Our comment on emerging new economic organisations in the US: (8.10.09)
Post-capitalist developments of this sort are extremely important. Our bankers and most of the West's leaders are struggling just to get back ante-meltdown 2008, to the Era of Waste which started half a century ago with the recovery from World War II. But even if they did, that would only prolong the agony.
The waste of finite resources, the ruin of the environment, cannot continue if mankind is to meet the existential challenges it now faces.
Capitalism - especially decontrolled laissez-faire capitalism - was and remains the largest factor in creating and continuing this Era of Waste. The worship of the Golden Cal - of the "bottom line", must be replaced partly by far stricter controls and partly by such new economic arrangements. Instead of blindly shifting from one immediately profitable path to another we must know what we are trying to do.
Capitalism plus government and non-governmental projects brought us through the great wars because all sought victory as an end.
In a word, humanity must have a "telos" - an end or purpose - that it is consciously moving towards. And the "telos" we can surely all agree on is doing all that is required for the survival of mankind.
The US - which took over from Britain in creating modern capitalism and is now suffering so severely from what it wrought - is surely the one country with the dynamism and imagination to lead the world toward that "telos" for survival. If the US shows a way to do that, China - already trying to re-organise for that same purpose - would join in.
But first we have to change the mind-set of politicians, the "old" media, and all the others who are now so blindly struggling to get back to "the good old days" before 2008.That first step forward may prove the most difficult one of all!
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