In recent days I am struck by how many pictures of distraught stockbrokers, stock analysts, bankers, traders, buyers, sellers, I’ve seen in the news. They’ve occupied the focus of web pages, and newspaper front-pages with their dramatic poses. We are alerted to their plight at the start of every newscast, and in extended treatments on cable networks and magazines. Their problem, we are exhorted, is our problem. And no doubt it is – since they’ve been gambling with our labor, our natural resources and our human rights for decades, with abandon, daring and license. 

The conservative revolution triumphed in the Reagan era, was embraced by Clintonesque triangulation (doing to the US social safety net what Reagan left undone) and exploded socially and economically in the Bush redux era, culminating in that industry of industries, war. Now it’s all imploding and we are summoned to have sympathy with these men pulling their hair out on television and in newspapers.

We are never exhorted so by the powerful to swift and decisive bailouts for working people, or, the poor, the homeless, the sick, the starving – the photographs of these groups that appear do not solicit anything but pity or contempt. Tough, the powerful say to them – it’s the way of the free market. Now here the rich are ‘begging for a handout’ – those words they made so popular when referring to the rest of us. The rich are the new poor. Bankers, from all over the world, fear in their eyes, their hands to their temple, their finger on their bloodshot eyes, their $300 dollar haircuts askew. This is the true image of despair.

I am amused and not a little terrified. What? Nobody left to bilk? No small countries to choke to death on structural adjustment programs? No new wars to gin up the arms industry?

Why don’t we instead overwhelm poverty with $700 billion dollars you ask. Of course not – who would the powerful prey on?

Word up (as the young people say)

A few weeks ago a blogger (no name- apologies- can’t seem to find the blog again) on DailyKos  reminded me of the following from Capital Vol. III Part III (1894) – The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall.

“The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself. It is that capital and its self-expansion appear as the starting and the closing point, the motive and the purpose of production; that production is only production for capital and not vice versa…

At a certain high point this increasing concentration in its turn causes a new fall in the rate of profit. The mass of small dispersed capitals is thereby driven along the adventurous road of speculation, credit frauds, stock swindles, and crises…

But as soon as it no longer is a question of sharing profits, but of sharing losses, everyone tries to reduce his own share to a minimum and to shove it off upon another. The class, as such, must inevitably lose. How much the individual capitalist must bear of the loss, i.e., to what extent he must share in it at all, is decided by strength and cunning, and competition then becomes a fight among hostile brothers. The antagonism between each individual capitalist’s interests and those of the capitalist class as a whole, then comes to the surface, just as previously the identity of these interests operated in practice through competition. How is this conflict settled and the conditions restored which correspond to the “sound” operation of capitalist production? The mode of settlement is already indicated in the very emergence of the conflict whose settlement is under discussion. It implies the withdrawal and even the partial destruction of capital…”

Pretty good for 1894.

*Dionne Brand is a Canadian poet, novelist, and non-fiction.

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