Next comes Chomsky’s take on the
destructive influence of the financial speculator, whom I am elsewhere calling
“the gravedigger of capitalism as-such,” on the character of modern
capitalism and on its possible remedies, if they can still be effective.
“There
are fears of a global meltdown,” he says. “It
might affect privileged folks like us, instead of just the usual victims.
Therefore it’s news.”
He sees the crisis originating in
the Nixon administration’s decision in the early 1970’s to lift restrictions on
capital flows, breaking the post-Second World War international economic
structure set in place under an agreement hammered out at Bretton Woods, New
Hampshire, in 1944. Bretton Woods established the International Monetary
Fund, the World Bank, and pivoted on the balancing concepts of free
international trade and restricted international capital flows. According to
Chomsky’s argument, organizers of Bretton Woods realized that free trade and
free capital flows were incompatible. Short-term (!) capital investments and
unrestricted capital flight would undermine investment and trade. “You can’t liberalize both.” Bretton Woods begot the “golden age of postwar
capitalism” in the 50’s and 60’s, but as the Nixon administration began
to remove restrictions on finance capital movements, it began a shift away from
investment capital toward speculative capital. “That was the big change in modern world history. Since then
the influence of finance capital has grown astronomically. The consequences are
even hitting the rich, and that’s where we are now.” Whereas in 1977 only about $18 billion a day was
involved in foreign-exchange transactions, in today’s market that figure has
soared eightfold. But even more dramatic than the
scale is the character. In 1970, most of the international foreign exchange
transactions were economy-related, and only 10% were speculative. By 1990 it
was estimated to be about 90% speculative, by 1995 it is supposed to be up to
95%. Speculative transactions are very short-term and they are highly
leveraged: based on very high debt ratios. About 80% of the transactions last
less than two weeks. A lot of it is days and minutes, which means it is just
playing against, guesses against, slight currency changes and interest-rate
changes, and so on. All of this is causing so much turmoil that in surprising
places you're getting strong opposition to it.
Chomsky notes that prominent economists,
free traders, the World Bank and the WTO have criticized the instability and
negative impact on long-term investment, caused by the “lunatic
ideas about liberalizing financial markets. Nobody understands them (the
financial markets). I mean, they are motivated by herd psychology. You know,
one guy leaves and everybody rushes out. Their reactions are very often
unrelated to the economic fundamentals.”
Chomsky sees this economic
situation in political terms. “There have been
perfectly reasonable proposals around for years as to how to control this,” he
says, but dismisses the efforts addressing it as an economic issue. “Governments certainly have the power to control it. These
are political decisions. They are not like the law of gravitation.” One
of the most useful political things to do he suggests is to join the resistance
to the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) which,
if it is passed and adopted by developed nations, “is
going to accelerate all this devastation by finance capital.”
And lastly, for the purposes of this entry,
here is an interesting analysis of how Third World nations dealt with
the catastrophic blow of 1980. “If you take a look at
the Third World countries, that pulled out of the crisis of 1980 it’s
the NIC’s (Newly Industrialized Countries) in the Japanese
periphery. The contrast with Latin America is striking: Up to 1980, they had
similar patterns, then Latin America went into a free fall, while the East
Asian economies did well. That was because Latin America was opened up to
international capital, while East Asia wasn’t. You don’t have capital flight
from South Korea, because you get the death penalty for that there. They not
only discipline and terrorize the workers in the usual way, but they regulate
the capitalists, too.
In general, it was a
move toward one end of the spectrum of state capitalism: the fascist end,
which turned out to be effective in warding off the general crisis of the
1980s.
Most interesting and instructive! My comments
will be of course much further developed at a suitable time.
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