Recently President Biden asked the Saudis to open up more OPEC oil in order to reduce the staggering costs of fuel in the West and to reduce the role of the particular horde owned by Russia. Mohamed bin Salman, Saudi's Crown Prince (and known as the murderer of journalist Jamil Khashoggi) refused point blank. He is close to Jared Kushner, Trump's son in law. Notwithstanding Jared's lack of experience he has just recently invested $2 billion in his new investment firm. All of course incidental. And all another small part of the increasing mangling of the greatest proposition of modern capitalism; that of globalisation.
The collapse of globalisation and its results have been with us before Covid. But Covid and now an east-west war have rapidly increased the coming capitalist break up. Shell has just reported their largest quarter profit ever; $9 billion. BP, Shell bosses etc., are all hugely delighted. But they are also all frightened - between the clink of champaign glasses and the scary future. For example BP has said that they were aching to offer a windfall tax! The British Tory government declined, so far stating that these companies are going to need their super pile for worthy investment when the oil runs out. Meanwhile Shell needs to increase their pile saying that it will be used as a windfall to buy back company shares, which will increase their company's stock. They are laughing but they smell a crash to come. We are no longer in the great, worldwide, constant, global miracle. Capitalism has always collapsed in its centuries of domination. But this time, after every means that have been used, a global economic catastrophe is the worst so far. And this particular collapse is already being threatened with nukes.
Look around. The 10 leading shipping lines in the world are in profit in 2021 to the record of $120 billion; the highest profits in 117 years. That is in Covid times. In February 2022, the 'investment monitor' tells us that 'the constraining supply and pushing prices up' and globalisation as we know it is gradually on the retreat and 'US-Chinese-trade tensions (are) rising levels of protectionism everywhere.' Shipping, the most important mechanism of globalisation, unstuck up to now from any particular country or tax, is declining fast.
Do you like bread? Global food crises are erupting. Tom Stevenson in the LRB explains the coming catastrophe. Just in case, as is often described by scared politicians, it was all Covid causing these crises. But it is just not so. While Ukraine and Russia account for huge parts of the export of grain, particularly Sudan, which in this case will double its acute hunger to 18 million in the next couple of months, more generally the Food, Agriculture Organisation states that the war 'revealed the fragility of the dominant global food system.' Egypt, Lebanon, Syria etc etc, are facing starvation in the millions. The World Food Program tells us 'an unparalleled global hunger crisis' is ahead.' Stevenson states 'an important part of the story has to do with the movements of poorly regulated commodities markets, dominated ... by a handful of financial institutions and corporations. Investor speculation drove the price of food out of the reach of most of the world's poor during the economic crisis of 2008.'
Does any thinking person, somebody not already yet crushed by war and starvation, avoid the conditions to come? The portents are with us all. Of course 'nicer' leaders than Trump, or his extremely unpleasant echoes, can be found in abundance, but what are we understanding? The old 'nice' leaders have already failed. They failed because their decades of the status quo has failed. The leaders that have insisted on the status quo cannot believe that their domination cannot, anymore, set themselves in the history of Western capitalism because its history has gone and Jared Kushner grabs the wealth. It is particularly in the shrinking west, that the traditional leaderships have been creating their own downfall.
There are now two roads in the current life of today's capitalism. China's The Belt and Road Initiative is a global infrastructure strategy adopted by the Chinese government in 2013 to invest in nearly 70 countries and international organisations. A third of it has already been broken up by corruption. But the two great movements through Africa and the East, led by China, is an effective construction against the West's imperialist long histories. China, using their $ trillions-plus to create a Chinese led, state capitalism, development, strikes a new and positive capitalist turn in low and medium developed countries. The US, of a Biden or a Trump type basis will ultimately go to war to prevent China's new empire against US hegemony.
The second path of late capitalism has already partly started. Centred in the crucible of the West, a thorough and essential destruction of all the social benefits in society is the only means of revivifying a new capitalism's increasing progress in respect of the ruling classes and their police, army etc.. Again, as with the China proposal, the result will be war, but internal of the sort that Trump began in his fight for the 'States'. Capitalism will not, despite the mechanical theorists that see inevitable stages that draw definitive lines in history, simply fade away. But its future is now much more limited in its possibilities.
The alternative? The second wave of socialism. Is there any other holistic alternative that is based on human needs and the right of self organisation, on the collective requirement of all equals, the control of all human discovery and a planet supported for life?
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