Financialisation ought to be reversed. Yet such an entrenched system will never be reversed by regulation alone. Its reversal also requires the creation of public banking that would operate with a new spirit of public service. It also needs effective controls to be applied to private banking as well as to international flows of capital. Not least, it requires new methods of meeting the financial requirements of households, as well as of small and medium enterprises. There is an urgent need for communal and associational ways to provide housing, education, health and other basic goods and services for working people, breaking the hold of finance on everyday life.
Ultimately, financialisation will not be reversed without an ambitious programme to re-establish the superiority of the social over the private, and the collective over the individual in contemporary society. Reversing financialisation is about reining in the rampant capitalism of our day.
Have they forgotten 1989 already? When we all finally saw, in gory detail, what the superiority of the social over the private led to?
Apparently the Co-op directors were very impressed when Paul Flowers said all this at his job interview.
“Financialisation”? WTF? Is this the latest buzzword to come out of the Leftard hive mind this week?
For sport, try replacing all banking words with groceries:
“requires new methods of meeting the grocery requirements of households”
“needs effective controls on international flows of food”
“requires the creation of public supermarkets”
Every so often we actually hear such arguments from the watermelons: green local food, distributed by small local shops complete with free hugs. However nobody is suggesting a National Food Service (for now).
> However nobody is suggesting a National Food Service (for now).
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/24/food-rationing-crises-public-health-problem-obesity-hunger-big-government
Is a return to food rationing close enough for you. A National Food Service is actually mooted in the comments. There are plenty of other loons out there too, a lot of them in nice Government sinecures with power over your life. Be afraid.
“There is an urgent need for communal and associational ways to provide housing, education, health and other basic goods and services for working people, breaking the hold of finance on everyday life.”
In a free society, there would be nothing to stop people from forming mutualist organsiations; in Victorian Britain, that is exactly what occurred (friendly societies, unions, etc). And this rich foliage of social entrepreneurship was cut down, quite deliberately, first by the Lloyd George/Asquith reforms before WW1 and later, under Attlee and co. We had “public banking” all right, and after a few decades, the results were plain to see before Maggie took over.
The authors of such diatribes are either ignorant of such history or, less creditably, know it and choose not to highlight this so as to present the false idea that “communal” = The State. It doesn’t, and the failure on the Left to realise this is a false choice is one of the tragedies of the age.
To repeat: there is nothing stopping people from setting up communal/other models of financial organisations and some have done so. But of course governments, by their regulatory zeal, have significantly raised barriers to entry. And now the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK is tightening the screws on things such as peer-to-peer lending and crowdfunding for small businesses. I wonder what the haters of “neo-liberalism” have to say about that?
Those eeevil bankers and their financialisation of feudal dues, first fruits, the tithe, the corvée, droit de seigneur and all.
Let’s get our pitchforks out!