Globalization has a rather simple idea at its heart. This idea has been used to enable and justify the drive of Kapital to increase the labor pool (by as many as possible) and make workers around the world compete directly with each other for the lowest wages and the worst conditions of working and living. And this simple idea is also used to degrade environmental protections around the world by giving those willing to run roughshod over our Natural World a comparative advantage- Globalization- a simple and (to many) seemingly innocuous notion, but one whose realization is now about to thrust our natural world over the precipice...
Comparative advantage was first described by David Ricardo (the founding father of Classical Economics) in his 1817 book On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. He used an example involving England and Portugal: in Portugal it is possible to produce both wine and cloth with less labor costs than it would take to produce the same quantities in England- however, the relative costs of producing these two goods are different in the two nations. In England it is very hard to produce wine, but only slightly difficult to produce cloth. In Portugal both are easy to produce. Therefore while it is also cheaper to produce cloth in Portugal than England, it is cheaper still for Portugal to produce an excess of wine, and trade that for English cloth. Conversely, England benefits from this trade because its costs for producing cloth has not changed but it can now get wine at a lower price, closer to the costs of cloth.
The conclusion drawn in largess is that every country shall gain by specializing in the commodities where it has this kind of comparative advantage- and trading these goods for others.
But the truth is... it is not really the nation which gains- it is Kapital- those who reap the huge profits to be made by exploiting the backwardness of labor and the vulnerability of underdeveloped resource bases. But now, it is everyone who stands to lose.
This process becomes possible and proceeds by utilizing comparative advantage for profit to contribute mightily in further detaching ordinary people from the natural world which must ultimately support them- and substitutes (only temporarily) an utter dependency on a vast and complex network of trade for the very essentials of their daily existence.
Globalization- the current crime of method deployed by Kapital... until the game is up...
Kalinzskii
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Religion and Myth
The most profound philosophical question is "what is reality?"
But this is a question which is not posed by religion. The human being, in his life of struggle, attempts to bring some kind of help into play, and this is the birth of primitive religion. In its primal form, religion is a 'calling out' for aid, for assistance through comfort. Religion is psychic comfort. Its power in the mental life of humans has held sway over the entire course of our history, and even further into the dim recesses of pre-history.
What is the most basic thing about religion? It is an attempt to control Nature through supplication to spiritual beings- beings imagined to inhabit our world and our lives. Religion develops to a way of explaining things also. Of course it is utterly nonscientific. But religion always, in all times and places, constitutes the culmination of long traditions, and in its own way explains the world by story telling. The stories inform the person who subscribes - of answers to many of the serious questions of life. "How did we get here, and how should we behave?" But this faith can never pose the most profound question- because that question, once posed, is the end of religion.
Thus the masses of humanity never ask the most profound question. People are too busy with the struggle for survival, and in the context of such a struggle, the question is silly. It can be said, the mind of a given person- that is reality- whether it is true or not- and an entire universe exists in a single mind. This mental universe is the essence of religion- an ultimate reality which cannot be pierced by any truth.
There is no real conversation between science and religion.
Kalinzskii
But this is a question which is not posed by religion. The human being, in his life of struggle, attempts to bring some kind of help into play, and this is the birth of primitive religion. In its primal form, religion is a 'calling out' for aid, for assistance through comfort. Religion is psychic comfort. Its power in the mental life of humans has held sway over the entire course of our history, and even further into the dim recesses of pre-history.
What is the most basic thing about religion? It is an attempt to control Nature through supplication to spiritual beings- beings imagined to inhabit our world and our lives. Religion develops to a way of explaining things also. Of course it is utterly nonscientific. But religion always, in all times and places, constitutes the culmination of long traditions, and in its own way explains the world by story telling. The stories inform the person who subscribes - of answers to many of the serious questions of life. "How did we get here, and how should we behave?" But this faith can never pose the most profound question- because that question, once posed, is the end of religion.
Thus the masses of humanity never ask the most profound question. People are too busy with the struggle for survival, and in the context of such a struggle, the question is silly. It can be said, the mind of a given person- that is reality- whether it is true or not- and an entire universe exists in a single mind. This mental universe is the essence of religion- an ultimate reality which cannot be pierced by any truth.
There is no real conversation between science and religion.
Kalinzskii
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Gaia and the Parasitoid
A parasitoid is an organism that spends a significant portion of its life attached to or within a single host organism in a relationship that is parasitic; unlike a true parasite, however, the parasitoid ultimately sterilizes, kills, and sometimes consumes the host. Thus parasitoids are similar to parasites except in the direr prognosis for the host.
Of course there is actually no clear separation between the concepts of parasitism and parasitoidy. Many species of true parasites can cause the death of their host- if for example they are present in overwhelming numbers or the host is in poor condition, or other compromising circumstances develop, such as secondary infections. In their extreme forms the categories of parasitism and parasitoidy are patently distinct; in general, however, there is a continuum of intermediate and contingent conditions that bridge the categories in practically every respect.
The human population bomb may be said to have exploded in 1945- the explosion has brought us from less than two to more than seven billion people on the earth today; we are swarming the planet and overloading the earth's capacity to support us. In spite of our technological advances in mass agriculture (while destroying vast necessary ecosystems and biodiversity) and our new industrial fishing techniques (creating of once rich oceans a spreading desert of marine life) - in 2012 each day over a billion people go malnourished.
This terrific explosion has resulted in a mass extinction of life- and will certainly destroy our present civilization with all the horror that will come with such a collapse.
What is to be done?
Kalinzskii
Of course there is actually no clear separation between the concepts of parasitism and parasitoidy. Many species of true parasites can cause the death of their host- if for example they are present in overwhelming numbers or the host is in poor condition, or other compromising circumstances develop, such as secondary infections. In their extreme forms the categories of parasitism and parasitoidy are patently distinct; in general, however, there is a continuum of intermediate and contingent conditions that bridge the categories in practically every respect.
The human population bomb may be said to have exploded in 1945- the explosion has brought us from less than two to more than seven billion people on the earth today; we are swarming the planet and overloading the earth's capacity to support us. In spite of our technological advances in mass agriculture (while destroying vast necessary ecosystems and biodiversity) and our new industrial fishing techniques (creating of once rich oceans a spreading desert of marine life) - in 2012 each day over a billion people go malnourished.
This terrific explosion has resulted in a mass extinction of life- and will certainly destroy our present civilization with all the horror that will come with such a collapse.
What is to be done?
Kalinzskii
Friday, June 1, 2012
Modernity
Let us as a thought split human kind into a division of two.
Note how divorced we (on the one side) are from the past, as a conscious state of mind.
That second other opposing side of humanity, those who abide in "all fixed, fast-frozen relations" (after Marx) - they must live with the dead. Yet we too (all of us) are nothing but the past culminated- it's just that we are cast asunder but forward by our Marxist attitude.
In common, this history is the core of our anxiety and our need to be oblivious- the past is just too hard to bear. But we of course have to bear it, so for our part, we look away into the perpetual present, and we sometimes find it hard to even imagine a future any longer.
But still... if we love the earth... as Marxists, are better off than those for whom "the past is never dead, it's not even past" (after Faulkner) and they are cut off from the the good blue-green earth because they remain frozen in an already dead - but continually dangerous thorn sharp religion of life denial- denial of the body and the earth.
Now let us divide humanity into a further division of three: and separate the third part from the second, by recognizing that there is not just one God in this ancient desert religion- but another who lies deep in the heart of the rapacious, there where is found a safe place for this thing- the God Mammon - this one all-powerful in plunder, racing all toward oblivion.
This is why we turn away, oblivious, after a way.
Kalinzskii
Note how divorced we (on the one side) are from the past, as a conscious state of mind.
That second other opposing side of humanity, those who abide in "all fixed, fast-frozen relations" (after Marx) - they must live with the dead. Yet we too (all of us) are nothing but the past culminated- it's just that we are cast asunder but forward by our Marxist attitude.
In common, this history is the core of our anxiety and our need to be oblivious- the past is just too hard to bear. But we of course have to bear it, so for our part, we look away into the perpetual present, and we sometimes find it hard to even imagine a future any longer.
But still... if we love the earth... as Marxists, are better off than those for whom "the past is never dead, it's not even past" (after Faulkner) and they are cut off from the the good blue-green earth because they remain frozen in an already dead - but continually dangerous thorn sharp religion of life denial- denial of the body and the earth.
Now let us divide humanity into a further division of three: and separate the third part from the second, by recognizing that there is not just one God in this ancient desert religion- but another who lies deep in the heart of the rapacious, there where is found a safe place for this thing- the God Mammon - this one all-powerful in plunder, racing all toward oblivion.
This is why we turn away, oblivious, after a way.
Kalinzskii
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