Leave it to ‘the markets’?

Recent polls in Australia now show that Kevin Rudd is the preferred prime minister of 44% of those surveyed, but the guy is just another right-wing creep swanning around the world, giving the world unsolicited advice in Ruddese while living it up in presidential hotel suites costing up to $2700 a night.

As the world teeters on the brink of the second dip of a global recession, Rudd reportedly observed that the global economy was a “wild beast”.

His solution to this was even less profound: a call for more free market measures and a demand that China let the market determine its exchange rate.

The world is in an unprecedented mess because the likes of Rudd and other politicians, and the giant corporations whose bidding they do, insisted that we “leave it to the markets”.

Ordinary people should ask why. Where, after nearly four decades, has leaving it all to the markets got us?

It has certainly made the super rich of the world richer, wiped out the livelihoods of millions and spurned urgently-needed investment in a socially and ecologically sustainable future.

Instead, trillions of dollars goes to bailing out banks and other big corporations. US$1.5 trillion a year goes on arms spending. Trillions more goes into making and force-selling piles of shoddy, often useless, stuff made to break down as fast as possible and fill the world’s ever-growing waste dumps.

After all this, Rudd still says we should continue on the market deregulation path.



The explanation for the horrible distortion of the world and our common future was once summed up by a wise person in this profound sentence: “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”

Think about it as you read about the trillions of dollars flying the world seeking a place for the biggest return, no matter at what social and environmental cost.

The fruits of the exploitation of generations of working people, now concentrated in the hands of an extremely wealthy few, today demands an ever-more extreme and bizarre sacrifice from the Earth and the majority of the people who live on it.

This is why the same wise person said if you want to understand how the economy really works you have to look beyond the many transactions in various marketplaces and work out the real social relations behind it.

Today the world’s richest 10% own 83% of the world’s wealth and almost everything we see flows from or is critically shaped by this ugly fact.

Green Left Weekly champions a world liberated from “the markets”, a society run democratically by the majority in a just and sustainable way.

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