Critics of our institutional democracy often complain that as a rule elections do not offer a true choice. For the most part what we get is a choice between a center-right and a center-left party whose programs are virtually indistinguishable. At the time of writing, the Greek elections scheduled for June 17, 2012 offer a real choice: between the establishment (New Democracy and Pasok) on the one side and Syriza on the other. And, as is usually the case, such moments of real choice throw the establishment into panic, driving them to conjure up images of social chaos, poverty, and violence if the electorate make the wrong choice. The mere possibility of a Syriza victory has sent ripples of fear through markets around the world, and, again as is usual in such cases, ideological prosopopoeia is having a heyday: markets begin to talk like a living person, expressing their “worry” at what will happen if the elections fail to produce a government with a mandate to continue the EU-IMF program of fiscal austerity and structural reform. But the ordinary people of Greece have no time to worry about such prospects; they have enough to deal with in the present, in which their lives are becoming miserable to an extent unseen in Europe in recent decades. Such predictions, of course, often become self-fulfilling prophecies, causing panic and thus bringing about the very disaster they warn of.
In his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, the great conservative T. S. Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is that between heresy and non-belief, that the only way to keep a religion alive is sometimes to effect a sectarian split from its corpse. This is our position today with regard to Europe. Only a new “heresy” (represented at this moment by Syriza) can save what is worth saving in the European legacy: democracy, trust in the people, egalitarian solidarity … The Europe that will win if Syriza is outmaneuvered is a “Europe with Asian values” (which, of course, has nothing to do with Asia, and everything to do with the clear and present danger of contemporary capitalism’s tendency to suspend democracy).
Greece is thus Europe’s singular universality: the nodal point at which the historical tendency that shapes its present appears at its purest. This is why—to paraphrase the finale of Wagner’s Parsifal—we should redeem the redeemer. We should not only save Greece from its saviors—the European consortium testing out “austerity measures” in Dr. Mengele-like fashion—but also save Europe itself from its saviors: the neoliberals promoting the bitter medicine of austerity and the anti-immigrant populists. There is, however, something wrong with this idea: the fact it is exactly the response of the archetypal European left-liberal moron—preferably a socially aware cultural intellectual—on the question of Europe today. As a politically correct anti-racist, he will insist that, of course, he rejects anti-immigrant populism: the danger comes from within, not from Islam. The two main threats to Europe, he says, are this very populism and neoliberal economics. Against this double threat, we must resuscitate social solidarity, multicultural tolerance, the material conditions for cultural development, etcetera. But how is this to be done? The main, moronic idea here involves a return to the authentic Welfare State: we need a new political party that will return to the good old principles abandoned under neoliberal pressure; we need to regulate the banks and control financial excesses, guarantee free universal health care and education, and so on. What is wrong with this? Everything. Such an approach is stricto sensu idealist, that is, it opposes its own idealized ideological supplement to the existing deadlock. Recall what Marx wrote about Plato’s Republic: the problem is not that it is “too utopian,” but, on the contrary, that it remains the ideal image of the existing politico-economic order. Mutatis mutandis, we should read the ongoing dismantling of the Welfare State not as the betrayal of a noble idea, but as a failure that retroactively enables us to discern a fatal flaw of the very notion of the Welfare State. The lesson is that if we want to save the emancipatory kernel of the notion, we will have to change the terrain and rethink its most basic implications (such as the long-term viability of a “social market economy,” that is, of a socially responsible capitalism).
Today, we are bombarded with a multitude of attempts to humanize capitalism, from eco-capitalism to Basic Income capitalism. The reasoning behind these attempts goes as follows: Historical experience has demonstrated that capitalism is by far the best way to generate wealth; at the same time, it must be admitted that left to itself the process of capitalist reproduction entails exploitation, the destruction of natural resources, mass suffering, injustice, wars, etcetera. Our aim should thus be to maintain the basic capitalist matrix of profit-oriented reproduction, but to steer and regulate it so that it serves the larger goals of global welfare and justice. Consequently, we should leave the capitalist beast to its own proper functioning, accepting that markets have their own demands that should be respected, that any direct disturbance of market mechanisms will lead to catastrophe—all we can hope to do is tame the beast … However, all these attempts, well intended as they often are in their endeavor to unite pragmatic realism and a principled commitment to justice, sooner or later encounter the Real of the antagonism between the two dimensions: the capitalist beast again and again escapes the benevolent social regulation. At some point, we will thus be compelled to ask the fateful question: is playing with the capitalist beast really the only imaginable game in town? What if, productive as capitalism is, the price we have to pay for its continuous functioning simply has become too high? If we avoid this question and continue to humanize capitalism, we will only contribute to the process we are trying to reverse. Signs of this process abound everywhere, including in the rise of Wal-Mart as the representation of a new form of consumerism targeting the lower classes:
Unlike the first large corporations that created wholly new sectors by means of some invention (e.g. Edison with the light bulb, Microsoft with its Windows software, Sony with the Walkman, or Apple with the iPod/iPhone/iTunes package), or other companies that focused on building a particular brand (e.g. Coca-Cola or Marlboro), Wal-Mart did something no one had ever thought of before. It packaged a new Ideology of Cheapness into a brand that was meant to appeal to the financially stressed American working and lower-middle classes. In conjunction with its fierce proscription of trades unions, it became a bulwark of keeping prices low and of extending to its long suffering working-class customers a sense of satisfaction for having shared in the exploitation of the (mostly foreign) producers of the goods in their shopping basket.7
But the key feature is that the ongoing crisis is not about reckless spending, greed, ineffectual bank regulation, etcetera. An economic cycle is coming to an end, a cycle that began in the early 1970s, when what Varoufakis calls the “Global Minotaur” was born—the monstrous engine that ran the world economy from the early 1980s to 2008.8 The late 1960s and the early 1970s were not just the era of the oil crisis and stagflation; Nixon’s decision to abandon the gold standard for the US dollar was the sign of a much more radical shift in the basic functioning of the capitalist system. By the end of the 1960s, the US economy was no longer able to continue recycling its surpluses in Europe and Asia: its surpluses had turned into deficits. In 1971, the US government responded to this decline with an audacious strategic move. Instead of tackling the nation’s burgeoning deficits, it decided to do the opposite, to boost deficits. And who would pay for them? The rest of the world! How? By means of a permanent transfer of capital that rushed ceaselessly across the two great oceans to finance America’s deficits. The latter thus started to operate
like a giant vacuum cleaner, absorbing other people’s surplus goods and capital. While that “arrangement” was the embodiment of the grossest imbalance imaginable at a planetary scale … nonetheless, it did give rise to something resembling global balance; an international system of rapidly accelerating asymmetrical financial and trade flows capable of putting on a semblance of stability and steady growth … Powered by these deficits, the world’s leading surplus economies (e.g. Germany, Japan and, later, China) kept churning out the goods while America absorbed them. Almost 70 percent of the profits made globally by these countries were then transferred back to the United States, in the form of capital flows to Wall Street. And what did Wall Street do with it? It turned these capital inflows into direct investments, shares, new financial instruments, new and old forms of loans, etc.9
Although Emmanuel Todd’s vision of today’s global order is clearly one-sided, it is difficult to deny its moment of truth: that the US is an empire in decline.10 Its growing negative trade balance demonstrates that it is an unproductive predator. It has to suck up a daily influx of