We live in dystopian times. The crisis of global capitalism is revealing itself in the most uncompromising fashion. Quantitative easing – the one ‘solution’ to the last crisis – has only re-inflated the global financial bubble, and created the prospect for the next impending crisis to be greater than witnessed heretofore. Government bonds across the industrialized world are either approaching, or already at, negative interest rates. Financial investors, aware of the next big recession, are betting against long term economic growth, for up to the next thirty years. Something is clearly amiss!
Those not fortunate enough to gamble on financial markets are already living the dystopian consequences of capitalism. In the Global North, wages have stagnated over the past decade, employment is increasingly temporary and insecure, and the ongoing erosion of the welfare state has become manifest in a housing crisis, health care crisis, and an elderly care crisis, all of which increases the care burden placed upon women. The ‘age of austerity’ created the perverse situation that children of the rich industrialised world increasingly face poverty. The aftermath of the global economic crisis has brought with it prolonged neoliberal restructuring, authoritarianism and heightened inequality.
In the Global South, poverty, violence and climate change continue to push thousands into dangerous attempts to migrate across borders, risking either death or imprisonment in inhumane detention centres with little or no regard for human rights. Natural resources have been depleted to the extent that we have little chance of reversing the harm that has been caused, and climate change proceeds unabated.
