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Library of Professor Richard A. Macksey in Baltimore

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Saturday, August 21, 2010

Don't worry about the economy, we don't need it

24 October 2009

Don't worry about the economy, we don't need it

"The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal."
-- Elia Kazan

Don't worry about the economy, we don't need it. A statement that is at once bold, brave and easily dismissed as foolish, but it's a sentence that encapsulates as succinctly as possible something that desperately needs saying.
"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes her laws."

-- Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744 -1812)
Godfather of the Rothschild Banking Cartel
in 'The Creature from Jekyll Island', p. 218
Most of us, most of the time, have no need or want whatsoever for the financial economy that exists today; that is - a systemic legacy of historical ownership, control and operation. In fact, if anything, the financial economy is a shackle and a hindrance to more people, more of the time, than it is of any tangible benefit. Which is just as it has been intended by that class of people who champion their private property, profit and capital over the interests of the very people that wittingly or unwittingly facilitate their privilege. But still, don't worry about the economy, we don't need it.

What we do need however is a coherent way of understanding the essential nature of the permanent crisis of Capitalism and its economy, complete with an understanding of how the murderous U-SUK alliance Imperialism we see in the Middle-East and elsewhere is Capitalism in its most barbarous form. We need a correct understanding to ensure that this is the last ever crisis of Capitalism that anyone has to endure and, equally as crucially, to collectively plan, organise and establish new ways for how 6 billion-and-counting human beings go about co-existing with each other on the blue-green planet that hosts us.



An accurate and insightful understanding of what the system of Capitalism under which we live is, how it operates, and what the function of the State is inside the system of Capitalist operation, would include an understanding of how the State has established and maintained for itself a monopoly on the 'legitimate' use of violence against everything, which it deploys via bodies of armed men in defence of the minority interests of private property, capital, capitalists and capitalism. Private property is theft from and an affront to the rest of humanity and the capital is a historical, fictional legacy controlled by a handful people who manage the fiction to best suit the needs of themselves and their class; it is these things that the State, for all its pretence otherwise, exists to protect. Which, in the 21st century information age, is a somewhat backward and regressive basis for anything and this is the crux of the issue: the State's role as actor and enforcer in defence of private property and private capital, while keeping empty a million houses from those with no homes or health, and families unable to feed, clothe and educate their children, because 4 million people live under institutionalised and enforced poverty.
"The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as inevitably as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe."

-- Friedrich Engels
from "The Origin of Family, Private Property and State" (1884)
Thankfully, outside the bounds of the public school theatrics of parliamentary politics and debate and mostly also outside of the bounds of mainstream media debate (with one or two notable exceptions like the discussion on Newsnight by middle-class pundits of impending "class warfare") people are beginning to explore what lies at the core of the system that enforces certain material conditions of existence. Better yet, they are beginning to explore solutions.



The State and Revolution, by Vladimir Il'ich Lenin


Since the snappily titled credit-crunch and the despotic actions of States around the world to sustain at any cost to workers the banking infrastructure and the workings of the financial markets of Capitalism the statement, "Don't worry about the economy, we don't need it" rings more true now than at any time before in history. And, while it is possible that some might label the statement "Don't worry about the economy, we don't need it" as the wild imaginings and inventions of an idiot, a 'conspiracy theorist', an Anarchist or a Marxist, or any other ad hominem 'insult' du jour -- as undoubtedly some will loudly decry it, and good luck to them all for their time is nearly up - the closing words of this article are given to a man of mental faculty, standing and repute beyond reproach:
Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

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