A different kind of Europe – The golden calf of capital

The economics of the elite has as much to do with blind faith as rational argument, says Susan George, so our resistance has to reflect this fact.

The Euromemo Group’s recent report is a particularly important and thorough analysis-cum-set of proposals to repair years of self-inflicted damage in the eurozone. Its voice, however welcome, is far from the only one in what has become a mighty chorus.

Many respectable experts, such as Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman and Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, and innumerable NGOs are singing from the same hymn-sheet. A broad coalition has proposed valid and converging alternatives based on both history and common sense.

But let’s face it. None of the reasonable, workable proposals of this consensus, ranging from the mild centre left to the long-time radicals, is even on the table. Governments, the IMF and institutions such as the European Commission and the European Central Bank are not reading, much less discussing or acting on them. This harsh truth should give us a clue about what is actually going on.

We are not talking economics here. We are talking religion – and hellfire and brimstone religion at that. There was no earthly economic reason to allow the Greek quasi-or-actual default to undermine and possibly destroy 50 years of the European work-in-progress. Greece represents no more than 3 per cent of the European economy. However, instead of obliging and helping Greece to correct obvious economic shortcomings, including a bloated military budget and no tax income from the church and the rich, a medieval morality-play scenario was chosen.

The austerity policies everywhere imposed are as dogmatic as anything John Calvin or the pope ever invented. It doesn’t matter that the prescribed doctrines can’t and won’t work. ‘Working’, if by that one means benefiting the great majority of European populations, is not the point. The prescribed commandments must be applied whatever the consequences – which, as opponents have repeatedly warned, will be full‑blooded recession and the increasingly likely destruction of a flawed but remarkable post-war political achievement.

Traces of older and darker human-sacrifice rites are here on display: the markets must be propitiated. These mysterious, god-like forces will have their due: throw another public service, another wage-cut, another batch of uneducated children and their underpaid, uncared-for, often unemployed parents on the fire. The thirst of these gods cannot be slaked. As the European leadership discovers at regular intervals, they always demand new sacrifices.

Yes, I recognise that quasi-rational forces are also at work. We are not talking only religion. We are also talking Politics, Money, Power and Rapport de Forces and our elites surely believe they have found a foolproof way to make the people pay once again for their crisis. Capital must continue to devour social substance, to privatise public services, to squeeze more value from labour, to perpetuate the yawning inequalities that keep it afloat.

I am simply asking that those who remain prepared to fight understand that we are not engaged here in rational argument concerning economic alternatives with respectable people whose ideas are simply different from our own. We are up against a rigid belief system whose priesthood is prepared to defend it to the death – and they have plenty of resources to bring to their battle. Yes, we must continue to campaign and explain, to propose and publish, to occupy and march. But we must also do much more than that.

With our financial transaction tax campaign, Attac verified the Gandhian rule of thumb: ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they criticise you and say it can never work, then you win.’ We have advanced considerably with the FTT but it has still not been applied to the euro. You only win when a majority of your adversaries realise it’s in their interests or when they can’t take the heat any longer.

The Euromemo proposals are not in the interests of the financial markets and no cosmetics will cause them to believe that they are. So we are set to remain in Gandhian stage 1: they will ignore us. That is why we need the help not just of economists but also of anthropologists and historians, actors and comedians and theologians. We need satire and denunciation, sermons and our own medieval morality plays.

Some of our foes might even recognise they are endangering themselves by worshipping the golden calf. Do not forget the papal legate who in 1209, during the Albigensian crusade, was asked by his troops what should be done about the possible Catholics mixed in with the heretics. He, like our sacred Markets and our 1 per cent, cried out ‘Kill them all – God will recognise his own.’ Even, possibly, the Germans.

Source: http://www.redpepper.org.uk/a-different-kind-of-europe-responses/