Year Four of the Silent Depression: 'the Western industrial world is crumbling'

from Dissent Magazine:




Year Four of the Silent Depression
Luther Carpenter - May 25, 2011


AS OF May 2011, governmental (and intergovernmental) institutions have prevented a 1930s-style depression. They’ve saved the financial system. Nonetheless, the Western industrial world is crumbling.

I call our situation a silent depression, analogous to the silent depression of 1974–84, which French economists called la crise. During la crise, there was massive deindustrialization in the heavy industries that had formed the postwar mode of production, and satiation where there had been rapid growth in the consumer durables that were its mode of consumption. La crise became normal, a second stage of postwar capitalism. New leading industries developed—information technology, speculative finance—and with them a new mode of consumption based on debt and income inequality. That stage of capitalism worked for a while, then turned desperate after 2000. High technology became less revolutionary, and high finance lurched from bubble to bubble; the rich couldn’t eat up all that the economy could produce. That stage came to an end in 2007–8.

Like its predecessor, the current silent depression means that not enough jobs are created to provide full employment. Since over two-thirds of workers in OECD countries are employed in the service sector (a figure even higher in countries like the United States and France), that’s where jobs have been destroyed. That sector isn’t going to pull us back to full employment. Most of the new jobs created in it and other sectors are part-time and precarious. To get us out of this mess and into a new stage of capitalist accumulation, new modes of production and consumption must be constructed out of new and recycled materials.

Most of my friends in France and the United States don’t say this, thought not because they aren’t hurting. Those who are self-employed (journalists, translators) have lost clients. Salaried workers have lost their jobs, or are at risk of losing their jobs. Many have children who are having difficulty finding a place in society, or they experience the effects of cutbacks in medical care and the annoyance of trying to talk to insurers or providers of what once were growing service industries. But they stop short of saying that the survival of their societies is seriously threatened. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=492

We could have led the way into the new sustainable energy economy. With new industrial jobs for Americans.

Instead we remain in the thrall of big oil, big coal, big nuclear. Not enough people with vision and who weren't corrupt in the political system.

And other countries are putting huge resources into subsidizing Solar, wind, hydro...

and narrowed the focus of the financial sector to investing in actual businesses that make things and provide services, and put up firewalls to prevent a revolving door between regulators and Wall Street firms, and ANY interaction that isn't on tape and subject to public inspection.