May 4, 2009

The Ethics of global Capitalism

the values of the market

social indoctrination: Social indoctrination occurs when a socially-conditioned system of values, or “program of values,” is so ingrained in the public mind that everyone enacts its prescriptions as pre-supposed norms of behavior.

Specifically, all assume unquestioningly, as givens, what the program designates as valuable and not valuable. All assess, for instance, the value of their own life in terms of the program’s system of measurements. Their sole goal is to climb the program’s ladder of available options, and if successful, receive a well-earned reward.

All fulfill the program’s specified roles without question, and accept its costs, however widespread, as unavoidable manifestations of reality – the way things are and must be. Victims of the program must be at fault since the rules are Good and Right. The rules are viewed both as laws of nature or God, and also, at the same time, rules which are freely chosen by the virtuous. There is no possibility that the rules could be wrong. The harm the program causes, therefore, can in no case be blamed on those who succeed within its framework. There must be something wrong with the victims.

The pattern of such a program in indoctrinated minds holds true across individuals, classes, nations, and skin color.

In large part, the ideology of a “program of values” is devoted to justifying the inevitability of the condition of the oppressed. Ideologies justifying social oppression have been pervasive throughout history. Examples range from ancient caste systems, to thinkers such as Socrates (469-399 B.C.E.), Plato (427?-347 B.C.E.), and Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) defending slavery for the majority of people as a necessary good for society, to contemporary genocides in the name of “development.”

The problem resides not in human nature, but in a “program of values” which remains unexposed, and, therefore, unexamined. The program comes with its own system of protective rationalizations which help hide it from view, and with ready-made reasons to stigmatize non-conformers as being against the beneficent social order.

In our time, the global market system is such a “program of values” – justifying the inevitability of the condition of the poor and oppressed, hidden from view by noble rationalizations (“freedom,” “Western civilization”), and with ready-made stigmas for dissenters (“communists,” “socialists,” “subversives,” “terrorists,” “fanatic,” “unrealistic,” “naïve”) (pp. 1-3 and 40).

the Ethical infrastructure of the market: People generally do not think of the global market system as being driven by human values, much less a socially-constructed “program of values” blind to life and justifying social oppression. Indeed, economists of all schools of thought continue to portray the market as a system regulated by economic laws independent of people’s choice. The market, they say, is “value-neutral.”

Exceptions to this conception of the market are rare, but include the founding theoretician of the market doctrine, Scottish economist Adam Smith (1723-1790), in his treatise, An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations (1776), and more recently, Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi (1886-1964), in his book, The great transformation – the political and economic origins of our time (1944).

Despite almost unanimous voices claiming the market to be “value-free,” the market is a human invention, and, therefore, is a manifestation of human values. No market decision has ever been made which has not been an expression of a set of values. Indeed, the set of values espoused by market advocates has the characteristics of being a “program of values” – that is, a set of values which is the result of social indoctrination, and of which the bearer is unaware – social values unexposed and unexamined.

Such values form the ethical infrastructure of the market, steering its course in a predictable direction, with predictable consequences. Like its precedents, the present market “program of values” is blind to life and justifies oppression (pp. 2-3 and 5).

An Example: The assumptions of the market are unmasked in the following example.

During the mid-1990’s, newspapers and development journals reported that in the “dynamic new economies of Southeast Asia,” “bold local entrepreneurs” were developing prawn farming, an “economic take-off innovation” which was establishing itself as a “major developing-world export.” All of coastal Asia was participating, the countries involved including southern Bangladesh, India, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and the Philippines. Hundreds of thousands of hectares were now devoted to the “pink gold,” the trade having already captured “80 percent of the world market,” and “exports having soared” to hundreds of millions of dollars of “needed foreign currency earnings.” Profits for producers were “ten times higher” than when rice was being grown in the same fields. The process was “bringing new prosperity and freedom to the peoples of the world.”

From the point of view of life, however, the story is one of disaster. Lured by tax incentives, large-scale prawn plantations secured peasants’ plots by rent or purchase, and flooded the land with salt water. Repeated such flooding rapidly degraded the highly fertile soil of the sea coasts and the Mekong Delta in these eight densely populated countries, and also polluted the ground water. With each area of land exhausted, the plantations moved on to other profitable sites, and the peasants, even those who had prawn-farmed themselves, were left with desert land. A market success was, in fact, a severe loss for life (pp. 7-9. Wikipedia 2009 “Karl Polanyi,” pp. 1 and 4).

across social classes: The market system motivates people across class, nationality, and skin color. Although it alters the lives of people in different classes differently, the few rich becoming increasingly wealthy, and the many more poor increasingly poor, the latter are ruled by it as much as the former. The aspiration of the poor is to exchange places with the rich. The determinants of the system, therefore, are deeper than a class analysis can suggest. Around the globe, people assume that the market system which is determining their lives, is a given ground of choice – the structure of reality itself, similar to a law of physics. The norm is the fact. The market values programmed in everyone’s mind, go across socio-economic class lines (pp. 1, 12-13, 17 and 31).

absolutism among post-modern affirmations of diversity: Even post-modern theorists accept without examination, the value framework in which money is an unquestioned good, and the more, the better.

The post-modern philosophical Position: Post-modern thinkers consider all doctrines which pretend to be universal, necessary, and good for humanity, as dogmatic dictates aimed at erasing differences and plurality. Instead of absolutist, immutable, and general structures of understanding, they propose a de-centered autonomy of the local, the contingent, and the particular. Life and meaning are irreducibly aperspectival, polyverse, and resistant to any necessary or obligatory order. Any global doctrine is reductive and implies “terroristic totalitarianism” – to be avoided by a radical embrace of diversity.

The global “free Market”: Even at the very same time that the difference-affirming post-moderns contest all totalizing ideologies, the most powerful ideology ever to be constructed, preaching an inevitable and necessary system of global social organization, is rapidly being implemented across the world. The model proclaims itself a “new world order” to which “no alternative” is possible,

and opposes any alternative as inimical to “freedom.”

The Response of post-modern Philosophy: The market system of global rule would seem to be in irresolvable contradiction with the post-modern philosophical position. Nevertheless, almost all post-modern celebrations of differences and plurality are silent about the ruling structure of the “free market” which is now being imposed on all of humanity.

The three-century old, specifically capitalist market structure being prescribed to the world as an inevitable grand narrative, eludes the attention of Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998), the French philosopher who himself coined the term “post-modern.” His The post-modern condition – a report on knowledge (1979), refers to it only as a mere abstraction – “the creation of wealth.” Lyotard writes:

“I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a meta-discourse, . . . some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth” (Lyotard. Quote pp. 42 and 56. Wikipedia 2009 “Jean-Francois Lyotard,” pp. 1 and 3-4).

But history has a well-known habit of producing the opposite of what its justifying ideologies assert (pp. 32 and 41-43).

the values of life

The Life-ground: Though not taking the needs of life into account, the global market system today is humanity’s final ruler and judge. Where originally, the market was seen as a structure serving society, the present global market has little use for society except as an aggregate of subservient resources – slaves. Labor is an instrumental and disposable “factor of production.”

Yet, within all of us, beneath the values of the market, a felt bond of being, a connection of life to life’s requirements, holds us together, crossing all boundaries, whether those of social classes, nations or even species. It is a life-ground which is much deeper than our socially conditioned framework of perception that what is good for the market, is good for society (pp. 22-23).

Chinese philosopher Wang Yang-Ming (1472-1529) gives a description of the life-ground:

“Even the mind of the small man is no different. Only he himself makes it small. Therefore, when he sees a child about to fall into a well, he cannot help a feeling of alarm and commiseration. This shows that his humanity (yen) forms one body with the child. It may be objected that the child belongs to the same species. Again, when he observes the pitiful cries and frightened appearance of birds and animals about to be slaughtered, he cannot help feeling an ‘inability to bear’ their suffering. This shows that his humanity forms one body with birds and animals. It may be objected that birds and animals are sentient beings as he is. But when he sees plants broken and destroyed, he cannot help a feeling of pity. This shows that his humanity forms one body with plants” (Wang Yang-Ming, “An Inquiry on the Great Learning.” Quote pp. 368 and 399).

Only values grounded in life can penetrate behind the mask of “development” as seen from the point of view of money accumulation, and reveal its complete de-linkage from the vital capacities of life (p. 385).

the civil commons: The “civil commons” is the external representation of a society’s life-ground. It is the organized, community-funded capacity of a society to provide universally accessible resources which help preserve and enhance the life of its members, including their environment. The roots of the civil commons anti-date those of the market by millennia.

The civil commons represents what people together as a society have in order to protect and further life, as distinct from protecting and furthering money aggregates. Whereas the market offers commodities for a price to those able to pay, the civil commons guarantees access for all to the goods required to safeguard and advance life-capacities. The healthy family is a prototype of the civil commons. Civilization universalizes its principles.

The civil commons, therefore, is the vast social fabric of un-priced goods which protect and enable life. It sustains society in a seamless web which evolves toward increasing civilization. It is society’s underlying life organization. It consists of the living bonds of a community organized to transform the life of all its citizens into more comprehensive, vital being.

What Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) called the death instinct on an individual level, is, on a social level, a life-destructive set of values which is closed, in that it avoids stimuli which do not fit with it, and reproduces itself no matter the cost to life. Humanity is ruled by such a set of values (a “program of values”) today. The values which drive the market, rule out the universally accessible goods of life from its system of worth. More money is an unquestioned good.

The existence of the civil commons shows that “self-maximizing choice,” the grounding rule of the market, is indeed not “human nature.”

There is now no place in the world, indigenous or industrialized, where the civil commons is safe from corporate market invasion. The life-and-death choice which confronts humanity, has as its resolution the sovereignty of increases in life’s vital capacities, and the vehicle of this sovereignty, the still evolving civil commons.

(Pp. 24-28, 30, 32-33, 372, 376, 381 and 390).

market theory – “value-free”

the foundations of market theory:

John Locke (1632-1704): The moral-theological foundation of the doctrine of the “free market” was laid by English philosopher John Locke, in his Second treatise of government, published in 1690 – one year after the Glorious Revolution which deposed King James II (1633-1701, king 1685-1688) and brought the accession to the English throne of William and Mary, upon their acceptance of the Bill of Rights (1689) which abolished the absolute (divine) right of kings (p. 46).

Locke substituted the absolute right of kings with the absolute right to private property, which he believed was conferred and protected by God:

“He who has given mankind the world in common” (Locke. Quote pp. 46 and 56).

But this seemingly fundamental moral norm of instituting and preserving private property, cannot be assumed as a given. It is not a “natural” condition or structure of the physical world, which can be studied in the way a physicist studies established laws governing the cosmos. It is, rather, a moral institution open to choice and rejection (p. 49).

For example:

* The early Christians repudiated the principle of private property as socially irresponsible. The New Testament, in the Acts of the Apostles, tells us:

“Not a man of them claimed any of his possession as his own, but everything was held in common. They never had a needy person among them, because all who had property in land or houses sold it, brought the proceeds of the sale, laid the money, and . . . it was then distributed to any who stood in need” (Holy Bible. Quote pp. 50 and 56).

* Most First Nations peoples regarded private property, particularly in land, as an offense against nature and community, accepting only personal possession for use. Shawnee leader Tecumseh (1768-1813) explained:

“The land is never divided, but belongs to all for the use of each. No one has a right to sell [land], not even to each other” (Tecumseh. Quote pp. 50 and 56).

Yet, every market transaction pre-supposes the principle of private property as a prescriptive right (p. 49).

Locke’s theory of property implies that:

1. The right to private property need not be earned by one’s own work or production.

2. Private property of the earth, including its resources and products, is an over-riding and inviolable right.

3. Private property may always, and in all things, be rightfully bought and sold by the medium of money exchanges between property-owners. Certain non-defined exceptions which Locke makes to this rule, do not include an exception for human labor (namely, that it may not be bought and sold), or for certain commodities (namely that, even if within the law, not any commodity may be bought and sold).

4. Private property may be accumulated by the medium of money exchanges without limit as to its amount and global extent, the degree of inequality it causes, or the extent to which it dispossesses others (pp. 91-92).

Adam Smith (1723-1790): In his monumental treatise, An inquiry into the nature and understanding of the wealth of nations, published in 1776, the year of the American Revolution, Adam Smith developed Locke’s declaration of the God-given, “sacred and inviolable right to private property” into a fully-fledged market theory – the dynamic system of the “free market.” Smith’s discussion has two central ideas:

1. The advantages of production and exchange free of royal charter and government interference.

2. The self-interested pursuit of profit promotes the social good:

“ . . . he intends only his own gain, and in this . . . [is] led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention” (Smith. Quote pp. 125, 132 and 156).

Smith, therefore, appropriated Locke’s idea of the “sacred and inviolable right to private property” as a basic premise, and to it, added two ideas – that production and exchange should be free of government interference, and that an “invisible hand” (a deist construct) converts the self-interested pursuit of profit into a social good (pp. 46-47 and 340).

Note that Smith:

1. Focused on the whole of society, seeing, as the title of his treatise implies, an increase in consumption as increasing the “wealth of nations.” This is in contrast to modern market theory.

2. Sought freedom for only one class – the freedom of manufacturers and merchants from state interference through the imposition of monopoly and trade barriers. Smith did not extend this principle to “the race of laborers” who depended on wages for survival. He did not, like market theory does today, argue that obtaining higher wages from one’s master, represents freedom for the working classes.

3. Considered a corporation (a “joint stock company”) inappropriate to a free market order – except for “uniform functions.” In contrast, today’s “free market” gives “corporate persons” the rights of an individual persons, thereby greatly facilitating the already great and ever-increasing concentration of capital ownership (pp. 80, 135, 139 and 260).

4. Conceived of money as of value only in “circulating consumable goods, provisions, materials and finished work” – that is, as a means of serving human needs and wants. Today, money accumulation is an end in itself, life valued only in terms of its usefulness in helping ever-greater money accumulations (p. 324).

5. Limited acquisitive self-seeking to:

a. Money-capital only (not, as at present, the seeking of a “larger share” of what is already there).

b. The market only, and only insofar as capital was used to produce tangible goods (not, as at present, self-maximizing behavior as the very meaning of “rational choice,” and any obligation to society as inconsistent with market “freedom”).

c. Domestic production only (not, as at present, to “flight capital” investment in foreign countries).

d. The investment of capital in the long-term employment of productive labor (not, as at present, speculation in land, currencies, bonds, or any other investment or capital expenditure which, in Smith’s words, diminishes the “funds destined for the employment of productive labor”) (pp. 132 and 324).

American economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006), in Capitalism and freedom (1964/1981), would develop “monetarist economics,” replacing Smith’s emphasis on labor, with an emphasis on preserving the value of owned money. Friedman argues that business has “no social responsibilities,” its only responsibility being “to make as much money as possible” (pp. 134 and 324).

On the other hand, Smith:

1. Knew that as the “invisible hand” achieved profits, efficiencies of production and lower prices, it would also produce large-scale miseries and starvation for working people. He writes:

“But in civilized society, . . . among the inferior ranks of people, . . . the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the species; and it can do so in no other way than by destroying a great part of the children which their fruitful marriages produce (Smith. Quote pp. 76, 98, 84, 112, 120 and 240).

2. Viewed wage labor as a commodity, with a price which, like any other commodity, “must be set by the market”:

“It is in this way that the demand for men, like any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men; quickens it when it goes on too slowly, and stops it when it advances too fast. It is this demand which regulates and determines the state of propagation in all the different countries of the world” (Smith. Quote pp. 239-240 and 254).

3. Recognized that the price of labor from wage-earners is cheaper than that from slaves:

“The wear and tear of a slave, it has been said, is at the expense of the master, but that of a free servant is at his own expense (Smith. Quote pp. 239-240 and 254).

David Ricardo (1772-1823): English economist David Ricardo claimed that the market doctrine contains neither moral principles nor prescription. The error arises from a confusion between social norms and the physical laws of nature.

For instance, in The principles of political economy and taxation (1817), Ricardo responds with the following statement to the British “Poor Laws” (also called the Speenhamland income-support laws, in effect from 1601 to 1834, when they were effectively repealed):

“The principle of gravitation is not more certain than the tendency of such laws to change wealth and vigor into misery and weakness” (Quote pp. 63 and 84).

Economists since Ricardo have replaced the value terms “wealth” with “increased productivity” and “vigor” with “willingness to work.” Like Ricardo, however, they have assumed that the market is the given order of nature.

The position implies deism, the popular intellectual religion in Ricardo’s time. Deism sees a rational God as immanent in the design of the world order, both natural and economic. The design is an eternal, necessary, and universal force. Non-compliance is followed by disaster as surely as a thrown object falls downward (p. 64).

Socrates (469-399 B.C.E.), Plato (427?-347 B.C.E.), and Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.) had similar kinds of thoughts about slavery, considering it a structure of reality, both necessary and good. However, they did not loose sight of the normative content of this social structure, which was imposed on people. They did not imagine it to be a “value-free” fact, rather conceiving it as a moral order of human rule, and justifying it as such. Since Ricardo, the market doctrine has denied the nature of the market as a historical social formation, claiming that the market is the given order of nature, and hence, with prescriptions which are not normative (pp. 62-67).

Behind the “free choice” of consumers and sellers within the market system, a theological absolutism is embodied in its concepts of property, supply, demand and profit maximization. Market doctrine rules out any human or social responsibility for the laws of the market, considering these as prior to, and independent of society – as are the laws of nature and God (pp. 72-73).

Note that, like Adam Smith, Ricardo was occasionally frank about the costs of the “iron law of wages” to the “servant class” when the demand for their work was low. In a truly “free and efficient market,” starvation was the price of not selling one’s labor to a master, and it was precisely to keep this incentive operating that Ricardo opposed so adamantly such external income-support systems as the Speenhamland Poor Laws (pp. 76, 98, 112 and 120).

dehumanizing the theory: The present ideology of the “global economy” is based on Smith’s premises, but with four radical revisions of his theory, all of which remove its human content:

1. Leon Walras (1834-1910): French economist Leon Walras leads the banishment of value theory from economics. At present, economists are depoliticizing the subject category “political economy” by their claim that all political and value judgments have been removed from market analyses, and hence market economics is “value-free.”

Economists thus claim that values have been banished from a subject whose every object of study is a value.

It so happens, however, that far from being “value neutral,” market theory, beginning with the morally-grounded principles of John Locke and Adam Smith, claims ultimate, universal, and axiomatic value for a market which is based on the absolute principles of the right to private property, the pursuit of self-interest and profit, and the monetized production and exchange of needed goods (pp. 47-48. McMurtry 1999, summarized in Hall 2008d, pp. 30 and 32).

2. William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882) and Arthur (Alfred) Marshall (1842-1924): English economists William Stanley Jevons and Arthur (Alfred) Marshall introduce the concept of marginal utility, which considers that, just as firms seek to maximize profits, buyers seek to maximize “utility,” as measured in terms of their willingness to pay.

This “marginal utility theory of value,” renders subjective the value of an object – the buyer’s willingness to pay. It contrasts with the “labor theory of value,” espoused by Adam Smith (1723-1790), David Ricardo (1772-1823) and German philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883), which conceives the value of a good in terms of the human labor required to produce it.

The new approach enables economists to study economic behavior in terms of mathematically conceived preference schedules – visualizing people as a-political atoms of automatically self-maximizing preferences, thus declaring as non-existent all social relations and life complexities.

The mechanistic paradigm on which marginalist theory is based, suits the market paradigm – which sees human and environmental life as inputs for global corporations in the business of maximizing profits for stockholders (p. 47. Ackerman 1997, p. 82, summarized in Hall 2008d, p. 32. Cox 2008, summarized in Hall 2008e, p. 15).

3. Ragnar Frisch (1895-1973) and Lawrence Klein (1920-): Norwegian economist Ragnar Frisch, and American economist Lawrence Klein help develop “econometrics” which, along with other formalist devices, increasingly enables economists to substitute mathematical symbols and equations for observed facts and social relations. Computers help the development of economic models – which would have resounding failures, such as the failure to predict the 1997-1998 Asian financial meltdowns (p. 47. Columbia Encyclopedia 2000).

4. Milton Friedman (1912-2006): American economist Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and freedom (1964/1981) develops “monetarist economics” which aims at preserving the value of owned money, thus replacing the over-riding emphasis which Adam Smith had placed on the use of capital as “funds destined for the employment of productive labor” (p. 47).

Friedman argues that business has “no social responsibilities.” The only responsibility of business is “to make as much money as possible.” The laws of the market form an inalterable framework of freedom on earth, and to not understand this fact is to “subvert” society (pp. 74 and 118).

market theory today: Contemporary market theory, of which English economist Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992), in The road to serfdom (1944), is an influential advocate, differs from that of Adam Smith in major ways:

1. Wealth for all Individuals: Smith’s focus was on the whole society. He saw an increase in consumption as the “wealth of nations.”

Contemporary market theory focuses on the ability of individuals to increase their own money as an end in itself.

2. Individual Freedom: Adam Smith sought freedom for only one class – the freedom of manufacturers and merchants from state interference through the imposition of monopoly and trade barriers. Smith did not extend this principle to “the race of laborers” who depended on wages for survival. He did not argue that acquiring higher wages from one’s master, represented freedom for the working classes.

Contemporary advocates of the market doctrine claim that:

a. The market confers freedom to everyone in it, including those who have nothing to sell but their working lives.

“Individual freedom” seems the ultimate, unifying value of the theory, the value which gives the theory its ethical force. The three basic principles of the theory – the right to private property, the pursuit of profit in investment, and the unhindered exchange of competitively-produced goods and services – are considered requirements for individual freedom.

b. The State is to enforce this individual freedom. This conception of the State as a “value-neutral” mechanism, “impartial with respect to competing conceptions for the good,” is new, and an almost unanimously pre-supposed norm of today’s “liberal” and “democratic” theorists.

3. Inequality without Limits: As presently conceptualized, the market system places no limit on private profit maximization. Specifically, it places no limit on either inequality of wealth, or any dispossession of others, including their means of life, which may occur through this private profit maximization.

Nevertheless, advocates claim that the State, which institutes and enforces this system of unlimited property rights for the richest of its citizens against all others, no matter how poor, is “neutral,” and takes no sides “between competing conception of good” (pp. 52-53).

4. The Rule of the invisible Hand: Proponents of the market doctrine defend the rule of the “invisible hand” as beneficent, and as the “maximally rational system of resource distribution.”

The increasing poverty and under-employment amidst great wealth, which occur even in “miracle economies,” are labeled “externalities” to the market – not costs of doing business, and hence, not components of the market model. Should these represent problems, they should be resolved by subjective realms, such as “morality,” or “politics.” The market doctrine must remain impersonal, restricting itself solely to costs and outputs – business ledgers and gross national (or domestic) product (GNP, GDP).

This relegation of social problems to other realms of responsibility, could be interpreted as limiting the necessity and universality claimed for the market doctrine as a system of rule.

Not so. The doctrine stipulates that:

a. Government is responsible for ensuring the security of property rights, but must not interfere with the accumulation of property or the maximization of profit.

b. Government is responsible for ensuring profit opportunities, and free exchanges, but must not regulate any price, including that of labor.

c. Government should not direct production. It should not plan the production and distribution of the goods and services required by its citizens to survive. Such activities by government are bound to lead to “tyranny.”

This is the essential argument of Friedrich von Hayek, in The road to serfdom (1944), and is the modern equivalent of Ricardo’s absolutist opposition to the “Poor Laws.” Hayek’s binary opposition is “the free market” vs. “totalitarianism.” Failure to understand that the laws of the market form an inalterable framework of freedom on earth, ensures “totalitarianism.”

d. Subjective realms, such as “morality” or “politics” over-step their bounds when they “interfere with the market.”

Thus, what at first appears as a limitation of the absolute rule of the market, in fact represents a delegated requirement that the State maintain this rule. The market is not a means to enrich life, but rather life a means to enrich the rich (pp. 57-59, 74, 240-241, 245, 252 and 340).

Note that advocates of today’s market doctrine:

a. Do not accept that humans have a right to live. Life and life’s requirements do not have a place in market values.

“Efficiency” is whatever reduces input of money per unit of revenue production. Monocultures are “efficient,” even if this means eliminating edible plants whose vitamin content complements those of a crop (pp. 79, 276-277 and 283-284).

b. Facilitate an “oligopolist structure of the market” by giving “corporate persons” the rights of individual persons, even as they ignore that the tendency toward oligopoly and monopoly is a logical consequence of market theory. In contrast, except for “uniform functions,” Adam Smith considered corporations (“joint stock companies”) inappropriate to a free market order (pp. 80-81).

The “immutable” and “necessary” rule of the free market, is, in reality, the rule of trans-national conglomerates which have ever-increasing control over market operations (p. 81).

Behind the deified design of the “invisible hand” of the market, lies a real, visible and very human center of command – billionaires, inter-locking directorates of multi-national corporations, and global intra-firm empires which dominate supply and demand. Down the chain of command, positions operate as subordinate functions of this ruling global hierarchy.

Whatever their rank in the system, whether “market-winners” or lower down, all enact the command of the market to reproduce and grow money. No matter that the mechanism of the market centralizes money and subjugates all life, all defend it as providing the structure for cherished values – free, individual competition. At both the individual and the social levels, the demands of the market constitute the “program of values” of which people are unaware, but which they enact (p. 82).

ethical implications of the market theory

The founding philosophers of market theory justified the theory’s basic principles – private property, money transactions to purchase any property, and inequality of possession without limit. Since then, the most basic tenet of the market doctrine decrees that this right to private property with no limit of inequality, over-rides any possible right of public interest or individual human need. The theory has many unstated implications, of which the following are examples (pp. 91-92).

slavery: Historically, property in other human beings has perhaps been the most dominant form of private property and market exchange – the center-piece of market transactions for more than 2,000 years, from classical Athens to ante-bellum United States. Slaves were the basic producers of surplus wealth, and have been the principal basis for the success and spread of market capitalism around the world.

The governments of market societies now prohibit slavery by law, and have thus fundamentally and coercively “interfered with the market.” Market doctrine does not usually acknowledge this line drawn against the right of any property. Claims that private property is the foundation of individual freedom exclude any explicit limit, such as the right to slavery. In principle, free market theory does not draw any line against the right to private property in slaves (pp. 92-93 and 117).

wage-earners: German social philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883) argued that if a buyer of one’s labor owns that labor as private property, one is a “wage-slave.”

The commodity of labor is the primary “factor of production” in the market, treated by market theory as any other factor of production used by its buyer as an instrument to achieve his goals. Human labor, consisting of billions of people’s lives, is continuously bought and used as a commodity on the global market. The “global labor market” thrives.

If a civilized norm decrees that humans should not be articles of sale on the market, this would seem to imply that neither should human lives be bought and sold as commodities. Such a norm, however, were it to be given the form of effective human and labor rights, would pose an insuperable difficulty for the market doctrine.

In principle, the theory does not distinguish between the buying and selling of human lives as instruments of labor (slaves), and the buying and selling of most of the vital waking hours of human lives as instruments of labor (the labor factor of production). From a practical standpoint, however, the cost of slavery far exceeds the payment of a market-set wage, particularly in times of labor over-supply. To make subjugated labor available, the wage-system theoretically is no different than slavery, just practically, less costly. Market theory puts no value on life as such (pp. 94-95 and 240).

child labor: In 1995, the United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) reported that globally, child laborers numbered in the hundreds of millions. Specifically:

“In India, 340 million children under the age of 16 are estimated to fall under the definition of child labor. In Africa, over 20 percent of children are thought to be economically active. In Latin America, the proportion is estimated at between 10 and 25 percent” (UNESCO. Quote pp. 96-97 and 120).

Child labor, bonded labor, and forced labor now rival slavery in their brutality. Market policy and practice accept these, on the basis of achieving “competitive prices for consumers.”

The market doctrine is consistent with enslaved labor in all its forms. Its goal of free circulation of goods and capital across borders, does not exclude these forced forms of labor.

On a practical level, the international coordinating bodies of the market, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), criticize labor protections. Trans-national trade agreements aggressively seek to remove regulatory barriers protecting labor from the market’s inherent drive to reduce the costs of purchasing and controlling labor. Neither market theory nor balance sheets take life insecurity, destitution, malnutrition or occupational disease into account (pp. 96-97, 100, 262 and 275).

the unemployed: Labor-replacing machinery has increasingly displaced workers, while the labor market which is available to trans-national corporations in search of low labor costs, is increasingly over-supplied with labor. The consequence is insecure conditions of employment, and workers unable to sell the only private property they have – their labor.

Market theory, pre-supposing “rational” (defined as strictly self-interested) sellers and buyers, accepts the destitution, malnourishment, and even starvation of the under-employed or unemployed. It seeks no floor to the price of labor, and at the same time insists that the State should not intervene in the price of commodities. These positions entail that un-sold labor should receive nothing.

Indeed, the theory does not repudiate the statements of either Adam Smith, its founder, or David Ricardo, the one who first proclaimed the “value-free” nature of the market. Both overtly endorsed the mass death of children and families due to “free market” operations. The conclusion that advocates of the “free market” accept these mass deaths as the workings of the “invisible hand,” is difficult to avoid. A more ready embrace of a homicidal sacrifice of humankind would be hard to find, but market logic decrees that this holocaust is “necessary” (pp. 98, 101-103, 106 and 113).

inequality: The phenomenon of the “free market” has the characteristics of a theological “program of values” which is no longer related to reality. Having elected this program as its final ruler, society has agreed to transfer wealth from the public to the private sector, particularly the rich. As inequality increases, the “trickle-down” theory of economics claims that for the rich to become still richer, is good for the non-rich. Indeed, the idea that un-earned money at the top is good for everybody, is a standard claim of market theory (pp. 105-106 and 108).

The pattern of ever more transfer of money from the poor to the rich, with no commitment by the latter to any socially useful function, is a global pattern. As soon as people cease to perform a demonstrable function in the maximization of profit by investors, their right to life and well-being is repudiated and over-ridden. The Free Trade Zones which are multiplying around the world, make explicit the absolute refusal of social obligation or responsibility by the rich (pp. 110, 113-114 and 116).

By treating the ruling interests of the market as a God, the market doctrine is able, in His name, to command, punish and over-ride all other interests of life.

The unspoken master “program of values” of the global market is to take wealth from those whom the civil commons protect and enable, and redistribute it to private owners of capital, with the message that they can do with it as they please. Life and its requirements per se do not have value (pp. 118, 259 and 277).

market sales and realities

selfishness sold as generosity: The idea, originating in Adam Smith (1723-1790), that the exclusive pursuit of one’ own private advantage in production and commerce, promotes the social good, struck a strong chord in the capitalist society, just then arising. Self-maximizing investors breathed a sigh of relief, as they now did not have to think beyond rewarding themselves.

German philosopher Georg Hegel (1770-1831), principally in Lectures on the philosophy of history (1837, posthumous), echoed Smith’s idea, elevating it into a principle, “the cunning of Reason,” whereby selfishness is transmuted into its opposite – the good of the whole. Hegel argues that:

“World-historical individuals [bring about great social advances in] the institutionalization of right and law on earth [through the militant pursuit of their own interests imposed on others, thereby organizing them into larger nation-state unities of ruling purpose and will]” (Hegel. Quote pp. 126 and 156).

English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) echoed the idea in his theory that the struggle for existence yields increasingly developed individuals and species, by means of a life-and-death contest for survival and genetic self-reproduction (p. 126).

German social philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883) echoed the idea in his concept of history as moving forward through the ruthless self-interest of capitalists and the revolutionary self-interest of proletarians, the latter eventually seizing power for themselves. Marx, however, is alone in having drawn a limit to the actions of the powerful. (Those who ruled in his name, did not) (p. 127).

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) echoed the idea in his concept of the Ubermensch (Superman) whose creative “will to power” sets him off from “the herd,” the “natural” slaves, and inferior beings of humanity. This “will” enables him to impose on them his own noble ruling forms, and mould them to his own higher will (pp. 126-127. Columbia Encyclopedia 2000).

The general idea that being selfish in the direction of ordering reality for one’s own gains is also good for others, is now part of the canon of “great man” narratives of Western history. It is an idea which enables rationalization by the powerful of their own power.

The seminal thought is that action, exclusively self-seeking, in competition against others, is good for society as a whole. It is a rationalization which elevates self-serving behavior to a moral high ground. The underlying conclusion is that the leadership of society is properly left in the hands of those who rule, with powerful technologies, over large numbers of people, and are able to impose on them an organizing will which is larger-scaled and more efficient than that of any competitor (pp. 126-127).

self-maximization sold as rationality: Adam Smith’s idea of the self-maximizing pursuit of profit as the servant of the social good, is now an integral part of economic theory. The focus on the self automatically equilibrates supply and demand, maximizes economic efficiency, and motivates producers to improve their products. The mind-set has become the established way of comprehending reality. Behavior which is not self-seeking is excluded a priori from economic models.

The principle has subsequently branched from market theory and practice, and found more general application, such as in the fields of social science and philosophy. The idea is that self-maximization is a universal principle of rationality. To be rational is to seek consistently to gain as much as possible for oneself. Any choice or any decision which is not “self-maximizing” is not rational, and automatically excluded from decision-making models, including those referring to justice and morality.

American philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002), in A theory of justice (1968), assumes as a given that rationality is self-maximization:

“I have assumed throughout that the persons in the original position [of seeking the general principles of social justice] are rational. In choosing between principles, each tries as best he can to advance his interests . . . It is rational for the parties to suppose that they do want a larger share . . . The concept of rationality [which] is invoked here . . . is the standard one familiar in social theory” (Rawls. Quote pp. 129 and 156).

Canadian-American philosopher David Gauthier (1932-), in Morals by agreement (1986), also assumes that rationality is “maximizing the interests of the self,” and goes on to apply it to morality. Morality tempers self-maximization with cooperation for common goals – no matter the nature of these common goals (pp. 129 and 156. McMurtry 1999, summarized in Hall 2008d, p. 34).

People are transformed into self-maximizing calculators seeking the most for themselves, independently of all other considerations – a homogenous mass of greedy atoms, all with the same goal, operating mechanically within a social machine.

That rationality could mean anything other than consistently seeking more for oneself, is no longer a thought that seriously occurs to the market-acculturated mind-set, whether in social and political theory or even moral philosophy (pp. 127-132 and 187).

But the assumption is counter-intuitive. Rationality is precisely thinking beyond one’s own self-seeking, and count others’ interests as important as one’s own. Reason uses non-partiality as its starting point, and consistency as its means. Rationality is the opposite of what the market “program of values” prescribes. To consider rationality greed pursued with mechanical consistency, is testimony to the imprisonment of thought within the market dogma (pp. 129, 131-132 and 151).

the corporate person (sold!): Market theory makes the general assumption that the market consists only of “free, independent, and responsible individuals” (owners, producers, sellers, and buyers) in a contractual paradise of “voluntary negotiations and transactions.” The competition is open, with each one having equal opportunity, and none able to dominate supply, demand or prices (p. 135).

This is manifestly false. Multi-national corporations are certainly not individuals. And yet they, not individuals, bear legal responsibility for hiring and firing individuals, investing money, owning assets, and incurring debts and liabilities. Corporations are “separate legal persons.” The legal entity of the corporate person explicitly exempts individuals from responsibility for what they do on behalf of the corporations from which they profit. Liability for civil or criminal offense, and for debt, is assumed by the legal agent by whose authority it came about – the fictitious corporate person (p. 136).

Moreover, at the same time that money-owning individuals profit from their investment in the corporation, without legal accountability, the corporation itself is guaranteed individual rights – “freedom of speech,” “the right to remain silent,” “freedom of association,” “freedom from regulatory discrimination,” and most of the rights and freedoms once thought to belong solely to individuals. The market “program of values” subjugates even the rule of law to its ideological construction (p. 137).

Corporations conveniently claim such rights as will protect their own interests, however these may affect the life and security of others. This includes the right to low taxes, the right to exploit and damage environmental life, and the right to the same property rights as those possessed by citizens of other countries. These are central prescriptions of “free trade” agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Corporations are international sovereigns:

1. International trade agreements, such as NAFTA, specify no rights but those of business corporations, and these corporate rights explicitly over-ride whatever domestic laws may be “inconsistent” with them.

2. The ability of corporations to withdraw investment from any nation which taxes, regulates, or otherwise limits their “competitiveness,” gives them the de facto sovereign power to defy any restraint (pp. 140-141).

The corporate system, not individuals, are the market sovereigns. Individuals are, if stockholders, beneficiaries of corporate gains, without legal accountability, and if workers, replaceable cogs in a profit-making machine. The sole measure of value in the system is money, whether it is used to produce goods and services which promote or which destroy the welfare of life. Human aspiration itself is reduced to the lingua franca of more money for oneself – called “individualism” by market ideology, and decried as “too much individualism” by critics. But the problem is the debilitation and homogenization of life, not individualism (pp. 138, 141-156, 229 and 232-237).

freedom (for those who can pay): Freedom means self-governing. Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), in The road to serfdom (1944), makes explicit the principal argument for the “free market” – the freedom it gives producers, buyers, and sellers from any external control in the production and exchange of goods. Since this freedom applies to all areas of people’s lives, it is the most important and fundamental freedom that exists.

Hayek states:

“Parties in the market should be free to buy and sell at any price at which they can find a partner to the transaction – free to produce, buy and sell anything that can be produced or sold at all” (Hayek. Quote pp. 159 and 209).

But the market recognizes only those who have enough money to pay. The others are not free to buy either what they want, or even what they need to live, such as food and shelter. Market rules dictate that they, then, have no right to these. The market does not recognize a need not backed by money. It has no reality for it, no value. Those without money have no freedom because they do not have the means to have freedom. Under market rules, they do not even have the right to live.

The market does not distinguish between needs and wants. It focuses only on the demands of those who have money (“effective demand”). For the market, a bomb is more valuable than a latrine. A $100,000 gold-plated toilet in a private jet, has 1,000 times the value of a $100 well for a rural village. The market allocates and distributes society’s scarce resources solely in accordance with how much money stands behind a demand. In the interest of the rich, a worldwide multi-billion dollar advertising business “stimulates demand” (pp. 159-163, 169 and 219).

freedom (but not for the producers): In The road to serfdom, Friedrich Hayek contrasts the “totalitarianism” of socially-planned production, with the ability of the market to provide the “freedom to produce.” Hayek’s claim has obvious truth. Vying with each other to attract buyers, entrepreneurs have a freedom which they would not have in an economy with monopoly conditions of production, such as the former Soviet economy.

But in the actual present global market system, few agents are free:

1. The investors of private Capital are free: Private investors are the only ones who are free under present global market conditions. They can choose whether or not to invest in a company which produces goods and services, for sale in the market at the highest price that buyers are willing to pay. Those opting to do so, get together and typically form a fictitious legal entity – the “corporate person,” a bureaucracy of employees under chief-executive command, given the goal of maximizing assets and profits. This “person” rather than the investors themselves is considered the owner of the “factors of production.”

2. The Entrepreneurs are highly restricted: In market economies, the ever-increasing oligopolist control of supply and demand in all major sectors of production, severely restricts the freedom of entrepreneurs.

3. The Wage-earners are not free: Freedom requires an option to do other than what someone else prescribes. Workers do not have this option because they have sold their labor as an instrument for the goal of another. The phrase “company time” makes this point clear.

Global market theory does not recognize workers as producers. In market theory, the “producers” are the investors of private capital – although they do not produce, only buy the labor of the workers, who are the ones who actually produce. The theory views this bought labor as a “factor of production” – a means to profit-making, along with “capital,” “instruments of labor,” “natural resources,” and “enterprise.”

To be sure, at the top levels of management, white-collar technical and managerial workers have some freedom to design and implement alternatives structures – however, only insofar as these conform to the ruling command of maximizing profitability for investors. It is a freedom constrained by the prescribed goal of selfish monetary gain (pp. 174-175 and 325).

freedom for capital – “free trade” agreements

the historical roots of capitalism: Historically, capitalism (private production for profit) has its roots in England, when the moneyed class “enclosed” (privatized) village pasture land held in common, and expelled small farmers from their small holdings, to convert the land into large-scale sheep farms generating high profits.

The process started around 1150, greatly expanded around 1400, reached a peak in 1675, and continued until around 1845, when there was essentially no more land held in common, and small farmers had been converted into swelling ranks of landless employed labor in urban factories. By means of this one act of “enclosure,” private capital had now brought into being the two factors of production it needs to make a profit – cheap natural resources, and cheap labor.

Capitalism paralleled industrialization, itself spurred, after 1492, by the vast influx of precious metals from the New World. In 1694, the creation of the Bank of England established capitalism as an economic system on a large scale.

two constraints on profits: Since its beginning, profit-making under capitalism has had two constraints – its dependence on domestic demand being sufficiently high so that its products can be sold, hence a profit made, and the unwelcome imposition by government of conditions under which profits can be made.

1. Dependence on Workers’ Demand: Historically, capitalism has depended for its existence on the aggregate demand in the domestic economy being sufficiently high so that products could be sold at a profit.

“Overproduction” (or, seen from the other side, workers who are too poor to buy), has plagued capitalism. Remedies have included calls such as:

* The call of English economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), in The general theory of employment, interest and money (1936) for government-created demand in the form of public works, particularly in times of depression.

* The continuous call of corporations for government-created demand in the form of high military budgets, subsidies to buyers, both domestic and foreign, and the provision of guaranteed markets for excess production.

But the massive government intervention required by the market system to keep it from self-destructing, has been a fatal flaw which not even its theory has been able to deny.

2. Subjection to Government Powers: Historically, business has disliked the ability of government to “interfere” with profit-making, dictating the conditions of business through mechanisms such as regulations, taxes, the protection of domestic industries, and the establishment of social programs (which make workers less dependent on wages dictated by business).

Governments ensure the accountability of private business by means of three types of leverages:

a. Legal Jurisdiction: Empowered by law, a government regulates or enters into agreements with private corporations, including foreign corporations. Governments cannot normally regulate private corporations in other countries (with some exceptions, such as the imposition by the U.S. Government of restrictions on foreign trade with Cuba).

b. Taxation: Governments can tax businesses on behalf of the public interest as represented by public health, welfare, education, and other areas of the common good.

c. Laws and Regulations: Governments can institute laws and regulations to prevent physical harm and damages to citizens and their natural environments.

“free trade”: In one stroke, “free trade” agreements (borderless trade regimes), have liberated trans-national corporations from their historical constraints by both domestic demand and government. They are now free from accountability to either society or public authority, and are the world’s ruling force, both workers and governments having to adapt to the “inevitable reality” of the “new world order.”

1. No more Dependence on Workers’ Demand: Trans-national corporations now enter and exit national markets at will, and can continue selling, provided there is sufficient world aggregate demand. They are no longer dependent for their profit on keeping wages high in their home country. The new corporate “freedom” undercuts completely the power of domestic workers to bargain and negotiate. No union is able to prevent investment from moving elsewhere.

2. No more Subjection to Government Powers: Free trade regimes abolish the power of governments to negotiate the conditions under which trans-national corporations are entitled to market access and resource ownership. Corporations are free from any “performance requirements,” and in all societies, have equal rights of citizenship to own and control anything (the right to “national treatment”). The agreements over-ride all conflicting local and national laws.

The power of corporations to enter and exit national markets at will undercuts the power of governments to control them. Just as no union is able to, no government is able to prevent investment from moving elsewhere. Government spending on social programs makes production “too expensive to be competitive,” and the corporation will move to a more “investor-friendly climate.”

Far from referring to freedom for people to exchange, the “free” in “free trade” refers to the freedom of private capital and corporations to own and sell across national boundaries, without limit to their access and control of the means of existence of other societies.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for example, prescribes no minimum standards for life-protective regulations. The maximum standards allowed are listed in the accompanying Codex Alimentarius, and domestic standards higher than those specified, may not be applied to imported products. In return, governments receive nothing but more trans-national commodities to buy, if they can pay. They are prohibited from ever seeking to negotiate back any of the rights they have given up.

Not possessing any principle by which it can recognize the systematic violation and obliteration of life, even today’s market doctrine does not rule out cross-border trade of goods and substances which are either themselves lethal or are produced by murderous and massively life-destructive processes.

The lives of human beings are rapidly being transformed into a competition of all against all for enough money to live, while ever-more money goes into ever-fewer hands. The collective security of a human community, developed over millennia, in which each supports all, and is in turn supported, is being replaced by money concentrations entirely decoupled from civil and environmental life. Care is allocated according to how much money one has to demand it – with devastating results for the poor and nature.

No limit is imposed on the holocaust of life on the altar of the money-to-more-money sequence.

To date, no national leader of a market economy has expressed the possibility that present dire human and environmental trends necessitate a reconsideration of the values on which capitalism is based.

(Pp. 226, 229, 260, 264-274, 278, 286, 288, 294, 303, 305, 308, and 311-312. Columbia Encyclopedia 2000).

measures of value – life and the market

The long economic war revealed by history, is the result of a conflict between two measures of value – that suitable for life, and that suitable for money. The two value systems are in conflict, and consistent victory for the money side, has led to our present deregulation of private capital on a global basis.

a gain in value for life:

If by life, we means organic movement, sentience and feeling, and thought,

and

if by the means of life, we mean whatever enables the preservation or the extension of life’s vital range on these three planes of existence – for instance, clean air, food, water, shelter, affective interaction, environmental space, and accessible learning conditions –

then,

holding the means of life at their established scope, is to reproduce the original value of life,

and

widening and/or deepening the means of life to a more comprehensive range, is to increase the original value of life.

An increase in life-value may be represented by the formula:

Life -> Means of Life -> More Life

L -> MoL -> (L + l)

(where l is an increment in life capacity)

The sequence which seeks not only to reproduce, but also to become more comprehensive life for all, is what we call “civilization.”

(Pp. 298, 311 and 370).

A gain in value for capital: In the market system, a gain in value means that money has been added to an original money investment. The sequence of money input (investment) to money output (original investment + profit) may be represented by the formula:

Money -> Commodity for Sale -> More Money

M -> C -> (M + m)

(where m is an increment of money)

Whatever its effect on life, the more money return from an original investment, the better was this investment. The money sequence has no measure for any possible change in the value of life as one of its consequences (not even for the investor’s own life). The objective is only to net more money from a baseline sum. Indeed, life itself is often diminished so as to increase profit. The final arbiter is money.

The underlying assumption of this measure of value, is that money can be used to either produce or buy goods and services, and that, therefore, an increase in money is equivalent to an increase in value. But this is a non-sequitur – it fails to take into account what the money sequence can do to the life sequence.

Thus, the calculus of the market system does not recognize a problem with the following sequence:

M -> C -> (M + m)

causes

L -> MoL –> (L – l)

Within the money frame of reference, all is well with this sequence, even though life may be stripped to its very fabric (p. 299).

when there is no measure of value for life

Assaults on life by monetized sequences of “value-adding,” are not registered in any version of the global market paradigm. The paradigm does not include any normative resources in terms of which it could recognize life, much less whether life capacities are amplified or destroyed. Harm to life is outside the calculus of the market, no matter how devastating and wasteful. The consequence is a systemic proliferation of continuous, cumulative harms by global market processes and products – harms which are not reflected in money prices.

Market sequences which are lethal to life fall into three categories – the production of commodities lethal to human life, the production of commodities lethal to environmental life, and sequences of money gain which do not produce any commodity.

commodities lethal to human life: The money sequence which produces a commodity destructive to life may be represented as:

M -> C_d -> (M + m)

(where C_d is a means of life destruction)

This sequence takes two forms:

1. Commodities which are directly lethal: Market theory sees no problem with money sequences which involve the manufacture of commodities which directly destroy life.

a. Weapons: Italian astronomer, mathematician and physicist Galileo (1564-1642) initiated the modern history of weapons, with his study of falling objects and projected missiles.

Weapons are instruments made specifically to harm, maim, or kill human beings. They are highly sophisticated instruments which can, as their manufacturers affirm, kill and maim millions of people in moments.

Most of the money sequences which involve commodities detrimental life, involve the production and sale of weapons. Weapons are highly valued, and since the market does not distinguish them from any other type of commodity produced in its sequences, they have become increasingly important over time. Indeed, for long, they have been either at, or near the top of the global market, in terms of both their value as manufactured goods, and their value as trade items. International competition to produce and market weapons is intense.

b. Lethal Consumables: The production and sale of consumables known to be lethal. The paradigmatic example is the production of cigarettes, of which the ingredients are known to cause addiction, disease and death, a fact which, in contrast to weapons, their manufacturers denied for as long as they could.

2. Commodities which are indirectly lethal: The production and marketing of images of life-assault have become the major “entertainment industry” of the global market. Branches of manufacture and sale include live contests, real-injury sports, films, videos, video-games, and other portrayals of people being terrorized, harmed and murdered. These products are commodities which communicate means of life destruction. They do not, like weapons or cigarettes, attack human life directly, instead depicting graphic assaults on life. The logic of the money gain is the negation of life.

commodities lethal to environmental life: The mechanized and ever-more efficient transformation of the organic into the inorganic, takes an extreme toll on our natural hosts, both vegetal and animal.

Money sequences which include the leveling of forest ecosystems to raise domestic animals, or the industrial extraction of natural resources, such as metals, timber and fish, leaving behind extinguished and polluted life-systems, do not have as their primary purpose the reduction of life to death. Rather, their purpose is to access the marketable elements of nature. Nevertheless, the way in which other creatures and ecosystems are converted into packaged commodities to be sold as priced goods, involves the large-scale killing of non-human life.

Commodities such as bottom-scraping nets, gas-powered chainsaws, tree grapplers, earth-surface bulldozers, and concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO’s), have no other function than to kill or eradicate life-systems.

For the market, commodities are not ends in themselves, only means to profit-making. The real end is more money. Karl Marx (1818-1883) missed this point when he talked of “commodity fetishism.” Behind the appearance of the market providing commodities, the fetish which drives the market is money.

no commodity produced: Where no commodity or use-value occurs between investment and profit, money expands merely by paper transactions of speculative turnovers or debt-service, neither of which contributes to production.

The sequence may be represented as:

M -> (M + m₁) -> [(M + m₁) + m₂] -> . . . [M + m₁ + m₂) + m_n]

(where m₁, m₂ and m_n are ever larger increments of money)

Examples of such a sequence include loans at compound interest, speculation in currencies and derivatives, arbitrages (the simultaneous purchase and sale of the same or equivalent security in order to profit from price discrepancies), and leveraged take-overs. Most of the money called “foreign investment” now takes this form, and its entry, then sudden flight from societies, can devastate these overnight.

The sequences indirectly but systematically negates life, by incrementally depriving society of its means for the support of social programs, such as public health, education, social welfare, pensions, civil arts, and communications. The money for these programs, is re-routed toward payments which increase the money value of capital.

This increasingly dominant global market money sequence, is called “finance capital.” Its rapid depletion of the social life-fabric is a systemic assault on life which is un-registered by the market paradigm.

(Pp. 300, 315, 326-330 and 382).

finance capital

Finance capital is speculative capital which circulates in financial markets. The present explosive growth of finance capital has its origin in an over-capacity of the global economy. The over-capacity drives investors to look for profit in risks. After a product is created, and its value determined, extra value may be derived from it by commodifying the risks inherent to it. A risk can be anything from the pace of carbon trading, to the accuracy of weather predictions. Speculative money is de-linked from its foundation in production.

The driving force behind “globalization” (the growth of the global corporate system), is not productive capital in the Marxian sense, but rather money seeking more money.

Foreign Exchange Transactions: Foreign exchange transactions, that is, trade in currencies (one national currency exchanged for another at a profit), is the largest and deepest speculative market.

For the investor, trade in currencies, has significant advantages over trading in other commodities:

1. The cost per transaction is extraordinarily low – 10-20 times lower than that for stocks.

2. “The market” is open non-stop, 24 hours a day (except week-ends).

3. The market is so large that even a substantial investment, such as, for instance, $10 billion, does not affect prices in the market, in the way such an investment would in either the stock market, or (except in the U.S. and Europe) the bond market.

Speculation has been encouraged by:

1. The “Floating” of the Dollar: In 1971, the severance of the dollar from the gold standard, by U.S. President Richard Nixon (1913-1994, president 1969-1974), created a market for speculation. Currency values were now determined by traders in currency exchange markets, and they began to speculate, because, from their standpoint, currencies from countries with “sound” monetary and fiscal policies, were of greater value than the currencies of their less “disciplined” cousins.

2. Deregulation: In the 1980’s, deregulation in Third World countries, through the Baker Plan of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), offered corporations new opportunities for foreign investment.

The Baker Plan is named after James Baker III, U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, 1985-1988. It attempted to solve the overwhelming debt of Third World countries to financial entities in the First World, not by debt reduction but by a “Program for Sustained Economic Growth” (the “Baker Plan”). More new financing would be provided in return for “reforms” aimed at achieving a higher rate of economic growth. Areas specifically targeted for elimination were import barriers, restrictions on foreign investments, and money-losing state enterprises.

The Plan focused on 15 major borrowing countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, the Philippines, Yugoslavia, Morocco, Nigeria, and Cote d’Ivoire). No steps were taken to scale down the debts of any country, including the debts of other, smaller borrowers.

By 1987, the Plan was effectively abandoned, as economic growth in “developing” countries had not increased by as much as had been hoped (Rieffel 2003, pp. 163-164).

3. Technology: The electronification of money and the computerization of market systems, greatly facilitated speculation.

The growth of the currency market has been such that it now dwarfs foreign exchange based on the production of actual goods and services. Table 1 summarizes this growth.

Table 1: Currency Speculation, World, 1975-2008^(a)

Year Currency Trading Percent U.S. Gross domestic Product (GDP)

(trillion U.S. dollars) Speculative (trillion U.S. dollars)

1975 4 20 1.7

1986 73 - 4.5

1998 657 98 8.5

2007 1,452 99^(b) 13.5

2008 2,059 - 14.3

__________________________________________________________________

^(a) McMurtry 1999, pp. 108, 116, 126, 240, 272, 276 and 289, summarized in Hall 2008d, pp. 60-61. Lietaer 1997, pp. 1-6. Data360.org undated, p. 1. DeFazio and Wellstone 2000, p. 1. Foreign Policy in Focus 2001, p. 3. Bello 2007, p. 2. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis undated, pp. 1-2. United States Government 2007, pp. 3-5. Wikipedia 2009 “Foreign Exchange Market,” pp. 1-3. Figures are in U.S. (un-adjusted) dollars.

^(b) In 2005.

Some comparisons help gage the magnitude of the present currency market:

1. United States Gross domestic Product (GDP): As Table 1 shows, in 2008, the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States was $14.3 trillion – that is, 0.7 percent of the world volume of currency trading that year.

2. Gross World Product (GWP): In 2008, the gross world product (GWP) (at official exchange rates), was estimated to be $62 trillion – that is, 3 percent of the world volume of currency trading that year.

3. “Core financial Assets”: In 2005, the world stock of “core financial assets” was $140 trillion dollars – held mostly by commercial banks, but also by non-bank financial operators, hedge funds, and private equity investors. This volume was 10 percent of the world volume of currency trading in 2007 ($1,452 trillion).

(Pp. 299-301, 325-329 and 355. Bello 2007, pp. 1-7. McMurtry 2002, summarized in Hall 2008a, pp. 2, 4, 15 and 29. United States Government 2009, p. 9. Wikipedia 2009 “World Economy,” p. 4).

MONEY AND SOCIETY: The temerity of money accumulation without regard to the needs of society, is arresting when one considers that the money-token depends entirely on society’s patronage for its value and power. Without society to give it value, money would be no more than an empty signifier without worth.

1. The money-token is a socially constructed unit of demand on society’s labor, resources, and goods. It represents a demand by its user on society, and the value of this token, therefore, depends on the content of the goods and services which other members of society, both past and present, have produced.

2. Unlike in the case of real goods, the value of the money-token and the right to possession of it, depend on a vast, tax-supported social groundwork of guarantees, support, defense and protection, in the form of laws, enforcement systems, infrastructures, literacy and numeracy dissemination.

The recognition that the power of private money to make demands on society, is totally dependent on an infrastructure provided by society through its government, makes the vestments of authority, independence and freedom in which money clothes itself, evaporate into thin air – like the clothes of the emperor.

The magnitude of a demand backed by money is precisely the measure of how much is demanded from society.

Money is not wealth. Money is a demand on the world of life (pp. 350-351 ad 357).

scarcity – the basis of the MARKET

THE CIVIL COMMONS AND THE MARKET

The Need of the Market for Scarcity: Everything in the market has its price. Every price, in turn, pre-supposes scarcity – we cannot sell a thing if it is freely available in nature or from the community. For a price to be demanded, scarcity is required. The market pre-supposes scarcity as a condition for the exchange of goods at a price, and the greater the scarcity, the higher the prices which can be charged. The more human scarcities, the greater the market opportunities.

Were all wants ever to be satisfied, there would be no basis for priced exchanges. The market relies for its existence on a limitless supply of wants which it can fill at a price.

Life Losses are Market Gains: The relationship between scarcities and market opportunities expresses itself in all areas of life. New conditions of scarcity which open doors to areas where profits can be made, are seen in all the basic needs of life – air, water, the environment, climate change, physical security, transportation, education, social security, and health care. A diminution of life in these areas is the pre-condition for the expansion of capitalism into these areas.

Head of the Council of Canadians, and founder of the Blue Planet Project, Maude Barlow, in her book, Blue covenant – the global water crisis and the coming battle for the right to water (2007), describes the process in action. Her detailed account traces how water scarcity has enabled a powerful corporate cartel to seize control of every aspect of the world’s water for its own profit. The goal is the deregulation of water by governments, and the trading of water on the “free market” like any other commodity. Those who can pay, can live.

Canadian journalist, author and film-maker Naomi Klein, in her book, The shock doctrine – the rise of disaster capitalism (2007), describes the political aspects of the process. Klein illustrates how privatization thrives during disasters, when the exploitation of people’s sense of vulnerability permits the sudden and overwhelmingly rapid installment of policies in all the areas of life at once – policies which under normal circumstances would meet insuperable resistance.

The corporate system which now sweeps across the globe, is reinforced and extended by the very destruction of life which it causes. Every loss in the conditions of life by the civil commons, represents a new opportunity for expansion of the market. Whatever has been laid waste in the civil commons, gives way for a priced good as a substitute. The market cannot see its gain from its own destruction of life, because it has no measure of value for life.

The downward Spiral of Life Security: Present losses in our life goods include physical security. The market fulfils this demand by means of two life-destructive solutions:

1. Money: Money turns into more money, and the more of it one possesses, the market advises, the greater one’s life security. But around the globe, the demands of large concentrations of money, such as pension or hedge funds, destroy civil commons, the real source of life security.

2. Weapons: Weapons deliver “security” by their powers of life-destruction.

In 2008, global military expenditures were $1.46 trillion – an increase of 45 percent since 1999.

Money and weapons – the two great pillars of the new global market order.

(Pp. 364-368. Barlow 2007, pp. xii and 1-2, summarized in Hall 2008c, p. 13. Klein 2007, summarized in Hall 2008c, p. 41. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute 2009).

money crushing life

From John Locke (1632-1704) and Adam Smith (1723-1790), private property in money, and the acquisition of money without limit, have been pre-supposed as necessary structures of the “free market.” Logically, therefore, the framework of the market value system has implied money sequences destructive to life. Over time, the theoretical spaces for these destructive sequences have been filled in. Today’s life-destructive money sequences are the continuation of past ways to expand resources, from the trade in slaves to the genocide of indigenous peoples (which continues today).

However, the single, absolute and unconditional goal of maximizing money returns for those who have money, without any commitment to any life-function, is a development which post-dates Karl Marx (1818-1883) and John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946). Money turning into more money is now worshipped as a final law of existence to which all else has become a servant, including society itself. No idolatry has ever been so despotic.

Breathable air, personal life-space, the preservation of biodiversity, the protection of cultural differences, or the opportunity for people to participate in the decisions governing their lives, are not values for the market. Neither are education, artistic expression, green natural surroundings, work to create what is not a saleable commodity, and free time to think and play.

And yet the market system has such an ultimate hold on humanity that it now challenges the very organization of life on earth. The life-blind adversary which is invading the shared body of life, is conflated with the common interest. Money which attacks life is confused with money as a means of exchange to serve life.

The underlying premise of the global market paradigm is the re-direction of society’s wealth from its traditional function of protecting citizens’ lives, to the new function of protecting money accumulations. The value which drives the system is gains in money, not gains in life (pp. 245, 250, 321, 330, 340-341, 346 and 392-393).

The following are examples of life being used as an instrument of private capital expansion, instead of capital used as a means to enable life.

workers: Capital expansion is at the expense of workers. Adam Smith’s religious faith in the perfect design of the market, and his scientific impartiality toward those made destitute by market operations, have remained intact to the present day. Workers are “a factor of production,” and their price, as that of any other commodity, “must be set by the market.”

An example is the attitude of the General Motors Corporation (GM) toward its workers.

Contractually, the General Motors Corporation (GM) has the obligation to cover the health care costs of retired employees and their spouses.

In 2007, as one more step in decades of concessions, the United Auto Workers (UAW) agreed to receive from GM a lump sum of $35 billion to cover these costs, and to manage the sum themselves through a newly-established retiree health care trust fund, called the Voluntary Employees’ Beneficiary Association (VEBA).

By May 2009, GM had paid $15 billion into this trust fund, and thus, still owed $20 billion. It proposed, however (and the workers will probably agree), to pay only half of this sum ($10 billion) in cash, and pay the remaining $10 billion as a 39 percent equity stake (stocks) in the new GM Corporation scheduled to arise out of the ashes of the present one, after a procedure of “controlled bankruptcy” and re-structuring supervised by the U.S. Government, Department of the Treasury.

The workers are worried. GM stocks are “illiquid and hard to value, posing a big risk to UAW members” the Union announced. By accepting the proposal, the Union will be gambling that the stock price of the re-structured GM corporation will be sufficiently high to allow the Corporation to honor its health care obligation to its workers – which it contracted to do.

Also, the 60,000 GM employees who are UAW members, will face 20,000 layoffs in addition to those which have already occurred, as well as “steep cuts” in pay and benefits which, for the Corporation, will lead to a reduction in hourly labor costs by more than $1 billion a year.

Yet, to date, GM has received $15.4 billion in bail-out funds from the U.S. Government.

And meanwhile, the financing arm of GM, General Motors Acceptance Company (GMAC), with assets of $180 billion, and 15 million customers in 32 countries (and heavily involved in speculation), has incurred unpayable debts of $22 billion, which the Government is likely to make good.

Al Jazeera (English) reporter Avi Lewis explains:

“The Treasury Department is prepared to bail out the financial arm of GM, while [its auto sector is] being forced into bankruptcy. So, not only do you have the financialization [of GM], and the bail-out of its financial arm (which dwarfs the others), but you also have . . . the capitalist at work in the auto sector . . . The capitalist logic is to [bankrupt] the company – unemployment and layoffs always raise stock prices. [They will] cash out on the bounce back” (Lewis 2009, p. 6).

(P. 240. Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report 2009, p. 1. Lewis 2009, pp. 6 and 8. TheStreet.com, p. 2. Reuters UK, p. 1. Kovel 2002/2007, summarized in Hall 2009, p. 40. General Motors Acceptance Company undated, p. 1).

AnimalS: Animals pay for capital expansion.

Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO’s) are commodities lethal to environmental life. Over and above the exhaustion of the soil by monocultures (a problem which must be remedied with chemical fertilizers), and the pollution on the feedlot (seldom remedied), the treatment of animals as “production units” in CAFO’s beggars the soul.

Professor of Journalism at the University of California in Berkeley Michael Pollan, in The omnivore’s dilemma – a natural history of four meals, describes:

“America’s food animals have undergone a revolution in lifestyle in the years since World War II. At the same time as much of America’s human population found itself leaving the city for the suburbs, our food animals found themselves traveling in the opposite direction, leaving widely dispersed farms in places like Iowa, to live in densely populated new animal cities [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO’s)]” (Pollan 2006, pp. 66-68).

“Feeding ruminants corn came to make a certain economic sense – I say “certain” because that statement depends on the particular method of accounting our economy applies to such questions – one that tends to hide the high cost of cheap food produced from corn. The 99 cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn’t take account of that meal’s true cost – to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc . . . – costs which are never charged directly to the consumer, but indirectly and invisibly, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-born illnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution), not to mention the welfare of the workers in the feedlot and the slaughterhouse, and the welfare of the animals themselves. If not for this sort of blind-man’s accounting, grass would make a lot more sense than it now does” (Pollan 2006, pp. 200-201).

“This premature weaning leaves the pigs with a lifelong craving to suck and chew, a need they gratify in confinement by biting the tail of the animal in front of them. A normal pig would fight off his molester, but a demoralized pig has stopped caring. “Learned helplessness” is the psychological term, and it’s not uncommon in CAFO’s, where tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives ignorant of earth or straw or sunshine, crowded together beneath a metal roof, standing on metal slats suspended over a septic tank. It’s not surprising that an animal as intelligent as a pig would get depressed under these circumstances, and a depressed pig will allow his tail to be chewed on to the point of infection. Since treating sick pigs is not economically efficient, these under-performing production units are typically clubbed to death on the spot” (Pollan 2006, p. 218).

“Egg operations are the worst . . . Beef cattle in America at least still live outdoors, albeit standing ankle-deep in their own waste, eating a diet that makes them sick. And broiler chickens, although they are bred for such swift and breast-heavy growth they can barely walk, at least don’t spend their lives in cages too small to ever stretch a wing.”

“That fate is reserved for the American laying hen, who spends her brief span of days piled together with a half-dozen other hens in a wire cage, the floor of which four pages of this book could carpet wall to wall. Every natural instinct of this hen is thwarted, leading to a range of behavioral “vices” that can include cannibalizing her cage mates, and rubbing her breast against the wire mesh until it is completely bald and bleeding . . . The operative suspension of disbelief depends on the acceptance of more neutral descriptors, such as “vices” and “stereotypes,” and “stress.” But whatever you want to call what goes on in those cages, the 10 percent or so of hens that can’t endure it and simply die, is built into the cost of production. And when the output of the survivors begins to ebb, the hens will be “force-molted” – starved of food and water and light for several days, in order to stimulate a final bout of egg laying before their life’s work is done” (Pollan 2006, pp. 317-318).

the media: The media, owned by a very few, is censored in the name of profit-making.

Concentration of Ownership:

The United States: The U.S. is losing the conditions for a free media.

Around 1875, cities typically had rival, independent newspapers. A non-corporate daily press carried the views of workers and views critical of business.

By 1983, 50 corporations controlled the great majority of all news media, using these as vehicles to stimulate demand. London researchers James Curran and Jean Seaton, in Power without responsibility – the press and broadcasting in Britain (1985), note:

“Advertisers . . . [had] a de facto licensing authority, since, without their support, newspapers [had] ceased to be economically viable" (James and Seaton. Quote pp. 193 and 211).

In 2006, 8 corporations controlled most of the media industry. (Their market value appears in parenthesis):

. General Electric (owner of NBC) ($391 billion)

. Microsoft ($307 billion)

. Google ($155 billion)

. AOL-Time Warner ($91 billion)

. Disney ($73 billion)

. Murdoch’s News Corporation ($57 billion)

. Viacom (formerly CBS) ($54 billion)

. Yahoo! ($40 billion).

At present, newspapers no longer represent good investments.

The World: Globally, cities are increasingly served by only one newspaper, which is (as are these cities’ other media) owned by a corporate chain, and financed by corporate advertisers.

Capitalist countries vary in the degree to which corporations control the production and distribution of social goods. Privatization, de-regulation, and commodification increase their control. Regulation by elected public authority, decreases it. Corporate control over the society is obscured, or idealized, by representing it as something freely “chosen” by all, as if by universal agreement – a “social contract.”

(Pp. 141, 192-195 and 203. McMurtry 1999, pp. 36 and 130, summarized in Hall 2008d, pp. 29 and 57. Shah 2009, p. 3. Media Reform Information Center 2008, pp. 1-2. McChesney 2009. Jhally 2007).

The underlying Structure of Censorship: In market societies, media owners have the legally-granted, private-property right to select and exclude content as they choose, constrained only by Government-imposed norms of public responsibility. Owners, management and advertisers, together establish the range of what can be said or represented in the media of public communication which they control.

“Alternative” media expose particular examples of censorship. The following is the underlying structure of this censorship in the mass media of market societies.

Basic Principle: As with other capitalist enterprises, large media corporations control the production and distribution of their social goods (in this case, content), so as to maximize their own money capital and social command.

Media owners, therefore, set the limits of the range of possibility within which communications can be produced. The narrowness of the range depends on the degree of corporate control over society.

Degrees of Exclusion: The degree to which content contradicting the Basic Principle is excluded, is in proportion to the overtness with which it does so:

The degrees of exclusion include:

1. Almost total Exclusion: Content which directly and overtly questions, criticizes or challenges the value or the necessity of the Basic Principle, is generally excluded.

Challenges to the value of the market system, include describing it as “exploitative,” “against the interests of society as a whole,” or “undemocratic”; making the claim that “the profit-maximizing imperative of the market is a law of greed, and hence, immoral”; describing the logic of profit-maximization as “parasitic greed”; pointing out that “profits for investors are made at the expense of workers, and this is an irreconcilable conflict of interest between the two”; and saying that “the very structure of international capitalism causes a deterioration in human welfare.”

Challenges to the necessity of the market system, include representing its pattern of control as “unnatural,” “inefficient,” or “impermanent.”

If published, such statements are subject to well-publicized attacks as being “nonsense,” “uninformed,” “immoral,” “a meddling with economic laws,” “politicizing the debate,” “out of touch with reality,” or “a disservice to society.”

2. Selective Omission: Content which shows capitalism, as a system, in an unfavorable light is rarely referred to, and generally omitted. This includes, for example, the fact that the present global market order was founded on centuries of mass genocide of indigenous societies, with tens of millions of victims around the globe.

3. Ephemeral Reporting: Content which shows capitalism, as it actually operates, in an unfavorable light, is acknowledged, but usually only in short, isolated and belated reports which quickly disappear from view. This includes, for example, homicidal or criminal behavior by large corporations and the state security services which represent their interests.

4. Marginalization: Positions against the interest of investors are reported as either in some way unworthy of attention, and hence to be rejected, or at the fringe of social opinion, and hence to be dismissed in favor of the “moderate middle ground.”

For example, popular opposition to “free trade” agreements is marginalized as socially irresponsible, not to be taken seriously because it is “uninformed,” “leftist,” “divisive,” “driven by dogma,” or “fearful.”

Another example is how U.S. President Barack Obama is presently marginalizing the idea of a universal government-paid health care system, an idea opposed by the vested interests of a $2.5 trillion industry which includes health insurance companies, health maintenance organizations (HMO’s) and for-profit private hospitals.

The idea is favored by the majority of Americans, including 59 percent doctors, and is popular among nurses and trade unions (Young 2009, pp. 1 and 5-9).

President Obama dismisses the idea as “impractical”:

“If I were starting a system from scratch, then I think that the idea of moving toward a single-payer system could very well make sense . . . The only problem is that we’re not starting from scratch. We have historically a tradition of employer-based healthcare . . . and you’ve got this system that’s already in place. We don’t want a huge disruption as we go into healthcare reform where suddenly we’re trying to completely re-invent one-sixth of the economy” (Obama 2009, p. 2).

Degrees of Inclusion: Within the permissible range, whether an idea is selected for production, depends on its relationship with the Basic Principle.

The degrees of inclusion range from the systematic inclusion, with approval, of ideas which validate the market order, to the more haphazard inclusion, with invalidating and dismissive comments, of ideas which oppose the market order:

1. Point of View Selection: Only the point of view of market leaders and their representatives and allies, is selected for inclusion and elaboration. For example, newspapers have “business sections” but no “workers’ sections.”

2. Events and Issues Selection: Events and issues which portray the market system in a favorable light are systematically selected for inclusion. Examples are descriptions of the market as providing opportunities for individuals to become rich, as a “democratizing” agent for societies, or as performing “miracles” in Third World societies.

3. Descriptive Terms Selection: Different adjectives are used depending on whether a matter favors or is contrary to the interests of investors. For example, transfers of public money to corporations are described as “incentives,” while transfers of public money to the unemployed are described as “government hand-outs.”

Dictators who impose “structural adjustments” on their people, are “firm-handed,” “austere,” “no nonsense,” “pragmatic,” or “applying market discipline.” Those who resist are “doctrinaire,” “extremist” or “resistant to change.”

Increases in profits are “good for the economy” while wage raises are “cause for concern,” “inflationary,” and “bad for the economy.”

Despite market failures of historic proportions around the globe, the media deny any limits to the beneficence of social relations based on the market, and continue to invalidate any possible alternative approach to social relations.

(Pp. 201-209 and 212).

the knowledge common: The knowledge we hold in common is being enclosed (privatized), making way for the expansion of capital into a new knowledge market.

An example is the recent proposed settlement of a suit brought by copyright holders (the Authors’ Guild and the Association of American Publishers) against Google, Inc. If approved by the court, the settlement threatens to “enclose” knowledge held in common (in the public domain), in a process similar to that when, from 1150 to 1845, the wealthy class (the first capitalists) enclosed land held in common (the village “commons”).

A brief History of Copyright Laws:

Great Britain:

1710 The Statute of Anne creates copyright, aimed principally at curbing the monopolistic practices of the London Stationers’ Company. The length of the copyright is 14 years, renewable once.

United States

1790 The first copyright act is passed by Congress. As in Britain, the length of the copyright is 14 years, renewable once by the right holders themselves.

1923 A great number of books become subject to copyright laws.

1959-2009 The length of the copyright is extended 11 times by Congress.

1976 For books published between 1964 and 1977, the length of the copyright is extended to the author’s life plus 50 years. Right holders have to renew their copyright themselves.

1992 For books published between 1964 and 1977, the copyright becomes automatic, without action needed by the right holder.

1998 For books copyrighted after 1923, the length of the copyright is extended to the author’s life plus 70 years, automatically, without action needed by the copyright holder.

In general, this means that copyright laws apply to:

* None of the books published prior to 1923. These books are in the public domain.

* An unknown number of books published between 1923 and 1964. The majority of these books are in-copyright but out-of-print, and the author or family is difficult or impossible to identify (called “orphan works”).

* All books published since 1964.

Broadly speaking, most books published from 1900 to 2000 are in-copyright.

A brief History of Google Inc.’s “Book Search Project”:

2004 Through its Book Search Project, Google begins to digitalize library books, and make them available on the Internet – for books in the public domain, with full-text display; and for books in-copyright, with small snippets display. The displays include advertising.

2005 Google is sued by the Authors’ Guild (representing 8,000 authors), and the Association of American Publishers [as represented by McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin Group USA (both the latter, part of Pearson, Inc.), John Wiley & Sons, and Simon & Schuster (the latter, part of CBS Corporation)].

The suit is a class action suit – the “class” being copyright holders. The allegation is violation of copyright.

2008 October: An agreement (subject to court approval) is reached whereby Google:

* Will pay $125 million to resolve present claims by authors and publishers.

* Establish a “Book Rights Registry” which will sell access to all books (both out-of-copyright and in-copyright).

The data bank will be available, by subscription only, to:

. Colleges and universities, which will be entitled to an “institutional license.”

. Public libraries, which will be entitled to a “public access license” – providing free viewing on one computer terminal per library, and charging individual users for the printing of copyrighted text.

. Individuals, who will be entitled to a “consumer license.”

* The revenues to which copyright holders are entitled, will be divided between them (63 percent) and Google (37 percent).

November: By November 2008, Google has digitalized 7 million books:

Books in the public domain 1 million

Books in copyright (out-of-print) 5 million

Books in copyright (in-print) 1 million

______________________________________________

Total 7 million

The institutions which are making their collections available to Google, include the New York Public Library; Stanford University, CA; the University of California; the University of Michigan; the University of Wisconsin; Columbia University; and Oxford University, UK.

The agreement is subject to approval by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The novel Use of the legal Category “Class” in the proposed Settlement: Class action usually addresses past harms. Under the proposed settlement, Google will pay $125 million for scanning in-copyright books without permission. The class, in this case, is anyone who owns copyright to the books which Google digitalized. The meaning of the word “class” is in accordance to past usage.

The proposed settlement, however, breaks with tradition in two respects:

1. It uses this same legal word “class” which traditionally refers to the past, but intends it to refer to a future class (future authors). If approved, the settlement will establish a new copyright regime which will apply to all new authors.

2. Copyright laws are usually passed by Congress. If approved, the settlement will establish a new copyright structure. A question of public policy – the control of access to information – would be determined by a private lawsuit.

A Google Monopoly over Access to Knowledge: The class action nature of the proposed settlement makes Google invulnerable to competition. All book authors and publishers who own U.S. copyrights are covered automatically, as a class. Whether or not they opt out, is immaterial because no new digitalizing enterprise would be able to compete with Google’s already massive, on-going operation.

To compete with Google, any new digitalizing enterprise would:

* Either have to do what Google did – start digitalizing, welcome a class action suit as part of the cost of doing business, and arrive at an agreement with the class which sued, namely, all the copyright holders at once, without having to get permission from them individually, one by one. To try to repeat what Google did, is unlikely to be feasible since all copyright holders are already automatically covered by Google. A Book Rights Registry has already been established to take care of their rights.

* Or, get permission from each copyright holder on an individual basis – a practical impossibility.

The proposed settlement gives Google the sole right to digitalize all books covered by copyright in the United States.

Lack of present viable Alternatives to Google: Google has no serious competitors.

The Internet Archive: The Internet Archive, founded, in 2005, by Brewster Kahle, is a non-profit on-line library. From 2005 to 2008, with technical help from Yahoo!, and financial support from Microsoft, its “Open Content Alliance” project digitalized books (at first primarily from the public domain), providing free access to them on the Internet.

In 2008, however, Microsoft withdrew its support. The “Open Content Alliance,” re-organized itself into the “Open Knowledge Commons,” which is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Internet Archive has 1.3 million books on its website.

In 2008, Google had assets of $32 billion, and revenues of $22 billion. It alone has the wealth to digitalize on a massive scale. Libraries have no incentive to let another entity scan a book for the second time. Thus, from a practical point of view, Google has sole right of access. It has used the law suit to acquire a monopoly on access to knowledge, and is now poised to exploit its financial power from within the safety of a protective legal shield.

Knowledge as a private Commodity: As of now, neither the court, nor the authors and publishers (who filed the suit), nor Google (which would benefit by no less than a monopoly in the digitalization of books), are likely to modify the settlement substantially. The judgment of the court will be based primarily on whether profits are divided fairly. It will not be a decision with the view of promoting the pubic interest.

The future holds, therefore:

1. The exclusive access by Google to all copyrighted books in the United States.

2. The books being available on-line only by subscription.

3. Google being free to negotiate deals with each of its institutional clients individually, not as a group whereby they could bargain for a lower price.

4. No means to restrain Google from charging exorbitant prices for subscriptions.

Only the copyright holders, through the Book Rights Registry, would have the power to force a change in subscription prices, and since high prices would benefit them, they would be unlikely to object.

“The market” would not provide a “correction” because there would be no direct connection between supply and demand. Institutional licenses would be paid for by libraries, while the users would be students, faculty and patrons of public libraries.

5. No means to hold Google accountable for any censorship it might impose, such as ranking some books low in their search engine, and even excluding some books entirely.

6. Google having sole access to the identity of the readers of any specific book. Already now, Google’s advertising programs “track users’ interests across affiliated sites,” and, in March 2009, the company “began using behavioral targeting based on users’ interests” (Quotes from Wikipedia 2009 “Google,” pp. 8-9).

Robert Darnton, chief librarian at Harvard University, writes:

“When businesses like Google look at libraries, they do not merely see temples of learning. They see potential assets, or what they call ‘content,’ ready to be mined.”

“The settlement creates a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company . . . It would turn the Internet into an instrument for privatizing knowledge that belongs in the public sphere” (Darnton 2009, pp. 9-10 and 19).

(Kahle 2007, pp. 1-2. Kahle 2009, pp. 1-14. Darnton 2009, pp. 1-21. Beam 2008, pp. 1-3. Authors’ Guild 2008, pp. 1-3. Open Content Alliance 2009, p. 1. Chan 2007, p. 3. Wikipedia 2009, “Google,” pp. 1-2 and 8-9).

the shape of knowledge: Knowledge itself is distorted for the sake of capital expansion.

The aim of knowledge – impartiality and comprehensiveness – is in irresolvable conflict with the aim of the market – the maximization of profits for corporate shareholders.

In the new “knowledge-based economy” (American futurist Alvin Toffler’s “Third Wave”), the distinction between truth and falsehood threatens to collapse, as commercial advantage, not truth, is the final arbiter of what “knowledge” is. With the cooperation of even universities, “knowledge” and “information” are enlisted to serve market needs – value-adding (profit) in a competitive international economy.

Knowledge in a market-based “Knowledge Economy”: Some of the implications for knowledge of a knowledge-based market economy, include:

1. Knowledge or information which either does not promote profits, or of which corporate advertising sponsors disapprove, is excluded from production, advancement and dissemination. An example is the number of deaths directly caused by corporate products and products.

2. Substances, such as natural substances with medicinal properties, which either cannot be patented, or for which an artificial equivalent can be made and patented (giving monopoly of production and distribution for 20 years), are undesirable as knowledge products. A profession of medicine dependent on pharmaceutical drugs is the preferred alternative.

3. The use by corporations of “intellectual property rights” to control the flow of knowledge or information. Corporations, not authors, have the final say in the decision whether or not to market a product. If an author signs over the copyright to a corporation, the violation of it, including by the author, is “an offense punishable by law.” If the author retains the copyright, the decision as to whether to market the product, is still in the corporation’s.

4. A lack of differentiation between knowledge and propaganda, information and mis-information, and education and indoctrination. This is a confusion between the means of storing and communicating knowledge and information, and the content of the storage and communication system. No matter how advanced in velocity, volume, and global range the instruments of electronic communications are, they do not distinguish between these alternatives (pp. 178-187. Wikipedia 2009 “Alvin Toffler,” p. 1).

education: Education is sacrificed for market goals. Education and the market system are opposed in all their principles. Those who do not understand this, accept the values of the market as the ultimate framework of human values, and offer no resistance to the subjugation of learning to the production of saleable commodities.

Education in a market-based “Knowledge Economy”: Some of the implications for education of a “knowledge-based economy,” include:

1. Acceptance of the corporate definitions of “knowledge” and “information.” Yet, the two differ in all their criteria:

a. Goal (money-profits vs. the advancement and dissemination of shared knowledge).

b. Motive (the satisfaction of any want for anyone with the money to back this want vs. the satisfaction of the desire for knowledge of all who seek it).

c. Methods (selling ready-made products at the highest possible price vs. expecting the autonomous fulfillment of the requirements of knowledge).

d. Standards of Excellence (how one-sidedly one’s own product-line sells vs. how inclusively the interest of others is taken into account).

e. Logic of Achievement (the production and sale of conveniences, with the encouragement of dependence on them vs. the development of another’s own capacities for independent use).

2. Acceptance of the corporate control of education, as representing a new demand of the economy on education.

However, corporate control of education leaves society without its historically-achieved capacity to think. Society becomes a massive collective system for the gratification of present desires for profit and consumption, with no search for either deeper understanding or more inclusive awareness as human ends in themselves.

Despite its claims of being a “market of ideas,” the corporate market is structured to exclude any assertion or value which does not serve it. Indeed, its “efficiency” consists of the destruction of whatever is not itself (pp. 187-192. Shiva 1993, pp. 9-64).

OUR AIR: Proposed solutions to global warming offer examples of how even when the threat of the market logic to life on the planet is demonstrable and tangible, the market-indoctrinated mind provides only solutions based on the same market logic which causes the problem. For the market, the only measure of value is money – its increases and decreases. Proposed solutions have the same focus, even in the face of impending disaster for life.

President Obama’s “Carbon Cap and Trade” Solution: Carbon dioxide pollution of the atmosphere by market processes, threatens the very conditions of life on Earth. With no measure for anything but profits, the market system automatically repudiates any suggestion of publically-imposed controls on emissions – as these would add to the cost of production. From its point of view, the only possible actions are those which serve the money-into-more-money sequence.

Following this market logic, in March 2009, United States President Barack Obama proposed a national market in carbon (a “cap and trade” system), with limits on emissions but an opportunity for companies to trade in pollution permits.

Corporations are pleased. Such “pollution credits” would:

1. Confer new monetized equity on the polluters.

2. Allow for profitable trading where no money value existed before.

3. Maintain purpose and decision within the money-expanding sequence of the market.

The value of life remains subordinated to the maximization of money returns to corporate investors. The invisible hand will surely take care of the actual goal of a reduction in pollution.

The solution to global warming remains confined to the same principles of calculation which have caused the problem in the first place.

The underling assumption of the market doctrine is that nothing, including the escalating deterioration of the earth’s ecosystems, is not resolvable by the price mechanism and profit motive of the market (pp. 356 and 366. McMahon 2009, p. 1).

Climate Scientist James Hansen’s Solution: The hubris of the market that life is subordinate to it, rather than the other way around – the market owing its existence to life – has established itself in the mind of even our most committed scientists. James Hansen, a prominent advocate for immediate action to curb global warming, is Director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Earth Sciences Division, Goddard Space Flight Center, Institute for Space Studies, New York, N.Y.

In January 2009, in a personal letter to then President-elect Obama, Hansen criticizes “cap and trade” schemes:

“This approach is ineffectual and not commensurate with the climate threat. It could waste another decade, locking in disastrous consequences for our planet and humanity” (Quote in Randerson, p. 7).

Yet Hansen’s own solutions remain within the bounds of the market. Hansen proposes a three-pronged attack on the climate problem:

1. A moratorium on, and then a phasing-out of all coal-fired power stations which do not incorporate a carbon capture and storage component.

2. A carbon tax at the source of carbon emissions, and the distribution of the revenue equally among taxpayers. High carbon users would be penalized, and low carbon users rewarded.

3. Research into “fourth generation” nuclear plants which can use nuclear waste as fuel.

Viewing global warming from within the parameters of the market system, Hansen laments:

“Nobody realistically expects that the large and readily available pools of oil and gas will be left in the ground” (Quote in Randerson, pp. 10-11).

This, in the face of an expected loss before 2100 of ½ the Earth’s species – ¼ of the genetic stock of the planet. The rate at which new species are appearing is less than one per year. The present rate of extinction is 3,000 species per year (8 species per day). By 2050, the rate is expected to be 5,000 species per year (14 species a day), and by 2100, 10,000 species per year (27 species a day).

Any more oil or gas pumped from the ground is at the expense of the composition, structure and organization of life on the planet. The conflict is one of values – wealth viewed as money vs. wealth viewed as life.

(Randerson 2009, pp. 1-11. Meyer 2007, pp. 3-5, 16 and 63, summarized in Hall 2007a. Wilson 1992/1999, pp. 29-31, 189-190 and 210, summarized in Hall 2005a, p. 5).

conclusions

The Market – a many-headed Hydra: The market system which now rules the world, has no feedback loop from life. Even in theory, the market is solely about the accumulation of money, without any measure to indicate how this accumulation might affect the life of society’s members or life in their environment.

Not only does the market system have no feedback loop for life, but it destroys life precisely by breaking down its feedback loops.

University of California, Berkeley, Professor Michael Pollan describes this phenomenon:

“Raising animals on old-fashioned mixed farms . . . used to make simple biological sense. You can feed them the waste products of your crops, and you can feed their waste products to your crops. In fact, when animals live on farms, the very idea of waste ceases to exist. What you have instead is a closed ecological loop – what in retrospect you might call a solution.”

“One of the most striking things that animal feedlots do (to paraphrase Wendell Berry), is to take this elegant solution, and neatly divide it into two new problems – a fertility problem on the farm (which must be remedied with chemical fertilizers), and a pollution problem on the feedlot (which seldom is remedied at all)” (Pollan, pp. 67-68. Wendell Berry is an American writer, farmer and critic. Wikipedia 2009 “Wendell Berry,” p. 1. Underline the author’s).

What is vaunted as market “efficiency,” is not efficiency seen from the point of the view of the whole, such as, for instance, the efficiency with which an old-growth forest uses the energy it receives from the sun. It is an efficiency as seen from the point of view of (to paraphrase Indian physicist and environmentalist Vandanna Shiva) a monoculture of the mind – a mind bent solely on money accumulation.

To have an economic system which does not take life into account, and then be surprised when life cries for mercy – from the world’s homeless and slum dwellers, to polar bears, fish and forests – challenges our definitions of mental health and madness. Yet those who consider themselves on the left (such as democrats, progressives, liberals, environmentalists, the global justice movement) do not think outside the confines of the market system. Accepting the system as a given, they seek to regulate it to make it kinder to life. They see the solution as not a change in the system itself, but as an acceptance of the system, and the need to struggle on each individual issue separately, to soften its impact on life.

Attention is focused on each head of the hydra, instead of killing the hydra itself. (In Greek mythology, Hydra is a water serpent with multiple heads. When cut off, each head is replaced by two others).

conditioned to accept the “invisible Hand”: When Adam Smith (1723-1790) saw an “invisible hand” transforming individual, self-directed behavior into the social good, the “market” was not what it is today. In Smith’s time, it was made up of individual buyers and sellers, with no one able to dominate supply or demand. Yet, even then, it must have been obvious to some that the automatic transformation of individual self-service into the common good, is not self-evident. Displaced small farmers were swelling the ranks of the landless poor migrating to the cities, seeking to sell their labor in order to stave off starvation. The common good evidently did not include them.

And now, when the market makes or breaks countries at a time, it seems even less self-evident that Providence is on the side of the common interests of life – clean air, clean water, non-poisoned food, health, education, a vibrant environment, the opportunity for a meaningful social life, freedom of action, self-governance.

Historian at York University, Toronto, ON, Canada, David Noble notes that our readiness to believe that a disembodied abstraction is an active agent in human affairs, dates back from the Old Testament. Noble points out that around 1,750 B.C.E., when the Epic of Gilgamesh was written, gods specifically did not take an active part in human affairs. When young, half-divine King Gilgamesh, said to have lived around 2,750 B.C.E., seeks to know from the gods the secret to eternal life, their answer is precisely not to count on them. They rebuff his plea, and send him back home to live the life of a human, enjoying the life he does have, and accepting his rootedness in nature. Everything in nature dies. Eternal life is reserved for gods.

By 550 B.C.E., however, when the Tale of Abraham was written, Abraham’s god does take an active part in human affairs. Abraham, patriarch of the Israelites, said to have lived around 1,750 B.C.E., hears a command, uttered out of the blue by a disembodied voice which no one else hears. He is enjoined to “go forth” from his home “to a land that I will show you.” In return, God will bless Abraham and his people, and make them great and powerful (Noble 2005, summarized in Hall 2008b, pp. 1-6).

Deism is a system of thought which advocates a religion based on human reason rather than revelation. Its emphasis is on morality, and in Adam Smith’s time (the 18^th century), it denied the interference of the Creator with the laws of the universe. Smith was a moral philosopher. His concept of the “invisible hand” is a deist construct (Columbia Encyclopedia 2000).

Conditioned to disembodied abstractions as active participants in the course of human history, Western society accepted with little questioning that a benevolent “invisible hand” was overseeing their actions. We still do today. Yet, how could it be true that the market works for the common good, when, as the market rules world-wide, not only are all the manifestations of life diminished and extinguished, but so are also the very conditions for life itself on the planet?

Don’t forget Indra’s Net – the Dissociation of the Ego: Our present experience of ourselves as individuals, each with a unique personality which is related to but different from its various roles (personae) in society, has not always been a fact of life. In the Near East, this “egoic” structure of consciousness made its appearance around 2,500 B.C.E. The new hero myth was its expression, portraying a hero (usually male) battling against the Great Mother (often portrayed as a dragon), refusing to be swallowed back into her – and retuned to sub-consciousness. By 1,500 Greek mythology was full of the victories of patriarchal gods. The early Jewish god Yahweh, is a production of this period.

Whereas in the East, the original, primitive Great Mother was transformed into the Great Goddess, and, therefore, integrated into the new level of consciousness which the ego symbolized, in the West, this did not happen.

American philosopher Ken Wilber explains how, in the West, instead of differentiating itself from the Great Mother, and then integrating her into its new, more encompassing consciousness (body and mind, nature and thought), the ego demoded and suppressed the Great Mother. There would be no Great Goddess in the West. Except for Mary, the West leaves out the Great Mother from any subsequent mythology. The Judeao-Christian-Islamic religions are patriarchal in the extreme, without a trace of the Great Mother being transformed into a wise, self-directed woman with both instincts and intelligence.

In the West, the new ego assumed illusorily that it was self-sufficient – independent from its roots in the earth (nature, the body, females). An atmosphere of hubris (from the Greek hybris, the “pride that goeth before a fall”) is characteristic of Western civilization. Body and mind lack integration. Instincts and reason are at war. History is a chronicle of the power-laced feats of a male ego dealing massive death to “inferiors.” The new self pretends to be God – cosmo-centric and immortal.

By 1700 C.E., the new ego had matured to the point that it could think logically. It differentiated the three truth domains of existence – Art (the “I” sphere), Morality (the “We” sphere), and Science (the singular “It” and the plural “Its” – the empirical sphere). Reason becomes the basic organizing principle of society. Italian astronomer, mathematician and physicist Galileo (1564-1642) lays the foundation for modern experimental science. German metaphysician Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) defines autonomy as the courage to think for oneself, without reliance on socially given rules and dogmas.

The scientific approach to knowledge would be mechanistic and representational. The paradigm – making a mental map representing the world – leaves out the observer, the self who is making the maps. “Objectivity” assumes that the thought process is so basically different from the external world, that it can reflect the external world accurately. This is the manifestly false assumption which underlies all scientific observations. It is the ego thinking itself independent from its roots (Wilber 1977/1993, 1980/1996, 1981/1996, 1983/2005, 1995/2000, 1996, and 2000/2001, summarized in Hall 2005b, pp. 36-39; in Hall 2006, pp. 19 and 23; and in Hall 2009, pp. 76-82).

Not surprisingly, the technology emanating from a science which omits the humanity of the observer, is also removed from life. It is a technology which enables the manufacture of nuclear bombs and the genetic engineering of life forms, with the same impartiality with which it helps the extension life and cyber communications. The problem is not so much in the falsity of the assumption, but in the forgetting that the assumption is false, and the failing to know that in truth, no observation in science is “objective.” The observer is ensconced in nature, society and culture.

Like science, capitalism has its roots in the same detachment (“objectivity”) of the observer. The attitude of John Locke (1632-1704) and Adam Smith (1723-1790) toward the workers, is extraordinarily callous. As an economic system, capitalism is mechanistic and repetitive in its operations. It focuses, not on the expansion of life’s faculties, but on money – a dead commodity regarded as “wealth.” Capitalism homogenizes society into a mass of disconnected atoms, each competing with one another for more money. Everybody has the same goal, or rather, must have the same goal in order to avoid starvation.

The emphasis of capitalism on the individual at the cost of society (never mind the “invisible hand”), is characteristic of an ego dissociated from others – both from the lower levels (nature, the body, the poor, the powerless, the special needs of women, children, the elderly, the disabled), and the higher levels (the human aspiration toward an ever-greater impartiality, consciousness of the needs of all, empathy, kindness, an ability to take into account all perspectives at once, a saintly, and even a sagely wisdom – perhaps even a trans-personal ego).

The evolution of capitalism has been in the direction of ever-more de-humanization, helped by pretenses of being “objective” and “value-free.” At present, speculative capital destroys whole societies overnight by withdrawing from societies which do not provide it a “favorable investment environment.”

Our assumption of the self-sufficiency of the logical part of ourselves (our ego), is at the root of both the destructive aspects of our technology, and our Hobbesian “each one against all” economic system (English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679). Our technology (especially in its industrialized form) and our economic system (especially corporate capitalism) are now damaging irreversibly life as we know it on the planet – human and environmental.

The solution to our destruction of life, whether by means of weapons of mass destruction (technology) or by means of the commodification and privatization of the needs of life, such as air and water (capitalism), is to integrate our capacity for logic (our mind, our thoughts, our ego) with the below (nature, our environment) and the above (our human wish to experience and integrate ever more of the universe).

The famous statement by French philosopher, mathematician and scientist Rene Descartes (1596-1650), “I think, therefore I am,” is untrue. Neither are animals mere machines, as Descartes saw them, and neither do we have to follow Descartes’ mechanistic approach to natural phenomena:

AI do not recognize any difference between the machines made by craftsmen and the various bodies that nature alone composes@ (Quote in Ponting 1991/1992, pp. 147-148, summarized in Hall 2007b, p. 62).

The reductionist productions of a dissociated ego, have been described by many:

* English philosopher of science Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) saw science reduced to:

“A dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly” (Quote in Walsh 1998, p. 3).

* German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) described the modern world as “disenchanted.”

* American social philosopher Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) described the universe having become as “disqualified.”

* American philosopher Ken Wilber describes our rationality as “instrumental,” “technical.”

* American psychiatrist, philosopher and anthropologist Roger Walsh describes our view of ourselves as:

“Meaningless blobs of protoplasm, adrift on an uncaring speck of dust, in a remote, unchartered corner of one of uncountable billions of galaxies” (Walsh 1998, p. 2. Wikipedia 1009 “Roger Walsh,” p. 1).

We might look to other civilizations for alternatives.

American historian of religion Huston Smith gives an insight of how Buddhism views the individual and society:

“Indra’s cosmic net [is] laced with jewels at every intersection, each jewel reflecting the others, including all the reflections they contain” (Smith 1991/1994, p. 96).

Indeed. A thought on which to meditate. What if this were the basis of our economic system?

Let us not ever forget

Indra’s net. ^(a)

_________________________________

^(a) Indra is originally a Hindu god, described in the Veda (the literature of the Aryans, in Northwest India, 1,500-500 B.C.E.) as the god of war and warriors; and the god of weather and thunder.

The Rig Veda states that Indra is both powerful and empathic:

“He under whose supreme control are horses, all chariots, the villages, and cattle. He who gave being to the Sun and Morning [and] who leads the waters.”

“Indra, you lifted up the outcast who was oppressed. You glorified the blind and lame.”

(Wikipedia 2009 “Indra,” pp. 1 and 3. Columbia Encyclopedia 2000).

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Polanyi.” Updated April 29. Accessed May 7, 2009.

“Alvin Toffler.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Toffler. Updated March 18. Accessed May 22, 2009.

“Roger Walsh.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Walsh. Updated April 26. Accessed May 30, 2009.

“World Economy.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_economy. Updated May 8. Accessed May 25, 2009.

Wilber, Ken.

1977/1993. The spectrum of consciousness. 20^th Anniversary Edition. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books.

1980/1996. The Atman project B a transpersonal view of human development. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books.

1981/1996. Up from Eden B a transpersonal view of human evolution. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books.

1983/2005. A sociable God B (1983 subtitle: a brief introduction to a transcendental sociology), 2005 subtitle: toward a new understanding of religion. Boston: Shambhala.

1995/2000. Sex, ecology, spirituality B the spirit of evolution. 2^nd edition, Revised. Boston: Shambhala.

1996. A brief history of everything. Boston: Shambhala.

2000/2001. The eye of spirit B an integral vision for the world gone slightly mad. Boston: Shambhala.

The above seven books summarized in Francoise Hall, 2005b. “A transpersonal View of War – War as a Substitute for Cosmo-centrism and Immortality during the egoic Stages in the Development of Consciousness.” November 5 (103 pages unpublished).

Wilson, Edward. 1992/1999. The diversity of life. New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton.

Summarized in Francoise Hall, 2005a. AAsk the Mosquitoes.@ March 19 (13 pages, unpublished).

Young, Quentin, 2009. “Dr. Quentin Young, long-time Obama Confidante, and Physician to Martin Luther King, criticizes Administration’s Rejection of Single-payer Health Care.” Interview with Amy Goodman. Democracy Now! 2009. March 11. (Quentin Young is the National Coordinator for “Physicians for a National Health Program”).

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/11. Accessed May 21, 2009.

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