The Time of Great Transformation and General Corruption

03/02/2014
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Societies normally rest on the following tripod: the economy, that guarantees the material basis so that human life may be good and decent; politics, through which power is distributed and the institutions that enable social coexistence are organized; and ethics, that establishes the values and norms that rule human behavior, so that there may be justice and peace, and conflicts be resolved, to avoid violence. Ethics generally carries an aura of spirituality reflecting the ultimate meaning of life and of the universe, ever present questions in the human agenda.
 
These aspects are intertwined in a functional society, but always in this order: the economy obeys politics, and politics are subordinated to ethics.
 
But beginning with the industrial revolution in the XIX century, more exactly since 1834 in England, the economy began to detach itself from politics, and to bury ethics. There appeared a market economy that was free of all control or ethical limits, but that directed and controlled the whole economic system.
 
The hallmark of this system is not cooperation but competition, that extends beyond the economy and impregnates all human relations. But this created, as Karl Polanyi put it, «a new, totally materialistic, creed that believed that all problems could be resolved by unlimited quantities of material goods» (The Great Transformation, Campus 2000, p. 58).  This creed is still accepted, with religious fervor, by most economists from the prevailing system, and, in general, by public policies.
 
From that moment on, the economy would function as the only axis of all the social relations. Everything would pass through the economy, concretely, through the Gross National Product, GNP. This process was studied in detail by the philosopher and historian of the economy, Karl Polanyi (1866-1964), of Hungarian and Jewish descent, who later converted to a Christian Calvinist. Born in Vienna, he did his work in England and later, pressured by McCarthyism, between Toronto, in Canada, and Columbia University in the United States. He showed that «instead of the economy being inserted in social relations, social relations are inserted into the economic system» (p.77). Then there occurred what he calls, The Great Transformation: from a market economy to a market society.
 
As a result, a new social system, never before seen, was born. Here society does not exist, only individuals in competition with each other, something that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher endlessly emphasized.  Everything changed, because everything, in fact everything, was turned into merchandise. All goods are taken to market, to be sold for individual profit: natural and manufactured products, sacred things directly linked to life such as drinking water, seeds, the soil, and human organs. Polanyi gravely notes that all this is «contrary to the human and natural substance of societies». But that is what has prevailed, especially in the post-war period.  Polanyi says that the market is «a useful element, but subordinated to a democratic community».  This thinker is based in the «economic democracy».
 
It is fitting to remember here the prophetic words of Karl Marx in 1847, in The Misery of Philosophy: «The time has come when all that men had considered inalienable became objects of exchange, of trade, and could be sold. The time when the very things that until then were shared but never traded; given, but never sold; acquired but never bought -- virtue, love, opinion, science, conscience, etc. -- the time has come when all of that has become merchandise. It is a time of general corruption, of universal venality, or speaking in political economics terms, a time when anything, moral or physical, once converted to a venal value, is taken to market to be sold for its material value».
 
The ecological chaos of the Earth is making us aware of the disastrous socio-environmental effects of the commercialization of everything. We must rethink the place of the economy in human life, especially when it comes to the limits of the Earth. The most ferocious individualism, obsessive and unlimited accumulation, weaken the values without which no society can be considered human: cooperation, caring for one other, love and veneration of Mother Earth, and the listening to the conscience that moves us towards the well being of all.
 
When a society such as ours, dulled by its crass materialism, becomes incapable of feeling the other as other, but only as an eventual producer or consumer, it is digging its own grave. As Noam Chomsky said a few days ago (on December 22, 2013), Greece is serving as a wake-up call: «the richest and most powerful societies, with incomparable advantages such as the United States and Canada, are those leading the rush to the precipice. That is the crazy logic of the "capitalist democracy" currently in existence.”
 
Now we must apply TINA (There is no Alternative): either we change or we will perish, because our material goods will not save us. That is the lethal price for having handed over our destiny to the dictatorship of the economy, transformed into a "god savior" of all problems.
 
- Leonardo Boff Theologian-Philosopher / Earthcharter Commission
01-24-2014 
 
Free translation from the Spanish sent by Melina Alfaro, done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.
 
https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/82881
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