Humanity's New Path

An ongoing series exploring both the path traveled and the path ahead.

In the recent second session podcast exploring the topic “Colonialism or sovereignty? How the global financial system traps countries in debt” the Geopolitical Economy Report panel of Rahdika Desai, Michael Hudson and Ann Petifor provide a critically keen and insightful look into the path traveled and look at the possibilities lying ahead. Past the midpoint, Michael Hudson makes this utterly crucial point which hasn’t escaped notice of some world leaders:

“We have to change the way of thinking, which is what we’re trying to do today, before we can actually mobilize enough support to change the law.”

And that’s more than just financial law which was the point under discussion, but how law in the West is fashioned, tailored to serve one specific class. In the late 1840s, the French lawyer and political-economist Frédéric Bastiat published a number of observations about how the plundering of people and nations was facilitated by law and those who wrote and write laws. Here are four that I find most noteworthy for our times, although others could be added:

When plunder becomes a way of life, men create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it. “Economic Sophisms," 1848

Sometimes the law defends plunder and participates in it. Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim--when he defends himself--as a criminal. “The Law,” 1850

When misguided public opinion honors what is despicable and despises what is honorable, punishes virtue and rewards vice, encourages what is harmful and discourages what is useful, applauds falsehood and smothers truth under indifference or insult, a nation turns its back on progress and can be restored only by the terrible lessons of catastrophe. «The Law», 1850

When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.

And most of that law was Roman Law, which was specifically pro-creditor and anti-debtor law as many, most recently Dr. Hudson in his Collapse of Antiquity, has shown.

So, what does all that have to do with humanity’s new path? Primarily it’s because in order to forge, to take, the best path forward humanity must know the path it’s been treading for 4,000+ years. And realistically, humanity doesn’t need to know all the specifics about that past path—that can be left for credible historians to present which humanity can consult. What humanity must know is that path wasn’t followed to promote humanity’s interest, but to promote the interests of a very small segment of humanity residing mostly in Western nations—the Plundering/Colonial Nations to be most specific.

The need for new thinking has been around for over a century and although suppressed still managed to flourish and travel. In the context of what’s now occurring in the world, an important revival of new thinking occurred in 1955 at the Bandung Conference whose stated aims were “to promote Afro-Asian economic and cultural cooperation and to oppose colonialism or neocolonialism by any nation.” When you read the podcast transcript or perhaps already know thanks to your prior knowledge, the new Neocolonial system put into place in 1944-45 was already doing its job. One of the bits of new thinking to emerge was that these nations sought a “third way” that was neither capitalist or communist, which is why they were then called Third World Nations—not because they were poor, but because they advocated for a new path, but of course that latter part of their message was obliterated by the Establishment Narrative.

Such a challenge to the System was of course seen with alarm and its key players were crushed with millions killed. When new thinking again arose with the fall of Bretton Woods in 1971, another attempt was made to establish was then named the New International Economic Order that was again brutally crushed with Chile being the prime example although many other nations suffered too.

But new thinking was never destroyed—you can’t kill an idea is an age-old maxim. So, why is today different from times past? There are several. First, the Neoliberal system has attacked all nations, not just those that did the Plundering. The overall process is complex but the results are there to see with what was called the First World now mostly deindustrialized. That process helped other nations develop and become stronger, most importantly China. As some know, China too embarked on its own new thinking path that’s led to where it is today. Second, the utter unfairness of the System known for decades has prompted these newly developed nations to not only question that System but to operate outside of it and to begin the creation of a new system. Third, the lessons of the past have taught all nations outside of the Plundering nations that they must stand together in solidarity—all must help all at all times. In the earlier days, the USSR by itself was never sufficient to challenge the System because both it and the RoW (Rest of the World) were too weak and overall solidarity was lacking. And that brings us to the fourth reason: The weakening of the Plundering Nations resulted in the strengthening of many other nations which established their own multilateral organizations that were joined by Russia, China or both. And the fifth reason were the last attempts by the Outlaw US Empire to plunder a series of other nations that has caused the RoW to revolt—The artificial Arab Spring and rape of Libya followed by a similar attempt in Syria, then in Yemen, and finally the 2014 Western/Nazi coup in Ukraine. Yes, there’re others in Africa that went unmentioned that are just as real and deadly. And the capper, was the gross illegalities taken by the Outlaw US Empire and its NATO vassals in response to Russia’s R2P operation to aid the new Donbass Republics where Russia’s foreign reserves were stolen, just as Iran’s, Libya’s, Venezuela’s, and Afghanistan’s were before. All that drove 85% of humanity to stand together for the first time against the gross illegalities and outright Anti-Human behavior of the so-called West. And that’s where Humanity now stands.

New geopolitical/geoeconomic thinking was announced by Xi Jinping in 2013 with the Belt and Road Initiative—BRI. It was proposed that humanity is all together on its way to shared future that can become possible through the advancement of trade and development projects that promote Win-Win outcomes instead of the anti-human status quo of Zero-sum, which is best exemplified by the Monopoly board game where the aim is to bankrupt all your competitors. This new thinking set the world ablaze in its possibilities, which of course were stiffly opposed by the System. But the System didn’t have any real way to combat this new idea as its industrial power which forms the basis for genuine geopolitical power had mostly been killed-off by Neoliberalism’s parasites. So the aim has been to undermine BRI though parasitic financialization via loans by what’s known as the “shadow banking industry” as the podcast and its previous session explains. But so far that’s met with very few results and the entire process the BRI idea ignited has vastly expanded. (I must mention the idea for a common Eurasia dates from the 1950s and was a view championed by Russian President Putin until roughly 2013 when it finally became clear the West was anti-Russian.) Today there are a plethora of multilateral organizations all focused on promoting commerce, development and a new international financial system to replace the failed Dollar Hegemony regime that has caused so much grief over the 100+ years of its existence. One of the most prolific writers about all those new organizations and their purposes is Pepe Escobar, who gave us the term Pipelinestan, and gave us a recap of the recent SCO Summit in his latest essay, “Finance, power, integration: The SCO welcomes a new 'Global Globe',“ And although Pepe notes—“The SCO declaration made it clear that the expanding multilateral body is “not directed against other states and international organizations.” On the contrary, it is “open to broad cooperation with them in accordance with the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, the SCO Charter and international law, based on consideration of mutual interests."—He reports what I consider an extraordinary statement by India’s PM Modi: “stated in his keynote address that the SCO will be as important as the UN. Translation: a toothless UN controlled by the Hegemon may end up being sidelined by a real ‘Global Globe’ organization,” which is new thinking that was immediately swept under the Western rug.

As this series of essays progresses, a number of very important, grossly underpublicized and thus unknown key documents and their proposals will be provided and examined for the role they might play as humanity forges its new path. One of these is what Xi Jinping called the Global Civilization Initiative which he proposed at the end of his important March 15, 2023 “Join Hands on the Path Towards Modernization” speech at the CPC in Dialogue with World Political Parties High-level Meeting. As you’ll see when you become familiar with China’s other proposed initiatives, as well as those from Russia, that they share a common language and philosophy, that philosophy being something else for me to write about and discuss with commentators. Students of Chinese and East Asian philosophical thought ought to quickly recognize its roots:

Ladies and gentlemen,

Friends,

A single flower does not make spring, while one hundred flowers in full blossom bring spring to the garden. As the future of all countries are closely connected, tolerance, coexistence, exchanges and mutual learning among different civilizations play an irreplaceable role in advancing humanity's modernization process and making the garden of world civilizations flourish. Here, I wish to propose the Global Civilization Initiative.

We advocate the respect for the diversity of civilizations. Countries need to uphold the principles of equality, mutual learning, dialogue and inclusiveness among civilizations, and let cultural exchanges transcend estrangement, mutual learning transcend clashes, and coexistence transcend feelings of superiority.

We advocate the common values of humanity. Peace, development, equity, justice, democracy and freedom are the common aspirations of all peoples. Countries need to keep an open mind in appreciating the perceptions of values by different civilizations, and refrain from imposing their own values or models on others and from stoking ideological confrontation.

We advocate the importance of inheritance and innovation of civilizations. Countries need to fully harness the relevance of their histories and cultures to the present times, and push for creative transformation and innovative development of their fine traditional cultures.

We advocate robust international people-to-people exchanges and cooperation. Countries need to explore the building of a global network for inter-civilization dialogue and cooperation, enrich the contents of exchanges and expand avenues of cooperation to promote mutual understanding and friendship among people of all countries and jointly advance the progress of human civilizations.

We are ready to work together with the international community to open up a new prospect of enhanced exchanges and understanding among different peoples and better interactions and integration of diversified cultures. Together we can make the garden of world civilizations colorful and vibrant.

The CPC [Communist Party of China] is committed to strengthening exchanges and cooperation with other political parties to pursue the just cause together. We are ready to deepen interactions with political parties and organizations in other countries to expand the convergence of ideas and interests. Let us leverage the strength of a new type of party-to-party relations for the building of a new type of international relations and expand global partnerships by fostering stronger partners with world political parties. The CPC stands ready to share governance experience with political parties and organizations of other countries so that together we can make big strides on the path to modernization toward the goal of building a community with a shared future for mankind.

The proposal was made at the end of Xi’s speech; so, to understand some of the context, reading the entire speech might be required. I suggest doing so for the education it provides into current CPC political philosophy. Those curious will find the parent site where the speech transcript is linked to be an outstanding reference site that will get linked to again in the future. For those wanting to explore the series of Geopolitical Economy Hour Shows and a host of other materials, Dr, Michael Hudson’s website is the place to go, where the essays, transcripts and articles go back to the early 2000s. Some of his books are available at The Archive which is free to join and has many millions of media items. For example, the Rosa Luxemburg book mentioned in the podcast, The Accumulation of Capital on a World Scale, can be freely downloaded. She wrote of new ideas then that remain relevant today.

To be masters of our selves we must also think for ourselves. While most of the world is growing together, part of the world is polarizing primarily because people have ceased thinking for themselves and acting in their best interests, while some have surrendered. Crooke cited the actual employment status within the Outlaw US Empire that the Bureau of Labor Statistics never publicly announces:

In the U.S. today, for example, officially unemployed figures are given as 6.1 million Americans; yet 99.8 million of working age Americans are considered “not in the labour force”. Thus a total of 105 million of working-age Americans have no job today.

Current US population is about 338 million. Shadowstats (which is transiting servers so I can’t currently link to its graphs) reports its “alternative” June unemployment rate to be 24.9%. Yes, that figure is equivalent to what it was during the Great Depression. And yet Fed policy is to create more unemployment and the fake deficit crisis was performed to provide political grounds to gut the social safety net even further. Knowing where we’ve been and how we got here is required so we can ensure we’re taking the right path for the future. You won’t be able to download it but as with a library you can check it out to read, and that’s perhaps the best book that tells people why unemployment’s a genuine 25%, not the under 5% the government lies about, Killing the Host. As with the law of digging holes, the first thing to do is to stop digging. To do that, those of us living within the Outlaw US Empire must find a way to defeat the Divide and Rule tools and the Establishment Narrative and attain solidarity so we can attain a political critical mass if we desire to walk a different path in our future.

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