Reform Movement in the West and Confusion with ‘Capitalism'

Reform Movement in the West and Confusion with ‘Capitalism'

A great people’s movement is sweeping around the world without easy equals in recent times short of the democratic strides that were made the world over in the 1830s and 1840s.

Even with that in mind it is unique because this time the Bolivarian reforms in Latin

America, the Arab and muslim movements are ahead of the Western intellect and initiative that eventually resurfaced with the occupy movement.

And that is fine, except that its not yet worked out in which ways our Western reform thinking and activism are still to weak to actually break through. The movement will go where it goes but there is one small step ahead we can take. I am examining a very popular but a bit inaccurate approach that is quite typically used, especially as a way of summing up a situation. I think there is a downside in continuously confronting injustice by naming it as the so called ‘capitalism’. I am trying to show how this prevents a process of clarification and the building of a forceful momentum. By way of deep organizing, political, labour and rural movement grew powerful in times past exactly to such game changing levels.

The West is still the West for better or worse, from Spain to Greece to Italy, to Ireland, Germany, the US, Canada and many other great countries. Now as in the 1840s there is a remarkably common set of perceptions and also misperceptions that circumscribe the scene. It is a different narrative in Latin America and the illegal but successful mass strikes in China against sweatshop working conditions seem to remember European and North American labour history better than we do.

What is the Gordian knot problem in the story? What we have not quite inherited from movements before our time and in other places is the authentic bite in word and direction that gave and gives them positive populist ascendency. In the 17 and 18 hundreds middle class and capitalist sectors in society demanded from kings and feudal elites to scale back militarism, financial manipulation and real estate speculation. The first British PM Robert Walpole stopped the ruinous Great South Sea real estate bubble in Britain and launched infant industry investment by government initiative with phenomenal success. New found power and confidence engaged in and merged into many progressive trends. By way of struggle and also consensus, goals like education, children’s rights, suffrage, old age security and access to medical treatment materialized over time. New ways of a social contract emerged. Social rights morphed out of a slow swap with common wealth of in many situations once free pastures, security providing village life and treasures of the woods of a rural world that was invaded by industries.

Political and economic rights were achieved against feudal elites sometimes allied with industrial elites. But many capitalists like Robert Owen, Friedrich Engels and Andrew Carnegie but also Henry Ford and others supported workers partly because they were aware that their own means grew because of worker productivity as close twin to worker well being.

If there is a crisis of capitalism it means exactly that, a crisis in which two centuries of progressive trends, a lot of constructive, dynamic but also adversarially arrived at  achievements and characteristics are given up in favour of a pre industrial reach back. From a vantage point of consideration and heritage of who we are it hurts to hear from well meaning people the repetitious verbalism of challenging so called ‘capitalism’, regardless of how empty and misleading the false front has become. It follows that the capitalism criticism has a habit of calling crime proceeds profits, and there is more costly beautification.

What is the effect of this, how does confusion stall reform? Its not helpful to provide, with the capitalist label, unintentional acceptance or slack opposition to a wide range of reactionary trends of militarism, mercantilism and morbid banking monopolies. Further there is subsidization of outdated energy technology and marginalization of entrepreneurial infant industry. We see a revival of 18th century inspired commons enclosures in the privatization of commons spheres like water and generally in the destruction of ecological survival. In best feudal tradition discourse has become stilted and ritualized through the fabrication of free-trade foundations that never existed, anti science magic and anti literacy oriented image obsession. All these represent, significantly so, neo-feudal, anti democratic illnesses which are not actively clarified. Their proponents receive a free ride with the endorsement of being called capitalist. The imposter image of ‘capitalism’ is waterproofed by way of having it certified by its critics. We are shooting ourselves in the foot by validating totalitarian class warriors, criminals and ideologues who parade as market based entrepreneurs. In short, don’t empower the SOB positions. 

Michael Moore made a doc film presenting a notion which is well captured in the film’s title “Capitalism a Love Story”. And then his empathetically told stories of injustice caused by robbery evaporated somewhat by barking up the wrong tree.

Who is in love with what and who can’t let go of it?

Just look at the downward spiral of manufacturing in North America, capital investment in the production of goods which constitutes, which defines capitalism, is in full retreat. Feudal colonialism really comes home to many places in the West with a gas fracking craze that reminds of King Leopold’s obsession for resource extraction in the Congo. A hasty industrial retreat is not without consequences as exporting jobs and giving up on infrastructure progress here also means to literally poison labour and life conditions as well as land and water and invade self determination for people in China and other developing countries; Aside to blindly burning away, as transport diesel, the petrochemical production base of their and our future generations in the name of a giddy shipping frenzy, called globalization that has run its course.

Totalitarian democracy like other dictatorial systems tend to build on false populism, on the demonization of government and its representative purpose. Sounds like incoherent nonsense?  Yes, because incoherency, magical thinking, anti literacy without memory deploying a drunken populism has always been the game of authoritarian rule.

The occupy movement has not yet grown out of the mesmeric impact of overwhelming media mind control in the west, embedded in plenty of false imagery from the ‘capitalism’ road show. Somewhere in that particular culture wasteland the emergence of a galvanizing and grounded narrative for progress is stuck so far.

Let’s  find a way to escape this long lasting flatness of pop culture, of the soaps and the Simpsons, of a teenage way of relating to the world without attention to elders, without carrying memory and without admiring wonder.

Our problems with relativism and false populism go on in the digital era with an uncritical enthusiasm for distorted rightwing and racist interpretations in movies like Zeitgeist and Strive. It shows how vulnerable we are to confusion tactics that sow doubt into our minds and distrust into our ability to produce true leadership.

In contrast the Bolivarian, the social democratic reformers in Latin America evolved by very carefully thinking through a difference between capital investment in production and innovation and education, be it private or public, and the destruction of neoliberal thinking. Because they understood the latter as an anti democratic, anti justice orientation towards outdated ways of speculation and colonialism. Consequently there was and is no lack of intellectual dynamics that would limit a reform process from becoming a transformative and self determining movement. 

Its not easy for us after decades of hypnotic saturation exposure to neoliberal media propaganda defrauding us from much of memory and reality. 

But galvanizing power, leadership and vision in a democracy movement is always possible if the narrative has the courage of a Midas touch. Think about the Matewan miner strike in West Virginia or the far reaching reforms that came out of the Mackenzie Papineau rebellion in Upper Canada. Overcome was a laziness to think, to debate, or even look.

From there the virtues, the vitality of communities together with investment in infant industries, like green energy, intense ecological agriculture, commons spheres like transportation, healthcare and education and remembering freedom of association for workers and neighbourhoods, can be renewed.

We have no time to loose in building strength and rolling with the punches. There is peace to achieve and to keep, as war and jingoism are the methods with which wounded empires attack solidarity.