Anti-capitalism by Simon Tormey

Author:Simon Tormey [Tormey, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780742519
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The suggestion admittedly involves some wishful thinking. Those blocs that currently exist, such as the EU and ASEAN, arguably perform in exactly the opposite way to that intended. As ‘national leftists’ and ‘true internationalists’ argue, the EU has so far imposed policies consonant with those of neoliberal orthodoxy, particularly as regards the necessity for balanced budgets, flexible labour markets, and reductions in social expenditure. Indeed the European Central Bank (ECB) has to date acted almost entirely in line with the strictures of the World Bank in imposing a deflationary regime orientated to generating economic growth at the cost of high levels of unemployment, a formula that could have been written by World Bank officials. The sovereign debt crisis of 2011–12 which saw the ‘Troika’ of the ECB, the EU and the IMF act in harness to discipline European states such as Greece, Ireland and Portugal reinforces the sense that the main purpose of international financial bodies is to safeguard the interests of banks and bondholders, if necessary through the imposition of austerity measures and the erosion of hard-won welfare and pension entitlements. Hardly the stuff of ‘internationalism’, however defined.

Looking at the global picture, prospects are hardly more encouraging. There seems little incentive for low-cost or highly productive economies to go along with a bloc-built consensus unless there is a massive compensatory mechanism to reassure them that they are not losing out. It would be interesting to hear the reactions of young people in Bulgaria, India or China, say, to the idea that what they need is less inward investment rather than more. How much compensation would have to be paid to convince people who have been raised on a diet of trickle-down economics, that there will be no trickle-down after all – but only some sort of recompense for lost opportunity? As NGOs like Forum for the Global South fear, national internationalism may become just a supra-national nationalism. This is particularly so where its advocates fail to show how a block on the movement of productive resources will aid those who currently look forward to the in-flow of resources caused by capital flight, the very phenomenon that encourages the wealthy to look to protectionist measures to defend their own workforce.

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