[P2P-F] Eleven Key Structural Problems from Chapter 8.doc (chris.macrae at yahoo.co.uk)

Tue Aug 2 14:05:38 CEST 2011

*Eleven Key Structural Problems from Chapter 8, A Users Guide to the Crisis
of Civilisation, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Pluto Press, 2010. *

*1. Key Structural Problem:** The dispossession of labour - the separation
of the majority of the population from access to the means of subsistence;
the ownership of the means of production - productive resources and the
technologies to extract and exploit them - by an elite minority.*

* *

*2. Key Structural Problem**: The globalization of capitalist social
relations the total domination of the world's productive resources by a
minority, and the corresponding worldwide dispossession of labour. *

* *

*3. Key Structural Problem**: Cyclical generation of socio-economic crises
of over-accumulation and underproduction (‘boom and bust'); which
exacerbates inequalities between historically advantaged core capitalist
states and labour peripheral states relegated to being suppliers of cheap
raw materials and labour, and markets for core agricultural (and other)
exports. *

* *

*4. Key Structural Problem:** The capitalist social relation's pressure to
exploit ever larger quantities of the world's natural resources for
production for profit, on an ever expanding geographical scale that will
soon be beyond the  natural world's ability to self-replenish. *

* *

*5. Key Structural Problem:** The systemic over-dependence on hydrocarbon
resources for industrial production, sustained by an international division
of labour designed not to meet the needs of local populations, but purely to
maximize profits for primarily Northern banks, corporations and governments.
*

* *

*6. Key Structural Problem:** The world monetary system is based on
fractional reserve banking - that is, the creation of fiat money as credit
at interest  which serves to subjugate the population to an enlarging and
un-repayable debt that is  the basis of self-reproducing profits for banks;
and which compounds the imperative for unlimited growth through
unconstrained exploitation of natural resources. *

* *

*7. Key Structural Problem:** Computational finance effectively transformed
the banking system's ability to create fiat debt-money through the
development of fraudulent quantitative models concealing ballooning levels
of risk, making possible the creation of exorbitant profits virtually ex
nihilo - but the costs were socialized and backlogged until the banking
system collapsed under the weight of its own un-sustainability.*

* *

*8. Key Structural Problem:** Nation-states and national identity, as the
primary loci of 'legitimate' political representation, are increasingly
detrimental both in terms of their negative impact on democracy, and the
categories by which human social groups ascribe identities to themselves.
While current forms of representative democracy are increasingly susceptible
to erosion and manipulation by nondemocratic military-financial forces,
ethnic and national markers of difference can increasingly be exploited to
polarize communities and legitimize political violence against the 'Other'.
*

* *

*9. Key Structural Problem:** Global governance institutions are mobilized
primarily as mechanisms for the US to regulate the international system in
its own interests, rather than the interests of the majority of the system's
members. Calls to reform these institutions (such as to make the UN more
democratic, or to make the World Bank more transparent) have therefore
consistently failed. *

* *

*10. Key Structural Problem:** The implicit philosophical and ontological
assumptions underlying neoliberal capitalism posit an extreme form of
materialism, reducing the world to a collection of physical, disconnected,
atomistic, self-interested and thus inherently conflictual units. These
assumptions are clearly mistaken, as they implicitly shape a global
political economy that is simultaneously destroying itself and the natural
world. *

* *

*11. Key Structural Problem:** Neoliberal capitalism is premised on a
materialist value system which penetrates the entirety of human life,
commodifying everything from human life to the natural world in the service
of maximizing a 'good' defined largely in terms of material consumption. Yet
this ethical system is responsible not only for the escalation of multiple
global crises, but simultaneously for high levels of psychological illness
and distress among neoliberal capitalist nations. It is therefore a value
system divorced from reality, incommensurate with human nature and the
natural world. *

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: christopher macrae <chris.macrae at yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 12:40 AM
Subject: Re: one simple leadership system failure: pro-youth versus
anti-youth Re: Eleven Key Structural Problems from Chapter 8.doc (
chris.macrae at yahoo.co.uk)
To: "Alan Rayner (Plus)" <alan at admrayner.plus.com>, peterchallen at gmail.com
Cc: jbunzl at simpol.org, patrick at pineapple.cc,
rebeccaharding at deltaeconomics.com, sabine at 3dmetrics.co.uk, lilly3653 at aol.com,
sofia at londoncreativelabs.com, mostofa12 at yahoo.com, pilar at gmail.com,
rodney.shakespeare1 at btopenworld.com, lesley.williams at the-hub.net,
jonathan.robinson at the-hub.net, peter at brandenergyresearch.co.uk,
ghbuzt at gmail.com, dennisharding at deltaeconomics.com, asmitchell at aol.com,
hattoribleu at yahoo.co.uk, charlie at p3capital.co.uk, klong at justmeans.com, Mark
Chaplin <caplinski at gmail.com>, tommy at i-genius.org, robert at omniworldview.com,
zasheem zasheem <zasheem at btinternet.com>

*this is a grand sentence*
*“For once men have been made to realize the crippling mutilations imposed
by an objectivist framework – once the veil of ambiguities covering up these
mutilations has been definitely dissolved – many fresh minds will turn to
the task of reinterpreting the world as it is, and as it then once more will
be seen to be.” *

but then to show how non-mathematical academia has become, I thought
einstein's main finding was objectivism is always a top-down approximation,
and the only way to progress  (when you find you are running out of spac )
is to map more micro

so if 60 years of the top-down monopolies of professionalism and academia
havent even bothered to change itself from the simplest maths advance in the
20th c (and in the last 20 years with the internet as the simplest tool that
ever could have emdiated chane) I dont expect the vast majority of academia
will help build a sustainable world in time

which is why one of the top 50 most exciting projects in the world I want to
see (say) 10 unversities come together to develop the un-mba and devalue all
the others that still preach MBA

I suspect that 2 of these 10 universties will be MIT and national uni of
singapore - anyone got other nominations and if so at what level should I be
trying to issue invitation to the 10 unis who sustain theworld

chris

--- On *Mon, 1/8/11, Alan Rayner (Plus) <alan at admrayner.plus.com>* wrote:

From: Alan Rayner (Plus) <alan at admrayner.plus.com>
Subject: Re: one simple leadership system failure: pro-youth versus
anti-youth Re: Eleven Key Structural Problems from Chapter 8.doc (
chris.macrae at yahoo.co.uk)
To: "Alan Rayner (Plus)" <alan at admrayner.plus.com>, "christopher macrae" <
chris.macrae at yahoo.co.uk>, peterchallen at gmail.com
Cc: jbunzl at simpol.org, patrick at pineapple.cc,
rebeccaharding at deltaeconomics.com, sabine at 3dmetrics.co.uk, lilly3653 at aol.com,
sofia at londoncreativelabs.com, mostofa12 at yahoo.com, pilar at gmail.com,
rodney.shakespeare1 at btopenworld.com, lesley.williams at the-hub.net,
jonathan.robinson at the-hub.net, peter at brandenergyresearch.co.uk,
ghbuzt at gmail.com, dennisharding at deltaeconomics.com, asmitchell at aol.com,
hattoribleu at yahoo.co.uk, charlie at p3capital.co.uk, klong at justmeans.com, "Mark
Chaplin" <caplinski at gmail.com>, tommy at i-genius.org, robert at omniworldview.com
Date: Monday, 1 August, 2011, 15:07

PS You might also like the attached piece, published at www.bestthinking.com.

----- Original Message -----
*From:* Alan Rayner
(Plus)<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>
*To:* christopher
macrae<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
peterchallen at gmail.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>
*Cc:* jbunzl at simpol.org<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
patrick at pineapple.cc<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
rebeccaharding at deltaeconomics.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
sabine at 3dmetrics.co.uk<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
lilly3653 at aol.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
sofia at londoncreativelabs.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
mostofa12 at yahoo.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
pilar at gmail.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
rodney.shakespeare1 at btopenworld.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
lesley.williams at the-hub.net<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
jonathan.robinson at the-hub.net<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
peter at brandenergyresearch.co.uk<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
ghbuzt at gmail.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
dennisharding at deltaeconomics.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
asmitchell at aol.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
hattoribleu at yahoo.co.uk<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
charlie at p3capital.co.uk<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
klong at justmeans.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
Mark
Chaplin <http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]> ;
tommy at i-genius.org<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
robert at omniworldview.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>
*Sent:* Monday, August 01, 2011 3:03 PM
*Subject:* Re: one simple leadership system failure: pro-youth versus
anti-youth Re: Eleven Key Structural Problems from Chapter 8.doc (
chris.macrae at yahoo.co.uk<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>
)

Dear Chris,

As it happens, I recently circulated the following message concerning
'Mathematical Nonsense' to my discussion group:

 I have just 'double-tweeted'
'@InclusionAL'<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=%27@InclusionAL%27>,
partly in response to Marcus du Sautoy's outrageous statement in his trailer
for 'The Code' (along the lines of 'mathematical abstraction is how we make
sense of the universe').

"For all its apparent utility, mathematical abstraction makes nonsense of
Nature and a mess of life....

...We need to understand, work with and mentally represent REAL space and
boundaries, not deceptive constructs founded on unrealistic premises"

I feel these points are especially relevant for all kinds of practitioners,
because practitioners have to work with reality, and so unrealistic models
of reality may seriously impede and impair their creative potential.

My enquiries into what I have come to call (only for the sake of having a
'label' for it) 'natural inclusionality' began with a feeling of discomfort
about how biological reality was being represented mathematically and
conceptually. There was something about the ABSTRACT QUALITY of these
quantitative representations that didn't relate well with my actual
practical experience and that, moreover, had very nasty implications if
followed through to their objective conclusion (as per the holocaust and
recent happenings in Norway ).

To work out what was wrong about/missing from these abstract
representations, I had to go all the way back in my own mind to first
principles, without, for the time being, being concerned about what other
people might or might not have said. This led me to think about the way
abstract logic represents space and boundaries, and to recognise that this
is not consistent with my actual experience of life and love. So, I asked
myself (and others with whom I engaged in conversation) - what
representations of space and boundaries ARE consistent with and do make
sense of my actual experience. First, I thought about boundaries - and
recognised (in my book, 'Degrees of Freedom - living in dynamic boundaries)
that boundaries are always to variable degrees dynamic, permeable and
connective and that they SIMULTANEOUSLY face both inwardly and outwardly.
This led me to think about space as the limitless, frictionless 'medium' in
which boundaries are 'suspended' like 'solute in solvent'.

Then the penny dropped. Oh My God! Abstract rationality has really screwed
up our understanding of reality and is making a horrible mess of our lives
and habitat. To make amends, we have to bring the infinite depth of space as
an intangible presence back into our understanding of dynamical form as an
energetic configuration OF space, not an abstraction FROM space.

All this came from first principles and real personal experience. It didn't
come from academic scholarship. As far as Academia is concerned, I still
feel like a babe in the woods. Slowly I have been trying to unravel the many
layers of academic complication that have obscured what at heart seems like
such a basic and simple truth. Real space is a receptive (non-resistive)
presence everywhere, and real boundaries are zones both of dynamic
distinction and mutual inclusion. Form is energetic. Space cannot be cut.

Real-world practitioners need in their praxis (theory and practice) to
understand, work with and mentally represent (re-imagine) real space and
boundaries, not deceptive constructs. At heart, it's very simple. The
difficulty comes in dealing with the mess made by impositional abstraction
in every kind of human endeavour. Dealing with that mess is where the need
arises for many talents to come together.

In the words of Michael Polyani:

“For once men have been made to realize the crippling mutilations imposed by
an objectivist framework – once the veil of ambiguities covering up these
mutilations has been definitely dissolved – many fresh minds will turn to
the task of reinterpreting the world as it is, and as it then once more will
be seen to be.”

Warmest

Alan

----- Original Message -----
*From:* christopher
macrae<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>
*To:* peterchallen at gmail.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>
*Cc:* jbunzl at simpol.org<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
patrick at pineapple.cc<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
rebeccaharding at deltaeconomics.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
sabine at 3dmetrics.co.uk<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
lilly3653 at aol.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
sofia at londoncreativelabs.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
mostofa12 at yahoo.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
pilar at gmail.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
rodney.shakespeare1 at btopenworld.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
lesley.williams at the-hub.net<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
jonathan.robinson at the-hub.net<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
peter at brandenergyresearch.co.uk<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
ghbuzt at gmail.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
dennisharding at deltaeconomics.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
asmitchell at aol.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
hattoribleu at yahoo.co.uk<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
charlie at p3capital.co.uk<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
a.d.m.rayner at bath.ac.uk<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
klong at justmeans.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
Mark
Chaplin <http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]> ;
tommy at i-genius.org<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>;
robert at omniworldview.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>
*Sent:* Monday, August 01, 2011 2:45 PM
*Subject:* one simple leadership system failure: pro-youth versus anti-youth
Re: Eleven Key Structural Problems from Chapter 8.doc (
chris.macrae at yahoo.co.uk<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>
)

  THE GREATEST MATHS ERROR IN THE WORLD
these 11 may be right but I search for a simpler overall slogan and I
believe what is common between all these problems is *their
short-termism robs youth to line the pockets of ever fewer elders* (orwells
big brother end game of superpower beating super-empowerment - given only
one of the 2 will spin tech's interconnected global villages)
**
*in other words all these people who rule and boundarise the world with
top-down economics and media and polarised politics are in one meta-network
computing a way ahead that disinvests in every community's capacity to
support youth's productive future - if you look at my dads 40 years of
daries<http://normanmacrae.ning.com/forum/topics/norman-macrae-books-surveys>at
The Economist you will see how he tracked with ever incraesing horror
but
optimistic tone this takeover of a discipline (celebrated for first 145
years of The Economist) which was orignated by french and scots to invest in
our childrens children more productive lives*

is pro-youth versus anti-youth an agreable headline to the people you
network with or not?

-in terms of communicating the 2 approached that my famjily's friends have
found netwirk over 30 years is
one slogan
or
catalogue solutions that match elders life legacies with youths heroic
gaols-
http://leadersandyunus.ning.com
that's why the second leg of what macrae foundation partners want to focus
on is forming a league table of 50 exciting projects- ones that if you find
solutions to help nyouth in one nation can network across to other youth's
nations

we circulated over 400 books around rebeccas world entrepreneur net at start
of 2008 which showed how yunus plays the game whenever he assembles exciting
projects; nick and sabine took 1000 people meetingts; my dad invited 40 of
you to lunch and yet london still doesnt seem to have come up with one
exciting project the world youth could use

or if you think it has please tell me or EU
<http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-bin/discuss.cgi?thread_id=564>where
its bookmark is

incidentally I believe brazil is coming up with several top 50 solutions
uniting youth;   if www.simpol.org still has activist networks into tehre
who could I chat to first

chris  macrae 1 301 881 1655

*Eleven Key Structural Problems from Chapter 8, A Users Guide to the Crisis
of Civilisation, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Pluto Press, 2010. *

*1. Key Structural Problem:** The dispossession of labour - the separation
of the majority of the population from access to the means of subsistence;
the ownership of the means of production - productive resources and the
technologies to extract and exploit them - by an elite minority.*

* *

*2. Key Structural Problem**: The globalization of capitalist social
relations the total domination of the world's productive resources by a
minority, and the corresponding worldwide dispossession of labour. *

* *

*3. Key Structural Problem**: Cyclical generation of socio-economic crises
of over-accumulation and underproduction (‘boom and bust'); which
exacerbates inequalities between historically advantaged core capitalist
states and labour peripheral states relegated to being suppliers of cheap
raw materials and labour, and markets for core agricultural (and other)
exports. *

* *

*4. Key Structural Problem:** The capitalist social relation's pressure to
exploit ever larger quantities of the world's natural resources for
production for profit, on an ever expanding geographical scale that will
soon be beyond the  natural world's ability to self-replenish. *

* *

*5. Key Structural Problem:** The systemic over-dependence on hydrocarbon
resources for industrial production, sustained by an international division
of labour designed not to meet the needs of local populations, but purely to
maximize profits for primarily Northern banks, corporations and governments.
*

* *

*6. Key Structural Problem:** The world monetary system is based on
fractional reserve banking - that is, the creation of fiat money as credit
at interest  which serves to subjugate the population to an enlarging and
un-repayable debt that is  the basis of self-reproducing profits for banks;
and which compounds the imperative for unlimited growth through
unconstrained exploitation of natural resources. *

* *

*7. Key Structural Problem:** Computational finance effectively transformed
the banking system's ability to create fiat debt-money through the
development of fraudulent quantitative models concealing ballooning levels
of risk, making possible the creation of exorbitant profits virtually ex
nihilo - but the costs were socialized and backlogged until the banking
system collapsed under the weight of its own un-sustainability.*

* *

*8. Key Structural Problem:** Nation-states and national identity, as the
primary loci of 'legitimate' political representation, are increasingly
detrimental both in terms of their negative impact on democracy, and the
categories by which human social groups ascribe identities to themselves.
While current forms of representative democracy are increasingly susceptible
to erosion and manipulation by nondemocratic military-financial forces,
ethnic and national markers of difference can increasingly be exploited to
polarize communities and legitimize political violence against the 'Other'.
*

* *

*9. Key Structural Problem:** Global governance institutions are mobilized
primarily as mechanisms for the US to regulate the international system in
its own interests, rather than the interests of the majority of the system's
members. Calls to reform these institutions (such as to make the UN more
democratic, or to make the World Bank more transparent) have therefore
consistently failed. *

* *

*10. Key Structural Problem:** The implicit philosophical and ontological
assumptions underlying neoliberal capitalism posit an extreme form of
materialism, reducing the world to a collection of physical, disconnected,
atomistic, self-interested and thus inherently conflictual units. These
assumptions are clearly mistaken, as they implicitly shape a global
political economy that is simultaneously destroying itself and the natural
world. *

* *

*11. Key Structural Problem:** Neoliberal capitalism is premised on a
materialist value system which penetrates the entirety of human life,
commodifying everything from human life to the natural world in the service
of maximizing a 'good' defined largely in terms of material consumption. Yet
this ethical system is responsible not only for the escalation of multiple
global crises, but simultaneously for high levels of psychological illness
and distress among neoliberal capitalist nations. It is therefore a value
system divorced from reality, incommensurate with human nature and the
natural world. *

--- On *Sun, 31/7/11, peterchallen at gmail.com <peterchallen at gmail.com>*wrote:

From: peterchallen at gmail.com <peterchallen at gmail.com>
Subject: Eleven Key Structural Problems from Chapter 8.doc (
chris.macrae at yahoo.co.uk)
To: chris.macrae at yahoo.co.uk
Date: Sunday, 31 July, 2011, 15:36

    Attached: Eleven Key Structural Problems from Chapter 8.doc
Message from peterchallen at gmail.com<http://uk.mc273.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected]>
:

Dear Chris,

 I think this extract spells out strongly the fundamental structural
faults we have to tackle -soooon !

Perhaps this should be converted intoa short and pithy article.

Peter

Google Docs makes it easy to create, store and share online documents,
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