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Friday, Oct 10, 2008
How did an English doctoral drop-out like Doug Henwood become the first anti-capitalist pundit for the CNN crowd?
Dec 22, 1998 | Dressed like a preppie banker or finance manager in his chinos, loafers and oxford-cloth shirt, Doug Henwood is addressing a roomful of professors and graduate students who have come to listen to this maverick economist give a ruthlessly detailed, up-to-the-minute lecture about the Southeast Asian financial crisis. Looking very serious, Henwood concludes quietly that the exploded economies in the former "Asian bubble" are indeed stabilizing. International Monetary Fund bailouts will soothe anxious investors. This will allow the United States' seemingly unstoppable bull market to continue almost unabated. The news seems to startle everyone.
"I don't understand your optimism," an audience member says in an incredulous tone.
"Actually, I wouldn't call it optimism," Henwood responds with a wry smile. "For me it's pessimism, since I want capitalism to end."
Despite these sentiments, Henwood has spent more than a decade devoting himself to an intensive study of why capitalism and its ruling class are stronger than ever. His newsletter, the Left Business Observer, founded in 1986, is so packed with detailed research and insights about the goings-on of the free market that it's read by everyone from radical Marxists to rabidly pro-capitalist libertarians. Norman Pearlstine, former executive editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been roused enough by Henwood's work to characterize him as "scum."
Pearlstine's invective is proudly blurbed on the dust jacket of Henwood's latest book, titled simply "Wall Street" (Verso Press, 1997). A mind-bendingly exhaustive account of the market in that most fictive and fetishized of commodities, money itself, "Wall Street" is a masterful overview (and indictment) of big finance and the wealthy rentier class whose "labor" consists of trading stocks, bonds, futures, currencies and the latest mutant spawn of the derivatives market. Written in the language of finance theory, statistics and political economy, "Wall Street" is like a "Satanic Verses" for the creditor set. Henwood speaks a kind of financial blasphemy, using the sacred wisdom of capital against itself.
Between lectures at UC-Berkeley and Seattle, Henwood took some time to relax and chat with me about how he came to be one of the few Marxist economists ever to appear on CNN. "I hope my work is participating in cultural subversion," he cracks, "because I've spent all this time studying stuff that I hate -- I have to read IMF reports and bourgeois economists. Wall Street is populated by some of the most cynical, greedy bastards on earth. But it's not enough just to say that. The last thing I want to do is sound like a guy on a soapbox moralizing. It's not their personal moral characteristics that create the system they populate. Capitalism is essentially an amoral system based on exploitation. And Wall Street is part of the class struggle, to use an unfashionable term. But most people don't realize this, so the market looks incomprehensible to them."
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