The only truly surprising
thing about the Panama
Papers leak is that there is no surprise in them: Didn’t we learn exactly
what we expected to learn from them? Yet, it’s one thing to know about offshore
bank accounts in general, and another to see concrete proof. It’s like knowing
that one’s partner is fooling around on you—one can accept the abstract
knowledge of it, but pain arises when one learns the steamy details. And when
one gets pictures of what they were doing.… So now, with the Panama Papers, we
are saddled with some of the dirty pictures of financial pornography of the
world’s rich, and we can no longer pretend that we don’t know.
Back in 1843, the young Karl
Marx claimed that the German ancien regime “only imagines that it believes in
itself and demands that the world should imagine the same thing.” In such a
situation, to put shame on those in power becomes a weapon itself. Or, as Marx
goes on, “the actual pressure must be made more pressing by adding to it
consciousness of pressure, the shame must be made more shameful by publicizing
it.”
This is our situation today:
We are facing the shameless cynicism of the existing global order, whose agents
only imagine that they believe in their ideas of democracy, human rights, etc.,
and through moves like WikiLeaks and the Panama Papers disclosures, the
shame—our shame for tolerating such power over us—is made more shameful by
publicizing it.
A quick look at the Panama
Papers reveals a standout positive feature and a standout negative feature. The
positive one is the all-embracing solidarity of the participants: In the
shadowy world of global capital, we are all brothers. The Western developed
world is there, including the uncorrupted Scandinavians, and they shake hands
with Vladimir Putin. And Chinese President Xi, Iran and North Korea are also
there. Muslims and Jews exchange friendly winks—it is a true kingdom of
multiculturalism where all are equal and all different. The negative feature:
the hard-hitting absence of the United States, which lends some credence to the
Russian and Chinese claim that particular political interests were involved in
the inquiry.
So what are we to do with all
these data? The first (and predominant) reaction is the explosion of moralistic
rage, of course. But what we should do is change the topic immediately, from
morality to our economic system: politicians, bankers and managers were always
greedy, so what is it in our legal and economic system that enabled them to
realize their greed in such a big way?
From the 2008 financial
meltdown onward, public figures from the pope downward bombard us with
injunctions to fight the culture of excessive greed and consummation. As one of
the theologians close to the pope put it: “The present crisis is not a crisis
of capitalism, but the crisis of morality.” Even parts of the left follow this
path. There is no lack of anti-capitalism today: Occupy protests exploded a
couple of years ago, and we are even witnessing an overload of the critique of
the horrors of capitalism: books, newspaper in-depth-investigations and TV
reports abound on companies ruthlessly polluting our environment, on corrupted
bankers who continue to get fat bonuses while their banks have to be saved by
public money, of sweat shops where child work overtime.
There is, however, a catch to
all this overflow of critique: what is as a rule not questioned is the
democratic-liberal frame of fighting against these excesses. The explicit or
implied goal is to democratize capitalism, to extend the democratic control
onto the economy, through the pressure of the public media, government
inquiries, harsher laws, and honest police investigations. But the system as
such is not questioned, and its democratic institutional frame of the state of
law remains the sacred cow even the most radical forms of this “ethical
anti-capitalism” like the Occupy movement do not touch.
The mistake to be avoided here
is best exemplified by the story—apocryphal, maybe—about the Left-Keynesian
economist John Galbraith: before a trip to USSR in the late 1950s, he wrote to
his anti-Communist friend Sidney Hook: “Don’t worry, I will not be seduced by
the Soviets and return home claiming they have Socialism!” Hook answered him
promptly: “But that’s what worries me—that you will return claiming the USSR is
NOT socialist!” What worried Hook was the naïve defense of the purity of the
concept: if things go wrong with building a Socialist society, this does not
invalidate the idea itself, it just means we didn’t implement it properly. Do
we not detect the same naivety in today’s market fundamentalists?
When, during a TV debate in
France a couple of years ago, the French intellectual Guy Sorman claimed that
democracy and capitalism necessarily go together, I couldn’t resist asking him
the obvious question: “But what about China today?” Sorman snapped back: “In
China there is no capitalism!” For the fanatically pro-capitalist Sorman, if a
country is non-democratic, it simply means it is not truly capitalist, but
practices its disfigured version, in exactly the same way that for a democratic
Communist Stalinism was simply not an authentic form of Communism.
The underlying mistake is not
difficult to identify—it is the same as in the well-known joke: “My fiancée is
never late for an appointment, because the moment she is late she is no longer
my fiancée!” This is how today’s apologist of market, in an unheard-of
ideological kidnapping, explain the crisis of 2008: It was not the failure of
the free market that caused it, but the excessive state regulation, i.e., the
fact that our market economy was not a true one, that it was still in the
clutches of the Welfare State. The lesson of the Panama Papers is that,
precisely, this is not the case: Corruption is not a contingent deviation of
the global capitalist system, it is part of its basic functioning.
The reality that emerges from
the Panama Papers leak is of class division, and it’s as simple as that. The
papers demonstrate how wealthy people live in a separate world in which
different rules apply, in which legal system and police authority are heavily
twisted and not only protect the rich, but are even ready to systematically
bend the rule of law to accommodate them.
There are already many
Rightist liberal reactions to the Panama Papers putting the blame onto the
excesses of our Welfare State, or whatever remains of it. Since wealth is so
heavily taxed, no wonder owners try to move it to places with lower taxes,
which is ultimately nothing illegal. Ridiculous as this excuse is, this
argument has a kernel of truth, and it makes two points worth noting. First,
the line that separates legal from illegal transactions is getting increasingly
blurred, and is often reduced to a matter of interpretation. Second, owners of
the wealth who moved it to offshore accounts and tax havens are not greedy
monsters, but individuals who simply act like rational subjects trying to
safeguard their wealth. In capitalism, you cannot throw out the dirty water of
financial speculation and keep the healthy baby of real economy. The dirty
water effectively is the bloodline of the healthy baby.
One should be not afraid to go
to the end here. The global capitalist legal system itself is, in its most
fundamental dimension, corruption legalized. The question of where crime begins
(which financial dealings are illegal) is not a legal question but an eminently
political question, one of power struggle.
So why did thousands of
businessman and politicians do what is documented in the Panama Papers? The
answer is the same as that of the old vulgar riddle-joke: Why do dogs lick
themselves? Because they can.
