Who Will Determine the Future of Capitalism?

Amid the worst financial and economic crisis in decades, the U.S.
business press tends to get caught up in the daily fluctuations of the
stock market and, to a lesser extent, the monthly changes in the
unemployment rate. By contrast, London's Financial Times is looking at the big picture. It recently launched a series
of articles under the rubric of The Future of Capitalism. In addition
to soliciting varying views on this monumental question, the paper
published a feature this week presuming to name the 50 people around the world who will "frame the way forward."

Kicking off the series, the FT's Martin Wolf was blunt in asserting
that the ideology of unfettered markets promoted over the past three
decades must now be judged a failure. Sounding like a traditional
Marxist, Wolf writes that "the era of liberalisation [the European term
for market fundamentalism] contained seeds of its own downfall" in the
form of tendencies such as "frenetic financial innovation" and "bubbles
in asset prices."

An article
in the series by Gillian Tett casually notes that "naked greed, lax
regulation, excessively loose monetary policy, fraudulent borrowing and
managerial failure all played a role" in bringing about the crisis.
Richard Layard of the London School of Economics weighs in with a piece
arguing that "we should stop the worship of money and create a more
humane society where the quality of human experience is the criterion."
Did editorial copy intended for New Left Review mistakenly end up in the FT computers?

Wolf finished his initial article
with the statement: "Where we end up, after this financial tornado, is
for us to seek to determine." Yet who is the "we" Wolf is referring to?

Following the damning critique of markets and poor government
oversight, the last ones we should turn to for leadership are the
powers that be. Yet that is exactly the group that dominates the list
of those who, according to the editors of FT, will lead the way
forward. The 50 movers and shakers include 14 politicians, starting
with President Obama and Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao; ten central
bankers; three financial regulators; and four heads of multinational
institutions such as the IMF and the WTO. Also included are six
economists, including Paul Krugman and Obama advisor Paul Volcker, and
three prominent investors, among them George Soros and Warren Buffett.

The list also finds room for three chief executives (the heads of
Nissan, PepsiCo and Google) and, amazingly, the chiefs of four major
banks: Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, HSBC and BNP Paribas. It even
includes two talking heads: Arianna Huffington and Rush Limbaugh.

Except for Olivier Besancenot of France's New Anticapitalist Party,
who is included among the politicians in a way that seems a bit
condescending, there is not a single person on the list directly
involved in a movement to challenge corporate power or even to
significantly alter the relationship between business and the rest of
society. There is not a single labor leader, prominent environmental
advocate or other leading activist. The editors at FT seem never to
have heard of civil society.

Then again, the problem may not be thickheadedness among FT editors.
Perhaps the voices for radical change have simply not been loud enough
to earn a place on a list of those who will play a significant role in
the shaping capitalism's future. In fact, one of the articles in the FT
series suggests
that in Europe neither the Left nor the labor movement has taken a
leadership role in responding to the crisis, even as spontaneous
protests have erupted in numerous countries.

In the United States, where those forces are weaker, anger at the
crisis has to a great extent been channeled into support for the
Keynesian policies of the Obama Administration. That's unavoidable in
the short term, but it doesn't address the need for fundamental
alteration of economic institutions. If, as the Financial Times suggests, the future of capitalism is up for grabs, let's make sure we all join the fray.

Originally posted at: http://dirtdiggersdigest.org/archives/341

• 104 Globalization
• 106 Money & Politics
• 187 Privatization
• 194 World Financial Institutions
• 208 Regulation