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| Assistant Editor, Ernie, after a fist fight with a neighbor's cat. |
Let me put forward the following propositions for your consideration.
1.
The crisis in Europe,
especially in its southern flank: Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy, offers an
unmatched opportunity in four decades to educate, agitate and organize for a
course towards a new and better society, an ecological socialist society.
2.
The European crisis
is the continuation of the 2008 world capitalist crisis also known as the Great
Recession, its current epicenter.
3.
Contrary to the
claims of (bourgeois) economists and policy makers, this is not merely a
financial crisis. [i] It is a
multi-facet crisis of capitalism.[ii]
It is a crisis of capitalist accumulation (growth). Moreover, it is a secular,
systemic crisis that coincides with the planetary crisis fueled by
carbohydrate-powered industrialization.
It is also a crisis of Our way of Life: a cultural crisis that of
“civilization” that has been built on the premise of domination and
exploitation of nature, including fellow human beings, the cultural basis of
the class society institutionalized with the Agrarian Revolution, 10,000 years
ago.
4.
The European crisis
has already provided a pre-revolutionary situation in Greece. This was signaled
by defeat of the four decades old two party system in the May 6th
Greek parliamentary elections: the Pasok
(a bourgeois socialist formation) and New Democracy
(a right of center bourgeois party) that colluded with the troika--European Union (EU), the European Central Bank (ECB) and
the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—to impose a bailout plan that mandates
deep austerity measures lost their majority and could not form a government. In a 300-member
parliament, the Pasok took only 41 seats (13.18 percent of the vote) and New
Democracy took 108 seats (18.85 percent of the vote). The
anti-austerity parties surged; in particular the SYRIZA
(Coalition of the Radical Left) rose to the second position with 16.8% of the
vote and 50 representatives.
5.
The
election was preceded by two years of intensifying mass protests, including
general strikes. During the past six month the socioeconomic crisis has begun
to be transformed into a pre-revolutionary situation. Self-activity and
self-organization of direct producers could create an alternative revolutionary
leadership to find a genuine way out of the crisis for Greece and show the way
to other Euro zone countries in crisis, particularly Portugal, Spain and Italy.
6.
It
is high time for the European parties and currents that speak in the name of
socialism, ecology or ecological socialism, especially in Greece and Spain
where the crisis has assumed a depression-like proportions and mass resistance
is strongest, to call for a United Ecological Socialist Europe as an alternative institutional
framework to the capitalist European Union. Let’s not forget: European Union
was formed by the European capitalist classes to serve their class
interest. A United Ecological Socialist
Europe will favor a European integration from below—based on self-organization
and self-activity of the European working people—to re-establish a society in
harmony with itself and with nature.
The contrast between the European Union and a United Ecological
Socialist Europe will not be more stark: for the former society is organized to
serve the economy (the profit-making machine) while for the latter all economic
activities will be organized by the direct producers in the interest of society
and in harmony with nature.
7.
The
slogan of the United Ecological Socialist Europe combined with transitional
demands tailored to each country’s situation will help working people to
imagine a workable alternative to capitalism. In the pre-revolutionary Greece, it should be combined with
a call for a government of direct producers and a constituent assembly based
organizations of the Greek working people. The constituent assembly will determine how the Greek people
will proceed—as master of their own destiny empowered by their own organization
and government and in solidarity with the rest of the European and world
working peoples not as hostage to
the capitalist masters Greek or otherwise.
8.
The
slogan of the United Ecological Socialist Europe as a perspective helps explain
why dichotomies proposed in the context of the current crisis (negotiation for
better terms for a Greek bailout, remaining within the Euro zone or breaking
with it, nationalizing banks or not, whether to rely of the June 17 elections
for a resolution to the crisis, etc.) are false choices if the capitalist
system itself is not questioned. However, the perspective of a United
Ecological Socialist Europe should not be taken as a recipe for an ultra-left
sectarian course. Clearly, there are no ecological socialist currents in Greece,
Portugal, Spain, Italy, elsewhere in Europe or the world with any influence
among the broad masses of the working people. This is a law of historical development: consciousness lags
reality. The slogan is not meant
to maintain and to reinforce this isolation. The perspective should help to
break out of this isolation through participation in the building of the mass
movement as it emerges in concrete situation and to build unity in action and
encourage widest discussion and build all forms of participatory democracy
among all revolutionary minded individuals and currents.
* * *
There
have been 99 posts since my last communication (nos. 701 to 799
inclusive). As usual, the focus has been ecology, environment and ecocide
(11 posts), global warming and climate change and other planetary crises (16
posts), evolution and evolutionary theory (10 posts), science and methodology
(8 posts) and issues regarding the Cuban revolution (11 posts).
Nine
post deal with various species and four with natural history, four were
book/film reviews and seven posts offered alterative visions, including ecological
socialism. A number of posts dealt
with labor, anti-war and protest movements.
As I
state regularly all signed articles represent the views of their author(s).
They are posted here because they relate to a subject of our interest and
some from the mass media can even represent current bourgeois thought. Only
unsigned articles are the points of view of Our Place in the World.
A list of hotlinks to the last 99 posts follow:
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[i] For the past two
year, the austerity approach to the European public debt favored by the German
bourgeoisie represented by Angela Merkel, Chancellor, and supported by the
French president Sarkozy, has been applied. The approach calls for frontal
attack on the living standard of the working people to resolve the capitalist
crisis as the debt-relief package for Greece exemplifies.
However, the test of events has discredited this approach.
Greece and Spain where the austerity program has been implemented are in
depression-like conditions. Unemployment
rate in Greece stood at 21.7 in January 2012 and in Spain at 24.1 in March.
Youth
unemployment in both countries stands at 50%. Understandably, austerity has
also led to the rebellion of the working people in Greek and to a lesser degree
in Spain and contributed to the defeat of Sarkozy in the French presidential
elections. The resistance to austerity could spread rapidly across Europe. At the same time, the bond
market—financial institutions that purchase sovereign debt—is no more willing
to purchase Greek, Spanish or Italian bonds. Public finance remains in
disarray.
This
has given the Keynesian policy makers an opportunity. Prominent economists,
including Nobel Prize laureates Paul Krugman and Amartya Sen, have
criticized the German-led austerity approach. As Sen puts
it: “There is, in fact, plenty historical evidence that the most effective
way to cut deficits is to combine deficit reduction with rapid growth, which
generates more revenue.” The Keynesian approach to macroeconomic policy differs
from the neoliberal approach in that the former admits market failure in
securing “full
employment” to enable workers to earn their own livelihood and (2) that it
favors provision of social services necessary for a smooth functioning of the
capitalist economy and society. Thus, the Keynesians argue that the capitalist
state has an important economic function (that the state and the market are
interdependent).
Over
the capitalist long cycle of accumulation, Keynesian and neoliberal policies
have alternatively been used and proponents of each claim historical support
for their approach. However, they
seldom admit instances of the failure of their policies. For example, the
Keynesian policies resulted in stagflation of the late 1970s and early 1980s
and the 2008 financial crisis was most immediately caused by neoliberal
policies.
What
is important to note is that neolibral and Keynesian controversies are about
the best way to preserve the capitalist system. They have little to do with how to arrive at a socioeconomic
system best suitable for the working people and the planet. Further, Keynesians also accept the
need for austerity measures. However, they argue a pro-growth deficit spending
program can soften the blow to the working people ensuring a less painful and
dangerous path to recovery.
[ii] Although the 2008 international
Great Recession has manifest itself first and foremost as a financial crisis,
it is neither merely a financial crisis nor it is simply due to bad
(neoliberal) policies. It is the most serious systemic capitalist crisis since
the Greet Depression of the 1930s.
The
development of finance is integral to the process of capitalist
accumulation: it has increasing
freed the accumulation process from the time requirements of the process of valorization of capital. However fictitious
capital—claims against future production; income generated by that
production—is also money that is thrown into circulation as capital without any
material basis in commodities or productive activity. Thus, the potential for financial crises: speculation on
future returns to capital that may or may not bear out. All financial bubbles originate from
this potential disparity.
However,
if financial investment remains within reasonable bounds and valorization of
capital proceeds without serious problems there will be no generalized
financial crisis. When the
valorization process encounters problems and financial investment become
increasing speculative as the result (because already held assumptions become invalid
and because money flows from productive activities associated with industrial
capital to speculation) generalized financial crisis happen as they did in 2008
and have been with increasing frequency and severity since the 1970s when the
secular decline in the average rate of profit began.
