Victory for the Communists!

Waldo had mentioned something to the effect that if you concentrate wealth in a small enough number of hands you can get effects not unlike communism.

Porto Alegre was the big communist get together.  The author complains that nobody goes because the communists are all at big ubber-business get together Davos:  Thus Porto Davos.

Views » April 11, 2006

The Liberal Communists of Porto Davos 

By Slavoj Žižek

So who are these liberal communists? The usual gang of suspects: Bill Gates and George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as court-philosophers like Thomas Friedman. What makes this group interesting is that their ideology is becoming indistinguishable from that of Antonio Negri, who has praised postmodern digital capitalism, which, according to Negri, is becoming almost indistinguishable from communism...

Liberal communists are big executives reforming the spirit of contest, or, to put it the other way round, countercultural geeks who took over big corporations. Their dogma is a new, postmodernized, version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand: Market and social responsibility are not opposites, they can be employed together for mutual benefit. Collaboration with employees, dialogue with customers, respect for the environment and transparent deal-making are now the keys to a successful business. ..

Above all, liberal communists see themselves as true citizens of the world, good people who worry. They worry about populist fundamentalists and irresponsible, greedy corporations. They see the “deeper causes” of today’s problems, the mass poverty and hopelessness that breed fundamentalist terror. So their goal is not to earn money, but to change the world (and, in this way, as a by-product, make even more money)...

The catch, of course, is that, in order to give it to the community, first you have to take it (or, as they put it, create it). The rationale of liberal communists is that, in order to really help people, you must have the means to do it. And as experience—the dismal failure of all centralized state and collectivist approaches—teaches us, private initiative is by far the most efficient way. So if the state wants to regulate their business, to tax them excessively, it is effectively undermining its own official goal (to make life better for the large majority, to really help those in need)...

[W]hat makes a figure like Soros ethically so problematic. His daily routine is a lie embodied: Half of his working time is devoted to financial speculations and the other half to humanitarian activities (providing finances for cultural and democratic activities in post-Communist countries, underwriting the movement in the United States to get public money out of private elections, coining pejorative terms like “free-market fundamentalists”) that ultimately fight the effects of his own speculations. Likewise the two faces of Bill Gates: a cruel businessman, destroying or buying out competitors, aiming at virtual monopoly, employing all the dirty tricks to achieve his goals … and the greatest philanthropist in the history of mankind...

In the liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: Charity today is the humanitarian mask that hides the underlying economic exploitation. In a blackmail of gigantic proportions, the developed countries are constantly “helping” the undeveloped (with aid, credits, etc.), thereby avoiding the key issue, namely, their complicity in and co-responsibility for the miserable situation of the undeveloped...