There are many unanswered question about the crisis, some practical, some theoretical. Despite the uncertainty and insecurity caused by the crisis, one thing is certain: this crisis marks the end of an era.What era, you be ask? The era of the unregulated, ‘greed is good’ free market. Capitalism is dead, long live financial capitalism. Like the medieval monarch, capitalism has two bodies – a natural and a political one.We are witnessing the death of its most recent natural one at the same time as a debate surrounding its political one. On blogs and on the street, people are asking themselves when this crisis will end, how to fix the system, how we can restore ‘confidence’ in the markets. This crisis is like Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans – it opens up and lays bare all those societal problems that nobody likes to think about – poverty, inequality, chronic mismanagement, and ineptitude.Those that think the end of the crisis will mark the beginning of good times, or the return of normalcy, are mistaken.

The riddle of the financial crisis consists in answering the question: how could a few (hundred) people and corporations collectively make and lose so much money that the world – 6.7 billion people – must now collectively pay? For those with a rudimentary knowledge of political economy it is easy to see that you simply cannot create money out of nothing, which, to be blunt, has been the major source of wealth creation since the 1980s: financial capital, hedge funds, leveraged capital, derivatives, credit default swaps, outsourcing, etc.But now let us go back in time a bit…

During the time of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus, economics was called political economy because of the underlying social (class) basis of the economy and the role of the state. In the 19^th century, as the working class arose as a force, government fell into the hands of industry, into the hands of the capitalists – the modern business class. And capitalism, as we all know, is about accumulation and growth. Buy for a dollar, sell for two. That has been the basis of daily existence for most of our recent history. This is the engine of growth, and as we all know, growth is good, right? Buy things – a new cell phone, fancy red leather boots, etc. That is what modern people do – they consume, they buy, they produce. Yet as people were buying, selling, turning money into even more money, politics disappeared from the economy. Regulations? Who needs them! Collectively, we were led to believe that a free market needs no regulations, and when times were good it seemed true.Yet the past twenty years have seen a remarkable concentration of economic and political power and a marked privatization of social services (for example, the disappearance of social welfare and the demise of public education).Yet as we have let the market regulate more and more, we must ask whether we have received anything in return?

Essentially, our great neoliberal era of globalization begins with a misreading of Adam Smith.His seminal book, The Wealth of Nations, was intended to provide a theory that would be useful to leaders of states in order to develop their nations’ wealth. Important is that it was meant to help leaders of nations develop their nations’ wealth, not their own personal wealth.Smith is quite clear about ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ paths of development. I leave you to answer this question: have the past twenty years been a natural or unnatural path of development?

The current economic crisis has shown that this ideology is bankrupt. If you follow the news, you will see that it is the same ‘Gods’ of Wall Street who now come begging for a government bailout. Those at the bottom will once again be paying for this bailout (in the US, we will pay directly; for those in the rest of the world, indirectly). $700 billion dollars can educate a lot of people, and create a lot of jobs. But instead we have no idea what this money is doing, and who it is going to.

Who should foot the bill for these mistakes? Whose heads should roll, as they do in troubling times? We collectively need to stop talking about this crisis like it’s a natural phenomenon, part of the weather.“Oh, have you heard there is going to be snow next week? Have you heard that the crisis will end at this time?” There is a cause, and it lies in the system itself, a system powered by greed and a lust for accumulation. The source of the crisis lies in the system.It is instinct for the world to blame a few ‘bad apples’ and to deny their complicity.I personally don’t blame the people, I blame the system.The bailout is another giant state subsidy of industry. Yet like most public-private partnerships, the risks are undertaken by the masses while the benefits will be seen by a select few.Inevitably, it is those at the lowest level who will pay for this. Those who benefited from the system – those who made all this money through dubious means – they were the first to come begging to the government for a bailout.Give us $700 billion to restore confidence in the financial markets. That is like an alcoholic managing a liquor store: it just doesn’t make sense. There should be no golden parachute for the capitalist class at the taxpayer’s expense.

Please, stop reading here. Turn on your TV, watch your serial, and get back to your business. That’s what we’d like you to do. That’s what they’d like you to do.Capitalism takes advantage of social inertia. Complain about the crisis, hoard foreign currency, and spend what you have quickly before it loses value. As long as the wants and needs of business remain more important than the basics requirements of life like food, work, healthcare, we should get used to the current situation.But go back to a real economy of production? Do we even know what that is?

Capitalism and its most recent form – neoliberalism – is but another variation of what Marx described: an unbridled capitalism becoming a mythology capable of magically endowing reality, power, and agency to things that have no life in themselves.When material things – money, goods, cars, cellphones – are endowed with human qualities and valued more than the people that produce them, we must ask ourselves how this situation came to exist and what we can do about it.

Michael Bobick, Ph.D. Candidate, Cornell University, USA