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.Plant and animal species may be going extinct at arecognized 1000 times the normal rate.The desertification of soils maybe proceeding by country-sizes each year.The sounds of the world maybe ever more dominantly the anaplastic din of motors burning non-renewable and productively precious fossil fuel.But the for-profit industrialTHE SOCIAL IMMUNE SYSTEM 113exploitation of the global life-environment must be left free to increase itsassaults on environmental life-systems to  keep the economy going.The long-awaited 1992 UN Rio Declaration on Environment andDevelopment provides another clue to the puzzle of global life disruptionand decline not being related back to the system-deciders determining them.The Rio Conference failed, despite the  environmental crisis recognizedby negotiators, to respond to the systemic and cumulative depredationof planetary life because there was a more basic programme by which itsparticipants were still bound.Principle 2 of the Rio Declaration recognizesthat  States [read corporations using state environments as vehicles]have the sovereign right to exploit their own resources..Principle 16declares that  the polluter should, in principle, bear the cost of pollution.without distorting international trade and investment.In short, the world body responded with no effective inhibition of theaccumulating destruction of the earth s biosphere, or the spreadingregime of reproduction behind it because it remained within the rulingstructure of thought.Five years after its 200,000-word programme ofhundreds of steps to be taken by governments acting for  sustainabledevelopment within the framework of  not distorting international tradeand investment , the ecocidal problem it was organized to resolve withall governments in attendance had become clearly worse.The 1998follow-up summit in New York concluded that overall trends  are worsetoday than they were in 1992.36 But no tie-back to the infrastructuraldeterminants of the progressive advance of the diseased state wasconsidered, or arose in media discussion of the problem.Rather, dispro-portionate coverage was given to those who denied climatic changes byindustrial gas emissions.The Cancer Stage of CapitalismAt this stage of the global market system s reproduction of transnationalmoney sequences to unheard-of volumes and velocities of transaction andgrowth, a systematic and irreversible destruction of planetary life-organization emerges for the first time in history.If we consider thedefining principles of carcinogenic invasion and eventual destruction ofa life-host, and do not avoid or deny the symptom profile in evidence, wediscern a carcinogenic pattern increasingly penetrating and spreadingacross civil and environmental life-organization.There are seven defining properties of a cancer invasion which medicaldiagnosis recognizes at the level of the individual organism.These sevenproperties can now be recognized for the first time at the level of globallife-organization as well.And this is the pathological core of our currentdisease condition.114 THE CANCER STAGE OF CAPITALISMThat is, there is:(1) an uncontrolled and unregulated reproduction and multiplication of an agentin a host body; that(2) is not committed to any life function of its life-host; that(3) aggressively and opportunistically appropriates nutriments and resourcesfrom its social and natural hosts in uninhibited growth and reproduction;that(4) is not effectively recognized or responded to by the immune system of itshosts; that(5) possesses the ability to transfer or to metastasize its growth and uncontrolledreproduction to sites across the host body; that(6) progressively infiltrates and invades contiguous and distant sites of its life-hosts until it obstructs, damages and/or destroys successive organs of theirlife-systems; and that(7) without effective immune-system recognition and response eventuallydestroys the host bodies it has invaded.Three years after these common properties of disease affliction on globaland cellular levels of life-organization were first identified,37 a former USUndersecretary of Commerce and Dean of the Yale School of Managementwho was speaking for the  globalization process , released a questionwhich was not followed up:  Or is there , he asked,  a bigger cancer at thecentre of the whole enterprise? 38 What might be the cancer, and whatwas the vehicle of its invasion were not ready to be considered.But thequestion insists: If there is in fact a malignant cancer pattern advancingacross environmental and social life-hosts, what is the disease agent thatunderlies its symptoms of invasion and assault?One diagnosis could be from the standpoint of the global life-host itself.It might be argued that the disease-agent is the human species, a rogueform of proliferating reproduction in its industrial stage which exhibitsthe seven properties of a cancer specified above.But it cannot be thehuman species per se because over 99 per cent of the species time on earthhas been free of any such pervasive, systemic pattern of incrementalenvironmental destruction.And it cannot be coherently diagnosed ashuman overpopulation as such because exponential human populationgrowth beyond the environment s carrying capacities is itself symptomaticof more fundamental social determinants  specifically, mass poverty inthe recent era of global industrialization where effective social responseto or regulation of these conditions is not in place.We can test this claimby application to the relevant evidence.Contemporary societies withoutmass poverty or industrialized conditions have typically had negativerates of reproduction.The  overpopulation disorder , we can reasonablyinfer from these general facts of its presence and absence, is a problem linkedto specific social-structural conditions: namely, mass impoverishment inTHE SOCIAL IMMUNE SYSTEM 115industrializing societies where there has been a failure both to overcome masspoverty and to regulate the industrialized extraction or destruction ofenvironmental resources in these regions.We can infer from these general facts, in turn, that breakdowns incirculation of vital life sustenance to members of social bodies andbreakdowns in environmental carrying capacities are related determinantsof the  overpopulation crisis.Overpopulation, we can therefore conclude,is a symptom of these deeper-lying conditions.These structural conditions,in further turn, correlate to an underlying common pattern of morbiditywhich we can analyse as follows [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]