Has the Capitalist system now run out of steam?

Has the Capitalist system now run out of steam, can we continue to accept it as the dominant social-economic system?

Is the future for the Capitalist system authoritarian and corrupt?

We have seen a scaling back of liberties in the US and the UK as a result of Islamic terrorism, and we have increasingly seen law corrupt the market.

Capitalism works if the market is unhindered and the price mechanism is allowed to reach equilibrium. However the synergy and amalgamation of corporations, and the cult of the lobbyist, has led to a skewing of the natural balance of the market.

Take the policy of preventing the sourcing vastly cheaper drugs from outside the US. Medical lobbyists in Washington have Medicare and Medicaid tied into the inflated US market, which costs the taxpayer millions as prices are manipulated and not exposed to market forces (i.e. vastly cheaper drugs from Canada and Europe). All this wasted money goes into the coffers of the pharmaceutical corporations, and of course a percentage of this finds it way into the pockets of lawmakers.

Who suffers? The poor who see their safety nets fraying at the edges.

Is it any wonder that lobbyist salaries have doubled since 2001? With lawmakers now eunuchs to corporate handouts the market is shaped by self-interest and counterproductive laws, the natural balance of the price mechanism corrupted.

Capitalism also relies on fear. There is little natural equality within capitalism and the Capitalists rely on creating a fear of the alternative, take Socialism. The Capitalist feared the rejection of property and the bourgeoisie, that was beginning to take root across Europe after WW2 and created the spectre that was the Soviet Empire. In demonising the Soviet Union the capitalists could unify the masses against a common enemy, creating an innate – although completely ignorant – hatred of communism.

After the collapse of communist Russia and its rapid slide into market fundamentalism and privatisation, the Capitalists had no unifying enemy, 9/11 soon put an end to that. The speed at which al Qaida became equally demonic was incredible, any intelligent debate about the root causes and motivations of the phenomena were quickly suppressed by a unifying patriotism. Any dissenters who raised any contrary opinion were hounded as traitors (take the Ward Churchill incident), rounded on by the compliant media.

So now Capitalism has its new unifying enemy and will continue to exploit the poor to satisfy its ever-demanding hunger for profits.

How can Christianity possibly reconcile itself with the continued rape of God’s earth, or the blood that is so cheaply spilt in the name of oil? It can’t. Again a massive corporate mobilisation of power and influence suppresses dissent. US media is completely dependent on advertising and is at the behest of its paymasters. The Capitalist frowns on any dissention against the policies of the corporate friendly Bush administration, and this pressure resulted in an emasculated media happy to remain silent as the president took the nation to war on a lie.

Capitalists will pump millions of Dollars into research that contradicts the scientific consensus on global warming (ExxonMobil have pumped $8 million dollars into funding these groups). Senior Republican, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (Tex.) has recently launched a probe into the funding of the scientists who discovered the ‘hockey stick’ phenomena of significant warming over the last part of the millennia – in fact according to their findings the 1990’s were the hottest decade in 1,000 years. Fellow Republican and Chair of the House Science Committee Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.) scalded Barton in July of this year:

“My primary concern about your investigation is that its purpose seems to be to intimidate scientists rather than to learn from them, and to substitute congressional political review for scientific review,”

It is this corruption of law and politics that threatens to undermine the capitalist model and the primacy of the market. The people and environment are secondary to a hunger for profit. The market no longer serves the people, adequately managing scarce resources and redistributing wealth; conversely the people now serve the market.

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So what are we assured are the underlying benefits of the Capitalist system?

‘Choice, freedom, and opportunity!’

Choice.
As the market matures the companies within those markets become increasing homogenised as they mimic each other, profiting on the disinformation of advertising. We are assured the differences between a hundred brands of toothpaste when in reality one will do. Why is this choice useful?

Advertisers corrupt our young with endless portrayals of sex and deviance. Mischief is encouraged and a corporate friendly counter-culture is fostered to extract money from the family purse via the demands of the children. Parents are under incredible pressure to clothe their children in labels, paying extortionate prices for the illusion of the brand.

Why is this choice helpful? It ties us into the subservient world of the paycheque and the need to work ever-longer hours to keep up with modern life. Time with the family is limited as fathers and mothers see parenthood as providing materialism, not love and attention. How is this for the benefit of society?

Freedom.

Where is the freedom to really make a difference in today’s politics? The two-party system in the US and the three-party carve up in the UK offer no real alternative to the status quo. All are centrist political entities that offer marginal differences in policy; all market friendly and increasingly intertwined with the corporate world. Would voting Democrat or Republican, Labour or Conservative actually offer any fundamental difference?

With the political climate as it was after 9/11 Bush wasted no time in introducing limits on liberties with the Patriot Act, and in the UK the Labour government hopes to infringe on civil liberties with its Terrorism Act. We are expected to accept the scaling back of our freedoms so the Capitalists can cement their position, and protect their lifeblood, Oil.

Opportunity.

While the development of new markets through enterprise is still possible, the possibility of carving out a profitable business in retail or manufacturing is almost non-existent. Who can contend with the purchasing power and logistical infrastructure of Wal-Mart or Tesco? How can one hope to compete with the large global manufacturers? The truth is we have very little opportunity left. We cannot penetrate the developed markets of the globalised corporations; one does not have the Capital.

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And so why do we suffer the continued disparity of Capitalism?

To this I have no answers