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The Next Marx: We Stand at the Verge of a New Financial Era
Lenin graces the cover of a recent issue of The Economist. The Financial Times is running an entire series on the “crisis in capitalism.” Francis Fukuyama, a recovering neoconservative, makes a plea in Foreign Affairs for the left to get its intellectual act together. And that noted class warrior Newt Gingrich has been assailing Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for being a ruthless moneybags.
Lenin depiction on recent cover of The Economist
Excuse me? Does the left hand know what the right hand is doing? What parallel universe did we all just stumble into?
It’s not the first time, of course, that the political spectrum has become all jumbled. Ten years ago, the 9/11 attacks sent some liberals scurrying rightward in support of the Bush administration’s extended response. The disastrous aftermath of the Iraq War then pushed even some leading neoconservative lights, like Fukuyama, in the other direction. The aftershocks of this upheaval can still be felt in the debate around the Libya intervention and the “right to protect” doctrine.
Now, the financial crisis and the Occupy movement have convulsed the political spectrum along a different dimension. The political categories of Right and Left—which derives from where opposing representatives, royalists versus radicals, sat in the French national assembly around the time of the 1789 revolution—have been woefully inadequate for some time. But if the house organs of the financial sector and the house intellectuals of the Right are all talking like a Marxist study group, then perhaps we are on the verge of a major transformation—not only in terminology but, more importantly, in the facts on the ground.
The message from the traditional Right is by no means unified. Let’s start with Gingrich, who is what passes for a conservative deep thinker these days (which makes me almost nostalgic for the days of William F. Buckley). Gingrich knows that his reputed “smarts” will go only so far in attracting votes in the Republican presidential primary. He has orchestrated a late surge, toppling Mitt Romney in South Carolina and threatening him in Florida, by combining two qualities: meanness and class resentment. Although Gingrich’s national unpopularity has become the stuff of legend – it’s at a nearly toxic 56 percent – a core group of Republican voters thinks he has the best chance of scoring a below-the-belt knockout blow against President Barack Obama in the November election.
But Gingrich the pugnacious pugilist has not been satisfied to rest on his unpleasantness. The man who pulls in several million dollars a year, enough to rack up several hundred thousand in charges at Tiffany’s, figures that, compared to Romney, he’s practically a member of the proletariat. Gingrich has criticized Romney for hitting the jackpot on financial investments, for having Swiss bank accounts, for firing workers. “Is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of other people and walk off with the money, or is that somehow a little bit of a flawed system?” he told reporters in New Hampshire. Way to go, Newt!
Gingrich’s indulgence in the rhetoric of class warfare – which goes well beyond anything that President Obama has dared – reflects the political insurgency that is taking place within both major parties. The populists are lining up against the plutocrats, with the tea party and the Occupy movement providing the shock troops. Such rebellions against the elite take place on an almost cyclical basis – progressives against the Gilded Age wealthy, New Dealers against the financiers, Reaganauts against the Republican blue bloods. If the U.S. economy improves and the threat of another major global downturn recedes, then perhaps both the tea party and Occupy will melt away. Obama will go back to his Wall Street-friendly rhetoric and the Republicans will deem Gingrich’s neo-Marxist tactics a failed experiment.
But with the U.S. economy still stagnant and the House of Euro collapsing in on itself, capitalism is indeed facing a crisis of confidence. For the Financial Times, which is running a series on the current challenges facing capitalism, the problem boils down to how much business executives get paid. Capitalism needs adult supervision because a few bad eggs have bent the rules to their own benefit, and this supervision best comes from, drum roll please, the state.
“Capitalism needs the state,” the FT editorializes, “not to run the economy but to regulate how individuals run it and have them face the consequences of their actions.” The state, in other words, has to step in to save capitalism from itself, but only in the limited fashion of a schoolmarm disciplining the disruptive elements. The FT provides space for Occupy London’s somewhat more radical critique, but the overall message of the series is one of irritated reproach: The super-wealthy have been making it increasingly difficult for the conventionally wealthy to go about their business of racking up profits according to the traditionally skewed rules of the game.
The Economist has a somewhat different take on the matter. Capitalism in general isn’t in crisis, just the Western, laissez-faire variety. Asian-style capitalism has recovered rather quickly from the financial crisis. “State capitalism is on the march, overflowing with cash and emboldened by the crisis in the West. State companies make up 80% of the value of the stock market in China, 62% in Russia and 38% in Brazil,” the magazine points out. “They accounted for one-third of the emerging world’s foreign direct investment between 2003 and 2010 and an even higher proportion of its most spectacular acquisitions, as well as a growing proportion of the very largest firms.”
But where the Financial Times practically begs the state to pay more attention to the economy, The Economist is leery of the state capitalism that has guided the economic success in China, South Korea, Singapore, and elsewhere. The magazine raises doubts about “the system’s ability to capitalise on its successes when it wants to innovate rather than just catch up, and to correct itself if it takes a wrong turn. Managing the system’s contradictions when the economy is growing rapidly is one thing; doing so when it hits a rough patch quite another. And state capitalism is plagued by cronyism and corruption.”
The Economist and the Financial Times have squared off on the issue of where to strike a balance between the guiding hand of the state and the invisible hand of the market, an age-old debate. They both recognize that the go-go days are over. Reasonable capitalists can disagree about the proper mix, but their goal is the same. They’ll tweak the original recipe but won’t fundamentally alter the ingredients or the final product.
Which brings us to Francis Fukuyama. In its special anniversary issue devoted to the last 90 years of thinking on global issues, Foreign Affairs invited the big-picture guy behind the “end of history” thesis to reflect on “the future of history.” More than 20 years ago, Fukuyama predicted that the triumph of liberal democracy would spell the end of serious ideological debate and thus the end of history. He has since revised his argument considerably, since many ideological challenges to liberal democracy have persisted—nationalism, religion, militarism—and history, red in tooth and claw, soldiers on. The two key challenges he identifies in his Foreign Affairs essay are China’s state capitalism and widening inequality. To Fukuyama’s dismay, the Left has not fashioned a plausible alternative to the unregulated market that has so palpably failed.
“For the past generation, the ideological high ground on economic issues has been held by a libertarian right,” Fukuyama writes. “The left has not been able to make a plausible case for an agenda other than a return to an unaffordable form of old-fashioned social democracy. This absence of a plausible progressive counternarrative is unhealthy, because competition is good for intellectual debate just as it is for economic activity. And serious intellectual debate is urgently needed, since the current form of globalized capitalism is eroding the middle-class social base on which liberal democracy rests.”
Fukuyama and the Right are taking the challenge of Occupy in some ways more seriously than traditional liberals. They understand that widening inequality challenges the very underpinnings of capitalism (much as the Right understands that climate change, as Naomi Klein points out in a Nation article last year, challenges the essential logic of capitalism). What Fukuyama really wants is for the “responsible” Left to come up with a middle-class-friendly alternative to what he considers a more dangerous populism. He fails to recognize that the standard of living of the U.S. middle class depends in large part on the global inequality sustained by our current economic system.
Despite his misunderstanding of the sustainability of the middle class—and his naïve commitment to a marketplace of ideas already tilted in favor of the wealthy—Fukuyama does raise an important point about the lack of compelling synthesis coming from the Left. We await a modern Marx who can shake up the Left just as surely as the Right with a trenchant critique of the current economic orthodoxy and a game plan for transformation. The Left, after all, has long been committed to a similarly unrestrained growth paradigm, from the industrial model of communism to the stimulus packages of progressive economists.
This Marx will produce not a manifesto for the middle class. Rather, the new synthesis will fuse economics and environmentalism in a way that fundamentally reorients both disciplines. Marx pioneered political economy; Marx 2.0 will pioneer planetary economy. It’s not just about greening capitalism, as if enough solar cells and Prii will save the world. Our current economic system has reached its planetary limit.
The confusions of our political classification system suggest that we stand at the verge of a new era. The task is not, as The Economist, the Financial Times, Francis Fukuyama, and Newt Gingrich all believe, to save capitalism or the middle class. The stakes are much higher than that. The rising waters will overwhelm Left and Right both. The future might be “storm socialism,” as Christian Parenti argues in TomDispatch, with big government expanding to deal with big weather. Or, if the next Marx is out there somewhere scribbling away, the future might be an entirely different economic system altogether.
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Show AllI have thought for some time that both capitalism and communism (or its semi-cousin, socialism) are out of date. Neither economic model takes into account globalization, computerization, a population in excess of seven billion, satellites. Another genius needs to appear with a new economic and social theory.
Although FDR's New Deal from 1935 to 1985 is the only historical example of successful control of capitalism, few left of center pundits have advocated its restoration. The New Deal was successful because its financial industry regulations regulated the structure of the industry.
Unfortunately we do hear too many pundits promoting tansaction taxes and advocating compensation caps. Without first restoring New Deal regulations, transaction taxes and compenastion caps will accomplish nothing.
Money must not be a commodity--people and machine work not money.
Democratic work places,to stay democratic they will have small membership; economic success of enterprise or individual not tied to excessive social and economic inequality. This will be the hardest since we have an outdated measuring system.
and, Social and environmental displacement, ruination and depletion no longer subsidized.
The "social democracies" the author mentions became "unaffordable" only when financial industry deregulation gave the banksters a license to steal.
That's what I was thinking too. It's almost as if the wealthy despised & feared the successful demonstration of social democracy. The social democrats, themselves, didn't help matters by kow-towing to the financiers. Confrontation was left to small radical parties like the sinn fein of Ireland.
And when the anti-tax crowd was able to reduce revenue to the point where national and state governments are sometimes in danger of collapse. Somewhere along the line we need to complete discredit (in case people don't realize it themselves) the Chicago School of Economics and the ignorance it spawns among supposedly intelligent people. The IMF is just now catching on to the fact that austerity does NOT improve economies but rather shrinks them further. ( Who'da thunk that?) Sarkozy is the only leader calling for a tax on transactions, so he may not be as right-wing as I've always suspected him of being. Let's hope the U.S. pays attention.
According to liberal theory, the dissolution of the Soviet Union ought to have produced a new flowering of democracy. Of course, nothing of the sort occurred—not in the former USSR or, for that matter, in the United States. Moreover, the breakup of the Soviet Union—the so-called defeat of communism—was not followed by a triumphant resurgence of its irreconcilable enemies in the international workers’ movement, the social democratic and reformist trade unions and political parties. The opposite occurred. All these organizations experienced, in the aftermath of the breakup of the USSR, a devastating and even terminal crisis. In the United States, the trade union movement—whose principal preoccupation during the entire Cold War had been the defeat of Communism—has all but collapsed. During the two decades that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the AFL-CIO lost a substantial portion of its membership, was reduced to a state of utter impotence, and ceased to exist as a workers’ organization in any socially significant sense of the term. At the same time, everywhere in the world, the social position of the working class—from the standpoint of its influence on the direction of state policy and its ability to increase its share of the surplus value produced by its own labor—deteriorated dramatically.
Certain important conclusions flow from this fact. First, the breakup of the Soviet Union did not flow from the supposed failure of Marxism and socialism. If that had been the case, the anti-Marxist and antisocialist labor organizations should have thrived in the post-Soviet era. The fact that these organizations experienced ignominious failure compels one to uncover the common feature in the program and orientation of all the so-called labor organizations, “communist” and anticommunist alike. What was the common element in the political DNA of all these organization? The answer is that regardless of their names, conflicting political alignments and superficial ideological differences, the large labor organizations of the post-World War II period pursued essentially nationalist policies. They tied the fate of the working class to one or another nation-state. This left them incapable of responding to the increasing integration of the world economy. The emergence of transnational corporations and the associated phenomena of capitalist globalization shattered all labor organizations that based themselves on a nationalist program.
http://wsws.org/articles/2012/jan2012/rept-j30.shtml
"The world turned (even more) upside down!" Think UK 1945 internationally. Tommy Sheridan, Derek Haton, Rose Kane, Che Gueverra they're playing your song. "It's time" as an Australian Labor slogan put in 1972.
Oh, and Karl Marx pointed out the state through government did create capitalism. Thus the Gipper was right, but not the way he meant it about "guvment" being the problem. No wonder John Locke that earlier day Marxist Englishman before Marx decided no government at all was the best. Go ahead on let the state wither away. But make sure the rest of the hierarchy goes right along with it. Easier said than done obviously!
It's "great to see" the Newt try to join "the people's revolution." But the train has really already left on track OWS. Hep me! Good God!
The Economist and the Financial Times sure know how to get it wrong. The Economist! Just acting like the echo chamber for MI5 it's accused at times of being. Do "promote the hierarchal capitlaist system." It's so you, Economist.
Give me Miltant when it was circulating any day of the week. Neil Kinnock, why'd you purge Militant and the Militant tendency from the British Labor Party? No wonder the base started packing their bags. That little purge of the deputy leader of the Liverpool
Council surely didn't help. What were you thinking? Labor loony lefties too much! Give it a rest. Neither the Wilson nor Callaghan folks bothered Militant if memory serves me.
This is basically Trotskyism (of a very dogmatic sort) crying in the wilderness about "what might have been". Marxism deals with reality, not what might have been but what is and , contrary to the author on whom we are commenting, is anything but "woefully inadequate". The communist parties and the international labor and progressive movements approached "nationalism" as a reality, one among many. To take only the most dramatic example from recent history, the Vietnamese Communist Party achieved leadership of the people of Vietnam by fighting for the "nationalist" goals of freedom and independence from the French and the American imperialists. They did so without abandoning their Marxist program and they inspired millions of French, American and other people throughout the world to question capitalism and to oppose imperialist war and exploitation. All the genuine Left experienced an upsurge in membership (yes, including Trotskyist parties, most of whom, especially in Europe, would take issue with you as well.) The "nationalism" on which you place the blame for the decline of the Left was permeated with internationalism and you have to do a major editing of history to conclude otherwise. It's true that the anti-communist social democrats tied themselves to their national business classes and have followed them down the road to "free trade", neo-liberal austerity and "humanitarian" neo-imperialism. But don't try to pin this on the communist left or the non-communist (but not anticommunist) revolutionary left. They were decimated by the actual balance of class forces , which are now tilting the other way (potentially). Capitalist globalization and the technology revolution gave the business classes the strength to go on an offensive against communism, against labor unions and against progressive social forces generally. This is the background to the "crisis" in Europe. Contrary to the author, there is no need for a Marx 2.0 to explain this.
I don't mean to rehash old debates---it's time to shelve them and unite in realignment going forward. But the aloof, "intellectual" view of "nationalism" will leave us in small, aloof, "intellectual" groups unable to connect with the millions who are being ground down by capitalism, who believe in social justice AND who love their country as they perceive it. Consider how Sinn Fein is taking the leadership of those in Ireland who oppose the austerity program. Consider how most Americans are furious at the export of American manufacturing to the underdeveloped and over-exploited nations. When they realize that this was a bipartisan effort, they will be looking for alternatives and we have to be with them.
Kradek -- Raises some very interesting questions & issues.
The remarkable and peaceful breakup of the Soviet Union is rarely considered in any serious way.
First, Amerikans and the people of the world should thank the Soviet rulers that they did try to maintain their grasp on power through war and nuclear weapons.
If Washington feels its Empire slipping away, don't be shocked if it employs nuclear weapons to maintain hegemony. That would certainly unmask the authentic 'Evil Empire'.
Remember that the breakup of the Soviet Union was primarily seized upon as a confirmation of neo-liberalism, the Washington Consensus, and the triumph of Amerikan Exceptionalism.
After the fall of the Soviets, Amerika would run a unipolar world without challengers.
Fukuyama, ironically, was hailed as a genius and visionary due to his ludicrous 'End of History' thesis. With his wresting of Hegel back from Marx and returning him to the political right, Fukuyama became an intellectual hero for the neo-conservatives, and his name was bandied about the Amerikan corporate press with great fanfare.
Whatever the failings of the Soviet system, recall that a majority of the Soviet population suffered immense economic hardships, decline in life span, inferior education and health care, etc. after the breakup. Most of the former Soviet people have not experienced a flourishing of any sort of authentic democracy, and in many former Soviet republics political repression has actually worsened.
Give Fukuyama credit that he was willing to break with his neo-conservative comrades over the invasion of Iraq-- and now the erosion of the Middle Class.
Economic elites in the U.S. tolerated trade unionism, a healthy Middle Class, etc. because they were threatened with a far worse system in Soviet Communism.
Often FDR has been praised as saving Amerikan capitalism from the capitalists by introducing key reforms that made it tolerable for the working class. His reforms, in this perspective, headed off a potential revolution.
With the breakup of the Soviet Union, the capitalist elites in the West saw it as GAME OVER! They had won the great ideological struggle. State capitalist systems such as in China, South Korea, etc. remained an annoyance to Washington -- but they could still do business (and make profits) from these economies.
In lassiz-faire capitalism, the plutocracy knows no limits to their greed. They NEVER have enough. This is why a a derivative and limited 'philosopher' such as Ayn Rand could be considered an intellectual giant in the Amerikan zeitgeist. She celebrates limitless greed and selfishness as the triumph of the good.
With the breakup of the Soviet Union, why should the plutocracy tolerate unions? Of what possible use is the Amerikan Middle Class in a globalized economy where their jobs can be exported for increased profits? Why produce things when financial vampirism yields greater profits? Why allow democracy when you can buy both parties and flood the world with corporate propaganda?
Is it any surprise that the political right now sees an opportunity to finish of trade unions for good (hence the war on teacher's unions, etc.), privatize the 'commons', and dismantle the New Deal?
Who needs the New Deal when there is no alternative?
It's a bad thesis to take the ramblings of a couple of financial rags and raving Republicans plus one bad academic and take it as a marker of profound change in social attitudes. I couldn't get through this Feffer piece. It has a somewhat engaging beginning, but it quickly becomes unbelievable.
Capitalisim is dangerous, workrs rights, environment suffer, benefits to society frequently fall short of claims. Regulate it like a Rocket Fuel Factory, tightly!
Same for "Free Mrkts", no such thing, Markets must always be Regulated "!
Socialism works for the VA; pendulam needs to swing back left a piece.
The "Next Marx" that the author wonders about is the people themselves. Notice how the author failed to see this. He failed to see it because he's your typical coordinator. The coordinators are the elites' most trusted volunteer slaves. Here's some proof that the author is carrying the elites' water:
"The Left, after all, has long been committed to a similarly unrestrained growth paradigm, from the industrial model of communism to the stimulus packages of progressive economists."
He's calling liberals "The Left", still. Obviously the liberals have long ago migrated over into the extreme right gutter to fraternize with the conservatives. The left has been taken over, now, by the people themselves. The far left is the political platform of universal equity/justice, the people's agenda. There is nothing in this world more solid than this platform. The author cannot write about it because he would lose his job, and the spoils. Read the book "Ishmael" and you'll see that the people are the leavers and the elites are the takers. The left is the political pole of the leavers, the right is the political pole of the takers. This is the new definition, that works for the people. It's clear, while the old definition was confusing. The new, clear definition will last forever, because it is the definition of the people, what works for the people, the leavers. Leavers, as in Ishmael, are the sustainers. The takers are the destroyers. The natural world will be sustained by the leavers, leavers take only what they need, while takers take more, more, more, more. Can't get enough. Until everything is destroyed. It's bizarre that the author of the article cannot talk in terms of what makes the most, obvious sense. He cannot, because he serves the takers, the elites, the destroyers.
The key concept underlying this piece is "sustainability," but the fact is that the age-old debate between the state and the invisible hand cannot be reconciled without a fundamental agreement on what constitutes "efficiency" and "sustainability" in that material world emerging as the final outcome of economic production. Thermodynamic accounting is the only possible scientific solution to the problem, but its adoption entails the complete abdication of the concept of profits since these necessarily contradict the second law of thermodynamics. Some basic ideas on the matter I offer on my webpage at:
http://home.roadrunner.com/~markwrede/NonFic/ThermoEcon.html
In the political ramifications of economic theory, I offer these ideas on my webpage at:
http://home.roadrunner.com/~markwrede/NonFic/MarketNeeds.html
The change of Francis Fukuyama is HUGE!
His is not an epiphany, but an intellectual and self-directed conscious (and conscience) change driven by careful review of factual data --- and most probably a revelation about the disastrous impact of a disguised global corporate/financial/militarist Empire, at the end of the 20th century, on the very trajectory of history's survival.
I have great admiration and respect for Francis Fukuyama since I first read his influential "The End of History" in 1992 --- although I disagreed with his conclusion of "liberal free-market democracy" being the end point of the battles for a final and stable political philosophy.
Fukuyama wrote that famous book (and preceding article in The National Interest) during the fall of the other competing global Empire, the Soviet Empire (or the "Evil Empire" as presidential actor, Ronald Reagan, called it --- not understanding the all empires are evil).
Fukuyama quickly became, perhaps through no fault of his own, the god-father and intellectual saint of neo-conservatism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Fukuyama
But the danger in having a truly open minded intellectual as your patron saint is that he may continue his intellectual journey and someday turn against your project --- particularly when history proves it to be disastrous, and in this case, even endanger the future of history.
Such second thoughts by Fukuyama were, in my humble opinion, becoming highly visible as early as 2006 in reading his insightful book, "America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy", in which I detected a distinct concern with imperial overreach, if not an Empire complex (or 'empire-thinking') overtly.
Beyond the disastrous neo-con imperialist project in Iraq (by Bush I) and Afghanistan and Iraq II (by Bush II), several former political and economic members of these neo-con Republican administrations started to speak-out against their distorted and deceitful economic and foreign policies, not the least of which were Paul Craig Roberts and David Stockman. Most recently it also appears that Christopher Hedges (of all people) may have had some influence on Fukuyama, and whom I applauded. “Chris, your book must have had an effect on Franics Fukuyama, because despite having become famous for his 1992 "The End of History" (which has been used and abused by the neocons to support economic power over-riding political democracy and forming the two-party 'Vichy' Empire that now oppresses us), Fukuyama has just written an article, "The Future of History" which suggests a progressive populist subsuming of the economic sphere WITHIN liberal democracy.”
Many factors, including disappointment with Obama (who Fukuyama endorsed in '08) may have also led to Fukuyama's change of mind and his ultimate development of his newest work, “The Future of History”, first as an article in Foreign Affairs magazine and presumably as a full book --- although he will probably have to alter the title, since “The Future of History” is already a 2002 book by (of all people) Howard Zinn, which suggests that Fukuyama has been thinking about the impact of Empire on the America super-power.
Perhaps with as influential an intellectual as Francis Fukuyama's revising his view of neo-conservatism (and Empire), this will not be how it ends at "The End of History", but rather with his newest Foreign Affairs article, "The Future of History", we will begin to see violent foreign affairs like the recent assassination of an Iranian nuclear physicist, and Obama's many drone assassinations, becoming unacceptable to an increasing number of countries (and world citizens) outside of this disguised and disgusting global 'Vichy Empire'.
Now the task of education about Empire's guileful lies and unjust global power projection is turning the corner with the intellectual honesty not only of long time truth tellers like; Chomsky, Wolin, Parenti, Korten, Stiglitz, Hardt and Negri, etc. etc. --- but now with leading figures whose previous work had been used by the Empire to disguise global Empire --- the premier intellectual of whom is the former god-father of the neo-con movement, Francis Fukuyama, who now has turned toward the light of truth about this disguised/Vichy Empire, and is enlightening the people about "The Future of History" --- and that we have a real 'future of history' if we but take the reins from Empire. There is indeed, "good news" about the future of history --- finally without EMPIRE.
Best luck and love to the "Occupy Empire" educational movement.
Liberty, democracy, justice, and equality
Over
Violent/Vichy
Empire,
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
Despite the catchy title, Feffer, does not seem to have fully absorbed the degree to which Fukuyama is very much aware of the level of urgency to promulgate a new political-economic theory, nor the willingness (and ability) of Fukuyama to volunteer his services to contribute to such a 'New Marxism'.
While Feffer concludes his article with the supposition that, "if the next Marx is out there somewhere scribbling away, the future might be an entirely different economic system altogether", Fukuyama actually volunteers himself in his article as, at least one of those, "obscure scribbler(s) today in a garret somewhere trying to outline an ideology of the future that could provide a realistic path toward a world with healthy middle-class societies and robust democracies. What would that ideology look like?
It would have to have at least two components, political and economic. Politically, the new ideology would need to REASSERT THE SUPREMACY OF DEMOCRATIC POLITICS OVER ECONOMICS and legitimate anew government as an expression of the PUBLIC interest." [emphasis added by me].
This is to show that Fukuyama is fully engaged in working toward the solution of such a new Marxism --- or what I would simply call a new commitment to sustainable democracy over guileful and violent Empire.
With regard to the need for new post-Marxist political/economic policy to be sufficiently "sustainable", from an ecological and environmental standpoint, it is highly useful to read Richard Heinberg's fabulous new "The End of Growth", which is available in Kindle format for short money.
http://www.amazon.com/End-Growth-Adapting-Economic-ebook/dp/B0056C1V5U/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&qid=1328129530&sr=1-1-fkmr1
Heinberg begins his introduction with an insightful quote from James Galbraith pointing out the blindness of many government and corporatist economists to understand, or ever admit, that the massive 'market flaw' of allowing negative externality costs to be dumped on society in order to create faux-profits, is the seminal and causal problem of Empire dominating the current political scam system:
"Leading active members of today’s economics profession...have formed themselves into a kind of Politburo for correct economic thinking. As a general rule — as one might generally expect from a gentleman’s club — this has placed them on the wrong side of every important policy issue, and not just recently but for decades. They predict disaster where none occurs. They deny the possibility of events that then happen.... They oppose the most basic, decent and sensible reforms, while offering placebos instead. They are always surprised when something untoward (like a recession) actually occurs. And when finally they sense that some position cannot be sustained, they do not reexamine their ideas. They do not consider the possibility of a flaw in logic or theory. Rather, they simply change the subject.No one loses face, in this club, for having been wrong. No one is dis-invited from presenting papers at later annual meetings.And still less is anyone from the outside invited in." — James K. Galbraith (economist)
I am quite confident that Fukuyama, as well as other volunteers interested in promulgating a new post-Marxian political/economic reality like; Stiglitz, Korten, Yves Smith, Simon Johnson, Akerlof, Grossman, et al are fully aware of both the urgency and the importance of this effort to save history, and our world.
However, conflating Gingrich and Romney with this effort, or even mentioning them (or Obama) in the same article, as Feffer has done, does not inspire confidence in any substantial understanding of the historical urgency of this issue.
Best luck and love to the "Occupy Empire" educational movement.
Liberty, democracy, justice, and equality
Over
Violent/Vichy
Empire,
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
The VA and socialism! Do watch "Born on the Fourth of July" by Oliver Stone giving special attention to how the VA in about 1969 was treating combat vets, and youl'll see the VA has nothing to do with what people generally refer to as socialism. Not in the least! Also bear in mind, things are absolutely worse today with less funding for the VA and much more for the war machine. Do some real research. Don't just rely on such lousy sources. Better yet! Do visit an actual VA hospital with vets who go there on a regular basis. Do try some in such areas as the Bronx and elsewhere other than in some affuent suburb where the VA puts on its big phony show to BS people whom they can BS. Being in the Nam as Stone was, he didn't have to make anything up. Deal with the fact that not much in the USA works the way some think. I know from vets I've dealt with. Medicare! Same story but just matter of degree. My late mom had it a good while back. The government was cutting the coverage even then. This has been a constant in the USA. Social programs get cut, and the war machine keeps getting fat. It goes back to Slick Willy. It's not this or that party. We have a one party despotism which Jesse Jackson used to actually talk about at least implicitly by saying that the Democrats were just the flip side of the Republicans. He needs to get back to where he was when he took on Slick Willy in 1992. We all do. We must go back much further to 1942 or the like to "the people's revolution." Just remember there's nothing new under the Sun that's worth anything. We had the Garden of Eden as one native Canadian singer put it on this forum. That's right. Being really progressive means going back to an egalitarian world which works, not the hierarchal Eurocentric, ethnocentric one which doesn't.
The Nazis were new. That's the real deal. Rule by the people by consensus and common sense and for benefit of all is at least 100 or 200 millennia old going forward until 12000 BP (before the present) if not until 10000 BP.