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Economic Progress Toward Ecological Suicide
by
Rob Urie
The modern dilemma is to understand just how unreasonable the
reasoning classes are in both thought and action. Political ‘progressives’ were
behind efforts to obliterate Native American cultures through forced
assimilation and acculturation for the purported ‘benefit’ of their victims.
Likewise, progressives continued and expanded institutional racism in ways
that persist to this day through promotion of bogus social ‘metrics’ like IQ
(Intelligence Quotient), the racialization of ‘crime,’ and through formal
strategies of forced cultural and economic assimilation via ‘education.’
Likewise, political ‘liberals’ have been the primary facilitators of the
ascendancy of the radical right in both academia and politics. In academia
liberals have functioned much like progressives in an earlier age, producing
‘reasoned’ rationales in their economics for economic imperialism. And in
politics liberals play three essential roles: to insist political differences are
matters of degree to be ‘worked through’ rather than the irreconcilable
differences of competing interests; to derail meaningful political action until a
‘better time’ in the future that never arrives, and to claim the political center no
matter how far the rightward march has taken it.
In the dimensions of economics and the environment ‘reason,’ both
academic and political, is producing unreasonable outcomes for most people.
The ‘managed’ neo-liberalism of academic economics pays lip service to the
looming catastrophe of global warming that its own radical capitalism
produces. If economic ‘growth,’ as measured by traditional metrics like GDP
(Gross Domestic Product), is desirable and it represents the output of
industrial capitalism contributing to global warming, as it does, then
‘solutions’ to global warming are simply attempts to clean up the catastrophes
and dislocations that capitalists and their academic apologists create. But as is
becoming increasingly obvious, these catastrophes never get cleaned up.
For example, about a decade after NAFTA (North American Free Trade
Agreement) was passed in the early 1990s cheap American corn flooded
Mexico and destroyed the peasant agriculture that had sustained millions of
peasant farmers for generations. Their livelihoods destroyed, those ‘freed’