<nettime> Greece and the Macroeconomics of Class Struggle.

[Dmytri Kleiner <dk@telekommunisten.net>]

Greece and the Macroeconomics of Class Struggle.


At thursday evening's talk at the occupied Empros Theater in Athens, 
Tiziana Terranova and I gave presentations on the political economy of 
social media to a diverse and engaged community.
The Empros Theatre is in central Athens, part of the overall urban 
geography that has been besieged by occupations, protest and police 
brutality in the recent surge of class conflict stirred by crisis and 
the accompanying austerity being inflicted on the Greek population. The 
theater was occupied by a collective of artists a few months ago, and 
hosts talks, presentations and events, often engaged in the cultural and 
political questions surrounding the resistance against the politics of 
austerity.
The financial crisis has pushed the greek economy into extremely dire 
straights. Eurozone pressure and speculative attack on government debt 
has forced the greek government into counterproductive austerity 
measures which are hotly contested by the population. As demand falls as 
a result of austerity-driven spending reduction, the economy sinks 
further into stagnation, in turn reducing taxation levels, leading to 
more austerity, and so on. A classic vicious circle.
The situation has unmasked the folly of the Euro. If Greece had 
monetary sovereignty, the government would have recourse to all sorts of 
monetary and fiscal means to stabilize demand and stimulate the economy, 
but because Greece is part of the Euro monetary union, it's hands are 
tied. As a user, and not an issuer of it's currency, Greece can not 
control it's monetary policy, and as a result, has concrete limitations 
on its fiscal policy as well. It can neither increase spending to 
stimulate the economy, nor can it issue bonds and adjust lending rates 
to influence interest and control the cost of servicing its debt. All it 
can do is raise taxes and cut spending, and while these may stave off 
default and move towards Eurozone dictated fiscal constraints, these do 
not do what the greek economy desperately needs to recover, that is,
create demand, and thereby employment, increase tax levels, etc.

Within Eurozone Monetary policy is centrally managed. Yet, Eurozone 
nations may be, and usually are, out of sync at any given time in terms 
of what sort of policy best suites their current economic situation, and 
policy is naturally driven by the bigger economies, such as those of 
Germany and France, and not according to the interests of smaller 
economies like Greece. Thus, the greek people pay the price for a 
financial situation that was not of their own making. While other 
nations, especially the financial elite within them, are able to escape 
consequence.
Yet, while one could conclude that if Greece left the Euro and regained 
monetary sovereignty it would protect it's people, sadly, not even this 
is likely to be true.
The political elite of Greece are beholden to the global financial 
elite and remain fully committed to the neoliberal program of wich the 
Euro was once shining jewel. The destruction of the welfare state, and 
immiseration of the workforce is not just a unhappy consequence of the 
neoliberal agenda, it is the goal. Thus, the Euro and the constraints it 
places on a nation's ability to pursue the public good is quite 
intentional. And as they say, where there's a will, there's a way.
Even without the Euro, the intent remains. There is no reason to doubt 
that the henchmen of neoliberalism would, in any case, find ways to 
continue to push greek workers towards destitution. This is the case in 
the US and the UK, where despite possessing monetary sovereignty, these 
governments seems to be more interested in insulating financiers from 
loses, rather than actually stimulating the economy and thereby 
benefiting the whole of the people.
The problem is that the role of the State is to mediate among the 
classes on behalf of the ruling class. This is a simple political fact 
that can not be changed. The ruling class controls the bulk of the 
wealth in society and thus has the means to relentlessly push it's own 
interests, and always eventually get its way. And with each victory, 
strengthen its position further.
Not ambitious politician or party can represent any other class, though 
they can represent different factions within it. To fail to attract the 
support of at least some faction of the ruling class amounts to handing 
victory to your rival, at least in most cases, and certainly in the long 
run.
The structure of the social order is the mirror image of the structure 
of wealth in society. It should be fairly safe to believe that even if 
the Greek government had the monetary sovereignty to intervene in the 
economy of behalf of their people, they would not.
Within a capitalist economy, wealth flows to owners of capital, and 
thus concentrates in fewer and fewer hands, while the share of wealth 
available to the great masses of people gets ever smaller, and with it, 
there political influence as well.
But for the largely autonomist crowd at the Empros theatre, the loss of 
political influence is not directly the most critical loss.
As with mutualist, syndicalist, "P2P" and other political views that 
can be described as autonomist, which can broadly include the free 
culture and free software movement, Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados 
of Spain, etc, a large current in the Anti-Austerity movement in Greece 
also believes that we must create our own institutions, our own 
alternative structures that move beyond the meagre choices offered by 
bourgeois society and prefigure the future society we are fighting for.
And that is right, that is also the main form of political struggle 
that Venture Communism proposes and explores mechanisms of realizing. 
Thus, the most important direct loss is not political influence, but 
rather mutual capital. Our capacity for investing in alternative 
structures comes from a single source: The amount of wealth that we, as 
workers, can consistently divert from consumption. Thus, as the share of 
wealth accrued by capital increases, not only does our political 
influence decrease, so does our capacity to invest in alternatives.
We can understand this as the macroeconomics of class struggle. The 
total wealth available for both political influence and alternative 
initiatives comes from the "monetary base" derived from the amount of 
wealth that workers can sustainably divert from consumption. Capitalism, 
as manifested in the neoliberal agenda, will work towards pushing this 
base towards zero, to increase its own base, its accumulated capital. 
Thus, the first dimension in the macroeconomy of class struggle os our 
collective will to fight to resist reduction of our base wealth. Mass 
collective struggles against further reduction of benefits and wages are 
crucial. "Counterpoltics."
Yet, this is but one dimension, since our base of mutual capital is not 
only smaller than the accumulated capital of the capitalist class, but 
far less intensively utilized.
We must intensify the application of our base wealth. We do this by 
investing in alternative ways to produce and share, this means both the 
organisation of the surplus working power of unemployed and 
underemployed members of our communities, but also by making whatever 
money we can spare have available for social investment in 
commons-orientated means of creating wealth. "Venture Communism."
And yet, these are still not likely to be enough. For not only is the 
Capitalist base far larger and more intensivly utilized, capital is also 
much more leveraged. Systems of capitalist finance multiply the amount 
of money by borrowing and lending. Much of the money available for 
investing and spending in the economy exists as a result of such 
activity.
We must not only protect our base wealth by means of counterpolitics, 
and intensify our application of wealth by means of venture communism, 
but we must expand the size of this wealth by means of "Insurgent 
Finance." That is we must draw capital inflows into our social economy 
by drawing the existing accumulations of retained wages; worker's 
pension funds. Pension funds are currently under the control of 
capitalist managers, and not only are they not being utilized to 
capitalize a people's economy, but pension funds have historically been 
some of the most predatory financiers in the industry, most often 
working against the interests of workers.
We need to create securities that underwrite social ventures and 
convince pension funds, and workers in general, to hold them. In 
addition to the securities used to build capital for social enterprise, 
we must employ other mechanisms such as crowd funding and mutual credit 
to further stimulate our social economy. Insurgent Finance must not only 
capture capital inflows to finance the means of social production, but 
also create liquidity to capture demand.
We transform our society as we build the means satisfy our needs 
outside the financial cycles of capitalism. When we take demand away 
from forms of consumption that reproduce capital and further concentrate 
wealth, and instead satisfy the needs and desires of our communities by 
other means. When we produce and share according to our mutual needs and 
desires, and not according to the logic of profit capture.
While there is certainly much more that could be said about these 
dimensions of the macroeconomy of class struggle, the implied strategy 
is straight forward: Protect our base wealth with counterpolitcs, 
intensify it with venture communism, expand it with insurgent finance.
See some of you at Cafe Buchhandlung Tonight, I'll be there around 9pm. 
(http://bit.ly/buchhandlung).
--
Dmyri Kleiner
Venture Communist


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