[Marxism] A letter from Iceland

[Louis Proyect]

Counterpunch, February 23, 2009
Letter From Iceland
A War Cry From the North

By EINAR MÁR GUOMUNDSSON

     You who live with an island in your heart
     and the vastness of space
     a sidewalk beneath your soles.

     Hand me the Northern Lights!
     I shall dance with the youngster
     who is holding the stars.

     We peel the skin from the darkness
     and cut the head off misery.

This poem, A War Cry from North, serves in many a way as a fitting 
beginning for this piece, not only because the poem describes the matter 
at hand; rather, I wrote it at the Sailors' Home in Klakksvik in the 
Faroe Islands in February, 1993, when the bank depression devastated the 
Faroes.

I was there on a reading tour and have related that story elsewhere and 
do not intend to draw the Faroe Islands into the financial crisis which 
Iceland now faces. Although the depression is said to be of an 
international nature, I intend to fix my sights on Iceland.

* * *

In the midst of all this turmoil, the first question that comes to mind 
must be: Was Karl Marx right? My friend, who has held on to all the 
volumes of Das Kapital and has read them, tells me this situation, as it 
appears now, is dealt with in the third volume. But few people, 
apparently, have read it because the second volume contains a lot of 
mathematics, according to my friend who does not stop at owning all the 
volumes but has read them, which is more than I, or most other people, 
have done.

This friend of mine says that Karl Marx talks about poetic capital, 
fictive capital, in the third volume of Das Kapital, where there is no 
real wealth behind the profits, simply an exchange of worthless 
documents between one individual and the next - worthless in the sense 
that there is in no reality in place.

Such a web of lies was woven by the Icelandic capitalists who were often 
called entrepreneurial Vikings and rumored to be spiffy and swell. In 
their own publications they appeared as demi-gods and pretended to be 
patrons of worthy causes, with wives who cared about children in Africa. 
They claimed they wanted to share something of themselves, that they 
were doing so well because their husbands worked so hard at the office 
and met with success in almost every endeavor. They bought their way 
into companies, gained majority stakes, formed new companies and sold 
them to one another and kept everything of value from the old companies, 
the possessions of the shareholders, for themselves. Such was the web of 
deceit. This was the fate of many a valuable company. Then they 
reappeared in their own publications, having bought ski slopes in the 
Alps, luxury apartments in Manhattan and yachts in Florida. These were 
the happy few indeed.

Note, I use the concept a web of deceit. Still, this is not quite the 
right phrase because all of this occurred in accordance with the laws of 
the market and with the blessings of the market. No laws, no rules, 
prevented the shenanigans of the financial grandees. The politicians of 
Iceland were fast asleep, shrugged their shoulders and clinked glasses 
with the financial grandees, they even felt insulted if they were not 
invited to the feast which was enveloped in Hollywood glamor and razzmatazz.

* * *

When libertarians speak of the market, they resort to religious terms: 
"This is up to the market." Or: "We'll let the market decide that." One 
only needs to replace the word "market" with the word "God" and the 
religious content of libertarianism becomes apparent. The invisible hand 
becomes the Will of God, irrespective of how people feel about God. But 
Mammon is shrewd and takes on many forms. This is to say, the 
entrepreneurial Vikings, the financial grandees, the Icelandic 
capitalists, or whatever you wish to call them, were only offering due 
sacrifices to the market or to Mammon. The rules of engagement were in 
place and they took advantage of them. In addition, there were the 
astronomical salaries, the options, the bonuses and more things of joy. 
In Iceland, a new class came into being, a class of the superwealthy who 
reduced the middle class to paupers and made fools of the lower class. 
All sense of values was thrown out of kilter. Ordinary vocations, like 
that of teaching, were considered declassé. No one took the bus anymore. 
Everyone jumped into a new car, even cars people didn't own but bought 
on installment, from the tires upwards.

The directors of the privatized banks proceeded without discretion. They 
considered their work such an accomplishment that they awarded 
themselves a monthly salary to the tune of a Nobel Prize. If this 
excessive generosity towards themselves was pointed out to them, they 
would grimace and threaten to leave the country. We should have taken a 
leaf from The Saga of Grettir, wished them a safe journey and asked them 
never to return. But they claimed to be in such demand abroad. One could 
even imagine they would be cloned so that the entire world could bask in 
their reflected glory. Then it was left to the Icelandic 
biopharmaceutical company Decode to discover the jealousy gene in those 
who had the temerity to criticize them. One of them even talked about 
getting a Ph.D. student to conduct research into why the Danes were so 
jealous of them.

* * *

I'll get to this later because Karl Marx now insists I give a more 
detailed account of his views. The difference, it is said, between Karl 
Marx and most modern economists is that Marx had a historical overview, 
that he considered history a classroom from which he drew lessons. In 
this respect his methods are not unlike those of epic novelists, just in 
a different field. The truth is concrete, said Marx, like the novelist 
who collects facts which form the basis of his work. Therefore there are 
correspondences here and they are not unrelated to modern literature, in 
that there is a correspondence between unrelated fields. Karl Marx would 
have discerned the reality of the poetic capital from the depression 
which ran rampant in the middle of the 19th century - in 1859 if I 
recall - the most dire depression civic society has witnessed, along 
with the Great Depression of 1930 and the one with which we are now 
faced. If these depressions are volcanic eruptions, other depressions 
are earthquakes, various sorts of reverberations, some of which are 
restricted to specific zones. Around the middle of the nineteenth 
century there were great transport developments in Europe which crumbled 
with the same resounding thud as the financial world is doing now.

We also know that the Great Depression of 1930 was caused by 
overproduction. But now the depression of 2008 is one of overinvestment. 
Therefore its origins are to be found in investment companies and banks. 
Faced with the greed which has followed in wake of this newly crumbled 
financial system, people are of course flabbergasted. For example, some 
of the Icelandic financial grandees have appeared on lists of the 
world's richest men. They travel by private jet and try to outdo one 
another with all kinds of displays of vanity. Bands like Duran Duran 
have performed at new year galas and Elton John has sung at their 
birthday parties. I'm not going to discuss their musical tastes as such, 
but there are those artists who have become court poets and painters to 
the billionaires.

* * *

Even the President has trotted around half the globe with them, maybe to 
watch a single football match and likened them to great men in toast 
speeches, exalted their daring. They have had the leaders of the social 
democratic movement in their pocket and these have been like 
ventriloquist dummies of the wealthy because, all things being equal, 
the billonaires needed to find an adversary and some of them have found 
that adversary in Davíð Oddsson who has occupied almost every position 
imaginable, that of mayor, prime minister, and now that of chairman of 
the Central Bank of Iceland.

The Baugur crowd, i.e. the wealthy men of Baugur Group, have blamed the 
financial depression on Davíð Oddsson and made liberal use of their own 
press for that purpose. The social democratic leaders, Ingibjörg Sólrún 
for instance, have aped the billionaires in respect to this ridiculous 
animosity, the billionaires who moan about their families being 
persecuted when attempts have been made to curb their crimes and 
immorality. Davíð Oddsson has accused them of greed and corruption, 
called them highrollers and made full use of his rhetorical skills to 
mock them.

But Davíð forgets one thing, that he and his party, the Independence 
Party, paved the way for these men by privatizing the banks and 
contributed to the utter lack of ground rules surrounding their 
activities. The Progressive Party, too, must shoulder much of the blame 
for this state of affairs. When the banks were privatized, Valgerður 
Sverridóttir, former Minister of Industry and Commerce, and one of the 
leaders of the Progressive Party, declared: "This is a significant 
watershed, as this is the most comprehensive act of privatization in the 
history of Iceland."

And she was in such a hurry to privatize the banks that summer houses 
and a valuable art collection were thrown into the bargain, free of 
charge. When someone had the temerity to criticize her for this, she 
mouthed off.

The politicians are therefore in the role of Dr. Frankenstein and the 
billionaires are the monsters who have utterly outgrown the economy and 
plunged the nation into debt to such a degree that when the moral 
criterion of the nation state is applied, the word "treason" comes to 
mind and therefore, given the situation in which the country now finds 
itself, there is no other recourse but to confiscate the properties of 
these men and then only to pay off debts, the debts they themselves have 
incurred.

* * *

On the surface, Davíð Oddsson's rhetoric concerning the corrupt and 
greedy highrollers is spot on because there has been no end to the 
disorder and doubledealing. I won't go so far as to say that we need to 
go back to Roman times to find parallels; rather we need go back to the 
twenties, the Roaring Twenties, when the Great Gatsby ruled the roost 
and fictional characters such as Babbit came into being. In fact, what 
Babbit has in common with the financial grandees is that the man, as 
such, is sympathetic but prone to the same shallow greed. But let's look 
closer to home. Joseph Stiglitz, Bill Clinton's economic advisor, 
himself a libertarian who became disgusted with libertarianism, wrote 
the book "The Roaring Nineties" which deals with exactly the same things 
that have been happening in the Icelandic economy, except people like 
those responsible for the Enron debacle have actually been taken to 
court in that country, whereas in Iceland the highrollers are invited to 
dine with the President at Bessastaðir, to whoop it up with the 
highrolling Martha Stewart who is apparently a friend of the First Lady. 
Someone might assume that the President owed us, his people, an 
explanation. When I say that the social democrats have been in the 
pocket of the billionaires, I do so without malice towards them. The 
position of the social democrats in recent years has changed in that 
they have shifted from left to right. They have become, without 
realizing it, a beast of burden for the libertarians. Tony Blair 
represents the original incarnation of this policy and Gordon Brown, who 
wants to finish us Icelanders off, has followed suit. Tony Blair 
attracted support from the left but implemented a de facto right-wing 
policy. This man was the greatest idol of the Icelandic social democrats 
and their leaders.

* * *

This development is not a question of a sudden change of heart, rather 
its causes are rooted in historical events such as the fall of the 
Berlin wall and the ensuing reality which has been associated with 
postmodernism. Nothing is absolute, all things are relative and the 
concepts of left and right are redundant and so on. This position goes 
hand in hand with the decline of trade unionism, the waning powers of 
organizations and lack of solidarity. This is crystallized in the fact 
that social democrats do not represent a policy but rather they come up 
with something they call deliberative politics which has parallels in 
postmodernist relativism. During the last election I remarked to a 
social democrat how sad it was that his party had such little concern 
for the working class. The social democrat looked at me and said, "The 
working class! What working class? This is a handful of foreigners." One 
cannot expect much of a policy from an environment where this is the 
prevalent spirit. It is exactly this position that has given the 
advocates of capitalism and libertarianism a free run and complete 
leeway to do as they please. The chairman of the Social Democratic Party 
- Samfylkingin - has sung the praises of the billionaires and 
commiserated with them in their self-pity and resentment, and almost 
made it her policy that they be given the run of practically everything, 
not just commerce and business, but also the media. In this environment 
there has been no opposition of note to the war in Iraq or anything at 
all for that matter. The politicians have been allowed to put on airs on 
talk shows, almost like actors delivering their lines, and a large 
number of our youth is lost to the worship of gadgets and financial 
snobbery. Boobification has run rampant, the penny dreadful is the 
literature du jour, revered by the shallow-minded.

As a consequence we are not only dealing with a financial depression 
which is rattling the homes of this country and all the foundations of 
society, but a profound spiritual depression which makes it even more 
difficult to face the financial one, or to be more precise, the ruling 
class will get off scot-free and the people will be left in the clutches 
of the IMF, which, given its record, will demand even further 
privatization and that the welfare system be demolished even more 
thoroughly than is already the case.

* * *

We find ourselves in a fairy tale called The Emperor's New Clothes and 
the weavers have said, "If you do not see how clever we are, then you're 
just stupid, and not only stupid but jealous, which is really worse than 
being stupid, because stupid people can be sent on a course in our good 
schools. Hand the fishing waters over to us, hand over the banks to us, 
and the water, the waterfalls, the energy companies, and we'll gallivant 
around the globe with the President and say: "We are the greatest in the 
world, and if you do not see this, you're not only stupid, but also 
jealous." Perhaps Iceland is a testing ground for things to come, and if 
not, an exaggerated version of the condition, the depression, which has 
been made apparent by the fact that the financial companies have run up 
a debt to the tune of the gross national product times twelve. If I 
recall, the American housing system was first shaken last summer, and 
it's an old and new philosophy that when America sneezes, the rest of 
the world catches a cold, but the Icelandic economy isn't just suffering 
from a cold, but from a case of pneumonia which is attacking its entire 
infrastructure. At the same time, it becomes more and more apparent that 
the US housing system which collapsed, and the Icelandic bank system, 
which has now also collapsed, are more like a pair of doppelgängers from 
the world of literature than two distinct marvels, although these are 
surely amazing phenomena.

Still, it's too early to determine what the depression means and how it 
will play out. It is apparent that a vast number of people are left 
bankrupt and perplexed and that the party has drawn to a close. The 
ensuing hangover will be a long-term one, but if the system has hit 
rock-bottom, we can expect better days ahead. The avarice can be seen as 
an addiction, a constant form of abuse, where imaginary money is pumped 
into the economy and the addiction demands more and more of it, and 
there is no way back until everything crumbles.

As is, the IMF will probably be given the task of picking the juiciest 
bits from the welfare system, privatizing our natural resources and 
welfare system, thus fulfilling the purpose of libertarianism. But you 
never know whether the fat servant will come to, now that he has become 
a whipped slave, and then the words of the poem will squeal at reality.

     You who live with an island in your heart
     and the vastness of space
     a sidewalk beneath your soles.

     Hand me the Northern Lights!
     I shall dance with the youngster
     who is holding the stars.

     We peel the skin from the darkness
     and cut the head off misery.

Einar Már Guðmundsson is one of Iseland's best-known poets and novelists.