43

Globalization North and South: The Road to Nowhere.


Frank Lee

‘We must sell more to strangers yearly than we consume of theirs in value’
Thomas Mun, 1571-1641, Director of the East India Company.
Author of English Treasure by Foreign Trade.

It was the same Thomas Mun who became the architect of what we might now call strategic trade policy. This was a development strategy based upon a number of economic policy inputs aimed at a systematic upgrading and development of the national economy to give it a system of competitive advantages in its trade with other nations. He postulated the following policies.

  • Imported goods that can be produced domestically should be banned.
  • Reduce luxurious imported goods by making Englishmen have a taste for English goods.
  • Reduce export duties on goods produced domestically for foreign markets.
  • If no alternatives are available to its neighbours, England should charge more money for its exports.
  • Cultivate wasteland for higher production and to reduce the amount of imports needed from abroad.
  • Shipping should be completed solely on English vessels.

Policies such as these, though never openly admitted, came to serve as the generally accepted development strategy for aspiring nations in both the 19th and 20th centuries, enabling these states to move from low value-added agricultural and mineral production to higher value-added manufactured goods and service industry. Britain was first in the game[1] but was followed in short order by Germany, the USA and a number of other nations in Western Europe and North America. This clutch of dominant or developed states were able to open up a productivity and technology gap with the rest of the world which is still in evidence. Although other non-European nations – mainly in East Asia and led initially by Japan – used essentially the same policies and are beginning to close the gap and in some instances have already closed it.

However, in the contemporary world and international trade terms what is called ‘free-trade’ is at the heart of the system – a system which was to become known as ‘globalization’ packaged and sold as an irresistible force of nature. Globalization is more-or-less neo-liberalism writ large. It has become an article of faith that free-trade was always and everywhere the best policy in spite of the fact that it was the mercantilist policies of a prior era which formed the basis of current liberal trade policy (see below). Globalization was codified in what became known as the ‘Washington Consensus.’ The new conventional wisdom was conceived of and given a legitimating cachet by political, business, media and academic elites around the world.

However, many of the elements – if not all – of the Washington Consensus were hardly new, many dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries and perhaps beyond. It could be said that the newly emergent mainstream orthodoxy represented a caricature of an outdated and somewhat dubious political economy of yesteryear.

The theory that free-trade between nations would maximise output and welfare was first mooted by Adam Smith, but its final elaboration was constructed by David Ricardo in his famous work The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation first published in 1817. Briefly, he argued that nations should specialise in what they do best and in this way world output would be maximised. The hypothetical example he used was England and Portugal and the production of wine and cloth, where he calculated that although Portugal had an absolute advantage in both cloth and wine production, England had a comparative advantage in cloth and should produce cloth, whereas Portugal should simply produce wine. It was asserted – though, since it was simply a model, no evidence was ever presented – that all would gain from this international division of labour.

This was yet another instance where economists were fixated with the model, but even a cursory glance at economic history, and particularly the transition from agrarian to industrial societies, demonstrates the weaknesses, and indeed, serves to falsify the whole Ricardian paradigm. The brute historical fact is that every nation which has successfully embarked on the transition from developing to developed economy has done so adopting policies which were the exact opposite of those advocated by the Ricardian free-trade school, and which, moreover, had a great deal in common with Mun’s prescriptions.

In the world of actually existing capitalism, free-trade is the exception rather than the rule. Contemporary world trade is mainly a matter of intra-firm trading, that is, global companies trading with their own affiliates and subsidiaries in different countries mainly for tax avoidance purposes – e.g., transfer pricing. Next there are regional trading blocs like the EU or Mercosur, which erect tariff barriers to non-members. Finally, with the virtual elimination of tariffs there has been created a whole array of Non-Tariff-Barriers (NTBs).

These include manipulation of exchange rates, subsidies to export industries, tax exemption and subsidies to R&D, publicly funded research which inter alia enabled the Internet to come into existence, procurement policies whereby public expenditure and goods were purchased in the home market by government departments, quotas, embargoes, sanctions, export licences, the list is extensive.

Thus, modernisation and industrialisation, wherever it took place, consisted of a smorgasboard of interventionist procedures involving a joint business/state system of economic planning which was directed from above by institutions such as the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI). Both Japan and South Korea made extensive use of import controls to protect specific industries. Additionally, both countries discouraged rather than promoted inward FDI.

A century earlier during its period of industrialisation the United States erected tariff walls to keep out foreign (mainly British) goods with the intention of nurturing nascent US industries. US tariffs (in percentages of value) ranged from 35 to almost 50% during the period 1820-1931, and the US itself only became in any sense a free-trading nation after World War II, that is once its financial and industrial hegemony had been established. In Europe laissez-faire was also eschewed. In Germany in particular tariffs were lower in the US, but the involvement of the German state in the development of the economy was decidedly hands on. Again, there was the by now the standard policy of infant industry protection, and this was supplemented by and range of grants from the central government including scholarships to promising innovators, subsidies to competent entrepreneurs, and the organisation of exhibitions of new machinery and industrial processes. Moreover, during this period Germany pioneered modern social policy, which was important in maintaining social peace – and thus promoting investment – in a newly unified country …”[2]

It has been the same everywhere, yet the Ricardian legacy still prevails. But this legacy takes on the form of a free-floating ideology with little connexion to either practical policy prescriptions or the real world. It has been said in this respect that “…practical results have little to do with the persuasiveness of ideology.” [3] This much is true, but it rather misses the point: the function of ideology is not to supply answers to problems in the real world, but simply give a Panglossian justification to the prevalent order of things.

Turning to the real world it will be seen that “…history shows that symmetric free-trade, between nations of approximately the same level of development, benefits both parties.” However, “Asymmetric trade will lead to the poor nation specialising in being poor, while the rich nation will specialise in being rich. To benefit from free trade, the poor nation must rid itself of its international specialisation of being poor. For 500 years this has not happened anywhere without any market intervention.”[4]

This asymmetry in the global system is both cause and consequence of globalization. It should be borne in mind that the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) are suppliers of cheap raw material inputs to the industrialised countries of North America, Western Europe and East Asia. In technological terms the LDCs find themselves locked into low value-added, dead-end production where no discernible development or technology transfer takes place. Thus, under-development is a structural characteristic of globalization, not some unfortunate accident. Put another way:

…if rich nations (the North) as the result of historical forces, are relatively well endowed with the vital resources of capital, entrepreneurial ability, and skilled labour, their continued specialisation in products and processes that use the resources intensively can create the necessary conditions for their further growth. By contrast LDCs (the South) endowed with abundant supplies of cheap, unskilled labour, by intentionally specialising in products that use cheap, unskilled labour … often find themselves locked into a stagnant situation that perpetuates their comparative advantage in unskilled, unproductive activities. This in turn inhibits the domestic growth of needed capital, entrepreneurship and technical skills. Static efficiency becomes dynamic inefficiency, and a cumulative process is set in motion in which trade exacerbates already unequal trading relationships, distributes benefits largely to the people who are already well-off, and perpetuates the physical and human resource under-development that characterises most poor nations.”[5]

Case Study 1. The cocoa-chocolate industry (hereafter CCI) of the West African nations, Cameroon, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Nigeria are a case in point. These countries produce the majority of the world’s raw cocoa beans. But of course, the industry as a whole is controlled by western multinationals such as Hershey, Nestlé and Cadbury-Schweppes (now Kraft). The structure of this industry – vertically integrated – is very typical of the relationship between the LDCs and the developed world. The low value-added part of the industry – growing and harvesting the beans – is left to individual farmers in West Africa. Buying agencies, either very close to, or in fact subsidiaries of multinational companies (MNCs), then buy the raw material at prices usually dictated by the MNCs. This asymmetrical relationship between supplier and sole buyer is termed ‘monopsony’ in the economics jargon. It should be understood that large companies not only over-price their products to the final consumer, but also under-price their purchases from their captive suppliers. From then on, the various stages of the processing supply chain are in the hands of the parent company. From raw beans, to roasting, milling, refining, manufacturing of chocolate or cocoa, shipping and packaging, branding and advertising – all of these stages add value to the product, value which is garnered by the MNC. The exporting African nations are left with the low or no value-added end of the operation, a technological cul-de-sac.

Case Study 2. The double-standard inherent in the trade liberalisation policies pushed by the west through its agencies the IMF and WTO. ‘Although “we” in this instance the United States ‘insisted the Lesser Developed Countries (LDCs) reduce barriers to our products and eliminate the subsidies for those products which competed against ‘our,’ (the US) kept barriers for the goods produced by the developing countries – and the US continued massive subsidies for its own producers. Agricultural subsidies encouraged American farmers to produce more, forcing down global prices for the crops that poor developing countries produce and depend upon. For example, subsidies for one crop alone, cotton, went to 25000 mostly very well-off US farmers, exceeding in value the cotton that was produced, lowering the global price of cotton enormously. American farmers who account for a third of total global output, despite the fact that US production costs are twice the international price of 42 cents per pound, gained at the expense of 10 million African farmers who depended on cotton for their meagre livings. Several African countries lost between 1 and 2 percent of their entire income, an amount greater than what these particular countries received in foreign aid from the US. The west African State of Mali, for example, received $37 million in aid but lost $43 million from depressed prices. (Joseph Stiglitz – The Roaring Nineties – p.207)

This is what happens when LDCs having been sternly lectured by the IMF-WTO try to play by the ‘Free-Trade’ rules.

Nor does it end there. MNCs can avoid much local taxation by shifting profits to subsidiaries in low-tax venues by artificially inflating the price which it pays for intermediate products purchased from these same subsidiaries so as to lower its stated profits. This means that the tax-take of the host countries is lower than it should be since MNC profits have been artificially manipulated downward. This phenomenon is known as transfer pricing and is a common practice of MNCs – one over which host governments can exert little control as long as corporate tax rates differ from one country to the next.

Bear in mind also that although the IMF and World Bank enjoin LDCs to adopt market liberalisation policies, they apparently see – or conveniently ignore – the past and current mercantilist practices of developed nations. Agriculture for example is massively subsidised in both NAFTA and the EU. But it really is a question of don’t do what I do – do as I say. This hypocrisy at the heart of the problem represents the elephant in the room. We know that countries which attempt to open their markets when they are not ready to do so usually pay a heavy price. The countries which protect their growing industries until they are ready to trade on world markets have been the successes – even in capitalist terms. The wave of development in the 19th century and the development of East Asian economies during the 20th bears witness to this.

But the object of the free-trade rhetoric and finger wagging posture of the developed world is precisely to maintain the status quo. We should be aware that:

…multinational corporations are not in the development business; their objective is to maximise their return on capital. MNCs seek out the best profit opportunities and are largely unconcerned with issues such as poverty, inequality, employment conditions, and environmental problems.”[6]

Given the regulatory capture of the political structures in the developed world by powerful business interests, it seems that this situation is likely to endure for the foreseeable future. Development will only come about when the LDCs take their fate into their own hands and emulate the nation-building strategies of East Asia.

…markets have a strong tendency to reinforce the status quo. The free market dictates that countries stick to what they are good at. Stated bluntly, this means that poor countries are supposed to continue with their current engagement in low productivity activities. But engagement in those activities is exactly what makes them poor. If they want to leave poverty behind, they have to defy the market and do the more difficult things that bring them higher incomes – there are no two ways about it.[7]

True enough, but if they defy western imposed trade austerity, they will inevitably face united and vicious opposition of the footloose MNCs and their respective states and global institutional backers. The crucial institutional command centres underpinning of the global system are provided by the troika of IMF, World Bank and WTO.

The Troika of Usury

The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank (International Bank for Reconstruction Development/IDA) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT-Later to become the World Trade Organization 1995) were created in 1944, shortly before the end of World War II, during the conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Both the IMF and World Bank are now based in Washington, DC. The IMF was designed to promote international economic cooperation and provide its member countries with short term loans in order to trade with other countries (achieve balance of payments). Such was their original remit.

However, like most bureaucracies they needed to expand and justify their existence. Their responsibilities were to undergo deep changes which were both cause and effect in this change of policy. Thus, during the 1980’s, the IMF took on an expanded role of lending money to “bailout” countries during financial crisis.

This gave the IMF leverage to begin designing economic policies – neoliberalism – for over 60 countries changes which were never part of the IMF’s original area of competence. (One particularly glaring example of just how far away the IMF’s responsibilities had moved from their original brief took place when it allowed Ukraine to avoid paying back a sovereign debt of $3 billion loan from Russia. This was a quite unprecedented violation of the IMF’s charter.) Countries in difficulties have to follow IMF policies to obtain the IMF’s “seal of approval” to obtain loans, international assistance, and even debt relief. Thus, the IMF has arrogated powers not only in structuring the global economy, but also on real-life issues such as poverty, environmental sustainability and development, which is part of the World Bank’s turf. The IMF is one of the most powerful institutions on Earth–yet few know what it is. The IMF has created a system of modern-day colonialism that Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) the poor to fatten the rich.

Many SAPs require changes in labour laws, such as eliminating collective bargaining laws and lowering wages in order to provide conditions favourable to attracting foreign investors. The IMF’s mantra of “labour flexibility” permits corporations to fire at whim and move where wages are cheapest. According to the 1995 UN Trade and Development Report, employers are using this extra “flexibility” in labour laws to shed workers, rather than create jobs. It goes without saying the machinations of the IMF and the US Treasury Department are carried out wholly in secret.

In the same vein much could also be said of the World Bank (WB) The World Bank was established at the same time as the IMF, during the Bretton Woods Conference in 1945. It was subdivided into the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development IBRD and the International Development Association IDA. Although conceived of as separate institutions the WB they began to merge and overlap, although the neoliberal consensus ensured an ideological conformity in both institutions. Its mission was supposedly to help developing countries to restructure and improve their economies with convenient loans. It also had the objective of helping the post-war recovery of Europe and Japan.

The world is very different today. The World Bank is said to aid developing countries to grow even more and faster than they otherwise would. Most experts, however, think that the Bank does this in an ineffective and unproductive manner because it is a bureaucratic institution itself and is also under the ideological tutelage of the Washington Consensus, a burden of ideological baggage which in fact acts as a barrier to growth and development. In many developing countries the World Bank and IMF impose very strict conditions concerning the issue and availability of loans, which as a policy, is not only counter-productive, but is harmful to the development needs of recipient states. The Bank pretty much openly cooperates very much with the interests of capital and seems unaware of its assigned remit, i.e., the needs of developing countries.

The Bank closely monitors indebted states along with the IMF and it is undeniably the case that the World Bank and many other international organizations are more concerned with promoting the interests of the few at the expense of the many. Like its partner in crime the IMF, the WB is very secretive in its activities involving hidden relationships and agreements with state and non-state actors. There are no disinterested mediators present, and the management of this institution has no obligation to inform any parliament or other democratic institution in the world about its closed meetings.

Finally, there is the World Trade Organization (formerly the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade – GATT). The change of name was a function of an extended global remit of this third member of the triad. Established in 1995 The World Trade Organization (WTO) includes 153 countries and is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. The WTO was intended to replace GATT granting it a broader purview. It has been used to push an expansive array of policies on trade, investment and deregulation that has exacerbated the inequality between the North and the South, and among the rich and poor within countries. The WTO enforces some twenty different trade agreements, including GATTS, the Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) and Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).

Consistent with the other members of the club – IMF, WB – the WTO is inherently undemocratic.

Its trade tribunals, working behind closed doors, have ruled against a stunning assemblage of national health and safety, labour, human rights and environmental laws, which have been directly challenged as trade barriers by governments acting on behalf of their corporate clients. National policies and laws found to violate WTO rules must be eliminated or changed or else the violating country faces perpetual trade sanctions that can be in the millions of dollars. Since the WTO’s inception in 1995, the vast majority of rulings in trade disputes between member nations have favoured powerful industrialized countries. Consequently, many countries, particularly developing countries, feel enormous pressure to weaken their public interest policies whenever a WTO challenge is threatened in order to avoid costly sanctions.

If it is broke, don’t fix it

It becomes increasingly clear that in the new epoch of neo-colonialism the position of many of the world’s poorest countries is highly marginal in terms of the global economy. The usual prescriptions of the IMF/World Bank ‘experts’ is that these countries should open up their economies more and by increasing their exports and liberalizing their regulatory structures. This is rather like applying leaches to the unfortunate persons suffering from haemophilia.

If I might digress for a moment. It rather reminds me of a passage in 1984 where Orwell’s hero, Winston Smith, is in conversation with a rather heterodox party intellectual, Syme. Unfortunately, both were in hearing range of another party member, a complete, droning party hack who was engaged in emitting a steam of verbiage, the usual shtick of the party line.

Orwell goes on: ‘Just once Winston caught a phrase – ‘complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism’ – jerked out rapidly as if it were all in one piece like a type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise a quack-quack-quacking …’ Syme turns to Winston: ‘There is a word in Newspeak’ said Syme. ‘I don’t know if you know it – duckspeak – to quack like a duck.’

‘Duckspeak’ is basically the lingua franca of these institutions as it is of the MSM, politicians and other defenders of the faith. Its primary object is to obfuscate, not to clarify. We should expect nothing more. For these policy makers ensconced in their air-conditioned marble halls duckspeak comes naturally. However, even a cursory examination of both the theory and practise of their prescriptions confirms their duckspeak policies.

For policy-makers around the world the appeal to an opening up to global markets is based upon and simple but powerful promise. International economic integration will improve economic performance … The trouble with this is that there is no convincing evidence that openness, in the sense of low barriers to trade and capital flows, systematically produces these consequences. In practice, the links between openness and economic growth tend to be weak and contingent on the presence of complementary policies and institutions.”[8]

Open markets before a national economy is ready for it is in fact a disastrous policy a policy failure which was brutally confirmed in Russia during the 1990s. Openness might (and I emphasise might) work if the playing field is relatively level, which clearly it is not. Tariffs imposed by developed countries on imports from many developing countries remain very high. At the same time agricultural subsidies to domestic farmers make imports from developing countries uncompetitive. In short, the odds are stacked against the developing world.

Of course, the charade of liberal world trade and global dominance will carry on regardless; like the EU it can do no other. The fact that it is a system of neo-colonialism sustained by a bogus narrative and naked power may or may not have dawned on it, but now the neo-liberal virus has begun to enter the imperial heartlands. The Rules of the Game are changing. The effect of neo-liberal policies are beginning to spill over from the developing world to the developed countries in Europe and North America. How else are political phenomena like Trump, Brexit, Catalan and Scottish Independence, the Yellow Vests and euro-populism explicable? Domestic colonialism is now an increasing feature of the developed world and the reaction to it has been all too predictable.

The Greek historian Thucydides astutely noted that empires and democracy simply don’t mix; when democracies become empires and those empires begin to get out of control, the methods of supressing resistance in those empires will also be used back home at National HQ in the imperial state. As is already apparent this involves thought-control and moves on to other and cruder forms of suppression including incarceration and outright physical violence.

So, this is where we have arrived. All the promises of a Brave New World after the fall of the Berlin Wall did not come to pass, and the world seems to be drifting towards a divided, turbulent and ugly future.

NOTES:-

  • [1] ‘Under George the First, English Statesmen had long ago clearly perceived the grounds on which the greatness of the nation depended. At the opening of Parliament in 1721, the King is made to say by the Ministry, ‘that (echoing Mun) it is evident that nothing so much contributes to promote the public well-being as the exportation of manufactured goods and the importation of foreign raw materials.’ Quoted in Friedrich List – The National System of Political Economy (p 52)
  • [2] Ha-Joon Chang – Kicking Away the Ladder
  • [3] Charles Morris – The Trillion Dollar Meltdown
  • [4] Erik Reinert – How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay poor
  • [5] Development Economics – Todaro and Smith
  • [6] Todaro and Smith – Ibid.
  • [7] Ha-Joon Chang – Bad Samaritans
  • [8] Dani Rodrik – The Globalization Paradox (pp136-137)

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BigB
BigB
Apr 29, 2019 7:53 PM

Excellent work, Frank.

Globalism really is a road to nowhere …but talking of globalist roads to nowhere – isn’t there an entropic White Elephant in the room? Especially in the week of the 2019 Beijing BRI Forum?

That is the BRI brought to us in conjunction with the IMF; endorsed by the UNSC (2015); and backed by the World Bank (co-funder of the AIIB).

A Russian grand strategy that is integrating the supercontinent with the Chinese grand strategy. In an Eastern alliance of BRI and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU): as announced the other day by VVP. Allied with the flagship project – the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) …forming a “multipolar trilateral” (of India, Russia, and China) of interest in pursuing the integration of the EAEU, BRI, and CPEC. Mmmmm? Not too sure Modi is onboard, especially if it means that the Chinese fleet can strategically bypass the maritime chokepoint of the Strait of Malacca – to end up anchored at the port of Gwadar … but …on y vas.

CPEC: the “zipper of Eurasia”; as part of the “Indo-Pacific” century; the integration of the EAEU, BRI, and CPEC will lead to the “convergence of civilisations” …this “supercontinental integration strategy” will stabilise the supercontinent. [Valdai Club globalese duckspeak provided by Korybko].

https://www.globalresearch.ca/president-putins-speech-2019-bri-forum/5675801

Ah, FFS! If it looks like a globalese duckspeak duck …if it walks like a globalese duckspeak duck …and it quacks like a globalese duckspeak duck …it must be an organic Ecological Civilisation. Right, Andre?

For anyone who thinks there is a natural progression – BRICS => BRICS+ => BRICS++ – riddle me this: …how did some guy from Goldman Sachs sit down and write papers laying the model for all this out in 2001? In “Building Better Global Economic BRICs.”

https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/archive/archive-pdfs/build-better-brics.pdf

Not an actual blueprint: but still remarkably prescient. Strange political bedfellows: BRIC – sometimes referred to as “BRICs without mortar” …it’s bullshit really, marketing, just pure marketing bullshit.

“In order for globalisation to advance, it had to be accepted by more people … but not by imposing the dominant American social and philosophical beliefs and structures.” Baron Gatley: ‘Lord’ Jim O’Neil.

Seems to be going well, his globalist marketing ploy? If it looks like a globalese duckspeak duck …

Jen
Jen
Apr 29, 2019 12:58 AM

Interesting that Thomas Mun was the director of the East India Company (later to become the British East India Company) because it was the very mercantilist policies he recommended which Frank Lee reproduces in his article that helped to destroy India’s textile industry over the 18th and 19th centuries and which drove huge numbers of unemployed and desperate textile workers into poverty and agriculture, turning India into the poster-child for Third World squalor and destitution.

Mun’s policies are best described as mercantilism, not as part of the original free trade economic philosophy as espoused by Adam Smith who actually opposed those policies.

bevin
bevin
Apr 29, 2019 3:05 AM
Reply to  Jen

“…India’s textile industry over the 18th and 19th centuries and which drove huge numbers of unemployed and desperate textile workers into poverty and agriculture, turning India into the poster-child for Third World squalor and destitution.”
India’s textile industry was intimately related with its agriculture, in much the way that it had been in Europe including the UK. In fact the ruination of the textile industry in India drove many families out of agriculture and were part of a process which turned subsistence economies into commodity producing ‘plantations’. This was not unlike the process which the handloom weavers experienced, as the spinsters and their wheels had in a generation before.
What happened in India was that the power over the economy fell into the hands, not of ideologues, mercantilist or liberal, but of greedy men backed by armies.
The basic problems India’s villages faced were insoluble-owing to the private property regimes imposed on them and the taxes/rent payments that they were forced to make, they were evicted from their ancestral holdings if they did not use the land to produce commodities (opium and cotton for example) to sell rather than food to eat. It is that, imperialism, which produced squalor and famine.

BigB
BigB
Apr 29, 2019 11:39 AM
Reply to  bevin

All of which can be seen as a cyclical pattern of capital accumulation and surplus capital displacement of the local economy. You have perfectly summed up the historic part of the cycle: where surplus UK imperial Empirist capital broke up the village scale ‘mini-rebublican’ indigenous way of life – subsuming it with larger scale agro-production for export and re-import …’round-tripping’ violently imposed value chains for the sole benefit of Bradford millionaires.

Fast forward – referring to the excellent work of Colin Todhunter – and a new wave of surplus neoliberal fictitious capital is re-invading the same fractured village space – breaking it up further for the benefit of TNC gene-edited bio-tech supply chains …for the benefit of – God knows (the biggest source of FDI for India is Mauritius – it is unlikely the capital organically originates there).

So there are historic waves of surplus capital accumulation – seeking what Harvey calls a spatiotemporal fix; allied with a techno-fix – displacing the indigenous way of life, fragmenting its historical and inter-community cooperative interdependencies; nihilating toward individuated corporate-state dependency.

Rather cynically, this is done on mock-humanitarian grounds – for the sake of the productivity and progress of the people …those who manage to survive the instinct to commit suicide. At an untold externalised cost to humanity, dignity, purpose, achievement …measured in environmental degradation and depletion, loss of interspecies inter-community and biodiversity …ultimately nihilating the life support commons for extracted rent and material gain …a displaced value chain that adds to the Human Development Index – ‘elsewhere’.

If we take a look at this anti-humanitarian surplus capital carousel – all that is happening is a displaced merry-go-round of cyclically increasing dehumanisation. A deferred debt and death spiral that has left humanity as a memory of a village scale quasi-self-sufficient networked mini-republican Universal Humanist ‘Buddhist’ economic – as if people mattered …as E F Schumacher put it.

Add in AI, fintech (financial technology), high speed land and maritime transshipment, shrinking the globe spatially and temporally with virtual information superhighways and rapid economic corridors – so AI techno-theology can refinance every last uncolonised pre-capitalist space with – internalising the externalised environment, creating environmental services – exponentially increasing pace …overproducing, overcapitalising (finacialising), overdeveloping humanism toward transhuman techno-financial-shamanism …

…STOP! Stop the world, I want to get off this entropic cyclical treadmill …the Talking Heads techno-ideological road to nowhere.

What some accept uncritically as progress is techo-dystopic regress and entropic involution – compressing time and space toward human redundancy and biological extinction. Perhaps a decompression and downshifting would allow us to realise that the indigenous ways of human scale living, with appropriate technology, and inter-subjective community valorisation offered us something globalised techo-theological progress and ersatz fiat-prosperity does not …life.

A meaningful life is human and affordable: a managed return to the mini-republican pre-capitalist hypergrowthism and expansionism that took us nowhere fast …and faster …and AI-augmented fastest. It is frightening the speed that you can leave humanity behind with ever quickening cycles of surplus capital accumulation. For what?

binra
binra
Apr 29, 2019 1:21 PM
Reply to  BigB

Technologism is the part of science that was harnessed and used as ‘progress’ for a private agenda masked in public goods.

There are technological boons, It was sanitation and better conditions and diet that virtually eradicated most infectious disease BEFORE vaccinations were introduced.
But Malthus saw the betterment of the poor as a threat to be retarded and reversed.

The WHY? or WHAT FOR? to a corporately captured scientific technologism – is being removed or eradicated from human thinking.

Possession and control DEPENDS upon dispossession and subjugation – at least when applied to objects and things. The original of possession is to have, to hold and to share in – as qualities of being. The original of control is an innate knowing of how to flow in any given situation – as an expression of being within – and not over – relational being.
Loss of our innate or intuitive movement of being to the manual override of an outside-in or top-down choking of life by inhibition is both our civilisation and our death wish.

There is need to inhibit and check loveless actions as part of a law that holds order over an otherwise chaos. But only as the conditions in which love can be un-inhibited to realign the will to freedom of a co-creational order – which would ideally be a maturing and mastery of core responsibilities for consciousness. FROM where, the distortions or fears that pervert or corrupt can be revisited and undone. I am not using moralising terms here – but that the desire to possess love or power can express in very destructive ways – to self and others. But that doesn’t mean it is not our birthright or ‘being-right’ to have and to hold and share such qualities.

In a society not only normalised to lovelessness – but actively systemising ‘care’ under technocratic controls, any true witnessing is reacted to as abnormal, dissonant, and parsed for offence by which to dismiss as hateful or ridiculous, and potential threat to ‘system security’.

Fear of love drives the thinking mind and its technological extension – as if to solve a relational communication breakdown with an external displacement/replacement.

All we have as a result is communication failure Writ Large on the global screen.
What if the ‘sensory feedback’ is actually to the mind that sends forth through idea?
As tangible feedback to the ideation held in mind?
But we blame the instrument or ‘personality construct’ – like a child in tantrum?
And does that cascade through the personality to then screws up our world?
Regaining the communication of the higher/lower faculties of mind as One – is the capacity to resonate in true relation and extend or magnify its witness.

Narrative
Narrative
Apr 28, 2019 11:26 PM

Very important article. Thanks Frank Lee. Indeed, we are seeing a world governed by the ‘Washington Consensus’!

The essay triumphantly debunks the perpetuated myth of “The-US-doesn’t-do-colonisation”.

The US has always put into practice economic colonisation which includes colonisation by controlling trade and now practicing Colonisation by Resources Control.

Next myth to be debunked: The US doesn’t use espionage (backdoors in CISCO routers) for Political and Economic leveraging. They only use mass surveillance to keep us safe from Bin Laden, don’t they?.

binra
binra
Apr 29, 2019 10:09 AM
Reply to  Narrative

@ narrative Is the ‘US’ an asset or proxy – rather than a self-determination?
The nature of ‘power’ is parasitic – especially to its host.

binra
binra
Apr 29, 2019 10:19 AM
Reply to  Narrative

I qualify that by saying the nature of corrupted and corrupting power is a parasitic corruption to any who align in its worth-ship.
That the USA was fed self-determinism and exceptionalism (self-specialness) is part of the baiting. The pattern of exporting destruction by psyop is within the idea of gaining or preserving life or life-investments upon the subjugation and destruction of ‘others’. But operates more insidiously as the trojan of suggestions by which to set a mind against itself or give willingness its own destruction under pretext of gaining favour, power or protection.

Stephen Morrell
Stephen Morrell
Apr 28, 2019 10:06 PM

Nice essay. Thank you. It’s always edifying to have the mirror of economic history held up to bourgeois economic ideology and ‘theory’. ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ also comes to mind.

BigB
BigB
Apr 28, 2019 5:52 PM

When it is zero not zero? When it is net zero.

Talking of globalisers on the road to nowhere: so the globalists behind the Extinction Rebellion and cynically abused child marionette – Greta Thunberg – had a think about who to lead the capitalist entropic death march to extinction? We need someone trusted, a principled man, with a kind avuncular demeanour. So they’ve only gone and chosen Jeremy Corbyn to lead us to extinction. And he agreed.

Which will surprise absolutely no one who has any idea what I am talking about. Who would have been following recent events. First the XR call for net zero emissions by 2050; then Greta calls on politicians for net zero by 2050; and on the front page of the Guardian/Observer today (where else?). Later this week Jeremy will table a vote in parliament, toward a net zero target. He wants us to wake up. That is after he shafts democracy on Tuesday over the ‘option’ of a Second Referendum …but that can keep.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/27/corbyn-declares-national-climate-emergency

Some us are very awake to cynical manipulation, and the ramifications of a capitalised ‘net zero’. The trouble is that ‘net zero’ can mean absolutely anything – including offsets or an updated ‘cap’n’trade’ …which worked really well – for the polluting corporations. I’ll leave it to an actual scientist to dissect BECCS, CCS, EOR, clean coal, nuclear (it has already been done, many times over) …but apart from the fact they all may fail at scale (by which it is too late); all contain masses of hidden energy and CO2 emissions (on a lifecycle analysis); they all tie us into capitalised supply chains (which are not autonomous and risk wars); and they already cost at least 15% more than the tumbling cost of renewables (see the paper I posted the other day).

And entropy ensures that the costs keep rising, not falling. After a short while, any excess energy will be absorbed by the extra costs of extraction, transport, processing, capturing the CO2, pumping it below ground, and keeping it there. In other words, there is no benefit whatsoever to society from these colossal entropic White Elephants. With their hidden extra costs, subsidies, and entropic decline. They are a massive drag on living standards and sustainable complexity (and we really want to keep Doctors and paramedics …antibiotics and orthopaedics would be nice too).

And who is going to pay all these hidden costs: we are?

I’ll leave it here. Those who understand the human tragedy and monumental betrayal of humanity incurred in this folly …will already get what I mean. Those who think I am the hater for pointing this out …answer me this: how much hidden hatred is involved in foreclosing the future – not just humanity, but all biotic life (of which we are the ego-logic 0.01%)? So we can have champagne socialism and neoliberal globalism for a few more years? Cynical child abuse, and globalist puppet climate dictator …it kind of depends on which side of the future of humanity you stand as to how you view Corbyn now.

And if you think a “Green Industrial Revolution” or “Green New Deal for Nature” is a good thing, I can only suggest you do some research. Starting with Cory Morningstar’s exposure of the manufacture of Greta Thunberg.

http://www.theartofannihilation.com/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-the-political-economy-of-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/

Ramdan
Ramdan
Apr 28, 2019 6:19 PM
Reply to  BigB

Someone said “the new can not grow from the old”…. if everything in the universe is actually balanced then it might well be that humanity, as it is today,–predatory, blind, destructive, short sighted, ego-driven–has become a burden for the universe and it will swiftly get rid of it….
We are becoming (if we are not already) the new dinosaurs, guided by a bunch of Rex(s)…

binra
binra
Apr 28, 2019 9:35 PM
Reply to  Ramdan

The idea – ‘burden on the Universe’ is simply absurd. Like ‘crime against history’.
Watch how the mind deceives – even without an evil ‘them’!

God is not mocked – by self-illusion. But the one who believes they have defiled and betrayed or brought pain and death into the heart of God – will surely react under such convictions as their defence against Reality.

Self destructive or Self-denying thought operates its own limitations even to the point of death – and collectively as individually.

The reptilian or primitive fight or flight response has been developed as the framing OF consciousness.
One might say a greater Consciousness consents to limit itself to such a mind and experience in the same way a monkey is trapped by the fixed down gourd with a fruit in – but a hole only large enough for an empty hand to enter of exit.

But while we can see that, we don’t connect our thought with its results – and persist in the same futility because we think we can have the fruit without the entanglement in suffering. Stretching the metaphor somewhat – we can if we give it rather than seek to get it for our self. This needs to be understood spiritually and not systemically.
Giving freedom is the only way to have it. denial of others can only entangle us under subjection to our own denials.

Scarcity and lack generate fear and division – so these need to be addressed in Life and not just in material terms.
A sense of – or fear of lack – generates the sense of separation from Life and Love and Light from which a separative drive to GET from, arises.

I am not talking of anyone else but ourselves here. Only a deeper self-honesty can challenge the subconscious defaults of a mind and its reality-experience and this cannot be thrust on others – but the experience of a self-dissonant reality CAN lead to a greater willingness to question its foundations – which will lead to shifts in perspective and perception-response. Or to a fatalistic death spiral. I hold we are beings of choice – regardless the reptilian SHOUT-brain of possession and control – and that choosing NOT to align in fear – allows Life to enter where willingness allows. One can only start right where we are – or believe ourself to be – regardless our past.
The willingness to align in Life is a persistent beginner’s mind and not a define and control sense of possession and control – and so is NOT a popular movement or an overt movement – but it is a genuine movement within being.

Ramdan
Ramdan
Apr 28, 2019 10:25 PM
Reply to  binra

That sounds beautiful….Probably you should tell the people running goverments around the world and then everything will be also beautiful (doesn’t it sounds nice 😁)
As of 1 min ago very few listen to anything similar to what you say and certainly, none in power position!
Everyone who tried to teach anything along those lines did it knowing that nothing was gonna change cause it needs a very large number of people to get it for a change to happen…
That being said, doesn’t mean that that type of change, underestanding, realization or whatever you call it, is not possible at individual level. There it is, but few scattered individuals have no impact on humanity outcome…..

binra
binra
Apr 29, 2019 8:08 AM
Reply to  Ramdan

That is how the fake mind maintains its narrative.
“You mean nothing and are insignificant – unless you sacrifice your being to my agenda”.

I am always talking into the mind – as is every living one – but if the mind is tuned to the blocking signal, then it ‘gives’ or projects denial.
Beauty of a current appreciation elicits joy in being.
Joy is radiance that goes out or shines indiscriminately to all other minds because in truth there are no other minds. Only within the blocking signal is ‘separate minds’ meaningful.

When you are in great need and light reaches you – be glad for the smile in the heart of your ‘brother or sister’ – because it shone into a hate and undid a mind in madness.

That denied hatred goes forth to wreak havoc is not recognised – and so the realm of assertive power under plausible deniability persists. Hate persists as a blocking signal that we have taken to be our mind. Perhaps because we did not GET what we WANTED!

And so the attempt and intent of GETTING it back or ‘GETTING even’ on those we give the power of the blocking to. Whom we project OUR mind into and then attack.

I do not pretend insanity is not active. I simply seek to open a sane perspective – because we cant undo a problem that is actively persisting in terms of ‘solving’ within the frame of the problem.

You hold all the meaning in the Universe and yet you also hold the freedom to create in line with what is all Meaning – or to follow the line of your own thinking. If not for this freedom of acceptance, Reality would be thrust upon you, rather than shared, and you would by ‘impacted’, limited and divided in loss of wholeness to seek power outside yourself – in the world of form – and of bodies.

Who are the ‘people’ running governments?
When I was a child I thought that being grown up meant I would know everything and could do what I wanted. Then I grew up!

What is running our minds?

Freedom restores awareness one willingness at a time – but every act of love is maximal. This is the undoing of the mind of judgement from its role of self-invalidation. Live your willingness – and yes if that is where it takes you – speak to the ‘people running governments’. But what if that is actually everyone you meet in every thought you share?

The idea of power is not what children fantasise – and chasing fantasy invokes the sacrifice of truth. But you CAN be yourself – and in nothing else can you be whole. But look and see that self is always and already in relation. Here we are, sharing a moment. I have NO power to determine your receiving. But in wanting to ‘impact you’ I will lose awareness of your Meaning – for the meanings I project and accept true by believing them in you.

Not knowing who you are is the condition in which I receive anew. But gathered ‘intel’ blocks a true reception. Looking up from our own self-image a moment so as to be shown or re-minded – rather than to manufacture reality.

The wish to manipulate minds is operating a global MINDF*CK – regardless the agencies involved. Genuine communication is NOT the dark arts of persuasion – but is a shared willingness in shared purpose. Thus if one wishes to USE the other – communication is blocked by a masking intent of private fantasy substitutions – and where these find mutual reinforcement – a polarised narrative reality. Suggestions can and do kill. Anyone who thinks their mind powerless is already given a perfect witness TO its power. But in a negative appreciation or set. I am not advocating self inflation of aggrandisement but uncovering the power in which we rest – to have and know and share in being.
Is there rest in conflict? No. But is there another way of looking on our experience, from which to be moved by to to a wholeness of being? Only in the willingness to break the spell or indeed the oath of a hidden hate.

Who doesn’t hate being coerced against their will?
But are we aligned to honour our own?

mark
mark
Apr 29, 2019 12:34 AM
Reply to  Ramdan

The poor dinosaurs get a bad rap. They weren’t doing anything wrong – show me a dinosaur that was jet setting round the planet. The dinosaurs were doing just fine minding their own business till they were all whacked round the head by a giant meteor 65 million years ago. Otherwise they’d still be here.

binra
binra
Apr 29, 2019 12:01 PM
Reply to  mark

Well they are still here. You just have to look.
The Cosmic environment has changed – and the expression of life has changed.
Biologically you can see the bird family as a continuation of the theme.
Psychically look at the human mind.
The fight flight response, amygdala capture or indeed the primitive or reptilian mind is simply marketised and weaponised in the human frame of narrative justifiction.

Note: organic tissues are sometimes retrieved from dinosaur remains. History is an interpretive construct over a present communication or situation. That doesn’t make it JUST a construct.
Millions or billions of years operates as the Great Mystery into which anything can be placed to put it outside any scrutiny or challenge. As a psychological defence this would likely be deemed ‘distantiation’. The Creative and the destructive are intimately linked – perhaps because our first experience of our own creative power is associated with a destructive outcome – that persists as War on Consciousness.

The fixing or densifying and settling or stabilising of consciousness to a fragmentation under narrative dictate is an attempt to reverse Creation to protect a limited and limiting form of thought and existence by the attempt to develop and expand its abilities.

Who needs cosmic catastrophe when we can make our own? ‘Terror gods R Us!’ But keep everyone primed for asteroidal disaster – for where there’s fear, there’s funding and a transfer of wealth, power and consciousness to an unending capacity to evaporate life, love and the power to share in its qualities.

crank
crank
Apr 28, 2019 6:19 PM
Reply to  BigB

What is galling to someone like me, is that Extinction Rebellion are branded as the rebellion.
The real rebellion happened twenty years ago, in Prague, at the J18 protests, in Seattle, at the protest in Genoa. People back then were actually identifying the profiteers and taking it to them – those who were hell bent on maintaining and expanding the system of Neoliberalism in spite of the abundant evidence (even back then) of the fact that it is killing us.
9/11 kiboshed it all by criminalising protesters and activists as ‘terrorists’.
9/11 deniers like Medialens side with 9/11 deniers like Monbiot in calling Cory’s analysis ‘conspiracy theory’.
Fucking dangerous frauds if you ask me.

crank
crank
Apr 28, 2019 8:15 PM
Reply to  BigB

The whole idea of carbon capture storage & carbon credits is one massive ploy not to transition to wind & solar & not plant more forests. It’s turning nature into double-entry bookkeeping & pretending nature works like money: it doesn’t.

Robin Monotti Graziadei

BigB
BigB
Apr 29, 2019 12:34 AM
Reply to  crank

Which is why I try, not always successfully, to look at things from a tangible standard of living socio-economic. It is the dream that we can tweak a few economic levers, use electric vans, use less single use plastic, recycle plastic plant pots (even Monty Don is a propagandist now (he’s a TV gardening personality)) …and prosperity and progress will carry on unimpeded, all the little turtles will survive, whales will ingest less plastic, and the virgin forests will regenerate so all the orphan baby orang-outangs will survive …providing we have paperless statements, leaflets and forms.

Not a lot of people know this: we have a multi-award winning BECCS pilot scheme – at the converted Drax power station in Yorkshire. Fed on wood pellets from clearcut forests in America. To feed it (and another two stations almost completed) from the UK would probably mean every garden in the UK growing 6X (hybrid) willow – with no room for farmland or amenity countryside. So, we are going to scale that up? And subsidise the venture with £2mn a day subsidy for every new station? From a LCA: including the 90 year regeneration of the clearcut forest; the transport and energy cost of pelletisation (from fully owned and built plants); the transatlantic transport; the burning and carbon capture and storage; and the huge tax payer subsidy …without which the whole thing would be a commercially unviable energy and CO2 sink – far worse than just burning coal.

https://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/2018/cfd-press-release/

And we are going to roll that out at scale, for whom? The CCS element was shelved when the subsidies were changed. Or utilise ‘clean’ coal from the reopened pits – how very Labour historic imaginary. Or nuclear: which means renewing our whole redundant 70s irradiating boneshaking fleet of nuclear power stations in ten years? Or relicensing them for another thirty. And the only ones who will build it are the Chinese – our mortal globalist enemies. Who are already plugging the gap left by the Japanese withdrawal from the market. Or the most expensive, unworkable, soon the be declared inoperable, entropic White Elephant ever built at Hinkley C? Another 12 of them?

The maths does not work for any of these globalist shibboleths. We will be committing to many times over the top costs of energy, from already redundant technology that may fail at scale, costs the earth, and will not even get developed without massive tax payer subsidies. But then the maths doesn’t work for our modern lifestyle, full stop. Switching to renewables and localised networked mini-republican neo-agrarian human scale community living does not suit the champagne socialist aspirationalle. Its that or biomass with a jackboot in yer face. Or worse!

crank
crank
Apr 29, 2019 2:23 AM
Reply to  BigB

The damage will already have been done by the way the left has turned its back on a deep critique of capitalism with a powerful vision of an alternative society.

This, in fact, is what happened a hundred years ago, when much of the left, particularly in German-speaking Europe, had abandoned a nature-based, holistic anti-capitalism in favour of an industrially-orientated Marxism. (81)

Juan J. Linz, in ‘Some Notes Toward a Comparative Study of Fascism in Sociological Historical Perspective’ explains that “the lack of understanding of traditional Marxist theory and especially Central European social democracy for the plight of the peasant and pre-industrial strata” (82) left the way clear for Nazi recruitment. “A romantic youth protest against bourgeois society was captured by the fascists,” (83) he adds.

Landauer was very aware of this problem. Berman and Luke explain that he saw the need for society to break free from “the false mechanical concepts of science that impoverish human understanding” (84) but understood that Marxism was itself trapped inside this mindset, with its “scientific” belief in the supposedly inevitable transition of capitalism into socialism.

This meant orthodox Marxists had to applaud capitalist growth and capitalist progress. “In the light of Landauer’s critique, nineteenth century scientific socialism ceases to appear as a radical critique of the status quo. Rather, behind its revolutionary pretenses, it buttresses the development of capitalist structures”. (85)

In failing to take up the Romantic struggle against industrial capitalism, building on the rich organic and holistic philosophy which was being developed in German-speaking lands, the Marxists allowed this powerful anti-capitalist current to flow into the stagnant waters of fascism.

https://orgrad.wordpress.com/articles/bringing-down-the-fascist-machine/

Does Jeremy still have time to get down the allotment I wonder?

To be honest, I wish he would just go away now, and take his idiot brother with him.

If a group sticks a symbol in a circle, does that mean that the symbol’s power is excluded from those outside the group ? If so, then as a non-member of XR, I am excommunicated from the ‘new dawn’, and glad to be.
What a fitting and horrific end to the horrifically absurd project of industrial capitalism.

bevin
bevin
Apr 29, 2019 2:46 AM
Reply to  crank

“In failing to take up the Romantic struggle against industrial capitalism, building on the rich organic and holistic philosophy which was being developed in German-speaking lands, the Marxists allowed this powerful anti-capitalist current to flow into the stagnant waters of fascism…”
There was nothing unique about the reaction to capitalism in the German speaking lands.
What you call ‘the Romantic struggle against industrial capitalism’ began in the United Kingdom. Marx in fact noted the importance of William Cobbett’s vast and enormously influential works in leading the way.
So did William Morris, as typical a representative of the reaction against liberalism as could be found and a socialist.
What you appear to be doing is to re-cycle ‘green’ fascist propaganda and taking it out of its historical context.
The enthusiasts for industrialism within the socialist movement tended in fact to come from German speaking lands. Marx, whose very first publication was a critique of the privatisation and enclosure of forests, ended his long life an enthusiast for the Russian mir, and the possibilities it opened of building socialism without the scourge of industrialism.

crank
crank
Apr 29, 2019 9:45 AM
Reply to  bevin

Bevin,
There was nothing unique about the [‘Romantic’?] reaction to capitalism in the German speaking lands.
Neither I nor the article says it was uniquely German.
What you call ‘the Romantic struggle against industrial capitalism’ began in the United Kingdom. Marx in fact noted the importance of William Cobbett’s vast and enormously influential works in leading the way.
‘Noting the importance’ is not very clear. The article looks into the differences between, say, Cobbett’s ‘organic’ socialism and Marx’s route to socialism through the organising of industrial workers.

So did William Morris, as typical a representative of the reaction against liberalism as could be found and a socialist.
Menitoned in the article. Try reading it ?
What you appear to be doing is to re-cycle ‘green’ fascist propaganda and taking it out of its historical context.
The enthusiasts for industrialism within the socialist movement tended in fact to come from German speaking lands.

This latter is what the article is saying, and is a refutation of both ‘green fascism’ and socialist denial of its roots. The German socialist’s emphasis on industrialism and abandonment of the what it refers to as ‘Organic II thinking’ left the door open for the latter to flow into the nascent fascist movements.
Marx, whose very first publication was a critique of the privatisation and enclosure of forests, ended his long life an enthusiast for the Russian mir, and the possibilities it opened of building socialism without the scourge of industrialism.
Marx explored many ideas in his life, some in apparent contradiction to each other. That doesn’t detract from his (and Engels’) core vision of industrial capitalism as a ‘progressive force’ and a stepping stone toward a socialist utopia.
Surely there have always been conflicting currents of thought within the history of socialism as in any intellectual movement, and not that I am an expert, I have read a little about the origins of eco-socialism and the ideals of post revolutionary Russia with regards to restoring the relationships between nature and humanity.
However, the truth is there for all to see. Taken as a whole, whether we look at the state communism(s) of Russia and China, the Keynesianism of social democratic Europe, the trade union movement(s), or the techo-utopian vision of ‘post capitalism’ / FALC of today, the over riding current of thought with regard to relations with nature and the land within socialist movements has been pretty similar to that within liberalism. It has been marked by domination and exploitation with little or no regard for the other life on Earth or the future generations of humans. (I think that there are theological reasons for this, but that is a longer response.)
Now we seem to have a so-called socialist prime minister in waiting who is stepping forward to lead the way into a Green New Deal era. What actually is the Green New Deal though? Does it matter? Will it do what it says on the can? What reaction do you get if you ask the average member of XR on their views about automation and 5G smart cities as a key part of the solution to industrial civilisation’s problems?
I am going to get a copy of Bastani’s new book and attempt a critique of it from a green anarchist perspective. I’ll post a link here when I have made my attempt.

BigB
BigB
Apr 29, 2019 10:13 AM
Reply to  crank

Sorry Crank, I’m inclined to agree with Bevin on the historical point. Marx, like all thinkers – even progressive thought-leaders as he undoubtedly was – are products of their time. And, like his near conremporary Darwin, that vision would have been set in a reductive and mechanistic (Newtonian) materialism – one that was very much timebound – following strict scientific principles. It has been argued that the scientific bent was an Engelian interpretation – not strictly Marxist at all. His followers – including, but not limited to Red Rosa – did see what was coming (the rise of fascism), and very much did everything they could to warn of it. At the personal cost of a skull crushing rifle butt and internment in an icy river.

And Marxist-Communism very much saw what was coming – but were forced into a rapid industrialisation to counter the historic trend. This is no apology for the failings of communism – but had they not, I would be writing this from Greater Germany. It is arguable that fascism was not an organic development at all, but one gamed by industrialists and bankers – pro Sutton.

Marx did critique the ecological perspective – and Engels posthumously added the famous ‘metabolic rift’ allusion. Bellamy Foster and Burkett – in their various writings – have established the modern Marxist ecology …using every last word and snippet that can be construed as eco. This is not a critique of the welcome concept – rather the manner of the writing …which tends to be for purists. (I know – pot, kettle, black!)

There is a counterargument to be made that industrial capitalism captured the workers imagination more than an idealised socialist eco-utopia …or bribed it with oil-filthy lucre – giving the working class the illusion of grandeur, set within a mock democratic panegyric of materialistic and imaginary socialism (ersatz statist pseudo-communism) – that appeared to satisfy the historical and materialist dialectics …without the need for a bloody revolution. Offering a higher standard of living than the real socialist workers paradise – which was relentlessly demonised (over the top, but not altogether unfounded). This obviously played out in the post-war military Keynesian and unionised labour dream harmonic …to which Corbyn acts as a totem of return.

Particularly for me, things were not at all well with this exponential industrialised dialectical materialism. East and West. By an accident of birth, I am the same age as the modern ecological movement …started by Rachel Carson, E F Schumacher, Herman Daly, and Murray Bookchin et al in 1962. The standout prophetic was , of course – Silent Spring (for me it was actually Schumachers village-scale ‘Buddhist economics’ – which is the summa of my entire ethos). This led to the radical New Left – which is, for me, the eco-socialist road less travelled. The one, had we taken it, would have avoided the critical mess we are in. A thoroughly predictable and avoidable Human Impact convergence crisis that no one wants to deal with.

Instead, the well chronicled bifurcation was New Labours alliance with neolib/neocon depolitics – post-Thatcher. Which annulled politics as a binary practico-inert forum of mock elections, ersatz referenda, and simulated democracy. Whoever we vote for: neoliberal globalism gets in. And stays in: even with Corbyn. Oh well, let’s all follow the principled, avuncular Pied Piper. I’m sure he knows where he is going!

crank
crank
Apr 29, 2019 12:53 PM
Reply to  BigB

BigB,
Not sure where you are coming from on this.
Sure, Marx was a thinker of his time. So were the Luddites activists of their time. What does this tell us? Does it tell us that the historical drive for industrialisation lay beyond the competing schools of political economy of the 18th/ 19th centuries?
The Marxists were the front line against fascism. No argument here. Even the Sutton case does not really detract from the fact that the Nazis hoovered up the peasantry’s sentiments for a ‘rooted culture of the soil’ and twisted them into something hideously deformed, whereas the German Left rejected these sentiments outright in favour of a vision of industrial workers forged into a culture disconnected with place and nature.
And sure, there have been movements within the Left, trying to balance out the human pull toward universalism and the pull toward the land – the Left is not monolithic. The point of the article is that the seams of thought that have dominated both Left and Right have been part and parcel of ‘the religion of progress’ which has at its core a story of mankind overcoming the limits of nature (including our nature) – i.e. a form of transhumanism.
I think it completely fitting that the last big working class socialist struggle in this country was the miners strike of the 1980s. Coal and working class politics bound together. Imagine that strike today in the era of climate emergency. How would it play out?
As said, I have not read so widely, but I have not seen presented by the European Left a vision of a simplified, de-growth, nature centric society. Even today.
It seems to have come about to some extent in Cuba through circumstance and necessity, and even that now looks to be in flux.

binra
binra
Apr 29, 2019 2:04 PM
Reply to  crank

quote: “mankind overcoming the limits of nature (including our nature)”.

This is of course not within the realms of possibility. But our notions of what nature is – and of what we are – can overcome us to a sort of trance state in which an impossible and unnatural condition is suffered and normalised.

Overcoming limits in psychic terms, is moving through them or past them such as not to be defined BY them.

But in technological terms, overcoming limits may represent the redistribution of psychic energies – and corresponding definitions of limitation – to shape-shifting that merely hides them in more insidious forms.

This is represented in mythic terms by chopping off the hyrdra’s head but it grows three more.
In other words shifting problems around AS IF real change is occurring.

The mind’s ability to reframe anything to contexts that serve a short term sense of need is its capacity to become inextricably invested in entanglement in a house of lies. That has no true foundation and so has every need to hide the fact from disclosure.

Progress as the destruction of what brought us to this moment is a mistaken identity. As long as we demonise our past, our denials will stamp out our presence.

The ways in which Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’ stamps on the face of a human presence unable to rise, takes any and every form – because it is the use of forms of seeming powers and protections that set and hold the limits over human expression and endeavour.

Full spectrum dominance culminates in total paralysis.
How to FIND or BE FOUND from there?
Mentally impossible – yet immediately accessible is to be the willingness for an embrace of Life – as true desire – openly accepted.
True desire rises to a true Call. Or Calls truly.
But instead of keeping fears hidden, they now come up to be released.

How much of our ‘world’ is our denials coming up to be released?
Or is it that they come up to destroy us?
The perspective depends upon our current purpose. A willingness to heal is of a different order than ‘kill and be killed’.
Choosing to be whole in what we do want does not demonise or assign negative charge to what we no longer use or accept as belonging to who we are now.
This isn’t progress so much as restored to creation.
How much of progress is actually fear of regress – that then operates regressively by embodying fear?

BigB
BigB
Apr 29, 2019 4:30 PM
Reply to  crank

Crank

I’m not sure where I am coming from today (suffering from a recurrence of bronchitis from going back to work to soon). So forgive me if I stopped making sense.

I think what I was deliriously trying to say is that we should be careful of making organic historical dialectical ‘grand narratives’. It is not possible to know what Marx foresaw, or that he should be held responsible for what came next. What came next was the age of oil and maximal leveraging of human labour – unforeseeable by Marx as just to what a rapid transformation of humanity that took place. In other words, what Marx meant by industrialisation was rapidly transformed in unimaginable ways just a few decades later. He could not see the coming green revolution population explosion due to oil. Or the rapid financialisation caused by the adoption of fiat currency.

The rapid incipient age of oil industrialisation of the British Empire, and the Imperial German Second Reich in particular – forced the Russian Revolution into avenues that were not contemplated by Marx. Nor could they have been. The age of oil developed its own dialectics.

Hannah Arendt attests to just how few Nazis there really were. It was not a popular grass roots movement. It was gamed and financially cultivated – for reasons that nothing to do with its pseudo-pagan-philosophy. That volkisch 19th century romanticism was hijacked for cynical political gain. People followed them not out of a shared sense of Sacred Germany – but out of self-presevational terror. That is the scary thing about fascism – however incoherent the philosophy, and however irrational the aims – ordinary average people become capos and eugenicist and antisemitic pagan volkisch. As much out of blind terror as misplaced authentic loyalty.

So the quote you bolded is dubious. The Marxists did not allow this to happen. Fascism flowed into stagnant waters because it was an inorganic terror regime. In fact, you probably did yourself a disservice bolding the quote, because the article makes this perfectly clear.

In the main thrust of the article: we should never forget where the ‘red/brown’ criticisms are coming from – the libertarian extreme centre. Anything other than the standard deviation from this fascist death cult is heading toward the New Gulag. This argument is so spurious it hardly needs rebutting. It is akin to what I called ‘primate protest politics’ – only the dirty kind of protest. That is, those who sit in the extreme centre, soiled by their own anti-life ethos, throwing their excrement at those who would rather a more peaceful world, are not fit to criticise unless they clean up their own mess. Which is pretty much the desolation of the entire planet, and the death and dehumanisation of all humanity.

I think people are getting tired of this poorly framed argument. Stephen Hicks, one of those who framed it in Explaining PoMo – is seemingly universally hated. His buddies, Peterson and Pinker, for instance – not much less so. It is an anti-intellectual argument – opposing free speech in the name of defending it. Reading around – it is a null pseudo-argument …not worth bothering about. Certainly not worth abandoning the words holism, organic,etc for.

Interestingly, Corbyn made the classic conflation of anti-capitalism and anti-semitism pseudo-proposition:

“Second, there are people who have come to see capitalism and imperialism as the product of conspiracy by a small shadowy elite rather than a political, economic, legal and social system. That is only a step from hoary myths about “Jewish bankers” and “sinister global forces”.

If capitalism is in mortal terror and invents ‘red/brown’ conflations to dismiss a relatively tiny proportion of people who might use the word ‘holism’ in their critique – I think we can safely assume we are on the right track!

[Sorry for the delirious reply, that includes this one].

crank
crank
Apr 29, 2019 9:48 PM
Reply to  BigB

Get well soon BigB.

mark
mark
Apr 29, 2019 12:29 AM
Reply to  BigB

What we have been seeing recently with the Extinction Rebellion and its Thunberg PR construct is Green Fascism in action. The weaponization of language (and children) coupled with self righteous and sanctimonious synthetic moral outrage.
“You have ruined my life”, “I have no future because of you”, and the ludicrous “we only have 12 years (or is it 11 now?) left to live.”
We are entitled to do whatever we like, cause disruption, demand deferential attention from media and politicians, because “we are saving the planet”, and anyone who disagrees with us and does not sign up to our agenda is obviously a morally worthless individual who is probably racist, homophobic, misogynistic, bigoted, old, uneducated, and who probably kicks his dog and cheats at cards as well.
This organisation and its hundreds of worldwide branches and slick PR machine appeared overnight out of thin air. It appears to be lavishly funded and supported to further a corporatist and globalist agenda by MNCs like Monsanto and their armies of bogus NGOs.

There is a very sinister objective behind this, which has nothing to do with preserving wildlife or saving the planet. It is to financialise or monetise the natural world, the land, water, air and animals, which can then be “traded” in vast money making boondoggles like the short lived Chicago Climate Exchange, from which Al Gore trousered a cool $500 million before its demise. This is what is intended on a vastly greater scale, an enormous bonanza for existing elites for literally trading in hot air. The only result will be a series of opaque, unaccountable boondoggles transferring even more wealth upwards.

This will be enforced by promoting what amounts to a Scientology type cult to impressionable children and vulnerable people, assuring them that “The End Is Nigh”, or at least only 12 years off. This will be used to justify schemes going well beyond scams of planting non existent trees in Africa and elsewhere. It will be a huge shake down operation by the Green Taliban, demanding that individuals and organisations pay them tribute and taxes to secure their endorsement.

The City of London and Wall Street would be quite happy with this arrangement. They will happily extort unproductive rent from the economy by trading in Green Certificates and Carbon Neutral Certificates, just as they now peddle hundreds of trillions in worthless “derivatives.” None of this will save a single polar bear.

The tragedy of it is that there is an issue, whatever you think of Global Warming scare stories. In the late 1920s, 90 years ago, when some of my relatives were born, the world population was 1.8 billion, less than a quarter of what it is today. And their standard of living is now several times higher than what it was then. For every car then, there are a hundred today. Even people in poor countries have vehicles, mobile phones, computers, jet aircraft, things that simply did not exist then. The population of Egypt was less than 10 million. It is now over 85 million, with another 10 million living abroad. This all adds up to a vast increase in pressure on resources like land and water. You can see this in the loss of bees and insects and bird species.

Anyone who argues this is an urgent problem that needs addressing deserves a fair hearing. You could even make out a case for replacing cars with public transport and phasing out the use of plastic packaging. But the problem won’t be solved by the Gores and the Di Caprios and the Thunbergs jet setting around the world collecting climate change awards. What we are likely to get are more useless money spinning boondoggles like hot air trading and carbon capture plants to enrich the Gateses, the Buffetts and the Bezoses even further.

Or green energy, which is highly dependent on fossil fuel. A few years ago, when Livingstone was London Mayor, he wanted to impose a huge levy of around £200 a day on people like builders and tradesmen using old vans. They would have to buy brand new vans, or pay the huge levy. Nobody gave any thought to what all those new vehicles would cost in terms of energy and pollution to produce.

BigB
BigB
Apr 29, 2019 1:28 AM
Reply to  mark

Overpopulation is a big globalist myth to justify their corporate capture of the worlds wealth. We may well be overpopulated, but it’s more that 70-80% of us globally don’t consume anything – relatively. It is overconsumption by the over-developed 20-30% that does all the damage. And weaponising the imaginary lifestyles of the developed countries – to maintain their profligate standards of living – will not address the deep Human Impact crisis …which is the current psychotic episode from the capitalist imaginal. One that risks all life on earth.

Modernity, and its debt-deflationary, living beyond its biophysical impact means – is at an end. Rather than face that: the globalist charity climate change NGO industrial complex, their financial backers, and the champagne socialists have formed an unholy wrong-kind-of-green and wrong-kind-of-red anti-life alliance. To maintain their prosperity and progress theological imaginal.

Fake clean energy, and species extinction aside – the greatest immanent threats to the human community come from exponentially increasing debts, exponentially increasing entropy, growing statist authoritarianism, militarisation, and exponentially increasing austerity and loss of future. All of which are fuelled by illicit oil money, which is more than poetic allusion – it is almost literally true (almost all (90%) of international capital loans originate offshore from dirty and looted oil money [according to Nick Shaxson]).

Raising another $100tn in ‘locked’ capital, to indefinitely extend the curse of the age of oil, greenwashing it as ‘clean’, is a suicide pact for humanity, and omnicidal for much of biodiversity. Most of whom have no idea what is coming. Carpe deum, and enjoy the ride over the net energy cliff. As Cory says: if we want to stop it – it is going to take all of us.

binra
binra
Apr 29, 2019 12:24 PM
Reply to  BigB

@BigB: I know you aligned in the fear or demonisation of CO2 as a world destroying influence – but if we were put computer modelled predictions aside to see what else operates current and active degradation and biocide of us and our Environment – would these be energy usage as such? I have every reason to believe genuine energy solutions are blocked – excepting black ops – and yet even with the ‘fossil’ fuel framework – there are measures that can seriously reduce actually toxic emissions. But there is NO room or will in our legally defined corporate sector to be truly accountable for exported toxicity. On the contrary it is generally cheaper to cheat lie and be fined for wilful pollution, poisoning and fraud than run a just business – which would likely go OUT of business under the current regulatory capture.

The capture of regulators extends to any and all vectors of influence. While money plays a part, it is mostly as a system of undue influence and control. Power-seeking is the motivation to use any and all vectors of influence by way of deceit, insider dealing and cartel conspiracy.
And by its fruits, I would say it is power for its own sake – and not to create a new world anything – whatever self-illusions may run in the belief that hateful deceit can be contained.

BigB
BigB
Apr 29, 2019 9:07 PM
Reply to  binra

Binra

I hope you can see that my analysis is not just hung on CO2 demonisation? Indeed, I warned of the dangers of such a narrow focus months back. My analysis is a broad multi-spectrum of all of the facets of the current human impact crisis. It is exactly the narrow focus that the XR psyop is trying to leverage to socially engineer society – we take the social impact whilst the manipulators maintain and increase their level of bad faith blood money wealth. Not on my shift, even if all I can do is shout very loudly …

I do acknowledge CO2 is a problem though …and there are Negative Emissions Techs that will work …trees and carbon cascades with biochar are particularly valuable. I believe pyrolosis looks promising (PyCCS) but am wary of any solution being capitalised within the current industrialised framework. But these are not being adequately resourced …in favour of clean carbon globalised capital anti-solutions.

It is our way of life in toto that is killing the planet. And only 30% of humanity is actually included in this. Overpopulation is a globalist myth. If there is to be any population reduction: it must start from the top …not the poorest of the poor excluded dehumanised Unperson. Humanity could survive without the daily bottom to top blood money tributary system that sustains a suprasociety of the parasites of all nations.

Our biggest and most pressing obstacles are exponential debts and exponential entropy – which together drive statist self-preservation and self-protectionism …of the national interest. And the national interest is invariably stealing someone elses wealth. All core and semi-periphery nations do it. There is no good credit imperialism or sub-imperialism …though there really seems to be a lack of appreciation of this core fact. The world system itself is anti-life. It entails the giant “triple evils” of racism, imperialism, and militarism. They are all contained in the dialectical materialism of phoney accumulation. Humanity is dying under the weight of debts – catalysed by hidden (but quantifiable) entropy.

It does piss me off a bit when others endorse this evil quite so readily and uncritically, I must say.

The entropic debt-deflationary dynamics drive the triple endemic systemic evils in an exponential negative dialectical materialism: an exponential race to the bottom that can only produce morbid moribund symptoms. Outside of this – where no is or can be – we had and have it all. We are all the wealth there ever is and ever could be – and it looks like we might just give it all away. CO2 demonisation is such a small, but significant part of this.

We are the world. Life is nearly negentropic and our support networks could have been – and possibly may yet be recoverable so – nearly negentropic. Oil could have lasted indefinitely – had we used it for what it was really valuable for. But we burnt the bulk of it in a petroleum flash, turned it into wars and wealth for a few – forsaking our humanity for filthy oil lucre. And now when it looks like that the carnival of death is winding down; rather than transition to a peaceful, if not optimal, survivability – we are gearing up to use the bulk of readily recoverable resources to have a great big internecine fight over what is left. There is little point yelling stop – no one is listening. The world is self-absorbed in the progress and prosperity techno-theological imaginary …dreaming of material self-preservation bubbles. BANG! That will wake them up – the sound of the cosmic reality-slapping the desiring-dream collective.

CO2 is the least of our worries right now. The real worry is the behavioural engineering taking place to weaponise CO2. The fact that people do not know the difference between real solutions – the entire abandonment of the hierarchical capitalist anti-economic reason – and the capitalist anti-solutions of fake clean energy …to fail at scale. The choice is life and death. I cannot put it more straight forwardly than that. And if we make the wrong choice now: there will be no chance for Plan B. Choose wisely, with your spiritual insight …that shouldn’t be too hard.

binra
binra
Apr 30, 2019 12:22 PM
Reply to  BigB

Yes, I recognize a ‘way of death’ runs AS IF a way of life and I accept this recognition in myself as a Calling or waking to a personal and relational responsibility, that is not possible to grow from or upon a fearful and addictive identification in a conflicting identity.

‘Bottoming out’ is the failure to maintain ‘narrative control’ as a believable basis for allegiance. But as a result of every kind of evasion and denial with all the ingenuity of which mind is capable BECAUSE what we most desire aligns our thought and behaviour.

My reading or our times is of the end of an era – where the ‘era’ is not merely a passage of time, but the world under its specific ‘Sun’ – which in this usage is an internalised ‘model’ of reality – set up as a tool for its manipulation. Or rather as the means for exploring the experience of possession and control as a theme or focus.

I think the story of the Prodigal Son suffices to give the sense of taking a living inherence out of context to run as a mis-taken right of inheritance. We get in our own way – and blame it on anything, everything ELSE.

I have the experience of the world – insane as it is humanly revealing itself in these times – and yet also holding a intimate quality of natural or innate beauty that inspires thoughtless being whose qualities can be known – but which is itself one without a second – until the mind ‘resumes’ its interjection of interpretive definition to make or control (its private reality experience).

Opening the field of awareness is the grounding of all we think, feel and do.
I cannot tell anyone of what they are as yet defended against as a result of projecting fears kept hidden and investing in keeping them so.

One of the reasons I write is to witness another quality of response than the fear-driven reaction. It may not seem fear driven to survive against perceived and believed threat – or to align in countering perceived and believed evils, but that IS the nature of the evil – to hide in the good unseen as a private agenda.

Uncovering the false as false is part of freeing ourself of a false allegiance or a false sense of self and world. It may be that very few are as yet willing to abide the hateful or feared of their ‘room 101’ so as to look on it from a willingess and desire for truth and so be free to look past terror symbols to what they are but the guardians set to keep hidden.

But every willingness to move through fear in willingness for healing of wholeness of being is part of its growing in our mind, as our noticing and as our capacity to see real choices instead of being framed in fear – or in attempts to stamp out fear in its symptoms.

To those who have (and thus share in being) more shall be given – because what we truly appreciate grows or appreciates.
But from those who have not – (an appreciation in shared being) more shall be taken – even the little they have. This is simply the result of a negative appreciation. the Law or Mind is the same, but working to create an abundance of lack or debt.

Identifying in lack and limitation is the model of private possession and control.
I am not addressing ‘things’ but Ideas that are assigned to ‘things’.
When our accepted Ideas as to who we are and what life and the world is for – change – the experience of self and world HAS CHANGED.

But the attempt to manipulate the ideas of the mind that makes the world (narrative control) is always the magical attempt to change the world to align with a core sense of private possession and control. And is simply the exploitation of leveraging fear and guilt and hate so as to incentivise behavioural conditions of compliance to a hidden or masked agenda.

Uncovering the mind OF denial without triggering the blame and shame of guilting invalidation is choosing NOT to give allegiance and support TO a mind of denial.

Selfism underlies EVERY form of ism that is deemed hateful and is the willingness to hate the OTHER as the ‘saving’ of the ‘self’.

Deceit runs as a self-illusion regardless the agencies of its operation. Giving our life and world to deceit is the result of unowned and unfaced fear – and its progeny.

The Model that we have developed as our current world is no more true than any other and is subject to the same distortions of definition for prediction and control – of a private agenda – as is any relational endeavour that becomes afraid of or invested against change, expansion, and unfolding of a true and truly shared appreciation.

Demonisation is a private export. But C02 will green the Planet. It enables naked mole rats to live extremely long lives. Nothing is so blinding as the assertion to know as an investement to protect. No one want to keep you blind more than those who want to export their ‘demons’ onto a willingness to suckle Big lies. An noone more arrogant in their surety that humans are suckers.

Sucking on worry is toxic debt packaged as concern.

Oh – so much for my quick rejoinder!

BigB
BigB
Apr 30, 2019 3:11 PM
Reply to  binra

I appreciate your response, but you are so wrong about CO2 …it will kill us quicker than CO from a defective boiler. Forget the atmospheric gas CO2. Think of the symbolic totem CO2. It is not a thing, it is a sign …a sign that is being rapidly weaponised in a call for climate action. That course of action will kill us. And, disguised as humanist concern – for the children – this is the very worst cynicism.

Mobilisation is to steal the future from ‘locked’ corporate capital – to the tune of $100tn …mostly pension funds and workers benefits. This will never be returned. There is already a $30tn pensions blackhole globally. That is stealing the future …one time.

Mobilisation is against the worlds poorest – who emit nothing (100 countries emit less than 0.01% GHG). Calls are for them to stop breeding. This is eugenicist racism of a sort the Nazis would only dream of. But it is humanitarian – for the children …not of the poor, they will be aborted before conception. That is stealing the future …two times.

This will give the climate bourgeoisie a bit of time to install BECCS, CCS, clean coal, find more shale and tar. None of this works. The invested capital will be lost. The dirtier and dirtier fuels (hydrocarbons decrease in quality due to entropy). THIS will cause a climate disaster – the false mitigation of the reported climate disaster. That is stealing the future …three times.

All these hydrocarbon supply chains will become increasingly fought over …proxy hybrid wars that could easily precipitate an internecine world war. The militarisation will sequester greater and greater resources for itself – to destroy in order to preserve supplies of resources. That is stealing the future …four times.

As statist governments, and corporate neo-state clients, endeavour to maintain the falling rates of profit …humanity is condemned to permanent austerity …with no chance of reprieve under the current systematic death. That is stealing the future …five times.

All of this will exhaust the environments resilience, ability to accommodate waste and pollution. and deplete the standing resources of nature. All of this will be capitalised – and rented back to us …what’s left. Inhibiting our ability to live. That is stealing the future …six times.

How many times can they steal the future? All for the symbolic totem of CO2. Stealing the future six times in order to save it once. Only a capitalist could think of that.

[the sixth mass extinction – stealing the biodiverse future …that’s seven times]

binra
binra
May 1, 2019 11:27 PM
Reply to  BigB

You are confusing carbon monoxide – which is deadly.

CO2 is carbon dioxide – without it your blood cannot deliver its oxygen – watch out for over breathing as a result of normalised anxiety. Try breathing in a paper bag for a while it wont kill you and will stop a panic attack in process. However for the purposes of the NWO it CO2 the justifiction for a pandora’s box or global control that traditional geopolitics can only provide a distracting sideshow from.

I do want checks on financial and corporate behaviours – changing the laws that effectively protect them or pay them to toxify and degrade our health, consciousness and environment without any real consequence.

I grew up with environmental concerns uppermost as part of a love of life and our Planet – but the Green movement has been bought, nurtured and subverted to use as a weapon of deceit, leveraging guilt and fear to induce abandoning reason to astroturfed overreaction.

I don’t associate your list of evils with capitalism – but with deceit finessed for war.

The advance of technological developments outpaced the checks and balances of the law and institutions of social protection – so as to buy them or completely circumvent them in terms of controlling interest in any significant strategic point. This is not to say that money is evil – but any substitution for reality will tend to short-circuit and replace it.

I still abide and rest in my sense that quality of conscious relation is the key and that all that runs on the scarcity or lack and fear driven modelling is inevitably drawn to support the sacrifice of life in the name of saving it.

Sometimes when a death process is diagnosed or recognised – instead of adopting nocebo fatalism in compliance to ‘standard of care’, a deeper honesty of being awakens to align in Life – not fear.

The agenda of an anti life elitism is transgenerational transnational and deceitful in that it will say or do anything to protect its ‘own’. But at the same time I hold it to be deceived and so calling out the false as false extends an invitation of choice in place of compulsive compliance. To make a choice we have to know what we are choosing between and this means freedom of information and communication. Those who rest in a true appreciation have no need to fear any legitimate challenge but only guard against deceit. While a hateful agenda lacks substance and MUST shut down or subvert communication by every trick in the book.

Regardless of the issues – the alertness for the tell-tale signs of deceit is a stitch in time – because it is always easier to operate a prevention of triggered shock-reaction than to own and undo the emotional fallout of taking the bait.

There is something about all this insanity worth noting, and that is that it is insanity and as such is dysfunctional to consciousness and life and this brings about its own destruction – even as it paints itself in victory.
There is no victory over life but an illusion that makes wages in death as a way of death masking as survival.

The core principle for a future in Life is to abide and extend the Presence of Life. The use of the present as a stamping ground for a past made in anger is its obliteration such as to make the past extend continuous with the future.
This the hostage to time in which a fleeting moment grabs what it can while it has no time to really connect – operates blindly amidst the Timeless of being – in which Now is Always – and change is the unfolding of thought and perspective to the desire and acceptance of its recognition.

Having taken the bait of a shock-horror reaction and contraction into a realm of terror – the emotional fallout is such an entanglement as to only tangle the more by trying to escape. This leads to a negative sense of futility and cynicism from which comes a willingness to sacrifice others in order to save one’s ‘self’. I’m sure you know that many believe kill or be killed is the underbelly over which any civilisation is but a masking veneer. But most only accept this when they have been triggered into hate and fear – and then willingly become the sacrificial armies or target populations to those who feed upon the spoils of conflict and destruction. ‘Its the Economy, stupid!’ – (Not sure where that phrase came from – but its the stupidity of an Economy based on lack, scarcity, fear and control or usurping of power under false allegiance. I don’t see change coming from the outside in or top down – excepting as a willingness to open relationship in support of genuine needs instead of persisting in systemic denial.

We live in our times as others theirs and then our time is served and we are done with time – at least for a moment.
So while there is a giant wave poised to crash over all that lives – some part of that is the mortal condition – and yet even here – there is great wonder and beauty and moments of such kindness as to transform our appreciation of being.

I don’t thing fear and guilt are true basis to ‘wake anyone’ to our true needs – but an honest account may prove a turning point. Toxic debt

binra
binra
Apr 29, 2019 11:14 AM
Reply to  mark

@mark: You articulate many current socio-political issues well – but the Malthusian Message is a core predicate for an anti-life elitism who hold their lives sacred by sacrificing others.

The issues of quantity disregard quality – as if life can be and is a closed system.
This is the core blindness to any who seek to possess and control (life).

Discernment of quality (as life) is denied by the induction to fear and division.

There are relationships where a quantitative shift has a qualitative effect – but the attempt to force this brings a hollowness of being into which fear-thinking finds fertile support as the driver of ‘self-development’ set OVER life, others and world.

The nature of our social organisation and relationship with our world (or lack thereof) is the qualitative block to any re-alignment of energies and exchange – at all levels of our being human – and not as defined and confined to marketising and weaponising outcomes.

The pattern of predicting disaster and invoking and enacting sacrifice to avert (what exists as a modelling in the conditioned mind), is both Chickin Lickin and Foxy Loxy – who are a team act for the evasion or denial of wisdom under the mask of searching for Owlsy.

The model or template or blueprint or predicate is not just wrong – it is being lived in as IF reality. Garbage in; garbage out.

Hatred of humanity os a core export of the NWO – and humans as virus to be eradicated is its message. Consider a moment that The Duke of Edinburgh is already a virus – already infecting the collective mind and already active in bringing broad spectrum biocidal destruction. Nothing personal here – so much as what he is willing to let his personage be used for.

I have seen him declare a public wish to reincarnate as a deadly virus in order to reduce the population at the time it was shown on tv. I have also seen the recording on youtube since but I cannot find it there now – and I note the very fact is ‘debunked’ as a product of conspiracist websites!

WHO is to determine the wheat from the chaff? (If mandatory vax rolls out as planned that may be read as a statement – not a question – but who is behind W.H.O?

The wish to personally become and align under the judgement of good and evil, usurps the mind of discernment of true from false. The usurping of a true being is the attempt to DO it as a manual override in mimicry of coercive and deceptive replacement for Life.

Scarcity and lack is the fear-induction to predation upon others like yourself – however it is masked. That we have this within our mind is simply observable – but that scarcity is manufactured and managed by design is a ‘predator class’ or parasitic throwback to ancient hate.

You cant let people bring forth their own creative solutions AND remain in control OVER them.
Any part of the System is held ‘too big to fail’ means invested interests are protected against change and loss – excepting to ratchet up control – which increased disorder – because it isn’t truly balancing needs but denying them.

Denials need to be sees AS deceits – and not propagated as acceptable currency of worth or else all that is worthy is sacrificed to a denial agenda.

harry stotle
harry stotle
Apr 28, 2019 5:13 PM

To all of this must be added 2 essential economic tools;

[1] the routine use of violence either in the form of sanctions which inflict serious harms (see Gaza, Venezuela, Iran, N Korea, etc) or military force (see Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc) so as to achieve certain economic ends, such as resource aquisition, or business deals that favour the aggressor rather than the indiginous population.

[2] a corporate media which lies endlessly about how and why certain events unfold – if real journalists do highlight investigative failings the corporate media will be at the forefront of smearing dissenting opinions (see murder of JFK, 9/11, WMD, Julian Assange, etc).
In this respect the media plays an essential role in sanitising the criminality at the heart of economic culture.

binra
binra
Apr 28, 2019 5:25 PM
Reply to  harry stotle

Yes – control of the Media is the first thing a Coup seeks to capture.

Mind control is de facto in place.

But where you look for truth is up to you.

binra
binra
Apr 28, 2019 5:00 PM

This article is well considered and seeks to identify patterns and purposes in our political social world.
Do all such end up with moral reprobations that those who are active in denying others care not a jot for – unless enough influence grew to oblige them to change their camouflage so as to work through a front of moral imperatives.

The judgement ‘more’ and ‘less’ splits things off from their Source.
Rejection is the cause of all pain.

When we fear that we are less than we are – what we now think you are drives us to seek to become ‘more’ than we are. What we are – in truth – is sacrificed to more or less as if it is all or nothing.

In the lure of a self inflation in the images and forms of ‘more’ is the experience of the rebellion against wholeness as a defence against extinction into the ‘Fall’ or Separation – and as at the hand of another – who may reflect your own rejection back to you and expose the sense of lack hidden under the assertions of self-possession. And so must be denied, stamped out.

The ‘me’ of the separative or segregative self-sense is fundamentally lack driven rather than wholeness inspired. Assertive as the very thing it accuses in others. Its nature is the usurping of life’s function as a manual override or matrix of meanings overlaid upon a Life that would go forth and multiply (create) of its original nature – but meets the stamp of denial and rejection under rationalisations that are summoned or invoked to justify and normalise insanity as the lesser evil.

The idea of making or developing a system by which to check evils becomes the giving over of a global system of control – or subjugation – to a hidden evil that we know not that we do – because resisting evil is what we believe makes us right – or at least the lesser evil. So while human law originates as an explication in form for the holding of order and the regaining of a lost wholeness – all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will never put Humpty together again.

As I see it each has to find active willingness to look within or self-honesty – as to ‘where they are coming from – or what they are accepting as true. Yet the very structure of our mind and of our language has been predicated on maintaining obfuscation – and by all and every means available.

This is to encounter impossible odds, adversity and obstruction or deterrent specific to your own particular proclivities – such as to crush any thought of escape. And so aligning in an adaptation to ‘power’ for protection as conditions demanding sacrifice.

I read ‘all men are born equal’ and this is simply untrue. But that all are created equal is of a different meaning – because Mind creates the extension of Itself as an integrality to the whole.
Our idea of mind is a usurpation. Our definition of self and mind is an obfuscation. A trained or conditioned slave needs no chain – and the arts of deceit have developed the induction of a mind in which slavery is defended against freedom – as if slavery is freedom – and war is peace. However it is not presents so starkly – but as a contract or promise of power and protection that disempowers and makes vulnerable and dependent.

We cannot change or release or repent of anything that our mind has put outside by denying in our self.
Denials are always active but out of sight does not mean out of mind – so much as a mind separated out from what we fear or hate to face.

That the negative is a driving force can drive an Economy as a lifetime – but is tyrannous by nature.
And no matter what glimpses or portents of glory or victory may induce further investment or indeed sacrifice – it is a road to nowhere.

Globalisation is a larger sense of Here. Now is no longer such a provincial framing. But if a self-destructive lack-driven denial of self and reality is given global dominion by the active (but default) sacrifice to an Insanity – then what is denied MUST rise in rage if rising only meets the stamping boot of rejection and denial through obfuscating narrative evasion.

However if the rising desire is for the embrace of Life on Earth – and not in sacrifice to a god of vengeance – then there is the possibility of recognition across otherwise impossible polarised identities.

How ‘here and now’ is our current embrace? Because unless we live from what we want to arrive in or grow in appreciation and shared endeavour – we cannot recognise it even if given us – because it will be seen more than we can accept worthiness of, or less than a sense of grievance and lack demands.

The patterning of a split mind unfolds or evolves mechanically or as a logical outcome of self conflicting contradictions.
Noticing this in our own thought is the way we shift our thinking and act from a sense of shared existence – as the giving and receiving. You can learn to acknowledge the living instead of using them as props for a personal sense of judgement. This is allowing qualities into communication that quantised control mind doesn’t and cannot see.
And it isn’t waiting for Life to happen, or conditions to line up, in order to extend our presence within a field of relation – rather than assert a ‘getting’ in a misbegotten world!

Perhaps living from an integrity of being is to leave what we know in an act of a true relationship – but no one can make the temporal, permanent – excepting to uphold the conviction and extend the sentence under ever diminishing returns.

Fair dinkum
Fair dinkum
Apr 28, 2019 2:56 PM

It’s all about the zeros.
They can never get enough.
The tragic irony of course is that we’re approaching the ultimate zero.
A world WITHOUT us.

MichaelK
MichaelK
Apr 28, 2019 1:58 PM

I spent years studying economics, trying desparately to hide my smirk. So much time spent on a set of theories and dogmas that seemed so divorced from observable reality that it actually hurt; and that was before we looked at how they even defied their own arguments and logic. It felt so isolated being a heretic surrounde by Jesuit zealots.

Joe
Joe
Apr 28, 2019 1:04 PM

Frank Lee is unknown to me, but I will search for more of his work.

George Ebers
George Ebers
Apr 28, 2019 12:58 PM

The deeply rooted “screw thy neighbour” good and hard theory of life. And erm – “greatness”.