The struggle to create a democratic economy based on human need requires finding a path to a drastically smaller financial industry. Banking should be a utility, under public control and existing to serve the productive economy, in contrast to its current incarnation as an uncontrollable behemoth that exists to extract wealth from all other human activities.

Given the stranglehold of financiers over the world’s economies, democratizing banks will be no easy task. But it can done. Countries such as Norway and Sweden have nationalized their banks, only to promptly hand them back to private owners.

As always, a word of caution is in order: Although the financial industry acts as both whip and parasite in relation to the productive economy (providers of tangible goods and services) — the whip spurring ever harsher working conditions and intensifying the movement of production to low-wage havens and the parasite extracting money from every possible human activity — there is no neat separation of finance from the productive economy in capitalism. Many manufacturers have financial subsidiaries, for instance, and corporate executives grow wealthy from stock-market bubbles inflated by speculators and other financial manipulations.

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