Breaking a system.

Two

The second claim for modern capitalism was summed up by Sir David King, the former chief scientific advisor to the government, at the University of Oxford's Smith School of Enterprise and Environment July 11 conference. He said, don't just look at current troubles in the west. Globally the real story of capitalism is that it is creating vast new middle classes, specially centred in India and China. He claimed that the middle classes (and those above) would be half the world's population by 2020. He noted that despite the recession in the west global commodity prices were still rising. Why? It was the sign that the 'new' economies were producing millions, perhaps billions, of new consumers - a new middle class - despite the west's retreat.

Like many of Britain's official 'thinkers' Sir David starts by seizing a single dramatic appearance of something that has caught his attention and then turns it into his world view. The future will trundle, like a train, along its parallel lines and only in the one, certain direction. But, sadly, many people have versions of this half baked idea. The west is collapsing; the east is on the rise. Communism kept China poor and capitalism is making it rich.

Beneath the surface appearance of things there are indeed profound and new processes at work. First, if it was communism that kept China poor, what kept India poor? What kept communist China and capitalist India poor - at the same time? And, for that matter, why is capitalist Europe and the capitalist US getting poorer, especially in the middle classes as well as in the working class sectors? Perhaps Sir David, if we think a little more and react a little less, we will see there is a connection.

Let us put the question in a different way. What has unleashed the power of vast and backward countries to move into rapid development, when for decades they were all held back? Last time it happened was in 1917 when Russia broke out of the international market, which held it back, which had constantly produced its backwardness, as a direct consequence of its connections (read dependence) on western capitalism. The development in capitalist led India and communist led China is also a direct consequence - of the increasing weakness of western capitalism; of its inability to control the whole world any longer. The major power centres of capitalism have never been weaker. It has no way forward, no project for growth any more in the west. Production and productivity, scientific and medical advance, invention and long term growth are no longer available there. What big capital's ransackers need now is dirt cheap labour and the international money casino. Capitalism, a system that once drove the world and its peoples before it in a mad, dangerous and brutal drive to the future, has now become a parasite on human civilisation. It scoops the pot in the fantasy land of finance. It nestles in the 19th century style spaces in the world where wage slavery is the real deal.

Are we on Sir David's train to the future? I think that most believe our current economics and politics are more likely to lead to famine and war than a middle-class takeover of the world. Unless we understand its historic weakness and finish it off!