Foreword

At the pivotal point of each age, scholarship comes forward that becomes the defining template of the age to come. This is such a work of scholarship. It is a work that explains the creation of today’s world, both its marvels and its violence and misery. Fortunately, it does not leave us with that analysis; it goes on to define what must be done in the future so we all may enjoy the fruits and comforts provided by the social productive capacity that is the property of us all.

History is written by the conquerors but there have always been the intellectual dissenters who have shaken the edifice erected by power and wealth. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich List, and Karl Marx were such voices, as were America’s Thorstein Veblen and Henry George. At times these voices were muffled by the drumbeat of the cheerleaders for the dominant ideological explanation of reality. But, as Dr. Smith demonstrates, these unapproved philosophies are reexamined as each crisis returns to shatter the security and faith in the orthodox explanations.

Smith examines the economic basis of the history of Imperial Civilization. His examination of the precursor configuration of society just prior to the advent of the Industrial Revolution reveals the configuration that is with us even now. Cities in the Middle Ages monopolized the means of production to themselves and conquered and controlled the source of raw materials and the markets in the countryside. Through financial, technological, and military power, allied imperial-centers-of-capital control the present world, their countryside, by the same methods and for the same reasons. Smith laboriously outlines the changing verbal coloration of this chameleon through each age and documents that its configuration has not changed.

This serious academic study documents in detail the strategies and techniques whereby a small part of the world’s population consumes the majority of the world’s resources.

Fewer than 500 people now have more wealth than half of the earth’s population. This is an astounding condition. That this is only known by scholars who study obscure statistics of economics attests to what Smith documents: the intense subtle monopolization of all structures of modern society, especially information, by those who own the bulk of it.

The masses of society have struggled for centuries to establish the rights that some of us now enjoy. Labor rights, political rights, women’s rights, and human rights are now a popular item of interest in all countries, even though control of society by the masses is waning. Instructively, in the United States, through the sleight of hand of the money that finances politics, political control has moved toward the 1/2 of 1% of the population whose wealth in 1995 roughly equaled that of the lower 90% of society.

Those same people have guided the removal of political control from the level of the voters to more and more rarified levels, ultimately to what Smith refers to as the IMF/World Bank/GATT/NAFTA/WTO/MAI/ GATS/FTAA/military colossus. As he describes, this is the legal and policing framework of a functioning, worldwide, corporate-controlled empire.

The value of Smith’s scholarship is that he not only reveals the heretofore unrecognized forces that have created the present world, but he goes beyond that to paint a clear and concise picture of the future world. In a world in which we are told there is scarcity and therefore poverty, Smith documents the fact that only part of the money spent on military and economic warfare since the close of World War II could have developed the entire presently undeveloped world. In a time in which those who inhale the world’s wealth for speculation, military hardware and economic warfare tell us there is no money for human needs, Smith documents there is an abundance of money and lays out specific and reasonable plans for providing for the world’s human needs. Simply stated, one of the values of this work is that it demonstrates in reasonable terms that there are real and legitimate solutions to the problems of housing, food, environment, and peace.

All students who read this work will understand that the world does have a future. There are reasonable solutions. The way that those solutions will be achieved is that the people of the earth will take control of their collective destiny and that the activities of society will be directed toward our common goal of the care of all of human society and the earth. Thus, Smith brings into focus the urgent fact that economic democracy and a modern commons must be the next claim of the world’s masses, in order to create full human rights and to institute policies beneficial to the collective destiny rather than profit and power for a few.

— William H. Kötke

Author, The Final Empire