Opinion Sur
To the social, environmental and political impacts of economic concentration one should add the systemic instability it generates, the hegemony financial capital brings into play and the expansion of several aggravated criminal systems (organized crime, human, weaponry and drug trafficking) supported by some banks and tax havens. Contemporary global economy maintains a course that tends towards an increasingly more accelerated wealth concentration (assets and incomes). Once established, the concentrative dynamic is extremely difficult to dismantle because it progressively strengthens the benefited actors who manage to extend their economic power over politics, the media, the educational system, think tanks, and those in charge of elaborating rules and overseeing regulations.
Backed by this growing multidimensional power, sectors that concentrate the results of social effort enable or impose a series of factors to protect the reproduction of their privileges, among others the following:
(i) Endurance of values and principles functional to their interests (greed, selfishness, violence, lack of consideration for others, irresponsibility).
(ii) They encourage and finance the development of ideologies, PERSPECTIVES ((interpretations)) and policies that become hegemonic; these are presented as superior to the rest and immune to the passing of time and changes in circumstances.
(iii) They impose formally democratic government systems but emptying them from essential contents through their capacity of conditioning electoral outcomes (handpicked democracies).
(iv) They generate social behaviors that sterilize transformational determination and mobilization, such as existential alienation, addictive escapisms, irresponsible consumerism, atomization of citizen will, disunion of popular sectors that instead of antagonizing could work to make their interests and needs converge.
Thus, the way of functioning that has been imposed upon us and of which it is difficult to escape does nothing more than reproduce the conditions for the current concentration process to remain in play.
The other flip side of economic concentration is a widespread inequality between countries and within each society. That inequality becomes evident in very different levels of life: wealthy minorities with access to a conspicuous consumption of luxury goods coexist with immense majorities mired in poverty and abject destitution and, between them, middle income sectors which, subject to aggressive and omnipresent commercial advertising campaigns, tend to imitate patterns of superfluous consumption acting as buffers for the social conflict deriving from inequality.
To the suffering imposed upon hundreds of millions of human beings, one should add the environmental destruction and the instability inherent to a highly concentrated functioning. The fact is that the economic system has no choice but to produce for those who have enough incomes not including all segments of the population: they focus in affluent sectors and layers of middle income sectors. When this effective demand results insufficient to absorb a dynamic productive supply that always seeks to expand, the concentrative dynamic aims to extend the market but not by increasing genuine incomes at a pace that would allow to close the demand gaps (that would imply a transformation to a certain extent of the concentration process). Conversely, the solution they turn to is providing funding to those who do not possess sufficient genuine incomes, which can activate the economy but only up to the limit imposed by the repayment capacity of those indebted. When those limits are surpassed, fearsome financial bubbles are generated that when they burst cause chain reactions and, eventually, crises that can be partial or systemic.
This way, a never ending process of concentration of assets and incomes reaches a point where the concentration itself becomes a severe restriction for its reproduction: it is not capable of generating an effective demand at rates compatible with the requirements of the productive supply. This restriction and the drive to keep obtaining high profit rates progressively deviates the allocation of financial capital towards sectors away from real economy. Only a portion of the financial supply will keep serving the existing consumer market but the rest will seek other spaces of greater relative profit: (i) those of aggravated criminal systems (organized crime, human, arms and drug trafficking) supported by banks and tax havens, and (ii) the space of financial speculation materialized through extracting value from those who try very hard to produce or market goods and services.
The competitive search for higher profit margins by operating with ‘clients’ within aggravated criminal systems and illegal schemes of a more and more unbridled financial speculation, is reflected in the increasing number of criminal charges against large international banks and other financial institutions [[A list of recent filings is reproduced in the article They have stolen even spring from us published in this same issue of Opinión Sur.]].
So the black hole of economic concentration appears with the break of organic growth and the establishment of a perverse dynamic that becomes unsustainable when accelerated over time due to its own weight and the expansion of an accumulation of highly concentrative nature [[There are other ways of accumulation that are not concentrative, either because other no concentrated logics of capital formation are imposed or, by default, if the State has full capacity to apply permanent redistributive mechanisms of social surpluses and to effectively supervise any attempt to evade them.]] . A dynamic that, as mentioned, is sustained through the control of the State, the media, the educational system, the imposition of an hegemonic way of thinking that is functional to the concentration process, and the manipulation of the democratic system.
Can this dynamic be changed? Of course it can, but it requires the concerted action of leaderships that majorities can choose as to effectively produce transformations in the way of functioning without falling into the trap of replacing a dominant group with another. Ultimately, it is about building full democracies with enough backing of the people to change the systemic course and sustain it over time.
