NEO CAPITALISM AND THE ANGST TO COME.


John Locke, 1689: “God gave the World to Men in Common; but since he gave it to them

for the benefit, and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it, it

cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave

it to the use of the Industrious and Rational (and Labour was to be his Title to it ;) not to

the Fancy or Covetousness of the Quarrelsome and Contentious.”



Locke’s eloquence notwithstanding, the foregoing is but a sententious justification of the

greed that justified man’s inhumanity to man and his criminal neglect of the environment

that gave us so much and finally landed us in the unpredicted mess whose deleterious

impact is as destructive as any world war. It is an example of the artificial logic that made

crass capitalism, and an un Christianly individualism acceptable to an otherwise

reasonable humanity. It ushered in quite smoothly the desacralization of much of human

pursuit including knowledge. And man began to worship at the alter of materialism as he became

over impressed by his own creations.

and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the Industrious and Rational (and Labour was to

be his Title to it;) not to the Fancy or Covetousness of the Quarrelsome and Contentious.”

Locke’s eloquence notwithstanding, the foregoing is but a sententious justification of the

greed that justified man’s inhumanity to man and his criminal neglect of the environment

that gave us so much and finally landed us in the unpredicted mess whose deleterious

impact is as destructive as any world war. It is an example of the artificial logic that made

crass capitalism, and an un Christianly individualism acceptable to an otherwise

reasonable humanity. It ushered in quite smoothly the desacralization of much of human

pursuit including the pursuit of knowledge. And man began to worship at the alter of materialism

as he became over impressed by his own creations.



On cat feet, in crept, the very worst of times. It came rather like a

thief in the night, unheralded, unpredicted, and unexpected; never before had the world

seen the loss of so much so quickly, nor seen such world wide loss of confidence set

about by crises so comprehensive and confounding that few are able to be objective in the

face of it. Countries that had paid so much lip service to Market Forces and Globalism

began to falter in their ranks; and rancor and dissent overtook them. The European Union

which had taken all of forty five years to knock together, began to fall apart in a few

weeks of collapsing markets, imploding automobile industries and the first whiff of a

recession. The spectre of Protectionism once again threatens to rent asunder the house that Free

Enterprise built.




In spite of the Obama phenomenon, (have greater expectations by so many ever before

been placed upon the shoulders of one man?), and the promise of solutions to the

ailments that presently plague the world, this summer promises to be a particularly gory

one as the riots and near anarchy that exploded in Greece reverberates throughout

Europe. The rest of us will get a chance to observe the ogre that exist just beneath the

veneer of the “well mannered”, “even tempered”, civilized European; much like the one

beneath the veneer of us all. It will be the summer of riots, violence, suicides, strikes,

plummeting oil and gas prices, even the English will be hard put to disguise regicidal

tendencies. The rest of us will not be spared: Globalism will come home to roost with exacting and grim vengeance.



In The Trouble With Interest Tarek El Diwany suggests that…“in order to meet the high

real rates of interest occasionally thrust upon it, enterprise tends to increase the rate of

resource extracting by boosting the productivity of physical capital. It might be argued

that, in the twentieth century, advances in technology have presented this solution to

developed societies on a plate, but technological advance may delay the day of

reckoning with. However long this delay proves to be, and it may be a very long delay

indeed, (our) earlier argument foretells the dire consequences that productivity can have

on the entropic Earth-bound system. Polluted river, festering rubbish tips and resource-

depleted seas may be just the first installment of the price that is paid.” El Diwani was talking

specifically about the futility of humans, or capitalists entering into a race with compound

interest. Nevertheless, the prediction speaks eloquently to us, not only about the Compound

Interest Predicament, but also about the crisis presently engulfing the world.



The trouble is that Capitalism has been so utterly successful in enslaving human enterprise that it

has ushered in a new Dynamic in the Free Market equation (The Asian Equation?).



It must be recalled there was a time when “World Markets” referred to a dynamic that

was essentially a “continued (western) postcolonial primacy of relationships of the

colonial era”. It was a dynamic that upheld the supremacy of all that was good in Adam

Smith and all relativist interpretations of the Invisible Hand that ensured that fundamental

Christian morals and ethics were not seen to be subverted by the baser inclinations of

man in his pursuit of free market enterprise; the kind of inclinations that were to lead to

the child labour that Charles Dickens was reacting to when he created his memorable cast

of characters in Oliver Twist and caused Max And Engels to write The Manifesto. This

inclination also gave us the modern slavery that blighted Africa.

This inclination, therefore, meant that free market enterprise appeared to promise the

Greatest Good for the greatest number. The problem, however, was the unstated fact that

the greatest number referred to, was primarily, the greatest number of the privileged in

the West. The truism that one gained at the expense of another was conveniently

consigned to apocrypha.

Free Market Enterprise gave rise to many offsprings, one prodigal was Laisse Faire, which

became so autocratic a monopolist that governments had to step in to protect

hapless citizens from the ogre; another offsring was Reagan’s Supply Side Economics

that was predicated on the deficit spending that actually insidiously sowed the seeds of

the cataclysmic financial implosion we are witnessing today.

That implosion heralds the end of the global market as we hitherto knew it to be. It is a

catastrophe; but it is a Western catastrophe which for the rest of us is a historic interlude

of momentous opportunity. It has to be restated that while Western nations slide into a

predictable and predicted recession, to the rest of us this is simply a glitch along the way

as we emerge into productivity and greater relevance amongst the comity of nations.



As the virus of recession spreads through out the Western world, it must be observed that

even the most fragile emerging markets remain somewhat inured to it. Asia is contending

with dampened growth expectations, not recession. China’s growth is expected to slow,

by as much as four points, down to eight from twelve percent. Almost all Western

nations, by contrast are experiencing negative growth. The Middle Eastern counties have

enough petrodollars to float through the crises. Intra-trade within ASEAN countries will

ensure the continued demand for oil and gas that will aid their relentless march to

modernity.



Even five percent growth rate in England, Germany, or the US, would’ve been heralded

as roaring growth. What is wrong with this picture then? Everything, if you happen to

come from any of these countries who have for long trumpeted the virtues of free

enterprise without realizing that when the rest of the world awakes to the need to engage

in the market space, it would indeed herald the dawn of a new, more dynamic world

which would not accept that “some animals are more equal than others”, or, at least, that

animals other they, are more equal than others! It would be an era in which the hitherto

powerful and privileged would share Capital Space or Market Space with the rest of the

emerging (productive) nations.



This would mean a REDUCTION for the West and a GAIN of Capital or Market Space

for the rest. This as difficult to adjust to as it was to adjust to the loss of space whether in

schools, in the electorate, in the market place or in the political space, as women, (and

blacks in the US) for instance demanded more.


The emergence of so many unto the global stage of relevance ushers in a multilaterality

that must necessarily mean the end of Capitalism as know it and the dawn of Neo or Post

Capitalism. The financial tumult unfolding presently must be seen as birth bangs that

bring forth something new. And for the survival of all we must adopt new strategies that

are predicated on the very opposite of what brought us thus far and that is a Non Zero

Sum Policy. It is a dynamic that jettisons confrontation in favour of Consensus and even

conviviality. Instead of a winner takes all situation, we adopt win win strategies that

moves everybody along. This is already happening amongst the many that capitalists

have adopted philanthropy as a New Age religion. We now urge that hitherto secular

states consider this option in the formulation of their strategies and policies.



“Colonial frontiers had been carved through ancient zones of regional trade and men had

naturally found ways of evading their obstruction.” Basil Davidson, Black Man’s Burden.

The problem facing mankind today is that we are presently at the extremes of a world

pecking order which has its foundations and architectonic based upon lines of military

conquest. However as Mutually Assured Destruction reduces ancient/traditional conflicts,

first with Low Intensity Conflict (LIC) and then with industrial/economic/ warfare and

ideological/religious warfare, we find the conquerors of Ancient times reacting in the

face of the dawn of a new post industrial era in which an altogether different dynamic is

at play.



The world over, populations that had previously struggled haplessly with Peasantry and

Poverty, are coming into the empowering strata of the middle class and in doing so, are

competitively vying for more capital(physical and financial), more goods, and a greater

socio-economic space which apparently is not limitless- The Challenge of this New Age

is how to expand the socio-economic space, Globally, to accommodate the newer,

younger and more vibrant peoples around the, hitherto, deprived corners of the world.



To some degree, at present the short term solution is that the mega-rich, the Oligarchs,

must have to yield some socio-economic space so that the rest may wrest some comfort

for themselves, but this is a short term solution at the best.



Henry Ford created a modern economic revolution when he built the Model T Ford. He

achieved various things simultaneously, e.g. Division of labour; which made mass

employment possible and therefore masses’ migration from rural to urban centres became

the demographic portrait of industrialization; mass transportation, the steel industry, labour

unions and therefore unionism, the urban setting as The Concrete Jungle, all

become immediately possible with the energies released by the Division of labour and the

automobile.

The liberation of the individual as he experienced an unprecedented and unbelievable

dominion over time and space unshackled the imagination and made space travel and

exploration possible. There followed a proliferation of goods and services and the

multiplication of providers and the consumers for these goods and services. The net result

was the quick and impressive expansion of the socio-economic space. So that by the

nineteen twenties, Americans especially could sing it that the good times “are here

again”. These were the roaring twenties.



The magical impact of the novel automobile has begun to wane. With the demystification

of production, robotics, and the ubiquity of production centers, automobile production

can no longer have the incredible impact it once had on the socio-economic space. The

world that Ford built is imploding. Ground Zero for the implosion that is occurring is the

US.



It is against this background that, with the improbable name of Obama, the implausible

cause of Real Change, and the impossible dream of attaining the Presidency of the United

States of America that one man came upon the world stage with a mandate to bring

change to the US and indeed, by implication, the rest of the world.



The task will be onerous for him as for us; as we attempt to chart the course of this NEO

CAPITALIST world.