The value of nothing, and the fire next time

The Value of Nothing and the Fire next Time

by Len Parker 

Twenty years after the first Rio Conference, the Rio+20 Earth Climate Conference 2012 is at an end. As predicted, it proved another talkfest and insult to our intelligence - with no real resolution for effective action.

I recall a previous occasion on which the optimistic hopes of a young girl - determined to address the “world leaders” to remind them of their responsibility to address environmental concern with urgency - were destined to be dashed.

A decade ago, a 12 year old Canadian, Severn Cullus-Suzuki, the founder of the Environmental Children's Organisation, addressed the suits at the United Nations and received a standing ovation. Her speech went viral on the internet.

She told the delegates: “If all the money spent on war was spent on ending poverty and finding environmental answers what a wonderful place this would be.

“In school,” she said, “you teach us not to fight with others, to clean up our mess, not to hurt other creatures, to share, not to be greedy. Then why do you go out and do things you tell us not to do?”

Later, in an article in Time magazine under the heading  "The Young Can't Wait”, a more mature and experienced young woman, disillusioned with the suits, said: “I thought I had reached some of them, that my speech might actual spur some action.”

“A decade later - after I sat through many more conferences - I'm not sure what has been accomplished … I have learned that addressing our leaders is not enough.”

She quotes Gandhi: “We must become the change we want to see.”

At the 2012 Rio+20 Summit the suits again heard from another teenager, this time from New Zealand. Brittany Trilford, a 17-year-old Queen Margaret College student, won the 'Date with History' youth video speech contest, and the opportunity to address the Summit.

In conclusion, she said; “You have 72 hours to decide the fate of your children – my children – my children's children – and I start the clock now.”

Sorry Brittany, looks like they were looking at their Blackberries to check their shares or see if it was time for lunch.

There is a saying: “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” I thought this was a wise remark of my grandmother. Only recently I found it was a quote from Oscar Wilde in his book The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The story of Dorian Gray, as with that of Dr Faustus, is about a man who sells himself to the devil for eternal youth - at least until the day of settlement. Before that time, however, he is reminded of his bargain by a portrait of himself that not only records his real age but his sins of commission, debauchery and self-indulgent riotous living.

It would appear that the day of reckoning for the Wall Street banksters, the neocons, capitalist free-marketeers, and those raping the earth – though not far off - has not yet come. The parasitical derivative dealers, reckless currency and futures traders – with their extortionate bonuses still paid - are bailed out by the global working class and the poor by attacks on our wages, health, education and welfare. But, according to the rich, it is our own excesses that are responsible for our predicament.

On this finite planet we inhabit, constant capital development demands ever-expanding growth that is irresponsible and unsustainable.

“As long as these resources remain, the demands of the rich can be met [or so they believe]– which may explain why so many of the rich see no problem. The poor experience a very different reality, but in a market economy their experience doesn't count.”

(from the introduction to The Case Against the Global Economy edited by: Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith)

Our strange new virtual world of financializatio was born out of market deregulation, a revolution in electronic communication, the invention of derivatives and puzzling complexity. The rich still get richer, while we may all drown - not only in the toxic debt the speculators and merchants of death have created, but in a rising tide of global warming. This does not “raise all boats” as promised, but threatens system collapse and perhaps billions of our lives.

This toxic debt, so vast it can never be repaid, accumulates, while the global crisis deepens. We, and Mother Earth become breathless with toxic gases while our future existence and possibly all life on the planet is threatened.

As an eco-socialist it will seem strange to quote from a speech that Senator Robert Kennedy gave at the University of Kansas in 1968 shortly before his assassination, but it is instructive - and may even have contributed to his death:

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, … is over $800 billion a year [now in the trillions] but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the Gross National Product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public officials. It measures neither our wit or nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

When have we heard a speech of such eloquence and substance from any of our politicians here?

New Zealand's Marilyn Waring, when she became a politician, also discovered the things she valued most about New Zealand counted for nothing: “its pollution-free environment; its mountain streams with safe drinking water; the accessibility of national parks, walkways, beaches, lakes, kauri and beech forests; and absence of nuclear power and energy.” Unfortunately for Marilyn, all these are now under attack from miners, loggers, and farmers' cattle polluting our streams.

The dirty secret of capitalism is not simply profit but accumulation, acquired through the exploitation of human labour power and the earth's resources in unsustainable endless growth.. Paradoxically, everything is measured but that which really matters.

This new virtual world of debt is 'measured' at many times the total global GDP - between $685 trillion and more than a thousand trillion. Don't try and imagine it, it is impossible. Raj Patel in his book The Value of Nothing writes:

... to borrow a trick from the brilliant essayist John Lancester, if you were to count a dollar per second, it would take twelve days to count a million, thirty-one years to count a billion, and for a trillion a thousand more fold, it'd take six times all recorded history.

Mind-boggling if you are on the minimum wage.

The deregulation of the global financial system opened up a casino economy. According to a US Federal Reserve report in the late 1990s:

...about 85 percent of dollar transactions were in cash at banks, supermarkets, gas stations, restaurants and the like... the trillions sloshing back and forth between countries, within and between corporations, and between large investors and entrepreneurs are transferred from one account to another through an electronic network.

(Richard Barnet and John Cavanagh “Electronic Money and the Casino Economy” in The Case Against the Global Economy)

Barnet and Cavanagh add that while “the number of electronic transfers amounts to only 2 percent of the total transfers”, yet they “involve five out of every six dollars that move in the world economy.” That was then. Now? Wow! Who knows?

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the Gross National Product (GNP) are inventions: a construct by accountants and economists that “does not take account of the extraction of natural resources which it treats as income, rather than the depletion of an asset, which it is, and ignores transactions that are not conducted through money.”

It also ignores “much of the most important work in society...that which we do for ourselves within our homes, extended families, communities: childcare, cooking, cleaning, home repairs and similar.”. But it counts family breakdown and disease as economic booms - “divorce lawyer bills, moving costs, and two households where one existed before...”

It doesn't record the damage we do to the environment and other species, “over which we have dominion” according to biblical literalists and very materialistic Christian religious fundamentalists awaiting the rapture. We can do as we like unto the day of reckoning.

Human myth and literature, however, is full of many legends dealing with the consequences of greed and selfishness. The Israelites worshiping the golden calf; Jesus throwing the money changers out of the temple; King Midas turning everything he touched into gold, including his beloved daughter; Odysseus being tempted by the Greek Sirens' song to his potential doom and having to be restrained; Shylock in The Merchant of Venice wanting his pound of flesh; crooked lawyers in Dicken's Bleak House.

Then there is the simple honesty of children, unaware of the consequences of their actions who see things as they are in “The Emperor's New Clothes”. It is the innocent child who announces to the cowardly crowd of servile toadies that in fact the King had no clothes. Thank you Severn and Brittany for speaking out!

What is missing is how we got here - the origin and consequences of the mode and relations of production and ideologies that arise from them. In other words, the class nature of society. While fundamentalists might deny evolution and Darwin, they surely are the greatest proponents of social-Darwinism. The term “the survival of the fittest” was never actually used by Darwin in his Origin of Species, but adopted to justify the privilege, power and property of the owners of the means of production.

“The survival of the fittest”, like “nature red in tooth and claw”, is a concept that belongs to parasitic, competitive and individualistic capitalist society. They are insufficient to describe the natural world of coexistence and interdependence (symbiosis), that represents our future if we choose to make one.

Brilliant young people like Severn and Brittainy are right to be angry. Time is short for us to learn what is of real value and to act. They are right also to believe that “another world is possible”, one not based on profit driven endless production for production's sake and consumption in a finite world, but on sharing, cooperation, and real needs.

While the God of the Bible, after the flood, may have promised the 'fire next time', let us make sure it isn't the consequence of human produced global warming. Above all, we must not let the capitalist suits and their spin doctors. with their all consuming obsession with market forces, extinguish the fire in Brittany's heart.