The Worst Capitalism and Socialisms

To the memory of GM Tamás

We live in the age of a transnational nazi franchise operation. At this point, it involves a somewhat odd assortment of countries--an ever growing group of brutal, anti-democratic, emotionally undeveloped, overcompensating impotent males literally a couple of doors away from the legislative organs of the state that has the world's largest military, plus Hungary, Israel, Brazil. Plus a number of runners-up, all over the EU. Plus India, and others.

I am afraid 10 years from now we will look back--if we are still alive--and see a decade of escalating, pointless, unjustifiable, terrorist political violence enveloping the core and the semiperiphery of the world. TBH, however, I'm not sure there will be anyone to look back by then.

All that is the exact conceptual opposite of revolutionary change. A Great Leap Backward.

Honestly, I don't know what kind of war would have to take place for a future neonazi USA-EU-Latin-America axis to be beaten. Nor can I see potential Allies that could affect such an outcome. We are looking at a very, very dim future.

BTW, IMHO, this is all, to a large extent, a direct outcome of the faulty, intentionally misdirected, vulgar and antihuman critiques, and--their logical consequence--a subsequent overthrow, of state socialisms world-wide. The kind of vulgarity that is handed down to "the masses" by the elites, to quiet them down and make them desperate. In that process, I lay the greatest blame on the doorstep of the intellectual elites and the nomenklatura of the erstwhile party-states that saw greater opportunities for self preservation and -promotion in the reinstatement of (semi)peripheral capitalism, at any cost, as opposed to a radical democratic reform of state socialisms. (For most of them, of course even those sly expectations didn't work out--they gave away the future of humankind, essentially, for peanuts--but that's another story.)

Savor, for instance. the words of the erstwhile Minister of Justice of the erstwhile People's Republic of Hungary, in 1988, when he introduced the Enterprise Transformation Act in the last state socialist Parliament: "The worst capitalism is better than the best socialism." Right on. So, we got capitalism, bad, and worse, and even worse, from the unacceptable and never properly authorized privatization of socialist state property through mafia rule in politics and business through the current, breathtakingly unequal exchange "relations" within the EU, squeezing record profits for west-Schengen capital from east-Schengen labor, through the "illiberal", cynical, in-your-face neofascist rule of a remarkably un-inhibited, political and business elite in the erstwhile socialist "bloc". And, add to all that--the first war between two former-socialist states.

Yes. The Minister said it, we got it. The Minister, famous for his wit, gave away the people's future for the geopolitical opportunity to make a bad joke, turning around the words of Georg Lukács, the greatest philosopher this country has ever seen.

So, instead of radically democratizing the state socialist systems that had featured the tremendous, historic achievement of having done away with the rule of private property, the political and business elites of erstwhile state socialist societies reintroduced constitutional protection for robbery (widely referred to as "private property"), a common crime in any, even remotely acceptable social order, claiming that it was the highest moral good for human existence. From that point on--there being no actual alternative that could pose a challenge to the rule of capital--there was no need even for a semblance of democracy, let alone popular legitimacy. And that is true, increasingly, anywhere in the world, way beyond the erstwhile-socialist "bloc." In this sense, the overthrow of the state socialist systems set back the calendar of history for humankind, all over the globe.

The system of global capitalism, unopposed by socialist organizations, effective ideologies and state capacities, has no need for democratic appearances. It can be (hence: is) run by mob rule and escalating state and other violence. Today's wars in parts of the (semi)periphery are coming home to the core, spreading all over the semiperiphery. War will not be brought by "terrorists" from the Global South. It will be the miseducated, breathtakingly selfish, shortsighted, thinking-impaired, barely literate, and hateful masses in the core that will demand and instigate it, just as they did, following Hitler, like sheep, in the world's most highly educated country at the time.

All this taking place while the planet is going up in the flames of a climate catastrophe. And at the point where centralized mind control becomes total by virtue of the unprecedented expansion of the media and its machine-generated, i.e., hyper-effective techniques of persuasion.