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We’ll all be screwed. Here’s why

Andrej Nikolaidis (Foto: Tone Stojko)

By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist

The famous line from ‘Dusko Dugousko’ (eng. Bugs Bunny) saying “he has five minutes of school and a long vacation” perfectly explains my educational background.

The diploma of the Sarajevo First Gymnasium (which, if my memory serves me right, was attended by both Ivo Andric and Miljenko Jergovic, as well as three out of seven secretaries of SKOJ) was sent to me by mail, when the war allowed it.

I had neither money nor will to go to a faculty. I didn’t enter the University of Montenegro a single day; however, it’s likely I ate a hamburger in one of the fast food stores offering the view over that building.

And that’s okay. I’m a writer. There’s no school for writing. When it comes to writing, everyone learns it by themselves.

Those who visited Western universities or held lessons there tell me that they still teach children the old postmodernist/poststructuralist tricks.

Borges argued, I’ll paraphrase it, that we must agree that German culture is more important to the world than the culture of, let’s say, Ghana.

We don’t have to. And not only that we don’t have to, but we mustn’t agree with it.

At the York University, my brother was taught that claiming that Bach’s music is more valuable than African folklore is a cultural-racist statement. Better in which parameters? Who sets the parameters? And to what extent are these parameters the product of colonial crimes and, let’s say, the privileges of white heterosexual men?

At thoroughly Americanized European universities, children are taught that there’s no truth, only pluralism of truths, and that, therefore, there’s no historical truth. History is a narrative, a fiction. Some things have happened, but the way we will connect and interpret these things is the work of ideology and the question of power.

Having in mind that everything’s relative, who is the arbiter, what’s the center holding the decentralized and thoroughly relativized world together? Answer: free market. Interesting: the free market is exempt from universal relativization; it’s sold as an absolute value in a world in which, they claim, there are no absolute values. In a world where ideological contamination is found in everything, the free market is supposedly a supra-ideological instance. Hell: it’s a brutal work of an ideology that, with less and less success, perpetuates the entire system.

The problem is that the free market is a fiction as well, as it doesn’t exist, just like the absolute, universal artistic value or truth.

What can I tell you … Of all the fictitious things, the economy is the most fictitious.

Example 1. The world is not driven by ideas, but by money. Yes: money is a symbolic function. There is no money. Yes: the world is driven by what does not exist. In any case, it hasn’t existed at least since 1971 when America delinked the dollar from gold under the rule of Nixon. Then, in fact, money moved into the world of ideas. So it’d be right to say that the world is driven by one idea: and that is the idea of money.

Since there has been no foundation in anything tangible since 1971, the dollar exists because America claims to exist, and the rest of the world is forced to agree.

This world is crazy. Lacan argued that a beggar who claims to be a king is no crazier than a king who claims to be a king. Why did he say that? Because he’s a king – a king only because he claims so, and the slaves agree. The king is only a symbolic function. Identification with its own symbolic function is the way to madness.

It may be concluded that a beggar who doesn’t have a penny and claims to be rich is not crazier than a country that claims to be the richest in the world. The difference is that this country, unlike the beggars, has nuclear weapons.

Example 2. The basic principle by which the financial market works is – prophecy.

Ever since Nixon, as I said, ended dollar convertibility to gold in 1971, financial capitalism has not been tied to anything tangible and real.

Wall Street is a global prophecy. The only job of the Wall Street clergy is to try to foresee the value of a company in the future. On the basis of that prophecy, decisions will be made whether to “buy” or “sell” them. The value of a company, including the biggest ones – especially the biggest ones – is not based on anything, let’s say, tangible and real. The previous or current value is not important. All that matters is how much it will be worth tomorrow. And we know nothing about tomorrow: they’re to prophesy about tomorrow.

When the global giant Enron collapsed in December 2001, it was sold for literally – change for coffee and cigars. Just a year earlier, its stock market value was $65bn. After the stock market crash in the fall of 2008, financial giant Lehman Brothers was sold peanuts. The value of that company, right before it’d fall to almost nothing, was estimated at 690 billion dollars on the stock exchange.

Where did all that money go? It didn’t disappear because it wasn’t there. The stock exchange estimated the value of the prophecies uttered by the prophets of those companies at 65 and 690 billion dollars, respectively. The said value referred to prophecy: how much Enron and Lehman Brothers prophecies will be worth tomorrow. Financial capitalism is a pyramid scheme made up of prophecies, a scheme so irrational that people find it hard to believe in its irrationality. I prophesy whether the one below me prophesied correctly, while the one above me prophesies about my own prophecy. The real value of the financial market is equal to the value of the smoke of burning money.

Next time you feel contempt or pity for people you see sneaking into bookmakers in order to spend a few euros there that they stole from their parents or hid from their wives, keep this in mind: they’re not bookmakers, they’re brokers, they aren’t losers, they’re prophets.  They do the same as the richest people in the world do. But unlike those on the top, they do it for less money. And with their own money.

On the other hand, while the entire financial capitalism is based on the effort to predict the future, the attitude of smokers is: no future. I don’t give a shit for the future, give me that cigar. Contempt for the future, that basic resource of capitalism, is the crime of smokers. That’s why it’s popular to despise smokers, it’s why discrimination against them is allowed at every single corner.

But, you know what? Sooner or later, but it’ll be sooner rather than later, and that’s what I prophesy – we’ll all be screwed. 

 

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