Another World is Possible, after The Fourth World War:
A pivotal book to the anti-globalization movement is called Another World is Possible, by Dr. David McNally. A good movie about the anti-globalization revolution turning violent is called The Fourth World War.
Tom Friedman is a great journalist, and used his journalistic abilities and skills to research his book. Dr. McNally is a professor of political science and studied globalization from an economic direction by looking up some actual numbers to see what was going on. And what do you think he found?
I won’t bother going into his numbers here, because that would just give people something to try to disprove. He discovered the shadows of Entropy and The Limits to Growth. Namely, that endless economic expansion in a world with a finite supply of resources is not physically possible.
Dr. McNally takes the very sensible approach to predicting the future of globalized Capitalism by backing up to the beginning, studying where Capitalism originated, and seeing how it had progressed from there to the present day.
I’ve already shown you a basic outline of how chiefs became kings and kings became aristocrats by being the continuing line of people everyone else looked up to due to their superior control of energy and material resources. Chiefs had simple genetic advantages that made them alpha males throughout the course of our evolution, but as people developed more complex economies, the people who started out with slight advantages kept multiplying their advantages generations by generation by leaving inheritances to their children, educating their children, and using the political power their economic power gave them to write laws in their favor. All this time, by controlling the most energy and material resources like the evolutionary chiefs, they’ve been maintaining a sensory illusion among most people, most of the time, that their economic success is proof of their superiority and their benevolence. Or if nothing else, their economic and political advantages made a lot of people decide to cooperate with them to try to get them to be benevolent.
The transition from feudal aristocracy to Capitalist aristocracy began in England about 350 years ago. Under feudal aristocracy, peasant farmers lived and worked on their land and paid taxes. Then some aristocrats discovered that they could make more profit on the peasants’ work by commodifying time. Peasants who farmed their own land could farm their land however they wanted. As long as they paid their taxes, they were free to produce as much or as little beyond that as they wanted.
The way peasants were farming their land was the same way they had always farmed their land. Each of their houses were built on their own private land, and other land in their villages was set aside as communal land, which might be wheat fields, sheep pastures, forests, rivers, or whatever. The communal land was for everyone to use, and since everyone lived in the same village with everyone else, the people in each village developed a sense of how the communal land needed to be used—how many sheep each person could graze in communal pastures, how the work was going to be divided in growing the wheat, how much each person could hunt in the forests, how much wood they could chop, and how many fish they could catch from the river. They measured their economic success in terms of everyone getting enough to eat. As you may have noticed, that means English peasants lived more or less the same way the Yurok did. Or the O’Odham. Or people all over most of the world.
The first Capitalists realized that the peasants using communal land prevented them from controlling how hard each peasant worked. Peasants with land controlled their own livelihoods. So the first Capitalists began enacting what became known as the Enclosure Laws, and also began evicting peasants from their lands. The aristocrats took ownership of the land, and then started charging the peasants rent on individual plots.
Now that the peasants didn’t work their own land, they were no longer in control of their livelihoods. Now the only way they make their livings was by selling their labor. That made them dependent on people who did own land, and that let the people who owned the land control how hard the peasants worked—which inevitably meant they made them work as hard as they could.
What the first Capitalists had discovered was that the peasants needed two things to make their livings: their land and their labor. If the Capitalists took control of the land, they took control of the peasants who depended on it. Also, now that they claimed ownership of half of the land-and-labor equation, they could claim ownership of half of the product of the peasants’ labor. (That’s the basic idea, anyway, regardless of how much rent the Capitalists actually charged the peasants.)
Out of all the skills and abilities people in England had at the time, a few turned out to be far more powerful than the rest. These were certain abilities and skills for mathematics and social interactions. People who had also accumulated a lot of material resources—namely, aristocrats—were well positioned to put their combination of abilities and skills to use. So these people used their social abilities and skills to negotiate certain laws into existence, and then used their mathematical abilities and skills to use the laws to channel more material goods—money, or anything they could sell for money—into their hands.
The laws were simply agreements made among people about how they would interact with each other. These first Capitalists figured out how to persuade people to make agreements that would favor them. The other people might’ve realized how much the agreements they were making would benefit the Capitalists, or they might not have. Once the agreements were made, each individual involved believed that every other individual involved intended to uphold the agreement and to help hold everyone else responsible for upholding the agreement. The basic result was that it was a lot easier for the first Capitalists to persuade groups of people to make agreements than it was for any individual in the group to un-make the agreement afterwards.
Now let’s fast forward 350 years and see how these patterns have developed.
By now, most people in the industrialized world don’t own productive land. Most people in the industrialized world can’t combine their labor with land to provide for themselves. A lot of people own other things they can combine with their labor to provide for themselves, but most don’t. That means that most people are still making their livings by selling their labor—and depend on selling their labor to make their livings. Whatever kind of a job you have, when you go to work, you use certain things that your employer owns to perform your work. You employer owns half of the labor-and-land equation you need to make your living, so he claims 50% of the product of your work (or some percentage, but that’s the idea). You are now paying rent on the tools, or truck, or photocopy machine, or whatever you use in the form of producing something that your employer can sell, some fraction of which he then pays you for your wage.
Whatever kind of a job you have, you use certain skills and abilities to perform your work. Regardless of what kind of a job it is, you will notice that there are two things that are crucial to the survival of your employer’s company. One is customer service, the other is accounting. That is, the ability to negotiate, and the ability to accumulate resources. Or, a certain type of social ability and skill, and a certain type of mathematical ability and skill. The people who have these abilities and skills use them to channel material resources into your employer’s hands. Which is why he makes more money than you do.
The other thing we can look at is how Capitalists are using their social and mathematical abilities and skills to write enclosure laws in the modern world. That is, how they’re making social agreements that cause more material resources to flow into their hands.
First of all, there’s the North American Free Trade Agreement. With the NAFTA, for the first time in history, representatives of corporations gained the ability to sue national governments directly. That is, our government leaders who write the laws agreed to let corporate representatives sue them.
By granting corporate leaders the ability to compete directly against national governments, the government leaders who wrote the laws elevated corporations to the status of political units equivalent to national governments.
There are more corporations in the world than there are national governments. Their leaders were not elected by citizens. Their leaders’ goals are to channel material resources into their own hands. Many of these corporations control more material resources than federal governments. As of 1999, the people at Microsoft controlled assets worth the gross domestic product of Spain; the people at General Electric assets worth the GDP of Thailand; the people at Wal-Mart assets worth the GDP of Argentina; the people at Cisco Systems assets worth the GDP of Iran; the people at Lucent Technologies assets worth the GDP of South Africa; the people at IBM assets worth the GDP of Columbia. In 2000, 51 of the 100 largest economies in the world were corporations; only 49 were nation-states.
It could be argued that the concentration of material wealth in the hands of a few people who had great ingenuity for investing it into new inventions is what made our technological level possible. Most people’s livelihoods depend on their selling their labor now, but in return they get cell phones and fresh fruit in the winter and planes to ride in to go visit their mothers a thousand miles away. That is true. But at what cost?
Mr. Friedman believes that it’s possible for nobly minded people to struggle against Globalization 3.0—or with it, or alongside it, or whatever he prefers to call it—to create a humane form of Capitalism. But obviously he completely misunderstands the fundamental problem the Globalization 4.0 revolutionaries are struggling against. If we struggle against the people who are making Globalization 3.0 happen, we’ll be struggling forever, and we’ll have to devote our entire lives to fighting for the privilege to be safe from people who want to drive us off our farms so they can make more money from the land by charging us rent. The struggle of the Globalization 4.0 revolutionaries is the struggle against the laws and other social institutions that make Capitalist oppression possible in the first place. Laws that let Capitalists do things like:
The people at Coca Cola buying the rights to an entire water shed in India, and banning everyone in the area from drawing water from wells on their own land;
The people at Monsanto and various other biotech companies taking out patents on genes found in plants, some of which were domesticated by indigenous people, who have been growing them for 2,000 years, and now charging people for the rights to grow their traditional plants;
The people at Myriad Genetic taking out patents on two human genes they discovered that indicate a susceptibility to breast cancer, blocking women from finding out if they have these genes, suing the Canadian government for ignoring their patents and testing women for these genes, winning the case, forcing Canadian doctors to send the women to get tested at Myriad’s labs for three times the price, which the Canadian government couldn’t afford, and thereby preventing these women from finding out if they’re susceptible to breast cancer;
The people at Pfizer charging AIDS patients in Africa 25 times their annual income for two months worth of AIDS treatment—or trying to charge them that much, anyway.
The problem with allowing corporations to compete against federal governments directly is that federal governments exist to protect their people (supposedly, anyway). A federal government is (supposed to be) an agreement among all the people of a country to work together to keep themselves safe from individuals amongst them who would threaten other group members, and to keep themselves safe, as much as possible, from external forces, including other groups of people. Our primate ancestors figured out how to do that about 20 million years ago, and with the stroke of a pen the Capitalist pigs outlawed it.
What Mr. Friedman doesn’t seem to understand is that by the time we of the Globalization 4.0 revolution destroy all of the laws that make economic oppression like this possible, we will no longer have a Capitalist economy at all.
Another product of Capitalism is institutionalized racism. As Malcolm X once said, “You can’t have Capitalism without racism.”
In the first book I told you about the evolutionary origins of racism—skin color being (or at least, seeming to be) an easy way to recognize whether a person belongs to your tribe or not. Well if you’re the kind of people who try to charge people 25 years’ worth of their income for 2 months worth of medicine, how do you get people to put up with an economic system like that? There are a lot more of them than there are of you.
How else, but by teaching all those people to hate each other, just like Rex did with the kids on his playground? Dr. McNally devotes a large chapter of his book to the economic origins of racism. He starts by looking at the laws that affected laborers in the Americas back when the Americas were first being colonized, and traces them from there. In the beginning, there weren’t many laws, and laborers were all equal to each other. Then Whites started being granted more rights and Blacks’ rights were taken away, and so were the rights of other individual groups of people. Soon enough, Blacks and Whites were two completely separate classes of laborers. By this point, all the Blacks were slaves and none of the Whites were slaves. So the Blacks hated the Whites and the White laborers distrusted the Blacks. Then their White leaders taught the White laborers to believe the Blacks were sub-human. And as a society we still bear the scars of that to this day.
And then they did the same basic things to divide all other races from each other.
And then they did the same basic things to divide ethnicities from each other.
And then they did the same basic things to divide religions from each other.
And then they did the same basic things to divide women from men.
Capitalists passed a lot of laws about who was allowed to immigrate to countries, who was allowed to own property, who was allowed to go to school, who was allowed to vote, who was allowed to have what jobs, who was allowed to testify against who in court, who was allowed in which public parks or schools or stores or restaurants, who was allowed to live in which neighborhoods, who were allowed to own guns, who was allowed to use physical violence on who, who was allowed to marry who… etc., etc.. We don’t have laws like that anymore, now we just have a society full of people who grew up with laws like that, who assumed those laws existed because certain groups of people were better at certain things, or certain groups of people were more dangerous than others. Or maybe those people’s children, who learned their attitudes from their parents. These people never figured out how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together, so when they saw one group of poor, illiterate people working at filthy menial jobs, and another group of well-to-do, well-educated people working at clean supervisory jobs, they assumed that proved those people were best suited for each of those jobs, not that there were a bunch of invisible laws forcing one group down into one category and leaving the other category wide open for the other people.
War is one of many results of racism, because wars depends on the public being taught to feel like a certain group of people deserves to be killed, injured, maimed, driven from their homes, and subjugated. Dr. McNally devotes some of his book to showing how much of warfare since the origins of Capitalism has been fuelled by the pursuit of profit—and usually a huge amount of profit for a few people.
I’ve heard a lot of people argue, as Dr. McNally does, that all of war is a conspiratorial economic system for the materially wealthy. That obviously can’t be true, because coalitional violence is a universal constant of humanity. Tribes of nomadic hunter-gatherers who don’t have classes of materially wealthy people fight wars against each other. Two people out of a tribe of 50 who get killed in a war against another tribe deep in the jungles of Brazil doesn’t make the evening news here in America for a couple of obvious reasons, but that doesn’t change the fact that those people just lost 4% of their population, which would be the equivalent of 12,000,000 Americans being killed. That 4% of the population of 50 were just as critical to their political and economic systems as 4% of the population of 300,000,000—they performed vital jobs, they had vital skills and abilities, they were parts of people’s families, and so on.
To say that all of war is a conspiratorial economic system of materially wealthy people now is not only misleading, but also dangerous. That leads people to believe things about the world that simply aren’t true, and then to take action on those faulty beliefs. I’ve written two huge books so far and now a third about how much believing in things that aren’t true gets people into trouble. To say that all of war is an economic conspiracy of the materially wealthy now would require the intervention of some invisible force that intervened at some point in history and made war stop being one thing and start being the other. Our inability to observe that force doesn’t prove it doesn’t exist, but in situations like this you need to consider the possibility that the person who believes that force needs to exist to explain the evidence is simply mistaken, and the progression of events can be explained using observable evidence, but the person just hasn’t figured out how.
At one end of the history of our species we have Cro-Magnons with their brand new multi-piece tools. At the other end we have the Iraq war. Wars are always, and have always been, won by whichever side manages to combine energy and matter to direct force against their enemies most effectively. So here we arrive at the origins of war as an economic system: Fighting a war requires material resources.
Hence the reason the Mesopotamians with their advantages in material resources conquered their neighbors, and their cultural descendants eventually conquered most of the world. Along the way, people with certain abilities and skills were able to acquire more material resources than the other members of their groups, and they used their material resources to affect the group’s decision-making more than other members of the group did. Everyone involved was attempting to preserve the survival of their DNA by the most effective means perceivable to them. The materially wealthy people—who had good negotiation and mathematical abilities and skills in the first place—were good at using their abilities, skills, and resources to persuade a large number of people that the benefits of fighting the war were worth the effort. In other words, the same combination of abilities and skills they had used to accumulate their material wealth could now be combined with the material wealth they had accumulated to alter a lot of people’s perceptions of the most effective means of preserving the survival of their DNA. Meanwhile, the materially wealthy people also perceived an opportunity to preserve the survival of their own DNA more effectively by making profits on the war, so they used their abilities and skills for persuasion and mathematics to figure out how to make the most profit possible. So the economic divisions that critical combination of abilities and skills began keeps growing wider and wider.
Then you get the initial sentiments for the American Revolution, where some colonists wanted to stop being the subjects of Britain, being amplified by materially wealthy people who realize that American independence would mean no more taxes to pay to the king.
Then you get the initial sentiments of the Civil War, where a lot of slaves wanted to be free and the president wanted to free them, being amplified by materially wealthy people who realized that paying the slaves would make them much more productive workers.
Then you get the initial sentiments of World War I, in which people of the major European powers perceived each other as threats, amplified by materially wealthy people who were making profits from foreign colonies, and who realized that their economic competitors in most of the other major powers in Europe had foreign colonies too.
Then you get World War II, which began with the sentiments of a lot of people of the winning countries of World War I wanting to get even with the losing countries, amplified by materially wealthy people crushing Germany as an economic power; and then materially wealthy people supporting Hitler in his rise to power by crushing the German labor unions and keeping the Germans from adopting Communism; and which ended with materially wealthy Americans who had vast supplies of material resources and the only large industrialized economy that survived the war unscathed, taking the opportunity to economically colonize Europe by offering to help them rebuild in exchange for favorable trade relations.
Then you get the Korean War and the Vietnam War, where two different groups of people were rebuilding their countries after the Japanese were driven out and were setting up Communist governments, combined with a fear of Communism among Americans, which materially wealthy people amplified to help them prevent the spread of Communism—which really blurred the lines between U.S. economic foreign policy and political foreign policy, since Communism made economics directly political;
Then you get the Cold War, where public fear of Communism was amplified by materially wealthy people who made sh*tloads of money on the military industrial complex;
Now we have the Iraq War, which began with a public fear of Arabs, Muslims, terrorists, and weapons of mass destruction, which materially wealthy people—including our own president—amplified to control access to the world’s second largest oil field;
And along the way you get dozens, if not hundreds, of smaller-scale versions of the same pattern.
After losing the Vietnam War, the Capitalists discovered a new weapon: weaponized debt. Hence the reason Dr. Sachs said that the International Monetary Fund and World Bank needed to be fixed. Remember what I said about people with good social and mathematical skills and abilities being good at tricking people into making agreements that were a lot easier to get into than to get back out of? The idea of a world bank and an international monetary fund that can loan money to help impoverished nations solve their economic problems sounds like a good idea. That is, until you consider that the Capitalists only loan the money to the people who need it on two conditions: that these impoverished people pay interest on the loan, and that they restructure their country’s economic system the way the Capitalists want it. That includes privatizing basic services that are socialized in a lot of countries, like railroads, electricity, phone service, and water; cuts in governmental spending on medicine, education, and food subsidies; the resulting pay cuts and layoffs for public employees; the removal of barriers to foreign trade and investment; and the devaluation of the local currency, which makes their exports worth less and their imports cost more. Basically, these Capitalists are telling these impoverished foreigners to set up an American economy in their country so they’ll have all the problems we have in America, in addition to being impoverished and owing interest on their loans. And I’m sure you remember from the last book how the unsustainable use of resources makes economic inflation inevitable, because the same amount of currency remains in circulation while the supply of material resources left to spend it on diminishes. So these Capitalists offer to help these foreigners in the short term, and knowingly push them into economic graveyard spirals to colonize them economically.
There are 190 federal governments in the world, and so far, about 100 of them have been “given” “loans” from the IMF and World Bank. In 1970 the combined third-world debt in the world was about 70 billion dollars. By 2000 it was over 2.5 trillion dollars—which means it multiplied about 35 times in 30 years.
You know what that means. Lots of people being pushed into poverty, and then hunger, malnutrition, starvation, famines, and plagues. You remember my example of the hope economy from the last book, where I talked about a loaf of bread being worth a pound of hope, and my raising the prices of bread forced you to trade more and more hope for your daily bread? The Capitalists “gave” the Peruvians a “loan” in 1990, and within a year bread was 10 times more expensive, fuel was 30 times more expensive, average real wages had dropped by 85% from their 1974 levels, and 83% of the country’s population couldn’t meet their daily calorie or protein requirements. You remember what I said about spending the year after I graduated high school living in Ecuador? When I heard the story about the economic collapse in Peru it really got my attention, because the city where I lived when I was there was about 100 miles from the Peruvian border. What Dr. McNally doesn’t mention in his version of the story is that the population of Peru at the time was nearly 3 times the size of the population of Ecuador, and two years after the Peruvians were “given” their “loan” their economic situation had grown so desperate they were poised on the brink of invading Ecuador. They backed down in the end, but let’s just say that was a stressful time for a lot of people I knew.
Oh, and by the way, you remember those million people who got hacked to death with machetes in Rwanda two years later? Guess who loaned their government officials the money that paid for those machetes? That’s not to say that the entire genocide was masterminded by Capitalists.
But you remember those Capitalists who won’t sell AIDS medicine at prices AIDS patients can afford, and who hold women hostage with their own breast cancer genes? I think it’s worth mentioning here that the people at the IMF and World Bank are forcing the survivors of the Rwanda genocide to repay the loans for the machetes that killed their own families.
Now that brings me to the War on Terror. A lot of people have been talking about a “war without end”. Why won’t the War on Terror ever end? Because the terrorists could be hiding anywhere, they can attack from anywhere, and they’re never going to surrender. They’ll fight with small, localized attacks of various types, like the insurgents are using in Iraq and Afghanistan right now, but all over the world. To fight against that, we’ll need a highly mobile military that can go into a hostile area, strike, destroy the target, and move on to the next area. The global war of terror is going to Vietnam all over the world, with no clearly defined locations, or targets, or enemies, or objective, or strategies.
Now you remember all those people who are so good at using their abilities and skills at negotiation, persuasion, and mathematics to keep profits flowing into their hands? Their idea of economic success depends on sealing off wells to prevent people from drawing water on their own land, forcing indigenous farmers to pay them for the right to plant the crops their own ancestors domesticated, letting people die of AIDS, and letting governments collapse. Do you think some starving Third World peasants might try to fight back against people like that? And how are they’re going to do it? Maybe with… oh, gee, let me think about this… maybe, say, small, localized attacks of various types, like the insurgents are using Iraq and Afghanistan right now, but all over the world? To fight against which, the Capitalists will need a highly mobile military that can go into a hostile area, strike, destroy the target, and move on to the next area? Which would make the global war against Capitalism Vietnam all over the world, with no clearly defined locations, or targets, or enemies, or objective, or strategies?
Do you notice a few things starting to fall into place here yet?
That brings me to The Fourth World War. The Fourth World War is a documentary movie made about anti-Capitalist movements all over the world that have already turned violent. It starts out peacefully, with peaceful demonstrations—that don’t accomplish much. Then people start using peaceful demonstrations more directly—called direct action—and start doing things like driving the army out of an encampment in Mexico by walking up to the camp, cutting through the barbed wire, walking in, and occupying the camp. Just like a restaurant sit-in back in the days of the Civil Rights Movement, only this time at a military base surrounded by scores of soldiers holding assault rifles. Then people keep marching in the streets, but then they start getting beaten down and arrested by police. So they start fighting back; then the police start shooting tear gas; then the protestors start throwing rocks. Then it keeps escalating. The next time the protestors march, some of them come ready for a fight, because they already know it’s going to happen. The police are there waiting for them, in riot gear and armored personnel carriers. Then they use the protestors who showed up wearing masks, and carrying clubs and homemade shields and bricks, as an excuse to start beating people down and shooting tear gas at them again. The protestors who came ready to fight take on the police, and some of the other protestors back them up. Meanwhile other protestors break into banks or corporate offices or whatever they’re there to protest—meaning Capitalism in general—and destroy everything in sight. It started in places like Mexico, South Africa, Argentina, South Korea; then it started spreading to Seattle and Genoa and Melbourne and anywhere else the G8 or World Trade Organizations tried to meet. Then the rioters start breaking through the police lines and destroy one of the police riot tanks. Someone spray paints WE ARE WINNING on the side of the riot tank. Then the police start shooting people, like Carlo Giuliani the Anarchist who attacked the Italian police jeep with a fire extinguisher and got shot twice in the face by the cop in Genoa, or Brad Will, the American reporter who got shot in the stomach by the paramilitary thug in Mexico, or countless other people whose names have never made the news. Then the rioters start throwing Molotov cocktails. Then people get hold of rifles and flee to the countryside to wage guerilla wars against the government, like the Zapatista Army of National Liberation did down in Mexico back in ’94 and up to the present. There’s a different version of this story unfolding in different parts of the world, but that’s the general progression of events that’s happening everywhere. The movie ends with a scene of about 20 Palestinian boys, probably between 6 and 10 years old, throwing rocks, a couple using slingshots, and one or two using actual slings, David-and-Goliath style. Then suddenly an Israeli army tank comes barreling through their midsts, 55 tons of steel with machineguns and a three-inch cannon, and sends the boys scattering. But only far enough to get out of its way and pick up more rocks to throw at it.
It’s peaceful demonstration turned to rioting turned to organized rioting, just like I told you was going to happen in the last book.
The movie was titled The Fourth World War as a multiple-entendre. What we consider Third-World countries generally refers to counties that don’t have Western (First-World) or Communist (Second-World) economies for any of a number of reasons. You could call countries that are being actively enslaved by Capitalists Fourth-World countries, which is a term I thought of years ago.
But the term The Fourth World War came most directly from something Albert Einstein said after the nuclear arms race began: “I have no idea what they’ll fight the Third World War with, but I do know what they’ll fight the Fourth World War with—sticks and stones.”
It could be argued that the Third World War was fought with nuclear weapons, just not nuclear weapons that were ever used in combat. You could say that the Third World War—more commonly known as the Cold War—was an economic war fought with nuclear weapons, with both sides racing to build them until the Soviet Union went bankrupt. And that’s when globalization began…
With so many movements around the world that have broken down into violence to some degree or another, you can just imagine how many there are that haven’t yet broken down into violence. Dr. McNally talks about a lot of movements like these that are happening in various places. You can find out more about them in his book. I’m devoting this book to showing how a peaceful revolution could be waged anywhere people have free speech—and how the Capitalists are probably going to turn it violent anyway by refusing to admit they’ve lost and driving people to desperation.