The Endtimers
Both the Christian and Muslim religions mythology contain stories of the End of Days, fought out in a battle at Armageddon, which is just outside modern day Damascus. For the Christians, the myth involves a clash between the forces of good and evil, based on the Revelations of John. As I set out here, - Suffering With A Bad Code - the real meaning of this Revelation, and who actually wrote it was known long ago. For Muslims a similar picture is painted - End-Time – and it has come to also symbolise the culmination of the struggle between the Sunni and Shia factions.
There are, in fact, more Christian religious zealots who visit Israel to see where this final battle is expected to start, than there are Jewish visitors to the country. Not surprisingly, they come from the home of Christian religious fundamentalism, the United States. But, as I pointed out some time ago - Morons On The March - these clerical-fascists do not just visit the place they hope is going to be the site for the end of the world, they also contribute large sums of money trying to help that process along the way. These nutters comprise around 10 million people in the United States, and they exert considerable political influence. Sarah Palin belongs to a Church where these ridiculous and dangerous ideas are promoted.
The reason this is important is that this kind of ideology is wholly incompatible with the kind of social democratic ideology that underpins modern capitalism. The latter seeks to further the interests of big industrial capital on the basis of an historic compromise with the workers. Capital seeks to expand by extracting more and more relative surplus value from the workers, whilst the workers accede to that increased exploitation, so long as, overall, Capital continues to improve their standard of living. If conditions are such that Capital cannot expand, then workers have to make sacrifices so that this supposed orderly progress can resume.
Over the last few days, as the US Government has now been shut down for 4 days, and as October 17th approaches, when the US could default on its debts, unless a deal is done to raise the Debt Ceiling, the markets have been remarkably sanguine. The reason is that they expect that the basic social democratic consensus that underpins modern bourgeois democracy will result in such a typically social-democratic compromise. The Republicans will fume, and profess their commitment to small government and balanced budgets, but in the end they will reach a deal with the Democrats for the US Budget to grow even bigger, and for it to be paid for by engaging in even greater borrowing. The markets are probably correct in that analysis. Increasing pressure from Big Business on the John Boehner and the Republican leaders will probably result in them baulking, and defying their own membership. Boehner himself may have to sacrifice his position as House Speaker to bring it about, but a deal is likely.
But, what is different than in the past is the role of the Tea Party. There is not a 1:1 correspondence between the Tea Party and the Endtimers, but both represent the same kind of social strata, and the ideas that spring from it. When you are dealing with people who actively work towards the end of the world, then all previous calculations of what is rational, and how rational people are likely to behave goes out of the window. The Endtimers have no interest in compromising with their religious opponents. They actively seek a war in the Middle East between Israel and surrounding states, because they believe it will be the prelude to the End of Days. The Libertarians and the Tea Party have no interest in compromising with their political opponents, because they believe that the US Republic has become corrupt and decayed, that it has succumbed to Socialism, and that Obama is a socialist dictator. And, to be clear, in this vision they do not see the large, capitalist corporations as their allies either. On the contrary, those huge, monopolistic corporations for them are equally part of the problem, because they are themselves a part of the huge corporate, socialist state that oppresses them.
Their world view is shaped by the kind of idea put forward by Hayek in the “The Road To Serfdom”, where he writes,
“Apart from the intellectual influences we have illustrated by two instances, the impetus of the movement towards totalitarianism comes mainly from the two great vested interests, organised capital and organised labour. Probably, the greatest menace of all is the fact that the policies of these two most powerful groups point to the same direction.
They do this through their common, and often concerted, support of the monopolistic organisation of industry; and it is this tendency which is the great immediate danger...
This movement is, of course, deliberately planned mainly by the capitalist organisers of monopolies, and they are thus one of the main sources of this danger. Their responsibility is not altered by the fact that their aim is not a totalitarian system, but rather a sort of corporative society in which the organised industries would appear as semi-independent and self-governing 'estates'.”
(pp 144-5, Routledge and Keegan Paul Ed. 1979)
Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, this Chapter is not included in the online version provided by the Institute of Economic Affairs.
The Neo-Austrian School of Hayek and Mises, are the classic representative of the sections of the bourgeoisie that is rooted in the past, and who's ideas like the feudal aristocracy are in Marx's words, “always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.”
Hayek and Mises may well have been perceptive, and indeed sharp in their criticism of this historic compromise between organised labour and organised capital that the modern bourgeois social democratic state represented, but like Feudal Socialism, their opposition to it was wholly reactionary, an attempt to turn the clock back to a previous golden era for the section of Capital their ideas represent, but which can never return.
However, much Conservatives, be they those of Thatcher or Reagan in the 1980's, or those of Cameron and the Tea Party today, attempt to turn the clock back to further the interests of the small capitalists, the same logic of the march of modern industry, which led to the creation of the modern bourgeois social democratic state, which requires the presence of a large welfare state to regulate the economy and to socialise the working class, continues to undermine them, not least in the actions of the permanent bureaucracy of that state, and its links via a thousands golden threads to the dominant sections of Capital.
And yet, it would be a very crude, economic determinist view, which failed to recognise that the material interests of that section of capital, which makes up the majority of the membership of the Tory Party, of the Republicans, and of other right-wing populist parties across Europe, and along with its attendant layers makes up the majority of electoral support for these parties, also presses down upon them, and the policies they are thereby led to espouse. And, in espousing them, a dynamic of its own is thereby developed similar to that described by Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire, which pushes ever rightwards. In its turn, it fuels the support for parties and factions often well to the Right of the mainstream of such parties, the Tea Party in the Republicans, the Tory Euro-sceptics, and UKIP etc. Similar developments and the establishment of similar groups can be seen across Europe.
The Tories espousal of austerity and anti-Europeanism has created a rod for their own back in the shape of UKIP, whose existence now forces an electoral strategy on them they would not choose. In the US, the threat of being “primaried”, i.e. deselected by Tea Party opposition in the primary elections, has worried Republican politicians more than the possibility of losing in the actual General Election. It is that fear, which now stalks the Republican Party, and now forces its mainstream leaders to accommodate it, and to bring the US to the brink of defaulting on its debts, thereby undermining its economic credibility, and sending the world financial system into chaos.
The markets should not count on the Endtimers compromising. They may see an end of days, for an economic system they see as corrupt and socialist as something to be welcomed rather than avoided.
No comments:
Post a Comment