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There appears to be only one game in town these days, and that's the free market economy. If you're not in it, you're nowhere, dead, a loser. Your children will starve, your wife is duty bound to leave you.
The economy: this huge metal and plastic beast with billions of nipples on which we all may suck if we're good.
This strange animal, the economy, obeys laws which only an arcane priesthood can understand. Silver haired men in dark suits jet into your country's capital, delivering The Sermon. You can take it or leave it, but if you leave it, they'll be shaking their heads and smiling sadly as they comment on TV news about the crash of your currency, the revolt in your cities, the property magnates reduced to selling sandwiches on street corners.
Is the Great Beast, the economy, a virtual being, the realisation of Bill Joy's artificial intelligence (AI) terror? Is it living its own life with its own goals, with us humans crouching in its shadow like beggars before a king? Is it the next step up the evolutionary ladder, drawing its life from us to accomplish some yet higher goal, with all, both rich and poor, scrabbling to do it service?
If so, then are the IMF a part of a stern, disinterested priesthood, like mediaeval monks, austere and selfless, full of compassion for suffering humanity? Are they in a special relationship to this Beast, guiding us into the path of righteousness that we may achieve absolution, or at least, an SUV in the driveway and a skiing holiday next year?
And the mass of ordinary folk, without the words and concepts to help in this perplexity, nevertheless grok wrongness as well. Unfortunately, this knowledge can madden them, can make them follow even worse leaders than the ones blessed by the Holy IMF and the Saints of the World Bank.
The IMF are the servants of a class interest -- a class who are doing very well at the moment, thank you. They're up there riding on the back of the Beast, which has no goal but their goals.
The great problem for the mass of us who are not in the saddle is that despite having the levers of democracy in our hands, the representatives we raise up to confront the riders of the Beast have a habit of joining them at the top. They then turn round and tell us we're not really suffering at all or that. sooner or later, the gravy will trickle down to us. The good news, they say, is that the Economy is in Great Shape. So cheer upm you miserable unemployed, you wretched homeless, you great unwashed.
I'll abandon my metaphor now, and look at the situation from a completely different angle. We are heading towards a universal worldwide state at a cracking pace, with only China a possible holdout of any significance (but only if President Shrub really screws up relations with them.) What would a universal state be like?
The last one which I know much about was the Roman Empire. It was a universal state in the sense that, once you were part of it, outside was such a mighty step down that it might as well not exist.
If you displeased the Emperor, there was nowhere to run. The economy of the empire was universal too. If you weren't doing so well, you couldn't up stakes and cross the border to try again. Like now, there was only one game in town. How did that game play out?
Rome began as an agrarian economy and the farmers were the backbone of the citizenry. When Rome successfully expanded as a result of reacting to external threats and overcoming them, the economy was turned on its head. The defeat of enemies brought in masses of captives who were used as slave labour. The rich bought the slaves and used them to work their farms and their mines, becoming richer still. The free-born poor farmers simply could not compete. They were forced off their land and moved to the city.
The situation was exacerbated by the acquisition of Egypt. Masses of cheap grain from the Nile delta flooded onto the Roman market depressing prices still further. Cheap grain meant a large urban population could be supported, but this population was impoverished, under- or unemployed, and essentially dependent on handouts. Those who supplied the handouts were in a position to control the politics of the city because they were able to call on the mob to support them. There were other complicating factors which I won't go into as they're not central to this argument, but isn't there something awfully familiar sounding about this?
We may not have slaves (I won't count sweatshop labour in Third World countries or among our own disadvantaged classes,) but the technology of production has had the same effect. Let's take the situation to an extreme by way of a thought experiment.
This involves the concept of the Santa Claus machine, proposed by Theodore Taylor, a former engineering professor at Princeton and head of the International Research and Technology Corporation in Washington, DC, in the 1970s. We know about robots replacing workers in manufacturing. He posited a highly automated factory with almost no human workers needed. Imagine placing such a facility in space where solar energy is abundant, 24 hours a day, perhaps on an asteroid comprised of usable metals. What if this factory could produce virtually any mechanical device we needed, given the appropriate programming? It's really not that far ahead of what's possible now.
Like the trickster in the fairy tale who's given one wish, and then wishes for an unlimited number of wishes, we can instruct this factory to make a copy of itself, which can then copy itself, and so on exponentially until we say stop. We can see that after the initial investment in the first Santa Claus machine (as Taylor called these factories) we get them free (hence the name).
We can then instruct these factories to make whatever we like, and again the products cost almost nothing. Great. But how would our system cope with this? Is a free market the best way to distribute free goods? Who would own or control the means of production and distribution?
If this is the situation we are rushing towards, we could easily end up like the Romans, with a great mass of the population living miserably on handouts and the controllers of the means of production at the top.
The current visions of our future from our leaders seem to be more wishful thinking than anything considered or properly argued.
On the conservative side, the idea seems to be that if people are hungry and frightened enough, they'll find something useful to do ‚ I'll call that the compassionate conservative vision. The nasty conservative vision is pure social Darwinism; let the weak perish and anything that makes life more bearable for those at the bottom is a positive evil.I'd say the nasty conservative vision pretty well describes the IMF's (and the Shrub's) position on all this.
On the left, such as it is, we have pseudo-leftists of the Tony Blair variety who talk the talk but act conservative; bitter leftists of the old school, defeated and looking for a hole to crawl in and die; clueless idealists and, coming up, naive but hopeful youngsters.
The Green movement is getting a kick along, and our upcoming national election in Australia could conceivably give them the balance of power in our upper house of Parliament. But the Greens everywhere suffer from a vast philosophical schism, not much talked about, but always likely to undo them as a credible political force.
This is the split between Shallow Ecologists and Deep Ecologists, which -- speaking crudely -- equates with those who think the environment can be saved if everyone realises how much it is worth economically to us humans, and those who think nature is perfect, humans imperfect and who look forward to a collapse in human society which will remove us as disturbers of the natural order.
I've yet to hear the Greens, or anyone else on the left, articulate a vision of an alternative future that seems credible, or even just attractive.
So this is the great problem we are facing. We have to develop an alternative vision to the one being foisted on us by the riders of the the Beast, and their priesthood, the IMF. I don't think such a vision has to be perfectly thought out, but it has to be attractive, sexy if you like, an erotic vison that people will want to believe in and will work to realise. At the moment, the alternatives are falling by default into the hands of the nutcases, and some of them are dangerous nutcases.
So put your thinking caps on, you lot, and get to work!
QUESTIONS? COMMENTS? Why not e-mail Lloyd?