{"id":992,"date":"2013-01-31T21:38:54","date_gmt":"2013-01-31T21:38:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beta.dminlgp.com\/more-dispatches-from-the-front-of-the-financial-crisis\/"},"modified":"2013-01-31T21:38:54","modified_gmt":"2013-01-31T21:38:54","slug":"more-dispatches-from-the-front-of-the-financial-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/more-dispatches-from-the-front-of-the-financial-crisis\/","title":{"rendered":"More Dispatches from the Front of the Financial Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Karl Polanyi, in the epic sweep of his work The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time,<\/em> sets forth an extremely timely reading of modern world history, even though he was writing in the 1940s.\u00a0 Polanyi\u2019s central thesis is that the rise of democracy, the industrial revolution, capitalism, liberal economic policy and ultimately the creation of a capital class (who would become the ultimate arbiters of much the political system) birthed the utopian idea of a self-regulating free market.\u00a0 Polanyi thus views the Western faith in the free market as the advent of the \u201ccontrol of markets over human society,\u201d or at least the idea of the market.\u00a0 In fact, Polanyi quickly points out that the self-regulating free market is very much a na\u00efve misnomer, as nations, cultures, and interest groups actually force the \u201cfree market\u201d into existence creating an essentially unstable political and economic situation that is complicated by varying issues of culture, politics, and economic instability, but in the end must be controlled for the benefits of the economic capital class.\u00a0 Ultimately, this system replaced what Polanyi postulates as the core elements of traditional human economics and society: reciprocity, redistribution, and householding.\u00a0 This rapid change and replacement of millennia of human social structure is ultimately what Polanyi refers to as \u201cThe Great Transformation.\u201d\u00a0 Polanyi goes onto to see this transformation as the source of the great upheavals of the 20th<\/sup> century, as societies, nations, and international regulatory institutions struggled to cope.<\/p>\n

In our own time we have seen the rapid strengthening of globalization, post-industrial and postmodern society and economies, and the entrance of the majority world into the Western economic system (where they must play by the West\u2019s rules).\u00a0 Currently, much of the West faces a continuously shifting economic crisis.\u00a0 As I sit writing this from Spain (currently on the frontlines of this crisis), unemployment sits at 25%, unemployment for people at 26 or under is a catastrophic 60%, a newly built billion euro airport sits unused and closed, and the streets of my city are just newly cleaned from the heaps of trash that piled up over a 13 day trash strike.\u00a0 What is more, hopelessness and ambivalence are in the air.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Is Polanyi correct in asserting that the utopia of free markets has created an impossible dystopia, tilted to those who already have?\u00a0 Has our Western faith in limitless economic progress and the free market blinded us all to the reality that the system might be unwittingly rigged away from justice?\u00a0 Has globalization (and the complexity of national and cultural diversity) sped up our entrance into a dystopian future?\u00a0<\/p>\n

There is, of course, much to unpack here.\u00a0 In the US, we are just awakening from the worst financial meltdown since The Great Depression.\u00a0 Deregulation of financial markets under the Clinton administration, encouraged the Greenspan school of thought, promised unlimited growth.\u00a0 Later the Bush administration in hoping to spur on the economy through the housing market deregulated banking loans.\u00a0 This was partly motivated by a generous idea that if more lower income people could buy property it would improve their lives and economic situation.\u00a0 Banks only saw the ability to generate more loans which on paper meant more assets for the bank, more commissions for the loan officers.\u00a0 The market was fluid, but the bubble eventually popped, predicated on people\u2019s greed, just as much as the capital class\u2019s belief in the \u201cself-regulating free market.\u201d\u00a0 The market of course did self-regulate, leaving a financial catastrophe in its wake crushing some, bankrupting states like California, but ultimately proffering the rescue of most of the capital regulatory class complicit within the Bush and Obama administrations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the same time, the European Union, built very much upon the liberal democratic values of free trade, unified currency, and free flow labor faces its own struggles.\u00a0 Iceland, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Greece, and Portugal all face horrific financial consequences after they faced their own great transformation into instability.\u00a0 Northern Europe still does not understand why Southern Europeans take midday naps, have an excess of holidays, and operate their economies around nepotism and clannishness.\u00a0 The German assumption was that if we give EU money to these nations they will operate exactly as we do.\u00a0 Utopia.\u00a0 Iceland is particularly instructive.\u00a0 A tiny nation of 300,000, who until recently was solely a fishing economy rooted more in reciprocity, redistribution, and householding \u00a0(and a strong economy in the removal of fairies) than a modern economy became wealthy overnight with the globalization of the fishing market and the regulation of the European fishing industry. This wealth motivated risk driven fisherman to set up banks and investment firms without any real education in financial markets.\u00a0 What transpired was Icelanders lending exorbidant sums of money to each other, and drawing the attention of the international markets, who then invested heavily into Iceland\u2019s unwitting house of cards.\u00a0 Finally, when people realized that there was nothing to stand on (at one point the head of Iceland\u2019s national bank was a poet) it was too late.\u00a0 This kind of flow of unregulated capital to nations and projects with no reasonable recourse was played out all over Europe, now leaving many jobless and hopeless, with everyone pointing the finger at someone else.\u00a0 Never mind that everyone took advantage of the good years.<\/p>\n

In Asia, China\u2019s entrance into the free market has the looks of recreating the Dickensian blight of England\u2019s Industrial Revolution.\u00a0 Pollution is run amok, labor exploitation is appalling, and even though the emerging Chinese middle class is bettering their lives, China appears as an unwieldy monster on the world stage.<\/p>\n

The options of utopian ignorance and postmodern bliss versus hopelessness and revolution are ripe within our world.\u00a0 Here is where I hope to turn us back to the gospel, and where the world needs a fresh encounter with gospel.\u00a0 As Western Christians we have often placed our faith in the market. \u00a0We have often found our desire in consumption.\u00a0 How do we unpack this connection?\u00a0 How do minister in a world where the d\u00e9tente of the Cold War has been replaced by faith in the free market, but in calamity across the globe?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Quite possibly we should turn to Richard Baukham\u2019s Bible and Mission: Christian Witness in a Postmodern World<\/em>.\u00a0 I believe Bauckham offers a strong answer, and most of all a critique of the attempts to redress our economic and societal upheaval through the imposition of power.\u00a0 American evangelicalism\u2019s dance with the Republican Party has only been an attempt to overlay another metanarrative over the American Christian experience, even at its purest motivations.\u00a0 Conversely, liberation theology also only offered the replacement of one system with another system.\u00a0 Both are essentially utopian, but failed to address the heart of the matter, the heart.\u00a0 Here Bauckham suggests a subversive approach to our postmodern world.\u00a0 A movement not based in metanarrative or coercion, but based in witness and expansion of the kingdom of God from below.\u00a0 Ultimately, he proposes a rejection of power, and an offer of hope in the witness of communities who live out the truth.\u00a0 Thus, if we are moving more and more towards a metanarrative of the free market, or a coercion of the free market into all and everything, then could the answer be a subversive witness of justice, transformed life, love, and community a.k.a. the church?\u00a0 Could our New Testament set in the context of the Roman hegemony, offer a fresh narrative reading of how to live in the postmodern free market world?\u00a0 Is the control of the free market, dare we say, the new Babylon? \u201cWitness to the truth, distinguished from the will to power by its willingness to suffer for the truth, confronts, and defeats the will to power (Bauckham , 109).\u201d<\/p>\n

In Spain, people are desperate for something.\u00a0 They are looking for answers that deal with narrative issues of the world, that deal with their feelings of helplessness in the face of the coercion, confusion, and the fantasy of the market that will make everything better. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Karl Polanyi, in the epic sweep of his work The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, sets forth an extremely timely reading of modern world history, even though he was writing in the 1940s.\u00a0 Polanyi\u2019s central thesis is that the rise of democracy, the industrial revolution, capitalism, liberal economic policy and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2,4],"class_list":["post-992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dminlgp","tag-polanyi"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/992\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}