How comfortable are people with the idea that recent events bespeak a sort of collective overreaching on the part of capitalism? I’m sure its a truism at this stage to suggest that the financial elites exhibited a form of economic stupidity in putting us in this predicament in the first place. But are they politically stupid, too? Today’s commentary from Jacobin seems to suggest as much. The piece starts by stating the protests seem to be exceeding the systems ability to manage them. Here, once again, the crisis is framed in Graeber’s terms:

What’s going on here? A clue, I think, is to be found in a remark that comes near the end of David Graeber’s recent magnum opus on debt: ‘The last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At its root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world . . . with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, flourish, or propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win’.

In this, Graeber is echoing one of my favorite, often-quoted lines from Fredric Jameson: “The mass of people . . . do not themselves have to believe in any hegemonic ideology of the system, but only to be convinced of its permanence.”

But, as the piece continues, a certain fragility has crept into the system, as is no evident from recent global events. Perhaps it is because capitalism has so perfected its ability to perform efficiently? It is incredibly vulnerable now to asymmetrical shocks. There are ways of mitigating this, of course, but only expensive, Keynesian ones.

Thus neoliberalism has systematically dismantled the supports and failsafe systems that kept dissent in check, and has relied instead on preventing dissent from arising in the first place. The 99% have been cut off from institutional channels for influencing policy or voicing their grievances, and thus have been left with no choice but to take it to the streets. And now that we have done so, we are seeing the chaotic and unpredictable failure mode of neoliberal governance.

via Failure Mode.

Hmm, failure mode? I guess we’ll have to see. But certainly asserting something doesn’t make it so, as Kautsky reminded Lenin. And while it took some time for Kautsky to be proved right, in our own time its not clear that we’re even close to seeing a replay of that debate in the offing. Which raises the sort of question a Mick Cox might be willing to ask: at what point WOULD we want to start asking that question? What sort of things would we have to see going on around us before we started to talk about the demise of (the current mode of) capitalism? The main players in the EU are obviously hoping to bid for time and eject Greece gently from the Euro. Papandreou’s hand grenade notwithstanding, that probably remains the plan. In the meantime, the Greeks have been given what Zizek would no doubt call an “unfree” choice. As economic theorist Yanis Varoufakis puts it:

In short, rather than an exercise in participatory democracy, the referendum is a shoddy, strategically ill-fated, morally corrupt and politically damaging ploy. Contrary to what is implied by the Greek PM’s  minders, the referendum was never meant as a means of strengthening Mr Papandreou’s bargaining power over his European colleagues and the IMF. Had he cared to oppose the October Agreement, he ought to have done so in Brussels. No, the referendum is a means of extracting, first, a vote of confidence from his party’s battered MPs and, secondly, to impose upon the Greek people a hideous dilemma which identifies consent to the terrible October Agreement with a continued commitment to remaining in Europe. Rather than a gesture of granting Greeks a voice, this referendum is an attempt to gag the electorate.

Via Yanis Varoufakis