Extinction Rebellion
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Allow me explain my position. I come from a scientific background, and therefore do not write anything that is not backed by the current scientific position. When I write my own opinion I specifically state so. I respect everyone writing here (we wouldn’t even be here if we were not concerned about the future of our society), and I would ask everyone to respect me, in the way that if you disagree, please provide some references, otherwise this is nothing more than demagoguery.
No, I do not suggest we need to murder anyone, nor do I say that we need to discriminate based on race or nationality, and there is nothing in my text that would even hint at that.
I do however insist that current understanding of ecological state of our planet in the scientific community clearly is that overpopulation is at the center of the climate crisis, along with the growth model of our economic system. (https://www.ecologicalcitizen.net/pdfs/v01n2-11.pdf ; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3987379/ ;Pachauri RK, Mayer L and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2015)).
I understand that it may be difficult to accept it, but you may as well say that you do not accept the law of gravity. This is too bad, but if we want to succeed we need to base our discussion on evidence, not on what we want there to be. Alan, of course I generally agree with you, there can be no doubt about it. Let me therefore explain my statements one more time, based on the best available scientific evidence to date. No, carrying capacity is not a flexible elastic definition. First of all, definitions shouldn’t be flexible to begin with, then they become useless. But if you mean that it’s a flexible notion, then I would still say: no, it is not, it is calculated based on physiological needs of human beings and availability of particular resources. Biology in this sense is not fuzzy at all, it clearly states how much of what we need to consume to survive, and the scientific consensus at the moment is that we are consuming more than is sustainable. What is elastic is how long we can abuse the planet this way, how much the use of resources will go up/down with the change from capitalism to socialism (and it’s not a given that it will go down, as we still have billions of people starving in failing states “thanks” to capitalism). For example, consumption of meat and water is increasing more rapidly than the population at the moment (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3987379/), so yes, in this sense it is flexible and elastic, but this argues rather not in our favor.
One more time, when I say peak “this and that” I am not just lightly throwing into the discussion random catchy phrases. I have spent the last several years reading scientific literature on this topic. So, if you are interested in learning more, please write to me, and I will give you titles of books and articles (e.g. these are good to start with: https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319478142 ; https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319263731 ; https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800910005021)
If however you disagree, please be kind enough to point me in the right direction of literature supporting your points of view.
Just to briefly comment on Alan’s “Liebig’s Law of the Minimum”: I am not sure how exactly it is relevant to the point, it may actually prove the opposite of what you said, as the law states that “The availability of the most abundant nutrient in the soil is only as good as the availability of the least abundant nutrient in the soil.” in its application to biology. Therefore, the weakest link will determine the growth of the whole system. If we need phosphorus for plants to grow (and we do), we cannot replace this nutrient with absolutely anything else, and price has nothing to do with it, pure physical availability. At the moment world agriculture heavily relies on mined phosphorus (and mining currently is impossible without fossil fuels), and this is a finite resource. Feeding 8+ billion people without external source of phosphorus indefinitely is impossible. Replacing it is impossible, you need to make DNA and ATP from something. Once again, I am not suggesting murder here, the current scientific consensus on the best course of action is to stop population increase asap and slow but steady decrease until at least 4 billion (decrease due to natural causes, of course). The best known way to do this is providing education to women.
There is a methodological problem here. which the quoted statistics don’t take into account Currently, the Earth’s 8 billion people are living in a capitalist society much of whose use of resources has nothing to do with feeding, clothing, housing, etc the population but is used for capitalism’s huge superstructure of buying and selling and preparations for war. If this waste were eliminated, as it would be in a socialist society, then the impact of a population of 8 million (or more) would be far less. Logically, then, any overuse of the Earth’s resources should be attributed to the existence of capitalism not to the number of people. To deal with it, the answer would be to get rid of capitalism not reduce the population.
I wouldn’t be so sure about this. “..almost half the world’s population — 3.4 billion people — still struggles to meet basic needs, the World Bank said.” (https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2018/10/17/nearly-half-the-world-lives-on-less-than-550-a-day). Which means that in socialism at least 3 and a half billion people would consume more if we are serious about eradicating poverty. One more time, I am not suggesting that people are to blame, or that we should murder them. Please do not misunderstand. My original post’s point was that we are currently rapidly moving towards disaster, and incremental changes in policy are definitely not going to solve this problem. We need socialism urgently, so planning to sit back and slowly get more party members is not quick enough, we may be too late. XR movement people understand this. In my opinion, we should try to unite with as many other movements as possible while still maintaining our values and educating people about socialism, in order to avert disaster.
“We need socialism urgently, so planning to sit back and slowly get more party members is not quick enough, we may be too late. XR movement people understand this. “ Yes, but that begs the question by assuming that something effective and lasting can be done about climate change outside of the socialist framework of the common ownership of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources, i.e under capitalism. Which it can’t be. So the best thing we few socialists today can do is to put over the case that socialism is the only way-out and whose establishment requires majority agreement and participation. There is the most effective thing we socialists can do now.
Schekn, Let us try and deal with the issues we appear to have a disagreement so forebear with me if I return to basics and make a lengthy reply.
Our idea of socialism has always been one based on the principle from each according to ability to each according to needs. We advocate a future world where there will be plenty for all. We argue that there is sufficient resources and technology to provide such abundance. This brings us into conflict with those in the eco movement who dispute this is possible and indeed demand the opposite – degrowth and some even suggest abandoning technology itself. We are told of the apparent paradox that humanity places limitless demands upon a finite world. Our goal they say is unsustainable. In response we say that these criticisms come from a logic embedded in seeing the world through capitalist eyes and not of a socialist vision of a completely different type of economics. The scientific community fail to put the revolutionary transformation of the profit system on the agenda and continue to construct their models within todays parameters of capitalism. We, too, are seeking to establish a “steady-state economy” or “zero-growth” society, a situation where human needs are in balance with the resources needed to satisfy them and we claim that our way is the only way.
Conventional economics declare that the true state of the world is scarcity. We try to explain that abundance is not a situation where an infinite amount of every good could be produced. And scarcity is not the situation which exists in the absence of this impossible total or sheer abundance. Abundance is a situation where productive resources are sufficient to produce enough wealth to satisfy human needs, while scarcity is a situation where productive resources are insufficient for this purpose. Abundance is a relationship between supply and demand, where the former exceeds the latter. In socialism a buffer of surplus stock for any particular item, whether a consumer or a producer good, can be produced, to allow for future fluctuations in the demand for that item, and to provide an adequate response time for any necessary adjustments. Thus achieving abundance can be understood as the maintenance of an adequate buffer of stock in the light of extrapolated trends in demand. The relative abundance or scarcity of a good would be indicated by how easy or difficult it was to maintain such an adequate buffer stock in the face of a demand trend (upward, static, or downward).
Will people want too much? Humans behave differently depending upon the conditions that they live in. Human behaviour reflects society. In a society such as capitalism, people’s needs are not met and reasonable people feel insecure. People tend to acquire and hoard goods because possession provides some security. In a socialist society “too much” can only mean “more than is sustainably produced.” For socialism to be established the productive potential of society must have been developed to the point where, generally speaking, we can produce enough for all but importantly, we do not project on to socialism the insatiable consumerism of capitalism. All projections hold the same neo-Malthusian view of human fertility and consumption that in response to abundance, humans would respond with more – more children and more consumption.
As someone from a scientific background you are well aware of the saying “Garbage In Garbage Out.” When I state that carrying capacity is not fixed it is because the outcome is dependent upon the input of data and information. That explains the wide disparity in estimates from a few billion (despite the glaring fact that we have alread exceeded that low figure) to tens of billions of people. It varies with a wide range of factors. How can the estimates swing so widely? Because people in different parts of the world are consuming different amounts of those resources. Usually, American lifestyle and consumption pattern are taking as the standard but there is no reason to presume that the rest of the world need follow the American example. Also ignored is the enormous socuial waste of resources most obviously in the in armament industries but also in the superfluous commercial activites of a buying and selling exchange economy. It is ahistorical to assume carrying capacity to be static. The “carrying capacity” idea originated with Giammaria Ortes, a defrocked Camaldolese who in 1790 published a tract called ‘Reflections on the Population of Nations in Relation to National Economy.’ Here Ortes set the unalterable upper limit for the world’s human population at 3 billion. Many since have joined the ranks of those who cried wolf.
We have been adapted our environments to be more productive to serve human needs for tens of millennia. We cleared forests for grasslands and agriculture. We selected and bred plants and animals that were more nutritious, fertile and abundant. What the record strongly suggests is that carrying capacity is not fixed. It is many orders of magnitude greater than it was when we began our journey on this planet. There is no particular reason to think that we will not be able to continue to raise carrying capacity further. The idea that humans must live within the natural environmental limits of our planet denies the realities of our entire history. Humans transform ecosystems to sustain ourselves. This is what we do and have always done. Our planet’s human-carrying capacity emerges from the capabilities of our social systems and our technologies more than from any environmental limits. The conditions that sustain humanity are not natural and never have been.
In regards to population our case is that numbers don’t matter, the type of system most certainly does. The argument that the planet is ‘overpopulated’ ignores the irrationality inherent within the capitalist economic system. All population projections hold the same neo-Malthusian view of human fertility and consumption that in response to abundance, humans would respond with more – more children and more consumption. In reality, human fertility and consumption work nothing like this. Affluence and modernisation bring falling, not rising fertility rates. As our material circumstances improve, we have fewer children, not more. The explosion of human population over the past 200 years has not been a result of rising fertility rates but rather falling mortality rates, higher child survival rates due to better public health, nutrition, sanitation and public safety. I could go on and on about the myth of overpopulation and explain the potential we have in providing for a far larger global population.
My mention of Liebig’s Law of the Minimum was to draw attention to resource allocation. There always exists a number of factors required to produce a given good, one of these will be the limiting factor. That is to say, the output of this good will be restricted by the availability of the factor in question constituting the limiting factor. It makes sense from an economic point of view to economise most on those things that are scarcest and to make greatest use of those things that are abundant. Factors lying in between these two poles can be treated accordingly in relative terms. Acting as if all factors are scarce is not a very sensible approach to adopt. Effective economisation of resources requires discrimination and selection; you cannot treat every factor equally, as equally scarce for this will result in gross misallocation of resources and economic inefficiency. It will thus be possible to choose how to combine different factors for production, and whether to use one rather than another, on the basis of their relative abundance/scarcity.
In reference to peak oil an interesting aside is that America’s belligerent over-reaction to the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, a country always recognised to be under the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, was that the CIA analyists had decided that the dramatic fall in Russion oil output was because it had reached that peak oil production and the invasion was the first step in encircling the middle-east oil countries to secure its future supplies. Later they learned that it was simply a restructuring glitch of old technology being replaced by more modern machinery that caused the fall in oil.
There is a chapter on “The Myth of Overpopulation” in one of our old pamphlets here. Although the sources are dated the basic argument remains.
In the meantime humanity’s technological capacity has increased more than population. After surveying these, Aaron Bastani concludes in his recent book Fully Automated Luxury Communism:
“[T}here is more than enough technology for everyone on Earth to live healthy, happy, fulfilling lives. What stands in the way isn’t the inevitable scarcity of nature, but the artificial scarcity of market rationing and ensuring that everything, at all costs, is produced for profit.’ (p. 156)
Meanwhile, as mentioned on another thread, Zeitgeist sympathiser Lee Camp tweets:
“There are millions who need food, healthcare, therapy, shelter, & education. There’s a society that needs saving from catastrophic climate change. Yet these problems don’t get solved because our economic system seeks profit over all else & that’s sociopathic.”
Ever since Malthus’s day “overpopulation” has been used as an argument against the possibility of a better society. It’s a shame that so many ecologists and Greens have fallen for it and so shooting themselves in the foot. It’s the profit system that’s to blame, not overpopulation.
Just to add that using the search facility in our blog will produce a plethora of posts on population with stacks of stats provided.
The latest being to-day’s one on the scare-mongering by Hindu nationalists that Muslims are out-breeding Hindus, using over-population as an ideological cover.
I have lost count of the times I challenged left-leaning greens on American websites to explain a solution to over-population that does not call for eugenic policies of infanticide of the increasing numbers of babies surviving at birth and early years or the euthanasia of all those elderly people, living longer and healthier.
The scenario is that with the exception of Africa fertility rates are dropping globally and in many cases so are the populations of many counties who are feverishly trying to boost birth rates.
And even in Africa itself many countries are following that demographic trend. But if such countries as Nigeria will experience dramatic population rises, the potential for agricultural expansion has been so far untapped.
How can a country like the Congo with so much mineral wealth of vitally required strategic raw materials be so desperately poor? That is not a population problem, it is a political problem.
As you say, ALB, the actual figures may have changed from our early pamphlets but our explanations has not. Nor have they changed from the time Marx exposed Malthus’s misconceptions on population.
I am very glad this discussion has become so avid 🙂 But I am afraid we are drifting towards the straw man side here, if you know what I mean. You just assumed I was with the green “let’s all go back to the stone age” people, and started convincing me of the folly of such opinion. I am happy to announce that I am all pro-technology, so let’s leave the straw man aside and concentrate on what I did say. I wrote originally that given the population increase and the participation of this population in capitalist economical system (the current reality), the world is quickly going towards destruction. This can be and has been quantified within certain limits of precision. What would happen in times of socialism is beyond the scope of science because it would require too much speculation, we have too little data. I said that I personally would be doubtful current levels of population can be sustained, but I am not going to argue about this, again, as we do not have enough data.
Some things we do have data on, however, and I will comment on this.
“We have been adapted our environments to be more productive to serve human needs for tens of millennia. ” – no, this is incorrect. Agriculture only existed for 1 ten thousand years, not tens. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture) Therefore, changing environment to serve human needs is a relatively new development.
“It is many orders of magnitude greater than it was when we began our journey on this planet.” – no, it is not. It only grew several times due to selection, and then another several times due to use of fossil fuels (machines and fertilizers). Now that fossil fuels are coming to an end, even this modest improvement is in jeopardy.
“There is no particular reason to think that we will not be able to continue to raise carrying capacity further.” – yes there are reasons to believe that. When you look at the curves of yield improvements, you see that most cultivars have already reached their limits, only corn and a few others are still growing.
“The idea that humans must live within the natural environmental limits of our planet denies the realities of our entire history.” – I am sorry, but this is pure hubris and folly. There is nothing else except the natural environmental limits on this planet.
“Humans transform ecosystems to sustain ourselves. This is what we do and have always done.” – Please do read the book <i>Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed</i>, by Jared Diamond.
“The conditions that sustain humanity are not natural and never have been.” – Please do read the book “<i>Guns, Germs, and Steel</i> “, it is very hard to discuss this topic without proper background. In short, natural conditions are the only thing that ever sustained humans.
To summarize, I am happy that you are so hopeful about our technological capacity, I would also like to finally see socialism happen and robots automatically do all our dirty work. The reality however is a lot more somber: it is 2019, we have capitalism all around us, there are very few people who realize that socialism could solve their problems, and we are very rapidly moving towards societal and environmental collapse. The gist of my previous posts that you have completely ignored is that our increasing population is increasingly consuming finite resources of the planet. Most of the miracle developments of the last 3 centuries happened thanks to our use of fossil fuels which will not last forever. We desperately need whatever precious little is left in order to rapidly shift from capitalist system towards “luxurious” communism, until it is too late. We cannot afford another hundred years of the Socialist party, there will be a lot less to build socialism from if we fail to act now.
‘We cannot afford another hundred years of the Socialist party, there will be a lot less to build socialism from if we fail to act now.’
Do what now? We have to achieve socialism before anything meaningful can be done. There are no magic formulas, no shortcuts – they’ve all been tried and failed (usually making things worse). Raising political consciousness among the majority of the working class is the only meaningful activity.
To blame popular consumption (what people consume) for exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity for humans is to assume that meeting people’s needs is the aim of production today whereas the actual aim is to accumulate capital out of profits.
Popular consumption is in fact a function of capital accumulation. The more capital accumulates the more people are employed or drawn into employment the more popular consumption increases. And vice versa as the drop in capital accumulation (slump) that followed the Crash of 2008 showed when greenhouse gas emissions slowed down.
If under capitalism people were to reduce their consumption or consume more efficiently the result would be more of what was produced would go to the profit-seeking and capital-seeking minority as profits.
Capitalism is an economic system governed by relentless economic laws from which there is no escape; which is why it can never work and can never be made to work in the interest of the majority or of the planet. It has to go and be replaced by the common ownership of the Earth’s resources before anything constructive and lasting can be done to tackle the threat of global overworking in a rational way. There is no alternative.
Yes, this is exactly what I am arguing for: “Raising political consciousness among the majority of the working class”. It hasn’t been done, and it needs to be done ASAP.
” There are no magic formulas, no shortcuts” – exactly what gives you the qualification to make such sweeping statement? “They’ve all been tried” – you cannot possibly try ALL possible solutions, it is impossible by definition.
ALB – I completely agree with everything you said there.
What I am proposing here (the first thing) is that we should approach the already most mobilized and interested people out there, namely XR and other climate change activists and educate them about capitalism’s role in the destruction of environment. But it is important to be flexible and not too conservative, so we can find the common denominator. I believe we all want the same thing in the end – a just society living in a sustainable way in a healthy environment.
Its always helpful to admit errors. Yes, I should not have said tens of millenia since the agricultural revolution was as you say relatively recent at 10,000 years or so ago not tens of thousands of years.
But would you accept that the hunter-gatherer societies did have an environmental impact on their eco-systems? As you cite Jared Diamond, has he not explained animal species extinctions in the quarternary period upon human action?
The amount of UNUSED arable land that can be brought into cultivation is enormous and with the application of new farming techniques such as agri-ecology the reliance on oil-based fertilisers is no longer necessary. That means that the environmental limits you insist remain in place can in in fact be exceeded. (look to a future article in the Socialist Standard on the Guinea Savannah Zone)
I think we can put the reason down to the reluctance of Big Ag to switch from their profit model of making African nations food importers and exporters of only cash crops such as palm oil/soya/tea/coffee and many other such commodities. We can also accept the that a meat-eating diet also has a negative influence on “environmental limits” and there is a considerable advertising business which says a building a new McDonalds in the neighbourhood is better than a new medical clinic.
There is also a global problem of land-grab of the most fertile regions to feed the profit appetites of the food industry.
And what about the rise of urban farming, treated as a new phenomenon, but the UK during the war greatly expanded its food production with the creation of new allotments.
You yourself touch upon the great potential of technological advances that aren’t restricted just to industrial products but can make farming more fruitful.
We should really now be concentrating on the political implications and ramifications of this disconnect we have with the wider eco-movement. This is where our focus should be.
I think we can agree that the likelihood of capitalism transforming itself into a economic system for the benefit of humanity is rather a gloomy prognosis. For it, it will always be business-as-usual until it collapses.
But will the possibility be more optimistic if we feed into the current prevailing beliefs of the eco-movement that there can be no more material development because we have a population problem and a consumption problem entirely due to the mis-distribution and mis-allocation of resources of todays flawed economic system. Should we give any credence to many in the eco-movement that alternative social systems other than capitalism is not feasible?
We accept overpopulation and overcrowding and urbanisation is a problem FOR capitalism, as is war, poverty, pandemics and a myriad of other issues.
So do we argue with those in the eco-movement that NO, too many people on the planet is not an existential threat for the human race, that NO, running out of various raw materials does not mean there are not other alternatives we can look towards.
I think our task is hard for the conventional wisdom ( supported by so-called experts who do not have political understanding and enter a debate outside their professional qualifications and repeat the same misconceptions as any other person who doesn’t possess a PhD) is that mankind is the problem and not the social system and the type of society it lives under. The task is made even harder because the more “radical” in the eco-movement advocate localism something that is not always the most eco efficient and cooperatives, a nicer capitalism but capitalism nevertheless
When I see a mass exodus of migrants from that densely packed together over-populated, country called the Netherlands that somehow can still be a net food exporter then I will accept the logic of the over-population alarmists. (Maybe not the best example as it soon may be flooded by rising sea levels. But on the other hand an example of the effectiveness of sea defences if applied elsewhere such a Bangladesh)
SCHEKN – “What I am proposing here (the first thing) is that we should approach the already most mobilized and interested people out there, namely XR and other climate change activists and educate them about capitalism’s role in the destruction of environment.”
We would welcome and appreciate some sort of contact list to accomplish this.
ALB has raised the problem elsewhere that the coming 20/27 September actions may manifest themselves in a way that we cannot reach out to. Also our customary propaganda approach of leafleting is very questionable regards paper waste.
I personally do not know where there are discussion lists and message boards that we can use.
We know our own messages are not being heard and falling on barren ground and for those few who do hear it , the messages are not resonating.
If you have links to a potential receptive audience it is the type of shortcut we would be very grateful for, schekn.
There is an unfortunate phenomenon when otherwise intelligent people cannot accept arguments that contradict their beliefs simply because these beliefs are packaged into a system. This is how democrats can never agree on almost anything with republicans in the US, even though both their platforms are so similar. I sense that the same thing is happening here. As a person with education in both hard sciences and humanities, I personally believe in what evidence and logic, our best friends in the path towards socialism, tell me to believe. Here is an example.
Alan, you were writing “We have been adapted our environments to be more productive to serve human needs for tens of millennia.” The idea of the whole paragraph, and indeed the whole “packaged ideological system”, is that our human ingenuity has always provided enough food (resources) for people. When I pointed out that we only just started doing this 10,000 years ago, you accepted, and yet insist that we “the hunter-gatherer societies did have an environmental impact on their eco-systems”. Now, how does this support your argument? That we had an effect? Oh yes, aborigines in Australia probably had a great effect very early on, by slaughtering all their big mammals very quickly so that there were none left to domesticate, and this is why they are still struggling with stone tools, while others work with computers. In other words, yes, you are right, we had an impact for longer than ten thousand years. But did we have an intelligent impact that would benefit our societies? No, we didn’t. This was a simple logical mistake, yet I believe you are a very intelligent person. Why did you make it? Because you think that with letting go of this particular belief you would also have to start questioning the rest of the package. But you really don’t have to. Like I said, I also strongly believe that we need all the high-tech solutions we have in order to successfully build socialism. I also believe that local farming is “not always the most eco efficient”, as you put it. I just happen to be a little better informed about the limits of agriculture.
There were fervent believers in communism in the Soviet Union. They would say, “No, it is not possible that our nuclear power generators may have technical problems. We have the best scientists and the best nuclear technology in the world!” – and then Chernobyl happened.
What I propose is to unwrap the packaged belief system of some fellow comrades and leave all the wonderful bits that actually are based on fact and proper logic, and let go of those that are erroneous. In our particular case of dealing with the eco-movement, I would suggest several things.
First of all, let’s look at the new wave of people joining XR. Maybe the movement was started by eco-maniacs, I do not know, but what I do know (because I visited their meetings) is that a lot of new people are joining who do not yet have any stiff beliefs about what causes climate destruction. Moreover, I was expecting to hear someone talk about this, but they didn’t. They seem to entirely avoid this topic. I heard recently a reporter on the news ask the director of the Bank of England if it was actually capitalism itself that was responsible for climate change. Of course, the director immediately started to say a lot of baloney about “great investment potentials”, but that is beside the point. The point is, let’s open our eyes and stop fighting imaginary enemies. It could actually be the time right now that people (aside from some few hardcore “back-to-the-caves” eco-warriors) are ready to hear the message of socialism.
Second, about your questions whether we should argue with “them” about the population and resource scarcity. No, I do not think we should argue with them, because the outcomes of these arguments are irrelevant. If we can agree that capitalism is what is driving environmental collapse (this we should argue about, but gently, through persuasion), then we can bring about education for women all over the world, and then overpopulation problem will be solved all on its own. The same is about resources. It is difficult right now to correctly estimate how much we have because those who sell them would have us believe they will never run out. To properly manage resource-based economy in socialism we would need to make better estimates of real quantities and to plan very carefully about how to benefit the society in the sustainable way, not just for those who live on this planet right now. So, again, there is no need to argue with eco-people, we can just drop the issue and concentrate on capitalism.
Thank you for bringing up the links / message boards / forunms where we can reach out. I am also not aware of those at the moment, but I will try to find out, this is important. Right now it looks like they are “unstructured” in the way that the structure is opaque, unfortunately.
‘ exactly what gives you the qualification to make such sweeping statement? ‘
What qualifications do you need to state the blindingly obvious? The 20th century saw experiments in every conceivable form of capitalism – from Fascism to Bolshevism, Anarchism and Co-ops to Keynesian reform and Monetarist free markets. And after all the suffering and dying was over what do we have in the 21st Century? The same old capitalism.
One of our greatest problems is that, unlike all of the above, we appeal primarily to the intellect and not the emotions. In this age of marketing, advertising, slogans and sound-bites our appeal to the intellect is drowned out. The paradigm shift from emotional individualism to a rational social being is a huge challenge for most. Schekn itrch, with his rational discourse, must be aware of this when he attempts to communicate with the politically naive or the downright cynicism of our age. Unfortunately I fear XR are just another example of appealing to the emotions without any understanding of what capitalism really is and how it works and that in their emotionalism they will not be able to hear us.
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