Across the globe, and in the developed economies specifically, the stagnation of the 1980's and 90's created impotent embitterment. As the new global long wave upswing began in 1999, the conditions began to emerge in which workers could turn that embitterment into rebellion, and action, first to raise their wages and conditions, and then to rebuild their organisations, and assert their interests.
As usual, they were constrained in the latter by the dead weight of the trades union bureaucracy, and the strength both organisationally and ideologically of social-democracy. The same was seen in the last similar period, the long wave upswing that occurred in the 1950's and 60's, and required workers to move forward via new, or restored grass roots channels such as the shop stewards movement, and to find, once again, the ideas of Marxism that had been lost during the 1930's and the war years, as well as being grotesquely bowdlerised by Stalinism, which continued to appear as the left-wing of the workers' movement in the following period. As I have set out elsewhere, even amongst the new left that emerged in the post-war period, the ideas of Marxism were distorted, owing more to the ideas of syndicalism and statism than Marxism.
Even as economies expanded at a more rapid pace, after 2000, creating the conditions for workers to advance, the workers' parties, like Labour, which had moved massively to the Right, compared to anything seen before in their history, could offer nothing to them, other than the delusion of benefiting from the rise of asset prices that had become the central pillar of conservative social-democracy over the previous 20 years. Forget about wage rises, let alone the idea of control of your workplace, the conservative social-democrats proclaimed, instead look at the rise in your house price, or the value of your 401k, or ISA. Of course, if you were one of those that had found yourself in precarious employment, or simply low value, low paid, service employment, who had not been able to buy a home, let alone have money left over to put into a pension or savings, such pronouncements appeared more as a kick in the guts, rather than a clarion of hope.
And, when the delusion itself fell apart in 2008, all those that had never benefited from it, must have had some sense of schadenfreude. It was short lived, as those same conservative social-democrats, so adamant in their refusal to propose state intervention on behalf of workers, were instantaneous in their response to provide state funding for the bankers and speculators whose paper assets had been turned into confetti. And to add to the kick in the guts, they followed up with a kick to the groin, as they then proposed to pay for all this largesse, by implementing a decade long programme of austerity on the workers, who had not benefited from any of the inflation of assets to begin with.
But, the fundamental material conditions had changed, and so, despite the austerity measures, despite central banks implementing QE to divert money from the real economy and into speculative assets, the global economy grew, with developing economies taking advantage of the imposed slower growth in developed economies to seize additional market share themselves. In so doing they illustrated, again, at a global level, what Marx had already explained in terms of capital at an individual level, which is that competition forces capital to accumulate, because, as demand rises, each capital must accumulate to expand their own production or lose market share, and become progressively less competitive.
And, global capital accumulation led to further employment of labour, establishing a virtuous circle. In the age of imperialism, you cannot understand capital in any single country without first understanding capital as global capital. Bit, by bit, expanding global trade also fed into the developed economies that had sought to restrain growth via austerity. By 2014, despite austerity, even the developed economies were growing more rapidly again, and the large increase in investment in raw materials, food and energy production, initiated in 1999, had now led to large increases in their supply, sending their market prices much lower, and providing a boost to profits via a release of constant capital, and rise in the rate of profit.
In 2012, as the Eurozone Debt Crisis rumbled on, and currencies came under attack, Mario Draghi, as President of the ECB, made his “whatever it takes” speech, in which he committed the ECB to the same kind of QE policies of infinite money printing that Bernanke had implemented in the US. What was actually required, in the EU, and is still required, was for it to back up its single market and single currency with a single fiscal regime, and a centralised debt management office, with fiscal transfers then being made to the component states. That way, each state would borrow on capital markets at the same rate. Without that, a centrifugal force lies at the heart of the EU structure itself, and the promise of money printing to buy up the worthless sovereign bonds of members states in trouble, was always a poor alternative to it, which would blow up, having itself created the dynamic for higher inflation.
When Greece elected a progressive social-democratic government, in the form of Syriza, the scene was set again, and once more, the conservative social democracy that defines the majority of EU states, as well as the EU itself, ensured that the full weight of economic pressure was put on it to buckle. It again sent the clear message to workers, across Europe, that the sate had endless capacity to intervene on behalf of the speculators, and an equal amount to intervene against the interests of workers, should they begin to make their voices heard.
All of those failures of conservative social-democracy to provide answers in changed material conditions, led to advances of the far right all along the way, and as I have set out elsewhere, that advance of the far right, was also a concomitant of the rise in the social weight of the petty-bourgeoisie since the 1980's, itself resulting from the slow down of growth of large-scale socialised capital. As the far right advanced, so sections of the Left and Centre, instead of defining actual solutions for workers problems, responded only to their own electoral fortunes, by seeking broader coalitions and alliances, which meant even less chance of presenting a distinct and clear alternative, as the third way mantra that elections can only be won from the centre asserted itself, but with that centre itself moving ever further to the Right.
The trouble is that, no matter how wide the definition of “the centre” is made, including sections of the Tories in Britain, and so on, so as to sew up electoral seats, it can provide no solution to the problems that exist that conservative social democracy, let alone those to its right can accept, because those solutions, required by workers, even as progressive social-democratic solutions, require greater economic growth, capital accumulation, and that means rising interest rates that will cause a massive bursting of asset price bubbles, much greater than 2008, and, to bring about that capital investment, the current executives that control that capital, but operate on behalf of shareholders, would have to be removed, and widespread industrial democracy introduced, so that workers and manages used profits to reinvest rather than pay out as dividends and inflated stipends to directors, or to buy back shares to inflate their prices and so on.
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