(Flickr picture tillwe, Creative Commons License)
Joschka Fischer, the former German vice-chancellor, was very outspoken this week in a speech to the London School of Economics. The Telegraph reports:
"Modern capitalism is based on a global ponzi scheme," he said. "There is no quick fix to this very severe crisis. It will transform global reality in a similar way as the collapse of the Soviet Union transformed the global system 20 years ago.
His discourse reminded me of the predictions of Immanuel Wallerstein. One of the important subjects of Wallerstein is the shifting hegemony of empires. He predicts a decline of the dominant position of the United States and the evolution towards a multipolar world.
Joschka Fischer talked about the power shift to the East, the fact that Washington looks primarily to Asia in its international relations - Asia was the first continent Hillary Clinton visited as secretary of state. The European leaders seem clueless regarding the decline of their continent.
They are even clueless as far as the difficulties of Eastern and Central Europe are concerned - creating a potentially dangerous situation.
Europe would become irrelevant – and vulnerable – if it kept failing to speak with a united voice, beginning with the creation of "a strong European pillar for Nato", so Fischer explained.
Back to Wallerstein. The distinguished professor not only talks about the decline of the dominant position of the US, but also about the tendency of profit rates from productive activities to go down. Companies try to counter this moving production from core zones to other parts of the world-system, but eventually start engaging in financial speculation in order to achieve really high returns - which would explain the ponzi-scheme tendencies of our societies.
In a recent text Wallerstein predicts that after a periode of high chaotic turbulence, which can last for 20-50 years, the new system which will emerge will not be the capitalist system we know today:
This will not be a capitalist system but it may be far worse (even more polarizing and hierarchical) or much better (relatively democratic and relatively egalitarian) than such a system. The choice of a new system is the major worldwide political struggle of our times.
A year ago, this kind of discourse would have been ridiculized as marxist ideology, nowadays conservative bankers discuss these texts seriously. Other thinkers, from a different perspective, come to equally radical conclusions. The network theoretician Manuel Castells for instance said years ago already, in this interview in NRC Handelsblad:
Networks are for this time what factories were for the Industrial Revolution. We see now the reversed process: the decentralization and desintegration of big vertical organizations into very flexible networks of small, dispersed units: indivduals, companies and small companies who can change easily and can adapt well to changing circumstances. Such a network can often function much more efficiently than a big company.
Words spoken in... 1997. Nowadays we all realize how efficient open source can be, how information technology is exacerbating the above described tendencies. Radical and accelerating changes, stuff to meditate about - whether we are members of a "war cabinet" or concerned citizens using web2.0 methods to talk to our politicians.
Roland Legrand
This is not new. Robert Shiller said this before and also Paul Samuelson.
Posted by: Thierry Debels | February 27, 2009 at 10:13 AM