By Elias Jabbour*
The big question is whether financialization will continue to run smoothly or not. Here is the “x” of the question.
The trend now is to talk about “turning off the lights of neoliberalism”. Just to remind you that this vulgate like Paulo Guedes, Mansueto de Almeida , Marcos Lisboa, Samuel Pessoa and other rubbish was never applied by any economy that had a country like the United States, Germany, Japan, finally G-7. Silicon Valley is closer to Rudolf Hilferding than it is to Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek. Government purchases boost billionaire cutting-edge scientific research in many of these countries. Development banks existed in Germany before Ludwig von Mises' father was born.
No technocrat in the aforementioned countries believes in “free market”, “business environment”. I suspect they don't even believe much in microeconomics. They are nothing but nonsense that are taught to young people in the process of dehumanization in economics courses on the periphery of the system. The big question is whether financialization will continue to run smoothly or not. Here is the “x” of the question.
For her to ebb, new social pacts should be built. Wall Street it needs to review its “democratically” won seats in the US House of Representatives and the European Union to completely relax its fiscal rules. Will German banks “promoters of democracy and freedom of expression” in countries like Greece be willing to lose?
recent editorial by Financial Times admits that the State will have to take back (look at innocent economics students: take back) its place at the helm of the economy. Can you believe? That is, financialization will move backwards, banks will put their hands in handcuffs and perpetual peace will emerge after the pandemic. Personally I don't believe that.
Even the weight of what I call the reconstruction, in the capitalist world, of the former Projection Economies will demand a lot of struggle, raising social awareness on the part of millions of workers and the so-called “precariat”. Design economy is synonymous with an economy focused on the achievement of large projects and which has demand as its driving force. For this to happen under capitalism (it already happens in China, under the banner of a “New Design Economy”), the “guys” will have to hand over their rings and fingers.
Meanwhile, left-wing intellectuals (I won't mention names so as not to touch on sensibilities. I advance that they are foreigners and that articles are circulating about the so-called “Wuhan soup”. In Brazil there is a philosopher who is prodigal) feed their fan networks with their “ macumbarias” bringing audiences to tears. They are odes against the consumer society and the possibility of reinventing communism to egalitarian agrarian communities. They remain trapped in Eurocentric and poor notions about China, starting with the false cognate (the “euphemism of euphemisms”) of “state capitalism”.
None of them can see virtues in that experience. Turns and moves comes a recognition. Everyone stamps that 2200-year experience of the national state as a “dictatorship”, or even the next imperialism. None of them treats the question with the rigidity of Germanic historicism or the early humanism of the philosophies that were born in the Yangtze and Yellow river valley. Deep down, they are nothing more than intellectuals from the colonial countryside, as cruel as the Japanese were once in Nanjing.
On the right (financialisation) a major impasse fueling the systemic chaos from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. On the left, the mental block on what the new project economy (higher-level variation of socialism) can teach the world, which proved its superiority by ending a quarantine in 72 days, will prevent the left from envisioning an alternative to the impasse that will come after the pandemic. It will continue to be hostage to utopias and intellectual charlatans like those that make up the minds of our youth.
The truth that comes from China will take a long time to impose itself on the old man. Lifting 840 million people out of poverty in four decades is nothing.
We will live another stage of systemic chaos.
*Elias Jabbour He holds a PhD in Geography from USP and is an Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Economic Sciences at FCE-UERJ.
Article originally published in trigger portal
