Crisis of Capitalism

Ini adalah tulisan brilian dari James Durante mengenai kritik atas kapitalisme. Sejauh blog ini berlangsung, hanya ada satu puisi dari Conrad Aiken yang seluruhnya berasal selain dari penulis, tetapi karya yang jenius ini tidak perlu lagi perubahan, ia mejelaskan persoalan dengan bahasa yang paling sederhana. Cukuplah pengantar ini, silakan menikmati.

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Mainstream economics of whatever stripe takes capitalism as a given. Capitalism is held up as a natural phenomenon like the weather or the solar system. Then they attempt to model the functioning of this allegedly natural phenomenon.

But capitalism is no more "natural" than feudalism or the classical Greek or Roman Imperial systems. Economics is a subset of politics. The kind of economic system under which one must live, its basic purpose and functioning, is dependent on the political will of a particular group in society. Capitalism, like the previous systems, is designed to benefit a particular class of individuals, namely those who own and manage the fields and factories and services. 

Under capitalism, the basic purpose of the state is to enforce laws that transfer wealth created by labor to owners and managers. Financial crises occur when this wealth transfer process becomes so severe that workers are no longer able to purchase the commodities and services that they themselves create. Wages are driven down, and income and wealth become so unequally distributed that there is insufficient demand to sustain economic growth.

The twist in this most recent crisis of capitalism involved a variety of complex, real-estate related derivatives (on the side of the ownership class) coupled with increasingly debt-laden middle and working class individuals and families (on the working class side). "Naturally," when the inevitable crisis occurred, the state (ally of the dominant class) bailed out the ownership class and has devised endless variations of austerity for the class that actually creates the valued goods.

A certain German born economist who worked all his life in England laid all this out in plain language for anyone who wanted to to see it. But power and greed are powerful and sufficient to blur most anyone's vision. Where he erred was in assuming that technological changes and economic laws would drive a historical transition. No, politics is the master of history. Today there is an incipient political clash between an increasingly corrupt and venal ownership class (represented in the schools by an army of economists) and working class that is beginning to realize how extravagantly the cards are stacked against them. Let a few major Spanish or Italian banks fail, let the house of finance cards start to crash and this political clash will become decisive. At that point the various dogs of the state--the police and paramilitary forces--along with a paranoid, neo-fascist right wing of society will join the fray. At that point the dictum that "the future is unwritten" will become a living, breathing historical reality. And then the dice will be rolled again and the possibility of real freedom and equality will resent itself.