2) The ideal of unlimited growth: As Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen argues, economic development should be directed not at unlimited growth for its own sake, but at sustainable growth specifically for the purpose of catering for the needs and well-being of the majority of people. The IMF’s own data proves that neoliberal capitalism has led to increasing concentrations of ever-larger profits among a smaller minority of the world’s population, with the percentage of benefits from growth to the poor shrinking, creating greater poverty and inequality all round.
3) Fractional reserve banking and the New Capital Accord (2000): The interest-based monetary system subjugates the real economy to a form of unrestrained financial plunder that intensifies debt in order to grow. This means not only monetary reform, but a fundamental decentralization of the economic and financial system based on the principle that the Earth’s resources belong to everyone, and that people everywhere should participate in economic and financial policymaking. This, of course, also means that political power must be increasingly distributed among communities.
4) Materialist fundamentalism: Underlying neoliberal capitalism are philosophical assumptions about life and human nature that reduce the world to nothing more than a collection of physical, disconnected, atomistic, self-interested and thus inherently conflictual units. This reductionist worldview rationalizes unlimited consumption based on the equation of personal happiness with accumulation of material possessions and fulfillment of material desires. There is no room for objective ethical values because such values cannot be readily identified as material objects. Yet clearly these ideological assumptions of capitalism are false – because if they were right, then they would work! Rather, we see that the manifestation of materialism in the global political economy is leading to massive destruction of life, rather than prosperity for all. This means that ideals like social justice and compassion are actually, objectively, more in tune with nature than neoliberals would have us believe.
Civilizational Renewal?
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