…but neither offers the social advantages of mutualism
You’d think, would you not, that a nation as intelligent as the Chinese could make a clothes peg. I’ve made the bloody things myself in the past: four serations in two bits of pine, and a bit of spring-wire. Me – myself – for fun: the very same me who, on deciding to give up woodwork after the Second Year, got this comment on my Report from the teacher involved:
“I am relieved Ward is giving up woodwork, because when in command of a chisel and some wood, he is a danger to himself and others”.
But no, so completely did the cultural revolution and then neoliberalisation of China destroy any desire for the kind of craftsmanship that produced beautifully carved soldiers…
…in 2016, they’re reduced to making clothes pegs that fall apart the minute you clip them onto a teeshirt mounted sensibly upon a washing line.
I suppose the decline is similar to that whereby Duper Turdlock reduced the Times’ reading age to 14; except that the Chinese decline took 2,700 years, whereas the Texas-cow shagger managed it in 18 years flat. The decline in reading age I mean, not his courtship of the former Mrs Jagger.
But the scandal of the pegs (when added to the solar garden lights that don’t light anything, and the circuit boards that die 10% of the way round the circuit) are symptoms of a Chinese economic history that is unique. For the People’s Republic of China went from being the world’s biggest Communist dictatorship to being the world’s biggest Neoliberal dictatorship with no intervening period in which to reduce the level of madness involved.
The only nation that comes close is the former East Germany (DDR), from whose water hole arose its Aphrodite Mrs Merkel. You must have heard of her….she’s the one that had a mock chat show and asked Debbie McGhee what she first saw in millionaire Paul Daniels.
[special troll message: that was a joke. Don’t panic]
No of course she wasn’t hahahaha…she’s the one that was a Jugendfüherin fluent in Russian on Thursday, and then a convert to neoliberal globalist capitalism by the following Monday. And no, that isn’t a joke: it’s absolutely true.
The overall points are these:
- Communism and Neoliberalism when taken together are contraindicated, and conducive to the destruction both of work fulfilment and individual responsibility.
- Whereas real ideologists are just sad twits, those who can switch ideologies at the drop of a soviet cap in favour of a bowler hat are not to be trusted.
- Mixed economies (like the UK & US in the 1952-71 period) produce – when subjected to neoliberalism – more wealth….alongside falling wealth equality, rising social discontent, falling worker wages, and falling productivity.
- Every society that has ditched (a) private ownership (b) market forces (c) functional social welfare (d) mutualised financial services and/or (e) punished the ideas of entrepreneurs, has gone backwards in terms of both world trade and sound public finances.
- All Communist and purist Friedmanite neoliberal States wind up with huge sovereign debt, a massive deficit of investment in infrastructure, and a cynical blue collar workforce resentful of the self-awarded privileges of the self-appointed élite.
Ergo sum, neither is the answer to where the pack-species Homo sapiens goes next.
Is it just vaguely possible that ideological Communists, Neoliberals, Thatcherites, Reaganomicists and EU/UK monetarist nutters might now accept that we need new ideas and fresh solutions, not the reheated leftovers from the 19th and 20th centuries?
We must live and hope. But in the meantime, I leave you with this disturbing thought: the dangerous duplicity of Camerlot has led them to accept nuclear advice from (and lobby the EU to promote the exports of) a Beijing government with an appalling record on citizen rights, and the making of clothes pegs.
The Slog 