by Chris Black
Those who posit the freedom of the individual against the power of the State ignore or deliberately misunderstand that it is neither the individual nor the modern State which drives the political agenda.
Both are more or less naked before the power of Capital. Here’s the thing, the individual is a political player only insofar as collectively he still has the weight of numbers.
The State is entirely in the hands of Capital.
Capital in this context is financial and international.
Most of us accept the obvious that Capital is international but that it is almost entirely financial has only been established as incontrovertible fact in the last years. When finance/money Capital called a halt on a whim to almost all productive enterprise in the Western World, productive capital was decidedly secondary.
Why worry about ownership and control of the means of production, when ownership and control of the means of producing money is the critical factor, which is not to say it isn’t possible to do both.
If the individual personality of the human being is to be returned to the decisive role in world politics, and even in the direction of our own lives, it can only be done through a vehicle that can make use of the weight of numbers in balance against money.
The only vehicle that exists effectively was, is and can only be the apparatus of the modern State. It must be wrested therefore from the hands of Capital by weight of those numbers.
Having done that it would be criminal stupidity to disarm that State, now in the hands and interests of the collective of individuals, in the face of Capital.
The State is controlled by or brushed aside by Finance Capital in the modern world. Those who would concern themselves with the freedom of the individual and the primacy of personality can only then desire first, control of the State, and then, a strong State.
Only then can the State act as the valid arbiter of the collective which always has power and money which too will always have power, in favour on balance of the collective. The State then is the decisive factor in whether the individual can be “free” and the extent that he can be.
Left alone against the full force of International Finance Capital the individual has charge of nothing.
The State in service to the Nation is freedoms final guarantor.