Another chance for anarchism
The world’s dominant political economy has crashed; neoliberalism — an ideological smokescreen for financialisation, cartelisation, and monopolisation — is so discredited that even its own advocates remain silent. Finance capital for its part is now concentrated in so few hands that over $21 trillion — more than the combined GDP of the United States and Japan — is held in secretive tax havens. Much of the money has come from drug-running, arms smuggling, tax evasion, and tax avoidance. It is used not for generating legitimate productive work but only for making paper money. Wealth does not trickle down; it floods upwards.
Another chance for anarchism
Arvind Sivaramakrishnan
The Hindu
September 18, 2012
The world’s dominant political economy has crashed; neoliberalism — an ideological smokescreen for financialisation, cartelisation, and monopolisation — is so discredited that even its own advocates remain silent. Finance capital for its part is now concentrated in so few hands that over $21 trillion — more than the combined GDP of the United States and Japan — is held in secretive tax havens. Much of the money has come from drug-running, arms smuggling, tax evasion, and tax avoidance. It is used not for generating legitimate productive work but only for making paper money. Wealth does not trickle down; it floods upwards.
Meanwhile, particularly in the Anglophone world, more evidence emerges almost daily of rampant criminality in every area of high finance. Far from regulating finance, let alone using the feeble criminal law available, governments terrified of financiers and also of the public instead confine themselves to passing progressively more vicious public-order legislation on the assumption that all people are terrorists.
As yet, comparatively little mass resistance seems to have developed to the processes whereby globalisation has become globalised oppression, though since the Occupy movement emerged in the United States in 2011 ordinary people have moved $ 4 billion out of established banks and into bodies like mutual societies. In the U.K., the Co-op Bank reports unprecedented interest from people who have learnt to distrust the high-street banks.
Critiques of capital abound, most comprehensively in the works of Marx and Hilferding, whose opponents seem to have no response beyond citing the record of the Soviet Union. That response neglects the fact that the historical record cannot exhaust the possibilities in any set of ideas — but the incoherence of allegedly liberal democracy is also neglected. It follows that the Bolsheviks’ brutal elimination of a strong left-anarchist movement before and after the Russian revolution has all but disappeared from history, as has the destruction of anarchist groups even by Spanish Republicans.
