|
The expressed purpose of capitalism is the aggregation of capital for the owners of capital assets. This goal is not connected to a larger purpose or to biological imperitives but is left to the individual capital accumulator to determine. The level of human extra-biological power being directed via our economic system driven by a non specified purpose is stagering. I believe that the underlying purpose of capital accumulation is directed toward achieving elevated social rank and the exploitation of that rank for power within an individuals social milieu.
Robert Fuller has defined rank abuse as the primary underlying dynamic of the most commonly identified social disease's of our time. Accumulation of wealth beyond the point of comfortable survival seems purposless until a common thread in excess wealth accumulation is identified. The ecological collapse of Easter Island, documented in Jarod Diamond's book "Collapse" was in large part driven by rank competition between cheif's of the various social groups on the island outstriping the available natural resources. The same is now happening on a global scale with capitalism and global climate change. We need to develop a non-rank competition economics that directs physical resources toward holistic biological purposes.
Why are we collectively allied with this system of directing our collective power?
In order to do what makes sense that identity (the individual private accumulator) must stand aside in favor of a point of view that asserts we aggregate for the common good of the biological self, which is both an individual and collective self. What is left after the aggregation for the common good of the biological self then can be accumulated for the exclusive purposes of the individual provided it does not degrade the common good. That is a model of accumulation that is not capitalism and not communism.
|
Economic System