1.Three Cancers that destroy Humanity.
The idea to organize 8,103,062,575 (billion) people with about 7000 spoken languages, 300 writing systems, 4000 “unique cultures”, 195 recognized countries, multiverse interests and aspirations, which live in a shared habitat with finite resources, into a coherent homeostatic system of peaceful, egalitarian, democratic and ecological production-distribution-governance, is truly gargantuan. In fact, it may be impossible to achieve in the 21st Century.
Among many other aspects to be taken into consideration when analyzing this daunting ontological “engineering task”, there are three structural system-input-deficiencies which have made it impossible for thousands of years to materialize this utopian dream of humanity. Three structural system-input-deficiencies (or cancers) which may make it impossible to satisfactorily organize this heterogeneous 8.1 billion binary (XX, XY) universe of the only surviving species (homo sapiens) of the genus “Homo” into a coherent harmonic global system.
The three cancers or structural system-input-deficiencies are:
1. The chrematistic market economy order based on private property.
2. The universal need for fractal (vertical) organization of numerically big Medium and Macro entities.
3. The behavioral ecology of human beings which is essentially determined by its genome- constitution.
2. Aristotle and Class Exploitation.
The etiology of these cancers, that have destroyed the dream of a “human community with a shared future” and common “values of peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy, and freedom” (Xi Jinping, 2022) in the past, remits us to the great scientific paradigms of Aristotle, Marx, Peters and advanced 21st Century Science.
In Western civilization it was Aristotle (384-322 a.n.e.), the founding father of the first scientific paradigm of Political Economy, who conceptualized with absolute clarity the elementary socio-political contradiction that has shattered human communities´ internal and external peaceful existence for the last 6000-Years: the perversion of the economically rational and ethically guided labor-transformation of nature for the survival needs and benefits of the members of the primary pre-class human communities, by chrematistics.
The concept of “political economy” –meaning the economy of the polis-- in ancient Greek theory referred to a socially praiseworthy end of economic activities for the benefit of the people (polis), not to the limitless individual accumulation of property and enrichment, that characterizes the capitalistic chrematistic order.
Aristotle discovered the fundamental socio-political contradiction that generates dystopia in human communities, by differentiating the oikonomia from crematistica (enrichment). While the oikonomia (economy) is necessary as a subordinate and serving function for the sustainability of the individuum and respective collectivity (horde, clan, tribe) --never as the all-dominating human activity and imperative human sense of life-- chrematistica is a perversion which through money, interest, trade, slavery, wars, etc. destroys social cohesion and solidarity in the community. And he wisely accepted Plato´s and Socrates intellection that chrematistics has no inherent limits and is the basic cause of tribute, exploitation, war, aggression, etcetera.
With the formation of the modern bourgeois Nation State in the 15/16th century and through colonialism, the system of chrematistics evolved into a global order with the interests of the national dominant classes determining the dynamics of human evolution. Later, with the development of industrial and financial capitalism, Imperialism became the dominant form of the chrematistic diaspora and the corresponding domination/enslavement of the people, until today´s paroxysmic state of the system.
3. Marx´s Immunotherapy against the Chrematistic Cancer.
The species´ legitimate desire for a sustainable economic and social reproduction process, combined with the archaic stage of his productive forces, had determined his economic activities for millions of years until about five millenniums ago, when the principle of local fulfilment of reasonably necessary demand (Bedarfsdeckungs Wirtschaft) was eroded by the emergence of the chrematistic cancer, which caused a phase change in the economic reproduction cycle, converting the subordinate sustainability function of the political economy into a dominant self-serving endeavor for enrichment and exploitation, in benefit of the most powerful individuals and groups of the community (polis).
By this process, a relatively egalitarian collective phase of economic activity in democratically organized communities of clans and tribes, sometimes called by Marx primary or original communism (Urkommunismus), was gradually substituted by new forms of hierarchically structured class societies like Slavery, the Asiatic Mode of Production, Feudalism and Capitalism as the new dominant prototypes of macro-social organization of the species; based on private and elite property accumulation and exploitation protected by repressive State apparatuses and ideologies.
Marx/Engels understood the transcendence of the historical shift to chrematistics in the global organization of the species and, consequently, the contingent nature of all superstructural phenomena (State, philosophy, etc.) on their economic basis. They recognized, that in essence, economic history, incarnated in social class structures, state formations, ideologies and the production and appropriation of the social surplus product, is the decisive evolutionary vector in the development process of all human class societies.
With this understanding of the dynamic social reality of humans three inferences became imperative:
1. Any objective analysis of class societies of a certain magnitude must be based on the scientific comprehension of its constitutive economic process.
2. Due to the dialectical dynamics of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), process analysis is the adequate methodology to understand interactive socio-politicalphenomena.
3. On the level of socio-political transformation and revolutionary praxis, the necessary emancipation strategy for the destruction of this millennial tyranny became ipso facto evident: destroy the ruling elites through revolutionary class struggle and develop a new system of political economy without exploitative surplus production and illegitimate surplus appropriation but based on the equivalence principle of economic activity.
That is, a system in which all activities will be remunerated according to their objective social valuemeasured with the metrology of scientific socialism´s labor value theory, instead of chrematistic profit terms, monetary protocols, and market prices. In one word, an economy, in which the value-input of the workers into the generation of collective social wealth is equivalent to the value he receives in products and services to satisfy his subsistence needs.
In essence, the equivalence economy would be the general operating principle of a global socialist economy liberated from capitalism in a democratic united global community. In this context, the expropriation of private means of production from the dominant bourgeois classes, although a key element, would only be a transitional step towards that ultimate equivalence economic configuration of an international communist society. And the proletariat, the most exploited and repressed sector of modern capitalism, would be the historic subject to accomplish this titanic task for the species.
4. Peters: Impossible to build a World Socialist Society based on National Market Economies.
Arno Peters, the last outstanding German Polyhistor, cartographer and economist, applied that reasoning of scientific socialism to the collapse of 20th century socialism in the Soviet Union and came up with a profound explanation for the implosion of that extraordinarily powerful system. An explanation that transcends the superficial corruption and conspiracy theory’s infiltration-argument of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The decisive step towards a socialist equivalence economy is not the de-privatization of social means of production –although it is important-- and their subordination under a centralized government command management. In a general market-economic eco-system determined by profit and market prices the labor force does not feel and recognize itself as the real proprietor of the economic production process, since, in fact, it is nothing more than an alienated powerless wheel in the gearbox of global profitmaking and value chains.
A real identification of the workers and citizens with a socialist society and therefor, the defense of that system against the return of the capitalists, is only possible through the combination of the labor value theory with the principle of equivalence in production, distribution, and retribution. This will be the decisive step of building a socialist society that will be immune to the subversion and restoration of capitalism. The key to the transformation of the market economic system into a political economy based on ethical community and ecology-considerations, is the equivalence principle.
Any hope to build a global solidary economic system for the specie, which is based on the premise of national chrematistic power structures (states and economy) governed by “national interests”, is a chimera, as Voltaire, Pareto et al understood a long time ago. In the words of Voltaire: “It is evident that a country can only win if another country loses”.
In essence, it would be a system predicated on a binary win-lose logic, incapable of functioning close to the equilibrium of interests of all social subjects and classes involved, and therefore inherently instable and plagued with entropic tendencies.
Equivalence Principle and Labor Value Theory are the two
indispensable Scientific Building Blocks for a functional 21st Century homeostatic World Socialist System.
The Peters Rose for the Basic Understanding of Value.
5. Life and Society: Complex Dynamic homeostatic Systems that reflect the ontological Dialectic of Nature.
The dialectical character of objective reality, that is, its movement caused by the interactive dynamics of the unitary contradictions between opposing tendencies --for example, expansion/contraction, attraction/repulsion, repression/rebellion, the biological imperative to feel safe as a phylogenetic link to survival versus the dangerously chaotic environment that threatens that imperative, etcetera-- manifests itself in human class societies in multiple ways.
Probably, the best example of the constitutive dialectic of Nature is the humanbody himself, as the “chemical biology of Apoptosis and the Life and Death process of Cells“ has shown. The human body is made up of about 1 trillion cells. About 60 to 86.4 billion cells die every day. To maintain organismal homeostasis, the same number is produced every day. This process is partly regulated by prodeath proteins and the opposite prolife proteins: “In many ways, prodeath proteins, such as Bax, act like yin, whereas the opposite prolife proteins, such as Bcl-2, act like yang. Capable of heterodimerization, they neutralize each other's function and retain a delicate balance. However, the excess of either one can tilt the balance toward cell death or survival.”
Professor Ziwei Huang (The Chemical Biology of Apoptosis: Exploring Protein-Protein Interactions and the Life and Death of Cells with Small Molecules), has been able to graph the material substratum of this dialectic in the following Yin-Yang model.
Figure 2. The Molecular “Yin” and “Yang“ in Apoptosis
6. Dialectics of the Universe and the Class War.
In social systems, probably the most important political repercussions of that ontological law of movement of the universe are the problems of governance and homeostatic equilibrium between the dominant classes and the dominated classes. In systemic terms, the need to maintain a macro-functional equilibrium between positive feedback loops that enhance or amplify changes and tend to move a system away from its equilibrium state, and negative feedback that tends to dampen or buffer changes. It is this interaction that tendentially holds a system to some equilibrium state conferring it a certain degree of cohesion and stability.
7. The behavioral ecology of human beings.
The resulting social acting of all animals, including humans, oscillates between the evolutionary imperatives of survival and procreation, and their associated rewards. But there is a unique difference between homo sapiens and the rest: the sophisticated human ability to consciously anticipate the outcome of choices and actions with a considerable situational degree of probability. While this confersan evolutionary advantage on our species when consciously trying to build a democratic and solidary global diaspora, it is outweighed by the real problem of the global and national diaspora-idea of real Democracy: the structural input failure of the system, which results from the fact that the human species is essentially an accident in the Complex Dynamic System “Evolution” and therefore not planned nor programmed for rational-democratic-ethical behavior, which is the foundational sine qua non for the construction of the desired democratic socialist diaspora.
This evolutionary “accident”, a phase change in the complexity of organization of matter on the blue planet occurred about 7 million years ago and created the unique central nervous system and neural architecture of humans (with 16 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex), which separate our species from earlier common animal ancestors. We are a biological system sui generis in the higher ape’s tree of evolution, characterized by the fundamental contradiction between the biological deterministic system-drives (genes) and the basic cultural“building blocks”, which are necessary for the architecture of a classless humanistic society. In essence, the contradiction of Genetic evolutionary imperatives versus the functionally indispensable requisites for an ethical socio-cultural evolution.
8. Will the fateful species have a democratic Future?
The three structural system input-deficiencies which may make it impossible to satisfactorily organize the 8.1 billion binary species of homo sapiens into a coherent homeostatically stable global macrosystem are, as we have mentioned at the beginning of this essay:
1. the chrematistic market economy based on private property;
2. the universal need for fractal (vertical) organization;
3. the behavioral ecology of human beings basically determined by their genome-constitution.
The prospects for overcoming these structural deficiencies are bleak. As to the abolition of chrematistics, currently, there exists no socialist equivalence economy on the planet and only a phase change in the contemporary correlation of world power could change that situation. For the fractal organizational imperative, as current scientific knowledge indicates, there are no substitute mechanisms on the horizon, which would be effective and more democratic. And finally, the antisocial behavioral ecology of humans can probably not be changed enough by cultural inputs, to create a state of acceptable equilibrium of interests and subjectivities for all parties involved.
The only reasonable phylogenetic hope for a global communist future may therefore lie in the dialectical evolution of the complex adaptive systems “life” and “society”, in which emergent qualities ----like language and consciousness seven million years ago— might develop.
That, of course, is, as any honest scientist and Marxist revolutionary will readily admit, a faint hope for the troubled utopia of equality, democracy and solidarity, the species has dreamed of for millenniums.
9. Is Chinese Socialism the Candel in the Dark?
Professor Angang Hu:
China in 2035: Towards a society of Common Prosperity for All.
Having built a moderately prosperous society in all respects that benefits more than 1.4 billion people, China has entered the stage of building a society of common prosperity and embarked on a new journey to achieve its second centennial goals. Common prosperity is an essential requirement of socialism, an important feature of China’s modernization, and a goal that the Chinese Communists continue to pursue, a long march from generation to generation.
As early as 1955, Mao Zedong put forward the grand vision of achieving common prosperity under socialism. In the process of promoting the agrarian socialist transformation, Mao proposed to “make all rural people common prosperity.” After the reform and opening up, Deng Xiaoping scientifically explained the essence of socialism: to emancipate the productive forces, develop them, eliminate exploitation, eliminate polarization, and achieve common prosperity. He took a dialectical view of the relationship between the emancipation of the productive forces and common prosperity and proposed “to let some people get rich first and break the poverty trap while preventing polarization, and finally achieving common prosperity.” Jiang Zemin pointed out that achieving common prosperity is the basic principle and essential feature of socialism, which must not be wavered. In practice, he launched the Regional Coordinated Development Strategy, which is also an important task and means of promoting common prosperity. He stressed that starting from the 9th Five-Year v vi PREFACE Plan, more attention should be paid to supporting the economic development of the central and Western regions, gradually stepping up efforts to counter the trend of widening regional disparities, and actively working to narrow the gap.
During the 10th Five-Year Plan, China began to implement the strategy for the large-scale development of Western China. Hu Jintao put forward the Scientific Outlook on Development, emphasizing the path of common prosperity and promoting well-rounded human development. Development should be in the interests of the people, rely on their support, and be of direct benefit to them. The goal is to ensure that all people have the right to education, employment and pay, medical and old-age services, and housing so that exploring a path of a harmonious society.
Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), General Secretary Xi Jinping has given higher priority to achieving prosperity for all, attached great importance to poverty alleviation, put forward the idea of a targeted approach to poverty alleviation, and lifted nearly 100 million rural poor people out of absolute poverty. After completing the ambitious goal of building a moderately prosperous society, the Party Central Committee clearly proposed to achieve common prosperity for everyone and made it a long-term development goal. Xi stressed that “entering a new stage of development, the full, correct and comprehensive implementation of the new development philosophy must pay more attention to the issue of common prosperity,” and pointed out that “achieving common prosperity is not only an economic issue but also an important political issue related to the CPC’s governing base.”
China already has favorable conditions for achieving common prosperity. These include: Achieving common prosperity under the leadership of the Party, which is a political guarantee; Achieving common prosperity while maintaining medium to high economic growth and high income, building the world’s largest moderately developed urbanized society, and narrowing the gap between urban and rural residents in terms of per capita income and consumption expenditure with continuous growth, which is a driving force for economic development; Significantly enhancing the country’s financial strength and distribution capacity, and building the world’s largest social security system with universal coverage and access for all, which is an important guarantee. From 2021 to 2035, China will make more obvious and substantial progress in the common prosperity for everyone through three Five-Year Plans.
Achieving common prosperity is a daunting and long-term task that faces many challenges. These include urban-rural disparities, uneven regional development, many vulnerable groups, a still high Gini coefficient, an inadequate redistributive capacity of the country, and so on. However, China’s current development base and development potential are fully capable of addressing these challenges and achieving common prosperity. Based on the overall goal and milestones for achieving common prosperity in the new era proposed by the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee and based on the 14th Five-Year Plan (the first common prosperity plan), we have proposed and designed a system of five major development goals and quantitative indicators. These include productivity indicators (4), development opportunity indicators (3), income distribution indicators (3), development guarantee indicators (9), and people’s welfare indicators (3).
These indicators are systematically integrated with the main indicators of the 13th and 14th Five-Year Plans, and forward-looking to 2035 based on the development trends of the main indicators. They draw up a grand blueprint for building a common prosperity society step by step, i.e., narrowing the gap between urban and rural areas, regional development, and residents’ income, achieving equalization of basic public services for all, and realizing the ambitious goal of making more obvious and substantial progress in common prosperity for everyone by 2035.
The main tasks for promoting common prosperity for everyone in the new era include: (1) upholding China’s basic socialist economic system and promoting the political, institutional, economic, social, and ecological advantages of common prosperity; (2) implementing the strategy of rural vitalization, promoting the modernization of agriculture and rural areas, and accelerating the integrated development of urban and rural areas; (3) implementing the new-type urbanization plan, realizing the people centered urbanization development model, and upgrading the level of urban governance; (4) realizing the equalization of basic public services, enhancing the public service policy system covering the entire population, and accelerating the process of integrated development of urban and rural areas, unification of basic public service standards, and policy convergence; (5) clarifying the responsibilities of governments at all levels for the provision of basic public services; (6) promoting the equalization of non-basic public services; (7) supporting the vitalization and development of special types of areas; (8) assisting low-income people with special difficulties (200 million to 300 million people). The policy of promoting the building of a common affluent society for all people requires a national effort…
Promoting common prosperity for everyone is an extremely ambitious development goal that must go through a rather long historical development process. Due to its long-term, complex, and arduous nature, the realization of common prosperity is a protracted struggle that cannot be rushed or postponed over and over again; it cannot be a “great leap forward” or a step-by-step approach; it cannot be an equalization of wealth and poverty, let alone a polarization. According to the regular characteristics of China’s socialist modernization, respect the objective law of development, make steady and solid progress, accumulate small victories for medium victories, accumulate medium victories for the great victories, accumulate quantitative changes for qualitative changes, accumulate qualitative changes for tremendous changes.
Beijing, China Angang Hu Shaojie Zhou
