What is "Moral Capitalism"? /Decision Making under Capitalism and the Impossible Survival of Humankind

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What is "Moral Capitalism"?

By William Bowles

Global Research, January 27, 2012

williambowles.info

PM Cameron's call for a "moral capitalism" would be laughable if it weren't so tragic and hypocritical. After all, hasn't it been capitalism's alleged occupation of the 'moral high ground' what they now choose to call 'humanitarian intervention' that has been used as a justification for mass murder and genocide? But plainly the millions killed and the countries decimated don't fall under Cameron's definition of what is and isn�t 'moral'. Clearly, it's for 'local consumption' only.

What it does epitomize is a desperate capitalism that has just plain run out of excuses for the world's desperate state of affairs. After all what does 'moral capitalism' really mean? The rich sharing their wealth with the poor? Fewer crooks and gangsters in government? An end to crony capitalism? The end to a political class that works solely on behalf of capital?

Examining Cameron's vision of his capitalist 'morality' a little more closely and it's clearly empty, meaningless rhetoric as the following excerpts demonstrate:

"He used his speech to discuss his vision for a transformed capitalism, based on two principles "which have been at the centre of Conservative thinking for centuries"."

""The first is a vision of social responsibility, which recognises that people are not just atomised individuals, and that companies have obligations too."

""And the second is a genuinely popular capitalism, which allows everyone to share in the success of the market.""

So I assume 'at the centre of Conservative thinking for centuries' includes slavery, colonialism, child labour and workhouses as well as a series of catastrophic wars and economic crashes? It would be nice to hear the Tories accept responsibility but now I'm the one fantasizing.

So, Thatcher's dictum, allegedly the one of the justifications for neo-liberalism that there's no such thing as society never existed either? Oh, companies have obligations? To their shareholders. Any other �obligations� they might have exist only because we the people have demanded it such as regulation and a limit on the power and influence the corporations. Things that successive Tory and Labour governments have removed. Moreover, under the umbrella of Cameron's call for a 'moral capitalism' I see no calls to reestablish regulation of the financial sector.

Popular capitalism as opposed to the unpopular variety. But surely isn't this what US capitalism has been peddling since the 1940s: millions of small shareholders all benefitting from the �free market�. Small town America with granny and her shares in AT&T. And exactly how, could we share in the success of the market? Banks are making enormous profits right now, so where's my share? It's a nonsense.

"The prime minister said that "where they work properly, open markets and free enterprise can actually promote morality" by creating "a direct link between contribution and reward; between effort and outcome"."

"Where they work properly"? Markets exist to benefit investors and nobody else, this is why the government has been bailing them out with billions of public money. In any case these empty calls are all after the fact. Cameron's call for a moral capitalism is an outright admission that there is nothing moral about capitalism whatsoever. Neither will capitalism acquire a morality simply because Cameron says it should have one.

So, the fact that as with all capitalist economic crises, it�s those who sell their labour who pay whilst those who buy it just get richer just doesn�t square with Cameron�s fantasy of workers being �rewarded�. Tell it to the the 3 million in the UK without a job or it seems, any likelihood of ever getting one.

"So we should use this crisis of capitalism to improve markets, not undermine them, because I believe that out of this current adversity we can build a better economy, one that is truly fair and worthwhile." -- David Cameron says UK must build 'a better economy' BBC Website, 19 January 2012

What can one say about this rubbish? At the end of the day it's just hot air, without substance or an iota of reality. It's all about what it should be or could be but offering workers a share in the corporations they work for doesn't alter a thing except, and this is crucial, transplant some of the risk over to the workers. Of course, if corporations were to be handed over to the workers, say in the form of cooperatives that would be novel and no doubt earn Cameron instant dismissal as PM. Not surprisingly, Cameron's only actual proposal is to strengthen cooperatives but it's merely cosmetic in nature.

"Bringing together the 17 existing pieces of legislation will simplify the process of setting up a co-op and reduce costs." -- Co-operatives will benefit from the UK's consolidation bill, the Guardian 27 January, 2012

What I find truly incredible is that the MSM actually prints/broadcasts this stuff, it's an embarrassing (public) schoolboy essay revealing Cameron as an extremely ignorant and arrogant member of his class. But it does indicate once again just how desperate the situation is for capitalism as each crisis increases in amplitude and with no apparent fix on the horizon except more impoverishment and more wars for the rest of us. Moreover, it also reveals the disdain Cameron and his class have for us that he thinks we would actually take this garbage seriously.

And if you think a Labour government would have done it any differently, dream on... join Cameron in his fantasy world of a 'moral capitalism'.

This just in and an indication of the degree of complicity between the MSM and the state:

Outrage at RBS boss's 1m bonus payout

Is it fair? Ed Miliband, Boris Johnson and countless others think not. Stephen Hester's million pound bonus for running the state-owned bank, RBS, is an outrage, they believe.

The government says it was a decision for the board, even though it could have blocked the decision as majority shareholder. Mr Hester's allies say it isn't much to pay - and wonder who would run the bank if he left? I have heard various answers to that question over the last few days. Of course Mr Hester is merely a symbol of the debate that rages in politics right now, of what is fair.

Benefits caps, tax thresholds and rates - politicians are vying for your approval in their judgement of what is fair. Michael Crick is on the case and two giant brains will be discussing fairness and whether it is really achievable, or even definable - Will Hutton and Ruth Bender. -- Channel 4 News Email, 27 January 2011

Note the reference to the "debate that rages in politics right now, of what is fair". Rages on? Where? Who is raging on? More nonsense, this time from the MSM anxious to appear as if it actually knows what it's talking about. My approval? How am I going to give that (or take it away)? An illusion of democracy in action. And the coup de grace for the entire 'debate' is "two giants brains�discussing fairness and whether it is really achievable, or even definable"? I despair. The chattering class chattering amongst themselves.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28923

Parasite Capitalism: Human Awakening Calling Time On the Beast

By Finian Cunningham

Global Research, January 27, 2012

Listen to this fable. A man was lying in bed, tired and tormented. Tired because it was the early hours and yet he could not sleep; tormented because the cause of his tiredness was a mosquito, lurking somewhere in the darkness that would sporadically make its presence known by homing in on the man’s head, its whining buzz ringing in his ear. Try as he might, the man could not find any rest. Covering his head with the bed sheet only made him hot and breathless, the clammy discomfort made all the worse because of the climate.

Furthermore there was the hateful, capricious presence of his tormentor. Just when tiredness was overcoming the man, luring him to sleep, his tormentor would descend with its wicked whining on the other side of the sheet. Jolted by the sound, the man’s irritation would surge again, knowing that another hour of sleeplessness would have to pass.

His mind began to wander into squeamish thoughts. If he submitted to his tormentor’s desires by throwing off the sheet from his head, gaining some air to breathe and some badly craved minutes of sleep, then the mosquito would as sure as hell take its toll. The man pictured the ruthless parasite gorging on his blood while sleeping. He was nauseated by the idea of an alien creature being able to violate his skin with impunity and dipping into the well of his lifeblood, sucking his body’s vital fluid until its spindly belly became grotesquely bloated. The horribleness of the process disgusted him, terrorized him.

But also the squalid, gratuitous relationship filled him with anger. All at once his anger redoubled because he then realized that he – a man – had wasted so much of his precious rest time cowering under a sheet intimidated by an inferior speck of an insect, which in daylight he recalled is actually a very ungainly, insipid kind of creature that can easily be captured and crushed.

The man wasn’t yet working to a premeditated plan. Angry and exasperated, now fully awake, he simply decided to throw off the sheet and enjoy the cooling air. Lying full-square on his back, at first he felt a certain amusement from his petty show of defiance. What he would do next, wasn’t quite in his consciousness. He was just for the moment merely taking in fresh air.

Then out of the blackness, it came again, the wicked whining. Louder than ever, it seemed, the tormentor was drilling towards his bare face. But this time the man did not shirk or take shelter under the sheet. It was probably a mixture of irritation and anger that made his hands snap together in reflex, not consciously. He was surprised by his own quick, powerful action. And what was even more surprising to him was the subsequent silence. At first hardly believing his luck at catching his tormentor in pitch darkness, he then became elated by the sustained silence that meant that the torment was over. He had at last acquired rest and he luxuriated in the satisfaction of earning it. To be sure, in the scheme of things it was only a small victory, but nevertheless the man allowed himself the pleasure of knowing that he had asserted his will deliberately, purposefully for the comfort and peace of his mind and body. No longer would he be subjugated by a fiend. Henceforth, or at least for the rest of the night, this man would be the subject of his own fate.

The parasitical nature of late capitalism in the early 21st century is beyond comparison to a pest such as the mosquito. The lifeblood sucked from the body of society by a tiny ruling elite is oceans in volume by comparison; the human misery and suffering magnitudes worse. Prolific journalist Stephen Lendman can provide the shocking data on the United States of America in particular and how that society has within the space of a lifetime been bled utterly dry by the Wall Street banks, corporate oligarchs and their servile political Igors in both mainstream parties, including the occupant of the White House [1]. The same torment of the large body of people by a parasitical elite is replicated in Europe and elsewhere.

That is the ineluctable fiendish nature of global capitalism, which over generations feeds on the lifeblood of workers, and emaciates them and their families, while the system’s executors become bloated to the point of bursting, with all the wastefulness and destructiveness, including wars, that that entails. There is no way of legislating against such parasitism because the legislators are, or will sooner or later become, part of the parasitism – as the rich get richer and power and wealth inevitably polarize under capitalism. It is like a centrifugal force; always taking, taking, taking until the majority are left looking like a spent liquid to be discarded. Look at every nation state under the diktat of capitalism at this time in history, and dare say that that isn’t so.

The only protection to be gained is from crushing the system and replacing it with a different paradigm of relationships (democratic socialism – an alternative that has scarcely ever been given the chance to develop under the tyranny of capitalist imperialism).

In truth, this is not an impossibly tall order. The tormentor is in actual fact puny in number and size when compared with the collective body and power of the people. In many ways, the tormentor is only able to continue his parasitical tyranny because the people have chosen thus far to cower and take relative disorganized shelter. Or worst, they have fallen asleep from weariness, assigning themselves completely to the mercy of an insatiable feeding frenzy.

But signs are that the great body of humanity is finally beginning to rouse in anger, precisely from a painful understanding of how it has been and is being tormented. The world is awakening – thanks to global communications – and no more so than in the United States, where it is arguably most needed. And like the man in the above fable, a moment of determined organization could be all it takes to suddenly overturn a state of fear and torment into one of joy and freedom.

Finian Cunningham is Global Research’s Middle East and East Africa Correspondent

cunninghamfinian@gmail.com  

NOTES

[1] America’s Great Divide Between Rich and Poor by Stephen Lendman http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28812

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=28898

Decision Making under Capitalism and the Impossible Survival of Humankind

On the Need to Clarify Some Concepts

By Prof. Pablo González Casanova

Global Research, January 26, 2012

Three epistemological problems seem to be inescapable: that of “the uncertainty” that characterizes a considerable part of scientific research, particularly of a historical and social nature; that of “the impossible,” which can be specified in logical, mathematical, and systemic terms; and that of “capitalism” which in its deepest meaning pertains to the realm of “prohibited knowledge” in academia.

It is necessary to define the boundaries of these obstacles. Otherwise, one might regard the thesis that we are trying to uphold as false: namely that the decisions of those who are at the head of the “capitalist means of domination and accumulation” lead to a situation in which human survival becomes impossible. Although it is a harsh thesis, its rejection by those who have the capacity to decide implies the cognitive self-destruction of the selfsame dominant groups and of those who form part of it. No matter how much one tries to open their eyes, even if it may seem illusory is very important. Research and communication of critical and scientific thought should be put forth not only for those who are already convinced, but also for those who have the capacity to make decisions, but who do not have the capacity to perceive and resolve the problems that threaten their own life and that of the human race.

These statements invite the elimination of the three obstacles mentioned as epistemological problems.

When Heisenberg discovered the “principle of uncertainty,” he also found “the specter of certainty.” Without specifically referring to him, Wallerstein often recorded the times and spaces of certainty in historical and social sciences. Similarly, the “technosciences” and the “sciences of complexity” expressly set out to diminish uncertainty through information and organization in which they may operate. Within their cognitive margins, their achievements are considerable. Recognition of the principle of uncertainty tends to increase the validity of scientific research that recognizes it to overcome it.

As for the validity of “the impossible,” it has been repeatedly confirmed not only in mathematics, but also in the very logic of historical and social systems. If that validity is not absolute, it is verifiable in some fields, although it may be invalidated in others. It tends to appear as “obvious” in arguments and as “stubborn” in points of fact.

As far as the concept of “capitalism” it is worth pointing out that among its essential features we accentuate those that refer to a “means of domination and accumulation” whose principal interest or main focus of “attraction” is maximization of profits and wealth, as well as the power that gives security to its beneficiaries and guarantees the continuity of their “lifestyles” and of their real and formal “values.” Other definitions—such as those of Max Weber or Joseph Schumpeter, and even some of Marx himself, in their economist collapses—have less depth and less potential for analysis.

Starting with these elements, we would like to reaffirm with certainty that human survival is impossible in the context of the continued domination of capitalism and its supreme logic: maximization of profits and defense of the values and interests of the dominant forces.

It is necessary to clarify another point. Given the impossibility of the survival of humanity under capitalism, the overcoming of that “means of domination and accumulation” also becomes “insufficient,” because the “collapse” of capitalism itself does not guarantee the survival of humanity. The “collapse” of the system might lead to a “Mutually Assured Destruction.” In the means of domination and accumulation that replaces it, forms of primitive accumulation and depredation might prevail that have already been accentuated in recent history. Awareness of these facts implies tremendous responsibility for sciences and social movements. Preventing “the fatal outcome” concerns both the dominant forces and the alternative ones, as “sick” as they may be in their desire to accumulate riches and power, and as “furious” as they find themselves victims of indescribable sieges and plundering.

The comprehension of the problems in today’s world can only be achieved if one notices the new situation of history. We live at a time of crisis in which not only a social system is at stake, but also the preservation of the ecosystem. For the first time in history, it is not merely a matter of taking steps on the road to human emancipation; instead, it is to ensure the very preservation of human life. Thinking of the crisis and its alternatives implies a demand for scientific rigor and responsibility in decision-making so that both ensure emancipation and human life.

This is not “scientism,” “superficial morality,” or “blackmail.” The impossibility of human survival under capitalism coincides with the difficulty of a peaceful transition to a system that guarantees human emancipation. Resolving both problems falls within the ken of historical creation. Its possibilities can perhaps be found in the logic of a new social, political, and ecological contract that at this moment seems to be mired in good intentions and feeble, idealistic reasoning.

Accounting: A Universal Language

It is difficult to understand the problems in today’s world and their alternatives solely on the basis of our culture of “experts,” “academics,” and “intellectuals,” with our habitual proposals, methods, and styles of debate. Our weakness, typical of incomplete knowledge, arises as long as we do not fully understand how problems and solutions are thought of in circles with “decision-making power” and in alternative, systemic, or anti-systemic social movements with their “knowledge” and practices in the construction of other possible worlds.

Within the academic or pundit subculture that we belong to, our research generally remains in the realm of observations, predictions, and calculations of risk, of disequilibrium, of alternative measures or policies. We characteristically focus on those who do not participate in the ways of thinking and deciding as a “last resort” or a “bottom line.” Not only do we take for granted the thought that arises beyond the world of “specialists,” but we also limit ourselves to studying the problems within certain specialized areas and we scorn others that, in the case of certain problems, might actually be closer to the real world, in this case with decision-making “by the rich and powerful” in terms of their business and power.

In the ecological crisis it is not the norm to analyze the problems in accounting terms and with accounting-based reasoning. If we do so, it is to calculate the totals of a governmental or private environmental plan, or the expenses budgeted or spent by the public sector to resolve environmental problems, or the proportion reached by environmental items of the GNP. In research on critical thought, accounting is used directly or indirectly to calculate trends that lower profit rates. However, in all of these cases, we lose the accounting reasoning of managers and shareholders of an enterprise who think in terms of costs and benefits that different political proposals might have in facing the environmental crisis. If we move from a “macro” analysis to “micro” phenomena and to decisions that appear to be self-destructive, we are thinking in terms of a “crisis of instrumental reason” or schizophrenia that is taking us to the destruction of the world. In none of these cases can we see how one reasons in capitalism and how that form of “normal” reasoning makes the survival of humanity impossible.

In order to support this thesis so that it not be invalidated in scientific dialogue, it is essential to analyze “profit making” that corresponds to the accounting-based reasoning of those who hold interests and responsibility in private companies. Based on the accounting mentality of entrepreneurs—shareholders and managers—(particularly those who are owners and directors of mega-corporations with their partners, subordinate companies, and subcontractors) we can enter into a type of reasoning characteristic of the brand of capitalism that is producing today’s problems and that threatens freedom and human life itself.

Entrepreneurial accounting allows us to get closer to the intimate logic of the complexes that articulate the thinking and action of world domination and accumulation. If dominant power displays varied positions, what tends to prevail are those who think, reason, and make decisions in terms of the cost-benefit of each one of their projects and of the overall corpus of projects for their enterprise, or for the field in which their enterprise operates. By extension of similar interests, this applies for all companies and entrepreneurs that handle similar, more or less articulated products or services and with the “complexes” in which they form a part on the side of the military and politicians.

In the first place, the problem consists of scientifically re-eval‎uating the discipline that has been most scorned by technocratic or critical analysis in today’s world, in other words the accounting mentality of corporations and the way it is applied and understood by shareholders and management. Following the reasoning of governmental accounting and auditing and of social “costs and benefits,” we do so after considering corporate auditing, which represents, with greater intimacy and depth, a logic that is already distorted by the media in national, state, or social accounting.

Corporate accounting, as a technique, clarifies how in full awareness and on a regular basis the major decisions that are threatening the destruction of the environment and the ecosystem are made, and why this would occur as long as capitalism continues to be the dominant means of production, accumulation, and destruction. Using corporate accounting as a starting point does not imply that we are unaware of the greater scope of reasoning over costs and benefits that are not materialized in books and corporate accounts and which “investors” have in mind; nor does it imply that in decision-making in today’s world we abide by the “profit making” of entrepreneurs and shareholders, to give only secondary importance to the logic of “security” and “the defense of values and interests” on those who make decisions.

On the contrary, by starting with the accounting-based vision of a company and seeing how it clashes with the need to build an immense space of political, cultural, economic, and social interventions allows us to confirm‎ that from the intimate reasoning of the company to that of the world, in the final instance, the logic of maximization of profits, power, and wealth, or of “the modes of consumer society” that prevail among those who benefit from the means of capitalist domination and accumulation, makes the survival of humanity impossible. If that “means” continues, humanity cannot survive and if humanity survives, that “means” will not survive.

Government accounting and auditing contain objectives and values in which economic reasoning alone is distorted by the media, corrected, and complemented by political reasoning. Here the possibilities of escaping the mere Midas syndrome arise, although they do not exclude it. The intervention and media distortion of the means of accumulation and domination only serve to confirm‎ that with all of their intervention and media distortion, the survival of humanity is impossible under capitalism. 

Some Possibilities and Limits of Accounting-Based Reasoning

In accounting-based analysis, this includes “keeping two sets of books” for tax fraud and transfers, for bribing officials, for “money laundering,” for monetary and mercantile speculation, for the manipulation of outsourcing surplus. In all of these fields, accounting or the accounting mentality of companies, and above all of mega-corporations, their managers and shareholders help to clarify the advantages and disadvantages of neoliberal policies for those who are beneficiaries of the accumulation and domination of capital. They also contribute to explaining the lack of interest or the outright rejection of the slightest measures that conservation of the environment would require and that in many cases would imply that a company cease to do business or that would diminish the company’s profits, or even that would suspend plans for new enterprises that are already under way. These and other lines of reasoning touch on problems that go beyond accounting. The complex of corresponding interactions lead to the true calculation of income and expenditures, adding the amount of accounting tricks, in a businessman’s mentality, that way of thinking of those who zealously defend “business as usual” or “the American way” and of those who insist on laissez faire policies that can be summed up in the expression‎ “mind your own business,” which is the one followed by the U.S. model, which is a paradigm for businessmen and for Heads of State.

There is a huge gap between accounting and entrepreneurial reasoning; nonetheless, this is enriched by reasoning from politics and power, by that of violence, repression, co-opting, corruption, intimidation, and persuasion in the struggle “for hearts and minds.”

Environmental problems cannot be separated from economic, political, military, and cultural ones. The major shareholders and management deal with all problems from the most significant angle before making decisions. Their “background” or “curriculum vitae” might be as entrepreneurs or as former politicians or military men who became entrepreneurs, the case is that in “military-entrepreneurial and political complexes,” the members of these groups never forget “to do accounts,” nor do they overlook the incalculable “values and interests” that ensure their businesses and lifestyle: “the American way of life” and that of the rich and powerful at other latitudes.

Accustomed to a process of legalization that had worldwide political bodies that legitimized the decisions made by the powers that be, the military, entrepreneurial, and political classes negotiate depending on how they perceive the correlation of internal and international forces. Organized into “power groups” they are articulated as “lobbies,” “pressure groups” or “interest groups.” With that, the so-called “political class” legalizes and justifies the use of public resources for repression, concession, intimidation, persuasion, negotiation of what the powerful define as “negotiable” or “non-negotiable.” With ties and “lobbies” of the same type—and other similar ones—they make accounting decisions and consensual policies. With this, they meet and confront policies on natural and human resources that lie within their borders or beyond, and they exert and spread the influence of transnational enterprises and networks of associate and subordinate complexes.

The main focus on accounting reasoning makes it possible to understand the “decision-making” of these military-industrial-and-political complexes. It allows us to better understand why the representatives of the “political class” in organizations and international congresses do not take into account, and in fact go so far as to reject, the diagnoses of the most respectable experts concerning the serious threats to the biosphere and the ecosystem, despite the fact that many of these threats have become more dangerous and have already confirmed the diagnoses and forecasts that scientists have made in the last fifty years.

Among the foremost types of accounting and non-accounting costs that imply the solution to the greatest threats to life on earth are those in which the following predominate:

1) The costs of containment, reduction, and elimination of entrepreneurial or technical procedures that lead to environmental problems.

2) The costs of containment, reduction, or liquidation of companies or techniques that would charge government treasuries or that would be the focus of expropriation or closures wielding arguments such as the “environmental debt,” defined as what expropriated companies owe to humanity.

3) The costs of eliminating neoliberal policies.

4) The costs of halting “developmental” policies that place the burden on developing nations and societies, and above all, on “underdeveloped” or “dependent” ones (depending on their variations in marginalization and exclusion, of formal or informal colonialism and neocolonialism).

5) The costs of reduction or doing away with today’s “model” of “consumer society” that, in the event of disappearing, would affect a large number of enterprises and would constitute a sort of revolutionary threat.

6) The costs of attenuating or doing away with poverty, marginalization, the exclusion of the immense majority of humanity.

7) The costs of casting aside the policy of depredation of natural and human resources and measures of “internal warfare” and of open or covert genocide of the excluded, “disposable” population. 8) The costs of permitting and even fostering autonomous, self-governing, and self-sustainable communities in search of a means of domination and accumulation that distances them from the dangers of biosphere destruction and ecocide, entirely new measures of an uncertain, revolutionary character.

When one thinks in terms of the margin of operation that must not be exceeded, of avoiding the creation of a threat for humanity—and whose costs are indeed immense—it can be seen that the margins have already been surpassed in a dangerous and at times irreversible way: climate change, acidification of the earth’s seas, and the hole in the ozone layer. Irreversible changes have already taken place in the loss of biodiversity, water sources for human consumption, and the nitrogen and phosphorous cycles of oceans.

If one limits oneself to the major problems of exhaustion of non-renewable resources and overexploitation of renewable ones, petroleum, gas, and coal stand out with imbalances in the resources that each country has at its disposal and the amount that each one requires. This imbalance largely explains the expansionistic policies of big companies and world powers. Therefore, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the U.S.A., which produces 40 percent less petroleum that it needs, sends the U.S. army to head the invasion of the world’s richest petroleum zone that runs from Arab countries, crossing the Middle East to Central Asia. To a large extent, the “oil thirst” explains the power plans behind the Israeli throne and western “democratic” invasions in Palestine, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

The entrepreneur’s viewpoint is fundamental in all of these areas and it extends: 1) to legal enterprises that are undertaken and that are permitted to be undertaken, 2) to informal or covert enterprises that are undertaken and are permitted to be undertaken, and 3) to enterprises that could be undertaken and that are not undertaken, 4) to enterprises that will be undertaken and that are undertaken.

In a preliminary list of costs, in which in addition to accounting-based reasoning in monetary terms, other values of those in a position to make decisions also appear. These values include security and domination, as follows:

Evidence of impossibility

Costs of reduction and elimination of risks of ecocide in the modern-day mode of domination and accumulation:

1. Costs of halting the “rationality” of large corporations.

2. Costs of halting neoliberal policies.

3. Costs of applying environmental and natural resource protection measures.

4. Costs of doing away with “secret banking” and other forms of “money-laundering” resulting from drug trafficking and activities that constitute criminal activities in positive law.

5. Costs of doing away with “tax havens.”

6. Costs of doing away with “money-laundering.”

7. Costs of applying minimal proposals made by the “panel” of intergovernmental scientists.

8. Costs of bringing an end to fiscal and customs “exemption” policies, payment deferral and cancellation of taxes, in order to augment scarce public resources to channel them into the resolution of environmental problems.

9. Costs that would imply stopping or de-structuring the agricultural industry to put an end to favored or imposed, authorized or illegal dissemination of transgenic and biofuel seeds.

10. Costs of doing away with “free trade” agreements that prohibit all subsidies, investment, or expense in favor of the rural sectors in dependent countries from where impoverished migrants flee, while large-scale agricultural-industrial enterprises in central countries, particularly the United States, continue to hand out enormous subsidies and governmental support.

11. Costs of resurrecting the projects of “Civilization,” “Progress,” “Development” originally conceived or as “universal projects” of wellbeing and social justice. Costs of substituting today’s deliberate “development of underdevelopment” project for a project that does not only undertake “humanitarian” actions, nor does it only apply the postwar social development policy with its immense trail of marginalized and those who were excluded.

12. Costs of putting an end to today’s model or style of “consumer society” widely stimulated by the Market and the State.

13. Costs of putting an end to “disposable” population that is “out of the market.” That population ranges between one to three billion inhabitants, according to recent indicators. Their accelerated growth is seen by many with a “neo-Darwinian”, post-modern colonialist coldness. “Neo-Darwinism” defends the “survival of the fittest” by sustaining that the subjugation and destruction of the weakest is a law of nature. In reality it is another way of expressing “racial purity” on a global level, a magno-genocide that with its secondary effects threatens to be terminal for the combination of earth and humanity.

14. Costs of setting limits and controls on production, traffic, and distribution of weapons and apparatuses of “open war” and “covert war.”

15. Costs of putting an end to drug-trafficking, which includes ongoing “smuggling” of high-power weapons and a huge “money-laundering” machine.

16. Costs of putting an end to air pollution in cities and urban zones.

17. Costs of putting an end to water pollution of seas, rivers, and lakes.

18. Costs of putting an end to the depletion of aquifer resources.

19. Costs of putting an end to deforestation, particularly the destruction of rainforests.

20. Costs of doing away with petroleum dependency.

21. Costs of doing away with other underground resources.

22. Costs of putting an end to nuclear waste, plastic and other waste products.

23. Costs of putting an end to so-called “ecological reserves” and their growing exploitation by transnational enterprises to preserve the original, local peoples and cultures.

24. Costs of putting an end to overexploitation of plant and animal species of the sky, water, and earth.

25. Costs of putting an end to modern-day plagues, such as AIDS and pandemics.

26. Costs of putting an end to “hunger.”

27. Costs of provoking and/or preventing nuclear war.

28. Costs of implementing nuclear disarmament.

29. Costs of putting an end to deregulated labor and with the informal labor sector of undocumented workers.

30. Costs of halting the “internal,” “covert” or “open war” (today known as “low intensity war”) that is waged against those “condemned to the land” of each block, backed by dominant political and military-entrepreneurial groups and their networks.

The Necessary Conclusion

The sum and political reasoning concerning the costs listed here is “dissonant” proof of what is impossible. However, we cannot stop there. The very sum of monetary and human costs forces us to consider antisystemic alternatives and the emerging transitions of those who struggle to build and who are building a new “means of domination and accumulation,” and a new hegemonic “system of emancipation.” The peaceful transition puts us face to face with an enormous problem. The selfsame radical alternative, antisystemic forces have already noticed it. Many of the organized media-distorting forces distorted by the media by a culture of protection, pressure and negotiation whose costs cannot be assumed by world capitalism have also noticed it. In all cases of awareness and the collective morality of transition, of the dangers to be overcome, as well as the best ways to overcome them constitute a new page in history.

The accounting propositions have to be fleshed out and expanded with other phenomena, parameters, and secondary effects, wanted and unwanted, open and covert. But let us not underestimate them as mere hunches. They display enough elements to be enriched and regarded as an axiomatic field. Within this framework of premises and as an axiomatic body, an inevitable consequence is that: the human species will survive if and only if capitalism ceases to exist. The disappearance of capitalism, it is well known, constitutes a necessary condition, although not sufficient in itself to achieve the survival of the human species. In mathematics, the necessary conditions constitute the foundations to formulate non-linear models of multiple interactions (i.e., “complex”), which may be related with possible transitions to a post-capitalism capable of the survival and the emancipation of Humanity.

Given that we refer to the necessary conditions that are not sufficient in themselves, we cannot discard scenarios that, albeit not capitalistic, maintain the privileges of the current system, even when changes takes place at a high human cost. In historical and systemic analysis, it will be possible to cite specific contradictions of capitalism that point to its end and that in themselves are not sufficient to impede a nuclear world war or to achieve human emancipation. In any event, the problem that remains a priority is what can be done? And how can it be done? Today, in the alternatives and decisions not only is the idea to propose how to prevent the self-destruction of those who in their endeavors to defend the system are actually bringing about the destruction of the world. Instead, the idea is to build a path toward a redefined brand of democracy, liberation, and socialism.

Whatever decision or plan in today’s world faces a possibility that did not arise in earlier transitions: the possibility that human beings directly or indirectly destroy the human race by destroying the environment and the ecosystem. The conditions for certain universal destruction already exist and they cannot be reduced to natural phenomena, nor attributed to metaphysical, physical, or biological forces.

The evidence of the impossible continuity of capitalism leads to thought concerning the historical transition to a system different from capitalism. The new transition entails ensuring the survival of humanity to the maximum possible. Furthermore, it will induce an emancipation capable of assuming the values and interests that “praxis” have contributed or the practice of earlier theories. The historical movement is so new that it cannot be understood if it is only seen by using the categories known from earlier struggles. The theoretical and practical experiences express an emerging history, whose original forms must be recognized.

The transition is so new in human history and yet so experienced, that it is taking over the goals of several betrayed, frustrated, or senseless revolutions. In addition to the values of the French Revolution of “Liberty, equality, fraternity,” the values of the revolutions of Independence of the oppressed and exploited on the global fringes that Haiti began in 1802 and that first Marx and then Lenin, and many others enriched in the theory and practice of the struggle for a society without oppressors nor oppressed, without exploiters nor exploited.

The new movements return to the former struggles of slaves, serfs, or the masses, the proletariat who fought against colonialism, imperialism, neocolonialism. They also inherited and resumed the struggles of the “comuneros”, of “communes,” “soviets,” “cooperatives,” or “communities.” Their experiences of victories and defeats led them to take the necessary precautions to avoid acting as refugees, nor be destroyed or distorted in the media by military or civil bureaucracies. Furthermore, they added new goals and non-negotiable struggles. Of the worldwide movement of 1968, they inherited and made more specific demands in the struggles for freedom of critical thought and for a democracy that formally and truly was socialist, in other words truly democratic, and that recognized, together with the political and social rights of the citizens, nations, workers, communities, the need for the force of decision-making and implementation of those decisions resides in them. They postulated that in all fields, women, “blacks,” homosexuals, Native Americans, and ethnic minorities should participate in all fields. They fought for a multicultural society respectful of beliefs, ideologies and religions. That is not why they did not turn to “the most covert social relation” to defeat what is that of oppression and exploitation of some men by others, through salaries, wars of divestiture and subjugation, unequal exchange, and public debt, of the foreign debt “paid several times over.”

Moving away from the dehumanized references of earlier revolutions leads to serious confusion. From these, one begins to increasingly identify the importance of dominant interventions and the priority of constructing the right kind of interventions and to not overlook them.

The new anti-systemic movements display expression‎ and reflections of a more refined and profound stage. Many of them come from different, distant cultures and without a central direction that interrelate them throughout the history of struggles.

The most recent stage of human emancipation has its main precursor in the Cuban Revolution. It is enriched by the movements of the indigenous peoples of Latin America and particularly by the Zapatista Mayas of Mexico, who “from below and with the underdogs” head a new, varied struggle for human emancipation. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, unforeseen alternatives have emerged. Latin America—as Noam Chomsky has pointed out with other words—stands at the vanguard of an emerging world history. In that region, social movement took on radical characteristics of a war for ideas, for active solidarity, and for peace, and they acquired incipient experiences of the military that was prepared to fight against its people, they fought alongside their peoples for another democracy, another independence, and another Socialism, as occurred in Venezuela. The indigenous peoples of Bolivia, who head the majority of citizens of that nation, also began a democratic process of national and socialist liberation.

In the history that emerges, phenomena similar to that of the past arise. To a large extent they are different. One should not classify them in the former categories of “anarchist,” “Indianist,” “revisionist,” or “ultras,” overlooking the rich experiences that surround them and the new paths that they explore.

Many of the movements in Latin America and of the different continents and peripheral and metropolitan regions give crucial importance to the congruence and consequence of thoughts, words, and actions. Observing coherence and consequence allows them to define others and to define themselves. It also helps them escape from the ideological and terminological confusion, to clarify memory, and to undertake the current struggle.

Among the almost universal features that the anti-systemic movements display today it is fundamental to add others, because they give priority to the horizontal organization of “the underdogs.” They are not anarchists. At the same time that they seek to give greater weight to horizontal organizations, they accept that their collectives of defense be hierarchically organized for greater efficacy, as long as they do not exceed the lines and limits of decisions that outline the collectives of the peoples and workers who form a part of them, in other words who always “command obeisance” or who “govern obeying.”

Another promising universal novelty consists of the generalized popular demand for a peaceful struggle that is strengthened by negotiations with respect for the very dignity and autonomy of the negotiators, as well as for the different beliefs and cultures. In them a very firm line is maintained for the struggle of the exploited and oppressed against the system of domination, accumulation, assimilation, mediation, and corruption that today is in a self-destructive crisis and from which they seek emancipation in a movement of negotiated struggles that are growing accumulations and articulations of forces.

The body of emancipating goals and the means to achieve them show an emerging history worldwide that leads to the use of metaphors of the new sciences. On the one hand, formations on different scales appear as “fractals” and resemble each other. On the other, “collectives in communication, information, research, production, distribution, “good government,” culture, celebrations, resistance are organized. As communities and networks of communities, they are capable of spreading to the most distant regions of the countries and Earth as a whole. On the path and in the struggle, they spread the values and interests of a new peaceful revolution—which does not overlook the dangers of violence in history and in “the births of history”—but their attractions and principal values include human emancipation, the defense of the “Good Life,” Peace and Earth.

Pablo Gonzalez Casanova is an award winning author, Professor of Sociology at the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is among Latin America's most distinguished social scientists.

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