We dealt last week with the challenge of feeding seven billion people. World population is growing at an ever increasing pace: we were one billion in 1802; in 1927, 2 billon; in 1961, 3 billion; in 1974, 4 billon; in 1987, 5 billion; in 1999, 6 billion, and finally, in 2011, 7 billon. In 2025, if an abrupt global warming does not occur, we will be 8 billion, in 2050, 9 billion, and in 2070, 10 billion. There are biologists such as Lynn Margulis and Enzo Tiezzi who see in this acceleration a sign of the end of the species, like bacteria, when put in a closed Petri dish, (capsula Petri). Foreseeing the end of their nourishment they multiply exponentially, and then, suddenly, they all die. Would that be the last flowering of the peach tree before dying?

Independent of this threatening question, we face a stimulating challenge: how to govern seven billion people. That is the question of a global government, namely, a multipolar center, tasked with democratically coordinating the coexistence of human beings in the same fatherland and Common Home. This configuration is a mandate of globalization, because it implies an intertwining of all with all, from within a singular and unique vital space. A global government will appear sooner or later, because the need for it cannot be postponed, if we are to face the global problems and guarantee the sustainability of the Earth.

The idea itself is not new. It was already found in Erasmus and Kant, but it acquired its first real form with The League of Nations, after the First World War, and definitively after the Second World War, with the United Nations Organization, the UN. The UN does not function well because of the antidemocratic veto some countries have, that makes any global initiative contrary to their interests non-viable. Organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, (IMF), the World Bank, the World Organization of Commerce, (GATT), of Health, of Labor, of Tariffs, and UNESCO express the presence of a certain global government.

At present, the gravity of systemic problems such as global warming, scarcity of drinking water, poor distribution of food, the economic-financial crisis, and wars, demand a global government.

The UN’s Commission on Global Government, defines it as «the sum of the different forms by which individuals and institutions administer their common issues and resolve diverse interests in a cooperative way. It includes not only intergovernmental relations, but also non-governmental organizations, citizens movements, multinational corporations and the global capital market» (see the United Nations’ pertinent Internet site.)

This globalization also occurs in cybernetics, through global networks, a sort of government without government. Terrorism has provoked a security government in the threatened countries. There is a perverse global government that could be called government of the corporate world power, made up of the big economic-financial consortiums that act in a concentric manner, until they are reduced to a small group that controls nearly 80% of economic activity. This has been shown by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technological Investigations, that rivals in quality the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, and has been spread among us by the economist Ladislau Dowbor, PUC-SP. This government is not very well known, but beginning with the economy, it powerfully impacts world politics.

The basic functions of a healthy global government are: peace and security, avoiding the use of violence as a solution; fighting the hunger and poverty of millions; education available to everyone, such that they become the actors of history; health as a fundamental human right; minimally decent living quarters; human rights encompassing the personal, social, cultural and gender equality; the rights of Mother Earth and of nature, preserved for us and for future generations.

To guarantee these minimum rights, common to all humans and also to the community of life, we need to encourage a process by which national states will tend to disappear, in the name of the unification of the human species on planet Earth.

In the same way that there is only one Earth, one Humanity and one common destiny, a signle government must appear, a government that is unitary and complex, that takes charge of this new planetary reality and allows the continuity of the human civilization.

To solve the economic-financial crises of Greece and Italy, by demand of the European Central Bank, governments have been formed that are composed purely of technocrats, without the participation of a single politician. They start from the illusion that it is all about an economic problem, that must be resolved through economics. But those who understand only economics, end up not even understanding economics. The crisis is not from having mishandled economics, but ethics and humanity. Both are closely related to politics. Therefore, the first lesson of basic Marxism is to understand that economics is not just mathematics and statistics, but a chapter of politics. A great part of Marx’s work is devoted to divorcing political economics from capital. When a crisis much like the present occurred in England, and a government of technocrats was created, Marx criticized it harshly, mocking it with irony, because he foresaw total failure, and that is what followed. The poison that created a crisis cannot be used to cure it.

People from the highest levels of finance have been called upon to lead the governments of both Greece and Italy. The banks and stock markets caused the present crisis, that has almost destroyed the whole economic system. These gentlemen are like fundamentalist Talibans: they believe in good faith in the dogma of free markets and the role of the stock markets. Where in the universe is it that greed is good, and that it is good to covet, are proclaimed as the ideal? How can one make a virtue out of a vice (and, let us also say it, from a sin)? They sat in New York’s Wall Street and in the City of London. They are not the foxes that guard the chickens, but those who devour them. With their manipulations they transferred great fortunes to a very few hands, and when the crisis exploded, they were helped out with thousands of millions of dollars taken from the workers and retirees. Barack Obama appeared weak, bowing more to them than to the civil society. They continued the party with the money they received, because the promised regulations of the financial markets became a dead letter. Millions are unemployed and in a precarious state, especially the young, who are filling the streets, indignant, rising against greed, social inequality and the cruelty of capital.

Can it be that people whose minds were formed by the catechism of purely neoliberal thinking are going to lead Greece and Italy out of this mess? What is happening is that an entire society is being sacrificed on the altar of the banks and the financial system.

Since the majority of those in the establishment do not think (they don’t need to think) we will attempt to understand the crisis through the light of two thinkers who, in the same year, 1944, in the United States, gave us an illuminating clue. The first was the Hungarian-Canadian philosopher and economist Karl Polanyi, with his classic work, The Great Transformation. What does it consist of? It consist of the dictatorship of economics. After the Second World War, that helped overcome the Great Depression of 1929, capitalism achieved a master stroke: it annulled politics, sent ethics into exile and imposed a dictatorship of economics. Since then, there has been only a society of market, rather than, as it was before, a society with market. Economics structures everything and turns everything into merchandise, ruled by cruel competition and shameless profiteering. This transformation has destroyed the social bonds, and widened the gap between rich and poor within each country, and at the international level.

The other is Max Horkheimer, a philosopher from the Frankfurt school, exiled in the United States, who wrote Eclipse of Reason (1947). There he sets forth the reasons for Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, that fundamentally consist of the following: reason no longer seeks truth and the meaning of things, but has been sequestered by the process of production and lowered to a mere instrumental function, «transformed into a simple tedious mechanism to register facts». He laments that «justice, equality, happiness, and tolerance, which for centuries have been deemed inherent in reason, have lost their intellectual roots». When a society eclipses reason, it becomes blind, loses the meaning of togetherness, and finds itself stuck in the swamp of individual or corporative interests. That is what we see in the present crisis. The most humanist Nobel laureates for economics, Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, have written repeatedly that the Wall Street players should be jailed, as thieves and bandits.

Today, in Greece and in Italy, The Great Transformation has acquired another name: The Great Perversity.