Eduardo Galeano - Upside Down - A Primer for the Looking-Glass World

“Options” define not the freedom to chose but rather the right to buy. “Futures” have dropped their mystery and become contracts. “Markets” are no longer boisterous plazas but computer screens. A “lobby” is no longer used to wait for friends but to buy politicians. Not only do ships travel “offshore,” now money does too, to evade taxes and questions. “Laundries” that once upon a time washed clothes now wash dirty money.

“Lifting” no longer consists of raising weights or spirits: “lifting” is surgery that keeps the authors of all these good deeds from growing old.

Ten years ago, the financial markets suffered another collapse. Distinguished U.S. economists from the White House, the Congress, and the New York and Chicago stock exchanges tried to explain what had happened. The word “speculation” was not uttered in any of their analyses. After all, popular sports deserve respect: five out of every ten North Americans play the stock market in one way or another. Just as “smart bombs” killed Iraqis in the Gulf war without anyone except the dead finding out, “smart money” earns 40 percent profits without anyone finding out how. Wall Street, which some say was named for a wall built to keep black slaves from escaping, is today the center of the great global electronic gambling den, and all of humanity is enslaved by the decisions made there. The virtual economy moves capital, trashes prices, plucks fools, ruins countries, and churns out millionaires and mendicants in the time it takes to say, “Amen.”

The world may be obsessed with personal insecurity, but reality teaches us that the crimes of finance capital are far more fearsome than those we read about in the papers. Mark Mobius, who speculates on behalf of thousands of investors, told the German magazine Der Spiegel at the beginning of 1998, “My clients laugh at ethical criteria. They only want us to increase their profits.” During the crisis of 1987, another phrase made him famous: “You’ve got to buy when blood runs in the streets, even if the blood is mine.” George Soros, the most successful speculator in the world, who made a fortune successively bidding down the pound, the lira, and the ruble, knows what he’s talking about when he says, “The main enemy of the open society, I believe, is no longer the Communist but the capitalist threat.”

Capitalism’s Dr. Frankenstein has created a monster that walks on its own, and nobody can stop it. It is a superstate over and above all others, an invisible power that governs us all even though it was elected by no one. In this world there is too much misery but there is also too much money, and wealth doesn’t know what to do with itself. In other times, finance capital broadened the consumer market by extending credit. It served the real economy, which to exist needed to grow. Today, utterly bloated, finance capital has put the productive system to work for it, while it plays with the real economy like a cat with a mouse.

Every crash on the stock exchange is a catastrophe for small investors who swallowed the line and bet their savings on the financial lottery. And it’s a catastrophe for the poorest barrios of the global village, whose residents suffer the consequences without ever knowing what caused them: in a single blow each “market correction” empties their plates and wipes out their jobs. But rarely do crises on the stock exchange fatally wound the suffering millionaires who, day after day, backs bent over their computers, fingertips calloused from the keyboards, redistribute the world’s wealth by moving money, setting interest rates, and deciding the value of labor, commodities, and currencies. They are the only workers who could refute the anonymous scribe who wrote on a wall in Montevideo: “He who works has no time to make money.”

Unemployment sends the crime rate soaring and humiliating wages spike it higher still. Never has the old Spanish proverb been so apt: “The hustler lives from the fool, and the fool from his work.” In contrast, no one says, “Work hard and you shall prosper,” because no one believes it anymore.

Labor rights have come down to the right to work for whatever you can get under whatever conditions you can stand. Work is the most useless of vices. There is no commodity in the world cheaper than labor. While wages fall and hours rise, the labor market vomits up people. Take it or leave it — there’s a long line behind you.

EMPLOYMENT AND UNEMPLOYMENT IN THE TIME OF FEAR

The shadow of fear is nipping at your heels no matter how fast you go. Fear of losing your job, your money, your food, your home. No talisman can protect you from the curse of sudden bad luck. From one moment to the next, even the greatest winner can turn into a loser unworthy of forgiveness or compassion.

Who is safe from the terror of unemployment? Who doesn’t fear being shipwrecked by new technologies or by globalization or any other of the many storms whipping today’s world? The waves pound furiously: the ruin or flight of local industries, competition with cheap labor from other latitudes, the implacable advance of machines that need no salary or vacation or bonus or pension or severance pay or anything but the electricity that feeds them.

The development of technology leads not to more free time or freedom, only to more unemployment and fear. Panic at the specter of the pink slip is universal: We’re sorry to inform you that due to the new budget policy we must make do without your services. Or simply that’s the way it is, without any euphemism to ease the blow. Anyone can get shot down anytime, anywhere. At forty, anyone can become old from one day to the next.

In a report on conditions in 1996 and 1997, the International Labor Organization says, “The evolution of employment in the world continues to be discouraging.” In industrialized countries, unemployment remains high and contributes to increasing social inequality, and in so-called developing countries, both unemployment and poverty have risen spectacularly. “That’s what spreads fear,” the report concludes. And fear does spread: you have a job or you have nothing. At the entrance to Auschwitz the sign said: “Work Shall Make You Free.” A little more than half a century later, any worker with a job should thank the company for its kindness in allowing him or her to carry on day after backbreaking day, fodder for the tedium of office or factory life. To find a job, or hang on to one, even if it comes without vacation or pension or any benefits at all and even if the pay stinks, is celebrated as if it were a miracle.

Famous Words

On November 28, 1990, the Argentine papers published a pearl of wisdom from a union leader now in political office. This is how Luis Barrionuevo explained his sudden fortune: “You don’t make money by working.”

When charges of fraud rained down on him, his friends offered him a testimonial dinner. Later on, he was elected president of a first-division soccer club, and throughout it all he remained at the helm of the food service workers’ union.