Daily Times

The financial inferno has set Europe ablaze. It is all happening at a dazzling pace with no respite for the debt-plagued nations. The crisis-ridden cyclic phase of capitalism has come full circle, and is staring its fervent apologists in the face. The current tide of ruin continues to grow unabated despite all the poppycock and the unique panaceas offered, and pandered, by its mercurial messiahs. As always, the conventional wisdom of the capitalist economists not only lacks logic, but seems anachronistic as well. The two oft-repeated remedies carry the risk of serious repercussions. The first one entails a lavish state-sponsored stimulus package aimed at fuelling short-term consumerism in order to circumvent overproduction and loss of profits — the two innate flaws of capitalism. Indeed, it is the first rule of the ‘holy scripture’. Furthermore, this is consistent with the state working as a representative of the ruling bourgeoisie. The other remedy, which is already in vogue within Europe, involves massive cuts to social spending, thereby depriving the people of the fruits of their labour in the guise of austerity.
During the cold war era, the capitalist forces under the scrupulous supervision of Keynes, though hardly savoury, reluctantly embraced the concept of a welfare state. The idea was to persuade the working class to settle for wage slavery. A mirage of democracy, a hollow equality and an elusive freedom were advanced — merely as slogans — to expropriate the people by hoodwinking them. For the proletariat of the world, a trap more pernicious and perverse than ever was prepared, but there’s the rub; the inherent contradictions of capitalism are prone to culminate in chaos sooner rather than later. Despite all the innovations, it cannot carry on this farce for too long.
Keynes’ theory of realisation of capital by investing in a military-industrial complex miraculously worked all through the cold war era. However, with the demise of the Soviet Union, indeed, history came to an end but for the capitalist economists. Now, the sheer brute force of capital governed the world, but a more lethal contradiction was rearing its ugly head. In the absence of an enemy, the Keynes model found itself ineffective once again. Islamic fundamentalism proved too insignificant an enemy to exhaust the piles of ammunition produced by imperial capital to realise itself. Finance capital — on the hunt for accumulation of more capital — indiscriminately doled out money without having any guarantees of retrieving it. The speculators played their role effectively. In other words, the economy went to the dogs. A ‘meltdown’ was inevitable. As always, the capitalist relations had become too narrow to encompass the wealth created by them.
With the economy in tatters, capitalism no longer required a fancy mask to obscure its inhuman face. The choice was wide open — give up to people or give them up. Indeed, capitalism develops the productive forces, but only to the point where they enhance its accumulation. Once the job is done, it ceases to be a progressive system. Those relations become a fetter, and hence their continuation requires outright coercion. In ordinary conditions, civil society — a relatively human face of this coercive superstructure — tends to maintain the hegemony of capital through private organisations such as NGOs, social and religious groups, etc. However, once the superstructure is threatened, all subtleties are swept aside to maintain the status quo. Both Europe and the US are going through this anarchic phase. People are being forced to make sacrifices in order to compensate for the losses incurred by the unproductive and ‘irresponsible’ (as the bourgeois cliché goes) system. In the sphere of human psychology, any privilege once provided readily attains a sense of permanence, and its revocation invariably accompanies outright coercion and mass revolts. The emergence of Syriza in Greece and the victory of Hollande in France are a few such examples of public outrage. Many ‘leftists’ are fascinated by this phenomenon to the extent of announcing as if the ‘spectre of communism’ is haunting the world. It is a case of wishful thinking, not a just analysis of a very tricky situation. Indeed, the situation is revolutionary, but a process does not automatically turn into an act.
In 1840, European society was on the verge of revolution. Within weeks of the publication of The Communist Manifesto, the workers in Paris overthrew the French monarchy. It was a signal to Europe to overthrow the rotten system. However, it could not be materialised. The Marxist theory is not about fatalism. Capitalism always produces its gravediggers, but it equally demands them to dig the graves of their expropriators with their own hands. They need to perform their historical duty that, if history is any guide, they quite often have failed to perform. There can be a number of reasons that underpin these failures, such as a lack of objective conditions, impotency of a vanguard party, and immobility of the proletariat. It is equally worthy of note that capitalist development does not always generate an essentially revolutionary proletariat. It is a possible consequence, but not the only one. Marx and Engels also hoped that the outcome of capitalist development would be a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large, but they never excluded the possibility of an alternative — a common ruin.
According to Marx, “the centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument and that integument is burst asunder.” However, he stopped short of proposing any name for the subsequent arrangement. As capitalism is coming apart at its seams, it will eventually make a sharp shift from private appropriation to social arrangements on a global scale. At present, only this much can be foretold. According to Eric Hobsbawm: “The post-capitalist society of the future will not follow the old models adopted by the different socialist countries in the past, especially the Soviet one. How the humanism of Marx and Engels comes about will depend upon the political activity through which this change will come about…the choice between socialism and barbarity. Which of these will prevail is a question which the 21st century must be left to answer.”

The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com