Modern world is rattled by crises: financial, political ones and then Fukushima. Well-known French sociologist Denis Duclos has published an article in the Le Monde Diplomatique, trying to find the tie between them. According to him, all three crises are the brainchildren of the global capitalist system.
Modern world is rattled by crises: financial, political ones and then Fukushima. Well-known French sociologist Denis Duclos has published an article in the Le Monde Diplomatique, trying to find the tie between them. According to him, all three crises are the brainchildren of the global capitalist system.
“Authority, exposed with its own crises”
That’s the name that French scientist gave to his article. The very attempt to seek for the reasons, unifying three of the most worrisome trends in the contemporary world, is surely worth respect. Hardly anyone managed to see certain patterns over the single events in the stormy sea of shocks, which the objective reality surrounding us, is subjected to. That’s the question that Duclos raises:
“The world is rattled by three crises. They can’t be reduced to three events we’ve seen on-screen: financial panic in the end of 2008, nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima that started on the 11th of March, 2011 and the Arab revolutions that started on the 14th of January, 2011. It seems barely possible comparing these events, which happened to different spheres of human life. The first crisis has seemingly burst out in a virtual sphere, having made trillions of dollars disappear from the bank accounts. The second one was caused by a major accident at nuclear power plant that supplied Japan with energy. The third one was caused by the mass people’s rebellions against the military-police regimes. Actually, what do two catastrophes — one resulted from the ‘triumph of greed’ and another from the unpredictable natural disaster — and a mass people’s movement, dubbed ‘The spring of Nations’ have in common?”
That’s how French philosopher answers this question:
“These, seemingly different phenomena have one thing in common — they challenge the global capitalist system. They will surely result in a global chaos; they may also cause such course of affairs that will liberate us and, as Marxists used to say, become ‘the midwife of history[1]’. Common feature of these crises is the fact that they are weakening the three main pillars of the system:
— its energetics basis;
— the mean of directing human labor resources through the use of money;
— the need for political stability, especially beside the liberal centers;
In each of these spheres crises embody the very same depravity that creates the intolerable technological threats, financial risk and the uncontrollable and unbearable authoritarian restrictions. Crises expose the smooth lifestyle, allowing the supreme mechanism of production capacity maximization to survive through the control and merciless exploitation of both man and nature. Primacy of finances over economics subjects the human activity to the logic of productivity“.
Three components of a crisis
Having adopted these Duclos’ statement as the initial premises, let’s try to analyze each of the “system pillars” first from the standpoint of their objective existence and then — the validity of unification of such different and seemingly incompatible things together.
1. Energetics
I think that the thesis about energetics being one of today’s pillars of capitalist industrial system goes without a discussion. Duclos’ reasoning regarding the technological threats, which he considers an inevitable evil, inherent to the global economic system, is less persuasive. Existence of modern industry without energetic resources is unthinkable. The issue of risk, hidden within the economic sector, is more real, without doubt. This is not just the nuclear energetics that destroyed the Japanese economy, but also the oil and gas industries. In theory, it would have been much better not to build nuclear power plant and not to produce either oil or gas, leaving the nature intact. Oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico may not be as great ecological disaster as the Fukushima accident, but it is also a sufficient threat to the ecology. European left-wing intellectuals are generally inclined to the “green” sentiments, but (alas!) today there’ no viable alternative to the existing energetic system. Recycled energy sources (wind, solar energy, tidal energy etc.) surely win over everyone’s hearts with their eco-friendliness, but at the current level of technological development they can hardly be treated as a substitute of the hydrocarbons and nuclear energetics. The only conclusion we may draw from the logical schemes of the French scientist is the need to minimize the damage to ecology and keep the safety at maximum. It’s necessary to change the conventional approaches to the nuclear energetics, building up the safety measures and reinforce the control over methods of producing raw hydrocarbons in order to prevent the possible eco-disasters. There’s no other solution, because we can hardly imagine our planet without the energy resources of natural hydrocarbon and artificial nuclear origin. Without them the humanity is destined to live the miserable life and refuse all the fruits of technological revolution of the 20th century, if not to death.
2. Virtual finances
“Virtual economy is not as much an aberration, as the field for maneuvers for the globalized authorities, thus, getting an opportunity to move plants along with laborers, create the emerging economies, factory empires and office continents, countering their productivity to the whipped consumption. In other words, the goal of shifting the center of economic weight towards its financial component is the creation of extraordinarily costly framework of the global economy. Its crisis, revealing itself in the blown bubbles of bankruptcies, discredits the general way of management over the creative role of people in this system”.
We may barely disagree with this thesis. The much-talked-about “invisible hand of market” is unable to balance the ratio of actual production and financial tools, whose initial intention was to maintain the economic relations between the manufacturers of goods and services, changed beyond recognition in the end of the 20th century and conditioned their primacy over the situation, they were intended to maintain. Bankruptcy bubbles of the American estate market, which burst out in 2008, are the results of the reign of derivatives — derivative financial tools — over the global financial system. Although, they’ve made the turnover of the non-exchange markets for more than a hundred years, they only started to strive towards their today’s status on the 26th of April, 1973, when the Chicago option exchange started to trade them. Having become an important investment tool and the hedge instrument, derivatives disastrously imbalanced the financial market. Due to various estimates, in 2008 aggregate value of all derivative financial tools, circulating at the global exchanges, exceeded the total capitalization of all the companies in the world 10 to 50 times. That’s exactly what Duclos writes about:
“Financial system took the advantage of the fact that liberal states treated it like a golden egg, using it to profiteer on the national debts, meddle with the loan offers and forcing the debtors to make deals, which either brought huge returns or attracted them into the invisible traps. Analogy between the financial crisis and the nuclear one becomes all the more obvious if we take the government impotence in front of the problems to be solved, into consideration. At Fukushima reactor rods were poured with water to cool them down, while the banks were poured with money in order to prevent the circumstances of the burst speculative bubbles”.
Pretty analogy between the nuclear catastrophe and banking crisis is quite outward still and hardly reflects the true nature of these phenomena. Here Duclos apparently traded the content for a good metaphor. In fact, the financial system truly lacks the overhaul, restoring it to the initial values of market economy and leaving its unnatural today’s state behind — when the tool becomes more important than the goal it was designed for.
3. Role of democracy in a global capitalist system
If not for the strangling of political freedoms in the countries that surround the market democracies, where allegedly law and justice prevail, millions of people would have had an unbearable urge for the labor outlets, remote to their place of residence, while the public and religious conflicts would have been postponed sine die[2] by the very possibility of a quiet trade globalization. Democrats themselves viewed the euphemistically dubbed “moderate” countries as merely a defensive bank, protecting them from the global conflict, which the Middle-Eastern powder keg is threatening them with. That’s why the demands of the revolted nations caused great anxiety, poorly disguised with an expectant stance” — Dennis Duclos writes.
It seems that we may hardly argue with that. From the standpoint of left-wing intellectuals (like our respected French friend) everything looks just like that. Yet, such approach is defective due to an idealistic concept of freedom in its classic meaning. Which countries Duclos keeps in mind, while naming them “the defensive bank” of the market democracies protecting them from the “Middle-Eastern powder keg”? The following quote makes it clear:
“…Arab princes crack down upon Bahraini demonstration together, Maghreb military cartels secretly support Colonel Gaddafi and all this works flawlessly — at that, the Western mistrust towards the Arab youth makes its contribution, too”.
Not a single sane person may sympathize the joint crack downs of Saudi Arabia and the UAE against the protests of the Shiite majority this spring in Manama; Colonel Gaddafi is not an exemplary democratic ruler either. But for some reason triumphed Arab revolutions incline towards the radical Islam with its charms like the Shariah courts, instead of the tolerant democracy we all know and love, the one that respects human rights and secures the equity of its citizens in every sphere: political, social and cultural. We may play idealists of course and call to bring the authoritarian regimes of Arab princes and other “revolutionary leaders” down, but even American neo-cons started to ponder over the consequences of demotion of authoritarian Arab rulers, who at least managed to keep the radically minded Islamic fundamentalists in check. Hasn’t Monsieur Duclos got enough of rebellious youth in Paris? Or are the police cordons around the 16th district[3] (known as the “ambassador’s district”), where his National Research Center is situated, so strong that the waves of the street riots fade away, before rolling towards this quiet place?
4. What are we left with?
Completely sharing the opinion of a French scientist regarding the authoritarian regimes, which are famous for “…prisons, overstuffed with prisoners of conscience, nepotism and greed of its political classes”, and agreeing with his estimate of dictatorship establishments, which “are unable to grasp the idea that their palaces are traps until it’s too late and that the streets (which they despise) will annihilate their privileges and that the assets, which they prudently hidden abroad may be suspended”, we’d still like to keep a sober pragmatic approach to the Arab revolutions, whose consequences may threaten the world as we know it — the world based on the Christian moral values (regardless of our attitude to religion).
Dennis Duclos believes the expectation of “three liberations” a response to the three “intertwined” crises, exposing the primacy of money, technology and power:
— human labor,
— nature, which cannot be predatorily exploited anymore,
— free participation in the political life of a “planetary society” instead of the rule of military-police regimes and xenophobic regression, which becoming all the more perceptible in the West — the assumed cradle of liberalism.
Such is the position of French intellectual in the debate over the failed European multi-cultural policy, apparent ecological problems of our planet and the reasons of the “banking greed” crisis. We give the due credit to the analytical gift of the French scientist, who attempted to bring such different socially-economic and ecological phenomena in a united model and respect his point of view, allowing us to proceed with a deeper analysis of the sophisticated picture of human society. Still we cannot agree with some of his thoughts. However, as we know from our historical experience, identity of views is barely productive in science (especially the public science).
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