The truth about the market turmoil
G2 has a piece today asking various anti-capitalists for their view of the current market turmoil. I was very pleased to see their research took them to one of the most compelling voices on this subject, Max Keiser. His Resonance FM programme, The Truth About Markets, is always entertaining — sometimes for the right reasons.
Mind you, for me the most insightful comment of the lot came from Michael Onfray:
Is this the end of capitalism? Absolutely not. The key feature of capitalism is that it’s malleable. It has been through antiquity, feudalism, the industrial era, it has worn the guise of fascism and now it’s wedding itself to the ecology cause. After this latest event, it will take on a new form.
And Bob and Roberta Smith had a fair take, too:
Yesterday, at the same time as Lehman Brothers went belly up and Merrill Lynch was bailed out, Damien Hirst made £70m. This tells us that capitalism is not dead. The rich got richer, and the poor got poorer – and in the evening, the rich went to an art sale and spent the small change in their pockets. This crisis is kind of like the capitalist cat shifting on its cushion.
But I’m also sceptical of the “great depression” analogies. The scenes I see on the streets in central London don’t resemble the black and white photographs I’ve seen from the early 20th century. It’s very, very bad for a lot of people who least need it, and it’s not something that needs any more drama.
