Like just about everyone else on
the planet, I have been trying to sort out my reactions to Brexit—the British
vote in favor of exiting the European Union. And what occurred to me even at
the very time I heard it was this: maybe it’s a necessary warning sign to the
neoliberal-powers-that-be that globalization, not democracy, is what’s run
amuck. Far from being just a protest vote against the influx of “foreigners”
and migrants—in other words, the racist reaction from the great unwashed of the
British lower classes—it may well be far deeper. It may be, that is, a cry of
the heart from those who do not want to be homogenized in the great likeness
machine of global corporatocracy that seeks to make everyone a stamped-out cog
in the consumer-exploiting Walmarts of the world. That’s what occurred to me
almost instantly when I heard the news. Nationhood may be anachronistic or even
dangerous in this ever-more connected world, but it’s also one of the few
things that has a chance of keeping different sections of the globe unique. And
what we need now is more of it not less—more distinctiveness in separate
populations, more distinctiveness in dress, language, buildings, customs, ways
of doing and being. Skyscrapers in Dubai, no matter how marvelous the technical
skill they demonstrate, simply strike one as completely out of touch with their
surroundings. We need people and populations that are more in touch with their surroundings, more unique to the
particular flora and fauna in which they arise.
And this may be what Brexit and the Trump phenomenon in our own country
are more deeply about.
We
hear about the chaos in the financial markets: the British pound dropping like
a stone, the stock market here and elsewhere dropping similarly, the financial
and economic mavens predicting more and more dire outcomes from uncertainty.
And though no one wants to see another financial crash, what we need to do is
understand that perhaps this is precisely what’s needed to wake these guys up.
Just consider what the outcome of the financial wheeling and dealing of the
past few decades has led to: conditions of inequality in both Britain and the
United States that are almost unprecedented. The corporate CEOs, the banksters,
the hedge fund managers are making obscene amounts of money and living like
oriental potentates, while the working slobs have been going steadily
backwards. More and more people lose their jobs to foreign countries whose
workers slave away at wages that completely obviate competition. More and more
corporations rush to have their goods made in these foreign factories, shifting
them whenever another country offers yet lower wages. And the gulf between the
very wealthy few running things and the masses of impoverished working stiffs
racing to the bottom grows ever wider. There is a professional class which manages to stay
reasonably solvent—the bank managers, the professoriat, the politicos. But they
hew to the party line of whoever’s in power, conservatives or laborites,
democrats or republicans, and maintain their insider edge regardless of who’s got
the reins (see Thomas Frank and his recent exposè of the Democratic Party in Listen, Liberal.) Meantime, those trying
to catch up find themselves always deeper in debt, even the middle classes who
have to incur a lifetime of debt to afford a college education. So there’s a
logic to chaos in financial markets. These usurers should find themselves in chaos. They should find themselves at the
bottom of a pit. But of course, they usually don’t. And those who land in the
pit are the suckers who buy into the myths of progress and globalization and
trade deals making everyone richer, and all the other myths about the benefits
of trade we’re constantly sold.
What
occurs to me, then, is that this isn’t about politics so much as economics. And
there is a difference. I, for one, am in favor of the United Nations and
attempts to keep the violence of the world under reasonable control. This
requires that nation states give up some of their sovereignty, which always
elicits protests and anguish from the breast-beaters on the Right. But by and
large, with some notable exceptions such as Israel’s continuing occupation and
ethnic cleansing in Palestine, the system has worked fairly well. Invasions by
one aggressive state of another’s territory have pretty much been limited—though
not entirely eliminated. The condemnation attaching to naked aggression such as
we saw in the 1930s and before have made such ventures too costly to most
nations’ global reputations. This, again, is not to say that such aggression
has been totally foreclosed, but it has, for the most part, been priced too
high for most nations to incur lightly. The loss of sovereignty is worth the
gain in peace (or at least accommodation).
In
the economic sphere, however, the situation is almost diametrically opposed.
And it is not nations that are at issue so much as trans-national corporations.
This tends to be the result mainly of trade agreements like NAFTA and the
still-not-ratified TPP. In other words, in the economic sphere, it is not
nation-states that are the major offenders, but corporations and the
aptly-named ‘vulture capitalists’, many of which have simply transcended
national boundaries. Indeed, the terms of trade agreements in a globalized
world have meant that national sovereignty has become subservient to corporate
rights—the right to make a profit. One example says this loud and clear: the
recent lawsuit filed by TransCanada. The corporation that had planned the Keystone
XL oil pipeline from Canada through the United States has just filed suit demanding
$15 billion as compensation for its losses from the “expected profits” it stood
to make if the deal was approved. This accords with the boilerplate agreement
in such trade deals: corporations have been essentially granted the right to
“expect” profits from planned ventures in any nation they choose, and if such
plans come into conflict with a nation’s determination to prevent the
despoliation of its territory or people, then too bad. The corporation has prior
rights here—a right to sue for damages to its profit—while a nation has no
right to prevent damage to its land or water or environment—or the globe itself
in the case of global warming. This, to me, is about as outrageous as
capitalism gets. The underlying notion is that profit is sacrosanct, and takes
precedence over considerations of human health or the health of the nation and
planet itself.
This,
I think, is what is really at issue in the Brexit vote and the Trump/Sanders
phenomenon in the United States. The people who are being crushed by the depredations
of big corporations—which pursue profit anywhere and everywhere, no matter the
damage to the nations in which they reside—have begun, if only dimly, to catch
on. Perhaps they don’t see beyond the slogans and xenophobia. Perhaps they
can’t or won’t articulate what is really at the heart of their malaise. But on
some level they understand. This is why they want to “take back their country.”
What they want is some control, or someone
they elect to control the monsters called corporations and financial
institutions that seem able to roll over anything in their way with no
consequences. What they want is some control over the obscene redistribution of
wealth upwards that has taken place in the past half-century. What they want is
something like fairness in the way their lives are disbursed, some more direct
connection to what they know, to what they can see, rather than some distant insider
decision-making that is invisible to them. What they want is some indication
that their vote can have some effect on the levers of power despite the fact
that they are not mega-rich. Brexit for
once gave many in England that indication. And my guess—and my hope—is that
more Brexits are on the way—especially if the powers that be do not wake up to
the earthquake that has just struck them.
Lawrence DiStasi
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