DEC 15, 2019
Global finance capital has
seized control of the economies of most nation-states. The citizens watch,
helplessly, as money and goods are transferred with little regulation across
borders. They watch as jobs in manufacturing and the professions are shipped to
regions of the global south where most workers are paid a dollar or less an
hour and receive no benefits. They watch as the taxes of the rich and
corporations are slashed, often to zero. They watch as austerity programs
dismantle or privatize utilities and basic social services, jacking up fees to
consumers. They watch as chronic unemployment and underemployment devastate
workers, especially the young. They watch as wages stagnate or decline, leaving
working men and women with unsustainable debts. This economic tyranny lies at
the root of the unrest in Hong Kong, India, Chile, France, Iran, Iraq and
Lebanon as well as the rise of right-wing demagogues and false prophets such as
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi.
It does not matter whether
liberals or conservatives, Tories or Labour, Republicans or Democrats are in
power. Finance capital is impervious to political control. The newly
defeated Labour Party in Britain, by adopting a Brexit-neutral
stance in the election, badly misread the zeitgeist. Yes, its leader, Jeremy
Corbyn, had to contend with hysterical warnings of economic collapse and
endured a smear campaign—amplified by a media mouthing the accusations of his
Tory opponents—that included claims he was a threat
to national security and an
anti-Semite, but his and Labour’s failure to appreciate how desperate
workers were for a solution, even one growing out of magical thinking about the
promise of Brexit, was a mistake. Brexit is not a realistic alternative to
economic tyranny. But it at least offers a hope, however unfounded, of
shattering the bonds of corporate power. It posits itself as a weapon in the
war between the insiders and the outsiders. That this desperate hope by the
outsiders is peddled by con artists and charlatans such as Johnson and Trump is
part of the sickness of our age, an echo of the economic distortions and
right-wing populism that saw fascists rise to power in Italy and Germany in the
first part of the 20th century.
Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase,
Citibank, Exxon Mobile, Walmart, Apple and Amazon are the modern versions of
the East India
Company or La Compagnie
Française de l’Orient et de la Chine. These and others among today’s
global corporations, with the assistance of the World Bank, the World Trade
Organization and the International Monetary Fund, have created unassailable
monopolies and effectively hollowed out many nation-states, both physically and
culturally. Forlorn, derelict urban wastelands, populated by the bitterly
dispossessed, are as common in France or Britain as they are in America’s Rust
Belt. Governments, captive to corporate control, have been prostituted to
transfer wealth upward, swell corporate profits and crush dissent at the
expense of democracy.
The decay and rupture of the
social bonds that once held our societies together have unleashed the dark
pathologies of opioid, alcohol and gambling addictions and led to an explosion
of hate crimes and mass shootings, along with suicide. Social control provided
by work, civic and political participation—bonds that integrated us into our
communities and gave us a sense of place, dignity and agency—has been handed
over to a heavily militarized police, a massive prison system and a judicial
system complicit in abolishing basic rights, including due process and privacy.
So, to steal a line from
Vladimir Lenin, what is to be done? Can a reformist political candidate, a
Bernie Sanders or perhaps an Elizabeth Warren—although I question the
authenticity of Warren—defeat Trump and the retrograde forces that empower him?
Or will the U.S. reformers suffer Corbyn’s fate? In short, can the system be
reformed from the inside? Or will we have to take to the streets, as the people
are doing in Chile, Lebanon, France, Hong Kong and elsewhere, to demand the
overthrow of corporate rule?
The left, even under Corbyn,
is not ready to speak in revolutionary language. Revolutionary rhetoric within
the political system has been adopted by the neofascists and the hard right.
The Brexit debate is about blowing up the system, not working within it. Those
who support Brexit and Johnson will, like those who support Trump, be betrayed.
But the language employed by Johnson and Trump is about destruction, and this yearning
for destruction runs deep among the working class. The tragedy is that by
backing these demagogues the public is complicit in its own enslavement.
Extinction Rebellion, which I support, is
attempting to counter this corporate assault and the consequent ecocide with
revolutionary language and sustained civil disobedience designed to make
governance impossible. I hope Extinction Rebellion will gain enough popular
support to raise a strong barrier before the corporate state starts employing
the brute force outlined in Operation
Yellowhammer, the six-page British government plan that calls for the
possible deployment of 50,000 regular and reserved troops and 10,000 riot
police to cope with the unrest that might be caused by food and medical
shortages following Britain’s departure from the European Union.
The violent suppression of
protesters in France, Chile, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, India and Hong Kong is
already underway, a window into what may be coming to England, the United
States and other countries that attempt to throw off the yoke of corporate
oppression.
The corporate state loathes
the political left, but the American political left, by agreeing to operate
within the constrained and largely rigged electoral system, is easily neutered,
as liberalism was this year in Britain and was in 2016—and will be in 2020—in
the United States. America’s Democratic Party leadership, as hostile to its
progressive candidates as many in the Labour Party hierarchy in Britain were to
Corbyn, employed a series of measures to prevent Sanders from obtaining the
nomination in 2016. They included a superdelegates scheme,
the use of hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate money, iron control of
the Democratic National Committee and blocking those registered as independents
from voting in Democratic primaries. Politicians such as Sanders and Corbyn are
easily dispatched.
But while the corporate state
detests political mavericks such as Sanders and Corbyn, it both hates and fears
the revolutionary left. The revolutionary left speaks an unvarnished truth
about corporate power and calls out the entire political ruling class for its
complicity. It is not interested in accommodation. It seeks to disrupt and
paralyze the corporate state. When many thousands, as in Hong Kong, take to the
streets shouting slogans like “There are no rioters, only a tyrannical regime”
and “It was you who taught me that peaceful marches are useless,” the corporate
ruling elites begin to worry. This is why populist leaders, including Eric
Drouet of the gilets
jaunes, or yellow vests, in France, are arrested. It is why Roger Hallam,
the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, spent six weeks in jail this fall in
Britain. It is why Edward Leung is serving a six-year prison sentence on
charges of rioting and assaulting a police officer during the 2016 Fishball
Revolution in Hong Kong. Revolutionaries refuse to play by the rules.
These global revolutionary
movements embody a resurrection of the concept of the common good, the belief
that a society should be structured around caring for all its members,
especially the most vulnerable. They are forces of solidarity, even community.
They understand, as the economist Karl Polanyi wrote,
that there are two kinds of freedoms. There are the bad freedoms to exploit
those around us and extract huge profits without regard to the common good. And
there are the good freedoms—freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom
of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s job—that the bad
freedoms destroy. The bad freedoms, championed by an atomized,
hyper-individualistic consumer culture, which kneels before the cult of the
self, have triumphed. The death grip of the ruling elites was illustrated in
recent days in Madrid, where world leaders refused during COP25—the
United Nations’ conference on climate change—to take meaningful action to halt
the climate emergency, an existential threat to humankind.
The bankrupt ideologies of
globalization and neoliberalism, formulated and used to justify the
consolidation of wealth and power as well as the ecocide that is devastating
the planet, have, however, lost their credibility. Neoliberalism, the idea that
once regulations on corporations and trade barriers are lifted and taxes
slashed, a society will prosper, was always an absurdity. None of its promises
could be defended by the history and theory of economics. Concentrating wealth
in the hands of a global oligarchic elite—eight families now hold as much
wealth as 50 percent of the world’s population—while demolishing government
controls and regulations, sending production to the global south, privatizing
public services and destroying labor unions does not distribute wealth.
Allowing global speculators to use money lent to them by the government at
virtually zero percent interest to buy back their stock does not distribute
wealth. Permitting corporations to engage in structured asset destruction
through inflation, to strip assets through mergers and acquisitions, to raise
the levels of debt incumbency to enforce debt peonage on the public, to engage
in corporate fraud that includes the dispossession of assets, does not
distribute wealth. The raiding of pension funds, credit and stock manipulations
and looting the U.S. Treasury when the bubbles and Ponzi schemes evaporate does
not distribute wealth. Such actions funnel wealth to those at the top. They
create enormous income inequality and monopoly power. They fuel discontent and
political extremism. They make the planet uninhabitable for most species. They
destroy democracy.
But economic rationality was
never the point. The point was the restoration of class power. Neoliberalism
transforms freedom for the many into freedom for the few. The idiocy of the
intellectual gurus who sold us this ideology—Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand—should have
exposed the con from the beginning, but they were given ample platforms, while
their critics, the old Keynesians, were pushed out and silenced. Freedom became
equated with freedom of market forces to do anything the capitalists wanted.
And that freedom doomed us and looks set to doom the ecosystem on which we
depend for life. Karl Marx in volume one of “Capital” explained over a century
ago how freedom of the market always results in social inequality.
The loss of credibility of the
reigning ideology has led the ruling elites to forge an alliance with right-wing,
neofascist demagogues such as Trump and Johnson who employ the tropes of
racism, Islamophobia, homophobia, bigotry and misogyny to channel the public’s
growing rage and frustration away from the corporate elites and toward the
vulnerable. These demagogues accelerate the pillage. They accelerate the
hatred, racism and violence that act as a diversion. And they accelerate the
social unrest that becomes the excuse for the imposition of tyranny. Hope lies
in the streets. Millions of people in Hong Kong, India, Chile, France, Iran,
Iraq and Lebanon understand. It is time to join them.
