Alessandro Sansoni: devil makes pots, but does not make lids

20.12.2017

International Conference: «Financial Capitalism and its Alternatives for the 21th Century: Contributions on the 4th Economical Theory»  the capital city of Moldova, Chișinău, on 15th-16th December.

The first fact we need to start with, if we want to reason about the overcoming of the current financial capitalism, is that now the mass of the virtual financial economy is in relationship with the real economy, that is the actual production of wealth of human beings that work, undertake, produce, over 9 to 1.

This is an objectively unsustainable relationship: a few hundred thousand people out of the over 7 and a half billion that currently inhabit the planet, through stock market speculations and financial engineering operations, continue to earn and move an unlikely amount of money every day.

The financial speculation that parasites the work, entrepreneurial or dependent, of peoples and individuals, is a practice as old as the world, but only today, thanks to the potential offered by modern technologies, has reached similar proportions.

If until today similar activities, although inappropriate, were not only physiological but above all tolerable, it is evident that in the medium term they will no longer be able to be supported by the real economy, which now no longer appears as an ox that drags its plow or his wagon among many difficulties and oppressed by asphyxiating pests, but rather as the carcass of a carrion to which swarms of wasps try to suck the little blood still available.

The prolonged and structural economic crisis, that Europe and, in general, the Western world is facing, is a witness of this, with a situation that has lasted for several years and shows no signs of stopping.

In particular, to suffer the crisis is above all the middle class, made up of public employees, employees, farmers, professionals, self-employed workers, small and medium entrepreneurs, etc. It is increasingly thinning, losing any possibility of continuing to aspire to future generations for any form of social mobility, if not in negative. With the progressive liquefying of the middle class, it is democracy itself and, at the same time, the modern state as we have known it in the last 200 years, to mark the pace.

Along with the financialization of the economy, globalization has proceeded with forced steps, with its corollary of dismantling ethnic and cultural identities. For decades the globalist "single thought" wanted to make us believe that it was a natural and irreversible process, fruit of the spontaneous progress of the human species.

Today we know, on the contrary, that globalization has been a desired mechanism and produced economically, triggered through agreements at the international level such as the establishment of the WTO, aimed at supporting the unstoppable development of the financialization of the economy, to be implemented on the head and on the skin of peoples and their interests.

Still, the devil makes pots, but does not make lids.

Despite the political class of the Western countries, and not only, and today the complete dependencies, not only economic, but even cultural, of the logic of finance, the long-term unsustainability of such a situation is producing those social, political and cultural antibodies that can, not without a salty price, lead us to a new era.

If the processes of globalization, both those territorially defined as the EU or the NAFTA, as well as those of a planetary dimension, such as the aforementioned WTO, have led to the disintegration of the National States, both in their capacity for social intervention and in their exercise of those sovereign prerogatives (monetary, territorial, cultural, etc.) that were consubstantial to them, the triggered reaction, and in some ways even favored by the paladins of globalization, distinguished by the emergence of the so-called "small homelands", anchored to ancient historical legacies, but in fact disintegrating the national teams (see for example the explosion of Yugoslavia, the overwhelming return of the North / South dichotomy in Italy, the Scottish independence, the current Catalan question, etc.), show us from now on what could be the alternative way to go in the future, in the awareness of the abstract absurdity of the "glockal" synthesis of the politically correct entity, which inevitably returns to the insolvably opposed global / local dialectic.

The hypothesis is that in the coming years the anxiety of the peoples to return to what is certain and well defined and limited and, therefore, controllable, may indicate the path to new élites of authentically popular extraction to take out the people from the oppression of the globalist finance. It’s a hope, it is true, but it is possible to cultivate realistically, based on the awareness that History never stops, even when radical chic thinkers or the teocons announce "the end".

The return to the real economy and its fundamental regulatory mechanisms do not mean the end of stock exchanges and speculations and the establishment of an idyllic world without social injustices. On the contrary it means the reconquest at a high price of a more human universe, but also endowed with perspective and concreteness, which the current virtual wealth cannot guarantee in the long term.

To prove it is another historical fact that marks the figure of these years we are living: the collapse of the European dream. More precisely: the end of that project of construction of the unity of the European continent on an economic and monetary basis.

A project that crumbles in the face of the evidence that tells us that it is not possible to separate the reasons and areas of action of the so-called "market" from the broader and all-encompassing ones of "political action".

The construction of a "European power" different from the classical ones, regardless of military and political strength because it focuses everything on the economic one (an idea cultivated above all by the German ruling classes, but not only) proved to be unrealizable, at the same time when it was not possible to impose the Euro as a world reserve currency instead of the dollar, with the only arms made available by the European Central Bank and the Brussels technocracy. It was an attempt that ended up making the European Union something like the god Chrono devouring his children (the Mediterranean countries strangled by public debt and a currency too heavy to ensure competitiveness in their economies), besieged by the mass of liquidity pumped by the Federal Reserve through the Quantitative Easing and by masses of induced refugees pouring into the Old Continent.

By inertia, the lords of Brussels delude themselves of being able to go forward, but the victories of the populist movements, even where they have not managed to go to the government, has in fact already imposed a change of course.

The dollar has remained the world reserve currency, but in the meantime the reasons of geopolitics have returned forcefully on the international scene, which in fact, even if not knowingly, already determines the present of American, English, Russian, Arabic, Chinese politics and, whether we like it or not, that Europe seeks through a "double speed" and "enhanced cooperation" to restore itself to a profile and a long-term working hypothesis.

It is not said that it can do it. On this there is to be less optimistic than the prospect of a return to the real economy. The progressive death of the European Union could be the prelude to a new era of wars and destruction.

In this aspect, only the construction of a new European ruling class, anchored to its ethnic and spiritual affiliations, but deeply convinced of the necessity of building a multipolar world, constantly striving for the pursuit of a balance based on negotiation, could prove decisive for the achievement of that objective, empirical and not theoretical or ideological which, together with the overcoming of the turbulent financial capitalism, aims to build, thanks to the teachings of geopolitics, order and peace.

Alessandro Sansoni, Italy, Member of National Board of Italian Journalist Order