Translation from Chinese by Sherwin Lu
EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is sort of a sequel to a previous posting How Capitalist Democracy Came About in History. It has laid bare the true features of the Capitalist Monopoly Financial Empire under its “free” and “democratic” camouflage. The next forthcoming sequel will further explain why the democracy as practiced by contemporary Western countries is not the right model for developing countries.
THE TEXT
When a government is made a mere figurehead by the real power held by capital, it can no longer fulfill its traditional functions and thus cannot serve as an actual executive agency of authority. Therefore, the political functions of capital power are more often than not performed by private enterprises. This fundamentally determines the essential distinction between Western businesses under the capitalist system and those private businesses in China and other countries whose sole goal is to make profits. Simply put, the monopolistic big businesses in the Western countries have actually been performing the same functions as those of the ministries and commissions of a centralized government, with their economic decisions playing the social role of a government’s administrative orders. The financial capital in a capitalist society, through their ownership structure, controls the monopolistic businesses of all industries and then, through the influence of these businesses, exerts its power over the whole society, with such swiftness and forcefulness as unsurpassed by government orders.
With real power centralized in capital, a democratic government is also an enterprise itself, the elected president being its professional manager and the parliament the equivalent of the general meeting of its shareholders, with the common people and small productive capitalists playing the insignificant role of retail investors in the business while the financial tycoons are the real bankers.
A real free market with its special operating principles only exists at the preliminary stage of a market economy. A mature market is inescapably controlled by a visible hand, which is the inexorable consequence of the evolution of private ownership, which allows big capital unrestricted takeovers of other businesses. The “free economy” much bragged about nowadays is but pseudo free.
A truly free market requires the unrestricted mobility of all the three factors: the employer (capital), the employed (labor) and the commodity (product); but in reality only the free flow of capital is guaranteed while the mobility of labor and commodity is restricted in the current capitalistic world economic system. The restriction on labor mobility has resulted in the global market being geographically divided into three worlds by polarization in class status and technological conditions, and the control on commodity flow creates price scissors gaps between developed countries’ industrial goods and developing countries’ agricultural products and raw materials, while the free mobility of capital has, through annexations of small businesses by big ones, led to the monopoly of all productive industries by financial capital, making it impossible for new big capital to emerge. Thus, by manipulating the market, financial monopoly capital has successfully maintained its absolute control over world economy.
Monopoly capital’s control of the market is far more relentless than centralized planning adopted by a communist regime. While the latter was government-led and open to the public, a market economy is conducted by big businesses that appear to be mutually independent but actually have a common chief boss, i.e., big financial capital, who is pulling the string behind the scenes.
The private ownership of those enterprises makes it impossible to seek out from public sources the behind-the-scenes connections between the different businesses, industries and fields. And the mobility of capital makes it impossible for outsiders to identify the owner of a business just by its location and staffing in the same way as one can that of a nation-state’s centralized government (for instance, a business located in China and staffed exclusively by Chinese may not be owned by Chinese capital), not to say to closely follow its secret activities. However, people can see through the observable facts to discover the relatedness and initial driving force behind them so as to obtain an understanding about the operation of monopoly capital’s ownership structure.
Myths about successful business enterprises are not rare in American history. The most popular ones we hear in recent years are from the newly rising electronic industry. Such a myth goes like this: Some university undergraduate worked out in private some advanced technology and then started at one stroke a global enterprise like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. But actually it was with the support of big financial capital and as part of its global strategy that all such businesses could have expanded so rapidly. Like all other monopoly enterprises under its control, they are not only moneymaking machines but are also taking on related political missions.
One of such missions for electronic industry is to collect intelligence information. This is why almost all soft- and hardware products manufactured in the West have all sorts of postern doors. While Windows operation systems and Apple cell phones have the function of customer data collection, Google provides via its search engine free satellite maps covering, among others, all military targets inside China and an enormous database storing all information from the internet, and Facebook supplies intelligence agencies with a free database listing social connections of all highly-educated people on earth collected through a network real name system. These apparently unrelated or even mutually competing firms are in fact performing the same functions. The coordination between them can be accomplished only by some organizational framework on a higher level, but the setting up of such a framework is beyond the authority and capability of the democratic government. It can only be based on an ownership network. And this is the functioning structure of capital’s highly centralized ruling power.
Besides monopoly of many an industry chain for more profits through annexations forming ownership networks, capital’s centralized power can also set up super-profit chains through inter-industry co-operation. For instances, the military and pharmaceutical industries have formed a profit-sharing alliance. So long as there are plenty of wars going on, their super profits are guaranteed. And the marriage between the food and pharmaceutical industries works like a perpetual motion machine: If the former can provide plenty of unhealthy food to create a lot of diseases, the latter can correspondingly sell drugs that relieve symptoms only without effecting a cure so that people will keep buying them to maintain their “health” for as long as they live; thus their complementary profit chain operates like an inexhaustible source of wealth. This is the key to an understanding of how various brand name food product empires could have expanded to all corners of the globe, how chemical additives have become so prevalent, and how the attempt to destroy Chinese medicine, especially to obliterate freely supplied knowledge of Chinese herbology (not protected as property nor patented), has become an overwhelmingly important part of the Westernization campaign in the past century.
It is by the secretiveness of such ownership networks that the market has been made to appear as a “free” one. What marks the “free” nature of the market, among others, is the binary oligopolistic competition structure. Just like the U.S, two-party political games, there have been two-competitor economic ones in many industries, such as MacDonald vs. Kentucky, Coca Cola vs. Pepsi Cola, General Motors vs. Ford, Intel vs. AMD, and Microsoft vs. Apple. This has been the consistent strategy adopted by Jewish financial capitalists, used earlier in betting on both sides of European political campaigns and wars and nowadays in fostering rival monopolies on the market. Whereas unitary monopoly is more likely to arouse inimical reaction from the public, only a binary structure tends to maintain a sort of balance and stability of a monopolistic system while putting up the appearance of free competition, just as different packing designs for a same kind of product could give people a false feeling of free choice among different products and induce them to forget their identical nature. The antitrust law can split an enterprise, but cannot split ownership. It is this operating pattern with the big boss pulling all the strings behind the scenes that underlies the “democratic politics” and “free market” of the Western capitalist world. |
