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i dont see the euro zone--or the e.u.---as in danger. but there are profound stabilization problems at the system level and no institutional infrastructure that's in place to address them. this follows from the various follies that underpin capitalist relations since the nixon administration began to dismantle the bretton woods system. that system was fashioned just after world war 2 and had a series of mechanisms in place that were designed to stabilize national economies---which isn't a real surprise given that it was a response to a world war. the american understanding of fascism at the time linked it directly to the currency problems experienced by weimar. presumably some looseness of interpretation held to accomodate italy---japan was treated as its own particular case. this enabled the americans to dodge the question of how fascism was linked to nationalism---which is not surprising when you think about it---but it'd be a digression. the nixon administration began dismantling bretton woods in the early 1970s and is largely responsible for putting into motion the casino capitalism the weakness of which are being exposed. for example, in the bretton woods system, the imf's role was a kind of system governor, like on an engine. it would intervene using instruments of short-term debt to stabilize currencies---which were in any event pegged to the dollar so values were no set in currency markets as they since have been. if you approach currency valuation with an experience of world war just behind you, volatility is a Problem. if you approach it after 30 years of more-or-less continuous expansion, it isn't so much. one result of the nixon administration's moves away from the bretton woods arrangement was a defunctionalisation of the imf, which became something of a generator of crisis, really---almost a specialist in it---typically in the interest of neo-liberal privatizations, which operated in the main to the financial advantage of very large corporations. since then, there's been this process they call globalization. one aspect of that has been a transnationalization of capital flows and a very considerable acceleration of their movements. one consequence of that has been a separation of corporations from any particular space---another has been a considerable increase in the ways that tncs can hide revenues---a consequence of which has been a diminuition in tax revenues from them. this is a big deal. you don't hear a lot about it in the american press because--well---it's corporate-owned. but i digress. the neo-liberal debt circulation system amongst nation-states is something i don't entirely understand---i was thinking as i started writing this that it'd be good to know about it--i just haven't looked into it. what's clear about it is that it developed and operated within the general framework of neo-liberal thinking, which assumed away crisis. and for a remarkably long time, on that level (if on no other) crisis hadn't really turned up---there have been Problems, but nothing of a magnitude that has threatened the functioning of the system as a whole. what's happening over the past couple years is such a crisis.
in principle, the problem in southern europe with debt flows from the unwillingness of the various national political orders to face down the holders of capital, force them into taking a loss in the interest of system stability and vaporize the debt. the southern countries are also unwilling to follow argentina's lead and annul it on their own. what looks to be at stake is the power of the private financial sector in system-level maintenance. but that sector is not competent to have the power they have. that seems to me to be in a nutshell what the Problem is.
a second problem follows from the ability of corporations to evade taxes. what is required to stop that is international law to do it. what is required for that is a trans-national institutional structure that can enforce the laws. at present that doesn't exist. at all. not even within the e.u.
what it looks like is that the network society---manuel castells name for where we are--has long outstripped the capacities of nation-states to regulate it. so there's an institutional Problem that's emerging as the social and political requirements for capitalist functionality cannot be met within the existing institutional infrastructure in a situation of system-level crisis.
the central obstacle to addressing this is the same neo-liberal ideology that enabled this situation in the first place because it is largely a conservative-dominated ideology that relies in the end on nationalism to have a discourse at all. so addressing the institutional problems would be a nail in the coffin of conservative thinking as it currently exists. the other problem is in a sense accidental---the collapse of an alternative ideologial viewpoint which followed on the collapse of the political left---which wouldn't be in a position to address this situation in any event, mired as it was in an outmoded marxian way of thinking about capitalism. the problem is there that there's nothing---not really---available as an alternative framework. this, in combination with the ideological hegemony exercised by neo-liberal "thinking" since the 80s, boxes people in cognitively. and that is playing no small part in the general crisis we are stuck in.
the euro-zone problems as merely an aspect of that.
i'm trying to stay off my hobby-horse of talking about the collapse of the american empire, but that's also a factor. the way to stay off it is to push post. which is what i will now do.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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