The Joy of Living

The planet can sustain all life on it yet the world is in crisis on every front. There are environmental, social and political problems all underpinned by an economic system that skews the distribution of wealth toward the already wealthy while depriving the majority. At the root of all the economic problems is profit or perceived lack thereof. Surely, we can figure out a system to replace the clearly broken present system. So entrenched is the belief in the current capitalist system that most people cannot even conceive that there could be an alternative. Perhaps the silver lining to is recession could be that people will be, for the first time, obliged to examine their assumptions and stretch imaginations for a different approach. Reforms put forward under the banner of “new alternative economics” attempt to address one aspect or other of the problem but do not alter the system. Tinkering around the edges is not enough to bring about a transformation of people’s relationship to the environment and to each other. Piecemeal reforms, fail to go to the heart of capitalism as a system.

At one time people lived in a communalised state of coexistence with Nature’s various ecosystems. It was self-regulating. Circumstance changed when some people around the world became dependent on farming, and this gradually introduced the concept of private property. Nevertheless, that system, based on private property was only regionally unsustainable while the rest of the planet was unaffected. Under capitalism the use of fossil fuels has has allowed a potential fatal runaway growth in the exploitation of the planet, endangering the existence of humanity and of all life on the planet. Capitalism is not only in the process of destroying the world. Our greatest need today is that of survival if not of our children, but definitely for our grandchildren.

CLICK READ MORE FOR FULL POST

 With global capitalism, international binding laws are drafted to facilitate the economic system to functions at maximum efficiency, i.e. an economy that competitively waste the least amount of its wealth on the labour to achieve the highest financial reward for investors. To reduce that cost to be competitive, the system must get more per wage unit paid. There’re many ways of achieving that is to pay workers less. Today it’s also achieved by enticing or forcing workers to compete for jobs, by lowering wage demands. But more significant is the increasing dependence on low-priced fossil fuel particularly coal and oil, the primary sources of energy. 

With the global human population now at roughly 7.2 billion, an estimated one billion people are hungry and malnourished, and millions are food-insecure. However, 70 percent of all of the world's agricultural land is used in the appallingly inefficient processes needed to produce animal products – products that are consumed primarily in affluent countries as well as by growing numbers of middle-income consumers in parts of the world that are adopting a more Western diet. Well over half of the grain produced in the United States, and almost 40 percent of world grain, is used as feed for horribly confined animals on factory farms. The grain misused in the production of animal products in the United States alone, if produced for human consumption, could feed nearly 800 million people a year.

Nonetheless, agribusiness and the retail food industry are striving to double the consumption of animal products globally by midcentury. To that end, dwindling vital resources such as fresh water, healthy topsoil and fossil fuel, all essential for supporting a rapidly growing world population, are being massively squandered in the production of meat, dairy and eggs. One study by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization suggested that raising animals for food, including production, transportation and refrigeration, is responsible for 18 percent of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions – while scientists associated with the World Bank put the figure closer to 51 percent.

Some environmental people today are more aware of the impact of our diet, particularly of the abuses of factory farms, and are opting to consume local, organic and "free-range" animal products. But the local production of animal products still uses more energy and emits more greenhouse gases than relying on plant-based foods, even those that might need to be transported long distances. While the better-off can afford the more expensive local items and thus avoid eating products from animals plied with chemical pesticides, antibiotics and growth hormones, the vast majority of people will continue to eat the cheapest fare that industrial agriculture can cruelly produce.

Throughout the history of humankind, except in herding cultures, 70%-plus of all calories consumed have been from plant based foods. The caveman slaying the mammoth for food is not an accurate reflection of most early human experience. In most of the so called hunter-gatherer groups of the past and present at least 2/3 of all food consumed was/is plant based food. Humans are omnivorous. We can draw nutrition from many kinds of food. However, animal products harm us in countless ways while providing us with some nutrition.  It just doesn't make sense to keep destroying our planet and our own health.

Capitalists’ sole responsibility is to make a profit, speculate on perturbations to the system like disasters, weather events and crop failures which affect supply and demand and that creates  strife and cut-throat competition. To replace the irrational, inequitable and inefficient monetary economic system which prevails, a new rational, self-regulating system is necessary to meet current and projected global realities. The type of economic growth we have experienced over the past 200 years cannot continue because it cannot be further supported by our natural environment. The evidence clearly shows that atmospheric temperatures are rising, nature is failing to sustain many of the services that are critical to human life, and the widespread exploitation of nature is sharply reducing the biodiversity that safeguards our existence. There is no longer any doubt that ‘growth' (by which we mean the massive use of carbon energy) is the cause of this environmental degradation. And yet, politicians, business, and call for ‘restoring growth' as quickly as possible. Their economic models assume all economic activity passes through the market system. Socialists argue for a completely new economic model where an improved quality of life will be promoted and which requires a new form of social technology that will enable humans to reorganize the way they go about living and interacting with their natural environment while improving social interaction. It is a goal to change human society. It refuses to be satisfied with making adjustments to our current system.

The capitalist system has created a powerful group of wealthy economic interests that have the economic and political power to resist change, but the mere challenge of change should not discourage us. Capitalism also completely reordered the way we live and interact and continues to bring very costly changes to our lives, so it is not really a matter of choosing between a presumed current stability and some unknown ideal. As Marxists, we in the Socialist Party, must make difficult long-run decisions unfortunately without the help of complete information or perfect models. We will have to develop dynamic planning that can be adjusted as the uncertain future evolves. we will have to make many more decisions in the future; there is no ‘big bang' process here for which we only have to specify the starting point from which everything will follow automatically. The fact is that today's decisions are based on only partial understanding about how things will work out, and whatever we choose, we may not get things exactly right. We are humble enough to confess we may even find that our initial decisions were very wrong. Therefore, that is why we continually call for a more democratic and participatory political system than we have in our current capitalist-controlled society.

Democracy is a word little understood. We tend to apply the word indiscriminately. When we live in a democracy we can trust our government to act in our best interests because we believe we are the government. When we are told we live in a democracy we believe so because we want to. It is disturbing to learn that in fact our government was not set up to be a democracy but an oligarchy. When one person rules, the government is an autocracy. When a few people rule that government is known as an oligarchy or plutocracy. When all the citizens govern, the government is a democracy. Democracy is a word of Greek origin. Demos means people. Kratos means power. Democracy means people power, a form of government in which the citizens govern themselves. There is no one to speak for them. They speak for themselves. Obviously, this is not the case in the “democratic” countries of the world. Real democracy has few supporters within the rich and powerful elite for there is great fear of “mobocracy.” The masses will take over and crush them. It is safe to leave things as they are. Those in charge know what they are doing. Let’s leave the business of government to the professionals. The people who run the show — the banksters, the oil magnates, the captains of the industry, those who profit from war — have no purpose in mind other than the acquisition of ever greater wealth and power at the expense of the rest of us. We should come to accept the fact that we do not now and never have lived in a true democracy.

We need to come up with an alternative. It is often argued that democracy is suited to small city-states and that it is too cumbersome for today’s nation-state. The simple and obvious answer is to break the large nation-state into small, manageable units, establish thousands of local assemblies that debate the issues and then gather the votes together. An orthodox Marxist cannot be orthodox unless he or she continually questions even the truths already acquired, including the words of Marx himself. The Socialist Party position is that under a democratic regime the workers would be able to achieve their aims by peaceful means, providing that capitalism did not itself destroy that democratic legality without which there could be no question of the successful adoption of peaceful means.