Explaining the crisis

[Hannah Bell]

Interview with David Harvey:

(Summary: Neoliberal ideology says that if a business fails, it should eat the consequences, but neo-liberalism in practice has been about bailing business & finance out when they failed. But when you bail out the sector in crisis, it merely shifts the crisis to another sector -- e.g. from the finance or business sector to the state sector.

So the finance/business crisis becomes a sovereign debt crisis of state finance, as in Greece or the fiscal crisis of the US States. States then try to shift the crisis onto the people, by cutting spending, especially social spending, i.e. austerity -- which mutates into the crisis of high unemployment & poverty.)



THE AUSTERITY measures could help resolve the fiscal crisis of the state, but in the same way that that crisis arose out of resolving the banks. So the big question is what kind of crisis will that promote? And of course this creates a crisis of unemployment. If states start introducing austerity... that’s going to cause major unemployment... So what that launches then is a huge struggle between the state and the public sector unions in particular. So we are likely to see, as we have seen in Greece and Spain, is a widespread struggle because the crisis is being displaced and this again comes back to my thesis that crises don’t get resolved, they simply get displaced from one sphere to another...

What that will lead to is a convergence of many forces on the left around the idea that we have to protect the population in general against these austerity measures that are coming from the state. I think the objective circumstances under which the crisis is unfolding are likely to lead to a more unified politics on the left, but there are many different factions on the left...

Right now, to the degree that the struggle is likely to be between public sector workers and the state apparatus, this is a very specific form of struggle, which is not based in the factories. It’s going to be the teachers unions and these groups that are likely to be pushed into a more vanguard role. So I think the left groups need to sit back and ask themselves who is likely to play a vanguard role in the current situation and what should the politics be in relationship to state governments and to corporate forms as well...

There is this wonderful poll that came out from the Pew Research Center that said only 43 percent of the people in this country actually think capitalism is good, and I think particularly among a younger group from eighteen to thirty, 43 percent thought socialism was better. So even in this country with the likes of Glenn Beck, I think they are getting so upset precisely because there is a quiet revolution going on in terms of attitudes, and we can support that by producing arguments. My own contribution was to write The Enigma of Capital, which is accessible to people, so they could get a good sense of what the Marxian argument is without being too dogmatic or arrogant about it. So I think that should be where we position ourselves right now.

http://www.isreview.org/issues/73/int-harvey.shtml

[Warren Stupidity]

1. convergence on the left? Not here.

There is no left left. Instead the crisis, and the crisis goes far deeper than the financial meltdown of 2007-2009, has spawned a convergence on the right and the emergence of an overtly authoritarian and theocratic radical right faction within one of the duopolistic ruling parties that is likely to seize control of that party after the 2010 elections.

[maryf]

2. K&Rnt