The State Of Things

Gosh, the news lately seems to imply the world is reaching a bizarre and terminal stage of its present regime. I suppose I could be happy since my positions are becoming more and more relevant. But the question whether things are going to happen in an easy way or a hard way. Yeah, that’s the sixty four trillion dollar question. And shit, “trillions” are now actually relevant to the situation.

There seem to be several factions of bourgeois.

-        Anonymous low level money, feeding into the general financial system

-        Identified medium and low level money openly invested in the financial system and allowing “normal production”.

-        High Level money, which is anonymous to us but necessarily to the other high level players. This realm is very paradoxical, it is fusion or a muddle between the overt and the covert. It is Citicorp, General Electric, Enron, George Soros, Osama Bin Laden, and so-forth. The trick is that much of this money is incredibly leveraged as well as being hidden in both secrecy and complexity. This high-level money has the elements of the general networks of trust scattered around the world. But the trust can be based on the reasoning of an entity being too big to fail, something which Enron showed faulty. But these networks of trust can exist regardless of how justified the trust is. The “Greenspan Put” and other things imply that many large institutions are “too big to fail”.

But also there is the working class and all those who can be treated as resources.

Whatever. The biggest thing that occurs to me is how the “Fed will buy stocks” approach is another level of bubblism. If Blue Chip stocks are redeemable by the federal government, then this give private companies the authority to issue US government debt.

This really gives a picture of a capitalist system which is getting closer and closer to catastrophic crisis – and which has intention of taking its medicine in a disciplined fashion. I certainly hope the Fed avoid a Japan-style crisis and heads straight to grand finale, Argentina-style.

I suppose that an American dictatorial occupation of the entire world would be one vaguely plausible approach. But this would be so disruptive of the present order that it is difficult to imagine. America has primarily intervened in areas where production really doesn’t happen.

Could capitalism retreat to each region of the globe, ignoring global relations? That also seems like a difficult situation.

We can see the same desire for profits through the domination of natural resources that we saw in the thirties. But we see a system where profits flow from far more difficult processes. So once America becomes enmeshed in an adventure, it finds things are far more complex. We can ask why the American Army stopped before conquering Iraq in the Second Gulf War. We can note that America’s Afghan occupation is presently a Vietnam-style quagmire (but other things are happening fast enough that this might not be the first thing that buckles).

More and more, the working class is those people who have nothing and live only on the package deals of capital. Capital still doesn’t have the resources to control us once these package deals fall through.

The shallowness of every kind of control is becoming clearer and clearer to people.