Franz J.T. Lee, March, 2009

President Obama, this is no economic crisis, it is the systemic breakdown of capitalism

To eradicate a perennial depressive pestilence, it is necessary, not to whitewash its phenomenological fascist grimace or its 'humane' features, is not to pump trillions of barren paper greenbacks, more fiat money or fake capital, into its cancerous economic veins. Precisely this, the desperate Democrats are now offering as a world panacea to rejuvenate once more a senile Dracula, to prevent the inexorable demise of a global capitalist mode of production, that already destroyed millions and millions of precious, promising human beings, intrinsic parts of total planetary life itself.

To get rid of a global, globalized 'plague' (Simon Bolivar), President Obama, we have to become radical, to grasp the 'axis of evil' at its very radix, at its very roots, to eradicate it.

The current radical solution is simply drawing up a global program and project to annihilate this Draconic world system, all capitalist relations, class rule, military threats, geophysical weapons and dangers and to introduce real, true human socialism 'of, by and for the people.' Taking a kaleidoscopic view, let us see why? Very simple: In Africa you do not poison the black mamba with its own venom. Any African, any true Christian knows what to do with a 'generation of vipers.'

Yes, Thomas Gray foresaw the coming human tragedy in this capitalist graveyard called globalization alias 'world economic crisis'. In his "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", he unveiled the cardinal, capital crimes against humanity, the destruction of human life and the wastage of human sweetness, of revolutionary eros and emancipatory orgon, on the capitalist 'desert air':

The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:  
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,  
And waste its sweetness on the desert air."

How much human creativity, creation, joy, fire, beauty, truth and love were destroyed by capitalism across the millennia, and now, in surplus production, in over production of useless rubbish and mortal arms of mass destruction, the pauperized toiling 'gems' and 'flowers,' the 'downtrodden' with trillions have to bailout their opulent masters, the international marauding vultures. Mercilessly they lose their livelihood, they are being laid off, sacked, their wages ransacked, their social benefits plundered.

Believe it or not,  soon, in violent class struggles, they will have to confront fascist regimes, economic starvation, political oppression and social misery and violent upheavals, worse than between 1929 and 1945.

The above is in the air, reading between the lines, with scientific precision cum ira et studio, any conscientious, conscious historian, scholar or Marxist could verify its ominous tendencies and apocalyptic latencies in the world news.

However, concerning Wall Street and President Obama's mega-recuperation plan, what does not appear in 'breaking news,' in the 'headlines' of world news?

The quintessence of that what we all want to save, the heart beat of capitalism. Except 'collateral damage', nobody is being exploited, dominated, discriminated, killed and alienated by, for and in capitalism.

What is its dialectical opposite, its negation, what is anti-capitalism, what is scientific and philosophic socialism? On the dangerous Information Highway the 'wicked' Arabs, Bin Laden and Ali Baba must have organized a mammoth robbery and stole all the proletarian mews reels.

Perhaps, at last, in Calcutta, the skinny children of Mother Theresa, tortured by physical and mental leprosy or AIDS, can now see a faint ray of real democratic hope on the Southern crimson horizon; at last, between the capitalist slumps, crashes and clashes, now these forgotten, god forlorn creatures, these little beggars, to their own detriment, also can have something bitter to chew, to 'celebrate': 'now it is their turn also'!

Humanity, welcome to the 'Club of Calcutta'!

In 'Capital', as a tendential law of the development of capital, Marx predicted it as the coming geometric progressive explosion of global pauperization of millions of global workers, and even of the middle and upper classes.

Hence, President Obama, what are we trying to save? Labor, Capital or Capitalism?  There exists no isolated world economic crisis rather we are witnessing the protracted global Last Supper of Capitalism?

Thus, Obama, learning from our common African history, we have to tackle the corporate, imperialist bull and bully by its very deadly horns! Otherwise we could just as well forget all the sweet eloquent peace-talks, could stop running from summit to summit, because soon the whole capitalist edifice could crash down like once the ex-Soviet Union, like lately the symbolic majestic ex-Twin Towers. And please, Ali Baba or Robin Hood have nothing to do with this Great Crash. King Midas, Croesus and Cecil John Rhodes, yes!

Now, strolling along memory lane, let us look briefly at the big historic picture before getting down to the current bottom line.

Compared to some six billion years of earthly planetary evolution, the latest  centuries of titanic capitalist growth just occupy a fleeting glimpse of solar material being; in fact, it not even fills a meager cubic millimeter of galactic existence and of transversal transcendence; and yet, within less than three earth centuries, a rampant capitalism nurtured by powerful, arrogant and ignorant ruling classes are already threatening to doom all flora, fauna and man himself to brutal, painful extinction.

The religious Nancy story that they tell the poor is: don't worry, no rich man will ever enter the aristocratic kingdom  of 'heaven', a huge 'flying saucer' New Jerusalem', that can accommodate 144,000 passengers, will come and take the downtrodden to everlasting glory. There is only a simple detail: as requisites you should be a member of one of the twelve tribes of the House of Israel and your passport number should not exceed 144,000. You should belong to the 'chosen few' of some 7 billion planet dwellers. And, in the galaxy of religious confusions and contradictions, according to revelation, if you change anything of the above, your destiny is eternal 'weeping and gnashing of teeth' in hell fire. This is no 'terrorist' conspiracy or  invention, any Christian reading his New Testament knows the above, and lives by many similar dogmas. With such obscurantism we cannot overcome this systemic crisis.

This has very little to do with 'rogue states', with 'Chavez- or Mugabe-tyrants', 'Castro-communists', Al-Qaeda, international terrorism, human trafficking or drug smuggling. It has a lot to do with corporate, imperialist accumulation of energetic resources, profits, capital, destructive wars, big business, fascist  megalomania and ruling class authoritarian and totalitarian power alcoholism.

This is what a radical scientist and philosopher should identify, must eradicate. Billions cannot be exploited forever. The American indigenas warned: Time is longer than rope.

Now it seems that even time itself is slowly fading into oblivion. The Titanic is sinking in time and space. The time to save humanity is running out. Cloned nanobots and robots, with a human interface, are not human beings, not saviors; also they will perish, like people, 'after people'.

Is this what we are bailing out? Or, in reality,  are we rescuing the following, the victims of capitalism? This ruling capitalist America never had in mind.

The millions of victims of the transatlantic and Arab slave trade, of European discovery, Christianization and militarization, of colonialism, of the rotting and rooting out of 'indigenas', ... of 'Red Indians', gypsies, communists,  'Bushmen', 'Kaffirs', 'Negroes', Palestinians and Jews, ... the hundred millions of victims of world wars, of Apartheid and Stalinism, of gulags and concentration camps, of torture chambers and exorcism, of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, of Falujah and Gaza, ... all of them, these ´miserables' (Hugo), the 'wretched of the earth' (Fanon) and the 'white man's burden' Kipling) today are still appealing for 'human rights', for 'reparation' (like the trillions which the finance houses and corporations are just now receiving). All of them are still buried in the 'blood and dirt' (Marx) of aggressive capital, of social amnesia; they are forgotten, are covered with star dust and they have no world press, no freedom of thought, no freedom of the press. They have served their fatherland as pack animals, as electoral and cannon fodder.

They died for what? To try to rescue capitalism? This the ruling classes do much better.

In fact, the toiling slaves, serfs, poor women and children, never ever had any press, (except oppression, suppression, depression and repression) and yet, they have the anti-capitalist revolutionary key to a still possible human emancipation.

Not the Club of Rome, not the Bilderberg Group, not the G8, and even less so, not the Democratic 'Family Club' could offer any lasting solution to the current great depression of global capitalism. Unless, of course, by Jove, our South African sangomas or our 'witch-doctors' from Kenya, could advice and convince President Obama to get rid of capitalism. In this case, the very first miracle ever would occur in the Milky Way.

Consequently, only the victims of ruling class arrogance and ignorance, who transhistorically fear no class and state terrorism anymore, can still tell us how to solve the systemic 'world economic crisis' with global anti-capitalist class struggle.

Let us leave religious doctrines, dogmas, scriptures and prophecies aside for a while, they do not really belong to the classic night literature of contemporary rulers, presidents, generals, VIPs and CEOs; the latter prefer to read and study Marx's 'Capital' before sneaking off towards Hillary's Democratic Wonderland.

As we ought to know, long ago Karl Marx scientifically has explained to us, to workers, that there is no such thing as a 'good capitalism' (Adam Smith); that the political jargon about  'military humanism', 'moral' entrepreneurs and  'wicked' speculators (of Wall Street) is part and parcel of Orwellian 'Newspeak', of body, mind and thought control, of 'full spectrum dominance' (Rumsfeld) and of an anti-socialist ideological myth.

Hence, rationally, how did capital come into being on planet earth, peacefully, in Sunday apparel, as a don, as manna and nectar for the 'chosen few', as original sin, as a blessing in disguise? One thing is sure, as it was born, as it lives, so capital itself is deciding to perish together with its staunch adherents in a black hole of existential 'nothingness' /Sartre).

In a foot note of 'Capital' (Chapter 31), Marx stated unequivocally that, if according to Marie Augier (in "Du Credit Public," Paris, 1842) money " 'comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,' capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt."

In all scientific probability, taking a very long view of history, the current so-called 'world economic crisis'  seems to be the final dissipating phase of capitalism as a dominant world mode of production and destruction on earth. In reality, the unilateral perverse relation between society and nature is taking its toll, production is giving way to human creativity and creation. Capitalism is the last exploitative mode of production on earth. This is the current contradiction: productive barbarism versus creative emancipation. This is the 'world economic crisis'. For obvious reasons, in the world news, in the mainstream mass media very little information can be found with regard to real modern capital and capitalism "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt."

Who really still sees the 'blood and dirt' of Iraq, of Afghanistan, of Gaza, of Sri Lanka, of Zimbabwe, of Venezuela, of the USA, of Nepal, in direct relation to the so-called 'world economic crisis', to decaying world capitalism?

The appearance forms in isolation can be found everywhere in the world news, including their censorship and ideological maltreatment. As Kant would say, they have already developed themselves to full recognizability. It is very easy to know what is capitalism, all the data and information are there, are globalized.

What really can see totalities and processes are sane, healthy, human brains, but over the decades most of them have been bamboozled, manipulated and indoctrinated by all types of 'belief' or 'make-belief' systems, by superstitions, religions,  malpractices and ideologies. Of course, very few of them will be able to grasp scientifically the bottom line of the coming Great Depression of the 2010s. Most of us still believe that great gods, great ideas, great men and great races make history. With such a foggy world outlook, which eclipses reason (Adorno and Horkheimer) and capitalist realities, as a species, we could barely survive the current cataclysmic onslaught of global imperialism.

Definitely the species man is an experiment, is part of experimentum mundi (Bloch); as such, it could succeed, fail or bring forth things 'not dreamt of in our philosophy" (Hamlet). However, as Anaximander of Miletus stated: who does not expect the unexpected will never find it. Within the 'world crisis', let us exemplify such complex intellectual endeavors.

In the raging world 'war of ideas', headed by the Murdoch empire, logically guarding its own corporate class interests,  permanently many of our minds are being bombarded, fractured, atomized and alienated, are being doomed to a passive, receptive, pacifist, masochistic master-slave mentality, to perform  schizophrenic acts and to nurture ossified thoughts and, as evasive mechanism, to indulge in excessive consumption and pathological consumerism.

Thus, concretely, who really relates the millions of surveillance cameras in Great Britain, and in Europe, ... which publicly at random daily are taking billions of photos of the innocent working population, ... with the atrocities and unmanned Israeli surveillance planes over Gaza. In the news, who connects this to Haliburton's war business, to Exxon Mobil's energy plans, to military coups in Venezuela, to Murdoch, to Microsoft, to micro-chips, to nanobots. At our universities, in Oxford, Harvard of the Sorbonne, who studies the world economic crisis within the context of a coming Big Brother, of global fascism? What is the relation of the collision of Russian and American satellites with HAARP, with scramjets, with Tesla technology and with 'flying saucers'?

To achieve the above, Mother Nature has  endowed us with our most formidable weapons, brains: with reflection, thinking, thought, theory, philosophy and sapience. Are we caring them?

Precisely this German national socialism in the midst of a severe global economic depression tried to capture: 'if you want to control a people, control its education' (Hitler). This is nothing new at all; in the third part of his 'Republic', Plato already suggested the fabrication of this arm of mental mass destruction. Maquiavelli's Prince and Hobbes' Leviathan have similar things in mind. Orwell and Huxley predicted the current version of global body and mind control. Thousands of films, videos and writings are treating the dangerous problem of mind and thought control at the level of the 21st century. In many cses mind control is not necessary anymore, they are ajready saturated with ever present cultural, religious and ideological toxic doses.

For these very reasons, revolutionary theory and emancipatory praxis are  quintessential for human survival. The cat falls onto its four paws, however, who has stopped to think, as Bloch said: "falls into eternal yesterday".

Unfortunately, capitalist  'education', 'socialization', 'culture' and religion have reduced many of our minds to passive receptors of myths, hoaxes, lies and ideology. If a minimum of intellectual capacity nevertheless still survives, what would we ask?

 How are we going to overcome a 'crisis' if we do not know what capitalism is all about?

In fact, in some circles, the very concept 'capitalism' has disappeared and has been replaced with some weird modern terms.

In brief, what are the main causes of this "world economic crisis"?

Millennia of violently separating the producers from their products and from their means of production, by converting the former into slaves, serfs and wage-slaves, and the latter into private property of opulent, parasitic ruling classes, ... who have just one thing in mind: to accumulate capital, profits and power ... all this caused the root of the present 'world economic crisis': it also contains the explanation and solution to a man made disaster, which can be changed by man himself.

Over the centuries, the symptoms have changed, the phenomena are different, labor and capital transformed themselves, the masters and slaves are more depersonalized, occult and sophisticated, the class struggles take on other complex forms, ... nonetheless, the foxes only have changed their fur coats but not their ravenous appetite for capital and profits.

Summing up, at this eleventh hour of the history of mankind, if capitalist consumption should still be playing the main role in our lives, that is, is still doodling doomedly the aristocratic, Socratic Thanatos tune for us, then as staunch lovers of global capitalism we should just play on, become our own grave-diggers, should relish the current Swan's Song, which is being staged daily on Broadway, but also in the financial cul de sac of Wall Street.

The world recession has not yet hit the bottom line, the worst, the political, military and fascist dimensions, the oppressive backlash,  are still in the making. Now already economists at Deutsche Bank predict that the US economy will continue to contract at an annual rate of 10 percent. Like in the past, in the 1960s, all over this could generate possible social unrest and upheavals, desperate rioting, burning and plundering.

All these could produce the long awaited pretext to usher in the 'New American Century', to install an Orwellian 'democratic' regime in the USA. For this legally everything is set already; the 'patriot laws' are there; politically the 'economic crisis' is welcome to wipe out all the economic corporate stumbling blocks, some are bailed out, others are left out in the cold; furthermore, the Republicans and the Democrats form two sides of the very same political reality, of the reigning military industrial complex; they are chips of the same imperialist block.

What does the future behold for us, unless we try now to nip possible world fascism in the bud.

In front of our very eyes, the world capitalist economy is breaking down, and therewith is shattering its own global finance system. At the same time, industrial production and world trade are beginning to fall into shambles, mass poverty is befalling the USA, world currencies could tumble, the cost of living could sky-rocket, bankruptcy and corruption are rife already, waves  of migrations searching for means of survival could try to reach the empty flesh-pots of North America and Europe.

President Obama's policy of multi-billion dollar bailouts of the banks and rich corporate investors will just deepen the economic contradictions and accelerate catastrophic results on a world scale, which could explode into another devastating military world war.

There is no other solution, by all means necessary the workers of globalization have to stop corporate imperialism forever or we all will perish together with our masters in barbarism. The alternative is very simple: Socialism or Barbarism.

Surely, as long as there is life, there is hope, "concrete utopian hope". On the eve of the 20th century Leon Trotsky said it in Latin: dum spiro spero! (As long as I breathe, I hope! In this militant optimistic spirit, let us touch the emancipatory sublime, let us get out of the capitalist rat holes, imperialist sewerage systems and corporate quagmires and reach out for the stars -- per aspera ad astra!