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Socialism For The Rich? Again?
The Silicon Valley Bank crashed a few days ago whilst I was in Lisbon and it made me think of our own and my own past as it relates to these crisis’, what they mean, what there is to do and what can be done differently in our future. At 44 years old I have, unfortunately, witnessed far too many of these inherent crisis’ to be surprised by them, nor the reactions they incur, yet, times are a changing and so are these crisis’ - hence this little excursion into linguistics, banking, utopianism and post-capitalism.
A few disclaimers beforehand, I enjoy economics and the study of them constituted large parts of my PhD- it’s an inherent part of Marxist Studies. Luckily, we don’t have to get into economics here, or anywhere to be honest if we are discussing the man-made flaws of our current economic model and what we would like to do different. The key to understanding “economics” is rather simple. It is mostly a bunch of highly specialized language made up to maintain an exclusive membership of people, class warfare through language, to explain a very simple reality the ruling classes want to obscure: We own everything, will protect this “ownership” with moralized violence and you and me pay for the privilege of existing under their ownership. Sure, go ahead and learn the insides and outs of the modern day banking / finance / trading systems, but all that will achieve is learning “their” language, without understanding the very simple fact that all economic relations are man made and thus subject to change at any time we chose to. That’s it.
A few short, not so hot takes before we dig our teeth into what is what and what can be. Bank crashes are a manufactured part of the capitalist system. The entire construct of modern day banks is an ultra-violent and corrupt machinery that exists solely to make rich people richer at the expense of us working people. Do we need banks in a post-capitalist society? I will argue for that shortly but before I wanted to point a finger at the post-Occupy Wall St. vocabulary that we use to often:
Socialism For The Rich, Capitalism For Everyone else.
It refers to the fact that no matter how badly a bunch of cocaine addicts on Wall Street, or in Silicon Valley in this case, fuck up, the government will step and guarantee their losses- still holding on to the concept of “too big to fail”. Guaranteeing meaning they use our tax money to guarantee the losses incurred. That is not Socialism and obfuscates the simple fact that this mechanism is exactly what Capitalism is. Banks under Capitalism exist to bankroll “our” systems, or so they say, when in reality they are in the go-between for the Capitalists corrupt and violent existence. So when these Bankers fuck up, of course they government will bail them out, it’s one big club and and as we all too damn well know, we ain’t in it. Socialism, if we wanted to argue for it under this Capitalist reality would have meant we all would have gotten a guaranteed income during the pandemic lock-downs so that us working people wouldn’t be exposed to a deadly virus whilst we delivered food for the bourgeoise “home office” gangs. So let’s not call these bail-outs at the cost of us workers not getting a fucking hand from our governments socialism, it’s capitalism in its purest form.
So what can a banking system look like in a Post-Capitalist & Socialist reality and do we need them in the first place?
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