Life in the shadows

A friend recently returned from Crete. He had a great time but was a bit depressed by the rash of new casinos and the signs of prostitution that he saw. He was he said reminded of the history of Cuba under Batista, before the 1959 revolution. (Anybody unfamiliar with this period in Cuba could do worse than watch Godfather 2. Cuba was turned into a brothel for the US's 7th Fleet and financed by the Mafia as a playground for the US's super rich.)

Between 1995 and 2006 Crete's authorities estimated that their 'black' (read unregulated, untaxed and super exploited) economy represented about 4.2% of their overall GDP. In 2012 new estimates made by the World Bank gave the equivalent figure as 25.6%. A German report of 2013 stated that unregistered Russian holdings in Cypriot banks amounted to $26 billion. (This was/is Russia's largest foreign capital investment.) The Germans were interested as it looked as though they would have to bail out Cyprian banks.

Processes like this are integral to globalisation. In fact, the unregulated economy is the most dynamic part of the modern capitalist system, with all of its effluent outwash among huge sectors of the world's population.

The UK's 'informal' economy has also grown. The UK's figures for '96 to 2006 are 2% of GDP created by the 'black' economy. By 2012 the UK was admitting to 10.1%. That was the equivalent to £150 billion a year. But the UK has its own particular twist to this picture. It has created a vast 'semi-regulated' economy, which acts as a porous, osmotic and over-inflated superstructure above the unregulated economy. 4.6 million in the UK are now officially self employed. This is the largest part of the 'new jobs' that the government has been announcing since 2010. And among other things the self employed receive on average a 40% lower income than the employed. Even Vince Cable said he was worried. The Guardian reported on the 14 May that he was concerned that employers were taking on these bargain bottom 'outsourced' workers rather than investing to create more productivity in the economy. Capitalism it seems will never do what's right by Vince.

What's happening in Cyprus is one side of an accelerating trend in global capitalism as it detaches itself from any claims that it naturally twins with democratic systems (always laughable), or with welfare, or, in the end, with any sort of social or human responsibility. It is not some moral accident that world slavery involves greater numbers today than those who were were victims of the 18th and 19th century 'slave trade.'A database compiled in the late 1990s put the figure for the transatlantic slave trade at over 11 million people. Siddharth Kara has provided an estimate of 28.4 million slaves at the end of 2006 divided into the following three categories: bonded labour/debt bondage (18.1 million), forced labour (7.6 million), and trafficked slaves (2.7 million). (Columbia Press; 2008.)