As the Greek crisis develops and spreads, threatening to become a Europe-wide sovereign debt crisis, I thought the following line from The Economist’s editorial on the matter (‘Acropolis now’, 1 May 2010) is worth noting:

When the unthinkable suddenly becomes the inevitable, without pausing in the realm of the improbable, then you have contagion.

Another piece in the same issue is entitled ‘The cracks spread and widen’, which reminds me of John Holloway’s new book Crack Capitalism. One of the reasons financial investors are unwilling to purchase Greek debt — now rated below ‘investment grade’, i.e. ‘junk’ — is because they fear ‘Greece will not be able to stomach the programme of budgetary and economic reform which the IMF is due to set out in early May, and on which the euro-zone rescue funds will depend’. The Economist is talking about struggle.

I’ve been thinking about some of the issues around events in Greece and also ‘public concern’ over government debt in many other countries, including here in the UK where all three main parties are promising austerity in order to sort out the ‘public finances’. From the perspective of the financial markets, the number everybody’s talking about is the spread on bond yields between Greek government debt and that issued by the German central bank. The spread — or premium — is essentially the difference in interest rates. At the moment, financial investors are demanding a premium of almost four and a half percentage points for Greek 10-year bonds over 10-year bunds. Put the other way round, while at the moment the German government pays an interest rate of about 3% on its new borrowing, the Greek government must pay 7.4%. Investors are demanding this higher yield — this premium — because they fear sovereign default, i.e. there’s a risk the Greek government won’t be able to repay and investors want some reward for taking on this additional risk they won’t get their money back. (Of course, investors fear sovereign default because of the ’structural’ problems in the Greek economy — low productivity, too generous social entitlements, etc. — and the fact that, so far, Greek workers are resisting attempts at ’structural readjustment’.)

The problems don’t just affect Greece. Portugal, Ireland and Spain have all been mentioned. But also Britain. Britain’s public debt is almost at the level of its GDP and, if it continues on its present trajectory, debt will rise to more than five times the level of annual output by 2040. This is ‘unsustainable’. In the words of three Bank for International Settlements (the central bankers’ bank) economists: ‘the question is when markets will start putting pressure on governments, not if’. These economists are talking about investors demanding higher yields — increasing the interest rates that governments must pay to borrow money. The circle is a vicious one, because higher interest rates mean the burden of higher interest payments and an ever-worsening fiscal position — in the absence of what the BIS economists call a ‘fiscal consolidation programme’.

There’s a lot to said about ‘market discipline’ (what it means for ‘the markets’ to ‘put pressure’ on entities like governments or populations), as well as about struggles around structural adjustment and austerity. What I’ve started thinking about is capital’s flight. Capital flees Greece or threatens to flee Greece, unless it receives that premium. Capital is threatening to flee Britain — and the ratings agencies are warning the UK may lose its AAA credit rating, which would herald higher interest rates, again a premium reflecting a slightly higher chance of sovereign default. But this fleeing capital… Where’s it gonna run? It can’t all wind up in Germany (the ’strongest’ EU economy)? What about China? Some of it’s taking refuge in gold, whose price (now at more than $1,100 per ounce) has risen three-fold over the past decade. The problem with gold, of course, is that it isn’t productive in any way: it’s a ’store of value’, but the only ‘rate of return’ it produces is a result of its rising price (kind of like housing) and it certainly doesn’t contribute to the production of value and surplus value, through the exploitation of human labour — the lifeblood of capital.

So we have a story of flight. Following the crises of the 1970s, capital fled the factories of the First World. It headed South, to Latin America and Africa, so stoking the international debt crisis of the ’80s. Then it fled some more. To China, to India and other ‘emerging markets’. It also sought refuge in finance, seeking a return from and a safer haven in government debt, in household debt and so on. But the present crisis has forced it to flee some more. What I’m wondering is: first, where can capital flee to next? second, if capital is fleeing, are we chasing; can we ‘chase it out of Earth, send it to outer space’? And third, how useful to our struggle is this story?

What do I mean by this? Well the first thing to say is the crisis doesn’t, on its own, mean the end of capitalism, it is, however, an interruption in the general direction in which global society has been pushed over the last thirty years. That is to say it does seem to be a fundamental crisis for the neo-liberal mode of capital accumulation. Central to this assessment is the way the crisis has broken the implicit neo-liberal deal of compensating for stagnant wages through access to cheap debt. We have talked about this deal elsewhere but it was also outlined with surprising accuracy in a recent article in the Financial Times titled: Debt is capitalism’s dirty little secret.

The FT article goes as far as admitting that neo-liberalism is fundamentally about the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich and argues that cheap debt was the only thing that prevented revolution. This seems like a vindication of David Harvey argument that neo-liberalism is based on ‘accumulation by dispossession’ and of course this process hasn’t ended with the crisis. The bank bailouts are a huge and naked transfer of wealth to the wealthy. Indeed some have argued that the bailouts in the global north are playing the role that Structural Adjustment Programmes have played in the global south. There is a lot of truth to this. The bailouts are a neo-liberal solution to the crisis in neo-liberalism, in this sense they are just neo-liberalism intensified. But it is this degree of intensity that indicates it is more than neo-liberalism in normal operation. After all it’s when a system enters a crisis situation; when it is far from equilibrium, that we can see most clearly the intensive processes that make it up. The socialisation of risk to defend the privatisation of profits follows neo-liberal logic but destroys neo-liberal ideology. It is for this reason that the underlying processes of neo-liberalism have become apparent not just to us but to the Financial Times. Neo-liberalism has been stripped of the fetishisms that would normal disguise it and this has caused a real, ongoing ideological crisis. At the very least there’s been a significant wobble, if not a total collapse, in the religious hokum of the invisible hand of the market magically producing the common good. The ideas and practices that have formed the middle ground of society are ceasing to make sense, even on their own terms.

Of course this raises the question of what happens now?

One common assumption is that when the middle ground of society is in crisis then a new middle ground will have to emerge; a new deal will have to be struck. There is an expectation that some version of Keynesianism must follow, a New, New Deal or perhaps a Green New Deal. There are however several serious obstacles to this scenario, not least amongst them is that the world still has a fundamentally neo-liberal composition. The common sense of society, how we understand the world and ourselves, (within which the political middle ground develops) has been fundamentally transformed by thirty years of neo-liberal governance (although this is true to greater or lesser degree in different parts of the world).

One important point we should recognise is that neo-liberalism has only a limited role for its own ideological argument. Such argument is used to create neo-liberal ideologues and activists but this isn’t how it transforms wider subjectivity or our common sense understandings of what is possible. These changes are brought about more operationally than ideologically. That is to say that neo-liberal common sense is actively brought about by interventions into class composition rather than through ideological argument. Neo-liberalism re-organises material processes, it intervenes into society to try and bring about the social reality that its ideology claims already exists. It actively tries to create its own presuppositions.

Instead of being persuaded by the power of argument, people are trained to view themselves as homo-economicus by being forced to engage in markets. It is in this way that people come to view themselves as human capital; that is as little enterprises locked in competition with others. Indeed this is increasingly true not just in our economic activities but throughout our whole lives. Thus we have the imposition of markets into more and more areas of life, which mean increasingly huge bureaucracies and more and more corruptive systems of measure. This is the Market Stalinism has taken hold in the public services.

Foucault, in his lectures on neo-liberalism, talks about changes in Governmentality, that is the manner or mentality through which people are governed and govern themselves.
Governmentality is multi-scalar; it isn’t just about global governance or how to govern states but also about the management of individuals. It is about how you should live. It sets up a model of life and then establishes mechanisms whereby you are shepherded towards ‘freely’ choosing that manner of living. If you want to participate in society you are force to behave as homo-economicus. The markets are rigged to make certain actions make more sense and other actions less sense. The dice are loaded.

Of course, despite the circularity of its self-fulfilling and self-affirming prophecy, there have always been large areas of life that haven’t accorded with neo-liberalism. However held in place by the neo-liberal deal it has seemed quite stabile for a long time. Access to cheap credit was essential for neo-liberalism to solve the problem of effective demand, to make sense on its own terms and to disguise the huge transfers of wealth and power that were taking place. This manner of living is now in real crisis and many of the things that were previously rigged to make sense, no longer do. A couple of years ago in the UK you were acting irrationally if you rented a house when you could afford to buy, now the reverse is true.

Neo-liberalism no longer ‘makes sense’, yet its logic keeps stumbling on zombie style. Just look at PFI schemes in the UK, where private finance is supposed to supply the money for government infrastructural spending, with the state renting back infrastructure for vast sums over a thirty-year period. Except now there is no private finance so the government has to lend banks the money to lend to private firms to build infrastructure, which it will then rent back to the state that lent the money in the first place. At every stage huge sums are skimmed off in to private hands. It doesn’t make sense yet the scheme is still being rolled out at the same rate it was before the crisis. There isn’t another logic or common sense to guide policy so neo-liberal logic is twisted through amazing contortions just to keep it all going.

Any new common sense, any new middle ground for politics, has lots of problems to overcome. It would have to operate in a similar multi-scalar fashion to neo-liberalism, that is, it would have to be tied to a new manner of living. It would also have the difficulty of starting from the composition we have now, with large parts of the world’s population still in the grip of neo-liberal common sense and modes of living. This is one of the greatest problems facing those advocating a New, New Deal. We aren’t talking about a few changes in elite thinking or some dabbling with government spending but the global re-composition of society.

Neo-liberalism is in crisis ideologically, it no longer ‘adds up’ on its own terms, yet it doesn’t seem to know it is dead. I could imagine it stumbling on for a considerable period, as no new middle ground is able to cohere and replace it. We face zombie-liberalism. This raises the prospect of no resolution being found for the crisis as we end up stuck in a long 10 or 20-year period of stagnation and drift. Even in its heyday neo-liberalism could actually be seen as a period of stagnation, it never reached anything like the growth levels of the post-war settlement years, but it still had its modernist side, the idea that neo-liberalism would solve the worlds problems. Without an overarching project we might just get a series of phoney recoveries, repeated crashes and a slow fragmentation, with some fractions of capital seeking to extend neo-liberalism and others trying to replace it but with nobody really succeeding.

Things have been quiet on this blog (we’ve been getting on elsewhere with life, birth & death, among other things). But the other night I got pulled up over my reservations about the forthcoming anarchist movement conference. So here are some rambling responses…

There’s all the usual trivial stuff about what “anarchism” means. Like a lot of people, I have a love/hate relation with the label. In the grand scheme of things, it’s clear that my politics are probably more “anarchist” than anything else. And at certain times it has been really useful to play up to that – a handy way of positioning myself in relation to other groups and practices. In the 1980s, for example, it was a really convenient short-hand for cutting out all the party hacks and robo-Trots. And during the struggle against the Poll Tax, “anarchist” came to mean someone you could depend on, utterly (they wouldn’t sell you out or grass you up).

But more often than not, I’ve found it a barrier, a limit to what can be done. Partly this has to do with how piss-poor most anarchist thought is (or was, certainly when I was growing up). It was never enough to say you were an “anarchist” – you had to say you were a “class struggle anarchist” to distinguish yourself from the 99 different varieties of nutter. But that brought up the whole thorny problem of the Left. However much we denied it at the time, anarchism rode on the coat-tails of the Left it despised (just as the Left was parasitic on the Labour Party). Anything that smacked of the Left (including any sort of critical Marxism) was anathema. It had to go. And what room did that leave for thinking? I can remember when a few people in Class War were talking about sticking the hammer and sickle icon on the Class War banner. “Can you imagine the cops’ faces when we come round the corner? Can you imagine the Left’s look of horror?” They were only half-joking. Shame, really…

But that’s really a side issue. Much more important is the whole idea of how movements come into being, and how they operate and where they end. It’s hard to pick fault with the spirit of the call, but in a strange way it seems so unambitious. In the face of a global economic meltdown, is re-constituting ourselves as an Anarchist Movement in the UK really the best option? We can’t tell from here how things are going to pan out, but maybe that sort of (activist) politics is dead. Sure, you’d hope that libertarian, anti-capitalist ideas and practices would now make more sense than ever, but that’s not to say they have to be wrapped up in all the trappings of politics-as-we-know-it. In fact, those trappings may prove to be a limit, hindering our ability to move rapidly and act flexibly as things unravel. It’s a possibility we should at least consider.

To be fair, some of this has to with London exceptionalism: I guess there are enough anarchists in London to make them appear a viable independent force (although a recent post by Ian Bone says otherwise). Out here in the sticks, it’s a little different. We don’t have the luxury of only working with “–ists”, and that’s not a bad thing.

Re-reading this, it does sound really negative. Sorry. I do have a lot of time for the spirit behind the conference, not least because it’s consciously based on the MayDay 98 conference. As I remember it, that event was really successful in reinforcing a new pragmatism and openness. It was part of a wider moment where movements coming from different directions opened themselves up to the prospect of ‘contamination’ (cross-fertilisation). There was a definite unfreezing of sectarian attitudes. Of course, one of the criticisms of that conference was that it didn’t result in a New Organisation. But that was never the point; and I’m not sure it would have had the same impact if that had been its aim.

Last night I gave a short talk on behalf of We Won’t Pay For Their Crisis to the Climate Chaos Cafe at The CommonPlace. There’s nothing staggeringly original in it, but it does contain some nice insights harvested from all over the place (some chunks were lifted verbatim from the latest issue of The Commoner and libcom).

WHAT DOES THE ECONOMIC CRISIS MEAN FOR THE CLIMATE CHANGE MOVEMENT?

We are in the middle of two crises, the climate crisis and the economic crisis. Although we we seem to treat them as separate, I’m going to argue that they are completely entangled. Tackling one without tackling the other is impossible or fruitless. But the connections are complex and shifting, so I want to first give a quick overview of how the economic crisis arose, before probing a little deeper…

60 YEARS IN 60 SECONDS

To understand the current economic crisis (and the collapse of what we call neo-liberalism, the most current phase of capitalism), we have to understand how it arose. And for that we have to go right back to the end of the Second World War. The post-war productivity boom was based on a ‘deal’ of higher wages in return for improved productivity – those were the days when we were told “you’ve never had it so good”. But by late 1960s this period of growth was being derailed by a wave of strikes and global unrest: in the workplace there were a growing number of struggles over time & quality of life (rather than money), while there was an explosion of anger from those excluded from this deal (i.e. anyone who wasn’t a white, skilled, male factory worker).

In the face of this, the post-war settlement was killed off in the mid- to late-1970s by a capitalist counter-attack which laid the foundations for ‘neo-liberalism’. You can pick any number of key moments – the coup in Chile in 1973, the defeat of the US air traffic controllers strike in 1981, or the defeat of the miners in 1984/5 in the UK. They were all part of a much broader systematic strategy, which played out here like this.

First, the old centres of workers’ militancy (mining, manufacturing) were dismantled and outsourced to low-wage economies overseas. In the UK in 1971 over 70% of people were employed in primary industries (like mining) or manufacturing, today over 70% of workers are in the service sector.

Second, the banking sector was massively deregulated. All sorts of complicated ‘derivatives’ markets were created. When this started to unravel in summer 2007, it ultimately resulted in the credit crunch – because no-one knew what all these pieces of paper were really worth.

Under neo-liberalism, wages were driven ever downward. I’m not alone in the fact that every pay rise I’ve had over the last 15 years has been below the rate of inflation. But while this boosts profits, the problem is that it keeps consumer spending (= economic growth) down. This problem was ‘solved’ by extending massive consumer credit, based mostly on rising house prices. This gave us the spending power to purchase all those lovely commodities coming out of the new manufacturing centres in the Far East and elsewhere. Hence the anomaly where our living standards in the UK rose at the same time as our wages as a proportion of profits kept falling.

Without primary industries or manufacturing the economy came to rely more and more on the banking and financial sector. This sector was in turn heavily reliant on rising house prices: complicated ‘mortgage derivatives’ were one of the major assets held by the big banks. So when the housing bubble burst, everything started to unravel – banks teetered on the brink of collapse, credit dried up, and the economy nosedived.

We are in uncharted waters. Despite comparisons to 1929, this level of collapse is unprecedented. How things pan out is of course partly down to us. But we don’t need a crystal ball to predict the storm that’s coming: in the UK, we’re already facing redundancies, wage cuts, benefit cuts, wage cuts, public service cuts, repossessions & evictions. Globally, there is mass social unrest on the horizon: workers laid off from thousands of factories in China have taken to the streets; food riots exploded in over 30 countries across the globe this time last year; and in the last few months we’ve seen violent battles in Latvia, Bulgaria & Iceland, not to mention Greece, Italy and France…

WHAT HAS ALL THIS GOT TO DO WITH CLIMATE CHANGE?

Obviously at a superficial level, there’s a shift of focus away from climate change, both for us as citizens/campaigners/workers/claimants and for NGOs and local and national government. Plus we now have to deal with the fact that a huge slice of public funds have been diverted into propping up financial institutions.

But we need to dig deeper. We talk about it as a “climate crisis” but from the point of view of capitalism (seen as a thing, an endlessly expanding dynamic system) it’s actually an energy crisis. And it’s an energy crisis that capital has to tackle in order to re-launch a new cycle of accumulation. This isn’t something new: the idea of “limits to growth” were an endless headache for capital in the mid-1970s before neo-liberalism took hold and unleashed new levels of exploitation.

In fact energy in its widest sense has been a permanent problem for capitalist development. Capitalism is an exploitative, ecologically destructive system but it is also incredibly dynamic. 300 years ago, when it faced down a similar twin crisis of a rebellious population and ecological crisis, its salvation was coal. Unlocking these carbon resources played a crucial role by allowing capital to substitute machinery for our labour, at a price that could sometimes be fixed years in advance and without risk of strikes, sabotage or go-slows.

It’s impossible to think about patterns of energy consumption, and therefore about global warming, without thinking of those social relations – capitalist social relations – that have shaped those patterns. The collapse of neo-liberalism and the climate crisis are intimately linked – so much so that they’re almost impossible to separate.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, for us. At the back of much of the talk around climate change has been the idea that if we can just get people to accept the thesis of “peak oil” or “global warming”, then we will be able to magically pass into a different sort of world. As if we can switch off a carbon-based economy without also switching off the material social relations that surround it. As if the relentless drive for economic growth is some sort of mad aberration that we can turn off, or tone down. It’s not. There is no accident. There are structural causes at work here: the way we reproduce ourselves socially is bound up with the way we reproduce ourselves economically and the way we reproduce ourselves ecologically. But – and this is the key thing – the global financial meltdown could lead to a recomposition of social forces that would enable the rapid switch-over we need.

To get that right, I think there are four related areas worth thinking about

1. HOW DO WE THINK ABOUT TIME?

By this I don’t simply mean what time-scales are we thinking about, altho they are also important.
There’s a time lag in the economic crisis which mirrors the time lag in climate change
– the first cracks in sub prime sector began Aug 2007 = implosion last year
– credit crisis from last summer = redundancies & layoffs now
– £500bn bank bail-out last autumn = massive public sector squeeze for the foreseeable future

This disconnect makes our responses very problematic – by the time we act, it may be too late. But there’s an even more important aspect to this time lag. Neo-liberalism has been built on a massive expansion of debt. By mortgaging our futures (in the case of pensions quite literally) we’ve been able to put off dealing with the fact that a few are reaping massive profits on the back of our falling wages. The same deferral, the same displacement of antagonism into the future, has also been going on with climate change. Except as we know that process is non-linear: once we reach a tipping point, change will be irreversible when it comes time to pay.

This leads into a deeper connection. Capitalist social relations are based on a particular notion of time. Capital is value in process: it has to move to remain as capital (otherwise it’s just money in the bank). That moving involves a calculation of investment over time – an assessment of risk and a projection from the present into the future. The interest rate, for example, is the most obvious expression of this quantitative relation between the past, the present and the future. It sets a benchmark for the rate of exploitation, the rate at which our present doing – our living labour – must be dominated by and subordinated to our past doing – our dead labour.

It’s hard to over-state how corrosive this notion of time is. It lies at the heart of capitalist valorisation, the immense piling-up of things, but it also lies at the heart of the production of everyday life. To paraphrase George Orwell, if you want a picture of the future, imagine a cash till ringing up a sale, forever. This is true at all levels, whether for capital’s planners meeting in Davos or for us trying to make ends meet.

But this is the deeper meaning of the meltdown: just like global warming, it has brought the future crashing into the present. Interest rates are now effectively below zero. We have reached a singularity. Capital’s temporality depends upon a positive rate of interest, along with a positive rate of profit and a positive rate of exploitation – all that has collapsed. And just as with climate chaos, the debts are, quite literally, being called in.

2. HOW DO WE THINK ABOUT CHANGE?

The word ‘crisis’ has its origins in a medical term meaning turning point – the point in the course of a serious disease where a decisive change occurs, leading either to recovery or to death. So capitalism may be in crisis, neo-liberalism may be over, but that doesn’t mean we’ve won. Far from it. Crisis is inherent to capitalism. Periodic crises allow capital to displace its limits, using them as the basis for new phases of accumulation. In that respect, it’s true to say that capitalism works precisely by breaking down. But that’s only true in retrospect – after the resolution of the crisis. In fact crisis is mortally dangerous to capital, because it means an open-ness to other possibilities.

The critical instability we’re living through offers a chance for a phase transition, a rapid flip from one form of social organisation to another – or to many others. From capital’s point of view, it’s exactly this sense of openness, of possibility, that needs to be closed down. At the three major summits this year (G20 in the UK in April, G8 in Italy in July, and COP15 in Denmark in December), world leaders will be looking to contain things, to rein in our desires, and draw a line under the events of the past few months. “Move along now, there’s nothing to see here…” Every ‘solution’ that’s touted at these summits will also be an act of closure, an attempt to reintroduce capitalist temporality, one that sees the future rolling out inexorably from the present. In other words, get back to work: normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

We have to do a fine balancing act here. On the one hand, as recession deepens, we’ll resist any measures that restrict our immediate freedoms. That might mean pushing for ‘solutions’ that are slightly less damaging, and which may therefore help capitalism off its sickbed. Individually we may accept pay cuts rather than risk redundancies (altho historically one doesn’t rule out the other). Similarly, the catastrophic build-up of greenhouse gases needs us to act quickly and decisively.

But on the other hand our greatest chance of something different lies in keeping the crisis ongoing, in keeping the future open. So we also have to resist the pressure from capital’s planners for a quick fix, whether at the G20 or at Copenhagen. As soon as crises are ‘solved’, our room for manoeuvre is diminished.

3. HOW DO WE RELATE TO THE MARKET?

As crises are closed down, the way the question is framed moves back on to a safer terrain for capital. We drift back into that temporality.

Climate change becomes a matter of carbon trading, or investment, rather than circulation of capital. It becomes a question of technical solutions and national/international policy decisions. Funnily enough, as climate change becomes the major topic at summits, it becomes fundamentally depoliticised. It’s easier to debate carbon parts per million in the atmosphere, rather than ask ourselves what sort of worlds we want to live in

It’s the same with the financial meltdown. Since last summer, it’s gone from a “banking crisis” to a “credit crunch” to an “economic crisis” to “negative economic growth” to “recession”. For months the use of the word “recession” was discouraged on the grounds that it would become self-fulfilling. But if there’s no name to what we’re living through, it can’t be normalised. And if it’s not normal, then we can behave exceptionally… So it’s officially a Recession.

We can see this move from “crisis” to “recession” in another way: a crisis for capital has become a crisis for us. Costs are shifted on to us. The massive bail-out of the banking system in the UK and the US is just the tip of the iceberg.

And it’s exactly the same with climate change. It’s obvious that costs of climate change are met disproportionately by the poor: globally it’s the poor who are most at risk of flooding, spread of disease, crop failure, resource shortages etc. And without a structural change, the costs of alleviating climate change will also be met by the poor. Three examples: green technologies are likely to remain expensive, so the poor will be shut out and forced to use “dirty” energy; agrofuel schemes which are still being forcibly rolled out across the global South (and in the US) in the face of widespread opposition; increasing enclosure of common land in the name of “conservation”, driving people away from resources that they have traditionally worked in order to sustain themselves. And in fact, as well as excluding the poor, all three have disastrous environmental consequences…

If we frame the question in this way, if we support attempts to resolve these crises through the market, and through the state, then we run the risk of engendering a green Keynesianism. In other words, a new regime of capitalist accumulation based on any combination of renewable energy, nuclear power, so-called clean coal or agro-fuels. It’s easy to see how this could make sense. You start off with the idea that in terms of life on earth “we’re all in it together”; but we need to save the economy first to enable us to have the resources to tackle the challenge…

In fact, far from being a ‘problem’ to overcome, the hope is that climate change may actually become a primary source of revenue to solve the massive fiscal problems faced by Europe and the US (but not those of the global South). Renewable energy, for example, is a huge growth sector, where demand far outstrips supply. And according to the head of UN Climate Change Secretariat:  “The credit crisis can be used to make progress in a new direction, an opportunity for global green economic growth… it is an opportunity to rebuild the financial system that would underpin sustainable growth … Governments now have an opportunity to create and enforce policy which stimulates private competition to fund clean industry.”

Or as the European commission President puts it when the EU signed a new climate change deal in December “We mean business when we talk about climate”.

But if the key question isn’t whether we shift away from fossil fuels, but how, then framing the answer in terms of the market and growth is a huge and explosive contradiction.

The problem of adopting the market as a frame of reference is that capital monetizes everything, it turns everything into money. And with financialisation, that trend has become even stronger. Under neo-liberalism, one of the most important roles of the the state, locally and globally, has been to impose “good governance”. In other words, to reinforce the idea that every problem raised by struggles can be addressed – on ONE condition: that we address those problems through the market. There’s a solution for everything, as long as we buy it. Or rather as long as ‘we’ (meaning the world’s poor) pay for it. If neo-liberalism had a slogan, it would be “stop me and buy one”.

Ironically some of the pressure for this has come from green campaigners who have argued, correctly, that capitalism takes no account of environmental costs when calculating price. But under the dictatorship of the market, money has become the measure of all things. The market tries to make commensurable things that are incommensurable. But how can you ‘sell’ the right to emit carbon? Or to poison water supplies?

This isn’t simply an ethical question, one of value against values. The idea of price is also based on linear dynamics. What price can you put on something when you can no longer calculate the probable outcome? As sea levels rise, it’s easy to predict coastal flooding. But then there’s the amount and pattern of rainfall, a probable expansion of the subtropical desert regions, Arctic shrinkage and resulting Arctic methane release, increases in the intensity of extreme weather events, changes in agricultural yields, modifications of trade routes, glacier retreat, species extinctions and changes in the ranges of disease vectors… Put that in your calculator.

4. HOW DO WE RELATE TO THE STATE?

With neo-liberalism in crisis, and the threat of irreversible climate change, the state’s role is going to become increasingly crucial. A de-carbonised global capitalism is not impossible. But it will require even higher levels of “discipline”. Austerity will have to be enforced on a massive scale.

As I said earler, capitalism is value in process – like a shark, it needs to keep moving or die. But this drive to self-expansion means it needs an ever-increasing energy base. Let’s look at it from the perspective of capitalism. The logic of capitalist growth is that it will always seek to externalise its costs. If we imagine there’s a three-way relation between capital, us and the environment (although none of these three things are actually discrete), then limits enforced in one sphere re-surface as intensified exploitation in another. If capital can’t rob one, it will rob the other. Leaving the coal in the hole, on its own, means more energy sucked from our bodies…

Let’s not forget that the last capitalist era of renewable energy (the age of sails and windmills) was also a time of slavery, genocide and enclosures on a massive scale

CONCLUSION

There are no easy answers here. The ground on which we’re fighting is shifting far too fast for that. But one thing to bear in mind is that movements rarely take straightforward forms.
In 1905 the Russian revolution which threw up the first Soviets began with a small strike by typesetters at a Moscow print-works: they wanted a shorter working day, a higher rate of pay, and the right to be paid for apostrophes. In France the uprising of May 68 was sparked in part by a student protest which began in Nanterre with a fight over demand for boys to be let into girls’ dormitories…

Last week a wave of wildcat strikes swept through UK oil refineries. They were hugely controversial, unpredictable, and came out of nowhere. Who knows their long-term meaning? And is it a coincidence that they happened in the energy sector?

What I’m trying to say is that real powerful interventions around climate change may well come from people and areas who don’t explicitly identify with climate change politics. They may take the shape instead of food riots, struggles against property developers, fuel poverty campaigns etc

There are two key points of intervention coming up. On 2 April the G20 are meeting in London’s Docklands. There’ll be a Climate Camp in the Square Mile in the City of London on 1 April. Then in December Copenhagen sees the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15). There’s a huge mobilisation underway amid an ongoing debate about what attitude we should adopt. Inside? Outside? One foot in? It’s been given added significance because will be almost exactly 10 years since the WTO shutdown in Seattle.

Before that, We Won’t Pay for Their Crisis are having a meeting on Saturday 28 February. It’s called ‘We are an image from the future’ and we will be picking up some of these themes and trying to relate them to recent events across Europe.

Things have been a bit quiet here because we’ve been trying to piece together our thoughts on crisis for an article in the next Shift. Those speculations can be found here (although we may one day produce a slightly longer version because we ended up cutting sections on wealth and value, among other things).

As we threw ideas around, one that kept bouncing back was the meaning of ‘crisis’. As we explain in the piece, “the word ‘crisis’ has its origins in a medical term meaning turning point – the point in the course of a serious disease where a decisive change occurs, leading either to recovery or to death”. It’s a fork in the road. In one sense, it’s utterly binary – you either live or die. But really it’s a lot more than that. In the current global crisis, the options are far more fluid. If capitalism recovers (i.e. if it can develop a new regime of accumulation), it won’t take the same form as the capitalism we faced 5 years ago; and if it fails to recover, it won’t simply curl up and die.

From capital’s point of view, it’s exactly this sense of openness, of possibility, that needs to be closed down. At the three major summits this year (G20 in the UK in April, G8 in Italy in July, and COP15 in Denmark in December), world leaders will be looking to contain things, to rein in our desires, and draw a line under the events of the past few months. “Move along now, there’s nothing to see here…” Every ‘solution’ that’s touted at these summits will also be an act of closure, an attempt to reintroduce capitalist temporality, one that sees the future rolling out inexorably from the present. So we’re treading a tightrope here. On the one hand, as recession deepens, we will resist any measures that restrict our immediate freedoms – and that might mean pushing for ‘solutions’ that are slightly less damaging (as lay-offs mount, it’ll be interesting to see whether the recent successful Chicago factory occupation is taken up elsewhere). But on the other hand our greatest chance of something different lies in keeping the crisis ongoing. Of keeping the wound open.