Het Neoliberale Geloof 386

The Beginning of the End of Capitalism: 2008
by Jan Lundberg
25 March 2009

http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=366&Itemid=1

Barack Obama is saying, "Rally around me, we can grow again -- let's just
borrow some more and spend anew." It won't work. He knows no other way,
ostensibly. But what’s that White House food garden about? Not a help to
the GDP, which is such a flawed measurement of what should count.

Until the new local self-sufficiency paradigm takes hold, we seem hell bent
on allowing remaining wealth and resources from the old paradigm to be
squandered and handed to the super rich. The "Defense" budget is
sacrosanct. Obama wants to spread around the money and be "greener," but
the system is crashing.

If we can see the pointlessness of propping up an inequitable system that
depends on exploitation, devastation, overconsumption and endless growth,
we can fondly look forward to the end of capitalism. It seems like it could
be on its last legs right now, as never before. 2008 was peak money, peak
cars, peak petroleum cost, and peak unaccountability.

Ending capitalism has to come from serious feelings that go beyond
daydreaming of a sweeter world. The feeling can be anger over being told
your choice is to either work meaninglessly your whole life or to starve.
Or tasting the advantages of cooperative living and seeing, in stark
contrast, a greedy manipulator trying to exploit others. Or sensing that
our ecological fate, common to all of us, is of no concern to materialistic
fools who act like they're not from this planet.

How can capitalism be questioned so easily today? Obviously, they fucked
up. This is where things were heading, but we were too kowtowed to question
the national and global system.

The biggest feeling, however, is from hunger in the belly. When people feel
the urgent motivation to take care of their stomachs and to assure the
survival of their families, that's when defense in the form of an
insurgency takes place. However, the revolution -- even if successful --
may not address the problem of opportunism by a new elite that may or may
not be capitalist.

But it is the astronomical debt and wealth of capitalism and the capitalist
governments' budgets that are at issue today. To try to figure out just how
huge the bubble is that's now popping is to play a numbers game. It's
easier to do that than to act like a revolutionary and start living without
capitalism. For now, it's still necessary to show people that the system is
out of control and crashing. President Obama is a great change from Bush
and the over two hundred years of white men occupying the White House. But
the phenomenon is a distraction from the greater story of collapse.

Numerically we can see that there's not enough real money to rescue the
inflated financial sector. The fact that the debt that's out there,
connected to toxic assets, is several times larger than the amount of
capital available is ignored in the hope that future growth will remove the
red ink and deficit.

Before that can happen and economic growth could resume, there would have
to be a number of impossibilities. Cheap and abundant energy, particularly
liquid fuels, would have to be found as never before in order to create and
distribute the endless amount of goods for consumption. Easy credit would
have to return, meaning that the risk of lending would have to be deemed
low once again. The stimulus budget would have to work wonders, but the
kind of economic activity it would have to create is more of the same:
expansion of the infrastructure for more urban sprawl, and turnover of
endless manufactured gadgets and appliances (by green consumers, it is
hoped).

Today's system of capitalism run completely amok (trillions of dollars that
don't go to the workers supporting the whole house of cards) is failing
fast. As the attempt to put band-aids on a metastasized cancer finally show
themselves to be part of an illusion created by those trying to desperately
prop up and then pull out their wealth, that's when the final, accelerated
collapse will be completed. The government will then attempt to retain
order via martial law and suspension of rights and environmental
protection.

This is the real Plan B when the sham of the growth stimulus becomes
obvious. This Depression will make the 1930s Great Depression seem like a
walk in the park. At the end of the tunnel, however, will not be the growth
of the post-war economy but rather the getting back to basics that the
back-to-the landers and city collectivists have been practicing since the
1960s counterculture.

Back to Plan B: when the bottom really drops out and the population freaks
out in a national Katrina fiasco – despite the kinder, gentler Obama
flavor -- more people than ever will have begun to suffer from hunger due
to job loss and lack of access to good land and fisheries.

And especially in the event of massive droughts or petrocollapse they will
march on the rich and try to take whatever they can. When order cannot be
restored within a few days, police and military personnel will head for
their own homes to protect their families and meager food supplies.

Meanwhile, some people will have already started organizing local systems
for food production and distribution, as well as other services and roles
to replace the global supermarket that has by then utterly failed and
disappeared.

The suffering and confusion will be so great that in the aftermath of
reorganizing there will be strong resistance to any attempts to repeat the
discredited ways that brought so much pain. As the dust settles and die-off
plays out, stability will be forming once again, albeit in a new world.
Climate destruction and loss of cheap, abundant energy will mean that
almost everyone will be lucky to have a subsistence lifestyle.

However, there will come an almost unprecedented level of equality and
sharing in order to maximize efficiency. Kropotkin made clear over one
hundred years ago conclusively that mutual aid is more productive, easy,
and natural compared to competition.

So the days of being lucky to have a job, to work for someone else's gain
-- when that someone else is not even visible or accountable -- is on the
way out. President Obama is still defending the old system. He probably
knows better. But those who have the greatest stake in the existing set-up
are his whole team of advisers, if not his bosses or hidden masters.

Regardless, Obama's “job one” is to avoid mass panic and thereby steer
the masses toward constructive patience via confidence building. That's
working to some degree now, but the momentum of job loss and factory
production cuts are too powerful a force to turn around with smoke and
mirrors – resource depletion and overpopulation are everything, and not
just topics for debate like abortion or stem-cell research are.

Obama was just what the establishment needed at the right time. He makes us
believe change is possible. But his own hope as presently defined is too
narrow to fit the times or the challenge.

Where we are headed is a question that the flag-waving blow-hards don’t
have a clue on. Obama should convene a series of public Alternative Futures
discussions such as on the town-hall level. Unfortunately, the many
unimaginative citizens of U.S. entitlement and exceptionalism will continue
to dominate the debate, and this plays into the hands of the corporate
media. Yet, ideas will come out, if only for a resumption of Victory
Gardens that the White House is, indeed, reviving at a meaningful time.