Millions being sacrificed for capitalism

In 1944 an experiment was carried out at Minnesota State University called the Minnesota Semi-Starvation Experiment. It involved the use of conscientious objectors to test the effects of starvation on the human body and the possible rejuvenating measures that might be undertaken to help people recover if they had endured such an ordeal.
At the time they were experimented on, the subjects of this study were on the periphery of society. To be a conscientious objector when America joined the World War II was to be a pariah in that state.
Combined with the extraordinarily lax approach to medical ethics at the time, this fact meant the plight of these men garnered little or no attention at the time.
While the 36 participants were selected from a group of 200 ‘volunteers’ the men’s non-participation in the war marked them apart from others in society and stripped them of some of the privileges usually afforded to the citizens of a nation. The aim of the experiment was to observe how the human body responded to starvation and to ascertain the best methods of combating malnutrition in the famine many felt was looming when World War II came to an end. These were laudable goals but the use of human subjects in this way will rightly be considered by many to be unjustified in the light of modern ethical practice.
The final report produced following the experiment was entitled The Biology of Human Starvation and is still used to this day by aid workers in the field all over the world.
A far more infamous human clinical trial took place in Tuguskee, Alabama, between 1932 and 1972. During that time, the US Public Health Service monitored and detailed the progression of syphilis in a population of African American men who falsely believed they were receiving free government health care.
In total, 600 poor men were observed as part of the study. Those who had syphilis were never told they had the disease and were not treated for it despite the discovery of penicillin in 1940 for the treatment of the infection. For their troubles, they received healthcare, food and free burial insurance. It was the exposure of this experiment that led to a radical shake-up in the laws around the use of human beings in medical experiments and moves towards a more ethical approach by the scientific and medical community.
The laws, rules and regulations that now surround experimentation on human subjects are extremely rigorous. In adhering to ethics on this point, many rightly state that progress in fighting disease in humans will take far longer than it could.
Most people however, feel this is a reasonable trade off and that the human rights of individuals take precedence over the wider progress of humanity. Only the most rabid utilitarian would disagree.
The loudest contemporary outcry with regard to scientific experimentation is about the use of animals by science and medicine. In recent years, there have been a number of incidents whereby animal rights activists have ended up in jail for their violent and illegal activities around institutions and scientists that use animals in their work.
Unlike medicine, chemistry and the other natural sciences, economics is not an empirical practice. The imperfection of their “science” has been exposed by the financial crash but despite this fact, the people of Europe continue to be used as guinea pigs in their ongoing experiment.
There is no small irony in the fact that the most accurate predictions regarding the outcome of the worldwide economic experiment in capitalism came from Karl Marx. As the philosopher John Gray so succinctly put it, Marx believed that “Capitalism was radically unstable.
It had a built-in tendency to produce ever larger booms and busts and over the longer term, it was bound to destroy itself.” Of course as we are all too aware, there are many casualties when the cycle rolls around to bust. The real results in people’s daily lives are keenly felt and can ruin lives forever in many cases. Of course Marx was completely wrong about the rise of a communist state to replace the capitalist one but as Gray tells us, “Where he was prophetically right was in his grasp of the revolution of capitalism. It’s not just capitalism’s endemic instability that he understood, though in this regard he was far more perceptive than most economists in his day and ours. More profoundly, Marx understood how capitalism destroys its own social base, the middle class way of life. When he argued that capitalism would plunge the middle classes into something like the precarious existence of the hard-pressed workers of his time, Marx anticipated a change in the way we live that we are only now struggling to cope with.”
Contemporary economists, despite the real human cost of their experiments, continue to advise governments who are in thrall to their pseudo-science while the people of Europe and the world live with the hardship and austerity that are the results.
The debts being carried by tax payers in Ireland and Greece as well as other Europeans at the moment cannot in reality ever be repaid in full but in order to service the bills, the people of these nations are being forced to endure swinging cuts and austerity.
Humanity can say that it is at least approaching enlightenment in the adoption of ethical standards that prevent the use of human beings for the purposes of experimentation in the natural sciences; why then is nobody calling time on this Europe-wide economic laboratory?
Perhaps the fact that so many millions are being sacrificed for the sake of this experiment that hides its true nature. Until the problem is recognized, it cannot be addressed and until it is addressed, people will continue to suffer for it.