The invention and frequent use of the term ‘Fake News’ is not an accident. Such is the pathetic condition of the intelligentsia in Pakistan and around the world, that exposing harsh realities is considered pessimism. Putting forward a revolutionary alternative as a radical lasting solution is termed utopianism at best and insanity in general. Fake news is the only optimism possible here. This situation is the outcome of a protracted and worsening crisis of the capitalist system on a worldwide scale that few in the corporate media and intelligentsia would admit exists. The year 2018 marked the highest number of people — more than 820 million — that are suffering from hunger and semi starvation on the planet according to an obviously conservative report by the UN. But it’s not just the poverty, misery and deprivation. There is also unprecedented violence, instability and turmoil in the world economy, in addition to trade wars, divisive politics, social distress, mass upheavals and boomeranging world relations.
However, the serious bourgeois analysts and strategists seem worried about the scenario. Time magazine wrote, “Markets are soaring, but divisions are deepening among citizens of both developed and developing countries. Liberal democracy currently has less legitimacy than at any time since World War II, and the global order is unravelling. There has been plenty of turmoil in international politics over the past 20 years, but 2018 looks especially ripe for an unexpected crisis — the geopolitical equivalent of the 2008 financial meltdown. Governments, political parties, courts, the media, and financial institutions, which support and sustain peace and prosperity, continue to lose the public credibility on which their legitimacy depends.”
Donald Trump’s ascendency to the presidency of USA has exacerbated these contradictions. The US state sponsored annual survey that is produced by the CFR(Center for Preventive Action), wrote this year, “The US is now the most unpredictable actor in the world today, and that has caused profound unease. You used to be able to pretty much put the US to one side and hold it constant, and look at the world and consider where the biggest sources of unpredictability and insecurity are. Now you have to include the USin that. No one has high confidence about how we [Americans] would react in any given situation, given how people assess this president…This president might welcome this development as he wrote in 2015, “I don’t want people to know exactly what I’m doing — or thinking…it keeps them off balance.”
During the winter of 2008-9, American trade and industrial production were collapsing at a rate even faster than that during the Great Depression. In the ten years since then, the world capitalist economy has staggered on at sluggish rates of growth and investment, and at the cost of a massive accumulation of corporate debt. Aggregate global debt has now piled up to a colossal $247 trillion, equivalent to nearly 250 percent of world GDP.
The last remnants of the liberal post-war agreements established in the upswing of capitalism, that was mainly a consequence of the massive destruction of World War II and the reconstruction that followed, are finally being stripped away
The last remnants of the liberal post-war agreements established in the upswing of capitalism, that was mainly a consequence of the massive destruction of World War II and the reconstruction that followed, are finally being stripped away. The concessions given to dissipate the post war movements of the workers and the youth that the ruling classes had to reluctantly give away; such as free healthcare, social housing, unemployment benefits, free university education, decent pensions, care for the elderly and the social welfare state are being dismantled. For decades, the ruling class had been fretting about these reforms gained by the working people and society. With indecent haste, that web of liberalism is being stripped away.
The world capitalist economy has been struggling for ten years to get out of the recession of the 2008 crash, but hasn’t been able to achieve healthy and stable growth and economic development. Even the present relatively high growth rates with Trump’s temperate steroidal boost in the US are fragile and temporary. Despite “quantitative easing” (the central banks’ printing of undocumented money) amounting to $3.7 trillion in the US, declining rates of profit have kept productive investment at a standstill. Instead, a huge bulk of loose cash is sloshing around, salted away in land, property, art work and an orgy of predatory asset stripping. The accumulated shortfall in the rise of world output, set against projections from the preceding growth rate, has been calculated at 8.4 percent— equivalent to the disappearance of the entire German economy.
Unprecedented levels of corporate debts are tightening the Chinese credit crunch. The escalating global trade warstirred-up by Trump is ringing alarm bells in the bastions of capitalist powers in both the east and west. National governments have entered a downward spiral of protectionism, tariffs and competitive devaluations. In the event of a new crash, with interest rates already close to zero, there is barely any margin left for adjustments in monetary policy; and with global debt already at record levels, states are reluctant to borrow.
The long-established parties throughout Europe and beyond are eclipsing.
The dominant nationalist conservative and social democratic parties have embraced vicious austerity and neo-liberal policies.
The ruling classes exploited the support of crumbling middle-class and backward elements of conservative chauvinistic parties. The bourgeois, this time, are evading direct military dictatorships and propping up reactionary parties such as BJP (India), as well as Islamist and religious-liberal outlets, such as the PTI in Pakistan. In Europe, UKIP, Front National, the Liga, the AfD, are neofascist parties.
Capitalism began losing its status as a progressive system at its inception, declining by the latter part of the nineteenth century into a retrogressive order. The scientific technological ‘revolutions’ from steam to electricity, telegraphs, railways, industrial conveyor lines, automation, computers, Internet and now Artificial Intelligence and other inventions and discoveries played a crucial role, leading to rapid growth in industrial production. However these technological wonders remained in the shackles of the bourgeois to enhance their rates of profits and intensify exploitation. The masses suffered from want and misery.
Today, eight individuals own more wealth than the rest of the human population. Such an inhuman system is ruining the existence of mankind. Its socialist transformation through a revolutionary insurrection is the only genuinely optimistic perspective.
The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at [email protected]
Published in Daily Times, September 17th 2018.