Since Donald Trump launched his chaotic trade war earlier this year, it has become a truism to say he has plunged the world economy into crisis. At last month’s spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, where policymakers and finance ministers from all over congregated, the attenders were “shellshocked”, the economist Eswar Prasad, a former senior IMF official who now teaches at Cornell, told me. “The sense is that the world has changed fundamentally in ways that cannot easily be put back together. Every country has to figure out its own place in this new world order and how to protect its own interests.”

Trump’s assault on the old global order is real. But in taking its measure, it’s necessary to look beyond the daily headlines and acknowledge that being in a state of crisis is nothing new to capitalism. It’s also important to note that, as Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.” Even would-be authoritarians who occupy the Oval Office have to operate in the social, economic and political environment that is bequeathed to them. In Trump’s case, the inheritance was one in which global capitalism was already suffering from a crisis of legitimacy.

Consider the decade before he was re-elected. In 2014, the global financial crisis and the Occupy Wall Street movement were fresh in the memory. The French economist Thomas Piketty appeared on bestseller lists around the world with his tome Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which highlighted income and wealth inequality. Bankers, billionaires and defenders of free market capitalism appeared to be on the defensive. “Nobody believes any more in a moral revival of capitalism,” wrote the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck in the New Left Review. The “attempt to prevent it from being confounded with greed has finally failed, as it has more than ever become synonymous with corruption.”

  • FistingEnthusiast@lemmynsfw.com
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    2 days ago

    Betteridge’s law in action!

    No

    Because of this broken system, the real power is now in the hands of those who will do anything to keep it. People dying because of greed isn’t abhorrent to them. Nobody gets that rich without a disregard for anything other than gathering more.

    The tipping point was passed a long, long time ago

    It’s going to take a global catastrophe or something, one where money is proven to actually hold no value, where the rich starve just the same as the poor before anything will change

    And even then, I’m not convinced.

    • It comforts me a little bit that these rich fucks thinking they’ll be kings of ashes also maintain the idea that money will still have any value in a dead world; That they’ll be able to retain staff to clean up for them and more importantly personal security. You know, a team of people armed to the teeth who outnumber them. They won’t last very long in their bunkers.

      • FistingEnthusiast@lemmynsfw.com
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        2 days ago

        In most instances I’d agree, but I’m sure that in America they’ll find people willing to stick by them in the promise of future riches when they (the rich cunts) have risen again

        I have seen them in action. They’re not successful because they can do stuff. Most of them are practically useless, but their skill is in getting the best out of people

        That’s actually not a bad thing. A leader (I’m going to use military as an example) doesn’t have to be the best marksman, the best at hand-to-hand, the best at getting a track back on a tank when it chucks one.

        The reason they lead is because they are the best at getting their team to do what they need to do

        I’m a natural sergeant.

        I’m better at some things, not as good at others, but I get shit done and can understand the bigger picture, and also advise those above me with field experience when appropriate about what will actually work in the field

        I recognise that those who are really high up the chain have talents

        But psychopaths are different. They only rise in business because it doesn’t matter if their men don’t trust them

        • xep@fedia.io
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          1 day ago

          Prioritizing-profits-over-people style unfettered capitalism is a system that is highly favourable to psychopaths, narcissists, and those of that ilk.