Economic Growth as Myth and Sickness

By Marc Batko (http://www.mbtranslations.com)

Neoliberalism confuses the goat and the gardener and offers the sickness as the cure. In “The Flexible Person,” Thomas Gerlach shows how flexibility or fitness for the market is made the ideal through athletic and medical metaphors. The citizen or the subject is sold and betrayed as human capital.

As self-righteousness is the “grand delusion,” (Eberhard Juengel), neoliberalism or profit worship setting investors and financiers above workers and consumers is based on many myths. One myth is economic growth as a panacea. In the 1950s we lived in a “guns and butter” moment when there were no limits. A little more productivity, pushing the workers, would solve all problems. Other myths are the self-healing market, the “invisible hand,” corporate beneficence and nature as a free good, external or sink. Nature, our mother, brother and sister, is the foundation for future life as public investment is the foundation for social harmony.

Todos somos Marcos, we are all Marcos or we are only bones for CocaCola! Life including the economy must be shared, not made the property of transnational corporations. As the Sabbath was made for humankind, not humankind for the Sabbath, the economy should serve life. When the market is total, absolute, sacrosanct and self-healing, it becomes a steamroller or idol. As the US falls into its trap, time changes from everyday time to Kairos time when economic exploitation and injustice and destruction of nature are status confessionis, matters of faith and decision, violations of our social contract with one another and our interdepedence with nature.

Charles Boylan, morning host of CFRO Vancouver Coop Radio, said that the dominant consciousness is frozen, refuses all alternatives and stylizes bankruptcies as normal business. We need to support one another in changing consciousness. The negative is bound to the positive as conservation of energy is bound to transformation of energy (F.Engels, Anti-Duhring).

In “Freedom according to the Stock Market,” Gunter Grass says that the freely elected members of parliament are not free in their decisions but are captive to large capital and profit maximization. Politics becomes the lobby for the stock market, he soberly concludes. If we are transfixed by economic market fundamentalism or freedom according to the stock market, we cannot see May 8 as a day of liberation.

As Hiroshima and the horror of the nuclear bomb changed the meaning of strength, health and power, our economic, social and political crises could free us from economic reductionism, the rule of instrumental rationality and the tunnel vision of self-interest.

There are alternatives to shareholder value capitalism and oil dependency in sustainability and subsistence economics, in sharing with the Global South and defying the WTO, GATT. TRIPS and GATS.

As prejudice is a stepping stone to understanding (Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method), oil dependence could be the stepping stone to true community and interdependence. Conserving energy is more productive than more power plants. Discovering the stories in ourselves may be more ennobling than the stories of office buildings.

We are called to be subjects, to struggle for equal opportunities and the minimum essentials of life. Our gifts and talents, hidden, ignored or buried by the neoliberal steamroller, can be rediscovered as we reclaim self-determination. Let us be people of humility and self-criticism with the openness and authenticity of the child as our model.

[the articles “The Flexible Person” and “Freedom according to the Stock Market” are available at www.portland.indymedia.org]