Fiction is the best guide. This is what the GOP dying looks like:
Posted on 05/31/2016 9:36:46 AM PDT by Lorianne
What does it look like when an ideology dies? As with most things, fiction can be the best guide. In Red Plenty, his magnificent novel-cum-history of the Soviet Union, Francis Spufford charts how the communist dream of building a better, fairer society fell apart.
Even while they censored their citizens’ very thoughts, the communists dreamed big. Spufford’s hero is Leonid Kantorovich, the only Soviet ever to win a Nobel prize for economics. Rattling along on the Moscow metro, he fantasises about what plenty will bring to his impoverished fellow commuters: “The women’s clothes all turning to quilted silk, the military uniforms melting into tailored grey and silver: and faces, faces the length of the car, relaxing, losing the worry lines and the hungry looks and all the assorted toothmarks of necessity.”
But reality makes swift work of such sandcastles. The numbers are increasingly disobedient. The beautiful plans can only be realised through cheating, and the draughtsmen know it better than any dissidents. This is one of Spufford’s crucial insights: that long before any public protests, the insiders led the way in murmuring their disquiet. Whisper by whisper, memo by memo, the regime is steadily undermined from within. Its final toppling lies decades beyond the novel’s close, yet can already be spotted.
When Red Plenty was published in 2010, it was clear the ideology underpinning contemporary capitalism was failing, but not that it was dying. Yet a similar process as that described in the novel appears to be happening now, in our crisis-hit capitalism. And it is the very technocrats in charge of the system who are slowly, reluctantly admitting that it is bust.
And you saw it most clearly last Thursday from the IMF.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Fiction is the best guide. This is what the GOP dying looks like:
Red Plenty ends with Nikita Khrushchev pacing outside his dacha, to where he has been forcibly retired. “Paradise,” he exclaims, “is a place where people want to end up, not a place they run from. What kind of socialism is that? What kind of shit is that, when you have to keep people in chains? What kind of social order? What kind of paradise?”
There are people in Venezuela asking that question right now. I wish more people in the United States would.
The article is making the case that neoliberal capitalism is headed to exactly the same place as communism.
Of course what the alternative would be they don’t say.
People predicted globalism would fail in the 90s but most Republicans and some Democrats (that seems to be the split) claimed it would lead us into paradise.
It’s not capitalism that is dying, it’s the politicos’ and the rentiers’ continuing efforts to convert the global economy to mercantilism that is falling.
Hillary is trying to dress it up as “progressive.”
The people of the USA have got their answer: DJT.
>Of course what the alternative would be they don’t say.
Regular capitalism with local sovereignty?
Perhaps. But they don’t say.
We'll know more after November!
True today they have become Fiji fledged Communists and Socialists
Their neoliberalism is crony capitalism. The state giving favors to certain businesses (solar, wind, nuclear), while punishing other businesses (coal, oil, Christian churches). The future will have free market capitalism and very small state governments. Anything else leads to total war and total destruction. Always has. Always will.
Another joyous and inane article from the marxists at the Guardian about the impending doom of capitalism.
And he doesn’t even realize that any of the ills of what passes for capitalism nowdays have been caused by the people attempting to “socialize” it.
If governments would stop taking an increasing slice of GDP and handicapping the producers of real wealth then the economy would take off. The only time it has been tried in the post World War II era - in the eighties - it was a resounding success. The problem is that once the politicians/bureaucrats see increasing government revenues they are physiologically incapable of restraining themselves from increasing government spending and interference, via rules and regulations, in the private economy.
Bkmrk.
The pendulum always swings back the other way.
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