Toxic Capitalism
We are all now familiar with the story of the rise of neoliberalism – Friedrich von
Hayek and the Mont Pe´le`rin Society, Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys,
Pinochet’s Chile – as simultaneously testing ground and template for a whole
new phase of capitalism. In intellectual historical terms, neoliberalism marked a
return to a Smithean economy based on private property, competition and selfinterest,
and to a Lockean politics vaunting the expression of self-interest as the
best-for-all pinnacle of bourgeois democracy. But it may be Russia nearly two
decades later that marks the most emblematic expression of this ruthless killand-
grab politics. By 1991, the forensic global violence of neoliberalism had
been visited on various countries in Latin America, Thatcher’s Britain,
Reagan’s America, IMF targets of ‘structural readjustment’ (from the Caribbean
to Africa), New York City, Poland. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of
lives had already been sacrificed either to direct state violence or war, unemployment
or starvation, the want of water or health care. The wars in Iraq, the Balkans,
and various locales in central Africa were still to come. Having already won the
Nobel Peace Prize a year earlier, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was the
toast of the capitalist world for ‘liberalising’ Russia’s social and political institutions,
in effect crying ‘uncle’ on the Cold War. Liberalising the economy was
next on the agenda, but rather than supporting a process already underway,
Western governments put ‘Gorby’ in a vice, requiring the most far-reaching economic
‘reforms’. Fresh from his organised destruction of the Bolivian and Polish
economies in the name of market liberalisation, Jeffrey Sachs played henchman
economist of Western capital, and the next two or three years turned the Soviet
economy into a whole new frontier of capital accumulation and dispossession,
looting the state’s coffers and the people’s everyday living. Egged on by
Western governments under the vogue sentiment that ‘greed is good’, the new
Russia suspended any meaningful democracy, put down a popular revolt…