The Middle Earth

Middle Earth.......this article is not about the place from J R R Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings.
This is about a Middle Earth, rather a 'Middle Ground' that I fantasy would someday exist.
So, let me put forth my fantasy and the world that I dream of.
Yes, it is a 'dream' as nothing like it exists today and possibly, no one today knows about how to achieve this. So, what is this middle ground about?
It is about a system between Marxism and Capitalism. Why am I still harping about Communism when it's almost gone from the face of the earth? Well, two decades after the Soviet Union has dramatically ceased to exist and Socialism is deemed hopeless by almost every government in the world, and after much of the old capitalist world rejoiced the downfall of Communism, the world is a very different place today and not what it was thought to have been.
The world economy and political condition are not in a good shape and a lot of people have been disillusioned by the promises of a prosperous free world, where, trade barriers are broken and there are ever more new opportunities over the horizon.
The world as we see it today, is not ruled by the governments we elect ( as this has mostly been an illusion in democracies) but by the huge corporations and banks who are driven by just one elemental urge........increase profit. In this maverick run for profit, companies seem to no longer have loyalties, they have truly becoming global and the true rulers of people's destinies.
This can't be forgotten as we see companies the world over hopping their jobs around the world between cheap places. What really is done in these 'cheap' places is........ move jobs, bolster a temporary local boom, increase competition and speculation (as it goes with all capitalist markets) and as the place becomes costlier...hop on to another country where things are still cheap.
What have we seen as they went along? A trail of sorrow and lost lost opportunities in lives people in these countries. The irony is, this trail started in the very nations that so ardently supported a free world with no trade barriers!!
Automobile companies and banks in the US ultimately had to be bailed out by people's hard-earned cash for fear of losing more jobs while their bosses still received hefty bonus packages. So who's running the show? definitely not the governments!
After the discussion about affects of a reckless economic system, let's see whether we lost any opportunities after the demise of socialist system.
Compared to the capitalist countries, there were no economic cycles in the Soviet block. The economies were more or less stable and grew in size (though not on par with the capitalist economies). People had a sense of security, and I have seen this with the people of my father's generation, though they were not prosperous. There is one strange thing that happened through 2009 and 2010.....most of the world's economy shrunk during these years but only one nation saw a growth in economy, it is the most notorious country on US foreign policy list viz., North Korea!! Yes it did, because it's economy has no elements of capitalism in it.
If you read through blogs about the Soviet Union, people still long to go back those years of socialism when there was a sense of direction and stability. We can have it too if only we can implement such a system without the greed of evermore prosperous lives.
So why can't we implement it? It is because people won't stop to be greedy and people won't stop to be complacent when there is no competition. Yes, the biggest problem that a socialist system will have is complacency and corruption. These problems were rampant in Socialist and Socialist inspired economies, even in the Soviet Union. There is no better example of complacency in Soviet Union than the incident of Mathias Rust landing his small plane next to Red Square, evading radar all along the East Germany and Western USSR. It is a fact that this incident helped Gorbachev speed up reforms in USSR!
There is one fact that I discovered over the years as I read and discussed about Communism and Socialism, it is the fact that no one knows how to achieve a Communist society. The biggest hurdles are complacency and greed, we can never skim these traits out of the human psyche.
Before 1990 the world was between two poles for about 50 years, now we have just one and many were happy about it when it happened. But we now see that we are in a tangle that is getting evermore complex and no one really knows how money behaves, as was evident from the British economic crisis of the 70s. There is talk of a double-dip recession while we still are struggling to get out of the present one.
My dream is of a world where we have struck a balance between Socialism and Capitalism for the good of the masses. We need to find a way where there is a healthy competition between industries while still they are responsible socially and not just look at profits being the sole urge driving their existence. The very requisite for a capitalist system,that economies should keep growing, we see today, is stripping our planet bare. Socialism seems to be a savior on the horizon, but it will in it's previous forms we've seen, overtime, sink the society into decay.
We need to find the 'Middle Earth' between these poles of human thought, a place where all people are equal in the literal sense, not just in elaborate constitutions written on paper, where all people have a stable future not robbed of livelihood and where our children are true masters of their destiny and not slaves to the whims of a wealthy few.