The Predators who rule the world

Who are the neoliberals?

The robber barons of old ruled their world. Today’s robber barons are much more powerful than those earlier titans, and they appear to be all but unbeatable.

The planet is owned and ruled by the same people; not the heads of State, but the owners of the capital. State governments, if unyielding to the superior power of the capitals, run the risk of becoming figureheads in the claws of the neoliberals. Do what we tell you to do or we will unmask the vacuum behind your façade. Some leaders try courageously to prove their freedom of action, up to a point, but even socialists have turned towards what is to be seen as the new socialism - Gerhard Schröder, or the New Labour - Tony Blair. There is no real ‘left’ any more —anywhere.

Europe is regressing towards the feudal era when individuals had no rights. They were work horses for the lords who owned the land and later, in the industrial era, for those who owned the factories. Once again, individual rights are seen as having no raison d’être, since invincible market forces dictate the state of the planet. According to the neoliberal predators, considering individuals and their needs, except as pawns in their planetary game of creating obscene wealth for the very few, is unscientific and unreasonable.

The men and women seated at the top of the world are ruthless gamblers who don’t hesitate to destroy each other and all the people dependent on them for their livelihood, if it’s in the interest of profit. The gambling instinct rules the planet though the dice are heavily loaded.

Reasonable and innocent people scream about rights to food, to water, to a decent living. The gamblers couldn’t care less; they are totally deaf to cries of despair. These latter day robber barons buy and sell, promote and demote with a perfectly cold hand. They laugh at the losses of their adversaries as they continue building their own edifices of global power, insensitive to the needs of the pawns who get crushed in the predators’ paths to glory.

These men and women have no souls. They are a different species who could be rooted out from the earth with no lasting damage and several huge gains for humanity.

Their claim is that market forces are unbeatable because they are rigorously scientific. Neoliberalism is not an ideology, it’s a force of nature and the ‘laws of the market’ are unbeatable, because of their inevitability. These people claim to be rigorously rational. The world is closed and immune to changes since market forces are ruled by strict reason, not by human laws or haphazard ideology. The ‘natural laws’ that the neoliberals claim are guiding the capital of the world can not be contained. Economic forces must be let loose without constraint or control.

Pierre Bourdieu defines it in this way: “Neo-liberalism is a weapon of conquest. It announces an economic fatality against which all resistance is vain. Neo-liberalism is similar to AIDS: it destroys the immunity system of its victims. (1) ... “Of all forces of clandestine persuasion, the most implacable is the one that is exercised simply because of ‘the order of things’.”(2)

Bourdieu continues to prove that neo-liberalism is not the ‘order of things’: “Everything that falls under the descriptive and normative name of ‘globalization’ is not the effect of an economic fatality, but of a conscious and deliberate policy, the one that has made liberal or even social-democratic governments of a group of economically advanced countries dispossess themselves of the power to control the economic forces.”(3)

How can this cruel scam continue?

This system is seemingly unbeatable because the power players, the gamblers, own the politicians. Even more important, they own the mainstream media. When you add to that the powerful mind-bending of advertising, television, political sloganeering and propaganda, you get a citizenry that is ignorant, subdued and numbed into a form of semi-consciousness where they try to keep up a façade of normality while trying to survive in a hostile world.

It certainly doesn’t help the people’s cause in their fight against these imperial masters that administrations like Bush & Co ‘starve the beast’ by cutting off more and more money for education, healthcare and social programs across his nation. The finance lords have the administration, and seemingly the majority of both parties in Congress, so well in hand that there is no real opposition to all this cutting of essential funds. The individual citizens have been rendered helplessly unarmed for such a vitally important fight. And this is, sadly, a trend spreading throughout Europe as well. Even the most basic funds have to be cut to make it possible for the predators to amass their obscene fortunes.

Who are the victims?

Ordinary people from all strata of society are feeling the heat of the battle for survival. But it’s primarily poor people in the rich countries and all but a few callous opportunists in developing countries who bear the heavy burden of suffering from hunger and deprivation. Heartless and mindless dictators who enrich themselves at the expense of their poverty-stricken countrymen will always be a fact of life. But the incredible arrogance and seeming invincibility of the corporate lords seems to be a twist that was born with neo-liberalism. And here we are back at the beginning. As Pierre Bourdieu says, it’s the “economic fatality against which all resistance is vain”, the implacable force of this system comes from the fact that it’s set up to appear simply as ‘the order of things’. It can’t be any different because that’s the way finance works in order to optimize profit, the only thing that counts in the world of the neoliberals.

The most dangerous propaganda is perhaps the theory these predators put forth that neoliberalism is going to get rid of the immense poverty that is destroying Africa and which renders life almost unlivable in many other parts of the world. It is going to raise the standard of living all over the world, according to the lords of global finance. Well, we have already seen how that theory is working.

In fact, in the multiple cases where the most essential public services having been transferred to the private sector in countries in both the North and South, we are seeing the quality of services consistently going down as prices consistently rise. A country submitting its public services to the maximization of profit leads to what Eric Hobsbawm(4) designates ‘a failed state’.

As for the quality of life which is in grave danger when job security is lost, Jean Ziegler says: “A citizen delivered without any protection to major social risks loses his quality as a citizen. A man who is constantly afraid of losing his job, his salary and his benefits is not a free man.”(5)

Is there a way we can beat this system?

Since neoliberalism works only for immediate gain and has no long-term view, no vision of a sustainable future, no goals of survival for the people or the environment, it cannot last. But so long as they continue ruining the planet, there will not be a future to count on. That makes their downfall or their overthrow terribly urgent.

Fortunately there have been movements afoot ever since the great debacle in Seattle at the WTO meetings in 1999. The are forces furiously set upon destroying this insidious system of plunder. Since Seattle, the WTO meetings have been seriously interrupted in Montréal in 2003, in Cancun in September 2003, as well as multiple G7 & G8 meetings, the World Economic Forum and EU summits (Genoa, Barcelona, Gothenburg, Geneva(6)). The meetings have mostly ended with a total fiasco. The protests were always met with violent police force and numerous demonstrators were imprisoned and treated by the mainstream media as violent criminals. There is hope, however, that there will also be serious protests in the streets during the upcoming WTO meetings in Hong Kong in December 2005.

The World Social Forum held its second gathering in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2002 (in protest against the World Economic Forum in New York City taking place at the same time) when more than 60,000 men and women from more than 2000 social movements on five continents came together in opposition to the inhuman forces of the neoliberal monster. Civil society is up in arms against the predators and is demanding the abolition of the WTO and the IMF, the elimination of tax havens, the canceling of the Third World debts, introduction of a tax on transactions of capital movement (the Tobin tax). These are just a few of the demands that civil society is putting forth. The next World Social Forum will take place in Caracas, Venezuela, in January 2006. Prominent civil rights leaders give high-profile talks at each of these forums and corrupt world leaders will soon learn civil society is a powerful force.

The heads of state are helpless tools in the claws of the predators since their countries would suffer loss of investment and capital flight in the face of their non-cooperation. The world thus depends on civil society and the strength of the masses of lucid and humane people, the power of the streets, to defeat the colossus that is eagerly devouring the world. Corruption and greed can ultimately be defeated if we the people see the truth and act in accordance with our common sense and human instincts.

1. Pierre Bourdieu, « Politik ist entpolitisiert », interview in Der Spiegel, Hamburg, 2001 ; Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) was one of the foremost sociologists of French society and the modern world; author of 25 books. His later years were marked by increasingly public engagement with issues of globalization and state power.
2. Pierre Bourdieu, Contre-feux ; vol.2, Paris, Publisher: Raison d’agir (2001)
3. Ibid.
4. British Marxist historian of great renown (b. 1917)
5. Jean Ziegler : Les nouveaux maîtres du monde, Editions Fayard, 2002 ; Jean Ziegler, UN Spécial Rapporteur on the Right to Food (author of l’Empire de la Honte, éditions Fayard, 2005)
6. In Genoa in July, 2001 (G-7 meeting), in Barcelona in November, 2001 (EU summit), in Gothenburg in June, 2001 (EU summit) and in Geneva on various occasions

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Siv O’Neall is an Axis of Logic columnist, based in France. She can be reached at siv@axisoflogic.com