Today's Topics:
1. France, Union Communiste Libertaire UCL - AL #304 -
Coronavirus crisis, Grain of sand in world capitalism (fr, it,
pt)[machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
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Message: 1
The health crisis caused by the coronavirus is driving the global economy into recession. Seeking to save financial markets and businesses
on the brink of abyss, governments are multiplying spectacular measures but remain inaudible. What the Covid-19 reveals is the financial
excess and the dependence of Capital on the State. ---- As governments step up their insufficient health measures, global finance is
collapsing at breakneck speed. The main Wall Street stock market indices (Dow Jones, Nasdaq, etc.) experienced one of the worst days in
their history on March 16, and the situation is not better for the major European and Asian financial centers: since the end of February,
the CAC 40 lost almost a third of its quotation.
The main world economic poles are already in recession, dragging the rest of the world. And international economic institutions (World Bank,
OECD, etc.) are lowering their growth forecasts for 2020.
Worn monetary levers up to the rope
This collapse takes place despite the bourgeois states announcing the craziest spending to reassure financiers. Central banks have stepped
up interventions in the markets so that commercial banks do not run out of liquidity, and yet the main American establishments have seen
their stock market prices drop. But the monetary levers have reached their limits: they were already practically at their maximum since
2008. So that the president of the European Central Bank announced the suspension of the rule imposed on the States - the famous 3% maximum
budget deficit, in particular .
But stimulus through public spending and lower taxes also have limits. As we are frequently reminded, the States are heavily in debt: around
100% in France and 110% in the United States. And the economic crisis that is coming will further cut government revenues.
What the health crisis reveals is the need for increasing state intervention to keep an increasingly globalized capitalism, with extremely
complex and therefore unstable production chains, afloat.
A purely stock market crash ?
Some analysts try to explain that this crisis is purely financial and will have little impact on the real economy. But they are the same
ones who tell us, in calm weather, that the value of financial securities effectively reflects the "fundamentals" of the real economy
(production, profit, employment, prices) ... Except that these fundamentals are in a state much more worrying than in the time of the crash
of 1987. American growth hovered around 4% in the late 1980s, whereas it hovered around 2 % these last years. American businesses and
households are also heavily indebted, as are the United Kingdom, Australia and many advanced capitalist economies. The slightest market
panic could therefore collapse entire sections of the US economy, starting with the private pensions or student debt sector, dragging the
whole world into a deep crisis.
Gigantism of the financial era
Capitalism is a delicate economic system. One of its strengths, but also one of its weaknesses, as Marx had analyzed, is that it is based on
bets about the future. In recent decades, indebtedness has become increasingly essential for the capitalist economy to continue to grow.
However, the financial sphere has been enlarged since the 1980s. National markets are interconnected and financial products (debt
securities, stocks, etc.) increasingly interdependent. In other words, it only takes one part of the world system to collapse for the rest
to follow. Nothing major has been done to avoid the re-occurrence of the 2008 crisis. In the United States, the meager regulations put in
place by Obama have been dismantled by Trump. The coronavirus is not responsible for the coming crisis, but the last straw that overflows
the vase.
Covid-19, a revealer
What the health crisis reveals even more deeply is the need for growing state intervention to keep an increasingly globalized capitalism,
with extremely complex and therefore unstable production chains, afloat. A big taboo in the debate between the capital-compatible left and
the liberal-conservative right is that public spending does not drop ... it stagnates or even increases despite austerity. After decades of
harshness, destruction of public services, all-out privatization, the state has never been such an indispensable actor in capitalism.
Simply, rather than intervening directly in the economy as it did in the XX thcentury it distributes grants to private companies that do
whatever they want with it. Not to mention the global military spending that continues to climb.
We should therefore especially not see in the first state measures announced the beginning of "socialism". In France, the state of health
emergency makes it possible to violate the most fundamental provisions of labor law (35 hours, holidays ...), while Portugal, led by the PS,
suspended the right to strike on 21 March. We are in fact witnessing a shift towards a kind of war economy, where the state missions and
supervises the employers to "make" the machine, including non-essential sectors, while guaranteeing it the obedience of the proletariat to
name of a "sacred union" which masks the brutality of the class struggle.
Mathis (UCL Grand-Paris sud) and Dadou (UCL Clermont-Ferrand)
https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Grain-de-sable-dans-le-capitalisme-mondial
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