As people came to expect ever growing material affluence, they handed over control, incrementally, of their lives, of their governments, to the agents of wealth production—corporations. As resource and energy constraints began to inhibit growth, one final organizational “efficiency” was possible: To consolidate all existent national based political economies into a global one—globalization. This allowed for increased efficiencies of scale. This is because the amount of emergence possible for a single, large, tightly integrated system is greater than the sum of the emergence of multiple regional (national) systems which are tightly coupled internally but loosely coupled to one another.
At this point, which is where humanity finds itself today, several problems are apparent:
1) Corporations exist to funnel wealth not to the entire political economy, but to the few who own their stock, and/or those who direct their activities—the “corporate elite.”
2) As this is not in the interest of the majority of the people, government (a thing “of the people”) must be subverted by these corporations in order to prevent interference with the wealth transfer to the corporate elite.
3) Once power over government is attained it must be used to suppress, or buy out, smaller rival corporations, and innovative new start-up corporations, as these threaten to stop the wealth transfer to the now established corporate elites. Capitalism’s inherent dynamics cause the demise of the so-called “free market.”
4) Religion must be used to keep the majority of citizens who have been disempowered under control. Nationalism can be used as well to motivate subjects in various parts of the now global corporate Empire to hate and fear each other. This is simply “divide and rule” in its modern guise. National borders are also useful to wealth extraction because capital can move anywhere planet-wide, while labor is geographically constrained by their national borders. This leads to a race to the bottom as workers confined to different countries compete to attract capital to provide them with jobs. Ever lower wages are the inevitable result of this asymmetry in the mobility of capital and labor.
If this were the sum of our difficulties, the solution would be clear enough: Revolution to regain human control over our political economy from our corporate masters. However, things are far worse than this:
1) The existing world political economy is “hard-wired” for endless growth, as much as possible, as rapidly as possible. It incorporates 15th century assumptions about the limitlessness of nature, and about the inability of human actions to have any significant consequences upon nature.
2) Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, wealth production has been based upon ever-growing exploitation of hydrocarbon energy. Our world corporate political economy is based upon the assumption that these hydrocarbon resources are effectively limitless.
But all of the above assumptions are false.1) Nature is now fully exploited. These are no new lands to conquer and exploit.
2) Our wealth generating activities are overwhelming the self-regulating capabilities of our biosphere. This is occurring very rapidly. Effective breakdown of these regulatory systems leading to climate chaos, flooding, drought, famine, disease and pestilence, is already underway and is accelerating.
3) We have used about half of the oil that is available to us. Peaks in coal and natural gas are not far away. No new technology exists to replace oil—not biofuels, hydrogen, or nuclear fission—nothing. And we are out of time. Demand for energy is increasing rapidly, supply must soon decrease. An economy built on endless growth must then collapse as growth becomes impossible due to energy constraints.
Overall, we are trapped within a political and economic system which is global in its extent, and that is hard-wired to accelerate all of us into cataclysmic chaos in the near future. We do not control this system any longer. Ultimately, no one now controls it. It cannot be “fixed” and it cannot be stopped. This means that revolution—where this means the violent or non-violent—overthrow of an existing government, and its replacement by new leadership, is insufficient. We must replace one entire organizational paradigm of humanity with another. We must do so quickly, else we shall probably perish, along with most of humanity, and indeed most of our biosphere.
How to accomplish this task? Looking back across history, let’s recall that as groups of people accomplished ever greater integration into an all-embracing system, the total resources and capabilities of their political economy increased commensurately. Creation of gods facilitated this end, beginning ten or so millennia ago.
Several millennia ago, monotheism was conceived. It demonstrated even greater systemic organizing properties—more emergence—than did polytheism. Several centuries ago, the power of applied human reason was integrated into the resulting political-economic organizational systems of Europe’s Imperial nations. Powered by hydrocarbon energy beginning in the late 1700’s, this system swept the planet. Unnoticed by most, the resulting human system was progressively hijacked by non-human profit maximizing entities—the corporations. Still, overall systemic emergent properties grew throughout this process.
The more tightly coupled human systems are, the more efficient they are at producing emergence—the basis of all wealth and comfort. History has demonstrated this. The application of human reason to consciously develop and direct our political and economic system was potentially a good thing leading to freedom from want for all.
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