WILL THE FALL OF SOVIET COMMUNISM BE FOLLOWED SHORTLY BY…
the fall of American Rationalized Capitalism? We certainly seem to be losing our hemispheric satellites! We’ve even managed to elect a ‘liberal-leaning’ Congress just now, and if we’re lucky, it may begin to dismantle our last harsh, ‘conservative’ regime – not democratically-elected at that. And a recent neocon mag pronounced the death of globalization with a beached ship on its cover!
Of course, that will still leave forms of Rationalized Corporate Rule in Britain (pace Her Majesty), the EU/Brussels, and Australia, maybe like the world still has Communist China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba – ‘liberalizing,’ like “capitalism with a human face.”
(“Rationalized Capitalism” isn’t small-time family shops and farms and crafts and merchant/traders, or even larger Sovereign-dominated limited corporations serving real public needs. It’s the anal-retentive, stingy, hyperactive, “Protestant work ethic,” megasized, hyper-exploitive, wage-slavery, excess profiteering, power-hungry, manipulative, inhumane, uncaring, “invisible hand”-trusting, “law of the jungle” [sic], “rugged individualistic,” world-consuming, Globe-Warming, warmongering, imperialistic, militaristic, fascistic, corporatistic/Big Business, anti-traditional, amoral/immoral, ruthlessly calculating, hyper-“scientific,” “bootstraps,” anti-welfare [pun intended!] kind best represented by early industrialism, robber barons, “neoconservatism”/neoliberalism, deregulation, globalization…and in fiction, Scrooge and the Ferengi. The label “rationalized” normally refers to the hyper-calculating, “scientific,” penny-pinching, profit-maximizing approach…but since sociologist Max Weber saw its rise linked so closely to that of Calvinist Puritan Protestant Christianity in Britain and even more so in America [arguably since Britain has always retained a culturally-dominant Broad Church], the other meaning of “rationalized” is also appropriate: reasoning how what you’re doing is good, moral, virtuous, Biblical, God-ordained, and for the Common Good, when it doesn’t seem so, even seems the opposite of these things.)