‘Civil society’, in Ireland, has a sort of sterile meaning, calling to mind perhaps a round of It’s A Euro Knockout featuring Pat Cox, Fergus Finlay and some GAA manager-turned-hotelier, campaigning in favour of the latest European Treaty.

Or maybe it means a load of nicely mannered middle class people of a leftish-liberal mien attending a billionaire-funded conference, where they listen to earnest discussions of how neo-liberal economic policies are failing Ireland. They clear their throats to voice their hearty agreement with eloquence, but participants are polite enough not to draw to the attention of the assembled that the changes in policy so vigorously advocated -even if they are quite modest- require open conflict and confrontation, in the streets and in the workplaces, and not the hope of sweet reasonableness, collaborative openness and dutiful deference in engaging with those who are imposing the policies. (The idea that it might be a problem with capitalism per se, as opposed to a nasty variant of capitalism that doesn’t seem to act on what we tell it, seldom goes down too well at these occasions)

Many people will not be familiar with Gramsci’s conception of civil society, which is what a lot of people notionally on the left hint at when they say things like ‘Congress is the largest civil society organisation on the island of Ireland’. (And the neat differentiation between ‘State’ and ‘civil society’ that such a claim entails means we can leave to one side the question of just how much unions form part of the State). For most people, I suspect, ‘civil society’ just means ordinary people, neither government officials nor politicians, ‘civil’ with a hint of the sense of being unthreatening and accommodating, with jovial handshakes and dinner dances. Which is not really what Gramsci had in mind.

The reason I mention this, more as a lengthy translation note than anything else, is that the writer below, Rosa Cobo, says that the hour of civil society has arrived, and I would not want this to be translated as the hour of Blair Horan, Feargal Quinn and Angela Kerins.

Originally published in Público.

The Hour of Civil Society

The big problem in our country is not just that the right wing has gained a grip on the majority of institutional power or that it has decided to monopolise public television news in an antidemocratic swoop. The problem deep down is that the world’s right wing is using the economic crisis as an excuse to pare down social rights and cut back or eliminate policies of social welfare. This is not merely another crisis of capitalism but a new strategy of the economic and political right wing to eliminate welfare states and prevent countries which do not have them from being able to create similar models. We are not faced with an economic crisis like previous ones, but a change in the economic and social model that puts an end to Keynesian policies of redistribution and advances a shrinking of the state as an instrument for regulating the market and as a guarantor of social rights. Economic globalisation, new information technologies and the economic crisis are being skilfully exploited by capitalism in order to do away with social and economic rights that it agreed upon after the Second World War with the labour movement and which gave rise in Europe to welfare states. The results of this operation by capitalism and the political right wing that represents it have been on display for years: poverty wages become more widespread, as does informal work, unregulated contracts, part time work, and, moreover, poverty and survival jobs are feminised. And all this accompanied by widespread drops in wages for more than a decade and a lengthening of the working day. As if this were not enough, this reconversion of Keynesian capitalism into neoliberal capitalism is expelling millions of people from the labour market and widening the abyss of inequality.

But this is not the only problem. There is another one that we need to reflect on. And that is that the right wing is conducting an ideological offensive that is so effective and solidly articulated that it has managed to demobilise a large part of public opinion. So much so that neoliberal economic policies have invaded our lives and our heads to the point that even progressives accept ideological approaches from neoliberal discourse and argue for them as if they were processes for rationalising our networks for social well-being. Ultraconservative and neoliberal discourse has contaminated our way of analysing reality to the point that social mobilisations and strikes are presented to public opinion as if they were actions bordering on terrorism. The delegitimisation of social conflict is the resounding proof of the successful ideological offensive of the right. As if this were not enough, these policies are being shown to public opinion as if they were irreversible. And, nonetheless, we know that there is nothing irreversible in history.

Meanwhile, social democracy has proven spineless in its criticisms of neoliberal capitalism and has been incapable of offering an alternative for society that is qualitatively different from that of the right. And elsewhere, the most radical left has not been able to convince public opinion that its political proposals protect the weakest sectors of society and the middle classes. Faced with a panorama so inimical to the interests of broad sectors of society a rapid and effective collective response is needed. And for this we must organise ourselves peacefully and actively in civil society. We must put forward reasons and arguments so as to unmask a discourse and a practice that are leading us to a rise in inequality and the abandoning of millions of people to their fate. In moments such as these, civil society configures itself as a motor for social change. A plural civil society, with many voices, marked by a diversity of interests and ideological emphases, but which left parties are obliged to listen to. Now, plurality must not be an obstacle for articulating a minimum set of demands that confronts the perverse policies that serve the market and impoverish wide sectors of society. We must go on the ideological offensive and engage in rational combat, always peacefully, with proposals and reasoning, against the discourses and the policies that are leading us into a rise in inequality. It is a question of articulating a collective response that lays manifest that neoliberalism is not the end of histoty and that another history is possible. This is the hour of civil society.

 

Translation of a piece by Sofía Balmont, found on constituyentes.org

Let’s get out of the cage

Learned defencelessness

We have seen what happens when we give a dog enclosed in a cage a reward every time he behaves as he is supposed to, or if we reward him at fixed intervals or variable ones, or if we never reward him or if we stop his punishment when he does what we want. In every case the dog will learn that his behaviour has a consequence or even a lack of consequence, which he will learn to foresee after a brief period of apprenticeship. And his mental and emotional health will remain within the limits of what is healthy.

But what happens if, regardless of what the dog does, we always punish him? A cage with an electrified floor grille. A dog locked inside. A series of shocks repeated at variable intervals, indefinitely, and nothing the dog does brings an end to the punishment. At first the dog will develop a frenetic activity, doing everything a dog can do within a cage in the hope that luck combined with his efforts will result in the behaviour that frees him from the torture: lifting his front left paw, his right paw, barking, jumping, wagging his tail…

Whatever the hell it is that meets the experimenter-torturer’s fancy so that the shocks end once and for all. But it is all useless. Whatever he does the shocks continue, rhythmically, mercilessly, endlessly. The dog ends up collapsing in a corner and doing nothing. He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t bark. He doesn’t complain. He doesn’t struggle. He puts up with shock after shock undisturbed. He is ill. He suffers from learned defencelessness.

I first listened to this basic lesson of psychology  20 years ago. I had nearly forgotten it.

Are you a good citizen? A good worker? A good parent? A good neighbour? Do you respect the rules? Do you pay your taxes? Are you honest with other people? And with yourself? Do you act according to your conscience? Do you believe in the system? Or perhaps you don’t believe in it? Have you done what they have told you to do since you were a child in order to live quietly and honestly? Have you studied? Have you done exams? Have you done a Master’s? Can  you speak languages? Have you worked hard since you were young? Do you get up every morning and work all day every day in order to contribute something to society? Do you pay your bills if you can still pay them? Did you vote for the right-wing? Did you vote for the left-wing? Do you not vote?…It makes no difference. Do you not have the feeling that, whatever your answers to these questions, it makes no difference?

That maybe they will bring down your salary again and again, or they’ll sack you, or you’ll be left without a home, or you’ll be suffocated with debts, or you will see no future for your children.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a civil servant, a construction worker, self employed, immigrant, from a village, from the city, old, young, man or woman. It doesn’t matter if you put effort into what you do, if you believe in it, if you expect a reward…there will be no reward. Or to put it better: the reward will not come from the person who keeps you locked in a cage with an electrified floor grille. He has decided that now it’s time for indiscriminate shocks and learned defencelessness.

But I’m going to tell you a secret. The cage has a door. All cages have one. Inside the cage the shocks will never end but outside there is clean air, solid ground, fresh food and other mistreated dogs with whom, after gagging and bounding the experimenter-torturer, you can build a world without cages. It is simply a matter of abandoning the corner we have curled up in, plunged in despair, and understanding that the only way out is beyond the bars and the lock.

I heard this basic psychology lesson twenty years ago for the first time. And I had nearly forgotten it..with all its importance.

 

This is a translation of a piece by Vicenç Navarro on the specific interests in operation behind Germany’s present drive for austerity in peripheral countries. (I have to admit, the ‘Gipsy’ acronym is a new one on me, but it does exist: there is a Centre for European Policy Studies paper by Daniel Gros entitled Adjustment Difficulties in the GIPSY Club – ‘Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and ItalY’) I am not sure I share his contention that the likely outcome of Germany's insistence on austerity for the periphery will be the disappearance of the European Union. Rather, I think that if things carry on in the way he describes, we will see a political union of authoritarian kleptocratic oligarchies that still goes under the name of the European Union, but stripped of any of the let's-all-be-friends pastel propaganda that sugar-coated the European Union in bygone days.

A brief note on the nationalisms –German and anti-German- cited by Navarro in his article. There is an article in the Irish Times today by commentator John Waters, which, with characteristic aloofnesss and preposterousness, makes reference to ‘the Germans, who have now managed to dispense with the thin veneer of democracy that previously graced the EU’.

This is a good example of how the logic of the European Union, in its current form, exerts a kind of centrifugal force that generates and bolsters facile reactionary nationalism. We might ask, if we were to take Waters seriously: which Germans have dispensed with democracy? The '8 million people in Germany (who) now work for an hourly wage of less than €9.15', or the '1.4 million' who receive 'less than €5 per hour'?

And even if we were to commit the habitual barbarism of taking ‘the Germans’ to mean ‘German elected representatives’, and ‘democracy’ to mean ‘representative democracy’, which is what it normally means in Ireland, how does the accusation of dispensing with democracy tally, for instance, with the failure of the German parliament to ratify the Fiscal Treaty? This is not to claim that Germany is some sort of exemplary democracy, but it is worth pointing out that the coarsening ignorance of such remarks, when widely broadcast, have an impoverishing effect on public political discourse.

The nature of the EU crisis makes it easier to speak casually of ‘the Irish’, ‘the Germans’, and ‘the Greeks’ and so on, glossing over conflicts within member states and obscuring common interests held by populations across member states. Among other things, speaking in this way is a handy way of denying that the capitalist system is in crisis, with its ready-made vocabulary for simplifying a crisis of sprawling complexity to a question of mere incompatibility between national caricatures.

From the point of view of ruling elites, this simplification is a handy tool for steamrollering awkward questions about democratic failure and for disciplining the population. Consider, for example, Labour Party minister Ruairi Quinn’s claim, in the early days of the first Greek bailout, that ‘we’ (i.e. ‘the Irish’) “instead of learning to behave like Germans we continued to act like Italians, or should I say Greeks”.  

It is also an important factor in socialising guilt for the financial crisis: ‘we’ –on account of some essential national characteristic (land hunger, residential property lust, congenital immaturity, ginger hair)- behaved badly; therefore ‘we’ deserve to be punished, both through the withdrawal of wages and public services, and through the imposed burden of private debt, which, if ‘we’ had been more careful, would not have befallen ‘us’.  

What they don't say about why Merkel still clings to austerity policies

The austerity policies that the German government led by Chancellor Angela Merkel is imposing on the peripheral Eurozone countries, called Gipsy in the Anglo-Saxon world, is driving them to a disaster (there is no other way of defining it). A large number of economists have been emphasising this fact (though this number has been very low in Spain), showing that the great recession that these countries are suffering is primarily due to these austerity policies. The reality is that the spreading of this disaster can even affect the German economy itself. One way would be by making it impossible for the peripheral countries to pay their debts, public and private, to German banks. It was the Finance Minister of the Merkel government himself who warned that the collapse of the Greek economy and its exit from the euro would have a very negative effect on the European financial system, centred on the German banking sector.

In actuality, a key objective of the austerity policies imposed by the Merkel administration on peripheral countries and their governments is to force them to pay what they owe to German banks. If these austerity policies are continued, the German banking system itself can be affected very negatively. This reality is ignored by those mainstream media columnists who, somewhat frivolously, claim that the Merkel government wants to ‘expel’ Greece from the euro.

Now, the persistence with austerity policies, despite the risk it poses to the German banking sector, also brings it great benefits. That is, the enormous crisis of peripheral countries is benefitting the German banking sector and the German State which, under the Merkel government is heavily influenced, not only by the banking sector, but also by the German industrial exporting sectors that are increasingly exporting to countries outside the Eurozone. Thus, German State bonds, in light of the deep crisis of confidence in the markets (assisted by the policies of the ECB which contribute to this lack of confidence, with the consequent rise in interest rates for public debt), become a safe investment, highly in demand. Thus there exists a flow of capital towards the German financial system, as a result of the crisis in the peripheral Eurozone countries.

Something similar is happening in the industrial sector. As German economist Frank Hoffer indicates, the decline in the automobile industry in peripheral countries, as with Fiat, positively affects the German automobile industry, as with Volkswagen. Hence austerity policies contribute to the immense dominance of German financial and industrial capital and the German State, which, in the long term, will have a high political cost, since this domination is being established at the cost of the other countries that are resisting these impositions. The case of Greece is an example of this. From this comes the rebirth of nationalisms, both German and anti-German, which can break up the European Union itself. It is not the viability of the euro but the viability of the European Union that is being called into question by these austerity policies, since the promotion of these policies is very quickly diluting the culture of European cohesion (which was always very limited), and replacing it with the culture of nationalisms that led to the First and Second World Wars, which the European Union sought to prevent.

Hence German figures who have shown their commitment to the European project, such as the former Chancellors Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl, have criticised the German Chancellor for placing German business interests above the European project, to the point that they can destroy it. There will be no World War III, but what could happen is that the European Union and not only the euro might disappear. But it would not be the disappearance of the euro (contrary to what is said, its survival is not in danger) that would destroy the European Union, but the disappearance of the European Union that would bring about the disappearance of the euro.

This is a translation of a piece by Vicenç Navarro, originally published on the 11th of May. One wonders whether Navarro has still too benign an opinion of Draghi’s artistic tastes.

Mario Draghi, Dalí, and the future of Europe

 

The President of the European Central Bank, Mr Mario Draghi, during his visit to Barcelona for the meeting of the Bank’s governing council, made certain declarations to ingratiate himself with Catalonia, referring to Dalí as an inspiration for the Europe that was being established in our continent. And Catalonia’s mass media (the majority of which is conservative in persuasion), apparently flattered by such a declaration, published these declarations with implicit applause.

I have to assume that Mr Draghi’s observation about Dalí was the result of ignorance, since were this not the case his declarations would be enormously alarming. Dalí was a fanatical defender of Spanish fascism. Although Dalí’s fascist sympathies are known in artistic circles where rigour ensures credibility (see the excellent biography of this painter written by Ian Gibson, The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí, Faber and Faber 1997), they are practically unknown to the majority of the general public. The conservative forces that dominate the majority of mass media in Spain have kept this dimension to Dalí quiet. His known relationship with the dictatorship in power in Spain is trivialised by attributing his closeness to the dictator to his desire to avoid paying taxes and to hide his great wealth, a widespread practice, even today, among the Catalan bourgeoisie. According to this version, Dalí tried to be on good terms with power in order to avoid the exchequer of the Spanish state. And given that all rich people did it, there was nothing to reproach Dalí for.

But his identification with the dictatorship was much more intense and profound than what is broadcast in the media. Dalí never helped the Republican government during or after the fascist military coup. As Ian Gibson points out, Dalí wrote positively about José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange, the Spanish fascist party. And in his speeches he used the fascist narrative, attributing to Spain an imperialist mission as the inspirer of a new civilisation. He supported the alliance of Franco with Hitler and Mussolini against the allies, and shared an admiration towards these figures as a brake on international Bolshevism. Profoundly antisemitic, he praised the historic function of Christianity, claiming that all art ought to be based on this religion. Close to a Spanish Catholic Church that had clear fascist sympathies, and to the Vatican of Pio XII, Dalí defended the dictator from criticism and contempt expressed by the majority of the international artistic community towards this figure, becoming his highest defender, a defence that reached sickening levels when, months before his death, the dictator signed the death sentence for five political prisoners who were members of the antifascist resistance. Dalí defended and applauded the execution of the five antifascists, claiming that in reality, Franco (whom at that moment he had defined as one of the greatest Spanish people ever to have existed) ought to have shot many more. Professor Malefakis of Columbia University in New York, and an expert on Fascism in Europe, has documented the level of cruelty of that regime, emphasising that for every murder committed by Mussolini, Franco carried out ten thousand. That dictator was the Spaniard who killed more Spanish people (and more democrats) in the history of Spain. One should not be surprised, then, that Dalí, at the end of the dictatorship, should have fleed Spain. A bomb was even discovered under his seat in the restaurant he used to visit.

One imagines Draghi, the President of the European Central Bank, was not aware of these facts, and shared the idealisation of Dalí that also exists in our country. (Only a few months ago, the biggest theatre in Barcelona –the Liceo- dedicated an entire opera to him, and Cadaqués, where the Catalan bourgeoisie goes on summer holidays, has a statue of Dalí in its main square). To correct his ignorance, I have sent Mr Draghi Ian Gibson’s book on Dalí. It would be desirable for him to read it since the policies the European Central Bank is imposing (and I say imposing because none of the austerity policies that the governments, including the Spanish government, are implementing in response to the pressure of the ECB, appeared in any electoral programme) are stimulating the appearance of fascism in the European Union. The harshness of its austerity policies and its hostility towards the working class, with its insistence on lowering wages and eliminating social protection (in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Mr Draghi said that the European social model was finished), is helping to create the type of Europe that Dalí desired and admired. The enormous desperation and pain that these policies are creating has generated a hostility towards European establishments, including the financial system headed by the European Central Bank, which, if it is not channelled through progressive and democratic forces, can end up in fascism for which the ECB, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund (the biggest instigators of these policies) will be responsible. The case of France is but one example.

This weekend will see mobilisations in the Spanish State and beyond (there will be a demonstration in Dublin, at the Spire on Saturday at 2pm) one year on from the 15th May demonstrations that gave birth to what is now referred to as 15-M. I will try and write a couple of pieces from my own viewpoint this week.

But first of all, a translation of a piece by John Brown on the current moment of electoral upheaval in France and Greece, and the relevance of 12-M in this regard.

France and Greece. 2 elections, no decision.

Yesterday, in two European countries, one big and powerful and the other smaller and more marginal in terms of continental power, electoral consultations took place. In the big country, once again the solemn drivel of the politics of representation was heard, with two candidates outdoing each other in ridiculousness, speaking in the name of “the French” and shamelessly emitting phrases like “the French want”, “the French think” etc. The big hexagonal country is an old centre of European power. It is being hit by the crisis but, for the moment, this has not turned into the social disaster that the countries of Southern Europe have encountered, especially the smallest and most marginal of them, Greece. Hence, it is still possible to play at representation, at a game of mirrors between right and left in which the different components of capitalist rule decide whether to give greater importance to the market or the State, to equality or freedom of enterprise. All within a splendid continuity between the two poles of a system which is never questioned according to these categories, because they are part of it. Whoever thinks that a capitalist regime is called into question by reinforcing the State or improving juridical equality between citizens ignores the fact that the generalised market that is characteristic of capitalism is the product of statist activity, and that equality of contract is the basic condition for the existence of the market. As Michel Foucault reminded Chomsky in their memorable Dutch television debate in 1971, a regime cannot be fought according to its own concepts and values.

Hence, the representative left can only represent, at best, a working class that forms part of the framework of capitalism, of its specific mode of distribution of wealth. Its role in class struggle is pure mystification, of hiding the antagonisms behind the common values of the system presented as “democratic” values or “values of the Republic” with the pompous voice used to proclaim big lies.

In the powerful hexagon, the presidential elections have been won, via a small margin of difference over the outgoing president, by François Hollande, a leader of the Socialist Party who set forth a programme that was moderately critical of austerity policies and who proclaimed his desire to modify the European Stability Pact. What he proposes, instead of austerity, is “growth”. Hollande will probably not take long in going back on his promises and returning to the ‘realism’ that consists of accepting austerity and cutbacks, perhaps in the name of growth. In France there is still a margin for lying with some success and also for cutting public spending and salaries. As long as this margin exists it will still be possible to have the puppet show of the two candidates, on the right and left, with their “populist” acolytes on the right and left who, between State and market, bring a third character into the farce: the people (pueblo). This people that irrupts as the Other of the market in the left discourse of Mélenchon or the Other of the State in the semifascist populism of Le Pen’s daughter. As if the people were not the unification by the State and in the State of the disperse agents of the market. Populisms are not a way out of the labyrinth of mirrors of representative politics in which an outside space simply does not exist, nowhere beyond representation that is not mere “terrorist” criminality, and even this is a mystified exterior, a false exterior entirely designated by power and from it. The class struggle cannot be represented, only those mirrors in which the false antagonism between State and market, between the people of the left and the guardian people of nattional essences, is reflected. As in the final scene of the film The Lady from Shanghai by Orson Welles, the protagonists shoot against their images in a labyrinth of mirrors and by shooting at their own image they kill the other.

Capitalism with a liberal flavour kills capitalism with a socialist flavour or vice versa. Meanwhile, they trot out the fascist bogeyman, previously fed via a studied State xenophobia so that the majority options, which are respectable and not ‘populist’, can present the most brutal policies as a ‘lesser evil’..by comparison with what would happen if the fascists were to win. The existence of a fascist bloc allows the parties of the regime to be fascists themselves through accusing the ‘populists’ on the extreme right of being so. Good cop bad cop.

Greece had elections yesterday too, but their course and their results are very different to those of France. The officialist (oficialista) European press has presented the results of the Greek elections as a strong advance for the ‘radical’ left and a reversal for the two big protagonists of Greek bipartidism, the socialists of Pasok and the right-wing Nea Dimokratia. However, something even more serious has occured: it has been shown that, once it gets to a certain point, democratic representation of neoliberal capitalism becomes impossible. The two big parties who defend austerity and the payment of the debt, Pasok and ND only enjoy under 33% of the votes: the rest of the forces represented in the Greek parliament are, by contrast, radically hostile to these policies which are driving the country into ruin and impoverishing the popular classes and the middle layers. This has not prevented the regime from doing everything possible in order to stop the Greek citizens from expressing their discontent: not only was it not possible to consult the population about the austerity measures in a referendum (the mere attempt at doing so cost Papandreou his job), but, in order to prevent the expression of minority positions, the minimum percentage for obtaining deputies was raised from 3% to 5% of the vote, which meant in the latest elections excluding 19% of the electorate, a percentage of votes greater than that obtained by Nea Dimokratia, the party that received the most votes. Not only this: the bonus for the party that won the most votes was raised just before the elections to 50 seats, so that Nea Dimokratia with 18.9% (just 2% more votes than Syriza, the left coalition that got 16.8%) receives, thanks to this generous ‘gift’, 108 deputies compared to Syriza’s 52. This blatant legal rigging, which was intended to guarantee ‘governability’ and allow a government of ‘national salvation’ made up of Nea Dimokratia and Pasok, the minority parties that represent the politics of austerity against which the voters expressed themselves clearly and resoundingly, was almost successful. The final results have not allowed for this solution, since not even with this legal electoral fraud could the parties of the “mnimonio” (the memorandum on austerity policies imposed by the European Commission, the ECB and the IMF) reach an absolute majority. Austerity becomes unenforceable by democratic means. This is the big difference between Greece and France. In Greece, with yesterday’s results it will be near impossible to form a government since, although Syriza has obtained an excellent result, it will be impossible for it to get sufficient support. The Communist Party, which already opposed unified lists with the ‘social democrats’ of Syriza because they were too ‘Europeanist’ will not accept any kind of post-electoral coalition. Elsewhere, a cartoonish but terrible Far Right, Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) has entered parliament with policies that oppose immigration policies but also those of the “Junta” (the hispanic name used in Greece for the dictatorship of the colonels) of the “mnimonio” (memorandum). The function of this formation is for the moment similar to that of Marine Le Pen in France and that of other far rights: to enable the neoliberal and xenophobic radicalisation of the majority parties that can present fascism as a “greater evil”, even though their militias are already on the streets acting against immigrants…

The elections that ought to have served to give legitimacy to the rule of financial capital through austerity and the payment of the debt have not achieved this objective in Greece. Austerity and debt are today unrepresentable, and so too is the resistance of the multitude against these policies. The mirrors have broken conclusively, although it is possible that there may be some playing with that large splinter that the far right constitutes. In the coming days anything can happen: if there is no majority to support the rescue plan and the imposed austerity measures that come with it, there could quickly arise a suspension of funding from Europe and the IMF and a suspension of payments by Greece. It is very likely too that the country will have to leave the euro, with the attendant repercussions on the other weakened countries (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland etc.) and on the zone as a whole. Greece today finds itself in a situation that recalls Germany in the 1940s. The causes are similar: Weimar Germany was destroyed by the payment of a brutal war debt imposed by the victors of the first world war. Keynes had already warned the war reparations commission of the disastrous consequences of this policy. Against the impossibility of a revolution due among other things to the deep division of the lefts and the sectarianism of the German Communist Party, an ugly and resentful little boor, as ridiculous as the leaders of Chrisí Avgi, ended up taking power. We know the rest of the story.

At this moment, only a powerful reaction at a European level against the policies of austerity can prevent the return of barbarism from our continent. We need a Europe that is a true space of productive co-operation for the multitude, a space of democracy and freedom and not a mere odious debt recovery agency managed by an oligarchy and a racist immigration policy. Not every country can allow itself the spectacle of the great “republican” puppet show that France enjoys; they can’t even do it within France. Greece shows us that social domination through debt cannot be represented democratically. To preserve democracy, it is urgent to put an end to economic policies that hide less and less their character of true political domination. This, however, cannot be done within the frame of the nation-States: the sovereignist nostalgia represented by fascism and to a certain extent by the ‘populisms’ is today a trap. It is only at a European level that there can be solutions to problems that moved away from the national level some time ago. By shutting ourselves into “our” States we will find ourselves with a capitalist rule that is ever more brutal and we will be ever more incapable of confronting it. Another European construction is necessary and urgent. The 12M will be much more decisive to this end than the elections of the 6th of May.

Translation (‘The 1% sacrifices our rights to save their privileges. THEY ARE LIVING BEYOND OUR MEANS’). Poster from social movement Juventud Sin Futuro (Youth without Future).

The ECB’s Governing Council is currently meeting in Barcelona. Here is a picture of them, from their website, so you can see how much they look like other people in Europe, especially women.

The increasingly authoritarian Spanish government, on account of the ECB’s visit, and mindful of the increasingly widespread awareness that the ECB is indeed operating as an Executive Committee of the Bourgeoisie, has suspended the Schengen agreement, providing a timely illustration that the primary freedom accorded by European Union member states is the free movement of capital, followed by the freedom of capital to move labour.

There will be protests (and, if the immediate history of protest in Barcelona is anything to go by, there will be agents provocateurs).

Translation:

WE DON’T CARE

3M ECB SUMMIT

WHATEVER YOU DO

WE WILL PUT AN END TO

YOU

Below is a translation of a letter of accusation made by the Assamblea de Treballadors/es en atur de Barcelona i la Coordinadora d’assambleas i co.lectius de Treballadors/es en atur de Catalunya – the Barcelona Unemployed Workers’ Assembly and the Collective Unemployed Workers’ Assemblies of Catalonia, which is circulating widely on social networks.

We, the unemployed, accuse you of the poverty that strikes 115 million people in Europe, of the rampant unemployment which threatens to rise above 6 million in the Spanish State and which reaches 25 million in Europe; of the cuts to social, labour and citizen rights that place under risk the health and the lives of the majority; of ruining the education system and of the policies that narrow the access of the sons and daughters of the people to university; of shredding rights to self-determination, of degrading democracy, and of threatening civil liberties under the growing shadow of an authoritarian State; of imposing your technocrat cronies, seasoned amid the sewers of financial speculation, onto the rule of nations.

You behave like little gods by virtue of your so-called independence, in deciding day after day the present and future of the 99% of the citizens. Today you turn on the tap of credit and tomorrow you turn it off, so as to put pressure on governments and oblige them into applying the policies of adjustment and cutbacks in social spending. But in reality you are the servants of the banks and speculators, who have promoted you to the job, and to whom you guarantee the repayment of their loans.

You believe you are wise men, but in reality you are fools who do not learn the lessons of economic history, drugged as you are by neoliberal ideology. So blind are you that your obedience to “price stability” and your contempt for full employment are driving Europe into depression and collapse.

You are meeting these days in Barcelona, a city whose inhabitants consider you “personae non gratae”, and so you will be surrounded by a colossal police detail organised by your servile governments of Spain and Catalonia.

None of this will free you from judgement for your odious acts. The people, as on other occasions, will bring down the gods, and sooner or later you will have your Nuremburg.

Listen to the voice of the suffering people, change your policies radically, end your paranoia over social spending and deficit reduction, and put the wealth of the elites at the service of social rights and full employment. If you do not dare, at least have the dignity to resign and dissolve.

One of the things you might notice, with regard to the Stability Treaty referendum campaign in Ireland, is the way the issue is presented as a purely Irish affair.

To a certain degree this is an outcome of the nature of a constitutional referendum: it falls on those people living in Ireland who live in the Republic and who fall under the category of Irish citizen to vote on whether or not the treaty should be ratified. Thus, however scrupulous the rules regarding media coverage in terms of equal airtime given to proponents of either side of the argument, there are certain political considerations systematically left out.

For one: does the opinion of those people living in Ireland who do not hold the status of Irish citizen count for anything? In terms of how the referendum is presented to us, and in keeping with the overwhelming tendency in Irish political discourse, it does not, even though many of these people are likely to be those worst affected by the regime established by the Treaty.

Two, the Irish citizens defined as being able to choose between the two options are impelled to weigh up their considerations, through the media coverage, in terms of what is ‘best for Ireland’, or what is ‘best for the State’, with all the polymorphous vagueness that that term entails in the context of Irish political discourse. It is worth bearing in mind here that the underpinning logic here is largely the same logic formalised and enforced by the EU Economic governance “Six-Pack” – the standardisation of rules on deficits, public debt, and public expenditure and so on, enforced from above by the European Commission, which the Stability Treaty seeks to constitutionalise. Whilst these rules give the impression of a collaborative undertaking, in reality they amount to a race to the bottom, in terms of wages and labour rights and concessions afforded to speculative investment; a downward convergence based on competition between states, under the primacy of finance capital, not solidarity across the different peoples who live within the borders of the European Union. The question of ‘what is best for Ireland’, then, assumes all this as naturally existing fact.

Three, following on from the previous consideration, the question of ‘what is best for Ireland’ as it is presented effaces any question of class antagonisms within Ireland, and places in its stead the notion of the ‘national interest’. So, for instance, when David Begg –hardly a fire-breathing radical- announced to the Labour Party conference that European solidarity was a defunct concept since places like Greece and Ireland had now become living laboratories for neo-liberal experimentation, the response of Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore, when questioned about this on an RTE current affairs programme, responded that the referendum was not about the interests of any particular group, but the national interest. At least Gilmore is consistent: recall his campaign phrase of ‘One Ireland – of employer and employee’. Moreover, Labour’s referendum campaign has produced posters with an image of a resplendent tricolour dominating the poster and the word ‘Labour’ as a miserable afterthought on the bottom right hand side.

You do not need to be a semiotician to work out what is being said with this image. Thus one of the effects of the referendum campaign has been the mobilisation of nationalist sentiment so as to win consent for neo-liberal punishment. This right-wing nationalist lurch in the Irish context is mirrored elsewhere in Europe. As Costas Douzinas notes of Greece in today’s Guardian, ‘Part of this picture – its most worrying aspect – is the rush to the right by mainstream politicians who, imitating Sarkozy, compete to display their nationalist credentials.’ This form of campaigning will have a grievous effect on the political atmosphere in Ireland: the erosion of labour rights set in train by the Treaty regime will be replaced by claims laid to entitlements as Irish ‘citizens’ to the exclusion of such entitlements for other people –whether guaranteed by political, social or labour rights. Witness, for example, the recent report in the Irish Examiner where ‘Southern regional president of the SVP Brendan Dempsey said he believes there is an unwritten policy to urge homeless EU migrant workers to go back to their homelands’. The scene is set for the punitive character of social welfare policies to be intensified, and along with it, a more generalised racist backlash.

Four, general awareness of life in other European countries is kept to a minimum by the way European politics is mediated. People are not inclined to care much about what goes on –in terms of people’s daily lives, their history, their culture- even in those countries geographically closer to Ireland. Whenever European politics is reported, it is nearly always in terms of crude caricature, and through the prism of the challenges faced by European leaders –the counterparts of the Irish ones- in disregarding the needs and desires of the people they are supposed to represent, or, as the media puts it, ‘the hard work of convincing their electorates’. This is in spite of the fact that there are plenty of people originally from other European countries living in Ireland whose lives form part of the fabric of Irish society. Thus there is practically zero importance afforded to the consideration of what it might mean to think about voting in the referendum on account of a common bond with people living in other European countries. If anything, it is actively discouraged.

Five, the referendum campaign, I fear, obscures rather than casts light on what is actually going on in Europe at the moment. Certainly it naturalises certain things that might otherwise be open to political discussion as faits accomplis: the ramifications of the six pack, for instance, were never subjected to any scrutiny whatsoever in terms of their impact on life for the majority of people in Ireland, or whether such things were desirable. And the debate over whether it is appropriate to bind parliaments to meet a particular set of GDP related targets has obscured entirely the fact that GDP, as an economic measure, largely serves the business class in that it excludes all manner of productive activities (for instance, raising children, domestic work) from consideration with regard to economic policy and includes all manner of unproductive, even destructive ones, for instance, those activities associated with asset price speculation. But most importantly, I feel, it suspends any sense that what is happening right now, while this campaign is underway, is an enormously destructive phase of European capitalism in which all manner of anti-democratic measures are being introduced and rights are curtailed, under the guises of ‘reform’, and ‘stability’.

As the translated article below, by Boaventura de Sousa Santos writing from the point of view of Portugal points out, time is of the essence in activating resistance to the ‘post-socialdemocratic order’ being imposed. A ‘No’ vote would be an essential component of such a resistance, but it has to come with a widening of the political imagination, an awareness of the need for new alliances to be formed, and consciousness of what he names as PREC – the politics of the ongoing bailout, which I think is the frame in which we should perceive the narrowing of the referendum debate down to the question of “where are we going to get the money from?”

The critical sociology of the catastrophe

There is no European consensus about the fiscal policies or the austerity programmes underway. What there is, however, is a consensus of the right-wing and an ongoing inability of the European lefts to present a credible alternative at the level of each country. As long as this goes on, time is the most uncertain and the most decisive factor in the resolution of the European crisis.

The more it passes, the more we will see a consolidation of the new post-socialdemocratic order thought out long before the crisis and which the right-wing now wants to impose and consolidate over the coming decades. The new order is a heaven for finance capital, a purgatory (this time without an ecclesial blessing) for productive capital and a hell for the immense majority of citizens, a catastrophe for life expectations that until now appeared reasonable and deserved. The catastrophe is being administered in supposedly homeopathic doses so that the paralysis of alternatives lasts more time (today, a cutback, tomorrow a rise in the price of water and energy, the day after, the closure of a service). What can be done to shorten this time?

1.      Know where we are headed. The end of convergence is underway. The plan A of the politics of the ongoing bailout (PREC) [In the translated Spanish version ‘política de rescate en curso’] consists of creating the conditions so that the countries in difficulty return to the ‘normality of the markets’. This is only possible at the cost of more wage reductions, more cuts to public spending and the subjection of these countries to a non-negotiable discipline that compromises and empties out their sovereignty. Thus there is a consolidation of a  duality between developed and less developed countries in Europe’s interior. Portugal, Greece, Ireland and (perhaps?) Spain will be the Mexico of Europe. If we do not want this Europe, it is urgent to struggle for this to come to an end.

2.      PREC can only produce two results: more PREC or expulsion from the euro. News reports and blogs on financial funds predict (they know, because they are the ones who realise the predictions) that, as with Greece, the first bailout is followed by a second one with greater restrictions, more austerity and a certain restructuring of creditor debt. This means that Portugal could be under guardianship for several more years (until 2018?) and, shold this be the case, an entire generation will have lived under a colonial regime disguised as democracy, but controlled, in practice, by a regal firm, Goldman Sachs. If, however, plan A does not work, there is plan B: expulsion from the euro or a solution that produces the same effect. This is something that is already being spoken of as regards Greece. If plan A is devastating for our aspirations as a European country, expulsion from the euro would be no less so due to the conditions in which it would occur, after PREC has destroyed our economic base (which until a little while ago gave indications of a qualitative change in product specialisation), after it has shredded our wealth, our savings, our gold. We might make allowances for the Socialist Party feeling prisoner of PREC 1, but it is inadmissible that it should not declare itself against any PREC 2 or 3. This is its opportunity to make a break from spurious inheritances and start building an alternative.

3.      Disobedience within the euro. It seems incredible that, in spite of all this, a non-catastrophic solution for our country has to be found at a European level. But it must be so, even if two very demanding conditions are necessary for it. The first is political actors who explore all the cracks in the system. General international law and the vast majority of international treaties hold derogation clauses in the event of national emergency. This derogation can involve the temporary control of capital and imports, as well as a moratorium on the servicing of debts. Can this disobedience on the part of a small country be punished with immediate expulsion? All this depends on the alliances that are forged on the way. Three things are for sure: whoever does the expelling will still run big risks; someone will have to disobey and someone will have to be the first; it is unthinkable that the Paris-Berlin axis should continue as the only one in the European Union and that it should not be possible to build alliances with other countries, among them, tomorrow, with France itself.

The second condition has to do with the European political system. The approaches that involve the whole of Europe must be formulated at a political level that gives them credibility. As has been seen, this level cannot be the national one. We must, therefore, re-found the European political system with the creation of a single European electoral constituency and transnational lists from which new leaders of a truly democratic Europe emerge. Inside or outside the euro, by choice or by imposition, there will be disobedience; the problem is knowing what level of disaster will be reached.