Double Trouble (2022)

Book Review from the April 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Norms Under Siege: The Parallel Political Lives of Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi. By Edoardo M Fracanzani, Zero Books, 2021. 244 pages, £14.99

Edoardo M Fracanzani has used his background in studying Italian politics and society to make a comparison between Italy’s and America’s most prominent leaders of recent years. The similarities he finds between the careers and approaches of Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump are cogently described in Norms Under Siege, and go much further than them both being slimy right-wing populists.

As Fracanzani explains, the parallels between Berlusconi and Trump began before they entered the political arena. Both started out in the real estate business and later moved into the entertainment industry, with Berlusconi’s empire of television channels and Trump as co-producer and host of The Apprentice. Their business careers were built on ‘a heavy reliance on cronyism, a proclivity to bending (and occasionally breaking) the rules, the adoption of a rather low ethical bar in the pursuit of their objectives’ (p.33), tendencies they continued to employ in their subsequent political careers. These were new vehicles for increasing the power they gained in business, with neither entering politics aiming to improve wider society. Before they became heads of government, each played around with political affiliations which would serve them best at the time. Trump had been a member of several parties, including the Democrats, before settling with the Republicans, while Berlusconi had allies in National Alliance, a party with roots in fascism, as well as Italy’s so-called Socialist Party (Partito Socialista Italiano).

Berlusconi, as head of the Forza Italia (‘Go Italy’) party, was first elected as Prime Minister in 1994, following a period of reform of the electoral system and public dislike of the centrist establishment. His influence over the output of Italy’s TV stations meant that he could win over the support of a large chunk of the populace, in particular those who were anti-left. He was re-elected in 2001 and 2008, and was prevented from running again in 2018 by his conviction for tax evasion. Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States in early 2017, after decades of the Republican Party shifting further to the right on social policies and promoting a stance of tax cuts, which didn’t really translate to reductions in state expenditure. Norms Under Siege was completed before Joe Biden moved into the White House, denying us Fracanzani’s views on Trump’s handling of the pandemic and his presidency’s turbulent end in January 2021.

As Fracanzani convincingly argues, with patiently explained examples, the two leaders used similar approaches to attract public support. Generally, this was among people with lower levels of mainstream education and a higher than average income. He writes that ‘possibly the most important element of Trump’s, as well as Berlusconi’s, extraordinary success with a certain class of voters is a rooted resentment toward the elites’ (p.135). They channelled this resentment into support by somehow giving the impression to many people that they are against the elite, despite them firmly being part of it because of their wealth and power. They are distanced from others in their privileged position, though their personalities (particularly their lack of taste, according to Fracanzani) made them unpopular with their peers, and their loose way of behaving differentiated them from other politicians. Berlusconi has the ‘manners of a TV loud-speaking salesman’ (p.25), which many voters could still relate to more than their usual staid politicians. The resentment towards the elite which Trump and Berlusconi used wasn’t only directed towards leaders but also to a perceived ‘cultural elite’ driving social trends leftwards. As Fracanzani says, ‘no one exploited political correctness fatigue for political gain more than [Trump]’ (p.107). His and Berlusconi’s disregard of ‘political correctness’, or even just basic decency, is exemplified in their sexist attitudes to women, which escalated to sex scandals which failed to derail them. Their behaviour is marked by a lack of shame, which indicates that they aren’t concerned about acting ethically. Despite, or even because of, their transgressions, they maintained a base of supporters whose loyalty is perhaps ‘the most striking aspect of the Trump and Berlusconi phenomena’ (p.124).

Of course, the two leaders had their critics as well. Their stock response to complaints against their behaviour has been to childishly play the victim and portray their accusers as enemies to get revenge on, a trick which apparently works. ‘The most striking similarity between Berlusconi and Trump is the way they were able to shape the public debate in such a way as to escape accountability from their unprecedented, unethical, and illegal behaviour’ (p.175). When challenged through the legal system, they used their position to avoid censure in ways which, according to Fracanzani, have caused ‘institutional damage’: ‘Possibly, the most apparent dents inflicted regard the law enforcement institutions these leaders choose to denigrate in order to bully their way out of criminal investigations’ (p.219).

Norms Under Siege’s account of the parallel careers of Berlusconi and Trump is a catalogue of the rules they have broken. Among these rules, there is a distinction between laws (which are, of course, set in legislation) and norms (social expectations, including ethical values), which is where we find the book’s title (although surprisingly, the word ‘siege’ never appears in its text). For Fracanzani, a combination of laws and norms ‘governs all systems’ (p.142), and because norms are less enforceable, a system which relies too much on them is vulnerable to being misused by any politicians there for their own benefit. So, his stance is based on believing in capitalist tenets like laws and that government is a machine which can be run responsibly, if it has sufficient safeguards against self-serving politicians. But his own opinions aren’t prominent in the book: his clear dislike for Berlusconi and Trump is tempered by his methodical tone, and he prefers to let his detailed analysis of the context in which they rose to their positions speak for itself. His book is a warning about how our political culture and system enable contemptible people like them to get power.

Mike Foster

Italy’s New Brand: 5-Star Movement (2013)

From the May 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The breakthrough achieved by a new political movement, the 5 Stars Movement (its official name is Movimento 5 Stelle, abbreviated as M5S), was a key result of the election that took place on the 24/5 February in Italy. For the Chamber of Deputies the M5S got 25.55 percent of the votes.  The figure for the Senate of Republic was similar. This resulted in 109 seats for M5S in the Chamber of Deputies and 54 seats in the Senate. For the old political establishment this outcome is quite drastic, but what does the M5S stand for, and will the Italian workers benefit from this electoral outcome?

Corrupt from the start

In order to understand Italian politics we need to go as far back as the artificial creation of Italy by the dominant European powers of that time (i.e., Great Britain, France and Prussia). Since its very foundation in 1861, Italian capitalism and its political establishment have been deeply linked to corruption and collusion with secret societies, such as Freemasonry and illegal organizations.

Italian schoolbooks still teach that about 1,000 men led by Giuseppe Garibaldi conquered the southern part of the peninsula, dominated at that time by the House of Bourbon that could field an army of 150,000 men. Even with the addition of rebels and help from Savoy and Britain, Garibaldi’s army could not count on more than 15,000, ten times less than the Neapolitan army (as Marx pointed out in the New York Daily Tribune 23 August 1860). How did they do it? Corruption was the main weapon used by Garibaldi’s army.

The weapon of corruption worked very well and has dominated Italian politics since. ‘Unlike the rest of Western Europe, the disintegration of feudalism in southern Italy failed to produce an independent entrepreneurial middle class’ (Judith Chubb, Patronage, Power, and Poverty in Southern Italy, 1982). This was in large part due to the colonial politics of the northern Italian bourgeoisie (Antonio Gramsci, Ordine Nuovo, La Settimana politica, Operai e contadini, 1919-1920). The banks of the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies were being systematically robbed by the new elite. From 1863 to 1866 the Bank of Naples lost 37 million lire (Gigi Di Fiore, Controstoria dell’Unione d’Italia, 2007). The Bank of Sicily’s director, Emanuele Notarbartolo, who tried to save it from bankruptcy, was murdered on the orders of Raffaele Palizzolo, another Member of the Italian Parliament and member of the management board of the same bank. Palizzolo was also a known Sicilian mafia boss, who took advantage like many others of the unification of Italy to make dubious investments (trafficking) for his own personal profit. The same year, 1893, another scandal involved another bank, Banca Romana, which to extinguish its debts printed fake money.  This scandal involved very important political leaders like Giovanni Giolitti and Francesco Crispi, founding fathers of Italy. These historical facts are just some early examples of how the Italian political system worked from the very beginning.

Things did not change during the Fascist dictatorship and after WWII the main party, the Christian Democratic Party (Democrazia Cristiana, DC), refined this rotten system even further. Their political machinery was based on clientelism and patronage. Amintore Fanfani, leader of the DC in the 50s, while advocating against clienteles and personality politics set up a scheme to recruit DC members called tesseramento which took clientelism to its extreme. Judith Chubb describes how these tessere (party membership cards) were crucial to get power within the DC political party. ‘The tessera of the DC is like a blank check: it can be given out to anyone – to relatives, to the deceased, to persons chosen at random from the telephone book or from health-insurance list’ (Corriere della Sera 7 November  1973). The trick was quite easy: you provide me with tesserati and I provide you with jobs in provincial councils, local government offices, agencies of the public administration. Of course the public sector grew like crazy with no equivalent growth in the private sector.

Organised crime was another very convenient partner for the political establishment because it controlled a part of the private sector, in particular the construction business. This system soon extended to the rest of Italy, in particular when ‘at the beginning of the 70s, Cosa Nostra (the Sicilian mafia) itself began to become a company. A company because, by getting a more and more hefty share – which sometimes became almost a monopoly – of the drug market, Cosa Nostra began to manage an enormous amount of capital’ (last interview with Paolo Borsellino, 1992).

As we have seen with Palizzolo, the connection between political class and organised crime has always been there, but now in the 50s, 60s and 70s, it became obvious, with people like Giovanni Gioia, Fanfani’s political secretary, Salvo Lima, a collaborator of Gioia with important connections with Cosa Nostra who was murdered by Cosa Nostra itself in 1992, and Vito Ciancimino, DC politician, mayor of Palermo and mafia member. To confirm Borsellino’s statement, we could just consider that Silvio Berlusconi started his empire by getting a surety from the Bank Rasini of Milan that was involved in Cosa Nostra money laundering. The best buddy of Silvio Berlusconi, Bettino Craxi, leader of the Italian ‘Socialist’ Party (Partito Socialista Italiano, PSI), became clearly important when Cosa Nostra and the DC were having some ‘marital’ problems in the early 80s. It was known that this traditionally small party (9.6 percent of votes), which still carried the hammer and sickle logo until 1985, at once became ‘important’ and notoriously corrupted to the core.

To an extent, the Italian political class underwent a transition in the period from 1969 to 1977, which in Italy was characterised by intense social and political unrest connected with the first serious economic troubles since the end of WWII. At the conclusion of this phase, the national political class represented not only a relative obstacle to the healthy development of Italian capitalism, but started to act as an absolute brake: the public debt boomed and in 1985 reached the warning level of 80 percent of GDP (in 1970 it was only 40.5 percent).

If in the past Italian politicians were not so different from their counterparts in other European countries – maybe just slightly more naive and less concerned with an effective capitalist industrial policy – from the first ‘pentapartito’ (i e. five parties) government in 1981 they began to act as a simple parasite clique who prompted an artificial economic development making use of what Marcello De Cecco referred to as ‘criminal (or bastard) Keynesianism’: unbalanced and unproductive public expense, generalised political corruption at all levels, competitive devaluation of the currency, high taxation rates on salaries together with widespread tax evasion in the self-employment sector, and, finally, heavy reliance on the protected export of low-technology goods related to the existence of the European Common Market.

Enter Beppe Grillo

When in 1986 Beppe Grillo, a successful comedian from Genoa, made a joke about the PSI being corrupt he said what everybody knew already. Grillo was banned because of this joke from Italian television. This showed how little people were then allowed to say in the mainstream media and how bad the political situation was.

Grillo’s activism against the political establishment became even more pronounced after that. At that time he was working in theatres, touching upon topics like corruption, pollution, consumer association matters, unemployment, bank scandals, etc. People who did not follow him in theatres could still see him on television on Tele+, where his live performances were broadcast every now and then. Grillo’s performances got mainstream media coverage when he talked about scandals like Parmalat’s, which broke before the media and justice system knew about it. The internet was the real breakthrough for Grillo. He could finally reach many more people, and his blog became the most popular in Italy.  Through Grillo’s blog, meet-ups were and are organised to allow ‘Grillo’s friends’ to meet face to face, discuss local problems and organise action groups, for instance against a local council that wants to build a new incinerator. In this way Grillo’s friends or followers started to become more and more proactive. In 2007 on the 8 September, a very symbolic date for Italy, a V-Day (Vaffanculo = Fuck off) was organised to gather as many followers as possible to protest against the political establishment. This was a great success, connecting 220 cities at the same time. On this occasion Grillo declared that he did not intend to create a political party but rather to eliminate them.

Grillo specified later that the M5S is in fact a movement and not a party. At the end of 2009 the M5S was founded. For some, Gianroberto Casaleggio is the real mind behind the M5S. It does not matter to us if behind Grillo there is Grillo or Casaleggio or Grillo and Casaleggio. What matters is what this political movement is about. They claim that they want to empower the citizens, getting rid of the old caste of politicians and their old systems based on clientelism and patronage. That’s reasonable and necessary in a country like Italy. We can sympathise with such a movement over this point, in the same way that Marx did with liberals like Garibaldi and Francesco Crispi in their battle against the Bourbon monarchy (Karl Marx, New York Daily Tribune, 8 August 1860), without this meaning that Marx was a liberal.   

The Five Star Movement’s platform

So let’s have a brief look at the M5S political platform. M5S complains that the state is disjointed from the citizens, that the constitution (which represents bourgeois law) is not applied, and that the state’s cost far outweighs its efficiency. Here a cry for bourgeois legality was expressed through the M5S.  Of course this message also appeals to workers, who have experienced years of abuse from the political class. M5S also proposes that the salary of the members of parliament be in line with the national average; this point has been seen as socialist, but in fact is just a sign that when a capitalist economy is in crisis politicians should get the blame too. Nothing socialist there! We think that the capitalist system itself should get the blame and not just its servant politicians.

An interesting proposal is to make debate available to all citizens with internet access via the live streaming of public meetings. This is not direct democracy, but the principle that workers could participate more closely in political debates is interesting. Following the same line, there is the proposal that new laws should be online three months before they are approved to get citizens’ comments. It is not clear if these comments will be enough to change the proposed laws or even stop them, but again the principle of participation is interesting. M5S asks for referendums without a quorum condition and for the obligation on Parliament to discuss laws proposed by a people’s initiative. All these efforts to make Parliament more accessible to the workers are welcome, however very limited they are by the fact that economic power will be still in the hands of a few who will be influencing the political world anyhow. A more transparent way of doing politics in Italy is the main reason why the M5S got such a large vote. This expressed a feeling amongst many, even some of the upper class who rely on the bourgeois legality of the constitution, that the current political system was not representing them. 

The M5S political platform includes several points about sustainability. Capitalism is not sustainable so to try to reconcile this with the health of the planet raises contradictions by definition.  In terms of economic policy the M5S wants to introduce class actions, abolish the dummy corporation system in the stock exchange, and abolish the so-called Biagi law in which workers with temporary contacts have no rights for holidays, sick leave or maternity leave, and have restrictions on their pension payments. Article 18 of the Workers’ Statute (Statuto dei Lavoratori, 1970) says that an employer ought to have a fair reason to fire an employee. Several governments have wanted to modify it, so allowing the employer to fire their employees quite easily, to create what they call ‘flexibility’. Grillo in his blog proposed that this article should not be changed but that instead the taxes on enterprises should be lowered. The fact that the M5S is against Biagi’s law and does not want to change Article 18 was a crucial point to gain votes from the working class. In principle not changing this article is good. Unfortunately the real problem is that the worldwide free labour market has considerably reduced the working class’s bargaining power. Instead of hoping that lower taxes on enterprises would solve the problem, workers should get involved in international movements to fight against capital. Instead, M5S national reformism seems to be the preferred way.  

Moreover the M5S tries to counter the anarchic nature of capitalism by proposing to forbid the closure of food and manufacturing industries which have the internal market as their main market and to ban cross share-holdings between the bank system and the industrial system; also that financial advice  institutes should share responsibility for losses; that a salary limit be established for the CEOs of corporations in which the State is the main shareholder; abolition of stock options; abolition of state monopolies such as Telecom Italia, Autostrade, ENI, ENEL, Mediaset, Ferrovie dello Stato. This is the part that seems to interest the Occupy Movement. M5S wants to reduce the public debt so as to reduce the costs of the State. As the Italian State costs a lot, the money will also need to come from somewhere else. Benefits to unemployed people are also mentioned in M5S’s programme.

M5S reached political power rather quickly as an anti-establishment movement, because in Italy politics, corruption and crime are so interconnected, and public opinion, influenced by bourgeois ideology, can no longer stand it. In economic terms, the M5S response is a Keynesian mixed economy, with the old illusion that government intervention will be able to control or even cure the anarchic nature of capitalism. Unfortunately, the mixed economy already proved to be ineffective in taming capitalism. But can the M5S at least get rid of corruption and collusion? We shall see. 

It may be interesting, from the social science point of view, to notice that reformist movements are becoming more and more hybrid and decoupled from traditional left and right alignments. The internet has become a powerful medium for people organization, but still people need human contact and public speeches to get convinced. For many people representing the old establishment, this has been a real revolution.  For the working class this is yet another reformist movement. The Italian bourgeoisie is in such bad shape that this quite moderate movement, which aims at a capitalist system regulated by the government with no obvious links to organised crime, seems to be asking a lot. The need to apply bourgeois legality is so urgent that voters from all sides were attracted to the M5S. Workers voted for the M5S with the hope that cuts to state expenditure and the abolition of Biagi’s law could improve their condition. Unfortunately, capitalism does not have a good face or a bad face, it follows profit. And although it is very appealing to kick the old politicians up the arse, the situation for workers is unlikely to be improved by M5S political reforms.

Cesco

Voice From The Back: The Profit Motive (2014)

The  Voice From The Back column from the June 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Profit Motive
The insanity of capitalism with its profits before people motivation is everywhere apparent. Millions spent on armaments while people die from lack of basic medical treatment, immense wealth accumulated by a tiny minority of parasites while millions die from lack of clean water and food, but the following news item probably sums up the madness best. ‘In a wide-ranging interview with the India-based Economic Times, Cargill CEO David MacLennan talks about how the globe-spanning agribusiness giant managed to turn the 2008 economic crisis into a “record year of profits” a remarkable performance, given that that year’s food-price spikes pushed 115 million people into hunger, as the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimated’ (Mother Jones, 2 April).


The Rich Get Richer
In last month’s Socialist Standard we dealt with the French economist Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century and its many short-comings, but its publication and the many reviews it has produced in the mass media has thrown up some interesting aspects of modern capitalism. Here for instances is the journalist Philip Collins in his review of the book. ‘Between 1977 and 2007 the richest 1 per cent of Americans took an astonishing 60 per cent of the growth in national income. Sixty per cent. The wealth of the richest 85 people in the world is greater than that of the 3.5 billion people who make up the bottom half of the world’s population’ (Times, 2 May). Such statistics must give even the staunchest defenders of capitalism cause for concern.


Not For The Likes Of Us
Professor Karol Sikora a former director of cancer services at Hammersmith Hospital and ex-chief of the World Health Organisation has expressed his views about treatment of the disease. ‘One of Britain’s top cancer doctors has called for expensive cancer drugs to be rationed for the frail elderly in favour of being given to younger patients’ (Sunday Times, 4 May). What the doctor really means of course is the elderly and poor patients being untreated. There would be a public outcry if he meant millionaires or even members of the royal family being denied the best possible treatment. As some of the treatments cost £50,000 per year it is obviously not for the likes of us workers.


Growing Old Disgracefully
After a lifetime of hard work many thousands of workers because of ill-health and ageing find themselves reduced to living in a so-called Care Home. ‘The Care Quality Commission, which carries out inspections of homes, this week confirmed that in the past three years warnings were issued to 1,200 homes, of which 158 were forced to close. …….. A request to 150 councils revealed officials examined a total of 16,405 cases in the past 12 months, up from 13,880 in the previous year. The number of elderly residents who claim they were abused by care home staff also rose last year to 30,785, or 600 a week’ (Daily Express, 4 May). All sorts of proposals are put forward to deal with the situation but the reality is that the Care Homes are under-staffed and under-funded and are unlikely to be improved inside capitalism.


The Gap Widens
The legal dispute over a divorce settlement between Silvio Berlusconi and his second wife shows the enormous gap between the millions who are trying to survive on $2 a day and the obscene wealth of the owning class. ‘Her demand for a one-off payment of 540 million euros (£440 million) caused talks to break down. Berlusconi, who is worth an estimated 6.5 billion euros, is said to be willing to offer her 200 million euros’ (Times, 10 May).


Some Consolation
At one time Britain was the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world but these days are long gone. There is one economic category though where Britain still leads the world. ‘The number of billionaires living in the UK has risen to more than 100 for the first time, according to the 2014 Sunday Times Rich List. There are now 104 billionaires based in the UK with a combined wealth of more than £301bn, the list says. That means the UK has more billionaires per head of population than any other country’ (BBC News, 11 May). This must be a wonderful boost to Britain’s unemployed and homeless!

The TV Boss Takes Power (1994)

From the May 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

The victory of Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia in the recent Italian election should be read as a warning. A year ago neither Berlusconi nor his party existed. The three biggest commercial TV networks in Italy are owned by Berlusconi. These, combined with huge financial resources, were used to sell the hard right, free market ideology which won the election. It is like Murdoch deciding to make the odious Andrew Neil the next Prime Minister of Britain — or Maxwell having used his media power base to do the same for himself: from Labour MP to media tycoon to national leader. The power which can be utilized by those who own and control the media is not to be underestimated.

Media imagery

This was not just the victory of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, with its smoothly designed media imagery and appropriation of the Italian football song as its theme tune; in coalition with Berlusconi was the ultra-nationalist Northern League, led by the Yeltsin like chauvinist yob, Umberto Bossi, and the cleancd-up neo-fascist party, Alleanza Nationale, led by Gianfranco Fini. The latter is on record as stating that "Mussolini was the greatest statesman of the century”. There is no way that the neo-fascist right would have been able to achieve the respectability of government office without Berlusconi's front to work behind. It was the freshness and media potency of Forza Italia which persuaded many voters to turn a blind eye to the unpalatable historic origins of Fini’s party. As it is, we are now seeing for the first time since 1945 a group of neo-fascist politicians taking their place in the government of a major European nation state. It did not take very long for capitalism to recreate that horror, despite claims that the military victory in 1945 had defeated such an ideology once and for all.

Cartoon by Peter Rigg.

But this was not just a spectacular act of trickery by a media tycoon. Nor was it a relapse of millions of Italian workers into the idiocies of the Twenties and Thirties. Once again, the real stimulus to this retreat into right-wing callousness was the utter failure of the left-wing reformists to show any signs of being able to tame the effects of capitalism. Like all reformists everywhere, the PSI and PCI, running in the recent election as a so-called Progressive Alliance, were complete victims of the iron economic laws of the profit system. And like their counterparts in the British government, Craxi and his fellow political leaders were not only extremely corrupt but — sin of political sins — they were caught. So, a discredited left-centrist political tradition provided the very soil in which the simplistic messages of the hard right grew.

In itself, neo-fascists sitting in a government created out of the media power of a would-be President is not of great moment. But it is part of a political trend. In the last US election the rise of Ross Perot, a transparently right-wing crackpot, was based quite simply upon the fact that he was a billionaire with money to buy as much media time as he wanted.

Intellectually bankrupt

Against him were two discredited and intellectually-bankrupt opponents: Bush and Clinton. The most important point about the Perot campaign was not that he lost, but that there was a chance that he could have won. In the USA today the right wing ravings of the media star, Rush Limbaugh, are all the rage. Is he to be dismissed as a future Presidential hopeful? And if not a lunatic like him, what about some other smoother media created demagogue? In Russia the ultra-nationalist ravings of Zhirinovsky and his Liberal Democratic Party are such that even the thuggish Yeltsin is regarded by political commentators as the most respectable option. In France Le Pen is still on the loose, still winning a fifth or quarter of the votes in the South and around Paris, and still forcing the more legitimate parties of French capitalism to adopt more racist positions so as to compete with the neo-fascists.

Schindler’s List

Anyone who has seen the new film, Schindler’s List, which in the view of the present writer is the finest film to be made by an American director in decades and should be viewed by everyone with a functioning brain, will know what happens when political instability gives way to political crisis and implosion. After the sighs of resentment at useless politicians will often come the desperate rush towards demagogic leaders and the politics of simple hate. In a century which has seen concentration camps, electoral victories by fascistic forces are to be taken seriously.

Mussolini and Hitler won the support of workers on the basis of an economic system in severe crisis and a political system which fewer and fewer people any longer believed in. Both of these factors are clearly present now. But Mussolini and Hitler won power through ritualistic techniques of persuasion essentially more typical of the last century than this one: mass rallies, flag-waving, anthems and military stunts. Today any potential dictator could do no better than obtain control of the electronic media and the press. These "barons” are elected by nobody and accountable to nobody. They are the most obvious sign that capitalism is not essentially a democratic political culture. They should be watched very carefully.

Steve Coleman