In These New Times

Cailean Bochanan

11th November, 2010

A John Pilger article is always a major trend setter on the left and the trend in question this time is an extraordinary one: Pilger effectively declares that there is no capitalist crisis. In the old days the drastic measures taken by the government to cut public spending would have been opposed by the left on the grounds that they were necessary for capitalism  but the sign for us of the need for  completely different system. Now Pilger declares that Britain’s financial travails are “not remotely a crisis”. Some doubtful statistics and facile analogies are good enough to reassure him that “there is no economic rationale” for the cuts. This is all the more extraordinary in that chancellor Osbourne is himself telling us that Britain is “on the brink of bankruptcy”: are we really to believe that this is a lie concocted to justify an ideological attack on public spending? Anyway, we don’t have to take Osbourne’s word for it: there is overwhelming evidence that Britain is bankrupt. He isn’t exaggerating, he’s playing it down: massive amounts of debt are being concealed by dodgy accounting including the bizarre practice of counting the bank bailout funds as an asset- does the government really expect to see that lot again? And then there the small question of 4 trillion of hidden debts.   Pilger claims Britain’s situation is no worse than in 1945 when Anglo-American power, having seen off Germany and Japan, largely at the expense of the Soviet Union, was consolidating its global leadership. For all his exposes on colonialism and the Iraq war, Pilger seems to have no sense that what we are looking at is essentially imperial demise: if Britain really was still, as David Cameron seems to think, in a position to dictate to countries like China how they should run their economies then  the figures would not be so grim- we could could go on offloading our debt onto others and consuming at their expense. But capitalism, at least the Anglo-Saxon version, which has always been inseparable from the domination of other nations, really is finished: the left just don’t want to know. They therefore content themselves with traditional remedial measures, laudable in themselves, such as opposing cuts on social spending and calling for taxes on the wealthy. They are unable to grasp the truly revolutionary nature of the crisis, or its dangers:  but this will soon become clear to them and to everyone else.

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