Abstract
The links between the crisis of subprime mortgages and the so-called crisis of European sovereign debt are sometimes concealed, so as to create a veritable sense of shared guilt meant to sanction the legitimacy of the austerity policies that have been imposed by virtuous Northern European countries on the undeserving countries of Southern Europe. We will analyse three main aspects of the current crisis: (1) we will interpret the austerity policies that today characterize the eurozone as the result of financialization; (2) we will define the state of permanent crisis as an instrument of governance characterized by specific economic policies; (3) we will show how all this unfolds at a stage of capitalist development wherein a new constituent process begins to take shape in a fragmented but nonetheless significant manner, and how this process is reclaimed by the very subjectivities upon which the accumulation of cognitive and relational skills depends in order to reproduce itself: the Welfare of the Common.
Introduction
The crisis continues and is becoming the pretext for a large redistribution of wealth from the debtors to the creditors. The links between the crisis of subprime mortgages and the so-called crisis of European sovereign debt are sometimes concealed, so as to create a veritable sense of shared guilt meant to sanction the legitimacy of the austerity policies that have been imposed by virtuous Northern European countries on the undeserving countries of Southern Europe. Those who have accumulated too many debts must pay, that is, they must submit to constraints imposed from the outside. This might even mean including a ‘balanced budget amendment’ in their constitution, thus setting into motion an explosive process meant to reinterpret and limit those parts of the constitution that sanctioned the rights upon which the so-called Fordist compromise between capital and labour was established. After all, the German word for debt is Schuld, which means, first and foremost, guilt.
The critique of the ideology that regards public debt as a form of sin has been articulated in many quarters, and it has drawn together an unusual group of economists, ranging from those who espouse the New Keynesian Synthesis (such as Nobel Prize winners Stiglitz and Krugman, and academics from the London School – one of the shrines of economic orthodoxy – such as Paul de Grauwe) to heterodox economists (such as the post-Keynesians who work at the Levy Institute of Bard College, the so-called Économistes Atterrés in France, and some Marxists who interpret this crisis in terms of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall) (see Askenazy et al., 2010; Bibow, 2012; De Grauwe, 2011; Dumenil and Levy, 2011; Krugman, 2011; Stiglitz, 2012).
Ever since 2007, the neo-workerist interpretation has attempted to go even further. While remaining focused on the relation between capital and labour, the mechanisms for the extraction of surplus value, and the emancipatory potential of living labour, it has proposed that the crisis should be viewed as involving the redefinition of the sovereign practices on which the process of valorization is organized in contemporary capitalism (see Fumagalli, 2011b; Fumagalli and Lucarelli, 2007; Fumagalli and Mezzadra, 2010; Lucarelli, 2010; Marazzi, 2010; Vercellone, 2008).
We will analyse three main aspects of the current crisis. First of all, we will interpret the austerity policies that today characterize the eurozone as the result of financialization. Since 2007, the redefinition of the measure, creation and capture of value, which characterizes the new regime of growth, has become more prominent. The process of financialization appears in fact as a practice of social control that subsumes life itself into the process of valorization. There are two basic reasons for this: on the one hand, the debt that weighs on families appears as the exact opposite of social ownership founded on welfare institutions; on the other hand, this phenomenon has been supported by the ideology of wealth effects, through the spread of conventions meant to eradicate the conflicts over both wages and the contents and modes of production and reproduction. The core contradictions underlying the current crisis can be understood only within the context of the structural changes that have accompanied the crisis of the Fordist paradigm (see Fumagalli and Lucarelli, 2011a).
Second, we will define the state of permanent crisis as an instrument of governance characterized by specific economic policies. We will see how austerity represents a new phase in the exercise of power, necessary to revive financialization.
Finally, we will show how all this unfolds at a stage of capitalist development wherein a new constituent process begins to take shape in a fragmented but nonetheless significant manner, and how this process is reclaimed by the very subjectivities upon which the accumulation of cognitive and relational skills depends in order to reproduce itself: the Welfare of the Common. Despite the numerous attempts to turn human life into an economic value (through flattery, imaginaries, blackmail, violence and total commodification), life invariably produces an excess that escapes capitalist control and cannot be measured in capitalist terms.
Austerity as the Consequence of Financial Command
Retracing the phases that have led politicians to abandon the forms of public intervention sustaining employment and the production of goods, and to favour instead interventions intended to direct liquidity towards financial markets, amounts to unveiling the political structures that sustain financial operators. We would like to do so starting from an analysis of financial behaviour, shunning all conspiracy theories. Great financial societies operate according to modalities that can be explained with reference to the concept of collusive oligopoly: operators implicitly agree on selling and purchasing strategies so as to maximize their joint profits. These implicit agreements rest on conventions, that is to say, on cognitive constraints. We put forward two theses in order to describe the two main properties of financial conventions: First thesis: the more concentrated the management of the savings invested in the financial markets, the more likely it is that a long-lasting convention will emerge, and that expectations will prove self-fulfilling.
As far as the banking sector is concerned, the data from the Federal Reserve show that in the US alone, from 1980 to 2005, there have been 11,500 mergers (around 440 per year on average), which have reduced the number of banks to less than 7500. By 2011, five BFs (brokerage firms and banking divisions: J.P Morgan, Bank of America, Citybank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC USA) and five banks (Deutsche Bank, UBS, Credit Suisse, Citycorp-Merrill Lynch, BNP-Paribas) gained control over more than 90% of all the derivatives. In the stock market, merging and takeover strategies have drastically reduced the number of publicly traded companies. 1
In this process of concentration, institutional investors (which include all those financial operators – BFs, banks, insurance companies – that manage financial investments on behalf of third parties, and that Keynes, in the 1930s, labelled ‘professional speculators’) play the main part.
2
Second thesis: The larger the resources traded on the stock markets – that is, the greater the savings directed towards them – the more these conventions influence the behaviour of non-professional financial operators, giving rise to a mimetic rationality.
Stock markets, in other words, are places in which a new rule of valuation is established, one that is founded on the collective judgement of financial operators. As André Orléan (1999) has noted, finance is a transgression; it is an artificial world in which are instituted temporalities and forms of valuation that break with the productive times and constraints typical of traditional management of companies and – we must add – of society as a whole. The recent history of financialization is tightly interlaced with the emergence of a new technological paradigm, and with the cycle of struggles starting in 1968. It is possible to identify a perverse relation between the reinforcement of financial command and the emancipation of living labour from the forms of command characteristic of Fordism. In this sense, on the basis of these two theses, we can articulate the following corollary. Corollary. Financial conventions become all the more stable the more they subsume desires and perspectives linked to the emancipation of heterogeneous subjectivities from capitalist relations.
The calls for emancipation from the command over the rhythm of production that have contributed to breaking the so-called Fordist compromise and were claimed by the working class have at the same time contributed to a crisis of working time, which has been further exacerbated by the spread of ICTs. The recourse to financial markets represents first of all an attempt to assign a new measure of – or, to be more precise, a new perspective on – the organization of productive processes and, at the same time, a promise of profit to which reality must adjust. In order to impose this form of command on reality, it is necessary to share the accompanying risks with as many subjects as possible. In this respect, there is nothing better than to subsume needs and desires, and to incorporate into financial valuation the main items of social expenditure (pensions, health, public utilities), in addition to all the intangibles, the potentialities expressed by new sciences and technologies.
Since 1984 – when the National Association of Security Dealers introduced the possibility of evaluating intellectual property rights financially, and pension funds were allowed to invest in high-risk shares (see Orsi and Coriat, 2003) – and up to the present, the evolution of financial markets has been characterized by many events (see Fumagalli and Lucarelli, 2011a). And yet it is possible to identify one recurrent feature: whenever the risk of collapse is realized, national economic policies always turn out to be a useful source of the liquidity necessary to set transactions in the financial markets back into motion.
The effect of the subprime crisis was not the collapse of financial markets. Instead, public interventions, requested above all by institutional investors, reduced private debt and increased the public one. 3
Starting from 2008, the highest capital gains made by institutional investors have originated from the exchange of CDS (Credit Default Swaps) derivatives and, in particular, from those derivatives related to the risk of public default, through the following mechanism: a few big financial firms begin to sell the government bonds of those countries whose chances of financing, in their opinion – an opinion which is sanctioned by the credit rating agencies – might be difficult. What follows is the depreciation of the bonds, which creates negative expectations as to their value in the future. The interest rates on the newly issued bonds begin to rise, widening the spread between these rates and those on the government bonds of countries deemed more secure (such as the German ones). This tendency feeds on itself, up to the point where the growing crisis forces the European Central Bank (ECB) to intervene and to buy bonds in exchange for new liquidity, while demanding that national governments adopt drastic economic measures to reduce the public deficit. At the same time, the value of the derivatives related to government bonds (CDS) grows exponentially, in proportion to the widening of the spread on interest rates. This allows the owner of CDS to make large capital gains. 4
Note how, among the European countries, those with the largest public debts are also those in which the rates of family savings are the highest and private debts the lowest. If, indeed, we were to consider the overall situation of debt (public debt + private debt), Great Britain and Denmark would be the most indebted nations, followed by Germany and France. According to this ranking, Italy and Greece would be among the most ‘virtuous’ countries.
Austerity is therefore the consequence of the logic of finance. These speculative manoeuvres, in passing, have not hit the countries with the highest risk of default – such as Great Britain and Denmark (where savings are low and the overall amount of debt is over 400% of the GDP [gross domestic product]) – but those which, within the prevailing technological and valorization paradigm, are strategically less relevant, as reflected by their balance of trade, which is negative (see Lucarelli et al., 2013).
The policies imposed at the European level are meant to achieve three interconnected objectives:
to create non-reimbursable liquidity for the financial system, in order to avoid the domino effect of private bankruptcies; to privatize public debt and bring it under the aegis of financial markets, while at the same time increasing private debt; once the liquidity has been provided – first by increasing public debt to cover the costs of the subprime crisis, then by privatizing the debt by means of austerity policies – to define, within Europe, a new ‘division of the debt’ in line with the evolution of the ‘cognitive division of labour’.
Economists who are critical of austerity policies have rightly stressed how these policies will not succeed in achieving their set objectives, that is to say, a reduction of the ratio between public debt and GDP. The argument is totally understandable: by adopting draconian measures to reduce public expense and increase taxation, the almost immediate consequence is – by virtue of the negative income multiplier effects – a contraction of GDP (the denominator of the relation), which also risks nullifying the efforts to reduce the public debt (the numerator of the relation). The end result is that, instead of decreasing, the ratio may increase, or, in the best case scenario, may remain unchanged. 5 According to Eurostat, the debt/GDP ratio across Europe (27 member states) has risen from 83.5% in the first trimester of 2012 to 84.9% in the third, while if we only consider the 15 states of the eurozone, debt now represents 90% of the GDP.
We are not witnessing the triumph of irrationality. The reasons behind austerity policies are understandable if we put aside the ideology that animates politicians’ statements and accept instead that these policies do not aim to renew economic growth. They aim instead to feed a process of accumulation and expropriation that is centred upon financial markets.
The State of Permanent Crisis
Austerity appears therefore as a response to the crisis of capitalist governance that is centred on financialization. The instability of a regime of accumulation founded on financial markets has become especially evident after the bursting of the subprime bubble at the end of 2007, even though, as already noticed, the profound reorganization of the modalities of valorization and the new forms of command and hierarchy typical of contemporary capitalism resist it. This is a capitalism in which the exploitation of knowledge – of both the knowledge set in motion by living labour, and the knowledge incorporated in constant capital, computers, software, investments in research and development, patents, etc. – is central. The expression cognitive bio-capitalism may appear verbose, but it has the advantage of focusing attention on the variables that really explain the role of financial markets. In relation to the structural changes brought about by the increasing importance of knowledge, financial markets:
continuously redefine the unit of measurement of value and financing of investment activities; seek to displace the welfare state as the insurer against collective risks, while spreading a worldview in which the capacity to manage risk is dependent on the capacity to manage savings with financial instruments; promote the privatization of welfare systems and delegitimize expansive fiscal policies, thus imposing themselves as the only instrument for the regulation of economic growth and the distribution of income. This is made possible by the processes of expropriation of social cooperation, which, in the case of an optimistic outlook on the future value of financial activities, activate a financial multiplier with expansive effects on the final demand (Fumagalli and Lucarelli, 2011b: 322).
And yet the system of political and economic governance that has thus been established has not been able to ensure even the lowest degree of stability. This, effectively, was impossible, because the arrangement that was to ensure such stability was an unlimited expansion of financial markets sufficient to produce the (surplus) value necessary to overcome the negative and distorting effects on the demand resulting from the increased concentration of revenues and the expropriation of social wealth (see Fumagalli and Lucarelli, 2011b: 324–5).
The set of norms which have been imposed – which either directly or indirectly impose constraints on support for any expansive economic policies or any experimentation with social policies that do not entail the management of resources by means of financial markets – articulate a governance which finds its justification in the publicly proclaimed state of emergency: from the war on terrorism in the first decade of the new millennium up to the financial crisis itself.
The state of permanent crisis has become an instrument of governance (Fumagalli, 2013), a reason for the establishment of norms that entrench a rigidly univocal worldview (“there is no alternative”). In Europe, economic policy decisions are enframed by two principles.
The first of these has to do with the institutional constraints which prevent the ECB from operating as the lender of last resort, that is to say, as the unfettered purchaser of public bonds on the primary markets. If this were not the case, the possibility of realizing capital gains by means of the speculative operations described above would, de facto, disappear. The ECB can only intervene on the interbank and secondary markets, in order to guarantee the provision of liquidity, which is the lifeblood sustaining financial speculation. The ECB’s monetary policy manoeuvres thus appear to be conditioned first of all by the need to sustain exchange in the financial markets and, consequently, by the potential for speculative pressure on public debt bonds. Even when the ECB intervenes in order to restructure public debt (as in the Greek case), its main preoccupation is, above all, to guarantee the resolution of debt in favour of the creditor banks, either through direct injection of liquidity into the banks involved or through the obligation to guarantee (thanks to forms of political-fiscal receivership) the payment of interest rates so high (around 30% in the Greek case) as to repay the creditors in the space of four to five years, and in a more than generous way. All this is undertaken with no regard for the socio-economic situation of the country or for any form of democracy.
The second principle has to do with the decision to implement restrictive fiscal policies, as the only measure capable of coping with financial speculation, by means of reduction of public spending. As already evidenced, this economic policy, sometimes imposed on some countries by institutional coups d’état (golpi bianchi), has no chance of achieving the objectives set to justify its implementation. We are witnessing the beginning of a vicious circle, in which even the strongest countries economically (such as Germany) risk falling into a recessive spiral that constantly feeds on itself. After having withstood the crisis of European debt for two years, taking advantage of a weak euro and the resultant increased competitivity of exports outside the eurozone, Germany too is now showing the first signs of a possible crisis. The German government has now modified its forecasts of growth. 6
This situation also reverberates on the credit and financial markets, within which the divisions between the great BFs and banks that operate predominantly at the national level are progressively widening. The former do not seem to have been overly affected by the crisis. 7 The situation of smaller banks, especially those based in the peripheral countries of the eurozone, is much worse, because, despite the significant injections of liquidity by both the Federal Reserve and the ECB, they are facing reductions of assets and therefore profits, sudden drops of ROE (return on equity), and increasing percentages of bad debt relative to the total amount of credit. The crisis of financial and credit markets takes on many different forms, according the dimensions and the type of activity of each individual financial institution. In this respect, the crisis accelerates the financialization of the credit market and the creation of revenues and speculative bubbles, at the expense of investments and the creation of jobs, through a constant process of concentration and through the selection and marginalization of the banks that do not hold the financial portfolios necessary to influence the dynamics of speculative conventions. The end result is the creation of a financial economy of production (see Fumagalli and Lucarelli, 2011a), revolving around the becoming-rent of profit (see Vercellone, 2010).
De facto, the ECB has supported an expansive monetary policy, but without the traditional effects. The reduction of the interlending rate implemented by central banks has not corresponded to a reduction of the interest rates on commercial credit. The latter, in fact, are increasingly dependent on the speculative dynamics of financial markets and are becoming less and less controllable by monetary authorities. Given the negative prospects for profit and the excessively high interest rates, the liquidity released to the credit market has not increased the offer of commercial credit and, rather than becoming a driving force for investments and growth, it has been used to buy the government bonds of indebted states. We are thus witnessing a sort of privatization of public debts at the hands of the banking sector. Banks are becoming the creditors of states, thus taking the place of families, whose savings are progressively shrinking due to the reduction of incomes (see Marazzi, 2013).
In other words, the growing liquidity of the central banks has been hoarded by financial markets and used for speculative and/or precautionary aims (in order to profit from the high interest rates).
This shows the real function of expansive monetary policies in a regime of accumulation controlled by finance, where central banks are autonomous and therefore operate only in the interests of financial operators. The crisis cannot be solved because the institutional architecture in which it unfolds is devised in order to preserve the state of crisis. The proof of this is the failure of the first attempt to come to the Basel III Accord, which aimed to reduce the leverage ratio and increase the amount of real capital of financial institutions, so as to ensure greater stability at the expense of financial speculations. The agreement reached was a race to the bottom that left the potential for speculation completely unaltered. This means that, while the economic and credit crises last, finance’s strategy is to continue to feed speculative bubbles, as the only source of profit, in the form of financial revenues.
The Neo-workerist Perspective: For a Commonfare
On closer inspection, what we have analysed so far is above all a crisis of capitalist valorization. Valorization is founded on the replacement of modalities of socialization independent of capitalist and financial logic (like some aspects of the system of production and the distribution of welfare) with the new forms of socialization imposed by financial conventions. This expropriation of the ‘Common’, however, points to a destructive and idiotic horizon of disintegration. Despite the profound processes of organizational and technological renewal, which have enlarged the base of accumulation by imposing – through the blackmail of need (income slavery) – the valorization of social and human cooperation, this process cannot bring about a long-lasting growth of the capital gains hoarded in the financial markets, other than in an extremely partial way.
While confronting the perverse effects produced by the state of permanent crisis, which has become the mode of governance across Europe, the ongoing discussion in the neo-workerist area has not limited itself to observing the possibility of the eurozone’s institutional collapse, as a consequence of the unsustainability of the gap between the balance of trade of creditor countries (with a permanent surplus) and that of debtor countries (with a permanent deficit). By focusing on the capital–labour relation and living labour’s potential for emancipation, neo-workerism has rather drawn attention to the possibility of a radical restructuring of debts, which is capable of limiting the influence of financial speculation, and to interventions that aim to redefine the policies of welfare, income distribution, reappropriation of the surplus value produced by social cooperation, and, ultimately, to acknowledge that excess of value which escapes capitalist accumulation.
In this article, we have argued that the weaknesses of the ECB and, implicitly, of the euro, can be explained by centring the analysis on the role of financial markets as the locus of governance in modern cognitive bio-capitalism. The issue at stake is the definition of a counter-power capable of imposing new forms of valorization that are opposed to the logic of finance. On what foundations could it be instituted?
A first point for discussion is the proposal to restructure that part of the debt which is kept in the portfolios of big financial multinationals and which has been the object of financial speculations. 8 This perspective presupposes a mobilization at the European level, as will become clear in the following considerations. As far as the Italian case is concerned, the restructuring would concern a percentage of the public debt that fluctuates between 20% and 30% (data from J.P. Morgan). In practice, it would be a question of starting a controlled default, as happens in bankruptcy law, when one modifies the condition of a debt–credit contract along the way. To this end, one might imagine freezing this part of government debt until its expiration date, thus shielding it from the speculations of big financial firms, while replacing it with European government bonds (on the model of Eurobonds) outside the free circulation of capital, with an official interest rate, which might be fixed, for example, at 2–3%.
This operation is technically feasible, but it is a politically complex one: in fact, it would be necessary to set limits to circulation in capital markets and to create a European agency owning these bonds, as guarantor. This new European agency could not and should not be the ECB, but rather a piece of a new European institutional architecture that aims to establish a common fiscal policy capable of dethroning national sovereignty over taxes and public spending. Note that in Greece this process of restructuring has been implemented twice over the course of 2012 – according to different modalities, but with similar aims (see Fumagalli, 2012). The public debt has been reduced by more than 30% through the devaluation (of more than 60%) of the government bonds owned by European banks. In order to compensate for these losses in capital account, creditor banks have been granted the payment of interest of around 30% and an injection of liquidity by the ECB. Hence, we are dealing with a default controlled ‘from the top down’. What should be imposed, instead, is a default controlled ‘from the bottom up’, where there is no compensation for the devaluation of government bonds other than the payment of interest rates in line with those of the market.
However, it would be necessary to take one more fundamental step: the resources freed by the reduction of the public debt must be used to finance and institute a Welfare of the Common capable of valorizing what today is devalued. The notion of Commonfare starts from the presupposition that social cooperation is the production of the Common. Throughout the evolution of capitalism, common goods have modified their structure many times. Common goods related to earthly survival and primary consumption (air, water, food, shelters, spaces of socialization, etc.), which are inherent to human action, have been complemented by new common goods that affect not only the composition of consumption and the meaning of subsistence levels, but also the composition of the inputs and, therefore, the process of valorization and the logic of accumulation: above all, knowledge (i saperi). We define the Common as the potential to expand social cooperation that attends the paradigmatic transformation of productive forces and the prominence of new forms of labour in contemporary capitalism, such as the increasingly socialized production of knowledge. Consequently the Common is not relegated to specific common goods such as water, for example. 9
To struggle in order to institute a Welfare of the Common (Commonfare) would therefore mean devising a politics that overcomes the current crisis and is capable of:
subverting the hierarchies imposed by free trade and reappropriating primary and public goods, material and immaterial, which, in the last 15 years, have undergone extensive processes of privatization, ‘enclosure’ and financialization; guaranteeing an unconditional basic income as the primary income, that is to say, as the remuneration of productive life, as an instrument of distribution and not redistribution; thinking up alternative financial and credit circuits in which money would become an instrument of the ‘common’, in favour of practices of self-management of social wealth, which today have been expropriated by processes of indebtedness and by financial speculation (see Baronian and Vercellone, 2013; Lucarelli, 2012; Marazzi, 2012).
As you can see, these proposals presuppose the de facto overcoming of the foundations underpinning exploitation in cognitive bio-capitalism: private property and, in particular, the privatization to which access to money is subjected, and the blackmail of need as an instrument of control and governance of women and men, who are forced to restrain the forms of their socialization within increasingly individualized and precarious job relationships. It is a matter of devising an alternative here and now, as a possible response to the permanent state of crisis in which we live.
Translated by Andrea Rossi
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We are indebted to several people for discussion of these issues over the years, most notably the comrades of the UniNomade network, which ended in 2013, particularly Christian Marazzi and Carlo Vercellone. We would like also to thank Tiziana Terranova. But overall we’re indebted to the psychedelic support by the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix and The Phish music. The usual caveats apply. The TCS editors would like to acknowledge the help of Paolo Palladino in the general editorial process for the section and improving the translations.
Notes
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