There are two central questions that emerge from the ongoing world wide financial crisis, questions that are underlined yet again by Murdoch’s News International (see earlier blogs ‘Declare War on Murdoch’ & ‘Murdoch’s Empire Knows No Bounds’); can capitalism ever be effectively regulated and if it can, will it really still be capitalism? Clearly, we have reached a stage in the rise of monopoly capitalism where some five hundred global corporations, some now state owned in China and Russia, largely control the world’s economic production.

These corporations covering manufacturing, energy supplies and financial and consumer services have become so inextricably linked with casino capitalism that the entire global edifice is perpetually on the brink of implosion. Criminality and corruption are everywhere.

In 2008, large companies and banks defaulted and had to be bailed out to the tune of trillions of tax-payers dollars. Now entire countries, including the once impregnable US, are on the verge of defaulting on their massive and unsustainable debts. Soon, entire trading zones will become vulnerable to the toxic contagion of debt. Urgent action is required but what specifically is to be done? The common call now is for regulation, but can the beast be tamed?

One of the defining features of capital is that it will always, inevitably, move to the highest point of return. Sure a few individuals will make so called ethical decisions as to where they invest, but taken as a whole and over time, capital will always seek to reproduce itself at the highest margins. It has to do this in order to remain competitive over its rivals. The good will of individual humans does not come into the equation. A corporation that is not ruthless will sooner or later be swallowed up by their competitors. Encumbered by the internal logic of capital which dictates that despite the brutal and never-ending search for cheap labour and cheap raw resources, there is a perpetual and relentless tendency for the rate of profit to decline as capital is forced to replace human labour with new technologies. This is the kernel of Marx’s economic theory and it remains as true today as it was when first extrapolated some 150 years ago.

Various reforming governments have tinkered around the edges of the corporate monolith but capital always seems to find a way around any attempts at regulation. Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is a classic example. Now the call for regulation grows louder but the media moguls will resist in the same way that the banks have resisted. The clamour for regulation grows louder by the day but nothing changes. The tail cannot wag the dog try as it might.

This might all seem a little too economically and politically deterministic. Surely humans, if they show enough resoluteness and clear headedness can tame the beast? If global regulation is put into place, and all the tax havens and off shore bolt-holes are closed down so there is no place to hide, and no way to play one off against the other, surely humans can regain control over the direction and purpose of the world’s economy? If we can increasingly control the mighty forces of nature and human evolution itself, surely we can gain control of our economic processes?

These are truly historic questions, and as institution after institution falls into crisis, where even the mighty General Motors was not immune, and giant US and UK banks collapsed into insolvency, they are questions that can no longer be shuffled away. The crisis has arrived at our front door. The radical left has habitually hungered for a revolutionary moment – well that moment has most likely arrived. But it arrives not as a twentieth century call to arms but as a call for a conscious process of dragging the highly concentrated pools of capital under public control.
Regulation needs to be so thorough, so all embracing that all the commanding heights of human production and resources become transparent, accountable and in the public domain. This will not be a question of choice. Capital has become so concentrated that many of the biggest conglomerates have become too big to fail. Capitalism has done its job and done it very efficiently. It has, with the most appalling human costs, concentrated vast human resources into a relatively few giant pots. The historical task for humans is to simply take back control of their own wealth.

Of course in the real world of today the word simply is nothing if not absurd. The process of socialising the means of production will be anything but simple. Capital will resist and resist with all its considerable strength. It will employ all its usual tactics of divide and rule. Racist scapegoats will be resurrected. Employed will be played off against the unemployed. Nation will be turned against nation. All the old poisons of the previous centuries will come to the fore. Sport, monarchy and mindless celebrity culture, for so long peddled by Murdoch’s media empire, will no longer suffice as opiates. Religion, the ultimate opiate, will be dragged out and dusted off. Already in the US, intolerant religious rhetoric is screeching to new heights. Muslims will likely become the new Jews.

As the world economy implodes, neither East nor West can be winners because each now totally rely on each other for their economic survival. As the collapse intensifies the streets will get ugly. If the West is forced to stop buying the cheap manufactured goods from India and China, that huge new Asian industrial proletariat will turn mean and angry. If the West is no longer able to pay its pensions and other social welfare payments the once privileged workforce of Europe and America, they too will turn mean and angry. That process has already begun.

The spectre of revolt will be everywhere. But amidst all the shouting and chaos will remain those two central questions: can capitalism be regulated and if so will it still be capitalism? Or, to put it another way, has the age of social ownership and the social control of the commanding heights of the world’s economy finally arrived? Capitalism may yet regroup and survive, but the omens do not look promising for an economic system that socially, has well and truly passed its use-by date.