<nettime> Crisis 2.0 - the political turn

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

Just before Christmas, Joschka Fischer - a man who incarnates the 
institutionalization of 1968 - published an article on the Project 
Syndicate website entitled "Europe's Make-or-Break Year." At stake, for 
him, was the failed recovery, the divisive policy of austerity, the rise 
of economic nationalism. The banks, in short.  "When the turmoil comes," 
he wrote, "it is likely to be triggered -- as with the euro crisis -- by 
Greece." How ironic. The former leftist who took Germany to war in 
Kosovo in the 1990s did not say a word about the military situation.

There is a New Cold War in the Ukraine, an extremely hot civil war in 
Syria, a branch of Al Qaeda alive and well in Yemen and a tremendous 
global insurgency spilling out of Iraq. Not just recession and 
unemployment, but fear and racism are stalking Europe. In my view, the 
assassinations that just happened in France will mark the turning point 
of the crisis that began in 2008. The last "liberal" plank - the EU - 
just fell out of neoliberalism. We're in for a definitive change of era.

The European Union as we knew it grew out of the crisis of the 1970s, 
when the Dollar Standard broke down, the new international division of 
labor emerged, and the USA, having lost its war in Vietnam, could no 
longer manage global hegemony on its own. The solution was to share 
economic power with Europe and Japan, which were home to the two other 
great currencies of the postwar era, the Deutschmark and the Yen. 
"Liberalism," as understood in the old British imperial sense, signified 
free trade cosmopolitanism, open borders for commodities and the 
pretense of global citizenship. That was the rhetoric, I mean. After the 
turmoil of global class struggle and Third World insurgency in the 
Sixties, the strategic plan was to structure a tight communications 
network across all sectors of the elites - corporates, financiers, 
politicians, educators, scientists, religious leaders - and use it to 
manage a new  economic expansion. Shared economic power would be much 
more difficult to criticize than raw political power coming out of 
Washington. The publicly accessible archives of the Trilateral 
Commission show how this was done. The Davos meetings in Switzerland 
continue to express the results. The EU - which sublated the Deutschmark 
into the European Single Currency - believed that it could become the 
ideal type of this Brave New Economic Order.

The solution worked four about 25 years, from 1982 to 2008. After its 
low point in the early 70s, the US went on to create neoliberalism's 
global currency (derivatives), its global security system (the 34-nation 
Coalition of the Gulf War) and its global infrastructure (the Internet). 
Each of those things was necessary to manage the new just-in-time 
production and distribution system that had been largely invented in 
Japan. All three centers became fabulously wealthy hyperconsumption 
societies, with bloated financial sectors, world-class educational 
systems, robotized factories and lots of cultural veneer, especially in 
Europe.

Each pole of the Triad had its exploitable periphery: Latin America for 
the US; Southeast Asia and China for Japan; North Africa and much of the 
former Soviet sphere for Europe. Throughout the period, the focus of 
global war was sharply narrowed to the Middle East, where a system of US 
client states (above all, Israel and Saudi Arabia) served to maintain 
control over energy supplies while stoking the permanent war economy. 
The whole thing seemed to function until the Asian Crisis of 1998, which 
also swept through the former East and Latin America. But after that all 
the big producer countries, including China, Brazil and Russia, set 
about securing relative political and economic autonomy. This allowed 
them to take full advantage of the unbelievable growth unleashed by the 
new productive system. Meanwhile the  came home to the neoliberal 
heartland in the form of the dotcom crash of 2000 - and the US responded 
in its usual way, by seizing the military pretext of 9/11 and 
simultaneously inflating a new financial bubble. As for Japan and 
Europe, they apparently believed they could just do nothing.

They were wrong. Since the 2008 crash and the total failure of the US 
wars - a double failure worse than Vietnam - we are living through a 
major crisis of capitalism, comparable to the 1970s and the 1930s. It is 
a global social and ecological crisis, whose burdens are distributed 
unequally, according to a regionalized and racialized class structure. 
So far this crisis has had no political expression whatsoever. It has 
everywhere been conceived in strictly economic terms, as a banking 
crisis, and it has been treated in the most facile way imaginable, by 
printing money for the banks. But the resolution of a major economic 
crisis requires a change of social order. And that can't be achieved 
without a political turn. Unfortunately it's now set to happen in the EU 
just the same way as it happened in the US a decade ago - under the 
pressure of war and racism.

We live in a planetary society with a totally integrated world market. 
After decades of globalization rhetoric that sounds like a simple 
statement. In reality it means we have reached the limits of capitalism 
itself. There are no more "peripheries" to exploit: every periphery is 
integrally part of the center. There are no more "externalities" to 
production: every ton of waste comes back in its producers' faces. Above 
all there are no more "foreign wars," for oil or anything else. Each new 
terrorist bombing proves it.

I guess that despite himself, Joschka Fischer was right. This will be 
Europe's make or break year. A neocon political turn is now imaginable 
for Europe. The French socialist prime minister Manuel Valls - who's 
what they call a "social-liberal" - is probably the perfect man to 
launch it. It can be done in the name of Charlie Hebdo, a '68-era 
satirical weekly that has often shown how the secularist left can be 
just as racist as anyone.

In the early 1990s, as Western capitalism was being hailed triumphant, 
Michel Serres opened his book "The Natural Contract" with the analysis 
of a Goya painting showing two combatants sinking into quicksand. "Let's 
make a wager," he wrote. "You put your stakes on the right; we've bet on 
the left. The fight's outcome is in doubt simply because there are two 
combatants, and once one of them wins there will be no more uncertainty. 
But we can identify a third  position, outside their squabble: the marsh 
into which the struggle is sinking."

A real political turn - and not just a blind man's walk into 
authoritarianism - would have to begin with a full recognition of the 
quagmire of the present.


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