GLOBAL CAPITALIST BLACKOUT

Gramsci (notebook prison, 1930): "The crisis consists precisely in that the old is dying and the new has not yet been born, in this interregnum appear a great variety of morbid symptoms" Will there be another spring for capitalism? 3rd Great Depression has begun. The recessionary spiral is of a magnitude unparalleled in history. This is not an other one crisis. Even more another great depression. This is a system blackout. Capitalism has run out of batteries. The system no longer has anything to offer. Its circuits are fusing in a short circuit global. Unquestionably the system is collapsing. Over 40% of global wealth has already been engulfed in a spiral of depression. In the U.S., more than 18 billion (including real estate and stock market) have been volatilized. A second massive wave of financial Tsunami disaster is threatening on the horizon of heavily affected economies by the autumn's one. Finance is sinking the real economy while attempting to save their assets at the expense of public finances, and this collapse are adding energy to the second wave. A huge feedback that will take forward much of what remains of the battered financial system. The elites are in a hurry transferring their damaged balance sheets to the public sector in a coordinated macro operation of "trash for cash" (money for garbage) in which private financial institutions change their unmarketable junk assets - which do not generate interest - by debt issued by states, which generates interest (paid by taxpayers). In reality no one is following any kind of economic policy. The problem is not about unsuccessful "economic policies". What is happening is a gun assault to the state resources to offset the losses of speculative business of all kinds. Drills and dynamite masked in the guise of anti-crisis economic policy. The insolvent rich do not take the path of insolvent poor. They are saved upon the resources of the rest. In the last 6 months, the Treasury and the Fed have already purchased or guaranteed about 12 billion of junk debt. Democrats overpassing Republicans in the race. T. Geithner, L. Summers, J. Corzine, K. Sheppard, K. Salazar, J. L. Jones ... The entire Obama team is composed of elements guaranteeing large corporations interests. "Yes We Can" actually means the unconditional revitalization in all possible ways, of zombie banks - Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs ... - dead banks, whose debts exceed the value of its assets, and which are kept alive with public funds transfusions. The Obama-Geithner plan - and its variants in Europe - seeks to delay as much as possible - with continuous transfusion of public funds - the recognition of the gargantuan financial embezzlement, . The rest is pure decoration, public relations to divert attention to the huge financial and non financial bailouts under way. But the size of the hole grows and grows. 14 billion are derived from 1.5 billion in sub prime and assuming a leverage of only 10 times this amount gives us a total of 140 trillion in derivatives embedded on the battered Wall Street balance sheets. The estimated volume of toxic ones increasing every hour - 4, 5, 7, 10 trillion? -. Recognition of financial bankruptcy delay implies real economy deteriorates further and the financial pyramid becomes more and more toxic. We are in a deflationary asset value path of such a magnitude that soon it will no longer be possibly to transfer to the public sector, without facing frightening consequences in monetary terms and bankrupt states. But the current situation is so serious that even if the pyramid is dismantled and the banking system is nationalized and restored , the business confidence and will not return. There will not be another bubble growth, there will not be another spring. Climate change is also active in capitalism and this is a winter with no foreseeable end. No work, no consumers. Without consumers there is no demand. The state can "boost" eventually, but can not substitute indefinitely consumption and investment. The only response is more productivity, more outsourcing, less wages, and ultimately, more depression. We have entered the self liquidation phase of capitalism, a global self immolation after the aura of the absolute concentration of capital. Holocaust capitalism To the surprise of many, capitalism has entered into bankruptcy without help or assistance of anyone. Never in the history of capitalism, the socialist opposition had been so weak and insignificant, yet the system collapses. This would lend support to the theory - expressed in this blog - that a socialist-communist opposition tempered capitalism and promotes stability. Without opposition, without the "co-existence", the system becomes operational in its purest form, without limitation or brakes and the invisible hand that guides the goddess greed is just taking it to the precipice and economic collapse. The overwhelming triumph of neoliberal ideology at its most exultant expression, which had even managed to get the successors of Stalin become champions - Al Capone - of capitalism and Mao successors proclaim the slogan "get rich is glorious", the system has entered in its liquidation phase. All fuses are melting in the system once the growth catalyst for growth has been exhausted. Without socialist opposition we are in Global Lock out The system produces and employs only if it is able to accumulate profits and to get even more benefits. Successive stages of wealth accumulation has been polarizing wealth exponentially until it reaches a stage where the equation has been broken, much of the production remains unsold and the spiral of depression started. Without profit capitalism strikes, does not invest except to merge and absorb their competitors, in an unbridled orgy of cannibalism. Although people need housing, food, clothing, credit ... the system has stopped, factories remain empty, the ships do not leave, plasma displays remain in the warehouses, crops are left rotting and there are only empty tables in restaurants. Is the overproduction crisis that studied the socialists of the nineteenth century but this time on a global scale. There are no escapes forward. No longer are there new, untapped markets, verge continents, inexhaustibly oceans, ... even world wars to fight. The rate of profit had stagnated absolute an definitively. The Big One At the moment the depression spiral is staggering. All planet production is stopping at a rate of hundreds of thousands of unemployed additionally every day. USA production fell by - 3.4% in the last quarter of 2008, Japan - 17.2%. German industrial production fell by 13% and Korea 21%. China industrial production has plummeted over the past 5 months. The 3rd Great Depression has begun. The recessionary spiral is of a magnitude unparalleled in history. This is not a crisis. This is not only a great depression. This is a system blackout, the real and final Great Depression, the Big One . Capitalism has been run out of batteries. The system no longer has anything to offer. Its circuits are fused in a global blackout. All "anti crisis" measures taken so far responded to the absence of an anti capitalist opposition and therefore all, absolutely all, contribute to deepen the blackout in a desperate attempt to postpone it. All of them try to socialize the losses of their bosses in a ridiculous attempt to recreate the conditions for another credit bubble, a pyramid, another speculation, the only way capitalism believes continue operating. There will be no rebound The irrational and suicidal capitalist drift has led the world to a limit of stress that is threatening the very survival of our species in the galaxy. Never than before, socialism is a pure matter of survival for the species. Capitalism was never a good system for the economic and social organization but has the capacity - systemic - to reproduce and replicate without control, no matter this will put in serious jeopardy the fate of mankind. From this 3rd Great Depression we will no got out in conditions of capitalism. Capitalism, once reached the stage of globalization can only bring more and more crises, more and more depression. Its it genetic code. This time the cycle will not stop, since the conditions for the rebound - an improved rate of gain - need another predator system expansion, submit other continents ... other planets?. As tumor grows the system needs for oxygen. Without growth, the system is drowning. The twenty-first century marks the physical limit of capitalism. What remains to be seen is if capitalism cancer kills its host or humanity recover in some way this terminal illness. The last stage of capitalism: the Criminal Capitalism The last Great Depression will only be overcome by socialism. Never before was more true the phrase "socialism or barbarism." In the current dominance of large multinational corporations, geographic areas of the planet will change the color of black, the color of mafia - failed states in bankruptcy. A dark stain that will be moving in the North direction, which was considered immune to barbar-capitalism. Its already usual for companies in distress, i front of the closure of bank finance, loan request to the mafia, the Camorra and organized crime. Loans "a la Russian." Few state organization, the more criminal organization. We are entering fully into the era of criminal-capitalism (the Camorra and the Cosa Nostra are collecting "taxes" amounting to 250 million euros a day) Bankrupt financial state opens the path to organized crime to control economic activity with enormous and increasing financial resources to penetrate and control entire sectors of the economy. As legal-state tax raising capacity decreases, illegal criminal revenue increases, an so its power and penetration on the economy. The post-Soviet Russian model (mafia - oligarchy - institutional corruption) will become widespread as the optimal model of capitalism under permanent depression: Appropriation of bankrupt administration public assets , penetration of organized crime in the representative institutions - Duma, the Federal Council - the acquisition of immunity by the major criminals, the financing of election campaigns... All Est Europe is walking in this direction. Italy is reforming to that objective. The criminal capitalism controls the entire production system Russian. More than half of the bank - about 400 banks - and through it the press and television, are in the hands of organized crime. The privatization of state coercion - 800,000 individuals in private security forces out of state regulation - make the security agencies criminal corrupt instrument at Mafia service. Back to Marxism ¿Stupefaction? Already a increasing number of economists seem to have experienced a miraculous conversion to Keynesianism and accepted be classified as such. But Keynesian politics where only possible due to heavy socialist opposition and could implement a phase in which capitalism could still lift head, conditions that no longer exist. The great promise of capitalism, deified by the "market fundamentalism" was that there was no need to study the problems, plan, monitor, ... because markets take care of everything. Faced with environmental disasters, resource depletion, growing poverty, ... more passivity an more passivity. The free market - no one remembered to mention that with monopolies "free" is a ridiculous term- and the "invisible hand" will settle all. Basing a system of social and economic organization in the glorification of greed and social insolidarity in order to obtain optimum social and economic, is one of the fallacies of the more sublime imagination. But still more sublime is the stubborn, well-paid and often concerned dedication of prevalent economics in denying the evidence of a long history of blood, misery and exploitation, a irrational and systematic looting and a traumatic and permanent tendency to implode, to war and to self-destruction. Marxism has taken 150 years studying the capitalist crisis. At counterflow, Paul M. Swezy, Harry Magdoff, (publishers and missing the Monthly Review), John Bellamy Foster, Mike Davis, James Petras, Robert Brenner, Robin Blackburn ... maintained and kept up their sharp florets, unraveling the mysteries of capitalist cancer and metastasis . There should we drink if we want to understand something of what is happening. Given the enormous magnitude of the disaster also the traditional economist are brecked. The only argument yo hear from the few economists left speaking is that, although touched and in bad situation, compared with the negative experiences of "real socialism", capitalism would be a lesser evil, and with some tweaks and adjustments, it could still function. The problem is that there is no time. These are not tweaks and adjustments but plug huge waterways of a system that is going to be ruined by moments before the imminent attack of a second financial tsunami of disastrouse proportions. Nationalist protectionism or socialist relocation Capitalism has proven time and again that can be reborn from its ashes. It is a true cancer reprogramming quickly and capable to contaminate and alter the best approaches. Social projects based on the coexistence have ended strengthening the system they pretend to replace - see other articles on this blog - and this is always an element to take into account in the future. "Every man for himself". Nationalism is rebirthing vigorously throughout the world. In this logic, the political pressure during the Great Depression of the 30s, led to a redistribution of income and wealth at the national level by means of protectionism. Closing the national market for national corporations, employers can encrease wages to generate the demand necessary for their business. It is imperative a return to the "localization" of production. It has been the "financial" scale economics, supported by social and environmental dumping, what has emptied and closed the factories of the antic industrial countries. But the relocation of production at a scale based on the respect for social and environmental rights is only possible under conditions of socialism. Resurgence of fascist totalitarianism The world has experienced the wretched consequences of national "socialists" (sic!) experiences. Crises are the best fertilizer for these mutations and degeneration of the capitalist system. Capitalism in crisis mutates rapidly to totalitarianism. Weimar Republic progressive government was destroyed by the same capitalist forces that had led Germany to war and defeat. Over 80% of the members of the Nazi party were unemployed and were instructed to communicate their anger and resentment to the rest of the population to finally brought them under the authoritarian yoke. The tactics that were used then are used again in the U.S. and the rest of the world, against any progressive alternative to the crisis. Pseudo-bureaucratic socialism Rosa Luxemburg: " The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive, cannot. New Territory. A thousand problems. Only experience is capable of correcting and opening up new ways. Only unobstructed, effervescing life falls into a thousand new forms and improvisations, brings to light creative force, itself corrects all mistaken attempts. The public life of countries with limited freedom is so poverty-stricken, so miserable, so rigid, so unfruitful, precisely because, through the exclusion of democracy, it cuts off the living sources of all spiritual riches and progress" (quoted by Wu Yiching "Rethinking Capitalist Restoration") The trajectory of the pseudo-socialism of the twentieth century shows that the central political problem in a socialist revolutionary process is to ensure that this process is not transmuted into its opposite and become the basis for a new kind of oppression and exploitation. Ultimately, socialism and democracy must be an indivisible part of a single project. The nationalization of the means of production and distribution, without the accompanying socialization of political power only creates a legal fiction while maintaining the alignment of work relationships, in which a "bureaucracy" is given the power and privileges. This situation paves the way to some of the key ingredients - the primitive accumulation of capital - for a quick mass privatization of public assets and a new capitalist mutation. During the process there is a transformation of the bureaucratic elite in capitalist mafia elite, the mafia assuming a preeminent rol in the process, as in the Soviet Union, or a bureaucratic capitalist mutation, in which mafia is subordinate and incardinated in a symbiotic relation with corrupt bureaucracy, as in China. The result is the reinstatement assets, public goods and workers in the globalized capitalist circuit under conditions of hyper-exploitation. But the result is also confirmation that the totalitarian pseudo-socialism is dead. The path of the XXI century true socialism will be free of past preconditions. Surviving the Great Depression: R + D = SR Production and employment can only return with rational , socialist, solidarity and sustainable parameters. The formula is simple: Redistribution + Democracy = Sustainable Recovery The capitalist formula behind the "productivity" eulogies is: Monopoly Concentration + Deslocalisation= Depression Permanent Socialism today is a pure matter of survival John Bellamy Foster: "How we choose to act today in response to this failed system is therefore the most critical question that humanity has ever faced.". The question is not capitalism or socialism. Capitalism is a form of social organization hypertrophic and suicidal, terminally ill, which threatens the very existence of mankind. In Great Depression conditions capitalism kill gradually its host. We have fully entered this Malthusian phase in which much of humanity becomes superfluous (Russia, 90 years). Thus, for a vast majority of the population and other forms of life on the planet, socialism is a matter of pure survival. But socialism does not fall from the sky. The "visible" hand of social solidarity means that there is not any automatism worth. Socialism, unlike its rival, is not an automatic mechanism for the organization of the productive system. Socialism must create, build, maintain, defend, refine and improve ... changing individualistic greed for solidarity and cooperation. The humble twenty-first century socialism The twenty-first century socialism has, however, a sad edge. Capitalist path is a dead end without other scape way that the self destruction of human society. XXI Century socialism has not the glorious option of "surpassing" capitalism, but the humble task of trying to heal humanity and the planet from the deadly wound breached by high levels of irresponsible predation and lack of solidarity. Socialism = deprivatization of the commons The capitalist system threatens the biological survival in the medium term and the immediate economic survival. Socialism has not only to do with the distribution of wealth and labor exploitation, but the organization of a new environmentally sustainable way of life. The climate, environment, nutrition, health and education, water, energy, biodiversity, information (one of the reasons of the crisis has been the the "privileged" information or its shameless handling by the information monopolies). Market (privatized, corrupted and manipulated by private monopolies, or simply crushed by the monstrosity of Wal Mart and similars), land, natural resources, ... heritage of humanity, public goods to be returned to social control, to be managed democratically out from the clutches of predatory multinational corporations, many of which operate on as virtually private monopolies. But the forms of production, the conditions under which it occurs, what is produced ... will have to be under democratic control, social and rational for the sake of sustainability, solidarity and a legacy to future generations. Is already long and problematic the history, full of hopes and shadows but also achievements, failures, corruption and betrayal, of socialist, communist and social democratic experiences. This material is a valuable arsenal to advance the task of building a socialist world that allows a humble cohabitation and a sustainable social organization of the human species within the whole planet. Actually existing socialism will not be a panacea, a happy world, a unique and finished model, but the result of a difficult process that will germinate after a difficult birth of complex projects, contrasts, trial and error, faced with a capitalist cancer that although disbanded would offer, no one doubt it, a stubborn resistance. Links: For an overview of the history of social projects: Robin Blackburn: Fin de Siècle: Socialism after the Crash. Yiching Wu: A critical study of capitalism restoration in China Atilio Boron: A similar approach .
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