The Futility Of Expecting Peace And Honesty Under Capitalism
By Lionel Anet
07 June, 2015
Countercurrents.org
During pre-capitalist civilisation, competition and its avoidance was its hallmark, it’s the reason for the strata that separated the people who could do and have whatever. But no mater, competition will occur when there’s inequality. Capitalism has gradually replaced the inherited stratified static society with a fluid one controlled with competition for wealth, measured with fiat money. That intensified the competition, which increased the clout of winners to boost their share of the world’s wealth and political power. We can live with unfairness within human society even with its wars, but nature can no longer sustain that life style, therefore, we can’t either.
Then, we must drastically reduce our demands on nature or die. The most wasteful and destructive activities are preparation for high tech wars, and the fighting to test the weaponry, and take assets, all of them are incredibly destructive so, its peace or perish. Nevertheless wars are an important part of civilisation; furthermore capitalism has evolved to a global status, therefore we could regard wars as revolutions. Those conflicts by their nature are very messy with unknowable outcomes and inflicting unbearable pain on people and nature. To save an environment that can sustain 9 billion people, we must have peace; but, it’s impossible to have peace in competitive societies that’s also changing the climate to an unliveable one.
Competition for wealth and power has a feedback loop, which is, having succeeded in a competitive endeavour that brings more wealth; it therefore increases the chance of winning in more of the same due to the extra power that wealth brings. To avoid the advantage of that extra wealth brings to a few individuals; up to 1970s it was contradicted by the negative feed backs the governments imposed on wealth, mainly taxes. But neoliberals reversed that by giving positive feed backs to the wealthy. This has changed the ratio in the wealth distribution in society where in 1970s we reach the minimum difference between the rich and poor, while today we are getting to the maximum divergence of wealth tolerable. Negative feedbacks such high rate of taxes on high earners and to avoid difficulties and conflicts - positive feedback, which is, society spending on health, education, public transport, and food supply such as fresh fruit and vegetables. That’s essential for peace
Peace for social beings is a state of cooperation where individuals can take pleasure helping each other so that we can all share in the participation of receiving and giving, as a part of nature. Where the success of an individual is regarded as a success for everyone and ones feeling of security is enhanced by how well others are doing, furthermore, because it’s both safe to be honest and with no obvious benefit to be dishonest people will tend to be more honest even for a psychopath.
On the other hand when money is so important as it is today, competition for it is the key to success and the more one has the more important one is and the more power one has especially in democracies. Capitalist democracies are the most competitive social system to ever exist, and cartels, monopolies, and trusts are the ultimate winners of competition. The goal of business is to be above competition, which is to have a competitive advantage preferably a monopoly, and that’s the logical outcome of competition. As neoliberals took over the economy, industrial worker had fraternal relationships that held them together; that was gradually replaced with competition within that working class.
Competitive relations have conflicts that are either overtly violent or covertly mean; they contrast with peaceful relationships that are cooperative, supportive, safe, and predictable. Unlike competition, cooperation doesn’t require forsaking ones feeling of comradeship, because we then see people as potential friend instead of probable enemies. While to be successful in a competitive milieu requires a deceptive friendliness, secrecy, ruthlessness, hard work, focuses on one’s success, cunningness, and looking for winnable conflicts.
We have never experienced peace during civilisation; we only have had times of supressed violence, which we call peace. Therefore, it’s hard for us to think of peace as anything but the absent of war, which still has the supressed conflicts for dominance, and that’s not peace because the conflicting tension within competition is still there.
What we need today is honesty; we already have the knowledge to ensure our survival and a good life for all. Knowing is of no use, unless we have the right equipment, or system to use that knowledge, for instance before people used the wheel they had the knowledge of it, but they didn’t have the material for the axle, they had to wait until iron axle were made. Today we have the knowledge to save ourselves but we don’t have the socioeconomic system to implement it.
When one considers our population is due to reach 9 billion by the middle of this century, with a degraded environment especially water resources, the options to maintain life for today’s young is limited. The only way we can survive is to attain a state of peace throughout the world. As pointed out that condition can only be achieved when we have rescinded our need to compete and renew relations that are fair and honest. It’s necessary to achieve that state of fairness, so that all people in a common endeavour worldwide are able to be adequately fed and housed, without destroying nature of its life.
A sustainable socioeconomic system can only be, at this stage, fair and honest, because of our overpopulation that will overwhelm the degrading resources. We will need to stabilised and then reduce our population to below half of what it will be. Not an impossible task, although it may never have been achieved voluntarily, but it’s a necessity now. People can and have achieved remarkable feat when there’s a clear need for action and if we have that common need to survive we will all survive cohesively, or we all perish competitively.
The knowledge in the world community is there that would enable us to survive. But our political and ‘economic’ leaders have more immediate concerns to acquire more power to maintain or raise their position in the system. Not realising it, in pursuit of that on a global scale will annihilate them, their family and their opponents. No one has a long-term interest in maintaining the status quo, in today’s terms it might mean even less than a few decades.
Capitalism’s controling agent is competition, which numbs honesty and that dominates all fields of life, resulting in gross unfairness, which is a twin of dishonesty. The twins are inseparable as are the twins of fairness and honesty; ‘fairness’ in capitalism is the right to exploit people, preferably legally.
The continuing increasing dishonesty sanction by the system is justified by our education. We have tertiary courses in public relation; their main job is the difficult task of convincing people to do what is against their interest. In conjunction with that is the government pursuit work, of deception, like spending on offensive military hardware and calling it defence.
Competition has a further important asset for the few billionaires, it sets the tone of society, which glorifies and envies winners and despise losers. But that is accepting a disparity in the allocation of all resources, which is the right to have more power than others, with a better life style, good health care, able to get better legal advice, and so on. Competition’s purpose is to create inequality of importance, which in capitalism are wealth and power, and that is unfair and is not only dishonest, but the competition justifies and glorifies the exploitation.
Lionel Anet is a member of Sydney U3A University of the Third Age, of 20 years standing and now a life member
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