A Quote by Pankaj Mishra
Happily, financial capitalism and free trade have not done away with national languages and literatures, as Marx rather too blithely hoped.
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To paraphrase Karl Marx, the great Karl Marx, a specter is haunting the streets of Copenhagen...Capitalism is the specter, almost nobody wants to mention it...Socialism, the other specter Karl Marx spoke about, which walks here too, rather it is like a counter-specter. Socialism, this is the direction, this is the path to save the planet, I don't have the least doubt. Capitalism is the road to hell, to the destruction of the world.
Marx saw that capitalism is a wasteful, irrational system, a system which controls us when we should be controlling it. That insight is still valid; but we can now see that the construction of a free and equal society is a more difficult task than Marx realized.
There is a phrase in trade theory; it's called "kicking away the ladder." First you violate the rules - the market rules - and then by the time you succeed in developing, you kick away the ladders so others can't do it too, and you preach about "free trade."
There's a sense in which Marx does contribute to the fund of human knowledge, and we can no more dismiss him than we can [George] Hegel or [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau or [Baruch] Spinoza or [Charles] Darwin; you don't have to be a Darwinian to appreciate Darwin's views, and I don't have to be a Marxist to appreciate what is valid in a number of [Karl] Marx's writings-and Marx would call that a form of simple commodity production rather than capitalism.
The free enterprise concept inherent in the economic model of capitalism should mean common people, or lower and middle class wage-earners, have greater potential to rise up and gain financial independence. In reality, however, free enterprise all too often leads to an almost total lack of government regulation that in turn allows the global elite to run amuck in Gordon Gecko-style financial coups.
Free trade is the serial killer of American manufacturing and the Trojan Horse of world government. It is the primrose path to the loss of economic independence and national sovereignty. Free trade is a bright, shining lie.
But suppose, for the sake of argument, free competition, without any sort of monopoly, would develop capitalism trade more rapidly. Is it not a fact that the more rapidly trade and capitalism develop, the greater is the concentration of production and capital which gives rise to monopoly?
It is not uncommon to suppose that the free exchange of property in markets and capitalism are one and the same. They are not. While capitalism operates through the free market, free markets don't require capitalism.
We do not have free market capitalism in America; we have crony capitalism. There is a huge difference between free market capitalism that democratizes a country and makes us more efficient and prosperous and corporate crony capitalism.
I would ask: Given the nature of free-market capitalism - where the rule is to rise to the top at all costs - is it possible to have a financial industry hero? And by the way, this is not a pop-culture trend we're talking about. There aren't many financial heroes in literature, theater or cinema.
The history of capitalism has been so totally re-written that many people in the rich world do not perceive the historical double standards involved in recommending free trade and free market to developing countries.
The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy. Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date.
People think what's in the US today is capitalism. It's not even close to capitalism. Capitalism doesn't have a central bank, capitalism doesn't have taxes, it doesn't have regulations; capitalism is just voluntary transactions. What they have in the US today I call crapitalism. But it's sad that so many people are confused and they think, 'Oh that's free markets in the US', when it's one of the least free market countries on earth.
I'm not against free trade but I'm against free trade deals that are negotiated badly, that actually compromise jobs, manufacturing jobs, compromise the national interest.
For over a century, popular struggles in the democracies have used the nation-state to temper raw capitalism. The power of voters has offset the power of capital. But as national barriers have come down in the name of freer commerce, so has the capacity of governments to manage capitalism in a broad public interest. So the real issue is not "trade" but democratic governance.
I love free trade. I love the concept of free trade. Everything about it is good. I went to the Wharton School of Finance. They say, Let's go free trade.
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