![By Dying Regime from Maldives (Protest calling for Sharia in Maldives) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://i0.wp.com/asiatimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Street_protest_calling_for_Sharia_in_Maldives_Democracy_failed_system_poster.jpg?fit=1200%2C800&ssl=1)
Karl Marx, following Hegel, famously made constant reference to the “correlation of forces” that were going to cause, according to him, the collapse of the capitalist system and the inauguration of the workers’ paradise.
The current correlation of forces would have thrilled Marx. It includes the following toxic elements:
- The most ridiculous, stupid, idiotic, surrealistic and extremely dangerous presidential election in American history. The world’s premier economic and military power is going through an electoral exercise that would shame a comedy writer as being too exaggerated.
- This electoral farce will lead inexorably to a third failed presidency in a row. The country which strode like a colossus across the global scene at the dawn of the twenty-first century is now a crippled giant of debt, denial, uncertainty, stagnation and social and racial unrest that would have astonished someone contemplating the future in the year 2000.
- In the light of the precipitous decline of the United States and of Europe, Russia and China are flexing their authoritarian muscles across eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific rim. India and Pakistan threaten each other across the Kashmir cease-fire line. North Korea increases its nuclear arsenal and the means of delivering it. Iran was granted the nuclear green light by the decadent West. The threat of nuclear war has never been stronger.
- Tens of millions of desperate men and women throughout the Western world, struggling with rampant concentration of wealth in ever-smaller numbers of people and the inevitable social and economic results of rapidly-developing technologies, are resorting to extreme political action of both the right and the left. Indeed, those labels don’t mean much any more.
- The Middle East and North Africa are increasingly a theater of spectacular barbarism and savagery that would have shamed a Neanderthal. The center not only “cannot hold” but is rapidly disappearing in much of the region.
- What I call World War IV, between Western civilization and radical Islam (the Cold War was World War III), is increasingly being lost by the West, not so much militarily as ideologically, as hordes of Western politicians, intellectuals and academics surrender Western values and embrace Islamic ideals in what can only be described as an orgy of appeasement and surrender.
This correlation of forces, it will undoubtedly be noted, is entirely negative. In recent world history it can only be compared to the late 1930’s. How that worked out need not be emphasized.
What are the chances of reversal and renewal? Very slim indeed. A new anti-radical trend in Latin America. A vital Israel and India. Yes, there are contrary developments but compared to the list above they are meager indeed. What is needed is a new, vigorous and decisive leadership in the West and that is not only not happening, but the opposite, as noted, is happening. The political forces of negativism, appeasement of the enemy, and extremism are on the rise everywhere. An entire generation is being indoctrinated with anti-Western values and from them nothing can be expected but more of the same. Or worse.
Lesson for the individual? Be afraid. Be very afraid. And act accordingly in your physical and financial planning.
Trust me Mr. Bailey, I agree with you, and I am planning accordingly.
Branka Alhamdy She is intelligent enough, but she believes that the world imperialist system controlled by the finance capitalist class has a future. It doesn’t. When Lenin declared that imperialism was moribund capitalism, the final stage of capitalism, it had some reserves. Now they are gone.
People all over the world are taking a serious look at Socialism with Chinese characteristics. It is a model which abolishes the finance capitalist class, but allows the bourgeoisie to participate in economic development, but not to rule the country politically or ideologically.
I can’t believe that you published this dross. I respect Asia Times as presenting a different perspective to the UK media. This diatribe has no place within any kind of journalism. ‘What are the chances of reversal and renewal? Very slim indeed. A new anti-radical trend in Latin America. A vital Israel and India’. A neo-liberal coup in Brazil and a destruction of any kind of popular democracy in venezula? Several commentators have stated that the whole Syria issue is about Isreal’s lreaction to an independent Iran (with nukes. Yemen? India and the fact the neoliberal/Washington Consensus is disempowering Indian citizens……
Discuss NATO build up of nukes in Poland; China sea incursions by the US; destroyer involvement off the coast of Yemen (not including arms sales to Saudi Arabia……
Could go on, but ‘the Archers’ are on the radio
What Westert Values is the author talking about? Spreading war and unrest around the world to support a Western controlled and corrupt economic system? The flowing of all wealth and value to 1/10 of 1% of the population? Invasions and occupations of third world countries to steal their resources? A massive military to prop up the biggest scam in history, the value of the US paper dollar? It looks like that horse has already flown the barn. People are looking for something new and better for themselves. They are looking to the scandinavian countries rather than to the corrupt societies in the USA and the UK. Winner take all ,( the base concept of Western Values) is not what people the world want anymore. There will be blood, blue blood at that.
"Karl Marx, following Hegel, famously made constant reference to the “correlation of forces” that were going to cause, according to him, the collapse of the capitalist system and the inauguration of the workers’ paradise."
It’s important to clarify to the eventual reader of this opinion piece the many errors of this passage.
Marx never stated that the collapse of capitalism was "inevitable" in the sense it would fall apart alone, over its own weight. He only stated that humans, by their very nature, only begin to envisage a new model of society when all the material development potential of the present society are depleted. In other words, a revolution never happens until all the other options are gone. And that happens this way because humans are not spiritual, transcendental beings: they are animals (natural beings) like any other. As such, they can only idealize solutions to problems that actually exist, that are in front of them.
Applying this to capitalism, Marx demonstrated scientifically (the the tendency of the profit rate to fall) that, given the development of capitalism, there are only two ends for humanity: socialism or barbarism. In other words, capitalism may well end with humanity going back to the stone age or even being extinct, or even develop to a post-modern apocalyptic dystopia, where only a handful individuals live in an unimaginable paradise while billions rot in the ground.
The author is confusing with a doctrine that developed in the beginning of the 20th century in Europe, from the USSR, called the mechanicists. The mechanicists believed (through wrong interpretations of Marx and Lenin) that socialism was inevitable, just like the laws of Physics.