Spiraling Towards Insanity
RL
29/11/2022
“There can be no question of which was the greatest era for culture; the answer has to be today, until it is superseded by tomorrow.” Stephen Pinker
Humanity has always been this way.
Emanating from the grand pipes of mass media organs, dribbling from the mouths of market evangelists, and whispered around half-empty staffrooms, modern people are lashed with this mantra. We are told that humanity is self-centred, humanity is short-sighted, and humanity is alone. The logic of the market rules. We are led to believe that, while our current system is not perfect, it is the best we can hope for. It is the most efficient form our political economy can take. As Francis Fukuyama gleefully put it, we are in the era of the ‘Last Man’ and have achieved the maximum greatness possible for humankind.
Now, as capitalism enters another major crisis, we hear it even louder. Among our crumbling infrastructure, burnt-out social services, skyrocketing levels of mental and financial instability and hilariously pervasive corruption, working Australians are being told that we should accept that these are simply natural occurrences. Naturally, your boss will fire half your team and not replace them; naturally, your landlord will raise your rent by 60%; naturally, you’ll lose your job when the market crashes.
This mindset is so pervasive it infests even those places where one might expect calls for the blood of bosses to abound, such as the labour movement. Recently we have seen the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) pathetically demonstrate this, when in the face of skyrocketing inflation and low wage growth punishing Australian workers, they feel the need to simply ‘fix’ the industrial relations system that Labor itself intentionally broke in a farcical attempt to ensure it remains ‘fair, simple and accessible for workers and [emphasis added] employers’.[1] The message put plainly by the ACTU is this: any solution to the double-edged sword of inflation and wage stagnation can only be found by working together with bosses.
This rings hollow when you consider the source of these problems. It’s not the average Australian who is to blame for the $320 billion dollars that the RBA magically printed into existence.[2] Nor is it our fault that bosses haven’t raised wages properly in 30 years. Nor that Labor killed the union movement and implemented neoliberalism to ‘save the economy’. If we’re being told that negotiations broke down, it was certainly not because of us. The suggestion, then, that we collaborate with bosses to fix these issues is insane after just a few moments of reflection. Did they collaborate with us when they made their decisions?
But such insanity is the name of the game. In fact, you could argue it is the intention of the game. Trapped in a constantly contradictory, ever-shifting haze, the average Australian finds themselves too exhausted to think, too broken to get angry, too depressed to be creative. Weighed down by the ideological vitriol pumped into us 24/7, we can’t see the forest for the trees.
The forest remains, however. Despite the increasingly desperate decisions of our ‘far-sighted’ banks and their political minions, they’ve brought about another great crisis, and capitalism is violently slamming against itself. Insanity reigns.
We see this already across the globe, and in Australia: central bankers fret maniacally between their usual cocaine lunches as capitalism’s fundamental contradictions shed their ideological glitter-paint. Take, for instance, the Bank of Japan, whose free-money junkies have yet to raise interest rates in the face of sky-rocketing inflation, eschewing so-called economic wisdom and causing the yen to collapse.[3] Or the Bank of England, who nearly faced a run on pension funds after Liz Truss attempted to implement ‘market-driven’ tax reforms that exclusively benefited high-income earners.[4] These examples are outliers, but even those obeying sacred economic laws of the neoliberal consensus have no plan for avoiding devastation. More and more, the economic libations earn less and less time, and our ‘rules-based democracies’ are running out of things to throw into the grinder. Shedding the language of their rationalisations and excuses, who only the most deluded believe, we can see one simple conclusion on the horizon: suffering is coming, and it will be us, the working class, who suffer, not them. No central banker lost his house in 2008. No land speculator found himself fired. No tech-CEO found themselves choosing between drug-fuelled delirium or sober depression.
Like the inflation and wage stagnation we are currently enduring, they will expect us to work with them through the coming crisis. Like 2008 and 2020, they will bleed the working class dry to sustain themselves within their perfect system. Despite their ideological insistence on humanity’s ultimate selfishness, we will be expected to be selfless. Despite their crucial role in causing this crisis, we will be told that our suffering is natural. That we, too, played a part in causing this. That everyone is equally affected by boom and bust. But we’ll remember 2008. We’ll remember 2020. They eagerly bet on us accepting their insanity. Now is the time to reject it.
The world exists outside of their money market play castles. The nature they sell us is simply a cheap commodity made for them, not for us.
We do not need them. We deserve better. Together, we can fight to create a better world.
Find out how you can get involved today:
References:
[1] https://www.actu.org.au/actu-media/media-releases/2022/urgent-action-needed-on-wage-growth-as-inflation-continues-to-climb
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-10/covid-economy-quantitative-easing-paying-it-back/100744158
[3] https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/bojs-wakatabe-says-yens-recent-fluctuations-too-rapid-one-sided-2022-10-15/
[4] https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/money/pension-funds-what-why-at-risk-bank-of-england-gilts-pensions-explained-1907170