I'll Wonder Why We Didn't Try To Do or Die

Porsche Carrera Che Guevara, f650biker, 2008

As Royal Mail heads toward becoming another target of the new depression, I recall where I was when it became apparent we wouldn't be able to afford the future. Funnily enough, I was out on delivery with my pocket radio listening to the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2. The big news of the week was the ongoing collapse of Northern Rock and the bank runs on their highstreet branches - something out of the past and decidedly out of the ordinary.

However, plenty saw it coming. It was just a matter of time before another big crash. What market goes up must come down. The good times do not continue forever, yet something like the fact that infinite economic growth is impossible is met with Wealth of Nations being thrown at you - as if Adam Smith was a proponent of magic. There are only so many resources on this planet and only so much of them.

Capitalism is not sustainable by its very nature. It is predicated on infinitely expanding markets, faster consumption and bigger production in a finite planet. And yet this ideological model remains the central organising principle of our lives
-Robert Newman, The Guardian, February 2006

As real manufacturing has been exported to those poorer nations in which profit margins can be extended by an order of magnitude, the developed world has shifted to a service economy. A lot of what passes as productive today is without actual productive value to society. At work every other week a supermarket sends out the same leaflet with discount coupons, the cash value of which is rounded to zero pence. Like cashback offers, this is a method to avoid actually cutting prices as most cashback offers go unclaimed, thus the business minimizes losses whilst maintaining the illusion of being value for money. It's a waste of time delivering these, it's a waste of energy delivering these, it's a waste of energy making these, it's a waste of time looking at these, and it'll be a waste of energy to have to recycle these. I have personally handed these to residents only to see them fly straight into their bin. And if it rains like Friday, the leaflet will more resemble a scrunched-up wet handkerchief. Yet this counts as genuine economic activity.

Other unproductive bullshit includes speculative trading - the financial equivalent of a random number generator. You surely remember it, it's seemingly the foundation of financial services and it happens to be why the world economy imploded. During the Great Depression we at least had a country with a socialist economic system that looked like the perfect alternative. Incidentally, one of my favourite films is The Hunt For Red October, but the final scene is always irritating. Ramius, explaining his defection from the Soviet Union, says to CIA agent Ryan that every country "needs a little revolution now and again". It's implied in this scene that he does not mean every country is in need of a revolution of some sort (because America is perfect, hence defecting to it), but that the Soviet Union needs a revolution emulating the American one. Though he means (indirect) democracy, it's a given that the 'revolutions' of Eastern Europe (just a year or two before the film's release) entail economic freedom - capitalism.

Capitalism is supposed to be about free markets, which is the opposite of the bank bailouts. Capitalists have always latched on to the Darwinian concept of 'survival of the fittest', and if the banks were truly capitalists they would have fallen on their swords willingly. Which is the real problem. Rather than represent the people who elect them, politicians have instead decided to shield corporations from the natural selection of the market. Thus we auction off the National Health Service but have to nationalise multinational financial institutions: privatise the profits, socialise the losses. That is but one consequence of corporate influence in politics, and one reason representative democracy is not working. To quote a comment on Digg:

Writing your Congressman won't change a thing either. Not unless you can send a bigger check to him than Monsanto can. And I really doubt you can.

If there was any justice the bankers would be doing the spandau ballet from lamp posts across the land. Why aren't they? Why instead are the people on the streets demanding less government? Less government is good - if anything, Western countries today are better at spying on their populations than East Germany. Why then are the same people also ranting about why the government should stay out of healthcare, as if the Feds were less ethical than the businesses that make money off your illness and then won't cough up when you need your insurance to pay for treatment?

You vote to strike a blow against elitism and you receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our life times, workers have been stripped of power, and CEOs are rewarded in a manner that is beyond imagining. It's like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming more power to the aristocracy.
-Thomas Frank, BBC News, January 2010

Probably the most visible of these movements is the "Tea Party" (hf. TP). Though they were against the bailout and may have been a genuine populist movement in the beginning, they have been thoroughly hijacked by any number of interests: old family racists, hellfire Christians, ultranationalists, corporations, the Republicans. The latter most of all, cruising along on the usual pendulum effect of politics. The TP is at this point thoroughly astroturfed and being led up the garden path under the belief they are being patriotic. They argue against net-neutrality to the benefit of media conglomerates, they rally against measures to combat climate change or deny it altogether to the benefit of the petroleum giants, they tell government to stop meddling with the market to the benefit of corporations deemed 'too big to fail'. In many ways this is worse than the capitalist selling you the rope to hang him. The TP is buying the rope to hang themselves, like good consumers.

It doesn't matter who you vote for, business interests always hedge their bets (unless the world economy is riding on it). Unfortunately, the way democracy works now means we have to invent a new word for actual democracy - demarchy. Today's democracy is a big media event that costs a lot to put on. It used to be that the Labour Party being a nominal proletarian party could rely on membership fees and trade union donations for support. Now Labour (whilst in government) relied on million pound donations from rich elites who coincidentally got a peerage at the same time. The Tories by contrast have long been the party of the bourgeoisie, and since Thatcher (boo) the party of the CBI. So voting in the other ones is out of the question - both have been drawn like magnets into the centre ground to the point they are largely indistinguishable. The situation in America is the same:

Republicans are the right leg of the puppet that is destroying our freedom and sovereignty. Democrats are the left leg.
This giant death machine takes a step with the left foot, then the right foot, then the left foot, then the right, etc. Both legs are moving us toward our certain destruction.
The only way we're going to see any improvements is if we stop putting republicans and democrats in power. They are owned by corporate interests that have no desire to adhere to the constitution or the laws of our republic.
-Comment via Digg, August 2010

What's more disheartening is that you cannot vote for a third party without the two party system negating your vote. Proportional representation in it's various incarnations counters this binary tendency, but even where this forces frequent coalitions is will still revert to this binary balance of coalition-in-government and opposition. As such I'm sceptical of the current UK coalition government's proposal for a referendum on Alternative Vote, as I doubt any change of the voting system will fix indirect democracy, hence my interest in demarchy (as mentioned above). The old elites never really went away, now they wear a business suit and ask for your vote every four years.

The more I think about these issues and formulate my weltanschauung, the more I wonder whether radical change can only come with a complete breakdown of the existing order - like the French Revolution, though it's debatable if anything changed there. Some heads must roll. Are innocent persons acceptable and or necessary victims? Or does that sound dangerously like terrorism?

On a side note, despite the massive profits produced every day (though not enough if you listen to the CBI) most people are still working five days a week. The economy could easily spare a day, it could spare time for the Eight Hour Day in the Nineteenth century. This would also fit nicely with the Prime Minister's 'Big Society' idea. After all, if lack of time is what is preventing people from being involved in their communities and freeing up money that the government would otherwise have to spend on communities, then a four day week is a great way to achieve this. Less work = more free time. Unless Cameron actually thought we'd all give up our own time to help the government pay it's debts. He should take a page from the market - you don't see them asking for assistance. Now please rise for our corporate anthem...

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Drafted July 2010