Politics in a Time of Crisis by Pablo Iglesias

Author:Pablo Iglesias
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2015-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

Remember Billy Elliot?

The hero of Stephen Daldry’s much-loved film is the son and brother of two British coal miners who are taking part in the historic anti-Thatcher strikes. Young Billy wants to be a ballet dancer, but the odds are against him: the bafflement of those around him is compounded by the family’s money troubles. Since there has to be a positive denouement, in the final scene the calloused father sheds tears of pride to see his son succeed in a domain that was always off limits to his class: Billy, now mature, is starring in Swan Lake.

But before this happy ending, the film allows us to glimpse the very unhappy consequences of Thatcher’s assault on the British working class. After the Iron Lady and her associates had done with Downing Street, the children of working people could no longer dream of being ballet dancers or university students; at most they could aspire to join a precarious workforce, in conditions far worse than their parents ever experienced. The Billy Elliots of today are the sort of person the British middle class scorn as ‘chavs’: social byproducts that embody all the evils of state intervention. As Owen Jones has written, after the Thatcherist experiment ‘no longer was being working class something to be proud of: it was something to escape from’.

The root cause of the events that burst upon the world in 2008, with the collapse of Lehman Brothers on 15 September, must be sought in the transformations the United States made to the economic model so as to ensure maintenance of its international dominance. For Giovanni Arrighi, the US position was one of domination without hegemony, in which its economic vulnerabilities (especially with respect to China) made it uncompetitive in a way that was only compensated by its military might. This ongoing process of decline meant the US moved to rebalance a set of relationships that had granted too much power to the working classes and damaged the country’s competitiveness. As Harvey notes, threatened on the terrain of production, the US counter-attacked, reasserting its hegemony by means of finance. The Bretton Woods system (monopoly capitalism in the framework of the nation-state) was abolished, along with the fixed convertibility of the US dollar to gold; the US began to print dollars at will, and its companies took their surplus capital abroad. Renouncing its status as the industrial standard, the US used its financial muscle to import cheap goods from around the world to sustain an economy now founded primarily on consumption.

New York became the finance capital of the world, and the power of the new financial party began to be reflected in the fabric of cities themselves. Many of us have grown familiar with Baltimore thanks to The Wire, the David Simon series on HBO, displaying the supreme metaphors of the new neoliberal order: old industries in ruins; subaltern classes (especially blacks) neglected and marginalized; neighbourhoods spruced up for the needs of tourism and consumer leisure in stark contrast to the

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