John McMurtry The Cancer Stage of Capitalism (1999)

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.27It is typically asserted or assumed that need cannot be defined, that whatis one s need is another s desire, that individual differences and preferencesdiffer too widely, that need is an inherently normative concept, that if onedefines need one is prescribing to others what they must have or nothave, and so on.This repudiation of life bearings is what one wouldexpect in a global condition where another system of value has becomedominant and occupies life-hosts.In economics in particular, the conceptTHE LIFE CODE VERSUS THE MONEY CODE 153of need has been banished from every text, class and boardroom aseffectively heretical.The term occurs nowhere in any recognized schoolor model and, as we have seen, the global market paradigm for a centuryhas universally excluded life requirements from its calculus.Welfare economics, a normative branch of economics, may seem anexception.For it employs value judgements of what ought to be produced,how production should be organized, and the way income and wealthought to be distributed.But welfare economics itself never touches downto the life-ground in its dominant schools.Pareto optimums, cost-benefitratios, compensation principles, efficiency gains and losses from socialinterventions, income-distribution consequences of public policies, socialwelfare functions, aggregated preference orders of communities, andcontingent valuation methods to quantify willingness to pay of socialpopulations have given rise to much debate and arcane proofs anddisproofs.But human need or life requirement as such never enters anyequation.The closest economics gets to life is to subjective reactions topriced goods and real or posited money-demand conditions.What onenever finds is connection to more basic ground and what life actually needsfrom the economy to go on living: either in the microcosm of individualsor in the macrocosm of social and environmental life-hosts.The issue oflife s reproduction or growth, or deficit and destruction, is unspeakablein the paradigm.Its benchmarks of life never go deeper than consumerpreferences, which as we know can be operantly conditioned incircumstances of controlled information to prefer state arms races topublic education and health, and carcinogenic junk commodities tocontinued life itself.28After the paradigm shift which regrounds economics in the life systemits programme now assaults and destroys, economists will relate to whatis required for life from the economy not merely what can be extractedfrom life to increase commodities sold and money flows to investors.Theneeds of life are not difficult to identify.They are only said to be impossibleto define across individual preferences because we have lost our lifebearings within a global condition whose regulating paradigm andsystem excludes life requirements from its premises and inferences ofjudgement.A need for something exists if and only if, and to the extent that,deprivation of it regularly results in an absolute reduction of its owner s life-range capability.We can prove what is or what is not needed by thesimple device of observing what happens to a human life without it.What is needed for individuals before all else are the basic means ofhuman life specified above.And the same goes for individuals takentogether as societies.Breathable air whose ingestion does not reduce thecapacities of the lungs to inhale and exhale or induce other organicdisfunction is such a foundational need, both for individuals as suchand for the communities of human life they together compose.Buteverywhere in growing urban market sites and beyond, the quality of air154 THE CANCER STAGE OF CAPITALISMdeteriorates, to the point that in most of the cities of the world the airsystemically produces bronchial and other diseases at epidemic levels, fromCalcutta to Toronto.We can walk through the list of basic means ofexistence and find a cascade down of capacity to carry healthy life.Witheven food, an apparent exception in still increasing absolute carryingcapacity, the combination of population increase driven by massimpoverishment, exhausted and depleting soilcovers from intensivemonoculture farming and pollution-induced climate change, increasingreliance on genetically altered and homogenizing plant and animalvarieties more vulnerable to disease mutations, and the increasinginaccessiblity of the poor to either land or food commodities togetherindicate a more precarious and declining life condition.With health-careand education, though less deadly in their absence than other basicneeds, there is also a downward slide of their carrying capacity andaccessibility to both absolute and proportionate numbers of the world speople.In Africa, for example, literacy and health-care systems collapseas governments are now forced by international market institutions tospend four times more on compounding interest payments to foreign moneylenders than on all public health and education combined (endlesspayments for debts that were incurred and accumulated for the most partby elites allied with transnational market forces and depositing flight capitalin transnational market banks).29 The life sequences of human as wellas environmental bodies are in these ways globally degenerating whiletrade and export figures within the money economy are celebrated.Wehave not considered the means of life of affective interaction because itmay seem least affected by global market trends.But here too the declineof this basic means of life would seem difficult to deny since the sites forit are radically reduced by commodified socialization by mass televisionwhich cannot interact, and by pervasively insecure employment conditionswhich, as we have seen, are known to select against healthy socialrelations.The point here is that an economic paradigm which does notrelate to human needs as a factor or determinant of its calculations is boundnot to be aligned with them in its recommendations and implementa-tions, and the facts everywhere demonstrate this consequence to havein fact followed systematically as this model s effects.The Institute for Innovation in Social Policy at Fordham University seeksto track social indicators of well-being in the US, which puts it at themarginalized forefront of the economic sciences by actually relating tolife co-ordinates in economic investigation.The Institute s methods do notpenetrate to the life-ground itself, and the vital means of existence whichare directly required to sustain the human life sequence in a healthycondition [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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