I just finished reading Eric Hobsbawm’s book "The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991", which is more than just a sum of personal recollections, but a critical historical review of the XXth century. I think the title is attractive but somewhat deceiving. When one gets into the nitty-gritty of the book, one realizes that those so-called extremes (State Capitalism vs. State Socialism) were in fact quite similar: both were hierarchical, authoritarian, elitist, repressive, and quite oppressive systems of class domination (albeit in different ways). What is interesting is that both systems were (State Capitalism, still is) “legitimized” by utopian ideologies that had very little grounding in objective reality. State Capitalism still nowadays tries to pass for a “free market”, when in fact its entire existence is closely linked to governmental chronic intervention in the economy; while State Socialism pretended to be founded upon truly egalitarian principles and upon “dictatorship of the proletarians”, when in fact it was dominated from the top by a minuscule elite of ruthless bureaucrats (the infamous nomenclature). In other words: Gog vs. Magog. That is, not really opposed extremes, but just extremely opposed forms of extremist ideologies at the service of elitist rule, apparently dissimilar, but pretty much the same in essence.
After the demise of the Soviet block and the end of the Cold War, the world seems to be dominated exclusively by Gog.
Apparently, State Capitalism, or this pseudo-free market Capitalism of today, reigns supreme. And also apparently, we live in a unipolar world entirely dominated by US imperialism. A hopeless terminal situation; a dead end historical venue; the “end of history”, as so presumptuously was announced by Fukuyama, the golden boy of reactionary thinking in the early nineties. However, precisely when things seem quite settled forever, history begins to flow wildly anew. There is no dead end but, on the contrary, huge fractures seem to announce the breaking of the dam. State Capitalism is entering a protracted phase of turbulence and instability, due to its inability to solve any of the most pressing issues concerning our survival as a species, while US imperialism loses global power almost on a daily basis. Yes, we are now entering the Age of Turbulence. An age of danger and possibility as we haven’t experienced since in the late XIVth century (I suggest reading the wonderful book by historian Barbara Tuchman, "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous XIVth Century"), when Europe began to emerge from Feudalism to enter an era of Capitalism and increased popular sovereignty, which were concomitant phenomena, but with no relation of cause and effect between them. I ask: where are we headed now to? Apocalypse? More and nastier State Capitalism? Or a new form of societal arrangement?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
http://trueslant.com/joshuakucera/2009/05/27/is-hugo-chavez-the-most-popular-leader-in-the-arab-world/
ReplyDeleteHugo Chavez most popular leader in the Arab world.
Interestingly:
ReplyDelete"On the question of “Which countries are the greatest threat to you?,” naturally the U.S. and Israel cleaned up. But China made a big jump: from negligible results in 2008, nine percent of Arabs identified China as one of the top two threats. Still, nearly twice as many Arabs said they would prefer China (14 percent) over the U.S. (eight percent) as the world’s only superpower, with Russia (seven percent) barely behind the U.S. Far more than any of those choices, though, Arabs would pick France or Germany (23 percent each) to rule the world."
"The achievements won by auto workers over decades of struggle—living wages, medical care, retirement benefits, college education for their children—have long been seen by America’s financial elite as an obstacle to its profits. The Obama administration is seeking to use its assault on auto workers to set the stage for a sweeping attack on the jobs and living standards of every section of the working class and thereby organize a “recovery” of the US economy based on austerity and poverty for working people and vastly increased profits for the wealthy."
ReplyDeletehttp://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/may2009/pers-m29.shtml