Seymour Transcription Welcome to the EU Futures Podcast, exploring the emerging future in Europe. I'm Olya Yordanyan, an outreach coordinator at the BU Center for the Study of Europe. Today is October 17th and Sandra Porcar, a visiting researcher at BU and I talked to author Richard Seymour. Seymour has written for The Guardian, BBC, Al-Jazeera, and other media outlets. RS: I m Richard Seymour, I just graduated from the LSC London School of Economics with a Ph.D. I'm an author. My most recent book is Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics, and I've been writing for a few years, written for The Guardian, London Review of Books, and various other publications and apart from that I'm a socialist and I spend a lot of my time involved in far-left fringe activity. OY: So what is the future emerging now in Europe? RS: The future emerging in Europe is one of crisis and decay and the various pathologies attendant on that. So, the crisis I would situate on two levels. First of all, there is the obvious one the one that we know about the crisis of capitalism and its various mutations. So, you start with the credit crunch, then you have a recession in the general economy, and then it gets transferred into the domain of the state which is a crisis of sovereign debt. And that then gets transferred onto the population in the form of austerity so there are various mutations of that crisis. That acted on an already existing problem or series of problems which had to do with the decline of representative democracy. And so, on a whole series of indices, in almost every industrial democracy in the world you have declining voting turnout, declining party membership, declining party identification. So, what you have is a situation in which the representative institutions don't represent or they're not perceived to represent. So, it's very important that when that happens there is a sense of a vacuum in which very marginal forces or previously marginal forces can suddenly acquire an influence well above and beyond that which they had previously and well beyond any real social weight they have in terms of their organized support. That has happened with Podemo, with Syriza, and with Corbyn. As I say I mean the future is going to be one in which there is going to be various workings out of that crisis but also, of course, we have to take account of the far right. UKIP in the United Kingdom, Le Front National, obviously Golden Dawn, and the various anti-refugee movements anti-muslim movements that are taking shape across Europe. The sense in which people feel disenfranchised by the system to some extent is even more important than the economic crisis because the sort of disenfranchisement, the political disenfranchisement that people are experiencing is the way in which they come to understand the financial crisis as something that has been imposed upon us by these outsiders, these elites, that have nothing to do with us. And that is the basis of the support for Trump, that's the basis of the support for the farright in Europe as well and those tendencies will just continue to play out. OY: You kind of answered many questions we're planning to ask you. I was reading some of your experience before this interview and you were so critical about austerity policies in general across the world. So, can you elaborate on that in terms of the European Union and how the European Union was trying to address the crisis within the Union, applying harsh policies? RS: Well, the official formal rationale for austerity policies is that by imposing this deflationary policy you can prove to business that the government is committed to getting the books in order. That you can you can be confident that this government is going to create a solid investment climate for you, so you don't have to worry about bad debts or anything like that. Of course, it
never works out like that and never has. And so, what one wants to do is to figure out, what is it between, on the one hand ideology and on the other hand pragmatism, that leads to austerity? You can't say it's just purely ideological because there's no such thing as a policy that isn't to some degree ideological. There's no way of resolving a crisis that doesn't favor one way of looking at the world as against another, or one set of interests as against another. So, rather than just say well it's ideological as opposed to pragmatic, the question is: who is it pragmatic for? And in what way is it ideological? Going back to the origin of these austerity projects, you can trace it back to the early 1970s in New York and of course in Santiago, Chile. And you can see that there was an emerging crisis of capitalism, there were declining profitability, there was declining growth, and the financial system was in a fragile state. And the governments of the day had got into a considerable amount of debt. So, in order to ensure that the crisis would be resolved in a way that was favorable to investors and not say, to public sector trade unionists or African-Americans or anybody else like that they represented the crisis of one of over-expenditure, public sector overexpenditure. I mean, public sector over-expenditure was very tangentially to do with it. And, of course, to say over-expenditure is a value judgment over-expenditure by what metric measure? On whom? But because the banks were owed a lot of money they had a huge amount of clout they had control of markets. And so, when New York City decided to deal with its debt crisis it ended up appointing a body that essentially consisted of the major, top businesses, and various other technocratic officials who worked out an austerity policy. And that policy was then applied throughout the entirety of the United States. So, there was a group appointed that consisted of leading businessmen, the mayor, and a series of technocrats and they worked together on a deal that involved reducing public expenditures, blaming the unions, and reshaping the state in a less democratic way. And, essentially, the total effect of all these changes was to shift the balance of class forces in favor of those who were already dominant but were coming to be more dominant and particularly in favor of financial capital. That was then unrolled across the United States after the Volcker Shock. It was then tried out in various Latin American states when they went through their debt crisis. And the European Union it was then not yet the European Union, it was the economic community but took an austerian turn in the early 1980s under West German leadership, essentially saying social democracy is dead, Keynesian intervention is dead, and the only way in which we are going to make our economies competitive is to drive down the cost of labor, drive down regulations and the imposition they make on business. But the scene rationales were used then as they re being used now there was this idea of so-called expansionary austerity you cut and then eventually you will see growth. Now, all the research on this shows that when you cut public spending, the result is quite a significant reduction in growth for the duration and for a short while afterwards but it's not totally irrational, because what happens then is that you get a new phase of growth just on different terms. It changes the balance of power within the society. So, these austerity policies were justified in much the same way as previous, and as austerity policies are being justified today which is the language of its expansionary austerity. If you cut public sector spending growth will start up. So, the formal rationale being expansionary austerity was cited in a vote when George Osborne when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer of the United Kingdom decided to implement austerity policies, in vote the orthodoxy of expansionary austerity, and he cited a number of specific, high profile academic papers. One of was then shown to be based upon serious, grave, statistical miscalculations. And this was widely cited in a triumphal way, as if to say, ah, well, the ideology of austerity is dead now. But, of course, that's not the way it works because underlying this there was an institutionalized ideology which sometimes people call it neo liberalism but essentially a set of premises about how economy and society should be run and those premises are fundamentally competitive. The idea that competition is the law of all social and economic life, and it's the job of the state to implement that law and to encourage people to abide in it and
anything else is to be eroded over time so anything that's solid eristic or collective has to be undermined. And all the institutions of government were used to that, they d been reformatted on that basis, civil service bureaucracies were indoctrinated into that. The Academia certainly on the economics side of it promoted this as an orthodoxy. So, when it came to the crisis nobody knew any other way to respond this was the only game in town. They certainly weren't going to try and revive Keynesian policies or social democracy, so it made a certain amount of sense. And now we're just seeing where that goes, I mean, the pathologies that brings. SP: You think from that, what is the future you ideally see in Europe? RS: The ideal future? SP: Yeah, your ideal Europe. RS: OK, the ideal Europe. Well almost it would be abolished which is to say, the institutions of Europe are not institutions which I think can be reformed in a way that would serve the interests of the majority of people. I think Europe would have to be rethought. It's too the whole idea of Europe is too embedded in first of all a kind of imperial history, a colonial history. And that sort of comes with the chauvinism and racism that you see when you get Fortress Europe policies implemented, where refugees are forced to drown rather than being allowed to enter, where they would rather make a deal with Turkey to keep refugee flows out than to talk to Turkey about its war on the Kurds in the southeast of the country. So, there s that side of it, but there's also the fact that the institutions of the European Union have historically been developed around the interests of investors, and communities of businesses the European Business Roundtable and the interests of organized labor, the interests of democracy over Democratic public have largely been excluded. And, to that extent, the more the European Union develops the less democratic it becomes, the more centralized, the more authoritarian, and the more it produces these nationalistic, populist, backlashes in the form of far-right breakthroughs like the very Brexit decision that we saw. In the long run, I would think the institutions of Europe what we call Europe would have to disappear for anything like a real community of Europe to emerge. And if such a thing could emerge I would suggest that it would have to emerge on the basis of almost the inverted values of the European Union. In other words, it have to be one that was open to migration from beyond its borders not just free movement within but from beyond. It would have to be founded on principles that were not to do with markets and competition. Whether you think markets have a purpose, they don't have to be everything and we don't have to have a Europe was predicated on markets ruling everything and on investors and so on. So, I mean, ideally, I would think that one would like some sort of federal arrangement of European societies and that I personally would like to see them organized on a socialist basis, in other words the interests of the majority, the working majority, would come to the fore when we talk about planning, when we talk about investment. So, if you're talking about big things like the economic crisis rather than trying to resolve a crisis on the basis of how do we protect the property rights of the minority? it would be more interested how do we make sure the majority don't suffer from the fallout? Or, if you're talking about the ecological crisis, that's something that requires huge planning decisions on a global level, requires the mobilization of billions hundreds of billions of pounds globally, and it requires coordination not just investment, but coordinated investment. I think a socialist Europe could take a leading role in that. If you can imagine a contrast for a moment, it's quite possible right now that Donald Trump will become the President of the United States. Now that's not the most probable outcome, but it s possible and if he does there's a whole series of far-right movements in Europe some of them close to power which will take huge
inspiration from that. There is also Theresa May's government in London. Theresa May is not herself of a Trumpian background she's a liberal Tory but, in order to keep power, in order to keep her position, she's pitching well to the right and talking the same language as Trump. Imagine the special relationship so-called in which you know London and Washington have always underwritten a global liberal economic and political order you know, with all of its problems and dysfunctions sure but imagine a special relationship organized around the ideas and attitudes of, basically, middle-class radicalism, middle-class right very racist, very nationalist, very protectionist the kind of Europe that you would see come out of that all the malingering undercurrents of the far-right would become the dominant currents. Once upon a time, there was a global pollster of reaction like this, and that was the Hitler regime. The special relationship armed with the biggest military force the world ever seen could, in principle, become something like that. So, it seems to me that to reverse that, we need to move quite radical opposite direction. So if I could put it in a nutshell I'd say we need something like a Socialist United States of Europe. And what that means in practice is something that we can afford to be open and open minded about it because it requires a bit of experimentation. But we have to get to a position whereby that's even on the cards which of course it isn't at the moment. SP: And how can you reach there? RS: How do we get to a place where it's possible to talk about a Socialist Europe? OY: Because right now it s such an absurd idea that nobody even dares to talk about that within the U.S. it seems such an absurd idea RS: It s entirely abstract right now, but what I would say is that, if you think about the way in which Karl Marx and writers in his tradition have tended to think about this, it's in a very anti-utopian way. And I think it's very useful that they've approached it in this way they don't start off by saying well here's a blueprint and this is what we've got to move towards. They start off by saying here are the crises, here are the problems, here are the dysfunctions, here's the tendencies inherent in capitalism, and if you work with the grid of those tendencies you can start to build the capacities for socialism in the present. You can t talk about socialism as something that you achieve as a blueprint it has to be something you start to build as a capacity in the here and the now. I think about things, the institutions that Europe has all the things that are bad about Europe could be inverted. You take the Central Bank that's a huge, potentially enormously powerful apparatus. If you weren t using it to create a money supply system and a sort of social secure banking system that looked after the rights of investors, you could invest in a green economy, you could invest in training and re-education for millions of people. You could invest in creating an economy that didn't demand of some people massive amounts of work out of their daily lives and, of other, no work at all and just being left on the scrapheap. In other words, you could use institutions like this and apparatus like this to change the balance of power in a way that benefited the majority of people. There's one policy that I think any radical left government, any socialist government, would try to implement if it was serious about getting there and that is to nationalize the banks. Now, that would be quite popular I suspect. I suspect most people are just sick to death of the banks. But it's also the most difficult policy on the agenda because the bankers would put up a tremendous amount of resistance and hostility to it, and their allies would too so the press would be against it, and business would generally be against it, and quite a lot of the parliamentary even within your own party would probably put up resistance to it. But if you succeeded, that is a nerve center of the economy. It's a nerve center of class power to be frank it is where a huge amount all the knowledge that makes the economy run is concentrated. If you
were able to genuinely take that under public and democratic ownership and make it responsive to democratic needs so, rather than having a policy that is basically about, at the moment, ensuring a certain level of unemployment they used to call the natural level of unemployment, but I think they call it something else now, the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment but if you can imagine a bank that wasn't about sustaining that, and not about sustaining interest rates that are amenable to that goal, but rather about serving social goals and social purposes, that would fundamentally challenge the concentrations of power that exist. And so, there's a few ways we can get there. We can talk about building movements and we've seen some of these types of movements the movement that became Podemos, for example, the movement of the squares, the Indignados. We can talk about supporting the development of new parties if that comes on the agenda. And then finally, you can talk about the power of office. I mean, it seems to me that there's a problem which is that we can really decide between these different ways of thinking about power there's a very traditional way of thinking about power which is: you elect somebody and then they do it for you. And that raises a whole series of questions about the nature of elected institutions. Imagine if like Joey Corbyn get elected in the UK on a not even a particularly radical agenda, but an agenda that is too far to the left for the majority of the press, for the majority of those parliamentary allies, supposed allies, and certainly for the opposition and immediately that government would become a spotlight enclave. It would will be surrounded by hostile forces and anything that went wrong would be used to lacerate it. And it would have to try to persuade business to invest it would have to go to businesses and say would you please start hiring people and investing in the economy because we re going to help you create a new wave of growth? And they re going to say, no, we don't think you are, we think you're implementing anti-business policies, an unfavorable climate for investment, and we're going to withdraw our capital invested somewhere else. Then you've got an investment strike and you know it becomes very difficult. So, in other words, transitions even moderate ones are incredibly difficult and they require something more than just one type of power, they require the convergence of several types of power. I think when you talk about movement building, party building, and we need to talk about how we work with the state, even when the state works against us.