Liberal capitalists and the Wall Street bail-out: they’re quite clever, these people.

There are several questions about the proposed bail-out of the once most powerful capitalist institutions on Wall Street that have been quite bothersome. These questions are quite basic; they are shaped less by scholarly work or influence, than by a most basic perception of inconsistency, contradiction, double-standards and ideological bias on the part of the liberal capitalist elites of the world. They’re quite clever, these people, you see. They have for years condemned any direct intervention in “the economy” (I use quotation marks around “the economy” because I believe it to be an abstraction. I am more convinced of the fact that there are people, transactions between people, markets where ownership of goods are transferred, and there is money). Liberal capitalists usually condemn socialists for “planning,” for state ownership of corporations and/or for state trading, they usually also swear complete obeisance, an almost fundamentalist loyalty, to “laws” and “mechanisms” – and any resistance or objections to such laws and mechanisms is tantamount to apostasy.

The Christian Bible says in Deuteronomy 17:13, apostates should be stoned to death; those who detract from liberal capitalist orthodoxy are othered as “dangerous,” or authoritarian or dictatorial. Sometimes these apostates, those who dissent to capitalist orthodoxy or who dare consider alternative approaches to social organisation, die or are killed under mysterious circumstances and are replaced by dictatorships who are friendly to the West – to the United States, in particular. This is not an exaggerration; it is what happened, for instance, to Patrice Lumumba, in the Congo (who was replaced by General Mobutu Sese Seko), and to Salvado Allende, in Chile (who was replaced by General Augusto Pinochet).

Anyway, when all else fails, these capitalist fundamentalists – surely it is not incorrect to call them that? – like to tell us (ordinary people) that we simply don’t understand economics, how “an economy works” or “how markets work” or that we should learn mathematics – (seriously). As if these “markets” and market transactions are devoid of any human agency … As if we, humans, were atomistic things locked in step in a reified “economy”.

The Ignorance of Uneducated People, and of Those Who Don’t do Mathematics

A few years ago, one of the West’s most respected capitalist economists, Paul Krugman, a darling of liberals in the United States, suggested that people who objected to cheap labour were simply ill-informed, or lacking in intellectual depth (implying that even child labour may be acceptable). As part of his fundamentalism, Krugman also hails the use of mathematics and algebra as the only way to explain economics or “the economy”.

When taken together – from the substance of his columns in Slate magazine, his book Pop Internationalism (see a review here – I refuse to direct the reader to book sellers because I am opposed to wilful product placement) and his praise for the use of mathematics to explain everything, or formalism, there is the suggestion that discussions or concerns about poverty, globalisation and even “the economy” are best addressed through a type exclusivism. This exclusivism is apparently homologous with the Christian variant, in terms of which there is only one way towards eternal life – through Jesus Christ. For liberal capitalists there is only one way to organise humanity – in all its complexity; the economic rationalist way as expressed in mathematical and/or algebraic formulation. Every other way of thinking is “unscientific” or lacking in rigour and should, therefore, not be taken seriously.

One recent project led by economists and published by the United Nations Development placed even human dignity and moonlight in the context of liberal capitalist discourse on social organisation! This total commodification of the natural and social world seems to be an objective of liberal capitalists. For instance, at the end of the documentary The Corporation, one of the avatars of liberal capitalism, suggests that the world would be a better place if every aspect of our world and our life – from the air that we breathe, to the water that runs in our rivers and streams – is privatised. Interviewed in the documentary, Michael Walker, president of the Fraser Institute (one of their slogans is “sound economics”) was asked whether he advocated “private ownership of every square inch of” he (Walker) replied “Absolutely”.

What all this suggests is that a) there is only one way to organise the world, through liberal capitalist orthodoxy b) there is only one way to understand/explain this world, through the rational economics logic that underpins this orthodoxy and c) anyone who differs from this orthodoxy is simply wrong (possibly even an enemy who needs to be eliminated), and d) anyone who criticises this orthodoxy and does so without hiding behind thickets of algebra is, well, uneducated. So, as an ordinary person, one who does not ascribe to any of these fundamentalist principles, I am guilty of dissent and apostasy, I find as morally repugnant the suggestion that people can be paid ten cents an hour for their labour (which economists like Walker and Krugman have defended and/or justified) – I find capitalist elite intervention to save the super-rich from their own screwing and doings on Wall Street to be repugnant. This “rescue package” also seems quite cruel, callous and hypocritical when one considers that actual or intended interventionist policies to roll back the poverty and inequality bequeathed by apartheid in South Africa, Soviet Communism in Russia or laissez faire capitalism in the United States are dismissed as unworkable, or as some type of evil conduct.

There’s a tale that is spun – it is clearly apocryphal, but amusing and useful, nonetheless – which says that the best thing the devil ever achieved was to convince the world that he does not exist. I want to twist that old canard and say this: The best thing that economists have achieved, in the context of the current rescue of Wall Street, is to link the rescue of rich people’s jobs and money to the destiny of the world. We, ordinary people, are told that if the rich go down in Wall Street – we will all follow….

END OF FIRST DRAFT OF PART 1