Save the Greeks from their saviors!

This is a plea from a group of French intellectuals on behalf of the Greek people. The text is aimed at the French intelligentsia, but applies to other countries as well. I’d definitely like to see far more support from the academic class for the European people’s struggle against austerity. Silence is no longer acceptable; if you’re not with the people, you’re with the banksters. We are living in a time when anti-democratic forces are once again loose in Europe, and the time to fight back is now before it’s too late! The original text is here.

“At a time when one Greek youth out of two is unemployed. Where 25,000 homeless wander the streets of Athens. Where 30% of the population has fallen under the poverty line and where millions of families are forced to place their children in the care of someone else in order for them not to die of hunger or cold, where refugees and the new poor compete for trashcans at the public dump, the “saviors” of Greece, under the pretext that “Greece is not trying hard enough”, impose a new aid plan that doubles the lethal administered dose. A plan that abolishes the right to work and reduces the poor to the most extreme misery, at the same time as it makes the middle class disappear.

The goal is not about “saving” Greece. All economists worthy of this name agree on this point. It’s about gaining time in order to save the creditors at the same time it leads the country into deferred collapse. Above all it’s about making a laboratory of social change out of Greece that, in a second generation, will spread throughout all of Europe. The model experimented upon Greece is one where public social services, schools, hospitals, and dispensaries fall into ruin, where health becomes the privilege of the rich, and where vulnerable populations are doomed to a programmed elimination while those who work are condemned to the most extreme conditions of impoverishment and precarity.

But in order for this neo-liberalist offensive to achieve its ends, it is necessary to install a regime established an economy of the most basic democratic rights. Under the injunction of saviors, we see throughout Europe technocratic governments installing themselves with disregard for popular sovereignty. This is a turning point in the parliamentary system where we see the “representatives of the people” giving carte blanche to the experts and bankers, abdicating their supposed decisional power –A kind of parliamentary coup d’etat, which also uses an amplified arsenal against popular protest. Thus, when members have ratified the convention dictated by the troika (the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund), diametrically opposed to the mandate for which they had received power, without any democratic legitimacy, it will have committed to the future of the country for thirty or forty years.

Meanwhile the EU is preparing to establish an account which would be paid directly to aid Greece but only so that it is used for servicing the debt. The revenue of the country should be the “absolute priority” devoted to repay creditors, and, if necessary, paid directly to the account managed by the European Union. The agreement stipulates that any new bond issued under it shall be governed by English law, which involves material guarantees, so that disputes will be adjudicated by the courts of Luxembourg, having Greece waive in advance any rights to appeal against an entry determined by its creditors. To complete the picture, privatization is assigned to a fund managed by the troika, where the title deeds of public goods shall be placed.

In short, it is the widespread looting, characteristic of financial capitalism which here offers itself a really beautiful institutional consecration. To the extent that sellers and buyers sit on the same side of the table, we have no doubt that this enterprise of privatization is a real treat for the buyers. But all the measures taken so far have only dug Greece into deeper sovereign debt. With the help of rescuers who lend at exorbitant rates, it has literally exploded into free fall in approaching 170% of GDP, while in 2009 it represented more than 120%. It is likely that this cohort of rescuers – whenever presented as “final” – had no other purpose than to weaken further still the position of Greece so that, deprived of any opportunity to propose itself the terms of a restructuring, is reduced to yield to all its creditors under the blackmail of “the disaster or austerity.”

The worsening of the artificial and coercive debt problem was used as a weapon to attack an entire society. It is proper that we speak here of terms related to the military: we are indeed dealing with a war conducted by means of finance, politics and law, a class war against society as a whole. And the spoils that the financial class wrestles away from the “enemy”, are the social benefits and democratic rights, but ultimately it is the very possibility of a human life that is taken. The lives of those who do or do not consume enough in terms of profit maximization strategies, should be no longer be preserved.

Thus, the weakness of a country caught between speculation and endless devastating bailouts, is the backdoor through which a new social model erupts conforming to the requirements of neoliberal fundamentalism. A model destined for all Europe and maybe elsewhere. This is the real issue and why defending the Greek people can not be reduced to a gesture of solidarity or abstract humanity: the future of democracy and the fate of European nations are in question. Everywhere the “pressing necessity” of “painful but salutary” austerity will be presented to us as the means to escape the fate of Greece, while it really leads us right into the middle of it.

Up against this attack against society, faced with the destruction of the last pockets of democracy, we call our fellow citizens, our French and European friends to speak loudly. Do not leave the monopoly on speaking to the experts and politicians. Can we remain indifferent to the fact the German and French leaders in particular have requested Greece to be banned from elections? Does the systematic stigmatization and bashing of a European people not deserve a response? Is it possible not to raise ones voice against the institutional assassination of the Greek people? And can we remain silent in front of the establishment of a forced march towards a system that outlaws the very idea of social solidarity?

We are at the point of no return. It is urgent to fight the battle of numbers and the war of words to counter ultra-liberal rhetoric of fear and misinformation. There is urgent need to deconstruct the moral lessons that obscure the actual process at work in society. It becomes more than urgent to demystify the racist insistence on the ” Greek specificity ” that allegedly is the supposed national character of a people (laziness and cunning at will) the root cause of a crisis in global reality. What matters today is not the specifics, whether they are real or imaginary, but the common: the fate of a people that will affect all others.

Numerous technical solutions have been proposed to overcome the alternative of “either the destruction of the society or bankruptcy” (which we see today really means “and the destruction and bankruptcy” of the society). Everything must be brought to the table as food for thought for the construction of another Europe. But first you must report the crime, bring to light the situation in which the Greek people is because of “rescue packages” designed by and for speculators and creditors. When a movement of support is woven around the world, where Internet networks buzz with initiatives of solidarity, are French intellectuals the last to raise their voices for Greece? Without further delay, multiply articles, media appearances, debates, petitions, demonstrations. For any initiative is welcome, any initiative is urgent.

As for us, this is what we propose: quickly move towards the formation of a European community of intellectuals and artists in solidarity with the Greek people in resistance. If we can’t do this, then who will? If we don’t do this now, then when?

Vicky Skoumbi, Editor-in-Chief of the journal, “Alètheia”, Athens, Michel Surya, director of the journal «Lignes», Paris, Dimitris Vergetis, director of the journal, “Alètheia”, Athens. And : Daniel Alvara,Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, Etienne Balibar, Fernanda Bernardo, Barbara Cassin, Bruno Clément, Danielle Cohen-Levinas, Yannick Courtel, Claire Denis, Georges Didi-Huberman, Roberto Esposito, Francesca Isidori, Pierre-Philippe Jandin, Jérôme Lèbre, Jean-Clet Martin, Jean- Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Judith Revel, Elisabeth Rigal, Jacob Rogozinski, Hugo Santiago, Beppe Sebaste, Michèle Sinapi, Enzo Traverso”

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Capitalism as religion

I blogged earlier about the connection between free market ideology and religion here. Now I present an excerpt from an unfinished essay, Capitalism as Religion by Walter Benjamin, written in 1921 and published in the Volume VI of his Collected Writings (in German). Here, Benjamin characterises capitalism not as something that resembles a religion, but as an actual religious cult as such. The translation is by Chad Kautzer. You can read the complete text here. A useful commentary by Benjamin Noys can be found here.

“One can behold in capitalism a religion, that is to say, capitalism essentially serves to satisfy the same worries, anguish, and disquiet formerly answered by so-called religion. The proof of capitalism’s religious structure – as not only a religiously conditioned construction, as Weber thought, but as an essentially religious phenomenon – still today misleads one to a boundless, universal polemic. We cannot draw close the net in which we stand. A commanding view will, however, later become possible.

Three characteristics of the religious structure of capitalism are, however, recognizable at present. First, capitalism is a pure religious cult, perhaps the most extreme there ever was. Within it everything only has a meaning in direct relation to the cult: it knows no special dogma, no theology. From this standpoint, utilitarianism gains its religious coloring. The concretization of the cult connects with a second characteristic of capitalism: the permanent duration of the cult. Capitalism is the celebration of the cult sans rêve et sans merci.¹ Here there is no “weekday”, no day that would not be a holiday in the awful sense of exhibiting all sacred pomp – the extreme exertion of worship. Third, this is a cult that engenders blame. Capitalism is presumably the first case of a blaming, rather than repenting cult. Herein stands this religious system in the fall of a tremendous movement. An enormous feeling of guilt not itself knowing how to repent, grasps at the cult, not in order to repent for this guilt, but to make it universal, to hammer it into consciousness and finally and above all to include God himself in this guilt, in order to finally interest him in repentance. This [repentance] is thus not to be expected in the cult itself, nor in the reformation of this religion – which must hold on to something certain within it – nor yet in the denial of it. In the essence of this religious movement that is capitalism lies – bearing until the end, until the finally complete infusion of blame into God – the attainment of a world of despair still only hoped for. Therein lies the historical enormity of capitalism: religion is no longer the reform of being, but rather its obliteration. From this expansion of despair in the religious state of the world, healing is expected. God’s transcendence has fallen, but he is not dead. He is drawn into the fate of man. This passage of “planetary man” [Planeten Mensch] through the house of despair is, in the absolute loneliness of his path, the ethos Nietzsche describes. This man is the Übermensch, the first who knowingly begins to realize the capitalist religion. The fourth characteristic [of the religious structure of capitalism] is that its God must become concealed and may only be spoken of in the zenith of his culpability. The cult becomes celebrated before an immature deity, [while] every image, every idea of it injures the secret of its maturity.

Freudean theory also belongs to the priestly rule of this cult. It is thoroughly capitalistic in thought. The repressed, the sinful imagination, is, at bottom, still an illuminating analogy to capital – to which the hell of the unconscious pays interest.

This type of capitalist, religious thinking magnificently reconciles itself in Nietzsche’s philosophy. The thought of the Übermensch loses the apocalyptic “leap” not by changing its ways, atonement, purification, [or] penitence, but in the apparently continuous, but in the end, rupturing, discontinuous intensification. That is why intensification and evolution are incompatible in the sense of “non facit saltum.” The Übermensch is the one who without changing, arrived, who streaked through the heavens – historical man.

[…]

Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, without dogma. Capitalism itself developed parasitically on Christianity in the West – not in Calvinism alone, but also, as must be shown, in the remaining orthodox Christian movements – in such a way that, in the end, its history is essentially the history of its parasites, of capitalism. Compare the holy iconography of various religions on the one hand with the banknotes of various countries on the other: The spirit that speaks from the ornamentation of banknotes.

[…]

Christianity in the time of the Reformation did not encourage the emergence of capitalism, but rather changed itself into capitalism.”

¹ The translator suggests this should actually read “sans trêve et sans merci”

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The market and the myth

I have blogged before about the theological underpinnings of the contemporary discourse on the economy. Here’s an excerpt from a 1999 article by theologian Harvey Cox where he discusses the religious aspects of free market ideology:

“A few years ago a friend advised me that if I wanted to know what was going on in the real world, I should read the business pages. Although my lifelong interest has been in the study of religion, I am always willing to expand my horizons; so I took the advice, vaguely fearful that I would have to cope with a new and baffling vocabulary. Instead I was surprised to discover that most of the concepts I ran across were quite familiar.

Expecting a terra incognita, I found myself instead in the land of déjà vu. The lexicon of The Wall Street Journal and the business sections of Time and Newsweek turned out to bear a striking resemblance to Genesis, the Epistle to the Romans, and Saint Augustine’s City of God. Behind descriptions of market reforms, monetary policy, and the convolutions of the Dow, I gradually made out the pieces of a grand narrative about the inner meaning of human history, why things had gone wrong, and how to put them right. Theologians call these myths of origin, legends of the fall, and doctrines of sin and redemption. But here they were again, and in only thin disguise: chronicles about the creation of wealth, the seductive temptations of statism, captivity to faceless economic cycles, and, ultimately, salvation through the advent of free markets, with a small dose of ascetic belt tightening along the way, especially for the East Asian economies.

The East Asians’ troubles, votaries argue, derive from their heretical deviation from free-market orthodoxy—they were practitioners of “crony capitalism,” of “ethnocapitalism,” of “statist capitalism,” not of the one true faith. The East Asian financial panics, the Russian debt repudiations, the Brazilian economic turmoil, and the U.S. stock market’s $1.5 trillion “correction” momentarily shook belief in the new dispensation. But faith is strengthened by adversity, and the Market God is emerging renewed from its trial by financial “contagion.” Since the argument from design no longer proves its existence, it is fast becoming a postmodern deity—believed in despite the evidence. Alan Greenspan vindicated this tempered faith in testimony before Congress last October. A leading hedge fund had just lost billions of dollars, shaking market confidence and precipitating calls for new federal regulation. Greenspan, usually Delphic in his comments, was decisive. He believed that regulation would only impede these markets, and that they should continue to be self-regulated. True faith, Saint Paul tells us, is the evidence of things unseen.

Soon I began to marvel at just how comprehensive the business theology is. There were even sacraments to convey salvific power to the lost, a calendar of entrepreneurial saints, and what theologians call an “eschatology”—a teaching about the “end of history.” My curiosity was piqued. I began cataloguing these strangely familiar doctrines, and I saw that in fact there lies embedded in the business pages an entire theology, which is comparable in scope if not in profundity to that of Thomas Aquinas or Karl Barth. It needed only to be systematized for a whole new Summa to take shape.

At the apex of any theological system, of course, is its doctrine of God. In the new theology this celestial pinnacle is occupied by The Market, which I capitalize to signify both the mystery that enshrouds it and the reverence it inspires in business folk. Different faiths have, of course, different views of the divine attributes. In Christianity, God has sometimes been defined as omnipotent (possessing all power), omniscient (having all knowledge), and omnipresent (existing everywhere). Most Christian theologies, it is true, hedge a bit. They teach that these qualities of the divinity are indeed there, but are hidden from human eyes both by human sin and by the transcendence of the divine itself. In “light inaccessible” they are, as the old hymn puts it, “hid from our eyes.” Likewise, although The Market, we are assured, possesses these divine attributes, they are not always completely evident to mortals but must be trusted and affirmed by faith. “Further along,” as another old gospel song says, “we’ll understand why.”

As I tried to follow the arguments and explanations of the economist-theologians who justify The Market’s ways to men, I spotted the same dialectics I have grown fond of in the many years I have pondered the Thomists, the Calvinists, and the various schools of modern religious thought. In particular, the econologians’ rhetoric resembles what is sometimes called “process theology,” a relatively contemporary trend influenced by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. In this school although God wills to possess the classic attributes, He does not yet possess them in full, but is definitely moving in that direction. This conjecture is of immense help to theologians for obvious reasons. It answers the bothersome puzzle of theodicy: why a lot of bad things happen that an omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient God—especially a benevolent one—would not countenance. Process theology also seems to offer considerable comfort to the theologians of The Market. It helps to explain the dislocation, pain, and disorientation that are the result of transitions from economic heterodoxy to free markets.”

Now Cox’s analogy isn’t just a case of simple sophistry. There’s good reason to trace the very idea of the free market as a naturally occurring phenomenon back to the Christian notion of natural law.¹ Some have also argued that Adam Smith originally conceived his famous invisible hand as literally the hand of God.² It’s no coincidence, then, that free market ideology is littered with such mythic elements.

I’m not pointing this out to ridicule those who believe in the free market myth. On the contrary, I think myths often have an element of truth in them. Indeed, myths may be even necessary for us to fully understand the world. But it’s when we fail to distinguish between myth and reality, and designate some particular myth as the Universal Truth, that we end up with fundamentalism. This is, I think, something we’ve been witnessing in the recent decades with the uncritical application of neoliberal policies, regardless of the destruction they’ve caused to civil societies and nature. What ought to be done now is to step back and evaluate the rationalisations we use for our economic activities in terms of their consequences in the real world, rather than in terms of ideology, and then start rebuilding the economy from the ground up with ecological and social sustainability in mind. The economy is not going to fix itself, no matter how much we believe in it.

¹ For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves, which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness… (Romans 2:14-15)

² See eg. Denis: The Invisible Hand of God in Adam Smith (2005)

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On the importance of facing the underclass

Perhaps the number one reason why camping on the streets has genuine radical potential is that it draws people from very different walks of life together. In everyday life, we tend to deal mostly with people of similar status to our own which makes it difficult to empathise with those who are in a totally different position within the society. What’s more, our culture teaches us to look down on those who have “failed in life”, the homeless, the beggars, the mental patients and so forth. Until we start getting rid of this tendency as a society, I don’t think any radical change is possible. As long as we keep excluding groups of people from our communities, we’re simply reinforcing the structures that create the inequality and oppression we’re supposed to be fighting against in the first place. It would be a fallacy to think that we’re not a part of those structures ourselves. Putting our bodies on the streets forces us to recognise and deal with this reality. Stanley Rogouski makes this important point about the Occupy Wall Street encampment in his article over at Counterpunch:

“To anybody who spent time in the now demolished Zucotti Park tent city, there are no longer two clear cut categories, homeless and not homeless, human and untouchable, dirty hippy or respectable protester. What made Occupy Wall Street in Zucotti Park so potentially radical is the way it taught us that homelessness is not an either/or proposition. There are not homeless people and not homeless people. There’s a continuum, running all the way from members of the “1%” like Michael Bloomberg all the way down to the demented, mentally ill man sleeping on the grating of a side street waiting for January, and the cold, to die. What separates a young idealist like Ketchup just starting her life, for example, from a lonely middle aged man like Ray Kachel headed for social oblivion? The answer would be “not very much.” What separates a member of the middle-class from the homeless man he walks over in Penn Station or the “dirty hippies” he used to smirk at as he walked by Zucotti Park? How many paychecks, how many medical emergencies, how many fights with his wife or his employer will it take before he’s out in the streets looking for a place to piss and finding that the Starbucks has converted them all into “employee only” restrooms. For most of us the answer would be “not very many.”

Occupy Wall Street at Zucotti Park took all of Wall Street’s victims and put them on public display, only a few blocks from the New York City Stock Exchange. It took the group of people most devastated by the “Great Recession,” people who were scammed into high interest, high risk mortgages by the casino on Wall Street, to the group of people who were most devastated by Bush’s crusade in the Middle East, homeless veterans of the Iraq war. But it did more. It gave them the opportunity to empower one another, to begin the process of building a community. It allowed the chronically homeless contact with people who had more social skills, who, perhaps, could teach them to pull themselves up off the streets. It brought the gay teenager who was kicked out of his home in the Bible Belt together with the middle aged liberal activist from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It brought the 22 year old, recent college graduate, too poor to move out from his parents house in the bad economy face to face with the laid off worker in his 40s and 50s. It dissolved the rigid social categories that separate us and allowed us to speak to one another as humans. It was, in short, the fulfillment of the words of Walt Whitman, that great New York poet who trod the ground around what is now Zucotti Park many times.

“STRANGER! If you, passing, meet me, and desire to speak to me, why should you not speak to me? And why should I not speak to you?”

Had the encampment at in Zucotti Park been allowed to persist through the winter, had the activists in Occupy Wall Street would have continued to feed the homeless and protect them from the police, they might also, in time, have secured help from the surrounding community. People might have brought their donations, not to the United Way or the local mega church, but right to the people who needed them.  Zucotti Park might have become a successful laboratory experiment in how to reclaim people who had fallen through the cracks into social oblivion. It might have exposed both the “1%” and the governments they own as the frauds they are. Clearly that could not go on. Maintaining occupied spaces also develops collective leadership. It requires people to understand the importance of camp discipline well known to any NCO in the military. It requires people to learn how to organize, to conduct outreach, to drive working groups and coordinate through general assemblies. Getting hauled off the Brooklyn bridge in handcuffs and spending 12 hours in jail with 125 other men begins to create the kind of bonds people develop in the military, only, in this case, those bonds are developed engaging in class war against your real enemies, not in an imperialist adventure overseas.”

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Silvia Federici on Occupy and anti-capitalism

To follow up on my latest lash-out against capitalism, I present a quote by Silvia Federici, a veteran activist, feminist and Marxist, taken from a recent interview. Here, she situates the Occupy movement within the global anti-capitalistic movement. She also emphasises the importance of reaching out to those minorities that have been victimised the most by the capitalist system.

“I must add that, in the present economic context, is it impossible to take on Wall Street’s ‘crimes’ without confronting the entire economic system at the basis of its abuses. As with any other movements, there are different strands within the Occupations. Some participants may be satisfied with just obtaining a more regulated banking system, or a return to Keynesianism. But the economic crisis is bringing to light, in a dramatic way, the fact that the capitalist class has nothing to offer to the majority of the population except more misery, more destruction of the environment, and more war.

Occupations, in this context, are sites for the construction of a non-capitalist conception of society and a coming together of the practices that, in recent years, have begun to concretize this project. A sign of the broad scope of this movement and its capacity to resonate beyond downtown Manhattan is that in Egypt the people of the squares have recognized the commonality between their movement and that of OWS or Oakland.

As some have put it, the Occupy movement is the first worldwide anti-capitalist movement to appear in a long time in the US.  It is the first movement in this country to give expression to the growing revolt against the present economic and political order, which is the reason why it has spread so rapidly and has excited the collective imagination to such a degree.

[…]

I agree with Mike Davis, however, that the movement should not be too eager to produce programmatic demands and should concentrate, instead, on making its presence more visible, on reaching out to other communities, and on ‘reclaiming the commons.’ This is beginning to happen with the migration of the occupations into the neighborhoods, which is essential to reconstruct a social fabric that has been dismantled through years of neoliberal restructuring and the gentrification and suburbanization of space.”

The most crucial test, however, will be whether the Occupy movement has the capacity to address the divisions that have structured the history of this continent. Clearly, you cannot have an egalitarian society without undoing the legacy of centuries of enslavement, genocide, and imperial warfare that have left a deeply scarred and divided social body. Confronting racism, colonialism and other forms of oppression and exploitation, both within the movement and in broader society and its institutions, will have to be the centerpiece of the drive for the production of a new “constitution,” whatever forms this may take.

A positive sign is that the composition of the movement is already quite diverse, although the degree of diversity varies in different parts of the country. It has been a long time since we’ve seen a movement bringing together students, nurses, veterans, radicals and trade unionists with immigrant- and people of color-led grassroots community organizations. The key questions will be whether this movement can be a bridge to the millions of incarcerated in the US jails, or to the many more who cannot take their money out of the banks because they have no bank accounts, and whether the movement’s agenda can include an end to the criminalization of undocumented immigrants and the policy of deportation.”

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Jérôme E. Roos on the European bankster putsch

As I wrote earlier, the recent events in European politics have blatantly shown that the elite is no longer even trying to uphold the semblance of democracy in Europe. Further evidence of this has emerged since as in both Greece and Italy new governments were instated without elections. Both new prime ministers have a background in the banking world, and you can bet your cojones that’s no coincidence. The slippery slope towards totalitarianism we’re on just got a helluva lot steeper. Here’s a quote from a good overview of the affair from Jérôme E. Roos:

“Last week, as bond markets rebelled over Papandreou’s unexpected flirtation with democracy, investors panicked and immediately turned their sights on Italy. Within a matter of days, Italy’s borrowing costs soared to the level where Greece, Ireland and Portugal had previously required EU bailouts. But unlike these smaller countries, Italy — the third largest sovereign debtor in the world — is considered both too big to fail and too big to bail.

And so Merkel and Sarkozy, backed by the financial firepower of the IMF and ECB, decided to take radical action. As one official confirmed last week, “we’re on our way to moving out Berlusconi.” Indeed, according to Fraser Nelson, “by last weekend, it was undeniable that an operation to remove Berlusconi had begun.” To begin with, Olli Rehn wrote a letter to the Italian finance minister demanding exact details about the 39 reform measures imposed by the ECB.

Meanwhile, further IMF inspections were announced to step up the pressure, and the ECB deliberately suspended its support by buying up a bare minimum of Italian bonds, all “to send an unmistakable Old Europe message: we have ways of making you quit.” Indeed, within days, the governments of both Greece and Italy had fallen, bringing an ignominious end to Berlusconi’s 17-year domination of Italian politics and the four-decade Papandreou dynasty.

The EU-sponsored coup d’étât is so transparent that even the pro-market Economist now confirms that “the immediate cause of [Papandreou and Berlusconi’s] downfall is plain: the ultimatum they received from euro-zone leaders at the G20 summit in Cannes to reform their economies — or else.” And so, just like NATO forced out Gaddafi, the EU has successfully forced out Berlusconi and Papandreou. If anything, this is the putsch of the century.

[…]

But a coup wouldn’t be a coup if its instigators failed to replace the overthrown tyrant with a puppet of their own. And so France and Germany further stepped up the pressure on the Greek and Italian heads of state. The New York Times cites a former top-ranking Italian government official as saying that Sarkozy and Merkel “privately urged Italy’s President, Giorgio Napolitano, to pick the technocrat, Mr. Monti” to form a new government.

The choice for Mario Monti and Lucas Papademos — both US-trained economists — as the new leaders of Italy and Greece has been justified with the argument that their expertise on financial issues will help them push through the necessary austerity measures and structural reforms to contain the crisis. The idea is to transcend “party  politics” and subject national decision-making to the “rule of experts” with superior knowledge of the issues at hand.

In a ridiculously naive article, the BBC argues that “technocrats, by reputation, competence and experience, can persuade the markets and eurozone leaders that they represent change.” According to Marco Incerti of the Centre for European Policy Studies, “the markets and the international partners of these two countries are looking for concerted answers and determined answers and these can’t be provided by political figures.”

But, as future weeks and months will attest, there is nothing apolitical about having a neoclassical economist as head of government. In the end, as Heather Stewart points out, economic reforms and budget cuts are profoundly political issues, and technocracy is really just a thinly veiled nom de guerre for a much more sinister plot. In fact, the supposedly “neutral” Mario Monti and Lucas Papademos come with strong ideological and financial strings attached.

[…]

The son of a banker, Mr. Monti studied economics at Italy’s elite Bocconi University and at Yale. He sat on the board of multiple large multinationals, was an EU Commissioner, is a high-profile member of the shadowy Bilderberg Group, and serves as Italian Chairman for the Trilateral Commission — a think tank described by Piergiorgio Odifreddi as an “ultra-liberal American, European and Japanese Masonry inspired by David Rockefeller.”

To top the bill, Monti — who has been appointed to solve a crisis that started not in Italy but on Wall Street – still sits on the advisory board of Goldman Sachs. You can’t make this stuff up! To make matters worse, Monti is not the only supposedly neutral technocrat with ties to the “giant vampire squid“. Mario Draghi, the new ECB President, was European President for Goldman at the time it helped Greece obscure its true debt levels to allow it to enter the euro.

Lucas Papademos, meanwhile, is a former Vice-President of the ECB and also sits on the Trilateral Commission. Here, the connection with the ECB is particularly worrisome as the central bank is exposed to Greek debt to the tune of at least 45 billions euros. By planting a former Vice-President at the head of the Greek government, the ECB hopes to ensure that it will actually get all that money back. There is a blatant conflict of loyalties here.

Ultimately, as Richard Morris wrote for the New Statesman, Berlusconi and Papandreou were forced to step down “because the markets thought it would probably be for the best if one of their own was given the chance to run things for a while.” And this is the outcome: an unaccountable clique of bankers taking charge of the crisis. Robert Saviano astutely observed the irony of it all: “It is clear that the markets have succeeded where the electorate, the opposition, the media and intellectuals have not.” “

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Just a few bad apples?

I just watched today on YouTube a video of the mock trial of Goldman Sachs that was held at Occupy Wall Street last week. While it’s admittedly tragicomic that we’re now more than three years into the current debt crisis and still nobody responsible (save Bernie Madoff) has gone to jail, as Matt Taibbi pointed out a while ago, I don’t agree with Chris Hedges that the main thing now is to return to the rule of law in finance. I think another quote from David Malone‘s excellent book The Debt Generation (2010) is in order here (I promise to write a review of the book later):

“If Goldman Sachs were to be found guilty¹, the case would no doubt be cited as an ugly ‘bad apple’ story, perpetrated by ‘rogue traders’. It would be a cautionary banker’s tale used to highlight their own horror at such ‘isolated’ bad practice. But, if you look around, it isn’t just a one-off. It’s not a case of one bad apple but more like an infected orchard.

There are currently investigations into the dealings of most of the world’s biggest global accountant firms, who along with the banks they ‘audit’, make up the muscle and sinew of the financial world.

All the investigations point to accountants seemingly blind to the very things they are supposed to be looking for. We see mortgage brokers not properly checking on the real ability of their buyers to pay the mortgage. We see the banks and brokers securitising those loans not properly checking the real quality of those loans. We see the banks’ auditors not properly checking the banks, and we see the ratings agencies not properly checking on the real quality of the securities but stamping almost anything as AAA guaranteed.

What we see are whole chains of people (and it’s people we are talking about here not some faceless automated ‘system’) choosing to ignore the law, and their moral obligation, and instead seize their share of the rotten profit. In many cases the bankers, their accountants and even their regulators are the same people who revolve from one position to another. So it’s not just Goldman Sachs bankers. Not just one bad apple. Not even just one bad tree. What we see is corruption from the roots up to the very top. Any horticulturist will tell you when an orchard is infected you cannot prune or simply remove the odd tree. You have to tear every last tree out by the roots and burn the lot. I’d say this is good and sound advice.

The financial system has become systemically corrupt. It is no longer fit for, or even designed, for the purpose of spreading wealth. It has become a means of looting wealth from those foolish enough to still observe the laws, and transferring it to those who regard themselves as far too clever and superior to have to bother with such trifling niceties.”

The keyword here, I think, is “systematically.” The problem we have is not individual greed or criminality, but a system that engenders and rewards unscrupulous profit-making, and nothing else. In this system laws are not seen as absolute limits but rather as obstacles to be negotiated.

I think the root of the problem is the fact that the financial system has become totally alienated from the real world. In the fantasy land of finance wealth can be created out of thin air and brokers bet on securities like they were race horses. Living in this fantasy land, these people fail to see that their decisions actually have effects on the lives of real people in the real world. Morality means little in a fantasy land. Morality can only arise from being an integral part of a genuine human society.

Nothing in this current financial system is worth salvaging. What we need is a totally new banking system that is wholly owned by the people, outlaws speculation and discourages hoarding of resources. But that’s not enough. We also need to take the production of those goods that are necessary for the sustenance of human societies back from the publicly traded corporations. That’s how we starve the vampire squid.

¹ Malone is referring to the fraud suit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission in April 2010.

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David Malone on the IMF and the Inquisition

Today I present an excellent quote by David Malone on the real nature of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), taken from his book The Debt Generation (2010). This bit was written already back in 2008, but in light of the recent developments in Greece in particular, Malone’s exhortation to overthrow the tyrant is now more urgent than ever.

“The IMF is perhaps the most spectacularly, ideologically blind institution to have been inflicted upon people since the Inquisition. In fact, they have much in common. Like the Inquisition, the IMF is ruled absolutely, by ideologues who would rather we all burned in hell than admit their particular, distorted version of the ‘free market’ is wrong. They have a consistent history of insisting on economic measures that have done long-term damage to almost every country they have got their claws into. Countries that largely ignored their ‘free market’ thunderings, such as India and China, however, are doing rather well.

I listen to these ‘free market’ ideologues, and I hear medieval theologians. They are all perfectly versed in the system of thought they have swallowed. They know the hierarchies of the angels and the powers of the Seraphim and Cherubim and argue about how many angels will dance on the head of the needle.

And yet the tragedy, for us, is that none of what they know and understand corresponds with things as they really, truly are. We are led by arrogant, blind men [not to forget the arrogant, blind women – morosopher] so swaddled in the luxuries afforded to the priests of a system that they cannot think to question the catechism that rewards them.

This bloated priesthood must be humbled and overthrown. We, the people, must leave the church of the ‘free market’ and clear our minds.”

Another way to look at it is that the IMF are a bunch of thugs employed by the financial elite whose job is to go around terrorising governments to submit to the will of their masters or face the consequences. As Joseph Stiglitz has said, “when the IMF arrives in a country, they are interested in only one thing. How do we make sure the banks and financial institutions are paid? […] It is the IMF that keeps the [financial] speculators in business. They’re not interested in development, or what helps a country to get out of poverty.” And, of course, our leaders are more than ready to bend backwards to fulfill any request the IMF makes, being the spineless worms that they are.

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Wu Ming 1 on fetishism and the Internet

Here’s an insightful excerpt from an essay written by Wu Ming 1 of the Wu Ming Foundation on the techno-fetishism that still prevails in the public discourse about the Internet today. This fetishism is what often keeps us from perceiving the power structures that are built into the infrastructure of the net and can lead to a dangerously naive view of corporations such as Google, Facebook and Apple, like we recently saw in the aftermath of the death of Steve Jobs.

“Whenever we talk about the Internet, the “mythological machine” in our discourses — powered by the ideology that we breathe every day, wheater we like it or not — reproduces a myth: the idea of technology as an autonomous force, a subject with its own spirit, a reality that evolves on its own, spontaneously and teleologically. Somebody even had the great idea of nominating the internet (which, just like any other infrastructure and network, can be used for everypurpose, including war) for the Nobel Prize for Peace. This rhetoric conceals class, property, and production relations: we can only see their fetishes. Here’s why the pages Karl Marx devoted to commodity fetishism are still useful (my italics):

«There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.»

“Fantastic form of a relation between things”. Like the computers interconnected to form the web. Behind the phantasmagory of the Internet lies a set of definite social relations, and Marx means production relations, exploitation relations.
The net rhetoric hides these relations. It is indeed possible to talk about the Internet for hours, days, months, touching only marginally the issue of who owns it, who is really in control of the nodes, the infrastructure, the hardware. The pyramid of labour — including slave-like labour — incorporated into the devices we use (computers, smartphones, ereaders etc.) and as a consequence into the Internet itself, is even less discussed. Eveyday, corporations expropriate social wealth on the net, and oppress the working class at each corner of the Earth behind the scenes. Nevertheless, they are considered less “corporate” than others. Until we realize that Apple is like Monsanto, that Google is like Novartis, that praising a corporation is the most toxic narrative we can choose, wheather we are dealing with Google, Fiat, Facebook, Disney or Nestlé—-until we realize all this, we will stay in the net like fish.

[…]

Because of net-fetishism, the spotlight is always on the practices of liberationpervading the Internet — ie the kind of practices we Wu Ming have put time and effort into for twenty years —, which are customarily described as the rule. In this way, people dismiss as exceptions all the practices of subjugation , eg using the net to exploit or underpay intellectual work, to control and arrest people (see what happened after the recent UK riots), to impose new idols and fetishes, to spread the dominant ideology, to enforce the same financial capitalism that’s destroying us. On the net, the practices of subjugation are the rule as much as the others. In fact, if we want to nitpick, we should consider them the rule more than the others, if we take into account the genesis of the internet, which evolved from ARPAnet, a military computer network.

The question is not wheather the net produces liberation or subjugation: since its creation, it has always been producing both things. That’s the net’s dialectics, one aspect is always together with the other, because the net is the form capitalism has taken nowadays, and capitalism itself is the contraddiction in process. Capitalism developed itself by setting individuals free from the old feudal bonds, and at the same time by imposing new kinds of subjugation (to the controlled time of the factory, to the production of surplus value etc.) Under capitalism,everything works like this: consumption sets free and enslaves, it brings about liberation that is also new subjugation, and the cycle starts over on a higher level.

Heron’s Aeolipile

Therefore, the struggle should consist in fostering practices of liberation to be played against the practices of subjugation. This can be done only if we stop considering technology as an autonomous force and realize that it is moulded and driven by property relations, power relations, and production relations. If technology could develop outside of these relations, thanks only to its being innovative, the steam engine would have been adopted in the 1st century AD, when Heron of Alexandriainvented the aeolipile—-but the antique mode of production did not need machines, since all the necessary workforce was provided by slaves, and nobody could or wanted to imagine any concrete development of that invention.

By fetishising technology as an autonomous force, we remain trapped within the old conceptual frame “Apocalyptic vs. Integrated”. If you make the slightest critical remark about the net, the “Integrated” will mistake you for an “Apocalyptic”, and will accuse you of incoherence and/or obscurantism. The former accusation resounds in such phrases as: ‘Aren’t you using a computer right now?’, ‘Don’t you buy books on Amazon too?’, ‘You own a smartphone too!’, and so on. The latter is expressed in the form of such useless preaches as: ‘Try to picture a world without the Internet…’ On the other hand, any argument about the positive aspects of the net will be welcomed by the “Apocalyptic” as a piece of servile, “Integrated” propaganda. Let us always remember Heron of Alexandria. His story teaches us that, whenever we talk about technology (and about the Internet in particular), we are actually talking about something else, ie social relations.

Let us ask again then: who are the bosses of the net? And who are the exploited of the Net, and by the Net?

It is not that difficult to find out: it suffices to read the “Terms of service” of the social media you’re using, read the licenses of the software you keep on your computer, digit “Net Neutrality” on a search engine—-and, dulcis in fundo, keep in mind stories like those of Amazon’s warehouses and Foxconn’s factories. Only in this way, I believe, we will avoid such bullshit as the “Internet for peace” campaign or the horrible, “softly” totalitarian scenario prefigured in Casaleggio & Associati‘s infamous video Gaia: The Future of Politics.

Let us not deceive ourselves: only violent conflicts will decide whether the evolution of the net will impose the supremacy of the practices of liberation over those of subjugation, or the other way around.”

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David Malone on the debt crisis and a people’s jubilee

To continue on the theme of debt, I’m reposting here a blog post by David Malone, author of the book The Debt Generation (2010). This is possibly the best description of the current debt crisis I’ve come across. Malone also has a simple solution to offer: a “people’s jubilee” where the people of Europe would simply refuse to pay any debts to the private banks. Of course, the ruling class will never allow something like this to go through so what we need is a pan-European insurrection to end the rule of the bankers. This is an evermore pressing issue now that the Eurozone leaders are once again planning huge bailouts for the banks. Time to put an end to the madness!

This wonderful image by Escher of two hands drawing each other is one of my favourite pieces of modern art.

For me, it is a brilliant visualization of the idea of bootstrapping. Or to put it more loosely, how you get something from nothing. Evolution is an example. From something simple you can get something complex. From chemistry you bootstrap life. From life you evolve consciousness and self awareness and finally Beethoven and Proust. In evolution there is no need for an outside artist. Species, just like the hands, draw each other in to existence.

I have no idea if Escher meant this when he drew the hands but his engraving captures it nevertheless.

The reason I mention this piece of art is because, if you are a particularly stupid species you can reverse this process. All you need do is replace the pencils with rubbers and you have the perfect image of what we are currently doing in our crisis of collective indebtedness.

So for example the Greeks, Spanish, Portuguese and Irish are all erasing themselves in an effort to pay off debt via austerity. Austerity which has so far, failed to reduced the debts but has erased the means by which they had hoped to pay the debts. In each of those countries the economy has shrunk faster than the burden of debts, leaving them worse off than before. Which is why each of them has suffered credit downgrades.

So far so stupid.  What is worse, according to all our leaders and especially all our banks, there is no alternative, no other way out.

I do not think this is true. I suggest an alternative is what we might call a people’s debt jubilee. The idea of a debt jubilee is an old one. I think a collective pan-European, even global, jubilee is worth looking at.

At the moment we are in a funny situation where we may personally regard the situation in Greece, Ireland and Portugal as sad, but we are encouraged nevertheless to see it on a national level, as both just and inevitable because, so we are told, it is a simple story of debtor nations such as Greece, Spain, Ireland and Portugal, owing vast amounts to the creditor nations like France and Germany.

So, we have the Greeks being crucified by ‘austerity’ in order to pay debts their government owes. Their government owes vast amounts of money partly because of debts it incurred through its own borrowing for its own expenditures, but partly also because it took on the private debts incurred by Greek banks.  The combination has proven to be unsupportable. Ditto for the Spanish, Irish and Portuguese. That’s the story of the ‘debtor’ nations.

But in the ‘creditor’ nations we find something at odds with the official debtor/creditor story. For here too, people, ordinary people, in France, Germany and the UK, are also suffering austerity measures. Here the austerity is blamed upon having to bail out the Greeks, or the Irish , Portuguese or Spanish.

The thing to remember here, is, to focus on the German/Greek example, that the German’s aren’t bailing out the Greeks because they love them so much. They are bailing out the Greeks in order that the Greeks can bail out the German banks. The German banks lent so much money to the Greek State (its various state enterprises) and Greek Banks, that if the Greeks don’t pay it all back – the private debts between private banks as well as State debts, then the German banks implode.

So the reality is the German’s aren’t bailing out ‘the Greeks’, they are bailing out private German banks and their private German debt agreements, The same is true of the Irish and British. The British recently ‘helped’ Ireland with a loan most of which will end up in British Banks. The Portuguese bail out will end up in France and Germany by one route or another.

So when we hear or use the phrase ‘German banks are exposed to Greek debt’ or ‘Greek losses’ what this means is that German banks lent money to Greek enterprises and banks and may now not get it back, if the Greeks default.  Which at first hearing sounds like it’s the Greeks fault. They don’t pay. They are at fault.  Fair enough.

The familiar charge is that the Greeks knowingly took on loans they could not pay back because they wanted a life style they could not afford. But if that is true, if the Greeks ‘knowingly’ took on loans they could not afford, then the bankers also must have known.  Unless you are willing to believe that Greek or Portuguese or Irish, bureaucrats and businessmen – thousands of them across Europe – all managed to put, not one over, but hundreds of billions over, on those ‘smartest men in the room’, year after year, – unless you can believe that, then the much simpler alternative is that the bankers knew as well. If they knew then they too are guilty.

The bankers knowingly lent money to people who could not afford to pay it back. And we KNOW THIS IS TRUE.  The various swaps contracts the Greek government entered into with Goldman Sachs and a whole host of the other Big Banks were specifically designed to hide the true extent of the indebtedness of the Greek government. The Banks KNEW, but lent anyway. And they lent to Spain and Portugal and Italy as well as Greece. This will become painfully clear shortly

Thus the real story is that the banks were delighted to lend to the Greek State, its state owned enterprises, its municipalities, its various private banks and its people, way beyond their ability to pay back. This was the bubble of lending, leverage and deferred payments. The bubble was NOT created by ordinary people, or even their national governments, hoodwinking the world’s banks. It was the world’s banks, those in Greece AND Germany and elsewhere, conniving together to lend and spend and lend some more, much more than was wise. The government’s got to strut on the world stage and talk about their economic brilliance and miracle working, the bankers got massive bonuses and the people made hay while the sun of their masters shone down on them.

So if the Greek state ‘should have known better’ and ‘been more prudent’ then so too should the German French, American and British banks who facilitated their profligacy. And yet all the banks in all the  countries have shed their losses on to the public in all their countries. Not only are the Greek people having to suffer austerity to bail out German banks, so are the German people. The Greeks suffer to pay the Germans, while the Germans suffer to bail out the Greeks so they can pay the Germans. Two hands determindly erasing each other, and for what and whose benefit? The Greeks? The Germans? Or the Bankers?

And this is where the idea of a ‘People’s Debt Jubilee’ comes in. At the moment we are told debtor nations are paying creditor nations. Whereas in reality, the people in all nations are paying and suffering, in order to pay the debts of private banks in all the nations. The division isn’t between nation and nation but between the banks and the people of every nation. In every nation austerity is erasing the wealth, vitality and well-being of the people in large part to pay off the private debts incurred by private banks.

The vitality and hopes of people in Greece are being erased to pay German banks and so too are those of people in Germany. The hands are erasing each other.

But imagine if the German people and the Greek people both said we will not repay private debts of German or Greek or any other banks. The obvious objection is that the German banks would die. And so they would.  But the German people would no longer have to pay the massive bail-outs THEY too have been paying. Let’s not forget that the German tax payer has so far payed hundreds of billions to bail out GERMAN banks dwarfing what they have so far paid to Greek banks. On top of which the money they  will give to Greece is FOR THE GERMAN BANKS anyway.

If the German Banks were left to suffer their private losses then neither the Greeks NOR the German people would have to keep bailing them out. And all that public money from the German tax payer and the Greek taxpayer, currenlty being bled from the people of those nations into private banks would be freed to invest in real production and employment, in both countries. Rather than bail out our present, insolvent banks who remain insolvent even after being bailed out, we would all be better off letting them die, and then putting our bailout money in to new, clean and solvent banks.

At the moment two nations are being yoked to pay off the debts and stupid lending decisions of insolvent private German banks. The same is being done in every other nation to pay off someones banks. It is not nation against nation it is banks against people.

If there were a People’s Debt Jubilee, where BOTH the Greek and the German people refussed to pay the private debts of insolvent German banks, then those German banks would die, true enough. But would the German people be worse off than they will be if they continue, along side the Greeks, to bail out those banks? I don’t think we know the answer for sure.  BUT we do have two and a half years of evidence that diverting public money from real investment in productive employment has not created a sustainable recovery. Our present ‘austerity to pay the banker’s debts’ policy is impoverishing us all. It has set the hands erasing each other. Whereas public money spent on investing in real growth and employment, instead of stuffing the bonus pot for a few thousand bankers, would set the hands drawing each other again and stop them from erasing each other.

At the very least I think we should explore the idea of a People’s Debt Jubilee.  Not just defaulting on what we owe to others but declaring that those who owe us, are free of debt as well. I think we would find we would all be better off if we stopped making each other pay off some greedy bankers’ debts.

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