An Indigenous Take on Yeats poem, The Second Coming.

This is an older article that I wrote while at the University of Maine, Orono. It seems to hold some truths today.

W. B. Yeats poem, Second Coming is a visionary attempt at prophecy:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre,

The falcon cannot hear the falconer

It speaks of the European world in 1919, two years after the Russian Revolution and the end of the First World War. The Falcon, the predatory bird of early World Capitalism and Colonialism, spins out of the control of the ruling classes of Europe. As Karl Polyani describes in his ground breaking book, ‘The Great Transformation’, unregulated Capitalism created an undemocratic, unaccountable economic system that leads to monopolies, speculations and eventually war between competing economic empires. The resulting Russian Revolution was a spin off of this. It produced a reaction in the form of a Communist state, but in reality it quickly morphed into a form of State Capitalism. World War 1 was the background of Polyani’s theses on the causes of unregulated capitalism, but this continues into modern times: Reagan’s ‘deregulation of greed’ and Clinton’s Dot Com bubble and bust.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;