I just finished Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bait and Switch, was not surprised by anything in it although it is apparent that the outlook is bleak indeed for those who wish remain employed at middle-class income levels, let alone expect to have any kind of job security or health coverage. But her conclusion suggests, what I’ve suspected for a while now (and has been anticipated at least since Marx in the 19th century), that capitalism, or what we call capitalism at any rate (the market economy, i.e.), is moribund. This raises a question: If this is indeed the case, will the whole thing collapse completely or will it transmutate into something else, a kind of tyranny ruled not be the truncheon but perpetual underemployment and the fear of unemployment? Perhaps one that transcends the need even for laws? One where compliance is technically voluntary but where dissent is practically impossible; reliant not on the Thought Police but inanity? It is impossible for me to see how “business as usual” can continue, the economy is increasingly unable, for nothing that has to do with lack of materiel or human resources, to take care of the population.* At present many signs suggest that the economy is self- destructing, that whole edifice will just collapse in a heap under its own weight; but if it is not, if the overall power structure can survive, it seems there is every reason to believe that will shortly find ourselves in a Dark Age bleaker than crude totalitarian world of 1984.
But what if instead the capitalism just self-destructs, as it almost did once? In the short run this will be a catastrophe for everyone and could even precipitate a nuclear war. But could it advantageous in the long run, once the rubble has been cleared? A cathartic event wringing in the millennium? I believe that this hope is widely held, but I think it is a dangerously complacent one. The reality, I believe, will be that scores of people who have hitherto been relatively prosperous will be trust to the bottom and won’t know what to do—the shock of such a radical descent would be beyond what most people could sustain. Therefore, if there is hope, it has to lie in us at last taking responsibility for ourselves. Deciding what aims are political and socially desirable and single-mindedly pursuing them, being fully prepared to confront whatever obstacles the forces of reaction will create to stop us. Idealism coupled with a hard eye on reality and the willingness to change strategy at once when a change of strategy is called for (Liberal support for the Democratic Party, who have failed to do anything other than support Republican policy, such as continuing the war on Iraq, comes to mind as an example of failed strategy. I think that creating a “third party” that takes a principled stand would be a logical next, but if that doesn’t work more “direct” forms of activism may turn out to be what’s required.).
*”And we have to find [long-term] solutions, because there is a level of macro-irrationality here that does beyond the micro-insanity of individual hiring and firing decisions: That is a massive, sickening, ongoing waste of talent, as exemplified by the taxi-driving engineer, the idle teachers and techies, the still employed people who are too crushed by anxiety to express their creativity (Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch).”
Peter Ward Crank Brooklyn, NY