Waiting for capitalism to end

Last week, I finished reading Wolfgang Streeck’s fascinating new book, How will capitalism end? Essays on a failing system, that was published last year and includes updated versions of several recent articles that had already been printed in various other hard-to-find sources. I had eagerly anticipated reading more of his work ever since I completed a laudatory blogpost back in 2015 after reading one of his previous books, Buying Time: The delayed crisis of democratic capitalism. It turns out that this new book is as good as I had anticipated for several different reasons, not the least of which being the inclusion of several polemical articles and comments about the various pitfalls into which many other authors have fallen when trying to analyze contemporary capitalism. His work is a model of rigour and clarity, with the result that it is much more convincing than anything that most other people have ever managed to write on the subject.

One of his main points is that the vast majority of professional economists are not the ones to be consulted whenever anyone wants to find out about capitalism. Those people always focus their analysis exclusively on the operations of “the market”, deliberately separating private capitalist investment from the rest of society, not to mention the natural world, as if whatever was happening outside the tiny sphere of big business had no bearing whatsoever on decisions being taken within that perfect little, closed environment. Which is why those pro-capitalist economists always refer to government “intervention” into the economy from the outside, or trade union “distortions” of reality, or other such “externalities”, including the natural environment, as if the rest of the universe had no legitimate bearing on “their” chosen subject.

Instead, Streeck argues that sociology from its inception should have adopted as its public mission the scientific analysis of contemporary capitalist society, and refused to follow American sociologist Talcott Parsons’ advice back in the 1950s to let the pseudo-science of economics exercise its blinkered hegemony over “its” subject. Simply because sociology is potentially so much better equipped to see capitalism for what it is, as part of a much larger analytical entity, the different elements of modern human society under capitalism as a whole interacting in an often destructive way, not only for most of the people within it, but also with the natural world that surrounds it.

In Streeck’s view, “the market” is, after all, just a ridiculously limited pseudonym to cover for the fact that private investors own all the tools that the vast majority of the people need in order to provide for their own livelihoods. Those owners will only allow other people access to those tools if they all agree to do so on terms set by those same owners, who insist that everyone else line up to guarantee them a maximum rate of increase on their capital.

In other words, even in countries calling themselves democracies, capitalist societies do not function in the original sense of entities being governed by the people as a whole. Though Streeck himself would not necessarily put it in this way, this means that all the deliberately deceptive words constantly being bandied about by the liberal theorists of democracy, such as freedom, human rights, “liberty, equality, fraternity”, and so on and so forth, do not really mean what most naive people think that they mean. None of those words should be seen as absolutes, but only as highly imperfect potentialities, to be granted by the owners of capital on a conditional basis to non-owners living in partly democratic republics or constitutional monarchies, as opposed to those living in absolute monarchies, totalitarian dictatorships or theocracies. But only if the much more numerous ordinary people living in the world’s theoretical democracies let a very small number of big capitalist investors “take their cut” (maximum profits) in advance of everyone else, regardless of whether or not there happens to be anything left over for the democratic majority.

In both the books that I read, Streeck refers back to the post-war “thirty glorious years” (1945-1975) of what he calls “democratic capitalism”, i. e., the only period during which modern capitalism succeeded quite well in maximizing its investments, while still managing to allow most ordinary people the opportunity to increase their overall standard of living. To be sure, this only took place in the small portion of the world’s countries that belonged to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, meaning essentially the Western world and Japan. In many of those countries, the income gap between the social classes actually decreased overall during that period, instead of increasing as it had always done before then, and as it is once again increasing, in an even more dramatic way, since that time. Not to mention the fact that capitalism only became democratic during a period when most people still largely ignored any possible negative effects of all that glorious economic growth on the natural environment.

As Streeck explains it, towards the end of that blessed period, even in those privileged countries, the falling rate of profit led to Richard Nixon’s 1971 decision to abandon the fixed, postwar, monetary exchange rates that had prevailed since the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. Thereby inaugurating what soon became an enormous inflation crisis, which had a much more devastating effect on profits than it did on wages and salaries. All early attempts at controlling that crisis failed until 1979, when the world’s most important central banks imposed monetarism, a four-fold increase in interest rates that eliminated inflation by plunging the world economy into a major recession.

That then led to the second major crisis, the debt crisis of the 1980s, when all the world’s capitalist governments, at all levels, were saddled with an enormous load of public debt, initially caused by monetarism, but exacerbated by short-term attempts at trying to save insolvent companies, farmers, homeowners, and so on, from imminent bankruptcy. Then came the third major crisis, that of private debt, the “financial industry” trying to preserve purchasing power for capitalist products by eliminating all previous limits on lending to what used to be known as “poor credit risks”. Both of those post-inflation strategies came to be known collectively as neoliberalism, replacing the Keynesian post-war strategy of limited government “intervention” into the economy with Hayekian theories of total reliance on “private enterprise”.

Neoliberalism also included the privatization of many previously nationalized companies, the adoption of a succession of free-trade deals leading to economic globalization, the deregulation of financial markets, the “financialization” of the world economy, a major increase in the ratio of speculative capital to productive capital, the implementation of massive tax evasion schemes and associated corruption of every possible kind, pro-capitalist government attacks on trade unions, dismantling of the welfare state through massive campaigns promoting government austerity, budgets balanced at the expense of everyone except private investors, and using all funds made available by stringent austerity programs to pay off as much public debt as humanly possible. In Europe, most of the former “Common Market” governments adopted a single currency, the euro, and used that monetary innovation to decouple economic policy even further from democracy, creating new, European-wide institutions deliberately cut off from any direct parliamentary influence.

In other words, the entire framework of “democratic capitalism”, such as it had existed during the “thirty glorious years”, was replaced by a strictly economic system of “governance”, run by the world’s leading private investors and an enormous bureaucracy of technocratic advisers. All the former communist dictatorships, and all the former socialist and social-democratic parties that had originally opposed capitalism, were all gradually absorbed into the globalized, capitalist world-system. Along with the drastically weakened trade unions that still continued to exist.

Then came the Great Recession of 2007-2009, initially caused by the lending of huge sums of money to new homeowners, in the USA and a number of other countries, who everyone in the financial business knew were totally incapable of repaying their mortgage debts. Which then mushroomed into even tighter neoliberal restrictions on what was left of democracy after all the other constraints so far mentioned. Although Streeck did not specifically explain it in this way, neoliberalism caused an enormous increase in the world-wide income gap between about one-ten-thousandth of the world’s population, possessing unprecedentedly high incomes, and the other 9999 ten-thousandths of that same population. As a result, the ultra-rich “masters of the universe”, or “crême de la crême”, now rule the roost, dominating even the slightly larger group of people who are merely well-off. Most of the world’s population, however, either remains very poor, or belongs instead to a flatlined “middle class” whose incomes stopped increasing about forty years ago.

Delocalization of more than half the world’s industrial jobs allowed millions of former peasants in many “Third World” countries like China to make a lot more money than they used to make, but their incomes after partial industrialization remain much lower than what such workers had been paid before that in the richer countries. With the result that the overall wage bill of the entire world’s industrial working-class, which now includes millions more people than it used to include, did not change all that much. In spite of the fact that delocalization significantly contributed to the enormous increase in the ultra-big business incomes mentioned earlier.

Which brings us to the central question of Streeck’s most recent book, how will capitalism end? In the first place, just in order to ask such a question, Streeck is obviously convinced that capitalism is on its last legs. Even though dozens of people have been predicting such a demise for decades, recent events do indeed indicate that private investment for profit does not seem to be doing well at all. Overall economic growth is at a world-wide stand-still, particularly in the countries dominated the most by private capitalism. Growth only continues to exist in such not yet completely privatized economies as China’s, although a large part of recent Chinese growth has been caused by huge over-investment in totally unproductive sectors, as well as in notoriously unreliable, official Chinese statistics.

Nevertheless, no alternative system is available to replace private capitalism, the state capitalism of totalitarian communism having failed as a self-sustaining alternative, and the other state-run capitalist enterprises in such places as Saudi Arabia also having run out of steam as well. Streeck himself emphasizes how very curious it is that at a time when private capitalism has no significant opposition to deal with any more, that it should nevertheless be suffering from a near-zero rate of profit gives credence to the idea that it is a victim of its own success. In other words, capitalism may have all along required the ongoing existence of at least some non-capitalist sources of plunder in order to survive.

Be that as it may, Streeck’s prognosis for the future is for a long interregnum, that is a sustained period in which the world’s most important private investors will simply let the world economy fall apart, for lack of a more profitable alternative. In which case, billions of people all over the world will have to try to survive, successfully in some cases, unsuccessfully in many others, at a time in which working conditions for those still employed, and living conditions for everyone, are simultaneously deteriorating all over the place. In fact, according to him, people have already started to deal with this already partly realized possibility, by adopting the four much-discussed strategies of “coping, hoping, doping and shopping”.

Coping simply means ordinary people trying desperately to keep everything afloat in their lives, by working very long hours for significantly less pay, and pushing themselves to the brink trying to do the increasingly difficult jobs for which they were originally hired. While simultaneously going all out to provide their children with the kinds of skills that what is left of the employment market still seems to require. Hoping means desperately clinging to traditional definitions of happiness, in spite of everything, avoiding resistance to power and “hoping against hope” that things will eventually go back to being “normal” at some point.

More or less in the way that a large section of the relatively impoverished middle class in the USA voted for a billionaire goof-ball like Donald Trump, offering a completely bogus “return to the promised land” of the previously industrialized USA by threatening the world’s largest corporations with an unending succession of Twitter attacks on anyone planning any further delocalization. Although Streeck’s work was published before the end of the recent US election campaign, he does refer to other such millenarian, right-wing populist projections in his book. Populism, however, is not an alternative to neoliberalism at all, but just another way of deliberately ignoring every problem, and inventing “alternative facts” to make everyone feel better.

Doping, of course, is another way of denying reality, by consuming huge quantities of alcohol, or tobacco, or various other drugs, most of them theoretically illegal. A truly enormous market whose only built-in limitation is the total elimination of such long-term consumers of capitalist products through death by overdose. The last of the four popular reactions is shopping, by which billions of consumers all over the world rack up astronomical ratios of personal debt to personal income through a “feeding frenzy”, which can only culminate in another crisis of universal bankruptcy.

So, going slightly beyond the limits of Streeck’s book, what kind of world could this interregnum turn out to be? The answer may lie in the possibility that one by one, all the world’s countries could follow the lead of the increasingly numerous “failed states”, such as Libya. In that country, six years after the Western-provoked collapse of the Gaddafi dictatorship, no credible government structure yet exists, and the entire country is divided into areas dominated by local warlords. In other words, the next social system destined to replace private capitalism in the whole world, will not be some kind of progressive step forward, toward one variety or another of world socialism, like many of us used to dream about in the past. Instead, the world will probably take a regressive step backward, toward something that has already existed in the past, namely feudalism.

At the moment, the only credible alternative to this projected, interregnum transition of undemocratic capitalism to the even more obviously undemocratic world of feudalism, seems to be the possibility that total war between all the competing warlords in every region may very well put an end to the human race altogether, thereby precluding the return to feudalism after all. What a fascinating choice of futures for all humankind! And all of it thanks to good, old-fashioned, free-enterprise capitalism.

Fighting intolerance without prejudice

At first glance, the title of this blogpost seems redundant, since prejudice and intolerance are usually treated like synonyms. However, dozens of different reactions I have been reading about, to all the horrific events that keep cropping up in the news these days, are making it obvious to me once again just how difficult it is for most people to make any sense out of the current wave of prejudice and intolerance that seems to be taking over the entire world.

One of those events was Donald Trump’s much maligned decision on January 27 to “temporarily” ban entry to the USA for anyone born in a group of seven Muslim-majority countries designated as being “hotbeds of terrorism”, ostensibly in order to protect the US population from any potential terrorist immigration. Another such event was the odious massacre of six Muslim worshippers, and the wounding of several others, in a Quebec City mosque on January 29, by a lone-wolf, extreme right-wing Québécois youth. Two events that the White House tried to link together by claiming that the anti-Muslim terrorist attack in Quebec somehow justified Trump’s partial immigration ban!

Whereas the real link between those two events is that the vast majority of the Muslims living in the Western world, as well as those living in the Asian and African countries involved in the ban, are not terrorists at all, any more than are the vast majority of non-Muslims living in those same regions. Most of the world’s Muslims do not even belong to one or another of the ultra-conservative branches of Islam, although opinions differ as to how many Muslims may passively support jihadism in any of its forms. However, the US ban certainly encourages not only non-Muslim intolerance of non-violent Muslims, but also seems to justify Muslim intolerance of the non-Muslim world in general. As well as encouraging many more xenophobic extremists, both Muslim and non-Muslim, to consider joining the already long list of perpetrators who act out their irrational fears over and over again, by killing a whole lot more people than have so far been killed by their predecessors.

Which means that the Trump administration is not fighting against terrorism at all. As pointed out recently by James Woolsey, a former CIA director, the Trump ban is instead helping to transform the current “civil war” inside the Muslim world, between extremists and anti-extremists, into a Samuel Huntington-style war between competing civilizations. Something that an ex-CIA director would certainly know a lot about, having been, if not personally, at least institutionally involved in using ultra-right-wing Muslim movements to help the USA fight against the influence of communism, and of nationalism, inside the Muslim world.

Which means that the intolerance of the current US government toward all Muslims is just part of the ongoing neofascist disease currently affecting the entire world. In every country, this epidemic starts out by abandonment of the official condemnations of intolerance that most governments used to hand out in the past, and instead promotes the acceptance of racism, sexism and all the other kinds of ultra-right-wing hate mongering, as the “voice of the people”. Once initiated, this neofascist tendency rapidly gathers intensity, becoming more and more violently reactionary with each passing day. As has already taken place in many other parts of the world, the Trump administration in the USA has now become an important part of what is currently the world’s most important problem.

Nevertheless, those who quite rightly denounce the US government for its intolerant and prejudiced attitude toward the Muslim world should not be going over to the other extreme, by trying to justify violent Muslim reactions to that intolerance. Unfortunately, many people who constantly inveigle against Islamophobia, particularly in the Western group of countries, often make the horrendous mistake of believing that it is the Western empires oppression of the Muslims that is the underlying cause of Islamic terrorism. Although the British, French and American empires all fanned the flames of jihadism in recent decades, the use of considerable amounts of violence to help “convert” subject populations to their will has been part and parcel of Islamic imperialism since the beginning. Imperialism, after all, was not invented in the West, but has in fact existed in most parts of the world, ever since the first Mesopotamian city-states started falling under the control of neighbouring empires over five thousand years ago.

Outside intelligence forces cannot create such an atavistic movement out of nothing, but always have to build upon tendencies already existing in any targeted population. As in every other part of the world that has been seriously affected by Western colonialism and neocolonialism, the Muslim world has been heavily corrupted toward ultra-conservative thinking and sectarian violence by the efforts of non-Muslim, “outside agitators”. But those efforts could never have succeeded without considerable, internal support from homegrown extremists, particularly those belonging to the Salafist and Wahhabist movements, often based in countries like Saudi Arabia. Once again, however, under Donald Trump as well as under his predecessors, the US government has decided for opportunist reasons not to include such countries in its list of “hotbeds of terrorism”.

In reality, jihadi violence, which is often practised in Shiite countries as well as in Sunni ones, is every bit as reprehensible as Western military violence, especially when it is perpetrated against largely civilian targets. Killing large numbers of innocent people as part of some imperial design is as morally reprehensible if its goal is to revive the expansionist Islamic caliphates of days gone by, than if its goal is to preserve Western neocolonial control of both human and natural resources, overseas. Both official government terrorism and unofficial Islamic terrorism are just two sides of the same coin.

Even though it can certainly be shown that US military forces, and their other Western and non-Western allies, including Israel and Turkey, have killed a significantly larger number of innocent Muslims than the jihadi terrorists have so far killed of innocent non-Muslim populations, the qualitative reality of civilian massacre far outweighs the quantitative difference in the number of corpses, at least from a moral standpoint. Especially when we realize that most of the non-combatant victims of jihadi terror were also non-extremist Muslims, or at least “not sufficiently extremist” Muslims.

Certainly, Islamophobia in non-Muslim countries has to be condemned for what it is, an irrational fear of all Muslims, the terrorist minority as well as the non-terrorist majority. But the fight against Islamophobia in the world’s non-Muslim countries cannot include creating apologies for violent jihadism. Every time someone denounces Islamophobia, that person should also denounce Islamism, defined as the use of the Muslim religion as a political weapon against rival empires. By the same token, everyone denouncing Islamic terrorism should also denounce Islamophobia, in the same breath. Both of those ideologies form part of the same, ultra-right-wing, reactionary, atavistic tendencies currently infecting world politics.

Right-wing organizations in the West, such as the Conservative Party of Canada, also quite cleverly use very real examples of “barbarian cultural practices” in many Muslim-majority countries as part of their Islamophobic propaganda. Ultra-right-wing organizations such as the National Front in France are also quite clever in their use of “republican” principles such as laicity (government-sponsored secularism) in order to fan the flames of popular Islamophobia. But the fact that these Western political organizations are quite good at what they do should not blind honest opponents of Islamophobia to the reality of the Islamic terrorists oppression of their own Muslim populations.

Barbarian cultural practices do indeed exist in every country, but they are in fact concentrated in various Third World countries, including many different Muslim-majority countries in Africa and Asia, such as Somalia and Afghanistan. But they also concentrated in places like Hindu-dominated India, whose huge population, including a significant Muslim minority, makes it the largest country in the world affected by that kind of intense oppression. These practices include such abominations as honour killings, female excision, forced marriages of pre-pubescent girls, prostitution slavery rings, wife beatings, polygamy and so on, targeting millions of people, mostly among the female portions of those populations. Other barbarian practices, however, such as punishing apostasy by using the death penalty, as well as jailing and whipping dissidents, have mostly been used against men.

The fact that all those practices have been so effectively and opportunistically used in many different Western electoral campaigns does not mean that opponents of Islamophobia should be allowed to get away with downplaying those forms of oppression, just because they take place more often in some parts of the world than in others. While it is true that all religions condone female oppression, the parts of the world least affected by modern forms of enlightenment are also the ones most affected by popular versions of misogyny. This also includes many Christian populations, mostly in Africa and Latin America, who often hate feminism, and sexual “deviances” like homosexuality, as much as do ultra-conservative Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and other religious extremists. Denying reality all over the world, including the Third World, does not get us anywhere. Which does not mean that such practices do not also exist, often to a considerable extent, in many other countries not usually classified as part of the Third World, such as the Russian Federation, or even in the not-so-enlightened Western countries.

The most often overlooked fact in this debate is that religious ideologies, like political ideologies, are always inherently biased in dozens of different ways. All ideologies, by definition, are necessarily intolerant and prejudiced, since they all have to lead people away from the truth, just to continue functioning as rival ideologies. It is impossible for any religion to avoid blowing its own horn, and still remain a distinct religion. When some religious people, “moderate”, non-fundamentalist believers, support tolerance, they are not doing so in most cases for religious reasons, but because those people have partially adopted more modern attitudes toward society, that originated in such non-religious sources as the philosophers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In other words, many people nowadays combine both religious, and secular, influences on their thinking. More or less in the way that the Republican Party in the USA combines such quite contradictory ideologies as ethnic imperialism, Christian fundamentalism and laissez-faire libertarianism in its own peculiar, ideological pedigree.

Holy books from most of the world’s religions, such as the Bible and the Koran, are chock full of horrific passages promoting full-scale ideological warfare against rival beliefs. They are incredibly intolerant of, and prejudiced against, their designated enemies, promoting ideological violence much more often than they promote peaceful attitudes and cultivated debate between rival sets of ideas. It is no wonder that fundamentalists nowadays who adopt a literal interpretation of the messages contained in such books often end up promoting terrorism.

It should also not be forgotten that most of the intellectual discoveries and contributions to scientific understanding that were accomplished during the reigns of the nominally Christian and Muslim empires of the past, that helped to make them great, were not made by fundamentalist, religious believers, but by thinkers influenced by such secular traditions as rationalist philosophy. The incorporation of Platonic and Aristotelian influences into nominally Christian (the Logos incorporated into the Trinity), and nominally Muslim (the Mutazilist school of Islam), intellectual life predated the eventual liberation of modern scientific thought from reactionary religious prejudices.

The same type of observation also applies to the use of “Western values”, usually referred to in the media as values “belonging” to some particular Western country, to camouflage incendiary attitudes toward Muslim populations living in the West. Since most Muslims, not just the extreme right-wing ones, still harbour more conservative attitudes toward such things as women’s liberation than do most mainstream Christians, they become an easy target for racism, being treated as an inferior “race” instead of as a competing, universal religion. Such recent events as the mass demonstrations in Egypt, against the dictatorship’s attempt to eliminate the traditional Muslim prejudice against women petitioning for divorce (easy for men, very difficult for women), are constantly buttressing Western Islamophobia and disdain for Islam in general. Wherever it is practised, the sharia law, governing social relations within the umma, is also an excellent example of the way that conservative Islam tends to treat women as if they were children. More or less in the same way that they were treated in most Christian countries fifty or a hundred years ago.

This debate also invariably centres around many Muslim women’s tendency to drape themselves in various kinds of cover-up clothing, ostensibly in order to hide their bodies from improper male leering. These wardrobe decisions are most often adopted as a form of identity politics, interpreted as either a cultural or a religious symbol of female purity. The problem is that these more or less exaggerated attempts at modesty are also forms of female oppression, either imposed by male members of the family, or by the Muslim community (umma) in general. Quite often, they also come about as the result of self-imposed, female masochism, that hides individual, ideological identification with the surrounding community even more than it hides women’s faces, or entire bodies.

The extremely oppressive “barbarian” practices mentioned above, the general Muslim tendency to oppose women’s liberation, and the more symbolic “wardrobe malfunctions” among radicalized Muslim women, are often misinterpreted by conservative and ultra-conservative political formations in Western countries as “proof” that all Muslims are extremists, tending towards terrorism. In places such as France and Quebec, possessing relatively strong secular  movements, the republican desire to truly separate Church and State (religion and government) has led such countries to legislate, or try to legislate, against religious control of public institutions, in a democratic effort to separate private belief from public policy. Unfortunately, the intervention of right-wing and extreme right-wing parties and movements into that debate has convinced many left-liberal zealots opposed to Islamophobia, that public secularism, also known as laicity, is only being used to get large numbers of uninformed people to hate Muslims more than they ever had before.

In reality, however, laicity is just part of the general thrust of the Enlightenment thinkers to free human societies from the arcane, atavistic attitudes of religious prejudice and intolerance. Ultra-right-wing deformation of the desire to separate Church and State for democratic reasons, has resulted in the extremely reactionary use of feigned secularism to promote Islamophobia instead, exactly the opposite of laicity’s original intent of controlling conservative Catholicism’s influence on government. In France, the National Front has turned secularism on its head, transforming it into a weapon for promoting fascism, more or less in the same way that the Nazis (“national socialists”) helped turn socialism into a bad word during the 1930s.

The massive recent influx of millions of North African and West Asian (“Middle Eastern”) refugees into Europe, most of them Muslim, means that in today’s world, it is mostly Western audiences that are constantly being admonished to reject prejudice and intolerance toward immigrant populations, rather than “Eastern” populations. Given the horrendously negative treatment of minority religious populations in most of the world’s Muslim-majority countries (not only Christians and Yazidis in the Middle East, but also Hindus and Buddhists in Indonesia), it is hard to believe that if the flow of refugees were reversed, the Muslim populations would be any kinder to the incoming Christians than the other way around. In fact, as far as I can tell, every majority religion in the world right now has a generally intolerant and prejudiced attitude toward religious minorities. Treating such minorities as if they were inferior “races” seems to have become a universal tendency among human populations.

But that sort of tendency has to be turned around completely if there is to be any future for humanity as a whole. Now that capitalist neoliberalism has globalized the entire world into one giant economy, it is not only the enormous, unprecedented income gap between the social classes that has to be overcome. At some point, the huge cultural differences between rival populations that have been building up ever since human beings started settling the entire planet thousands of years ago, cannot be allowed to drive us all increasingly closer to an Armageddon of total war between rival, neofascist empires. All the ultra-right-wing movements now dominating world politics, Islamophobia as well as Islamism, and all the other kinds of racism and racialization of religion that currently exist, have to be swept aside. Globalization has to be humanized rather than continuing to be used, as it is now, as a weapon of imperialism, oppression of women, and the crushing of “inferior” social classes.