19.03.2009

Mounting problems, no solutions

The G20 will not agree on anything substantial, reckons James Turley, but the left has problems too

As most on the left will be aware, the G20 - an inter-governmental group comprising representatives of 19 economically powerful countries, with an extra slot for the European Union - meets on April 1.

This is a routine meeting, but we do not live in routine times - the first item on the agenda is nothing other than the tumultuous economic crisis that has spread throughout the world. The assembled bourgeois politicians are publicly hopeful that some meaningful agreements - however modest - will come out of the conference, which will take place in east London’s Excel centre.

Gordon Brown and German chancellor Angela Merkel have met in advance of the conference, and both insist that it “will deliver”: “I think you will find that countries will be agreeing together about what we are going to do in future, both in fiscal and monetary policy and in the regulatory system,” said Brown at a joint press conference with his German counterpart (The Independent March 14).

Brown wants to win a commitment to fiscal stimulus across the 20 political-economic entities involved - or at least cajole enough members as makes no difference. His efforts have been hampered by a spectacularly unsurprising leak which revealed that the prime minister and his lieutenants regarded seven of those economies as “second-tier” countries in terms of lobbying efforts.

The likes of Australia and Canada are no doubt highly vexed to find themselves lower down the pecking order than Saudi Arabia and South Africa; but they should not be overly surprised, as they can hardly be counted as strategically important players in this particular drama (compared to South Africa’s political clout in Africa, or the Saudis’ vast oil wealth). Extending this snub to Russia looks to be a more serious gaffe - however botched its emergence from the USSR, the Russian Federation sits on a great deal of mineral wealth, upon which other economies rely significantly, and relations are already tense.

Even beyond this minor embarrassment, the omens are ill for the ruling class. Robert Gibbs, a spokesman for US president Barack Obama, made it clear that “we are not going to negotiate some specific economic percentage or commitment” (ibid). Failing to nudge Canada - or even Russia - into accepting common action would be one thing, but the world hegemon state sets the pace that others follow.

With that in mind, Brown once again visited America two weeks ago, where he made a number of adulatory but urgent speeches that implored the US to take a lead in combating the crisis. Brown is, of course, a noted Atlanticist (something conveniently ignored for years by those soft lefts who fantasised about him as being much more pro-worker than Tony Blair) - but his canvassing in Washington DC must be read in the context of his self-appointed role as some kind of deal-maker. The Gibbs announcement, therefore, is troubling for him.

We may wonder precisely why he has appointed himself the role of single-handedly uniting the known world in the face of adversity - it seems somewhat to be an attempt to shore up his flagging political fortunes in the UK, after the second so-called ‘Brown bounce’ waned. His unpopularity stems in large part from his complicity in the political-economic strategy that is the immediate cause of the credit crunch - the ploughing of capital into the credit system rather than production proper, resulting in a ziggurat of meaningless money-values tied only tenuously to productive economic activity. Brown’s time as chancellor was crucial in the final stages of the City of London’s transformation into what amounts to a US tax haven (the IMF formally designated it as such two years ago - see The Observer April 22 2007).

Now, he is left ploughing ever more cash into banks which remain recalcitrant and resistant to loosening up lending - despite, in a great many cases, being majority-owned by the taxpayer. This is not a popular policy, but more attractive to the government than the alternatives.

What are the alternatives? Principally, letting the crisis do its ‘natural’ work - that is, destroying large amounts of capital. The significance of the 1929 crash for contemporary bourgeois discourse seems primarily centred on the ‘new deal’ and adoption of proto-Keynesian policies elsewhere that most visibly contributed to the resumption of ‘normal service’ - albeit with the introduction of substantial welfare systems.

But we should not forget the single biggest contributing factor to subsequent economic recovery - World War II, which saw the utter devastation of much of mainland Europe. The war is inseparable from its crisis. More prosaically, the 1929-33 period saw massive contraction in production - Britain, which got off relatively lightly, saw a drop of 20% in 1930. In the business cycle of capitalism, such devastation (physical or institutional) amounts to a necessary correction.

It is barely worth explaining why this is not an option for today’s ruling class - that is, we know exactly what ‘letting the market decide’ means during this type of crisis: depression, political upheaval and war. Only the lunatic fringe of the neoliberal right still advocates such a policy (though it was infamously popular among Senate Republicans last summer when they defeated the initial version of the $700 billion Paulson bailout plan).

But we have to take our argument to its full conclusion - if the business cycle is a rhythm internal to capitalism, then to prevent the ‘full’ crisis is to suspend history. Inasmuch as the Brown plan - such as it is - to get the world leaders to agree to a fiscal stimulus package is actually successful, it inaugurates not another boom period, but something of a new era, in which boom and bust genuinely ceases to operate. Ironically, Brown’s claim to have abolished it will have come true.

While he meant an unending period of prosperity, however, the reality will be a sustained period of stagnation - a very tense period of stagnation at that, with the state pulled between, on the one hand, the immanent tendency of capital to expansion and self-valorisation and, on the other, the severely hampered ability of capital’s tendencies to operate in any rational fashion at all.

As such, we must situate the crisis within the long-term decline of capitalism - contrary to popular opinion, the fact that governments and institutions are ameliorating and propping up the system rather than leaving it to its convulsions is not evidence of progressive evolution since the 1930s, but decay.

There is something else in decline here, as well - US hegemony. In 1945, with the crisis period nearing its end, the US economy accounted for half the entire world’s productive capacity. Devastated Europe and Japan could be rebuilt in the interests of American global leadership (within, of course, the limits imposed by the existence of the USSR). The long boom after the war, and also its successors in the form of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, were effectively underwritten by the ability of the US to deploy military force and fulfil other state functions on an international level.

Now, it is clear that despite a temporary recovery in the wake of the USSR’s dissolution, this ability is severely compromised. The US is not able to force a solution to the crisis, as it might have done in the period of its dominance - even if one were available.

World leaders will not be the only ones making the trip to east London for the event - a number of protests are planned, including a trade union-sponsored demonstration on March 28 under the slogan ‘Put people first’, and a whole series of actions big and small on April 1 - from an ‘alternative summit’ teach-in run by the Universities and Colleges Union to a series of parades in and around the City. Estimates for potential attendance figures range up to 500,000 - not at all implausible, particularly if another dip in the economic situation or high-profile bankruptcy should fall close to the date. In Ireland a few weeks ago, a broadly anti-capitalist protest attracted around 120,000 people - that is about 4% of the total population, equivalent to three million Britons.

The politics of the event may not be quite so encouraging - while the umbrella group for the April 1 protests, G20 Meltdown, specifically criticises capitalism (we note with interest that participating organisations include the likes of Stop the War, which has studiously avoided such ‘divisive’ ideas in the past, to say nothing of the liberal NGOs), it remains substantially vague and negative in its programme. Capitalism isn’t working - so what, then? That there are Marxist groups uncritically repeating this stuff is a depressing prospect.

Marxists should be making the case for overthrowing the system. If we cannot make that case when the system looks for all the world like it is overthrowing itself, we may as well give up.

That groups such as the Socialist Workers Party still feel the need to put their critique in pseudo-populist terms suggests a monumental losing of the plot, and remind us that it is unfortunately not only capitalism that is in deep decline, but the traditional organised radical left opposition to it.