LA NATURALEZA ANTIDEMOCRATICA DEL CAPITALISMO EN EEUU, ESTÁ SIENDO EXPUESTAthumb/b/bf/Pyramid_of_Capitalist_System.png/484px-Pyramid_of_Capitalist_System.png
Por Noam Chomsky (*)
Por Noam Chomsky (*)
El desarrollo de una campaña presidencial norteamericana simultánea al desenlace de la crisis de los mercados financieros ofrece una de esas ocasiones en que los sistemas político y económico revelan vigorosamente su naturaleza.
Puede que la pasión por la campaña no sea una cosa universalmente compartida, pero casi todo el mundo puede percatarse de la ansiedad desatada por la ejecución hipotecaria de un millón de hogares, así como de la preocupación por los riesgos que corren los puestos de trabajo, los ahorros y la asistencia sanitaria.
Las propuestas iniciales de Bush para lidiar con la crisis apestaban a tal punto a totalitarismo, que no tardaron en ser modificadas. Bajo intensa presión de los lobbies, fueron reformuladas "para claro beneficio de las mayores instituciones del sistema… una forma de deshacerse de los activos sin necesidad de fracasar o casi", según describió el asunto James Rickards, quien negoció en su día, por parte del fondo de cobertura de derivados financieros Long Term Capital Managemen, su rescate federat en 1998, recordándonos ahora, de paso, que estamos pisando vía ya trillada. Los orígenes inmediatos del presente desplome están en el colapso de la burbuja inmobiliaria supervisada por el presidente de la Reserva Federal Alan Greenspan, quien sostuvo la cuitada economía de los años de Bush amalgamando el gasto en consumo fundado en deuda con la toma de préstamos del exterior. Pero las raíces son más profundas. En parte, se hallan en el triunfo de la liberalización financiera de los últimos 30 años, es decir, en las políticas consistentes en liberar a los mercados lo más posible de regulación estatal.
Las medidas tomadas a este respecto, como era predecible, incrementaron la frecuencia y la profundidad de los reveses económicos graves, y ahora estamos ante la amenaza de que se desencadene la peor crisis desde la Gran Depresión.
También resultaba predecible que los reducidos sectores que se hicieron con los enormes beneficios dimanantes de la liberalización llamarían a una intervención masiva del estado, a fin de rescatar a las instituciones financieras colapsadas.
Tal intervencionismo es un rasgo característico del capitalismo de estado, aunque la escala actual es inaudita. Un estudio de los investigadores en economía internacional Winfried Ruigrok y Rob van Tulder encontró hace 15 años que, al menos 20 compañías entre las 100 primeras en el ranquin de la revista Fortune, no habrían sobrevivido si no hubieran sido salvadas por sus respectivos gobiernos, y que muchas, entre las 80 restantes, obtuvieron substanciales ganancias por la vía de pedir a los gobiernos que "socializaran sus pérdidas", como hoy en el rescate financiado por el sufrido contribuyente. Tal intervención pública "ha sido la regla, más que la excepción, en los dos últimos siglos", concluían.
En una sociedad democrática que funcionara, una campaña política tendría que abordar estos asuntos fundamentales, mirar a la raíz de las causas y de los remedios, y proponer los medios a través de los cuales el pueblo que sufre las consecuencias pudiera llegar a ejercer un control efectivo.
El mercado financiero "deprecia el riesgo" y es "sistemáticamente ineficiente", como escribieron hace ya una década los economistas John Eatwell y Lance Taylor, alertando de los peligros gravísimos que entrañaba la liberalización financiera y mostrando los costes en que, por su causa, se había ya incurrido. Además, propusieron soluciones que, huelga decirlo, fueron ignoradas. Un factor de peso es la incapacidad para calcular los costes que recaen sobre quienes no participan en las transacciones. Esas "externalidades" pueden ser enormes. La ignorancia del riesgo sistémico lleva a una aceptación de riesgos mayor de la que se daría en una economía eficiente, y eso incluso adoptando los criterios más estrictos.
La tarea de las instituciones financieras es arriesgarse y, si están bien gestionadas, asegurar que las pérdidas potenciales en que ellas mismas puedan incurrir quedarán cubiertas. El énfasis hay que ponerlo en "ellas mismas". Bajo las normas del capitalismo de estado, no es asunto suyo tomar en cuenta los costes que para otros puedan tener –las "externalidades" de una supervivencia decente— unas prácticas que lleven, como suelen, a crisis financieras.
La liberalización financiera tiene efectos mucho más allá de la economía. Hace bastante tiempo que se comprendió que era un arma poderosa contra la democracia. El movimiento libre de los capitales crea lo que algunos han llamado un "parlamento virtual" de inversores y prestamistas que controlan de cerca los programas gubernamentales y "votan" contra ellos, si los consideran "irracionales", es decir, si son en beneficio del pueblo, y no del poder privado concentrado.
Los inversores y los prestamistas pueden "votar" con la fuga de capitales, con ataques a las divisas y con otros instrumentos que les sirve en bandeja la liberalización financiera. Esa es una de las razones por las que el sistema de Bretton Woods, establecido por los EEUU y la Gran Bretaña tras la II Guerra Mundial, instituyó controles de capitales y reguló el mercado de divisas. (1)
La Gran Depresión y la Guerra pusieron en marcha poderosas corrientes democráticas radicales que iban desde la resistencia antifascista hasta las organizaciones de la clase obrera. Esas presiones hicieron necesario que se toleraran políticas sociales democráticas. El sistema de Bretton Woods fue, en parte, concebido para crear un espacio en el que la acción gubernamental pudiera responder a la voluntad pública ciudadana, es decir, para permitir cierto grado de democracia.
John Maynard Keynes, el negociador británico, consideró como el logro más importante de Bretton Woods el de haber establecido el derecho de los gobiernos a restringir los movimientos de capitales.
Por espectacular contraste, en la fase neoliberal que siguió al desplome del sistema de Bretton Woods en los años 70, el Tesoro estadounidense contempla ahora la libre movilidad de los capitales como un "derecho fundamental", a diferencia, ni que decir tiene, de los pretendidos "derechos" garantizados por la Declaración Universal de Derechos Humanos: derecho a la salud, a la educación, al empleo decente, a la seguridad, y otros derechos que las administraciones de Reagan y Bush han displicentemente considerado como "cartas a Santa Claus", "ridículos" o meros "mitos".
En los primeros años, la gente no se hizo mayores problemas con el asunto. Las razones de ello las ha estudiado Barry Eichengreen en su historia, impecablemente académica, del sistema monetario. Allí se explica que, en el siglo XIX, los gobiernos "todavía no estaban politizados por el sufragio universal masculino, el sindicalismo y los partidos obreros parlamentarios". Por consiguiente, los graves costes impuestos por el parlamento virtual podían ser transferidos a la población general.
Pero con la radicalización de la población y de la opinión pública acontecida durante la Gran Depresión y la guerra antifascista, se privó de ese lujo al poder y a la riqueza privados. De aquí que en el sistema de Bretton Woods "los límites a la democracia como fuente de resistencia a las presiones del mercado fueran substituidos por límites a la movilidad del capital".
El obvio corolario es que, tras la desmantelación del sistema de posguerra, la democracia se ha visto restringida. Se ha hecho, por consiguiente, necesario controlar y marginar de algún modo a la población y a la opinión pública, procesos particularmente evidentes en las sociedades más aproadas al mundo de los negocios, como los EEUU. La gestión de las extravagancias electorales por parte de la industria de relaciones públicas constituye una buena ilustración.
"La política es la sombra que la gran empresa proyecta sobre la sociedad", concluyó en su día el más grande filósofo social norteamericano del siglo XX, John Dewey, y así seguirá siendo, mientras el poder resida "en los negocios para beneficio privado a través de un control sobre la banca, sobre el suelo y sobre la industria, un poder que se ve ahora reforzado por el control sobre la prensa, sobre los periodistas y sobre otros medios de publicidad y propaganda".
Los EEUU tienen, en efecto, un sistema de un sólo partido, el partido de los negocios, con dos facciones, republicanos y demócratas. Hay diferencias entre ellos. En su estudio sobre La democracia desigual: la economía política de la nueva Era de la Codicia, Larry Bartels muestra que durante las pasadas seis décadas "los ingresos reales de las familias de clase media crecieron dos veces más rápido bajo los demócratas que bajo los republicanos, mientras que los ingresos reales de las familias pobres de clase trabajadora crecieron seis veces más rápido bajo los demócratas que bajo los republicanos".
Esas diferencias se pueden ver también en estas elecciones. Los votantes deberían tenerlas en cuenta, pero sin hacerse ilusiones sobre los partidos políticos, y reconociendo el patrón regular que, durante los últimos siglos, ha venido revelando que la legislación progresista y el bienestar social siempre han sido conquistas de las luchas populares, nunca regalos de los de arriba.
Esas luchas siguen ciclos de éxitos y retrocesos. Han de librarse cada día, no sólo cada cuatro años, y siempre con la mira puesta en la creación de una sociedad genuinamente democrática, capaz de respuesta dondequiera, en las urnas no menos que en el puesto de trabajo.
NOTA: (1) El sistema de Bretton Woods de gestión financiera global fue creado por 730 delegados procedentes de 44 naciones aliadas en la II Guerra Mundial que acudieron a una Conferencia Monetaria y Financiera organizada por la ONU en el hotel Mont Washington en Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, en 1944. Bretton Woods, que colapsó en 1971, era el sistema de normas, instituciones y procedimientos que regulaban el sistema monetario internacional y bajo cuyos auspicios se creó el Banco Internacional para la Reconstrucción y el Desarrollo (IBRD, por sus siglas en inglés) –ahora una de las cinco instituciones que componen el Grupo del Banco Mundial— y el Fondo Monetario Internacional, que echaron a andar en 1945.
Traducción para http://www.sinpermiso.info/ : Casiopea Altisench
(*) Noam Chomsky es profesor emérito de Lingüística en el MIT: Instituto de Tecnología de Massachusetts. Sus escritos sobre la lingüística y la política han sido publicados constantemente por diversos medios. Este artículo (dice la fuente gringa) apareció primero en el New York Times (pero en los buscadores de http://www.nyt.com/ si bien aparecen varios textos de Chosmky, éste, como tal no lo encontró el autor del blog (...))
Versión en ingles:
Anti-democratic nature of US capitalism is being exposed
NOAM CHOMSKY
en http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2008/1010/1223560345968.html?via=mr
Bretton Woods was the system of global financial management set up at the end of the second World War to ensure the interests of capital did not smother wider social concerns in post-war democracies. It was hated by the US neoliberals - the very people who created the banking crisis writes Noam Chomsky
THE SIMULTANEOUS unfolding of the US presidential campaign and unravelling of the financial markets presents one of those occasions where the political and economic systems starkly reveal their nature.
Passion about the campaign may not be universally shared but almost everybody can feel the anxiety from the foreclosure of a million homes, and concerns about jobs, savings and healthcare at risk.
The initial Bush proposals to deal with the crisis so reeked of totalitarianism that they were quickly modified. Under intense lobbyist pressure, they were reshaped as "a clear win for the largest institutions in the system . . . a way of dumping assets without having to fail or close", as described by James Rickards, who negotiated the federal bailout for the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, reminding us that we are treading familiar turf. The immediate origins of the current meltdown lie in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad. But the roots are deeper. In part they lie in the triumph of financial liberalisation in the past 30 years - that is, freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation.
These steps predictably increased the frequency and depth of severe reversals, which now threaten to bring about the worst crisis since the Great Depression.
Also 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. A study by international economists Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder 15 years ago found that at least 20 companies in the Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their respective governments, and that many of the rest gained substantially by demanding that governments "socialise their losses," as in today's taxpayer-financed bailout. Such government intervention "has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries", they conclude.
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.
The financial market "underprices risk" and is "systematically inefficient", as economists John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalisation and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred - and proposing solutions, which have been ignored. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These "externalities" can be huge. Ignoring systemic risk leads to more risk-taking than would take place in an efficient economy, even by the narrowest measures.
The task of financial institutions is to take risks and, if well-managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. The emphasis is on "to themselves". Under state capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others - the "externalities" of decent survival - if their practices lead to financial crisis, as they regularly do.
Financial liberalisation has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement creates what some have called a "virtual parliament" of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programmes and "vote" against them if they are considered irrational: for the benefit of people, rather than concentrated private power.
Investors and lenders can "vote" by capital flight, attacks on currencies and other devices offered by financial liberalisation. That is one reason why the Bretton Woods system established by the United States and Britain after the second World War instituted capital controls and regulated currencies.*
The Great Depression and the war had aroused powerful radical democratic currents, ranging from the anti-fascist resistance to working class organisation. These pressures made it necessary to permit social democratic policies. The Bretton Woods system was designed in part to create a space for government action responding to public will - for some measure of democracy.
John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.
In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a "fundamental right", unlike such alleged "rights" as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as "letters to Santa Claus", "preposterous", mere "myths".
In earlier years, the public had not been much of a problem. The reasons are reviewed by Barry Eichengreen in his standard scholarly history of the international monetary system. He explains that in the 19th century, governments had not yet been "politicised by universal male suffrage and the rise of trade unionism and parliamentary labour parties". Therefore, the severe costs imposed by the virtual parliament could be transferred to the general population.
But with the radicalisation of the general public during the Great Depression and the anti-fascist war, that luxury was no longer available to private power and wealth. Hence in the Bretton Woods system, "limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures".
The obvious corollary is that after the dismantling of the postwar system, democracy is restricted. It has therefore become necessary to control and marginalise the public in some fashion, processes particularly evident in the more business-run societies like the United States. The management of electoral extravaganzas by the public relations industry is one illustration.
"Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business," concluded America's leading 20th century social philosopher John Dewey, and will remain so as long as power resides in "business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda".
The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades "real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans".
Differences can be detected in the current election as well. Voters should consider them, but without illusions about the political parties, and with the recognition that consistently over the centuries, progressive legislation and social welfare have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above.
Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace.
* The Bretton Woods system of global financial management was created by 730 delegates from all 44 Allied second World War nations who attended a UN-hosted Monetary and Financial Conference at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in 1944.
Bretton Woods, which collapsed in 1971, was the system of rules, institutions, and procedures that regulated the international monetary system, under which were set up the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (now one of five institutions in the World Bank Group) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which came into effect in 1945.
The chief feature of Bretton Woods was an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate of its currency within a fixed value.
The system collapsed when the US suspended convertibility from dollars to gold. This created the unique situation whereby the US dollar became the "reserve currency" for the other countries within Bretton Woods.
Noam Chomsky is professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His writings on linguistics and politics have just been collected in The Essential Chomsky , edited by Anthony Arnove, from the New Press. This article appeared first in the New York Times
© 2008 The Irish Times
Bretton Woods was the system of global financial management set up at the end of the second World War to ensure the interests of capital did not smother wider social concerns in post-war democracies. It was hated by the US neoliberals - the very people who created the banking crisis writes Noam Chomsky
THE SIMULTANEOUS unfolding of the US presidential campaign and unravelling of the financial markets presents one of those occasions where the political and economic systems starkly reveal their nature.
Passion about the campaign may not be universally shared but almost everybody can feel the anxiety from the foreclosure of a million homes, and concerns about jobs, savings and healthcare at risk.
The initial Bush proposals to deal with the crisis so reeked of totalitarianism that they were quickly modified. Under intense lobbyist pressure, they were reshaped as "a clear win for the largest institutions in the system . . . a way of dumping assets without having to fail or close", as described by James Rickards, who negotiated the federal bailout for the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, reminding us that we are treading familiar turf. The immediate origins of the current meltdown lie in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad. But the roots are deeper. In part they lie in the triumph of financial liberalisation in the past 30 years - that is, freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation.
These steps predictably increased the frequency and depth of severe reversals, which now threaten to bring about the worst crisis since the Great Depression.
Also 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. A study by international economists Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder 15 years ago found that at least 20 companies in the Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their respective governments, and that many of the rest gained substantially by demanding that governments "socialise their losses," as in today's taxpayer-financed bailout. Such government intervention "has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries", they conclude.
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.
The financial market "underprices risk" and is "systematically inefficient", as economists John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalisation and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred - and proposing solutions, which have been ignored. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These "externalities" can be huge. Ignoring systemic risk leads to more risk-taking than would take place in an efficient economy, even by the narrowest measures.
The task of financial institutions is to take risks and, if well-managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. The emphasis is on "to themselves". Under state capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others - the "externalities" of decent survival - if their practices lead to financial crisis, as they regularly do.
Financial liberalisation has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement creates what some have called a "virtual parliament" of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programmes and "vote" against them if they are considered irrational: for the benefit of people, rather than concentrated private power.
Investors and lenders can "vote" by capital flight, attacks on currencies and other devices offered by financial liberalisation. That is one reason why the Bretton Woods system established by the United States and Britain after the second World War instituted capital controls and regulated currencies.*
The Great Depression and the war had aroused powerful radical democratic currents, ranging from the anti-fascist resistance to working class organisation. These pressures made it necessary to permit social democratic policies. The Bretton Woods system was designed in part to create a space for government action responding to public will - for some measure of democracy.
John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.
In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a "fundamental right", unlike such alleged "rights" as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as "letters to Santa Claus", "preposterous", mere "myths".
In earlier years, the public had not been much of a problem. The reasons are reviewed by Barry Eichengreen in his standard scholarly history of the international monetary system. He explains that in the 19th century, governments had not yet been "politicised by universal male suffrage and the rise of trade unionism and parliamentary labour parties". Therefore, the severe costs imposed by the virtual parliament could be transferred to the general population.
But with the radicalisation of the general public during the Great Depression and the anti-fascist war, that luxury was no longer available to private power and wealth. Hence in the Bretton Woods system, "limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures".
The obvious corollary is that after the dismantling of the postwar system, democracy is restricted. It has therefore become necessary to control and marginalise the public in some fashion, processes particularly evident in the more business-run societies like the United States. The management of electoral extravaganzas by the public relations industry is one illustration.
"Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business," concluded America's leading 20th century social philosopher John Dewey, and will remain so as long as power resides in "business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda".
The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades "real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans".
Differences can be detected in the current election as well. Voters should consider them, but without illusions about the political parties, and with the recognition that consistently over the centuries, progressive legislation and social welfare have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above.
Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace.
* The Bretton Woods system of global financial management was created by 730 delegates from all 44 Allied second World War nations who attended a UN-hosted Monetary and Financial Conference at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in 1944.
Bretton Woods, which collapsed in 1971, was the system of rules, institutions, and procedures that regulated the international monetary system, under which were set up the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (now one of five institutions in the World Bank Group) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which came into effect in 1945.
The chief feature of Bretton Woods was an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate of its currency within a fixed value.
The system collapsed when the US suspended convertibility from dollars to gold. This created the unique situation whereby the US dollar became the "reserve currency" for the other countries within Bretton Woods.
Noam Chomsky is professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His writings on linguistics and politics have just been collected in The Essential Chomsky , edited by Anthony Arnove, from the New Press. This article appeared first in the New York Times
© 2008 The Irish Times
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