Reifying the economy
by Tom Sullivan
From Europe to the Pacific rim, capitalism marches on. Right over democracy. Guess what? People don’t like it. You remember people? They’re the ones, as Pope Francis suggested, the economy is supposed to serve, not rule:
Hundreds of thousands of people marched in Berlin on Saturday in protest against a planned free trade deal between Europe and the United States that they say is anti-democratic and will lower food safety, labor and environmental standards.
The organizers — an alliance of environmental groups, charities and opposition parties — said 250,000 people were taking part in the rally against free trade deals with both the United States and Canada, far more than they had anticipated.
[snip]
Opposition to the so-called Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has risen over the past year in Germany, with critics fearing the pact will hand too much power to big multinationals at the expense of consumers and workers.
“What bothers me the most is that I don’t want all our consumer laws to be softened,” Oliver Zloty told Reuters. “And I don’t want to have a dictatorship by any companies.”
Yet that is what it appears we have. We are moving towards “authoritarian capitalism” like China and Singapore, says Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek:
That’s for me — I’m very naïve here — the importance of all these agreements, TiSA and so on. These are agreements which will determine the basic coordinates of our economic and social life, flux of capital money, flux of information for decades to come. And it’s done in secret; nobody controls it. You know, this is where we are moving. The big decisions are done in top secret. They are not even debated.
In fact, he says, “when voters really do have a choice, it’s usually perceived as a crisis of democracy.” Voters are the problem. “[W]e are basically returning to pre-democratic times, in the sense of majority cannot be trusted.”
Because the values of the economy have overtaken human values. “We have fallen so far into this paradigm of reifying the economy that we’ve said that the basis upon which we decide something is right or wrong is whether or not it grows or shrinks GDP,” Anat Shenker-Osorio observed at Netroots Nation 2014 [timestamp 2:30]
Faith in unregulated markets is misplaced, writes Robert Shiller, co-author of “Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception.” Human values matter:
In fact, the real success of economies that embody free markets has much to do with the heroic efforts of campaigners for better values, both among private organizations and advocates of government regulation. For example, before 1900 most of the patent medicines that were sold to the public were fraudulent.
Most of these frauds have since been eliminated, not by market forces, but by the activities of private citizens who took action not selfishly but for the public good. Examples include Harvey Washington Wiley (1844-1930) and Alice Lakey (1857-1935), whose campaigns led to the foundation of the Food and Drug Administration in 1906, and Stuart Chase (1888-1985) and Frederick J. Schlink (1891-1995), whose advocacy in the 1920s led to the establishment of Consumer Reports in 1936.
But the reality of global capitalism today is, “Everyone is violating the rules,” says Žižek:
You have certain rules, but you are never really expected to follow those rules, you know. There are rules which you are expected to violate. And, a situation that interests me even more — there are not only things which are prohibited, but you are expected silently to do it, nonetheless.
This is why the economy feels out of control — the secrecy, the cheating, the race to the bottom, the running roughshod over humans in service to mammon. As I wrote:
Post-Reagan, deregulated capitalism has long looked like something out of Mary Shelley or science-fiction films, a creature we created, but no longer control. Billionaires and their acolytes see only its benefits, but as Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm says in The Lost World: Jurassic Park, “Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running, and then screaming.” Where once We the People held capitalism’s leash, now we wear the collar.
On the Pacific rim, citizens of Australia and New Zealand are concerned about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. They don’t want “a dictatorship by any companies” either.
More trade is not what really concerns people. Sovereignty and democracy are. And stability. “People are really hungry … for economic stability, more even than economic opportunity,” Shenker-Osorio told One News in New Zealand.
The question is whether “the economy” will allow them to have any. That is the question that hangs in the balance.