Anti-Globalist Zeitgeist

CPI (M) Breaks New Ground

ZNet, May 12, 2008

By Badri Raina

". . .the party congress held recently at Coimbatore had decided that the CPI(M) should directly take up social issues."
(Prakash Karat as reported by The Hindu, May 8)

As I sit to write this comment, I have before me a long-winded draft that took a whole day to do.
I now think my requirement for the task here must be to underscore without baggage or ambiguity the point I wish to make.

As to the first part of my title, much comment is already available internationally, especially within American writing itself, that establishes the endgame status of neo-liberal globalism that was installed as neo-imperialist world policy by the Washington Consensus of 1990 (put in place by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the American Development Bank).

For example, Kevin Philip who looked forward to a republican future—by which he had meant a regime of openness and democracy wherein enterprise would be fairly rewarded without lapsing into totalitarian consolidation—in his book Emerging Republican Majority (1969) now acknowledges the betrayal of that dream in a new book, titled Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism.

In short, the book concludes that American republicanism has after all turned out to be a handmaiden to Wall Street, and that the long battle to rein in big finance that began from the time of Jefferson has been lost.

And with that has also been lost the hegemonic pretensions of American democracy.

Indeed, no less a man than Martin Wolf, chief economic commentator of The Financial Times was to say that "the dream of global free market capitalism died" the day that Bear Stearns bailout was announced.

II

This failure has happened despite invasion, war, brutal repression, denial of every conceivable liberty within the Anglo-Saxon world and in the invaded territories, and the most unthinkable forms of inhuman and degrading torture, not to speak of the loss of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives.

Continued . . .