Why the current crisis has no solution
For at least thirty years, most Western countries - Italy least of all, because capitals shortage has long been a national problem - have effectively been transferring the power to decide and direct public policy to what are commonly called "the markets". These "markets" have grown enormously in capitalization and in autonomy. Even the authorities that controlled them - the Stock Exchanges of New York, London, Frankfurt, etc - have been largely privatized and frequently been objects of mutual takeover efforts. Whether or not these were successful, they were the public evidence that the public power - the state - did not wish to have any role of control or even of supervision over these boiling, rabid oceans of ill-controlled money.
The reason Greek philosophers, and their successors until the Enlightenment and beyond, treated democracy with nervousness if not with contempt is that they dreaded mob rule. Ancient democracy, such as prevailed in Athens, was based on the assembly of free citizens, and was constantly in danger - unless managed by a strong and respected politician such as Pericles - of reverting to mob rule. And in mob rule, the philosophers dreaded not so much the element we think of most easily - the unleashed violence of the mob, street murders in revolutionary Paris or lynchings in the old South - but its fecklessness, its inability to settle on any goal and achieve it, its being, politically speaking, quicksand. Mob rule means the lack of any sense of public direction, of any boldness or moral authority, and of any ability to say yes or no.
Well, the unrestricted power of the markets is mob rule, and mob rule with a terrible refinement - it is ultimately not human. A mob made of human beings is at least susceptible to human influences; classical accounts are full of crazed mobs brought to their senses by some respected individual, an Aristides or a Memenius. And that is not only a matter of ancient legends: we have seen, in our lifetimes, an instance of the most terrible of all mobs - an armed mob of soldiers - stopped in their track by the moral authority of three people. But the current "markets" are a cyber-mob, trained to mindlessly follow the buy or sell orders automatically issued by their number-crunching machines - like the damned sheeple in Dante, who, having never shown any personality of their own at all, were condemned to pursue for all eternity a meaningless rotting rag instead of a flag.
Now we have come to the last pinch of the vise. Having devoured all sense of public authority, having insulated themselves against any kind of control, having, indeed, grown by means that no legitimate authority would tolerate - one estimate claimed that as much as 20% of the capital swilling around the world's market was of illegal origin; as good a reason as any to legalize the drugs trade - the markets now discovered that without the voice of authority, the titles and deeds and capitals they trade are worth nothing. And so they yelp for the very authorities whose authority they have devoured to save them from the logic of their machines, hammering their own stocks with mechanical persistence; at the same time as they reject each successive attempt by the public authorities to impose some control as inadequate and not credible.
Ultimately, this is connected in various ways with the disastrous series of decisions that have entrenched debt at the centre of modern economies and privatized everything that was not nailed down and plenty of things that were. To tease out the various ways in which these things are interdependent would take more time than I have right now, but I may return to the subject.
The reason Greek philosophers, and their successors until the Enlightenment and beyond, treated democracy with nervousness if not with contempt is that they dreaded mob rule. Ancient democracy, such as prevailed in Athens, was based on the assembly of free citizens, and was constantly in danger - unless managed by a strong and respected politician such as Pericles - of reverting to mob rule. And in mob rule, the philosophers dreaded not so much the element we think of most easily - the unleashed violence of the mob, street murders in revolutionary Paris or lynchings in the old South - but its fecklessness, its inability to settle on any goal and achieve it, its being, politically speaking, quicksand. Mob rule means the lack of any sense of public direction, of any boldness or moral authority, and of any ability to say yes or no.
Well, the unrestricted power of the markets is mob rule, and mob rule with a terrible refinement - it is ultimately not human. A mob made of human beings is at least susceptible to human influences; classical accounts are full of crazed mobs brought to their senses by some respected individual, an Aristides or a Memenius. And that is not only a matter of ancient legends: we have seen, in our lifetimes, an instance of the most terrible of all mobs - an armed mob of soldiers - stopped in their track by the moral authority of three people. But the current "markets" are a cyber-mob, trained to mindlessly follow the buy or sell orders automatically issued by their number-crunching machines - like the damned sheeple in Dante, who, having never shown any personality of their own at all, were condemned to pursue for all eternity a meaningless rotting rag instead of a flag.
Now we have come to the last pinch of the vise. Having devoured all sense of public authority, having insulated themselves against any kind of control, having, indeed, grown by means that no legitimate authority would tolerate - one estimate claimed that as much as 20% of the capital swilling around the world's market was of illegal origin; as good a reason as any to legalize the drugs trade - the markets now discovered that without the voice of authority, the titles and deeds and capitals they trade are worth nothing. And so they yelp for the very authorities whose authority they have devoured to save them from the logic of their machines, hammering their own stocks with mechanical persistence; at the same time as they reject each successive attempt by the public authorities to impose some control as inadequate and not credible.
Ultimately, this is connected in various ways with the disastrous series of decisions that have entrenched debt at the centre of modern economies and privatized everything that was not nailed down and plenty of things that were. To tease out the various ways in which these things are interdependent would take more time than I have right now, but I may return to the subject.