Occupy movement complaining against centre-leftist corporatism not capitalism



Above: the OWS protest in Zuccotti Park, near Wall Street,
New York City
(Source:  http://www.city-analysis.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/zuccotti-park-ows.jpg)

This blog is a bit late because events were moving rapidly. It is about the Occupy movements that sprung up in America and around the world. It has been repeatedly claimed that the movement is entirely opposed to capitalism as a entity. However, it seems that a slight re-evaluation of this statement would perhaps be helpful.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, and its syndicates in various other nation states around the world, is primarily focused on a perceived greed of 'bankers' given the massive bailouts that nation states supplied to them during the economic crisis of 2008-2009. But that is exactly where a misinterpretation has taken place: the Occupy movement seems opposed to the bailouts themselves, and perhaps with some reason, rather then the principle of banking institutions. The bailout of banks, and in Britain's case the effective nationalisation of the banking system, increased national Government debts aroound the world massively. As Benito Mussolini once said:       

"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power"1      



Above: The Rt Hon Gordon Brown, former 
PM of the United Kingdom
(Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/grahamstewart/gordon_brown_portrait.jpg)

 What many in the Occupy movement are opposed to is the use of public funds to bail out large, "capitalist", banking corporations. In effect, they want free market capitalism to work as it should do, not in its state-collaborating  current form. Capitalism, fundamentally, is not about propping up failed companies, banks or otherwise. The difficulty is that the way that the system was allowed to function, especially throughout the Brown Chancellorship in the United Kingdom. encouraged undue risks to be taken - and for banks to expand to become too big for any one state to control properly. 

It is now states that have borrowed too much who are forcing Banks into difficulty. Banks and Governments have become far too interlinked. There is now a realisation that the debt accrued by Banks lending to sub prime borrowers never really disappeared: it was merely transferred from Bank balance sheets to those of respective governments. The truth is that the corporate relationship between Banks and States - highlighted by acts taken by the previous centre-left government in the UK to prop up banks as a face saver after years of mismanagement of the sector - is going to be very hard to dissolve.  It is obvious that big was not best when it comes to the banking sector. Governments that now try to spend their way out of trouble are stuck: by spending they increase the debts held by Banks and end up back at square one or in a worse position.

The lesson, as pointed out by the Occupy movement, is that corporations have to be able to fail. Capitalism functions by creative destruction ('schöpferische zerstörung')2 as mentioned in The Communist Manifesto, but in a different context: out of the ashes of disaster arises success. The correct response to the global credit crunch would have been for governments to have allowed national banks to collapse into central banks, with central banks effectively taking over ownership. In this manner, debts owed to the Bank could have been removed, central banks would have actioned their responsibility as lender of last resort, and the crisis would have been contained to adlanticist countries.
 


1Source: http://thinkexist.com/quotes/benito_mussolini/
2 Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction