GLOBAL TOTALITARIAN POLICE-STATE & TECHNOTRONIC SOCIETY: EXTENDING CAPITALIST LIFE

Erle Frayne Argonza

Let me go back to the question of what lies ahead of us—when ‘late’ capitalism dies and yet capitalism will be extended.  I am not discounting the possibility that capitalism’s life span will be extended, but this will no longer be ‘late’ capital, just to remind everyone.

You better fasten your seat belts, as the stormy days ahead will come for sure, and as this heraldry from me will sound as stormy already as those times ahead. Stormy heraldry, because (a) you will not come to like it and that (b) its impact will be so nauseating and revolting that you’d rather sedate yourself most quickly with wine, liquor, pot or anything that can reduce that revulsion. I forgot, for the fundamentalists, you’d pray for hours to allay your fears.

By the time ‘late’ capital arrived up to the current juncture, or roughly the whole of the post-Great Depression era, the following developments have come about:

·        State intervention/planning was infused into the system. Post-war former colonies proceeded on their industrial development tracks along this dirigist market model. The USA and Europe were saved from collapsing, emerging markets appeared.

 

·        Market reforms were later introduced, bringing back free market and free trade principles. Centrally planned economies China and Vietnam infused market reforms to construct a ‘social market’ model, while former socialist states folded up in Eastern Europe and 3^rd world states.

 

·        The era of ‘mad economics’ resulted from the system integration efforts of ‘instrumental reason’. The dividing line between the rational and the mad in decision-making and system maintenance was effectively deconstructed and erased. In esoteric-mystical argot, this era is the period of the Demonic Mind, the era of Anti-Christ.

 

·        ‘Virtual economy’ based on predatory financial practices of creating values from out of money flows (rather than from concrete production) was exemplified by ‘bubble economies’. Bubble bursts were followed by destructive, catastrophic crises and shrinkages of affected economies.

 

·        Nation-states’ economies came to be integrated into a single economy, via globalization. A planetary economy was already institutionalized, yet no planetary state exists to regulate conduct of commerce and business at a global level. The contradiction between the norms of the planetary economy and the interests of the nation-state has led in no small measure to the fragmentation of nation-states and  emergence of mini-states. Globalization has been undermining the nation-state in general.

 

·        All of such developments will hyper-converge in the months ahead in a general system crisis characterized by hyper-inflation, great depression, and total system collapse. As the economist Lyndon LaRouche correctly perceived, that collapse phase is now taking place at a rapid rate.

 

·        Wars and hostilities are intensifying across the globe. Surrogate wars of world powers have also been rehearsed, such as the Georgia-Russia conflict. All of these conflicts will hyper-converge in a World War III or intercontinental war, the duration of which no one can forecast so easily.

 

So, going back to the issue, if the ‘virtual economy’ cannot be sustained and its collapse will bring the final death blow on ‘late’ capital, is it possible to extend capitalism’s life span? Yes, the possibility is very likely. But the context emerging from the resolution of the general global crisis will hardly resemble what you’ve ever seen before nor imagine.

First of all, the consolidation of the system and attempts to prolong it can never take place without draconian police state tactics. As Lenin correctly emphasized, the dividing line between liberalism and fascism is a superficial one. Neo-fascism will become the political modality in order to save capitalism and bring it to its next phase. State terror heretofore untold will unravel the old order of things and bring the ‘new world order’ into place, resulting to pogroms that will dwarf both Hitler’s ‘final solution’ and Stalin’s ‘purges’ combined.

The possibility of a global state will finally become granite rock, with the United Nations most likely the base for creating that global regulatory mechanism governed by a demonic ‘world rule of law’. This global state will have its own military and police forces, and will have no qualms in quelling dissent and enforcing global fiats in order to bring forth the ‘new world order’.

The global corporations of the moment, whose assets and revenues are already so huge that they dwarf those of nation-states’, will all the more become gigantic. The same corporations will then declare their respective turfs among region-states and city-states that will be created from the dismantled nations. Each mega-corporation will be endowed with its own private army, akin to the British East India Company or BEIC of old, of professional mercenaries beholden to no state but to the corporation, but which can be mandated by the global state to engage hostile forces in other regions and cities.

The era of New Feudalism will then ensue from the social and urban-ecological arrangements emerging. The era of ancient Florence, Venice, or city-states with their own respective armies and ruled by powerful commercial families, will come back though in more sophisticated vogue. The competing powerful & wealthy city-states will then give rise to new conflicts in the form of ‘wars of the cities’, much akin to the ancient Greek city-states’ conflicts. Before this century’s end, no more nations shall exist, but rather a world of cities and regions integrated largely through the mediative and regulative planetary state. Weaker cities and regions will become the vassals of powerful cities and corporate groups, at a time when technology will even be more revolutionary. The New Feudalism will be based on an integration of capital and information, contrasted to the Old Feudalism that was based on land.  

As soon as 3^rd phase cybernetics will conclude, and probably a 4^th phase will begin, which will all the more erase the barrier between human and machine, the envisioned Technotronic Society will become the manifest order. Cyborgs and machines will then become perfected and endowed with quasi-human intelligence, while those humans with weak minds will be totally controlled via perfected chips, mega-computers, and new cybernetic systems. Large numbers of subhuman ‘Manchurian candidates’ or MCs will become the docile slave labor of the day, well fed and provided for, but whose behavior will be totally programmed and re-programmable.

That technoronic society of the neo-feudal capitalist ‘new world order’, or simply Technotronic capitalism, was fitfully described and forecast in the film series Matrix and Terminator. As 3^rd phase cybernetics is advancing today in laboratory incubators of the North, cybernetics that will dismantle the barrier between human and machine, the possibility of an early arrival of that dreaded machine-controlled ‘new world order’ has become concrete. The question is no longer ‘will technotronics come’, but rather ‘when will it come’? Matrix and Terminator are no film fantasies but are rather scientific extrapolations based on existing and developing cybernetic principles.

So, fellows out there, would you count yourself among the fanatical supporters of ‘capitalist life-span extension’, or would you rather opt for a new economy & society other than the ‘new world order’ that has been engineered by the global oligarchy? Or, would you rather be silent about the matter, as the ‘silence of the lambs’ means the Keynesian “In the long run, all of us will be dead!” Caput!

Let me now end here. Suffice that I shared my notes about the possible extension of the favorite economy of the pro-capitalists or the most abhorred society by capitalism’s detractors. At least I didn’t fail to show you the possibilities, I being a sociologist and economist who learned from my thinker mentors the craft of social forecasting or ‘futurology’.

Till next writing! Adios! Adieu! Paalam! Farewell! 

[23 August 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila.]

ANOTHER GREAT DEPRESSION COMING AS FINANCIAL SYSTEM ENDS

Erle Frayne Argonza

Is the global economy moving downward towards a devastating collapse?

If we employ a long-term Kondratieff cycle to model the world economy, we can see that the period beginning in 1935 approximately (when the big market economies US-UK-Germany moved towards another cycle of growth approximately after the Great Depression, should have ended around 1995 approximately, after which comes another great depression.

As early as 1989, ramblings of a global collapse began to murmur in the US economy. Mexico, Japan, Argentina, and other economies followed in the 1990s, while Europe went through a general low-growth trend that was the most sustainable for the continent as a whole. Then came the Asian meltdown of 1997. Then the USA again went through a recession in 2001, a pattern that has been repeated again from 2008 to the present. It seems that the pillars of the world economy couldn’t get out of a short-term crisis without having to crash back to another episode of short-term crisis altogether.

Is it really a ‘short-term’ crisis in the first place? Or is it in fact a ‘systemic crisis’, and that the financial downspin the Northern economic pillars are going through could very well be the terminal phase of a very long cycle of growth that began after the end yet of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648)? That in fact, several long-wave Kondratieff cycles have already passed over since that time, and that finally the system is DEAD in the wood?

Well, not only the financial system but the whole of CAPITALISM is already on its death throes. Those oligarchs behind the systems now dying won’t see the systems they built die down just that without “bringing down the other houses” with them, it seems. Which means that, right after the terminal phase of the system, another huge, catastrophic war will come, which will later see another Westphalian-type treaty or so that will re-carve the contours of polities into a Post-Westphalian totalitarian technotronic global order.

Below is a briefer from the Executive Intelligence Review that summarizes the issue at hand.   

[18 August 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila. Thanks to Executive Intelligence Review database news.]

End of the Line for Financial System; Bankruptcy Issue Raised

Aug. 10, 2008 (EIRNS)—The death of the financial system was the implicit subject of several articles in the financial press over the weekend, reflecting the way reality is setting in and attitudes are changing.

• “Investment banking is dying,” was the blunt statement by William Cohan, in a op-ed in today’s Washington Post entitled “The End of the Masters of the Universe?” Cohan says that the revenue streams of the investment banks are drying up, and that there is genuine fear in the corridors of power on Wall Street.
• “We have a banking crisis and an agency crisis and a mortgage crisis and a coming credit card crisis. We’ve never seen anything like that before. And it all seems to be coming home to roost at the same time. That’s never happened either,” Charles Geisst, a professor of finance at Manhattan University, told yesterday’s Washington Post. He said the Great Depression was the last time the financial markets were hammered by such a variety of factors, adding: “But we did not even have credit cards in the 1930s; there was no such thing as student loans.”
• The specter of generalized bankruptcy was raised by Yale finance professor Robert J. Shiller in an op-ed in the New York Times. Citing the failure of Bear Stearns and the government measures to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Shiller asks, “What if the next case is worse? No one in government seems to feel a responsibility for warning about such possibilities and formulating a detailed policy for dealing with them.” Shiller says that “Bankruptcy law is a good place to start. After all, the dreaded financial meltdown would amount to a wave of bankruptcies…. What would happen to the economy if hedge funds had to liquidate, one after another, in a financial crisis? We need to rethink the theory and practice of bankruptcy, given the new complexities.”

Shiller points to the inherent limitations in current bankruptcy laws, which were largely drawn to protect narrow financial interests, and are poorly suited to deal with systemic problems, when a “subsidized system of triage would be needed to identify which companies should be saved, with the main criterion being the possible economic impact of their liquidation.”

These comments, taken as a whole, represent the way discussions of the “unthinkable” are beginning to percolate, and converge upon the outlook of Lyndon LaRouche. Shiller’s mention of triage by bankruptcy echoes the emergency measures proposed by LaRouche, of putting the financial system itself through bankruptcy, protecting the population with a firewall, and freezing the financial paper while we determine what debts will, and won’t, be honored. Whatever Shiller may think about LaRouche’s proposals, he is implicitly admitting that the system is finished, and that we must prepare for its demise, making decisions on the basis of the interests of society, and not merely the narrow interests of financial institutions. Reality is setting in, and reality leads inexorably to the policies outlined by LaRouche. 

RECESSION STAYS, SPIRAL POINTS TO GLOBAL MELTDOWN

Erle Frayne Argonza

The recession stays, the downward global economic spiral will continue for an indefinite time. This is the pattern that we can now see across the globe.

Stock markets have been crashing, going through a freefall for couples of months now. In Manila, the Philippine stock market is down at 2,500+ points as of this morning, or 800 points short of its best performance of 3,300+ late last year. The pattern is true in other stock markets as well.

One thing is clear: this is a global meltdown going on, and the spiral’s turn-around towards more positive gains in the succeeding months. Trillions of dollars have already gone down the drain, loses that may never be recovered again.

Many pockets are getting badly hurt, both from the fund-rich hedge funds and portfolio financiers to ordinary middle class investors. Just about two (2) years ago, everything was bullish in world stocks, most especially in Asia. That situation had since evaporated.

Unfortunately, the harbingers of liberal dogma are still banking on liberalization policies that have proved to be so bankrupt they are, in fact, the very cause of this global meltdown shaping up. The ‘virtual economy’ unleashed by liberalization resulted to looting sprees by fund managers and hedge fund operators, the same money that they partly utilize for corporate social responsibility.

Now the oil price hikes and currency market volatilities have compounded the recession. It’s just mid-2008 by the way, and there’s still the bombing of Iran that we all await as the non-surprise ‘surprise attack’ from neo-cons and Zionist fascists, which will guarantee higher prices for oil and better dollar leveraging power. This will come sooner or later.

Forecasting has been made simpler by anarchic events at this moment. There is no end in sight to the recession, oil prices will still move up, and the recession will lead to a deeper meltdown of the liberal financial-monetary system of casino-style looting by financier operators.

Better do some belt-tightening if you haven’t done this yet. Let’s continue to watch the horrible unfolding of events. Madness and unparalleled greed have shattered the financial-monetary system, the ‘virtual economy’ of predatory financiers.

[Writ 12 June 2008, Quezon City, MetroManila]