Political quadrilemma
from David Ruccio
Dani Rodik shatters the neoliberal dream by noting a political trilemma:
We cannot have globalization, democracy, and national sovereignty simultaneously. We must choose two among the three.
If European leaders want to maintain democracy, they must make a choice between political union and economic disintegration. They must either explicitly renounce economic sovereignty or actively put it to use for the benefit of their citizens. The first would entail coming clean with their own electorates and building democratic space above the level of the nation-state. The second would mean giving up on monetary union in order to be able to deploy national monetary and fiscal policies in the service of longer-term recovery.
The longer this choice is postponed, the greater the economic and political cost that ultimately will have to be paid.
I think there actually may be a quadrilemma: we cannot have capitalist globalization, political democracy, national sovereignty, and economic democracy simultaneously.
What we’re witnessing, in Europe and elsewhere, is the absence of economic democracy—the making of economic decisions, at both the micro and macro levels, through democratic institutions that involve the vast majority of the citizenry. If we move in that direction, we will be able to create very different kinds of globalization, political decisionmaking, and national sovereignty. That would be a real blow to the neoliberal nightmare we’re currently living through.
I have been saying and writing it for quite a while — democracy and globalization under current trade conditions are incompatible. (As applicable to the USA — therefore not raising the issue of sovereignty.) “Compensated free trade” would improve the situation — again, for this country.
In practice “democracy” is just a shopfront for Oligarchy. Always has been.
And the various oligarchies are in constant conflict, vying for control of territory and resources:
After Romney becomes President and Netanyahoo is re-established in Israel, watch out!
Again, mistaking form for substance. American “democracy” is and always has been a fraud and mask of plutocracy which is what the “Repuiblic” was founded on (along with genocide, slavery, imperalism, colonialism, racism, misogyny and the like) and built upon. neo-liberal globalization is neo-imperialism pure and simple.Here is one of my lectures to the Institution of Marxism Research of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in August of 2009 entitled Necoclassical Economics and Neoliberalism as Neo-imperialism”
https://jimcraven10.wordpress.com/2012/08/14/neoclassical-economics-and-neoliberalism-as-neoimperialism-a-lecture-to-the-academy-of-marxism-of-the-chinese-academy-of-social-sciences-cass/