From OrganicDesign Wiki
by John McMurtry
Professor of philosophy
University of Guelph
Susan George correctly emphasises in her review of my book, The Cancer
Stage of Capitalism (Pluto Press, 1999), "The cancer stage of capitalism
is not a metaphor. It is a rigorous description of where we are." The
current financial stripping of economies and environments across the
world exhibits, in fact, all the hallmark characteristics of a
carcinogenic invasion. As on the cellular level, an uncontrolled rogue
sequence of reproduction invades and self-multiplies across social
borders with no committed function to life-hosts. As on the cellular
level, the cancer advances by not being recognised by surrounding life
communities.
The depredatory effects of mutant money sequences proliferating their
demand on life systems without inhibition or control are now
systemically evident across the world. Societies and environments in
Latin America, Africa, Russia and the former "miracle economies" of Asia
have already been hollowed out. The cancer has metastasised and is
advancing. But the IMF responds to it as a nodal system that has itself
been occupied. Everywhere it compounds the rogue sequences of
hot money by stripping barriers to their unregulated movement even
further, as we have seen in earlier issues of ER.
Meanwhile governments across the planet allow their powers of money
creation, interest-rate control and public investment to be controlled
by private bankers and financial institutions. The decoupling of the
money economy from the life economy has accordingly pursued mutant
sequences never before seen. Sequences such as continuous tidal currency
speculations, derivative leveraging, disemploying mergers, usurious
bleedings of entire countries and continents, military spending with no
relationship to defence, and conversion of the natural world into waste
sinks and looted resources. Even in Europe, the public finances of the
world's most developed nations have passed into the control of a EU
Central Bank whose master principle is to serve borderless stockholders
propelled by the single goal of multiplying their monetised demand in
ever greater volumes and velocities.
As with a cellular cancer, the problem comes back to the failure of host
social bodies to recognise the uncontrolled growth of what feeds on
them. The carcinogenic sequences are masked as "necessary sacrifices"
and "free capital flows" and so the surrounding life community does not
recognise them. The result is that mutated metabolisms with no committed
function to any life organisation consume human and environmental
resources with no limit to their deregulations, privatisations and
restructurings.
Many people are now awakening to the systemic invasion. Even the
currency speculator, George Soros, calls for international regulation of
money markets. Soros is divided between the destructive program he
carries as a life-decoupled speculator and his place as a conscious
member of the larger life community. This schizoid split is occurring
within individuals and societies across the planet.
The good news is that this is a sign that the wider social immune system
is beginning to identify the disease pattern. On the other hand, there
are so many levels of invasion and consequence of the predatory money
circuits that one can get lost in a daze at their overwhelming assault.
They are hitting everywhere—at ecological carrying capacities, at the
real economy, at social infrastructures, at productive workers and
younger generations, at public regulatory agencies, at electoral
processes and at public health and education foundations. The effects
are consuming and despoiling the very conditions of life itself—the
atmosphere, the oceans and aquifers, the soil covers and the forest
lungs of the world. Everywhere behind the degradations and breakdowns of
the biosphere uncontrolled money sequences are at work.
Soros thinks, "the change must come from above." But political and
business leaderships only begin to talk reform in general when the range
of political possibility is opened up by a fightback from below. Despite
all the social meltdowns and ecological catastrophes, the CEO's of
transnational corporations and their government and academic minions
even now continue the carnie-barking slogans of "globalisation" and
"free markets," quite ridiculous terms for the secretive corporate
privatisation and oligopolisation that is in fact going on. As on the
cellular level, the proliferation of the cancer circuits is masked so
that the surrounding life community does not recognise them.
What is very striking about Soros is that he has recognised the disorder
from within the very front end of the carcinogenic advance—the financial
syndicates of currency attackers who now strip the transactive
metabolism of entire societies for their private money sequence
multiplications. Soros is like a voice from within the tumour formations
calling stop. This is the human possibility of cancer at the social
level of life-organisation, and it is what makes it curable.
The ground of such recognition and response is what I call "the civil
commons." The civil commons is what societies construct and individuals
internalise to ensure their members access to vital life goods and to
defend them against collective threats and dangers. The civil commons is
what private financial circuits have confiscated and consumed in Russia,
Mexico and Indonesia. And the civil commons is what is now fought for in
any society that hopes to survive—France and Norway, for example, and
other countries that are awaking to the rogue money-sequence occupation.
The collapse of the civil commons begins when people believe that the
monetised market is society, and that the public interest is one with
the market's latest demands. This conceptual meltdown precedes the
economic meltdowns that follow. The problem is ultimately one of a kind
of mental collapse, which is promulgated by transnational corporations
and their mass media vehicles.
Most of the required levers of public monetary authority are already
available to achieve effective intervention in the carcinogenic
money-sequences. Reclamation of established sovereign rights of money
creation and the application of already formed frameworks of
international law are in place to ground defence against the decoupled
financial system now predating social environmental life-hosts. The
immune resources need to be triggered into response, however, before
they can function.
Anyone in business who is not programmed by the rogue money code can
agree. But how does one tell here who is in fact a disease agent and who
is not? One can tell whether one is part of the problem or part of the
solution by a simple test. Does your economic activity have or not have
a committed function to the social or environmental life-host? If it
does not, it passes the first diagnostic test of the carcinogenic agent.
If it has a function of enabling the reproduction and growth of life,
then it is ruled out as a disease agent. If it is propelled to maximise
money-demand as an end in itself, then it is a disease agent. But
whether a person or an organisation is or is not a bearer of the
pathogenic code is a pattern of behaviour that admits of choice. That is
what being human means.
The solution begins with recognition of the disease pattern. It becomes
evident once the masking slogans of "free capital movement," "painful
market restructurings" and so on are seen through. We must follow them
to the life-depredating consequences their prescriptions effect. The
disorder keeps expanding because the corporate market system has
disconnected consequences from cause. This is possible because there are
no co-ordinates in the market paradigm to recognise life-destructive
effects.
In social life systems as well as cellular ones, cancers only advance by
not being marked. Once their markers are displayed, the surrounding cell
community goes to work in complex and time-tested ways—clearly marking,
exposing and perforating the predatory sequences of multiplication.
The violent side of the advancing cancer is most evident in former
colonies. Across Africa, Latin America and now Asia, entire nations have
been reduced to debt-slave societies by compounding interest charges,
corporate looting of natural resources, and concentration-camp
conditions of pervasive armed force, lifeless surroundings and
starvation wages. But the civil commons in even the most dispossessed
societies fights against the occupation. At the most courageous, it
forms into the Zapatista uprising of Mexico's southern state of Chiapas
since 1995. Or in this New Year, it forms into the Kaiama Declaration of
All Ijaw Youths of the Niger delta next to the Ogoni. These are
uprisings for the defence of the shared lifeground of peoples. You can
tell they are the social immune systems of the civil commons because
they join across tribal and cultural divisions to defend the lifeground
seized from them.
Pressure is mounting in the civil commons across the first world as
well. In Europe, for example, it is people fighting for their social
infrastructures—from income and employment security to ecological
protections. The battle for life is now planetary and at many levels. It
is not a question of having an optimistic or a pessimistic view. The
question in the end is whether societies that host the invasion remain
in a state of denial, or respond.
