The United States and its spiritual antecedent in the old empire are forever bound it seems in the noble endeavor of keeping the world safe for their various aristocratic and pretend aristocratic masters of the universe. Whether it is Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher working in tandem to rid their nations of allegedly feather-bedding unions in the 1980s or now, some thirty years after their victorious crusade, when one's nose gets tickled the other one sneezes. Yet, once again, the clock is ticking.
While, at the moment, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron seems not to have a direct counterpart in Democratic President Barack Obama, he might as well have. The young man who was elected to give us redemption from the excesses and crimes of the previous administration and even what some saw as reparation (albeit on the cheap) for the crimes of slavery, has ineffectually presided over a nation held hostage by the forces of the right on every significant matter of governance.
Now, as the world watches Great Britain's cities in flames, other images rush in: of Marx in the British Library believing he was writing the script for the demise of the nineteenth century's version of the evil empire, or, in our own century, of Naomi Klein drafting her warning call in The Shock Doctrine, or of disenfranchised Black Americans burning down their own cities, or even of Reichstag fires and a cataclysmic war that followed. Many commentators have seen in the right's recipe to save capitalism as we have known it a return to the nineteenth century, a century of laissez-faire capitalism and the absence of social welfare programs. If this is true, and the economic masters have not learned the lessons of history, we are in for a very tough time indeed.
For, in fact, the prosperity that the advanced industrial nations enjoyed for a brief period after World War II was paid for with tens of millions of lost lives. Capitalism is like the mythic phoenix that goes down in flames and is then reborn out of its own ashes. The communist revolutions in Russia and China that laid claim to breaking the cycle proved incapable of doing so. What their brief tenure did accomplish, however, was to provide an excuse for the capitalist world to divert the largest single portion of its wealth to financing gargantuan war machines. It was neither the reformist regimen of Franklin Roosevelt nor the revolutions in Russia and China that proved capable of--even temporarily--meeting the needs of modern humanity. Instead, it was an insane dance of destruction and rebuilding on the graves of millions of men, women and children.
We now seem dangerously close to repeating the tragic errors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As austerity programs are put in place in the aftermath of the Financial Panic of 2008 concurrent with the greatest gap between rich and poor the world has ever seen, the inevitable has occurred. Cet animal est très méchant: quand on l'attaque il se défend. "This animal is vicious: when attacked, it defends itself." goes the old saying. Whether in London or Athens or Cairo or Madison, Wisconsin, the aggrieved have begun to take to the streets. Take away workers' voices by destroying their unions, take away their pensions, their health benefits, their access to decent schools and libraries, their very access to a means to put bread on the table for their families, and--eventually--they will react.
War is such a simple, elegant solution. So many surplus laborers are just killed off. So many jobs are created to build and replenish the weapons of their own destruction. And, of course, the masters have once again saved their hoarded wealth from the attacking mob. Tick...tick...tick...
