in the times last week hugo rifkind threw down the gauntlet to demonstrators protesting at the G20 summit to “formulate a coherent argument” and “propose some sort of feasible alternative to the world economy instead of just bitching about it and blowing your bloody whistles.”
humorous disciples of neoliberalism too often delight in ridiculing critics through caricature. so i welcome this opportunity to point out that we not only offered cogent reasons why capital and trade liberalisation aggravate global inequality, but predicted that they would prove destabilising as well. we not only argued that stock market and property bubbles were no substitutes for productive investment, but predicted that these bubbles would pop, leaving wreckage in their wake. and we predicted that, whatever one might say about markets in general, free-market finance and free-market environmentalism were accidents waiting to happen.
yet rifkind and others are right to ask what we want instead. our answer is simple: we want to empower people to protect themselves and the natural environment from the damage caused by neoliberal capitalism. but we also want to replace the economics of competition and greed with the economics of equitable cooperation so we are not forever fighting defensive battles to mitigate environmental destruction and economic injustice, and so we need not fear that a crisis such as this will happen again...// robin hahnel, 04.01.09, the times
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