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Frédéric Lordon: On the blind spots of people who think "another Eurozone is possible" by Miri Davidson Verso blog, June 15 <http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2037-frederic-lordon-on-the-blind-spots-of-people-who-think-another-eurozone-is-possible> . . . Let’s dream a little and have some fun imagining this ‘other possible Euro’. None of its arrangements are written into the Treaty anymore, all of them having been handed to the Eurozone parliament. Now a majority forms to put the ECB back under political control, giving it the mission of supporting jobs and growth; it gets rid of the automatic budgetary rules in favour of a pragmatic, conjunctural approach; it poses the question of cancelling certain debts; and it envisages clipping the markets’ wings in order to neutralise their reprisals against a progressive reorientation of economic policy. Who could believe that Germany – and doubtless other countries too, but principally Germany – would accept this ‘other Euro’? Left in the minority, it would leave in the name of defending its principles, considered vital stakes to be defended. And so the ‘other Euro’ would do without it – if there is any sense to a single European currency that doesn’t include Germany… . . . So when we look for the reasons why another Euro is not possible, we must be lucid enough to look first of all to this point of most resistance, and then also to the Greek experience, or rather, what the European Union is subjecting Greece to in accordance with German principles. After all, now we know what weight a humanitarian crisis has, as compared to the defence of a monetary orthodoxy: none. . . . ... if we consider that even if the FN did arrive in power, it would not take France out of the Eurozone. And this is the reason why: if and when the prospect of the FN arriving in power took on any substance, big capital would make a pact with it. It would do so without the least hesitation, since – as history has amply demonstrated – capital knows no enemies on the Right, however far to the Right they are. . . . ...you don’t have to have any special insight to imagine what capital’s attitude would be to the Front de Gauche if it was at the threshold of power: indeed, there is every reason to think that capital would not try to make a pact with it, but rather would enter onto a ‘war’ footing: even a ‘war without limit’... . . . Some will say, rightly enough, that Tsipras is fighting to stay in the Euro. But on the one hand, as we were able to tell them even before he came to power, this fight is doomed to failure [8] and the only alternative to outright capitulation is to leave the Euro. And, on the other hand, Syriza has a large internal minority as well as an external Left opposition that resolutely insist on Euro exit. And even the most dishonest newspaper columnists would struggle to pass these people off as the harbingers of xenophobic nationalism. The truth is that this internationalist radical Left – standing up for a real internationalism, not an imaginary one – which is determined not to let itself be intimidated, is the only true rampart against the far Right, the true far Right, which will resume its forward march as soon as the Euro-liberals are back in power in Athens. . . . [8] http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1824-frederic-lordon-syriza-faces-a-choice-between-capitulation-and-open-sedition Greece against Europe: a war of narratives—Christian Salmon by Miri Davidson Verso blog, June 12 <http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2035-greece-against-europe-a-war-of-narratives-christian-salmon> . . . But, as the 2008 Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman asks, does this metaphor of the family in debt really make sense? The answer is simple: in a family, income is independent from expenditure. So you can reduce how much you’re spending while maintaining the same level of family income, and hope to get out of debt by slowing down the repayment schedule. That’s not how it works at the national scale, since some people’s expenditure constitutes other people’s income. If you think cutting expenditure is the way to get the country out of debt, then you will reduce some people’s income because others are spending less, and vice versa. The falling incomes that follow aggravate the debt problem. Even Keynes saw that "The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity at the Treasury". So why continue insisting on austerity? In Europe the whole terrain of economic policy has been left to Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism (deregulation, state intervention, financialisation) and German ordoliberalism (the reign of "norms", debt-as-failing, and reparatory fiscal rigour…). The contradictions between the IMF and an EU under hegemonic German influence – contradictions that are today flowering – can be explained in terms of the opposition of these two great neoliberal narratives. The hegemony of the German ordoliberal narrative among bureaucratic elites owes not to bad faith but to their faith itself, that is, to their collective belief in the effectiveness of the juridical norms contained in treaties. They invest their faith in Treasury officials, jurists, and the top functionaries, who are very competent in implementing norms, but are certainly not economists. All this has had the effect of displacing analysis of the sense of the EU’s basic mechanisms and of economic laws into the legalism of inter-European diplomatic negotiations. This is the empire of accountancy and juridical norms, inherent to the European treaties themselves. Rather than knowing about economic laws they prefer invocations borrowed from EU Newspeak: restoring confidence, repayment, effort, serious… A grammar of blame and punishment, which percolates through bureaucratic and media elites. "One of the great ironies of the Eurogroup is that there is no macroeconomic discussion", Yanis Varoufakis explained a few days after the end of the negotiations. "It’s all rules-based, as if the rules are God-given and as if the rules can go against the rules of macroeconomics. I insisted on talking macroeconomics". . . . _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
