openpolitics.com

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Everybody seems to be in debt, this is sort of puzzling in a way.”
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And I would say, no, and one reason why is because there seems to be this feeling since
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the 70’s that basically all social problems can be solved through debt.
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One theory I saw, which is kind of interesting, it’s the autonomist reading, Midnight Notes
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Collective, it’s a group of Italian autonomist Marxists.
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But they had this very interesting reading of the two phases of post-war capitalism.
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What they basically said is that after World War II they kinda gave a deal to the North
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Atlantic white working class and they said, “Okay, if you guys don’t become commies we’ll
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give you free education, free health care in most places anyway, we’ll give you social
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benefits of various kinds.”
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And social struggles between 1945 and 1975 where more and more people asking in on the
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deal.
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And there is a tie between productivity and wages.
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So whenever, and the lines go up together, increases of productivity are met with increases
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of wages.
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Since the 70’s the deal is clearly off and one reason is because they reached kind of
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crisis of inclusion that you can’t actually give that deal to everybody without fundamentally
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changing the nature of the system.
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So first minorities, so you have the Civil Rights Movement, other people who’ve been
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left out of the deal want in, people in the Global South want in, women want in, feminist
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movement.
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It reaches a point where it just sort of snaps and you have this fiscal crisis, oil crunch,
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ecological crisis and they say, “Alright, deal off, we’ll give you another deal.
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No longer will wages be connected with productivity, you can all have political rights because
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political rights don’t necessarily give you any economic benefits, but you can have credit.”
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So the credit solves everything, everybody’s being, that’s why you have microcredit saves
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the Third World, why you have 401k’s and mortgages and there’s this huge extension of credit.
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And you could say the same thing happened, right?
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More and more people want in on the deal and more and more people are getting credit to
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the point where people they’re just doing these crazy sub-prime scams and things like
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that are beginning to run the system.
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And when it cracks it looks almost exactly the same, you get the oil shock, you get the
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financial crisis, you get the visions of ecological catastrophe.
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It’s the same thing all over again except at this point it’s not clear what they’re
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[chuckles] gonna come up with next.
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So, in that sense, yeah, you have this unprecedented series of bubbles, built on bubbles, built
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on bubbles.
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And I’m speaking as someone who’s working the Global Justice Movement and we were like
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doing our studies for the G20 as part of like several intellectual collectives where they
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kind of, the activists kind of told us, “Alright, well, they’re all meeting to come up with
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their evil plan and tell us what their evil plan is likely to do so we can oppose it.”
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And so we figure it and I guess they’re gonna have to do green capitalism, declare an emergency,
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we had various ideas for what would be a viable solution.
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And they kept not doing it; they just fight each other.
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In fact one of the reasons why the Global Justice Movement fell into such a problem
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is, like, at least in 2000 we knew what their evil plan was [laughs] and we could oppose
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it.
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And now they don’t seem to be able to come up with one, we had better ideas for their
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evil plan than they did.
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[chuckles]
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So we were sitting around and saying, “Well, come on guys come up with your formula and
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we can fight you.”
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And they wouldn’t so they were sort of stuck on this credit like bubble system that fell
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apart and they haven’t quite come up with what they’re gonna do next.