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Introduction
A revolution in progress -
another in the wings?
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Societies evolve continually. Sometimes they evolve through
imperceptible minor changes - whose effects are only
gradually noticed. In other cases, sudden shifts occur -
changing the very structure and dynamics of society in
fundamental ways. When the dynamics and structure of a
society are fundamentally shifted, then its evolution
continues on a different path - guided by different forces,
different rules, or different leaders. Such a sudden shift
is known as a revolution.
The word revolution, to most people, brings up images of
violence and armed rebellion. One thinks of a crowd storming
the Bastille, peasants rising against the Tsar, or of
colonists fighting the British redcoats. But there are other
kinds of revolutions, relatively undramatic at the time,
whose profound influence only unfolds later. Such a
revolution was the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution began in northern Britain,
particularly Scotland, in the late eighteenth century. The
revolutionary sudden shift can be summed up in a single
phrase - the centralization and acceleration of the
manufacturing process. Most of the other changes we
associate with the Industrial Revolution - the disruption of
rural life, the emergence of industrial towns and cities,
the acceleration of economic growth - are all natural,
evolutionary consequences of the shift in the manufacturing
process. Centralized manufacture of course needed factory
workers. People left rural areas to take those jobs, and
hence towns developed and rural life was disrupted. The
acceleration of manufacture created more goods, enabling the
economy to expand.
But these are only a few of the consequences of the
Industrial Revolution. Over time, the changes caused in
Britain, and in the rest of the world, were far more
dramatic than those which occurred in the early days of
industrialization. For one thing, industrialization was
contagious - once it proved its effectiveness in Britain,
other nations eventually had to follow. Hence it became a
worldwide revolution. Industrialized societies became
nations of large cities, transforming the nature of
political, social, and economic arrangements.
Industrialization produced more effective weapons, leading
to fiercer wars. New markets were needed to absorb excess
production, leading to imperialist expansion - assisted by
the more effective weapons. The revolutionary shift itself -
the centralization and acceleration of manufacture - was
relatively undramatic compared to the world-shaking
consequences that naturally unfolded from it.
Is globalization the consequence of a revolutionary shift?
The changes globalization has brought are certainly
revolutionary enough, no one can deny that. The world is
being transformed as radically by globalization as it was
earlier by the Industrial Revolution. But are these changes
simply the continuation of long-existing trends, or have
there been underlying sudden shifts that explain the
dramatic and rapid changes that have occurred? Government
officials, media commentators, and economists seem to have
little doubt - to most of them globalization is obviously
the natural, inevitable outcome of market forces. Nations
have no choice but to get with the times - to become more
competitive. As President Clinton expressed it in a 1998
speech in Geneva, "Globalization is not a policy choice, it
is a fact."
But the truth is that policy choices - such as free-trade
treaties - have been very instrumental in accelerating
globalization. One can identify other decisive events,
including the US decision to go off the gold standard in
1972, which seem to be more a case of choice than of
inevitability. But even these policy choices can be
understood as natural, incremental responses to the
pressures of a growing global economy. As that economy
naturally developed, tariff barriers became a hindrance to
further growth, and pressure was put on governments to
reduce the barriers. Free-trade treaties resulted. Most of
the other pivotal choices can be explained in the same way.
Natural economic developments plus natural political
responses: the combination nicely accounts for globalization
as an evolutionary process - or so it seems.
But when one looks deeper into the origins and history of
globalization, it becomes clear that there have indeed been
particular, rapid, revolutionary shifts that have enabled
globalization to evolve as it has. Just as the complex and
far-reaching Industrial Revolution can be traced back to a
change in manufacturing methods, so can globalization be
traced back to a very small number of specific revolutionary
shifts. Furthermore, these shifts could not have been easily
predicted, and were not simply natural responses to events.
One of these shifts was brought about by World War 2. Before
that time Western powers were in continual conflict, and the
global economy was partitioned. Rather than a single global
economy, there were separate spheres of influence, or
empires. Each Western nation focused on developing its own
domestic economy, and on exploiting the trade advantages it
enjoyed within its own sphere of influence. The dynamics of
the global economy were thus driven from a handful of
control centers - the leading industrial nations - and from
there control radiated out into each sphere of influence.
Following 1945 all this changed.
The war had resulted in overwhelming US military supremacy,
and a Pax Americana regime was established early in the
postwar world. Under this new regime, it no longer made much
sense for European powers to compete militarily for economic
spheres, and the old empires were gradually dismantled.
America was now maintaining order in the third world -
European businesses could get the benefit of foreign trade
without the assistance of their own national militaries.
The fundamental structure of the global economy had rapidly
shifted from partitioned to integrated. The dynamics of the
global economy - formerly centered around national economies
- were also changed utterly. Investors anywhere in the West
could now seek opportunities anywhere in the third world.
The dynamics were no longer centered on nations, but rather
on corporations. Each corporation became the center of its
own economic network, and as trade barriers were gradually
decreased, corporations found national boundaries - both in
the West and in the third world, to be increasingly
irrelevant.
All of these developments - adding up to a significant
portion of what globalization is about - follow naturally
from a single revolutionary shift - the establishment of the
pax-americana regime. Before that regime, globalization was
impossible; with the regime, integration of the global
economy, in one form or another, became all but inevitable.
The outcome of Word War 2 had given America military
supremacy, but the US had other options available to it
besides establishing the pax-americana regime. There was
considerable domestic pressure for the US to return to
isolationism and minimize foreign entanglements. Why did
America instead pursue a role of active leadership, guiding
the creation of the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions?
Why didn't America follow standard Western tradition, and
use its overwhelming power to carve out its own private
sphere of influence, leaving the European powers to stake
out their own? And why was the US so intent on promoting
some kind of central global policing force? America
originally intended for the UN to play that role, and when
it failed, the US immediately took over the role in the form
of the pax americana regime.
In fact, the strategic considerations that went into these
momentous policy decisions are a matter of public record. In
1939, important parts of the world were coming under the
control of Japan and Germany, and the US government was
trying to figure out what response would best serve US
interests. The government turned to the Council on Foreign
Relations (CFR), a high-level think-tank, and empowered it
to convene a series of planning sessions in order to come up
with a sensible strategy for the US to follow. Notes and
bulletins produced by those sessions are publicly available,
and the development of the strategic thinking can be clearly
traced.
The CFR sessions systematically assessed market sizes, and
resource availability, in different parts of the world,
seeking to identify what sphere of influence the US would
require in order to fulfill the trade requirements of the
American economy. Out of these deliberations came the
fundamental framework for US war strategy.
This kind of planning proceeded throughout the war, and
plans were refined as the shape of the outcome became
apparent. In the end the CFR had abandoned the idea of a
limited sphere of influence, and had opted for a global
approach. They developed a comprehensive blueprint for the
UN, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the other
Bretton Woods institutions - all of which were later
implemented largely as planned.
The fundamental objectives behind this blueprint were stated
clearly and candidly by the participants themselves in
publicly available documents. These excerpts are from
"Trilaterialism - The Trilateral Commission and Elite
Planning for World Management", Hooly Sklar ed., South End
Press, Boston, 1980.
Recommendation P-B23 (July 1941) stated that worldwide
financial institutions were necessary for the purpose of
"stabilizing currencies and facilitating programs of capital
investment for constructive undertakings in backward and
underdeveloped regions." During the last half of 1941 and in
the first months of 1942, the Council developed this idea
for the integration of the world.
- Trilateralism, p. 148
Isaiah Bowman first suggested a way to solve the problem of
maintaining effective control over weaker territories while
avoiding overt imperial conquest. At a Council meeting in
May 1942, he stated that the United States had to exercise
the strength needed to assure "security," and at the same
time "avoid conventional forms of imperialism." The way to
do this, he argued, was to make the exercise of that power
international in character through a United Nations body.
- Trilateralism, p. 149.
From this it becomes clear that the primary objective behind
this planning is to facilitate the growth of global
capitalist economy - to "facilitate programs of capital
investment". No other primary concerns seem to play any
role in the planning process - least of all any related to
human rights, or world peace, or democratic sovereignty.
Economic growth, and economic growth only was the prize upon
which these planners always kept their eyes.
The rest of the agenda is about how to accomplish this
single objective. The third word ("backward and
underdeveloped regions") is targetted as the place where
growth can be generated - through corporate-funded
development projects ("capital investment for constructive
undertakings "). The planners anticipate that third-world
nations will need to be coerced into this agenda ("the
problem of maintaining effective control over weaker
territories"). They also anticipate that overt imperialism
will be politically unacceptable in the postwar world
("avoid conventional forms of imperialism."). A solution is
proposed to solve these anticipated problems - and that was
to deploy American power ("United States had to exercise the
strength"), but to disguise it as an international mission
("make the exercise of that power international in character
through a United Nations body.").
These several policy recommendations - all of which were
implemented in the postwar era - are all in service of the
one single objective - to "facilitate programs of capital
investment". A "United Nations" comes into the discussion
for only one reason - so that it can serve as a cover for US
intervention in pursuit of the capital-growth agenda. All
the rhetoric about world peace and cooperation was added on
afterwards. Ironically, the real US objective for the UN -
'coercion through intervention' - is nearly the opposite of
the professed objective - 'peace through cooperation'.
This use of 'dual-agenda propaganda' is characteristic of
the CFR-developed plans. There is never any compromise with
the objective of capital growth, all policy recommendations
are determined by that alone. And whenever one of those
policy recommendations seems likely to prove unpopular, a
strategy is proposed to disguise that policy as something
other than what it really is. A cooperative, representative
UN sounds much more appealing than a 'rubber stamp agency
for US military intervention'. Propanda and policy were
designed together.
Now that we know something about the birth process of the
postwar system, it becomes clear that the pax-americana
regime was not the root revolutionary shift after all - that
regime is only part of a larger postwar architecture. And
that architecture was the direct result of a particular
series of CFR planning sessions. The root revolutionary
shift, enabled by these sessions, was the
'shift-in-thinking' on the part of top American policy
makers. They had been led to envision America's role in an
entirely new way. Instead of being one of the major powers,
competing for power and influence, top leaders now
envisioned America as having a central, leadership role in a
new kind of world, a more ordered world.
The most important single outcome of the CFR planning was to
bring about this revolutionary shift in the thinking among
top American decision makers. The logic behind the plans
convinced the decision-makers that America should seek a
central leadership role, and the detailed plans themselves
showed exactly how the project could be carried out. When
the decision was made to act on those plans, the
shift-in-thinking was consummated, and a revolutionary
agenda was implemented. All of those aspects of
globalization that have been discussed so far evolved as a
natural consequence of the postwar regime established by
that agenda.
To the extent we have examined it so far, the birth of
globalization can be accurately characterized in traditional
revolutionary terms. There was a core of revolutionary
activists, in the form of top US decision makers. There was
a policy committee in charge of creating the revolutionary
agenda, in the form of the CFR planning sessions. There was
a revolutionary army, capable of enforcing the new regime,
in the form of the powerful US military. There was an ancien
regime that needed to be dismantled, in the form of
partitioned spheres of influence. There was a propaganda
strategy, in the form of the appealing UN system, with its
promise of world peace and cooperation. There was even a
kind of societal class that benefited most from the
installation of the new regime, in the form of the biggest
Western corporations - who were well poised to exploit the
opportunities which were to be opened up.
At first, apparently, there was nothing revolutionary in
anyone's minds. Their task was to come up with a response
strategy to Japanese and German expansion. But as the
investigation proceeded, a compelling revolutionary vision
emerged - a more ordered global system under the leadership
of America. The decision-makers assumed the role of
revolutionary activists when they began to pursue this
revolutionary vision. These activists spread the vision to
wider American leadership circles, and it became the
foundation for subsequent US policy. In 1941, with the
signing of the Atlantic Charter, the basic vision was
endorsed by British leadership. In 1942, with the signing of
the Declaration of the United Nations, the USSR and China
endorsed the vision, making it officially unanimous among
the dominant big-four powers.
The propaganda strategy turned out to be successful. The new
architecture was promoted on the basis that it promised
world peace, and a voice for everyone at the United Nations.
This selected portion of the revolutionary vision was so
appealing that all the great powers could be brought on
board, despite their many differences of ideology and
self-interest. US officials did not bother to point out that
the architecture had come out of an investigation into
America's _own best interests, and that the primary objective
behind the new regime was to maximize the growth of global
capitalism. If he had known the whole story, Stalin might
have viewed the scheme with more suspicion, despite the veto
power that Russia assumed would guarantee its interests.
By 1946, when Churchill articulated the concept of the Iron
Curtain, it had become clear that Western leaders gave
higher priority to containing communism than they did to
world peace. There had been a hidden agenda lurking behind
the new regime's propaganda. That agenda - maximizing
economic growth through capitalist development of the
third-world - required that the socialist ideology be
contained as much as possible.
Socialist economies are planned centrally, and are not
typically attractive to outside investors. It was not the
Soviets that was so much the target of containment, but
rather the Soviet ideology. When Western cold-warriors later
claimed "Soviet influence" under ever rebellious bush in the
third world, they spoke of it in geopolitical terms, as if
the Soviets were establishing imperial outposts. In fact, it
was an ideology that was being suppressed in every case. Any
ideology which sought to organize a third-world economy
around its own local self interests, rather than investor
interests, was labeled "Marxist", and the Soviet
expansionist Bogeyman was offered as an excuse for whatever
"order restoring" military intervention might be required.
In actual fact, Soviet forces - as well as Chinese -
preferred for the most part to stay home and keep order in
the their own regions. There were no Soviet military bases
strung around the third world as there were American ones.
Communist forces and advisors were drawn only reluctantly
into external conflicts, such as Korea and Vietnam, after
the tide of battle had begun to threaten the borders of
their own realms. It was not Soviet expansionism that was
responsible for the more than fifty military interventions
undertaken by the US in the postwar era, despite the
official statements of the day.
Those interventions were in each case aimed at maintaining
governments in the third world who would be supportive of
Western investor interests. In the final analysis, the
primary agenda of the new, more ordered, world regime proved
to be the one that had not been emphasized when the regime
was installed: maximizing the growth of global capitalism.
Because of that agenda, existing communist states were
isolated as much as possible. And because of that agenda,
third-world regimes were prevented, by force if necessary,
from adopting economic policies contrary to the interests of
global capitalism.
Keep in mind that all of these developments arose more or
less naturally out of one rapid revolutionary shift - the
shift-in-thinking of a small but very influential elite
group that occurred between 1939 and 1945. That group
consisted of a handful top US government officials, and a
team of CFR policy advisors. This small elite group
developed, while looking for something else, a revolutionary
vision for a new global regime. They proceeded to act, in
effect, as the vanguard of an ultimately successful
revolutionary movement. This movement had a public agenda -
with which it recruited the rest of the world its cause, and
it had a private agenda - which ultimately dominated the
priorities of the new regime. That private agenda was to
maximize the growth of global capitalism, and the CFR
advisors who defined that agenda were generally
well-connected to top business and financial circles, or
were themselves part of those circles.
The leadership of this global regime remains centered in the
top echelons of the US government. And the tradition of
ongoing elite strategic planning has been institutionalized
in the form of the National Security Council (NSC), the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and miscellaneous other
agencies - all working closely with a network of
corporate-linked think-tanks and consulting firms. As the US
continues to impose its leadership, using unilateral force
when considered necessary, it follows the policy guidelines
defined by this ongoing, corporate-dominated, elite planning
process.
The central agenda behind these policy guidelines continues
to be maximizing capitalist growth, although this agenda is
no longer hidden. Market forces - meaning whatever serves
the interest of global capitalism - has now become the
publicly avowed mantra of Western political leadership
generally. As national leaders focus on making their nations
more competitive, they are in fact declaring their nation's
submission to market forces - to the dictates of global
capitalism. The initially hidden revolutionary agenda has
become the universal economic dogma in Western policy-making
circles.
Policy agendas in the West are dominated not by internal
political forces, but rather by the need to be
"competitive." It is not the internal democratic process
that dominates Western policy, but rather the growth
requirements of the largest global corporations. Those
requirements are what define the meaning of market forces.
Being "competitive" is to conform to the dictates of
corporate operators and investors. In the old days
corporations existed within a home nation - and they were
expected to abide by the regulations those nations
prescribed. Today corporations are greedy entities,
independent unto themselves - and nations are expected to be
'competitive' in seeking to satisfy their needs.
Competitiveness is a bit like prostitution - if you give it
away cheaper, you _might get more customers.
Although the primacy of corporate interests, in the economic
realm, has "come out of the closet" to great acclaim, the
inner circle of the revolutionary movement has never
acknowledged that its interventist policies are also
dictated by precisely the same agenda. The propaganda
strategy of a dual agendas continues to operate in the area
of military interventions and other "non-economic" affairs.
The motivation for US-supported interventions continues - as
always - to be the maintenance of regimes that best serve
the needs of global capitalism. In the days of the Cold War
"fighting communism" served as a public-agenda excuse for
such interventions. Today a public-agenda emphasizing
"humanitarian concerns", and "fighting terrorism" is
employed to justify "order restoring" interventions.
It is the West that willingly sold the technologies of mass
destruction to Iraq, during its decade-long conflict with
Iran. How credible is current US outrage that such weapons
might actually exist somewhere? It was the CIA that kept
Manuel Noriega on its payroll, when he was committing the
acts for which the US later indicted him. How credible was
this CIA-approved drug-dealing activity, as an excuse for a
military invasion that left thousands of civilian
casualties? It was the US that worked in close partnership
with the Indonesian regime for decades, and it was US
advisors that trained the murderous militias in East Timor.
How credible is the urgency now, after twenty years of
US-supported genocide, that is expressed for this
"humanitarian crisis"? Especially as the US is even now, in
Columbia, training death-squad militias in the very same
methods that led earlier to genocide in East Timor. As they
say here in Ireland, isn't it about time people started to
"cop on" - to "get it"?
But unfortunately, the "propaganda agenda" - justifying the
activities of the global regime in appealing PR terms -
works very successfully for the general Western TV viewer.
Since East Timor was essentially blacked out of the Western
media for twenty years, few people are aware of the long
history of US involvement. When the genocide was finally
revealed on TV screens worldwide, outrage was expressed by
media commentators and Western officials.
There was literally a public outcry in favor of
intervention. Few viewers realized that the cavalry being
sent in to save the day, was being dispatched by the very
same crowd that created the genocidal situation in the first
place. The actual reasons for intervening in East Timor will
come out later in this investigation, but you can be assured
that they are related to re-organizations in the global
regime - not to any belated, hypocritical concerns over
human rights.
Again, let me remind you that all of of these developments
evolved naturally out of a single, revolutionary
shift-in-thinking that occurred during the war years. Notice
also that what we call "globalization" is only one part of
the revolutionary global regime that arose out of that
sudden shift. The term "globalization" is generally limited
to economic affairs. But the US-led global regime - which
arose out the revolutionary shift - controls a wider domain
than merely the economic.
The revolution that began in the war years had an economic
objective - enabling the growth of global capitalism - but
the revolution itself was primarily a political revolution.
The structure of global political power was centralized into
a US-led regime, replacing the centuries-old system of
competing and autonomous Western powers. And the policies of
this US-led regime have from the beginning been determined
by think-tanks that are themselves an integral part of the
elite corporate establishment.
Earlier we discovered that pax americana was not actually
the root cause of global integration, but merely a necessary
intermediate development. Similarly, we now discover that
globalization is not really the right name for the
revolution we are living through. The revolutionary regime
is more all-pervasive than that. The full scope of this
unfolding revolution would be better expressed by the phrase
"elite corporate regime".
The significant actions of this revolutionary regime are in
every case determined by an agenda aimed at maximizing
corporate economic growth, and this applies to military
interventions as well as free-trade policies. And the
deliberate planning process which translates this agenda
into specific policy recommendations is dominated by
think-tanks and advisors who are intimately connected to
elite corporate circles. Our current global regime - our
world political system - is highly centralized, highly
organized, and is operating according to policies set down
by a relatively tiny, corporate-dominated, elite planning
community.
The revolution is still evolving, and it continues to be
guided by an inner revolutionary circle that has hidden
agendas. In economic affairs, the economic consequences of
this revolutionary regime have been named "globalization",
and most observers interpret that as a natural, inevitable
process - they seem to have no idea that its foundations
were laid in a series of top-secret meetings in Washington
DC during the war years. As for the wider revolution - the
establishment of an elite corporate regime - most people,
including informed and sincere observers - fail even to
recognize its existence.
Right-wing radicals seem to be the only sizable social group
that has "copped on" to the reality of a centralized world
government - what they call the New World Order. But their
ideological bias prevents them from perceiving the corporate
hand at the helm of that regime. They typically see "liberal
big government" as the threat to their freedoms. Their
attitude toward the corporate sector - which they might
refer to as "free enterprise" - is a favorable one. They
themselves seek relief from "excessive governmental
interference" - just as do the champions of corporate "free
enterprise". These radicals see themselves as allies with "private
enterprise" - in the struggle against "big government"
domination. They are so near, and yet so far, from
understanding the nature of that which threatens their
freedoms.
There is more to the story of this momentous historic
revolution, which we first identified with globalization,
and later found to be much broader. There are other
significant consequences of the war-years' shift-in-thinking
that could not be developed in this introductory overview.
In addition, it turns out there were two more revolutionary
shifts-in-thinking, one of which occurred in the early 1970s
timeframe, and another which occurred around 1990. These
shifts functioned as "mid-course corrections" in the agenda
of the global regime. These "corrections" made adjustments
for unanticipated developments, and fine-tuned the system
for greater capitalist growth. This broader story will be
developed later in this investigation.
There is one observation I would like to leave you with,
even though it has not been fully established thus far. This
elite-guided corporate revolution is still evolving and
developing. Solid foundations have been laid for further
centralization, and expanded central powers, and we have yet
to experience the full consequences. The global regime,
despite the momentous changes that have already occurred
since 1945, still has much to show us. Market forces, and
competitiveness continue unchallenged as the fundamentalist
religion of political leaders throughout the West. There is
nothing - apparently - to impede the global regime from
carrying forward its plans to their ultimate conclusions.
The handwriting is already on the wall, if you look in the
right places.
When we return to this question of the 'capitalist end game',
we will find that the final solutions in store for humanity
are more frightening than anything we've seen so far -
despite all the ravages that globalization has already
wrought on the people of the world. Things are clearly
destined to get much worse, and the pace of regime
consolidation is rapidly accelerating. If people do not
begin copping on to what's happening around them, it will
soon be too late for anything to be done to reverse the
process.
And in fact, is there anything that could be done to reverse
the process? Is there any conceivable political strategy, or
any sufficiently motivated constituency, that could dare
hope to successfully challenge the agenda of the ruling
revolutionary regime? Has there ever before in history been
a regime so powerful, so well armed, so well organized, and
so firmly entrenched - as the elite corporate regime that
currently runs the world? Who even has a workable plan for
some better regime? How could our complex technological
world, with its far-flung trade dependencies, and its
requirement for boundless energy resources, be successfully
run in any other way than it presently is? The prospects for
any reversal in our dismal global path seem remote indeed.
The reader, at this point, may well be despairing in a cloud
of melancholy pessimism. Why read on if the story is only
going to become more hopeless?
But as the saying has it, it is always darkest before the
dawn. Our societies - not only in the third world but in the
West as well - are suffering under increasing stress. The
doctrine of competitiveness compels our governments to
squeeze ever tighter on public services and entitlements,
and to relax ever looser all constraints on corporate
accountability. Globalized labor markets push down wages and
benefits, and increase unemployment and under-employment in
the West. Reckless corporate development is destroying the
environment - to the point where the viability of necessary
support systems are coming under increasing threat.
Homelessness and crime are increasing, and the regime is
responding with bigger prisons, longer sentences, and
greater "police powers" - which translates into an alarming
erosion of personal civil liberties. In America, many
minority communities resemble dictatorial police states,
half the male population has a police record or is in
prison, and a paramilitarized police force behaves like an
arrogant occupying army.
These stresses are sowing seeds of discontent throughout the
world. As the regime tries to squeeze ever more growth out
of a finite world, the greater these stresses will become -
and the greater the discontent. The greater the discontent,
the more likely are people to begin to suspect that the
regime they are living under is dysfunctional. As the
quality of life deteriorates for nearly everyone, one might
hope that people - especially all those thousands of
political activists and their myriad movements - might begin
to organize a solidarity movement aimed at overcoming the
very heart of the beast - political domination by an elite
regime, which as long as it is in power will continue its
ruinous agenda of growth through reckless development.
Such a solidarity movement - if its goal is to overcome
elite domination - would in fact need to be a full-fledged
revolutionary movement. A complete change-of-regime, on a
global scale, is the only way that the ruinous agenda can be
checked. The inner circle of the current regime is
dogmatically tied to its agenda of growth - the whole
capitalist system would collapse if investors did not have
growth opportunities to put their money into. This regime,
so long as it is in power, cannot possibly permit any
significant change it its growth agenda. The current regime
must be dethroned entirely, and replaced by some other kind
of regime, before there can be any possibility of salvation
for humanity.
Not only must some new revolutionary regime come into power
- but that regime must have a workable plan for guiding
society toward a functional economic system. Unlike the
dysfunctional capitalist system, a functional system would
recognize the reality of global limits and would find ways
to live within those constraints. A functional system, in
short, is the application of sanity to economic affairs. The
current capitalist system, on the other hand, is driven by
an insane logic. In the very face of environmental collapse,
and with societies deteriorating globally as a consequence
of globalization, the regime only accelerates its efforts to
squeeze out still more growth. Like frenzied lemmings, our
elite leaders are rushing headlong toward a cliff. Insanity
has ruled for too long. A revolutionary movement to restore
sanity to human affairs is long overdue.
If you grant that a counter-revolution against the elite
revolutionary regime is in some sense necessary if the human
condition is to be advanced - then that leads to some
challenging questions... What is the likelihood that such a
revolutionary movement actually can or will emerge? How will
it develop a workable revolutionary agenda (ie, a sound plan
for a functional successor regime)? How likely would such a
movement be to gather the overwhelming support needed to
prevail over the well-organized current regime? Could the
revolution be accomplished by peaceful means? How could a
broad constituency reach agreement on a revolutionary
agenda? How might the emergence of such a movement be
encouraged or facilitated?
The first part of this investigation - "The dynamics of
revolution" - will examine how past revolutions have come
into being, how they developed their agendas, how they
expanded their support, and how they managed to reconcile
their agendas with the diverse interests of a broad
constituency. After this examination, we will be in a much
better position to approach the questions in the previous
paragraph.
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