So I’m glad to see the WSWS, a news source I respect as much as I may have certain ideological differences, analyses the Madoff spectacle on a very similar manner to that which I propose. Because they are not sitting an administrative law exam tomorrow and they are better at this whole journalism thing, they have a lot more concrete and unarguable basis to ground their article on:
While acknowledging that Madoff’s decision to plead guilty and cooperate with investigators seeking to unravel his schemes would ordinarily count in his favor, Chin underscored the political reasons for imposing the maximum sentence possible under the law. Madoff’s fraud had left his victims “doubting our financial institutions” as well as “our government’s ability to regulate,” he said.
So here we have it from the judge himself: the essential evil in Madoff’s actions–from the viewpoint of the ruling class–lies not on the swindle qua swindle (where do profits come from?) but on the mismanagement of the swindle, which has scared the marks, alarmed the cattle, frightened the prey… etc. The unacceptable sin of a bourgeois is the destruction of a very carefully cultivated state of appearance, which hides the reality of class exploitation behind a façade of reward for effort, free agents, and just and equal exchange of value for value. When these pillars of the bourgeois edifice are seen to shake under violations as deep and blatant as Madoff’s scheme, the working classes, whose labour is the source of all use values but those with which nature itself selflessly provides us, can see the reality hidden behind the screens: exploitation, subjection, alienation, and, in summary, the eternal swindle of surplus value extraction.
I’m not simply being hyperbolic when I speak of the systematic and necessary swindle entailed by capitalism. If you don’t want to believe in the greater–profits–at least consider the lesser, and realize Madoff is not the rare aberration which the press is attempting to depict, in the manner of a scapegoat, to burden with Wall Street’s crimes entire. Consider this:
At least a half dozen big hedge funds and private investors had close relations with Madoff, and seem to have had advance notice of his collapse—the bankruptcy trustee is now suing them for making more than $10 billion in withdrawals in the months before December 2008.
So while the press have their feeding frenzy at the expense of their chosen villain of the week, remember that Madoff’s more successful homologues have engaged in a great redistribution of wealth–from the bottom to the top–under the unquestionable guise of profits and financialization. In the meantime, the holders of political power get elected on a hazy platform of change and immediately proceed to bail these operators out, but, after all, they paid for the campaign. While we workers keep our illusions, both in the pillars of a building ever more subject to shaking and quaking, from the misdesign and inner tension instituted by the blind architect which was history, and in the political power which is all too often counterpoised to that economic edifice, while in reality it functions but as buttress of it, we’ll continue getting swindled, and, from time to time, we will wonder: does it have to be like this?
Tags: capitalism, madoff, scandal, spectacle, swindle, wall street
