New World Order University Forum

We recently lived through two major Communist holidays, Earth Day (Lenin’s birthday) and May Day (honoring the date of the Russian Revolution). The European Communists celebrated May Day with riots in the streets. See the report by Thomas Grove at Thompson/Reuters. Grove characterizes these riots as fueled by rising unemployment and anger over European governments’ focus on bank bailouts rather than focusing on the needs of the unemployed.

Essentially this little conflict is a protest of the unionized Left against the Leftist governments. By contrast, rising unemployment in the United States isn’t leading to union demonstrations but to tea parties on the Right. When will the Left join the Right in the streets? Ummm, a little while after the auto companies emerge from bankruptcy, or some other major industry announces huge layoffs, or when states begin to cut teachers and bureaucrats on a large scale.

Actually we believe that Sarkozy and Merkel have done as well as can be expected in this crisis. They refused to fund further bailouts for America and England, negotiated compensation for bad U.S. debt foisted onto Europe’s banks, tried to close down tax havens used by capitalist exploiters, and moved to support their banks and industries. They did, however, support IMF control over central bank policies, and they gave the IMF a mandate to bail out Eastern European banks and European countries facing bankruptcy. We are not convinced handing more power to the IMF will play out well, but let’s wait and see how it goes.

So what would the Communists have done if they were in power? Refuse to shore up their troubled banks? Let them fail? Fine, but there aren’t going to be more jobs created in an economy where debt defaults ripple across entire industries and sectors. The Communists would have to provide subsidies for “make work” jobs and extend unemployment benefits to avoid the immediate suffering of the newly unemployed. They still face the same problem of severely lowered demand for autos, houses, and other consumer durable goods. How long can they support jobs and production at industries for which demand is falling? Actually, the best hope for the Communists is the same best hope for the capitalists and the governments, to stimulate demand to keep industries afloat while doing its best to alleviate the worst suffering. The Communists don’t appear to have a Communist plan for the European economy. Anyway, if they had one, it would simply impoverish the workers.

But there doesn’t seem to any thinking about how to stimulate demand, and how such stimulus could be sustained, by anybody anywhere. Nor is there any planning for dislocated people when the New World Order experiences crisis. Forced migration without planning is the default outcome of New World Order Disorder.

What is lacking at the top of the socialist governments of Europe is any thinking about how to restructure the national economy to meet local demand. All of these countries are now so dependent on putting their favored industries on steroids to produce for export that they cannot imagine any alternative economy to globalism. At the same time, the reality of present economic conditions as well as public protests forces them to address economic issues nationally. But, being socialists, all they can think of is creating make-work jobs, and, being globalists, they can’t imagine cutting loose of the free trade treaties that allow foreign competition to undermine their industries.

Regardless of whether the global economy revives or whether it crashes further and forces to the fore a philosophy of economic nationalism, Europe’s leaders are transitional figures who will soon disappear from the scene. None of them is intellectually equipped with a positive vision of a nonglobalist future. The best they can think to do is respond to the various pressures. Rising to a high position in the New World Order is not necessarily all that rewarding. Aside from intellectual atrophy, socialist leaders also become victims, in a sense, of economic laws more powerful than their calculations and schemes.

The World Socialist Website reports on May Day demonstrations around the globe. WSW also reports on demonstrations and executive kidnappings in France, and WSW reports on rising unemployment in Australia. The Socialists propose that the Australian government support a minimum-wage job for everyone who wants one, a job guarantee program.

World Politics Review reports on unrest in Russia.

Time is the calculus in the equation of the future. The question is, how much debt can you issue, and how much savings can you burn up creating band-aids, before the global economy recovers? And, if it doesn’t recover, the squandered capital then cannot be used to build a genuine economy. While the socialists have their moment in the protest spotlight, the real calculus behind the scenes is the burn rate of capital. The irony of this situation is that the socialists may somehow triumph and get their policies adopted only to find that their unsustainable job-creation policies accelerate the burn rate, leading to the greatest economic crash in history, with no capital to start an economic recovery.

This has all happened before, when the Social Democrats (Bolsheviks) took power in Russia, outlawed small business, and shrank the economy by 90 percent. Lenin had to rely on foreign loans and investment to ameliorate his socialist policies and get a little economic activity going. This time, there may not be any foreign capital available to bail out the socialists. They should be rooting for the recovery of the banks because they are not equipped to deal with the suffering and dislocation that will occur under large-scale economic failure.

May Day is supposed to be a celebration of Communism, the celebration of the uncelebrateable. A good turnout this year, but the mood was subdued.

Tags: Communism, European Union, May Day riots

This entry was posted by Director on Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 at 3:51 pm and is filed under Global Communism, Global Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.