The End of Capitalism?

The Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, has been very clever, but not clever enough, if you look at the chart for Greece. What’s happened is that he needs to get the latest EU bail-out deal through Parliament, and he only has a wafer-thin majority. The opposition were going to vote against it, and so were some rebels within his party. So he said he would call a referendum. The people, of course, could give the wrong answer, which would be “No” to a further round of austerity measures, and which would effectively end Greece’s membership of the Eurozone.

So the opposition were forced to go OK, we didn’t really mean it, we were only playing politics, we will vote with the government on this issue. So Papandreou got his way, and has just survived a vote of confidence, and has promised a government of national unity.

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But there is a price to pay, because he told the people they could have their say, then took it away again. He played with them for his own ends. And Greece has a Moon-Pluto conjunction. The Moon is the people. You cannot play with Pluto this way. We have already seen riots in Greece over the austerity measures, so the people are prepared to make their case. The chart I am using for Greece is the 1974 chart for the new democratic Greece that arose out of the old military dictatorship. The Moon-Pluto conjunction shows that history, a disempowered (Pluto) people (Moon.) But also a people who reclaimed their power, and will not be treated in the same way again.
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With Moon-Pluto, it is not a matter of if the people lash back at Papandreou, it is when. (Since writing this, an opinion poll has suggested the people want a national unity government rather than the present one.) Mars is often a good planet to look at when considering confrontational or military situations. Right now, the country is having a Mars Return at 27 Leo. The Greek MC, the institution of government, is at 24 Pisces. Mars will move into the sign opposite, Virgo, next week, and will gradually approach the exact opposition, stationing at 23 Virgo in January. Progressed Mars is already at 21 Virgo. Meanwhile, Uranus will change direction next month and start moving towards an exact opposition to the natal Moon. Pluto is moving away from an exact square to the Moon, but it is still highly influential.

The people are going to be restless (Uranus) and demanding power (Pluto), and the state itself (MC), not just the government, will be under siege (Mars by both transit and progression.)

Pluto and Uranus are also hard aspecting the Greek Mercury and Venus, and starting to hard aspect Saturn and the Ascendant. Greece has a long, hard road ahead of it. It could easily be that the country goes into some sort of meltdown (Pluto opposite Saturn) and the military takes control again, especially when you consider its history and the current actions of Mars: the pressure on the MC from transiting and Prog Mars will be intense right through until June 2012, due to the retrograde cycle of Mars. Moreover, the Progressed MC has just changed sign, another indicator of a change in the form of government. (Italy, where the real debt problem lies, has MC at 1 Virgo, which Neptune is about to oppose, again suggesting a change in the forms of government, even perhaps meltdown.)

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Military governments have a bad name, and like all governments they enjoy the taste of power and want to stay on regardless. But if a country goes into meltdown, I think sometimes the army has to take control. It can sometimes be better than a chaotic, corrupt democracy, such as you get in Pakistan.

Greece, though, is just the start of something much, much bigger. It will be the start of an avalanche. Uranus square or opposite Pluto is the toughest, most dramatic and most transformational configuration in the heavens. And a series of exact squares will begin next year.

The last time this aspect occurred was in the early 1930s, at the time of the Great Depression, German re-armament and the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. At that time there were 5 exact squares in just under 2 years; this time there will be 7 exact squares in just under 3 years, beginning June 2012. Last time, the squares occurred quite late in the cardinal signs. This time, they are occurring in the early to mid-cardinals, which is where so many major powers have their Suns. This one, therefore, will be much further reaching in its effects. Look at these Suns: the US at 13 Cancer; the UK 10 Capricorn; Germany 9 Libra; France 13 Libra; China 8 Libra; the EU 10 Capricorn.

Last time, the square was closing, leading up to the conjunction of the 1960s. So even though it churned everything up, the same basic system remained: the continued rise of world powers and wealth under a capitalist system, fuelled by technological advance and limitless energy supplies. This time, we have an opening square. It suggests that the old system itself will be to a large extent destroyed. This is all in the next few years. I’m not hyping this up, my arguments are based on a straight reading of the astrology.

Some say it will be the end of Capitalism. It may be, but only aspects of its present form. I don’t think you can get rid of capitalism itself, in the sense of people’s desire to trade and create wealth for themselves, unless you have a feudal or a communist system. You can’t go against human nature, not indefinitely.

It is very hard to see what is coming next, after the avalanche. You can see a number of European countries defaulting as part of the avalanche, and Europe restructuring itself. Banks would take a huge hit, and there would be another banking crisis. And you can see the world being knocked back into recession as a result, probably more deeply than we have experienced already, if you look at the intensity of the astrology. (The previous opening Uranus-Pluto square, in the 1870s, was associated with what is called the Long Depression.)

And you can also speculate that there will be increasing levels of popular protest against a system that has brought us so low: Uranus-Pluto is associated with radical protest (Uranus) against power (Pluto). The Occupy protests may or may not last, but they will come to be seen as the precursors of much wider waves of protest in the next few years. Beyond a certain point, governments have to listen to the voice of protesters, for they are the electorate.

The protesters are the voice of the future, they are what is coming. And what will be required, at a minimum, is legislation against the excesses and unfairnesses of the old system. Against a growing super-rich class who pay little or no taxes; against the inflated salaries that directors pay themselves; against a speculative financial system that can ruin banks and ordinary people’s savings and pension schemes. Those are the obvious changes.

But even those sorts of changes can be relatively cosmetic, and reversed again a few years later. What we are talking about with Uranus-Pluto is deep structural change. So far, that has not happened, even remotely. We have not had an exact square from Uranus to Pluto yet, and we are still at the stage of hanging on as best we can to the old. Governments have talked about legislation to avoid a repeat of the 2008 crash, but it’s not gone much further than that.

Yes, there will be a shift in global power from west to the east, and that is a big part of the change. But that is still the same system re-arranging itself. Uranus-Pluto applies just as much to China, which has Sun at 8 Libra. The most important shift will be systemic. What is called the Second Industrial Revolution, or the Technological Revolution, occurred after the last opening Uranus-Pluto square in the late 1800s. A new phase in the economic history of the world will probably be opening up. But from this vantage point, it seems quite opaque as to what it could be.

And that is as it should be. Have you ever been able to see the other side of a major personal transit? I haven’t. I can get an idea of what needs to go in my life, but not what is positively going to develop out of that. It has to be lived. And I think it’s the same with this major transit that the world is going through. We are getting an idea of what needs to go. The Euro, or aspects of it, would seem to be part of that. But I don’t think we can have much idea of what is going to come out of the chaos that seems to be coming our way. Even when I talked about taxing the super-rich etc, that was as much wish-list as anything, which is not a good way to predict. Because the world that is coming will not necessarily be a ‘better’ one. What constitutes ‘better’ is often just a point of view anyway. ‘The end of capitalism’ seems another example of wish-list prediction.

I think it is possible to be influenced by the evolutionary idea that humanity is in some way advancing. That seems to be part of the ascensionist background to the 2012 Mayan prophecy movement (which is a bit like the Chinese taking up one of Merlin’s prophecies! I wonder what modern Mayans make of it all?) Even with a person, you cannot assume that they will progress when they have a transit. Will this be the point at which they hit the wall and give up on their life, or will they learn from their mistakes? That is the crucial point, learning from your mistakes, and that is what collectives are so bad at. What is evolution without that?

This does not mean there are not patterns to human history, and this is what astrology can be good at illuminating. And the pattern, like a kaleidoscope, is about to change. And it is changing because a life and a society are made up of lots of different forces and currents that reach a balance for a while and then gradually tip over into a new balance, sometimes painfully.

So this huge change that is about to happen as Uranus and Pluto make their exact squares has to be lived. Some psychics maybe can see the other side of it, to some extent, but that is their own experience. If you adopt it yourself because they have said it, it becomes a belief, it is not yours, it is not authentic, it is a hindrance to your own way of seeing.

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Uranus changes direction in a month’s time, and will begin its run-in to its first exact square to Pluto. At the end of November it will begin to station in preparation for turning round. I think from then on we will start to see events that change the structure of the system, like the Eurozone actually fragmenting, instead of just threatening to do so. The stage is set. As I put in a previous post, Pluto has already made at least 2 hard aspects to the Sun, Asc and MC of the chart for the Treaty of Rome, the vision behind the EU. That says to me that it is already an empty shell, it has been eaten from within, nobody really believes in it anymore, at least not in its present form, and probably all we are waiting for is Uranus to change direction.