Mega-crisis in the making?

Things come together, the capitalism system cannot hold. That’s the message from Canadian activist academic Dr Sandra Rein, speaking at a seminar on gender activism at Rhodes University on the weekend.

And here we were thinking that our biggest problems are racism, crime, political degeneration and electricity.

“We have a global crisis if you look at the totality,” said Rein. One aspect was militarism; another was increasing poverty.

Plus: the “global credit meltdown”, which started in the US and spread to Europe, could dwarf the 1997 Asian crisis. “They are now admitting in US they might have to bring out the word recession,” she said.

That’s not all. “Economic volatility is also affected by rising price of oil — which is at the highest it has ever been. That causes a crisis in consumption, which feeds into militarism.”

The proffered ethanol solution to oil threatened food security, warned Rein.

No tinkering with a single part of the problem could produce a solution, she diagnosed.

Not too encouraging for us, when we add our own problems to this “perfect storm” mix.

Then again, although we have the aftermath of the arms deal, at least we don’t have what Rein critiqued as a widespread slogan in North America (“truly the dark continent”) — the rhetoric to “support the troops”. In Canada, a major shopping chain even sells garments with the slogan.

“If you can get people feeling sorry for these troops, governments can get to increase their military budgets,” she said. This “incredibly effective slogan” worked even though the soldiers who were sent to Afghanistan and Iraq had a choice — they were not conscript forces.

The militarism, said Rein, would have been familiar to German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, who lived through the German imperialism of World War I.

I guess at least we’ve got peace in our part of the globe. It’s not a guarantee of solutions, but it’s a damn side better than war.

Totalities are big, hard to identify and get one’s head around, noted Rein. A response to the crisis has to be a total response — but there is no single solution, she concluded.

Indeed. That’s something we’ve been learning ever since it began to sink in that our 1994 elections were not, on their own, going to usher in all-round transformation of people’s lives.

At the same time, you have to be a total cynic to think that we haven’t had hundreds of small changes for the better. And you’d be blind if you thought the momentum to a truly better country has halted — mega as our local and global challenges are.

Rein was keynote speaker at a seminar on gender activism convened by the Rhodes Institute for Social and Economic Research, and sponsored by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation