17
September
What nobody seems to be saying...
Philip Tagg
In the last few days the ‘markets’ in London and other major cities plunged, adding insult to all the injury already suffered by ordinary people in the USA and elsewhere. Today, when the New York Stock Exchange opens, it is possible that billions of dollars will again be wiped off the world ‘market’. This could plunge the USA and the rest of the capitalist world into serious recession, adding even more insult to unspeakable injury. It seems that the perpetrators of last Tuesday’s massacre, if their aim was to cause maximum harm to the system we live under, have powerful allies in our financial traders.
Governments will probably use the public purse to ‘prop up the markets’. That means taking money which could have been used for health, education, social reform, saving the planet from ecological disaster, looking after our young and elderly, wiping out third-world debt, etc. It also means taking the value of what ordinary people produce through their own hard work — after all, money is no more than an abstraction and reification of that value — to prop up those very few people who know no better than to cling to the wealth they have accumulated at our expense.
There is nothing mystical or metaphysical about ‘the market’ It is not a holy, inexorable, unquestionable force outside human control. It consists of real individuals, of real human beings who play roulette with the wealth the rest of us create. Those who gain most on ‘the market’ are those with most money. They are also the first to take their money and run like rats from a ship that has sprung a serious leak which has already led to the death of thousands of innocent people. They seem to think it’s OK to leave the rest of us to man the pumps and to mop up the damage they helped cause.
What kind of respect does that show towards those who perished? What kind of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ absolves its wealthiest members from all social responsibility? Should those people and their corporations be treated as if they were above the laws of human decency? Why are their cowardly acts in times of crisis like these not treated as treason?
These questions need some answers.
