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