Skip to main content

Anti-Capitalism, Pro-What?


The anti-capitalists have been occupying London in their Fawkes-off masks, railing against banking and "usury", in sympathy with other such gatherings around the world - a glocalist rallying of the usual anarchists, left-leaners, and rabble-rousers.  So far so good, you might say - except what are they protesting against, precisely?  The global financial system?  Clearly, the GFS has problems.  We are seeing that now, with the turbulent, sometimes rather faltering, markets, and Western economies of Europe and America.  But - and this I think is key: what should we replace it with?  Sudden removal of the GFS, like oxygen for a patient, would kill us all.  The utter chaos of a world without banking, or commerce, or indeed, money, is almost unthinkable.  It is true that we may need to gradually move to a less-growth-intensive model, or a feudal-agrarian model, or an anarcho-syndicalist one; whatever.  It has to be gradual, and it has to be well-founded and argued for.  I don't think Communism has proved itself capable of filling the void, as even China and Russia have recognised.  Mixed economy, like Sweden, or Canada, perhaps.  It is impressive, and democratic, and no doubt satisfying, to show contempt for the fat cats of Wall Street and the City, but after the chants and the banners fade, what will keep the world's 7+ billion people working, exchanging goods and services, and managing to share out scarce resources?  Some form of economy.  Time to build it then.

Comments

Andrew Shields said…
Well, from an American perspective (or the perspective of an American living in Switzerland, at least), what's needed is the reintroduction of the regulation of banking and finance that largely stabilized capitalism from the New Deal until the Reagan-Thatcher wave of deregulation. The latter was presented as an anti-ideological, common-sense move against the ideologies of the New Deal, when in fact, it was the deregulation itself that was "ideological" in the negative sense (i.e., based on ideas with no connection to reality).
Mon Oct 17, 08:47:00 am 2011
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A  poem for my mother, July 15 When she was dying And I was in a different country I dreamt I was there with her Flying over the ocean very quickly, And arriving in the room like a dream And I was a dream, but the meaning was more Than a dream has – it was a moving over time And land, over water, to get love across Fast enough, to be there, before she died, To lean over the small, huddled figure, In the dark, and without bothering her Even with apologies, and be a kiss in the air, A dream of a kiss, or even less, the thought of one, And when I woke, none of this had happened, She was still far distant, and we had not spoken.
Post a Comment
Read more

Poetry vs. Literature

Poetry is, of course, a part of literature. But, increasingly, over the 20th century, it has become marginalised - and, famously, has less of an audience than "before". I think that, when one considers the sort of criticism levelled against Seamus Heaney and "mainstream poetry", by poet-critics like Jeffrey Side , one ought to see the wider context for poetry in the "Anglo-Saxon" world. This phrase was used by one of the UK's leading literary cultural figures, in a private conversation recently, when they spoke eloquently about the supremacy of "Anglo-Saxon novels" and their impressive command of narrative. My heart sank as I listened, for what became clear to me, in a flash, is that nothing has changed since Victorian England (for some in the literary establishment). Britain (now allied to America) and the English language with its marvellous fiction machine, still rule the waves. I personally find this an uncomfortable position - but when ...
15 comments
Read more

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
3 comments
Read more