The G20 agreement has been hailed by world leaders as a “historic” moment, which will help bring the world out of the recession that has caused so much misery and anxiety for people across the globe.
This may well be the case and of course it may not. Twenty years from now maybe we will see if the decision made on Thursday to pledge one trillion dollars to end the recession was a bold and brilliant move or a colossal collective mistake.
Right now it is very difficult to say if it truly is a “historic” event. We do have, however, every right to hope that it will be in a positive way and perhaps we can celebrate the way that nations came together to work to solve each others problems.
The G20 summit also saw a coming together of a very different kind, however. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest during the summit and by no means all of them were there simply because they had lost their job.
There were also climate change protestors and anti-war protestors as well as violent anarchists who became embroiled in bloody fights with the police and manage to smash up a branch of Royal Bank of Scotland.
This shows us that the world still has many problems besides the economy, problems which cannot be fixed by IMF funding, fiscal stimuli, interest rate cuts or financial regulation.
Some have argued that the current crisis shows that capitalism and free market economics have failed. The anarchists in particular must have felt that this was their moment to prove that they were right all along.
Certainly the current crisis has shown us that the system is not perfect. Capitalism is a man-made system and as such it is vulnerable to the same weaknesses that inherent to man.
