"[A] society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells."
That is what Marx and Engels had to say about bourgeois capitalism in the 19th century. Those who have enjoyed ridiculing the Communist Manifesto may wish to duck and hide as we watch the government take over the financial markets hoping to stem their current nose-dive. For years, to breathe the word "regulation" in the good old USA meant being tarred as a 'pinko- socialist' or denounced by the Rush Limbaugh-'Homo Boobiens'- crowd as a liberal, or worse, a Democrat.
When H. L. Mencken remarked that the reason so many Americans were attracted to fundamentalism was because they were uneducable, he was impugning our Christian evangelicals who, unable to grasp the complexities of the universe being explained by modern science, sought refuge in the simplicities of revelation. But Mencken was unfair to reserve his scorn for the blindly religious. There are no truer believers than our recent crop of Republicans. Together with our gung-ho Wall Street boys they arrived in Washington with their Ayn Rand bibles and a fervent trust in the God of the Great Free Market. Convinced that government was the problem rather than the solution they attacked its functions with no more acumen, nor an ounce less faith than our religious zealots confronted Darwin and Episcopalians.
Greed is Good
It might have been funny watching these disciples of deregulation try to shed their Republican skins were the rest of us not forced to face the hell created by their unfettered Frankenstein: a world ridden with poisons and scarcities, wars, diseases and impending extinction. All in order to enrich the five hundred happy souls who now control half of Man's 'made' wealth. Compared to our 'greed-is-gooders the fervid Evangelicals seem rational.
Somehow our neo-liberals (we call them neo-cons because of their imperialist foreign policy but economically they were bred by Friedman's neo-liberalism) tacked their regressive philosophy onto poor Adam Smith, but it was an Austrian named Friedrick Hayek who first claimed that government interference in an economy was the "road to serfdom".
How anyone swallowed such swill is no less remarkable than believing that the earth is 7,000 years old and that God created dinosaur bones just to trick us. Hayek's own argument would seem to destroy his entire treatise since it asserts that human rights spring from property rights, and that therefore a society can be no more free than its economy.
The problem with his analysis, as we are currently witnessing, is that property can as easily be lost as it is gained. So someone left without property would also forfeit his or her human rights. Which brings us to the more unsettling proposition. Perhaps, just as homeowners in Michigan who face foreclosure may see their right to vote revoked, destroying our rights as citizens was the plan all along. One finds it hard to imagine someone wanting to return to a time when there were basically two classes, rich and poor. Much less to a world where five or six families made the big decisions and trusted they'd be carried out by a coterie of sycophants. Yet where democracy still faintly persists, it persists, like an old church ritual-- full of solemn gestures and recitations that have no effect upon the poor in body.
God Soothes Fear
One can imagine Homo Erectus emerging from his cave and wondering how the devil he was to survive huge wild animals much less whatever caused all that thunder and lightning. God surely filled the need to ease his panic since only He could explain it. Now picture the poor sod staring at the fine print on his mortgage application. He doesn't grasp the lightning speed of "market fluctuations" or care about those derivative beasts with their "strips, strangles and straddles". He just wants a roof over his head so he can stay dry when it rains and feel safe from landlords and other predators. The way he's been led to see it-- since the Market is a mysterious God, his banker can be trusted like his priest.
Even Marx's admirers say he got it wrong believing that the bourgeoisie had forged the weapons of its own destruction by creating the modern working class. So far that criticism appears borne out. This entire financial worldwide scheme may have gotten so huge and convoluted that it's no longer enough to shout "kill the priests!" Before grabbing for the torches and pitchforks we'll be fighting for a path back through hell.
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