SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIALISM
The latter is nowadays depicted as an undesirable, even impossible,
ideal by most of the free capitalism protagonist economists and politicians of the
day, who preponderate in the world, post the collapse of the Soviet Union and
fall of socialist systems in general – mainly due to their own inherent defects
and unpopularity due to the Big Brother regimes and suppression of human rights
in that name. However, as Dr. Paul Craig Roberts had made it clear in his “Failure of Laissez Faire
Capitalism”, and as more and more people-friendly
economists all over the world are recognizing, it is not State Socialism alone
which is capable of such misrule, but more so, the profit greedy corporate
capitalism, vastly growing unbriddled in this age of so-called globalism, which
is prone to as also demonstrated its oppressions and genocidal atrocities against
the peoples and only benefited the 1% super-rich at the cost of the deprived 90%
all over the world. In this context it is exhilarating to find that as per the Sustainable
Development Index (SDI) designed
by anthropologist Dr Jason Hickel, which in a
way properly upgrades the Human Development Index developed by the Pakistani
economist Mahbub-ul-Haq that is being used by the United Nations
Development Program since 1990 too, is now the highest in Cuba, one of the last
bastions of Socialism, which has survived all the threats, sanctions and aggressive
attacks by the world’s most formidable imperialist power till date, and blended
its state socialism with humanist democracy and even free markets to an extent;
this SDI “calculates its results by dividing a nation's "human
development" score, obtained by looking at statistics on life expectancy,
health and education, by its "ecological overshoot," the extent to
which the per capita carbon footprint exceeds Earth's natural limits.” So often the supposedly
freedom and democracy oriented capitalist imperialist West portrays its
developed economies as glaring examples of success of capitalism cleverly
hiding not only their miserable human rights records all over the world but,
more important, the enormous ecological costs they imposed on the nature and
environment and the peoples of the world in general. It is a truism that if environmental
costs are reckoned the capitalist corporations can never prosper in the front ranks
and if public costs i.e. the stupendous public finances they plunder are taken
into account, one only wonders why not organized intelligent communities of people
themselves take over the reins instead of leaving it to these crooked devotees
of Moloch and Mammon. Well, that is exactly what is meant by the ideal of
sustainable development oriented humanist democratic socialism, which is the
only option to save us from the dangers of an armageddon and an ecological
disaster resulting in total ruin of our species altogether. §§§
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