Aufheben #23-2015/16

2013-14 issue of Aufheben with 3 longer articles - After the Crisis - 5'000 years of debt? - Fracking Struggles

EDITORIAL: THE ‘NEW’ WORKFARE SCHEMES IN HISTORICAL AND CLASS CONTEXT The government’s ‘new’ workfare schemes are one part of a massive programme of welfare reform, backed up by an unprecedented ideological attack on the ‘undeserving poor’. The schemes, which have been attacked for their treatment of many of the claimants forced onto them, are the latest in a long line of attempts to ensure the unemployed function properly as a reserve army of labour. THE EURO CRISIS: TAKING THE PIGS TO MARKET For more than two years we have seen the politicians and policy-makers of Europe repeatedly involved in frantic and often fraught negotiations to find an agreement to resolve what has become known as the euro crisis. Certainly the euro crisis has been a ‘crisis too good to miss’ for the European ruling class. It has provided the opportunity for governments across Europe – not just the eurozone – to push through sharp cuts to public spending and the welfare state and to accelerate privatisation and neo-liberal reforms. In this article we shall give an account of the unfolding of the euro-crisis since the end of 2009. We shall also consider the explanations concerning the causes of the euro-crisis that have been put forward. Although these explanations may all have a certain element of truth, we shall argue that the euro crisis can only be fully understood if it is placed in the wider context of the tectonic shifts being brought about in the global accumulation of capital caused by the rise of China and the newly emerging economies of the global south. THE CLIMATE CRISIS... AND THE NEW GREEN CAPITALISM? The inability of the world's states to take decisive action on climate change makes a strong case for the incompatibility of capitalism's endless growth with finite ecological limits. However, this identifies the interests of capital per se with fossil fuels, and overlooks the emerging ‘green capital’ which sees averting dangerous climate change as an opportunity for new avenues of accumulation. While this may be too little to late, the struggles between ‘fossil’ and ‘green’ capitalists look likely to increasingly shape both capitalist development and geopolitics over the coming decades. INTAKES: THE ARAB SPRING IN THE AUTUMN OF CAPITAL Our Intakes article, from ‘Friends of the Classless Society’ (Berlin), contextualizes the recent tumultuous events in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. The basis of the cross class alliances was their shared opposition to the dictators. Now the dictators have been overthrown, the article argues, both market liberals and the statist left are likely to be disappointed by developments. This analysis serves as a welcome antidote to the enthusiastic accounts put forward by both mainstream liberals, who have seen the Arab Spring as a series of democratic bourgeois revolutions that will usher in parliamentary democracy, the rule of law and economic property, and the autonomists and left who see the uprisings in the Arab world as a manifestation of an emerging amorphous global anti-capitalist movement.

Contents: BREXIT MEANS… WHAT?HAPLESS IDEOLOGY AND PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCESA number of left groups and individuals campaigned for the UK to leave the European Union in the recent referendum. We argue that the Brexit campaign, and the referendum itself, its results and its implementation, have been one with a victory of the ruling class against us. The implementation of Brexit will negatively affect solidarity among workers and radical protesters, setting back our strength and potentials to overturn capitalism. Many people in the radical left were blinded by the ideological forms of our capitalist relations, the reification of our human interactions, to the point of accepting a victory of the far right with acquiescence, or even collaborating with it. THE RISE OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES:REIFICATION OF DEFEAT AS THE BASIS OF EXPLANATIONConspiracy theories have become more widespread in recent years. As populist explanations, they offer themselves as radical analyses of ‘the powerful’ – i.e., the operation of capital and its political expressions. One of the features that is interesting about such conspiracy theories therefore is that they reflect a critical impulse. We suggest that at least part of the reason for their upsurge (both in the past and in recent years) has to do with social conditions in which movements reflecting class struggles have declined or are seen to be defeated. We trace the rise of conspiracy theories historically and then focus on the most widespread such theory today – the idea that 9/11 was an inside job. We suggest that one factor in the sudden rise of 9/11 conspiracy theories was the failure and decline of the movement against the war in Iraq. CHINA: THE PERILS OF BORROWING SOMEONE ELSE’S SPECTACLESWe argue that the transition facing China is the shift from the export of commodities to export of capital. This transition would mark a major step in transforming China from what we have termed a mere epicentre in the global economy to its establishment as a distinct second pole of within the global accumulation capital – an emerging antipode to that of the US. The group Chuǎng argue that recent Aufheben analyses are ‘too optimistic’ concerning China’s ability to maintain economic growth rates and fuel global capital accumulation. We reproduce their article as an Intake. In our response, we contend Chuǎng are unable even to recognise what we are suggesting let alone argue against it. This is because in making their analysis of the current economic situation in China, they have borrowed the spectacles of neo-liberal economics. They have thereby inadvertently adopted a myopic and ideologically circumscribed perspective that contains crucial blind-spots.