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Artificial Economy

Under our noses, and against common sense, the mechanist paradigm has taken over the whole means of production, reorienting it away from people’s ability to directly provide for their own needs, toward factory production controlled by the few. “Production” itself has been redefined as making money and consolidating economic power. The modern financial world proclaims a deceptively neutral-sounding ethos of “investment,” an artificial ecology. Behind a benevolent facade, global financial institutions are tools to increase the share of those who control them, by impoverishing nature and society at large. The ideal of plenty for all, envisioned by Bacon and Marx, is subverted to the dreams of the few for personal power and gain. The past two hundred years have confirmed common sense: that economic mechanism can only bring a loss for most people of the means of production as well as of the rewards.

RELATED TAGS: [economic mechanism, mechanist paradigm, means of production, self-subsistence, investment economy, artificial ecology, Bacon’s social vision]