Collapse and Uprising in Europe: The Right to Insolvency and the Disentanglement of the General Intellect's Potency
- Collapse and Uprising in Europe:The Right to Insolvency and the Disentanglement of the General Intellect's Potency
Austerity in Europe
"The German worker does not want to pay the Greek fisherman's bills," the fanatics of economic fundamentalism are saying, while pitting workers against workers and leading Europe to the brink of civil war.
The entity that is "Europe" was conceived in the aftermath of the Second World War as a project to overcome modern nationalism and create a non-identitarian union based on principles of humanism, enlightenment, and social justice. What is left of this original project, after the recent financial collapse that has stormed the American economy and jeopardized the Eurozone? Since the beginning of the European Union, the constitutional profile of the European entity has been weakly defined, such that economic goals of prosperity and monetarist financial constraints have taken the place of a constitution. In the 1990s, the Maastricht Treaty marked a turning point in this process. It sanctioned the constitutionalization of monetarist rule and its economic implications: a decrease in social spending, cuts in labor costs and an increase in competition and productivity. The effects of a narrow application of the Maastricht rules became evident in 2010: overwhelming Greece and Ireland and endangering other countries, the financial crisis exposed the contradictions between the desires for economic growth, social stability, and monetarist rigidity. In this situation, the Maastricht rules have been shown to be dangerous, and the overall conception of the EU, based on the centrality of economic competition, has revealed its frailty.
If we are to compete with emerging economies where labor costs are lower than those in Europe, we must lower European wages. To compete with economies where the working day never ends and where labor conditions are unregulated - with poor safety, crippling shifts, and lack of job security - we must abolish the limits on the working week, make overtime mandatory and renounce safety at work in Europe, too. Thus the evolution of capitalism requires not only the abrogation of the principles that derive from socialism, but also the revocation of the Enlightenment tradition and the humanist legacy, up to and including the abolition of democracy, if this word still means anything.
Is this the Europe we want? Is this the image of itself that Europe has decided to accede to? Obviously, we are not dealing here with principles but with power relations. In the last few years, the financial class, a now dominant group in the world's economic government, has used globalizing technical powers to enormously augment the wealth that ends up in the pockets of a minority in the form of profit and financial rent. The working class and polymorphous cognitive labor could not resist the attack that followed globalization. This uneven wealth distribution is in conflict with the possibility of a further development of capitalism: the reduction of the global wage is bound to cause a decrease in demand. The result is an impoverishment that makes society more fragile and aggressive, and a deflation that makes it impossible to re-launch growth.
Financial Power and Capitalist Nihilism
The European leading class seems unable to think in terms of the future. They are panicking and, frightened by their own impotence, trying to reaffirm and reinforce measures that have already failed.
This European collapse is exposing the agony of capitalism. The flexibility of the system is over; no margins are left. If society is to pay the debt of the banks, demand has to be reduced, and if demand is reduced growth will not follow.
Nowadays, it's difficult to see a consistent project in the frantic action of the leading class. A culture of "No future" has taken hold of the capitalist brain. The origin of this capitalist nihilism is to be found in the effect of the deterritorialization that is inherent to global financial capitalism. The relation between capital and society is deterritorialized insofar as economic power is no longer based on the property of physical things. The bourgeoisie is dead, and the new financial class has a virtual existence: fragmented, dispersed, impersonal.
The bourgeoisie which was in control of the economic scene of modern Europe...
