Reykjavík Grapevine - 10.10.2008, Síða 15

REYKJAVÍK GRAPEVINE | ISSUE 16—2008 | 15
ARTIClE BY vALuR gunnARSSon — ILLuSTRATIon BY KöDDI HRISTBJöRnS
Thankfully, this will be the last we will hear of
the market as the cure of all ills in our lifetime.
Or at least until we start telling our grandchildren
to beware of those who try to convince them that
greed is good. Will they listen then? I doubt it. It
will always be in the interests of the rich to make
people believe that they should be allowed to do
as they want. And those with the money will in the
end control our minds. Unless something is done
to stop them.
My generation will be the one hardest hit by
our current predicament. The people in their late
20’s and 30’s, the ones who have taken out loans
to buy homes at exorbitant prices that are now
practically worthless. We are the ones who will
never forget, in the same way that everyone who
was around in the 30’s learnt to have a healthy
suspicion of the market. It took 50 years from the
Great Depression until free market policies be-
came dominant again. By that time, everyone who
could still remember the hard times was either
dead or had lost influence. The same mistakes
were made all over again.
ThE RETuRN oF hISToRY
So much for Libertarian Capitalism. What next?
During the 20th Century, two ideologies emerged
to seriously challenge capitalism. During the
Great Depression, it seemed one or the other of
these might win out. It took a World War to defeat
Nazism. This left communism and capitalism to
duke it out for the next half century until there re-
mained, as in Highlander, only one. We who grew
up in the 80’s and 90’s were indoctrinated in an
era in which many were talking about the end of
ideology. It wasn’t the end, but rather that one ide-
ology, that of the Free Market, had replaced many.
And even if those who doubted the prevailing
system weren’t thrown into a gulag, they certainly
had little stock in the marketplace of ideas.
Here in Iceland, we had the free market poli-
cies of the conservatives in the daily newspaper
Morgunblaðið competing with the free market
policies of the newly rich in daily newspaper Frét-
tablaðið. For a while, libertarian capitalism was
the only game in town. It only took 20 years to
blow it. History is back with a vengeance.
ThE NEW JEWS
So, will that mean that other ideologies will make
a comeback? Probably. Just as we have had to deal
with bad ideas from the libertarian spectrum for
the past decades, we will now have to listen to bad
ideas of a different kind. People are still reeling
from the shock of having everything they believed
in come to an end. But after shock comes anger.
Just as the wealth was unevenly distributed, so
will poverty. And when people see that the ones
who deserve it least will be the hardest hit, anger
will start to simmer.
During the Great Depression, a scapegoat
had to be found and, as so often before, people
started blaming the Jews. This time around, they
might turn on the immigrants. Even with full em-
ployment, there is always some resentment to-
wards those of different backgrounds. As mass un-
employment spreads, the locals will be vying for
the cleaning and service jobs that they wouldn’t
touch with a stick during better days. Anyone seen
as an outsider is bound to suffer most during hard
times, and the same will no doubt be true now.
ThE FASCIST MoDEl?
Nazism never really took root in Iceland during
the 30’s. It may simply be because there was no
significant Jewish community to use as scape-
goats. Immigration to Iceland only really started
in the 90’s. We may well see some political parties
on the far right emerge to take advantage of direc-
tionless anger. Hopefully, the anger will be better
directed at those more deserving of it.
In any case, immigrant communities haven’t
really set root here, and many people will simply
leave. Still, it is a bad omen that the first weekend
after the collapse saw 13 violent attacks reported
to the police in a single night. This may well be a
record.
The main difference between Fascism now
and in the 30’s is that at the time, it was a new and
unproven idea. We have now seen what it leads to
and, hopefully, this will ensure that we don’t have
to go down that road again. Nevertheless, the idea
of a controlled economy allied with nationalist ar-
rogance is bound to make some sort of return. In
Russia, it already has.
ThE lEFT-REDS
It is not just parties of the far right who will benefit
at the polls. Parties of the left will tone down their
feminism and environmentalism and start taking
a greater interest in the economy. The Left-Greens
are the one major party in Iceland that can be
said to be blameless for our current predicament.
They will now benefit by not being in power, the
same way that Obama benefitted by having had
no part in the Iraq War. But if they fail to offer solu-
tions, those with more radical ideas will become
louder. Instead of the Left-Greens, we may end up
with the Far-left-Reds. The era of identity politics
is over. We’re back to class struggle now.
But history never repeats itself completely.
In the 30’s, when things seemed to be going well in
the Soviet Union as seen from the outside, commu-
nism was a better proposition than it is now. And
yet communists failed to take power in any coun-
try during the Great Depression. It will be harder
to be a communist now, after we know what hap-
pened in the Soviet Union. So many people will
want a new ideology for a new Depression.
ThE SECoND CoMING?
But the most vibrant ideology these days goes
back a long way. Even during happier times, peo-
ple were starting to turn to religion when the mar-
ket failed to provide them with purpose. Not only
the parties of the left, but also others who have
warned against the dangers of excessive greed
will benefit. As people begin to lose their material
wealth, they will turn for comfort to the one party
that has always been willing to provide it. Now, as
the rich are becoming poor, the first last, there is
much in the Bible that will seem apt.
History should have taught us that giving po-
litical power to the clerics has never been a good
idea. But history is no guarantee that mistakes will
not be repeated. If worst comes to worst, religion
will become the greatest threat to democracy, the
Nazism of the 2010’s.
ThE GREAT DEPRESSIoN oF ThE 2070’S
None of this is to say that we are witnessing the
end of capitalism. But we are seeing the end of its
most extreme form, laissez-faire. Neither capital-
ism nor communism functioned very well when
taken to their extremes. The social democracies
of the Nordic countries became the richest coun-
tries in the world, as well as those that took the
best care of its citizens. Sadly, Iceland decided
to go in a different direction. It must now pay the
price. In any case, this will probably be last de-
pression caused by Wall Street. The Great Depres-
sion of the 2070’s will start in Shanghai.
Winter has come. We won’t see spring again for a
long time.
The Great Laissez-faire Dream is
over. To many, it always seemed
like more of a nightmare. In any
case, we must now wake up and
face the facts. It beggars belief
how entire nations can blindly be
led towards folly by leaders who
in retrospect were so obviously
wrong, and how all those who
knew better were brushed aside.
And how this can happen again
and again, in different forms.