Welcome to Suicidal Capitalism
This article by William Pfaff has been brought to my attention by Another Point of View and seems to echo some of the thoughts exposed in my posts about Gorz.
I reproduce it here in it’s totality:
The globalization of the international
economy launched by the United States as an accidental policy of the
Clinton administration has since been much lauded as benefiting
(some of) the poor of the world by drawing them into the
international capitalist system. This is not actually what it was
designed to do.
It has proven, like the god Janus, to have two aspects. The second
face now has been revealed. Economic globalization has as its second
result to impoverish (some of) the rich of the world.
The free market originated in 19th century Britain in what is
called by historians the Great Transformation. As the English
political philosopher John Gray describes it, in a prophetic book (in
1998) on the destructive effects of globalization called False Dawn,
that transformation tore from their local roots the economic markets
that since medieval times and before had been tied to communities,
and had evolved through the needs and adaptations of those
communities and their immediate neighbors.
Because of their origins these markets were constrained by
the need to maintain social cohesion. In mid-Victorian England, in
part because of the development of transportation and communications,
these community-rooted markets – “embedded in society and subject to
many kinds of regulation and restraint” – were destroyed. They were
replaced by deregulated markets that ignored social and communitarian
needs, and functioned only according to the rules that suited
themselves.
Because of their inter-communication and interaction they no longer
set prices according to what the farmer, artisan and community could
bear. The free market created a new economy in which the prices of
all goods, including labor –- or probably one should say, labor above
all – were set or changed without regard to the effects upon local
society. Welcome to the world of capitalism “red in tooth and claw.”
This was the capitalism that provoked the critiques and
analyses of the great classical economists of the Scottish and
British Enlightenments, generally read today (in Washington think-
tanks) chiefly in order to justify injustice, and in deliberate
disregard of the social responsibility that was part of the work of
such men as Adam Smith and David Ricardo.
This was the capitalism that gave birth to the Communist Manifesto
in which Marx and Engels wrote that “All old-established national
industries have been destroyed or are daily being
destroyed….Everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the
bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.”
It was the epoch that provoked socialism and
every variety of radical and religious reform meant to restore human
values to economic life. Over the years this new version of capitalism
was civilized, or half-tamed, until the arrival of globalization.
With globalization, technology once again was eagerly used to
destroy existing capitalism by repeating the two crimes of
assassination that had destroyed the pre-capitalist economy: the use
of technology to expand markets so widely as to destroy existing
national and international regulations, and second, once again to
commodify labor.
Labor was no longer a social or economic “partner” in manufacturing
industry and business, which meant a human collaborator. Labor
became simply a “cost,” to be reduced so far as possible, or to be
eliminated.
This was rationalized with two contestable euphemisms. The first
was that a progressive process had been set in motion by which the
profits of globalization would “trickle down” so as to benefit the
entire work force.
This is unimaginable if labor is a commodity of unlimited supply –
as it tends to be today, and which is a specific characteristic of
globalization. The power was destroyed which labor had possessed
when industry was forced to hire from a given pool of workers in a
given location.
In addition, the tendency of globalization is to exploit a given
workforce until it no longer has a margin of survival (Ricardo’s
“iron law of wages”), and then move on. See rust-belt industry and
trailer-home former towns
The second of the three self-destroying (indeed suicidal) qualities
of globalization has proved to be the inner dynamism driving it to
expand by means of the division, subdivision, and quasi-
universalization of the distribution of risk until this process had
broken through the barrier of professional dissimulation. This means
that the risk has been rendered unaccountable for, because
effectively unidentifiable —- which had been the unconscious or
unavowed purpose of the process.
This is what has happened in international finance, where the
accepted and normal framework of exchange between risk and
responsibility that is inherent in capitalism has become
indecipherable. Neither banks, the international financial
institutions, nor governments – and certainly not investors – are
capable of assigning value to certain tradable paper or commodities –
so that economic exchange comes to a halt. Today we stand on the
brink of that fatality.
The third suicidal quality of globalized capitalism has been its
creation of an organization of greed and individual acquisition and
power which, because of the internationalization of the global
economic system, has become not only unconscionable but
unassessable. There is no assessable value in it. Thus the
literally irrational pursuit of objectively meaningless rewards by
some of those captains of finance now on the way to jail.
Welcome to the newest version of internationalized capitalism: the
suicide version. It now is on display in Washington and other
parliamentary and judicial inquiries and tribunals, with consequences
which we and our children will now live with.
See original post.
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