I have to admit that I still haven't quite gotten over seeing the Oscar winning documentary, "Inside Job", which is described by its director, Charles Ferguson as being about "the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial services industry and the consequences of that systemic corruption". I found myself especially depressed by the part America's most prestigious educational institutions have been playing in this corruption. This is as if America's mind itself were corrupted, with unimaginably negative consequences for the country.

A healthy intellectual community is vital, central, to any meaningful change.  For at bottom the battle to be fought politically must be first be fought intellectually and if America's intellectuals are corrupt, who is to fight it? As the Bible says, "Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men."

What is the battle that has to be fought? Steve Walt has written a powerful paragraph that shows the outlines of it:

I confess I don't see any way of winning that battle as things stand today other than if the conservative movement simply collapses under the weight of its own stupidity, unfortunately damaging millions of people's lives and welfare in the process. I wonder how many dumb things anyone can do on borrowed money, for how long?

I am reminded of Marx's much ridiculed prediction that capitalism would eventually collapse under the weight of its internal contradictions.  Where he went wrong, in my humble opinion, was imagining that a revolution would hurry the process. I think he made that error out of the natural and very human desire to see things we would like to happen, happen when we are still alive to see them happen. Life is very short and a human being's power to imagine future utopias nearly infinite. How many millenarians over the centuries, have sold everything and then sat in a field waiting for the world to end? Humans are always seeing signs that the end is near. Today we have the Rapture movement to prove that this waiting hopefully for the world to end is just part of the contradictory and tragic nature of our species. So, in my opinion Marx succumbed to this most human of traits, wishful thinking, when he predicted revolution being the end of capitalism and the instrument with which to effect the liberation of humanity. However, inevitably the world will end someday. Won't it?

On the other hand his analysis of the forces within the capitalist system, those which could cause its final collapse seem to me as rationally scientific as a seismologist discussing the San Andreas Fault.... On examining the fault scientists know that something terrible is bound to happen sometime, but the they don't know when, maybe tomorrow or maybe in 300 years. The idea of a revolution causing the collapse of capitalism is like thinking that if all the inhabitants of Los Angeles jumped up and down simultaneously, that this would cause the famous earthquake called, "the big one" to occur. But just because revolution has failed doesn't mean that capitalism is safe, because it can fail all on its own and there is no guarantee that anything better will automatically replace it.

The prime reason that the world's left(s?) appears so helpless today in the face of capitalism is that capitalism has become a truly international or better said, "a-national" movement. Today many corporations are even headquartered officially in offshore tax havens to avoid paying taxes. They are not controlled by any nation, while the left always, despite singing "The Internationale",  is inevitably attached to the states they inhabit and the only state where a revolution might actually change the whole world, The United States of America, is the state least likely to ever see one.

However just like the Rapturettes probably all we can do is wait and hope.  

Crossposted from: http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/