculum, which in my opinion could easily be defined as Neo-Marxist."
"Tagged on almost as an afterthought, Clause 152 of the Bill gives powers to ministers to order personal information that you or I might have handed, say, to the Inland Revenue, to be passed over to the benefits department or some other agency without our knowledge. This will be known as 'an information sharing order'."An information sharing order: Orwellian euphemism for giving government agencies details of private individuals that they should in no way be entitled to have. There is of course a very good reason as to why this clause has been so slyly slipped into a Bill which it otherwise has absolutely no relevance to:
"The reason a bill is needed to allow data sharing is because there are statutes that specifically forbid it. The reason they do so is that past governments and parliaments have considered it wrong to gather information about people all in one place because that would produce a comprehensive picture of an individual's life, and what business does the state have in obtaining that?"Yes, but of course, we in this country have sadly gone from the halycon days of having governments and elected (*cough*) Prime Ministers who actually had some scruples concerning freedom of the individual to the government of the day, beholden as it is to a terrifying communitarian ideology whose only logical outcome, becoming actualised more and more every day, is an absolute socialist nightmare.
I do sometimes wonder if this is going to turn violent.
In the meantime, get writing. Here's what you need to do:
In your own words, please ask your MP to read Part 8 (clauses 151 -
154) of the Coroners and Justice Bill, and to oppose the massive enabling powers in the "Information sharing" clause. The Bill is due its Second Reading in the Commons on 26th January 2009.
Request them to demand the clause be given proper Parliamentary scrutiny. This is something that will affect every single one of their constituents, unlike the rest of the Bill. Insist that they justify such clauses, make it clear to them that you do not consent to such an abuse of your personal information. There is a grave danger that the government will set a timetable that will cut off debate before these proposals - which are at the end of the Bill - are discussed.
http://www.WriteToThem.com is the tool you will need.
The Libertarian Party is totally opposed to these clauses, and would repeal them instantly should it ever be in the position to do so.
Last year, as I wrote HERE, I travelled to Brussels to attend a meeting of "EU experts, civil society and social partners to support the Commission's Impact Assessment on the forthcoming initiative on smoke-free environments".
Seconds into the meeting, to which I had been invited, several hands shot up and two or three delegates announced that if I didn't leave they would leave the room. Others nodded in agreement. In the EU, it seems, free speech and tobacco operate on different planets.
Next week, also in Brussels, a group called The International Coalition Against Prohibition (TICAP) was due to hold a two-day conference under the patronage of Godfrey Bloom MEP (UKIP). The event was called "Smoking Bans and Lies" and the programme was unambiguously partisan.
Venue was the European Parliament building and I understand that several readers of this blog were planning to attend.
Yesterday morning it was reported that the conference had been moved from the Parliament to a hotel near the Parliament building. Last night I was told by Gawain Towler, press officer for UKIP in Brussels, that the original conference hosted by Godfrey Bloom has been cancelled and in its place is a "new" conference with a very similar programme. (Don't ask me why. I'm only the messenger.)
The "new" conference will be called "Thinking Is Forbidden" and officially it will be hosted not by Godfrey Bloom (UKIP MEP) but by the British arm of the Independence/Democracy Group (aka UKIP). Delegates who were due to attend "Smoking Bans and Lies" will be invited to attend "Thinking Is Forbidden" instead.
The reason for this game of musical chairs seems to be related to THIS outrageous letter which was sent, in December, to Hans-Gert Pöttering, president of the European Parliament, by Florence Berteletti Kemp, director of the Smoke Free Partnership (which includes Cancer Research UK).
In her letter, Kemp argues that "this event should not under any circumstances take place on the premises of the European Parliament". She then gives the following reasons:
There's a lot more of this high-handed nonsense in Kemp's letter and any self-respecting institution would have torn it up and sent her packing. But not the European Parliament. I am told that on on Tuesday 12 January a committee met in camera and decided that permission for the conference to be held within the Parliament building had been withdrawn.
Neither Godfrey Bloom nor anyone else associated with "Smoking Bans and Lies" were told that the conference was on the agenda. In their absence, the committee acted as judge and jury. According to UKIP's Gawain Towler, the organisers only discovered that they were barred from using the Parliament building on Tuesday this week, a full seven days after the meeting.
What has happened beggars belief. I am assured that the venue was secured months in advance. Delegates and speakers have made travel arrangements. Hotel accommodation has been reserved. Video conferencing links have been booked.
And yet ... is anyone surprised? The anti-tobacco lobby is ruthless and will happily suppress any form of debate, or opposition.
Ironically, thanks to these unelected bureaucrats, news of the conference will almost certainly reach a far wider audience than would otherwise have been the case.
Note: "Thinking Is Forbidden" will take place at the Hotel Berlyamont Silken, Blvd Charlemagne 11, Brussels, on 27-28 January. For details/confirmation contact Gawain Towler, Independence/Democracy Group, telephone +32 (0)2 284 6384.
Chris Mounsey of the Libertarian Party is a speaker at this conference, and in this matter the Libertarian Party UK (LPUK) fully support the TICAP conference and UKIP. I would urge any Libertarians available to travel to attend this conference, and show the world how the EU has exercised its power as a totalitarian super state.
Any idea of free speech within the confines of the EU parliamentary estate has finally been put to the test, and it has failed abysmally.
Cameras, Tapes, Video's will all be published.
Gordon Brown said today that the recession now gripping Britain was unlike any others since the Great Depression, caused not by domestic economic mismanagement but by a "complete market failure" set off by the sub-prime crisis in the United States.
~ The Times
It can't just be me who finds the words "That man is a total shit"* leave his mouth just about any time Gordon Brown speaks these days. I know he's incompetent, I know he's desperate; but really he's not incompetent enough to believe any of the things he has been saying recently. The horrible thing is he/they ARE competent to manipulate the public.
The way he is handling our progressing oblivion is greatly reminiscent of the way B'Liar drip-fed us slightly modified stories about Iraqi WMD, before he eventually admitted - sloooooooooowly - that they were never there. Now Brown is slowly revealing to the public that we are truly, utterly, fucked*; fucked* beyond belief. But at the same time he continues to cling to the lie that somehow it's all been caused by the American sub-prime fiasco (so called because it happened in AMERICA, IE: not here). I'm sorry to have to make the observation that the public generally believe him; the press generally don't know any better and probably wouldn't say so if they did; most people you speak-to ultimately believe the crap he is peddling: they even think it'll be over soon. (Special mention to spin-master Peter Mandelson, the only competent politician in Britain; it's just a shame that you won't apply yourself to anything ethical.)
The only way to deal with somebody like this is to DRAG HIM DOWN. Show him that we will not sit and watch as he digs us deeper and deeper into the shit* for the sake of a boost to next week's polls and a new lie that he can spin to the media. Inflation has dropped don't-you-know? Yes Gordon, we know, you gave us a paltry VAT cut when we should have had a huge income tax cut; inflation would fall anyway - wouldn't it - if nobody has any money to spend. And where did all that bank-bailout money go? That's right: to bankers, who could've predicted that?
I assume that the man intends to call an election, I don't know why else he'd offer even a superficial, irresponsible, duplicitous and worse-than-pointless tax-cut of the kind we've had; he doesn't cut taxes, we know that by now. So where is it? Is the announcement planned for February? Or have you bottled-it again you sad pathetic weasel of an openly Stalinist excuse for a man leading a gang of murderous in-your-face moronic losers.
I couldn't wait for Margaret Thatcher to go because she was mad; I couldn't wait for John Major to go because he was stupid; I couldn't wait for Tony Blair to go because he was evil...
I have no words that can adequately describe this man, but all of the above apply and more.
*I wouldn't normally swear on this blog, but it is becoming increasingly inappropriate not to - given the scale of the outrages that we are living-through.
[In some ways Darwin's push for the idea of common descent] is less radical and topical than his other, more philosophical legacy: that order can generate itself, that the living world is a 'bottom-up' place. On the internet, Darwinian unordained order is now ubiquitous as never before.
Ideas evolve by descent with modification, just as bodies do, and Darwin at least partly got his idea from economists, who got it from empirical philosophers. Locke and Newton begat Hume and Voltaire who begat Hutcheson and Smith who begat Malthus and Ricardo who begat Darwin and Wallace. Before Darwin the supreme example of an undesigned system was Adam Smith's economy, spontaneously self-ordered through the actions of individuals, rather than ordained by a monarch or a parliament. Where Darwin defenestrated God, Smith had defenstrated government
When we call a capitalist society a consumers' democracy we mean that the power to dispose of the means of production, which belongs to the entrepreneurs and capitalists, can only be acquired by means of the consumers' ballot, held daily in the marketplace."
~ Ludwig von Mises
Darwin's debt to the political economists is considerable. In his last year at Cambridge in 1829, he reported in a letter, 'My studies consist in Adam Smith and Locke'
Both ants and termites live in large colonies consisting mostly of sterile, wingless workers, dedicated to the efficient production of winged reproductive castes which fly off to found new colonies.
[...etc...]
In both ants and termites the workers can include specialist castes such as soldiers. Sometimes these are such dedicated fighting machines, especially in their huge jaws (in the case of ants, but 'gun-turrets' for chemical warfare in the case of termites), that they are incapable of feeding themselves and have to be fed by non-soldier workers.
~ Richard Dawkins
[No member of the Jewish community has ever come to me/us asking for a handout]
~ Margaret Thatcher
Technology is a case in point. Although engineers are under the fond illusion that they design things, nearly all of what they do consists of nudging forward descent with modification. Every technology has traceable ancestry; 'to create is to recombine' said the geneticist Francois Jacob. The first motor car was once described by the historian L.T.C. Rolt as 'sired by the bicycle out of the horse carriage'
Technology also experiences progress and 'arms races' between competitors[...] Linux and Apache are operating-systems designed [by] democratic methods[...] Wikipedia is a bottom-up knowledge repository[, ]matching expert-written encyclopedias for accuracy and reach. It grows by natural selection among edits.
Software inventors have learned to recognise the power of trial and error rather than deliberate design.
Uh oh. Ministers are about to conceal MPs' expenses, even though the public has just paid £1m to get them all ready for publication, and even though the tax man expects citizens to do what MPs don't have to. They buried the news on the day of the Heathrow runway announcement. This is heading in the diametric wrong direction from government openness.
You can help in the following three ways:
1. Please write to your MP about this www.WriteToThem.com - ask them to lobby against this concealment, and tell them that TheyWorkForYou will be permanently and prominently noting those MPs who took the opportunity to fight against this regressive move. The millions of constituents who will check this site before the next election will doubtless be interested.
2. Join this facebook group and invite all your least political friends (plus your most political too). Send them personal mails, phone or text them. Encourage them to write to their politicians too.
3. Write to your local paper to tell them you're angry, and ask them to ask their readers to do the above. mySociety's never-finished site http://news.mysociety.org might be able to help you here.
NB. mySociety is strictly non-partisan, by mission and by ethics. However, when it looks like Parliament is about to take a huge step in the wrong direction on transparency, we've no problem at all with stepping up when changes happen that threaten both the public interest and the ongoing value of sites like TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow.
H/T mySociety
...The idea of a "war on terror" gave the impression of a unified, transnational enemy, embodied in the figure of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The reality is that the motivations and identities of terrorist groups are disparate. Lashkar-e-Taiba has roots in Pakistan and says its cause is Kashmir. Hezbollah says it stands for resistance to occupation of the Golan Heights. The Shia and Sunni insurgent groups in Iraq have myriad demands. They are as diverse as the 1970s European movements of the IRA, Baader-Meinhof, and Eta. All used terrorism and sometimes they supported each other, but their causes were not unified and their cooperation was opportunistic. So it is today.
The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists, or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common. Terrorist groups need to be tackled at root, interdicting flows of weapons and finance, exposing the shallowness of their claims, channelling their followers into democratic politics.
The "war on terror" also implied that the correct response was primarily military. But as General Petraeus said to me and others in Iraq, the coalition there could not kill its way out of the problems of insurgency and civil strife...
We must respond to terrorism by championing the rule of law, not subordinating it, for it is the cornerstone of the democratic society. We must uphold our commitments to human rights and civil liberties at home and abroad...
The call for a "war on terror" was a call to arms, an attempt to build solidarity for a fight against a single shared enemy. But the foundation for solidarity between peoples and nations should be based not on who we are against, but on the idea of who we are and the values we share. Terrorists succeed when they render countries fearful and vindictive; when they sow division and animosity; when they force countries to respond with violence and repression. The best response is to refuse to be cowed.
The government is largely free of pervasive corruption, though minor instances of political donations for “honors” (peerages and titles) have made news during the Labour government, and in 2007 a party-funding scandal (discussed above) tarnished the government...
The law provides for press freedom, and the media in Britain are lively and competitive... Although broadcasting is dominated by the state-owned British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the organization is editorially independent...
Although the Church of England and the Church of Scotland are established churches, the government both prescribes freedom of religion in law and protects it in practice. Scientology is not recognized as an official religion for charity purposes. Muslims and other religious minorities complain of discrimination... Academic freedom is respected by British authorities...
Freedoms of assembly and association are respected... Civic and nongovernmental organizations are allowed to operate freely...
...The police maintain high professional standards, and prisons generally meet international guidelines.
Britain has large numbers of immigrants and locally born children of immigrants, who receive equal treatment under the law. In practice, their living standards are lower than the national average, and they complain of having come under increased suspicion amid the terrorist attacks and alleged terrorist plots in recent years.
Women receive equal treatment under the law but are underrepresented in politics and top levels of business.
Jan. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Morgan Stanley is seeking a supertanker to store crude oil, joining Citigroup Inc. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc in trying to profit from higher prices later in the year, four shipbrokers said.
The bank has yet to find a suitable vessel, said one of the brokers, all of whom asked not to be identified because the information is private. Carlos Melville, a spokesman for Morgan Stanley in London, declined to comment.
[PV: reproduced with kind permission of the author from his website. I realise that some of you may still believe that infinite growth is possible in a world of finite resources—it simply isn't. Denial may be comforting, but it's hardly a constructive way to deal with the situation that we humans find ourselves in]
What to do in a failing civilization
by David M. Delaney
Copyright © 2005 David M. Delaney
Can global civilization adapt successfully to degradation of the biosphere and depletion of fossil fuels? I argue that it cannot. Important elements of all constituent societies would have to be reformed. Reform would have to be radical and would be uncertain of success. It could be undertaken only in the presence of incontrovertible necessity—a necessity that will reveal itself incontrovertibly only when catastrophic collapse has become unavoidable. I conclude that those who seek to preserve civilization should plan for its survival in restricted regions.
The nature and scale of our economic behavior is reducing the capacity of the Earth to support us in the future. The list is long: destruction of biological diversity, over fishing, ozone holes, aquifer depletion, the drying up of rivers and lakes, the pollution of ground water with salt and industrial chemicals, soil degradation, desertification, fossil fuel depletion, mineral depletion, and climate change. In spite of these trends, we demand more from the Earth each year. The demographers say that there will be 8 or 9 billion of us in 2050, absent intervening catastrophe, just when some of these trends will have reached their full destructive capacity, and all of them will be working furiously to demolish the support Earth lends us. Can we react in time to oppose these trends effectively?
The overshoot trap
Limits to the growth of population and economic activity are sometimes imagined to be like walls we might run into. When we get close to the walls, this simile suggests, we can slow down to avoid a crash, or at least slow down enough that the crash bends our fenders instead of smashing us to bits. A better simile reveals a greater hazard. We are like a thoughtless retired person without a pension who lives too lavishly on substantial saved capital. We consume greatly more than the income generated by our natural capital, consuming the capital as well as the income. Addicted to luxury, we increase our spending each year.
As concrete examples of natural capital and income, think of rivers, lakes, and aquifers that should be pumped out no faster than they can be replenished by rain and melting snow. Think of stocks of oceanic fish that should be harvested only to an extent that does not reduce their yearly census. Think of forests and wetlands that should be kept as reservoirs of biological diversity and sources of clean water, instead of being clear cut or paved. Think of soils that once had a natural vitality and generative power, but have been rendered lifeless by their overuse to hold fertilizers and pesticides, or by making them foundations for roads, buildings, airports, and houses. Think of fossil fuels that might have been invested in infrastructure for renewable energy but which have instead gone into food, clothing, buildings, and personal transportation.
The capacity to produce sustainable income—food, energy, materials—disappears with the natural capital that generates it. Day by day the proportion of capital in our consumption increases. We don't see that the income portion of our consumption is decreasing as long as we don't distinguish between consumed income and consumed capital. At some point, retrenching to rebuild our natural capital becomes impossible. If we were to decide to consume only income, we would starve and there would not be any income left over to rebuild capital. At this point we are trapped. Bankruptcy is inevitable, but we may continue to live still more lavishly each year as long as capital remains to be consumed. The trap is known by ecologists as overshoot. When we finally reach the limits of natural capital, the Earth's support for our presence will decrease suddenly to an astonishingly low level compared to the largesse we have become used to. This necessary consequence of overshoot is called crash, or die-off.
Ignorance of the trap hidden in the consumption of natural capital encourages a belief that the human population of the Earth is not now intrinsically excessive and will not become intrinsically excessive before the occurrence of a benign demographic transition—a supposedly naturally decreasing fertility that will stabilize the human population at, say, 8 or 9 billion. There are two versions of this belief. In the first version, if the rich reduce their consumption and share with the poor, all will be well because there will then be enough to go around, and population growth will have stopped. In the second version, if the rich cooperate to make the poor much better off through economic development, the benign demographic transition, which is said to be caused by prosperity, will be virtually certain. We don't need to worry about not having enough to go around, this version continues, because we've always found enough before. None of this is credible to those who perceive that most of current consumption is capital. It is likely that the Earth's long term carrying capacity for humans has already been reduced well below the current level of population. If so, the inevitable reduction of population will probably be initiated and paced by the decline of fossil fuel production over the next 50 years.
What has kept us from anticipating and avoiding overshoot? Or, if you are not convinced that we are already in overshoot, what keeps us from modifying our behavior now to avoid an otherwise inevitable overshoot? I will not attempt a complete answer to this question. I offer instead a few partial answers that provide sufficient support for my thesis. One partial answer: most of us are ignorant of the overshoot trap, hence do not fear it. Another partial answer: our economic life depends in several ways on continuing economic growth. We are afraid of disturbing the economic arrangements that keep us prosperous.
The economic growth trap
Economic growth requires increasing the amount of high quality energy and materials degraded by the economy each year. Economic growth on a finite planet will eventually stop. If it does not exhaust the resources needed for its continuation, it will stop earlier for some other reason. Allowing resource depletion and biosphere degradation to terminate economic growth will produce catastrophe. Unfortunately, our dependence on economic growth makes it extremely unlikely that we will give it up voluntarily before the catastrophe. Our dependence has at least four aspects: A) in the need to deal with adverse consequences of labor-reducing innovations, B) in commercial bank money, C) in the need to maintain tolerance of inequality, and D) in financial markets.
A) The first dependence on economic growth is in the need to avoid the adverse consequences of innovations that reduce the need for labor.1 By definition, each labor-reducing innovation either increases the amount of a good produced or throws some people out of work. Firms that create or exploit a labor-reducing innovation create new jobs internally by driving other firms out of business. The new jobs implementing the innovation offset the loss of jobs caused by the innovation, but the innovating firms don't necessarily hire all of the job losers, because the innovation reduced the total amount of labor needed to produce the original amount of the good. In order to re-employ all job losers, the economy must grow to produce more of the good with all of the original workers, or produce more of some other good with the cheaper labor (the job losers) now available. In either case the economy grows. Much of what we consider progress is due to labor-reducing innovations. In order to live without economic growth, we would have to give up this kind of progress, or introduce arrangements to allow workers who become unproductive to retain their relative wealth and self-respect, or relegate most people to a repressed underclass. There is a powerful incentive to avoid these contingencies by encouraging economic growth.
B) The second dependence on economic growth is in the creation of money by the act of borrowing at interest from commercial banks. Much of the money in each loan by a commercial bank is created by the loan itself. The bank collects a fee—the interest—for providing the service of creating the money. Other ways of creating money have been explored in theory and practice. Successful local currencies have been based on some of these alternatives, (see Douthwaite, Short Circuit, page 61) but all national money is now created by interest-bearing loans from commercial banks. This way of creating money contributes instability to an economy based on it. In order to keep the money supply from contracting when a loan and its interest are paid, a larger total of new loans must be created, increasing the money supply. (This is not transparently obvious. For a more detailed explanation, see Douthwaite, The Ecology of Money, page 24.) When the economy grows to match the increasing money supply, the value of money is relatively stable, and commercial-bank-created money is benign. If the rate of economic growth does not match the rate of growth of the money supply, the money supply becomes unstable. Given the use of money created by interest-bearing loans from commercial banks, an economy can minimize the resulting instabilities of the money supply by sustaining moderate growth. Monetary instability would put significant hazards in the way of deliberate attempts to contract our economy unless the creation of money was radically reformed.
C) The third dependence on economic growth is in the political and geopolitical need for tolerance of inequality. Differences of wealth are at least as great within the developed countries as they are between developed and developing countries. Think of the ratio of the average income of American CEOs to the average salary of workers in their companies. Domestically and internationally, the tolerance of the poor and middle classes for the existence of wealthier classes and countries depends on a belief in economic growth. The poor struggle, while seeing that others are wealthy and still others are grotesquely wealthy. The poor are told a story: if they keep to their work and to their diversions, and tolerate the rich, they will be better off in the future than they are today. They believe this story, or at least don't revolt against it, because it is supported by propaganda and shared myths, and has been true for many. When economic growth disappears forever, the poor, like everyone else, will recognize that they will be progressively worse off, with no future relief possible. The peaceful tolerance by the poor and the middles for the rich will disappear. A peaceful end of economic growth would require redistribution of wealth, with consequent political and geopolitical contention. Desire to avoid the contention makes it unlikely that deliberate elimination of economic growth will be attempted before economic growth is ended by nature. The intolerance of differences of wealth that will then appear will itself not be tolerated by the rich, causing additional domestic and international conflict just at the advent of other adverse changes. At that time, if not before, tyrannical repression of the poor will greatly tempt the rich.
D) The fourth dependence on economic growth is in the financial markets—the mechanism of capitalization of public corporations. Public corporations, the main actors in industrial economies, depend on financial markets not only for capital for innovation, but for discipline, valuation, motivation, and a major part of their rationale for existence. Owners of capital—investors—give the use of it over to public corporations by buying equity or debt in financial markets. They do so only because they expect that they will, on average, and over the long term, receive back more than they gave up. That expectation disappears when most investors understand there will be no economic growth. Most of the apparent wealth of the world consists of equity and debt bought and sold in financial markets. A general decline of market prices reduces general wealth in proportion. Any realistic possibility of the end of growth would fill investors with something like terror. Political initiatives to bring an end to growth will be opposed by investors with every means at their command. The controversial nature of proposals that would reduce or eliminate economic growth will likely prevent the proposals from reaching even the status of political contention. When the onset of sustained economic contraction is generally perceived, investors will withdraw from financial markets. The resulting failure of the markets will make many necessary developments impossible to finance and will produce confusion and stasis in public corporations just when we need them to adapt to new circumstances.
The trap of taboo and incrementalism
The possibility of overshoot should have stimulated reform to prevent it many years ago. Instead, it seems likely that reform will never occur. Many informed people sense that our way of life cannot continue, but few understand the trapping effect of overshoot. Why? It's a simple and powerful concept from a well established discipline. It remains esoteric for no obvious reason. There are many influential interests that deny the importance of such ideas, but even committed and resourceful opposition cannot explain the complete marginalization of the issue. Why is there not more discussion of the destructive and doomed nature of unrestrained economic growth? Limits to Growth, the 1972 report to the Club of Rome, investigated economic growth and overshoot. Its initial popularity stimulated a subsequent widespread repudiation. The complete success of that repudiation is puzzling. Even environmentalists can be heard to repeat the refrain of the growth enthusiasts that the predictions of Limits to Growth failed to come true. Read the book again to locate the failed predictions. You won't find them, because they don't exist. The only predictions contained in Limits to Growth cannot fail before 2070.
Organized groups don't address the concerns of Limits to Growth because they cannot "sell" them. Discussion of radical reform repels many and attracts few. Catastrophic contingencies can be mentioned in public only at some risk of ridicule or ostracism. Most environmental organizations acknowledge these realities, and restrict themselves to limited "consciousness raising", or to conservation, recycling, the Kyoto protocol, or preserving tiny parts of the biosphere. None of these activities, even if temporarily successful, can alter the outcome of overshoot. Nor can they prevent entry to overshoot as long as the fundamental problems of excess population and unrestricted economic growth are not solved.
Environmental activists believe that non-alarming incremental improvements of awareness and "concern for the Earth" will eventually create political conditions in which more fundamental action will be possible. Unfortunately, the necessary reforms are intrinsically radical, and always will be. Vested interests will always oppose improved understanding of the fundamental problems, not always cynically. We must not limit our conception of vested interests to investors, captains of industry, and politicians who minimize and avoid controversies that are not forced on them. We must also count a wish for a new child as a vested interest—or a dream of a new car, or a new house, or college for the kids, or a raise in pay, or a career in advertising, or a secure retirement. Important psychological barriers stand in the way of understanding that dreams must be canceled and replaced by much more modest ambitions. The psychological barriers cannot be overcome by agreeing that the dreams are not threatened, but tacit agreement is implied when the taboo against "alarmism" is respected. Only epiphany or a shocking and credible threat will overcome those barriers. Epiphany is too rare to produce social change. That leaves the shocking and credible threat. Who, other than a few marginalized academics and some isolated commentators, would explain the overshoot trap to the public? Certainly not our "leaders". It might have been explained by organized activists, but organized activists become too quickly addicted to acquiring new followers and avoiding taboo by trimming alarming contingencies from their messages.
What to do
A catastrophic collapse of the economy and population of the world is more than likely. We cannot escape overshoot's trap. What should we do?
First, who are "we"? Until now I have used "we" to refer to all humanity. If we insist that "we're all in the same boat", we shall all drown, because the one boat will sink. Those who hope to preserve civilization must accept that it is likely to sink into chaos in much of the world. The survival of some elements of civilization will require lifeboats that can be constructed only from communities, regions, perhaps nations, that are not now in overshoot. To preserve civilization at least some of these must choose to stay out of overshoot, establish independence in the production of food, energy, materials, and crucial manufactured goods, and defend their borders against the migrations that will tend to spread overshoot everywhere.
This strategy may fail. The necessary awareness and resolve may not develop soon enough in any of those fortunate regions not already in overshoot. Awareness and resolve may be prevented by the very institutional and psychological mechanisms that have been described earlier in this essay. Regions with resolve may be prevented from implementing it by superior governments or by economically or militarily stronger trade partners. But those who argue for survival of a community may have a better chance of persuading their audience than had those who argued for better management of global population and resources. They will have the advantage of arguing at a time when less fortunate regions of the world have begun to provide both unmistakable examples and unmistakable threats.
There is a great need for a culture of guerilla relocalisation—a movement that would have as its goal to partially prepare communities so that they may coalesce more readily into autonomous regions when the need becomes apparent. Richard Douthwaite has discussed methods that would serve these goals in his book Short Circuit.
Overshoot and crash may so damage the biosphere and deplete other natural capital as to extinguish humanity, or to reduce humanity to a few bands of wandering hunter-gatherers. These possibilities are now beyond our control. We can only hope there will be enough world left to sustain at least a greatly reduced new civilization, and act to keep the final struggles of overshoot from precluding even that possibility.
End Notes
1) I first learned of the obstacle that productivity-improving innovations put in the way of proposals to limit economic growth from a post by Roger Arnold in the Energy Resources discussion group, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/energyresources/, January, 2005.
Readings
Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère. 1998. The End of Cheap Oil. http://dieoff.org/page140.htm. Scientific American, March.
Donella H. Meadows et al. 1972. The limits to growth, a report for the Club of Rome's project on the predicament of mankind. New York, NY: Universe Books. 205 pages.
E.O.Wilson. 2002. The Bottleneck. http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/parakh/bottleneck.pdf. Scientific American, February.
Garrett Hardin. 1998. The feast of Malthus. http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles_pdf/feast_of_malthus.pdf. The Social Contract, Spring: 181-87.
Herman E. Daly. 1991. Steady-State Economics, Second. Washington, D.C.: Island Press. 302 pages.
———. 1996. Beyond Growth, 254 pages. Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press Books.
Kenneth S. Deffeyes. 2001. Hubbert's peak, the impending world oil shortage. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 2005. Beyond oil, the view from Hubbert's peak. New York, NY: Hill and Wang.
Leslie McCall. 3 November 2003. Do They Know and Do They Care? Americans' Awareness of Rising Inequality. http://www.princeton.edu/~csdp/events/pdfs/mccall.pdf.
Matthew R. Simmons. 2000. Revisiting "The Limits to Growth"; could the Club of Rome have been correct, after all? An energy white paper. http://www.simmonsco-intl.com/files/172.pdf. Simmons and Co. 78 pages. Limits to Growth (LTG) made no predictions that can fail before 2070, the time horizon of its predictions. Far from being pessimistic, it predicted that the exponential growth it observed could be stopped in time to prevent catastrophe. The adverse trends it observed have continued unabated and unaddressed, proving LTG essentially correct in its understanding of the dynamics of the population and economy of the world. The 30 years of inattention to LTG's message have greatly increased the risk of catastrophe.
Richard Douthwaite. 1996. The ecology of money. In Schumacher Briefings No. 4. Devon, England: Green Books, www,greenbooks.co.uk. 78 pages. A comparsion of the properties of different kinds of money, of which debt based commercial money is the only one in common use. The different money systems are compared on their adequacy to serve the three key functions of money: as a medium of payment or exchange, as a store of value, and as a unit of account. The book argues that currency reform is needed to support sustainability. Conclusions: 1. All monies should be created by, or on behalf of, their users, and not by institutions wishing to profit from the activity. 2. Different types of currency have to be used concurrently if the three key functions of money are to be adequately performed. 3. The international unit-of-account currency, to which all other monies would be related, has to represent, and thus protect, a truly scarce resource. In other words, when we save money, we should also be saving something vitally important, like the integrity of the natural world.
———.1996. Short circuit, strengthening local economies for security in an unstable world. Complete revised edition is available online at http://www.feasta.org/documents/shortcircuit/. 386 pages. Another title for this book might have been "Guerilla relocalization." Describes techniques for use by small and not so small communities to create and enhance a degree of independence from national and international economies without the cooperation of the larger economies.
———. 1999. The growth illusion: How economic growth has enriched the few, improverished the many, and endangered the planet. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, Canada. 383 pages.
Richard Heinberg. 2004. Power down, options and actions for a post carbon world. Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers. 208 pages.
Thomas Prugh et al. 1995. What natural capital is and does. In Natural capital and human economic survival, edited by Thomas Prugh, 51-69. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green.
Tony Boys. 1997. "An Historical and Cultural Perspective on the World Ecological Crisis." 1997. Published in Japanese in the Academic Journal of Shion Junior College, Vol. 37 (Pp. 13-62), December 1997. In English on the Web. Shion Junior College. 13 June 2005 http://www9.ocn.ne.jp/~aslan/hcp/. The 'Compound Crisis' of Population, Food, Oil, Soil, and Water, The Growth Treadmill and the Globalized Economy, As You Sow, So Shall You Weep, Brief Glory or Long, Dull Obscurity?
William R. Catton Jr. 1982. Overshoot, the ecological basis of revolutionary change. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 298 pages. Perhaps the only thorough treatment of population overshoot from an ecological perspective that is intended for the general reader.
World Resources Institute. 2005. Millenium ecosystem assessment, summary for decision makers. Washington, DC: Island Press. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment examines how changes in ecosystem services influence human well-being. The MA did not aim to generate new primary knowledge, but instead sought to add value to existing information by collating, evaluating, summarizing, interpreting, and communicating it in a useful form. A summary interpretation may be found on line at http://www.millenniumassessment.org/proxy/document.429.aspx
"What to do in a failing civilization" was first published in the Proceedings of the Canadian Association of the Club of Rome, Series 3, Number 6, September 2005, a special issue on The Age of Oil. The entire issue is on line at http://www.cacor.ca/Proceed-Sep%2005.pdf
Contact author at ddelaney@sympatico.ca
On the one hand, you have a Labour government that believes in smart, targeted state action to ensure a speedy, fairer recovery. A government that is, unashamedly, on the side of ordinary families and is willing to do whatever it takes to support them.
And on the other hand, you have a Conservative party undergoing a crisis of ideology believing, underneath David Cameron’s warm words, in an old-fashioned ‘you’re on your own’ dogma, and that the best way to solve Britain’s problems is to do virtually nothing and let the markets take their toll.
