This is from COMER. They put out some interesting stuff, at least to me no
expert on monetary matters!
Cheers, Ken Hanly
The Civil Commons
Globalisation: The Doctrine of Inevitable Revolution in Reverse
by John McMurtry
The slogan "Marxism is dead" was proclaimed almost immediately on the
fall
of the Soviet Union in 1991. Very soon after, a strange ideological
inversion occurred. In place of "the inevitable victory of the
proletariat"
which Marx had predicted almost 150 years earlier, there was the
"inevitable
process of globalisation" instead. The victory of the working classes of
the
world, according to scientific socialism, was inevitable because of
historically deepening contradictions between capitalist productive
forces
and relations, contradictions which would by dialectical necessity issue
in
socialism (or "the first stage of communism" as Marx put it).
This defining certitude of the greatest oppositional movement in the
history
of capitalism did not, as we know, turn out to be in accord with the
facts.
Much has been made of the failure of this "inevitable revolution." An
industry of post-modernism has arisen to attack Marx's meta-narrative of
necessity for violating the contingent, the plural and the free. But a
still
deeper irony of history has emerged which no-one in the post-modern
global
order has yet noticed.
The certitude of an inevitable world revolution has merely shifted
sides.
What was once abhorred by liberal theory as the metaphysic of "Marxist
economic determinism" has become instead the neo-liberal program of
"inevitable economic restructuring." What was formerly condemned as a
brutal
violation of people's freedom to decide how they live was now declared a
matter in which "there is no alternative." All societies on earth have
now
been issued one decree. "Society must adjust to the necessary changes of
globalisation, or perish."
As for the reversal of Marxist and market positions on the question of
knowing history in advance and the economic necessity of society-wide
shock
treatments and social re-engineerings, this astonishing transferral of
superpower identities has transpired in the dark regions of the Western
ruling-class psyche. Its psychopathological projection and
re-introjection
remains repressed today. But the irony is that no moral anchor was more
deep-seated before the fall of "the Marxist state" than repudiation of
such
"denials of free will" and of "moral choice." No doctrine was thought
more
objectionable by such cornerstone social ethicists as Karl Popper and
Isaiah
Berlin than one prescribing belief in whole societies' submission to
"the
external forces of historical necessity." The heroic story of Western
civilisation was finally triumphant, most believed, when such
scientistic
predestinations of world power had been defeated by the free world in
the
victory over Nazism, and the defeat of "the evil empire" of the USSR But
hardly had this last historic victory of global freedom been won than
memory
of the old enemy of historical inevitability dissolved unremarked into
thin
air.
The "global market revolution" has ever since been declared as an
overriding
destiny, determining the future as surely as the laws of nature make
objects
fall and heat rise. Few in this era dare to declare a contrary belief.
The
test is simply to look at any day's newspapers or television broadcast
to
see if this ultimate assumption is once overtly questioned by any
representative of the world's decision-making institutions or those who
comment on their policies. The ineluctable destiny of all societies on
earth
to compete for survival within this final global order -- no alternative
is
conceived possible -- has achieved a status beyond doctrinal dogma. It
has
become a regulating principle of public consciousness. So occupied with
its
demands are the mass media across cultures and continents, so
commandeered
by its funding regime have the academies and sciences of the world
become,
that one comes to believe that indeed this "new revolution of
shareholder
value" is inevitable. When Winston finally confesses in Orwell's 1948
novel
1984 that "at last he loved Big Brother," he sounded the tocsin of a
time to
come. One day soon, in under a half century, all would assume as their
home
of life what they had earlier set their soul against -- an order imposed
on
them by wheels of a higher, inexorable power whose finally defining
command
is that there is no alternative but to submit to it. More astoundingly,
all
human will would be urged to dedicate itself above all to serving its
demands.
When Margaret Thatcher made the slogan "There is no alternative" so
famous
that the acronym TINA has since become a transnational watchword of
recognition, the backbone of six centuries of British working class
struggle
first resisted as a battle for the future. But saturation conditioning
of
consciousness with no other public message permitted reproduction
eventually
overwhelms the mind. If the mass media's spaces are owned by those who
multiply their wealth from the "necessary economic restructuring," then
how
can opposing voices be communicated to the public as a whole?
In such circumstances of silencing, but with new conditions of social
insecurity lurking everywhere underneath, there are two general pathways
for
adapting disquieted publics to the "no alternative" rule. Both depend on
the
new final selectors for political survival and success -- the corporate
media and the financial markets. One course for maintaining the
no-alternative order is to finance official and unofficial armed
militias to
terrorize, torture and kill effective opponents -- as typically
US-directed
and narcotic-financed operations have done from Indonesia and Chile to
Guatemala and the former Yugoslavia. At the other pole of decision path,
which is confined to the most developed electorates, a leader of
"progressive" aspect can be selected to be presented to the public as
the
finder of "a new message." Here what is sold is a poll-validated image
of
reassurance which will appeal to increasingly insecure populations who
remain uncertain of the new rule within which they could be the next to
lose
out.
There are also various paths in between the poles of "no alternative" --
from dumb-down bullies who ram through the social re-engineering behind
the
orchestrated solidarity of attack-the-poor "populism" (as in Ontario
Canada), to back-pedalling social democrats redirected in office by
business
and media-created crises (as in Ontario in an earlier term of
government, or
in Germany later). What all have in common in the post-1991 era is rigid
maintenance of the no-alternative order.
Let us here consider Britain. To ensure that its inevitably restructured
economy continued down the same path after Maggie Thatcher and her
lacklustre Tory successor, a movement was selected from
long-out-of-office
Labour. It was called "the third way," a vague slogan recycled from the
days
of the Vietnam War. The "third way" was led by Tony Blair who could be
counted on to, precisely, not represent another way, but to hold to the
course of "no alternative" as a condition of achieving office. Before
being
trusted by business as the successor TINA regime, Blair had to make his
servitude to the new order perfectly clear to the primary selectors --
the
corporate mass media and the nation's London financial centre. This
route of
succession was predictable from the given circumstances if Blair's
leadership was to be counted on to sustain the still ongoing revolution.
Blair turned the Labour Party inside out to secure this trust. The
Murdoch
press in ongoing exchange favoured him with the mass media attention
required for public image sale. The London financial district silently
approved by not warning of a severe economic downturn or threatening
capital
flight if he were elected (the standard blocking tactics against a real
Labour government).
Evidence for the success of these arrangements is not hard to piece
together. Only favourable coverage of Blair -- unheard of for an actual
Labour leader -- came from the Murdoch press empire. No dire forecasts
or
even hints of economic instability came from London's financial
district.
The other side of the arrangement proceeded in pattern. Murdoch's giant
corporation was not pursued to pay tens of millions of British taxes
which
it continued to evade by financial location in offshore banks (again
unprecedentedly). Questions of the legality of Murdoch's growing
media-and-professional sport monopoly were at the same time not further
raised by the "New Labour" government.
More significantly, the London financial district got what it had been
unable to wrest from any past regime -- the "New Labour" government's
formal
and immediate relinquishment of all control over national interest rates
and
currency exchange values to the Bank of England, so that elected
government
control of the nation's main financial levers were now exclusively in
London
bankers' hands.
The public record testifies to all these facts, but only in the
fragments of
unnoted connections. To observe their pattern at work again, watch the
corporate media's lavish attention to the witless Stock Day in Canada,
and
the executioner President-in-waiting, Junior Bush.
John McMurtry is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph,
ON.
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Copyright © 2000 John McMurtry (COMER Publications, used by permission).
"Economic Reform" is the monthly journal of the Committee on Monetary
and
Economic Reform (COMER), a Canada-based publishing think-tank. Annual
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