Читать книгу Crisis in the Eurozone - Costas Lapavitsas - Страница 7

INTRODUCTION: THE END OF EUROPEANISM

The history of capitalism is the history of its crises. Each time it had to confront an outburst of its own contradiction, the mode of production had no solution but to reinvent itself, to push its own limits further back, thereby gaining new strength but always at a certain cost, recreating those limits at a larger but transformed scale. New contradictions thus appear, leading to further crises and reconfigurations within the same fundamental structural coordinates. This is, at least, the pattern of all the major crises of the system – those which have affected its historical core since the nineteenth century.

The crisis of 1870s and 1880s led to the end of the classical liberal era and the passage to monopolies, another wave of imperial expansion and the first attempts to rationalise the economy and regulate the class antagonism by the means of state intervention. This first ‘great transformation’ of the mode of production led in its turn to World War One – or rather, to the new thirty years’ war of the ‘short twentieth century’, out of which emerged a socialist bloc as system of states, the dismantling of the colonial empires, new forms of imperialist domination and, last but not least, the welfare state. This domesticated form of capitalism was restricted to the core Western countries, but it combined unprecedented economic growth with conditions of parliamentary democracy and political stability, setting new standards of legitimacy for the mode of production.

With hindsight, it became clear that this configuration was the product of exceptional circumstances – the impact of two world wars and the weight of a victorious socialist revolution over one sixth of the globe – very unlikely to be reiterated in the future. In any case, its impetus was exhausted after three decades, and a new era started: neoliberalism, an era during which – thanks to the crisis, followed by the collapse of the ‘socialist camp’ – the mode of production succeeded in rolling back most of the concessions previously made to the working classes. A new world emerged, built on the ruins of the socialist experiments, including their attenuated welfare-statist versions – the world of global finance–oriented capitalism.

It is too early to say whether the current crisis, which started as a real estate crisis in the US, morphed into a crisis of the banking system and then crystallised in a sovereign debt crisis, will mark the end of the neoliberal era. In a way, the tectonic plates have only started moving and the balance of forces is still uncertain, although the strategic advantage achieved by the dominant classes during the period of high neoliberalism still operates fully. What looks certain however is that this crisis will leave behind at least one casualty: the so-called ‘European project’, or ‘European integration’, embodied in the institutions of the European Union with, at their core, the Economic and Monetary Union. If we think that this project has been the only one of any real importance consciously designed by the dominant classes of the Old Continent, it becomes clear that we are witnessing a turning point of world historical importance, comparable in some senses to the victory of the West in the Cold War. The importance of the project undertaken by Costas Lapavitsas and his collaborators of the SOAS-based Research on Money and Finance group lies in their pathbreaking contribution to explaining the causes of this major upheaval.

Of course, concerning the EU, we knew that the coordination and diffusion of neoliberal policies have consistently been at the core of the project, especially after its relaunching in 1986 with the Single European Act. It is also well known, thanks especially to the powerful argumentation of Perry Anderson,1 that insulation from any form of popular control and accountability is the founding logic of all the complex nexus of technocratic and expert-staffed agencies which form the backbone of the EU institutions. What has been euphemised as the ‘democratic deficit’, actually a denial of democracy, legitimised in various ways by the apologists of the European project, has become especially obvious since the 2005 French and Dutch referenda on the proposed constitution of the EU, several years before the start of the current turmoil. The missing element from the picture back then was however the political economy of the edifice. It seems that the coming of the crisis acted, as it usually happens in these cases, as a detonator, bringing to the surface pre-existing contradictions and making it possible to reflect theoretically upon them.

Ever since the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, it became clear that the whole EU project, not only in its economic and political dimensions but also as the fundamental theme of Europeanist ideology, was increasingly dependant on the realisation of the EMU. It was indeed the first time in history that a currency common to more than 300 million people living in seventeen different countries was created from scratch, without a unified state behind it. In highlighting the rationale of this enterprise – its sources of strength but also its intrinsic limitations and contradictions – the analysis proposed by Lapavitsas and his RMF colleagues in the following chapters is crucial.

Let us note first that it is no coincidence if this analysis is initiated by one of the rare Marxist economists who has been working for a long time on issues of monetary theory and contemporary finance. Indeed the euro can only be understood in the context of an increasingly financialised capitalism, both as an expression of this now dominant trend and as a powerful tool leading to its further expansion. The euro is a project of world currency, functioning both as a reserve currency and as a means of circulation and payment, designed to compete with the US dollar. And this imperial type of ambition could not have been carried by any national currency within the EU, including that of the most powerful economy, Germany. But neither could it have been accomplished by the currency of a unified European super-state, because European capitalism does not exist except as a convergence of national economies, of nationally defined spaces for the accumulation of capital, or to put it another way, of national social formations, each of which is shaped by its specific configuration and balance of class forces.

The solution to the ‘neither ... nor’ oscillation, which epitomises the nature of the European project as a whole, lies in the famous stability pacts, generalising in the entire eurozone the founding principles of what Habermas at his best had very aptly called ‘Deutsche-mark nationalism’: an independent central bank, absolute priority given to fighting inflation, strict budgetary discipline and a whole culture of procedural approaches neutralising political choices under the cover of sound and virtuous technocratic management. What is at stake here is much more than some particular tradition whether cultural (supposedly ‘Protestant’) or political (that of the Federal Republic emerging from the ashes of an irrevocably defeated project of imperial expression), or even the simple expression of the leading economic role of Germany within the EU. These conditions, which inscribe neoliberalism into the genetic code of the EMU, are actually necessary prerequisites of the project of a world currency in the highly particular, indeed unique, circumstances mentioned above. This is why they provided the terrain for a voluntary strategic convergence of the dominant classes of Europe while at the same time giving to Germany a properly hegemonic role – although never politically explicit – ‘always-already’, as if it were wrapped up in some ‘post-national’ and generally ‘European’ form of legitimation.

The consequences of this are far-reaching. One of the most essential achievements of the demonstration of Lapavitsas and his collaborators lies in their analysis of the way in which a polarisation between a ‘core’ and a ‘periphery’ emerges out of the very structure of the EMU. The general idea, and the terms themselves, are of course familiar to any reader of the rich Marxist and radical literature on combined and uneven development, the gap between the ‘metropolis’ and the ‘periphery’ and spatial inequalities of a systemic type. But now we have a systematic demonstration of the specific way this applies to the area of the most developed countries of European capitalism. The various reports included in this book show how the loss of competitiveness of the periphery (the now famous ‘PIGS’: Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain), as the result of higher inflationary levels and rise in nominal labour costs, was just the flip side of the export prowess of Germany and other core countries, with the deficits of the first group mirroring the increasing surpluses of the second. This whole mechanism has been hugely amplified by the sheer existence of the common currency, resulting in cheap credit, both for private agents and for states, and by securing high credibility for this public and private debt bonds in the international markets. Who could dare to think that there was the slightest risk of default from a country part of such a strong and successful world-currency zone as the eurozone?

The success lasted a few years, boosting the overall financialisation of economies internationally, ‘bubbles’ of all kinds in the periphery (especially in real estate, banking and credit-fuelled private consumption), accompanied by export performances and gigantic lending flows from the core. Rising social inequalities, environmental destruction, weakening of the productive capacities of the ‘losers’ – this unpleasant downside remained backstage, obliterated by the success story of the new single currency bringing prosperity and stability to all. It was the moment of the triumph of the Europeanist ideology: a Greek or a Portuguese pensioner, with a few hundred euros as a monthly income, felt part of the club of the rich and mighty, on an equal footing with her Northern European counterparts. ‘Europe’, at last, meant something more concrete, and symbolically binding, than remote bureaucratised institutions, deprived of any popular legitimacy. As Marx famously wrote, quoting Shakespeare, money is ‘the radical leveller that … does away with all distinctions’. 2

With the start of the 2007–8 downturn, repressed reality took its revenge, dissolving the fetishism of the single currency and euro-euphoria. It would be foolish, of course, to blame the euro as such for the crisis, which is of international proportions and has deep roots in the contradictions of the existing mode of production itself. But the euro, and more generally the entire mechanism of the EU, is of paramount importance in explaining the specific form the crisis took in this area of the world, and in the strategies adopted by the dominant groups to confront it. To put it differently, the pre-existing divergence between the euro-periphery and the core started now looking like an abyss.

Despite its low growth rates in the early years of the new millennium, and the 2009 downturn, the German economy proved resilient, whereas the PIGS plunged into continuous recession, with Greece once again the ‘weak link’ of European capitalism, experiencing a 1930s-type Great Depression. But this pattern is not the outcome of the blind interplay of pure economic forces. Every step of this descent into the depths has been mediated by the entire set of EU institutions, with the IMF playing only a secondary, and relatively lenient, role. With the transformation of the banking crisis into a sovereign debt crisis, the nightmare took hold in the peripheral states. Every EU summit, every round of negotiation between debtors and creditors led to a long series of ‘bailouts’ accompanied by draconian ‘memoranda’, endless austerity packages and ‘shock therapies’ fully conforming to the standard IMF models previously applied to the South, with entire countries placed under regimes of ‘limited sovereignty’. The crisis of the eurozone opened the way for ‘disaster capitalism’ moving now westwards, to the edges of the Old Continent which has become a laboratory of policies which will eventually be implemented, if only in a modified and possibly softer ways, elsewhere.

It is only now that the full power of that blend of hybrid supranational, but still interstate, authoritarianism and of institutionally embedded neoliberalism, which constitutes the DNA of the EU, can be fully apprehended and understood. And this process could not leave the ideological realm untouched. The dark side of Europeanism has now come to the surface: blaming the losers, the ‘lazy’ and ‘profligate’ southerners, has now become the conventional wisdom of the mainstream media and politicians. It is crucial however to stress here that the revival of these racist stereotypes should not be understood as a return to the past, even if it draws heavily from an old Orientalist stockpile. This intra-European neo-racism is rather the purest outcome of the newly polarised reality created by the internal logic of so-called ‘European integration’, the realities of which were already quite familiar to the inhabitants of the European Mezzogiorno constituted by the former Eastern Bloc countries.

The reader will find in the following pages a clinical step-by-step analysis of this process, fully confirming the scenarios presented in the first RMF report (March 2010) on the effects of the austerity policies. She will also find an uncompromising critique of the illusions created by all the supposedly ‘left’ variants of Europeanist ideology, which converge in their disregard of the real mechanisms operating within the EMU and its institutional framework. On paper, of course, it is perfectly possible to show that a single unified European entity, undertaking full fiscal and monetary responsibilities, could easily tackle issues such as the Greek sovereign debt. A European Central Bank with the backing of a proper state apparatus could rescue the European banks and manage the losses. But this amounts to pretending that, by virtue of some fiat, the existing reality could be changed magically into its very opposite. In other words it amounts to the type of wishful thinking which has paralysed the entire European Left, even those currents which refused to compromise with neoliberalism and fought, sometimes with success (like in the 2005 French referendum), against certain aspects of the European project. Such an outlook has prevented the Left from realising that the more ‘European’ each ‘solution’ or ‘strategy’ was, the more it was synonymous with radicalised neoliberalism and anti-democratic regression.

Apart from leading to political impotence, this perspective has also proved to be a kind of ‘epistemological obstacle’ to the analysis of the recent crisis, and more specifically to an understanding of the manner in which the general systemic trends (such as the instability created by financialisation, the issues of profitability and the pressures on labour) are mediated by political actors, by states or alliances between groups of states of uneven economic and political weight acting within a hybrid supranational framework such as the EU. In this sense, the euro should be understood not only as a ferocious class mechanism for disciplining labour costs – starting with the wages of German workers, which remained flat during the whole first decade of the new century – but also as a means through which the hegemony of German capital is forged and imposed on the European and, more broadly, the international stage. This is why every political agenda which claims to be serious in its objective of breaking with neoliberalism, even within an overall ‘reformist’ or ‘gradualist’ perspective, must pose the question of breaking with the euro and confronting the EU as such.

This brings us to the final but probably also most crucial point of the material collected in this volume: not satisfied with providing a pioneering analysis of the specificities of the capitalist crisis within the eurozone, Lapavitsas and his RMF collaborators went one step further, providing us with the outline of an alternative strategy. This outline starts with the proposal of default on the sovereign debt – a matter of sheer survival for the countries of the periphery, starting of course with Greece – and extends to exiting unilaterally from the euro for the countries which need to default, allowing them to regain control of a part of their national sovereignty and to escape from the cataclysm of internal devaluation imposed by EU-designed shock therapies. These measures, of course, need to be supplemented by a set of others, such as the nationalisation under genuine public control of the banking system, the control of capital flows and income redistribution, including a reform of the tax system which would counter years of neoliberal tax-alleviation in favour of the wealthy and corporate power. This proposal for an alternative path immediately sparked controversy, starting in Greece, but gradually shaped the entire agenda of the debate within the Left but also beyond it.

Some found these ideas absurdly radical, others saw them as too modest and moderate. They were criticised for being ‘nationalist’ or ‘utopian’, ‘reformist’ or ‘adventurist’. One needs, at the very least, to acknowledge that they mark a sharp break with the entirety of the aforementioned deeply rooted tradition of Europeanist wishful thinking, with its belief that this meticulously built neoliberal authoritarian fortress could be amended and transformed from within. Let us note that the method followed here by Lapavitsas and his colleagues is faithful to what a certain tradition of the workers’ movement has called ‘transitional demands’.

What is meant by this? Neither the ‘maximum’ nor the ‘minimum’ programme, neither the cry for utopian ‘impossibility’ nor the management of the existing order of things, but a cohesive set of concrete demands strategically designed to hit the adversary in the heart, where the contradictions of the situation tend to concentrate, in order to create the necessary lever to change the overall balance of forces. Questions such as the default on sovereign debt, the dismantlement of the EMU and confrontation with the authoritarian fuite en avant of the EU are the contemporary equivalent of the demands of peace, bread, land and popular self-government on which depended the outcome of the first assault on Heaven of the twentieth century. Urgently posed as issues of immediate relevance where the current crisis has hit the hardest – that is, in the europeriphery and more particularly in Greece – they are central to the strategic debate of the Left in the Old Continent as a whole.

At a time where any type of strategic thinking has become increasingly rare, and even more so on the Left, and where the crisis of capitalism seems to inspire perplexity and embarrassment amongst what remains of its organised adversaries rather than new energy to wage further battles, the work undertaken in the volume at hand needs to be recognised in its proper measure: a major intellectual achievement combining rigorous and innovative scholarship with lucid but also radical political commitment.

Stathis Kouvelakis