Disclaimer: Some readers will find my next two columns dreamy. I just mean to make people think alternatives. The world does not have to ride on the neo-liberal capitalist train towards certain destruction.
The Orange Man is riding the American Empire’s horse for a fall. Trump’s unprovoked attack on Iran and his threat of annihilating a whole civilization have made that fall irreversible. That could give rise to a possible new world order. We might even be already feeling its birth pangs.
Although painful, the birth of a new world order would be a welcome development. The US is expected to no longer play a lead role. Its false pretense of holding the world together mostly with its military might has just been exposed as, in fact, a threat to earth’s existence. Trump has shown that the wealthy neo-liberal capitalist elite are willing to sacrifice anything and everything on the altar of wealth and power.
Mankind has to learn a lesson from this dreadful historical moment and take the opportunity to find a more man-and-earth-friendly way of harnessing the earth’s resources. What is happening demonstrates that the production of war materials is so profitable that capitalists (of the military-industrial complex) are willing to displace everybody and even destroy the world for it. A new world order is needed where no nation possesses such arrogance of power as to tell Pope Leo that “America has the military power to do whatever it wants to the world.”
The world cannot survive neo-liberal capitalism. This extreme mode of capitalism works for infinite growth in profits as driven purely by amoral market forces. Infinite profit growth depends on infinite sales growth, which in turn depends on infinite growth in production. But far from being infinite, the earth’s resources are finite. The earth is totally consumable, like one can eat up a whole cake. If we are smart, we must shift to a system that exploits the earth’s resources to provide all peoples with what they need to live a fully human life but without killing their natural ability to regenerate.
With neo-liberal capitalism owners alone enjoy the profits. Non-owners are left to work as laborers who survive on wages determined unilaterally by owners. Professionals attend mostly to the needs of owners and managers who alone can afford their services. Ordinary workers have to depend on government help that is often slow and marginal because capitalists or their proxies are running governments.
While owners alone enjoy the profits, consumers pay for the cost of production and sales. Prices cover all the costs of producing, selling, advertising, delivering the goods and the desired profits? In neo-liberal capitalism, profit is individual (to the owner or owners only), but the cost is social, paid for by consumers.
Because of this, if you cannot afford the price of goods, then your survival is under threat. This is true for individuals and for nations. We need a system that respects the limited resources of the earth and the right to life, justice and freedom of everyman. It would, however, be the understatement of the century to say that it’s not going to be easy to shift to that system. But then, do we really have a choice?
Next Wednesday, the alternatives.