Thoughts on the Eurozone crisis

I must admit to having rather mixed feelings about the ongoing Eurozone crisis. From my leftist point of view the difficulties besetting the neoliberal Euro project should be encouraging, since they expose the democratic deficit at the heart of the EU, which one might imagine would raise public consciousness about the need for progressive social change, but, on a more personal level, the prospect of the European economy entering a prolonged period of recession, with the accompanying political turmoil, is rather unsettling.

People have been comparing the current crisis to the situation in Europe during the inter-war period, which obviously didn’t work out too well, what with the rise of Fascism and the mass destruction of the Second World War. That may have sounded a bit hyperbolic a few months ago, but events since then on both sides of the Ionian Sea have added to the general sense of gloom, and the transparent inability of our political leaders to address the problems hardly inspires confidence.

Things went badly wrong the 20s at least in part due to the mishandling of the situation by the Comintern, but at least back then there was an international Communist movement, with influential mass parties in most European nations, and the still-fresh example of the Bolshevik revolution to provide inspiration. Today the organised left is much weaker, and such opposition as there is tends to coalesce around disparate formations like the “Occupy” movement, which are all over the place politically, and in some ways openly reactionary.

So I’m finding myself hoping that the Eurozone leaders will pull some sort of rabbit out of the hat, probably involving the ECB issuing Eurobonds to relieve the difficulty Italy is having accessing credit at affordable rates. As these will be underpinned by the German economy, the quid pro quo will be Berlin taking over control of financial policy for the Eurozone as a whole, since the prospect of the ECB printing money to bail out the Greeks and Italians terrifies the Germans who remember the hyperinflation of the Weimar era.

It probably won’t take a great deal of time for the populations of Italy, Greece and the other peripheral economies of Europe to wake up to the fact that they are being forced to endure severe austerity by politicians over whom they have no democratic influence. What will happen then is the big question; the stage would be set for a populist neo-fascist movement, but hopefully the left will have enough time to formulate a coherent response, and to get sufficiently organised to withstand the troubles that lie ahead.

Reality intrudes

Regular readers will know that this blog oscillates between fairly frivolous virtual-world and cultural commentary and weightier posts about the state of the world. The former have been predominating recently, partly because I’ve not been too busy this last month or so, and thus have had more time to waste online, but mainly on account of events in the real world being just too depressing to think about. Still, we have pretensions of seriousness here, so I guess we should try to acknowledge that there are things going on beyond our immediate preoccupations.

When we last wrote about the Libyan situation it looked as if a lengthy civil war was brewing, which was tragic enough, but the subsequent intervention by NATO has made things even worse. Now that neither side has any motivation to negotiate, and the airstrikes have, unsurprisingly, failed to halt the fighting, the pressure for an escalation of Western involvement will only grow. Our own dear government have been the biggest cheerleaders for war so far, but I suspect even they know that the public won’t support an Iraq-style invasion, so it seems likely that some sort of covert-operations-plus-arming-local-forces strategy will be put in place. We’ve been down that road before of course, in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and look how well that worked out.

It’s surely more than a coincidence that this latest war has broken out just as a cut in the defence budget was on the cards, giving the generals another chance to warn us that we will all be murdered in our beds by rampaging [insert current focus of xenophobic paranoia here] unless we keep handing blank cheques to the military-industrial complex.

The defence cuts may end up being reversed, but the government shows no sign of backing down on its plans to slash other areas of public spending, despite half a million people turning up to register their opposition last weekend. (The event was rounded off by the now-customary police riot, allowing the cops call for an immediate reversal in police budget cuts, else we will all be murdered in our beds etc). Government ministers continue to tell us the cuts are regrettable, but necessary, as the public finances are totally shot, despite the growing body of opinion that says that the economy isn’t actually in such bad shape, and that in fact it looked worse for most of the last two centuries, during which Britain managed to build an Empire, defeat the Nazis and found the Welfare State. The Tories’ claim that the country will be bust unless all public employees take a pay cut, work to 75 and settle for a miserable pension is being exposed as a threadbare cover for their ideologically-driven agenda to privatise the whole public sector, for the benefit of their cronies, who will be given free rein to make us poor suffering citizens pay through the nose if we want the most basic of public services.

See? Pretty much a downer, huh? And I haven’t even touched on the nuclear catastrophe in Japan, the war in the Ivory Coast, the assault on organised labour in the US, or the myriad of other reasons to believe we are collectively headed to hell in a handcart.

Are there any reasons for optimism? I’d like to say that the left is resurgent as people wake up to the reality of the system, but it doesn’t seem that that is true. There is a lot of anger about the cuts for sure, but not much organisation, and there is a sort of learned helplessness around, a feeling that our opponents are just too strong, and we can only keep our heads down and try to ride out the storm.

I might be too pessimistic. I’m just a tired old man in a tired old country; the young comrades seem more up for the fight. The London demo was encouraging, as is the pro-union campaign in Wisconsin, and of course the masses in the developing world are already showing us the way. I guess I’ll keep doing what I can, but I suspect I’ll feel the need to escape to a peaceful fantasy world more often than ever.

Universal Gloom

The Tory Party Conference is under way, and the headline news today is George Osborne’s plan to abolish child benefit payments to higher rate taxpayers.

This is a smart political move, as the fuss the cut will generate among the middle classes will dominate the media, and provide cover for the even harsher cuts he has in store for poorer sections of society (the full horror of which we probably won’t know until the conclusion of the spending review at the end of this month), promoting the fallacy that “We are all in this together”.

The attack on child benefit isn’t just about saving money though, it is a strike at one of the central pillars of the Welfare State, the concept of Universality. The idea that all children have the same entitlement, whatever their background, is a powerful statement of social equality, and eroding it is part of the Tories’ plan to turn back the last 60 years of progress and return us to the divided society of the pre-war era.

There is already a two-tier education system, which will be extended by the plans to allow Universities to charge what they like for tuition, effectively reserving higher learning, and the economic advantages it bestows, for the rich. The NHS in England is going to be dismantled in favour of a patchwork of privatised provision, and the general benefits system is threatened with huge cuts. All this while a double-dip recession looms, and millions face joblessness. The wealth gap may have grown massively over the last decade, but it looks like it may get mediaeval in the years ahead.

Grim times. It would be nice to think that things were looking brighter on the other side of the Atlantic, but it seems that the right is set for an unlikely resurgence there too. This month’s Rolling Stone has an excellent article on the Tea Party, their regressive politics (summed up succinctly by writer Matt Taibbi; “After lengthy study of the phenomenon, I’ve concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They’re full of shit”), and how, ironically, their incoherent populist anger is being co-opted by the Republican Party to serve the interests of the financial elites that the TP-ers supposedly despise. The Democrats, meanwhile, seem to have been stunned into inaction by the disappointment that has been the Obama administration.

Grim, grim times. We can only keep working away, and hope that the cold winds of change blow some life into the embers of revolt.