The rustling of angel wings

When the candles of the Velvet Revolution were lit in 1989 and the peaceful breaching of the Berlin Wall that November signalled the ‘end of communism’, Joschka Fischer, then leader of the German Green Party, said that, for a moment, he thought he heard the rustle of angel wings.

Image: Courtesy of Duncan via Flickr

Now another apparently velvet revolution seems to be underway. Capitalism’s victory over communism has proved ephemeral, undone by its own fallacious belief in the ability of markets to deliver the best of all possible worlds for the largest number of people by pretending that economics is governed by natural laws like gravity or thermodynamics. Markets are not scientifically neutral forces, however much economists like to pretend they are. In reality they are just people buying and selling stuff, including currencies and mega-tonnes of debt.

One of the main reasons the revolutions in 1989 were velvet is that people asked a key question: is everything getting worse because our governments want it to happen, or because they didn’t know how to stop it? By the time Gorbachev visited East Berlin in October 1989 they knew that their governments were powerless to stop anything. So when the Russian leader told the crowd, ‘if you want democracy, take it now’ (meaning ‘go for it, and I won’t roll the tanks over you this time’) everyone went home and got out the candles.

Are we entering a similarly historical transformational moment as 1989? That depends if similar ingredients are in place. For certain, quite a lot of people have come to the conclusion that politicians are far from being in control of our destinies. Disaffection with government grows by the day as the evidence mounts that its decisions are dictated by loci of power outside the democratic institutions politicians are supposed to serve. How else to explain the near 50% rise in corporate bonuses, the failure to curb the excesses of the speculative financial sector and the pouring of money into debt relief for banks rather than directly into the pockets of ordinary people and entrepreneurs who are genuinely motivated to stimulate the real economy?

I am not so sure the two other key ingredients are in place though – a Gorbachev scale leadership of the moment, plus a widely acceptable process for designing and installing a new ethics based relationship between politics, business and citizens. It is not as if there was not a huge amount of work underway. Organisations like Forum for the Future, the New Economics Foundation and the International Institute on Environment and Development are a few examples of innovative thinking about alternative financial models. But unlike the proponents of the economic theories who have dominated for over three decades, there is little evidence of a serious strategy for getting these new ideas into power. Believers in the perfectability of markets like Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman started their campaign after WWII and saw themselves as ‘freedom fighters’ using guerrilla warfare tactics; UK economist Sam Brittan called them ‘post-Keynesian counter-revolutionaries engaged in a world war that would affect billions of people’. Their apogee came when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher took their ideas to the peaks of global power.

If change is left to hazard rather than good leadership, if there is no positive story of how the future could be and a trusted process for getting there, then, as a recent report from UK think tank Demos shows, danger looms in the shape of increased EU-wide support for parties offering the simple, extreme solutions which tend to thrive in troubled times.

The angels may have unfolded their wings, but they are not rustling them yet.