Il potere del denaro: oligarchie nell’età globale

The New Deal experience, later consolidated in the post-war «reformist» culture, was the most conscious expression of the need, in every democratic society, to avoid the concentration of power favored by the market. The loss of awareness of the fact that every interventionist policy in economy is also a policy that distributes power might be considered as a sign of the transition to a new era; in which an opposing objective to the New Deal is posited: a new redistribution in favor of the strong, as a necessary product of the functioning of the market. In the Bretton Woods’ world, the rules allowed for a wider autonomy to handle internal balance and protect the weaker members of society through public policy as well as public visibility. In the world of the rules established by Reagan and Thatcher, the room left for national economic policy was drastically reduced. National States have lost an important part of their ability to decide in favor of the markets. It is not the former who control the latter; but the latter —financial markets in particular— who have become the supervisors of the States’ behavior. The effect of this change is the increasing distance between strong and weak countries and, internally, of social inequality. National politics, crushed by the logic of the markets and the new international rules, is no longer able to gather the consensus of citizens. It is therefore urgent to find its legitimacy in international markets and institutions, rather than in society. Citizens no longer have an interlocutor in politics who responds to their needs and lose the ability to understand what is happening. The market culture, which has become hegemonic, narrated what was happening as the inevitable result of technical facts, while in reality it was a change in the rules of civil coexistence.