Andrew Smart on Greece’s two fingers to the tyranny of the cult of productivity

While much of the mainstream media is decrying Syriza’s electoral victory, implying the party is somehow on a par with neo-Nazis, routinely dismissing them as radical leftists (a term usually reserved for such pilloried villains like the Sandinistas), and generally bemoaning the fact that the Greek people have basically said fuck you to the international financial cabal – we should reflect on the significance of this watershed moment in the current battle between human beings and rapacious financial capitalism. Economists, pundits and politicians love to write long-winded articles about arcane things like structural reform, austerity and rates. They love to lecture us about “consequences” and “markets” and “responsibility”.

The problem is that none of those things exists except in the minds of bankers, the politicians the bankers own, and dim-witted newspaper columnists. The sheer idiocy of modern economic dogma is now laid bare for the whole world – the global financial and political élite really are that stupid. Greece, the élite said, must impose harsh austerity in return for a really bad deal on a loan, lest the country face a depression of untold horrors. The Greek élite accepted the deal, imposed the austerity – which, let’s just be clear means fucking over working people – and the country promptly fell into the very depression the IMF, the European Central Bank and a bunch of Wall Street douchebags warned would happen if Greece didn’t accept their shitty terms for a loan. The glorious irony in all of this is that, by their own fanciful definitions, financial and political elites have now been revealed as irresponsible and consequence-ignoring frauds.

You can read all the complicated Excel graphs you want about unemployment rates, debt-to-rolls-of- toilet-paper-ratios and etcetera, but the story here is extremely simple. There is a very small group of people who control most of the money in the world and they want to control even more of the money because they are by and large pathologically greedy and lack empathy (this has been shown in psychological research). The mechanism by which this group increases its control over the money is more or less loan sharking. Because this group already has most of the money, there are many places in the world that desperately need some money simply to survive. These selfish prigs (the euphemism for them is “investors” or “IMF”) try to find countries desperate enough to have to borrow a tiny fraction of the investors’ money at exorbitant interest rates. In return the already suffering country must agree to eliminate the bare-bones social infrastructure that is barely keeping the country from complete social and economic catastrophe.

The by-now-totally-empirically-refuted argument these guys (and they are mostly guys) try to hawk is that eliminating government services for poor people somehow allows businesses to thrive, the businesses pay more taxes, and the government can pay the investors the ridiculous interest rate on the loan. All this is usually explained with meaningless acronyms like GDP and vague words like “growth” and “stimulation”. Notice that in this scenario the government is not allowed to spend the borrowed money on the services it cut or eliminated in order to get the loan in the first place.

Of course there are many subtle details involved, but I think it’s worthwhile to make the underlying story here explicit because it is not hard to understand. The international credit system is basically a racket. A racket is a service in which shady and nefarious people fraudulently offer to solve a problem that the shady and nefarious people created. This is no different to paying the mafia protection money so that the mafia doesn’t torch your store. In other words without the international financial system and the IMF the problems that the IMF offers to solve would not exist in the first place.

Once you understand the fundamental nature of the intricate web of international finance – it is in principle and in practice an enormous racket protected by very powerful states – many of the conceptual confusions and pedantic debates become clear. The people who suffer from this most are – as always – ordinary workers, women, the elderly who want nothing more than to have enough money to settle down and enjoy life.

This is why allowing people to settle down and enjoy life makes the racketeers – sorry investors – so hysterically angry. The entire scheme would fall apart if everyone had a decent income, some dignity, meaningful part-time work, and a lot of leisure to learn the ukulele. The dirty secret the cult of productivity is hiding is that society would function just fine, and in fact better (after all the bar has been set very low by the continual crises of capitalism). All the self-righteous moralizing about responsibility from the business and political class is the height of hypocrisy: it is exactly the same as a mafia strongman lecturing the storekeeper that it would be irresponsible of the storekeeper to let the mafia strongman burn the store down.

In the broader sense, convincing everyone that economic productivity is only measure of life has to be the greatest trick in the history of evil. This is why we should say chapeau to Syriza. Of course, investors and their lap-dog politicians will not stand idly by while an upstart left wing party that actually cares about its people sets an example for the rest of the world. Syriza will be attacked, in the press, financially, politically. But for now we should enjoy the afterglow.

ENDS