D4net Netwerk voor Dromers, Denkers, Durvers en Doeners

Franco B erardi,  August 19, 2011
 
At the end of 2010, I finished writing a book about the cultural collapse of the most important mythology of capitalist modernity: that of “the future” and its associated myths of energy, expansion, a  nd growth.¹ While I was writing, I sensed a possibility that the economic crisis could be deepening. But what actually happened in the summer of 2011—the extraordinary crash of global financial capitalism and the beginning of the European insurrection that exploded in London, Athens, and Rome in December 2010 and then grew massive in England during the four nights of rage in August, and which I expect to spread everywhere in the coming months—this has pushed me to write something more. Alas, writing about the present is a dangerous thing when circumstances change so quickly. But I cannot deny the thrill of running alongside the disaster.

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Now one of the trends that had actually been going on, rather unnoticed for at least the last 15 years or so, was that one of the biggest fields of expansion for multinational companies has actually been the public sector.

I think the left, certainly the British left, has very much focused on seeing the financial crisis as something to do with banks and something to do with financialisation and the finance economy. All the political action that we've seen recently - including the Occupy movement, whom I support absolutely – is all focused on how the banks are the baddies, how to change the banking system, how to make it responsible etc, etc. There has been very little focus on what's been happening in what one might call the 'real economy'. That's a complicated phrase to use: people used to talk about finance capital and industrial capital, as if they were two quite distinct things, which they probably were 100 years ago, but the reality is that industrial capital behaves more and more like finance capital. We've got transnational companies with parent companies in tax havens, creating an internal global space around which they move their profits, not paying any tax whatsoever, and behaving increasingly like banks.

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Who is George Papandreou? The author challenges what he sees as the defence over recent years on this website of PASOK’s reform agenda by Anthony Barnett and Mary Kaldor. This neoliberalism in sheep’s clothing, he argues, has nothing to do with the radical democratic reform proposed by the Arab uprisings and Occupy movements. This is our latest debate on whether Europe can make it.
One of the most cherished neo-liberal myths is that responsibility for the malaise of Greece and the origins of its debt lie squarely in the corrupt practices of state officials and public sector workers, the clientelistic party system and the inefficiency of tax collecting mechanisms.

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Michel Sargasso

The economic crisis we face today is not only a crisis of the economy. It is also a crisis of economics. The free-market fundamentalism that attained ideological dominance in the final decades of the 20th century has been discredited by financial collapse, global imbalances, mass unemployment, and environmental degradation. To confront these challenges, we need an economics for the 21st century.

We need an economics for open minds that breaks free of the closed-minded economic dogmas of the past. We need an economics that aims to secure long-run human well-being, not an economics preoccupied with maximizing short-run output and profits. We need an economics that recognizes that we need to safeguard the Earth for our children and generations to come. We need an economics for people, the planet, and the future.

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Immanuel Wallerstein March 2011

I have written repeatedly on the structural crisis in the world-system, most recently in New Left Review in 2010.2 So, I shall just summarize my position, without arguing it in detail. I shall state my position as a set of premises. Not everyone agrees with these premises, which are my picture of where we are at the present time. On the basis of this picture, I propose to speak to the question, where do we go from here?

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Onder redactie van Jasper Blom

1 De politieke economie van het financiële systeem: het spel van markt, macht en crises 11
Jasper Blom
2 Europese integratie en de crisis 39
Daniel Mügge
3 Corporate governance in Nederland – hoe bedrijven handelswaar werden 59
Laura Horn en Arjan Vliegenthart
4 Machtige spelers op zoek naar speelveld: de rol van pensioenfondsen in het vormgeven van financiële markten in Nederland, 1970-2008 79
Rodrigo Fernandez
5 Banken in crisis: sterker toezicht of beter bankieren? 111
Jasper Blom
6 Kredietderivaten als katalysator van de crisis? 143
Rien Jeuken en Bob Coppes
7 Het mondiale anker voor financiële stabiliteit: het IMF 179
Wouter Schilperoort
8 Een ‘schitterend’ ongeluk; verhalen van de crisis 205
Ewald Engelen

Zie bijlage pdf

By George Friedman

Everyone is wondering about the next disaster to befall Europe. Italy is one focus; Spain is also a possibility. But these crises are already under way. Instead, the next crisis will be political, not in the sense of what conventional politician is going to become prime minister, but in the deeper sense of whether Europe’s political elite can retain power, or whether new political forces are going to emerge that will completely reshape the European political landscape. If this happens, it will be by far the most important consequence of the European financial crisis.
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The ascension of Mario Monti to the Italian prime ministership is remarkable for more reasons than it is possible to count. By replacing the scandal-surfing Silvio Berlusconi, Italy has dislodged the undislodgeable. By imposing rule by unelected technocrats, it has suspended the normal rules of democracy, and maybe democracy itself. And by putting a senior adviser at Goldman Sachs in charge of a Western nation, it has taken to new heights the political power of an investment bank that you might have thought was prohibitively politically toxic.

This is the most remarkable thing of all: a giant leap forward for, or perhaps even the successful culmination of, the Goldman Sachs Project.

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