Europe’s revolution from above | Étienne Balibar

A great Guardian CIF post by Étienne Balibar providing a penetrating, and to my mind fairly spot on, analysis of what is happening in Europe and in the Eurozone in particular at the moment. He points initially to the take over of Greece and Italy by the technocrats, ‘ordained and supervised by the IMF’ and the emergence of a Franco-German “directorate” (or the “commissarial dictatorship”) within the EU who are using the ‘whip of necessity’ to bring about “a revolution from above”.

“We know that this notion, invented by Bismarck, designates a change to the structure of the material constitution, in which the balance of power between society and state, economics and politics, results in a preventive strategy on the part of the ruling classes.”

However, this ‘true revolution’ which is being sketched out has three obstacles “whose combined effects could result in an exacerbation of the crisis, and therefore the end of Europe as a collective project”.

It’s worth reading the whole thing in my modest opinion, but as an inducement I will leave you with this question:

“The big question is what will be the direction of the citizens’ revolt against the dictatorship of markets that instrumentalise governments, which has recently been announced by Jean-Pierre Jouyet. Will it turn against the instrumentalisation of debt that crosses borders, or will it turn on the European project as a cure that is worse than the disease?”

EU Parliament chief refuses to protest at illegal arrests by Israel | The Electronic Intifada

David Cronin on how president of the EP Jerzy Buzek isn’t too bothered about the arrest of his colleague Irish MEP Paul Murphy by Israel in International Waters.
“The president of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek has declined to protest at how Israel arrested one of his own colleagues in international waters.

Last weekend, Paul Murphy was one of 14 Irish people kidnapped by Israeli forces who boarded the MV Saoirse, as it sailed towards Gaza. Murphy, a member of the European Parliament (MEP), has still not been released but is expected to be flown from Tel Aviv to Dublin tomorrow.

Buzek took his time reacting to Murphy’s arrest, which took place last Friday. It wasn’t until several days later that Buzek urged Israel to “quickly” release his fellow MEP and the other detainees. Buzek does not appear to have posted any statement about the arrests on his website.”

Words of a Euro Doomsayer Have New Resonance | Betting on Bernard Connolly

Good god….

Bernard Connolly was “a European Union economist in the early 1990s, where he helped design the common currency’s framework, but then he was dismissed after he expressed turncoat views. In 1998, just months before the euro’s introduction, he predicted that at least one of Europe’s weakest countries would face a rising budget deficit, a shrinking economy and a “downward spiral from which there is no escape unaided.”

“The origins of that fear, as well as the anger and passion that drive him, date to 1995, when he took a leave from his job with the European Commission to write “The Rotten Heart of Europe.” The book was an excoriating history of the failure of the euro’s predecessor, the European exchange rate mechanism.

In 2005, when Greek, Portuguese and Irish bonds were trading at rates barely higher than Germany’s, Mr. Connolly’s work at AIG Financial Products persuaded a small group of hedge funds and independent investors to bet on a euro zone crackup.

They did so by buying the credit-default swaps of what he saw as the most vulnerable European countries.

When fears that those countries would default took off in 2008 and 2009, sending the values of those swaps skyward, they were able to sell - reaping large profits.

“It took a while, but we finally were able to monetize Bernard’s views on Europe,” said James Aitken, who worked with him at AIG Financial Products and describes his job at the time as translating Mr. Connolly’s arcane musings into actual investment strategies.

While other investors have also profited from following Mr. Connolly’s advice, Mr. Aitken says that the analyst’s true passion is to try to prevent the social and political train wreck he fears is just around the corner.”

Video: David Harvey at Occupy London November 12, 2011

David Harvey at Occupy London / November 12, 2011 / International Day of Solidarity from Elaine Castillo on Vimeo.

Transcript of the talk here.

Aditya Chakrabortty | Why doesn’t Britain make things any more?

Aditya Chakrabortty on Britain’s de-industrial revolution

And yet many of the arguments that preoccupy the British are haunted by the spectre of manufacturing. Angry at the overweening power of banks? Then you want a more mixed economy. Distressed at the gap between the rich and the rest of society? In the end, that will require jobs with decent wages and skill-levels, like the old manufacturing jobs.

This applies to non-economic debates, too. Politicians go on about localism, without discussing what de-industrialisation has done to local economies. Pundits bemoan the loss of community spirit without considering the wrecking ball that has been put through many communities.

In Walker, on the Tyne, the workers at Pearson Engineering are recalling when their firm employed 1,000, rather than a couple of hundred. Clark, the apprentice who worked his way up to company director, sketches out his retirement plans. Then he pauses. “I’m beginning to worry about what my grandkids are going to do,” he says.

Michael Roberts | Europe: default or devaluation?

Marxist economist Michael Roberts has an excellent post which goes through the arguments made at a plenary session at the Historical Materialism conference last weekend. The most interesting part of the discussion, and the most heated, was on whether or not the left should advocate that a peripheral Eurozone country should leave the Euro, or if instead it should remain and under what conditions.

“There was significant disagreement on the question of the euro, Europe’s single currency. Lapavitsas was charged emotionally in telling the audience that the first and most important thing the left had to campaign for before any of the above programme was to break with the euro.  The euro was at the heart of the problem.  It was a  ‘world money’,  not a currency for the people.  By this, I think he meant that it was an imperialist currency like the US dollar.   Capitalists conduct their transactions in dollars and euros.  They hold their reserves in these currencies.  For that reason, the euro’s value was controlled by big capital to the detriment of the likes of Greece, Portugal etc, the weak capitalist states of the Eurozone.”

Ozlem Onaran, who’s excellent 2010 paper Fiscal Crisis in Europe or a Crisis of Distribution? I recommend, made some key economic arguments against leaving the Euro and Michael Roberts agrees.

“Leaving the euro and adopting a national (non-world) currency for the Greeks would be no solution on its own. Doing that would mean the New drachma would be devalued by at least 60% against the euro.  That might make Greek exports more competitive, but exports are only 30% of GDP.  Import prices would rocket in new drachma terms and very soon inflation would run through the Greek economy and start to cancel out the gain from devaluation.  History has shown that devaluing a currency to gain competitive advantage does not deliver for long.  Also, debts owed by corporations, banks and households in euros would double.  The government may default on its debts, but what could households do with their euro mortgages or businesses with loans from European banks?  Moreover, if all the ‘bailout’  Eurozone economies also left the euro (as advocated), they would devalue and we would enter a ‘beggar-my-neighbour’ race to get the lowest value currency to compete in Europe’s markets.”

David Graeber: Occupy and Anarchism’s Gift of Democracy

“As the history of past movements all make clear, nothing terrifies those running America more than the danger of true democracy breaking out. As we see in Chicago, Portland, Oakland, and right now in New York City, the immediate response to even a modest spark of democratically organised civil disobedience is a panicked combination of concessions and brutality. Our rulers, anyway, seem to labor under a lingering fear that if any significant number of Americans do find out what anarchism really is, they may well decide that rulers of any sort are unnecessary.

Almost every time I’m interviewed by a mainstream journalist about OWS, I get some variation of the same lecture:

“How are you going to get anywhere if you refuse to create a leadership structure or make a practical list of demands? And what’s with all this anarchist nonsense - the consensus, the sparkly fingers … ? You’re never going to be able to reach regular, mainstream Americans with this sort of thing!”

It is hard to imagine worse advice. After all, since 2007, just about every previous attempt to kick off a nationwide movement against Wall Street took exactly the course such people would have recommended - and failed miserably. It is only when a small group of anarchists in New York decided to adopt the opposite approach - refusing to recognise the legitimacy of the existing political authorities by making demands of them; refusing to accept the legitimacy of the existing legal order by occupying a public space without asking for permission, refusing to elect leaders that could then be bribed or co-opted; declaring, however non-violently, that the entire system was corrupt and they rejected it; being willing to stand firm against the state’s inevitable violent response - that hundreds of thousands of Americans from Portland to Tuscaloosa began rallying in support, and a majority declared their sympathies.”

Fiscal Crisis, or the Neo-Liberal Assault on Democracy? | Judith Butler

Judith Butler writing for the Greek Left Review…

Rather, neo-liberalism works through producing dispensable populations; it exposes populations to precarity; it establishes modes of work that presume that labour will always be temporary; it decimates long-standing institutions of social democracy, withdraws social services from those who are most radically unprotected - the poor, the homeless, the undocumented - because the value of social services or economic rights to basic provisions like shelter and food has been replaced by an economic calculus that values only the entrepreneurial capacities of individuals and moralizes against all those who are unable to fend for themselves or make capitalism work for them.

And

The problem is not a fiscal crisis whose bailout will return matters to normal. The problem is that the neo-liberal forms of political and economic power regularly abandon populations to conditions of precarity, and that this periodic and regular abandoning of people has itself become the normal. As a result, the call on the streets is precisely not to “fix” this fiscal crisis, but to insist that the dismantling of neo-liberalism is imperative for the renewal of radical democracy.

Beware of the technocrati | Eurointelligence

Interesting comment from Eurointelligence…

This is quite a brilliant comment by Robert Shrimsley of the Financial Times. He makes the point that there is now a possibility of technical government – led by Lucas Papademos in Greece, and Mario Monti in Italy, both former high ranking EU officials. While European officials may find this reassuring, it is not solving what is fundamentally a political problem in those countries. The problem with technocrats is that they have avoided the traditional routes to power. Shrimsley  concludes the best politicians are also experts – they know what is politically possible. (we agree with this. It is another one of these quick fix ideas. The EFSF did not work. Leveraging did not work. The next delusion is technical government. The eurozone crisis is a major political crisis at heart. This is why the financial markets are panicking.)

Wolfgang Streeck | The Crises of Democratic Capitalism

Vincent Browne in the Sunday Business Post and Fintan O’Toole on Tuesday both wrote about the undemocratic nature of how Merkel and Sarkozy summoned Papandreou to Cannes in order to force him to abandon the democratic process of a referendum on the austerity plan for Greece. Over on Cedar Lounge Revolution, CMK and LeftAtTheCross drew attention to a scholarly but accessible essay by Wolfgang Streeck on the conflict between capitalism and democracy. I recommend it to you.

[...]

There are various ways to conceptualize the underlying causes of the friction between capitalism and democracy. For present purposes, I will characterize democratic capitalism as a political economy ruled by two conflicting principles, or regimes, of resource allocation: one operating according to marginal productivity, or what is revealed as merit by a ‘free play of market forces’, and the other based on social need or entitlement, as certified by the collective choices of democratic politics. Under democratic capitalism, governments are theoretically required to honour both principles simultaneously, although substantively the two almost never align. In practice they may for a time neglect one in favour of the other, until they are punished by the consequences: governments that fail to attend to democratic claims for protection and redistribution risk losing their majority, while those that disregard the claims for compensation from the owners of productive resources, as expressed in the language of marginal productivity, cause economic dysfunctions that will become increasingly unsustainable and thereby also undermine political support.

[...]

One factor here is that the arenas of distributional conflict have become ever more remote from popular politics. The national labour markets of the 1970s, with the manifold opportunities they offered for corporatist political mobilization and inter-class coalitions, or the politics of public spending in the 1980s, were not necessarily beyond the grasp or the strategic reach of the ‘man in the street’. Since then, the battlefields on which the contradictions of democratic capitalism are fought out have become ever more complex, making it exceedingly difficult for anyone outside the political and financial elites to recognize the underlying interests and identify their own. [21] While this may generate apathy at the mass level and thereby make life easier for the elites, there is no relying on it, in a world in which blind compliance with financial investors is propounded as the only rational and responsible behaviour. To those who refuse to be talked out of other social rationalities and responsibilities, such a world may appear simply absurd—at which point the only rational and responsible conduct would be to throw as many wrenches as possible into the works of haute finance. Where democracy as we know it is effectively suspended, as it already is in countries like Greece, Ireland and Portugal, street riots and popular insurrection may be the last remaining mode of political expression for those devoid of market power. Should we hope in the name of democracy that we will soon have the opportunity to observe a few more examples?

[...]