Occupy Wall Street and the US working class posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: capitalism, class struggle, democrats, occupy wall street, us politics, us working class, wall street

Springtime posted by Richard Seymour

The green shoots of the American Spring:  New York; Austin; New Orleans; Boston; Portland; San Francisco; Los Angeles; Sacramento; Atlantic City; Richmond; Atlanta; Seattle; Boise; Baton Rouge; Mississippi; Illinois; Detroit; Oklahoma; Kansas; ... and, of course, Madison, Wisconsin.  (And there's more where that came from.  Just google 'occupy x' where 'x' is any major US city or town).  This isn't east coast-west coast.  It isn't red state-blue state.  It isn't north-south.  It isn't Democrat-Republican, Cheech-Chong.  It's class war, the 99% against the 1%.

Coming to London next week, and worldwide.  Strike, march, occupy.  Build the new model commune!

Labels: anticapitalism, change we can believe in, commune, communism, finance capital, socialism, us politics, wall street

First we take Manhattan posted by Richard Seymour

Wall Street's famously chaste, humble bearing may not be the secret of its charm.  When you ask what is, you begin to realise what the Right has accomplished.  It has plausibly retailed something as banal as markets, and all the variations and derivatives thereof, as a libidinised field of popular (competitive) participation, the final source of all wealth/value (stock markets delivering oodles of the stuff like ducks farting out golden eggs), and, if this isn't a tautology, a genre of erotica.  The insurance company as an aphrodisiac.  Yet it had to occur to someone to give Goldman Sachs and allies something to worry about, a something from which they have thus far been protected.  Under the Obama administration, which treats the quack orthodoxies of investment bankers as technocratic panaceas, the politically dominant fraction within the US ruling class has rarely seemed more powerful and at ease.  In their home city, the banks and traders have colonised the political system to the extent that one of their own sons, Michael Bloomberg, can take office and actually run the city as a favour to them.  (Bloomberg declines remuneration for his services.)  This is 21st Century philanthropy.

On that very subject, it must be a felicitous coincidence that JP Morgan Chase donated $4.6m to the New York Police Department on the same day that the same department engaged in a mass arrest of hundreds of #OccupyWallStreet activists marooned on the Brooklyn Bridge.



"The whole world is watching," the protesters chant. No doubt. The question is whether any of those watching will take this as a cue to join the occupation in solidarity.  Admittedly it is already an over-worked reference, but there are compelling, if distant, echoes of Tahrir Square in New York (and now, I understand, financial districts in Boston, Miami, Detroit, San Francisco, etc.), in the sense of a nascent attempt to find a new model commune.  What the occupiers seek to create is both a rallying point for oppositional forces, and a model of participatory democracy that, if replicated, would give popular constituencies the ability and authority to solve their problems.  We'll come back to the model of self-government being debated in Zuccotti Park, but as far as rallying opposition forces and pricking the mediasphere goes, the occupation has been having some success. The critical moment has been the participation of the organised labour movement, with the direct involvement of transport and steel workers, and the solidarity of Tahrir Square protesters.  (A mass strike by transport workers in Egypt has just won a major victory, gaining a 200% pay rise, just months after the army outlawed strikes).  The context of which it partakes is a germinal revival of class struggle in the United States.  Doug Henwood, who initially expressed reservations about the (lack of) politics of the initiative, describes the situation as "inspiring".  This is why the initiative has been greeted with the predictable sequence of tactful silence from officials, followed by open hostility, police brutality, threatening murmurs from Bloomberg and, finally, last night's mass arrest - which I would imagine follows orders from the mayor's office. Bloomberg, you'll be relieved to know, is not exercised on behalf of multi-billionaires like himself, but those Wall Street traders on a measly $40-50k, inconvenienced by anticapitalist wildlife. 

As far I can tell, the occupation began with a deliberate strategy of having minimal concrete politics and no demands.  The idea was that the politics and tactics of the occupation would be agreed in the context of a participatory, open-ended symposium.  No doubt some of this is mired in what I would consider a destructive and caricatured anti-Leninism, but I can imagine it comes from real experiences and expresses legitimate desires.  Some participants reportedly argued that what was important was the process, not a set of demands.  The process itself, the decentralised, participatory system, should be the main 'demand' in this perspective.  "Join us," would be the slogan.  I can't imagine this approach being effective.  There was an early fear that this could mean that right-wing elements would easily take over the movement and distort its agenda, and indeed some of the Tea Party websites have been vocal in their support for the occupation.  Yet they aren't setting the agenda in New York.  The political messages vary from the extremely abstract ("Care 4 Your Country") to the bluntly specific ("End Corporate Personhood"); from the maximalist ("Smash capitalism, liberate the planet") to the broadly populist ("I am the 99%").  The best slogan I've seen is, "How do we end the deficit?  End the war, Tax the rich."  This has the virtue of being a popular demand, a concise point, and right on the money.

On the issue of populism, I see that Doug Henwood has reported some misplaced sympathy for small businesses among some of the occupiers.  Perhaps this would be a fitting moment to revive the old Stalinist/Eurocommunist idea of the "anti-monopoly alliance".  I'm not being completely sarcastic.  While the petty bourgeoisie is largely a bedrock of reaction, it can have its radical moments, especially when capitalism is wrecking the lives of small traders, shopkeepers, homeowners - as we've recently seen in Greece, where the lower middle class is overwhelmingly on the side of the working class and the left in this fight.  I'm just saying that while one wants ultimately to win people to consistently anticapitalist politics, a sort of leftist, Naderite populism opposing the 99% to the 1% (the people against the ruling class in other words) is not a terrible place to start.  The main thing is what the most organised and militant sections of the working class do - if they throw their weight behind the movement, they will probably lead politically.

But what I find most interesting is not the immediate politics, the tactics and the process - which I think tends to become an obsession - but what these say about the strategic orientations of the occupiers.  In the broad outline, there have been two major strategies for those challenging capitalism.  The reformist strategy has been the dominant one, and immense human capital and potential has been sunk into its promise.  It posits society as, above all, a body of intelligent, rational citizens who can judge capitalism as wanting by reference to standards that transcend the system itself - ethical precepts that are universal, rational and humanistic.  The influence of Kant on such thinking is well-known.  The goal is therefore firstly to mobilise people behind a community interest favouring the gradual supercession of capitalism.  This allows for a certain elitism, since it requires the dominance of those deemed most articulate, rational and intelligent in their advocacy of socialist values, as well as those most equipped to handle office.  Secondly, those people are to put their trust in parliamentary means, using the power of the executive to impose abridgments of capitalist relations.  Those advocating this strategy have differed immensely on the degree to which such an approach needs to be supplemented by industrial militancy and mass pressure.  But it is ultimately the parliament which asserts the community's interests versus capitalist interests.

The revolutionary strategy rests on a different analysis.  It judges capitalism by standards immanent to it, and raises socialism not as an abstract, supra-historical project, but as one situated within a specific historical moment - a technologically advanced, complex socialism has become possible because capitalism has created the material preconditions for it.  Its universalism is not abstract, but class-anchored; rather than the sane, adult citizenry being the repository of universal values, it is the working class that is the 'universal' class, since it has a direct interest in the abolition of capitalism and an historically produced capacity to bring it about.  Finally, it sees parliament not as an ideal democratic space in which socialist values can be elaborated and implemented with the authority of the executive at its back, but as a component of the capitalist state that is hostile to socialism.  It follows that the aim is to create alternative, working class centres of sovereignty capable of implementing democratic decisions made at the level of the rank and file.  Whether such a counter-power was to call itself a soviet, a commune or a Committee of Public Safety (as envisioned in News from Nowhere), its purpose would be to work as a rising alternative form of legitimate authority that would eventually be in a position to challenge the capitalist state.  Through a period of dual power, the working class would learn to govern itself, acquiring the skills and self-confidence it would need, resisting attempts by the state to suppress it, until it was in a position to win a majority for taking power.  This counter-power would logically centre on the process of production, but extend well beyond the workplace.  It would have its own media, its own budget, its own leisure, and its own pedagogy.  It would be the material infrastructure of the socialist order it sought to create.  This doesn't preclude parliamentary strategies, as a means of helping legitimise and even attempting to legalise extra-parliamentary power.

Where does Occupy Wall Street fit into this?  It is not my objective to pigeon-hole it as either a revolutionary or reformist strategy - it is neither, in fact.  To put it in what will sound like uncharitable terms, it is baby-steps, the experimental form of a movement in its infancy, not yet sufficiently developed theoretically or politically to be anything else.  There is a sort of loose autonomism informing its tactics, while its focus on participatory democracy is redolent of the SDS wing and the Sixties 'New Left', but it is not yet definite enough to be reducible to any dominant strategy or perspective.  It is, however, potentially the nucleus of a mass movement, and how it relates to the problems addressed by both reformists and revolutionaries now will make all the difference in the future.  At a certain point, the severity of the state's response to it will force a theoretical and political clarification on its (official or unofficial) leadership.  Recall how the high watermark of Sixties radicalism in 1968 was also the moment at which the state got serious in its repression.  This was the year in which the term "police riot" was invented to describe Chicago cops' response to protesters outside the Democratic convention, where police mercilessly assaulted protesters and bystanders alike, while students chanted "The whole world is watching".  This was the year in which the FBI murdered several black leaders.  It was in the years that followed that the movement was forced to crystalise politically, to become a much more grim undertaking - though with the unfortunate drawback that many of the leaders were drawn into the most ultra-Stalinist politics while others simply took their 'community organising' schtick into the Democratic fold.  So, I would say that if a mass movement emerges from this, the early orientation of Wall Street occupiers to the major strategic questions will make a big difference.

The very attempt to mimic Tahrir Square implies a goal of creating an oppositional, popular sovereignty - a goal also hinted at in the rhetoric about "being the change you want to see in the world".  It implies an aspiration, at this stage no more, to take and keep control of public spaces, conveniences, workplaces, government buildings, etc.  This is a good, radical development.  For the moment, it would be an improvement if they could march on a public highway without being arrested for it, and that is why it is so important that the movement spreads and enlarges.  To that end, the evidence of class-anchored analysis and tactics by the occupiers is hopeful. For example, Pham Binh reports that Occupy Wall Street won the support of the Transit Workers' Union after engaging in a solidarity actions with workers at Sothebys and the post office.  In this respect, the movement is already light years ahead of some of the early New Left trends, while the union movement is politically in a much better place than it was in, say, 1965.  As in Wisconsin, the fate of this movement will partially depend on how much it defers to the Democratic leadership.  I see no evidence of Obamamania or any other form of Democratic filiation among these occupiers.  Indeed, the movement arrives just as Obama's support is crumbling among all sectors of his base (despite the efforts of apologists such as Melissa Harris-Perry to reduce this to the carping of white liberals), and could work as an alternative pole for its scattered elements, much as the left and various fragments of Clinton's disaffected base were fused together into a movement in Seattle in 1999.  The achilles heels of the movement will inevitably be any tendency to exaggerate the suspicion toward centralism, which would tend to leave it vulnerable to repression, and also any tendency to over-state novelty as a virtue in contrast with the ideologies of the 'old left', which would leave it ideologically disarmed - as if any movement can do without the condensed learning and experiences of past generations facing similar problems.

At any rate, there is much to be said for the idea of an American Spring.  And beginning the arduous process of experimenting in self-government is not a bad way to herald its advent.

Labels: barack obama, capitalism, democrats, occupation, occupy wall street, protest, ruling class, socialist strategy, strategy, wall street

Police attack Wall Street occupation posted by Richard Seymour

Odd how you get these spaces for dissent in the US capitalist media. You rarely see anything like this in the UK:

Labels: capitalist crisis, class struggle, finance capital, police brutality, ruling class, us politics, wall street

Still not good enough, apparently posted by Richard Seymour

"The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics."

Labels: austerity, capital accumulation, capitalism, deficit, finance capital, neoliberalism, obama, profits, US imperialism, wall street

Obama: the dream dies posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: banks, obama, us politics, us working class, wall street

Then and now posted by Richard Seymour

Clinton, 1993: "You mean to tell me that the success of the economic program and my re-election hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?"

Labels: barack obama, bill clinton, capitalism, democratic party, us politics, wall street

Crisis and recovery: myths about China posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: capitalism, china, depression, obama, recession, us economy, wall street

Another Wall Street bubble, thanks to the bailout posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: banks, bubble, capitalism, federal bail-out, profits, recession, us economy, wall street

Allied turf wars posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: 'obamamania', afghanistan, barack obama, capitalism, europe, iraq, liberal imperialism, multilateralism, the liberal defense of murder, unilateralism, US imperialism, wall street, yugoslavia

The end of freedom posted by Richard Seymour

The spectacle of right-wing commentators lamenting the end of the free market and the imposition of tyrannical state socialism is ridiculous and, in its way, pathetic. It reminds one of those apologists for Southern slavery who deride Lincoln as an agent of communism on the basis of what Marx said of the Civil War. Yet, in a way, I sympathise. The feeling of one's ideological universe imploding cannot be pleasant, and must be disorienting. For what is actually happening here? In a way, bail-outs under neoliberalism are nothing new. And even as the British government moved to partially nationalise the banking system, Brown was very clear to state that the individual entities will remain private, while Darling insisted that such entities as were wholly nationalised would repay the amount spent on them in full and would be restored to the private sector. It is pitched as a pragmatic effort to stabilise the system within the terms of neoliberalism, not as a significant parting from it. But those for whom the ideologeme of the 'free market' was a living reality don't believe them and, while their distress might provide momentary amusement, there is an important sense in which they understand very well what is taking place.

A few weeks back I was at a talk by Dan Hind at the very glamorous offices of the IPPR just off the Strand. (Actually, they were rather drab and inconspicuous offices, although I hesitate to extend the same description to its permanent inhabitants - I will have a book to promote myself, you know). It was, as you would expect, about his book on The Threat to Reason, which holds that there are more dangerous forms of irrationality than spiritualism, snake oil salesmen, cults, religion and 'postmodernism'. One of which, as he pointed out, happens to be the claim that 'free markets' are hardwired into 'human nature'. Some version of this claim has implicitly underwritten the programmes of successful political parties in much of Europe and the United States for three decades - this is not to say that majorities actually believe such zaniness, but it is to point to the hegemonic status of these ideas. It is not just the pseudo-pragmatic claim that 'markets work', are the most effective delivery system for goods and services, and are superior in most respects to the state or any other conceivable collective form in which production, distribution and exchange could take place. It is much deeper than that: it is the ideological claim that human beings are naturally inclined to truck, barter and trade, and that freedom consists precisely in allowing this deep urge to be fulfilled. In some right-wing sociology, this is indeed all that human beings ever do, whether in regard to commerce, love or friendship. Unfreedom consists in every form of public life that restricts or regulates such activities, and so there must be a balance between such cessions of authority to non-market institutions (regulators, tax collectors, policemen) as are deemed necessary for markets to work and the need to obsessively contain such authority. Further to that, obstacles to that natural propensity are posed not only by monopolists but especially by trade unions and the kinds of radical anticapitalist political parties that encourage secession from the 'free market'. These are implicitly 'totalitarian' threats, and a good liberal state is one that is capable of responding effectively to them, curbing their power, and - if the threat becomes too extreme - destroying them. This is how Milton Friedman and his students became collaborators with the Pinochet regime. And it is how Friedman himself came to defend child participation in waged labour as a necessary step on the road to freedom.

The longevity of this silly and sinister dogma is not for want of effective criticism. It was skewered long ago by Karl Polanyi, who pointed out that markets in the modern, capitalist sense - so far from being the result of a natural human propensity - were created by violent government intervention. Moreover, he argued that freedom was not best protected in it, but rather that the passing of the market economy "can become the beginning of an era of unprecedented freedom", since "regulation and control can achieve freedom not only for the few, but for all". Freedom for the few entailed the freedom to exploit, to make gains radically incommensurate with one's contribution to society, to hold back innovations and prevent their being used for the wider good (such as HIV drugs). Such freedom can only be sustained in the long run by force and violence, and ultimately fascism. Liberty for the many involved limiting those freedoms claimed by the few as the only freedom worth having. It was true that such freedom as had been claimed for the market was cognate with other freedoms championed by liberalism: freedom of expression, of conscience, of association, and - of course - free labour. However, the capitalist market would leave neither of these freedoms intact were it not humanised, disciplined and regulated, and ultimately suppressed. So Naomi Klein, though brilliant, is not original in asserting that 'free markets' have an elective affinity with coercion, violence and dictatorship. Corey Robin draws on a long tradition of left-wing and progressive thought when he points out that, contrary to the common bromides of neoliberalism and 'antitotalitarianism', states are often the repositories of freedom while civil society and the market is often its enemy. And the unwillingness of so many millions of human beings to pursue their purportedly innate disposition, their curious and sometimes powerful reservations about it, has been a permanent aporia of this kind of liberalism.

But then why should such implausible doctrines not only have survived the Keynesian/state capitalist interregnum but actually come to thrive again? How could it be that a sizeable number of people have appeared to acquiesce in its basic assumptions? This reminds us that ideology is not merely (mis)reportage: if I say that the Queen is a symbol of the glorious traditions of a Christian nation, I am making an ideological claim; but if I say that the Queen is a particularly large fifth moon orbiting Omicron Persei 8, I am not. It is difficult to understand why this is if you consider a claim just in relation to its truth value. In order to understand the ideological representation of markets, one has to understand something about how markets function. One cannot neatly seperate a pro-market discourse from what it is discoursing about. This is what is important in Marx's 'ideology criticism' - far from upholding a banal dichotomy between 'essence' and 'appearance', Marx collapsed the distance between the two. They are not identical, but nor are they autonomous. As he argued in the Grundrisse, against Proudhon and his followers, social equality is precisely not just a false claim made for markets. Rather, individuals are "stipulated for each other", in the context of an exchange of equivalents, as free and equal agents. Market transactions do not express themselves as involuntary expropriation, even where that is in fact what is happening, but as voluntary engagements.

That explains the context in which the ideas of neoliberalism could even be comprehensible; the historic collapse of the postwar social democratic compromise provided the occasion for their aggressive relaunch; and the liberalisation of the stock exchange announced their hegemony. The true believers really do see the broad historical shift that is taking place. The financialisation of the economy and aggressive deregulation that neoliberalism championed is drawing to a close. This doesn't mean that such regulatory models as are introduced are likely to be to the general benefit of the population. We are not, short of a sudden upsurge in American radicalism backed up by organisational regroupment, about to see the New Deal restored. Nor does it mean that the reconstitution of class power that is about to take place will diminish finance capital as such - rather, it is likely to concentrate its power, and integrate it more closely with the state. And in fact, unless there is resistance, it is likely to be a much more authoritarian state. But for neoliberals, state intervention into the economy in itself constitutes a net contraction of the total available freedom. And this is what they think they mean by communism, or socialism, or - as in Naomi Wolf's histrionical audit of the Bush administration's recent actions - a fascist coup. These people have spent a great percentage of their adult lives believing that the alternative to a perpetual liberalisation of the markets was the restoration of serfdom. Capital and its managers were always more pragmatic: their aim was to hegemonise the state, to make it a powerful instrument of their interests, not to diminish it.

Labels: capitalism, federal bail-out, freedom, neoliberalism, socialism, wall street

Is Neoliberalism Finished? posted by Richard Seymour

According to Alexander Cockburn, citing the Financial Times' Martin Wolf, "neoliberalism has collapsed". The Telegraph reports that the Federal Reserve is considering Nordic-style nationalisations. Even New Labour is touting "socialism", albeit north of the border. The Wall Street Journal says:

On the Richter scale of government activism, the government's recent actions don't (yet) register at FDR levels. They are shrouded in technicalities and buried in a pile of new acronyms.

But something big just happened. It happened without an explicit vote by Congress. And, though the Treasury hasn't cut any checks for housing or Wall Street rescues, billions of dollars of taxpayer money were put at risk. A Republican administration, not eager to be viewed as the second coming of the Hoover administration, showed it no longer believes the market can sort out the mess.

Are the GOP really getting all Kremlinesque? Leave that to one side for a second. It seems self-evident that the whole mythology has collapsed. Neoliberalism has just not delivered the dynamism that it promised: economic growth, labour productivity and wage growth are all down on the statist-corporatist era of 1945-1970. The 'liberalisation' of financial markets has changed the property structure and increased risks while increasing global turbulence. The growing profile of the financial markets has produced record debt, insane stock market bubbles, and fraud on a massive scale, all adding to the risk in the system. (One market that has benefited dramatically from such turbulence has been securities and post-trade markets, the latter dealing with the clearing and settlement of transactions - one European settlement firm, Euroclear, had an annual turnover of $450 trillion in 2006 alone). Like previous crises such as the 1987 crash that followed swiftly from London's 1986 'Big Bang' of deregulation, there are now widespread calls for tougher regulation. Unlike in previous crises, these could be enduring. Capital and its ideologues are seriously worried.

The US economy is not only tanking, but it is dragging down the dynamic East Asian economy with it. (Although the World Bank expects China and other 'developing' countries to soften the global economic landing). The UK economy is showing worrying signs of turning purple, despite the happy face put on by the Office for National Statistics in its most recent profitability report (pdf). It looks as if the only reason for a slight rise in profit rates recently is that the figures exclude financial corporations from the accounting and include the UK Continental Shelf, which is basically the hydrocarbons producers in the North Sea. High oil prices have dramatically increased profitability in that sector to 49.8% from a mere 25% (approx) in the second quarter of last year. On the other hand, non-UKCS companies have actually experienced a decline. Overall, the combination of high energy profits and lower profits elsewhere has resulted in a slight increase in profitability of 0.1% on the last quarter. That's the happy face. Meanwhile, profits in the financial sector are falling at their fastest rate for five years. The financial services sector could slash 11,000 jobs in response to the credit crunch, the CBI says. Annual house prices are expected to fall for the first time in years, which you could argue is good from the perspective of those who haven't got a lot of money to buy a house - the trouble is that mortgage access is being drastically restricted as well: no more 100% mortgages, not for a long time. The European banking system is being seriously squeezed as the giant Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) and Deutsche Bank announce huge write-downs of debt.

Given all this, is there any sign that the political classes are making a drastic turnaround? Not really. It is true that central bankers are considering strong interventionist measures to bail out the banking system, but this just means socialising the costs and losses incurred by the system while keeping it in private hands or restoring it to the private sector when it gets profitable again. It is exactly what they have always done. I seem to recall a financial columnist claiming to be a free marketeer during the boom and a socialist when things go bust. That about sums up the attitude of the average investor. No long term transformations of orthodoxy are in evidence. For example, this is the Treasury Department's recommendations for a new regulatory system for US finance (pdf). There is noticeably no break with neoliberal orthodoxy, and in some ways it promotes further deregulation for example by reducing the power of the SEC. It seems to be intended to deal with alleged competitive disadvantages faced by Wall Street. For example, the calls for reform in settlement and clearing are obviously a response to the growing consolidation in European settlement and clearing in which the United States is purchasing a growing interest, especially since the New York Stock Exchange acquired the pan-European stock exchange Euronext. And - I simply assume - these proposals have been written in cooperation and following extensive consultation with 'industry leaders'. It has certainly been welcomed by America's leading capitalists. There is zero probability that the regulatory framework of the Glass-Steagall Act, repealed by the Clinton administration in 1999, will be resuscitated in any form; there is no plan for improved welfare or reversing long term privatisation trends; and Bush's stimulus package was "too little, too late" according to Joseph Stiglitz.

The European Union, for its part, is still pushing the agenda it decided upon in Lisbon in 2000 at the height of the dot.com boom, when it declared that thriving financial markets were the best source of a dynamic knowledge-based economy, the best way to allocate resources efficiently and thus the best way to promote the entrepreneurial spirit. Rapid deregulation was accompanied by reduced labour productivity for several years, but recent improvements are now being cited as the basis for continuing the reforms, even though it isn't evident that these have anything to do with what are temporary gains. The EU's internal competitiveness rules continue to be used to erode workers' protections and welfare systems, and the European Commission under the influence of right-wing Irish Fianna Fail politician and internal markets commissioner Charlie McCreevy - a lover of horses, markets, and all things American - is sticking to a 'non-interventionist' orthodoxy (which means intervening on behalf of investors). McCreevy's response to the Northern Rock disaster was to blame excessive transparency in the banking industry. The commissioner is currently considering a complaint by the postal firm TNT against Germany's minimum wage laws, which the company says violates fair competition rules, and at the same time lodging complaints with six EU states over the lack of competition (ie, efficient public sector monopolies) in postal services. There is of course a cleavage in European finance-capital between those who seek to create a pan-European economy with a Franco-German hub, and those Atlanticists who want to gravitate toward Washington via London. This was given recent expression by the announcement that Deutsche Boerse (the operator of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and providor of transaction services) and six other European companies that handle post-trade transactions will be setting up a joint exchange, which will exclude NYSE Euronext and the London Stock Exchange. But they all agree on the need to continue the 'liberalisation' process.

Even if the crisis deepens radically, we will not see any fundamental departures from the orthodoxy unless there is a concomitant rise in class struggle and a rapid revival in the fortunes of the global Left. Those would in principle be likely outcomes. At the moment, however, the big hope for the American liberal-left is a candidate who has done many favours for Wall Street, including voting to limit class action suits against corporations. And the other two candidates are just as bad, and nuts to boot.

Labels: financial sector, neoliberalism, recession, ruling class, us economy, wall street