NEO CAPITALISM AND THE ANGST TO COME.
John Locke, 1689: “God gave the World to Men in Common; but since he gave it to them
for the benefit, and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it, it
cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave
it to the use of the Industrious and Rational (and Labour was to be his Title to it ;) not to
the Fancy or Covetousness of the Quarrelsome and Contentious.”
Locke’s eloquence notwithstanding, the foregoing is but a sententious justification of the
greed that justified man’s inhumanity to man and his criminal neglect of the environment
that gave us so much and finally landed us in the unpredicted mess whose deleterious
impact is as destructive as any world war. It is an example of the artificial logic that made
crass capitalism, and an un Christianly individualism acceptable to an otherwise
reasonable humanity. It ushered in quite smoothly the desacralization of much of human
pursuit including knowledge. And man began to worship at the alter of materialism as he became
over impressed by his own creations.
and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the Industrious and Rational (and Labour was to
be his Title to it;) not to the Fancy or Covetousness of the Quarrelsome and Contentious.”
Locke’s eloquence notwithstanding, the foregoing is but a sententious justification of the
greed that justified man’s inhumanity to man and his criminal neglect of the environment
that gave us so much and finally landed us in the unpredicted mess whose deleterious
impact is as destructive as any world war. It is an example of the artificial logic that made
crass capitalism, and an un Christianly individualism acceptable to an otherwise
reasonable humanity. It ushered in quite smoothly the desacralization of much of human
pursuit including the pursuit of knowledge. And man began to worship at the alter of materialism
as he became over impressed by his own creations.
On cat feet, in crept, the very worst of times. It came rather like a
thief in the night, unheralded, unpredicted, and unexpected; never before had the world
seen the loss of so much so quickly, nor seen such world wide loss of confidence set
about by crises so comprehensive and confounding that few are able to be objective in the
face of it. Countries that had paid so much lip service to Market Forces and Globalism
began to falter in their ranks; and rancor and dissent overtook them. The European Union
which had taken all of forty five years to knock together, began to fall apart in a few
weeks of collapsing markets, imploding automobile industries and the first whiff of a
recession. The spectre of Protectionism once again threatens to rent asunder the house that Free
Enterprise built.
In spite of the Obama phenomenon, (have greater expectations by so many ever before
been placed upon the shoulders of one man?), and the promise of solutions to the
ailments that presently plague the world, this summer promises to be a particularly gory
one as the riots and near anarchy that exploded in Greece reverberates throughout
Europe. The rest of us will get a chance to observe the ogre that exist just beneath the
veneer of the “well mannered”, “even tempered”, civilized European; much like the one
beneath the veneer of us all. It will be the summer of riots, violence, suicides, strikes,
plummeting oil and gas prices, even the English will be hard put to disguise regicidal
tendencies. The rest of us will not be spared: Globalism will come home to roost with exacting and grim vengeance.
In The Trouble With Interest Tarek El Diwany suggests that…“in order to meet the high
real rates of interest occasionally thrust upon it, enterprise tends to increase the rate of
resource extracting by boosting the productivity of physical capital. It might be argued
that, in the twentieth century, advances in technology have presented this solution to
developed societies on a plate, but technological advance may delay the day of
reckoning with. However long this delay proves to be, and it may be a very long delay
indeed, (our) earlier argument foretells the dire consequences that productivity can have
on the entropic Earth-bound system. Polluted river, festering rubbish tips and resource-
depleted seas may be just the first installment of the price that is paid.” El Diwani was talking
specifically about the futility of humans, or capitalists entering into a race with compound
interest. Nevertheless, the prediction speaks eloquently to us, not only about the Compound
Interest Predicament, but also about the crisis presently engulfing the world.
The trouble is that Capitalism has been so utterly successful in enslaving human enterprise that it
has ushered in a new Dynamic in the Free Market equation (The Asian Equation?).
It must be recalled there was a time when “World Markets” referred to a dynamic that
was essentially a “continued (western) postcolonial primacy of relationships of the
colonial era”. It was a dynamic that upheld the supremacy of all that was good in Adam
Smith and all relativist interpretations of the Invisible Hand that ensured that fundamental
Christian morals and ethics were not seen to be subverted by the baser inclinations of
man in his pursuit of free market enterprise; the kind of inclinations that were to lead to
the child labour that Charles Dickens was reacting to when he created his memorable cast
of characters in Oliver Twist and caused Max And Engels to write The Manifesto. This
inclination also gave us the modern slavery that blighted Africa.
This inclination, therefore, meant that free market enterprise appeared to promise the
Greatest Good for the greatest number. The problem, however, was the unstated fact that
the greatest number referred to, was primarily, the greatest number of the privileged in
the West. The truism that one gained at the expense of another was conveniently
consigned to apocrypha.
Free Market Enterprise gave rise to many offsprings, one prodigal was Laisse Faire, which
became so autocratic a monopolist that governments had to step in to protect
hapless citizens from the ogre; another offsring was Reagan’s Supply Side Economics
that was predicated on the deficit spending that actually insidiously sowed the seeds of
the cataclysmic financial implosion we are witnessing today.
That implosion heralds the end of the global market as we hitherto knew it to be. It is a
catastrophe; but it is a Western catastrophe which for the rest of us is a historic interlude
of momentous opportunity. It has to be restated that while Western nations slide into a
predictable and predicted recession, to the rest of us this is simply a glitch along the way
as we emerge into productivity and greater relevance amongst the comity of nations.
As the virus of recession spreads through out the Western world, it must be observed that
even the most fragile emerging markets remain somewhat inured to it. Asia is contending
with dampened growth expectations, not recession. China’s growth is expected to slow,
by as much as four points, down to eight from twelve percent. Almost all Western
nations, by contrast are experiencing negative growth. The Middle Eastern counties have
enough petrodollars to float through the crises. Intra-trade within ASEAN countries will
ensure the continued demand for oil and gas that will aid their relentless march to
modernity.
Even five percent growth rate in England, Germany, or the US, would’ve been heralded
as roaring growth. What is wrong with this picture then? Everything, if you happen to
come from any of these countries who have for long trumpeted the virtues of free
enterprise without realizing that when the rest of the world awakes to the need to engage
in the market space, it would indeed herald the dawn of a new, more dynamic world
which would not accept that “some animals are more equal than others”, or, at least, that
animals other they, are more equal than others! It would be an era in which the hitherto
powerful and privileged would share Capital Space or Market Space with the rest of the
emerging (productive) nations.
This would mean a REDUCTION for the West and a GAIN of Capital or Market Space
for the rest. This as difficult to adjust to as it was to adjust to the loss of space whether in
schools, in the electorate, in the market place or in the political space, as women, (and
blacks in the US) for instance demanded more.
The emergence of so many unto the global stage of relevance ushers in a multilaterality
that must necessarily mean the end of Capitalism as know it and the dawn of Neo or Post
Capitalism. The financial tumult unfolding presently must be seen as birth bangs that
bring forth something new. And for the survival of all we must adopt new strategies that
are predicated on the very opposite of what brought us thus far and that is a Non Zero
Sum Policy. It is a dynamic that jettisons confrontation in favour of Consensus and even
conviviality. Instead of a winner takes all situation, we adopt win win strategies that
moves everybody along. This is already happening amongst the many that capitalists
have adopted philanthropy as a New Age religion. We now urge that hitherto secular
states consider this option in the formulation of their strategies and policies.
“Colonial frontiers had been carved through ancient zones of regional trade and men had
naturally found ways of evading their obstruction.” Basil Davidson, Black Man’s Burden.
The problem facing mankind today is that we are presently at the extremes of a world
pecking order which has its foundations and architectonic based upon lines of military
conquest. However as Mutually Assured Destruction reduces ancient/traditional conflicts,
first with Low Intensity Conflict (LIC) and then with industrial/economic/ warfare and
ideological/religious warfare, we find the conquerors of Ancient times reacting in the
face of the dawn of a new post industrial era in which an altogether different dynamic is
at play.
The world over, populations that had previously struggled haplessly with Peasantry and
Poverty, are coming into the empowering strata of the middle class and in doing so, are
competitively vying for more capital(physical and financial), more goods, and a greater
socio-economic space which apparently is not limitless- The Challenge of this New Age
is how to expand the socio-economic space, Globally, to accommodate the newer,
younger and more vibrant peoples around the, hitherto, deprived corners of the world.
To some degree, at present the short term solution is that the mega-rich, the Oligarchs,
must have to yield some socio-economic space so that the rest may wrest some comfort
for themselves, but this is a short term solution at the best.
Henry Ford created a modern economic revolution when he built the Model T Ford. He
achieved various things simultaneously, e.g. Division of labour; which made mass
employment possible and therefore masses’ migration from rural to urban centres became
the demographic portrait of industrialization; mass transportation, the steel industry, labour
unions and therefore unionism, the urban setting as The Concrete Jungle, all
become immediately possible with the energies released by the Division of labour and the
automobile.
The liberation of the individual as he experienced an unprecedented and unbelievable
dominion over time and space unshackled the imagination and made space travel and
exploration possible. There followed a proliferation of goods and services and the
multiplication of providers and the consumers for these goods and services. The net result
was the quick and impressive expansion of the socio-economic space. So that by the
nineteen twenties, Americans especially could sing it that the good times “are here
again”. These were the roaring twenties.
The magical impact of the novel automobile has begun to wane. With the demystification
of production, robotics, and the ubiquity of production centers, automobile production
can no longer have the incredible impact it once had on the socio-economic space. The
world that Ford built is imploding. Ground Zero for the implosion that is occurring is the
US.
It is against this background that, with the improbable name of Obama, the implausible
cause of Real Change, and the impossible dream of attaining the Presidency of the United
States of America that one man came upon the world stage with a mandate to bring
change to the US and indeed, by implication, the rest of the world.
The task will be onerous for him as for us; as we attempt to chart the course of this NEO
CAPITALIST world.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
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