Kieran Lawrence looks at autonomous weapons and the effect they could have on modern warfare
Continuing a series on world leaders, Miles Deverson takes a look at Angela Merkel
Ben Bland examines the fallout from the Iowa caucuses and looks forward to the New Hampshire primaries.
In the first of a series on world leaders, Miles Deverson takes a look at Nicholas Sarkozy
The Yorker politics team has invited various political societies to provide a fortnightly comment on current affairs. Next up is the University of York Green Party, with their first column.
On Wednesday, November 16 the NYPD broke up the Wall Street section of the global 'occupy' protests, the centrepiece of the movement.
Meanwhile protests in other cities are slowly dying down and the authorities are close to reaching a similar conclusion in London. The end is nigh for Occupy, yet global capitalism still stands, so surely it was a failure?
Yet such a statement suggests that the protests were distinctly 'anti-capitalist' and hence supportive of unpalatable doctrines like communism or Stalinism, and so the mainstream media and political establishment dismiss them as 'loons'.
The problem with such an assertion is simple; the occupy protests are not anti-capitalist at all, in fact they are pro capitalist, only they support a different form of capitalism to the 'neoliberal' definition so routinely shoved down our throats.
Instead, wide levels of public support for the demonstrations as well as general resentment towards financial greed suggests that ordinary people within the capitalist system are waking up to its labyrinth of lies and abuses. Such people do not want a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' or to 'smash the state', all they want is a re-configuration of the present system to end its corruptions and injustices.
Since the 1980s we have been sold 'free market' policies that would create a wealth that 'trickled down' for all. Not only has this failed to occur, but in many ways these policies have not created a free market at all. Instead they have linked politics and corporate power to the benefit of both.
Politicians and corporations have developed a monopoly on what defines 'capitalism' and the 'market' and so they have a monopoly on prosperity as well, hidden behind the façade of media manipulation and vacuous democracy.
Anglo-Saxon systems are so obsessed with acquisition. That is why we have the travesty of a law that companies must pursue profit above all else, leading to unsustainable and high risk operations. We only need look abroad, to successful mixed economies like Norway, or even in some respects, Germany, to see that this does not have to be the case.
The state can have a role in a prosperous capitalism, but only if we see growth as just one of an array of aims for our society to look toward. In fact, currently one of the fastest growing economies in Europe, Belgium at 0.7% of GDP, has no government with which to implement austerity measures. Cutting down the state even further will clearly only hurt the economy more.
Any questioning, it would seem, of the economic status quo, down to its finest minutiae, faces similar accusations. Measures such as the Tobin Tax, breaking up the banks, tougher stances on financial sector bonuses, and a slower pace to the cuts, are all denounced as 'unrealistic' or met with blunt replies like 'you wouldn't understand' and 'what is your alternative then?' It is implied that any opposition goes against the natural or necessary state of affairs.
Yet all of these have the support of several notable figures like the ground-breaking Cambridge economist Ha Joon Chang, and are only opposed by the money men, whose interest lies in the continuance of the present arrangements and who have betrayed our trust in the past.
By creating a social democratic state based around green investments in cutting edge technologies and an expansion of public transport, we can bring the opportunities of capitalism to everyone, not just the rich few, and can balance out the naturally unsustainable and exploitative aspects of it.
By separating out the economy, we could avoid risk taking, and create slow, and stable economic growth. By putting people before profit we could stop the reductive nature of the present arrangements. The sexualisation of children, the marketing of virtue, the mimicry of all human life, as mere economic units, figures on a spreadsheet. Put simply, we could learn again, that there is more to life than money.
An economy is determined by the aggregation of individuals that are involved in it. So let it be the 99% that defines what capitalism is, rather than the oligarchy of the 1%. It is time to end the occupation, not of the ordinary people protesting, but the occupation, nay annexation, of our societies, our governments, our everyday lives, by the interests and agendas of a rigged system.
The Greek root of the word economy, oikonomia, meant household management. So perhaps it is time to get our house in order and begin the discussion of alternatives.
You must log in to submit a comment.
