When is the Failure of American Global Capitalism?

A few weeks ago at the Soap Factory, during a quite good discussion of current dissident art in China, one of the panelists said something that really blew my hair back. 

“… and of course, as we know now, Marxism failed.”

Well, ok then.  That’s that. 

My initial shock came not from the jab at Marxism—by all means, go ahead—but that anyone could so easily speak to an -ism’s definite conclusion.  It’s over.  It failed.  Done deal. 

There are of course, as we know now, definite complications within an -ism word.  Which Marxism?  Marx’s communism?  Lenin’s Marxism?  Structural Marxism?  Groucho Marxism? 

(The speaker obviously didn’t mean the last of those, which was anything but a failure by anyone’s terms.) 

But the question of time further adds to quite literally insane remark that an -ism could be concluded and characterized as a success or failure.  For such a qualification to happen, an -ism would have to set out with at the very least a somewhere coherent set of goals and within a certain time period not achieve those goals. 

And even though we can lean on our authoritarian institutions (those institutions we look to for authority) for these boundaries, we also have a hard time making these determinations—especially for our own ideological movements.  

Here’s an example: It can be argued, and is being argued more and more, that of course, we know now, that the Civil Rights Movement in America failed.  A crazy statement?  Not if you look at incarceration rates, poverty rates, unemployment rates, drug arrests, etc. 

From the indespensible Atlantic piece on Dr. Cosby’s social activism:

In May 2004, just one day before Cosby’s Pound Cake speech, TheNew York Times visited Louisville, Kentucky, once ground zero in the fight to integrate schools. But TheTimes found that sides had switched, and that black parents were more interested in educational progress than in racial parity. “Integration? What was it good for?” one parent asked. “They were just setting up our babies to fail.”

With the distance of history and geography separating us from the actual Marx and some of his lineage, it’s easy to have such certainty.  But what about the 20-year decline of the American Empire?  We’re currently in the eye of the storm, moving so gently until the outer edges constrict us during a bubble burst or oil shortage or systematic financial scare. 

Is it too soon to say that American Global Capitalism, which sought to create either a global free market economy to raise all world economies and constituencies (a clearly intellectually dishonest argument made by that buffoon Thomas Friedman over and over) or a world-wide feudal economy with U.S. corporations at the top of hierarchy (a more realistic read of the past two to five decades), has failed?  That our financial approach has bankrupted other countries and unions, that our top spot in the world pecking order is all but guaranteed to pass within a generation to emerging world powers? 

Or because we still have the ability to buy larger TVs every Christmas, are we not yet to the point of blowing the final whistle on our -ism as we have for others?