Nekaj odlomkov iz komentarja, ki ga je Slavoj Žižek napisal o panamskih dokumentih (The Panama Papers · ICIJ in Delo DOSJE: #panamapapers) za Newsweek – Explaining the Panama Papers, or, Why Does a Dog Lick Himself?
From the 2008 financial meltdown onward, public figures from the pope downward bombard us with injunctions to fight the culture of excessive greed and consummation. As one of the theologians close to the pope put it: “The present crisis is not a crisis of capitalism, but the crisis of morality.” Even parts of the left follow this path. …
There is, however, a catch to all this overflow of critique: what is as a rule not questioned is the democratic-liberal frame of fighting against these excesses. The explicit or implied goal is to democratize capitalism, to extend the democratic control onto the economy, through the pressure of the public media, government inquiries, harsher laws, and honest police investigations. But the system as such is not questioned, and its democratic institutional frame of the state of law remains the sacred cow even the most radical forms of this “ethical anti-capitalism” like the Occupy movement do not touch.
The mistake to be avoided here is best exemplified by the story—apocryphal, maybe—about the Left-Keynesian economist John Galbraith: before a trip to USSR in the late 1950s, he wrote to his anti-Communist friend Sidney Hook: “Don’t worry, I will not be seduced by the Soviets and return home claiming they have Socialism!” Hook answered him promptly: “But that’s what worries me—that you will return claiming the USSR is NOT socialist!” What worried Hook was the naïve defense of the purity of the concept: if things go wrong with building a Socialist society, this does not invalidate the idea itself, it just means we didn’t implement it properly. Do we not detect the same naivety in today’s market fundamentalists?
… The lesson of the Panama Papers is that, precisely, this is not the case: Corruption is not a contingent deviation of the global capitalist system, it is part of its basic functioning.
The reality that emerges from the Panama Papers leak is of class division, and it’s as simple as that. The papers demonstrate how wealthy people live in a separate world in which different rules apply, in which legal system and police authority are heavily twisted and not only protect the rich, but are even ready to systematically bend the rule of law to accommodate them.
… The global capitalist legal system itself is, in its most fundamental dimension, corruption legalized. The question of where crime begins (which financial dealings are illegal) is not a legal question but an eminently political question, one of power struggle.
