Barack the Red

Some terrible things were said about Obama during the American presidential campaign: he was called a Socialist.

Some people who sleep in their car because they don’t have any housing went to his rallies … accusing him of wealth redistribution.

Although this country is a so-called free one, its proletariat has for generations been conditioned by a small fascist elite to defend a liberal ideology. A paramount ignorance has been pointed out within this nation that was born under the Age of Enlightenment. Things are about to change, though.

Do not believe that America will change because Obama wants it. This bliss that used to be found in injustice and inequality is about to come to an end in the U.S., but it will be nobody’s choice as those who would have wanted change were too weak and those taking advantage wanted no change.

Technologies have evolved and this has led to an industrial capitalism reaching an apogee, bringing along some kind of abundance to the West, but was then betrayed by this new economy.

When the abundance time came 50 years ago, capitalism had to face an over-satisfaction of its material needs, and at the same time, a challenging society where the true demand was dedicated to services: education, health, leisure.

In a tertiary society, the traditional notion of Capitalism tends to lose its importance to the benefit of competence, which is a knowledge that one can only acquire from a person who received it from someone else. There is a changing capitalist/worker relation.

Capitalism had for a long time priority over the service industry because it has created a factitious consumer society based on the possession of what is short-lived and insignificant. Society was diverted from its real needs and was offered more toys, cameras, videos, TV sets, cell phones, laptops and especially cars.

As a result, a notion of satiety was introduced and brought along with it a dislike for anything unnecessary, even when a reduced demand for industrial production could be more satisfied thanks to imports from Asia.

With a few efforts made, it would have been possible to even more mechanize the North American industry and produce all those knick-knacks at lower costs, but it was also obvious that it would mean putting off the evil day, as the American society had enough of it and should be manipulated forever to give it a kind of taste back, whereas it was slowly dying from a lack of services.

More mechanization wouldn’t make purchasing power or an effective demand possible, and would undoubtedly lead to a labor force layoff.

We would enter a system gradually depending on many forms of assistance, help and aids. Whereas the relations with exporting countries would go wrong and end up in an international, maybe even military, crisis.

So let’s assume that we’re going to play everybody’s game, uttering some counterfeit money that would have no value. The rich people would show the necessary decency not to spend and consume too much, except for what deals with their investments, which would avoid inflation. At least for a time being…

It’s like strolling in hyperspace standing close to a black hole, but we already have fallen down into the hole, and as a result, we now have to settle a financial crisis with all that fake money at our disposal. Money that will soon vanish: just try to picture the stock exchange as if it were a kind of oven for banknotes. First, we would have to cremate as much as possible, what would be left would just have to be devaluated.

This crisis is not just a matter of finance, though. The monetary crisis is the reflection of a reality. Barack Obama’s big challenge will be to make a deep change here and there in what mostly matters in an industrial country: production. He was given a mandate by those to whom the country belongs, and those same people expect the U.S.A. to produce something else and in a different way than it used to be. That’s all that matters.

The secondary sector worker has to move out to a production of services. It is important to produce huge quantities of various services, going from medical services to tourism, culture to video games. Workers need to be retrained; they have to be competent in this new sector represented by the production of services. A big part of the labor force still works in the secondary sector.

It’s just not a simple retraining; it’s a transformation of a work culture into a new status. The new jobs generated require an initiative, creativity and sometimes even a talent to communicate, a great motivation that will be shared with the entrepreneurship. Those services will more often as usual have to be rendered the best way ever, and their providers will be qualified independent workers.

The capital/competence relation must change and giant industrial corporations can only survive if they split up into a multitude of tiny human-sized enterprises, in the middle of which the worker will have the professional behavior of an entrepreneur.

The emblematic example that will prove this evolution will be the purchase and take-over of General Motors and other car manufacturers by their employees, in order to turn this entire sector into a large sub-contracting network, directly inspired from a tertiary sector structure.

In order to avoid a decreasing economy, the State will only have to agree with the commitments that workers will accept from their present owners.

This transformation of workers into independent entrepreneurs will only be made possible if job safety –usually pretty illusory when technologies need a change- is replaced by income safety. A guarantee will actually be necessary for workers leaving a sector for another one.

If the State wants to be able to guarantee an effective demand, it will also have to guarantee the value of the index-linked retiring funds and transfer payments. The U.S.A. needs a brand new Social Security system. Obama will only be able to organize it by nationalizing the financial institutions and taking control over money and credit.

The U.S.A. will have to face an economy with many changing parameters, although the population won’t necessarily understand the reason of these changes and how they’ll be undertaken. A kind of compassionate but nevertheless not obliging system. Those who will try to misuse it won’t be treated with any form of indulgence.

That used to be the USSR’s challenge in the early 20’s. Fortunately, out of this new “socialism” have emerged the notions of freedom and personnel initiative as complements to the solidarity that is often imposed to the interdependency-related developed economy.

Those who used to talk about Socialism will yet have to learn what some precise words mean.