Stephen Hawking on the Future of Capitalism and Inequality

October 15, 2015

     

by Conor Lynch /Counterpunch   

Pic Wikipedia

  

 

Last Thursday, the acclaimed physicist and cosmologist, Stephen Hawking, dropped a truth-bomb about capitalism and the future of inequality. With the rapid technological advancements of the past few decades (e.g. computer technology, robotics), we have seen economic inequalities grow at alarming rates, and a kind of plutocratic class of owners — that is, capitalists — become immensely wealthy. Hawking believes that, if machines do end up replacing human labor and producing all of our commodities, and we continue on the current neoliberal route, we are on our way to becoming a sort of dystopia of a top ownership class, with immeasurable wealth, and a bottom ownerless class — that is, the masses — living in abject poverty. In a Reddit Ask Me Anything session, Hawkins wrote:

“If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.”
The replacement of human labor by machines has always been a fear for working class people. Back in the midst of the industrial revolution, it resulted in a worker backlash known as the luddite movement, where in England, textile workers protested layoffs and economic difficulties by destroying industrial equipment and factories. Today, we see this with the elimination of many previously stable manufacturing jobs in cities like Baltimore and Detroit, replaced largely by automation. This kind of technological innovation that we see throughout the history of capitalism is what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” which he describes as a “process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” Schumpeter called this process “the essential fact about capitalism.”
Creative destruction has always garnered a net positive for society. While innovations eliminate jobs for many, new technologies historically create new industries and new jobs that come with them. This inherent process of capitalism rapidly increases worker productivity and therefore makes once luxurious goods available to a wider spectrum of the population. New technologies help produce significantly more products, which then flushes the supply, and pushes down the price to meet demand.
As I said above, historically, creative destruction ends up producing new jobs after eliminating old ones. But today, it seems we may finally be heading in another direction, and technology has already begun to eliminate more jobs than it creates. Nothing exemplifies this more than the “big three” automakers back in 1990 (GM, Ford, Chrysler) compared to the big three tech companies of today. In 1990, the American automakers brought in $36 billion in revenue altogether, and employed over one million workers, compared to Apple, Facebook, and Google today, which together bring in more than one trillion dollars in revenue, yet employee only 137,000 workers.
And how about American manufacturing compared to the financial industry? Since the 1950’s, the financial industry has gone from enjoying around 10 percent of domestic corporate profits to around 30 percent today(with a high of 40 percent at the start of the century), while manufacturing has dropped from close to 60 percent of corporate profits to around 20 percent. But what is really telling is each industries domestic employment. The financial industry’s employment has remained quite steady over the past sixty years, at under 5 percent, while manufacturing has dropped from 30 percent to under 10 percent. This has a lot to do with the financialization of the American economy, but also the rise of automation. And it’s not about to get any better. According to an Oxford University study from 2013, up to 47% of jobs may be computerized in the next 10 to 20 years.
The middle class has been hit the hardest over the past few decades, and it will continue to be hit hard in the coming decades at this rate. From 1973 to 2013, for example, a typical workers compensation only increased by 9.2 percent, while their productivity increased by about 74.4 percent. Compare this to the post-war period (1948-1973), where productivity rose by 96.7 percent and worker compensation by 91.3 percent. At the same time, the top one percent wage has grown by 138 percent since 1979, while the ownership class has seen their wealth accelerate at a rapid clip. During the late ‘70s, the top 0.1 percent owned just 7.1 percent of household wealth in America, while in 2012 that number had more than tripled to 22 percent, which is about equal to the bottom 90 percents household wealth. Think about that. Just 0.1 percent of a population owns as much wealth as 90 percent.
Now, as Hawking’s said, there seem to be two possibilities. The future may become even more unequal as technology continues to replace labor and leave the masses unemployed and ownerless (currently, this seems more probable), or, if wealth is more evenly distributed, everyone could enjoy “luxurious leisure,” or as Karl Marx famously put it:
“In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
The influential economist, John Maynard Keynes, believed that the future of capitalism (as oppose to socialism or communism, as Marx believed) would bring this leisurely existence to human beings. In his 1930 essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” he predicted that the growth and technological advancements that capitalism provided would lower the average working week to fifteen hours within a century, making what to do with one’s free time our biggest concern. On money, Keynes provided a hopeful prediction with the singing prose he became known for (barring his exceptionally dry General Theory).
“The love of money as a possession -as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life -will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.”
Keynes made some prophetic predictions in his day, but this was not one of them. Today, it seems Marx’s analysis of capitalism better fits the great economic inequalities and the global mobility of capital.
Still, nothing is set in stone. The rise of Bernie Sanders, for example, reveals a growing movement ready to combat the neoliberal status quo that has come to dominate American (and global) politics. If the economy continues on the road it is on, the question of wealth distribution will no longer be just a moral question of how great a level of inequality we as a society are willing to accept, but a question of political and economic stability. The ownership of capital will ultimately determine this future, but there are other movements and policy ideas with this future in mind, such as a guaranteed basic income, where all citizens, once they reach a certain age, are provided a stipend, which would likely replace traditional safety nets. Switzerland may be the first country to enact this policy, and a vote will likely come in 2016. The proposed plan would provide a guaranteed monthly income of $2,600, or $31,200 annually; in other words, enough for everyone to survive and pursue work that they actually enjoy. For those on the right getting ready to scream the S-word, it should be noted that many conservatives and even libertarians, such as F.A. Hayek, have endorsed this idea. It has a surprising history of bi-partisan support, and would, at the very least, prevent extreme poverty in the future, as robots and computer technology continue to take human jobs.
The growing inequality around the world can no longer be ignored, and addressing this and the other problems of capitalism, such as environmental degradation, is not only the morally right thing to do, but the pragmatic thing to do.




BLOGGER REF  http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

      

Conor Lynch is a writer and journalist living in New York City. His work has appeared on Salon, Alternet, The Hill, and CounterPunch. 

Accelerationism

 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia/Blogger Ref  http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

 

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In political and social theory, accelerationism is the idea that either the prevailing system of capitalism, or certain technosocial processes that have historically characterised it, should be expanded, repurposed or accelerated in order to generate radical social change. Some contemporary accelerationist philosophy takes as its starting point the Deleuzo-Guattarian theory of deterritorialisation, aiming to identify, deepen, and radicalise the forces of deterritorialisation with a view to overcoming the countervailing tendencies that suppress the possibility of far-reaching social transformation.^{[1][clarification needed]} Accelerationism may also refer more broadly, and usually pejoratively, to support for the deepening of capitalism in the belief that this will hasten its self-destructive tendencies and ultimately eventuate its collapse.^[2][3]
Professedly accelerationist theory has been divided into mutually contradictory left-wing and right-wing variants, with "left-accelerationism" attempting to press "the process of technological evolution" beyond the constrictive horizon of capitalism, for example by repurposing modern technology to socially beneficial and emancipatory ends, and "right-accelerationism" supporting the indefinite intensification of capitalism itself, possibly in order to bring about a technological singularity.^[4][5][6]

Contents

 [hide] 

• 1 Background
• 2 Contemporary accelerationism
• 3 References
• 4 Further reading
  • 4.1 Books
  • 4.2 Articles

Background[edit]

A number of philosophers have expressed apparently accelerationist attitudes, including Karl Marx in his 1848 speech "On the Question of Free Trade":

But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.^[7]

In a similar vein, Friedrich Nietzsche argued that "the leveling process of European man is the great process which should not be checked: one should even accelerate it...",^[8] a statement often simplified, following Deleuze and Guattari, to a command to "accelerate the process".^[9]

Contemporary accelerationism[edit]

Prominent theorists include right-accelerationist Nick Land. The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru), an unofficial research unit at the University of Warwick from 1995–2003,^[10] of which Land was a member, is considered a key progenitor in both left- and right-accelerationist thought.^[11] Prominent contemporary left-accelerationists include Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, authors of the "Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics",^[12] and the Laboria Cuboniks collective, who authored the manifesto "Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation".^[13]
Along accelerationist lines, Paul Mason tried to speculate about futures after capitalism. He declares that "[a]s with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started." He considers that the rise of collaborative production will eventually help capitalism to kill itself.

References[edit]

1. Jump up ^ Wolfendale, Peter (2014). "So, Accelerationism, what’s all that about?". Dialectical Insurgency. Retrieved 5 February 2015. 
2. Jump up ^ Shaviro, Steven (2010). Post Cinematic Affect. Ropley: O Books. p. 136. 
3. Jump up ^ Adams, Jason (2013). Occupy Time: Technoculture, Immediacy, and Resistance After Occupy Wall Street. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 96. 
4. Jump up ^ Jiménez de Cisneros, Roc (5 November 2014). "The Accelerationist Vertigo (II): Interview with Robin Mackay". Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. Retrieved 5 February 2015. 
5. Jump up ^ Williams, Alex; Srnicek, Nick (14 May 2013). "#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics". Critical Legal Thinking. Retrieved 5 February 2015. 
6. Jump up ^ Land, Nick (13 February 2014). "#Accelerate". Urban Future (2.1). Retrieved 5 February 2015. 
7. Jump up ^ Marx, Karl, On the question of free trade, Speech to the Democratic Association of Brussels, 9 January 1848.
8. Jump up ^ Quoted in Strong, Tracy (1988). Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 211.  Original in The Will to Power §898.
9. Jump up ^ Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (2004). Anti-Oedipus. London: Continuum. p. 260. 
10. Jump up ^ "CCRU". V2_Institute for the Unstable Media. Retrieved 2015-10-09. 
11. Jump up ^ Schwarz, Jonas Andersson (2013). Online File Sharing: Innovations in Media Consumption. New York: Routledge. pp. 20–21. 
12. Jump up ^ "#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics". Critical Legal Thinking. Retrieved 2015-10-09. 
13. Jump up ^ "After Accelerationism: The Xenofeminist manifesto". &&& Journal. Retrieved 2015-10-09. 

Further reading[edit]

Books[edit]

• Land, Nick (2011). Brassier, Ray; Mackay, Robin, eds. Fanged Noumena. Urbanomic. ISBN 9780955308789. 
• Mackay, Robin, ed. (2014). #ACCELERATE: The Accelerationist Reader. Urbanomic. ISBN 9780957529557. 
• Noys, Benjamin (2013). Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism. Zero Books. ISBN 9781782793007. 

Articles[edit]

• Brassier, Ray (13 February 2014). "Wandering Abstraction". Mute. 
• Brennan, Eugene (12 August 2013). ""Debate is Idiot Distraction": Accelerationism and the Politics of the Internet". 3:AM Magazine. 
• Land, Nick. "Meltdown" at the Wayback Machine (archived April 8, 2012).
• Mackay, Robin (2014). "So, Accelerationism, what’s all that about?". Dialectical Insurgency. 
• Moreno, Gean (2012). "Notes on the Inorganic, Part I: Accelerations". e-flux. 
• Negri, Antonio (2014). Translated by Matteo Pasquinelli. "Reflections on the "Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics"". e-flux. 
• Pasquinelli, Matteo (9 June 2014). "The Labour of Abstraction: Theses on Marxism and Accelerationism". 
• Power, Nina (2015). "Decapitalism, Left Scarcity, and the State". Fillip. 
• Wark, McKenzie (2013). "#Celerity: A Critique of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics" (PDF). 
• Williams, Alex; Srnicek, Nick (14 May 2013). "#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics". Critical Legal Thinking. 

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Accelerationism&oldid=694796395"

Categories:

• Social change
• Social theories
• Marxism

“Economic Personalism” is a Fraud: The Solution to Capitalism

Economics and Catholic Social TeachingGlobalizationNewspaper“Economic Personalism” is a Fraud: The Solution to Capitalism

 

November 1, 1998 By Mark and Louise Zwick Blogger Ref  http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

 

You don’t have to be a genius to realize the failure of Marxism. Even before 1989 one could have realized that Marxist regimes were not built on Marxist ideologies and theory, but were built on the rather strange foundation of tens of millions of bodies of the proletariat who disagreed with the regime.
The foundation of the Marxist governments of Russia and China was two cemeteries.
Dorothy Day left the left. She realized as a young woman that the world’s economic problems were not solved by socialism and Communism. She resigned from the left because of its lack of profundity after her World War I experience with socialists. (See Anne Klejment and Nancy Roberts, eds., American Catholic Pacifism, Praeger, 1996). Several years later, at the age of 30, she became Catholic, only to discover the papal encyclicals and personalism. Dorothy Day was influenced by great thinkers like Peter Maurin, Father Virgil Michel, O.S.B., Emmanuel Mounier, Leo XIII and Pius XI.
Early editions of The Catholic Worker are full of references to the popes and their writings.
Dorothy was neither a socialist nor a capitalist. She was a Christian personalist like the present pope. Dorothy made clear her goal in starting the newspaper in its first editorial: “In an attempt to popularize and make known the encyclicals of the popes and the program offered by the Church for the constructing of a social order, this news sheet was started.”

Capitalist Success

You don’t have to be a genius to realize the success of the global market. Twentieth- century capitalism has evolved into a system that is brilliant at creating new capital. Truly it is wealth creation at its best.
With the global market we have seen the global gross national product grow by 40%, even in the ’70′s and ’80′s.

Achilles Heel

This pattern of great wealth creation, accompanied by great want, has long been the Achilles heel of modern capitalism.
The United Nations Development Program found that in 1996 the assets of the world’s 358 billionaires exceeded the combined incomes of countries with 45% of the world’s people (358 people would not fill St. Anne’s Church in Houston in one sitting).
The U.N. declared that “Development that perpetuates today’s inequalities is neither sustainable nor worth sustaining.
Unfortunately, the gap is accelerating. It is much worse. Houston Chronicle, “Outlook” section, Sept. 27, 1998)

Capitalist Doctrine and the Center for “Economic Personalism”

Encouraged by this success, capitalists have shown an interest in a theology of wealth creation and have targeted students, seminarians, religious and professional leaders, paying their way to seminars and buying books for them, to form them in better understanding the free market economy and to encourage them to promote its growth.
Under the leadership of Father Robert Sirico, a center called the Acton Institute has been founded to guide people in the way of this new theology. More recently, the Acton Institute has developed what they call a Center for “Economic Personalism.” While Fr. Sirico may be well-intentioned in trying to do good as a priest, he comes down on the side of those only interested in personal gain and profit. When his groups emphasizes liberty and creativity for capitalists, what they are defending turns out to be liberty and creativity only for a few.
Lord Acton, after whom the center was named, was the leader in the last century under the direction of Father Iguaz Von Dollinger in attacking the church’s definition of infallibility in 1870, even after the decree was issued. Father Dollinger, his mentor, was excommunicated. Lord Acton felt that the Roman Pontiff can and ought to “reconcile himself to and agree with progress, liberalism (including economic liberalism i.e., laissez-faire capitalism) and modern civilization.” (Syllabus of Errors) Lord Acton despised Pius IX and the Vatican and barely remained in the Church.
Lord Acton coined the famous phrase, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” He was prophetic in his description of the global economy.

Neglect of Papal Teaching

It appears that the people at the Acton Institute have the same attitude towards the Vatican teaching as Lord Acton. They neglect completely the papal teaching on economics, except out-of-context references to Centesimus Annus. They quote the popes in their condemnation of socialism but omit their call for solidarity with the poor and for justice.
We are especially appalled, rather outraged, that they use the words “economic personalism,” which for them really means individualism like the rugged individualism of the American frontier. What they describe is not the personalism of Emmanuel Mounier and Peter Maurin, which concentrates on respect for all persons and their vocations in life..
Fr. Sirico spent a semester at the London School of Economics. He recommends further dialogue between Personalism and free market economics, the Austrian, Chicago and Virginian schools (the authors attended the University of Chicago and know the Chicago school and Milton Friedman, a hero of Fr. Sirico).

Calvinist Economics

The Acton Institute and the Center for Economic Personalism rely heavily on the teachings of John Calvin, who emphasized that the outward appearance of material comfort signified God’s grace and approval. In Calvin’s teaching and preaching, the poor were thought to be visibly damned.
Ads placed in both Catholic and Protestant journals feature the Acton Institute programs as a celebration of the legacy of Leo XIII and Abraham Kuyper, a neo-Calvinist, presenting the themes as “100 years of Christian social thought.”
Unfortunately, their programs have precious little to do with the legacy of Pope Leo XIII, and are rather a distortion of it.
Fr. Sirico, endorsing this thinking, advertising the programs as a synthesis of Calvinist and Catholic thought, doesn’t sound like he belongs to the same church as the Pope, who speaks so strongly about solidarity and the terrible gap between rich and poor and even suggested when he last visited Poland that some capitalists came close to excommunication because of the terrible injustices.

Intolerable Contrast

On September 27, 1998, John Paul II, recalling the day’s liturgical celebration of St. Vincent de Paul, drew our attention to “one of the great challenges which confronts our conscience, the truly intolerable contrast between that portion of mankind which enjoys every advantage of economic well-being and scientific progress and the enormous masses of those who live in conditions of extreme need.”
The Holy Father added that, “in the strident contrast between the indifferent rich and the poor who need everything, God is on the side of the latter. It is not licit to resign ourselves to the immoral spectacle of a world in which there are still those who die of hunger, who do not have a home, who lack even the most basic education, who do not have the necessary help when they are ill, who cannot find work.”

The Cemetery Again: “Economic Personalism” Is a Fraud!

You don’t have to be a genius to realize that the global economy (international free market) now solidly in control and flourishing, has been built on the bodies of Third World people who have worked for practically nothing to fill the coffers of First World companies. We meet these people every day at Casa Juan Diego. (See the Houston Catholic Worker,January 1998, “The Neediest and the Greediest,” e.g., Wal-Mart, Disney, Nike, the May Company (Foley’s), K-Mart, J.C. Penney, etc.)
The foundation of the tremendous success of these companies is slave wages.
Again, we have a very healthy economy built on a cemetery filled with poor workers who have died not with a bullet to the head or a firing squad but death from malnutrition, overwork, slave wages, poisoned water, inadequate housing or trying labor union organizing.
The global market has re-invented serfdom. Economic structures that should facilitate a better life and a better environment have facilitated slavery. A recent column in the Business section of the Houston Chronicle on the renewed need for labor unions exposed local chicken factories where workers must wear adult diapers because they are not allowed time off to go to the bathroom.
The devil of the industrial revolution of the 19th century has returned with seven more, worse than the first.

Success of the Global Economy

Twentieth century capitalism has evolved into a system that is brilliant in creating wealthy capitalists, but very poor at expanding the number of capitalists. Even in the United States, where the economy is thriving, the net worth of the top one percent is now greater than that of the bottom 90 percent.
It is incredibly ironic that global free-market advocates would call their ideas economic personalism when, as William Greider reminds us, “In the global marketplace defined as free trade, everyone is free, it seems, but the people. Multinational enterprise can come and go from one market to the next, investors may insist upon terms for the use of their capital, governments may demand concessions in exchange for commercial opportunities. These contractual rights do not extend to the citizens, however” (William Greider, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, Simon and Schuster, 1997, p. 388).
When Fr. Sirico says that “Economic prosperity through free trade is the most effective distributor of wealth and power,” (“The Public Square,” First Things 75 (Aug./Sept. 1997) perhaps this terrible disparity is what he means.”

How Can This Be?

Emmanuel Mounier, father of modern Christian personalism, would be shocked by the falsity of the concept of economic personalism as expressed by the Acton Institute. Any personalism espoused by the Acton Institute is, by their description, a definition of individualism instead of personalism. Individualism is what Mounier called “personalism’s dearest enemy.” (Emmanuel Mounier, Personalism, Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1952,)
Mounier understood the problem of neoconservatives who have never had to live in poverty or never had any contact with the poor: “Intellectuals unaccustomed to the crudity of certain realities, men of too great lesiure who do not understand the force of material constraints… forget that the initiatives of individual are embodied in institutions, both their short-comings and their determinisms, that new objects call for new knowledge. Such institutions, be they good or bad, always contain a menace of oppression for the person.”

Mounier’s Personalism

Mounier’s blueprint for a personalist economy asks everyone to lay aside greed and materialism. It is in harmony with the Beatitudes:
“On the plane of individual ethics we believe that a certain kind of poverty is the ideal economic rule of personal life. But by poverty in this sense we do not mean an indiscreet asceticism or a shameful miserliness. We refer rather to a contempt for the material attachments that enslave, a desire for simplicity, a state of adaptability and freedom, which does not exclude magnificence or generosity, nor even some striving for riches, providing such endeavours are not avaricious..” (The Personalist Manifesto, Longmans, Green and Co., 1938p. 192).
Mounier felt that the biggest problem of modern capitalism has been proclaiming the primacy of economics over history, over the life of the people, over community, over living out one’s faith and one’s values. The “extreme importance attaching today to the economic problem among human preoccupation is a sign of social disease.”
We can readily understand what Mounier means by the primacy of the economic when we think of the tremendous pressure brought upon people to buy and posssess things, live a certain life style and always reach for the highest level of comfort. Social consideration and display are priorities. Even among church people we must let the economic factor dominate or be considered odd. No one in the U.S. is unaware of what putting the primacy of economics in the medical field has done to the availability of good medical care to all.

Contempt for Workers

You don’t have to be a genius to realize the attitude of First World companies towards their Third World workers. It is clear by the amount of money paid to them-a few cents an hour.
We were very saddened recently when we heard a prominent theologian say that his brother who lives in Latin America says that it’s great that the multinationals give jobs to these people, jobs they wouldn’t otherwise have. The slave wages paid in Third World countries are even slave wages among slaves. To say that no other jobs exist except maquiladoras is to admit that the “structural adjustment” programs required by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank at the behest of the richer nations have created such economies in poor countries and are a complete failure.
Mounier felt that the system of factories “is based on contempt, conscious or implicit, of the laborer.” He reminds us how this was expressed by one businessman, Taylor: “We don’t ask you to think. There are others who have been paid to do that.” The economics of the business world “tries completely to ignore the person and to organize itself for a single quantative and impersonal goal: profit.”
According to Mounier, “profit recognizes no human criterion and no limits. If it does accept a criterion, it is that of the bourgeois values of comfort, social consideration and display, and it remains indifferent equally to economic well-being as such and to the good of the person it contacts.” (p.180).
Mounier echoed the teachings of the popes on the primacy of labor over capital. He emphasized that profits do not have rights, but workers do. For many workers the invisible hand of the market had a knife in it.

JP II’s Great Trilogy

Writing in the New Oxford Review in September 1998, and quoting Laborem Exercens,Rupert Ederer expresses these same concerns, pointing out that for Pope John Paul II, “the payment of the just wage is ‘the concrete means of verifying the justice of the whole socioeconomic system….’” Ederer contends that “that proposition strikes at the very heart of liberal capitalism, in which labor is just a disposable commodity that is left to the mercy of the ‘free market.’”
In a summary of Catholic social teaching of the last 100 years, Ederer emphasizes the great trilogy by John Paul II: Laborem Exercens (1981), Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) andCentesimus Annus (1991), stating that these three writings alone would be enough to earn him the title Doctor of the Church and that they “contain whatever critique is needed for confronting the dire consequences of our present return to Victorian capitalism and they offer us the moral principles according to which a saner social order can be constructed.”

Emmanuel Mounier and Jeff Gates

It is very interesting to read The Personalist Manifesto, published in the 1930′s, (brought to the United States by Peter Maurin, who persuaded the monks at St. John’s Abbey to translate it), and find how exactly pertinent it is to today.
It is also fascinating to read Jeff Gates’ The Ownership Solution (Addison Wesley, 1998), and discover so many of the same ideas-a writer today expressing Mounier’s ideas about capital. Based on a decade of experience in developing worker ownership in ESOP’s (Employee Stock Ownership Plans), advising companies and advising governments in twenty-five countries on involving workers in ownership, Gates’ book is one of the best practical interpretations of modern papal social teaching.

What is our Real Religion?

When Gates writes, “We are all now buffeted by a global economy in which key actors are encouraged, even mandated, to maximize financial returns in a worldwide auction of sorts in which financial values have become a substitute for the values of ethics, religion and community,” and that “Money, not man, is fast becoming the measure of the common good” (The Ownership Solution, p. xxi.), he sounds very like Mounier.
When Gates names as worship, a “secular sanctification of market forces” the attitude people worldwide are developing toward financial returns, he reminds us again of Mounier, who understood that it was the lack of a “philosophy of life” which allowed people to accept the primacy of economics over all else. Mounier insisted that “the problem of economics cannot be solved independently of the political and the spiritual problems, to which it is intrinsi-cally subordinate” (p. 165).

Institutions in Control, Not People

There has been a major change in capitalistic ownership, another facet of the growing concentration of wealth. “Almost half (47.4 percent) of all outstanding shares of U.S. corporations are now held by institutions. America’s institutional insurance investors-pension funds, mutual funds, insurance companies, banks, foundations and university endowments held $11,100,00,000,000 ($11.1 trillion) in assets as of 1 July 1996.”
As Gates points out, “Money management focused on maximizing financial returns is now new. What is new is the vast scale and the skyrocketing growth of contemporary ‘disconnected’ capital’”-money and investments totally unconnected to persons. (The Ownership Solution, p.2)

How Could all this Happen?

How could we, a people committed to opportunity for all, allow such terrible disparities between rich and poor to develop?
Gates’ analysis is similar to Mounier’s: capitalism as we know it has a very poor feedback system. The market is only interested in money. Its figures do not relate to human concerns.

Marie Antoinette Capitalism

Free market advocates try to give the impression that their system is open to all. Gates describes the reality for the person who does not already have large quantities of capital: “Policymakers routinely claim that capitalism is an ‘open’ system because anyone can purchase shares. It’s a free market-anyone (i.e., anyone with money) can buy those new equities.
“Expecting a broad base of wage earners to buy their way into significant ownership (i.e., from their already stretched paychecks) is what I call ‘Marie Antoniette Capitalism,’ only instead of urging ‘Let them eat cake,’ the modern refrain is ‘Let them buy shares.’” (The Ownership Solution, p. 23)

Houston Catholic Worker, Vol. XVIII, No. 6, November 1998.

- See more at: http://cjd.org/1998/11/01/economic-personalism-is-a-fraud-the-solution-to-capitalism/#sthash.0DbkgHgj.dpuf

Will capitalism clean up the world?

World leaders gathering in New York to reach a global agreement on climate change have big money behind them

Formerly better known for building coal-fired stations, China has closed and cancelled scores of them, mainly to combat the air pollution that kills some 250,000 a year  Photo: AFP/Getty Images

By Geoffrey Lean

8:30PM BST 19 Sep 2014/Telegraph/ Blog Ref http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

              

It all feels a bit familiar as, five years after the Copenhagen debacle, world leaders gather in New York on Tuesday to talk about reaching a global agreement on tacking climate change. The summit is expected to launch another long trek towards a treaty at the end of next year.

But this time almost everything is different from 2009, when the talks failed. Economics are figuring larger than ecology this year. Some of the most obstructive countries in Copenhagen are now pushing hardest for a treaty, while some of the keenest back then look like they’re dragging now. And – though environmentalists don’t like admitting it – the world is making progress through adopting a suggestion from the much-reviled George W Bush.

There are, of course, some things that stay much the same. Global emissions of greenhouse gasses continue unabated: this month, the World Meteorological Organisation reported that they grew at their fastest in three decades last year, and are now at record levels. And Christiana Figueres, UN chief of the treaty negotiations, warned again that time to curb them is running out.

Nevertheless, the buzz is more about expanding economic opportunities than impending ecological disaster, real though that may be. The key report published this week in preparation for the summit was not from Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth or any of the usual suspects, but rather by leaders of the IMF, Bank of England, OECD, China Development Bank, World Bank and businesses usually treated as enemies by greenies. Its message? Tackling climate change can help, not harm, economic growth.

Hard cash increasingly says so too. Last year there was greater worldwide investment in renewable energy than in fossil fuels for the fourth year in a row, as the cost of solar and windpower tumbles. The worldwide market in low carbon goods and services exceeds £3.4 trillion a year and often outperforms the rest of the global economy. No country has seen the opportunity more clearly than China, now the world’s biggest renewables investor. Formerly better known for rapidly building coal-fired stations, it has closed and cancelled scores of them, mainly to combat the air pollution that kills some 250,000 Chinese a year.

The main obstacle to progress in Copenhagen, China is now taking the lead in calling for action - along with that other erstwhile bugbear, America. Barack Obama and his secretary of state, John Kerry, have made securing a climate treaty a legacy issue. The president, by taking executive action to get round an obstructive Congress, and aided by the rapid expansion of shale gas, is bringing down US emissions.
India’s recent elections – says Britain’s Energy Secretary, Ed Davey - have “changed the mood” in another traditionally reluctant nation. Navendra Modi, the new prime minister, boosted renewables while serving as chief minister of Gujerat, and Davey says he “has the will and commitment” to do the same nationally.
By contrast, the EU - which led the push for change in Copenhagen – has been growing less enthusiastic, and the new president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, seems determined to downgrade the issue.
The emerging agreement, too, is totally different from the one on the Copenhagen table. That sought to set a global ceiling on greenhouse gas emissions and then divide them between nations. This one starts at the other end, with governments pledging what they think they can achieve – a concept originally advanced by George W Bush.
For the first time all nations, including the smallest and least polluting, will join in. But the scheme has an obvious flaw. It’s most unlikely that the pledges will be nearly enough to head off serious climate change; PricewaterhouseCoopers has calculated that international efforts would have to increase fivefold to do so.
But it is the best that is reasonably achievable. And the, not unrealistic, hope is that – once a clear signal is given that the future is low carbon – the competitive power of capitalism will rapidly cause the world to exceed the targets.
Yet, disappointingly, Modi, China’s president Xi Jinping, and chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany won’t be at the New York summit. Inevitably their absence diminishes it – but, equally, it opens up an opportunity for David Cameron. Every British prime minister for the past 35 years has played a central, constructive – and often crucial – role in climate negotiations; Cameron, more than any since Margaret Thatcher, firmly believes in their importance.
He has, of course, been pretty quiet on the issue of late. But, as the last week north of the Border has shown, critical times call for the courage of prime ministerial convictions.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society

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* Book: The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism. by Jeremy Rifkin. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014
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"In The Zero Marginal Cost Society, New York Times bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin argues that the capitalist era is passing—not quickly, but inevitably. The emerging Internet of Things is giving rise to a new economic system—the Collaborative Commons—that will transform our way of life.
In his provocative new book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, Mr. Rifkin argues that the coming together of the Communication Internet with the fledgling Energy Internet and Logistics Internet in a seamless 21st century intelligent infrastructure—the Internet of Things—is boosting productivity to the point where the marginal cost of producing many goods and services is nearly zero, making them essentially free. The result is corporate profits are beginning to dry up, property rights are weakening, and the conventional mindset of scarcity is slowly giving way to the possibility of abundance. The zero marginal cost phenomenon is spawning a hybrid economy—part capitalist market and part Collaborative Commons—with far reaching implications for society.
Rifkin describes how hundreds of millions of people are already transferring parts of their economic lives from capitalist markets to what he calls the global “Collaborative Commons.” “Prosumers” are making and sharing their own information, entertainment, green energy, and 3-D printed products at near zero marginal cost. They are also sharing cars, homes, clothes and other items via social media sites, rentals, redistribution clubs, and cooperatives at low or near zero marginal cost. Students are even enrolling in free massive open online courses (MOOCs) that operate at near zero marginal cost. And young social entrepreneurs are establishing ecologically sensitive businesses using crowdfunding as well as creating alternative currencies in the new sharing economy. In this new world, social capital is as important as finance capital, access trumps ownership, cooperation supersedes competition, and “exchange value” in the capitalist marketplace is increasingly replaced by “sharable value” on the Collaborative Commons.
Rifkin concludes that while capitalism will be with us for the foreseeable future, albeit in an increasingly diminished role, it will not be the dominant economic paradigm by the second half of the 21st Century. We are, Rifkin says, entering a world beyond markets where we are learning how to live together in an increasingly interdependent global Collaborative Commons."

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• Books
• Commons
• Economics
• Commons Economics

Solidarity Economy

Blogger Reference Link http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics
From Wikipedia






The definition of "solidarity economy" consists of activities organized to address and transform exploitation under capitalist economics, and can include diverse phenomena.^[1] For some, it refers to a set of strategies and a struggle aimed at the abolition of capitalism and the oppressive social relations that it supports and encourages; for others, it names strategies for "humanizing" the capitalist economy—seeking to supplement capitalist globalization with community-based "social safety nets".
The solidarity economy can be seen a) as part of the "third sector" in which economic activity is aimed at expressing practical solidarity with disadvantaged groups of people, which contrasts with the private sector, where economic activity is aimed at generating profits, and the public sector, where economic activity is directed at public policy objectives, or b) as a struggle seeking to build an economy and culture of solidarity beyond capitalism in the present.
The still evolving term "solidarity economy" is an English translation of a concept formally formulated in Lima, Peru in 1997 (economía solidaria), in Quebec in 2001,^[2] and in Brazil during the World Social Forum of 2001, and in Portuguese as "economia solidaria".^[3] It is also represented by the French "économie solidaire" and similar terms in several other languages. As such it is sometimes translated by other expressions such as "solidarity-based economy".

Contents

 [hide] 

• 1 Social and solidarity economy
• 2 Examples of solidarity economy organisations
• 3 References
• 4 References
• 5 External links

Social and solidarity economy[edit]

The solidarity economy is often considered part of the social economy, forming what might be termed the "social and solidarity economy" (from the French "économie sociale et solidaire"). The concepts are still under development and the difference between the two terms is gradually being clarified. An organisation seeing itself as part of the solidarity economy generally goes beyond achieving purely social aims: it aims to put right an injustice by expressing solidarity. For example, a local sports club has a social aim and so can be considered part of the social economy, but would not normally be considered part of the solidarity economy except in special circumstances (e.g. a township sports club in South Africa in the days of apartheid).

Examples of solidarity economy organisations[edit]

• Fair trade organisations form part of the solidarity economy as their aim is to express practical solidarity with farmers in the developing world by paying them fair prices for their produce.
• Self-help organisations also form part of the solidarity economy as members support each other in dealing with their problems as a practical form of solidarity.
• Co-operatives and especially Worker cooperatives form part of the solidarity economy if their aims include a commitment to solidarity in some form.
• Trade unions are often considered a key part of the solidarity economy as they are based on the principle of solidarity between workers.
• Open source development and other forms of commons-based peer production.
• Social center
• Give-away shops and other forms of Gift economy
• Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) as a way of replacing money.
• Solidarity lending
• Ethical purchasing
• Economy for the Common Good

References[edit]

• Miller, Ethan. Solidarity Economics. Strategies for Building New Economies from the Bottom-Up and the Inside-Out - February 2004
• Miller, Ethan. Other Economies are Possible!, ZNet
• Euclides André Mance. Solidarity economics, Turbulence
• Solidarity Economics
• German Conference on Solidarity Economy held in Berlin on 24-26 November 2006

References[edit]

1. Jump up ^ "Solidarity Economy: An Overview," US Solidarity Economy Network
2. Jump up ^ The Intercontinental Network for the Promotion of the Social and Solidarity Economy
3. Jump up ^ Singer, P (2002) "The Rebirth of the Solidary Economy (sic) in Brazil" in B de S Santos Produzir Para Viver.; Brazilian Forum for the Solidarity Economy] (in Portuguese)

External links[edit]

• RIPESS - Intercontinental Network for the Promotion of Social Solidarity Economy
• Haverford College Solidarity Economy Resources
• Grassroots Economic Organizing
• Euclides André Mance Archives
• SolidarityEconomy.Net
• The U.S. Solidarity Economy Network
• Portal de Economía solidaria (in Spanish)
• Solidarische Ökonomie (in German)
• Different articles available in English, French and Spanish (MIJARC)
• SOLECOPEDIA (online encyclopaedia on solidarity economy, in English, French, Spanish etc.)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Solidarity_economy&oldid=580742906"

Categories:

• Social economy

Capitalism is Dead. Long Live Transhumanism.

                                                                                                                                         

By: Lee Coburn

Published: April 22, 2013

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Humanity is now entering the fourth economic paradigm. First we were hunter gathers, second  farmers, third the industrial revolution. Now the fourth paradigm, where transhuman entrepreneurs, utilizing both neurological and machine augmented intelligence, are replacing capital as the economic driving force in free market economies.

In the last 40 years computers and robots have replaced humans in more than 9 million traditional jobs. This trend is accelerating as Intelligent Self-Educating Computer Systems (ISECS) like WATSON, WolframAlpha, Quora and others are moving from the lab into the cloud.
Humanities golden age? Possibly, but like the start of the industrial revolution it is the transition that’s scary, creating unemployment, pain and suffering. Today transhuman entrepreneurs are pulling us into a new age where  bioinformatics, nanotechnology, 3D printers, ISECS, and robot slaves will do our work, freeing us for love, play and fun.
For this document we define Transhumans to be free thinking, courageous doers, who, use augmented intelligence, to harness the frontiers of human knowledge and technology.
During the industrial revolution vast amounts of capital were needed to start and build railroads, steel mills, auto factories and giant retail businesses like Montgomery Wards. The world economies were driven by the need for capital, hence the name capitalism. Today most American steel mills have closed, General Motors has filed for bankruptcy, and Montgomery Wards is history.
The fourth economic paradigm is being created by transhuman entrepreneurs who use the internet and advance computer systems to augment their intelligence, enabling them to better utilize our growing scientific and technological knowledge. Look at the market value of companies started by transhumans like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Peter Diamandis, Ray Kurzweil, Larry Page, Sergy Brin, Mark Zuckerberg and thousands of others. Rather than needing capital, these companies are generating trillions of dollars of surplus capital.
Golden age of opportunity: Because scientific and technological knowledge is developing exponentially, there are more entrepreneurial opportunities today than at any other time in human history. Best of all. there are no formal educational requirements, school dropouts like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and other entrepreneurs with even less education outnumber those with Ph. Ds..
Today 90% of all scientists and inventors that have ever lived are alive and working. They are producing more new opportunities every 15 years, then were produced in the last 100. And the last century was very inventive with TVs, computers, space travel, washing machines, airplanes, autos and much more! Check out the website http://www.kurzweilai.net/, where their daily newsletter documents five to twelve new scientific and technological advancements. Many of these discoveries point to new products and industries.
Entrepreneurs themselves are a major source of new opportunities. When the Wright brothers invented the airplane they created opportunities for airplane manufacturers like Boeing. They also created thousands of second tier opportunities. These, for the most part are low tech, like food services, airport support, travel agents and manufacturers of airplane seats, etc.. It is in this second tier where historically businesses have earned the most money and created many new jobs. So, the more entrepreneurs there are, the more new opportunities there will be.
Oh yes, there are going to be shortages, this is great news. Because history shows that shortages are opportunities for creative problem solvers. Look at energy today, while doom and gloomers are crying in their beer, there are over one hundred-thousand scientist, and inventors working on the energy challenge. Those who find answers will win big. Already companies are earning millions and creating new jobs, building wind turbines, solar collectors, and biofuel plants.
Another way transhuman entrepreneurs create jobs for others is by spending money. Buy a wool coat, and you create work for the coat maker, the weaver, and the sheep rancher. And when an entrepreneur banks money the banker loans it out to someone who spends it. And the billions entrepreneurs give to charities, are also spent creating more jobs. In fact the source of all paying jobs on planet earth is people spending money. So unless entrepreneurs burn or bury their money, every penny they earn goes to create work for others.
Check out the following to get a glimpse of the awesome world that todays transhumans are creating. 1) ABUNDANCE by Diamandis & Kotler an awesome book about transhumans who are creating the future. 2) Wikipedia’s list of emerging technologies - a very exciting and long list indeed. 3) Kickstarter and other innovative ways of funding transhuman entrepreneurs.
Evolutionary blind side.  The big challenge is to deal with a linear bias rooted in millions of years of human and pre human evolution.  Exponential rates of change are counter intuitive. I find that my own misjudging of exponential rates of growth to be embarrassing for I have been a systems programer for 30 years dealing with binary numbers and have read and reread  Ray Kurzweil’s awesome book the Singularity is Near. Yet when I ran the following number problem through my spreadsheet, I still said wow, when I saw the answer.
Gather 20 handfuls of firewood, each weighing one pound and you end up with a pile that weighs 20 pounds. On the other hand if each handful gathered increases in weight exponentially, 1, 2, 4, 8... pounds then gathering 20 times will result in a 1 million pound wood pile, and a denuded forest. (wow?)
Not only do exponentials move into warp speed after the knee of the curve their slow start makes them look benign in the beginning.

Robots are a good example, 40 years ago people were making wild predictions that robots would soon be taking over everybodys jobs. But it didn’t happen for robots proved too expensive, stupid and slow. Yet in 2011 Foxconn  announced plans to install a million robots in it’s Chinese factories replacing low cost Chinese workers. For the last 40 years the cost of robots has been dropping exponentially, and their intelligence and speed increasing exponentially, it looks like today robots have passed the knee of the exponential curve and the rate of deployment will be?

Caution: As capitalism rolls over and dies millions will suffer under it’s decaying corpse. One sign of a major paradigm shift is when yesterdays good advice no longer works.
Forty years ago going to college was a financially smart thing to do. Today according to government statistics 54% of college freshman will drop out without getting a diploma. Then of the ones who earn a diploma 51% will after graduation end up working at a job that doesn’t require a college degree, like flipping burgers.  This means that 77% of those entering college, spending money and time, taking out student loans, will end up being harmed financially.

But look at the numbers, doesn’t it pay to go to college? Yes, and No. It works like this. Out of 10 million graduates 5 million are surgeons, doctors, dentists, lawyers, engineers etc. many with years of seniority. On average these 5 million are earning $70,000 a year. And then there are the other 51% who have had to take jobs that don’t require a college degree, secretaries, delivery drivers, or flipping burgers etc. and their average income is $15,000 a year. Add all the earnings together and divide by 10 million and you get an average of $42,500 a year and this is the impressive number told to high school students. What would you think of a drug company whose drug harmed 77% of those who took it but who advertised using only testimonials from the 23% who benefited?
Forty years ago governments could stimulate their economies by increasing the money supply. But companies started by transhuman entrepreneurs as of 2012 have billions of dollars of surplus capital. Consequently they don’t need all of the easy money.
So what are investors and financial institutions doing with this flood of easy money? First thousands of large and small outdated businesses are borrowing more money than they can manage effectively. Results? A sharp increase in bankruptcies. Then there are the bubbles, remember the dot-com boom and bust when millions of people and their dogs bought blue sky dreams. And of course there was the great housing bubble, when financial institution sitting on billions of dollars of excess liquidity, with inflation nipping at their heels. They became ever more desperate to put their cash to work,  there came along some clever people who devised mortgage-backed securities, which allowed banks and others to offload mortgages with little or no accountability.  As the flood of capital continued to grow, many of these financial institutions made ever more marginal loans. Then when the increased capital didn’t create a high growth economy, the housing bubble burst in 2008.
Forty years ago we help and encourage poor third world countries to set up colleges and universities. We trained many of their young people who returned home and became professors. Now these third world universities are very demanding, with more work and less social life than most American schools. The majority of students are majoring in engineering, math and science. The result has been more highly educated young people then these third world economies can employ.