Referring to Paul Street’s ZNet article – “Missing the Marx, More or Less:  On Intellectual Failure and Environmental Catastrophe”, January 24, 2014 –   in order to achieve an intellectual solution to the global economic, political, cultural, & ecological crisis and environmental salvation, we need to develop a system rooted in equality, community, development, and sustainability rather than one that emphasizes maximizing profit, consumption, production, accumulation of wealth, concentration of wealth, inequality, hegemony, and individualism that is at the expense of humanity and our whole planet.  Our very survival as a human species , the survival of our flora and fauna, and the survival of our world depends on that solution, pointed out by Noam Chomsky(2004)  in his book – “Hegemony or Survival:  America’s Quest for Dominance”.  It is the ultimate unavoidable imperative.  Otherwise, we’ll perish as a species along with all of the other species , and the annihilation of the planet.  This requires a radical shift in thinking and action that Dr. Paul Street has stated so brilliantly as usual in this article and in other numerour articles.  Reputable scientific studies at MIT and elsewhere show conclusively the danger of extinction that we are facing.

      What we need to do is to interact in a rational harmonious way with our environment where we control it as associated producers, regulators, and consumers for the betterment of humanity and our entire environment.  In other words, alluding to Smith, including his critique of capitalism –  “irresistible and relentless pressures for growth are functions of the day-to-day requirements of capitalist reproduction in a competitive market, incumbent on all but a few business….” – we need to develop systematically a world that is grounded in a non-capitalist economic systerm that is based on human eed, environmental need, and a different value sytem, as opposed to an economic system, based on profit, that tragically has spiraled out of control, endangering our whole Mother Earth. [1]

  Yes, what we desperately need is production and consumption for the common good and in accord with democratic principles.  The ancient Hebrew communities lived this way as illustrated by the Essenes that Jesus Christ, John the Baptist, and Jesus’s discliples lived in.  Their more modern version is known as the kibbutz, an agricultural community in Israel, that is based on this ancient jewish agrarian socialism demonstrated by the Essenes, Zealots , and other communities in ancient Israel.

  These urgent global problems that we have , including the existential global  ecological and economic crisis are man-made.  But we can reverse them by taking the necessary radical steps of transformation.  We don’t have much time; otherwise, we face extinction as a human species, including the destruction of the flora, fauna, and our planet.

 

1.  Smith, “Beyond Growth or Beyond Capitalism?”