It looks as though we are on the brink of a major new crisis.
The money being poured into artificial intelligence companies is not going to deliver the expected returns. This gigantic overinvestment is not paying off, and the problem is being papered over with loans through dubious channels, which only makes the debt worse. We are being lured into a new and gigantic financial pyramid scheme. The collapse and bursting of the bubble that lies ahead (putting a date on it is far more uncertain) will be much bigger, and worse, than 2007/2008. Back then, states could still ride to the rescue of banks and markets. Now they can’t, because as a result of that episode their debt levels are enormous. They have been bankrupt and on the edge for a long time. The war in Iran (a lost war for the United States and the West) is weakening the petrodollar. Fewer and fewer US Treasury bonds are being bought. In 2008, US public debt stood at 9 trillion dollars. Today it is officially 40 trillion, and probably far more. In the eurozone, public debt averages over 80% of GDP. So there is no possibility of another con trick/rescue. All that’s left is collapse.
I remember the first interview I did in Germany on my return from China in 2008. The banking crisis was in full debate. A well-known Berlin sociologist said to me: “We don’t know what’s going to happen; the only clear thing is that neoliberal capitalism as we know it is finished.” Twenty years later we are in the same place, but facing a far worse collapse that will leave financial capitalism and the governments subordinated to it literally stripped bare. The system is going under, and its politicians and institutions with it.
Faced with this evidence, certain possibilities open up. Having been through the experience of 2008, now is the moment for states to take advantage of the weakness and discredit created by financial capitalism to impose their authority over it. Naturally, the current European governments and the current European Union, which built the highways and the conditions for capital’s primacy over politics, will have to be swept away. In that context, people like the French economist Frédéric Lordon point out that France offers a particularly favourable situation. (The system is going to collapse… and is that good news?)
In next spring’s presidential election there is a mature left-wing option that exists in no other European country, that of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, with a real chance of putting up a fight. If the collapse has happened by then, the change that would reverse the current relationship of subordination between politics and finance would be a matter of simple common sense. The entire corrupt media artillery would be incapable of countering the reality suffered and experienced by the vast majority of citizens. And if France took such a step, the contagion could be inevitable: goodbye to the EU, to its infamous armoured treaties, and to its stupid warmongering technocracy, vassal to the United States. An opportunity would open up for the “1848 moment” that Europe needs: a popular liberation as an alternative to war, racism, and climate disaster.
Catalans describe this kind of reasoning and expectation as “soñar tortillas” — that is, an illusory pie-in-the-sky daydream — but unless we accept the nonsense of the “end of history” that has been preached to us for the last forty years, we must remember that great historical turning points have always seemed illusory right up until the eve. Great changes remain possible, and we must be aware that the collapse of the system contains possibilities.
