Civilization and Beyond: Learning from HistoryNearing, Scott
History
Civilization and Beyond: Learning from History
Nearing, Scott
Civilization -- History
An effective world government, therefore, must adopt and administer an
economic program designed to: (a) Utilize and conserve natural
resources, making them available, on a just basis, for the use of
successive generations; (b) End involuntary poverty and insecurity and
the exploitation of man by man and of one social group by another social
group; (c) Make necessary public services generally available on equal
terms, to all mankind; and (d) Guarantee equal opportunity to
earth-dwellers based on the greatest good to the greatest number.
Feeding, clothing, housing and educating an agricultural village was a
prime consideration at an early stage in social history. Providing the
necessaries and amenities of life in a commercial-industrial city
occupied the attention of city fathers as a consequence of the shift
from agriculture to trade and commerce as the principle source of
livelihood. Caring for the physical, physiological and cultural needs of
populations in the United States, Britain, Japan and other growing
commercial-industrial nations presented difficult challenges. The
organization, expansion, defense and improvement of the American,
British, Japanese and any other contemporary empire, posed even larger
and more complex problems which have nagged mankind during recent
generations. Recently, the planet-wide revolution of 1750-1970 has
brought the entire human family with 3,700 million members isolated in
140 different nations, face to face with political, economic and social
problems on a planet-wide scale. These problems are planet-wide in their
dimensions. Measures designed for their solution must be equally
planet-wide.
Villages, cities, regions and nations have learned, often the hard way,
how to think, plan and act in terms of their own interests, or, more
concretely, in the interest of their owners, masters and exploiters. It
is with politics and economics of this planet-wide level that we of the
present generation are particularly concerned.
Dwellers in western Europe and North America have to deal with the
politics and economics of monopoly capitalism. Its central offices are
generally located in particular countries--Britain, Holland, France,
Germany, where big business enterprises had their beginnings and from
which representatives of oil, steel, textile, motor and banking
enterprises spilled over into the territory of their competitors as well
as into the "third world" of erstwhile colonies and other dependencies.
Monopoly capitalism has made no real effort to organize a functioning
world economy. On the contrary, it has established, maintained and
consolidated centers of economic interests and activities at the
national level. In theory and in practice the bourgeois-dominated planet
is divided into economic and political states and spheres of influence,
each equipped with the separatist institutions of political sovereignty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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