- \n
- liberal ethics, prescribing that bogus rights trump flesh and blood goods,<\/li>\n
- jurisprudence setting property rights in stone,<\/li>\n
- irresponsible freedom, and<\/li>\n
- orthodox economics are, all four of them, conceptually based on mythologies immune to revision in the light of experience and evidence.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
They became dominant because of the military victories of the stronger (for examples, the New Model Army of Oliver Cromwell, the parliamentary army led by William of Orange, and the superior military technologies deployed by the East India Company in India, by the British and French in the opium wars against China, by the American commodore Perry to open Japan to foreign trade, and generally by Europeans and North Americans on all continents).<\/p>\n
Gandhi, of course, and peace philosophy generally, take a different stance, claiming that the power of military force has been greatly overestimated, while the power of truth has been greatly underestimated.<\/p>\n
Today there is a new reason to believe that truth has a chance and that the deathward course of history can be reversed. It is that the existing world economy no longer serves anybody\u2019s interests. Continuing on the path of social disintegration and ecocide that we are now on does not serve the interests of even one human being, no matter how rich that human being may be. No not one. We can now speak of unbounded organization, aligning across sectors for the common good, doing what works for the good of all without being partisans of one class against another class, while achieving what the partisans of the working class have always wanted. All classes have the same interest\u2014namely survival in harmony with nature in a society with a high degree of equality. A dignity economy.\u00a0 As Martin Luther King Jr. put it, a world house where the human family lives in beloved communities.<\/p>\n
Today, nothing would better serve the true interests of the rich than an end to poverty.<\/p>\n
Yesterday\u00b4s burning question of the exploitation of the surplus value produced by labour and appropriated by capital addressed a problem J.T. \u00a0Kumarappa (\u201cGandhi\u00b4s economist\u201d) set out to aufheben <\/em>(solve and include in a higher synthesis. \u00a0Kumarappa framed the progress or regress of economics in terms of moral development or moral decay.\u00a0 Thus, he transcended both Marx\u00b4s critique of the private appropriation of the social product and Rostow\u00b4s Stages of Economic Growth. <\/em>But today the stealing from labour of what it produces \u2013a concept ultimately derived from John Locke\u00b4s concept of property, which in turn was part of European modernity\u00b4s rejection of Europe\u00b4s own traditional communitarian ideals– is ceasing to be a question. Labour is ceasing to be the main factor of production. \u00a0Today when investors want to increase productivity and so increase production, they invest in technology and dismiss redundant employees. \u00a0\u00a0<\/em>The fate of the mine workers of South Africa is an emblematic example.<\/p>\n
The burning question is now, who will get the benefit of advanced technology? \u00a0A care ethic or a solidarity ethic answers: \u00a0everyone, including the other species that share the planet with us. Psychology, epidemiology, and other sciences are learning that the privileged classes would be healthier and more secure in a more equal and more caring economy.\u00a0 Everybody would be happier in the \u201cgood society\u201d as Abraham Maslow conceived it, where basic security would lead to Erik Erikson\u00b4s basic trust for people of all ages.<\/p>\n
Capitalism, conceived as domination by an overwhelming need to create favourable conditions for capital accumulation whatever might be the social and ecological costs, is not in anybody\u2019s interest. Capitalism conceived as freedom to engage in business, where freedom itself is conceived as responsibility and business itself is conceived as a social institution intended to serve society, can be in everybody\u00b4s interest.<\/p>\n
Thus reforming capitalism by redefinition would grant the point Gandhi made when he pointed out to his dear friend Nehru that if we are doomed to fail in achieving the moral reform of people in business, we would in all likelihood \u00a0also be doomed to fail in achieving the moral reform of people in politics.\u00a0 It would acknowledge the research findings of the neoliberal economist Gary Becker showing that persons in the public sector who in principle are serving the public often are no less self-interested than people in the private sector.\u00a0 \u00a0And it would grant (with some reservations) Fredrich von Hayek\u00b4s epistemological\u00a0 point: the world is too complex for public planning to be a substitute for the countless decisions private actors make every day managing limited pieces of the global economy. \u00a0\u00a0It would call for the cooperation of all sectors, private, civic, and public for the common good<\/p>\n
Those who, like Gandhi himself, prefer the word \u201csocialism\u201d to the word \u201ccapitalism\u201d would be entitled to \u00a0call redefined capitalism socialism (to praise it, not to condemn it)\u00a0 Those who find that both capitalism and socialism are obsolete words that can safely be dropped from today\u00b4s vocabularies would get a free pass.<\/p>\n
There is a precedent for allowing such linguistic flexibility\u2014allowing the same thing to be called either capitalism or socialism– in the varying descriptions of the Swedish Model back in the days when it was a great success.\u00a0 Partisans of capitalism took Sweden to be proof that capitalism works, sometimes calling it \u201cmature capitalism.\u201d \u00a0Partisans of socialism like Gunnar and Ava Myrdal and their friends Jawaharlal and Kamala Nehru, viewed Sweden as an early pioneer of the shared prosperity that was destined to be all of humanity\u00b4s social democratic future.<\/p>\n
Whatever you call it, there is a pressing necessity is to create the surpluses that will make it possible to achieve shared and sustainable dignified livelihoods for all, and then to transfer surpluses from where they are generated \u2013the huge surpluses of Apple, Google, and Facebook are samples of more to come\u2014to where they are needed.\u00a0 The common good requires, as a first social priority inseparable from first ecological priorities, the social integration of the excluded.\u00a0 It requires welcoming the excluded \u2013the people walking barefoot from Honduras to the Mexican border, and the people crossing the Mediterranean in leaky boats are samples of more to come.\u00a0 Whatever you call it, organizing human life to make it sustainable will require sharing prosperity with tomorrow\u00b4s majorities who will be redundant in the labour market.\u00a0 But the contemporary imperative to produce enough to meet everyone\u00b4s needs is subject to contemporary constraints.<\/em><\/p>\n
A key constraint is that high tech must not crowd out but rather supplement human scale agriculture and industry: for examples urban agriculture on vacant city lots and rooftops, permaculture, home-grown fruits and vegetables, the rice farmers of Bali.\u00a0 \u00a0The purpose is to feed everybody, yes, but it is to feed the soul as well as the body. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Biophilia (\u201cthe urge to affiliate with other forms of life\u201d \u2013E.O. Wilson) is a part of human nature that will not be satisfied by a nutritionally adequate diet produced by distant industrial processes replacing conventional agriculture. \u00a0Another constraint is a sine qua non<\/em>: the sustainable human institutions of the future must resolve the deadly conflict between the economic necessity of growth and the ecological necessity to reverse consuming every year more resources than the earth can renew.<\/p>\n
Dare I say that this requires stabilizing or reversing the sheer numbers of people on the planet?<\/p>\n
At this point, where I mention the need for liberation from \u201cthe economic necessity of growth\u201d in order to \u201creverse consuming every year more resources than the earth can renew\u201d I am tempted to change my answer to my initial question \u201cIs it still possible to reverse humanity\u2019s march toward self-destruction?\u201d <\/em>from yes to no.\u00a0 Why? Because as we speak most governments are fighting the economic impact of Covid by promoting growth.\u00a0\u00a0 They try to keep the economy going and growing by funding consumption, by keeping banks solvent, and by subsidizing business.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0All is done, ostensibly at least, to get people back to work as soon as possible.\u00a0 After the crisis the same mental model will be employed to try to raise growth rates that in most of the world were already lagging before Covid, attempting to bring down the numbers of those who were even then rejected by the labour market.<\/p>\n
Why does this policy response of governments to crises tempt me to change my answer from yes to no?\u00a0 Because there is no possible way to create consumer demand sufficient to bring into existence employers who will find it profitable to hire everyone in the world who needs a job, and to pay them good wages out of the revenue derived from the sale of the products the new hires contribute to making.\u00a0 \u00a0Simplifying, the wage funds produced by sales of the products made by the wage-earners cannot possibly fund dignified livelihoods for everyone.\u00a0 If we are ever going to be a human family living in a world house, some of the sisters and brothers doing useful work will have to be paid by tapping profits and rents.<\/p>\n
Mother Teresa was literally telling the truth when she said, \u201cPoverty will end when we learn to share with the poor.\u201d\u00a0 But since (as witnesses testify) she would run from the room when the other nuns began to talk about social structure, it would appear that she did not understand the full meaning of her words.\u00a0 In their full meaning, they mean that if the poor ever become not poor, it will be for the same reason that the rich are not poor now.\u00a0 It will be because surpluses will be channelled their way.\u00a0 Their work can be funded by income flows derived from assets like, to give just two examples, real estate and shares in corporations.\u00a0 And it is not necessary for tomorrow\u00b4s poor to imitate yesterday\u00b4s idle rich by also living without working, living on handouts.\u00a0 The ex-poor can enjoy the dignity and self-respect of people who do useful and intrinsically valuable work.\u00a0 Their dignity can come from making contributions to the common good that markets left to themselves do not reward with wages. \u00a0Examples would be work that nurses our poisoned and sick biosphere back to health; and, as King suggested, work providing loving care for people who, for whatever reason, need loving care and are not getting it.<\/p>\n
I wish I did not have to say the following, and I will happily stand corrected if I am mistaken: To reverse humanity\u00b4s march to self-destruction, we must do everything Greta Thunberg says we must do, and we must do it in ways that avoid short term collapse when the old way ceases to exist, and the new way does not yet exist.\u00a0 Immanuel Kant\u00b4s categorical imperative, \u2018So act so that everybody acting as you act is a logical possibility\u2019<\/em> (and not a logical impossibility, like \u2013to use Kant\u00b4s favourite example\u2014a world where there are debts but nobody ever pays them) must be replaced.\u00a0 It must be replaced by a new categorical imperative: So act so that if everybody acted as you act, life on earth would become sustainable.\u00a0 Is anybody but Greta seriously contemplating doing this?<\/p>\n
None of this is impossible from a technical point of view.\u00a0 Gandhi\u00b4s affirmation that there is enough for everyone\u00b4s needs but not enough for everyone\u00b4s greed is true today in spades.\u00a0 We still have a chance.\u00a0 The more people understand why the odds are against us, the more our chances improve.<\/p>\n
At this moment in history, in spite of the odds, we have a chance to put ideals of truth and solidarity into practice quickly on a massive scale. Because we are living a mega crisis so intense and so terrifying that even the blind can see the system is not working.\u00a0 Because honesty and caring do work.\u00a0 Because in principle we have nobody against us. We are only opposed by people who do not understand. Yet.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>Prof. Howard Richards is a member of the\u00a0TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/strong><\/a>. He <\/em>is a philosopher\u00a0of social science <\/em>and<\/em> Research Professor of Philosophy at <\/em>Earlham College, Richmond<\/em>, Indiana<\/em>, USA<\/em>.\u00a0He was educated at Redlands High School in California, Yale, Stanford, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Toronto, Harvard and Oxford. He currently teaches in the University of Cape Town`s EMBA programme.\u00a0His books include:\u00a0<\/em>The Evaluation of Cultural Action; Letters from Quebec; Understanding the Global Economy; The Dilemmas of Social Democracies; Gandhi and the Future of Economics; Rethinking Thinking; Unbounded Organizing in Community;\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0The Nurturing of Time Future.\u00a0His new book, written with the assistance of Gavin Andersson, <\/em>Economic Theory and Community Development: Why Putting Community First Is Essential for Survival, is scheduled to be published in July of 2021.<\/em> howardri@earlham.edu<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"YES! Today the conflicts of interest that created today\u00b4s unsustainable world no longer exist. NO! Most governments are fighting the economic impact of Covid by promoting growth through funding consumption, keeping banks solvent, and subsidizing business–to get people back to work. After the crisis, the same mental model will be employed to raise growth rates that in most of the world were already lagging before Covid, to bring down the numbers of those who were even then rejected by the labour market.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1982,354,2653,984,658,1983,329,1594],"class_list":["post-194956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial","tag-economic-crisis","tag-economics","tag-growth","tag-paradigm-change","tag-peace-economics","tag-political-economy","tag-resources","tag-war-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=194956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194956\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=194956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=194956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=194956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/a>Prof. Howard Richards is a member of the\u00a0