alternet | Who writes the laws, in a society dominated by finance capital,
neoliberal economics and the ideology of free trade and globalization?
In a system, to quote the author I alluded to earlier, “under which the
market is the regulator of social production,” including the production
of culture and thought? (Yes, that would be V.I. Lenin, of October
Revolution fame.) Whose interests are those laws meant to protect? Does
the world of Mossack Fonseca and its ilk, where morphing, shifting
corporate entities shepherd amazingly large sums of money in secret from
one jurisdiction to another, sound like the operation of a free and
fair market society where everyone who works hard or has talent has an
equal chance to become Donald Trump or Kim Kardashian? Or does it sound
like a rigged system designed to delude the powerless and make them
accomplices in their own impoverishment, while ensuring the indefinite
oligarchic rule of the rich and powerful?
One of Lenin’s main points, in the essay “What Is to Be Done?,” was
that the market system produces its own rules, its own ideology and its
own self-justifying structure of thought. Those things are enforced
upon the entire society, and you can’t do anything to fight the system
until you get outside that ideological structure. One does not have to
agree with Lenin’s concrete solutions (which I am not inclined to
defend) to see that the problem is still with us. It may be the secret
narrative behind the Democratic primary campaign between Bernie Sanders
and Hillary Clinton, for instance: While they are nominally not far
apart on many issues, Clinton is a member of the Mossack Fonseca-level
social stratum, and represents its interests. Whatever his flaws as a
candidate may be, Sanders isn’t and doesn’t.
