Crisis? What crisis?
Fredag 9 Januari, 2009 kl. 11:29 fmEverybody’s been talking about this ‘crisis’-thing: hundreds of billions of dollars, euros, yuan and whatnots have been plowed into so-called ‘bailout packages’ (which are just a clever way that capital has found to turn its own crisis into yet another way to redistribute social wealth upwards – by once again borrowing against our future labour, because after all, these packages will have to be financed somehow), there’s been plenty of international summits, the media write about it…
And yet, in almost every discussion I have with friends and comrades, the same question comes up: is there ‘really’ a crisis? Or is all this just some elaborate ploy (along the lines of Naomi Klein’s argument in The Shock Doctrine), some media hype, or something that happens to someone (else), somewhere (else), but not here, not to ‘us’? In short: does this crisis ‘really’ matter? And if so, how will it matter? What does it mean?
So my plan is to regularly trawl through the barrage of crisis-related news in my favourite publication, the Financial Times, and translate their economese into slightly more understandable language. Why? Because what matters to capitalists (those who read the FT) often also matters to anticapitalists. And one of their key concerns is ’social stability’: they don’t want shit to explode in their faces. We sort of want it to. The new stories are the same. Just the reading is different. So in that sense, here’s the first installment of what will hopefully be more or less regular ‘updates from the enemy’, provided by your friendly undercover (radical) economist, Milton Freeman.
Today’s story from the FT: “Human cost rises as worldwide gloom deepens” (see below) goes straight to the heart of what this crisis is about. Again, many comrades have asked what this crisis has to do with us. Well, to start out with, not necessarily a lot. The ‘radical subcultures’ that I’m aware of tend to finance themselves in ways that aren’t affected much by changes in international trade, currency values, etc. In fact, most of ‘us’ live on state money: working in the care economy; in education; living on benefits; studying. Most of us who engage in wage labour work in services that can’t easily be ‘outsourced’ (economists call this ‘non-tradable), or for which demand is pretty constant, even as people grow poorer (old or physically challenged people still need to be taken care of, even if a huge bank like Lehmann Brothers implodes – economists call this ‘inelastic demand’). So ‘we’ aren’t the first to notice when shit hits the fan in the international economy. Who is? Well, read the article below: massive amounts of people are going to be unemployed. In India, some 10 million people could lose their jobs in the next three months. That’s more people than live in all of Sweden!
And why does that matter for political radicals? For two reasons: first, when people lose their jobs, they tend to suffer. Even moreso when they don’t live in (relatively) cushy welfare states like Sweden or Germany. Second, it’s a question of political strategy and ’stability’. Remember Greece? The revolt had a lot to do with the impossibility of finding ‘decent’ jobs in the future. People tend to get even more pissed off if they lose what they already have. So how will the crisis affect Europe, the global North? It’ll be a massive crisis of unemployment. You and I might not be noticing it yet, but expect mass unemployment to come to a theatre near you very soon. And then we’ll need to get our political asses in gear: in Germany, it’s not easy to forget what happened the last time an international financial and economic crisis threw millions of people out of work. The far right is working on their political strategies right now. We need to do the same. There’s an opening here, an opening to change things. How I don’t know. But there’s one thing we really can’t do: sit on our asses and ignore the crisis, just because it hasn’t shown up in our own wallets yet.
Talk to you soon. Radical greetings from your friend,
