by Linda Burnham
Capitalism in crisis is a sight to behold. Most of the
time the system seems to hum along quite nicely. Oh,
maybe a passel of people loses their jobs when some
big-headed suit at the top decides to up and move on to
a cheaper labor market. And maybe a city or two, or
even a whole region, goes bankrupt and destitute, shops
boarded up, ghosts in the street. Maybe a generation of
young people ends up poorly educated because nobody
could figure out how to turn a decent profit schooling
ten-year-olds, so it slid down to the bottom of the
priority list. Maybe there's an aberration here or
there, like the positive incentive to filling up
prisons. But overall, the thing has the reputation of
the proverbial well-oiled machine, humming along and
delivering the greatest good to the greatest number.
And besides, it's the only machine in town.
But then it breaks down. Spectacularly.
And it turns out that this highest possible form of
human development has more than a few foundational
flaws, the relevant one at the moment being that it is
subject, inevitably and constitutionally, to periodic,
devastating crisis.
At such moments the verities of capital are called into
question, and not by the closet Marxists and nostalgic
revolutionaries. No, the capitalists themselves, in
deed if not in word, are heaving great chunks of their
ideology overboard. Invisible hand of the market? Heave
ho. Limited government intervention in business? Heave
ho. Self-correcting system? Heave ho. Whatever it takes
to re-stabilize the system, let's do it. Principles be
damned.
The pragmatic and temporary abandonment of core
ideological beliefs is a great unmasking. And behind
the mask - fear, befuddlement, bravado.
The lords of finance live in a universe in which they
are rewarded for being both insatiable and delusional.
With maximizing profits as their single imperative they
toil daily at the task of turning every human
relationship and every form of matter - animal,
vegetable or mineral - into a monetized asset. The only
limits on how many ways that monetized asset can be
reconfigured and repackaged; the only limits on how
many times it can be resold; the only limits on how
many ways profit can be wrung out of it are the limits
of the imagination. We're human; our imagination is
without limits. We've figured out how to buy, sell and
lease the air space above buildings and the wind
blowing across the plains. And here you thought
'inherit the wind' was just a metaphor. But at least
the air is a substance you can feel and hear and, on a
crisp fall day, smell. Our boys are way beyond that,
having long since abandoned the molecular to trade in
the entirely immaterial.
So those are the rules they've been playing by. Did the
current crop of players make up those rules? No, they
are the rules of the reproduction of capital and the
current players just happen to be in the game at a time
when, abetted by the information superhighway and in
the context of globalization, they've triggered a
crisis that may yet turn out to be steeper, wider and
deeper than any in recent history. As anybody standing
on the corner could tell you, don't hate the player,
hate the game.
And the rest of us? What are we to them? We are the
human embodiment of the capacity to carry and pay off
debt. That's it, that's all. We are our credit scores.
We might as well have them flashing on an LED display
implanted in our foreheads.
We've been suckered, cajoled, manipulated and coerced
into joining them in their world of delusion, ensnared
as bit players in the grievous overproduction of
imaginary wealth. And while the realm of the fictitious
expanded infinitely, the realm of our real lives
contracted and shrank. Our wages flatlined or fell; we
lived in fear of acquiring an uninsured health problem;
our mortgages turned into a leaden ball and chain. The
loans and debts multiplied and the interest rates kept
rising. One administration after the other enabled a
regime of trickle up profits and trickle down pain.
So while they're frantically hustling to salvage the
system, let's stop for a moment to consider where we
stand.
We collectively face three major, inter-related crises:
the global crisis of capitalism; the crisis of
planetary sustainability; and the crisis of war,
militarism and empire.
The crisis of capitalism will be temporarily resolved.
On our backs, to be sure, and it will undoubtedly take
a while, but the markets will stabilize, borrowing and
lending will resume, and profit-taking will be back on
track. The mask, now in the repair shop for a custom
remodel job, will be back in place, firmly affixed to
once again show the face of capital triumphant. And
capital triumphant will have firmly in hand the one
chunk of ideology that was never tossed - there is no
alternative, or TINA.
Which brings me to the fourth crisis, hardly
acknowledged and barely discussed, at least here in the
U.S.: the crisis of the political impotence of the
left.
We stand at the brink of multiple disasters in the
howling absence of an alternative vision for
sustainable, people-centered human development, or an
alternative platform for deep reform, or an organized
base capable of challenging and shifting power.
And so this moment - the great unmasking - should serve
as an urgent reminder that we have a multi-generational
project at hand. That is, to construct a viable politic
and effective organizational forms capable of acting on
the belief that it is possible to build a society that
lifts up that which is generous and creative and humane
while curbing the greedy, the short-sighted and the
predatory. There must be an alternative.
Otherwise we, and generations to come, will remain at
the mercy of the players and their game.
______________
Linda Burnham is a co-founder and former executive
director of the Women of Color Resource Center. She was
a leader in the Third World Women's Alliance,
an organization that grew out of a women's caucus in
the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),
The numerous articles she's published include: "Has
Poverty Been Feminized in Black America," "Race and
Gender: Analogous or Not," "A Sledgehammer Message
from L.A.," and "Recruiting for the FBI: Reflections
on The Bell Curve."