CAPITALISM WITH A HUMAN FACE

(This note was actually written in February 2009, that is, long before I started posting entries on my blog on a regular basis. Posting it today, I am making just one minor updating, with regard to Mr. Rudd. To placate the sticklers for necessary quote and allusion attributions, the title alludes to Alexander Dubcek’s famous phrase “socialism with a human face,” coined by him during the “Prague Spring” events in Czechoslovakia in the late 1960’s.)

In a remarkable essay The Global Financial Crisis, published in the February 2009 issue of The Monthly Magazine, Australia’s Prime Minister (from 2007 to2010) Kevin Rudd denounces unregulated capitalism, of what he sees as the era of “the neo-liberal ascendancy, from 1978 to 2008,” drawing a parallel between neo-liberalism in economics and neoconservatism in foreign policy. (As a curiosity, take notice of Rudd’s starting date of the neo-liberal ascendancy, which is 1978. A lot of deep changes took place in Washington, in the aftermath of President Nixon’s Watergate, thence spreading throughout America and across the rest of the free world. For my take on the international significance of Mr. Nixon’s political assassination, see my Nixonian entry Russia’s Greatest American Hero, with references to it in my entry Assassination Of An American Dream, and in several others.) It is this unholy neoliberal-neoconservative ascendancy that Rudd blames for the current crisis, and calls for the coming of the new era of “social capitalism,” which he characterizes as “a system of open markets, unambiguously regulated by an activist state, and one in which the state intervenes to reduce the greater inequalities that competitive markets will inevitably generate.”

This assessment coincides with my own description of "capitalism with a human face" as nothing more than government-regulated capitalism,-- a total historical defeat for the ideology of laissez-faire, the latter, in its turn, being the essence of the capitalist ideology as such, considering that all that this ideology stands for is utterly inconsistent with even the smallest trace of government regulation.

(Incidentally, Kevin Rudd is a colorful personality, now apparently permanently out of politics, following a recent second heart surgery. A bona fide original, I will miss him… On the other hand, the culprits of the Global Financial Crisis, whom he lambastes, the greedy CEO’s who abused their power, and the Madoff’s who were criminally taking advantage of the holes in the poorly regulated system, still prosper, ready to do more lying, cheating, and stealing, thus keeping the capitalist ideology alive and well, to the detriment of the international community and of their own countrymen, if of course they still have a country which they can rightfully call their own, offshore asylums, hideouts, and all. They are the ones who have given capitalism an utterly monstrous face.)