Recently on German Joys, I’ve read a post about the sentencing of Madoff which has made me think a bit about the whole judicial system, in particular when applied to what in effect are criminal celebrities like Madoff, as a sort of spectacle, a mechanism with similar uses than the classics have been said to attribute to tragedy.
Madoff’s biggest crime, if it can be called a crime, is that he got caught. He put in question, in a public and embarrassing way, that this whole setup we live under is but a big swindle, a swindle which dimensions would dwarf the abilities of any man to construct. All too often we here about Madoff’s “victims”. Madoff’s victims were gamblers who chose to believe in the promises of a swindler, but in a way that implicates them too. What did they think Madoff was doing with their money? In the best cases, being the most charitable we may be without breaking with reality, they didn’t know and didn’t want to think about it too deeply, but educated people–and Madoff’s investors weren’t exactly paupers–know the only big machine for making free lunches is the capitalist system itself and its dynamic of exploitation of labour and nature. It’s unthinkable that they could have believed Madoff was not a swindler: they just thought he was swindling someone else.
As the Spanish idiom says, ladrón que roba a ladrón tiene cien años de perdón: a thief who steals from a thief has 100 years of pardons. Of course this idiom itself is little more than a nice turn of phrase, but it clearly encapsulates an intuition: that there is something, if not virtuous, at least not depraved in utilizing people’s avarice, greed, and complete unwillingness to think–especially when such thoughts may disturb the miracle, the chance of getting something for nothing–to one’s own benefit.
I don’t think of Madoff as a hero. In the best of cases, he managed to reallocate ill-gotten gains from one place to another. His punishment, though, is not so much derived from some notion of fairness or moral uprightness that was broken by his conduct–which is otherwise frequent enough–but rather from the embarrassing fact the swindler got caught. The bourgeois see one of their number fumble a task on which their livelihood as people and as a class depends, and can’t but unsheathe their knives. Don’t they do this every day to labour without any fuss? Why did this clumsy man have to call attention to the fact that, comes down to it, capitalism is the biggest swindle in history?
