Before you lefties get too carried away with capitalism-bashing, even schadenfreude over the current travails of cross-border capitalists, mull over this.
The last great financial crisis of 1929 and the great depression which followed from it and lasted for most of the 1930s led to WW2. You don't really have to struggle to mount a pretty strong case about the war-inducing nature of the following combination:
- increased poverty making individuals more desperate and hence more likely to support extreme political parties;
- economic isolation and reduced cross-border economic links reducing nation states' perception of their own economic interest in the maintainence of peace.
The 1930s were, pretty much uniquely in the last 200 years, a period of reduction in economic liberalisation: national isolation, tariffs, hostility to free trade and falls in cross-border investment. Even WW1 didn't have as much impact on the massive 19th century globalisation of capitalism as the 1930s depression did.
In the modern era of nuclear weapons, scarcity of vital resources such as oil and metal ores, the risk of war and the likely carnage caused by war are massively higher. So the importance of the sense of mutual dependence of nations' economies caused by cross-border investment, in reducing e.g. the extent of recent Russia-West or China-West tensions to way below what they would otherwise have been, is all the greater.
Far from knocking capitalism, you really really ought to be praying for it with every fibre of your being. Because if it fails, nuclear holocaust won't be far behind.
The last great financial crisis of 1929 and the great depression which followed from it and lasted for most of the 1930s led to WW2. You don't really have to struggle to mount a pretty strong case about the war-inducing nature of the following combination:
- increased poverty making individuals more desperate and hence more likely to support extreme political parties;
- economic isolation and reduced cross-border economic links reducing nation states' perception of their own economic interest in the maintainence of peace.
The 1930s were, pretty much uniquely in the last 200 years, a period of reduction in economic liberalisation: national isolation, tariffs, hostility to free trade and falls in cross-border investment. Even WW1 didn't have as much impact on the massive 19th century globalisation of capitalism as the 1930s depression did.
In the modern era of nuclear weapons, scarcity of vital resources such as oil and metal ores, the risk of war and the likely carnage caused by war are massively higher. So the importance of the sense of mutual dependence of nations' economies caused by cross-border investment, in reducing e.g. the extent of recent Russia-West or China-West tensions to way below what they would otherwise have been, is all the greater.
Far from knocking capitalism, you really really ought to be praying for it with every fibre of your being. Because if it fails, nuclear holocaust won't be far behind.
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