By Leni Rubinstein
June 2018
With ‘The New Silk Road’, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched by Chinese President Xi Jin-ping in 2013, a new paradigm for the future – a new, just world economic order — has been made possible.
President Xi’s grand design for the future, “the Common Destiny of Mankind,” envisions a global economic, scientific, and cultural renaissance, the which would put an end to geopolitics and the danger of world war, and centers upon collaboration among nations around a principle of mutual development, ‘win-win’. This vision for the future mirrors the ideas of the past great renaissances in the West, as well the exalted intent of the founding documents of the USA, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and it promises a human future for mankind.
Why publish a Chinese-language version of There Are No Limits to Growth now, 35 years after it was written? Answer: to help understand ‘the rot’ in the West.
The polemic waged by LaRouche in this book refutes the prevalent idea that there are limits to the growth of human economy and population, a view, which has been used against the development of the underdeveloped, former colonized countries, and which also rejects the Belt and Road Initiative. The existing paradigm in the West is sometimes called the “Washington Consensus,” but is in essence the outlook of the British Empire of the likes of Parson Malthus, Adam Smith and company, and has increasingly become hegemonic over the past almost 50 years. Catch-phrases like “back to nature,” “post-industrial society,” “environmentalism,” and “green,” have become the norm.
The 1972 publication of Limits to Growth (Forrester & Meadows), sponsored by the Club of Rome, was used to launch a public relations campaign, and instantaneously made the Club of Rome a major policy-influencing institution. The book forecast doom and claimed, that due to the finite resources of the earth, the planet could only sustain 1-2 billion, a number already surpassed then. This book became a bible for the anti-human, “zero-growth” environmentalist movement.
Lyndon LaRouche was the only person to challenge and refute the “zero-growth” so-called economists. LaRouche termed their views “A Blueprint for the Extinction of Humanity,” and “Zero-growth: the Political Economy of Fascism.”
In No Limits to Growth (as well as in other writings) LaRouche creates the Science of Physical Economy as distinct from the standards of a speculative, financial-based system of purely money values and a ‘market’ determined production. Physical Economy is premised on the unique ability of human beings to discover new principles of natural law, which produces new technology and therefore creates new resources – something no animal can do. LaRouche demonstrates, that it is human creativity, which is value in economy. Thus, there truly are no limits to growth in real economics.