Between ‘crapitalism’ and ‘conmunism’

The state of global power politics these days seems to pretty well illustrate the truth of John Kenneth Galbraith’s famous remark that “under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.”

In other words, capitalism at its crappiest, in the form of so-called neoliberalism, is devoted to the greater enrichment of the rich and the further impoverishment of the poor by any means including the process of privatising profits and socialising losses.

This is shown most spectacularly in relatively recent times by the splurging of public monies to prop up the predatory profiteers that precipitated the global financial crisis of 2007-8.

While communism – having already been revealed as a monstrous con by decades of murderous Stalinist and Maoist totalitarianism and the collapse of the USSR in 1991 – has been spurred by its failure to achieve world domination by military means, it is finally embracing money as the way to beat the “crapitalist” West and its allies at their own game.

This strategy looks like a winner so far for “communist” and now also “crapitalist” China, as it already has the US deeply in its debt, and is busy making countries like Australia as dependent on it as possible through trade, while outright buying those with ruling regimes allegedly for sale to the highest bidder, like Malaysia.

And, in recognition of the well-known fact that crapitalism is driven by fear as well as greed, China continues supporting the Kim regime in North Korea to keep its competitors nervous.

Meanwhile, the exponents of crapitalism everywhere else seems to imagine that it’s business as usual, and continue to try and excuse their execrable excesses by quoting the observation by Adam Smith in “The Wealth of Nations," that “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

But they take care to selectively ignore the fact that, while he identified self-interest as the motivation for capitalist entrepreneurship, Smith deplored self-interest so excessive as to constitute neoliberal-style crapitalism.

Stating, for example, that “our merchants and masters complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price and lessening the sale of goods. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regards to the pernicious effects of their own gains.”

And also declaring that “no society can surely be flourishing and happy of which by far the greater part of the numbers are poor and miserable.”

By about a century after Smith had written these cautionary words, however, capitalism if not outright crapitalism had rendered the vast majority of people in most societies so poor and miserable that Karl Marx called for the abolition of not just private profiteering, but private property.

Instead, he proposed public or “collective” or national ownership of each country’s natural resources, land, agriculture, manufacturing, trade and commerce, and the equal participation of all citizens according to the now-famous principle “from each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs.”

This, Marx predicted, would lead to the elimination of not just economic and social inequalities, but even, eventually, to the “withering-away of the state.”

But unfortunately he placed far too much faith in GWF Hegel’s dialectic proposing the paradoxical reversal of the master-slave relationship, and too little, if any, in Immanuel Kant’s perception that the one crucial factor differentiating us humans from other animals is that we’re driven by not just by potentially satiable physical needs, but also by our capacities for insatiable psychological wants or greed.

So the idealism of Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” quickly “manifestered” into fake Marxist, Leninist and other ideologies according to which, as George Orwell famously remarked in “Animal Farm,” his classic political allegory, that “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

And, catastrophically worse, as Orwell went on to expound in his subsequent novel 1984, the State, far from withering away as Marx had predicted, became utterly dictatorial, or, in a word, totalitarian.

Single-party dictatorships used Marx’s all-too-true observation that “religion is the opiate of the people” to force their people to forsake their worship of traditional deities in favour of omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent communist parties and their quasi-divine premiers like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and others of their accursed ilk.

Of course, except in cases like that of the Christian so-called “right” and those nations ranging from Saudi Arabia to Malaysia led by lying, repressive and clearly corrupt regimes falsely claiming to be genuinely Islamic for the purpose of keeping the “faithful” supporting them, religion is not so much of an opiate of the people these days as it was back in Karl Marx’s time.

But there are lots of alternative people-dumbing opiates available now than Karl ever dreamed of. In Australia, for example, the country I happen to inhabit, the list of alternative addictions to religion to keep as many people as possible from focusing on the fact that the nation is cursed with as crapitalist a neoliberal government as any on the planet is virtually endless.

Ranging from actual opiates like heroin and opioid prescription painkillers through alcohol, sport, poker machines, celebrity worship and “reality” television to the entire web of potential addictions awaiting the unwary online, from pathological levels of social networking through gaming and gambling to internet porn.

Personally, as a recovering workaholic, reformed capitalist and long-time fan of Marx’s aforementioned ideal, but an enemy of its perversion by ideological communism, the only refuge from crapitalism, conmunism and popular opiates that I’ve been able to find is my favourite alternative Marxism.

Groucho Marxism, that is. As the great Groucho himself famously remarked, I have no desire to join any club that would have me as a member. Especially if it was a club that thought it could club me into claiming complete, unquestioning faith in crapitalism, communism, nationalism, patriotism or indeed any other economic, political religious or social–ism you can think of.

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DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include “Mad about Malaysia,” “Even Madder about Malaysia,” “Missing Malaysia,” “1Malaysia.con” and “Malaysia Mania.”- Mkini