Category: Life

‘The capitalist life crisis’ by Jeff Noonan

The failure of the Durban Conference on Climate Change, (December, 2011) to agree to anything more substantial than that all nations would work together to develop binding targets for reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 2015 is a metonym for the life-crisis besetting globalised capitalism.[1] Because global capitalism subordinates what John McMurtry calls “life-value”  to the expansion and accumulation of  money-value, it progressively undermines the conditions of planetary life-support, human life-requirement satisfaction, and meaningful human life-capacity development and enjoyment.[2]  Resources, relationships, practices, norms, institutions, and forms of life-activity have life-value when they:  a) satisfy objective requirements of human life-maintenance, reproduction, and development, b) thereby enabling the expression and enjoyment of the human life-capacities of sentience, imaginative and cognitive thought, and creative activity in ways which are, c) life-coherent.  McMurtry’s principle of life-coherence asserts that in order to be good, expressions of life-capacity must not only follow from the free choices of the agents who enjoy them, but must also, “consistently enable ecological and human life-together.”[3] In other words, good forms of individual life-capacity expression must contribute to, rather than undermine, the natural field of life-support and the social field of life-development within which individual life-activity is grounded.   The vaunted “liberties” of liberal-capitalist society are blind to the natural and social grounds upon which all good lives ultimately depend.  Hence, capitalism is a system that necessarily generates crisis in all important dimensions of being alive.  In the present essay I will explore the four most fundamental dimensions of capitalist life-crisis and the adequacy of egalitarian liberal, human rights-based cosmopolitan, and twenty-first century socialist responses to them.

Read More

The Natural Step – Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development‏

The Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development http://www.thenaturalstep.org/sustainability/the-framework-for-strategic-sustainable-development/ Human society is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Earth environment. If our “parent company” destabilizes, our society and our economies go down with it. This is another way of expressing the funnel metaphor. Science has proven we are currently destabilizing our Earth environment, and this in turn is producing escalating… Read More

Factors Influencing the Trajectory of Mental Capital over the Life Course

Figure 1 Schematic representation of the multiple factors influencing the trajectory of mental capital across the life course. Adapted from 19 and 20. AGING, MENTAL CAPITAL, AND WELL-BEING As populations age, it is increasingly important to understand the effects of global aging on the mental capital and well-being of older people. This has been the… Read More

The War On Democracy (2007) (English subtitles) by John Pilger

http://johnpilger.com/videos/the-war-on-democracy ‘The War On Democracy’ (2007) was John Pilger’s first for cinema. It explores the current and past relationship of Washington with Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile. Using archive footage sourced by Michael Moore’s archivist Carl Deal, the film shows how serial US intervention, overt and covert, has toppled a series… Read More

Life Capitalism – One Life-Science to Rule Them All

In order to transition from our present death economy and birth a new life economy, we need to bring new life-tools to our toolkit of investigations and experimentation. Given the recent realisation that our present economic science, in its present incarnation can be described as a form of “alchemy,” we have now to ask what… Read More

Expanding our Public Health System to include Collective Life-Capital Health

“Natural capital’ is an understandable attempt to put a value on our living planet and all the services it provides for us, writes John McMurtry. But it fails by measuring nature in dollars and cents. We need to develop a new concept of ‘life capital’ that must be preserved from exploitation and degradation no matter… Read More

The way forward – A life-coherent democratized economy

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.” – Audre Lorde In the previous post, The Final Frontier – A blueprint for building a life-value rebased global economic and political system… Read More

Watch “How Big Oil Conquered the World” on YouTube

Published on Dec 27, 2015 TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=16888 From farm to pharmaceutical, diesel truck to dinner plate, pipeline to plastic product, it is impossible to think of an area of our modern-day lives that is not affected by the oil industry. The story of oil is the story of the modern world. And this… Read More

The Final Frontier – A blueprint for building a life-value rebased global economic and political system for healing and solidarity through the life-currency of life-coherency (Updated November 3, 2018)

What I hope to do in this article is to use what insights I have gained so far from my expertise as a medical specialist in terms of diagnosing and the treatment of diseases and see how far I can go in applying Professor John McMurtry’s life-value compass to the insights I have discovered along the way. I will draw heavily on my article, The Secret to a Healthy Nation – in-depth article based on presentation given at Operation Rescue’s fundraiser on October 3, 2015, and the critique of it by Prof McMurtry in The Secret to the Ill-Health of Nations.

Read More

“The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society” – President John F Kennedy 1961

The secretive jurisdictions of international financial centers which claim to be essential for capital growth and development, like state communism, is going to be the downfall of corporate crony capitalism, as both support conformity and rigidity of ideas in a top-down hierarchical pattern as “efficiently” as possible. This is done without challenge from outside; hence the stifling of genuine innovation and genuine resilience and ability to adapt to new knowledge of our destructive potentials in all of life’s spheres of influence and concerns, hence producing the persistent lack of truth and reconciliation and healing of all of the maladies of humanity and the planet. If this is not a form of globalised supranational “communism” now on steroids, where there is pervasive reverse projection, where the meanings of our labels have been tranmorgrified and no longer mean what they are supposed to mean any more, then I don’t know what is!

For example, do we really still have a “free market” and “democracy” anymore? Aren’t these ideals now usurped by the diktats of the financial-military-corporate media-digital collusive complex which now reign supreme where we have concentration of wealth and power at the top? When The Establishment preaches freedom of choice, freedom of mobility and freedom of privacy, are they talking about freedom for entitlement of theirs at the top, while relegating those of us at the bottom to a form of mental, social and debt slavery? Where is the genuine democracy and freedom in that? Should we not have by now an intelligent system that matches unused life resources to unmet life needs by the supply and demand principles of the free market? What about the genuine ability of the electorate to chose a leader of their choice without the rules of engagement being gerrimandered to maintain the power structure in the first place? Where is the economic and political justice in all of this? Again I stand by my claim that the only difference between state communism and corporate croney capitalism is not one of kind, but one of degree and scale, and the reverse projections that the latter creates to block out the obvious consequences of our life destructive and human indignifying machinations.

Read More