Crisis, Crisis, Everywhere!

From Michael Albert's blog (author of Parecon: Life After Capitalism)...

"(1) Capitalism is in crisis all the time. Thus, millions upon millions of people dying from preventable starvation or lack of medication ought to count as crisis. Billions of people occupying economic roles that deny them dignity and influence even over their own immediate conditions much less over broader social relations, ought to count as crisis. Indeed, there is an almost endless litany of despicable pain and suffering capitalist economics daily imposes on humanity, even when operating optimally, whether via low or no wages, via low or no concern for ecological disaster, via low or no attention to social and collective needs, or via low regard for human potential, dignity, and capacity - save for how these can be commercialized into obscenity.

(2) Capitalism is only publicly recognized to be in crisis, however, when its deadly decay escalates to affect those at the top - which is why we now say, hey, this week capitalism is in crisis, whereas a year back, with only slightly less human costs piling up - we didn't say it was in crisis. There is a balance sheet. Some peoples' suffering counts - their's. Some peoples' suffering doesn't count - our's.

(3) Mainstream efforts to deal with the dislocations capitalism wreaks upon us, as well as with its more typical slip slide on a less rocky road, always seek to preserve or even enlarge the advantages of elites while maintaining systemic relations that afford the possibility of those elites continuing to accrue advantages. Mainstream efforts, that is, seek first to enrich the rich at the expense of whoever is in the way - and second to ensure that greed doesn't get so out of hand that it threatens the overall conditions of enrichment.

(4) We can therefore aconfidently predict, despite our wider confusion, that owners and their minions in universities and think tanks, not to mention on the boards of their companies, will in the current upheaval scurry around mightily seeking to right their ship - which means seeking to return to a condition that is only moderately disruptive to them while still allowing a generalized rip-off of everyone else." (full article here)

And from James Ferguson's Expectations of Modernity, a case study on Zambia, failed by a system that blames it for failing...

"the abjected, redlined spaces of decline and disinvestments in the contemporary global economy are as much a part of the geography of capitalism as the booming zones of enterprise and prosperity--they reveal less the outside of the system than its underbelly...disconnection and abjection occur within capitalism, not outside it."