SO CAPITALISM looks like surviving, then, and pretty much unscathed too, come to that. On strictly statistical yardsticks, the current economic downturn may indeed be the worst since the 1930s. Yet it somehow doesn’t feel like we are living through an action replay of the twentieth century’s most troubled decade, not even in slow motion.
True, the dole queue is growing rapidly and is going to grow some more. But the unemployed are not trudging from Jarrow to London in protest. If Orwell reincarnate returned to Wigan, he would find obesity more of a problem than malnutrition. KFC and Burger King have obviated any need for soup kitchens.
The poorest people in Britain during this recession are, by and large, those who constituted the poorest people in Britain during the extended boom years.
For the substantial majority of the workforce that remains in work, a little belt tightening has been necessitated. Meals out get bolted down in the local curry house rather than anywhere posh, holidays this summer will be spent in Britain rather than abroad. But this is not what our grandparents meant when they used the words ‘hard times’.
Fascism is on the rise, in the limited sense that the BNP looks a banker for some euro seats. But not one country this side of Belarus can properly be described as a dictatorship, and none look obviously on the brink of authoritarianism.
I would rather that Britain did not send a small coterie of racist wingnuts to a less-than-influential assembly in Strasbourg. However, that they get to do so does not presage the re-emergence of the Blackshirts.
Such popular discontent as there is with the political system is filtered through celebrity culture. If we have to have populist demagoguery, better it focus on Esther Rantzen than Sir Oswald Mosley.
The Marxist left – which grew in influence in the 1930s, as working class militants and intellectuals somehow managed to overlook what was unfolding in Stalin’s USSR – is not now a meaningful factor in politics. The successor organisation to the Communist Party of Great Britain confines itself to not liking the EU very much.
The most obvious counter argument from the catastrophists is that all of us ain’t seen nothing yet. The recent gains for the Footsie and the 12-month highs for many commodities are a mere bear market rally or dead cat bounce; pick your animal metaphor of choice, in the expectation of worse to come.
Maybe, maybe not. If the last two years have underlined nothing else, it is the extent of unknown unknowns when it comes to economic forecasting.
But on the balance of probability, it looks like the willingness of card-carrying neoliberal governments to throw the Keynesian kitchen sink at the problem has at least averted the Armageddon scenario.
Sadly, the Keynesianism on offer has not even been the social democracy-tinged version seen in the past, with its attendant commitment to full employment through the management of demand. Rather we have been served up a bloodless technocratic variation, premissed essentially on bank bailouts and expansionary monetary policy that work in favour of the elite.
A year from now, I could be regretting this post, of course. But after all the speculation since 2007, wouldn’t be ironic if the only lasting impact of the credit crunch was slightly tighter regulation of the banking system, with the left no further forward at the end of the process than it was in the beginning?
Posted at 13:39, 21 May 2009
Comments (13)
Did we want capitalism to collapse while there was no left wing to pick up the pieces?
Our things are still made by foreign kids and bond slaves- the left has more of a cause than ever, even if the most exploited are now either part of the underground "illegal" immigrant economy (Have you read "Chinese Whispers"? A must read for the British left) or abroad.
If we see the same kind of unrest abroad as we did over here as the countries develop- might that be the end of capitalism? Where do the capitalists have left to move their operations to once the *global* working class organizes?
This recession was never gonna hurt capitalism. From the start everything was successfully pinned on mythical "Free Market" capitalism, leaving capitalism as it actually exists unhurt ideologically.
Be careful with your timing Dave. We may be seeing a kind of re-run of Weimar but in slower motion. The UK has just been downgraded by one of the world's largest credit rating agencies. As Professor Nouriel Roubini (the man who predicted the financial crash in some detail) has said, recovery may not come for another year or so and will not even then feel like any recent economic upturn. The reason of course is the massive indebtedness (arising out of the trillions sunk in useless assets) which has to be repaid. It looks as though the BNP and their saloon bar rivals UKIP will be coming in from the fringes to the "mainstream.". The left is nowhere and the far left is shrinking into marginality (at least in England). In the European elections No2EU is merely echoing UKIP with leftist language. Yet the crisis has created a massive new canvass on which a different economic and social future can (and bloody well) should be being created by the left.
agree with John Palmer,
The anti-European sentiment is very dangerous, but more, as there is no credible Left alternative then the Far Right could gain from these events.
One reason that the British Left (but not just confined to them) are stuck is, 1930s thinking, as if history plays itself out again, and only if we have the magic slogans can we galvanise the masses and on wards to the revolution!
The British Left would do better to accept that we are in the 21st century, forget the nostalgia and deal with reality as it is now, without the 1930s thinking.
The failure of "Free Market" capitalism coupled with the MPs expenses scandal does open the door to making the Labour Party again a progressive organization and a broad enough church to house divergent opinions.
This time around the recession is hurting people who were better off in the south rather than in the industrial north which may help the far right.
I dare say that socialism would be an infringement of the Human Rights Act. The human right of the capitalist to steal another persons labour power and to make profit.
David ~ I've been trying to place these vapid reflections of yours, ("Drizzle over Hackney, outlook gloomy, rest of the world cut off"), for a while and today, finally, I've got it…
"The old grey donkey, Eeyore (D.O.) stood by himself in a thistly corner of the Forest, his front feet well apart, his head on one side, and thought about things. Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, "Why?" and sometimes he thought, "Wherefore?" and sometimes he thought, "Inasmuch as which?" and sometimes he didn't quite know WHAT he was thinking about." ~ Winnie the Pooh
BTW: Hurling money at banks and bankers is most certainly NOT Keynsianism. And if this is not yet another of your rhetorical flourishes, see Jamie Galbraith’s recent thoughts on the mechanistic and deeply flawed models of current economic forecasting and the self-serving illusions therein. The fire next time.
But best to all at the 100 Acre Forest and to your troughing MP Christopher Robin. ("I claimed by the rules...I blame Hazel the Tigger. Vote Labour without Pooh Stickery")
Richard it's actually Marshwriggle Marxism. A species in the Narnia books who on a brilliant sunny day will say, "it's sure to pour down soon".
Btw, having grown up in a socialist and Communsit enviroment I don't recall many of them in the 1960s really were Marxists. Not *really*....
Richard :-D I've got a theory that much of what we know as British humour, the Goons/Python stuff at least, can be traced back to Winnie the Pooh. Shame that Disney's ironed out so much of the strangeness.
I think there are massive shifts going on within capitalism itself currently, as the balance of power is changing. So when Dave says "capitalism" is surviving, he doesn't say "whose capitalism." As for the UK, we may end up being losers - and that is not something in which we have real previous experience, as a nation.
"It's snowing still," said Eeyore gloomily.
"So it is."
"And freezing."
"Is it?"
"Yes," said Eeyore. "However," he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately." (Yet?) ~ Winnie the Pooh
Maybe "The Donkey Knows" after all !
To pick up on a few points ~
"The facts about the 1930s depression are better known (than the 1870s) but no less scary….we think of the entire decade and rightly as, "the Depression". But the downswing lasted only until 1933. The "recovery" phase lasted right through until 1939. If you have any surviving grand-parents, ask them how that "RECOVERY" felt to live through to get a measure if what a slump involves...
"There have been many stunning revelations in this crisis , but one of the most profound has been the FRAGILITY of globalisation. In 1973 and 1929 the major economies of the world were, at most, interlocked. Since 1989, globalisation has created something less like a mechanism with interlocking gears and MORE like a nervous system with extremely receptive sensors and highly conductive neural pathways…This highly distributed model of production is historically new and only now undergoing its first crisis. What we know is that it transmits COLLAPSE as well as it transmits expansion." - Paul Mason BBC Economics/New Statesman. 26 March 2009
So that dislocation, and the massive future global debt reconciliation (IMF enforced?) that John speaks of are still to be worked through. And as also well pointed out above, this spatial future/balance is not "UK" determined. Or even EU. Slash and burn for the UK, whatever the next government? Where then the complacency?
As Galbraith Snr said, "Economic forecasting exists to make astrology look credible."
Some forecasters are predicting that the US economy will grow slightly in the second half of 2009.
But it's too early to say whether a 1930's-style crash has been averted.
But whatever recovery there is, is very fragile.
-mainly a stock market rally created by the billions thrown into the pot by central bankers and governments.
Indicators of production and trade look quite grim;
* The US economy contracted at over 6% for two consecutive quarters between late 2008-early 2009.
* Germany and Japan's economies are contracting at 4% per quarter.
* The Eurozone contracted by 2.5% in the last quarter, with many of the "emerging" economies of Eastern Europe in trouble.
There is also an inflationary time-bomb ticking away under the policy of "quantitative easing".
It's based on the same sort of groupthink that assumed ever-increasing mortgages were O.K because house prices would always rise.
The Bank of England now assumes that the fictitious money it issues will be counterbalanced by real economic activity in the future.
This is a very big assumption!
It's just as likely that the currency will be increasingly worthless, leading to an inflationary spiral and deep cuts in living standards.
Britain will end up in a relegation zone dogfight with Ireland and Iceland!
It's an interesting sign of the times that Willem Buiter's FT blog is seriously discussing the merits of negative interest rates and even abolishing currency as a bearer instrument.
I somehow feel that the media-created frenzy over MP's expenses is preparing everyone for the new asceticism this situation might entail.
You begin to envisage a society dominated by warrior monks, carrying devotional icons to Joanna Lumley and taking orders from shadowy, tax-evading offshore clones.
But it doesn't have to be that way......
It makes me wish that I'd taken more advantage of it when the going was good. Should have lived it up a bit more!
(puts on devil's advocaat hat)
Politically the Left is finished, out of date and out of its depth. All there are is various types of liberalism, ie more positive liberty or more negative liberty?
But Marx? He's just some dead German.
Economically of course facts are very different, but the politics is what makes something possible. And leftist politics are going nowhere; currently an authoritarian mish-mash of nihilism, Islamism and childish, undergraduate whataboutery.
Socialist economically? Sure; goes with positive liberty (ie the freedom to have a health service or get paid proper wages or the right to join a union).
But politically? Fuhgeddaboudit.
badnewswade: that's OK as far as it goes. And I agree that the left are at least partially responsible for this collapse; we haven't been driven out so systematically and ruthlessly.
Although there is a media cordon around the left, this has always been the case, and in the past, there were popular newspapers which had to be launched to state the case for political liberation. Somehow people managed.
I think it boils down to a lack of seriousness. People who've fought in wars and experienced genuine hardship had more in the way of sternness. In the absence of world war and conscription, the political project became that of maintaining and updating those institutions which represented socialism at either a governmental or labour movement level. It's a bit dry for many people.
Not an immediately revolutionary prospect, but results from doing this right have usually justified the Labour Party's existence (eg Open University) - and in the 1970s there seemed to be a chance that the next phase would be of empowerment, in the forms of worker democracy.
Well, this still is the next phase - we can see from Latin America - that this is the logical progression, once social democratic instutions are accepted as governing the social life of a country. But in the UK, there is almost an air of inevitability when looking at New Labour from a historical perspective. Perhaps it was bound to happen; that a younger generation with less grasp of the basic labour movement qualities and only a thin conception of core values and history, would begin to squander the legacy of the past.
And this lack of seriousness has now infected the whole left-wing throughout the EU. If things are to improve, it will require a lot of donkey-work - a bunch of Arthur Hendersons. Put crudely, the internet seems to encourage Keir Hardies instead.