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by James L. Secor

As the economy of the world, via the US, comes tumbling down like Humpty Dumpty, I read articles about the End of Capitalism, some writers even noting that with controls it would still never work. For once, I think age works in my favor, age and an education and the heresy that drove me to question the mainstream knowledge-base; for these writers, so obviously presenting their case for the Marxian revolution and Communism, have no history — and no horizon, so hemmed in are they by their age and near-religious belief in a happy one-solution-for-all-ills dogma.

What we are seeing now is not the end of capitalism; we are seeing the end of oligopoly, a very different thing. There is no free market, though this phrase is used by both the mainstream (the oligarchs) and the Marxian horde lost in what Galbraith might call the common wisdom, in this case for the Left. Everyone is playing on the word "free," a word-concept with a strong knee-jerk reaction, especially when coupled with "socialism." The oligarchy cites Adam Smith, though he did not particularly care for free markets and advocated controls, not to mention that the market economy of the 18th century is not the market economy of the 20th... and Smith spoke to a nation's entire economical well-being, the common wealth (Wealth of Nations being the title of his treatise), not individual businesses, others (and the nation) be damned, as is the present state of affairs. The neo-conservatives have engaged in misdirection and deception, the which is enhanced by the public's — and probably the politicians' — ignorance of Smith's Wealth of Nations, though it's been bandied about enough to seem familiar.

Smith was not speaking to a kind of political organization; and he wasn't speaking about particular business practices; but he did make a note about the ill-effects of selfishness and greed, so that the national economic situation he spoke to is not what we have today. What we have today is an oligopoly; what we have is no controls on greed, which the industrial machine equates to freedom, freedom to do anything it wants in the name of profit despite the fact that freedom also includes the freedom not to do. There is, after all, a choice. This kind of absolute and total unrestrained action is anarchy and anarchy is contrary to civilization.

Civilization is a very old concept raised up to control destructive (and self-destructive) impulses and urges so that people could live together, live better. Anarchy makes hash of this, as exemplified by the Reign of Terror post-French Revolution; and contrary to the preaching from modern-day "anarchists" who are after a total elimination of government for individual rule which is, of course, a kind of real chaos when compared to authoritarian government and in the face of an unchanged social system. Anarchy, according to the OED, is: "absence of government; a state of lawlessness due to the absence or inefficiency of the supreme power; political disorder." So it would seem this anarchic state is the freedom that the present oligarchs have sought and imposed on the world, becoming drunk on the heady joy of doing whatever they want to satisfy their greed for power and money: they have brought the entire world to the brink of The Abyss, from which cliff we can see that their theories, touted as the common wisdom, have run the gamut of their intellectual desert, bringing us flatlands of dust and sand sans vegetation (Hell?); that is, their theories have failed utterly. Their theories are grand delusions. Delusion, therefore, has run the world for the past 30-40 years under the fancy name of globalization, a word that did not exist in 1975 if the OED is to be believed (the word is not there). Globalization, though it has had some positive effect, is the end result of greed and peculiar arrangements of monetary policy that, in order to "work," must disregard much of reality... and humanity. In World Hypotheses, Stephen C. Pepper notes that any society that excludes any human is a psychotic society because all considerations, not just one idea and not just a great generalization, must be taken into account.

These oligarchs are of the same ilk as the crime syndicates in China (Triads, Dragon Societies) that believe anything is okay, including (somebody else's) loss of life, as long as they make money. They are involved in things like fake drugs, inferior construction materials, lead in toys and paint, mercury in vaccines and dental care — even tainted baby formula. In China, this kind of economic revolution is reminiscent of the Chinese classic Outlaws of the Marsh. Supposedly a band of outlaws fighting the injustice and corruption of the system, they gave up their fight when they gained the same privileges that they were bitching about others having. Free market oligarchs have given the world a prohibition-like crime wave: anything goes, sang Cole Porter.

A little definition is in order. An oligopoly, according to the OED, is, via its etymology, business run by a few businesses; while oligarchy is government by a few, which I think we can all agree is what we have in the US today, the ruling clique being the oligopolists, the businesses. In truth, it might be said that these people have ushered in a time of oligotrophy, a decrease in nourishment; for we are running headlong, in Casey Jones fashion, into a time of want.

Seemingly beyond the historical horizons of the young, disenchanted Marxists shouting gleefully about the end of capitalism is the fact that once there were controls. Once capitalism worked. FDR put into effect controls on the greed and rapaciousness of delusional business practices and, through the 1960's, capitalism worked, albeit more of a democratic-socialist variety, with LBJ putting in more stop-gap programs for social well-being (security) that many like to label socialist, a word covered with fear and ignorance fostered by examples of failed revolutions, and indissolubly linked to a different kind of social organization, communism. Both forms of government are now passé solutions to problems and sociopolitical situations that no longer exist. The kind of socialism bandied about today calls for full renunciation of what we have now in favor of a giant step back in history to an equality (if you will) in the time of plenitude of poverty, a time when serfdom and poverty defined the lives of most of Europe. The US is not 19th century Europe, nor is the rest of the word. Is there a rule that Eurocentrism should be the world ethic? Nineteenth century Europe with its long history of racism, hatred, intolerance, war and disease is the best way to go? The best of all possible worlds? This was tried once, centuries before, in the New World: the result was edifying?

It is only when a populace feels secure about the basics of life, especially in the face of unexpected turns of fortune — including national disasters — that production and the quality of the goods produced increases, increased production being the businessman's mantra for just about everything good and necessary, at best a rationalization that ought to be questioned but today nobody questions or considers: all that's wanted is immediate action to solve a problem by those who see a problem. If the security of a population is socialism, then that would seem to be a way to go. Despite the fanatical outcry by the oligarchs, caught in the same web of misunderstanding and ignorance as most of the population — despite this hysteria — I think it is safe to ask if socialism — meaning the security of a populace — can work.

I am not speaking of a form of government, as most who speak of socialism do, but to social programs that create a living situation for people sans anxiety. Although FDR and LBJ set the US along such a path, in another realm altogether this kind of socialism has proven to be most edifying — with one downside. Where can we find this kind of social security in today's' broken system? Amongst the elite (elitist?) politicians: Representatives, Senators, Cabinet members, Federal judges, the President and Vice-president all have 100% medical coverage — for life. What is often called, by health insurance companies and big PHRMA, socialized medicine. What an amazing concept! Removing all anxiety over health concerns of all kinds. And the filthy rich have it. Our leaders have it and they apparently want to keep it for themselves. And we the people pay for it. What is the downside to such a wonderful state of existence? It keeps people like Dick Cheney alive.

Well, anyway...

After many fruitful years of exemplary capitalism came a new breed of production-oriented businessmen and increased production, which means more and more and ever more; and since production must continue to increase ad infinitum in their universe, profit must also increase ad infinitum — like a perpetual motion machine; however, with socially edifying controls in place, this was seen as not possible, so the new breed began shouting about getting Big Brother out of our lives, not bothering to define who "our" was. Everyone of that generation knew who Big Brother was and everyone hated Big Brother, so without question their ploy played. A magician's misdirection, for all that was wanted was government control out of the lives of the greedy, production- and profit-oriented great corporations, the bankers and investors and faux economists from Yale and Harvard, people so imbued with Ricardo and Malthus and the common wisdom that they could not see the world had changed over the years, they could not see the inhumanity of their obsession — or if they could, it was of no consequence.

When you're in the business of creating want and producing the goods to satisfy the want-delusion, you can't expect the lie to stand the test of time. Liars are eventually caught out because the lies must be consistent and they grow bigger and bigger until it takes two whopping hands to shove them down people's throats. We can't blame it all on the Republicans, however, for Clinton put the final touch to the move from controlled, working capitalism to oligopoly by repealing Steagall. The neo-conservatives did the rest, with a vengeance. And you can still hear them scrambling in their call to let the damage work itself out "naturally," a Ricardian and Keynesian idea via an unspecified amount of unemployment (Cf. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society). Naturally? Well, then, crumblings like we're seeing now, depressions and inflations are natural, as are unemployment and poverty, insecurity and death... and government unconcern, as was true of monarchies and theocracies, people's lives being basically worthless. You know the mantra: there must be poverty for there to be progress. And... only the better sort are worth keeping alive (AKA Social Darwinism). None could see that without this despised horde, these short, dark people as Froissart calls them, there would be no one to make the goods that make them money. Of course, if economic depressions are natural and naturally correcting, bailouts are unnatural.

It is this kind of belief in a natural system along with practical delusion that helped bring about The Great Depression in the 1930's, with the precipitous fall of the stock market in 1929. With what's coming up, The Great Depression will assume the character of a shallow bowl. FDR put into effect controls on the capitalism of the time, which was along the lines of oligopoly. FDR brought to bear social policies in an attempt to support the people, people being necessary to production and consumption. All have been gutted in today's world: can you see the results? Are you secure in your home, in your health, in your retirement? Are you secure in your job? Once, a short while ago, Americans did have a modicum of these kinds of securities. Now, life expectation is scratch to survive and then die in poverty. Die! Die, you filthy swine lower form of humanity. Die! You... shits.

FDR's failure was in not supporting the union movement, which was the true Marxian revolution; for Marx hated government, the only true revolution coming from below, from the grassroots. If a Marxian revolution comes from above, it is just one more repressive, dictatorial government... as can be clearly seen if one looks to Russia, China, Cuba and North Korea. Some even say Vietnam is not a communist nation. Why? Power's still at the top. The ruling elite have it all, no matter if they dress like everyone else or not. Why are they so sleek while the rest of the populace looks to be malnourished? Not so different from pre-revolution days. There are modern Chinese writers (Mo Yan, Can Xue) who have had their hands slapped for stating there's little difference between the present regime and the prior Qing Dynasty. And it does appear that once Mao got to power, things didn't really change so much: the people suffered to keep the government hegemony in place. This is the world of the young, obviously misguided Marxists of today, people who don't know the difference between socialism and communism.

The world of the present is not the world of Marx's (and Engel's) theories and so Marxian principles do not truly apply: they are passé. But they are handy and comfortable and make the uncomfortable and disillusioned feel good because they are something to hang onto; they are a change, a common wisdom that explains everything and has a cure for everything, much like your snake oil salesman. Even socialism (as a form of government) must be tempered because of the times: it's not 1890 any more. And Marx didn't advocate socialism, which he saw as a lower form of government than his utopian communism. Any of these supposed leftist American revolutionaries notice this yet? No. They yell and scream and write the same slogans that were bandied about a hundred years ago about rights and freedom and greed and equality and never notice what kind of world the prior Marxist revolutions have created. Any change is good, right? Anything but... .

The end of capitalism for these Marxian-minded people implies that capitalism has no good points at all. None. Baby and bath water, to use a cliché, are the same and deserve to go down the drain. Glug glug. But... capitalism gave these self-styled revolutionaries the education and intellectual gifts that allow them to speak, albeit with pseudo-intellectual lips; capitalism gave them the good life they have, the good life their parents had, the better life their grandparents dreamed of. So that, in their security, they have the time and energy to talk rebellion. Capitalism gave them their computers, cell phones, heart pacemakers, micro-surgery and Velcro. But they want more. They want the more that their richer, above-classers have, very much like The Outlaws of the Marsh (who actually lived on a mountain). Our young Marxian horde are disillusioned middle classers for whom the lower, poverty classers are not only still lower (below them) but very foreign, for these Marxians have never lived in want They are familiar with destitution only as a concept, using these poor (in the aggregate) to bolster their own ends. The workers, the poor and downtrodden are still fodder, it appears.

My father's family survived at the bottom of The Great Depression. My grandmother sold pies out the back door. There are no pictures of my father before WWII because cameras were as far beyond conception as a trip to the moon. Sometimes, my father had one meal a day: crackers and milk. He still liked to partake of such fare on occasion later in life out of some kind of romantic attachment, I suppose. But FDR's controls on capitalism allowed him to advance and move up in the world — the entire family. My father is the baby in the family, an accident; delivered on the kitchen table, as I'm told. At 86 he's the only one left. Grandma Secor died in 1974 at the age of 96, living a life she would never even have dreamt possible... due to capitalism: her three children have risen high in the working class ranks. The kind of controlled capitalism of FDR, a democratic socialism that made America the ideal of the free world — once — worked. Many of Minnie Secor's grandchildren are middle class. I am the most (best?) educated of them all — but I'm still working class. These Marxian young people have advantages that only capitalism gave them, yet they want to shit on it and throw it all away. Do they once stop to consider the implications of that "free world" they are striving for? The unfree was (is?) Communism. Communism... unfree...

Let them come to some "communist" country and live for awhile. Let them see the egalitarianism — that doesn’t work — and live like the average everyday citizen, not your urban middle and working classes. I live well here in China because the universities and middle schools offer good housing or housing allowances; but I've also lived in a house without bathroom or shower. I shit and pissed in a pot and emptied it out in the morning. I walked half a mile to the public showers — this I did not mind, for I met and got to know my neighbors, something that is unknown in modern America. The ceiling dropped bugs and bits of debris into my food, onto my head, into my bed. The windows were small and up high and it was dark inside, dark and dank. When I brought my clothes in from the line, they were damp again within the hour. I washed my face and my food and my clothes in the kitchen sink. No AC, no heat. Electricity that was an afterthought, the house being built before electricity. Indeed, the original house was one room and the two built-on additions were obviously so; the kitchen build-on was falling away from the main house. I had to hang cloth on the ceiling to keep my cooking from being home to dirt, debris and sometimes not-so-miniscule bugs. The floors were so black with dirt encrustation over the years that rain resulted in a mild mud puddle at the door. And this is the norm in China. Even in this age of adopted American oligopolistic greed and corruption, this is home to most of the people.

The house at #7 Linfu jie, Anyang

The kitchen

This and worse. Indeed, the revolution and the oligopoly parading as capitalism has created beggardom. Which is probably why the modern young Marxists shout about how ineluctable capitalism is, conveniently forgetting what capitalism's done for them, conveniently not seeing that the Marxian revolution did not solve the problem. Ask the poverty-stricken, the farmer and the peasant in the US what Marxism is. You know, white Marxist, walk into a black neighborhood, a really bad, poor black neighborhood like... North Street, Baltimore, and say, "Hey, nig. Whatchu know bout Marxism?" Ask the poor people and beggars about Marx. Marx is for people who read. Marx is for the college educated (Mao was college educated, contrary to popular belief). Marx is for the middle class, especially the middle class who want more... the middle class that capitalism allowed them (and their parents) their opportunities. Opportunities that still don't exist for the vat majority of the people in these post-Marxian revolutioned countries. But why bother with reality when fantasy is so much nicer!

Yeah. The end of capitalism. The beginning of Marxian poverty, poverty of life, poverty of mind, poverty of... just about anything you can think of because poverty is life, so sayeth Ricardo and Malthus. When I read The Communist Manifesto, I see a reactionary conservative, like Plato, believing in something that doesn't exist. I see a doctrine that isn't much different from a monarchy and certainly fits the bill for dictatorship, which really isn't so very much different from what the greedy capitalist colonists in the Americas rebelled against... and the present oligopoly has given us.

But you can't throw everything away or you're left with re-inventing the wheel, to use another cliché. You've got to start with what you've got now and what you've got now is an up-and-coming Massive Depression with needed controls on oligopolistic greed. It needs government to turn itself back to its original purpose: the welfare of the people — as is happening in China, though those who are not in China do not see it (Cf. Li Datong's articles at www.opendemocracy.com and shikejian's blog at www.bokee.com, this latter in Chinese, though there's an English version here); America's got a kind of fascism, a close-minded dogmatic authoritarianism.

Put into effect controls on economic idiocy and delusion and build up the security of the people, for if people do not feel secure they do not perform; rather, they wallow in fear and decrepitude and bare survival. The common wisdom must be dumped for something that has something to do with reality. That is, the system is broken. The basic assumptions underlying our fall from grace need to be questioned — obviously.

We have the opportunity to make a new world... but all I hear are disenchanted (white male) voices clamoring for the old, disenchanted voices crying out to make humans and dinosaurs exist together in a one-size-fits-all solution. An out-of-date solution. Because the failure of the system is not the failure of capitalism: we don't have capitalism any more. The failure is very much more human and very much uncivilized: greed. Me, my, mine and to hell with you.

We have a psychotic social system, as Pepper would say, and to expect more psychosis to fix it is crazy. But Americans are stuck on authority and believe that government should give them the good things and fix itself. It is not true that the government hands down to its people the right and good and necessary, the present notwithstanding. If it did, there would have been no need for feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment and the Bobby Sealeses and Malcolm X's and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s and Caesar Chavezes that litter our history, people and groups that forced the government into being human. It is because of this attitude — that government-authority is the arbiter of the good life — that makes Marxians old hat. Or, perhaps, just more of the same under a different name. Marx called for an end, called for the death — of capitalism 100+ years ago.

But we don't have capitalism any more. We have a dearth of capitalism. Now, what are we going to do about it?

How about questioning a couple basic premises underlying our social organization? Like... we are bad, sinful creatures and racism is justifiable.

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