Globalization has eradicated great power war, dedev reverses
No Mindset Shift – Right Wing Fill-in
Download 1.56 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- No Mindset Shift – Cap Inevitable
- No Mindset Shift – Resiliency
- A2: Revolution / Movements
- A2: Trainer
- Trainer agrees—transition will require unanimous agreement and will take decades if even possible
- Collapse doesn’t solve- gradual change is better than disruptive change
No Mindset Shift – Right Wing Fill-inTransition spurs right wing groups to powerMartin Lewis, Professor, School of the Environment, Duke University, GREEN DELUSIONS, 1992, p. 170-171. While an explosive socioeconomic crisis in the near term is hardly likely the possibility certainly cannot be dismissed. Capitalism is an inherently unstable economic system, and periodic crises of some mag intude are inevitable. An outbreak of jingoistic economic nationalism throughout the world, moreover, could quickly result in virtual economic collapse. Under such circumstances we could indeed enter an epoch of revolutionary social turmoil. Yet I believe that there are good reasons to believe that the victors in such a struggle would be radicals not of the left but rather of the right. The extreme left, for all its intellectual strength, notably lacks the kind of power necessary to emerge victorious from a real revolution. A few old street radicals may still retain their militant ethos, but today’s college professors and their graduate students, the core marxist con tingent, would be ineffective. The radical right, on the other hand, would present a very real threat. Populist right-wing paramilitary groups are well armed and well trained, while establishment-minded fascists probably have links with the American military, wherein lies the greatest concentration of destructive power this planet knows. Should a crisis strike so savagely as to splinter the American center and its political institutions, we could well experience a revolutionary movement simi lar to that of Germany in the 1930. No Mindset Shift – Cap InevitableNo alternative to capitalismFriedman 2000 (Thomas, one of America's leading interpreters of world affairs. Born in Minneapolis in 1953, he was educated at Brandeis University and St. Anthony's College, Oxford. His first book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, won the National Book Award in 1988. Mr. Friedman has also won two Pulitzer Prizes for his reporting for The New York Times as bureau chief in Beirut and in Jerusalem, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, pg 127-129, jj) No, Sirivat explained to me: "Communism fails, socialism fails, so now there is only capitalism. We don't want to go back to the jungle, we all want a better standard of living, so you have to make capitalism work, because you don't have a choice. We have to improve ourselves and follow the world rules. . . Only the competitive survive. It will probably require a national unity government, because the burden is so big." A few months after this I attended a lecture in Washington by Anatoly Chubais, the architect of Russia's failed economic reforms and privatization. Chubais had come to Washington to make a last-ditch appeal to the IMF for more aid to Russia, but at the time the still-communist dominated Russian Duma, or parliament, was resisting the IMF's conditions. The Duma was also regularly denouncing Chubais as a traitor and foreign agent for submitting to IMF demands that Russia radically reform its economy along real free-market lines. I asked Chubais how he answered his critics, and he told me: ., 'O.K.,' I tell them, 'Chubais is a spy for the CIA and IMF. But what is your substitute? Do you have [any alternative] workable ideas?'" Chubais said he never gets any coherent answer, because the communists have no alternative. I was in Brazil a few months later, where I interviewed Fabio Feldmann, the former environmental secretary of Sao Paulo and a federal deputy in the Brazilian parliament, who was campaigning for reelection in Sao Paulo. His office was a beehive of campaign workers, awash in posters and other campaign paraphernalia. Feldmann is a liberal, and I asked him about the nature of the political debate in Brazil today. He responded: "The [ideological] left in Brazil have lost their flag. The challenge of the federal government is jobs and employment. You have to generate and distribute income. And what is the program of the left? They don't have proposals to generate income, only to distribute it." What are these stories telling us? Once the three democratizations came together in the late 1980s and blew away all the walls, they also blew away all the major ideological alternatives to free-market capitalism. People can talk about alternatives to the free market and global integration, they can demand alternatives, they can insist on a "Third Way," but for now none is apparent. This is very different from the first era of globalization. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Industrial Revolution and global finance capitalism roared through Europe and America, many people were shocked by their Darwinian brutality and "dark Satanic mills." They destroyed old orders and hierarchies, produced huge income gaps and put everyone under pressure, but they also produced sharply rising standards of living for those who could make a go of it. This experience triggered a great deal of debate and revolutionary theorizing, as people tried to find ways to cushion workers from the cruelest aspects of free-market capitalism in that day. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described this era in The Communist Manifesto: "Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." Eventually, people came along who declared that they could take these destabilizing, brutalizing swings out of the free market, and create a world that would never be dependent on unfettered bourgeois capitalists. They would have the government centrally plan and fund everything, and distribute to each worker according to his needs and expect from each worker a contribution according to his abilities. The names of these revolutionary thinkers were Engels, Marx, Lenin and Mussolini--among others. Decentrally planned, non-democratic alternatives they offered communism, socialism and fascism - helped to abort the first era of globalization as they were tested out on the world stage from 1917 to 1989. There is only one thing to say about those alternatives: They didn't work. And the people who rendered that judgment were the people who lived under them. So with the collapse of communism in Europe, in the Soviet Union and in China - and all the walls that protected these systems - those people who are unhappy with the Darwinian brutality of free-market capitalism don't have any ready ideological alternative now. When it comes to the question of which system today is the most effective at generating rising standards of living, the historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism. Other systems may be able to distribute and divide income more efficiently and equitably, but none can generate income to distribute as efficiently as free-market capitalism. And more and more people now know that. So, ideologically speaking, there is no more mint chocolate chip, there is no more strawberry swirl and there is no more lemon-lime. Today there is only free-market vanilla and North Korea. There can be different brands of freemarket vanilla and you can adjust your society to it by going faster or slower. But, in the end, if you want higher standards of living in a world without walls, the free market is the only ideological alternative left. One road. Different speeds. But one road. When your country recognizes this fact, when it recognizes the rules of the free market in today's global economy, and decides to abide by them, it puts on what I call the Golden Strait Jacket. The Golden Straitjacket is the defining political-economic garment of this globalization era. The Cold War had the Mao suit, the Nehru jacket, the Russian fur. Globalization has only the Golden Straitjacket. If your country has not been fitted for one, it will be soon. No Mindset Shift – Human Nature Psychology makes the drive for growth inevitable—people aren’t satisfied with accepting less. Friedman 5 — Benjamin M. Friedman, William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University, former Chair of the Department of Economics at Harvard University, holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University, 2005 (“Rising Incomes, Individual Attitudes, and the Politics of Social Change,” The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Published by Knopf Publishing Group, ISBN 0679448918, p. 80-82) The key is that while everybody of course wants to have more income [end page 80] so as to enjoy a higher standard of living, better health, and a greater sense of security, our sense of what constitutes “more” for any of these purposes is mostly relative. Whenever people are asked how well off they think they are, they almost always respond by comparing their lives to some kind of reference point. 4 Further, whether most people think what they have or how they live constitutes “more” or “less” depends on how their circumstances compare to two separate benchmarks: their own (or their family’s) past experience, and how they see people around them living. The principal driving force underlying the positive influence that economic growth has over people’s attitudes, and through the political process therefore over the character of their society, is the interaction between how each of these two respective points of comparison affects people’s perceptions. Obviously nothing can enable the majority of the population to be better off than everyone else. But not only is it possible for most people to be better off than they used to be, that is precisely what economic growth means. The central question is whether, when people see that they are doing well (in other words, enjoying “more”) compared to the benchmark of their own prior experience, or their parents’—or when they believe that their children’s lives will be better still— they consequently feel less need to get ahead compared to other people. If so, then the reduced importance they attach to living better than others leads in the end to more wide-ranging benefits, for the society as a whole, whenever general living standards are increasing. Happiness depends, of course, on more than just money and the things money can buy. In surveys, most people say that their sense of satisfaction with their lives depends most on the strength of their family relationships and personal friendships, or their health, or their education, or their religious attachment, or their feeling of connection to a broader community beyond their own family, or their sense of being engaged in purposeful and productive work, or even on their everyday work environment. 5 In many surveys the single most important influence on adults’ happiness is whether they are married. (People who are, or who are living together as if they were, are typically happier.) 6 People with “extrovert” personalities also tend to be happier on average, perhaps simply because they have more friends. 7 Money matters too, however. People with more income typically enjoy not just a higher standard of living in terms of food, clothing, and housing but also better health (in part because of better access to medical care, but also because they drink and smoke less and get more exercise). They also have better educations and a stronger sense of security in the face of major life uncertainties. Familiar popular images of the business rat race [end page 81] notwithstanding, people with higher incomes on average also have more leisure time, and they mostly spend it in activities that foster the friendships they then say (in surveys) matter far more than money. Having at least some financial resources is even helpful in maintaining marriages, perhaps because it allows young couples to live on their own instead of with their parents. 8 At any given time, within a given country, people with lower incomes are far more likely to say that they are unhappy. 9 But the essential point is that how much income it takes to enjoy advantages like these is a relative matter, and the most obvious benchmark people have in mind when they draw such comparisons is their own past experience. People who live better now than they did before, or better than they recall their parents living, are likely to think they are doing well. Those who look back on better times— better for them and their families, that is— think they are not. As a result, psychological studies have repeatedly confirmed that people’s satisfaction depends less on the level of their income than on how it is changing. 10 But rising incomes are, in turn, what economic growth is all about.* * (footnote) The idea that satisfaction depends primarily on changes in economic well-being (to the extent that economic factors are important in this regard) is hardly new. Adam Smith observed that “all men, sooner or later, accommodate themselves to whatever becomes their permanent situation.” Hence “between one permanent situation and another, there [is], with regard to real happiness, no essential difference” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 149). Moreover, Smith claimed no originality for this view but attributed it to the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece. Natural survival instincts make capitalism inevitable and desirable Serwetman, ’97 (Will, JD Suffolk Law http://www.ninjalawyer.com/writing/marx.html) Karl Marx's work laid the foundation for the theories that redefined the left in the nineteenth century. He analyzed capitalism and concluded that while it was productive, the forces that drove it would lead to its inevitable collapse and replacement wi th communism. While Marx gave the world a great deal to think about and has influenced billions, his theories are inherently flawed. Some of the details have been addressed by modern Communists and Socialists, but the basic underlying assumptions of his work, when subjected to scrutiny, seem to conflict with reality. These assumptions lead me to question his conclusions regarding the forces that drive history, the self-consuming nature of capitalist society, and the viability of a communist society. Marx's first set of assumptions regards the nature of [hu]man[s]. He bases his materialist conception of human nature on that of B. Ludwig Fuerbach. Both men believed that a [hu]man[s are] is a product of his society. Every individual's beliefs, attitudes, and ideas a re absorbed at an early age by exposure to those of the world around him. This argument makes some sense but it ignores two things: the infinite and contradictory variety of experiences any society will produce and the evidence that [h]man's behavior will always be guided by certain instincts. Jeffery Dahmer and Martin Luther King were products of the same society. At some age, humans acquire the ability to learn and make their own decisions. At this point, we are free and can develop any way we choose. In a single day, a human being has bi llions of experiences, and he will learn from many of them. Man not only chooses which experiences to learn from, but what he learns. Which experiences influences us most and the degree of their influence is dependent upon our choices. Those choices are the only thing that separates the Dahmers and Martin Luther Kings of the world. However far into the childhood or the womb you take back our chain of experiences, there must be a starting point. That starting point is our subconscious and our base instincts. Man is a product of evolution. When Marx argued that there is no single nature of man because we're simply products of our society, he seemed to be overlooking the forces that made man what he is today. All living organisms possess a survival instinct, without which life could not exist. Humans are no exception; without a survival instinct there would be nothing to prevent us from starving ourselves out of negligence, hurling ourselves off of cliffs, or committing suicide when we're upset, any of whi ch would make the continuation of our species impossible. When we face danger or discomfort, human beings respond at a very basic level. Fear and desire are perfectly natural to us. We are separated from other living things, though, by our ability to reason. Nietzsche's most sensible argument was that conscious thought coupled with our survival instinct generates what he called a "will to power." "Will to power" is the application of conscious thought to our survival instinct. It allows us to formulate strategies for survival and act upon them. No theory of human nature is plausible unless it has definitive survival value, and it cannot be inhe rent to man unless it's in our genes. If it's not known to be in our DNA, we can't prove that it exists in all men. Survival instinct and conscious thought can be proven, so the existence of a will to power is hard to ignore. Even Marx acknowledges the human will in "Alienated Labor," although it plays no role in his theory. It is possible that there are other elements of human nature, not accounted for by the will to power, that we have not yet found in our DNA. Looking at human history, we can empirically observe a sense of compassion in men that helps us build the great societies that we have. By compassion, I refer to our general distaste for watching other human beings suffer--those that enjoy suffering cannot function in society, and so do not reproduce as often. Natural selection weeds out people who cannot live wit h others. Marx believed that man could acquire compassion and genuine concern for his comrades simply by making it important in post-capitalist society. This would not only take generations to instill in society, but it there is no reason to believe tha t any given individual would embrace it. Because Marx's materialist view on humanity does not acknowledge our nature, his ideal reflects the same mistakes. If human nature can be changed, as he feels it can simply by changing our society that we live in, why should we live with the inequities of capitalism? The problem is that his assumptions are backed by no credible arguments. If one accepts the materialist conception of the world at face value, then most of what Marx wrote will be consistent. If one disagrees with the way Marx sees manki nd, however, and takes a more Nietzschean view, the Marxist ideal is a prescription for disaster. Due to our naturally distrustful, greedy, and ambitious natures, which precede capitalism, humans will not motivate themselves to do anything unless there is a reward. Their survival instinct won't let them. Competition isn't just good for men--it's necessary. If there were no competition for the things we need, we would just take them and copulate and nothing else. While the species might survive, it would not progress, and we can live better. Competing for resources forces us to establish our identities and do more than just sit there and exist. Our will to power drives us to accumulate food, money, and control in order to maximize our chances of survival and reproduction. As long as our nature remains unchangeable, We will never be able to adjust to life in a Marxist society. Marx's economic theory is flawed as well, since it ignores the role of individuals and looks only at groups. The genius of a few individuals is all that has kept mankind raised from the life in nature that Hobbes called "brutish, nasty and short." The individuals responsible for these achievements were generally not rewarded until the advent of capitalism and is industrial revolution, which has increased our rates of progress exponentially. If these few contributors weren't punished for their differences , they spent their lives working humbly under the "patronage" of feudal lords. Capitalism encourages individuals to make their contributions and spread them throughout the world, raising all of mankind higher and higher from our natural, animal-lik e existence. Human Nature Beckerman, emeritus fellow at Balliol College, Oxford, 1995 (Wilfred, “Through green-colored glasses: environmentalism reconsidered”, pg 21) Most criticisms of economic growth not only contain errors of logic or fact. They are also divorced from political reality. Even if it could be demonstrated that economic growth does not lead to a rise in welfare, it would still not follow that we should try to bring growth to a halt. For, I the absence of some transformation in human attitudes, the like of which has never been seen in spite of constant admonitions by powerful religions for thousands of years, human nature has not yet abandoned the goal of increased prosperity. To some people this goal is a denial of holiness. But to others it is a testament of the infinite variety of the human spirit. And to some it is an opportunity to rid the world of poverty and drudgery. This means that if growth were to be abandoned as an objective of policy, democracy too would have to be abandoned. And, as the experience of the 1980’s has demonstrated, even totalitarian regimes cannot, in the end, survive if they fail to deliver the increase in living standards to which their populations aspire. No Mindset Shift – ResiliencyCrisis strengthens capitalism --- no transition Mead, 9 – Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow in U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations (Walter Russell, “Only Makes You Stronger,” The New Republic, 2/4/09, http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=571cbbb9-2887-4d81-8542-92e83915f5f8&p=2) Even before the Panic of 2008 sent financial markets into turmoil and launched what looks like the worst global recession in decades, talk of American decline was omnipresent. In the long term, the United States faces the rise of Asia and the looming fiscal problems posed by Medicare and other entitlement programs. In the short term, there is a sense that, after eight years of George W. Bush, the world, full of disdain for our way of life, seems to be spinning out of our--and perhaps anybody's--control. The financial panic simply brought all that simmering anxiety to a boil, and the consensus now seems to be that the United States isn't just in danger of decline, but in the full throes of it--the beginning of a "post-American" world. Perhaps--but the long history of capitalism suggests another possibility. After all, capitalism has seen a steady procession of economic crises and panics, from the seventeenth-century Tulip Bubble in the Netherlands and the Stop of the Exchequer under Charles II in England through the Mississippi and South Sea bubbles of the early eighteenth century, on through the crises associated with the Napoleonic wars and the spectacular economic crashes that repeatedly wrought havoc and devastation to millions throughout the nineteenth century. The panics of 1837, 1857, 1873, 1893, and 1907 were especially severe, culminating in the Great Crash of 1929, which set off a depression that would not end until World War II. The series of crises continued after the war, and the last generation has seen the Penn Central bankruptcy in 1970, the first Arab oil crisis of 1973, the Third World debt crisis of 1982, the S&L crisis, the Asian crisis of 1997, the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2001, and today's global financial meltdown. And yet, this relentless series of crises has not disrupted the rise of a global capitalist system, centered first on the power of the United Kingdom and then, since World War II, on the power of the United States. After more than 300 years, it seems reasonable to conclude that financial and economic crises do not, by themselves, threaten either the international capitalist system or the special role within it of leading capitalist powers like the United Kingdom and the United States. If anything, the opposite seems true--that financial crises in some way sustain Anglophone power and capitalist development. Indeed, many critics of both capitalism and the "Anglo-Saxons" who practice it so aggressively have pointed to what seems to be a perverse relationship between such crises and the consolidation of the "core" capitalist economies against the impoverished periphery. Marx noted that financial crises remorselessly crushed weaker companies, allowing the most successful and ruthless capitalists to cement their domination of the system. For dependency theorists like Raul Prebisch, crises served a similar function in the international system, helping stronger countries marginalize and impoverish developing ones. Setting aside the flaws in both these overarching theories of capitalism, this analysis of economic crises is fundamentally sound--and especially relevant to the current meltdown. Cataloguing the early losses from the financial crisis, it's hard not to conclude that the central capitalist nations will weather the storm far better than those not so central. Emerging markets have been hit harder by the financial crisis than developed ones as investors around the world seek the safe haven provided by U.S. Treasury bills, and commodity-producing economies have suffered extraordinary shocks as commodity prices crashed from their record, boom-time highs. Countries like Russia, Venezuela, and Iran, which hoped to use oil revenue to mount a serious political challenge to American power and the existing world order, face serious new constraints. Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad must now spend less time planning big international moves and think a little bit harder about domestic stability. Far from being the last nail in America's coffin, the financial crisis may actually resuscitate U.S. power relative to its rivals The biggest loser of the financial crisis thus far seems to have been Russia, a country that stormed into 2008 breathing fire and boasting of its renewed great-power status. After years of military decline, it put its strategic bombers back in the air; sent its fleet to the Caribbean; and reintroduced displays of martial power to Kremlin parades. Petrodollars filled government coffers, and political dissent at home had largely disappeared. Russia's troubles had been eased by the effective suppression of the Chechen insurgency, while America's troubles remained severe, with the U.S. military mired in two wars. When its troops invaded Georgia, Russia seemed once again to be acting like a great power--and not a very nice one. A2: Revolution / MovementsNeolib’s inevitable and movements are getting smothered out of existence—no alternative economic system Their alt is doomed without institutional engagement --- lack of a political alternative makes neolib and cap inev --- also takes out uniqueness Jones 11—Owen, Masters at Oxford, named one of the Daily Telegraph's 'Top 100 Most Influential People on the Left' for 2011, author of "Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class", The Independent, UK, "Owen Jones: Protest without politics will change nothing", 2011, www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/owen-jones-protest-without-politics-will-change-nothing-2373612.html My first experience of police kettling was aged 16. It was May Day 2001, and the anti-globalisation movement was at its peak. The turn-of-the-century anti-capitalist movement feels largely forgotten today, but it was a big deal at the time. To a left-wing teenager growing up in an age of unchallenged neo-liberal triumphalism, just to have "anti-capitalism" flash up in the headlines was thrilling. Thousands of apparently unstoppable protesters chased the world's rulers from IMF to World Bank summits – from Seattle to Prague to Genoa – and the authorities were rattled. Today, as protesters in nearly a thousand cities across the world follow the example set by the Occupy Wall Street protests, it's worth pondering what happened to the anti-globalisation movement. Its activists did not lack passion or determination. But they did lack a coherent alternative to the neo-liberal project. With no clear political direction, the movement was easily swept away by the jingoism and turmoil that followed 9/11, just two months after Genoa. Don't get me wrong: the Occupy movement is a glimmer of sanity amid today's economic madness. By descending on the West's financial epicentres, it reminds us of how a crisis caused by the banks (a sentence that needs to be repeated until it becomes a cliché) has been cynically transformed into a crisis of public spending. The founding statement of Occupy London puts it succinctly: "We refuse to pay for the banks' crisis." The Occupiers direct their fire at the top 1 per cent, and rightly so – as US billionaire Warren Buffett confessed: "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." The Occupy movement has provoked fury from senior US Republicans such as Presidential contender Herman Cain who – predictably – labelled it "anti-American". They're right to be worried: those camping outside banks threaten to refocus attention on the real villains, and to act as a catalyst for wider dissent. But a coherent alternative to the tottering global economic order remains, it seems, as distant as ever.
There's always a presumption that a crisis of capitalism is good news for the left. Yet in the Great Depression, fascism consumed much of Europe. The economic crisis of the 1970s did lead to a resurgence of radicalism on both left and right. But, spearheaded by Thatcherism and Reaganism, the New Right definitively crushed its opposition in the 1980s.This time round, there doesn't even seem to be an alternative for the right to defeat. That's not the fault of the protesters. In truth, the left has never recovered from being virtually smothered out of existence. It was the victim of a perfect storm: the rise of the New Right; neo-liberal globalisation; and the repeated defeats suffered by the trade union movement. Decline doesn’t cause revolution – decreases class solidarity Greer, ’11 (John Michael, Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (still probably more qualified than their authors), “How Not To Play The Game,” 6/30, http://www.countercurrents.org/greer300611.htm, bgm) The gutting of social safety nets, the slashing of salaries and benefits, and the impoverishment of millions of previously affluent people are part of that process, and lead to a rising spiral of social conflict that may well push a good many nations into crisis or collapse. Not, it’s probably worth noting, into revolution. It’s an interesting detail of history that revolutions rarely happen in ages of decline; the classic recipe for revolution is an extended period of economic improvement for the bulk of the population, followed by a standstill or a reversal. (The government of China would do well to take note of this.) In times of decline, the class and group solidarity essential to an effective revolution dissolves into a scramble for slices of a shrinking pie, in which your own peers are usually your worst enemies. Mind you, social hierarchies get fed through a blender in times of decline; the former holders of wealth and power tolerably often end up starving in alleys if they don’t simply get their throats cut, while sufficiently ruthless individuals from well down the ladder can climb right up to the top. Sill, the general trend in ages of scarcity is that the circle of people who have access to wealth and privilege narrows step by step, leaving most of their former peers to scramble for scraps or to claw their way into the charmed circle by fair means or foul. No political crises Stelzer 9 Irwin Stelzer is a business adviser and director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute, “Death of capitalism exaggerated,” http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26174260-5013479,00.html A FUNNY thing happened on the way to the collapse of market capitalism in the face of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. It didn't. Indeed, in Germany voters relieved Chancellor Angela Merkel of the necessity of cohabiting with a left-wing party, allowing her to form a coalition with a party favouring lower taxes and free markets. And in Pittsburgh leaders representing more than 90 per cent of the world's GDP convened to figure out how to make markets work better, rather than to hoist the red flag. The workers are to be relieved, not of their chains but of credit-card terms that are excessively onerous, and helped to retain their private property - their homes. All of this is contrary to expectations. The communist spectre that Karl Marx confidently predicted would be haunting Europe is instead haunting Europe's left-wing parties, with even Vladimir Putin seeking to attract investment by re-privatising the firms he snatched. Which raises an interesting question: why haven't the economic turmoil and rising unemployment led workers to the barricades, instead of to their bankers to renegotiate their mortgages? It might be because Spain's leftish government has proved less able to cope with economic collapse than countries with more centrist governments. Or because Britain, with a leftish government, is now the sick man of Europe, its financial sector in intensive care, its recovery likely to be the slowest in Europe, its prime credit rating threatened. Or it might be because left-wing trade unions, greedily demanding their public-sector members be exempted from the pain they want others to share, have lost their credibility and ability to lead a leftward lurch. All of those factors contribute to the unexpected strength of the Right in a world in which a record number of families are being tossed out of their homes, and jobs have been disappearing by the million. But even more important in promoting reform over revolution are three factors: the existence of democratic institutions; the condition of the unemployed; and the set of policies developed to cope with the recession. Democratic institutions give the aggrieved an outlet for their discontent, and hope they can change conditions they deem unsatisfactory. Don't like the way George W. Bush has skewed income distribution? Toss the Republicans out and elect a man who promises to tax the rich more heavily. Don't like Gordon Brown's tax increases? Toss him out and hope the Tories mean it when they promise at least to try to lower taxes. Result: angry voters but no rioters, unless one counts the nutters who break windows at McDonald's or storm banks in the City. Contrast that with China, where the disaffected have no choice but to take to the streets. Result: an estimated 10,000 riots this year protesting against job losses, arbitrary taxes and corruption. A second factor explaining the Left's inability to profit from economic suffering is capitalism's ability to adapt, demonstrated in the Great Depression of the 1930s. While a gaggle of bankers and fiscal conservatives held out for the status quo, Franklin D. Roosevelt and his experimenters began to weave a social safety net. In Britain, William Beveridge produced a report setting the stage for a similar, indeed stronger, net. Continental countries recovering from World War II did the same. So unemployment no longer dooms a worker to close-to-starvation. Yes, civic institutions were able to soften the blow for the unemployed before the safety net was put in place, but they could not cope with pervasive protracted lay-offs. Also, during this and other recessions, when prices for many items are coming down, the real living standard of those in work actually improves. In the US, somewhere between 85 per cent and 90 per cent of workers have kept their jobs, and now see their living costs declining as rents and other prices come down. So the impetus to take to the streets is limited. Then there are the steps taken by capitalist governments to limit the depth and duration of the downturn. As the economies of most of the big industrial countries imploded, policy went through two phases. The first was triage - do what is necessary to prevent the financial system from collapse. Spend. Guarantee deposits to prevent runs on banks and money funds, bail out big banks, force relatively healthier institutions to take over sicker ones, mix all of this with rhetorical attacks on greedy bankers - the populist spoonful of sugar that made the bailouts go down with the voters - and stop the rot. Meanwhile, have the central banks dust off their dog-eared copies of Bagehot and inject lots of liquidity by whatever means comes to mind. John Maynard Keynes, meet Milton Friedman for a cordial handshake. Then came more permanent reform, another round of adapting capitalism to new realities, in this case the malfunctioning of the financial markets. Even Barack Obama's left-wing administration decided not to scupper the markets but instead to develop rules to relate bankers' pay more closely to long-term performance; to reduce the chance of implosions by increasing the capital banks must hold, cutting their profits and dividends, but leaving them in private hands; and to channel most stimulus spending through private-sector companies. This leaves the anti-market crowd little room for manoeuvre as voters seem satisfied with the changes to make capitalism and markets work better and more equitably. At least so far. There are exceptions. Australia moved a bit to the left in the last election, but more out of unhappiness with a tired incumbent's environmental and foreign policy. Americans chose Obama, but he had promised to govern from the centre before swinging left. And for all his rhetorical attacks on greedy bankers and other malefactors of great wealth, he sticks to reform of markets rather than their replacement, with healthcare a possible exception. Even in these countries, so far, so good for reformed capitalism. No substitutes accepted. A2: TrainerHistory proves elites will use strong incentives to maintain consumerism, and they’ll crush any serious transition with violence – Trainer’s wrong. Fotopoulos 2000 (Takis Fotopoulous, Greek political writer and former academic, “The limitations of life-style strategies: The Ecovillage “Movement” is NOT the way toward a enw democratic society,” http://www.democracynature.org/vol6/takis_trainer_reply.htm) However, before we proceed to assess Trainer’s stand on the matter we have to clarify the meaning of confrontation with the system. In a broad sense, this confrontation means any kind of activity which aims to confront rather than to bypass the system, at any stage of the transition to a new society. Such activities could include both direct action and life-style activities, as well as other forms of action aiming at creating alternative institutions at a significant social scale through, for instance, the taking over of local authorities. The condition for such activities to be characterised as confronting the system is that they are an integral part of a mass political movement for systemic change. This type of confrontation does not involve in principle any physical violence, apart from self-defence in the case, for instance, of direct action, although it should be expected that the elites will extensively use any form of violence - particularly economic violence - to crush such a movement. On the other hand, in a narrow sense, confrontation means the physical confrontation with the mechanisms of physical violence which the elites may use against a movement for systemic change and refers exclusively to the final stage of the transition towards an alternative society. On the basis of the above definition of confrontation it is obvious that the two paradigms do not differ significantly as regards the possibility of confrontation in a narrow sense. Thus, for the ID project, whether the transition towards an ID will be marked by a physical confrontation with the elites will depend entirely on their attitude at the final stage of transformation of society, i.e. on whether they will accept peacefully such a transition, or whether they will prefer instead to use physical violence to crush it, as is most likely given that the transition will deprive them of all their privileges. Trainer also accepts the possibility of such a conflict: ‘If someday we do find ourselves in mortal conflict with capitalism then so be it, but the strategic situation will then be quite different to what it is now’.[28] Still, it seems that Trainer, in consistence with the focus on values rather than on institutions which characterises his paradigm, attempts to support the hypothesis that the system could be bypassed and a physical confrontation might be avoided, even at the very final stage of transition. However, the examples of the Eastern block regimes and of South Africa that he uses to justify his hypothesis are hardly convincing. A brief digression on the collapse of these regimes might be useful in understanding the unrealistic nature of this hypothesis. It is clear that to understand the reasons for the collapse of a regime one has to consider the nature and the causes of it. Thus, on the basis of the first criterion, the South Africa example is not relevant to the systemic change that we have been discussing here. What happened there was not a replacement of one type of social and economic system by another but a restructuring of the ruling political and economic elites to include members of the black majority. Although the average black individual, as a result of this change, gained more civil rights and liberties than before, s/he is still not going to be less heteronomous than the average citizen in the North —the topic of discussion here. On the basis of the second criterion, the collapse of the Eastern European blocks is also not relevant to the kind of systemic change that we are considering. As I attempted to show elsewhere,[29] it was the internal contradictions of these regimes which led to their collapse, as a result of the lack of any effective popular base to support them. This is because what reproduces a social system in the long term is not just the threat of physical violence but, mainly, the provision of adequate incentives which will gain the support, or at least the tolerance, of the majority of the population. It was therefore the failure of these regimes to provide such incentives, like the ones provided by Western regimes, which led to their collapse. Thus, first, the failure of ideological incentives was inevitable in a system characterised by a fundamental contradiction between the official ideology of economic equality and the reality of concentration of power. Second, the lack of effective material incentives, (positive or negative), similar to the ones provided in the West, made the long-term survival of the system impossible. Consumerism, a powerful positive incentive, was impossible in the East, given the relatively low level of economic development and the drainage on resources, as a result of the military competition with the West, imposed by the latter in its effort to choke any threat against the market economy. Also, the threat of unemployment, a basic negative material incentive used to undermine any effective social action against a system, was ruled out by an official ideology which even imposed a constitutional guarantee of full employment. On the other hand, the system of the market economy and representative democracy provides enough ideological and material incentives to create a ‘contented’ majority in the North (or a similar minority in the South), and at the same time achieve the tolerance of most of the rest of the population. It is these incentives which, together with the occasional use of physical violence, especially in the South, enable the ruling elites to keep power , rather than the use of physical power. However, when such incentives do not work and a serious threat to the market system develops (as for instance it happened in Germany during the Great Deppression or frequently happened in the post-war period in the South), the ruling elites will have no hesitation to use physical violence. The examples, therefore, given by Trainer to justify his hypothesis about the possibility of radical systemic change without confrontation are not representative at all. Had he wanted to be convincing he should have provided evidence of capitalist regimes which fell without confrontation and, as far as I know, History is not exactly full of such examples! Trainer agrees—transition will require unanimous agreement and will take decades if even possibleTed Trainer, New South Wales professor, ‘95 [The Conserver Society: Alternatives for Sustainability, pg210] This is an unspectacular and possibly disappointing conclusion. It would be nice if one could at this point detail heroic, action-packed strategies guaranteed to establish conserver society quickly. But, as we have seen, the transition requires radical structural change in the economy and in the geography of settlements and such changes cannot begin to be made until most people agree to them. This in turn is not possible until people in general understand the reasons for the changes, and regard the alternatives as viable and attractive. The transition might take another 20 or 30 years, possibly much more. We must therefore be ready for a long haul, in effect for a lifetime of patiently working for what is at present a very distant goal. Collapse doesn’t solve- gradual change is better than disruptive changeTed Trainer, New South Wales professor, ‘95 [The Conserver Society: Alternatives for Sustainability, pg15] At best it will probably take decades for the changes under discussion to be achieved. Sudden and disruptive change is not necessary. It could be a process of gradually building new arrangements within the old geography and systems, so that more and more people can move from the consumer way to the conserver way, Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.56 Mb. Share with your friends:
|