Category Archives: Translated Articles

Saturating the Human Wellbeing Market

By Mateo Aguado
Original Spanish version published in Rebelión
Translation by Joe Keady

As we all know, a substantial portion of our human wellbeing depends on the possibility of satisfying  certain material needs, needs that we, in a market economy, meet through consumption. The inequalities that exist in the world, however, mean that everyone does not have the same opportunity for consumer action; those opportunities are always greater in the wealthier, more “developed” countries, which is to say countries with higher GDP per capita.

Although GDP has traditionally been used to compare social progress and human wellbeing internationally, many researchers have criticized that usage and questioned the extent to which a country’s average income might actually reflect the well being of its citizens. That criticism of GDP as an indicator of progress can be summed up as follows: a) using a mathematical average ignores social inequality; b) it does not incorporate other factors that have a significant impact on wellbeing, such as life expectancy, amount of available leisure time, or environmental degradation; c) it does not consider production through black market labor or from labor that the marketplace does not provide (such as domestic or voluntary labor); and d) it calculates aspects that do not create wellbeing (such as military expenditures) while simultaneously ignoring aspects that do (such as artistic heritage).

While there are studies that differ, the ones that have been completed to date on the relationship between income and human wellbeing have shown that, past a certain threshold (between $13-18,000 dollars annually per person), higher income do not improve the quality of a person’s life (1). Which is to say that there is a threshold above which the relationship between income and wellbeing disappears; above which more money does not mean greater life satisfaction.

Nonetheless, it is important to emphasize that a proportionate relationship between per capita GDP and life satisfaction does exist below $13,000 annually per person. In that case, small increases in income bring significant improvements in life satisfaction. That is to say that income and wellbeing do develop in parallel in those cases where almost all income is allocated to meeting the most basic needs (such as eating when the food supply is uncertain), which are the ones that have the greatest impact on wellbeing.

In any case, once a certain necessary income level has been reached that is sufficient to guarantee access to the basic material needs to live well, an increase in income no longer entails a relative increase in the quality of life. In that case, income may increase tremendously without corresponding to human wellbeing at all.

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Revolutionary Mythology and Revolutionary Reality, by Rudolf Rocker

Originally published in Die Freie Gesellschaft, Vol. 4, Issue 36/37, 1952
Original German version available via anarchismus.at here.
Good intro to Rocker’s work available here.
Translated by one Joe Keady.

Rudolf Rocker (1873-1958) was a bookbinder, member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and anarchist activist from Mainz, Germany. He fled to London in 1895 where he was active in the Jewish labor movement and edited Yiddish newspapers. He was interned during World War I and in 1919 returned to Germany where he co-founded the Free Workers’ Union of Germany (FAUD). He drafted the FAUD’s Declaration of Syndicalist Principles and remained one of its leaders until he immigrated to the United States in 1933. He was also a major influence on the development of the German anarcho-syndicalist movement and the Federation of Libertarian Socialists (FFS) after World War II.

Revolution and the Cult of Revolution

The impression that a thing creates from afar is always different from how it appears up close. Both perspectives have their advantages, but they have disadvantages as well. When we observe a landscape from a distance, we can see how distinct elements interrelate with one another. We get a complete picture rather than just segments of it. As we move closer we see things more clearly, but we lose the overall impression that can give us perspective: As the saying goes, we can’t see the forest for the trees. It is only from a distance that we can comprehend scale or the proportion of one thing to another. But it is only when we look from up close that we can analytically observe the course of development and assess it in detail.

The same can be said of every historical event without exception. Major historical turning points like the Reformation or the French Revolution create new social realities based on the restructured social circumstances. Historic events that are already in the past, and that we consequently can only assess from the perspective of the present, gradually become traditions to us and those traditions are what form the basis of our assessment in most cases. But tradition is always a colorful mixture of truth and poetry that is created under the influence of the circumstances that we ourselves live under. And that is why an image always arises that is entirely different from the one that the people who lived during the period in question actually experienced. The result is that we often see things in a romanticized light and it is therefore not unusual that we end up with ideas that have little in common with historical reality. That is entirely understandable: The further behind us a historical period gets, the less we find ourselves in a position to accurately comprehend the lot of individuals of that time. We see the outer contours of the image, the heroic gestures of great men who became leaders in those struggles and above all the dramatic acts that are clearly silhouetted against the background of historical events. So we have a wider scope, but the more intimate details, the ones whose interrelations create the complete picture, remain largely unknown to us and, as a result, have not impact on our judgment.

It is only when we ourselves have experienced a similar catastrophe of worldwide importance, as is the case today, that thinking people can hone their understanding of past events. Their own environment forces them to compare what is today with what once was. The scales fall from their eyes and they begin to understand that there are many things in the past that they have only seen through the tinted lens of tradition and therefore many things that they have misjudged or fundamentally misunderstood. Their own experience makes them more critical and helps them look more deeply into things that they had hardly noticed before or had accepted as self-evident to the point that they gradually became internal certainties that no longer required agonizing over. And the fact that we are coming to these conclusions right at this moment should come as no surprise at all: We always understand best the things that become entwined with our own fate. Personal experiences are always stronger and more enduring than the most beautiful traditions that are transmitted to us by others. Anything that a person has to slowly and painfully achieve through his or her own thought will always make a deeper mark than illusions that are readily accepted as truth. That is why periods like the one we are experiencing today are trying years when each of us has to decide whether he or she has learned anything from the past thirty years or has simply come up short.

I am not arguing that tradition is inherently harmful or should be discarded. There are traditions that pass ideas and intellectual accomplishments on to subsequent generations and that would be disastrous to lose because they are among the most precious pursuits of our personal and social life. That is why they frequently inspire posterity for centuries afterward and strongly influence people’s intellectual lives, often much more deeply than most people realize. But as strong as tradition’s influence on subsequent generations might be, we should never forget that it is only the reflection of a time that has passed and, because of the way that it comes about, poetry will necessarily replace the deeper knowledge of historical events that we have lost. That is precisely why it not infrequently becomes a cult that clouds our sense of reality and misleads us toward idealistic ways of thinking that are also fictitious. But we only really become aware of that when we are suddenly (and usually without the necessary mental preparation) surprised by major, violent events that force us to acknowledge that a previous period in our history has reached its conclusion – even while the future is still foggy and we can only gradually make out the new paths that we have to carve in order to face the new reality.
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Collapse and Rebirth in the Mayan World of the Zapatistas

Foto

EZLN supporters use their silence as a sign of protest — Photo by Victor Camacho

By Luis Hernandez Navarro
Translated from the original Spanish by Joe Keady
Originally published in: La Jornada, December 22, 2012

Nothing can reappear that never went away. By silently and peacefully occupying five cities in Chiapas this December 21, the Mayan Zapatista rebels did not reappear but rather reaffirmed their existence.

The EZLN has been here for more than 28 years. It never went away. It grew discreetly for its first ten years, then publicly announced its own existence more than 18 years ago. Since then it has sporadically spoken and remained silent, but it never stopped existing. Its disappearance or irrelevance has been declared time and again, but it has always resurfaced powerfully and meaningfully.

The start of the new Mayan cycle was no exception. More than 40 thousand Zapatista supporters marched in the rain in five cities in Chiapas: 20 thousand in San Cristóbal, 8 thousand in Palenque, 8 thousand in Las Margaritas, 6 thousand in Ocosingo, and at least 5 thousand more in Altamirano. It was the largest mobilization since the rebels first emerged in southeastern Mexico.

The scale of the protest is an indication of its internal power: far from declining in recent years, it has grown. It shows that the opposing strategy of counterinsurgency, carried out by the various governments, has failed. It demonstrates that their project is not only a genuine expression of the Mayan world but of many poor mestizo campesinos in Chiapas as well.

The EZLN has never left the national scene. Guided by its own political calendar, true to its own ethical consistency, and with the power of the state against it, it has strengthened its own forms of autonomous government and sustained its political authority among the indigenous villages within the country and its active solidarity networks internationally. If it does not always appear in public, that does not mean that it is not present in many significant struggles across the country.

Its supporters govern themselves, administer justice, and resolve agrarian conflicts through the five Boards of Good Government in the autonomous municipalities of Chiapas. In their territories, the rebels have established their own health and education systems independently of the state and federal governments, organized production and commerce, and maintained their military structure. They have successfully addressed the challenge of transferring leadership from one generation to the next. Moreover, they have effectively avoided the threats posed by the drug trade, public insecurity, and migration. The book Luchas muy otras. Zapatismo y autonomía en las comunidades indígenas de Chiapas [Other Struggles: Zapatismo and Autonomy in the Indigenous Communities of Chiapas] is an extraordinary window into some of these experiences.

This December 21, the Zapatistas staged a march that was orderly, dignified, disciplined, cohesive, and silent – and that silence resounded far and wide. Just as they have had to cover their faces to be seen, they were now refusing to speak in order to be heard. It was a silence that expresses a fertile capacity for other horizons of social transformation and a tremendous power from below; a silence that communicates the will to resist in the face of power from above: As Ivan Illich once said, “He who remains silent is ungovernable.”

One cycle of political struggle came to an end in Mexico this first of December at the same time that another began. The EZLN has a lot to say in the nascent map of social struggles that is starting to appear in this country. Its mobilization may have a strong impact on them.

Amid the contours that define the new stage of social struggle, we find: the return of the old PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) dinosaur to the president’s office, with its Salinismo leadership style and its authoritarian use of state power; the pretense of social-conflict management based on an agreement among the elites that excludes the ranks of the subaltern; and the crisis, decomposition, and reorganization of the parliamentary left and the emergence of new social movements.

The EZLN is a new player that, without being invited, has taken a recently available seat at the national political table.

The Pacto por México, which was signed by the PRI, the PAN (National Action Party), and, individually, by the president of the PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) claims to establish a program of reforms without broad segments of society. The EZLN mobilization makes it clear that a very broad part of Mexican society has not been included in that agreement and that what its signatories have agreed upon does not necessarily have the citizens’ support.

The party of the Aztec sun (the PRD) is mired in an internal struggle that could fracture it. The New Left’s aspiration to yoke its destiny to the Peña Nieto government mortgages off any possibility of maintaining critical distance from power.

The National Regeneration Movement (known as Morena for short) has been jumping through organizational hoops to register as a party; the Organization of the People and the Workers (OPT) will probably follow suit. Nonetheless, there is a great deal of political and social territory that the parliamentary left has left vacant and the Zapatistas have undeniable political authority among its inhabitants.

In the past year and a half, social movements that question power have emerged outside of the political parties. They do not feel that they are being represented by any of them. The Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, #YoSoy132, community struggles against public insecurity and ecological devastation, student protests in defense of public education, and others are not on the same paths as the institutional politicos. The sympathy toward Zapatismo among those groups is real.

But beyond this moment, the marches of the thirteenth Mayan baktun are a new ¡Ya basta! similar to the one that was spelled out in January 1994. They are a renewed way of saying ¡Nunca más un México sin nosotros! (Never again a Mexico without us!), as expressed in October 1996, that opens up new horizons. They ask for nothing and they demand nothing. They are demonstrating the power of silence. They are announcing the collapse of one world while another is being reborn.

Making Every Central Bank a Bad Bank: Ernst Lohoff and Norbert Trenkle Discuss the Economic and Financial Crisis – Part 1 of 3

Questions by Reinhard Jellen
Translated from the original German by Joe Keady
Originally published in: Telepolis on August 1, 2012; reposted here
Part 2 of this interview is here; part 3 is here.

Black clouds on the horizon: With economies in Europe threatening to fall like dominoes and the end of the euro in sight, the political countermeasures seem to be increasingly ineffective despite their absurd dimensions (Germany, for example, is currently committed to an overall liability of € 644 billion).

Every solution to the problem seems to discretely transform into an even bigger problem while exacerbating and deepening the economic, debt, and financial crisis even further. With the end of the final remaining financial bubble, namely sovereign lending, together with looming inflation, the current crisis could make the period following Black Friday in 1929 look like a pleasant stroll on a bright Easter Sunday. The following is a conversation with Ernst Lohoff and Norbert Trenkle, whose book Die große Entwertung (The Great Devaluation) locates the historical limits of the bourgeois economy in our time.

Richard Jellen: How does Marx help us understand the present crisis better than other theorists?

Ernst Lohoff: To answer that, first we have to look at the conversation around the present crisis, which is characterized by a remarkable discrepancy. On one hand it’s an established fact that this is a crisis of “historical proportions” and every couple of weeks there is a new summit meeting that ends with the most important heads of state announcing that they have just saved the global economy from destruction. On the other hand, the explanations that are being offered for this dramatic development are extremely meager. The official discourse around the crisis is being conducted at the level of an amateur plumber who fixes a pipe here and there while the basement fills with water. Every kind of finance-technological maneuver is being discussed, but nobody really knows what will come of them because there is no theoretically grounded analysis of the ongoing crisis process.

Meanwhile, economic theory’s more thoughtful representatives are openly conceding the bankruptcy of their discipline. Harvard professor and former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff, for example, recently told the German business paper Handelsblatt that the highly elegant economic models that have dominated academia for decades have, in practice, been “very, very unsuccessful. When the big shock came, they turned out to be worthless.”

RJ: What caused that total failure?

EL: We think that it goes back to the very questions they’re asking in the first place. The fundamental question of our crisis era is really quite obvious: Why does a society with absolutely explosive material productivity, one that can produce material wealth endlessly, have to conclude that it is apparently “living beyond its means”? We can find the answer to this question in Marx – provided that we read him critically and not along the interpretive models of traditional Marxism or the so-called Marx Renaissance that we’re experiencing now.

Material Wealth
vs.
Abstract Wealth

Marx’s Capital doesn’t begin by contrasting capital and labor but with the “elementary form” of capitalist society: the commodity. Marx shows that the basic contradiction that explains capitalism’s tendency toward crisis in general and the current crisis in particular is built into the commodity itself. It is the contradiction between two different forms of wealth: material wealth, as expressed in the production of goods, and abstract wealth, which is categorially represented as value and reified in the form of money.

Under the conditions of modern commodity production, meaning within a capitalist society, material wealth is only ever produced to the extent that it can also be represented as value, meaning to the extent that it contributes to the valorization of capital. So the production of goods is always a means to an external end: the end in itself of turning money into more money. Any time this end cannot be achieved because the valorization of capital has ground to a halt, material wealth also stops being produced. Goods are even destroyed because they can’t be sold despite the fact that needs are left unmet on a massive scale. People have to live in tents while their houses sit empty, for example, simply because they can no longer pay off their credit.

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The Economic Crisis and Fictitious Capital: Ernst Lohoff and Norbert Trenkle Discuss the Economic and Financial Crisis – Part 2 of 3

Questions by Reinhard Jellen
Translated from the original German by Joe Keady
Originally published in: Telepolis August 2, 2012; reposted here
Part 1 of this interview is here; part 3 is here

While both neoliberal and Keynesian theorists prefer to interpret the crisis as a problem of supply- or demand-side valorization, Ernst Lohoff and Norbert Trenkle claim that the bourgeois economy suffered a heart attack with the onset of the IT age when the increasing replacement of human labor with technology crowded exponentially larger numbers of people out of waged labor than it took in while retaining labor as the fundamental source of profit. It is a change that they say can only be compensated with speculative capital, or what is known as “fictitious capital.” The quantity of property titles traded on the financial markets whose value can only be realized in the future but that are traded as capital in advance, such as derivatives, futures, options, etc., has increased dramatically in recent years and exceeds the value produced by the real economy many times over.

But this displacement of accumulation from production into the sphere of speculation does not eliminate the valorizationproblem. Instead, it moves the problem to a more profound level – with all the more serious consequences. If faith in the realization of future value should collapse because it is foreseeable that the real-economy basis that the property titles correspond to has eroded then, in the view of the authors of Die große Entwertung (The Great Devaluation), the entire chain letter-style system will also collapse. Part 2 of our conversation with Ernst Lohoff and Norbert Trenkle about the economic and financial crisis.

Reinhard Jellen: What caused the present crisis?

Norbert Trenkle: When we look at the causes, we have to distinguish between the two major layers of the crisis. The base level crisis of the valorization of value is, as has already been said, a result of the acceleration of productivity development, which makes labor increasingly superfluous. The third industrial revolution is playing a critical role in that. While there were also powerful drives toward rationalization in earlier phases of capitalist development, for instance in the 1920 and ’30s when Fordist production methods were introduced, new sectors of industrial mass production were also opening up at the same time and they required massive additional labor. That expansion of commodity production into new fields compensated for the rationalization effects so that ultimately even more labor what used than before.

But in the third industrial revolution, this compensation mechanism isn’t working anymore because restructuring the production process based on information technology means shifting a society’s productive power to the level of knowledge or, more precisely, to the application of knowledge to production. The foundations of capital valorization are called into question as a result because this leads to an absolute displacement of labor power across every sector of value production that can no longer open up new industries to make themselves competitive.

RJ: So what is fictitious capital and what is its role in the current crisis?

Ernst Lohoff: Fictitious capital is essential for understanding the second layer of the crisis. It is a term that Marx introduced as distinct from functioning capital. He showed that capital doesn’t just transform the production of potatoes, steel, textiles, etc. into commodity production in the course of its development but that money capital itself also becomes a tradable commodity. Continue reading →

Toward a More Politicized Mobilization

By Isabelle Porter & Lisa-Marie Gervais
Translated from the original French by Translating the printemps érable (see info below)
Original French text here
August 25 2012“The street must have representation”

“The movement is taking a new direction to prevent the election of the Liberal Party or the one led by François Legault,” says sociologist Jacques Hamel. (photo credit Jacques Nadeau, Le Devoir)

===

Judging by the demonstrators’ enthusiasm August 22, you would think you were back in the peak of the “Printemps Érable”. Just as dedicated as they were in the first days of March, students and sympathizers walked with a renewed fervor during the present election campaign. However, casseroles concerts are becoming a rare sight, only a handful of marchers keep the nightly demonstrations going and the great majority of students chose to return to classes. Is the movement dead?

“A movement is not a strike. It’s not a demonstration. It’s men and women, citizens, who get involved, who express themselves, who oppose a decision that was taken, regardless of the mode of expression they choose. It doesn’t matter if it’s by voting in a general assembly to go out on strike, taking part in a demonstration on the 22nd, writing an open letter in a newspaper or even simply talking about it with family and wearing a red square. That’s a movement”, argues Éliane Laberge, President of the Québec College Student Federation [Fédération étudiante collégiale du Québec (FECQ)]. “There are still plenty of students against the hike. They have simply decided to use another approach, in this case the truce before they go to vote on September 4. We respect that.”

Martine Desjardins, President of the Québec Federation of University Students [Fédération étudiante universitaire (FEUQ)], admits that the mobilization is less “explosive”. “The mobilization has undergone a transformation. It is more underground, less explosive than the nightly demonstrations, but we go door to door every evening in neighbourhoods. Maybe it doesn’t make for good media clips, but it helps get our message out”, says Mrs. Desjardins, noting that her federation like that of the colleges has been very active in conducting a campaign across the province, from Abitibi down to the lower St. Lawrence.

That too is a strategy, she points out. “It’s important to change the mobilization during the electoral campaign and to adapt to the situation”, says Mrs. Desjardins. According to her, that’s because any disturbance or street demonstration diverts the campaign from the real issues and helps the Liberals. The fact that the “street” is quiet removes one of Jean Charest’s hot buttons, says Mrs. Desjardins, ironically picking up one of the Liberal leader’s talking points.

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Neoliberalism Turned into the Godfather of the Finance Industry: Ernst Lohoff and Norbert Trenkle Discuss the Economic and Financial Crisis – Part 3 of 3

Questions by Reinhard Jellen
Translation by Joe Keady
Originally published in: Telepolis August 6, 2012, reposted here
Part 1 of this interview is here; part 2 is here.

During the Keynesian era, the state established itself as an active supporter of economic life through direct and indirect interventions. However, the basic inconsistency between material output and its abstract and crisis-prone valorization in the bourgeois economy was never questioned. As a result, the fundamental dilemma remained: an increase in productivity with unchanged or stagnant rates of accumulation accompanied by a tendency to cut jobs and the increasing erosion of the basis for real accumulation.

When the Keynesian recipe stopped having a positive effect on private investments in the late 1970s, it was replaced by neoliberalism, which guided untapped investment capital into the speculative sphere of the finance industry. This led to the real economy’s growing dependence on the impulses of the financial markets, which negatively impacted its economic base, in turn causing periodic bubbles in unfunded financial securities. Since the New Economy and the housing bubble burst, the extent of the crisis has gradually become clear with the erosion of public finances. Part 3 of the conversation with Ernst Lohoff and Norbert Trenkle, authors of Die große Entwertung (The Great Devalorization). [Translator's note: The book is excellent and I would highly recommend that an English-language publisher in the critique-of-capitalism biz find a decent translator and get that thing out there. Just saying.]

Reinhard Jellen: You link the respective victories of Keynesianism and neoliberalism with various phases of the economic valorization dynamic in capitalism. Can you explain that?

Norbert Trenkle: Keynesianism’s relative success during the postwar boom era was linked to specific structural conditions that were beyond its reach, meaning that it had not and could not have created them. Keynesian regulatory and redistribution policy was entirely functional as long as mass industrial employment expanded and acted as the engine for a self-sustaining boom in the valorization of capital. The expansion of welfare systems and an increase in real wages not only contributed to social pacification but also stabilized the economic upswing because it strengthened mass consumption. The expansion of public infrastructure was at least as important. Without that, ubiquitous industrialization and the commodification of everything in society could not have functioned. Cars would not have been able to drive without a dense network of roads, electrification of households required a sufficient supply of electricity, and a good, wide-ranging education system was necessary for educating a skilled labor force.

So the state took on a central role and that fed the idea that it was also in a position to keep economic development running, to guide it, and to stabilize it over the long term. But when the postwar Fordist boom came to an end, that turned out to be an illusion because, to the extent that valorization of capital ground to a halt as more and more workers were laid off due to the rapid increase in productivity, it was not just the financing sources for state activities that ran dry. Even more serious was the fact that it could not manage to start a new surge in self-sustaining valorization of capital despite massive credit-financed stimulus and growth packages.

From our perspective, there is nothing remarkable about that because, while the state can intervene in the market’s mechanisms to a certain extent, it has no access to the basic process that is driven by the internal contradiction of capitalism. To put it another way, Keynesianism was helpless in the face of the across-the-board rationalization that followed the third industrial revolution, which ultimately eroded the foundations of valorization of capital. Every attempt to lead the real economy out of stagflation failed miserably.

That was the deeper reason for neoliberalism’s victory. While it did not have a plan for revving up valorization of capital either, it laid the groundwork for the economic dynamics to be shifted to the “finance industry” and consequently for the crisis to be postponed for the next three decades. The critical factors here were, on one hand, consistent liberalization of the financial markets and, on the other hand, the Reagan administration’s increase of the national debt, which in a way served as financing for the postponement of fictitious-capital accumulation on an enormous scale. The destruction of Fordist structures through the disempowerment of unions, etc. did the rest because at the same time the privatization of the public sector opened up new fields for financial investment, for example the transformation of state pension systems into private life insurance.

RJ: What role does the IT revolution play in all of this?

NT: In the same way that Keynesianism backed up the expansion of industrial mass production, neoliberalism became the godfather of the “finance industry.” It is an irony of history that it simultaneously helped the third industrial revolution break through as a result. By itself it would have suffocated on its own productivity. But the accumulation of fictitious capital created the leeway that was necessary for a broad installation of information technology. It was possible to temporarily override the powerful rationalization effects that brought about a massive displacement of living labor from the core valorization sectors by taking on future value. The result, however, is a progressive erosion of value production that is only really becoming noticeable in its full scale now in the crisis of fictitious capital.

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Closing Statement at Pussy Riot Trial

By Yekaterina Samutsevich
Translated from the original Russian by the Chto Delat Work Group, source here

In the closing statement, the defendant is expected to repent, express regret for their deeds or enumerate attenuating circumstances. In my case, as in the case of my colleagues in the group, this is completely unnecessary. Instead, I want to voice my thoughts about the reasons behind what has happened to us.

That Christ the Savior Cathedral had become a significant symbol in the political strategy of the authorities was clear to many thinking people when Vladimir Putin’s former [KGB] colleague Kirill Gundyayev took over as leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. After this happened, Christ the Savior Cathedral began to be openly used as a flashy backdrop for the politics of the security forces, which are the main source of power [in Russia].

Why did Putin feel the need to exploit the Orthodox religion and its aesthetic? After all, he could have employed his own, far more secular tools of power—for example, the state-controlled corporations, or his menacing police system, or his obedient judiciary system. It may be that the harsh, failed policies of Putin’s government, the incident with the submarine Kursk, bombings of civilians in broad daylight, and other unpleasant moments in his political career forced him to ponder the fact that it was high time to resign; that otherwise, the citizens of Russia would help him do this. Apparently, it was then that he felt the need for more persuasive, transcendental guarantees of his long tenure at the pinnacle of power. It was then that it became necessary to make use of the aesthetic of the Orthodox religion, which is historically associated with the heyday of Imperial Russia, where power came not from earthly manifestations such as democratic elections and civil society, but from God Himself.

How did he succeed in doing this? After all, we still have a secular state, and any intersection of the religious and political spheres should be dealt with severely by our vigilant and critically minded society, shouldn’t it? Here, apparently, the authorities took advantage of a certain deficit of the Orthodox aesthetic in Soviet times, when the Orthodox religion had an aura of lost history, of something that had been crushed and damaged by the Soviet totalitarian regime, and was thus an opposition culture. The authorities decided to appropriate this historical effect of loss and present a new political project to restore Russia’s lost spiritual values, a project that has little to do with a genuine concern for the preservation of Russian Orthodoxy’s history and culture.

It was also fairly logical that the Russian Orthodox Church, given its long mystical ties to power, emerged as the project’s principal exponent in the media. It was decided that, unlike in the Soviet era, when the church opposed, above all, the brutality of the authorities towards history itself, the Russian Orthodox Church should now confront all pernicious manifestations of contemporary mass culture with its concept of diversity and tolerance.

Implementing this thoroughly interesting political project has required considerable quantities of professional lighting and video equipment, air time on national TV channels for hours-long live broadcasts, and numerous background shoots for morally and ethically edifying news stories, where the Patriarch’s well-constructed speeches would in fact be presented, thus helping the faithful make the correct political choice during the difficult time for Putin preceding the election. Moreover, the filming must be continuous; the necessary images must be burned into the memory and constantly updated; they must create the impression of something natural, constant and compulsory.

Our sudden musical appearance in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior with the song “Mother of God, Drive Putin Out” violated the integrity of the media image that the authorities had spent such a long time generating and maintaining, and revealed its falsity. In our performance we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to unite the visual imagery of Orthodox culture and that of protest culture, thus suggesting to smart people that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch and Putin, that it could also ally itself with civic rebellion and the spirit of protest in Russia.

Perhaps the unpleasant, far-reaching effect from our media intrusion into the cathedral was a surprise to the authorities themselves. At first, they tried to present our performance as a prank pulled by heartless, militant atheists. This was a serious blunder on their part, because by then we were already known as an anti-Putin feminist punk band that carried out their media assaults on the country’s major political symbols.

In the end, considering all the irreversible political and symbolic losses caused by our innocent creativity, the authorities decided to protect the public from us and our nonconformist thinking. Thus ended our complicated punk adventure in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

I now have mixed feelings about this trial. On the one hand, we expect a guilty verdict. Compared to the judicial machine, we are nobodies, and we have lost. On the other hand, we have won. The whole world now sees that the criminal case against us has been fabricated. The system cannot conceal the repressive nature of this trial. Once again, the world sees Russia differently from the way Putin tries to present it at his daily international meetings. Clearly, none of the steps Putin promised to take toward instituting the rule of law have been taken. And his statement that this court will be objective and hand down a fair verdict is yet another deception of the entire country and the international community. That is all. Thank you.

Who Is to Blame for the Crisis Outbreak?

[Part II of a three-part series on the crisis in capitalism, originally published in German here; part I available here (German), here (English), and here (Greek)]

by Tomasz Konicz
translated by Joe Keady

No One Is to Blame for the Crisis: Crisis of Capitalism, Part II

The more the crisis intensifies, the more mutual blaming dominates the public discourse around it in almost every Western country. Meanwhile, it appears as though every nation and every relevant social group is, in fact, responsible for some kind of aberrant behavior that has contributed to the disaster that is currently unfolding before our eyes in Europe.

The German government and its austerity policies, for example, are being blamed throughout almost all of Europe for escalating the debt crisis that is pushing the European currency area toward collapse. The weekly left-liberal British paper New Statesman reached a new high point in this rising wave of criticism of the German austerity dictate with its most recent front-page story, declaring that Angela Merkel is the most dangerous leader in the world and depicting her as a Terminator who is bound by an austerity fetish and, due to the increasing suicide rates in Southern Europe, as already having “blood on [her] hands.”

Outside of Europe the criticism of Germany has also reached something of a consensus level, as the German media were forced to notice during the G20 summit:

US President Barack Obama and the heads of state of India, Brazil, Argentina, and Russia had only crushing verdicts for Merkel’s policies, which they say are leading the global economy into recession.
- Spiegel

In Germany, there is also a belief that the debt issue has been adequately settled. From Thilo Sarrazin, an immensely successful one-man resentment-production specialist, to “economics professors” emeritus like one Ottmar Issing, it is the lazy southern countries that are responsible for the crisis. Issing got right to the heart of this distorted interpretation of the crisis – which effectively ignores Germany’s enormous current account surplus in comparison with that of the eurozone – in an article for the national German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:

The realization that the problems in each country, almost without exception, can be attributed to their own mistakes is being restrained less and less. Excessive wage increases over many years (not least of all in the public sector), unsound financial policies in no small number of cases, and unrestrained lines of credit for banks had to end in crisis.
- Ottmar Issing

And furthermore, of course, the mean and nasty bankers and speculators who contributed to the development of gigantic speculation bubbles with their extreme greed are also held responsible for the present chaos. This is another argument made by the New Statesman in its critique of Merkel mentioned above. It blames “the world’s ‘top’ bankers” for the outbreak of the crisis, which Merkel’s “deficit fetishism” has only made worse. Right-wing extremists and right-wing populist forces, however, blame foreigners, the unemployed, refugees, welfare recipients, Muslims, Jews, or Roma, as desired, for contributing to the crisis dynamic in one way or another. Thilo Sarrazin recently added a broad new facet to this extreme-right phantom by connecting the alleged Southern European sloppiness with the weather. Specifically, the unrecognized SPD satirist claims that the weather imprints itself on the “popular character”:

In my book, I call it the fog factor. The foggier and colder the winter is in a given country, the more solid its finances. If one is forced by nature to prepare for hard times, that obviously has an impact on the character of a people.
- Thilo Sarrazin

Winter in Singapore, which achieved a budget surplus of almost 3% in 2011, must be murder.

Personifying the Causes of the Crisis

All of these more or less credible crisis interpretations and their corresponding allocations of blame are based on a shared basic assumption: The crisis was caused by the aberrant behavior of some particular individuals, groups, or social strata that disrupted capitalism’s smooth operation. The premises of all of the crisis interpretations above is roughly, Somebody must have violated the noble laws of the market economy, thereby causing the present chaos. Blame is then allocated according to one’s ideological preference: The bankers were too greedy, the Southern Europeans lived beyond their means, Germany has lapsed into an “austerity fetish” and is leading the world toward a depression, foreigners took away our jobs – or the debt crisis is the result of a “popular character” determined by the weather.

Without exception, each of these interpretations of the current systemic crisis of capitalism blames a group of people for a crisis that was caused by deficiencies in the guilty parties’ character, culture, or race. The causes of the crisis are being personified, by which the current dislocations are traced back to the characteristics of the group of people or nations that are affected. But the social system in which these scapegoats operate remains unexamined in this personification. In everyday awareness, capitalism has long since sedimented into human beings’ natural state, no more worthy of reflection than, say, gravity.

In fact, the basic assumption of this scapegoat theory as explained above has to be changed into its logical opposite in order to pick up the trail of the actual causes of the crisis. The crisis erupted, therefore, because all of the participants fulfilled their economic functions within the market economy brilliantly. Nobody is to blame for the outbreak of the crisis. Capitalism is undergoing a systemic crisis precisely because all of its economic subjects are doing exactly what the system demands of them as efficiently as possible.

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