Comrades! We Must Not Let This Debt Crisis Go To Waste!

The corporate media is panicking about the debt crisis. The politicians are squabbling over entitlement reforms and tax increases. The capitalist ratings agencies are warning about a downgrade in the U.S. credit rating. Americans are worrying about their jobs, their homes, their possessions–everything. The government wants to print more money, and the people can’t find enough money to buy basic goods. We are told to be afraid.

But those of us who have always struggled for social justice, for a truly free and humane society, know there is nothing to fear. FDR was wrong: we need not even fear fear itself! For the imminent collapse of the American economy is not just proof that the critique of capitalism was right all along. It is also an opportunity to replace an oppressive system with a revolutionary one–more efficient and democratic than last century’s attempts.

Comrades! This is our moment. The extraordinary confluence of the debt crisis in the U.S. and the debt crisis in the European Union is the surest sign that the globalized capitalist empire itself is crumbling, defeated by its own internal contradictions. Yes, the Soviet Union fell because it could not match capitalist production. But the United States will fall because it cannot afford capitalist consumption–neither private nor public.

Only a few of us understood the full import of the 2008 financial crisis at the time–that a Republican president enacted the largest-ever expansion of government spending and power just before handing the presidency to the most radical Democrat ever elected to the job. What Bush hoped would be temporary–the debts, bailouts, and interventions–Obama has made permanent. Permanent, at least, until the entire edifice crumbles.

It is a matter of weeks before the Treasury is empty; before the currency itself loses all its value; before any remaining stores of value are in weak enough hands to be seized. The new regime we shall build will not have wealth, but it will have power. Both political parties are colluding, despite their mutual distrust, to make sure of that: even Republicans have proposed giving the president new powers to raise the debt ceiling.

The Democrats are stoking public fear by claiming that seniors may not receive their Social Security checks on August 3rd because of Republican intransigence on taxes. Foolishly, they have revealed to those seniors that there is no Social Security Trust Fund, after all, despite decades of Democrat promises! When that reality begins to dawn, Americans will exact their revenge upon both parties–and on each other.

As for those few who dream of a libertarian alternative–they are doomed to fail, just as liberal reformers in the Soviet system were marginalized even in a democratic Russia. Freedom, comrades, is a delusion, an escapist dream–appropriate, perhaps, to small artists’ colonies, but not to post-modern nation-states. The U.S. Constitution is a bizarre historical anomaly, a cult that survived only to give birth to this transformative moment.

How we will laugh, comrades, when those neo-liberals who proclaimed the end of history will be forced to witness history’s revenge–and culmination! They forgot that the Soviet empire failed, in large part, because its satellites could not pay their debts. The self-destructive debt of the West is more than irony–it is justice. What communism could not defeat, and what jihad could not destroy, is about to end. A new day will dawn!

Comrades! We must not let this debt crisis go to waste! Resist federal spending cuts! Resist calls for a balanced budget amendment! Resist lower corporate tax rates! Resist any and all policies that might set the United States back on a path to fiscal stability and economic growth! We cannot allow imperialist capitalism to win–not this time, when so much is falling into place, when so little time is left in Obama’s fortuitous presidency!