4.2. the last stand of ‘big capital holders’
Western big capital holders’ have always been well aware of the financial mess the US and Europe have gradually created for themselves. The core of their strategy now is to suck all they can out of their countries of origin and the easiest conduit to realize just that is through the national banks’ money creation capabilities. The recently approved Cares’ act in the US gives them the legal cover they need to ensure a non-stop supply of free dollars from the Fed all the while imposing ‘the reason that is at work within capital’ to society at large.
The Cares’ act is the first step of a hastily conceived financial strategy to try to push through a radical worldwide reset of the governance-world. The plan is to finance a campaign to maximize the control of big capital holders over the whole earth by affecting the following 3 determinant factors of the governance-world :
4.2.1. The daily life of the common Joe (individual life)
The political context fosters the economic and social conditions. Covid-19 erupts in the context of an everything bubble and so it is acting as a pin that crashes the bubble. No doubt that the common Joe’s lives will be greatly impacted and the intensity of the impact depends on:
A. the evolution of Joe’s social status over the last decades : a graph visualizes better than words the brutality that neo-liberalism visited on the annual incomes of Western populations over the last 40 years.
A. the evolution of Joe’s social status over the last decades : a graph visualizes better than words the brutality that neo-liberalism visited on the annual incomes of Western populations over the last 40 years.
This graph leaves no possibility to doubt. The incomes of the bottom half of the US and EU populations have been stagnating or falling over the last 40 years. But did the costs of their daily lives go down ? The following graph answers the question.
Compilation from US Inflation Rate by Year from 1980 to 2019
While incomes were stagnating inflation was increasing the cost of daily life during each of the last 40 years… No wonder the bottom 50% have no savings left and are living paycheck to paycheck.
B. the impact of the crash on his present situation :
“ Your paycheck is gone. That activity you started — a brew-pub, a gym, an ad agency — no longer produces revenue. The HR department at the giant company you work for told you: don’t bother coming into the office tomorrow, or possibly ever again. Your bills are piling up. The numbers in your bank account run to zero. That sure smells like money disappearing. Wait until the pension checks and the SNAP cards mysteriously stop landing in the mailbox.
There’s going to be a lot of trouble. Ordinary Americans are going to get super-pissed if money doesn’t disappear from the stock markets, too. They’ve seen this movie before. They will know for sure that they were played, that the class of people who hold most of the stocks are doing just fine while everybody else stares into that old abyss staring back at them. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near the Hamptons on that fateful day.“ (1)
So where do we land after Covid-19 ?
Jim Kunstler observes that Western governance is simply unable to answer the realities of the day and he concludes that nature is going to take over...
“ … we just can’t face the task of reorganizing our national home economics to suit new circumstances. So, nature will do it for us. Nature will furnish us with a marvelously efficient black hole where we can conveniently stash our fake money so that we’ll never have to see it again. Nature will bust up our giant institutions, our giant corporations, our giant networks of financial obligations. And after a period of confusion and social disorder, some clever humans will aggregate into smaller networks and re-organize their activities on a smaller scale that actually supports truthful relationships between the production of things deemed to hold value and money that represents those things."
But before chaos transforms into a new cycle of order Western working citizens (the middle-class) will be forced to discover that they do no longer have a role and a place in their society. What comes our way, within the borders of nations, is a cycle of extreme social misery for the 99% while the 1% live in abundance outside of national borders… :
“ There is an entire class of society right now that has been designated "expendable". And it's being like an amputation that is being cut off and sacrificed. An entire class, millions of people, they don't have any income, anymore. They were living paycheck to paycheck before this. They have zero savings. And now, they're expected to continue paying for rent and basic necessities? It's abominable.
So, here is an idea of how a 21st century barbarism will look like. Entire populations become irrelevant. The system simply dumps them just to sustain its perverse dysfunctionality. “ (2)
For a more systematic exposition of my views about the future societal reality in Western countries see 4.1.3. The gamble of Western big capital holders.
4.2.2. The standing of nations (states)
It should be clear by now that the plan of big capital is to re-calibrate the weight of nations in order to modify the contemporary balance of power at the heart of the governance-world. This strategy addresses 3 main aspects :
• force feeding the addiction of emerging countries to the dollar
• crashing the Chinese economy and destroying the competition of state capital
• re-structuring US society to a state of combat readiness to help private big capital beating Chinese state capital
But this plan seems to have been elaborated in haste. It focuses indeed exclusively on some limited aspects of the dimension governance-world that I sketched as follows in note 11 on page 23 :
“The concept of governance-world views societies as being governed – mentally by axioms of civilizations and worldviews, – and on the material plane by political systems (economy, law, culture and force) ”.
The mental side of the dimension is completely ignored or deemed to be answered by an Orwellian manipulation of the minds. But this is not going to address the core problem of Western societies which is that these societies have completely atomized. These societies have lost their traditional worldview which was ensuring their societal cohesion. As a result the individuals have nothing to share any longer and with the access to the web they ended up in complete loneliness living in an isolated bubble that separates them from their society.
It’s all good and well to think that it is possible to manipulate the minds of the individuals into thinking what the powers that be want them to think. But that does in no way succeed to mobilize their mental and physical energy. So the West, and particularly the US, do not really have any longer a society that dreams with a common heart. What we witness during this corona-virus episode is the impossibility for the West to impulse a unified societal action. This is in stark contrast with Japan, Korea and greater China where the pandemic was beaten rapidly at a relatively low cost in lives. These are highly cohesive societies that easily mobilized to undertake unified societal actions.
It will take one generation at least before societal cohesion can be rebuilt around a common narrative in Western countries and in the meantime they will simply be unable to mobilize their populations in any rebuilding project.
• force feeding the addiction of emerging countries to the dollar
• crashing the Chinese economy and destroying the competition of state capital
• re-structuring US society to a state of combat readiness to help private big capital beating Chinese state capital
But this plan seems to have been elaborated in haste. It focuses indeed exclusively on some limited aspects of the dimension governance-world that I sketched as follows in note 11 on page 23 :
“The concept of governance-world views societies as being governed – mentally by axioms of civilizations and worldviews, – and on the material plane by political systems (economy, law, culture and force) ”.
The mental side of the dimension is completely ignored or deemed to be answered by an Orwellian manipulation of the minds. But this is not going to address the core problem of Western societies which is that these societies have completely atomized. These societies have lost their traditional worldview which was ensuring their societal cohesion. As a result the individuals have nothing to share any longer and with the access to the web they ended up in complete loneliness living in an isolated bubble that separates them from their society.
It’s all good and well to think that it is possible to manipulate the minds of the individuals into thinking what the powers that be want them to think. But that does in no way succeed to mobilize their mental and physical energy. So the West, and particularly the US, do not really have any longer a society that dreams with a common heart. What we witness during this corona-virus episode is the impossibility for the West to impulse a unified societal action. This is in stark contrast with Japan, Korea and greater China where the pandemic was beaten rapidly at a relatively low cost in lives. These are highly cohesive societies that easily mobilized to undertake unified societal actions.
It will take one generation at least before societal cohesion can be rebuilt around a common narrative in Western countries and in the meantime they will simply be unable to mobilize their populations in any rebuilding project.
4.2.3. The relations between nations (geo-politics)
The ambitions of Western big capital holders to maintain their hegemony over the whole world are presently on display for all to see. Their strategy is a succession of 3 actions :
• the destruction of the Chinese economy
• a massive issuance of new dollar denominated loans
• a radical Restructuring of US society
• the destruction of the Chinese economy
• a massive issuance of new dollar denominated loans
• a radical Restructuring of US society
4.2.1.1. Destruction of the Chinese economy
It was thought in the West during the first few weeks after the outbreak of the new corona-virus that the Chinese economy would be destroyed and some in the West very publicly rejoiced. But, oh surprise, the Chinese system of governance guided its peoples’ war to victory and the devil of war was put back in its bottle in a record time. This was the demonstration by the Chinese nation that it has the capability to successfully withstand a biological attack.
But the greatest surprise of all was perhaps that the immense amount of energy, that the West had poured during multiple months in the meanest anti-Chinese propaganda, was turned against its originators in an elegant Tai Chi Wuwei (3) move that forced the world population to watch the televised spectacle of the competition, to conquer the corona-virus, between two antagonistic visions of societal governance. And that competition consecrated a clear winner and a clear loser. There was no war between Western big capital holders and the Chinese state capital holder. But the world population observed the complete ineptitude of the Western liberal system of governance which contrasted with the mastery of an East-Asian Confucian system of governance.
This result was so incontrovertible that there was no way to erase it from the minds of the citizens of the earth. So Western big capital holders and their liberal system of governance, in haste, concocted a Plan B that forced the launch of a frontal attack on state capital holders and more particularly on the biggest among them all the Chinese state whose governance is in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party :
• all out propaganda attack, peddling nothing else than lies, to separate Western minds from being attracted by a seductive East-Asian worldview
• racist campaign against anything Chinese that opens the doors to a possible conflict between civilizations that the West can’t win any longer for the good reason that it lost its traditional worldview …
• call on Western Corporations to leave China while big capital is opposed to the idea of losing the largest consumer market on earth …
• blackmail and extortion by imposing the extraterritoriality of US legal decisions
From where I sit this whole thing looks so odious that I can’t see another outcome than it flopping miserably. The Western action originates indeed with the nationalist tendance among big capital holders. But those are not, by a long shot, the biggest. Western big capital holders are indeed in their great majority in the internationalist camp. ‘The reason at work within capital’ imposes indeed capital reproduction + capital expansion and capital expansion is only available in a globalized world. So if I’m correct the move, by the Western nationalist fringe among big capital holders, is signaling the end of Western liberalism. But only time will tell if I’m right.
But the greatest surprise of all was perhaps that the immense amount of energy, that the West had poured during multiple months in the meanest anti-Chinese propaganda, was turned against its originators in an elegant Tai Chi Wuwei (3) move that forced the world population to watch the televised spectacle of the competition, to conquer the corona-virus, between two antagonistic visions of societal governance. And that competition consecrated a clear winner and a clear loser. There was no war between Western big capital holders and the Chinese state capital holder. But the world population observed the complete ineptitude of the Western liberal system of governance which contrasted with the mastery of an East-Asian Confucian system of governance.
This result was so incontrovertible that there was no way to erase it from the minds of the citizens of the earth. So Western big capital holders and their liberal system of governance, in haste, concocted a Plan B that forced the launch of a frontal attack on state capital holders and more particularly on the biggest among them all the Chinese state whose governance is in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party :
• all out propaganda attack, peddling nothing else than lies, to separate Western minds from being attracted by a seductive East-Asian worldview
• racist campaign against anything Chinese that opens the doors to a possible conflict between civilizations that the West can’t win any longer for the good reason that it lost its traditional worldview …
• call on Western Corporations to leave China while big capital is opposed to the idea of losing the largest consumer market on earth …
• blackmail and extortion by imposing the extraterritoriality of US legal decisions
From where I sit this whole thing looks so odious that I can’t see another outcome than it flopping miserably. The Western action originates indeed with the nationalist tendance among big capital holders. But those are not, by a long shot, the biggest. Western big capital holders are indeed in their great majority in the internationalist camp. ‘The reason at work within capital’ imposes indeed capital reproduction + capital expansion and capital expansion is only available in a globalized world. So if I’m correct the move, by the Western nationalist fringe among big capital holders, is signaling the end of Western liberalism. But only time will tell if I’m right.
4.2.1.2. A massive issuance of new dollar denominated loans
Covid-19 supplies an ideal opportunity to reboot the global economy. Dollar liquidity shortages outside of the US put many countries of the world in a weak spot.
“ More than 90 countries have inquired about bailouts from the IMF—nearly half the world’s nations—while at least 60 have sought to avail themselves of World Bank programs. The two institutions together [only] have resources of up to $1.2 trillion. There is $11.9 trillion of U.S. denominated debt out there alone, plus the dollar float required to finance day-to-day international trade (usually held as national, foreign exchange reserves)”. (4)
Conditional bailout packages from global financial institutions will saddle nation states, which were already looking fragile in recent years, with mountains of debts that will be impossible to pay back at maturity.
The US is using the issuance of such massive new Dollar denominated loans as an opportunity to ensure that the dollar recovers its global hegemonic role in the flows of money around the world. These loans will also be conditional to neo-liberal style reforms that undermine public services and give free access to the corporations owned by Western big capital holders.
David Malpass, the president of the world Bank, gives a list of the neoliberal reforms that are expected from the recipient countries (5):
The US is using the issuance of such massive new Dollar denominated loans as an opportunity to ensure that the dollar recovers its global hegemonic role in the flows of money around the world. These loans will also be conditional to neo-liberal style reforms that undermine public services and give free access to the corporations owned by Western big capital holders.
David Malpass, the president of the world Bank, gives a list of the neoliberal reforms that are expected from the recipient countries (5):
“Beyond the severe health impact from the pandemic, we should expect a major recession of the global economy.
We are working to provide a fast response, utilizing all our available instruments. Countries need to move fast to boost health spending, strengthen social safety nets, support the private sector and counter financial-market disruption.
Countries will need to implement structural reforms to help shorten the time to recovery and create confidence that the recovery can be strong. For those countries that have excessive regulations, subsidies, licensing regimes, trade protection or litigiousness as obstacles, we will work with them to foster markets, choice and faster growth prospects during the recovery.”
Seen the limited resources of the World Bank and the IMF new loans will be limited. Deep down this means an existential problem arises for nations when they can’t access the necessary monetary instruments to ensure their existence and as Alaster Crooke astutely mentions :
"The BIS is saying that unless the Fed makes bail-outs and working capital available on a massive scale – all the way down, and through, the supply-pyramid to nitty-gritty individual enterprises – trade collapse cannot be avoided.
(…) the crucial point is made by Professor Rogoff: “We’re looking at a commodity-price collapse – and a collapse in global trade unlike anything we’ve seen since the 1930s. An avalanche of government-debt crises is sure to follow, he said, and “the system just can’t handle this many defaults and restructurings – at the same time.
(…) What is hinted at here is the concern that when multiple dynamic complex systems begin to degrade, they can, and often do, enter into a spiralling feedback-loop. … When a crisis hits, as at present, everyone in the Eurodollar system suddenly realizes they have no ability to create fiat dollars, and can rely only on that which exists in national foreign exchange reserves, or in ‘swap lines’. … The absence of monetary instruments – in crisis – can become existential.”
Seen the extreme risks involved, with Western loans or dollar swaps, for the sake of their existence desperate countries might as well reject the dollar and adhere to a new international monetary system. If their experiment succeeds it could signify the end of the dollar as the Global Reserve Currency. This would put an end – to the US exorbitant privilege to pay for imports with money created out of thin air, – and to the US power to sanction other nations.
4.2.1.3. a radical Restructuring of US society
In a video published by ‘Moderate Rebels’ Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton discuss with Michael Hudson about the financial scam of the CARES Act :
“ Facing the Covid-19 pandemic, the US Congress rammed through the CARES Act — which economist Michael Hudson explains is not a "bailout" but a massive, $6 trillion giveaway to Wall Street, banks, large corporations, and stockholders. Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton discuss the enormous financial scam with Hudson, who reveals how the economy actually works, with the Federal Reserve printing money so rich elites don't lose their investments. “ (6)
Michael Hudson’s analysis, while being right in its description, does not help us to understand the direction of the societal changes that have been unleashed by the latest episodes of money creation and its distribution to the corporations owned by Western big capital holders.
Here above in the introduction to “part 4 : the gamble of Western big capital holders” I sketched the strategy that is being unleashing upon Western societies :
1. within the borders of the traditional nation-states poverty will increase at even higher levels than at present and we’ll assist at a worldwide acceleration of human misery that will reach historically unprecedented levels
2. dystopian national governance systems will try to ensure that ordinary people stay put and submit to the new order
3. national governance will be left in the hands of ‘a fringe vassal middle-class of servants who will act as :
3.1. a new feudal power imposing its authority over the institutions of power of nation-states
3.2. managers of the national branches of Multi National Corporations.
For internal necessity of population control nation-states will primordially transform into dystopian governance systems and for external reasons these dystopian systems will maximize the use of technology to compete with the citizens in order to reduce wages and lower the workers’ expectations.
In may of 2019 a little known organization, under the federal government, called the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), published an interesting document (7) about how to overhaul the American way of life and the economy in order to ensure that the USA is not being left in the dust technologically by China. Here is a short presentation (8) about the NSCIA’s mission :
Here above in the introduction to “part 4 : the gamble of Western big capital holders” I sketched the strategy that is being unleashing upon Western societies :
1. within the borders of the traditional nation-states poverty will increase at even higher levels than at present and we’ll assist at a worldwide acceleration of human misery that will reach historically unprecedented levels
2. dystopian national governance systems will try to ensure that ordinary people stay put and submit to the new order
3. national governance will be left in the hands of ‘a fringe vassal middle-class of servants who will act as :
3.1. a new feudal power imposing its authority over the institutions of power of nation-states
3.2. managers of the national branches of Multi National Corporations.
For internal necessity of population control nation-states will primordially transform into dystopian governance systems and for external reasons these dystopian systems will maximize the use of technology to compete with the citizens in order to reduce wages and lower the workers’ expectations.
In may of 2019 a little known organization, under the federal government, called the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), published an interesting document (7) about how to overhaul the American way of life and the economy in order to ensure that the USA is not being left in the dust technologically by China. Here is a short presentation (8) about the NSCIA’s mission :
“ Last year, a U.S. government body dedicated to examining how artificial intelligence can “address the national security and defense needs of the United States” discussed in detail the “structural” changes that the American economy and society must undergo in order to ensure a technological advantage over China, according to a recent document acquired through a FOIA request. This document suggests that the U.S. follow China’s lead and even surpass them in many aspects related to AI-driven technologies, particularly their use of mass surveillance.
(…) It is indeed striking how the coronavirus crisis has seemingly fulfilled the NSCAI’s entire wishlist and removed many of the obstacles to the mass adoption of AI technologies in the United States. Like major crises of the past, the national security state appears to be using the chaos and fear to promote and implement initiatives that would be normally rejected by Americans and, if history is any indicator, these new changes will remain long after the coronavirus crisis fades from the news cycle. It is essential that these so-called “solutions” be recognized for what they are and that we consider what type of world they will end up creating – an authoritarian technocracy.
(…) it is worth asking if those who share the NSCAI’s vision saw the coronavirus pandemic early on as an opportunity to make the “structural changes” it had deemed essential to countering China’s lead. Though the May 2019 NSCAI document was authored nearly a year ago, the coronavirus crisis has resulted in the implementation of many of the changes and the removal of many of the “structural” obstacles that the commission argued needed to be drastically altered in order to ensure a technological advantage over China in the field of AI.
(…) The coronavirus pandemic is–intentionally or not–being used as a testbed for new surveillance technologies. … It is indeed striking how the coronavirus crisis has seemingly fulfilled the NSCAI’s entire wishlist and removed many of the obstacles to the mass adoption of AI technologies in the United States. Like major crises of the past, the national security state appears to be using the chaos and fear to promote and implement initiatives that would be normally rejected by Americans.
The NSCIA document states textually that :
“to ‘leapfrog’ competitors in emerging markets what is needed is not ‘individual brilliance’ but instead specific structural conditions within the market”. The idea being that “the U.S. must alter the ‘structural factors’ that are currently responsible for its lagging behind China in the ‘adoption’ phase of AI-driven technologies”.
What is implied here is that the US needs to change the working of its internal market by reforming the following structural factors :
1. Some ‘legacy systems’ in the U.S. are hindering the adoption of new AI driven systems :
1.1. cash and cards in finance hamper the development of cell phone payment systems
1.2. individual car ownership achieve low utilization rates and is multiplying the number of cars on the road
1.3. medical services by a human doctor hamper the development of AI based approaches
1.4. US small ‘consumer pockets’ hamper the large scale adoption of mobile on-demand services which could be remedied by increasing urban population density
2. the NSCAI calls for more “explicit government support and involvement” to speed up the adoption of new systems
2.1. lending public data-banks on civilians to train AI
2.2. re-architecture of cities for autonomous vehicles
2.3. large public investments in AI start-ups
2.4. public-private AI task-force to implement smart cities
3. clearing regulatory barriers in the fields of privacy laws, self-driving cars, and smart cities
4. NBU (next billion users) markets: China gets a first shot at exporting AI and could end up writing the international norms about the deployment of AI
5. mass surveillance: a killer application for deep learning that also attracts the ‘first-and-best customers’ for AI
In summary this restructuring strategy will try to divide the US and its client societies into 3 parallel worlds :
• the corporations, owned by the biggest capital holders, will be supplied with free money for as long as the eyes can see and they will also be freed from the application of national protection laws. The big capital holders themselves will be living in sanctuaries that are completely detached from the obligations imposed by national laws (taxes, housing, education, health, and so on).
• the servants of big capital holders will act as a TINA (9) kind of technocracy that will have full power to re-engineer society technologically in order to maximize the returns on the investments of big capital holders while ensuring that the rest of the world becomes captive of these new technologies
• the majority of citizens will be made captive of ‘the reason that is at work within capital’ and will thus be forced to labor against low remunerations while being imposed high interest rates on their loans and being subjected to strict national laws that govern their daily lives. A sizable chunk of society will be constituted of deplorables that live in misery on the margins and they will opportunistically be proposed part-time jobs to remember the majority that there is a reserve army ready to take over …
1. Some ‘legacy systems’ in the U.S. are hindering the adoption of new AI driven systems :
1.1. cash and cards in finance hamper the development of cell phone payment systems
1.2. individual car ownership achieve low utilization rates and is multiplying the number of cars on the road
1.3. medical services by a human doctor hamper the development of AI based approaches
1.4. US small ‘consumer pockets’ hamper the large scale adoption of mobile on-demand services which could be remedied by increasing urban population density
2. the NSCAI calls for more “explicit government support and involvement” to speed up the adoption of new systems
2.1. lending public data-banks on civilians to train AI
2.2. re-architecture of cities for autonomous vehicles
2.3. large public investments in AI start-ups
2.4. public-private AI task-force to implement smart cities
3. clearing regulatory barriers in the fields of privacy laws, self-driving cars, and smart cities
4. NBU (next billion users) markets: China gets a first shot at exporting AI and could end up writing the international norms about the deployment of AI
5. mass surveillance: a killer application for deep learning that also attracts the ‘first-and-best customers’ for AI
In summary this restructuring strategy will try to divide the US and its client societies into 3 parallel worlds :
• the corporations, owned by the biggest capital holders, will be supplied with free money for as long as the eyes can see and they will also be freed from the application of national protection laws. The big capital holders themselves will be living in sanctuaries that are completely detached from the obligations imposed by national laws (taxes, housing, education, health, and so on).
• the servants of big capital holders will act as a TINA (9) kind of technocracy that will have full power to re-engineer society technologically in order to maximize the returns on the investments of big capital holders while ensuring that the rest of the world becomes captive of these new technologies
• the majority of citizens will be made captive of ‘the reason that is at work within capital’ and will thus be forced to labor against low remunerations while being imposed high interest rates on their loans and being subjected to strict national laws that govern their daily lives. A sizable chunk of society will be constituted of deplorables that live in misery on the margins and they will opportunistically be proposed part-time jobs to remember the majority that there is a reserve army ready to take over …
4.3. awakening to reality
The engine that powers societies, in the age of Modernity, is capital or better "the reason that is at work within capital". This is the determinant factor behind everything that occurred and continues to occur in the historical era of Modernity. From science, peoples’ incomes, to popular culture everything of substance is indeed fostered by the investments realized by big capital holders.
The reason that is at work within capital
What I mean by ‘the reason that is at work within capital’ is straightforward. Money transforms into capital through the act of investing and so its traditional function as a means of payment transforms into the new function of capital which is the search for incessant growth. But more importantly ; there is an intrinsic rationality inside capital that forces the mind of its holder to maximize the chances of its incessant expansion.
It is indeed the intrinsic rationality of capital that drives the thinking of its holder and not the other way around. The capital holder is not imposing his own rationality on the working of capital. It is ‘the reason that is at work within capital’ that imposes its rationality on the capital holder. In other words my contention is that the capital holder is the prisoner of a logic that does not originate in his own mind. His actions are indeed more like reactions to his fear that the intrinsic rationality of capital might impose sanctions on him for non observation of its reason. The sanction is the loss of his invested stake which means that the money that he initially invested has vanished. Capital holders want to avoid such a loss at all costs and for this reason their minds submit, in a religious sense, to the absoluteness of ‘the reason that is at work within capital’.
The suffering involved in the loss of his money is what motivates the capital holder to submit to ‘the reason that is at work within capital’. This explains why his mind simply submits and accepts the elimination of any notion like the precautionary principle or any other societal considerations. But the fact is that these principles of human wisdom had been acquired over the long haul of the past tens of thousands of years. These principles had been derived from the observation, by uncounted generations of (wo)men, of the rhythms of nature of societies and of human psychology.
The loss of humanity’s ancestral wisdom
Animism acted indeed in the same manner as the scientific method. The difference between animism and science resides in the time frame in which the repeatability of a phenomenon has to operate. The accepted phenomenon in animism had to be repeatable over tens of thousands of years while repeatability in science is most often merely an affair of years or at best of decades. And this explains why in Late-Modernity the so called truths of science have led to so many side-effects that are now literally haunting humanity.
It took a religious like submission to ‘the reason that is at work within capital’ to possibly lose contact with the bigger picture that humanity derived from this long haul observation. This loss appeared not to cost anything in the short and medium term of decades and sometimes of centuries. This explains why so many generations of scientists might have thought that humanity’s loss of the big picture was inconsequential.
We had to wait for, the direct observation of the consequences of the multiple side-effects of Modernity, to be forced to question why these damages are being inflicted in the first place. And that question, in turn, obliged us to search past the traditional uni-dimensional silos of science. In multidimensional approaches we discovered set theory and ensembles, systems theory and complexity, and we gradually started to understand the limitations of science as an inquiry into mechanistic materialism where the parts compose the whole but have no interrelations among themselves.
The fact of the matter is that science, as a system of inquiry inside a vision of reality stuck in mechanistic materialism, was unable to appreciate the big picture of traditional animist knowledge. It was thus no accident that Modernity overlooked its rich knowledge base. But the resulting loss has loaded humanity with the weight of direct and immeasurable consequences. It is indeed this loss of the big picture that allowed the multiple side-effects of Modernity to escalate unopposed. And as we observe today in Late-Modernity the convergence of these multiple side-effects is now appearing to be a deadly threat against the good working of the societies of the diverse living species, the well-being of their individuals, and possibly the survival of all or most living species.
The Late-Modern predicament of humanity
While the consciousnesses of our predicament sets in we also discover that humanity is in a bind. Today in Late-Modernity big capital holders own indeed the vehicles of international high finance which give them full control over the unfolding of the societal realities around the whole world. The core of their strategy is to concentrate the ownership of the production of market offers in their own hands. And their tactical principle is focused on the ownership of the political decision making process and of the money creation process. This has proven to be a winning strategy over the last decades and as a consequence capital has momentarily won the class war in Western nations. This reality today appears to be a hindrance in humanity’s answer to its Late-Modern predicament.
The fact is that ‘the reason that is at work within capital’ concentrated most of the wealth accumulated by humanity in the hands of Western big capital holders. And they use this wealth to deflect the criticism, or the fight against them, by revolutionary or reformist forces. As Warren Buffet famously stated :
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning”. (10)
Western big capital has indeed won the class war. It has indeed largely succeeded to concentrate the ownership of the production of market offers in its hands and it furthermore owns the political decision making process as well as the money creation process. The central role of these processes is to blind the citizens to the reality of how their societies operate and most importantly to the realities of a historically high inequality between the ‘have and have not’. This inequality manifests in the miserable life conditions of ever larger chunks of their populations while their elites live in affluence and above the law.
In the midst of such a social context dreaming of changing the governance of Western societies appears like a pipe-dream. Changing Western governance most probably will appear under the assault of life necessity and the emulation perhaps of societal practices in the non-Western world.
Western big capital versus state capital
The only really successful competitor of Western big capital, that ever emerged, is state owned capital at the hands of socialist governments who can mobilize national financial resources to counter the often destructive actions undertaken by Western big capital holders and their servants. No wonder that Western big capital holders want to destroy the political parties controlling those rare governments. With this in mind we might think that the strategy of big capital would be to focus on the destruction of the CCP (11) ...
But things are not always what they appear at first sight. The CCP was only labelled a competitor very recently. During the first 40 years of the era of ‘China’s reform and opening up’ the CCP was viewed as an ally that acted as the creator of a new gigantic market that big capital and its ideological servants thought would inevitably fall into their hands sometime along the way of its development. Only recently did big capital suddenly discover that :
1. China was rapidly overtaking the West economically
2. the CCP had no intention to go away from the Chinese governance
3. the CCP had all intentions to lead the Chinese nation back to its traditional place as the leading nation on earth
4. these first 3 factors appeared to imply that the end of US economic and cultural hegemony is fast approaching
5. these first 4 factors appeared to imply the loss by the Western civilization of its short historical dominance over the world and the return to the long haul normality with China and India as the dominant economic actors
Ray Dalio just published a series of articles that point to the same direction. His views are derived by what he knows best which is Money, Credit, Debt and Economic activity. His following graphs are a very instructive complement to my thesis :
I have been writing in :
• A growing disconnect between East and West
• What is going on ?
• And the present series of articles
that the USA is in economic, social and cultural retreat.
In the midst of such a social context dreaming of changing the governance of Western societies appears like a pipe-dream. Changing Western governance most probably will appear under the assault of life necessity and the emulation perhaps of societal practices in the non-Western world.
Western big capital versus state capital
The only really successful competitor of Western big capital, that ever emerged, is state owned capital at the hands of socialist governments who can mobilize national financial resources to counter the often destructive actions undertaken by Western big capital holders and their servants. No wonder that Western big capital holders want to destroy the political parties controlling those rare governments. With this in mind we might think that the strategy of big capital would be to focus on the destruction of the CCP (11) ...
But things are not always what they appear at first sight. The CCP was only labelled a competitor very recently. During the first 40 years of the era of ‘China’s reform and opening up’ the CCP was viewed as an ally that acted as the creator of a new gigantic market that big capital and its ideological servants thought would inevitably fall into their hands sometime along the way of its development. Only recently did big capital suddenly discover that :
1. China was rapidly overtaking the West economically
2. the CCP had no intention to go away from the Chinese governance
3. the CCP had all intentions to lead the Chinese nation back to its traditional place as the leading nation on earth
4. these first 3 factors appeared to imply that the end of US economic and cultural hegemony is fast approaching
5. these first 4 factors appeared to imply the loss by the Western civilization of its short historical dominance over the world and the return to the long haul normality with China and India as the dominant economic actors
Source: “Statistics on World Population, GDP and per Capita GDP, 1-2006” by Angus Maddison, University of Groeningen. Via “The Economic History of the Last 2,000 Years in 1 Little Graph”. Derek Thompson. The Atlantic. 2012-06-19. This graph was actualized by laodan.
Source: Towards a new reserve currency system? Helmut Reisen, OECD Development Centre.
Ray Dalio just published a series of articles that point to the same direction. His views are derived by what he knows best which is Money, Credit, Debt and Economic activity. His following graphs are a very instructive complement to my thesis :
In The Changing World Order. Chapter 1: The Big Picture in a Tiny Nutshell
I have been writing in :
• A growing disconnect between East and West
• What is going on ?
• And the present series of articles
that the USA is in economic, social and cultural retreat.
Ray Dalio views this retreat as the consequence of a rupture between the fundamentals constituted by Money, Credit, Debt and Economic activity
“ To create more wealth, one has to be more productive. The relationship between the creation of money and credit and the creation of wealth (actual goods and services) is often confused yet it is the biggest driver of economic cycles, so let’s look at this relationship more closely.
There is typically a mutually reinforcing relationship between a) the creation of money and credit and b) the amount of goods, services, and investment assets that are produced so it’s easy to get them confused. Think of it this way. There is both a real economy and a financial economy. Though they are related, they are different. Each has their own supply and demand factors that drive them.”
In The Changing World Order. Chapter 2: Money, Credit, Debt and Economic Activity
This graph gives the US present moment as being a time of printing money and revolutions and wars. In the meantime China is still rising...
Western big capital holders have suddenly been faced with these realities within the last few years. And under Trump they gradually split in two warring factions : the nationalists and the globalists. The nationalists give priority to their nation state while the globalists give priority to ‘the reason that is at work within capital’. This difference in priorities naturally opposes these 2 factions. The nationalists go into militancy defending trade protectionism and dreaming about national greatness while the globalists push to eliminate all national trade barriers by instituting the primacy of trade deals over national legislation. It is thus no surprise that the globalists are the ones who control the largest stake of capital while the nationalists’ holdings are generally limited by the size of their national markets.
The views of these 2 factions also diverge on how to handle China. As the Trump administration showed for all to see the nationalists want to destroy China’s capacity to compete and to further grow. The globalists for their part view China’s market as the biggest opportunity of all times to further grow their profits. In the initial stages of Trump’s trade war the globalists in his administration xii focused mostly on immediate purchases by China to satisfy the electorate while the nationalists focused on sanctions and maximalist demands that China would never accept. In other words the globalists wanted to find a way to resolve the dispute while the nationalists wanted a Chinese capitulation or the break-down of the negotiations.
Geo-politics today, at its core, is a reflection of the impact on all nations on earth that results from the conflict between Western private big capital holders who own the political decision making process in their countries of origin and state capital that is managed by socialist leaning parties. This conflictual relation, as described here, divides the world into 5 categories of nations largely defined by their system of governance :
1. Western nations whose political decision making process is fully owned by private big capital holders : the Anglo-world, with its 5 spying eyes, has strongly individualistic societies that view the state largely as a negative
2. China remains one of the rare countries that are governed by a communist party that sticks to the centrality of state ownership in the economy and the fusion of party and state institutions. In the case of China its system of governance furthermore appears to act like a continuation of its historical dynastic system. Cuba, North-Korea, Vietnam, Venezuela are the other nations in this category.
3. Western nations whose political decision making process is partly owned by private big capital holders : Continental Europe has traditionally had more communal societies than the Anglo-world and historically it has also reserved a large space to state initiative in the economy. Japan, South-Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam always formed an integral part of the expanded domain of the Chinese civilization and developed strong communal behaviors. After adopting ‘the reason that is at work within capital’ they succeeded to accommodate this reason with their communal behaviors. While different from Continental Europe these nations’ have ‘compatible’ societal approaches and often take a similar stance on International matters …
4. Other nations combine in various degrees communal societal behaviors while strictly limiting the interference of their private capital holders in the political decision making process and reserving a role for the principle of state ownership : Russia, Iran, South-Africa, Cambodia, Myanmar and the Stan’s fall in this category.
5. Due to their particular economic context most African, Arab, and South American countries are still navigating in the realm of governance uncertainty. I mean that their further economic development will eventually affirm their national character ...
At the present stage of the global economic reset of the center of gravity of the economy-world there is no doubt that China’s economic success has already inspired many countries. Russia, for one, with the accession of Putin to power gradually reserved a larger intervention for the state in its economy and it is also starting to reform its state institutions on the China model. But it is important to note that while China is being emulated it is not advocating the adoption of its model of governance by other nations.
The Chinese view is that national contexts are different and that systems of governance have to be adapted to the specifics of their contexts. This attitude denotes a radical pragmatism that contrasts with the ideological approaches of Western countries which want other countries to adopt their democratic systems of governance and the private ownership of the economic offer.
Western big capital holders have suddenly been faced with these realities within the last few years. And under Trump they gradually split in two warring factions : the nationalists and the globalists. The nationalists give priority to their nation state while the globalists give priority to ‘the reason that is at work within capital’. This difference in priorities naturally opposes these 2 factions. The nationalists go into militancy defending trade protectionism and dreaming about national greatness while the globalists push to eliminate all national trade barriers by instituting the primacy of trade deals over national legislation. It is thus no surprise that the globalists are the ones who control the largest stake of capital while the nationalists’ holdings are generally limited by the size of their national markets.
The views of these 2 factions also diverge on how to handle China. As the Trump administration showed for all to see the nationalists want to destroy China’s capacity to compete and to further grow. The globalists for their part view China’s market as the biggest opportunity of all times to further grow their profits. In the initial stages of Trump’s trade war the globalists in his administration xii focused mostly on immediate purchases by China to satisfy the electorate while the nationalists focused on sanctions and maximalist demands that China would never accept. In other words the globalists wanted to find a way to resolve the dispute while the nationalists wanted a Chinese capitulation or the break-down of the negotiations.
Geo-politics today, at its core, is a reflection of the impact on all nations on earth that results from the conflict between Western private big capital holders who own the political decision making process in their countries of origin and state capital that is managed by socialist leaning parties. This conflictual relation, as described here, divides the world into 5 categories of nations largely defined by their system of governance :
1. Western nations whose political decision making process is fully owned by private big capital holders : the Anglo-world, with its 5 spying eyes, has strongly individualistic societies that view the state largely as a negative
2. China remains one of the rare countries that are governed by a communist party that sticks to the centrality of state ownership in the economy and the fusion of party and state institutions. In the case of China its system of governance furthermore appears to act like a continuation of its historical dynastic system. Cuba, North-Korea, Vietnam, Venezuela are the other nations in this category.
3. Western nations whose political decision making process is partly owned by private big capital holders : Continental Europe has traditionally had more communal societies than the Anglo-world and historically it has also reserved a large space to state initiative in the economy. Japan, South-Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam always formed an integral part of the expanded domain of the Chinese civilization and developed strong communal behaviors. After adopting ‘the reason that is at work within capital’ they succeeded to accommodate this reason with their communal behaviors. While different from Continental Europe these nations’ have ‘compatible’ societal approaches and often take a similar stance on International matters …
4. Other nations combine in various degrees communal societal behaviors while strictly limiting the interference of their private capital holders in the political decision making process and reserving a role for the principle of state ownership : Russia, Iran, South-Africa, Cambodia, Myanmar and the Stan’s fall in this category.
5. Due to their particular economic context most African, Arab, and South American countries are still navigating in the realm of governance uncertainty. I mean that their further economic development will eventually affirm their national character ...
At the present stage of the global economic reset of the center of gravity of the economy-world there is no doubt that China’s economic success has already inspired many countries. Russia, for one, with the accession of Putin to power gradually reserved a larger intervention for the state in its economy and it is also starting to reform its state institutions on the China model. But it is important to note that while China is being emulated it is not advocating the adoption of its model of governance by other nations.
The Chinese view is that national contexts are different and that systems of governance have to be adapted to the specifics of their contexts. This attitude denotes a radical pragmatism that contrasts with the ideological approaches of Western countries which want other countries to adopt their democratic systems of governance and the private ownership of the economic offer.
___________
Notes
1. “ When the Birdies Sing Like the Fat Lady” in Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler
2. “We have come now to the point where an entire class of society has been designated "expendable" the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens. 2020-04-22.
3. Wu wei is non-action. But non-action is not doing nothing. It demands the highest mental concentration and focuses on using the energy of the antagonist to defeat her/himself. A Chinese Wu Wei move forced the world to watch the defeat of the West. But in matter of fact it was the West that forced its propaganda in the eyes and minds of all citizens on earth and doing so it forced in peoples’ eyes the image of an abject Western governance ineptitude versus the excellence of Chinese governance.
Turning around this reality implies forcing Western propaganda to deflect peoples’ attention from their political leaders’ sheer incompetence and this is being realized by a whole Western bloc propaganda attack against China. In this new age world of propaganda reality and fiction have unfortunately become indistinguishable and the perception of Western populations will thus eventually be reformatted into hating “the other”....
4. “Revolutionary Times and Systemic Collapse – ‘The System Cannot Handle It’ “ Strategic Culture by Alaster Crooke. 2020-04-20.
5. “Remarks by World Bank Group President David Malpass on G20 Finance Ministers Conference Call on COVID-19” in Worldbank.org. David Malpass speech in Washington on March 23, 2020
6. “US coronavirus 'bailout' scam is $6 trillion giveaway to Wall St - Economist Michael Hudson explains” Moderate Rebels on YouTube with Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, and Michael Hudson.
7. “ Chinese Tech Landscape overview. NSCIA presentation “. May 2019.
8. “Techno-Tyranny: How The US National Security State Is Using Coronavirus To Fulfill An Orwellian Vision “ in “The Last American Vagabond” by Whitney Webb. 2020-04-20.
9. TINA was Margaret Tatcher’s slogan ‘There Is No Alternative’ ...to the neo-liberal order.
10. “In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning” NYT by Ben Stein. 2006-11-26
11. CCP = Chinese Communist Party
12. Steven Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow are the 2 globalists in the Trump team
2. “We have come now to the point where an entire class of society has been designated "expendable" the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens. 2020-04-22.
3. Wu wei is non-action. But non-action is not doing nothing. It demands the highest mental concentration and focuses on using the energy of the antagonist to defeat her/himself. A Chinese Wu Wei move forced the world to watch the defeat of the West. But in matter of fact it was the West that forced its propaganda in the eyes and minds of all citizens on earth and doing so it forced in peoples’ eyes the image of an abject Western governance ineptitude versus the excellence of Chinese governance.
Turning around this reality implies forcing Western propaganda to deflect peoples’ attention from their political leaders’ sheer incompetence and this is being realized by a whole Western bloc propaganda attack against China. In this new age world of propaganda reality and fiction have unfortunately become indistinguishable and the perception of Western populations will thus eventually be reformatted into hating “the other”....
4. “Revolutionary Times and Systemic Collapse – ‘The System Cannot Handle It’ “ Strategic Culture by Alaster Crooke. 2020-04-20.
5. “Remarks by World Bank Group President David Malpass on G20 Finance Ministers Conference Call on COVID-19” in Worldbank.org. David Malpass speech in Washington on March 23, 2020
6. “US coronavirus 'bailout' scam is $6 trillion giveaway to Wall St - Economist Michael Hudson explains” Moderate Rebels on YouTube with Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, and Michael Hudson.
7. “ Chinese Tech Landscape overview. NSCIA presentation “. May 2019.
8. “Techno-Tyranny: How The US National Security State Is Using Coronavirus To Fulfill An Orwellian Vision “ in “The Last American Vagabond” by Whitney Webb. 2020-04-20.
9. TINA was Margaret Tatcher’s slogan ‘There Is No Alternative’ ...to the neo-liberal order.
10. “In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning” NYT by Ben Stein. 2006-11-26
11. CCP = Chinese Communist Party
12. Steven Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow are the 2 globalists in the Trump team
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