THE AGE OF SPECULATIVE CAPITAL AND GLOBAL CIRCULATION FIGHTS (3)

by Achim Szepanski

​The restructuring of the taxing state towards the debt state has two consequences: On the one hand, institutional investors (pension funds, insurance companies and hedge funds) are always anxious to keep their investments safe in their investments such as government bonds, on the other hand allow the money flushed into the public purse funds certain governments to maintain state services, even though citizens were warned as early as the '90's that the welfare state was no longer sustainable and needed to be transformed. The combination of a growing government loan and a simultaneous reduction in taxes quickly led to growing deficits in government budgets during this period, which in turn worried lenders. The governments had no choice to use an increasing share of their debt repayment budgets, which further limited social services. As the growing deficits also increased interest rates on government bonds, an additional way had to be found to at least slow down this process. This was to encourage households to follow states in debt policy and to finance ever larger parts of the cost of reproduction by borrowing. Citizens should, as far as possible, go into debt themselves. Facilitating the conditions for private borrowing has thus become a means of keeping taxes low,

Even the financial crisis did not significantly change these states' policies. In addition, massive state deficit spending saved the banking system and deported costs to the populations by increasing austerity measures while still encouraging private debt. While government bond issuance should compensate for declining tax revenues, consumer credit has been used to limit the growth of the government deficit. Wolfgang Streeck speaks at this point of the transformation of the debt state in the consolidation state, but the consolidation is so far hardly successful, so that future generations can not be easily freed from the systems of debt. The bailouts of the big banks confirmed this once again. The "too big to fail" policy continues to focus on private investors, leading to three trends: lowering capital and corporate taxes, disrupting social programs and public services and making labor markets more flexible.

​The governments of the developed countries still prefer one policy of increasing the economic attractiveness of their territories, which operates under the heading of compulsory property, whereby private lenders can buy and sell government bonds in the secondary markets at any time, so that the pressure on governments, in contrast to the selective pressure that voters all four years of participating in the elections are a continuous one. While opinion polls are always oriented towards the next elections in their polls, investors' "moods" are the object of permanent evaluation, or to be more precise, permanent anticipation. The slightest sign of market skepticism can affect the capacity of governments to issue more government bonds and thus also limit the resources of politicians to be re-elected.

But because voters cannot be completely ignored, politicians - living caskets - point to the exorbitant costs of applying to social programs, refugees and public infrastructures, and ignore the question of falling taxes on capital and deregulation of markets,

The advocates of a left-wing policy, which rely on the restoration of democracy and national and state sovereignty, point in this context again and again that the growing xenophobia is a result of deregulated financial markets, globalization and not least the un-elected supranational bureaucracies, The citizens would feel powerless and abandoned to the state, and in order to reduce the xenophobic mood among the citizens, it would be necessary for particular to restore state sovereignty and control over households and budgets. This kind of propaganda for a sovereign nation-state has always had difficulties to set itself apart from right-wing populist positions, the free flow of goods, capital, but especially from migrants to their countries. Since their phobia of foreigners is more coherent than left-wing populism, which desperately seeks to separate between xenophobia and protectionism directed against parasitic financial capital, ethnocultural nationalists can far more effectively enforce their border-closure policy.

But because voters can not be completely ignored, politicians - living caskets - point to the exorbitant costs of applying to social programs, refugees and public infrastructures, and ignore the question of falling taxes on capital and deregulation of markets ,

The advocates of a left-wing policy, which rely on the restoration of democracy and national and state sovereignty, point in this context again and again that the growing xenophobia is a result of deregulated financial markets, globalization and not least the un-elected supranational bureaucracies. The citizens would feel powerless and abandoned to the state, and in order to reduce the xenophobic mood among the citizens, it would be necessary in particular to restore state sovereignty and control over households and budgets. This kind of propaganda for a sovereign nation-state has always had difficulties to set itself apart from right-wing populist positions, the free flow of goods, capital, but especially from migrants to their countries. Since their phobia of foreigners is more coherent than left-wing populism, which desperately seeks to separate between xenophobia and protectionism directed against parasitic financial capital, ethno-cultural nationalists can far more effectively enforce their border-closure policy.

​Wagenknecht and Co. are trying to counter this by saying that stricter border controls are in the interests of local workers and employees, as this would prevent the influx of cheap labor, while at the same time referencing capitalist globalization as a source of refugee flows. However, this argument reinforces the impulsive policies of the rightists, who are quite capable of accepting criticism of imperialism for its protectionist and isolationist perspectives. However, protectionist ambitions are repeatedly disappointed, as the financial investors who trade government bonds are themselves exempting the efforts of newly elected governments to regulate capital flows and strengthen the control of credit institutions. anticipate and speculate on the prices of government bonds, yes, even countries can drift into ruin. Governments elected to restore state sovereignty are being penalized by the financial markets and, in the end, are themselves strengthening restrictive measures against the people.

An alternative to this rather helpless policy is to challenge the pre-emptive power of financial capital and its crediting strategies by attempting to occupy the functions and timelines of the financial markets themselves. To do so, one must break with a policy that seeks to create a safe haven in the state against the attacks of financial capital by relying on well-tried policies such as elections, demonstrations and similar actions. At this point, Feher points to movements such as 15-M and Occupy, who wanted to give their exit a vote with their occupations of public spaces, but also of banks, although for various reasons, these movements were doomed to failure.

Interesting in this context is the debt strikes that have emerged from the Occupy movement, initiatives by Rolling Jubilee and Debt Collectivein 2012 and 2014 were set in motion. Above all, these campaigns involved massive student borrowing through borrowing, with activities related to financial assistance and the elimination of individual debt and the mobilization of a larger number of indebted students to initiate political activity conduct. The student loans track a larger proportion of students today for the rest of their lives. In contrast to companies, students in the US can not declare themselves personally insolvent. The student loans whose repayment is uncertain (here mentioning the future precarious employment as well as the devaluation of the university degrees), They are bundled into loans and securitized and are rather poor investments in the eyes of the portfolio holders. Crowdfunding was the reason why the above initiatives tried to generate funds to buy these declining collateral. These were then burned in a symbolic act.

translated by Dejan Stojkovski

taken from:

non.copyriot