The passages below are from apologist for the 1% Anne Applebaum. I bother with them here just in case people end up in conversation with others making similar arguments designed to hinder the movement. The arguments are most likely to come from Democrats who are afraid of working people, who have or are the top 1%, and who ultimately few their lot in life as good enough to warrant the exploitation and sacrifice of the rest of us. Applebaum types:
The emergence of an international protest movement with no coherent program is therefore not an accident: It reflects a deeper crisis, one with no obvious solution. Democracy is based on the rule of law. Democracy only works within distinct borders and among people who feel themselves to be part of the same nation. A "global community" cannot be a national democracy. And a national democracy cannot command the allegiance of a billion-dollar global hedge fund, with its headquarters in a tax haven and its employees scattered around the world.
This passage contains several myths. The first is the myth of law. It obscures the fact that every state is based ultimately in force and violence. The parliamentary state seeks to legitimatize this violence with law. In the US, EU, and UK, this law protects the capitalist class and its neoliberal system. The second is the myth of nation. This myth obscures the imperial and colonial dimensions of liberal-democratic states, as if their power had always been bounded. It relies on an ultimately ethnocentric and likely racist notion of the nation--there are multinational and multicultural states. The third is the myth of democracy. This myth elides democracy with parliamentarism and liberal-legalism, forgetting the wide variety of democratic forms (from pressures states exert on one another, to cultural exchanges, to global culture, to the UN, to NGOs, to the cabals of the superrich in Davos and their other hidey-holes. The fourth is the myth of the inevitability of capitalism. This one operates to naturalize the existence of billion dollar hedge funds, as if these creatures were unavoidable features of world.
They are not. Hedge funds are going to be destroyed, rendered extinct, eliminated, discarded into the dustbin of history as the ill-conceived relics of the avarice of the capitalist class. No wonder Applebaum is afraid--she knows this is happening and is doing her best to restore the sense of capitalist inevitability that had bewitched too many for too long. Guess what. Too late.
Unlike the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, to whom both the London and New York protesters openly (and ridiculously) compare themselves, we have democratic institutions in the Western world.
Here Applebaum tries to deny the reality of a global movement. But no one believes this lie (except maybe a few of the delusional hedge fund managers). The movement in Egypt relied on ten years of organized work of unions; it was also stimulated by the economic problems of extreme economic inequality and the absence of economic opportunity. The comparison isn't ridiculous. That she ridicules it is a sign of her fear.
They are designed to reflect, at least crudely, the desire for political change within a given nation.
The democratic institutions in the US, UK, and EU are only designed to permit changes within the ruling elite. They are institutions for arranging competition within the capitalist class, not between the capitalist class and other classes. Applebaum, bless her heart, can't help but admit this, "at least crudely."
But they cannot cope with the desire for global political change, nor can they control things that happen outside their own borders. Although I still believe in the economic and spiritual benefits of globalization—along with open borders, freedom of movement and free trade—globalization has clearly begun to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracies.
Really? Or is it capitalism and the neoliberal project for restoring the power of the financial elite? Globalization did not cause the Bush tax cuts. Globalization didn't mean that bankers, hedge fund managers, and CEOS had to earn million dollar salaries and million dollars bonuses. Globalization didn't require corporate raiders to purchase functioning companies and dismantle them and sell them for scrap. Neoliberalism has been a project of the class capitalist to seize more and more of what belongs to all of us. Globalization didn't require that--in fact, there's been global movement for centuries.
What is worth noting in Applebaum's rant is the way that her presumption of the ongoing power of hedge funds leads her into a position of nationalist retrenchment. Since she can't blame capital, she blames foreigners--the generic global threat to democracy (which really means the threat of the awakening global movement to the capitalist system).
"Global" activists, if they are not careful, will accelerate that decline. Protesters in London shout that "we need to have a process!" Well, they already have a process: It's called the British political system. And if they don't figure out how to use it, they'll simply weaken it further.
Hold on, hold on for dear life, hold on to what is broken, hold on to what is no longer capable of deflecting our fury and our rage, hold on. And keep holding on as you sink.
The systems are too broken even to call systems any more. This is vivid and true in an England that has abandoned any pretense to public education.
And, actually, the processes that are being born matter--a new world is giving birth to itself.
via www.slate.com
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