What Have We Learned After Lockdown Week 1

So after our first week in lockdown what have we learned?

1) The Western Empire’s supply lines are total shit. Absolute trash. Thank goodness we DIDN’T ever get into a serious war with Russia or China these past years. We would have run out of everything we need inside a week and had our asses handed to us inside a fortnight. 

This from the civilization that held the entire Pacific basin against the Japanese in World War 2. What a disgraceful self-destruction of a nation, through the abject greed of its political and wealthy class. Globalised supply chains clearly DON’T work and should never be trusted again. Especially in the case of China, a nation we were daily being told we had to prepare for war against, we would have for the first time in history been engaging in an attack on our own manufacturing base. It would have been instant suicide and one of the shortest wars in history. This would have been a madness historians would have had a great deal of trouble explaining, to any surviving future generations.

2) The neo-liberal economy is the most fragile and hollowed out bit of fluff ever. An economy should have been able to handle a slow down, or even a full shut down, for a few months without the instantaneous careening off a cliff into massive economic crisis, and risking full civilization breakdown that we have witnessed in the past week. 

Imagine if we had been in ancient Rome and the Emperor, on a whim, suddenly declared an entire month a holiday in honour of Jupiter. Rome never collapsed due to any of these types of whims. The debt-based economy is totally unsustainable. 

The endless hollowing out of workers rights and casualisation of workers is not just an attack on the working class, but actually a suicidal destruction of the very economy that sustains the supposed capital wielding class. Even if you don’t have issues with classical Adam Smith Capitalism this system is far from that, and is in fact a threat to the entire of civilization due to its wildly unsustainable nature.  

3) The War machine CAN actually be paused completely. Whilst a few skirmishes still rage here and there, this is to be expected after such a long war has been raging for the past 20 years. But by and large a massive shut down of the war effort, and troop movements, has occurred in the past week. 

As long as the political will is there this WAS ALWAYS POSSIBLE. Never let the war hawks forget this moment again. If anyone tells you we have to maintain endless war ever again remind them of this moment in history.

4) Whilst we are on the topic of the war machine we also learned that sometimes, massive Government intervention, causes more harm than good. The huge lockdowns we have seen around the world have sent millions plunging below the poverty line and facing potential mass starvation around the world. All this pain to try and save thousands from dying from the virus.  

Whether this was done on purpose or by accident is irrelevant. It shows how one part of the system can make a proposition to help people, which leads another part of the system to inflict massively more pain than the original problem would cause. As Trump said “The cure is worse than the disease”. 

Remember this social dynamic next time someone tells you we have a RESPONSIBILITY TO PROTECT, when they say we need to invade other countries to ‘save’ their populations. To ‘save’ the Syrians, to ‘save’ the Iraqis, to ‘save’ the Serbians, we need to plunge into epically violent conflicts that kill millions more than any supposed local despot ever would have. We must rethink how we triage the needs of some over even greater needs. 

5) The locking down of borders to human traffic is finally beginning to be followed with the locking down of borders to capital flight. This is the only way to maintain a future world, where we have massive deglobalisation under way. 

Part of the reason we have such a huge refugee crisis right now is because the wealthy countries were setting up harvesting systems, which sucked the flow of capital out of the developing world back to the European and American centers of ‘finance’. The millions of people flooding around the world trying to cross borders were simply chasing this dwindling capital from their home nations, and were trying to catch back up to it in the nations it arrived in. 

This was always a massively unsustainable system that could not be allowed to continue. Decentralised capital leads to decentralised communities able to sustain and support themselves, leads to way less flows of human labour attempting to move around the world. The concept of the entire globes labour force being in competition with itself, rather than firewalled into localised economies, could never survive. 

This shock to the system has proven this to be exactly the case. Now we see huge restrictions on people’s movements and FINALLY Capital controls are being put into place. This marks the true end of Globalisation. The future will be Nationalistic. Steve Bannon was correct when he said the future is Economic Nationalism. This need not be conflated with any hysterical racial superiority theories, as so many on all sides of politics have been attempting to do of late. It’s just a simple function of sustainability and mathematics. 

6) On the note of Nationalism we are also seeing in the time of great crisis that privatisation was the complete scam many thought it was. The myth that centralised industries could ever offer true competition is laid bare. 

As we know privatization never lead to the promised lowering of prices anyway. Any gains in tax cuts, due to entire sectors no longer being funded by the Government, were instantly lost to the massive price gouging these companies engaged in anyway. Now, in the face of this emergency, huge sections of the private sector are being nationalised anyway. We are seeing the private hospital systems immediately caving under the stress and being nationalised. We are seeing public transport in some sectors already renationalised. And as the economic crisis gets worse we will see the Utilities being nationalized. 

Already in Iran, relief on the economic front, is being delivered through the utilities as it was ALREADY still nationally held. Energy will be renationalised before the end. We should even call for telecommunications to be renationlised in Australia. Maybe Internet and Mobile telephony can stay in private hands, as luxuries, but the need for a nationalised, old style, copper landline network to be reinstalled has been shown to be massive in this summer of crisis. ONLY such a network could withstand disasters such as major fire, hurricane or nuclear war and be used as part of the emergency response.

7) Forcing the retirement savings of everyone to be invested in a stock market, which cyclically completely wipes itself out, has also been shown to be a strange and demented idea at providing a stable future for people to retire on. Much like the nationalisation wave we are seeing so many people are going to zero on their super that we are going to be back to just having most of the population on a retirement pension anyway. Yet again the promises of the neo-liberals were exposed as malfeasant lies.

8) The larger nation states, with big central Federal organs, have proven the most incapable of dealing with the speed of the crisis. The United States, the UK, the E.U, Iran and Australia are all shattering in their Federal centers, under the sudden stress of the crisis. Their ability to project power from the center into the regions they occupy has dramatically plunged. 

In the case of the E.U the whole myth of European Solidarity has been laid bare, as countries desperately restrict the flow of medical goods internally between the member states, as they realise their lack of local production has left them hugely vulnerable. Even the megalith that is China is showing that it is cracking at the seams as regionalism and provincialism massively rises overnight in this crisis. 

Some may argue that Russia is the exception to this rule however with no serious outbreaks in Yakutia or Siberia we have not yet seen the dynamic to prove what will happen to Moscow should the regions begin to suffer. The smaller nations have been fairing MUCH better with consistent policies that adhere across the population. As this blog has been arguing for a decade we MUST break up the large nation states into smaller nations for a sustainable future.

So that is quite a lot that we learned in just one week. The speed with which we are now all learning things can be a bit overwhelming but finally these truths are being exposed. One can only imagine what we are going to learn in the COMING weeks.

At some point people are going to learn that in fractional reserve banking much of the money they believe is in banks is not actually really there. That is going to be a very fun learning curve to watch occur. If you thought panic buying toilet paper was the most fun you have had in a decade we haven’t seen nuthin yet. Enjoy the ride everyone and stay safe.