A week into the Financial Times’ “major new series” on the future of capitalism and my head is about to explode.

What is it called - cognitive dissonance - when two contradictory ideas live side-by-side?

That’s what reading the FT feels like these days. They still print on pink paper. There’s still the stock, commodity and currency quotes on the inside pages. The weekend edition still has the ‘How to Spend It’ color magazine with full-page adverts for Swiss timepieces and exclusive real estate.

But in light of this series I’m expecting to soon see survival gear and guides to communes in the Oregon woods.

The paper reads like the Marxist sociology texts I inhaled at Leicester University in the 1970’s. Consider:

• “Another ideological god has failed.” (Seeds of its own destruction, Martin Wolf, 8 March)
• “The idea that unfettered, unregulated capitalism would invariably produce the good outcomes was a wrong economic theory regarding how capitalist societies behave and what causes their crises.” (A failure to control the animal spirits, Robert Shiller, 8 March)
• “Our world is broken – and I honestly don’t know what is going to replace it. The compass by which we steered as Americans has gone.” (Bernie Sucher, head of Merrill Lynch’s Moscow operations, quoted in Lost through destructive creation, Gillian Tett, 9 March)
• “No one can read the chronicles of those earlier crashes without sensing – with a chill – that history is repeating itself. The story of the modern capitalist economy is a rhythmic repetition of cycles, syncopated by eerily similar crises …This is not the bankruptcy of a social system, but the intellectual and moral failure of those who were in charge of it: a failure for which there is no excuse.” (Editorial, 9 March)
• “Ideologically, the manifest failure of market fundamentalism is the starting point … The financial crisis has turned (the) old political logic upside down. As the recession deepens, cultural issues pale in significance next to economic ones. Public anger towards Wall Street … has transformed the Masters of the Universe from heroes to villains.” (The audacity of help, Chrystia Freeland, March 11)
• “…executives and their companies have been caught in the grip of a storm that will revolutionize business. The deep freeze of capital markets, the implosion of financial groups and the resulting rise in governments’ sway over the private sector have called into question some of the foundations of Anglo-Saxon capitalism.” (A need to reconnect, Francesco Guerrera, 12 March)

So, if the FT is right, the ideology has failed; the economic theory is wrong; the compass we steer by has gone; history is repeating itself; financiers are moral and intellectual failures, villains even; the storm of revolution is upon us (emphasis added).

Which means?

Well, (dusting off the texts from Leicester) an alternative was once proposed:

“The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.” (Capital, Volume I, Chapter 32, Karl Marx, 1867)

“In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbor, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety. Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation.” (Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10, Karl Marx, 1867)

However, that alternative came up short in a few places over the last 150 years.

One thing to consider is the transcendence of the whole panic and crisis mentality; the dialetical thesis and antithesis; winner and loser; boom and bust. Rather than looking for a solution in political economy or the labor theory of value, perhaps a more radical (or root-source) alternative is needed in this time of crisis:

“The root-source of disturbance in the human realm is not a financial crisis, or the crisis of global warming and extreme weather, or the problems that arise with the migration of people to everywhere, or the breakdown of the international system in the United Nations, or the epidemic nature of disease and poverty.

The root-source of disturbance in the human realm is the (by-now-paradigmatic) presumption that human beings exist in the world merely in order to consume, to acquire, to luxuriate in conditional experience of all kinds, to exploit the possibilities of enhancing their own “self”-interests — with no other principle or countering force to which they must be accountable.
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The present world-chaos must be clearly and thoroughly understood - not only as the total and final collapse of all past civilizations (or of ego-culture and the “tribalization” of separate and opposing human socities), but as the consummate critical moment of opportunity for humankind as a whole and single order of mutual responsibility on Earth.
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The old moral, social, and political “order” of humankind is now dead. A new and true and right order of humankind is, now, and forever hereafter, necessary.
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Only everybody-all-at-once can change the current chaos.”

Not-Two Is Peace, Adi Da Samraj.