To Achieve a New International Development Architecture

by Dennis Small

[Print version of this editorial]

The issue is this: What is it that actually gives value to a currency, or value to an economy? This is where Lyndon LaRouche is uniquely qualified and, therefore, the world is thrust into a situation where, whether people like it or not, they will have to take up his ideas, if we are going to make it past this hurdle.

Here’s what I mean. Take the case of an engineer, or in geometry: You can use Euclidean geometry to build a bookshelf, to do something of that sort. You can assume that the world is flat, even though we know it isn’t; you can use the basic assumption of a triangle having 180 degrees, and so on, to work things out for immediate purposes. You could believe in Newton, which is false.

But, if you want to travel to the Moon, if you want to go to Mars, if you do not understand Einstein’s breakthroughs in relativistic physics, you’re going to miss your target. You’re going to make a mistake. Your bookshelf is not going to stand up to what you’re actually trying to do.

We’re facing the same situation right now in the economy, where you could use certain measures, even monetary measures, for a brief period of time. You could, for example, even assume that you’re going to develop a new currency with backing from oil, other commodities, and so on and so forth.

But, here’s the question: What happens when your investments lead to an entire leap in the technological platform, where oil is no longer a form of fuel but it’s just a feedstock for petrochemicals, plastics, and so on, as it should be? What is the value of your oil if you have succeeded in the development of your physical economy by transforming a technological platform, which devalues everything that previously had value? Clearly, you are not going to be able to use any particular object. You cannot have a physiocratic approach to this thing. There can be stepping stones, but stepping stones toward the only thing that actually does not change throughout all change, as Plato referred to it. And that is, the human capability of constant, unending creative advance in the development of the physical universe.

That capability, that scientific advance, that advance in creative arts, that breakthrough to discover new laws of the physical universe—that is the actual, only measure of a physical economy that can function.

And therefore, the task that is immediately before the BRICS, to be able to walk through this next ring of fire, is to begin to get a grasp of the economics that Lyndon LaRouche has laid out, because no monetary approach is possibly going to work.

And, for that very reason, I think that projects, such as the space project of India, of Russia, of China, of the United States, and of Europe, express the common destiny of mankind. And, to the degree to which nations of the so-called Global South, that have also made progress in this direction, such as Argentina and Brazil, and so on and so forth, they become part of that universal project.

That emphasis on scientific advance and technological breakthroughs, as the driving force of the economy, that is what has to be transferred into the issue of developing a monetary system, or a credit system, that can issue credit for the purpose of those kinds of advances.

So, I think that that’s where the discussion takes us—to that very interesting conundrum, of how do we think about the next step, because it is not linear. There’s a complete transformation of the entire nature of man’s relationship to the physical universe, and that’s what economics is all about. And I think that that’s the standpoint from which we now will be facing the political and the economic task before us.