“We apologize for the inconveniences, but this is a revolution.” — Subcomandate Marcos, January 1, 1994
As a history buff, I recently started to re-read a book of essays from Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos that I read more than 8 years ago. I was struck by the prescience of Subcomandante’s essays. Even when he seemed to offer no predictions for the future, more than a decade later, many of his arguments, though he offered them with Mexico in mind, remain remarkably applicable to the state of the Western financial world today. His following essay, “The Fourth World War Has Begun” originally appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique in September of 1997. It is a critically important essay because 12 years later, the intimate link that Marcos speaks of between globalization and the fraud of our global banking system has now in 2010, washed upon our shores.
When Portuguese novelist and Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago visited Chiapas, Mexico to meet with Subcomandante Marcos, he stated: “The issue that is being fought out in the mountains of Chiapas extends beyond the frontiers of Mexico. It touches the hearts of all those who have not abandoned their simple demand for equal justice for all.”
Here are excerpts from this important but forgotten essay below.
The struggle over [new markets] is leading to a New World War — the Fourth. Like all major conflicts, this war is forcing national states to redefine their identity. The world order seems to have reverted to the earlier epochs of the conquests of America, Africa and Oceania — a strange modernity. The twilight years of the twentieth century bear more of a resemblance to the previous centuries of the barbarism than to the rational futures described in science fiction novels.
Vast territories, wealth and, above all, a huge and available workforce lie waiting for the world’s new master but, while there is only one position as master on offer, there are many aspiring candidates. And that explains the new war between those who see themselves as part of the “empire of good”.
Unlike the third world war, in which the conflict between capitalism and socialism took place over a variety of terrains and with varying degrees of intensity, the fourth world war is being conducted between major financial centres in theatres of war that are global in scale and with a level of intensity that is fierce and constant…
Are megalopolises replacing nations? No, or rather not merely that. They are assigning them new functions, new limits and new perspectives. Entire countries are becoming departments of the neoliberal mega-enterprise. Neoliberalism thus produces, on the one hand, destruction and depopulation, and, on the other, the reconstruction and reorganisation of regions and nations.
Unlike nuclear bombs, which had a dissuasive, intimidating and coercive character in the third world war, the financial hyperbombs of the fourth world war are different in nature. They serve to attack territories (national states) by the destruction of the material bases of their sovereignty and by producing a qualitative depopulation of those territories. This depopulation involves the exclusion of all persons who are of no use to the new economy (indigenous peoples, for instance). But at the same time the financial centres are working on a reconstruction of nation states and are reorganising them within a new logic: the economic has the upper hand over the social…
In this new war, politics, as the organiser of the nation state, no longer exists. Now politics serves solely in order to manage the economy, and politicians are now merely company managers (emphasis mine). The world’s new masters have no need to govern directly. National governments take on the role of running things on their behalf. This is what the new order means – unification of the world into one single market. States are simply enterprises with managers in the guise of governments, and the new regional alliances bear more of a resemblance to shopping malls than political federations. The unification produced by neoliberalism is economic: in the giant planetary hypermarket it is only commodities that circulate freely, not people.
Injustice and inequality are the distinguishing traits of today’s world. The earth has five billion human inhabitants: of these, only 500 million live comfortably; the remaining 4.5 billion endure lives of poverty. The rich make up for their numerical minority by their ownership of billions of dollars. The total wealth owned by the 358 richest people in the world, the dollar billionaires, is greater than the annual income of almost half the world’s poorest inhabitants, in other words about 2.6 billion people. (My comment: This inequality has only become more magnified since 1997. This CBPP study illustrates that the top 1% of all Americans captured 67% of the increases in income in the US between 2002 and 2007 and the richest 0.1% of American households captured 12.3% of the entire US income during this same time period.)
The progress of the major transnational companies does not necessarily involve the advance of the countries of the developed world. On the contrary, the richer these giant companies become, the more poverty there is in the so-called “wealthy” countries. The gap between rich and poor is enormous: far from decreasing, social inequalities are growing…
One of the lies of neoliberalism is that the economic growth of companies produces employment and a better distribution of wealth. This is untrue. In the same way that the increasing power of a king does not lead to an increase in the power of his subjects (far from it), the absolutism of finance capital does not improve the distribution of wealth, and does not create jobs. In fact its structural consequences are poverty, unemployment and precariousness. In the 1960s and 1970s, the number of poor people in the world (defined by the World Bank as having an income of less than one dollar per day) rose to some 200 million. By the start of the 1990s, their numbers stood at two billion…
The unemployment and precarious labour of millions of workers throughout the world is a reality which does not look set to disappear. In the countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), unemployment went from 3.8 % in 1966 to 6.3 % in 1990; in Europe it went from 2.2 % to 6.4 %. The globalised market is destroying small and medium- sized companies. With the disappearance of local and regional markets, small and medium producers have no protection and are unable to compete with the giant transnationals. Millions of workers thus find themselves unemployed. One of the absurdities of neoliberalism is that far from creating jobs, the growth of production actually destroys them. The UN speaks of “growth without jobs”. (My comment: this comment seems to foretell how “the absolutism of finance capital” would create the very “jobless recoveries” that politicians incessantly speak of today.)
But the nightmare does not end there. Workers are also being forced to accept precarious conditions. Less job security, longer working hours and lower wages: these are the consequences of globalisation in general and the explosion in the service sector in particular.
All this combines to create a specific surplus: an excess of human beings who are useless in terms of the new world order because they do not produce, do not consume, and do not borrow from banks. In short, human beings who are disposable. Each day the big finance centres impose their laws on countries and groups of countries all around the world. They re-arrange and re-order the inhabitants of those countries. And at the end of the operation they find there is still an “excess” of people.
The nightmare of emigration, whatever its cause, continues to grow. The number of those coming within the ambit of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees has grown disproportionately from 2 million in 1975 to more than 27 million in 1995. The objective of neoliberalism’s migration policy is more to destabilise the world labour market than to put a brake on immigration. The fourth world war – with its mechanisms of destruction/depopulation and reconstruction/reorganisation – involves the displacement of millions of people (My comment: This essay should be a mus read for UNHCR goodwill ambassador Angelina Jolie.) Their destiny is to wander the world, carrying the burden of their nightmare with them, so as to constitute a threat to workers who have a job, a scapegoat designed to make people forget their bosses, and to provide a basis for the racism that neoliberalism provokes…
If you think that the world of crime has to be shady and underhand, you are wrong. In the period of the so-called cold war, organised crime acquired a more respectable image. Not only did it begin to function in the same way as any other modern enterprise, but it also penetrated deeply into the political and economic systems of nation states.
With the beginning of the fourth world war, organised crime has globalised its activities. The criminal organisations of five continents have taken on board the “spirit of world cooperation” and have joined together in order to participate in the conquest of new markets. They are investing in legal businesses, not only in order to launder dirty money, but in order to acquire capital for illegal operations. Their preferred activities are luxury property investment, the leisure industry, the media – and banking. (My comment: Follow this link for a peak into the enormity and commonality of money laundering activities by banks.)
Ali Baba and the Forty Bankers? Worse than that. Commercial banks are using the dirty money of organised crime for their legal activities. According to a UN report, the involvement of crime syndicates has been facilitated by the programmes of structural adjustment which debtor countries have been forced to accept in order to gain access to International Monetary Fund loans.
Organised crime also relies on the existence of tax havens: there are some 55 of these. One of them, the Cayman Islands, ranks fifth in the world as a banking centre, and has more banks and registered companies than inhabitants. As well as laundering money, these tax paradises make it possible to escape taxation. They are places for contact between governments, businessmen and Mafia bosses…
The world-wide power of the financial markets is such that they are not concerned about the political complexion of the leaders of individual countries: what counts in their eyes is a country’s respect for the economic programme. Financial disciplines are imposed on all alike. These masters of the world can even tolerate the existence of left-wing governments, on condition that they adopt no measure likely to harm the interests of the market. However, they will never accept policies that tend to break with the dominant model. (My comment: This is precisely the reason why fiscal policy under Bush Sr., Clinton, Bush Jr. and Obama never changes and remains remarkably consistent despite the enormous professed differences among these Presidents.)
In the eyes of mega-politics, national politics are conducted by dwarfs who are expected to comply with the dictates of the financial giant. And this is the way it will always be – until the dwarfs revolt…The third world war showed the benefits of “total war” for its victor, which was capitalism. In the post-cold war period we see the emergence of a new planetary scenario in which the principal conflictual elements are the growing importance of no-man’s-lands (arising out of the collapse of the Eastern bloc countries), the expansion of a number of major powers (the United States, the European Union and Japan), a world economic crisis and a new technical revolution based on information technology.
Thanks to computers and the technological revolution, the financial markets, operating from their offices and answerable to nobody but themselves, have been imposing their laws and world-view on the planet as a whole. (My comment: Consider how western stock markets have been repeatedly gamed for the past year by the computerized high frequency trading programs of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, et al.) Globalisation is merely the totalitarian extension of the logic of the finance markets to all aspects of life. Where they were once in command of their economies, the nation states (and their governments) are commanded – or rather telecommanded – by the same basic logic of financial power, commercial free trade. And in addition, this logic has profited from a new permeability created by the development of telecommunications to appropriate all aspects of social activity. At last, a world war which is totally total!
One of its first victims has been the national market. Rather like a bullet fired inside a concrete room, the war unleashed by neoliberalism ricochets and ends by wounding the person who fired it. One of the fundamental bases of the power of the modern capitalist state, the national market, is wiped out by the heavy artillery of the global finance economy. The new international capitalism renders national capitalism obsolete and effectively starves their public powers into extinction. The blow has been so brutal that sovereign states have lost the strength to defend their citizens’ interests.
The fine showcase inherited from the ending of the cold war – the new world order – has shattered into fragments as a result of the neoliberal explosion. It takes no more than a few minutes for companies and states to be sunk – but they are sunk not by winds of proletarian revolution, but by the violence of the hurricanes of world finance. (My comment: Iceland and now perhaps, Greece, are fine examples of this. On the horizon, Ireland, Japan, Italy, etc.?)
The son (neoliberalism) is devouring the father (national capital) and, in the process, is destroying the lies of capitalist ideology: in the new world order there is neither democracy nor freedom, neither equality nor fraternity. The planetary stage is transformed into a new battlefield, in which chaos reigns. Towards the end of the cold war, capitalism created a new military horror: the neutron bomb, a weapon which destroys life while sparing buildings. But a new wonder has been discovered as the fourth world war unfolds: the finance bomb. Unlike the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this new bomb does not simply destroy the polis (in this case, the nation) and bring death, terror and misery to those who live there; it also transforms its target into a piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the process of economic globalisation. The result of the explosion is not a pile of smoking ruins, or thousands of dead bodies, but a neighbourhood added to one of the commercial megalopolis of the new planetary hypermarket, and a labour force which is reshaped to fit in with the new planetary job market.
The European Union is a result of this fourth world war. In Europe globalisation has succeeded in eliminating the frontiers between rival states that had been enemies for centuries, and has forced them to converge towards political union. On the way from the nation state to the European Federation the road will be paved with destruction and ruin, and one of these ruins will be that of European civilisation.
Given the similar nature of Marcos’s numerous essays prior to the one he wrote above, it is no wonder that a Chase Manhattan (now part of JP Morgan Chase) analyst publicly called for the “elimination” of Subcomandante Marcos in a January 1995 memo. When the Chase memo was leaked to the public, many argued, including present day US Representative Marcy Kaptur, that the Chase Manhattan memo was a thinly veiled call for the murder of innocent people: “Suggesting the killing of innocent people, throwing elections–none of this seems to bother Chase… anyone who honestly believed that Wall Street’s hands weren’t all over … [U.S. policy towards Mexico] should take a good hard look at this memo.” You can access the referenced Chase Manhattan memo here.
Marcos’s deep understanding of the complexity of globalization issues and its intimate ties to the global banking syndicate (the BIS, the IMF, the World Bank, Central Banks and CHIPs) is well formulated in his above essay and proves him to be a peer of men like Gerald Celente and Nassim Nicholas Tale. In fact, within the bigger and more layered context of globalization, Marcos has few peers in explaining the links between globalization and financial fraud. Marcos’s understanding is even more remarkable when you consider that for years at at time, he has been cut off from all major media distribution channels.
