CommonDreams: The Great Unmasking

[marmar]

Published on Wednesday, October 22, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
The Great Unmasking
by Linda Burnham


Capitalism in crisis is a sight to behold. Most of the time the system seems to hum along quite nicely. Oh, maybe a passel of people loses their jobs when some big-headed suit at the top decides to up and move on to a cheaper labor market. And maybe a city or two, or even a whole region, goes bankrupt and destitute, shops boarded up, ghosts in the street. Maybe a generation of young people ends up poorly educated because nobody could figure out how to turn a decent profit schooling ten-year-olds, so it slid down to the bottom of the priority list. Maybe there's an aberration here or there, like the positive incentive to filling up prisons. But overall, the thing has the reputation of the proverbial well-oiled machine, humming along and delivering the greatest good to the greatest number. And besides, it's the only machine in town.

But then it breaks down. Spectacularly.

And it turns out that this highest possible form of human development has more than a few foundational flaws, the relevant one at the moment being that it is subject, inevitably and constitutionally, to periodic, devastating crisis.

At such moments the verities of capital are called into question, and not by the closet Marxists and nostalgic revolutionaries. No, the capitalists themselves, in deed if not in word, are heaving great chunks of their ideology overboard. Invisible hand of the market? Heave ho. Limited government intervention in business? Heave ho. Self-correcting system? Heave ho. Whatever it takes to re-stabilize the system, let's do it. Principles be damned.

The pragmatic and temporary abandonment of core ideological beliefs is a great unmasking. And behind the mask -- fear, befuddlement, bravado.

The lords of finance live in a universe in which they are rewarded for being both insatiable and delusional. With maximizing profits as their single imperative they toil daily at the task of turning every human relationship and every form of matter -- animal, vegetable or mineral -- into a monetized asset. The only limits on how many ways that monetized asset can be reconfigured and repackaged; the only limits on how many times it can be resold; the only limits on how many ways profit can be wrung out of it are the limits of the imagination. We're human; our imagination is without limits. We've figured out how to buy, sell and lease the air space above buildings and the wind blowing across the plains. And here you thought "inherit the wind" was just a metaphor. But at least the air is a substance you can feel and hear and, on a crisp fall day, smell. Our boys are way beyond that, having long since abandoned the molecular to trade in the entirely immaterial. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/22-1

[dixiegrrrrl]

1. K&R

:kick:

Love that line:

The lords of finance live in a universe in which they are rewarded for being both insatiable and delusional.