Disease of Capitalism оr Decline of Civilization?

Disease of Capitalism оr Decline of Civilization? 

Humankind is sick. Perhaps, very few people doubt that. Even among the participants of Davos Forum. However, even realizing that humankind is sick, whether we have a sound enough idea about the nature of its illness, whether the diagnosis is reliably defined?  Alas, no - the diagnosis is not established. Instead of the diagnosis or explanations a magic word "CRISIS" is being “implanted” persistently into brains of people. If necessary, this “sacral” word is being decorated with various adjectives like “debt”, “financial”, “global”, “trade”, “economic”, etc. And such a substitution more or less satisfies people in the bulk; they are accustomed to trust TV and various “gurus”. In fact, however, this word explains nothing, it merely inspires fear. It is no more than an instance of wrong, false word usage. Crisis is not at all an illness; it is impossible to be sick with crisis – this is nonsense. Crisis is a point of instability of a process, leading to a decisive change.  If one has in mind the clinical course of a disease, there are only two possible outcomes of a crisis - either the patient recovers, or dies. Crisis is by its very essence a short-term state of a system; it cannot be chronic. 

In general, surprisingly many circumstances of now-a-day “crisis” look rather odd. An idea, or more truly - a belief, is being imposed methodically into people’s consciousness that the crisis has arisen unexpectedly, as a natural disaster. Neither the governments, nor presidents, or any «Group of Eight or that of Top Twenty” as well as the team of winners of so-called “Nobel prize in economy” had noticed obvious symptoms of the threat approaching. Thus all they as though do not bear here any responsibility. But when the disaster has already occurred, all they concertedly simulate activity on ostensibly its overcoming, diligently avoiding, however, objective analysis of its roots. 

 Let's mention but some, the most obvious symptoms of the troubles brewing up in the world.

 

• Drastic speeding up depreciation of money (relative to gold).  Throughout two centuries of capitalism in the US the rate of depreciating money was being kept on a rather low level about 0.4 % a year, whereas in the last 35 years it accelerated more than twenty-fold, up to 10%. In the year 1834, one dollar “weighed” about 1.5 gramme of gold, now - about 17 milligrammes. The consequence: Money has lost the ability to perform duly its fundamental functions – to be the measure of value and the means of its storage. Whether can this substance be considered Money thereafter?
• Drastic drop of the efficiency of financial turnover. Half a century ago, the production of one dollar of GDP in the US required about one dollar 50 cents in financial turnover, now – more than 60 dollars.

• Drastic growth of external (National) debts of almost all developed countries. The debt of the US grew about fifty-fold within last 50 years and exceeded now 15 trillion dollars. Total the US debt is still four times greater, about 60 trillion dollars.
• Drastic growth of Derivatives. This is a very tangled “financial instrument”, which allows making big money out of hopes, illusions and risks of its clients. Its embryo existed from of old, but from the middle of the last century the derivatives went into booming growth. Total volume of contracts concluding annually by different mechanisms of derivatives, has attained an “astronomic” level of a quadrillion dollars (thousand trillions). Warren Buffett considering that derivatives decrease the stability of economy, surely had reasons to call this instrument the “financial weapons of mass destruction”. 
• Uncontrollable growth of population of super-rich people whose incomes incommensurably surpass the real needs of realization almost any productive business.With respect to only few super-rich people one can tell that their incomes really correlate with their contribution to humankind progress. Most of super-rich do not produce real values; they gain their super-incomes because they are super-rich and can manage a considerable share of real incomes created by productive structures of society. 

A synchronous display of the symptoms listed above testifies that all they have common roots. They mirror various facets of a single process of global scale and historic significance. This process is nothing but the change of socio-economic formation – the replacement of capitalism by a quite different socio-economic system. There are strong reasons to call the system that is impending as “Neofeudalism” though its vanguard seeks now to mask itself under less worrying name of the “financial capitalism”.  

In the old incarnation of feudal system the owners of land, the landlords were real  “masters of life”, since land at those times was almost the only primary source of energy necessary for subsistence of human society. In the present reincarnation, again the owners, this time the owners of big money, one may call them finlords, claim the superb status of “the masters of life”. Meanwhile the capitalists, due to whose activity the capitalist civilization was created, and who were real “masters of life” in their epoch – they lose their antecedent status and gradually turn into executors of finlords’ demands.

The very “architecture” of social system undergoes radical changes. In the days of classical creative capitalism the economic pyramid of a society was, if considered quite simplistically, two-storied: below – the employees, above – the employers (capitalists). The employees perform work producing certain values; the employers organize their work and create conditions to make it efficient. Hypertrophy of so-called “financial capitalism” means the occurrence of the third storey of economic system. Its uppermost “storey”, where a huge financial power concentrates, actually is not a productive one. Nothing real is being produced there but money – big money - which appears there, as if “from nothing”. Actually, however, nothing appears from nothing, and the big money of the third storey is being pumped in fact from lower storeys, by whose joint efforts real values and real incomes are being created. The share of total income, which goes upstairs to the third storey, is not small but doesn’t satisfy a growing appetite of its residents. Eager for strengthening its power over society, financial capitalism manifests an evident interest to own enrichment even at the expense of reducing incomes of the lower social strata. That is quite logical: a very high degree of economic inequality is a necessary condition of existence and relative stability of a system of feudal type, nо matter either medieval one or neo-. 

The epoch of capitalism is characterized by unprecedented successes in science, technology, democratization of social relations, a certain decrease in inequality, general increase of well-being of people (not everywhere though, but in many countries). One may go on with eulogy for the brave epoch, despite it passes away, but we surely would like to understand, why does the capitalist system cede so easily its positions in live history? In general any evolving system bears in itself the germs of its own decline and is doomed to be replaced, sooner or later, by a system of other design. The time distance between “sooner” and “later”, i.e. the real lifespan of a system depends, however, on its will to self-preservation. Unfortunately, the existing system shows in this respect a surprisingly slack or even perverted behavior. The governments of states, at least of many, manifest full readiness to obey implicitly the demands of bankers, although the latter ones were in fact among the main initiators of the current dramatic events. On the contrary, the opposite side represented by big money, acts vigorously. It pushes the creation all the new international financial organizations, advertising them as a rescue for the world economy. It intrudes its people into state structures: only for some months of the last year the leading posts in the governments of five or more European countries were occupied by bankers. (France had lost a chance to appear among them rather casually).

The capitalist world never was afraid of anything – to connect two oceans with a channel, to construct a huge ship or build three hundred meters high skyscraper, to fly up in the sky, to split atom, to “land” on the Moon … All seemed realizable. Sometimes even the possibility of surmounting fundamental laws of Nature. So was it until recently. Now humankind is afraid of everything – of  uncountable “-isms” (Islamism, nationalism, terrorism, fascism, etc.), of new strains of flu virus, of global warming, of unexpected scientific discoveries, of landing aliens, of falling an asteroid, of absorption by a black hole, and so on. Great nervousness, sometimes even real panic arises because of negligible shifts in negative direction of some so-called «economic indicators». But most of all humankind fears to have known true diagnosis of its illness. Instead it attempts to heal itself by “home remedies”, which were in use a century ago and sometimes helped for a while. This time it is a hopeless way, the more so because there are influential layers of society, whose aim is substitution of capitalism, not its recovery.

It remains to rely merely that humanity, at least its sufficient part, is “adult” enough to set its face consciously against the efforts of authorities to draw it back into state of political infantility.

2. (2) What follows from the capability of Homo sapiens to use energy above physiological needs?

The next source, which Homo sapiens employs when implementing his definitive capability are living beings, plants and animals. A significant part of additional energy that people use above their physiological needs they retrieve from the objects of inanimate nature, such as firewood, coal, or other burnable materials. Alive objects, plants and animals, provide people with food, thus satisfying their physiological needs, but humans had mastered to employ various living beings not only as food but also for getting from them additional energy for other purposes. Retrieving additional energy from living objects is linked with some peculiarities, however. All living organisms possess powerful mechanisms of self-preservation due to which they actively resist to external influences. Therefore living organisms cannot be coerced to do something for humans for nothing, inasmuch as they, in contrast to Homo sapiens, are incapable of using energy above their physiological requirements. In striving to acquire additional energy from plants or animals people have no other way but to enter with them into a kind of symbiotic relationship. People have to facilitate the life of their symbionts either providing them with additional feed, оr safeguarding from biological competitors, etc. Only under such condition a certain left-over of the energy reserve of symbionts can appear and people can reckon on getting it for their purposes. Domestication of plants and animals and formation of a specific sphere of human activity, the agriculture, in which more than a half of the world population is engaged even now, is just the realization of such symbiosis in a wide scale. This channel provides humankind mainly, but not only, with energy needed to cover its physiological requirements. The total capacity of this channel of energy supply correlates, with some degree of certainty, with the population of Earth.

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2. (1) What really follows from this distinction?

Thus Homo sapiens is a species whose individuals are capable of using energy above their physiological needs. It was precisely this fundamentally new capability that added to a human being the qualities that singled him out of the world of all other living beings.
The emergence of a species endowed with the new capability engendered far-reaching consequences. From this point on, a rather slow at first, but a progressively accelerating deviation of the biosphere from its relatively stable state of dynamic equilibrium began. This was followed also by the emergence of processes with positive feedback when any achieved success favors getting new successes. Such processes accelerate the development of an evolving system but reduce its stability. Generally speaking, since the advent of Homo sapiens on the arena of the global evolutionary process, its biological phase gave place to the phase of cultural evolution that is characterized with much greater rate of changes.
It stands to reason that the human capability of using extra energy can be realized, provided that there are available sources. Homo sapiens succeeded in discovering and mastering energy from different sources. All they can be classified into three groups, differing in the character of the interplay between the subject and the object of the interaction. In all cases, the active subject is the same; it is Homo sapiens hungry for additional energy. The objects of his aspiration may belong either to the inanimate world, or to the world of living beings other than he himself, or, finally, that may be his congeners. In the first case, the source of energy, such, for example, as firewood, coal, oil, uranium, etc., is passive and can be exploited by humans within the limits defined by their technical capabilities. Just through this channel the contemporary humankind gains technological energy in amounts covering its physiological needs for tens of times on average, or even for hundreds of times in the developed countries.

1. What is Human?

This question interested people from of old. As a token of deep admiration for the insight of people of the classical antiquity who had asked this question first, let us repeat it in an ancient language:

Quid est Homo?

Strange though it may seem but no satisfactory definition of man can be found. The name “Homo sapiens” given to our species by Carl Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae (1758) sounds pleasingly for human’s self-esteem but it is not a definition in scientific sense. It is merely the formal “address” assigned to the sprig, which our species occupies on the branchy classification tree of living beings. As to the adjective “sapiens” (wise, judicious, it itself is not defined unambiguously and therefore cannot serve as a definition for anything else. Charles Darwin himself wrote in “The Descent of Man” (1871): "It would be impossible to fix on any definite point when the term man ought to be used.” A lot of formulas, dished up in the modern literature as the definitions of the species Homo sapiens, are not the definitions, in effect. All they only list some or other features peculiar to humans, but neither specifies that fundamental distinction of Homo sapiens, which singled this species out of all other living beings.

Thus, we come to a somewhat odd conclusion that all the efforts directed at deepening of our self-knowledge on the conceptual level, which lasted since ancient times, had led to surprisingly moderate results. Ancient philosophers could define Human as “two-legged without feathers”, whereas now, about two and a half millenniums later, we should content ourselves with the following: “bipedal apes belonging to the mammalian species Homo sapiens”. The latter definition can hardly be considered as noticeably more informative than the former one. Thus, one has to recognize that Jean Bruller (Vercors), a French writer, author of a sophisticated fiction “You Shall Know Them” (1953), had sufficient reasons when wrote “Not science nor philosophy, not Parliament nor clergy, can decide manlike ape of apelike man”. And then: “All man's troubles arise from the fact that we do not know what we are and do not agree on what we want to be”.

And here we have to make a step that may open the path to solution of the problem considered, in spite this step will conflict with the traditions of the humanities. This step is as follows.

To formulate a meaningful definition of Homo sapiens, a purely humanitarian approach is insufficient; a bit of physics is necessary.

From the viewpoint of physics, any living being is a complex, highly structured, dynamic system that forms and maintains itself alive due to energy flows it uses. Plants exist due to the flows of solar energy they absorb and convert into chemical energy of their biomass. Animals get needed energy from biomass of plants they eat or from biomass of other animals. Hоmo sapiens is a living being and nothing intrinsic to all other living beings is alien to him.

All living beings consume as much energy as they need for performing their physiological functions. The amount of energy available for a certain kind of organisms in a given habitat defines their population, whereas the diversity of coexisting species provides self-adjustment and stability of the biocenosis. Thus, the communities of naturally occurring organisms exist in a state of dynamic “equilibrium” with their habitat, and such state may last indefinitely long. The condition of sufficiently close conformity of energy consumption with physiological needs of living beings is of fundamental significance; all living beings existing on Earth are subjected to it. All with the only exception that appeared several hundred centuries ago, the species Homo sapiens. It differs from all other species in its ability to use energy in amounts exceeding physiological needs. Just this feature is distinctive. It allows to formulate a rational definition emphasizing the fundamental difference of a new offshoot on the Hominid’s branch of the evolutionary tree:

Homo sapiens is a species whose individuals are capable of using energy above their physiological needs.


When our prehistoric ancestor kindled a fire, saddled a horse, or forced his congener to do certain work for him, he, in fact, used more energy for his aims than his physiology required. It was precisely this fundamentally new capability that provided exclusive position of humans among other living beings and turned the prerequisite of a great evolutionary success of the species..
From the definition proposed a series of significant consequences follow logically thus allowing to explain in a quite natural way many sociocultural phenomena, which cannot be explained adequately on the basis of traditional imagination of what is Homo. This is, however, the next question yet.