Learning From Dead Empires

Gary Younge nails the structural corruption of the British plutocracy. One of the signal ironies of the British decline is that because it occurred at a much slower rate than the American decline, Britain developed certain coping strategies (e.g. the NHS, or the fact that Britain's military-industrial complex, though still unnecessarily large, consumers far less of British GDP than its US counterpart does vis-a-vis the US). Here in the US, though, the neoliberalization and atomization of social life means that there are very few collective institutions which could halt the descent into total social meltdown.

Realistically, the resistance is just a few tens of thousands of Occupiers, dissidents within the state governments and educational institutions, and some brave and tenacious union and social activists. (Things are a little better in Europe, where the citizens of Greece, France and Spain are starting to wake up).

This isn't a counsel of despair, but of realism: we have to create an inclusive populism to fight market populism, a speculative imagination capable of fighting financial speculation, an egalitarianism of need to fight the plutocracy of greed.

And we have allies. The most powerful developmental states of the planet have broken free of  neoliberalism, and are beginning to move towards egalitarian and democratic alternatives.