Quote:
Originally Posted by Aardvark
We own the service industry and control, to a limited extent, the markets. We are making alliances in other places, such as central Asia where it is still cool to be a Brit. We also over-consume so a cutback on non-essentials will mean, whilst we trash our own pubs and restaurants by non-use, we will not be importing so many white goods etc. We will be severely buffeted and unemployment will soar and the pips will squeak, but we will survive as we have infrastructure in place, we have built enough houses if we double up a bit, we have a naturally stable population in terms of revolutionary tendencies, we are well educated in real terms and we have enough people who can survive on a bag of chips and 25p lager in front of the telly. So long as we have bread and circuses we'll be all right.
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The problem with services industries are that they don't create wealth, merely recycle it. You just can't have a economy totally given over to fundamentally useless activities and rely on imports to supply your every need. It like the legendary town whose economy consisted solely of people taking in each others laundry. The basic mechanisms of the "money-go-round" still works BUT there is no-one to do the real work so the town just falls to bits.
Moreover they are vulnerable, very vulnerable to sequential collapse as the product they supply is eminently dispensable and they are tied to their local community and can not seek new markets. Because of these factors a service industry based economy is best compared to a very long row of close coupled dominoes, made out of Semtex.
The fact is we do not have the infrastructure we need, we have no industrial capacity to speak of nor do we have enough agricultural land to feed our population. We do have the High Speed One rail connection but it is unclear how this helps.
As to the reaction of the populace. How we see this as going is entirely dependent on what we see happening, what they are reacting to.
This one is different to any economic downturn ever seen. The mechanisms of the system itself are breaking down. For decades we have systemically weakened and distorted our own society and economy and there is a serious possibility, maybe even a probability, that those systems could just fail completely under the external pressures now building on them. These pressures are only just beginning to get going and the cracks in the foundations are already terrifying. For example the price of oil is high simply because of supply Vs demand, there is no supply problem as yet. Periodically those supplies are threatened by wars in the Middle East, revolutions in Nigeria and Venezuela and hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico. These events cause spikes and when one of these random events hits the already elevated oil price the result could be to apply intolerable pressure on the fragile economy of the West.
One interesting aspect of this is that the pain is on its way not for the underclass or the working class. These people have nothing left to lose and can not be anymore humiliated or reduced than they already have been by the 20th century. The people with their balls in the bacon slicer this time are the classical middle class. They have the huge debts and they performing useless sinecure tasks in the employ of the State and they have the ridiculously exaggerated expectations of something, a lot of something, for nothing. Interestingly they are completely lacking any sort of reality based intellectual tools which might help them understand what is about to hit them.
Historians, particularly Marx, have commonly observed that you can do what you like to the working class but whatever you do don't disappoint the middle class. They have been proven to be volatile, completely unprincipled and susceptible to any wild promise offered them over and over again. All the successful revolutions in history have been products of the outraged middle class. Looking at our own situation we see a huge section of the middle class already radicalized, although atypically they have been radicalized to half a dozen different ideologies and even more bizarrely none at all. There instincts tell them that someones **** needs kicking but as yet no one has identified a suitable weak satisfactory target that they feel comfortable scapegoating.