Cyprus is the latest European casualty in the decline of capitalism, it will not be the last, sadly the capitalist beast will not die quietly, before its final death throes, it will create a lot more damage and misery, a dying beast can be very dangerous. The living standards of the ordinary people will continue to decline to even more deplorable levels, as capitalism tries to extract a blood transfusion from the public purse. The magic wizards of the economists club will continue to spout theories for growth and predictions of green shoots, meanwhile you and I go down the tubes, waiting for that pie-in-the-sky. How far we sink will depend not on a wonderful capitalist recovery, but on what action we take to speed the demise of this cruel, unjust, exploitative, insane, greed driven system. Forget the welfare state system administered by the puppets of the corporate world, which will always be at the the mercy of the vagaries and needs and greed of the capitalists that pull the financial strings. We have to create outside the system, along the lines of communities, mutual aid and co-operation. Workers control and self-management is the only road to a society free from exploitation. All the crap about being impoverished, being necessary and for our own benefit, is no more than propaganda to try to keep you quiet and subservient while you are being screwed. The last thing they want is for the people to take matters into their own hands and shape the society in which they want to live. It is a matter of take what you get, or create what you want. Communities, communes, workers control, direct democracy, a world freed from the greed driven madness and the suicide of capitalism.
The following is an extract from an article in the latest, The Commune:
With an economics based upon a subjective notion of value – marginal utility – neither the Keynesians, nor the neo-liberal economists could see that value cannot be printed. With the dot.com bubble followed by a property bubble, debt ratios in the West reached record levels. The sub-prime mortgage market in the US kicked off the credit-crunch of 2007 & the outright panic of late 2008 when the collapse of Lehman Brothers threatened the whole financial system. Banks got nationalised. Banks had their bad debts bought by the government. Governments bought back their debt from the banks, long-term as well as short-term debt, & so stopped credit money from collapsing. Taxpayers are now picking up the bill in the form of ‘austerity’: cuts to government spending & a new, more intense phase of ‘rolling back the frontiers of the state’. Because of the crisis of overproduction (too much produced relative to what the market can afford to buy sustainably) capitalism can no longer even pretend to offer humanity improved living standards. Across the globe workers are suffering. Final-pension salaries are no longer ‘affordable’. Graduates are unemployed, saddled with debt & with little prospect of having the same standard of living enjoyed by their parents. Others are ‘written-off’ whilst still at school as ‘no-hopers’ & are expected to become invisible, not to riot as many did in England in the summer of 2011. The politicians’ expenses scandal in Britain has damaged the façade of so-called ‘representative democracy’. They are increasingly hated along with the bankers. The capitalist media has also taken a knock with the phone-hacking scandal & the collusion of senior police officers at London’s Metropolitan police with Rupert Murdoch’s News International has been revealed. There is little trust left.Read the full article HERE:
