From an interview with Jerry Mander, a noted critic of globalization:
“London: Some people feel that now that communism has collapsed, free-market capitalism may be next. After all, the economy can’t continue to grow forever — at some point, an exponential curve has to either level off or crash.
Mander: I think that if I say “Yes, we have to rethink capitalism,” then it gets reduced to, “Oh, he’s anti-capitalist.” It’s not capitalism in particular that has to be rethought, it’s the whole economic structure. The global economy is not capitalism. I have a master’s degree in economics, and I know this is not capitalism. What we have now is a centrally controlled economy. The only capitalism that takes place is among the people who have no part in the real benefits of the system — you know, t he people at the lower rungs have some capitalism going with small stores and so on. But, basically, the great part of the system doesn’t function in a capitalist manner. It’s not a socialist manner either. It’s some kind of hodge-podge of connections that have been put together for greasing the skids of advanced development and growth and corporate benefit.
Free trade? Free market? We don’t have either of those either. We have some kind of combination. What we have is a corporate take-over of the rules and a lot of corporate authority.
London: Corporatism?
Mander: Yes, a corporate economy — an economy that is good for corporations. It’s not capitalism exactly, and it’s not socialism exactly, and it’s not anarchy either. It’s a different of system of organization in which corporations exercise the control and reap the benefits…”
— Excerpted from the Perils of Globalization.
Mander is of course correct, but the world isn’t quite as static (yet) as he seems to indicate. Corporations still rise and fall and new ones arise to replace them. The same thing is true of private fortunes. The basic problem is that Corporations figured out long ago that the returns from an investment in government are nearly always higher than risk in open markets. However besides resulting in the corruption of government, it creates Corporations that are less competitive, because they don’t have to be. This was demonstrated well back in the 19th century in comparing Railroad firms that grew through land grants versus those that used their own funds.
So, with Corporate fascism, we get interlocking board directorates, a revolving door between industry and the bureaucracy and the tendency of the normal ebbs and flows of markets to be exaggerated, with an inexorable tendency towards absolutism. It’s all happened before, as any reader of Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire is only too familiar with…
Interesting.
I was looking at land speculation in the 18th century (to understand what happened recently with some historical perspective) and it looked like government was involved there as well – in subsidizing settlements in the west, in the case of speculation in frontier land.
Re – Gibbon. Are we condemned to always have empires? The European state system worked to check the worst of them, didn’t it?
No hope of a multi-polar world again?
“Gibbon. Are we condemned to always have empires? The European state system worked to check the worst of them, didn’t it?”
a) The Roman Empire may have been acquired by force of arms but it was held together because people benefitted from it; they wanted to be a part of it. Nor was it destroyed by barbarian hordes but rather from within; the barbarians were welcomed as liberators.
b) I dont understand your comment about European States. European empires were the cause of world wars, partly due to competition among them and partly due to late comers such as Japan who both wanted to emulate them and were also exluded from the club in trade manners. I don’t believe Imperialism is dead either but simply in remission, although I doubt the Euros will be players when it re-emerges.
Yes – there were skirmishes all around the world over markets (Seven Years War etc. in Asia and the Americas) – while Spain, Holland, France and Britain variously became top dog…but I mean, the balance of power did prevent empire taking hold on the continent itself for any length of time, right?
The reason the Asians ended up being colonized was because they fell back in technology.
I’m saying a relative balance in technology among a number of power centers would prevent one dominant empire.
Maybe the problem is not empire so much as intervention.. I mean, a nice lazy empire which rarely intervened would be vastly preferable to an activist young kingdom always fighting wars of choice.
The Moghul empire worked liked that in the Indian ocean trade…it tended to be hands off…
and so fairly peaceful trade flourished just before the entry of the Europeans into that area of the world…if I recall right.
Lila, My knowledge of oriental history is sadly lacking, although I have read quite a bit about twentieth century history of China and Japan, an interest largely due to all of my relatives, mostly uncles, that served in the Pacific War.
I don’t believe the balance of power in Europe could have been maintained without foreign intervention. But for Wilson’s sending Pershing’s expeditionary force into France, I’m certain Germany would have prevailed, not that such an event would have been a bad thing, in fact I believe with little doubt the world would have been a better place had the Great War produced that outcome. The only doubt comes from not knowing how Imperial Germany as a continental power would have behaved in the ensuing decades.
Yes…in the case of the 20th century – I wouldn’t say it was unsuccessful prior to that.
I mean 20-30 years of relative peace is still an achievement.
Corporations generally are just manifestations of the banks; they come and go in their season like the various crops that a farmer plants and harvests when they have matured.
Given an adequate definition of “government” (to wit: A “government” is one or more persons who claim natural resources, are willing and able to defend their claim on those resources, and make and enforce decisions regarding the allocation of those resources; in other words, he, she, or they “govern” their property.), the only way to get back to a multi-polar world is for the US to lose (or give up) the ability to defend its claim (which it maintains by having the ability to destroy any part of the planet at any time)on the world’s resources. I see no reason why it would want to, and under a better economic system, we might be even better off “all on the same page”.
Well, empires decline on their own. But it wouldn’t be an improvement to get, say, a Chinese empire in place of the American. Possibly, we’re at a point, when technology will give us a different option..
I think non one has mentioned yet that a certain group of people want to keep the world order as it is, they have power and influence. They like rigid hierarchical structures which keeps them at the top.
Chiefly new finance techniques allowed the Europeans to expand, namely fractional reserve banking, universal taxation and conscription into the military largely after the French Revolution.
The firm or corporation and its legal structure is largely ‘a fiction’, its accounts are highly complex (who own what, who is owed what, who lent how much etc.), therefore corporations may go out of business, new ones may appear, they may merge, some rich people may get poorer, but underneath all this surface, I think the people who own all the firms are a small class of financiers.
An Example:
The Washington Times did have it on their pages now the lin is dead.
Arrested oil tycoon passed shares to banker
LONDON (Agence France-Presse) — Control of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s shares in the Russian oil giant Yukos have passed to renowned banker Jacob Rothschild, under a deal they concluded prior to Mr. Khodorkovsky’s arrest, the Sunday Times reported.
Voting rights to the shares passed to Mr. Rothschild, 67, under a “previously unknown arrangement” designed to take effect in the event that Mr. Khodorkovsky could no longer “act as a beneficiary” of the shares, it said.
Mr. Khodorkovsky, 40, whom Russian authorities arrested at gunpoint and jailed pending further investigation last week, was said by the Sunday Times to have made the arrangement with Mr. Rothschild when he realized he was facing arrest.
Mr. Rothschild now controls the voting rights on a stake in Yukos worth almost $13.5 billion, the newspaper said in a dispatch from Moscow.
Mr. Khodorkovsky owns 4 percent of Yukos directly and 22 percent through a trust of which he is the sole beneficiary, according to Russian analysts.
From the figures reported in the Sunday Times, it appeared Mr. Rothschild had received control of all Mr. Khodorkovsky’s shares.
The two have known each other for years “through their mutual love of the arts” and their positions as directors of the Open Russia Foundation, Yukos’ philanthropic branch, it said.
Russian authorities Thursday froze billions of dollars of shares held by Mr. Khodorkovsky and his top lieutenants in Yukos — throwing control of the country’s largest oil company into limbo and causing frenzied selling on financial markets.
Russian prosecutors said owners of the shares are still entitled to dividends and retain voting rights, but can no longer sell their stakes.
They said the freeze was necessary as collateral for the $1 billion that Mr. Khodorkovsky and his associates are accused of misappropriating during the 1990s.
Mr. Rothschild is the British head of Europe’s wealthy and influential Rothschild family, and runs his own investment empire.
http://washingtontimes.com/world/20031102-111400-3720r.htm
I’d like to post that…but the link is broken
…here’s the piece on the Times:
A SENIOR MEMBER of the Rothschild banking family has emerged as the key figure in the battle for control of Yukos, the Russian oil giant.
The Sunday Times can identify Lord (Jacob) Rothschild as the secret holder of the large stake in Yukos that was previously controlled by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the oil company’s chairman.
Khodorkovsky, reputed to be Russia’s richest man, was last week arrested by Russian prosecutors on charges of fraud and tax evasion. His imprisonment has triggered a trustee agreement he put in place with Rothschild a few months ago.
Rothschild, 67, now controls the voting rights on a stake in Yukos worth almost £8 billion. This places him at the centre of a dispute with the Russian state. It is widely believed that the charges being brought against Khodorkovsky are a response to his political ambitions to succeed Vladimir Putin as Russia’s president.
Lila
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/article1101531.ece