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Charles Hugh Smith: Preventing The Final Fall Of Our Democratic Republic
Charles Hugh Smith: Preventing The Final Fall Of Our Democratic Republic
There’s mounting evidence that the Age of American Exceptionalism is grinding to an end.
Demographically, in the U.S. (as well as many other developed nations), the prospects of the younger generations are substantially less than those of the Baby Boomers. The same is true socioeconomically as well; the wealth gap between the 1% and everyone else continues to accelerate.
What’s been the root cause of this slide towards greater and greater inequity? And can anything be done to reverse it?
Economist analyst and author Charles Hugh Smith addresses these core questions in his new book Pathfinding Our Destiny: Preventing The Final Fall Of Our Democratic Republic. Charles concludes that we are the terminal end of a multi-century process of centralization that is no longer working for society’s benefit:
We have a political system which is becoming increasingly tied into money. Now, people have always said, like from 100 years ago, “money is the mother’s milk of politics”. Money and power have always coalesced around political power. But in the last, say, 70 years, post-World War II, the central governments and central banks of the world have grown immensely in their centralized power.
And one of the theses I’m proposing in my book is that centralization itself in now the problem. We’ve been told for 400 years that it’s been the solution. Just centralize power and wealth into tighter and tighter control and then that will somehow solve whatever problems we have.
The intense concentration of power is becoming blatantly visible these days. Six media companies control most of the media in the U.S. It used to be six banks, but now I think it’s down to only three or four, who control most of the financial system.
What Money Means
What Money Means
But there’s much about money that is misunderstood.
Many among the masses don’t realize the intense and coordinated efforts currently being waged by central planners to trap and devalue our savings through financial repression. They’re being fleeced without being aware of it — working harder and harder for less and less.
Many others overvalue the impact money has on our happiness. They make all sorts of sacrifices in pursuit of money, but remain poor in the things that truly matter.
In our new book Prosper!: How to Prepare for the Future and Create a World Worth Inheriting, we examine closely what true wealth is. Yes, money absolutely plays a critical part in it; but it is only one of several pillars — one of 8 Forms of Capital — that we identify as required for a rich life. Good health, purposeful work, meaningful relationships, a resilient lifestyle, self-worth, a supportive community — all of these ingredients are as important as money for overall happiness.
We wrote Prosper! as a resource that those already “awake” to these insights can use to share with family and friends who aren’t yet aware of them.
And since money is a universal attention-grabber as a topic, we’re making our chapter on Financial Capital available here for free — as a means of engaging someone you care about in the discussion. We think it’s one of the best digests of what happening right now with our money system:
Alternatives to Capitalism
It is said that capitalism believes in competition but hates competitors. With this thoughtful book, Robin Hahnel and Erik Olin Wright aim to strengthen the resources of anti-capitalist politics against the charge that ‘there is no alternative’. While there is a debate on the left over the value of engaging in utopian planning of the kind represented by this book, Hahnel and Wright present their approach as supporting radical politics, building confidence rather than distracting from current struggles. The thinking and action inspired by real-world examples (such as participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre) underlines the point. We need concrete inspiration; we need to believe that ‘another world is possible’. In Erik Wright’s words, ‘We need … utopian longing melded to realist thinking about the dilemmas and constraints of building viable alternatives to the world as it is.’
The book sets out two approaches to anti-capitalist utopian thinking, taking the form of a dialogue between the two authors (embedded in a shared commitment to radical conceptions of equality and democracy). Each sets out a position and provides a constructive and reflective commentary on the other’s contribution, and a response to the points raised about their own.
Hahnel’s proposal is for a system of participatory economics, originally developed with the US activist and radical economist Michael Albert. This is essentially a bottom-up method of production and consumption planning. In this book, he focuses on the mechanisms by which individual producers and consumers would collectively elaborate an agreed annual plan, without the need for markets or hierarchical central control. A little more detail on the content of the proposed system at the outset of his dialogue with Wright would have been helpful, although he does provide useful references to his extensive writing on participatory economics elsewhere.
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