February 2012.

Our world today

“The old is dying and the new cannot be born: in the interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms will appear.”

Antonio Gramsci, Marxist thinker

“I will make everything new.”

Jesus Christ, the beginning and the end.

We all have heard of the “Ten Lost Years,” from 1929-1939, usually labeled The Great Depression, which was more severe in the North America than elsewhere.

When this economic disaster started here, some 22 percent of the labour force worked on farms. Between 1929 and 1932 most of these jobs disappeared as agriculture became a victim of its own success thanks to better seeds, better fertilizer, better farming practices, and especially widespread mechanization, fueled by an abundance of cheap oil. The result of this accelerating productivity caused output to increase faster than demand, resulting in much lower prices. That, combined with a sudden influx of millions of surplus workers, changed the structure of the economy. It was this, more than anything else that led to rapidly declining incomes. Farmers then (like workers now) borrowed heavily to sustain living standards and production. Because neither the farmers nor their bankers anticipated the steepness of the price declines, a credit crunch quickly ensued as farmers simply couldn’t repay what they owed.  As a result the banks too became a victim of declining agricultural incomes, and thousands of them went belly up.

Then WWII war came to the rescue: the conflict with Germany and Japan revved up the industrial base and employed the millions of idle bodies, enlisting them both in the army and in the arms industry. Overnight the deep depression disappeared.

Fast forward to today. We now find ourselves in a similar situation as 80 years ago, courtesy ‘progress’ again, this time not through greater farm efficiency but through enhanced computer power, the software revolution, and the globalization of jobs, dispatching them to lower wage countries, China in particular.

For a while the reckoning was postponed as rapidly rising real estate prices, fueled by cheap money and cheating banks, created the illusion of wealth, until the housing bust came.

Economists blamed the debacle in the 1930’s on tight money, so this time the experts did the opposite: they poured trillions in to the banking system, without producing a cure. Bankers got their big bonuses, but the common folk kept on suffering.

Indeed, the old is dying, the new cannot be born, and a great variety of morbid symptoms are appearing. The USA now has 6.6 million fewer jobs than 4 years ago and 23 million would like to work but have dropped out. Also wages have been falling, and poverty is rampant.

What we are experiencing in 2012 is again a fundamental re-alignment of the economy. Just as 80 years ago the jobs of farm hands never returned – now 2 percent of the labour force produce more food than the nation can absorb – thanks to shipping jobs to Asia, and greater productivity, we again have a permanent surplus of labour.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, an economist at Columbia University, suggests that in the   current situation the best solution is to concentrate on two fields for the jobs of the future: education and health, expanding the service economy well beyond the current 70 percent. At the same time this Nobel Prize winner suggests that we better prepare for a much lower living standard.

Making the service sector bigger is easier said than done. In the USA already 17 percent of GDP – Gross Domestic Product – is spent on health care – more than in any country – with a very low success rate. The same holds true for education. The vested interests in both fields are just too difficult to dislodge.

My proposal is different. It is plain that the old order is dying. In 1939 war was the cure. That is no longer an option – even though some Republicans would like to attack Iran. The only way to heal our situation is to make peace with the physical world by imagining the new creation to come. Bonhoeffer starts his 200 page Creation and Fall (dealing with Genesis 1-3) with these remarkable words, “The church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”

The Greek word for ‘end’ is telos. Jesus in Matthew 5:48 tells us to be ‘telos- minded’ – “be telos-minded as I am telos-minded “- (teleios is the Greek word there), which really means that now already our life must reflect the ‘perfection’, the ‘whole-ness’ of the New Creation.