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A question for Rowan

Listening to the Archbishop of Canterbury lamenting the behaviour of bankers, I was tempted to ask: what did you expect?

The trouble with criticising The Spoon's cynical defence of banking practices against the archbishop's call for repentance on the grounds that they were breaking no rules (shades of the standard MP's defence for fiddling their expenses there) because of the "notorious lack of legislation relating to banking" is that, ironically, I largely agree with him – though probably not for the reasons he might think.

The lack of legislation on banking is, to maintain the religious allusions, not a God-given state but the true nature of the capitalist world, in which real power lies not with those who make the laws but with the class which benefits from them (or more accurately from the lack of them). My response to the archbishop was actually "Well, what do you expect?" Given that, I thought he was doing quite well on Newsnight on Tuesday, in a liberal hand-wringing sort of way, until he got to the end and blamed it all on original sin, to which Paxo could only splutter in response: "You don't really believe that do you?" – a truly priceless question to ask the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Along with the laughter-inducing naivety of the comment, however, came a reflection on why it is that the political and social response to this crisis has indeed been so pusillanimous on all sides. How, even though we wouldn't use the term original sin, the widespread though impotent feeling has indeed been that some people – the spivs and speculators, the greedy bankers and the Bernie Madoffs and other ideal scapegoats, as The Spoon quite rightly calls them – have behaved badly and that it is "not fair" that we are all now having to pay the price for it. What we seem unable to do is to recognise that the bankers actually did nothing wrong at all. It's not just that they have nothing to apologise for – not least, as Spoon points out, because they are still doing it and getting away with it – but actually they were doing precisely what was expected of them; namely to valorise capital, to take some money and turn it into more money – basta! "Externalities" such as social inequality, economic exploitation and environmental degradation are not their concern (unless, in the case of the latter, they can spot a good green investment opportunity). Indeed the fact that the money was actually only virtual money based on a non-existent ability to pay is also not their problem.

After all, as Niall Ferguson has pointed out, that is a pretty good description of banking and capitalism itself. With any understanding of what has actually happened to us in this crisis and a recognition of the reality of the world as it actually is must come a realisation that a division of the banking system and the economy into a "real" or "productive" sector and a "speculative" and "parasitical" one is entirely artificial. To understand this we need a proper historical view of what is going on, rather than seeing the Second Great Crash as some sort of divine intervention or a sudden and unpredictable outbreak of original sinfulness (I realise the two must be linked in some unfathomable way).

All that has happened is that from around 1974 the balance of power within capitalism as a whole shifted away from one based on the post-war consensus of a more or less functioning social democratic model of social partnership – or "capitalism with a human face" – to a more open system of class antagonism. The rise of finance capital was an essential part of this shift as the locus of production moved from the centre to the periphery, requiring the unlocking and mobilisation of vast quantities of investment capital.

The deregulation and privatisation of society, politics and economics, in which everything solid once again melted into air, is thus not some excrescence dreamed up by Hayek and Friedman and put into practice on a whim by Thatcher but is actually integral to the functioning of a modern and globalised capitalist economy. So while Rowan Williams is right in one sense that we all (well, those of us who could afford it) took part in the bubble, we did not take part on equal terms.

The privatisation of society brought with it the privatisation of hope in the form of individual deficit spending because there was – as Thatcher again quite rightly recognised – no alternative. The massive increase in credit not only made us feel better about ourselves but also masked that fact that in real terms, wages in the industrial world have actually fallen in the last 30 years while social inequality has increased. During this period the class struggle was masked by the struggle to pay off the credit card. Apart from a few heroic and doomed attempts to resist the tide, it was this shift, 15 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, which actually brought about the death of socialism and the end of community. The whole debate since then about spivs and speculators versus good honest citizen-bankers is one designed to divert attention away from this fact.

To blame modern bankers and hedge fund managers for their greed is, to paraphrase the 19th-century philosopher of individualist egotism Max Stirner, akin to blaming a tiger for attacking his prey. The tiger is in the right for attacking and the prey is in the right for defending itself. To ask repentance of either (let alone both equally) is to miss the somewhat Darwinian point about the nature of capitalism. But then I guess that's why Christians talk about lions (and tigers) lying down with lambs. Maybe it's time for the lambs to get up and fight back.

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