e-Newsletter 7
CONTENTS
1) Brand New Turbulence Article: ‘Do You Remember the End of History?’ Published in Mule Magazine
2) German-Language Economic Crisis Special
3) Spanish Translation of ‘Et tu Bertinotti?’
4) Finnish Translations of ‘The Movement is Dead, Long Live the Movement’ and ‘The Crazy Before the New’
5) French Translations of John Holloway’s ‘1968 and Paths to New Worlds’
6) Free Association Article on the Crisis
7) All the Usual Requests
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1) BRAND NEW TURBULENCE ARTICLE: ‘DO YOU REMEMBER THE END OF HISTORY?’ PUBLISHED IN MULE MAGAZINE
Turbulence have written a short article on the economic crisis, ‘Do You Remember the End of History?’ for Mule magazine. We are happy to be able to share the article with you here. It can also be found online here.
There have been a number of requests floating around over email lists asking for introductions to the financial (or as we prefer to call it, world economic) crisis. We’d like to think that this article could be useful as such a ‘primer’ – it also contains a few very tentative ideas about what the crisis could mean for radicals.
We’ve turned the article into an A5 flyer which you can download as a PDF, print out, photocopy and leave in your local bookshop – or anywhere else which seems sensible.
The flyers can be found on our website: www.turbulence.org.uk
A German translation of the text can be found here.
And a Swedish translation here.
Here’s the article…
DO YOU REMEMBER THE END OF HISTORY?
By Turbulence
It was all the rage in the 1990s. Neoliberal capitalism, sometimes called Thatcherism or Reaganism, was supposed to represent the pinnacle of history. The slogan then, as the Iron Lady was fond of saying, was ‘There Is No Alternative’. The task of overturning this totalitarian cant started a long time ago. The Counter-Globalisation Movement that arose at the turn of the century and is associated with the protests in Seattle and Genoa, refused to accept that history was over. It put forward the slogan ‘Another World is Possible’. We were part of those movements and now amidst a momentous world economic crisis we can say quite clearly that we were right and they were wrong.
This is not about gloating – it goes right to the heart of what this crisis really means. Above all, neoliberalism was successful in that most ideological of manoeuvres: claiming the centre ground. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve who oversaw much of the de-regulation that contributed to the present crisis, has admitted that he’s had to re-examine his entire life’s dearest beliefs. The essential dogma of neoliberalism – that markets are the best way to allocate social wealth and resources, because only there can individuals’ pursuit of their self-interest be magically transformed into social progress – has been thoroughly disproved. It is no longer common sense, or the only sensible position: it’s now clear that it was a partisan ideology (rather than neutral ‘science’) all along. To hear someone like Greenspan recognise that is like hearing the Pope say, ‘maybe I’ve been wrong about this whole God business’. This is neoliberalism’s ‘fall of the Berlin wall’ moment.
But to say that the world is going to change doesn’t mean that this will be the end of capitalism, or even necessarily the beginning of anything ‘better’ than neoliberalism. It means that now is the moment when a certain economic and political arrangement created in the late 1970s became unsustainable.
The rise of neoliberalism was partly a response to a politically strong and demanding working class, used to the idea that its basic needs should be met by the welfare state, that real wages would rise, and believing itself entitled to more. Since then, real wages have stagnated or declined, welfare provision has been rolled back and restricted, insecurity and fear have become widespread. In return we got cheap credit, thanks to low interest rates and deregulated financial markets – underwritten by rising house prices (the ‘bubble’ where this crisis began) –, private insurance and pensions, and (particularly in the UK and US) a feast of consumption fuelled not by rising wages, but by rampant personal debt. A very few speculators got very wealthy. Some of us got houses and a pension. Most of us got deep into debt.
Now this whole ‘deal’ has collapsed. The name ‘credit crunch’ says it all: the days when cheap credit compensated for losses in all other areas are over. We face the grim reality of those stagnant wages, precarity, rising prices and ever-shrinking social provision. In short, we in the global North face what most of the world’s population experienced in the 1980s, when the IMF and the World Bank roamed the globe selling ‘structural adjustment’.
It was around this ‘adjustment’ that the initial struggles against neoliberalism took place in the 1990s, and the same could happen now. We can’t know exactly where these new social conflicts will erupt, or in what form; whether they will take hold and become generalised. Perhaps around rising food and utility prices, as people reinvent a centuries-old tradition of price-setting, informed by a ‘moral economy’ of ‘fair prices’ that opposes the ‘political economy’ of the market. Perhaps around housing, remembering lessons from the anti-poll tax movement, as people organise to prevent evictions and reclaim physical space.
But this also means that the shape of the restructuring which will be being designed and debated by the G20 and others over the coming months will depend on how people will react to the situation. Everybody’s talking about a ‘New Deal’: well, the deal we get can only be as good as our capacity to demand – and reclaim – what we want.
History, then, is up for grabs. But we knew that all along.
2) GERMAN-LANGUAGE ECONOMIC CRISIS SPECIAL
We’ve also recently produced a German-language ‘economic crisis special’, featuring the two articles addressing the issue in Turbulence 4. Both pieces, by David Harvie and Christian Frings, are available in English and German online here.
The flyer can also be downloaded as a PDF.
The special is featured as a supplement to the latest issue (No. 39) of arranca!, published by the group FelS in Berlin, on ‘militant investigation’. It was published on December 19 2008.
Copies of the special issue will be available at the Interventionist Left’s mini-conference on the crisis in Frankfurt Main this Sunday, January 25 2009. Further copies can be ordered (for a small donation to help cover costs, see website for details) via the usual email address: editors@turbulence.org.uk
3) SPANISH TRANSLATION OF ‘ET TU BERTINOTTI?’
A Spanish translation of Sandro Mezzadra’s article, ‘Et tu Bertinotti?’ published in Turbulence 4 is now available online, along with the introductory note by Keir Milburn and Ben Trott. The article was translated by Bárbara Iniesta.
4) FINNISH TRANSLATIONS OF ‘THE MOVEMENT IS DEAD, LONG LIVE THE MOVEMENT!’ AND ‘THE CRAZY BEFORE THE NEW’
A Finnish translation of Tadzio Mueller’s article in Turbulence 4, ‘The Movement is Dead, Long Live the Movement!’ is now available on our website. It was originally published at http://fifi.voima.fi
A Finnish translation is now also available of Kay Summer and Harry Halpin’s article, ‘The Crazy Before the New’ from Issue 1 of Turbulence. The article was translated by Soile Koskinen and published in Väärinajattelija # 3.
5) FRENCH TRANSLATION OF JOHN HOLLOWAY’S ‘1968 AND PATHS TO NEW WORLDS’
A French translation of John Holloway’s article in Turbulence 4, ‘1968 and Paths to New Worlds’ is now available at the Turbulence website.
The text will soon be made available by the French network, Infokiosques.
6) FREE ASSOCIATION ARTICLE ON THE CRISIS
The Free Association, some of whom are also involved with Turbulence, have a new article out on the current economic crisis. It was written for Shift magazine and can be found on their website here.
7) ALL THE USUAL REQUESTS
As ever, we are desperately in need of donations. If you can make a contribution, no matter how small, via the PayPal button on our website, it would be tremendously appreciated.
If you would rather send us money some other way, get in touch at editors@turbulence.org.uk
We are also always looking out for people who can help with translations. If you can, get in touch at the usual address.
Other than that, we are of course always delighted when people link to our website, become our MySpace friends, and help out with distribution. We’d like to thank all the people who’ve already done so!
(January 23, 2009)
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www.turbulence.org.uk // www.myspace.com/turbulence_ideas4movement // editors@turbulence.org.uk
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Who we are
Turbulence is a journal/newspaper that we hope will become an ongoing space in which to think through, debate and articulate the political, social, economic and cultural theories of our movements, as well as the networks of diverse practices and alternatives that surround them. Read more here
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