Or the incredible credit crisis.

And so the dominoes begin to fall. In many ways this is a classic capitalist crisis, the popping of a 15 year credit fuelled consumer spending bubble, but it is also a singular event. It is singular because, the ‘credit fuelled’ part of the sentence is not some foolish excess or avoidable side effect but is inherent to the neo-liberal wave of accumulation over the last 30 years. Real wages in the developed world have fallen since 1979. Actual wages might have gone up a little but they don’t go anywhere near enough to cover the rollback of the social wage during that period. You might have more theoretical cash in your hand (although most is taken out by direct debit before your hand gets anywhere near it) but you have to pay directly for stuff the state used to provide and that you paid for indirectly through taxes but now you have to pay much more for that stuff (housing, etc). Since real wages have declined, increased consumer spending has only been possible through increased indebtedness. And that indebtedness in the UK and US is what has driven ‘development’ in China and India. Once credit dries the pyramid crumbles.

The credit crisis is also singular because, as we have pointed out in Turbulence, it is just one of a series of overlapping and interpenetrating crises; the food crisis, the energy crisis and perhaps most difficult of all the climate change crisis. This does indeed seem to be the playing out and the coming to a head of the contradictions of thirty years of neo-liberalism. In many ways the social movements have been ahead of the game here. There has been awareness for years that Seattle marked the beginning of the end of ‘the end of history’, of neo-liberalism in its modernist phase. Neo-conservatism was the attempt to restructure neoliberalism through a populist supplement based on permanent war. This seems to have stumbled to a halt but I suppose it could be picked up again. After all military Keynesianism is what got the US out of the 1930’s great depression – hard to see where the resources would come from though. Well, the same place it always does I suppose – our pocket – but war capitalism is a high risk strategy, that needs a Staussian uniting of the nation against a common enemy: Al Quida has never really fit the bill.

There is something that might though, although the neo-cons can’t quite get to this enemy, that’s global warming. This is what makes the Copenhagen summit to sign a new post-Koyoto agreement, so important. One of the most likely new regimes to emerge is a green Keynesianism, based around ameliorating the most catastrophic possibilities of climate change, while imposing a new austerity, that is a Keynesianism but not one based on social provision. As Naomi Klein reminds us it is just such shocks as we are going through that are used to change the normally unchangeable.

So it seems very likely we are at a new conjuncture and that a new regime of regulation will have to emerge and no-one knows what that new regime will look like. What is certain is that the amount of struggle taking place will have a huge influence on this and that the forms of struggle will have to change dramatically to accord with and influence the new situation.

Britain has the highest personal indebtedness of any country in the world. Now debt is normally a disciplining mechanism, it makes you stay on the straight and narrow, but it does get to a stage where it has the opposite effect, where it gets to the size where it can’t be dealt with under the rules of the game. Many people must be fairly close to that. This is also inherent to neo-liberalism, which was about privatising risks that used to be socialised, (as welfare provision, national insurance schemes). Well, that is for most of us; for the banks and the rich it’s been privatising profits while socialising losses. We have an interesting antagonism emerging when we are confronted with the truth of this. The hatred and Schadenfreude against the bankers is very apparent on talk radio, blog comments, etc.

There is also no clear idea how far this crisis goes, some are talking about a hundred year event, the wiping out of the global financial architecture. We can’t know if that’s true because nobody can: nobody knows how much Lehman brothers is worth, or what its debts are and nobody knows what other banks’ liabilities are. You’d always imagine that techniques of governance are sophisticated enough that global meltdown won’t be allowed to happen but the overlap of these various crises make that a difficult task too.

We can look to the experience of the Argentinazo to think how that could play out and also for the forms that struggles might take. Of course we in the UK have our own history of debt struggles and the anti-Poll tax movement might be an interesting period to revisit. There might also be increased opportunity for the cross-pollination of the UK and European movements, especially around the concept of precarity. There have been some suggestions along those lines, originating from some unlikely sources. There was even a little discussion on Ian Bone’s blog about how the timing might be good for price reduction struggles. The previous attempt to import Euro-mayday style precarity actions into the UK being a little mistimed and so not resonating widely.

But that would mean a little joined-up thinking and the overcoming of a lot of the parochial baggage that we have inherited from the UK anarchist scene and indeed a shift in the level of thinking at least to the European level. And here we come back to Copenhagen, the ESF in Malmoe this weekend and the possibilities of a new green Keynesianism. The time does seem right for a cross-pollinating of the green orientation of a lot of the UK movement, with the focus on work, in particular the new conditions of work, of movements on the continent.

For some in the class struggle anarchist tradition that means overcoming the class-as-identity, class-as-culture orientation of the UK and starting to look at class composition, class as a tool of anti-capitalist analysis. That means the end of hiding behind all the lazy, comforting, bullshit rhetoric about “woolly jumper wearing yogurt weavers” and moving to think about climate change as a fundamental front in the class war. In fact the inability to make a similar leap was the reason we were involved in trying to dissolve the Class War Federation a decade ago.

The parochialism of the UK anarchist scene is only one of the things we have to take into account, however. The UK is in a funny position at the moment, as the political parties are almost entirely absent from the field. The Labour party looks like it will be wiped out at the next election, the Liberal Democrats have decided that the time is right for a move to the right and are promising even more fundamentally neo-liberal policies. The secret of great comedy – timing. At the same time the largest, but also most pernicious of the left groupuscles, the SWP, is in a state of virtual collapse and is turning in on itself, in order to regroup and survive as a rump. This all offers great opportunities but also great difficulties, for the social movements, as much as they exist, and the autonomous left in the UK.

The chances of the autonomous left getting at least some sort of workable relations with the traditional left is probably better with the SWP less confident and in regroupment. And that actually matters to some degree, they are part of the field we have to play in. If we can’t work together, then we have to at least be in control of our relationship. This goes for institutional parties although there are hardly any for us to have even very critical relations with in the UK, except perhaps the Green Party, who end up in the same tents at the climate camp. And despite the distorting effects they have on our ability to analyse things, we have to remember that they and the local MPs provided some protection for us at Kingsnorth. After all NECTU are leading a pre-emptive strategy against us to try and increase their fiefdom, and that, which in itself provides both opportunities and problems for us, has to be taken into account in how we act.