Adrian Pabst has written an article in ABC Religion and Ethics entitled “What is to be Done? Overcoming the Capitalist Heresy“. It begins:
As the leaders of the G20 met in the luxury resort of Cannes on the French Riviera, popular outrage and protest movements were spreading across the globe.
From Occupy Wall Street to the camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral, the protesters express a deep-seated anger aimed at global finance that is shared by ordinary people and certain elites alike.
Across the globe there is an implicit, inchoate sense that big business and big government have colluded at the expense of the people. Both centralised states and free markets are disembedded from society, and society is subjugated by the global market-state.
Through local vassals like the City of London Corporation, it subordinates social to commercial purpose, as Blue Labour’s Maurice Glasman has argued.
And so global finance has become disconnected from ethical or social goals, while governments of both the Left and the Right have either replaced mutualist arrangements among workers with centralised, bureaucratic welfare, or outsourced the delivery of public goods to private service providers – or, indeed, both.
Collusion between big government and big business has generated a system that privatises profit, nationalises losses and socialises risk. From the very outset, the global economic turmoil was merely a symptom of a much larger moral crisis.
Thus far the expressions of anger are as diverse as the demonstrators’ demands are vague. That is why the call by the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams for a new debate on specific action is so important.
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