The Crisis in Europe, Bourgeois Quacks and We Communists

Now that, in its current stage, the most violent manifestations of the general crisis of capitalism seem to be concentrated in the Eurozone (after only superficially having loosened its grip on the American imperialist centre from which it parted), we can amuse ourselves by looking at the numerous remedies for ‘saving the nation’, and the various ‘financial rescue packages’ continually being doled out to the petty bourgeois, terrified of losing its assets.

Each ‘school of thought’ has its own particular diagnosis and cure. Theoreticians and university professors, each of them extolling the brilliance and efficacy of their own proposals, squabble amongst themselves, striving to come up with new hypotheses and solutions whilst accusing their rivals of making matters worse.

In the media too we witness the same kind of confusion. Gloomy predictions of a crash – designed also to cow the proletariat – are followed by the moderate optimism of official reports, and the final declarations of high level conferences, all rapidly communicated via the regime’s press, spreading optimism one minute, a grave sense of responsibility the next. In a word, the media is just doing its job.

This profound crisis, which the entire world insists on categorising as ‘financial’, has shown its mendacious face with the unsustainable burden of interest on the State bonds of the infamous PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain), whose financial weakness was supposedly triggered – another monstrous lie – by an intolerable public debt. Then came the usual nasty, anti-proletarian theorisations about ‘low productivity of labour’, ‘overly bureaucratic and spendthrift States’, and a no longer tolerable situation of ‘living beyond one’s means’.

And the Greek workers – who “work on average 44.3 hours a week, whereas the European Union average is 41.7” (Eurostat), who “have an average wage level of 73% of that in the euro zone whilst a quarter of Greek workers earn less than 750 euros a month”, who have “golden pensions” averaging 617 per month, 55% of that in the euro zone, and with everything getting worse all the time – have had insult added to injury by being told they are partly responsible for the catastrophe.

Amidst the various ups and downs, with some events truly dramatic and some obviously staged, the most critical occurrences – so far – have taken place in the smaller theatre of Greece; and it is here, including during the recent farcical elections, that the billowing froth of the supporters of the latest fallacious, demagogic theories has been concentrated.

But, depending on the criticality of the situation, from time to time the storm fronts spread further a field, and the capitalist media is forever switching from prioritising one symptom of imminent disaster over another. The ‘criticality level’ of Greece, a country liable for a debt that isn’t actually that enormous, although the interest payable on it is, and was, in relation to the productive capacity of the country, has suddenly become secondary compared to the much more serious and substantial problem of the Spanish banking system. The latter is not being strangled by debt, as the chatterers would have it, but by credit, in enormous, unredeemable quantities; a pile of useless paper which not only doesn’t produce interest anymore, but doesn’t represent a claim on anything at all.

We see a continuous opening of fronts, of slippages in an intrinsically unstable and politically contradictory structure which is no longer financially sustainable; especially now that the pressure of the real crisis, in the realm of production, is spreading and gathering pace.

All the resources of the European Central Bank are redeployed to deal with the new, but widely predicted, storm centres shaking the European Monetary Union – Spain, Portugal, Italy… It is the same old bourgeois remedy: shift onto the ‘public’, the State and the ECB, a debt that is essentially ‘private’, derived from banking and business. Tomorrow, faced with a banking system which is ‘too big to be saved, too big to go bankrupt’, who can say what decisions the ECB will take.

For some time now the big bourgeoisie has been transferring its “assets”, its capital, to new ‘safer’ markets, where it might make a bit less but where – they hope – it won’t get swallowed up in a collapse of the European financial system. And small businessmen as well, the petty bourgeoisie and many workers are anxiously looking for some arrangement to protect their meagre savings, some way to avoid losing them if the banking system goes into meltdown.

The words public debt, private debt, currencies, devaluation, inflation, taxes, bonds, are constantly rammed home, in ever language and accent, in various different combinations embellished with various analyses, depending on the economic school from which they derive or the interest group of the commentator concerned.

But we have no intention of entering into the merits of these bold diatribes about nothing, these remedies for the madness of capitalism, these proposals and cures which the so-called left, ignoble servitor of capital, also dedicates so much time and effort to. All these remedies hold very little interest for us, and if any of them actually do end up working, we will totally oppose them. The financial disaster is a theme which needs to be dealt with specifically within the context of Marxism and in conformity with our revolutionary perspective based on the theory of capitalist collapse. We have no wish to compete with the professional theoreticians of least-bad-capitalisms, although, we have to say, not much progress seems to have been made on that front in any case!

On one, fundamental point do the economists seem to be totally agreed as they cry in passionate unison: capitalism must survive! According to them, even if it can be shown, as it can now, that capitalism can no longer be improved, reformed, “humanised” or “made moral” it must still be defended, for ever and ever, along with its infernal companion, the all-regulating, al-defining, all-seeing and all-hearing market.

We though take a totally different position. We view all the ideological distortions, all the theorisations about how to improve, adjust or make the current state of things bearable as incompatible with our vision of the world view, with our science.

As to saving the euro and the European Community, resolving the debt problem and, above all, the question of the fate of their states and their empty coffers, we simply don’t give a damn about any of it. We are opposed to any prescription for salvaging what is salvageable, for breathing oxygen into the markets, for building a new society founded not on conflicting national States but on a “community of peoples”, engaged in peaceful trade, rationally controlling fair and equitable markets from which speculation and injustice have been eradicated, and so on and so forth. We hope they all fail. Our unique and all-encompassing vision is communism, the rebellion of those rejected by this society who will destroy the bourgeois States and suppress for ever relations of production founded on capital, wages and the market.