Where the fuck is the ‘revolutionary subject’ in the European crisis?

An interesting question from George Magnus of the banking giant UBS via Zero Hedge: “Why Are The European Streets Relatively Quiet?”

To understand the background of Magnus’s question we have to go to 2010. At that time, the economist Michael Pettis predicted Europe would have three years or or so to impose its “labor restructuring” before all hell broke loose and national politics descended into chaos:

“I don’t in any sense pretend to be an expert on the subject, but one of the things that surprises me is that as far as I know (perhaps because I am looking in the wrong places) and in spite of very clear historical precedent, very few analysts, even the greatest euro-skeptics, are wondering about the changes in electoral politics that are likely to take place in Europe over the next few years as a consequence of the euro adjustment.  For example Wolfgang Munchau has an excellent article in the Financial Times in which he concludes, like I did in my post last week, that:

The eurozone is manoeuvring itself into a position where it confronts the choice between two alternatives considered “unimaginable”: fiscal union or break-up.

Obviously I think he is right, but I would add that the window for that choice is a small one.  If Europe doesn’t move quickly, within two or three years it will probably be very difficult, if not impossible, to engineer fiscal union.  By then domestic politics are likely to be too unstable for the European political elite simply to arrange union over the heads of the citizenry.”

But here we are five years after the outbreak of the global crisis and almost three years after Pettis wrote his words, yet still European working classes are offering only limited resistance — nowhere near the sort of political chaos the bourgeois apologist Pettis imagined.

Gonzalo Lira and the coming “J. Crew Anarchist” Revolt

Gonzalo is cooking with gas, baby!

Fuck the rules. Fuck playing the game the banksters want you to play. Fuck being the good citizen. Fuck filling out every form, fuck paying every tax. Fuck the government, fuck the banks who own them. Fuck the free-loaders, living rent-free while we pay. Fuck the legal process, a game which only works if you’ve got the money to pay for the parasite lawyers. Fuck being a chump. Fuck being a stooge. Fuck trying to do the right thing—what good does that get you? What good is coming your way?

Fuckit.

When the backbone of a country starts thinking that laws and rules are not worth following, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to anarchy.

TV has given us the illusion that anarchy is people rioting in the streets, smashing car windows and looting every store in sight. But there’s also the polite, quiet, far deadlier anarchy of the core citizenry—the upright citizenry—throwing in the towel and deciding it’s just not worth it anymore.

If a big enough proportion of the populace—not even a majority, just a largish chunk—decides that it’s just not worth following the rules anymore, then that society’s days are numbered: Not even a police-state with an armed Marine at every corner with Shoot-to-Kill orders can stop such middle-class anarchy.

Brian and Ilsa are such anarchists—grey-haired, well-dressed, golf-loving, well-to-do, exceedingly polite anarchists: But anarchists nevertheless. They are not important, or powerful, or influential: They are average—that’s why they’re so deadly: Their numbers are millions. And they are slowly, painfully coming to the conclusion that it’s just not worth it anymore.

Once enough of these J. Crew Anarchists decide they no longer give a fuck, it’s over for America—because they are America.

A real time view of the crisis as it unfolds…

Above is a currency strength heatmap created by Zero Hedge. This heat map shows the relative strength of the dollar to other currencies. The countries in green are seeing the dollar weaken against their currencies, while those of a more reddish hue are seeing the dollar strengthen against their currencies.

As you can see, the dollar is weakening against almost all other currencies.

Devaluation can be a means of gaining an advantage over your competitors. It can also be a means of defaulting on your debts, provided all of your debts are denominated in your own currency, by paying your creditors in cash that is worth less than it was when you incurred them. Finally, it can be a means of impoverishing your own population by depreciating the purchasing power of their wages.

As you can see from the map above, the US is impoverishing the entire planet by eviscerating the purchasing power of its currency. It is doing to every country what Greece, Spain, Ireland, etc., are doing to their own populations — squeezing them unmercifully. It alone can do this, among all countries, because its currency is the world’s default currency.

However, merely devaluing your currency is not enough — even if you own the world’s reserve currency. What is required is not merely a monetary devaluation, but a real devaluation — productive employment must collapse, factories must be mothballed, money capital must lie idle, the real prices of goods must fall.

Moreover, even this will not stem the crisis: beyond the collapse of productive activity, the actual waste of social resources — in the first place labor — must definitely increase. Hence, even as productive assets are devalued, speculative debt must increase even faster.

Finally, capital must be exported to those places — mostly shown in gray — where the market in labor power may have the greatest likely return on investment.

A question for John Bellamy Foster: Why does Monthly Review hate working people?

As part of our series of exchanges with Michael Lebowitz, we noticed that he often writes for the magazine, Monthly Review, which touts itself as an “independent socialist magazine.” On its website, the magazine states:

Monthly Review speaks to workers, labor organizers, activists, and academics. A scholarly, accessible critique of capitalism, edited by John Bellamy Foster.

Intrigued, we investigated further, particularly interested to see their take on the current crisis, and to discover how they addressed the problem, raised by this crisis, of hours of work. We did not have to look long. The magazine highlights the crisis in an editorial note for February 2010 that delves into several aspects of the crisis, including the tepid response given by Washington to the plight of working families versus its lusty embrace of the gangsters on Wall Street.