Neoliberal governments want to have their cake and eat it. Having dismantled the social buffer of regulation, public assets and benefits in the name of economic dynamism and personal responsibility, they are now bailing out the financial sector, absolving corporate ‘individuals' of responsibility for their past recklessness. At the macro level, we have seen US, UK and European central banks flooding markets with liquidity in a desperate attempt to restart bank lending. Latterly, we have seen tokenistic gestures towards the ‘little man' such as the UK government's decision to subsidise the housing market through stamp duty holidays and helping mortgage defaulters. It doesn't take a genius to see that the well-being of business is the top priority of governments.
But what about individuals? In Britain, Thatcher's sell off of social housing was perhaps the most decisive act in throwing the working class on the mercy of the market and credit lenders while appealing to their ‘family values' and dreams of personal security. Today the housing market is in deep crisis and the family values card is again being played in the service of the market. The house-buyer's aid package will only encourage more people into a perilous housing market and negative equity, prioritising banks over people's needs. Instead of creating adequate stocks of social housing for the increasing numbers the crisis will make homeless, the money is intended to prop up the housing bubble and the debt-dependent economy it drives. £100 million will be used to help with mortgage interest repayments. Banks must be loving it, as they hike up fixed-rate mortgages to an 11-year high.
Hazel Blears, Labour's community secretary, gets half way to the truth of the situation. The plans to help people, she explains, are not aimed at those who have been reckless in their borrowing but at ‘decent' families. That's right! People shouldn't be branded reckless and punished for their heavy dependence on credit when the wage has declined steadily in real terms since the 1970s. The indecent parties are, of course, the banks, hedge funds, private equity companies etc., profiteering from public subsidies. And any notion that this widespread ‘recklessness' will be lessened by the ‘worst recession in 60 years' is rebutted by a recent report showing that people's dependence on credit has increased over the last year in the UK. Clearly, then, the cost of borrowing has simply become more expensive post-sub-prime, and its terms revised in favour of lenders, while its economic necessity remains unchanged.
So what are ‘decent' families to do in such turbulent times? The government itself has predicted that while crime (or is that criminalisation?) will rise in response to lay-offs and general economic misery, right-wing extremist political activity is also set for an upturn. As if anticipating all this, Hollywood offers us the embattled figure of the Dark Knight as the citizen's last hope. But even this heavily armoured bat struggles in the face of nihilistic chaos. Amitabh Kumar's Raj Comics for the Hard Headed', which illustrates Neil Gray's article on Hindu cultural nationalism in this issue of Mute, considers the complexity of the superhero's popularity. Does he/she represent a God-like power from another dimension, or a manifestation of our human potential to overthrow our oppressors? Does he/she embody the law as state of exception, or act outside the (perennially suspended) law? Whatever the answer, Neil Gray's discussion of Hindu nationalism's racist myth of Indianness shows what can happen when political movements manipulate popular fantasies of identity and salvation. In the case of Hindutva, it is Lord Rama - Vishnu's avatar on earth - who has been transformed into the figure-head of its racist, nationalist politics.
Against the reactionary figure of the God-like individual redeemer, some of the writers in this issue pose the figure of collective struggle. George Caffentzis analyses the links between the food, fuel and housing bubbles. The fight against neoliberalism's ‘new enclosures', he argues, is largely responsible for these bubbles, which are essentially capitalism's response to continued resistance. While its success can be measured in terms of the financial punishment it unleashes we can, argues Caffentzis, still read these crises as signs of working class and peasant defiance. Mihalis Mentinis, in his analysis of the growing anti-capitalist consensus across Mexico's social movements, sees violent confrontation on the horizon.
The lone crusader is not the only superhero fantasy doing the rounds. Heroically labouring populations whose toil might somehow sustain the world indefinitely are also popular, even on the left. Giovanni Arrighi's account of China's ‘industrious revolution' presents just such a fantasy. However, Daniel Berchenko argues its continued economic growth cannot be sustained by the hyper-exploitation of its workers alone. While China fails to invest in fixed capital and the education and reproduction of its workforce, how sharp is its competitive edge? Such Marxian fundamentals, it seems, don't interest US financial Doomsayers any more than they do sociologists. Here, Jon Amsden argues that the Doctor Dooms are not doomy enough, their predictions of recession all too easily allayed by the Federal Reserve's series of interest rate cuts. In the absence of the promised economic kick-start, the real threat is not inflation but deflation, as demand fails and the real economy contracts.
Between these dark predictions and the State's failure to put in place a safety net for those falling off the credit tightrope, can we expect anything short of increased austerity for the working class? Unless, of course, we reject the superhero fantasy altogether and see that it is ordinary people who have the power to rid Gotham of its ghouls.
Josephine Berry Slater <josie AT metamute.org> is Editor of Mute
