Trotsky's Ghost: Part Three

It now seems fairly certain that all ensuing crises will be global in nature.  Due to the world-wide interlocking directorate that exists under the ever-frailer aegis of the U.S. dollar, it would be difficult to contain a crisis within the borders of a single nation.  Even China, with its command economy, will be hard pressed to shield itself from an economic epidemic beyond its borders so long as it relies so heavily on exports to other nations.  The economic fates of the Western hemisphere and Europe are intertwined.  Even sub-Saharan Africa, desperately struggling with the colonial "inheritance" left behind by its former European masters, will certainly not be immune.

     All this brings to mind the novel St. Petersburg written by the Russian novelist Andrei Bely in 1916, on the eve of the Russian revolution.  The novel's device is to place a time bomb in the home of a Russian aristocrat early on.  Through all of its remaining pages, the reader can hear that bomb ticking away.  The plot device serves, of course, as a metaphor for the conditions that led to the real explosions that would be set off in the aftermath of World War I. 
     The new millenium, of course, has brought us nothing so much as a sharpened awareness that we are not living with just one ticking time bomb, but three.  At the moment the economic crisis is on the front pages, but embedded under a layer or two of denial are two crises that may well explode before we ever reach a resolution of our economic troubles, namely the environmental crisis and, third, the perpetual risk that men in power will resort to the time-worn solution for getting out of a jam, the use of real rather than metaphoric bombs.  (Viewers of PBS's current Masterpiece Theater offering, titled Birdsong, have been exposed to the devastating loss of life that took place during World War I.  Viewers who are students of the history will understand that that was precisely the point.) 
     The Russians, though no longer ruled by communist commissars, are clearly still beyond the pale.  Their internet news service, RT.com, gives us daily reminders of the build-up of military forces in the Persian Gulf and their attitude toward U.S. missile deployments in Eastern Europe becomes daily more belligerent.  Echoes of the wacky, millennial doomsday prognostications that have long predicted a global cataclysm in 2012 can be found everywhere in the media.  In truth, there is a frightening suspicion that, ironically, the risk of war is now greater than it ever was during the heat of the nominally cold war.
    In my previous post, I chided Paul Krugman for not taking his analysis to the next level and flat out acknowledging that Western policy makers are not merely avoiding taking the measures necessary for at least ameliorating the economic crisis, but are in fact determined to exacerbate it.  There is, however, an even deeper layer of the onion to be peeled away.  If, as I suggested, they are interested in reverting to nineteenth century laissez faire capitalism, the question still remains: why are they willing to go to such an extreme?  To some extent, no doubt, philosophical and ideological factors are in play, but is there more?  The strong suspicion arises that traditional capitalism has died on the long vines of derivatives and other such expressions of unbridled greed.  To use an alternative metaphor, there is now so much grit in the capitalist cogs that the machine has essentially ground to a halt.   There is no new idea out there.  No obvious remedy.  Don't count on the New York Times printing an obituary, however.  Not yet.
     Some followers of Trotsky's thoughts are already finding conditions ripe in the present situation for a global turn to what is for them the obvious alternative--socialism and communism.
     Tick...tick..tick...

(Above photo of Andrei Bely from the pages of Wikipedia.)