From Amy Goodman’s interview with David Harvey, Democracy Now March 2009
Capitalism historically has grown at a 2.5 percent compound rate of growth since 1750. OK. And in good years, it’s growing at three percent.
Obama, the other day, said, “Well, in a couple of years, we’ll be back to three percent growth.” Gordon Brown says, “Well, actually, the economy will double in the next few years.”
Now, when capitalism was constituted by everything going on around Manchester and a few other hot spots in 1750, three percent compound growth rate was no problem. You’re now looking at a situation where you’re going to say three percent compound rate of growth on everything that’s going on in East and Southeast Asia, Europe, North America and everywhere in the world. We’re looking at a different kind of world.
The total economy back in, say, 1750 was about $135 billion. It was $4 trillion by the time you get to 1950. It’s $40 trillion by the time you get to 2000. It’s now $56 trillion. If it doubles (again) we’re talking about $100trillion. And by 2030, you’re going to have to find three trillion .. profitable opportunities for capital to operate at that point.
Now, there are limits .. and I think we’re hitting those limits environmentally, socially, politically. And I think it’s time we started really thinking about an alternative. In other words, we have to think about a zero-growth economy.
This is a very useful way of putting the current crisis in perspective and he goes on to say that these stark statistics and trends mean that …
DAVID HARVEY: … In effect, you’re going to have to have a nonprofit economy. And how you do that, of course, is a big, big question. I’m not—I don’t have the blueprint for it. But I think that this is one of the key questions we should be thinking about right now.
And what disturbs me is we’re going through this crisis right now, and we’re not asking those kinds of big questions that we should be asking.
Gaian Democracies was written to ask those big questions – and many more – within the context of co-creating democracies that could live in symbiosis with the Gaian systems on which all life depends.
Moreover, it tried to offer ways in which our societies could think, act and learn to be ever-more completely democratic by adopting a soft-systems approach to tackling those big and complex questions.
Critics of neo-liberalism and capitalism like David Harvey, and many of the quasi-anarchists in the anti-globalisation movement, ignored or rejected all the questions we asked, the new vocabulary we used and the new ideas we offered.
And, as far as I know, they still do. Yet, as Harvey says,
In effect, you’re going to have to have a nonprofit economy. And how you do that, of course, is a big, big question. I’m not—I don’t have the blueprint for it.
Note: The wholly wrong-headed idea that somewhere there could be “the Blueprint” for tackling ‘the big questions ‘. This is a typically Command and Control way of thinking: “Here’s my plan. Now you go and implement it.”
It also illustrates the distance that those who say they want our societies to tackle the big questions have to go before they can begin to work out how to think, act and learn systemically so as to re-configure today’s lethally obsolete political, economic, governmental and security systems.
Note: Tackling the big questions will require us to “RE-CONFIGURE today’s … SYSTEMS’
Together those systems and their many components form “The Global Monetocracy”.
We coined this term to enable readers of “Gaian Democracies’ to see all those big questions as ‘emergent properties’ of a profoundly anti-gaian and anti-human system.
Thinking in terms of blueprints, or policy proposals or grass-roots protests and projects will do nothing to change the fundamental purposes and values of The Global Monetocracy. Still less will they take the reins of global government from its greedy grasp.
What kind of global system of democratic governance is needed for the human family to come through the next couple of centuries in good shape? That is the really big question and one that all the progressive, anti-capitalist, anti-globalisation movements need to start to work on today rather than just talk about in terms of their obsolete ways of thinking.
If they put their minds to it, they might just do the bulk of the work in time to make a real impact ‘After Obama’.
After Obama?? 