“Deprived of centralized banks and corporations, we’ll be forced to do things again. And in the process, we’ll find out that these institutions were not our benefactors at all. They were never meant to be. They were invented to mediate transactions between people, and extract the value that would have passed between us. Far from making commerce or industry more efficient, they served to turn the real world into a set of speculative assets, and real people into debtors.

The current financial crisis is the best opportunity we have had in a very long time for a bloodless revolution against the faceless fascism under which we have been living, unaware, for much too long. Let us seize the day….”

Douglas Rushkoff in Arthur Mag

Comment:

I won’t quibble about calling what we have fascism. I think that’s true in some ways.

But I’ll quibble about other things. The system didn’t turn people into debtors or the real world into speculative assets. The real world has always had a speculative angle to it.  When people hoard, buy in bulk, store, buy cheap and sell high, they are speculating. People have always speculated.  But it used to be that not everyone could speculate, because not everyone had access to cash or the savings needed for it. Or the knowledge and tools to do it. But now, the banks have sold everyone the possibility of risk-free speculation with other people’s money. They sold us on the notion that risk can be taken out of life. And we bought it.  That every loss can be made good.  That 1+1 can equal 3 or anything else, but that 1-1 can never be 0. That has nothing to do with business. It has to do with the desire for comfort, for being looked after and for having someone else do your thinking, your acting, your good deeds, your fighting, your spending and your saving for you.

That someone is the state.

And so I think this isn’t the end of the “machine” of statism at all. I think it’s just another stage – the death throes of  the overly imperial nationalist form, leading to another, more internationalist….