The Kommirat - A Voice in the Wilderness

The headlines in some of the British press today told us that "Capitalism 'has been broken', top UK business leaders warn". The Chairpeople of Santander, Barclays, Lloyds and HSBC banks, a past Chairman of Marks and Spencer and the Director of The Confederation of British Industry have all weighed in telling us what I have been telling you for the past five years that " the underlying promise of western capitalist economies - that a rising tide lifts all boats - has been broken", adding that  "The state of capitalism is in desperate need of reform and modernisation, according to some of the UK’s top business leaders, who claim that the system has been hurt by management greed, corporate tax dodging and investor short-termism". Writing in the Financial Times, the Chair of Santander said that
“The financial crash, a fixation on shareholder value at the expense of purpose, and the toxic issues of payment of tax and executive pay stand in the way of redemption”.

What makes this newsworthy for this blog is that these corporate giants, by their assessment of the crisis that they are responsible for demonstrate that they are in fact intellectually deficient, as they miss the crucial point of their own analysis, which has been the core theme of this blog since it began, that the issues they raise are in reality symptoms of a common cause, a particular economic model, and they are so fixated with this model that they fail to understand the real problem and so are incapable of providing a meaningful solution. They are an example of how Rabbie Burns implores us (I will write his words in received English) "Oh would the power the gifter give us, to see ourselves as others see us". It speaks volumes that these persons finally waken up to see what has been staring them in the face for the past ten years at least, such is the power of self-delusion, and these are the people we amusingly refer to as the elite. Oh they are elite all right, they lead the way in stupidity, venality, self-importance and a complete disregard for reality. However, even in their belated realisation of the carnage they have inflicted on the world, they are still light years ahead intellectually, of the residents of the pigsty who have not yet noticed the state of the nation and its economy. 

I repeat what I have been telling you since I started this blog, there is no such thing, nor can be such a thing, as a free market. It is an illusion and a fraud, and until these intellectual giants accept this they will never be able to offer solutions. The whole fundamental basis of their philosophical worldview is quite simply wrong. The fundamental assumptions of the free market model are wrong. Again I will bore you with repetition; nowhere does Adam Smith refer to the concepts of capitalism, the free market, laissez faire, or the concept of an unfettered economic system. So, if Smith does not talk about such things, where do they come from, and more importantly, what do they mean? This blog is obviously too brief to answer that, but if it were to we would have to radically rethink our whole understanding of market economics. Thus it is not essentially capitalism that is broken, it is the philosophical and intellectual foundations of the dominant model that are broken. Actually it is a mistake to say they are broken, because they have never been truly functional. There is no such thing as capitalism that can be accurately defined as a working model. It is a generic term, a template to attempt to explain a general methodology of production, ownership, trade, exchange and barter. For example, if Britain is a capitalist country, then the United States cannot be and vice versa. By the same token if Germany or France define capitalism then those others must be something else, as they are all quite different models of economic systems. The one thing that they have in common however, is that none of them can be described as free. They can all of course be described as capitalist, but there is no such thing as a capitalist model, that is also an illusion. Britain was still a capitalist country even when her major industries were nationalised, when most of its housing was public, when it built the NHS and the welfare state. It has never been what we understand as a socialist society. It is testament to how the political narrative has been so thoroughly corrupted that we can describe such measures as socialist, particularly when most of such measures were enacted by Conservative governments. The one worrying aspect of these developments is that the Kommirat is beginning to appear to be mainstream, sharing an outlook with bankers and industrialists. I have been a voice in the wilderness for too long to be comfortable anywhere else. You have been warned.

Your Servant

Doktor Kommirat   

I think the American gun culture must be an illness

As you know I am reluctant to comment on other cultures and nations given that the UK has nothing to boast about. I have, however, been reflecting on the concept of socialisation in the aftermath of the Las Vegas tragedy. Very little shocks me but I listened in disbelief to the arguments of several defenders of the American gun culture and they struck me as being so irrational that they verge on the insane. What was completely unacceptable was the response of the 45. In terms of leadership, people like 45 will go to any length to defend the rights of people to bear and carry arms, but stay completely silent on the right to life, and the right to be safe in your daily life from indiscriminate murder. In addition, if that was not an act of terror, then nothing can be designated terrorist, but then again the terrorist in this instance was white, so that makes this crime something else. The United States is not alone in this racist view of course. White Anglo-Saxons can never be terrorists and the British share that view. It is helped of course that they claim to be Christian.

Many people have made the point that the Second Amendment to the Constitution must be viewed in its historical setting and should not be taken literally. Guns didn't even have rifling when that was written and were incapable of firing 100 shots per minute, which brings me back to socialisation because all of the evidence I have seen over many years appears to suggest that Americans are impervious to any nuance or relativist argument. We have a right to as many guns, of whatever make and calibre and an inexhaustible supply of ammunition for them as we can afford, simples. American culture is radically different from European in this respect and so there is simply no comparison, nor genuine understanding of this fundamental cultural and normative difference towards guns, mass murder and the seeming indifference in the USA to the psychopathy involved in gun culture. I actually thought that the killing of their children at Sandy Hook would permeate the American consciousness to the extent that they would be motivated by that most fundamental human instinct, the protection of one's offspring, but their dedication to guns has proven to be a greater force than their dedication to their children. A report on CNN noted that more Americans have been killed by their fellow Americans than all of the Americans killed in all of America's wars. That should surely give pause for reflection. More Americans have died than were victims of the Wehrmacht and the Vietcong combined without considering any other conflicts. Perhaps it is time that the Second Amendment was amended?

This cultural aspect of American life strikes me as a form of addiction, an illness that plagues the body politic. Socialisation is an extremely powerful human phenomenon that can blind us to many things, but particularly to reality. That was one of the lessons of Plato's analogy of the Cave and was famously characterised by Francis Bacon in his theories about the idols of the mind, as he tells us that "the mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence, nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture" What is of great concern to me is that, as Britain becomes more and more a reflection of the United States, we fall under the same perverted fascination with guns and they become more and more normalised until we too claim a 'right' to bear and carry them. If the reality that the consequences of a literal translation of the Second Amendment are a far greater threat to America's future than either Hitler or Ho Chi Minh does not begin to register with the American consciousness then they are indeed facing a truly dystopian future. You have been warned

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat