European Spring: The Gradual demise of Capitalism

By Gaither Stewart, Dandelion Salad

It’s an accumulative kind of thing, the demise of capitalism worldwide: at first the waning and the dwindling, now the rapid corkscrew-like downwards spiraling, of greedy, vicious, cannibalistic capitalism busily devouring itself. Today, one can only conclude the imminence of its just demise.

Just as one once said in Italy during the agony of the death of the Italian Communist Party, just as one once spoke of the loss of the propulsive force of the French Revolution, current events show that also capitalism, the capitalist system itself, has lost its self-proclaimed propulsive force. Today, for a growing number of capitalists it is a case of si salvi chi puo, every man for himself. No one can logically claim that capitalism as an economic-social-political idea propels forward world society.

In the face of the current disaster of the capitalist system, one can ldetermine that capitalism’s ideology, its promises for societal well-being, were false from the start. One can no longer defend capitalism in good faith. Marx was right, over a century and a half ago: capitalism has hung itself in its excess, in its greed for more and more and more.

Underlying what I prefer to call the Mediterranean Spring rather than the European Spring are a host of symptoms of a highly infectious pandemic of rejection of the capitalist system. The movement of the movements infecting Spanish youth camping on the plazas of their nation today is transversal. Its common denominator is anti-system, which, though they might not yet realize it, I believe translates into anti-capitalism.

Rejection of what is and what has been in Europe. The fever has spread across all of southern Europe, from Portugal to Greece. The Spanish-Portuguese mood is almost identical in Greece, where working people, especially youth, refuse to pay for the greed of capitalism. Also some similarities are visible in the overturn of systems in Tunisia and Egypt. Now today also in Italy, the grass roots—youth and workers. the unemployed and the underpaid underemployed—demand the same rights claimed by protesters in Spain and Portugal and Greece.

It has become contagious. A fever. The Mediterranean world is burning: the demand is economic democracy, political justice and peace. In Spain, Real democracia ya! Real democracy now. The time of indifference seems over and past. Society has awakened. Spain’s indignados, modern Don Quixotes, have occupied sixty plazas across the Spain. The Indignant Ones movement in Portugal is the same. The movement is hailed and imitated by Greeks and Italians. In France, they occupied for a brief time the Bastille. Capitalism should tremble. For when indifference ends, social activism takes over. Revolution is in fact already underway.

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