Capitalism 3

It’s eating itself up, so to speak. The problem with profits that are derived from the financial system is that you can only derive them by creating bubbles, and you can only create so many bubbles before they burst.

Walden Bello (2019): „We Have to Move to a Post-Capitalist System“. In: Jacobinmag 28.10.2019

Walden Bello (born 1945) is a Filipino sociologist and director of the NGO Focus on the Global South. Bello was in the resistance against dictator Marcos (who ruled the Philippines from 1965-1986), and was one of the first critics of globalisation. Bello broke into the World Bank office in the early 1980s and stole some 3,000 pages of confidential documents to prove collaboration between the International Monetary Fund (the World Bank's sister organisation) and Marcos.

In recent decades, there has been an increasing financialisation of the economy. Today, rather than through the production of goods or services, vast amounts of money can be made or lost in very short intervals through financial transactions. In his book Dark Victory (1994), Bello describes how financialisation was implemented as a strategy by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s in order to re-subjugate the decolonising Global South, for example, through currency speculation. Thus in 1997, thanks to rumours about a lack of dollar reserves in Thailand, banks and investors immediately withdrew their money not only there, but also in other countries, which then went bankrupt as a result.

*Walden Bello (1994): Dark Victory. The United States and Global Poverty. Amsterdam: Transnational Institut.

2019