Transcripts
"Give to Ceasar"
by Donatella Bernstein
The ancient Greeks used to ask themselves what constitutes the "good life". Precisely because we no longer ask such questions, it is imperative to reassess them at crucial points in history. This is such a moment.
Greek thinkers deplored the advent of coinage. In their view, coins would make wealth abstract, pushing the limits of greed beyond the reasonable. To stock cauldrons and urns needed vast palaces to stock coins required no space at all. Since then came paper money, and now electronic money, now no longer backed by gold reserves. There is now truly no limit to wealth - and greed has grown exponentially. We are now in a position to see the full impact of what were then Greek misgivings on the consequences of the abstraction of money.
It is not that gain or profit from money, in the middle ages called usury, is deleterious in itself. It's the fact that it has no ceiling. Until recently governments mediated between conflicting interests of different parts of society: business and public services, industry and education and research; the rich and poor; now governments, left or right, as if on cue, are abdicating their duty to act for the common good and are instead delivering public assets, resources and services to corporations. It's a bit like entrusting professional thieves with keeping the public purse.
It is right and proper that businesses should be run for profit. But give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to public institutions what pertains to the common good.
The difference between a healthy, dynamic economy and one where the power of shareholders eschews matters excessively in their own favour has come about because two principles have been ignored, and unlimited profit taken for granted: 1) what constitutes a legitimate profit; 2) who creates wealth, and therefore should have some proportion of the wealth created.
The first problem has not been under discussion at all. Everybody knows beauty products or pharmaceuticals have fantastic profit margins, but the principle of just profit for reasonable investment or work is not considered. In fact, the largest sums of money are made by money itself, whereas manufacture and industry are secondary to financial prerogatives. The system has gone so far in this direction that the very concepts of profit and wealth have become absurd and meaningless. Just consider what would happen if money itself collapsed. It is, after all, only a convention. It can only work when people believe in it.
The second point is not independent of the first: how is wealth created, are the Murdochs and Rockerfellers, Sainsburies and Gates of this world exceptional beings who toiled hard at their own industries, or are they able organisers and manipulators harnessing the toil and creativity of others? Could they have created their wealth unaided? Clearly not, their empires were built by subordinates, employees, and workers. The increasing influence of shareholders, who do NOT produce wealth, is due to the fact that money is not only totally abstract a value, but that it can be separated entirely from its use. It is schizophrenic money. This can only result in a schizophrenic economy, and a pathological society. Those who actually build empires, the workers, are squeezed out of their means of survival, their rights annulled. These are instead at the mercy of shareholders who need know nothing about the firms, the products they make
nor their end use. The paradox is that there are many more workers than shareholders, and an impoverished workforce simply can-t afford consumer products any more, which brings the system into a frenetic search for "new markets", at the same time impoverishing people further and further afield. A population of ill-informed workers is not improbable. The propagation of misinformation is essential to this system, and is already happening.
Consider that 3 million unionised workers marched in Rome last week, and barely got a mention in the press outside Italy. Dissenting citizens, no matter how numerous, are branded as hooligans and terrorists. Consider the article 2 weeks ago in the Guardian, about meat-packers in U.S. industries, a very dangerous and unsafe trade. One worker's plight was highlighted in particular, who ended up on the scrap heap after horrific work injuries. Ironically, he had actually been an instrument in breaking the union hold on his plant, having broken the picket when colleagues were on strike. The firm had little regard for safety measures, the State had no legislation to protect workers, and this particular worker had his arm, and later his leg torn away by meat hooks and unsafe machinery. He got no compensation, and when he stopped being productive, he was summarily sacked. The company solicitor who worked out a modest compensation package was sacked by the firm, and the local judiciary held to ransom by the company who employed their legal firms. This is the kind of pressure that can be put to bear whenever a confrontation occurs between the judiciary and business all over the world, though it is more advanced in the "land of the free".
The difference between national and global events is only one of scale. The same monetary thuggery is applied to small governments that have the misfortune to default on debt payments or become the vested interest of powerful neighbours (cfr. Latin America, Haiti, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines). It's a case of either letting them in or they destroy the economies they cannot control (cfr. Tanzania, Angola, Cuba, Nicaragua) never mind the human cost (not OUR humans - as Roosevelt said of Noriega: "he may be a bastard but he's our bastard")
Perhaps Marcos ' analysis is not far wrong: This is the fourth world war. The third was the cold war, this one is the economic colonisation of the world. It operates on the principle that what is mine is mine, and what is yours is also mine. The Washington Consensus, on which the World Bank and the WTO operate, is that the world is one big "free market" - free, that is, for us, or U.S., and allies to penetrate (allies a respectful second), but not free for the rest of the world to invade our markets. Just see what the reaction is when they try. Seattle and Genova gave the third world the framework in which to question the existing power structure. When the G8 were meeting in Genova, another meeting took place in Africa, where developing countries formulated the muted request that their agriculture be allowed to compete for our markets.
Bankruptcy, partly brought about by our terms and conditions to our trading partners and interests on loans gives international organisations the right to restructure local economies in terms of the Washington Consensus: no tariffs on foreign imports, reduce government spending on public services, reduce government input altogether, no right to decide own economic policy, enforced sale of any profitable public asset to the private (mostly foreign) sector. This is called Structural Adjustment Policy.
In the case of Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, it meant selling off the vastly profitable national electricity grid, telephone and cement works. No scheme was envisaged to set up proper sewage and water works for a population, which cannot afford it.
Losers are not choosers; this is a lesson over 2000 years old. When the Gauls sacked Rome in 390 BC, the Romans were allowed to ransom themselves with 1000 lbs. of gold. But the Gauls had trumped the scales, and when the tribunes protested, the Chieftain Brennus threw his sword on the side of the weights and exclaimed : "woe to the conquered!"
Woe indeed. Those nations who have accepted loans and allowed Structural Adjustment have never been free since: they have become vassal states, not only economically, but politically as well. European nations too have become hostage to the board room: as Giddens lamely defends: "what can we do? We would witness a flight of capital".
He is right in the sense that the functioning or pathology of the economic system is an international problem. The solution has to be a concerted, or, as Bunzl would say, a simultaneous effort.
First, a thorough re-thinking of gain and profit to peg them down to reality. Legitimate profit margins should be set by the public sphere, internationally, so that they finally have a ceiling. If pharmaceuticals make drugs for pennies, what is a legitimate profit margin? 100%, or 200%? Surely not 1000%? What is a legitimate salary for a CEO before distributing wealth downwards? After all, the baker doesn't have such high margins, and bread is more essential. In fact, most essentials have low profit-margins, and most highly-skilled workmanship and professions are paid less than bankers and CEOs. There might be a day when we can be held to ransom for a cabbage, when the very few less polluted places in the world can sell us cabbages we can no longer grow, at any price they wish. You can't eat money after we have destroyed the earth.
Secondly: Some justice in the distribution of wealth is in order, so that those who are actual productive forces have a say in company policy and investment, equal to that of the shareholders. Otherwise the shareholders can work in their own firms unaided, and we can all start from naught negotiating the social contract. Workers' councils, management and finance should have equal weight.
At a time with so many and such crucial issues to reconsider, I cannot but concur with Ann Pettifor, when she said the Left is bankrupt of any vision. This is true not only in the UK but also in Europe at large. The Italian left, comprising more than half the 38 official parties, has not come up with any political vision to oppose to financial thuggery buying all our governments and dismantling our more democratic institutions. They could have at least taken cues from civil society. And the ferment of thinking the public sphere into a different mode, where "another world is possible". The only reservation with this movement, ever more global, is that once it starts putting forward concrete proposals and works things out on the ground, as it will have to, it may splinter into countless different interest groups, and lobbies, and these will again replicate the fractures and shortcomings of the past. It's down to us to see that doesn't happen.
Donatella Bernstein
Founding Member of Friends of Le Monde Diplomatique
© Friends Of Le Monde Diplomatique
