John McMurtry argues that our world disorder of unending crises is the predictable result of a cancerous economic system multiplying out of all control and destroying ecological, social and organic life - a process he describes as 'global ecogenocide'. In this updated edition he explains the 'social immune response' required to fight this cancer, prescribing developments akin to the Occupy movement and the 'Pink Tide' democratic social transformation occurring in Latin America.
In a global cultural orthodoxy that is increasingly hostile to life, this book shows the necessity and possibility of building a sustainable society based on a universal commitment to nature and humanity.
John McMurtry argues that our world disorder of unending crises is the predictable result of a cancerous economic system multiplying out of all control and destroying ecological, social and organic life - a process he describes as 'global ecogenocide'. In this updated edition he explains the 'social immune response' required to fight this cancer, prescribing developments akin to the Occupy movement and the 'Pink Tide' democratic social transformation occurring in Latin America.
In a global cultural orthodoxy that is increasingly hostile to life, this book shows the necessity and possibility of building a sustainable society based on a universal commitment to nature and humanity.


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Overview
John McMurtry argues that our world disorder of unending crises is the predictable result of a cancerous economic system multiplying out of all control and destroying ecological, social and organic life - a process he describes as 'global ecogenocide'. In this updated edition he explains the 'social immune response' required to fight this cancer, prescribing developments akin to the Occupy movement and the 'Pink Tide' democratic social transformation occurring in Latin America.
In a global cultural orthodoxy that is increasingly hostile to life, this book shows the necessity and possibility of building a sustainable society based on a universal commitment to nature and humanity.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781849648042 |
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Publisher: | Pluto Press |
Publication date: | 07/20/2013 |
Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 392 |
File size: | 695 KB |
About the Author
John McMurtry is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of the multi-volume Philosophy and World Problems, written for the UNESCO Encyclopaedia of Life Support Systems, Value Wars (Pluto, 2002) and The Cancer Stage of Capitalism (Pluto, 2013).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Decoding the Cancer System and its Resolution
The cancer stage of capitalism is not a metaphor. It is a diagnosis of the global economic disorder as carcinogenic in all the hallmark characteristics of this disease.
Ever more indicators show the life-system collapse at the social level of life-organization, from vast new lifeless lands and waters to wastes without end and spreading false foods and toxins. In one new window in on the disorder, Frances Moore Lappe reports, 'scientists report from 55 to 87% of energy in the U.S. is wasted. Roughly 40% of food in the U.S. is waste, and ... 40% of what the U.S. eats is empty calories.'
Yet even where the deadly symptoms are seen, their underlying common cause is neither recognized nor responded to. We are increasingly aware of the everyday signs – that corporate cigarettes cause lung and other cancers, that transnational junk foods cause obesity, that body-care products are laced with carcinogens, and that non-infectious diseases are now epidemic across the world. But connection to their macro-economic causal mechanism is blocked out.
The purpose of this investigation is to lay bare the common cause driving all the degenerate trends and the public pathways of recovery from it. The global frame of our condition reaches across East and West, but the system-wide disorder is nowhere decoded in public discourses and expert studies. The thinking world outside G-20 state rule has now awoken to the 'neo-liberal disaster'. But the depth and meaning of the underlying sickness is not yet comprehended.
HOW CHINA AND THE WEST COLLABORATE IN DESTROYING THE LIVING WORLD WITHOUT KNOWING IT
Has China under the Communist Party escaped the Great Sickness? It is governed by social plan, not private banks and foreign corporations, and its gross domestic product (GDP) has moved at a blazing pace to lead Japan, the US and the European Union. Yet China has also led the world in large-scale destruction to life-systems and repression of human-life rights. While it is the 'most competitive' of nations in low money costs and productive volumes – the alpha and omega of the industrialization model – it is further down the road of devastating the most basic life-functions and enjoyments of being alive as human – fresh air to breathe, biodiverse surroundings, rewarding work, and life-space for individuated being.
This is not a paradox. China's staggering growth figures, gigantism and money-stocks now sweep across continents leading the global race downwards to no life-standards at all. The life-blind machine model of modern economics is now totalized by China beyond all past scales.
The thanatic convergence of East and West is, however, not defined or resisted. On the contrary, ever more of the human life-protections of the past won by worker unions, civil struggles and environmental consciousness are erased to 'globally compete' including the collective agencies of them. Underneath the supporting soils, forests, oceans, rivers, and life habitats are cumulatively dismantled and polluted to convert into more dominant money-sequences as the ruling goal of the global system. Ever larger-scaled invasion, mining, depletion, destruction, wastes, and pollution move deeper and wider through the planetary life-host. Earth-spanning transnational corporations advance in their rule of governments and technological powers of destruction at once. The West maximizes private money-capital flows as end in itself. China maximizes gross money-value product at lower costs. Both override all human and ecological life-requirements.
Turning Tibet and the Three Gorges Dam into resources for more product with no life-standards and suppression of hundreds of popular uprisings a day advances from strength to strength in China. Slashing of the social life-support systems to feed private transnational banks and corporations towards one economic collapse after another leads the West. In both, social evolution itself is reversed. In both, externalization of all costs of life-destruction is built in. The West's centuries of industrial-worker and civil struggles and evolving concern for the environment have been systematically demolished. China's once guaranteed food staples for all, equality, free health clinics and people's bicycles have been abolished. Beneath civil and ecological life-crises across domains, there are ever diminishing means and security to labour, environment, human rights, and biodiversity, and ever more to multiplying transnational money-sequences with no committed life-function.
A onetime shock-treatment manager, Jeffery Sachs, now recognizes from his 'clinical economics' that we must look for 'the unknown underlying disease'. Yet the nature and depth of the disease is only vaguely conceived – lack of 'civic virtue' and 'economic fairness'. Yet even Wall Street money moguls bleeding the world claim both. Without principled criteria, moral categories mask the problem. The 'disease' remains unrecognized. Yet that 'something has gone terribly wrong' – Sachs' words to Occupy Wall Street protestors – are felt across the world. What exactly is it that has gone wrong? The answer to this question takes us far deeper than any official voice or expert has yet dared to say.
Explanatory Model versus Metaphor
The 'cancer stage of capitalism' has been widely misunderstood as a 'metaphor', including by the marketers of this book's first edition. It is not a metaphor, but an explanatory model. A metaphor identifies a likeness, as in 'he is a lion in battle'. But like any metaphor, it fails to explain beyond the image: it blinkers out the weaponry, skills, and strategy that the man has but not the lion.
In contrast, the cancer model of capitalism is an explanatory model. All of the hallmark characteristics of cancer invasion apply. As we see in depth ahead, the pattern is first recognized in deregulated transnational money-sequences which multiply with no life-function and attack the productive life of societies at every level. A scientific process of elimination leaves it as the sole unifying diagnosis of all the symptoms. The diagnosis is then tested across all the crises of organic, social and ecological systems for significant exceptions. Direction of increase or decrease of the depredation, successful response or not, is tracked across 25 years. The diagnosis is confirmed again and again with no counter-evidence to it, but only denial. Because the ruling paradigm of understanding has no life-coordinates, it so cannot see the deadly system disorder.
A reader might retort with the sage words of Susan Sontag who says that 'the use of cancer in political discourse encourages fatalism and ... it could be argued that the cancer metaphors are implicitly genocidal'. She is right so far as the metaphor is a slogan of system fascists seeking to eradicate opposition, as in Latin America where death-squads of ruling oligarchies used this Orwellian figure for decades. Diagnosis here does the opposite. Its analysis demands social change, repudiates fatalism, and exposes genocide as a leading edge of the cancer system.
How Global System Images Reverse Reality
Yet cancer is unspeakable even when the disease becomes undeniable. So leaders and journalists call it a 'financial contagion'. This has become a stock mantra to describe economic collapses in the global corporate global system from Latin America to Asia to Europe over more than 15 years. As the private conglomerate money-sequence cancer devastates one region and continent after another, 'contagion' is the choral slogan substituting for explanation. In fact, the collapse invariably originates in private, self-multiplying and non-committed money-sequences racing through societies in their new deregulated freedom. Foreign money-sequence attacks on sovereign currencies, high foreign-bank compounding debt, and speculative property or other bubbles all share one underlying common pattern – turning private money into more money in exponential self-multiplications with no life-function and a money-demand haemorrhaging in and out of host economies destabilizing them towards collapse. The raiding conglomerate money-sequences make a killing expropriating billions of dollars a day for their private money-sequences called 'investors' – impossible under prior capital controls – but the lives of whole societies and tens of millions of people pay the price in mass disemployment, social system dismantling, and foreign expropriation.
Yet every such crisis has been made mandatory to allow under 'free capital and commodity flows'. 'Contagion' reverses the meaning. It shifts diagnosis from the structural problem of the system to the victim societies themselves. They lose up to 24 million jobs as in South-East Asia in 1997–98, their public sectors are stripped, their most lucrative assets are sold off at fire-sale prices, their home markets and production systems are converted to foreign corporate control, and domestic life-requirements at every level are overridden. Yet with the 'contagion' model, it is the victims spreading the disease among each other that is the reverse explanation. The life-blind private conglomerate money-sequences precipitating every step of their collapse across nations are thus blocked out of view, absolved and, indeed, made a panacea of 'more foreign investment'. No distinction is ever made between destructive and productive capital sequences. 'Contagion' conceals every moment of the cancer system at work.
'They were spending beyond their means' becomes the next image of reverse explanation. In fact, it is always the self-multiplying money-sequences spending money they do not have in up to 100:1 leveraging that destabilizes, indebts and dispossesses these societies and the majority of the world. The process is led and enabled by private transnational banks in on- and off-accounting systems. From the beginning of the cancer system mutations, private banks were allowed 'fractional reserves' of a 25:1 ratio to legal tender – bad enough. But even that was eliminated down to zero legal tender as an 'unfair tax against banks' – as it was called in Canada which silently abolished reserves held by government before the prototype 1988 'Free Trade Agreement' (FTA). The FTA in turn replaced all limits on transnational corporate raiding of domestic markets and resources with unilateral sovereign rights of foreign corporations, including banks. No practice more exemplifies 'spending beyond your means' than these banks' with zero money-reserve requirements debt-lending and speculating with endlessly more money than they have. And no 'entitlement programme' comes close to the thousands of pages of rights for transnational corporations alone in 'free trade' agreements.
As always, however, the blame for 'spending beyond your means' – as all else in this system – is projected onto the victims. And as always 'entitlement programmes' are projected onto social sectors of life-security rather than the while global-corporate money-sequence rights which overwhelm them. Yet the supra-Orwellian reversals of fact are not noticed. Only a few lead analysts penetrate, in particular, the private bank hijacking of government's constitutional money-and-credit issue to speculate and debt-enslave others at endless costs for them and equally endless growing riches of the big banks. It is the most thickly obfuscated secret of the era. Social immune recognition is still non-existent in official culture – even after 2008 when the multi-trillion dollar black hole fraudulently created by Wall Street has ever since been filled with public money with one economy and society after another plunging into depression and ruin from the knock-on effects – with now the European Union itself attacked by the very private banks siphoning the public money and bond-attacking and demanding higher rates from the most indebted countries: while at same time not lending the money out again but speculating for faster returns with no productive function, in fact overriding any life-serving investment whatever.
Least of all is this a 'contagion' among the victim societies. Most of all it is an 'entitlement' beyond imagination for the primary money party. And 'spending beyond means' is the very axis of the money-sequence system which has bled societies dry and continues to do so by the very same covert method – multiplying money demand from thin air to predate social life-organizations to ruin across the world. The underlying cancer properties of the system remain undecoded even as its uncontrolled compounding circuits have consumed the lifeblood of societies again and again across continents, and ever more into the US-EU powerhouse societies themselves. That the mounting trillions of public dollars poured into the problem is used not to bail out the victim societies at all but only the big banks themselves is still a public secret and undecoded in system principles. Reverse images are always how the cancer system masks itself and how it proliferates beneath detection. The primary structure of the reverse-deception is to project onto its victims the responsibility for their dispossession.
The Primary Growth Circuit of the Money-Sequence Cancer System
The inner logic is very simple. The people must pay for the money-sequence cancer growth, and so more public wealth and individual savings must be taken away to do so. The principal mechanism is debt multiplication of governments and individuals managed by private banks' issuing long-term compounding debts without the money to back the loans. Governments alone back the private banks which have not the money to do so if there is a run on the banks or failed speculations where the bank paper becomes market worthless, as in 2008.
At bottom, governments lend to themselves through the compound-interest take and terms of the big banks which have endless levers of finance to sustain and increase their take – for example, bankrolling presidential campaigns and receiving deregulation and bailouts in return. In this way, the 'financial industry' has doubled its share of corporate profits over 20 years, received over $20 trillion of public wealth across borders since 2008, and made bigger profits after the economic collapse it caused than before – with public sectors and publics not only paying the bills, but stripped to pay the private banks and bondholders still holding and compounding their debts. At this point the profligacy of the victim societies is blamed for millions of their people having to lose their jobs and livelihoods, their social life-support systems, and their prize public assets to pay the out-of-control debts that have resulted. When bailout 'rescues' come, however, it is only the big private banks and bondholders which get the infusions of public wealth.
The banks, financiers and investors – read financial speculators across borders with no regulators – go on doing ever more of this crisis after crisis. The pattern of Western public authorities in response is invariant – to maximally enable this transnational money-sequencing to more with no life-function, and to demand ever less for public use and social and ecological life support systems, with the IMF as enforcer of the global circuits of life-system deprivation. In this way the debts owed to and speculations by the private financial corporations and syndicates keep growing even after they have melted the system down in 2008 by fraudulent binges of spending, debt-lending and speculating by money-sequences multiplied countless times beyond the legal tender they have. Thus in 2012, leveraged-fund casino-betting on the currencies of Greece, Spain, and Italy with money that does not exist except by private banking paper continued to feed on and ruin these societies with no whisper of disallowance by the European Union or its Central Bank, itself under Wall Street direction.
Further locking in of nations by the EU bankocracy has been prescribed by a law that central banks must be not only unaccountable to governments, but inaccessible to requests for financial assistance in public policy formation. This is called 'central bank independence' – decoded, the displacement of sovereign legislatures' control over fiscal and monetary policies by big banks in which the central banks are in a revolving door relationship with Wall Street and company.
This mutant historical reversal of responsible government to serve autonomous money-sequencing adopts a mask. It misapplies the sacrosanct idea of 'the independence of judiciary' to its central bank creatures to override sovereign government itself.
Who is to resist? All of these historic societies had their heads of state removed at the end of 2011 over a week, two without election, and two replaced by former Goldman Sachs executives who were part of – by 2010 – the $12.3-trillion hijack from the American public to bail out the fraudulent banking system. How could the dots not be joined? Why did no elected party or politician or media of record call for the constitutional and demonstrably necessary transition to a public banking system to reclaim government's sovereign responsibility for the integrity of currency and credit issue in the public interest rather than the ruin of all of them? How could the proved fraudulent, incompetent and society-destructive private financial casino continue in charge of the very economic lifeblood of modern nations?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Cancer Stage of Capitalism"
by .
Copyright © 2013 John McMurtry.
Excerpted by permission of Pluto Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
1. Decoding the Cancer System and Its Resolution2. The Ancient Taboo
3. The Pathologisation of the Free Market
4. The Social Immune System and the Cancer Stage of Capitalism
5. The Life Code versus the Money code: The Paradigm Shift
6. The Great Vehicle of the Civil Commons
Notes
Index