November 17, 2012
Israel: The Logic of a Settler State
Let us not today fling accusations at the murderers. Who are we that we should argue against their hatred? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza and, before their very eyes we turn into our homestead the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers have lived. We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home. Let us not shrink back when we see the hatred fermenting and filling the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs, who sit all around us. Let us not avert our gaze, so that our hand shall not slip. This is the fate of our generation, the choice of our life – to be prepared and armed, strong and tough – or otherwise, the sword will slip from our fist, and our life will be snuffed out.
– Moshe Dayan, 1956.(1)
This land absorbs the skins of martyrs.
This land promises wheat and stars.
Worship it!
We are its salt and its water.
We are its wound, but a wound that fights.
– Mahmoud Darwish, “Diary of a Palestinian Wound” (1969)
While every conflict has its specificities, it is impossible to understand the nature and trends of the Israeli state without an understanding of the greater logic of which it is but one example. What I mean by this is this: Israel is the most recent and thereby the most contradictory example of the logic of settlerism, of the settler state as a phenomenon in capitalist history. All capitalist states have certain attributes necessary for the expansion and reproduction of the capital relation, such as limitations on workers’ freedom and mobility, a military-industrial complex, territoriality, and enforcement of exploitative relations of production, but settler states are a specific social formation of these that go over and beyond capitalist ‘normality’. The settler state is, in this sense, the most complete and pure outward appearance of the capital-state relationship. When successful, its natural ideology is that of an expansionist, self-confident liberalism; when threatened, its natural ideology is fascism.
The settler state distinguishes itself from the ‘normal’ forms of appearance of the capital-state relationship in several ways. First, that it is a state which even in its historical, embryonic form is already capitalist, and does not have the inheritance of the ‘muck of ages’ of absolutism, feudalism, and so forth. Second, it involves the voluntary transfer of a people from elsewhere into a given land, whether already occupied or not, which in so doing establishes a new social formation both separate from and against the existing one of the settled land. Thirdly, the necessary result of the combination of these factors is the demographic principle of the settler state: its very existence stands or falls by the numerical presence of the settler population as against the tally of the original population(s), as these become, by the very act of the settlement itself, the respective bearers of their social formation in them. In other words, the reproduction of the social formation of the settler society is, as with all societies, dependent on the reproduction of its population; but this principle is elevated to a higher level in the settler society, because rather than the reproduction of the population being the reproduction of the different classes and the whole ensemble of the historical heritage of that particular people, the reproduction of the population takes on a competitive form in and of itself. It is measured not in the ability to reproduce the working class per se, but in the ability to reproduce the settlers over and against the ‘natives’, whoever they may be.
This leads to the fourth principle, which is that the logic of the settler state is therefore necessarily racial and expansionist. Racial, because the settler society reproduces its social formation as a whole, and thereby subsumes its class differences into an artificial unity generated not by the process of nation-building within a given territory, as in the case of the traditional bourgeois process, but by the processes of demographic-military competition with the ‘native’ population, a competition fought out on all physical fronts. This inherently racializes the relationship between the settler population and the ‘natives’, as every settler, regardless of their class, is a guarantee of the survival of a social formation in a territory where this is under threat as a whole; it thereby becomes a question not of class against class, but of people against people, of a struggle over physicality and territoriality rather than over the process of economic production and distribution within the social formation. This is a wholly regressive and vicious throwback to the worst instincts and group behaviors of humanity.
It is also for this reason necessarily expansionist; not just because of the often limited number of settlers in the first periods of the settlement, and the sense of constant danger of extinction by the ‘native’ population, but more importantly because the only possible guarantee for the normalization of the social formation, the eradication of its bad conscience and its sense of ‘having survived’, rests ultimately in the destruction of the ‘native’ population and their rival social formation. Moreover, the struggle against this latter people or peoples itself perpetuates the artificial, racialized unity among the settlers themselves, and is thereby a welcome mechanism for externalizing and staving off the inevitable internal class conflicts the process of normalization entails. Therefore, the logic of the settler state necessarily and inherently contains within itself a drive towards the total fragmentation of the ‘native’ populations and the dissolution of their social bonds, if not their physical extermination as such – in other words, settlerism always means a logic of ‘ethnic cleansing’.
It is not difficult to find in history examples that underline the argument made here, and to demonstrate the particularity of this form of the capital-state relation in the modern world. In the case of the settlement of America, it has often been observed how the British upper class’ refusal to allow settlement to follow its expansionist course beyond the Appalachians was a major factor in the rebellion of the colonists. Indeed, the very same revolution in the United States which inaugurated the great bourgeois revolutionary upheavals of the modern era was an unmitigated disaster for the various indigenous peoples of what is now the USA, as their very physical existence came constantly and repeatedly in contradiction with the logic of American settlerism. The results are well known, and even now, the American counties with large native ‘reservations’ on them are the poorest in the country and have worse social statistics than many developing countries. In Canada and Australia the story was much the same, and in Australia perhaps most genocidal in its completeness, given the very low level of technological development of the various Aboriginal peoples compared to the ‘natives’ elsewhere; whereas in New Zealand the high level of military organization of the Maori and the lower number of settlers had a mildly dampening effect on the full consummation of settlerism. In all these cases, the racial factor was immediately evident from the start and has been since, and in all these cases there has been a clear political economic reality of ‘race burning class’, as J. Sakai put it.
Of course, the various practices and details of the settler logic vary from place to place according to the historical circumstances. In South Africa, the settlers being perpetually a small minority compared to the various indigenous peoples, especially after the completion of the Bantu migrations, compelled a policy of apartheid – a system in which the racially oppressed black workforce were to be kept separate and confined from the white population, lest they overcome them or destroy by ‘dilution’ the demographic basis of their social formation. It was not realistically possible for the native populations to be physically destroyed or fully ethnically cleansed from the majority of the territory, and this made the apartheid system a logical result – at least from the point of view of the settlers. (There were of course rules for ‘coloreds’, the Indian population etc., but these do not affect the larger picture.) The United States had the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery, and imported a great number of involuntary migrants, which created in effect a double settler state with two parallel racialized social formations, one historically progressive and industrial and one historically regressive and agrarian. The inevitable conflict between these was fought out in the American Civil War, with known results. But it should then come as no surprise that the settler logic of society re-established itself with vicious vigor almost immediately afterwards, and the potential for its destruction through radical Reconstruction was quickly lost.
In Israel, the logic of the settler state expresses itself in its most virulent forms. Firstly, the Zionist project of the settlement and colonization of Palestine is a unified whole, as all settlerism must be for it to not collapse under its contradictions. It therefore makes no difference whether it applies to Hebron or to Tel Aviv, in this regard, as in all circumstances the definite characteristics of the settler state described above are in operation and must be in operation. The artificial unity is present in the militarist-racial structure of Israeli society, in particular in its universal conscription, and in the very knowledge that even the continued existence of Arab place-names is a threat to the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’. Its expansionism is clear and obvious. From its modest beginnings the Israeli state has through perpetual war and ethnic cleansing swollen beyond any of its original territorial claims, and it shows no signs whatever of stopping. Its apartheid system expresses the racialization and the demographic factor clearly, and so does the constant talk of the ‘demographic threat’, the refusal to allow any Palestinian right of return and the open talk of deportations and ethnic cleansing, the secular political trend against socio-economic and internal class struggle and towards externalization in the form of further expansion and aggrandizement speak clear language.
Israel here has the misfortune of being the newest settler state, and so its victims can learn from history, even if its own settler population cannot. The very notion of a ‘two state solution’ with its own Arab Palestinian ‘natives’ is a risible one given the parallels between the Israeli consideration of Palestinian treaties and Palestinian land claims and the American treatment of the same relations with the various Native tribes, all of whom eventually ended up in open-air prisons called reservations. Indeed, Gaza, presently being bombed to smithereens, is nothing if not a ‘reservation’ of this type. But the Palestinians are not the only ‘natives’ victimized by settlerism: Israel treats its Druze and Bedouin populations no better, and regardless of the willingness of Druze to serve in its military, they have been systematically expropriated. It is worth noting that the willingness of settlerism to destroy any social formation opposing it on its physical-territorial domain of expansion finds its parallel in its willingness to accept any kind of settler as long as they are willing to underwrite the racial-settler system: one can look here at the history of the Irish and Italian migrants to the US, but even in the case of Israel there have been many Russian, Indian, even Peruvian migrant settlers accepted into the Israeli polity as ‘returning Jews’ whose Jewish identity was deeply spurious or nonexistent.
It is no coincidence that as Israel has become stronger and its logic has expressed itself more fully, it has become ever more fascist and less concerned even with formal equality and democracy – as shown most recently by the restrictive laws forbidding even the commemoration of the Naqba (the original ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians), the exclusion of anti-Zionist groups from parliamentary representation, and the unification between Likud and the fascist organization of Avigdor Lieberman. As I have argued, this trend of the capital-state relation to move away from formal liberalism and into a fascist siege mentality is characteristic of a settler state frustrated in its normalization process. For settler states, this normalization process can only occur on the basis of the destruction of the social formation of its rivals, of the original inhabitants; the US and Australia only even considered reforming the racial ladder system after their physical-demographic security as a settler state and their destruction of all rival social formations was complete. So it is with Israel also, and therefore Israel as a state does not and cannot want peace, whatever individuals within it may fervently hope.
Of course, this analysis is not to claim that such a logic develops wholly on its own, or that there is no agency on the part of the Other to which the settler state opposes itself. Indeed, the civil rights struggle in the United States and the campaigns for recognition on the part of the First Nations in Canada were major and inspirational examples of revolutionary organization on the part of oppressed groups, and it is equally no coincidence that such groups became more radicalized against the whole structure of the racialized capital-state relation of their settler societies as they struggled against them. The Palestinian cause has rightly taken inspiration from these examples, as well as from the resistance against the slightly different settler structure of northern Ireland, and it has in turn become a major emancipatory force of its own.
This is also why it is irredeemably silly when people point to the Palestinian struggle and ask why it garners so much attention and passion compared to the many struggles worldwide, whether in West Papua, in Syria, in Brazil or in Sudan. What such smug distraction misses is the essential role of the struggle against the settler logic. It is not a contingency of history that the US and Israel are so closely connected in alliance that there is ‘no daylight between them’. On the contrary. The hegemonic United States is a settler society and Israel is the only social formation of a similar type planted, in the decolonizing period of modern history, in the middle of the periphery (for want of a better term) and in a land of great religious significance at that. Therefore, much more than all the other such sites of struggle, Israel is a cornerstone of the political world-system. The struggle against Israel is therefore not just a question of the emancipation of the Palestinians, but it is a struggle against settler logic altogether, and through this, a struggle against the political manifestation of the current world order. This makes it a crucial site in the perpetuation of the imperialism of the West as well as in the ‘containment’ of global revolutionary and emancipatory struggles, and this gives it its particular significance.
It is also for this reason that any attempt at a ‘two state solution’ is not just inadequate and impossible, given what has been said about the inherent logic of settler states, but is actively reactionary compared to the enormous victory for revolutionary forces a unified Palestine would be. A single Palestine on the basis of secularism, democracy, and socialism would be transformed from a cornerstone of the capitalist-imperialist world order into a cornerstone of an emancipatory one. The prerequisite for this possibility is the defeat of Israel as a Zionist entity, the defeat of its inherent settler logic (and Zionism is historically just one example of settlerist ideology), and thereby the dissolution of its current social formation into one that is not irredeemably anti-emancipatory. There can be no ‘Zionist left’, no ‘liberal Zionism’, and so forth, for such propositions are incompatible with the practical logic of the settler state. The concept of Israel must die so that a Palestine may live for Jews and Arabs, Druze and Bedouin alike.
1) Cited in: Ghada Karmi, Married To Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine (London 2007), p. 3.
November 14, 2012
Book Review: Costas Lapavitsas et al., “Crisis in the Eurozone”
Costas Lapavitsas, Professor of Economics at SOAS, and a number of economists associated to one extent or another with the Research Group on Money & Finance, published this book as an examination of the effects and meaning of the economic crisis of our times for the countries in the Eurozone. They limit themselves quite specifically in this manner, not discussing the wider impact on the EU, the non-Euro member states, or the nature of the crisis insofar as it does not immediately relate to the issue of the Euro and the banks of the Euro system. What one does get, however, is a remarkably precise and detailed analysis of the constituent elements of the crisis in the Euro, the European banking system, the nature of the bailout and its failures, and the relationship between debtors and creditors within the Eurozone, which have emphatically been on the political foreground in the past two years or so.
The framework is that of examining the opposition of interests between the core countries of the Eurozone, the creditor states of France, the Netherlands, Finland, Austria, etc., and most importantly Germany, and on the other hand the intra-European periphery, Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Ireland (though Ireland is not the focus of this study due to its idiosyncrasies). As Lapavitsas et al. argue, the European Central Bank and the monetary union which it underpins are essentially constructs created to achieve these purposes: first, to create a European currency which can rival with the US dollar as the ‘world money’ Marx identified capitalism must have in the absence of a metallic standard; secondly, to unify the money market and thereby the competitive strength of the financial institutions of the Eurozone; thirdly, to facilitate the imposition on the EMU member states of a permanent system of austerity, inflation-targeting, and budgetary restraint which would make any serious national opposition to the interests of European finance capital (and industrial exporters and carrying traders) impossible. In this it has succeeded wonderfully well.
However, as skeptics pointed out from the start, the Eurozone contains a serious contradiction between the interests of the capitalists of the core (well served by this) and those of the periphery, for whom this does not work as well. The authors rather unusually emphasize Germany’s primary position within this system, and its dominance over the interests of the periphery, as following not so much from its export strength as from the fact it has had the longest and most enduring neoliberal wage repression of the Eurozone. This then combines with its absolutely high levels of productivity and its political power over the ECB (located there) to make it fundamentally more ‘competitive’ than the southern countries, which have seen rising nominal wages but insufficient corresponding productivity growth. This is supported and further examined by a great deal of graphs and data, unfortunately often not clearly visually presented.
A second major section of the book is to argue the effects of the financialization of the Eurozone, and how this has played out in generating much of the crisis. The crisis started, of course, with the collapse of interlinked financial bubbles in the United States – the real estate bubble and the multiply leveraged debt bubble. But the focus is here on the Eurozone only, and this has experienced similar phenomena. It is certainly worth remarking on how commonplace it has become for commercial banks to undertake financial ‘investments’, for consumer debt to skyrocket in response to stagnating real wages and an increased dependency on credit in the open market for previously ‘shielded’ consumption like education and housing, and to note the enormous expansions of fictitious capital luring in investment from institutional investors, domestic corporations, and so forth, exposing them to much greater degrees. However, this aspect remains somewhat undertheorized in this book. There is little explanation of the political economy of financialization itself, its origins and its relationship to the rate of profit in the overall economy – other than declaring it, rightly, as part of the neoliberal project. This is perhaps defensible as such considerations can be found in various other books, and one cannot expect one book to discuss everything. But a more political economic background might engage the work more with the criticisms of much of the distributionist theories and ‘crowding out’ explanations of financialization as offered by for example Andrew Kliman, and would contribute to that debate. As it stands, financialization appears as an exogenous cause explained merely in terms of ideological drives for deregulation and the economies of scale of large corporations that allow them to self-finance investment, as also summarized by Lapavitsas here.
The third subject of the book is probably of the greatest political-economic interest, namely a practical discussion of the trends in the current crisis and the attempts to resolve it on the part of the ‘troika’, and what the periphery countries can do about it. The focus here is, understandably and rightly, mainly on Greece, although no doubt much of the same applies to Portugal and perhaps also Spain. Lapavitsas et al. take a strong stand against what they see as the failures of the political left to properly understand and critique the presuppositions of the EMU system, thereby paralyzing left politics at precisely the moment it needs to intervene strongly. One might add that this also leaves open the door to other forces to do so instead, as already becoming visible in Hungary and Greece. The left’s response has been a muddled back-and-forth between on the one hand suggesting massive lending and investment by the ECB and Eurozone countries respectively as a simple stimulus programme, and on the other hand an inchoate resistance against the European system as a whole, proposing solutions which would involve a more ‘popular’ Euro policy.
For the authors, this is inadequate and incoherent, and they make a strong case. As they describe it, there are essentially three possible routes: the first is to continue the current policy. That is to say, the troika provides liquidy and limited debt relief to periphery countries in return for severe austerity policies. The purpose of this is purely to retain the credibility of the Euro as a whole and thereby benefit the financial institutions as well as the beneficiaries of the Euro as a world money, and the costs come down entirely on the shoulders of the working people of Europe and especially of the periphery. There is some discussion here, as in many post-Keyenesian arguments, about the inability of the austerity policy to actually revive growth and investment, but this strikes me from a Marxist angle as besides the point: its sole purpose in the short to medium run is to favor financial capital interests, as with Cameron-Clegg’s policies on behalf of the City of London, and the restoration of the investment climate for the national bourgeoisies is left to the mass devaluation that results from prolongued recession and unemployment. Here, Marxism and the theory of the transnational class have considerably greater explanatory power than the (post-)Keynesian analysis, which would have us believe the ruling class is simply unable to see its own interests, and that those interests can partially coincide with those of the population as a whole. We must resist such notions.
However, on rejecting the recipe of austerity and recession, two other options remain. The second is the ‘left-EMU’ option, that is, to attempt to use or reform the EMU institutions such that a genuinely ‘popular’ policy can be followed. This seems to be the notion favored by much of the social-democracy in Europe insofar as it is having second thoughts about the neoliberal turn, and also that favored by the trade union leaderships and the left ‘civil society’ and so forth. Here Lapavitsas et al. are very useful in their denunciation of this approach, at least for the periphery. As they rightly note, there is very little reason to believe even a reform like abolition of the Stability and Growth Pact would be able to overcome the contradictions inherent in the Euro project as currently conceived, and aside from that, it is virtually inconceivable that the ruling classes of Germany, France, the Netherlands and so forth would be willing to move any further in that direction. They have already permitted the ECB to make various direct interventions to restore liquidity, they have accepted partial defaults on creditors’ terms, and they have had to substantially finance the EMU-wide bailout funds like the EFSF – all of which entails in practical terms a distribution of value from the core to the periphery. The middle classes of northern Europe are well aware of this, and are exercising strong pressure not to budge any further. A left option within the EMU is therefore for the periphery actually a more utopian possibility than the third, the option of exit.
The exit strategy is the most politically significant and the most interesting, and especially for Greece appears as the only really viable option purely from the point of view of economic development. While restoration of national fiscal and monetary power and disembedding from the EMU on the part of the periphery might be seen by some as a concession to nationalism and contrary to the international interests of the workers, it is worth considering the substantial economic historical evidence for the importance of sovereignty in achieving developmental goals.(1) Moreover, as Lapavitsas et al. make clear, there is not much choice. The various calculated scenarios of the econometricians of the troika themselves indicate that Greece will not by the current course be able to sufficiently reduce its national debts, both public and private, and the severity of the depression in the country and capital flight are further undermining the state’s tax base. The ECB cannot indefinitely keep propping it up, simply because it is not backed by a federal or united European state of which it can be the monetary-fiscal incarnation, and therefore its risk position from the point of view of transnational finance capital is relatively unstable – one major reason why the ECB’s interventions have been much more conservative than those of the Federal Reserve. More importantly, the current prospect is indefinite high unemployment, negative growth, loss of real living standards, and loss of self-determination for Greece’s working people, never mind the looming spectre of Chrysi Avyi. This cannot be allowed to go on, especially as PASOK, ND, and the ‘Democratic Left’ are by no means capable of convincing the troika of EU, IMF, and ECB to act against their own interests and pressures and let Greece off the hook.
However, as the authors make clear, there are two ways in which exit could be undertaken, and their impact would be significantly different in each case. The first is the conservative exit, which would entail a creditor-led default along the lines of the ‘haircuts’ imposed so far. The creditors would then have to accept a swap of euro-denoted debt for drachma-denoted debt, for which they will impose considerable conditions in return. The Greek small savers, pension funds, middle class small investors and the like will be hit hard, while the primary financiers of the troika will demand exemption from default in return for this manoeuvre. Greek banks would have to be recapitalized, possibly on the basis of nationalization, but managed from the outside by the troika or their comprador forces domestically (as is essentially the case now in both Greece and Italy). The northern creditors would also be hit considerably, but if the exit involves just Greece, the costs would be limited and probably surmountable. However, continued participation in the EMU structure would almost certainly entail continued or more severe austerity as precondition for a later re-entry into the euro.
The option favored by the authors instead is what they call ‘radical exit’, and this is the option which socialists within and without Greece ought to examine and discuss most seriously and earnestly. In all versions, this basically involves a unilateral declaration of default, i.e. bankruptcy, on the part of a Greek government willing to act decisively in favor of the interests of the Greek masses. There would be an enforced shift from the euro to the drachma, by unilateral declaration, and of course the necessary bank holiday and capital controls imposed upon the country to prevent bank runs and capital flight. The troika and the northern expropriators would be expropriated at a stroke, the banks nationalized under public control, and the overall debt audited as to its structure (which is not currently public knowledge) and liabilities. Such a course of action in the short term is only possible if the government is willing not just to intervene, but to intervene radically and immediately, with a clear plan. Any muddled or delayed action would worsen the situation by permitting more capital flight, steeper rises in the inevitable inflation, and worse dislocations and shocks to living standards.
It is almost certain the result would in any case be painful for the Greeks in the immediate term, with inflation, loss of lending facilities abroad, and rising costs of imports (oil, consumer goods, machine tools, and medication especially). But it would permit, as Lapavitsas et al. rightly note, an actual way out that is not permanent austerity. The restoration of national sovereignty in the political-economic sphere must be used immediately to redistribute the very unequal wealth of Greece, as it is no coincidence that the periphery nations are the poorest and the most unequal. An industrial plan must be developed to counteract unemployment, the bourgeoisie and Orthodox church seriously taxed for the first time, and the ossified political and civil society structures crushed. Depreciation can be expected to improve the ‘competitiveness’ of Greece over time, and it is a great opportunity for the modernization in productivity terms Greece has never properly undergone. The prospects for living standards in Greece would over 10 or 20 years be almost certainly considerably better than those under the current policy, and the authors use the example of Argentina’s default and state-led revival programme as analogy.
This book certainly makes a strong argument for why euro continuation is not compatible with the interests of the working people of the European periphery. However, as may be clear from the above summary, its perspective is still somewhat limited. It is in some respects still somewhat too simplistic – for example, the authors seem somewhat naive about the compatibility of the radical course with EU membership overall, handwaving this away in the sense of ‘who knows what will happen’. It seems to me such an exit would, unless shared by several countries at once, necessarily entail an exit from the EU as a whole, given the centrality the euro project now plays in it. Also, the authors do not address the political and ideological dimension adequately. Even among the Greek population there is a great reticence about the exit strategy. This is partially borne out of the real increases in wages and consumption since joining the Eurozone, fuelled considerably by the boom period’s cheap euro credit, but it is also a serious reflection of the sense that membership of the EU and its inner structures acknowledges Greece, Portugal, and similar countries as belonging to the modern, developed, and cooperative European project. Much of this is no doubt illusion, but it is a live one. The very fact that the EU to many people stands for a historically unprecedented peace between the major European states and for a guarantee of a certain formal freedom and equality – the formal equality of money – over the isolation and tyranny of Colonels and falangists cannot be ignored. Here, ideology plays an important role in holding back more radical critiques and strategies, out of fear of throwing the baby away with the bath-water. This is not a wholly unfounded fear, and any left programme of exit must address it.
Another political economic limitation is that the book’s analysis and strategic considerations do not go beyond the immediate logic of the developmental state. Indeed, much of this is no doubt intended to function as transitional demands towards a more lasting change of social formation; this is certainly true for a Marxist economist like Lapavitsas, although perhaps less so for a Keynesian like James Meadway. However this may be, the use of for example Russia’s recovery strategy after 1999 as proof of the possibility of a radical option shows the strength but also the limitation of this strategic idea. After all, how radical is Putin’s militarist, oligarchic developmental nationalism? There is little room here for at least critically discussing the traditional left critiques of nationalism and of the idealization of work, in short, the critique of productivism.
Certainly the conditions of the Eurozone and the crisis are such that the ‘development in one country’ route cannot be avoided – whatever the Trotskyist clichés may be, one must either act or not, and someone has to make the step. One could not blame Greece for a developmental nationalism in this way. But the logic of competition between nation-states under capitalism necessarily forces a contradiction between such developmental nationalism and the interests of the domestic working class, not to mention the working classes of other nations. A more thoroughgoing socialistic approach would be needed to disembed the exiting countries from these logics as well. The difficulty there is, however, that unlike China or the USSR a country like Greece or Portugal has few major resources and a small economic base to start from, and an autarkic developmental state capitalism is likely not a viable option. Here the necessity of solidarity between nations, not just in words but in actually mutually supportive political-economic strategies, is paramount; else a new Greece risks ending up a new Cuba. In saying this, I have by no means solved the strategic problem, and it is one fraught with political and economic difficulties. But in writing Crisis in the Eurozone, Lapavitsas et al. have made a major contribution to the sober and concrete consideration of the possible ways forward; it is now up to other socialist critics to join this debate.
1) See for example M. Shahid Alam’s excellent book Poverty from the Wealth of Nations (Basingstoke 2000) on this subject.
November 13, 2012
On the Rolling Jubilee
A quick comment may be appropriate on the subject of the so-called ‘rolling Jubilee’, a programme initiated by an organization calling itself Strike Debt. The purpose of this programme is to support debt relief for individuals. This follows up on the idea for a Biblical-type ‘jubilee’ of debt cancellation and nonpayment in the wake of the current crisis, one advocated for by, among others, the prominent anarchist anthropologist David Graeber and many of his followers around the Occupy movement, as well as by some of the post-Keynesian critics of the financial order, like Steve Keen. Whatever the merits or demerits of this proposal as such, the specific form of the rolling Jubilee is worth examining. The notion is here to use donated money to buy up junk debt for pennies on the dollar in the secondary market, and then instead of attempting to enforce the debt obligations, to abolish them instead. The website calls this ‘a bailout of the 99% by the 99%’, and as a fairly original and creative approach to using the financial markets for the purposes of radical politics, it has rightly garnered some attention. Read the rest of this entry »
