It seems to me that the more I listen to the news, read the papers and watch TV news programmes, the more I feel vindicated, and the more I feel the warmth of the company of countless thousands of like-minded people the world-over, whose lips noiselessly repeat ‘I told you so’. I say “warmth of the company” but it’s cold comfort to experience it. The ‘I told you so’ response is painfully uncathartic. And what I really want to feel is the same sense of outrage that the indignados express. Actually, the índignados are a fascinating phenomenon, but I fear it will lead nowhere. As many commentators in the press have observed, what is so surprising about the uprisings of spontaneous outrage, pillage, occupations and demonstrations is that it took them so long to hit the streets. And that their protests have, in the main, been mild and inoffensive. Well, apart from the quite evidently non-pacific lootings in London and anarchy in Athens. Indignant? I should co-co. I’d be righteously outraged, incandescent, incensed. Since we’re talking Thesaurus, a synonym that Roget offers is up-in-arms. And that, of course, is what they haven’t been. What on earth took them so long? But we haven’t seen the last of this. Watching on the TV news householders cast out into the streets by bailiffs – no, not by bailiffs alone but by police; and violently, too: I saw the blood. Those that angrily intervened, that got into fights with the police, that willingly entered the fray, were, to me, the indignados who had passed through outrage and were fully-on to incandescence. I felt for them, cheered them on (pathetically, from the other side of the TV screen), incensed from the armchair so-to-speak. It seems scarcely credible that a government of the left (for that is what it was, then) acted as bailiffs for the bankers. Those fat-cats basking in multi-million bonuses and payoffs-for-failure, still gloating after the orgasm of public money ejaculated over them, saving their company’s margins whilst those that American politicians refer to as ‘decent, hard-working folk’ now join the thickening ranks of the homeless. To lose one’s job is par for the course these days; but that loss invokes the eventual loss of benefits along with dignity, not to mention the inability to meet the monthly mortgage. Why do we stand idly by? – well, most of us anyway. Is it because we are powerless, or that we feel impotent against the great political forces taking to the stage each night on the news? Or is it that we’ve lost a social conscience? Or perhaps we never have let one develop: reared on consumerism and bloated with plenty, these last 30 years or so, we neither recognise the venal corruption in our midst nor see the poor, the halt and the lame as victims of the system. We’ve forgotten to look where we’re going – the classic car-crash analogy – and all have assumed that someone responsible must be at the wheel.
Of course, some people have been quietly harping on about this theme for years: the creeping globalisation, the deregulated capitalism, the short-termism of the markets that look only at quick returns, the growth of private equity (whose raison d’être is precisely quick returns), the sale of national assets – companies like Boots and Cadbury’s to name just two – to foreign buyers whose interests are not ours, not national and not in the product: only in the profit. Yes, we’ve seen the signs for years, and the eruptions of anger manifest in anti-globalisation protests at nearly every G20 these last years. But they’ve been portrayed by the press as cranks (along with climate-change protesters), anarchists and looters. We should have listened. Tony Benn was whistling this tune 40 years ago, as were Eric Hobsbawm and others, but over the years we’ve lost the music and what’s more, lost interest in singing together. Was it inevitable? Is it really the end of capitalism or just a blip? What are the Chinese really thinking right now, as they wallow in trillions of credit dollars? Could this be Marx’s I-told-you-so moment?
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