The argument is won: capitalism as
an effective system to organise society and provide
for human needs has expired. The evidence is
conclusive. Trillions of dollars to kickstart the
economy in the US and Europe may have given an
ephemeral lease of life to the financial class to spin
the casino wheel once again, but it is more apparent
by the day that the tentative “recovery” has
spluttered to a standstill. Gridlocked by
unprecedented levels of personal and national debts,
the engine of production – the real economy – is in a
state of rigor mortis.
This collapse has been a long time
in the making. Decades of easy credit was up to now a
way for the ruling class – government, corporations,
financial institutions – to let the majority of
workers subsidise the chronic loss in their
livelihoods, which have been drained since the
mid-1970s by the oligarchy’s self-aggrandisement from
wage cutting, regressive taxation and public spending
cuts. The political class – whether liberal or
conservative, right or left – have facilitated this
giant wealth-siphoning process.
However, the point is that the
economic system is now objectively shown to be
moribound. And it is impossible for so-called
mainstream politicians to think of any other way of
doing business. They are ideologically blind. Recall
former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s
arrogant assertion: “There is no alternative”.
Likewise, US President Barack Obama insists on
throwing billions more dollars at the banks and
financiers on Wall Street. But that won’t kickstart an
economy in which millions of workers are without jobs
and homes or who are on crumby wages and up to their
necks in debt. The profit system has hit an historic
dead-end and this gridlock is a result of deep trends
to do with the decline in capitalism as a mode of
social production (falling wages and profits and the
concomitant explosion in financial speculation and
debts).
Widespread poverty and human misery
is now seen on a massive scale in the so-called
developed world. Some 40 million Americans, for
example, are subsisting on food stamps. The
distinction between “developed” and “developing”
economies (always a myth anyway) is blurred. The ranks
of the world’s long-suffering poor are swelled with
dispossessed blue and white-collar workers and their
families from across the US and Europe. Together more
than ever, they stand shut out from those gated havens
of obscene wealth for a global minority.
Similar historic junctures have
been witnessed before when capitalism floundered from
its inexorable tendency to make the rich richer and
the poor poorer. Disturbingly, the release valve for
the system and its bankruptcy has always been war.
Death and destruction is the lender of last resort to
an economic system that – despite itself – inevitably
polarises wealth to an unworkable degree. The First
and Second World Wars – claiming more than 70 million
over a period of less than 10 years lives – were
effectively the ultimate, grotesque bailouts.
In our time, war, it seems, has
already begun. The US oligarchy and its NATO allies
are waging a veritable war on the world: killing,
disappearing and incarcerating millions of civilians
in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan – a war that is
expanding into Yemen, Somalia and the rest of the Horn
of Africa, with the militarisation of sea lanes and
oceans (see Chossudovsky,
www.Globalresearch.ca) and the setting up of
“forward projecting” military and missile bases in
every continent (see Rozoff, ditto). On top of
ordinary poverty and misery, the world is truly seeing
another historic descent into barbarism. Given this
war-mongering dynamic, the growing US antagonism with
Iran, Russia and China is far from an idle threat. It
is the logical next step for a deeply illogical
economic system.
But history is not inevitable. We
are not necessarily programmed to repeat its horrors.
A combination of global communications among citizens
and political and social consciousness may be enough
to prevent a military conflagration and overthrow the
misrule of the oligarchy. What is needed is a) a
widening of the recognition that capitalism as a
system of social production is finished; and b) the
case has to be confidently made that an alternative is
very possible. That alternative is socialism (the
subject of a further article). To those who remain
skeptical, they should bear in mind the stark choice
that Rosa Luxemberg foresaw for humanity: that is,
socialism or barbarism. And we already have the
latter.
finian.cunningham@gmail.com