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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/13/capital-politics-wikileaks-democracy-market-freedom

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_in_Services_Agreement


How capital captured politics
WikiLeaks has shown us that western democracies are now ruled by market
forces that debase the very notion of freedom

        Slavoj Žižek	
        The Guardian, Sunday 13 July 2014 20.15 BST	
        Jump to comments (368)

'The Trade in Services Agreement prohibits more regulation of financial
services, despite the fact the 2007-08 meltdown is generally perceived
as resulting from a lack of regulation.'

In May, an international trade agreement was signed that effectively
serves as a kind of legal backbone for the restructuring of world
markets. While the Trade in Services Agreement (Tisa) negotiations were
not censored outright, they were barely mentioned in our media. This
marginalisation and secrecy was in stark contrast to the global
historical importance of what was agreed upon.

In June, WikiLeaks made public the secret draft text of the agreement.
It covers 50 countries and most of the world's trade in services.

It sets rules that would assist the expansion of financial
multinationals into other nations by preventing regulatory barriers. It
prohibits more regulation of financial services, despite the fact that
the 2007-08 financial meltdown is generally perceived as resulting from
a lack of regulation. Furthermore, the US is particularly keen on
boosting cross-border data flow, including traffic of personal and
financial data. Despite all this, we heard little about it.

Yet is this discrepancy between importance and secrecy really
surprising? Is it not rather a sad but precise indication of where do
we, in western liberal democratic countries, stand with regard to
democracy? A century and a half ago, in Das Kapital, Karl Marx
characterised the market exchange between worker and capitalist as "a
very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom,
Equality, Property and Bentham." For Marx, the ironic addition of Jeremy
Bentham, the philosopher of egotistical utilitarianism, provides the key
to what freedom and equality effectively mean in capitalist society. To
quote The Communist Manifesto: "By freedom is meant – under the present
bourgeois conditions of production – free trade, free selling and
buying." And by equality is meant the legal formal equality of buyer and
seller, even if one of them is forced to sell his labour under any
conditions (like today's precarious workers).

The main culprits of the 2008 financial meltdown now impose themselves
on us as experts leading us on the painful path to financial recovery.
Their advice should trump parliamentary politics. Or, as Mario Monti put
it: "Those who govern must not allow themselves to be completely bound
by parliamentarians." What, then, is the higher force whose authority
can suspend the decisions of the democratically elected representatives
of the people? As far back as 1998, the answer was provided by Hans
Tietmeyer, the then governor of the Deutsche Bundesbank, who praised
national governments for preferring "the permanent plebiscite of global
markets" to the "plebiscite of the ballot box".

Note the democratic rhetoric of this obscene statement: global markets
are more democratic than parliamentary elections, since the process of
voting goes on in them permanently (and is permanently reflected in
market fluctuations) and at a global level, not only within the limits
of a nation state.

This, then, is where we stand with regard to democracy, and the Tisa
agreement is a perfect example. The key decisions concerning our economy
are negotiated and enforced in secret, and set the coordinates for the
unencumbered rule of capital. In this way, the space for decision-making
by the democratically elected politicians is severely limited, and the
political process deals predominantly with issues towards which capital
is indifferent (like culture wars).

This is why the release of the Tisa draft marks a new stage in the
WikiLeaks strategy: until now its activity has been focused on making
public how our lives are monitored and regulated by the intelligence
agencies – the standard liberal topic of individuals threatened by
oppressive state apparatuses. Now another controlling force appears –
capital – which threatens our freedom in a much more twisted way: by
perverting our very sense of what the word means.