THE CLUB OF ROME: INCUBATOR FOR THE "SCIENCE" OF THE APHENOMENAL MODEL

As the following excerpt from an obituary from today's editions of The New York Times discloses, the Club of Rome and its work mark the starting-point of the scientific research problematic in which the modern aphenomenal model has been incubated. By ‘modern’, we refer to the version of the model based on theories developed from the field of systems and operations research. These theories conceal or downplay the roles of human planning and intervention in the contemporary technological disaster. Their modus operandi consists in ascribing outcomes not to class interests and intentions — including their human authors — but rather instead to the automaticity of systems and their operation. This approach shifted the focus away from the contradictions engendered by centuries of foreign domination and the local rebellions and resistance that this fuelled. Instead, the focus became one of fine-tuning the automaticity of such systems with more comprehensive planning. In practice, disguised by gobbledygook about “better feeedback loops”, the content of this comprehensiveness included continuing ever-greater intrusion by North American and European governments, and their tools inside and outside governments of developing countries, to keep public right co-opted by monopoly right in these countries, making peoples and governments in the developing world kowtow to the whims of North American and European corporate molochs.

Starting in 1960, the Rostow brothers (Eugene Rostow in the CIA, Walt Whitman Rostow as the author of The Stages of Economic Growth) unfolded their theories and practices for “modernising” developing countries in a manner that would integrate them more closely, and subjugate them, within a U.S.-dominated imperium (later dubbed the Pax Americana). This was applied with special vigour in central and South America and the Latin Caribbean. With the sole exception of Cuba, by the mid-1960s there was no government in Latin America whose armed forces and police were not compromised and embroiled in programs of the CIA and the US armed forces to train and equip death squads. The theories and practices engendered by this line of political economy were what informed, and provided the warp and woof of, the Club of Rome's entire outlook and approach. Among other aims, this was intended to further the same aims of foreign colonial domination in general without openly reasserting the discredited open racism of Eurocentric outlook in particular.

With the installation of the Kennedy administration, imperial “help”, i.e., foreign intervention and domination developed largely under the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), was mandated for modernising developing countries. With its modelling of overpopulation as a condition endemic to economies that fail to achieve critical mass and take off, etc., the Club of Rome produced many “scientific” justifications ascribing the economic difficulties of developing countries to their unfittedness to handle properly the “complexity of modern systems and their requirements” — a logic resonating with toxic British imperialist noises spawned in the 19th century about ”races that are best-fitted for ‘self-government’ ”. No blame for these countries’ failure to thrive was ever attached to any of the destructive consequences of centuries-long colonial intervention and dictate and the massive violence unleashed by colonial masters to prop up local ruling tools against rebellion from below.

The Club of Rome ensured that their own actual consciousness would never be asserted openly — that “we” your overlords, possessing the powerful magic of systems analysis, are white and know what’s what, and what’s best, whereas “you” our lowly subjects are lesser breeds without the law in need of continual whiffs of grapeshot combined with the occasional good extermination. It focused instead on effecting some cosmetic surgery on the ugly and hated visage of European colonialism, enough to ensure the return of this imperialist agenda — newly decked out as “fresh American thinking” — to the commanding centre of world affairs.



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Hasan Ozbekhan, 86, Economist Who Helped Found Global Group, Dies

By JEREMY PEARCE
The New York Times, Mon 26 February 2007, Page B6

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Hasan Ozbekhan, a Turkish-born economist and management expert who helped found the Club of Rome, a group of thinkers who came together to examine unwieldy global problems like food shortages and overpopulation, died on Feb. 12 in Philadelphia. He was 86.

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In the early 1970s, Mr. Ozbekhan (pronounced UHZ-beh-kahn), who taught at the University of Pennsylvania and applied the field-of-systems theory to global problems, helped inspire the group of planners, diplomats, scientists and academics who came together as the Club of Rome. He wrote a paper, “The Predicament of Mankind,” that became an influential core document of the group, addressing issues of energy, overpopulation, depletion of resources and environmental degradation.

Alexander N. Christakis, a former colleague in the Club of Rome, said Mr. Ozbekhan’s writings constituted “a forward-looking document” and argued that global problems were “strongly interconnected and that any attempts to deal with them independently would simply not work.”

Mr. Ozbekhan, who was the club’s director of research and a member of its executive committee, later resigned, but the organization continues and now operates from Hamburg.

In 1975, while working as a consultant for the French government, Mr. Ozbekhan published a report about long-range planning in Paris. The report reviewed land use, cultural issues and the city’s economy and tried to provide the French with an avenue toward developing the city “within the context of a globalizing world.” In 1977, he gave a lecture on the future of Paris before the Royal Society in London.

Hasan Ziya Ozbekhan was born in Istanbul. He earned an undergraduate degree from the London School of Economics. He became an American citizen in the 1950s.

From 1963 to 1969, Mr. Ozbekhan was principal scientist and director of planning at the System Development Corporation, a military research group and software development company in Santa Monica, Calif.

In 1970, he was named a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also taught statistics, operations research and social systems sciences. He retired in 1992.

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