Critique on Julian Assange

Solution Preview

He is neither. These are not the only two choices available. Julian Assange is someone who the present system has forced into being. Modernity is based on the power of capital. Societies are controlled by it. States are instruments of capital. Yet, when the economy goes into a tailspin, even educated people blame "the president" or "the government" for it. Strangely, only specialists bother to notice that states have no power over investment decisions, interest rates or even the function of their own bureaucracy (which are independent and unionized).

Capital also tends to concentrate itself both as an economic and a political entity. Capital has more power than states. Governments remain lumbering, large, overly procedural entities whose every move can be invalidated by courts. Power is money, and the most significant collection of money is capital, increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer conglomerates. Media is the worst example of this. It is "censorship" when the state tries to squash a story. Usually, it is discovered fairly soon and condemned. Media conglomerates, representing 3-4 families, squash news daily, and yet, it is excused by the workings of the market.

Power is power regardless of who wields it. Assange's mission is to pinpoint where certain abuses of power are occurring, and expose it. He is "in trouble" not because he leaked NSA documents. Journalists were doing that hourly during the Vietnam War. He's done something more nefarious: he has shown the world that states are but one, albeit clumsy, source of power in the word, and one that is waning in significance.

An example of this is the 2007 leak concerning Barclay's Bank and its ability to squash news of it in the Guardian of the UK. The documents leaked concerned Barclay's Bank using a set of shell companies in the Caribbean to avoid paying taxes. ...