Em traços grossos, a lição retira-se do desmantelamento da regulamentação dos mercados financeiros. Sem baias, a propensão do sector financeiro foi para, em enxame, apostar em produtos financeiros sem cobertura de activos. A miragem de lucros exponenciais funcionou até que se quebrou um dos elos - os empréstimos subprime. A "bolha" rebentou, as instituições financeiras ficaram com os balanços a descoberto e alguns Estados foram chamados a financiar os "buracos" para evitar o contágio à economia real. Mas o aperto geral do crédito repercutiu-se em recessão. Os Estados endividaram-se nos mercados financeiros de dívida pública, alguns foram forçados a programas de austeridade e acabaram na mão das agências de rating, financiadas pelo próprio sector financeiro. Pelo caminho, os pobres foram ficando mais pobres e os ricos mais ricos.
Algo assim aconteceu no início do século XX. Aconteceu no início do século XXI. E nada está a mudar.
Caro João Rodrigues,
ResponderEliminarA respeito destes vaivéns entre diferentes épocas, e do correspondente recurso à analogia como utensílio de compreensão-explicação, não resisto a deixar-lhe um excerto, que é também uma sugestão de leitura. Procure levar isto sobretudo à conta de amizade, não tanto de petulância...
THE SPECTRE OF ANALOGY
Alberto Toscano, New Left Review 66, Nov-Dec 2010
"The Western world’s imagination of historical time seems at present to be pulled between auguries of irreversibility and narratives of stubborn repetition—focusing now on impending ecological collapse, now on a new Great Game that retraces an older geopolitics, or else on the extent to which the current economic crisis will re-run the sequence of 1929–33. The so-called ‘lessons of history’ tend to provide little by way of orientation, at most serving as a series of warning signs. But for all the condemnations and celebrations of postmodern amnesia, the question of the identities and differences between past and present—and of their relevance for political practice and historical research—remains very much on the agenda.
Luciano Canfora’s typically erudite exploration of the political use of historical paradigms—that is to say, of analogy as the hinge between politics and history—provides many important elements for rethinking this question. The author of numerous scholarly works on Ancient Greece and Rome, Canfora is possibly Italy’s most prominent communist historian, regularly stepping into the breach of public polemic. He is best known in the Anglophone world for his Democracy in Europe (English translation 2006), which became the object of sustained controversy when its prospective German publisher refused it, due to its alleged calumny of the achievements of West German liberalism, and its leniency towards Stalinism and the ‘socialist democracies’ of the Warsaw Pact (see NLR 56). In recent years, he has published a series of short essays in which he brings the historian’s craft to bear on contemporary events; for instance, Esportare la libertà (2007) examined the gulf between the rhetoric deployed and the realities inflicted by states claiming to be ‘exporting freedom’, from Athens and Sparta to the us invasion of Iraq.
In The Political Use of Historical Paradigms, Canfora turns his attention to the question of analogy, and its place in historiography and political thought. His approach contrasts with a contemporary trend to see analogy as a representational expedient that stifles singularity and novelty, reinforcing the standardized prejudices of doxa. The ascendancy of philosophical categories such as immanence and ‘the event’ from the late 1960s onwards is an important dimension of this anti-analogical perspective, much of it inspired by Spinoza—as evidenced in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri. We might also recall the objections from within the tradition of dialectical thought to the kind of ‘picture-thinking’ associated with analogical reasoning; in Volume 3 of Capital, for example, Marx warned against the misleading and merely ‘formal analogy’ between the agricultural economies of antiquity and capitalist agriculture, ‘which turns out to be completely illusory in all essential points to a person familiar with the capitalist mode of production’.
Against this broad front of critics, Canfora strongly defends analogy’s ability to impel transformations in the scale and scope of historical research, all the while underscoring its relativity. For although such parallels can on occasion act as lures away from sober reflection, Canfora sees them as crucial ‘bridges between the known and the unknown’; between identity and difference, logical abstraction and lived experience" (pp. 152-3). Toscano refere-se a Luciano Canfora, L’uso politico dei paradigmi storici
Bari, Laterza, 2010.
Como diz o comentador:
ResponderEliminarJosé Luiz Sarmento , Maia, Portugal. 20.12.2010 15:17
O resultado até agora tem sido a guerra
"A situação descrita foi uma das causas da Primeira Grande Guerras Mundial. Entre as duas guerras houve uma querela semelhante às actual querela do Euro - e esta foi uma das causas da Segunda Grande Guerra. Parece que o capital financeiro prefere pôr o Mundo a ferro e fogo a perder o mínimo dos seus privilégios."
E é simples de perceber. Durante a guerra suspende-se a democracia (se a houver), e o capital financeiro continua a lucrar. Na II Guerra Mundial os Rockfellers e Vanderbilts até aos nazis emprestavam dinheiro.