So i would like to explain the origin of my blog URL. I first read about the concept from white Fungus Issue #10, which published an article by Juan Santos called 'CAPITALISM AT THE EXPENSE OF ALL LIFE Part 2: Burning Down the House ', and then i read it again (and copied it) from Juan's Blog: http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com/ i really recommend reading as much as you can of his fabulously insightful words. Unfortunately Juan Santos passed away recently so much respect goes out to him for his fantastic work and i am sad that he will no longer be able to share his thoughts with us.


so this is just an excerpt, for the full text see his blog or White Fungus magazine.

Money is Worthless

Not even parasites feed off of other parasites, but capitalists do. And, sometimes the most shopworn and obvious of truths are among the most profound; like this one: You can’t plant or eat money. For that matter, you can’t plant or eat gold or silver, either.

In the subprime mortgage crisis we see the same principle of rip–off that the capitalist applies to the worker, only in reverse. Rather than paying the worker less than the value of what she has produced, in this case the capitalists lured the workers into buying into what they couldn’t afford, a standard of living beyond what they were (under) paid for their labor. “Get ‘em comin’ and goin’” was the idea. After all, it always seemed to work before – the whole principle behind profit is cheating – getting something for nothing.

And, besides, that’s exactly what money is worth – nothing. Its value is invented, then sustained by faith or belief- by widespread cultural agreement. It has no substantive value in and of itself. The same is essentially true of gold and silver. They are essentially glittering metals of little practical use or value in comparison, to say, iron ore, copper or diamonds. When money was tied to the gold or silver standards, its value was just as much a convention – a matter of suspended thought, belief and common agreement, as the value of unbacked currencies – floating paper money – is today. You can’t eat a treasure chest of gold bullion, and you can’t plant it and grow it. There is hardly a rational way to assess its life-value, in the way that one can decide whether this bushel of corn is worth more to you, for your purposes, tastes and dietary needs, in the context of your natural, local ecology and economy, than that bushel of potatoes. Beyond the aesthetic value of their color, pliability and gleam, gold and silver have little tangible, intrinsic or organic value in any ecosystem or natural economy. And, as relatively rare, soft metals, they have historically had little widespread practical use. But, like the “almighty” paper dollar, they are considered “precious.” It’s a matter of sheer invention, sheer faith, sheer abstraction. It’s sheer invented nonsense – worth little more than the paper a sub-prime mortgage agreement is printed on; worth little more than the electrical energy that encodes a numeric value in a computer.

So, having shipped production of all kinds overseas, where workers produce a greater profit margin with their labor than they can in countries with relatively higher standards and costs of living, U.S. bankers and other capitalists began to scam each other, selling one another the debt owed by workers on mortgages they could not – by design – afford. Really, they were selling one another faith, based on the blank belief that the bill would never really come due – the same lie they sold to the workers who bought the mortgages in the first place. They were selling one another electronically configured squiggles in a computer data base, each preceded by a mathematical minus sign. But, the bill came due, the ripped off worker couldn’t afford it, the debt that had been sold could not be paid, and the whole game began to collapse, just like it does in the last days of any gangster. Like the last, desperate days of Bonnie and Clyde as the law closed in on them, karma is closing in on the banksters. In the meantime, someone else equally desperate ripped the copper (not gold) pipes out of the place, and the mortgaged house of cards could no longer be re-sold – except to you, as worker in the role of taxpayer. The end result is that billions, if not trillions of increasingly worthless dollars are being re- transferred, in a massive, unprecedented re-distribution of wealth, to the very thieves and killers who stole it in the first place, then “lost” it in a maze of lies and fraud.

The most important end result, however, is that socially produced wealth that might have gone toward creating a more Earth centered economy – or to halt, at least, the very worst ravages of the capitalist cancer on the body of the Earth and on all of the millions of species who will be driven to, or over, the edge of extinction -including, quite possibly, our own, will instead be funneled, as unearned profit (there is no other kind of profit), into the hands of the very forces that are destroying us all, to enable them to continue destroying us all, if possible.

That’s the logic. Capitalist civilization is a suicide pact. It’s a suicide cult – one that “profits,” however temporarily, at the expense of all life. Thank the Creator it’s falling apart at the seams, and that its smokestacks – its virtual death camps and crematoria – may fall right along with its financial racket. As Richard Heinberg wrote in an essay entitled The End of Growth that hit my mailbox only moments ago, “The worldwide financial crisis, and the decline in available energy, mean that we may also have seen the final year of aggregate world economic growth.” Let us pray that he’s correct; such a collapse may be the only chance we all have to survive.

Heinberg summed it up this way, “Growth is dead. Let’s make the most of it. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

Hey so this is my first and only blog. i made this diagram and i wanted to put it somewhere so i made this blog to put it here