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Where are the alt voices?
October 11th, 2008 (04:50 pm)
Over the past weeks as the financial services industry has unravelled and politicians of most mainstream ilks have rushed to reassure the bloatocrats that they will be able to get back to exercising their accustomed power while illegal immigrants clean their offices, I have been listening for articulate alternative voices, for any suggestion that, as the current system wobbles, there are clear options to simply re-establishing confidence in the powers that were and carrying on as before spending money we don’t have on things we don’t need.
As Schnews puts it, "Bigger monopolies and mergers are concentrating power into fewer hands" but, the opposition is not there. As I have been suggesting recently to my beleaguered partner, "...anti-capitalist direct action, [has] declined in the west in recent years; with more energy being put into the war on Iraq and the recent resurgence of eco-action around oil use and climate change." As neoliberalism totters, where are the people to give it the push we need?
I have been looking around the web and finding some interesting social networking technology developments from Rise Up (crabgrass) and the World Social Forum (OpenFSM), but no clear calls for an alternative politics. Oliver James on the Today Programme this morning said:
We need more than more of the same, and we need it now. We cannot continue to shore up the chimera economy of continuous growth and the apparatus of the value extracting, unregulated finance industry.
But as ever, his programme for action is left to others:
Why, indeed. So where is the political campaign addressing these fundamental issues?
As Schnews puts it, "Bigger monopolies and mergers are concentrating power into fewer hands" but, the opposition is not there. As I have been suggesting recently to my beleaguered partner, "...anti-capitalist direct action, [has] declined in the west in recent years; with more energy being put into the war on Iraq and the recent resurgence of eco-action around oil use and climate change." As neoliberalism totters, where are the people to give it the push we need?
I have been looking around the web and finding some interesting social networking technology developments from Rise Up (crabgrass) and the World Social Forum (OpenFSM), but no clear calls for an alternative politics. Oliver James on the Today Programme this morning said:
In only three weeks neoliberal, Blatcherite [Blair/Thatcher], selfish capitalism has been completely discredited in its own terms: proven conclusively not to work... The claim that private enterprise is good, public service incompetent can never again be made with a straight face.
We need more than more of the same, and we need it now. We cannot continue to shore up the chimera economy of continuous growth and the apparatus of the value extracting, unregulated finance industry.
Chomsky continues to point out what is wrong, in a good an analysis of the current collapse (Anti-democratic nature of US capitalism is being exposed):
predictably, the narrow sectors that reaped enormous profits from liberalisation are calling for massive state intervention to rescue collapsing financial institutions. Such interventionism is a regular feature of state capitalism, though the scale today is unusual.
But as ever, his programme for action is left to others:
In a functioning democratic society, a political campaign would address such fundamental issues, looking into root causes and cures, and proposing the means by which people suffering the consequences can take effective control.
Monbiot puts the bail out in the wider context of government support for powerful industry lobbies (Congress confronts its contradictions) and asks, " ... why the hell should we be supporting them?"Why, indeed. So where is the political campaign addressing these fundamental issues?
