We Need to Talk
Archie
marriage it either means that the request is to deal with difficult
problems or, in the case of an abusive relationship, that phrase may
mean the victim has had it. It's over.
If you're old enough you may remember when we fell in love. We had
just emerged through tough times; a depression and a war. It was the
50s. The grim years had passed and we were courted by a spirit; the
spirit of capitalism. The grim bleakness of the past was giving way to
televisions, household conveniences of all sorts, rock and roll and a
world of optimism and colour. And over the next few decades the
trajectory was clear and it was aiming toward heaven. The sky was the
limit. Everything was getting better.
We collectively fell in love with the spirit of capitalism. It was
youthful and charming and it was a fantastic provider. Our lives were
improving. Wages were rising and demand for goods and services
demanded more goods and services.
In Western Europe and North America we not only fell in love with
capitalism, we got married. Our past flirtations with socialism were
forgotten. Capitalism loved us and we loved capitalism. It demanded
fidelity and we grew to trust it. We became loyal. It was a marriage
made in heaven.
Something happened along the way.
We assumed that capitalism would remain faithful. But it hasn't.
Instead, it began its affairs. We looked the other way. Capitalism had
its 'needs'. It dated throughout Latin America and in Asia but we
remained confident that it would always come home. It spent weekends
in the Middle East and assured us that it was a matter of bringing
home the bacon. It was business.
At first, we could look the other way. After all, this was just sex.
It wasn't love.
Have we fooled ourselves? Has capitalism just used us? We thought it
was genuine love and that love would last forever. Are we in denial?
We still dream of yesterday and superimpose it on tomorrow. We
continue to believe the lies; we want to. We believe that this is just
the natural cycle of boom and bust and that the good times will
return. We want to believe it in the face of some very hard
realities.
Our partner seems more and more inhumane as time goes by. Sometimes it
behaves like a psychopath. And maybe it isn't "sometimes", maybe it is
a psychopath all the time. Maybe that is just what we have been
married to all these years.
We must examine ourselves; our own dual nature. We are a consumer and
we are a worker. Capitalism has always served and smiled at the
consumer side. And it has been served by the worker side. It has been
far more ruthless to the worker that it has depended on for its very
sustenance; capital. It has turned vicious to the worker while still
flirting with the sexy consumer side of us. But we are one and the
same. Kill one and the other dies as well. Abuse the worker and the
consumers wilts.
Capitalism flirts and smiles at others and still rules the household
with an iron fist. In the past we ignored its nasty side when it would
come home drunk and beat the hell out of us. We were forgiving when it
raped Vietnam and punished us for protesting. We have forgiven and
forgotten all the violence, the cruelty, and the disappointments.
But now things are getting serious. We are at a point where we have to
ask ourselves whether this marriage is good for us. We thought the
violence would end, that the system would mature and settle down. It
matured alright but instead of settling it has become more virulent.
Like the saying goes - 'be careful what you wish for'. It matured and
is becoming less stable and predictable. It is ripping all we had
built to shreds. It still rules the roost and what do we get out of
it? The house is falling to pieces. We are running out of food and
medicine and capitalism is off running with that whore in China. In
the past we put up with the abuse but we were getting something out of
it.
What we have to face up to is the fact that we fell in love with and
married a psychopath and that psychopath is now an addict. While the
house falls to pieces capitalism it is still borrowing and spending
like there's no tomorrow. It is feeding its insatiable gambling habit.
And where is the money coming from? Need we ask? We are in hock to his
communist whore and we have no idea how we'll pay it back. We never
see a paycheque anymore and the kids are getting hungry.
Taking Stock
It is time to take a sober second look at what we have been married
to.
To be fair, capitalism never did promise loyalty. It always said that
it was interested only in making profit. We assumed that we were part
of it. And we were as long as we were needed to create capital. In
return we got shiny new cars and a feeling of security. We didn't
complain or even notice the ugly moods as long as we got what we
wanted. We sold ourselves to them. We needed the money. We knew we
were being exploited and we all said, in unison, "what's good for GM
is good for America". We knew it was a marriage of exploitation. We
considered it mutually beneficial and it was.
Our failure to look at the ugly nature of our partner is something we
all need to take responsibility for. Our partner went all over the
globe killing and dominating poor people and what did we do? We turned
away and pretended it wasn't happening. Their theft was our hegemony
and we glazed over the invasions, the assassinations, and the proxy
fascism that our masters used to bring home the bacon. We accepted it
and called it 'national security'; obedient to a fault.
Within the hegemony the terms of exploitation we had agreed on are no
longer satisfactory to our partner. Gambling finance capital is far
more lucrative and far more attractive than dealing with ugly blue
collar workers demands and complaints. Gambling is a lot more fun,
even when the gambler knows he will win. The shell games have been
hard to keep up with but they are worth watching. These games expose
the lack of loyalty our partner has for us.
We have just witnessed massive criminal activity on the part of
capitalists resulting in further gutting to our manufacturing
infrastructure. They created a false economy through leveraging to
overvalue stocks. They have operated using any means available to
increase short term gains for themselves and have been rewarded for
their criminal behaviour with massive bailouts granted to them by
their employees (politicians). They have created bubble after bubble
staving off reality. Pretending everything's okay - telling us
everything's okay. Lying.
Our partner continues to spend and buy flashy things and as time
passes he spends less on the house and family and more on himself.
Reform
Before running to a divorce lawyer we may want to look at the
possibility of reforming the relationship. If two parties want to make
it work it has a chance. But we need to ask ourselves; What would
reform look like? After all, the marriage itself starting within a
context of reform. John Maynard Keynes recognized flirtations back and
forth between workers/consumers and capitalism and he dressed
capitalism up in a shiny new suit and taught it to speak and act like
a gentleman.
In the 1980s the magical belief that supply creates demand was pushed
by politicians, right wing think tanks and economists. These voodoo
ideas took hold and this redefined the relationship. The Keynesian
marriage was now standing on precarious ground. Supply side economics
implied that wealth emanates from the wealthy class and dismissed the
value of work and workers in favour of a myopic focus on increasing
short term capital. It was as if the marriage didn't matter anymore.
And to the capitalists, it didn't.
Keynes was on the demand side and said that demand creates supply.
Keynes made sense. The former does not. The crisis of 2008 drives that
reality home in spades. And even though it makes no sense to you or
me, Bush and Obama were instructed by their betters to deliver
boatloads of tax dollars based in dead labour to bail out the
criminals. The story line was that those deemed "to big to fail" were
supposed to stimulate the economy by loaning our tax dollars back to
us.
That cynical thought that just crossed your mind is pure
intelligence. Recognize it.
The model that has been successful worked with the understanding that
to stimulate the economy it is necessary to stimulate demand for goods
and services. Instead of bailing out the capitalists the Treasury
should have saved homes and jobs. They should have provided massive
infrastructure projects like Roosevelt's New Deal. That would have
stimulated the economy. But it would have caused inflation. The same
people that wrote up Obama's bailouts are those that would be hurt
most by inflationary pressures. And it was not done.
But there is more to it than that. The context we are operating with
is one of advanced and matured monopoly capitalism. Products are
produced as cheaply as possible (for the benefit of the consumer) and
any and all means to cut costs are utilized as the capacity to squeeze
a dime from a unit of labour decreases. As it is, capitalists are
becoming ruthless. And it is far easier to squeeze a dime from a unit
of labour in China than it is in North America or Europe.
Not only is John Maynard Keynes dead; so is Henry Ford. Capitalism in
2009 - 2010 is not the same partner that we married in the 50s. It has
morphed into monopolism. It has lost its facade, its charm.
Raw capitalism is cruel. People are sacrificed every day in wars and
over 40,000 Americans die each year because they cannot afford health
insurance. This is a health care holocaust. It is easily and
completely avoidable but the problems persist and persist for the sake
of profit. Monopolism has shown itself to be a more ruthless
psychopath than any human could possibly be. Decisions are made every
day in boardrooms that result in human misery and death. The system is
pernicious and incorrigible.
We also need to consider the outcomes that reform (if at all possible)
would result in. If we could resurrect Keynes and get the production
machines back in gear in the post industrial world, the outcome would
be exactly the same as it has been. We would stave off the inevitable
but the nature of the beast would remain unchanged. Staving off the
inevitable is exactly what Greenspan, Paulson and Bernanke have done.
It is what the smoke and mirrors bubbles of the past few decades have
done; bought time.
In all this we tend to our daily lives and ignore the deterioration of
our economic and social realities. We have been doing so since the 80s
when capital began its 'globalization' emphasis. Leftists like Michael
Moore and scores of protesters were pointing out red flags to no
avail. And here we are twenty years later and we can see that the
leftists were right. And at this point, time is not on our side.
Or Revolution
The metaphor here points toward divorce. As we search the metaphorical
singles bars looking for a new marriage partner we can see that there
is none. The old communist order has fallen to pieces for good reason.
Communist and clerical totalitarians smile and wave from the dark
corners. The psychopath told us its either him or them. We have but
two choices. The dictatorship of the psychopath or totalitarianism.
Looking into a crystal ball for the way forward we consider the status
quo and see shades of Colombian drug gangs or Somalian style anarchy
in our streets. We may see shades of Mussolini fascists beating them
back. No matter what way we look we see poor people trembling over
burning barrels. It is capitalism without Keynes and it could morph
into any of a number of styles of barbarism.
The status quo has got to go
Collectively we are pioneers. We are going where no society has gone
before. For the most part, we have no idea where we are going. We
really need to take this matter seriously. And we must look at facts.
To begin with we need to recognize that the psychopath had never been
our provider. It was always the other way around. It is the workers
that have fashioned every item of value in our world; the cars, the
streets, the buildings and everything in them. The capitalist hires
managers who are workers and people to organize the trading and the
buying and selling; also, workers. Everything that is done is value
from mining the ore to building the cities is done through work. If we
examine it, it was us all along. It is us that built this
infrastructure that now rots and rusts. And it rots and rusts because
Joe Psycho can't make a profit.
We lack confidence in our ability to survive without our abuser. But
this is nothing to be alarmed about. Slaves have always felt dependent
on their master and on some level feared independence.
We have more choices than we imagine. We don't have to decide between
one tyrant over another. We can roll up our sleeves and stand
together, independent of rulers and tyrants.
We need to develop a vision where each and every human being has his
and her vital needs guaranteed. THEY will tell us we can't do it
without 'them'. THEY will tell us we will perish without 'them'.
Abusers always need to make victims feel dependent and helpless. But
if we examine what has really happened and how wealth is actually
created, we can see that all the wealth, including capital, has been
manufactured by us; the people that get up and trudge off to work
every day.
We believe that the abuser has the power but in fact, we have all the
power. The abusers power is based in illusions and scams.
We need to talk.