My friend Adrian Reynolds has once again sourced a definitive piece about the current financial crisis which we are living through, and which threatens to destroy our livelihoods and wreck our children’s future. (Yup, THAT crisis.)
It’s a piece in the Huffington Post by Les Leopold. Read it here. It’s a an argument which I don’t think anyone could seriously contest; compare and contrast with the pieces by Polly Toynbee and Mark Taibbi I’ve already referenced in this on-going feature.
The point is, some people want capitalism to fail; but I’m not one of them. I want capitalism to return. For what we have at the moment is not capitalism at all; it’s a billionaire bail-out society which is unfair, unstable, and profits no-one apart from rich bastards. Think about the Russian Tsar’s empire in the early years of the twentieth century; that’s just about how crap it is now.
Leopold ends his piece with a series of practical solutions, all of which are doomed to fail. Because they lack theatricality. They are technical solutions to what is essentially a moral and ethical crisis. For that reason, I prefer the RICO Act solution. It sends a message: astute business practices and racketeering ARE different things, and must not ever be confused; hence, white-collar crime should lead inexorably to jail time.
Hey, serious stuff, for what is essentially a frivolous website about science fiction and fantasy and movies. Next week will feature some cool images of Neo in the Matrix; that’s the kind of site this is, most of the time. Neo, of course, is a HERO, who saves his world from a terrible conspiracy that denies ordinary people the chance to live ordinary decent lives.
In real life – there are no heroes! We surrender to evil conspiracies! We allow our ordinary decent lives to be totally fucked up by short sighted selfish bastards!
Or do we?
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An analysis I’ve found compelling lately is that of the ‘free market anti-capitalists’. They’re quite good at showing that, historically, capitalism (in the large, corporate sense) has been the use of state-granted monopolies and force to subsidise the grabbing of other people’s property.
From this essay (http://www.liberalia.com/htm/kc_iron_fist.htm ): “But no system of exploitation, including capitalism, has ever been created by the action of a free market. Capitalism was founded on an act of robbery as massive as feudalism. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege, without which its survival is unimaginable.”
Obviously, this current crisis has done nothing to shake that analysis.
So, I’ll bring back free markets with you and hope that they return, but I’ll hold off on capitalism, if that’s all right…
I like the analysis Nathaniel presents. It’s another frame for viewing capitalism’s essential dilemma: it’s predicated on something which has never existed, ie a free market. Vested interests always have and always will work together to protect their own, and that stacks the decks. And protecting interests isn’t a problem in and of itself — that after all is what the union movement is for, and has achieved much. Problem comes when the robbing bastards at the top rob so much that the entire system is destabilised: a recent Guardian article — http://www.guardian.co.uk/busi.....es-banking — suggested that if banks were to support their activities based on actual capital rather than imaginary money, prices across the board would need to rise by a third, which itself would cause all kinds of chaos.
I take all those points – and I’ll be looking at that link later today, thanks Nathaniel.
If I were to defend capitalism, it’s at the level of individual entrepreneur. Someone who sets up a pizza joint, works hard, makes money, sells it and retires moderately rich. That to me is defensible capitalism. Or, dare I say it, a writer grafts years for little money, then finally sells the film rights to his movie. (Not me! Hypothetical example!)
I’ve read the argument that in the middle ages – before banking as we know it was invented – anyone who needed money would have to borrow the actual money from a social superior. And thence there wasn’t much social mobility. But banking, which relies on ‘imaginary money’, makes it possible for the serf to, in effect, become an entrepreneur; and hence banking can liberate society socially.
But what we have now goes beyond anything sane or moral…