When The World Went Mad

George Monbiot is either a lunatic or the New Prophet. This, I suspect, is how impressions of him divide, but as with many in the world of journalism he is somewhere in between, a slightly mad proselytizer. George can't be that mad as he earns a good-sized wedge from being an environmental doom merchant and all-round conscientious objector. He does, however, have some grounds for being mad. Having variously been placed in a coma by hornets, been pronounced dead because of cerebral malaria and had a metal spike driven into a foot, he can be excused for being hopping mad, if only moderately.

George, though, is now truly nuts, the consequence of the world having gone raving mad. This happened - you may not have noticed - on 28 August. Who says so? Well, George does. On Tuesday last week, three separate events coalesced to cause George to believe in globalisation for the first time; the globalisation of insanity, that is. These were the debate regarding the third runway at Heathrow, the postponement by a day of the Republican Party convention because of Hurricane Isaac and the announcement of a record ice melt in the Arctic. If the connection between the three is not apparent, then you won't know about or believe in man-made climate change and you probably think that George is indeed a lunatic.

I happen to think that he isn't. He is one of the sanest journalists I can think of, if only because of his ability to make some get as hopping mad with his proselytizing as he himself was with that spike in his foot. George is a regular and willing contributor to a grand debate going on in the blue sky world of the intellectualati regarding the world after capitalism. The environment, climate change and the use of resources are all aspects of this grand debate, but they are arguably of less immediate importance than economies.

At the same time as the world was going mad, the Spanish were adding to the ever-increasing insanity of the collapsing financial system in Europe. Recession was deeper than had been thought, Spain was heading towards finally admitting that it needed bailing out and the Catalonians had put in their demand for five billion to tide them over for a few months.

The Spanish Government, with the ever anonymous Rajoy closeted in his bunker of delusion and donning his Nero disguise and reaching for his fiddle, has been in a state of denial. It has spun the yarn of growth returning, while doing everything in its power to bring growth from the spinning mule to a stubborn and braying halt.

Rajoy, as with other Western leaders, spins the solutions to recession as being between the black and white of austerity or growth, while failing to appreciate that the narrative of recession and therefore the solutions may not in fact be true or attainable. What if this isn't a recession? What if this is how it is and how it will be?

Accepting that economic crisis has an inevitable solution through either the path of austerity or growth is akin to the denial of man-made climate change (and Rajoy knows all about this because he has denied it). The reason why is that there is a denial as to how the crisis came about. Nuancing it as a failure of banking systems and as initially the fallout from exposure to toxic, sub-prime debt is to identify the effect and not the cause.

For this, one has to go back to the 1980s. A desire for global inclusion, for free trade, for deregulation (especially of finance and banking sectors), for de-industrialisation and a shift to intangible services, and for the exporting of Western political philosophy in the fallacious pursuit of global democraticisation came together under umbrellas of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. Market liberalism was founded on sound enough principles, but it was founded also on unknowns, as was the whole European monetary union project.

We now know the unknowns, but despite this there is a persistence in styling solutions according to principles that pre-dated the 1980s and so which pay scant regard to the fundamental alteration of global power, industrially, financially and in terms of resources.

Climate change is largely irreversible. In the same way, economic change with the transfer of power to China and elsewhere is also largely irreversible. It is why Monbiot and others search for a model that is "after capitalism". It is one in which neither the prescription of austerity nor growth can hope to succeed. A radical new model is required.

The world didn't go raving mad on 28 August. It started to go loopy in the 1980s. We didn't know it then, but we do now. And I for one am hopping mad.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.