Thread: The world piles pressure on a weary eurozone

Human nature.We're great,but we have a few faults here and there.

Originally Posted by Parihaka

Well about time. A rapidly unifying Europe under an unelected socialist govt. operating in tandem with the continents top tier of investors to saddle the public with massive debt and no representation.

The German Supreme Court has decided that the German Constitution does not support this model anyway. The German Government is currently in contempt of this ruling pretty much, and Merkel is the one behind that.

The Euro bailout laws in Germany were passed in rather shady ways anyway. The first round, last year, was quickly signed in by Federal President Köhler only one week before he quit his job after holding onto it despite pressure for months.
There are currently about 15,000 complaints filed with the Supreme Court against the whole thing, also demanding immediate injunctures forcing the Federal President not to sign in the law until the Supreme Court has passed its verdict on it, so we don't have a situation like with Köhler last year.

It's moderately likely that the Supreme Court will pass a verdict that Germany would need a new constitution for ESM. One that would support a true supranational European government that the EU member states' peoples can yield their sovereignty to. Not the club we have today in which other governments can just dictate what Germans should pay.

One of the most common mistakes in the design process is the belief that design comes before basic principles. In other words it is like trying to better design a square wheel. I see this happening with the EU as well. You simply can't have the currency without the state. Thus you can't have the economy without the state. And Europe is not a state, it is a continent full of different nation states that, yes, share some common values and principles but also they have their unique characteristics aka differences that make them special and unique. Those differences are the base for their identity.

So now, they want to create the super state based on crumbling economy and the failing currency after they created the economy and currency without first creating a state. Its like trying to build the house from the roof to the foundation and not the other way arround.

It really blows my mind.

Yes that's right, Marxism is the answer. Now if we could only know what the question is.....

Why Marxism is on the rise again
Capitalism is in crisis across the globe – but what on earth is the alternative? Well, what about the musings of a certain 19th-century German philosopher? Yes, Karl Marx is going mainstream – and goodness knows where it will end

Class conflict once seemed so straightforward. Marx and Engels wrote in the second best-selling book of all time, The Communist Manifesto: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." (The best-selling book of all time, incidentally, is the Bible – it only feels like it's 50 Shades of Grey.)
Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote about grave-diggers, the truth is almost the exact opposite. The proletariat, far from burying capitalism, are keeping it on life support. Overworked, underpaid workers ostensibly liberated by the largest socialist revolution in history (China's) are driven to the brink of suicide to keep those in the west playing with their iPads. Chinese money bankrolls an otherwise bankrupt America.

The irony is scarcely wasted on leading Marxist thinkers. "The domination of capitalism globally depends today on the existence of a Chinese Communist party that gives de-localised capitalist enterprises cheap labour to lower prices and deprive workers of the rights of self-organisation," says Jacques Rancière, the French marxist thinker and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. "Happily, it is possible to hope for a world less absurd and more just than today's."

That hope, perhaps, explains another improbable truth of our economically catastrophic times – the revival in interest in Marx and Marxist thought. Sales of Das Kapital, Marx's masterpiece of political economy, have soared ever since 2008, as have those of The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse (or, to give it its English title, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy). Their sales rose as British workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded system going and the snouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the rest of us struggle in debt, job insecurity or worse. There's even a Chinese theatre director called He Nian who capitalised on Das Kapital's renaissance to create an all-singing, all-dancing musical.

And in perhaps the most lovely reversal of the luxuriantly bearded revolutionary theorist's fortunes, Karl Marx was recently chosen from a list of 10 contenders to appear on a new issue of MasterCard by customers of German bank Sparkasse in Chemnitz. In communist East Germany from 1953 to 1990, Chemnitz was known as Karl Marx Stadt. Clearly, more than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the former East Germany hasn't airbrushed its Marxist past. In 2008, Reuters reports, a survey of east Germans found 52% believed the free-market economy was "unsuitable" and 43% said they wanted socialism back. Karl Marx may be dead and buried in Highgate cemetery, but he's alive and well among credit-hungry Germans. Would Marx have appreciated the irony of his image being deployed on a card to get Germans deeper in debt? You'd think.

Later this week in London, several thousand people will attend Marxism 2012, a five-day festival organised by the Socialist Workers' Party. It's an annual event, but what strikes organiser Joseph Choonara is how, in recent years, many more of its attendees are young. "The revival of interest in Marxism, especially for young people comes because it provides tools for analysing capitalism, and especially capitalist crises such as the one we're in now," Choonara says.

There has been a glut of books trumpeting Marxism's relevance. English literature professor Terry Eagleton last year published a book called Why Marx Was Right. French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou published a little red book called The Communist Hypothesis with a red star on the cover (very Mao, very now) in which he rallied the faithful to usher in the third era of the communist idea (the previous two having gone from the establishment of the French Republic in 1792 to the massacre of the Paris communards in 1871, and from 1917 to the collapse of Mao's Cultural Revolution in 1976). Isn't this all a delusion?

Aren't Marx's venerable ideas as useful to us as the hand loom would be to shoring up Apple's reputation for innovation? Isn't the dream of socialist revolution and communist society an irrelevance in 2012? After all, I suggest to Rancière, the bourgeoisie has failed to produce its own gravediggers. Rancière refuses to be downbeat: "The bourgeoisie has learned to make the exploited pay for its crisis and to use them to disarm its adversaries. But we must not reverse the idea of historical necessity and conclude that the current situation is eternal. The gravediggers are still here, in the form of workers in precarious conditions like the over-exploited workers of factories in the far east. And today's popular movements – Greece or elsewhere – also indicate that there's a new will not to let our governments and our bankers inflict their crisis on the people."


Protestors at the Conservative conference last year. Photograph: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA / Rex Features
That, at least, is the perspective of a seventysomething Marxist professor. What about younger people of a Marxist temper? I ask Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal, a 22 year-old English and drama student at Goldsmiths College, London, who has just finished her BA course in English and Drama, why she considers Marxist thought still relevant. "The point is that younger people weren't around when Thatcher was in power or when Marxism was associated with the Soviet Union," she says. "We tend to see it more as a way of understanding what we're going through now. Think of what's happening in Egypt. When Mubarak fell it was so inspiring. It broke so many stereotypes – democracy wasn't supposed to be something that people would fight for in the Muslim world. It vindicates revolution as a process, not as an event. So there was a revolution in Egypt, and a counter-revolution and a counter-counter revolution. What we learned from it was the importance of organisation."

This, surely is the key to understanding Marxism's renaissance in the west: for younger people, it is untainted by association with Stalinist gulags. For younger people too, Francis Fukuyama's triumphalism in his 1992 book The End of History – in which capitalism seemed incontrovertible, its overthrow impossible to imagine – exercises less of a choke-hold on their imaginations than it does on those of their elders.

Blackwell-Pal will be speaking Thursday on Che Guevara and the Cuban revolution at the Marxism festival. "It's going to be the first time I'll have spoken on Marxism," she says nervously. But what's the point thinking about Guevara and Castro in this day and age? Surely violent socialist revolution is irrelevant to workers' struggles today? "Not at all!" she replies. "What's happening in Britain is quite interesting. We have a very, very weak government mired in in-fighting. I think if we can really organise we can oust them." Could Britain have its Tahrir Square, its equivalent to Castro's 26th of July Movement? Let a young woman dream. After last year's riots and today with most of Britain alienated from the rich men in its government's cabinet, only a fool would rule it out.

For a different perspective I catch up with Owen Jones, 27-year-old poster boy of the new left and author of the bestselling politics book of 2011, Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Class. He's on the train to Brighton to address the Unite conference. "There isn't going to be a bloody revolution in Britain, but there is hope for a society by working people and for working people," he counsels.

Indeed, he says, in the 1860s the later Marx imagined such a post-capitalist society as being won by means other than violent revolution. "He did look at expanding the suffrage and other peaceful means of achieving socialist society. Today not even the Trotskyist left call for armed revolution. The radical left would say that the break with capitalism could only be achieved by democracy and organisation of working people to establish and hold on to that just society against forces that would destroy it."

Jones recalls that his father, a Militant supporter in the 1970s, held to the entryist idea of ensuring the election of a Labour government and then organising working people to make sure that government delivered. "I think that's the model," he says. How very un-New Labour. That said, after we talk, Jones texts me to make it clear he's not a Militant supporter or Trotskyist. Rather, he wants a Labour government in power that will pursue a radical political programme. He has in mind the words of Labour's February 1974 election manifesto which expressed the intention to "Bring about a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families". Let a young man dream.

What's striking about Jones's literary success is that it's premised on the revival of interest in class politics, that foundation stone of Marx and Engels's analysis of industrial society. "If I had written it four years earlier it would have been dismissed as a 1960s concept of class," says Jones. "But class is back in our reality because the economic crisis affects people in different ways and because the Coalition mantra that 'We're all in this together' is offensive and ludicrous. It's impossible to argue now as was argued in the 1990s that we're all middle class. This government's reforms are class-based. VAT rises affect working people disproportionately, for instance.

"It's an open class war," he says. "Working-class people are going to be worse off in 2016 than they were at the start of the century. But you're accused of being a class warrior if you stand up for 30% of the population who suffers this way."

This chimes with something Rancière told me. The professor argued that "one thing about Marxist thought that remains solid is class struggle. The disappearance of our factories, that's to say de-industrialisation of our countries and the outsourcing of industrial work to the countries where labour is less expensive and more docile, what else is this other than an act in the class struggle by the ruling bourgeoisie?"

There's another reason why Marxism has something to teach us as we struggle through economic depression, other than its analysis of class struggle. It is in its analysis of economic crisis. In his formidable new tome Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Slavoj Žižek tries to apply Marxist thought on economic crises to what we're enduring right now. Žižek considers the fundamental class antagonism to be between "use value" and "exchange value".

What's the difference between the two? Each commodity has a use value, he explains, measured by its usefulness in satisfying needs and wants. The exchange value of a commodity, by contrast, is traditionally measured by the amount of labour that goes into making it. Under current capitalism, Žižek argues, exchange value becomes autonomous. "It is transformed into a spectre of self-propelling capital which uses the productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its temporary disposable embodiment. Marx derived his notion of economic crisis from this very gap: a crisis occurs when reality catches up with the illusory self-generating mirage of money begetting more money – this speculative madness cannot go on indefinitely, it has to explode in even more serious crises. The ultimate root of the crisis for Marx is the gap between use and exchange value: the logic of exchange-value follows its own path, its own made dance, irrespective of the real needs of real people."

In such uneasy times, who better to read than the greatest catastrophist theoriser of human history, Karl Marx? And yet the renaissance of interest in Marxism has been pigeonholed as an apologia for Stalinist totalitarianism. In a recent blog on "the new communism" for the journal World Affairs, Alan Johnson, professor of democratic theory and practice at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, wrote: "A worldview recently the source of immense suffering and misery, and responsible for more deaths than fascism and Nazism, is mounting a comeback; a new form of leftwing totalitarianism that enjoys intellectual celebrity but aspires to political power.

"The New Communism matters not because of its intellectual merits but because it may yet influence layers of young Europeans in the context of an exhausted social democracy, austerity and a self-loathing intellectual culture," wrote Johnson. "Tempting as it is, we can't afford to just shake our heads and pass on by."

That's the fear: that these nasty old left farts such as Žižek, Badiou, Rancière and Eagleton will corrupt the minds of innocent youth. But does reading Marx and Engels's critique of capitalism mean that you thereby take on a worldview responsible for more deaths than the Nazis? Surely there is no straight line from The Communist Manifesto to the gulags, and no reason why young lefties need uncritically to adopt Badiou at his most chilling. In his introduction to a new edition of The Communist Manifesto, Professor Eric Hobsbawm suggests that Marx was right to argue that the "contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment', a system of exploitation and of 'endless accumulation' can never be overcome: that at some point in a series of transformations and restructurings the development of this essentially destabilising system will lead to a state of affairs that can no longer be described as capitalism".

That is post-capitalist society as dreamed of by Marxists. But what would it be like? "It is extremely unlikely that such a 'post-capitalist society' would respond to the traditional models of socialism and still less to the 'really existing' socialisms of the Soviet era," argues Hobsbawm, adding that it will, however, necessarily involve a shift from private appropriation to social management on a global scale. "What forms it might take and how far it would embody the humanist values of Marx's and Engels's communism, would depend on the political action through which this change came about."

This is surely Marxism at its most liberating, suggesting that our futures depend on us and our readiness for struggle. Or as Marx and Engels put it at the end of The Communist Manifesto: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."

Why Marxism is on the rise again | World news | The Guardian

"Why Marxism is on the rise again
Capitalism is in crisis across the globe – but what on earth is the alternative?"

Democracy.

Originally Posted by Versus

"Why Marxism is on the rise again
Capitalism is in crisis across the globe – but what on earth is the alternative?"

Democracy.

Huh? I thought it is politicl, not economical model.

Originally Posted by Doktor

Huh? I thought it is politicl, not economical model.

Why am I always sleepy when you post an interesting argument? Cause it is midnight and it is 95 degrees...

Well Doktor, it depends on the perspective.
If the capitalism is a system of free enterprise,sacred private property rights and the freedom of choice, I would like to ask few questions than.
First, the free enterprise. How can you do anything and expect to be profitable when the market is dominated by multinational corporations that control most of the market? They took all the space in the market and left none for your little firm. So in a way,multinationals are communists cause they took away your freedom by being so large that there is no room for you and with no room for you to move you can't move although the system gives you the right and the incentive to move. You have the freedom to move but there is nowhere to move to. So you are constrained just as you would be in communism.
Second, sacred private property rights.
How many things today are really owned and how much are on the credit base? Having something on credit is not owning that something. So actually you don't own things,banks do although you are lead to believe that you own that something. That means that your private rights have been privatised by some other instance aka banks and privatised privacy equals no privacy cause it cancels itself. So just as in communism private property and rights do not exist.
Third the freedom of choice.
In a world full of mega stores,and multi corporations how many choices do you have? Not much cause the market is dominated by them so although you have the freedom to chose, there is not much to chose from if you have only few big ones that function on the same principle. So although they are diverse and they are competing, the global rules of the game make them the same since they operate on the same scale, which is global. So working for one company is like working for any company cause the only type that has a chance is a company that is globally present and thus follows the global rules which that make that company same as any other company. So your freedom of choice is cancelled by the very nature of the choices you have.

Try to picture it like this.
You have map where you have two countries. One is communist other one is capitalist. The communist country is painted red while the capitalist country has many small dots of different color. Dots vary in size and color and represent small,medium and large companies. Communist system is boring it has only one color,while the capital country color is vivid,it is colorfull. Now fast forward in time and you will se that the size of those dots in the capitalist country grow and as they grow the swallow other dots and colors. Over time you will have only one color just as you have in the communist country cause that one dot that became so large that it filled up the entire space of the capitalist country thus making it equally monolithic as the communist country. And with one company comes one rule,one system etc. As you move globaly the global rules of the game make those global companies the same although they are different and those same rules make them monolithic thus again you end up with monolithic system just as you would have in communism.

Originally Posted by Doktor

Huh? I thought it is politicl, not economical model.

That's because most people nowadays only think of the communist manifesto when hearing Marx - but not of his real primary work, Das Kapital (btw: the above article confuses them too). Marx literally spent decades on musing about the cause and effect of capitalist exploitation of the people, and the inherent instability of capitalism over time. The communist manifesto, by comparison, is more of a side result of his works. He was foremost an economic scientist, not a politician.

Kato, versus,

All I said is Democracy is not an economic model

Strictly said it's not a political model either, so?

Its all about principles and factors.
Principles are one thing factors are another. They are not the same thing. Democracy is the principle and the economy is the factor. Same goes for communism.

Originally Posted by Versus

Europe is not a state, it is a continent full of different nation states

: No single 'demos' so can't be a 'polis'!

Originally Posted by Versus

Dots vary in size and color and represent small,medium and large companies. Communist system is boring it has only one color,while the capital country color is vivid,it is colorfull.

: 'Many coloured dot companies compete, through competition, on an equal playing ground, 'society' benefits from the increased tax revenue. You cannot fund Europe on the 'workers rights/free healthcare model'. This fact is slowly dawning on the elite but it will take years to make the average Frog farmer (who has been living cosy with EU subsidies for years) understand.

Fact is that having done away with the USSR we are now trying to institute another corporate/political elite - we bail the banks out and the banks buy Government bonds to ease the Government debt. Of course they say it's all for our good etc.. but it's lies, damn lies and accountancy. "You can fool all of the people some of the time or all of the people some of the time but not both." They have lied about their 'democracy' - hell if the EU was a country it wouldn't be alowed to join the EU for lack of democracy! They have lied about the euro so many times that nobody believes them.

Tell me if the euro goes caput does this mean that Germany must invades Poland? Wasn't that the point?

Originally Posted by snapper

You cannot fund Europe on the 'workers rights/free healthcare model'. This fact is slowly dawning on the elite but it will take years to make the average Frog farmer (who has been living cosy with EU subsidies for years) understand.

Uh, you do realize that we have three different healthcare models in Europe? In which you're on the side you're condemning while the "Frogs" are on the side you're endorsing?

There's the "free state-run" scheme. Of the nations above 10 million people that's your island, Italy, Spain, Denmark and Romania. On the other side there's the ones with competition and free choice of insurance company. Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Poland. And there's the ones where the state insurance only covers part of the cost and everyone has private insurance to cover the extra. That's France and Greece pretty much.

DRAWBRIDGES DOWN! A GERMAN PLEA FOR A MORE BRITISH EUROPE

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By Alan Posen*er
DIE WELT/World*crunch

BERLIN - On the Con*ti*nent, we often hear claims that the British are bad Euro*peans. And some Brits believe it too. Echo*ing such dis*sat*is*fac*tion is David Cameron’s recent men*tion of a pos*si*ble ref*er*en*dum to gauge the pulse of the nation’s rela*tion to the Euro*pean Union – the British aren’t happy with what they have now, he said, and nei*ther was he.

But see*ing the British as bad Euro*peans is a stub*born mis*judg*ment. It prob*a*bly stems from the fact that the British reject the idea of an ever clos*er Union – clos*er as in a shared cur*ren*cy, for exam*ple. How*ev*er, now that this idea of a deep*er union has led to the ongo*ing cri*sis in the euro zone, it’s time to remind our*selves of what exact*ly Great Britain means for the EU.

A look back at the EU sum*mit held in Decem*ber 2011 is help*ful in this regard. France’s then-President Nico*las Sarkozy summed things up this way: "There are now clear*ly two Europes. One of them wants more sol*i*dar*i*ty between its mem*bers and reg*u*la*tion. The other is attached sole*ly to the logic of the sin*gle market."

Edi*to*ri*al*ists had a field day with this, of course. If the euro zone goes on like this, they said, it would become an "alter*na*tive sys*tem" to Anglo-Saxon cap*i*tal*ism. And here the cyn*ics say: have fun cre*at*ing your "alter*na*tive system," your “reg*u*la*tion” and “solidarity,” with*out Britain and with Greece, Italy, Spain, Por*tu*gal and Co. – not to men*tion the same France now run by Social*ist François Hol*lande!

But it would be equal*ly cyn*i*cal not to rec*og*nize that Europe actu*al*ly needs Great Britain, just so that this night*mare doesn’t come to pass. The Anglo-Saxon tra*di*tion of eco*nom*ic lib*er*al*ism and social lib*er*al*i*ty paired with sig*nif*i*cant eco*nom*ic, cul*tur*al, diplo*mat*ic and mil*i*tary power – in short, a unique blend of "hard" and "soft" power – means that Great Britain is not only essen*tial to the EU but that it’s an essen*tial part*ner for its biggest part*ner, Ger*many.

Of course, this all assumes that Ger*many wants to be more than the Con*ti*nent’s cash cow, and that Europe aspires to being more than a mere trans*fer union.

British jour*nal*ist David Ren*nie recent*ly wrote that in Europe the deci*sive polit*i*cal poles were no longer right and left, but rather “draw*bridge up” and “draw*bridge down.” Those who were for rais*ing the draw*bridge cried the bat*tle cry of Old Europe in their wish for pro*tec*tion*ism, for clos*ing off from inter*na*tion*al mar*kets - par*tic*u*lar*ly finan*cial mar*kets - , for "sol*i*dar*i*ty" instead of com*pe*ti*tion, "reg*u*la*tion" instead of free*dom. The xeno*pho*bic “draw*bridge up” folks also favored lim*it*ing migra*tion.

“Draw*bridge down” - New Europe - meant being open to the world, mar*kets, the famil*iar and the unfa*mil*iar. And nowhere is such an atti*tude more in evi*dence than in mul*ti*cul*tur*al, cos*mopoli*tan Lon*don.

Lib*er*al*ism and eccen*tric*i*ties

It is not an acci*dent that the British cap*i*tal is the hub of the finan*cial indus*try in Europe. Accord*ing to Euro*stat, 35% of all finan*cial ser*vices in the EU-27 are pro*vid*ed in Lon*don: 90,000 bankers work there, 8,000 of them for Deutsche Bank, which con*ducts most of its busi*ness out of Lon*don, and all told, 251 for*eign banks have Lon*don offices.

In the eyes of many Ger*mans, this does not reflect well on the British. Prop*er economies build cars and refrig*er*a*tors, or at least so goes the fairy tale, even as 74% of jobs in Ger*many are now in the ser*vice sec*tor. And while it may cur*rent*ly be the thing to bad*mouth Wall Street, it shouldn’t be for*got*ten that the EU-27’s finan*cial ser*vices sec*tor is the sec*ond largest in the world after the US.

Europe tops the US as the world’s great*est exporter of finan*cial ser*vices, large*ly thanks to Lon*don, the most impor*tant link between the mar*kets in the States, Asia and Europe, and also home to the world’s fore*most ship*ping agents with*out whom Volk*swag*on couldn’t export and super*mar*ket chains like Lidl couldn’t import. Any*body who wants a Europe that doesn’t include Lon*don’s City wants a Europe cut off from the world.

In his remark*able essay "On Europe’s Constitution," Jürgen Haber*mas (Ger*many's most renowned philoso*pher)*points out that "peo*ples of a con*ti*nent with shrink*ing polit*i*cal and eco*nom*ic weight" can*not limit them*selves to using the EU "defen*sive*ly, to main*tain their cul*tur*al biotope." On the con*trary, they need to use polit*i*cal lee*way "offen*sive*ly as well by ardu*ous*ly build*ing fur*ther glob*al steer*ing capacities."

With*out Britain’s glob*al expe*ri*ence and polit*i*cal weight as an atom*ic power, and mem*ber of the UN Secu*ri*ty Coun*cil, the Com*mon*wealth and the "Anglos*phere" that spans the plan*et, Haber*mas's call would be illu*so*ry.

And final*ly: let us not for*get the British con*tri*bu*tion to Euro*pean cul*ture. This isn’t just cul*ture in the nar*row sense, from Amy Wine*house to Julian Barnes via Ken Loach and Jamie Oliv*er. This is cul*ture in the sense of a dis*po*si*tion – the relaxed lib*er*al*ism of a geo*graph*i*cal*ly and soci*etal*ly eccen*tric nation. And even more impor*tant: a nation that nat*u*ral*ly shares the val*ues of the Unit*ed States of Amer*i*ca.

Some Euro*peans, who secret*ly dream of a con*ti*nen*tal mini-empire under Ger*man lead*er*ship, or a Gaullist alliance led by the French, fear that Great Britain could hin*der an ever clos*er Union.

But if the euro cri*sis has one les*son to teach, it’s this: that the unthink*able “deep*en*ing” of the Union har*bors infi*nite*ly more explo*sive power than a broad*en*ing of it. And that’s what the British always said – not as “bad” Euro*peans but as the best of the best. Now that the dream of the euro is turn*ing into a never-ending night*mare, Britain is more impor*tant for Ger*many - and Europe - than ever before.