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while the returns gave Maduro a crucial political victory and renewed mandate, they did nothing to abate acute social and economic problems. This helps to explain why throughout January, elected officials in both the government and in the opposition actively engaged in working groups to coordinate national, state, and local-level responses to Venezuela’s severe insecurity crisis. As part of those meetings Capriles shook hands with Maduro in a dramatic gesture of de-escalation. Despite mistrust and early skepticism, opposition governor Henri Falcón would go on to acknowledge that the discussions were proving promising and productive. At the same time, Maduro’s government began to float, and even implement, a series of economic measures long urged by economists and business leaders, like easing the flow of dollars to the private sector and signaling willingness to reduce costly subsidies on the price of gasoline—a politically unpopular move that even some in the opposition rejected.

What seems clear after a month of protests is that in the short term, the government of President Maduro has won a reprieve. They have severely hampered Capriles’ message of long-term support building, reminding popular sectors that might otherwise be receptive to an alternative to chavismo that the opposition has little interest in their concerns. But they have also postponed difficult decisions and discussion by Maduro’s government around social and economic issues that remain grave. For Maduro, then, while strengthened momentarily, the bigger challenge will come from confronting not these protests, but the ones that may yet to come when opposition hardliners leave the streets.

According to the Helsinki-based World Institute for Development Economics, people in the richest one percent of the world population are now almost 2000 times richer than the bottom 50 per cent. [v]

Ten years later François Bourguignon [viii] found out that while the planetary inequality (between national economies), if measured by the average income per head, continues thus far to shrink, the distance between richest and poorest national economies continues to grow, and internal income differentials inside countries continue to expand.

As long ago as in 1979, a Carnegie study [x] vividly demonstrated what an enormous amount of evidence available at that time suggested and common life experience continued daily to confirm: that each child’s future was largely determined by the child’s social circumstances, by the geographical place of its birth and its parents’ place in the society of its birth – and not by its own brains, talents, efforts, dedication.

This is how Joseph Stiglitz sums up the revelations brought up by the dramatic aftermath of the two or three arguably most prosperous decades-in-a-row in history of capitalism that preceded the 2007 credit collapse, and of the depression that followed: inequality has always been justified on the grounds that those at the top contributed more to the economy, performing the role of “job creators” – but “then came 2008 and 2009, and you saw these guys who brought the economy to the brink of ruin walking off with hundreds of millions of dollars.”

In his latest book The Price of Inequality (WW Norton & Company 2012), Stiglitz concludes that the US has become a country “in which the rich live in gated communities, send their children to expensive schools and have access to first-rate medical care. Meanwhile, the rest live in a world marked by insecurity, at best mediocre education and in effect rationed health care.”

Stewart Lansey falls in with Stiglitz’s and Dorling’s verdicts that the power-assisted dogma meriting the rich with rendering society service by getting richer is nothing more than a blend of a purposeful lie with a contrived moral blindness: according to economic orthodoxy, a stiff dose of inequality brings more efficient and faster growing economies. This is because higher rewards and lower taxes at the top – it is claimed – boost entrepreneurialism and deliver a larger economic pie.

Outside party politics new social movements, including environmental, anti-cuts and feminist groups, have not come together sufficiently with the old, defensive organisations of the working class to produce the coalition that might make them an effective political force.

This is no time for simple retreat. What is required is a renewed sense of being on the side of the future, not stuck in the dugouts of the past. We must admit that the old forms of the welfare state proved insufficient. But we must stubbornly defend the principles on which it was founded – redistribution, egalitarianism, collective provision, democratic accountability and participation, the right to education and healthcare – and find new ways in which they can be institutionalised and expressed.

Before discussing its limits, I will summarize Professor Stiglitz’s response to the problem he calls “market failure.” Professor Stiglitz attributes “market failure” to “lack of transparency.” He has several recommendations on how to check market failure. The first is that government needs to bridge the gap between social returns and private returns, both to encourage socially necessary investment as in agriculture and to discourage socially undesirable investment as in real estate speculation. Second, the government may set up specialized development banks. In support, he cites the negative example of America’s private banks and their “dismal performance” alongside the positive example of Brazil’s development bank, a bank twice the size of the World Bank, and its “extraordinary success” in leading that country’s economic transformation. Finally, Professor Stiglitz cautions against liberalizing financial and capital markets as advised by the Washington Consensus.

I am not an economist, but I have been forced to learn its basics to defend myself in the academy and the world. Like you, I live in a world where policy discourse has been dominated – I should say colonized – by economists whose vision is limited to the economy. Professor Stiglitz derides this as “free market fundamentalism” and I agree with him. Like fundamentalist generals who think that the conduct, outcome and consequence of war is determined by what happens on the battlefield, the thought of fundamentalist economists not only revolves around the market but is also limited by it. Just as war is too important an activity to be left to generals, the material welfare of peoples is also too important to be left to economists alone.

The Eurozone was created as a single currency for Europe but without constituting Europe as a democratic polity. The result was that monetary policy was formulated outside the framework of democracy. The states in Europe have done to their own people what the Washington Consensus did to African peoples in the 1980s. Unelected governments rule Europe; the EU ruling phalanx is not accountable to anyone.

Here is my point: The antidote to the market was never the state but democracy. Not the state but a democratic political order has contained the worst fallout from capitalism over the last few centuries. The real custodian of a democratic order was never the state but society. The question we are facing today is not just that of market failure but of an all-round political failure: the financialization of capitalism is leading to the collapse of the democratic order. The problem was best defined by the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US: it is the 99% against the 1%.

It would be a shame if this audience is to walk away from Professor Stiglitz’s lecture with a message that the problem is just one of “market failure” and the solution is a robust state that regulates markets and provides development finance. Is the lesson of the Structural Adjustment era simply that we need strong states to defend ourselves from the Washington Consensus? Or does the experience of the SAP era also raise a second question: What happens if developing countries are forced to push open their markets before they have stable, democratic institutions to protect their citizens? Should we be surprised that the result is something worse than crony capitalism, worse than private corruption, whereby those in the state use their positions to privatize social resources and stifle societal opposition?

But even with these and other deficiencies, Piketty, nevertheless, brings a certain degree of reality—even a sense of “class warfare” (if only implicitly)—back to bourgeois economics. The result is to heighten the crisis of neoclassical theory. Moreover, he argues—even though he dismisses the idea as “utopian”—for the imposition of a tax on wealth.33 Piketty thus represents a partial revolt within the inner chambers of the economics establishment.

Edward Wolff has pioneered the study of wealth data in the United States. In his most recent paper, he finds that the average (mean) net worth of the wealthiest 1 percent in 2010 was $16.4 million. By contrast the average for the least wealthy 40 percent was $–10,600 (that is, it was negative!).39

Piketty has no notion of capital as an exploitative social relationship.

However, beginning in the mid–1970s, capital made a remarkable comeback, and the ratio began to climb, and is now approaching the level that existed at the start of the First World War. Public capital has been privatized and political regimes throughout the world have been very well disposed toward the interests of wealth-holders.43

He shows that throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and right up until the First World War, wealth in most rich nations equaled six to seven years of national income.

If the rate of return on capital r is greater than the growth rate of the economy g, then capital’s share of income will rise. Piketty shows that over very long periods of time, r has in fact been greater than g; in fact, this is the normal state of affairs in capitalist economies.

He finds that there is a direct and significant correlation between the size of the endowment and the rate of return on it. Between 1980 and 2010, institutions with endowments of less than $100 million received a return of 6.2 percent, while those with riches of $1 billion and over got 8.8 percent. At the top of the heap were Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, which “earned” an average return of 10.2 percent.49 Needless to say, when those already extraordinarily rich can obtain a higher return on their money than everyone else, their separation from the rest becomes that much greater.

Reality could not be more different than what neoclassical theory leads one to expect. In the United States, real weekly earnings for all workers have actually declined since the 1970s and are now more than 10 percent below their level of four decades ago. This reflects both the stagnation of wages and the growth of part-time employment.50 Even when considering real median family income that includes many two-earner households there has been a decrease of around 9 percent from 1999 to 2012.51

But how does this relate to issues of class struggle and class power? What are the consequences of these realities in terms of control of corporations, the economy, the state, the culture, and the media? Piketty, though making a few tantalizing allusions, tells us next to nothing about this.

“The neglect of power in mainstream economics,” as the heterodox Austrian economist Kurt Rothschild wrote in 2002, “has its main roots…in deliberate strategies to remove power questions to a subordinate position for inner-theoretic reasons,” such as the search for mathematical models with a high degree of mathematical certainty.

It goes without saying that Piketty’s acceptability to neoclassical economics is dependent on his avoidance of the question of inequality and power.

Just as class power tends to concentrate, so does the power of the increasingly giant, oligopolistic firms which, in economic parlance, reap monopoly power, associated with barriers to entry into their industries and their ability to impose a greater price markup on prime production costs (primarily labor costs).

Writing for the Wall Street Journal, Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, declared that “Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away…. Only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits…. Monopoly is the condition for every successful business.” Indeed, this might even stand as the credo of today’s generalized monopoly capital.64

For Piketty himself there is no organic relation between the two main tendencies that he draws in Capital in the Twenty-First Century—the tendency for the rate of return on wealth to exceed the growth of income and the tendency toward slow growth. Nor is his analysis historical in a meaningful sense, which requires scrutiny of the changing nature of social-class relations. Increasing income and wealth inequality are not developments that he relates to mature capitalism and monopoly capital, but are simply treated as endemic to the system during most of its history.

Here it is useful to recall that for Keynes the danger was not only one of secular stagnation but also the domination of the rentier. He thus called for the “euthanasia of the rentier, and consequently the euthanasia of the cumulative oppressive power of the capitalist to exploit the [artificial] scarcity-value of capital.”69 In today’s financialized capitalism, we face, as Piketty recognizes, what Keynes most feared: the triumph of the rentier.70 The “euthanasia of the cumulative oppressive power of the capitalist” is needed now more than ever. This cannot be accomplished by minor reforms, however—hence Piketty’s advocacy of what he calls a “useful utopia,” a massive tax on wealth.71

It is significant that imperialism plays no role in Piketty’s analysis, neither in explaining the growth of wealth and wealth inequalities, nor even in the analysis of past growth, or prognostication of future growth. On the contrary the book is informed by a perception according to which capitalist growth in one region…is never at the expense of the people of another region, and tends to spread from one region to another, bringing about a general improvement in the human condition.

Significant in this respect is that he chose as the epigraph of his book a line from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen from the French Revolution: “Social Distinctions can be based only on common utility.”75

One could hardly pick a statement more opposed to the system in which we live, which seeks not the common but the individual utility.

Half of Spain’s unemployed no longer receive benefits, while 33 of the 35 biggest companies avoid tax through subsidiaries in tax havens (6). Half a million children have been plunged into poverty since 2009, but the wealth of Spain’s super-rich has increased by 67% since Rajoy came to power (7). To avoid the wrath of a fractious population, last December’s “citizen security” law outlawed everything that made the 2011 mobilisation possible, including meetings in public places and distributing leaflets.

Spain’s situation may be risky. It makes the far right, Iglesias has pointed out, “as happy as a fish in water” (8). Yet the Spanish left has an advantage over its French counterpart: a large fringe element of the nationalist far right is formally integrated into the PP, which makes it difficult for them to push an anti-system platform, unlike France’s Front National, which has only ever run local councils.

“To be specific,” Lago said, “we don’t talk about capitalism. We defend the idea of economic democracy.” Nor is the left-right dichotomy discussed: “The divide,” Iglesias has said, “now separates those, like us, who defend democracy ... and those who are on the side of the elites, the banks, the markets. There are people at the bottom and people at the top ... an elite and the majority.”

People looked at them like they were from another planet, and my students went home discouraged ... That’s what the enemy is expecting us to do: use words no one understands, remain a minority, fall back on our traditional symbols. And they know that as long as we do that, we pose no threat to them.”

Shaped by Gramscian thought, Podemos leaders believe that the political struggle should not be limited to overthrowing existing social and economic structures, but should also be against the hegemony that legitimises the domination of the powerful in the eyes of those they dominate. In this cultural area, the enemy imposes its codes, language and narrative. And one tool stands out for its ability to shape “common sense” — television.

“There’s nothing extremist about Podemos’s programme” (10), Iglesias has said: a constituent assembly on coming to power, tax reforms, debt restructuring, opposition to raising the retirement age to 67, the introduction of a 35-hour week (40 at present), a referendum on the monarchy, a kick-start for industry, the recovery of powers ceded to Brussels, self-determination for Spanish regions. Foreseeing an alliance with similar movements in southern Europe (Syriza in Greece, which has come to power in the 25 January election), Podemos’s plans do threaten financial powers, what Iglesias calls “German Europe” and “the caste”.

And those powers are already baring their teeth. A piece by journalist Salvador Sostres in El Mundo in December compared Iglesias to the former Romanian leader Nicolae Ceauşescu, and claimed he had only one idea: “to make the blood of the poorest flow, to the very last drop.” A PP politician was even more direct:  “Someone should put a bullet in the back of his head.”

Was Thatcherism then all that new? No – it was essentially a reversion to an older, Dickensian (if not even Hobbesian) variety of capitalism, bringing back into significance those more unpleasant features of the capitalist system that were supposed to have been abandoned in the forward progress of human history.

Graeber’s alternative is to recognize the diversity of motives that guide people’s economic interactions. He proposes that there are three “main moral principles” at work in economic life: communism, exchange, and hierarchy.

but principles of interaction present in all societies in different proportions: for example, capitalist firms are islands of communism and hierarchy within a sea of exchange.

The most simplistic renditions of neoclassical economics may reduce all human interactions to self-interested exchange. But the idea that society is made up of different but interdependent levels is hardly new in social theory. Neither is Graeber’s view that to talk of a society as a unit may be misleading, since people are involved in social interactions across multiple horizons that may not fit together into a coherent whole.

The greed of the Europeans is contrasted with the inscrutable warrior honor of Moctezuma, who would not object when he saw Cortés cheat at gambling. Also, Cortés and his fellows were drowning in debt, and so was Emperor Charles v, who sponsored his expeditions.

English villagers were quite happy with market transactions in their place, as part of a moral economy of mutual aid.

It is, rather, the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest; of the gradual transformation of moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal – and often vindictive – power of the state.

For Braudel, capitalism is the domain of the big merchants, bankers, and joint stock companies that feed off the market and reorganize it. For Graeber, the easiest way to make money with money is to establish a monopoly, so “capitalists invariably try to ally themselves with political authorities to limit the freedom of the market.”

In place of a materialist economic history, Graeber’s 5,000 years are organized according to a purported cycle of history in which humanity is perpetually oscillating between periods of “virtual money” – paper and credit-money – and periods of metal money. The emergence and rise of capitalism up to 1971 has to be shoehorned into this quasi-mystical framework as a turn of the wheel back toward metallism.

What do these units of measurement measure? Graeber’s answer is: debt. Any piece of money, whether made of metal, paper, or electronic bits, is an iou, and so “the value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one’s trust in other human beings.”

et it doesn’t seem to have made much difference to monetary theory. Texts have no problem acknowledging that money is not a commodity, and then going on to claim that money exists because barter is inefficient.

The reason, to be blunt, is that unlike Graeber’s critique, not much of monetary theory itself rests on the historical origins of money. Economics deals with the operation of a system.

As for arguments that money is essentially about debt, or essentially a creature of the state: this is to make the mistake of reducing something involved in a complicated set of relationships to one or two of its moments. Economics has generally met the challenges of credit and state theories of money not with fear or incomprehension, but with indifference: if credit or the state is the answer to the riddle of money, the wrong question may have been posed.

But to call its value a social convention seems to misrepresent the processes by which this value is established in an economy like ours – not by general agreement or political will, but as the outcome of countless interlocking strategies in a vast, decentralized, competitive system.

But however far credit may stretch money, it still depends on a monetary base: people ultimately expect to get paid in some form or other.

Graeber’s general reading of Smith’s worldview is quite tendentious: Smith was blind to the flourishing credit economy of mutual aid all around him, had hang-ups about debt, and “created the vision of an imaginary world almost entirely free of debt and credit, and therefore, free of guilt and sin.” The gold standard was a strategy by the powerful to undermine the informal rustic credit economy.

The value of gold acted as an anchor for the value of any currency convertible into it. This was not due to any inherent goldness to money, and people didn’t have to believe in any such thing to support the gold standard. There was a big difference, as Schumpeter put it, between theoretical and practical metallism, a difference which does not register in Graeber’s picture.

In the modern period, state after state committed to metallic anchors as strategic decisions to enhance trust in their national currencies.

The ultimate killer of the gold standard in the twentieth century was not changing minds about the nature of money, but the rise of the labor movement and collective bargaining: deflations became more painful and politically unacceptable.

Pierre Berger, a French economist responding to a previous incursion by the anthropologists, wrote in 1966: “With no disrespect to history, one is obliged to believe that an excessive concentration on research into the past can be a source of confusion in analyzing the present, at least as far as money and credit are concerned.” He meant that economics studies a system, and the origins of its parts might mislead about their present functions and dynamics.

They scarcely existed five years ago but now they look like credible candidates to exercise power; and they may be able to relegate their countries’ socialist parties — which share responsibility for the general financial disaster since 2008 — to a supporting role, just as Britain’s Labour Party supplanted the Liberal Party, and France’s Socialist Party supplanted the Radical Party (3). Those changes were permanent.

In Athens, that nowhere is all too clear. But austerity’s cruelty, with social and health consequences extending to hunger, cold and increases in infectious diseases and suicides, does not necessarily mean a change of policy (4). Austerity’s architects are well paid to have nerves of steel.

Syriza has calculated precisely that free electricity, public transport, emergency food for the poorest and vaccines for children could be financed through more aggressive anti-corruption and anti-fraud measures. The outgoing conservative government admitted that these deprived the public coffers of at least €10bn a year.

These measures are not up for negotiation with other parties or the country’s creditors, Milios insists: “They are questions of national sovereignty; they won’t add anything to our deficit. We are therefore intending to implement this policy whatever the outcome of debt renegotiations.”

In these circumstances, the European conference on debt that Tsipras called for two years ago in this publication (6) could become a realistic prospect. Ireland’s finance minister backs the idea, and it has a historical precedent in the 1953 conference that cancelled Germany’s war debts, including what it owed to Greece. Syriza hopes the conference it is calling for will provide “the alternative solution which will bury austerity for good.”

Merkel has threatened Greece with expulsion from the euro if its government breaks the budgetary or financial disciplines to which Germany is so attached. The Greeks want both to loosen austerity policies and to remain in the single currency. Those wishes are shared by Syriza (8), because a small, exhausted country cannot fight on all fronts at once. “We’ve been the troika’s guinea pigs. We don’t want to become the guinea pigs for a euro exit,” says Valia Kaimaki, a journalist with links to Syriza. “Let a bigger country, such as Spain or France, go first.”

Moulopoulos believes that “without European support, it will not be possible to do anything at all.” That is why Syriza accords importance to support from forces beyond the radical left and the Greens, in particular the Socialists. Yet the Greeks have had experience of the surrenders made by social democracy since Andreas Papandreou forced his party to make a major shift towards neoliberalism 30 years ago. “If he had stayed on the left, there would have been no Syriza,” says Moulopoulos. “In Germany too, when Oskar Lafontaine resigned from the government [in 1999], he expressed regret that social democracy had become incapable of even the most insignificant reforms. Globalisation and neoliberalism with a human face completely destroyed it.”

Electoral victory for Syriza, or for Podemos in Spain, could demonstrate, contrary to what Hollande or Matteo Renzi in Italy say, the viability of a European politics that rejected austerity. That would challenge more than the German right.

Now the threat is much greater. “If we don’t change Europe, the far right will do it for us,” Tsipras has warned. It has become even more urgent to be bold.

The task for the left in Greece and Spain, on which much depends, is hard enough without adding onto their shoulders the heavy responsibility of defending Europe’s democratic destiny, and averting a “clash of civilisations”. But that is what is at stake.

If ever proof was required that the theory is selected to suit the politics, one need only consider the reaction politicians have to economists who dare suggest this moralistic framework is unnecessary; or that there might be solutions that don't involve widespread human suffering.

the vicious cycle of austerity. As a larger percentage of government spending has to be redirected to paying rising interest rates, budgets are slashed, workers fired, the economy shrinks, and so does the tax base, further reducing government revenues and further increasing the danger of default.

So there is no doubt that world banker domination – which should have been reduced by the 2008-09 financial melt – will continue. Only the occasional sovereign default – Argentina (2002), Ecuador (2008), Iceland (2008) and maybe Southern Europe this year – or imposition of exchange controls (as rediscovered by Malaysia in 1998 or Venezuela in 2003) reduces the banksters’ grip.

The strongest political effort by these libertarian anti-Bilderberg protesters is to attempt the election of Texan member of Congress, Ron Paul, as president, and with 20 percent popularity, he remains Mitt Romney’s only irritant within the Republican Party as the November showdown with Obama now looms.

As long as SYRIZA is able to confront the Troika — even at tremendous costs — they would maintain their credibility and secure support of their voters. An apparent slippage in the government’s position on the other hand, would have fatal consequences. It would damage the reputation of the Left in Greece heavily and the Right, maybe even the fascist Golden Dawn party, would see its popularity surge.

Besides some impressive initiatives which combat the direct effects of austerity policies like foodbanks and solidarity clinics, there is another remarkable development. People are talking about the creation and extension of alternative economic networks – and they already started working on it. In the last years, many cooperatives were born, producer-consumer networks and producer markets were established. Some were established out of pure necessity, but there is also a realization of the fact that there won’t be any fundamental change without alternative economic institutions.

As the national week of mourning continues, church leaders have spoken out against Lonmin and students at Wits University in Johannesburg are set to march. A national inquiry into the events has already been established but it is not clear if the ANC can contain the wave of radical protest the massacre has set in motion. Malema may be an opportunist, as some charge, but the grievances he articulates are all too real.

Sarkana was right, only he did not go far enough. The reconquest forced by the combination of debt and mining was not just of Africa: it was planetary. So are the consequences. Let’s hope that his heirs in South Africa can begin the resistance.

Raymond Aron explained the emergence and the nature of modern anti-Semitism by the coincidence of the Jewish emancipation from the ghetto and the social turbulence caused by modernization.

Claude Levi-Strauss said that there were only two ways of dealing with the presence of difference, one was anthropophagic and the other anthropoemic. The anthropophagic strategy consists of “devouring” and “digesting” the stranger, transforming thereby an alien substance body into a cell of one’s own organism. In short, in “assimilation”: renouncing whatever distinguishes you from the “genuine stuff”. If you want to be a French citizen you have to become a Frenchman in your behaviour, your language, the way you act, your ideas, preferences and values. The other strategy, anthropoemic, means exactly the opposite: rejecting – “vomiting”, incarcerating people in camps or ghettoes, or rounding them up, packing them back into a boat or into a plane and sending them back “where they came from”. None of the two strategies are truly “working” in our globalised world. Assimilation makes sense as long as people believe (or are powerless to contradict such a belief imposed by the dominant power on the rest of the world) in a clear hierarchy – superiority and inferiority - of cultures, and one direction of progressive evolution – from “inferior” to “superior”… In our multi-centred world however few people are daring, adventurous or arrogant enough to maintain that there is a cultural hierarchy and to enforce such an idea upon reality.

I think it is one of the merits of Europe that it does not promote one model Europeans are obliged to adopt. On the contrary - Europe thrives on the very diversity of its population, on diversity of ideals, customs, traditions, cultures… This is precisely the secret of the unique European creativity.

Recovery driven by fiscal policy would have involved an increase in the shares of public investment and social welfare spending in national income, reducing the share going to the rich.

Recovery based on a "rebalancing" of the economy would have required policies that hurt the financial sector. The financial system would have to be re-engineered to channel more money into long-term investments that raise productivity. Exchange rates would have to be maintained at a competitive level on a permanent basis, rather than at an over-valued level that the financial sector favours.

There would have to be greater public investment in the training of scientists and engineers, and greater incentives for them to work in and with the industrial sector, thus shrinking the recruitment pool for the financial industry.

Given all this, it is not a big surprise that those who benefit from the status quo have persisted with QE. What is surprising is that they have actually strengthened the status quo, despite the mess they have caused. They have successfully pushed for cuts in government spending, shrinking the welfare state to the extent that even Margaret Thatcher could not manage. They have used the fear of unemployment in an environment of shrinking social safety nets to force workers to accept more unstable part-time jobs, less-secure contracts (zero-hour contracts being the most extreme example), and poorer working conditions.

Greece, Spain, and other eurozone periphery countries could explode any day, given their high unemployment and deepening strains of austerity. In the US, which is considered the home of quiescent workers, the call for living wages is becoming louder, as seen in the current strikes by fast-food restaurant workers.

All of these stirrings may amount to little, especially given the weakened state of trade unions, except in a few countries, and the failure of the parties on the left of centre to come up with a coherent alternative vision. But politics is unpredictable. Five years after the crisis, the real battle for the future of capitalism may be only just beginning.

In the US, it began with the Emergency Economic Stabilisation Act, enacted on 8th October 2008. On the basis of this, the Troubled Asset Relief Programme was created. In the UK, there were two significant bank rescue packages in 2008 and 2009, totalling at least £550 billion. This did not represent a sudden mass conversion to Keynesianism among the world’s elites, but a panicked attempt to prevent a complete global meltdown. It is easy to forget in retrospect just how much panic there was about the coming disaster.

In April 2009, at the Conservative Party conference, the Tory leader David Cameron announced an ‘age of austerity’. He suggested: ‘Over the next few years, we will have to take some incredibly tough decisions on taxation, spending and borrowing – things that really affect people’s lives.’[3] Without being too specific, he tried to link the drive for ‘significant savings’ to a democratic desire for more transparent, honest government.

What Elliott reported as brute fact was, I would maintain, inescapably an ideological proposition. But the power of it as ideology was the fact that it appeared perfectly natural and inevitable.

what a senior civil servant thinks is in ‘the national interest’ is unlikely to be identical to what his driver or valet thinks is in ‘the national interest’. Thankfully, O’Donnell explained his motives very bluntly: a minority government ‘would not have had the strength in parliament to be able to pass the tough measures that would be needed to get us through this problem’.[10] This view was absolutely consistent with civil service orthodoxy – the unelected leaders of the British state, and this was particularly so of O’Donnell, are fully assimilated to the neoliberal orthodoxy that colonised that state during the 1980s.[11] So, for the civil service leadership, ‘the national interest’ meant a strong executive implementing austerity.

Far from austerity encouraging business to invest and generate a windfall of growth and good times, companies are sitting on a large quantity of cash – the proper collective noun is ‘shitload’[17] – which they refuse to invest due to there being a dearth of good profit-making opportunities. From this vantage point, it looks as though austerity in the narrow sense of immediate fiscal retrenchment is a losing bet.

However, as I’ve said, it is far more to the point, and far more interesting, to understand the rational core of this ideology, because that is what makes it resonant

The Treasury is stacked with eager experts, all more or less trained in the same neoclassical economic theory. It is part of a state dominated by a civil service elite that shares the broad precepts of this thinking. It is linked with a series of institutions, from academia to the City, which reinforce it. The Rogoff/Reinhart debacle does not significantly alter the balance of ideological forces within British elites. Short of a more severe crisis, a profound social disturbance, or a more concerted challenge from the political left and labour movement than has been seen since the poll tax, the most likely result is that the Treasury will prudently adapt its course in response to fluctuating events while remaining within the same broad paradigm.

The dominant ideology, the ideology of the ruling class, is not a malign conspiracy, but nor is it stupidity. The ruling class lives this ideology, because it resonates with its interests, its experience, and its accumulated expertise.

This support is multifarious, possibly inchoate. Can it be given a shape that can channel into a more focused energy, and a coherent – even while open – set of political purposes?

The question then becomes whether or not Corbyn can ‘represent’ the commonality of these demands. And this is a question of process – a two-way process, and one which is ongoing. Here Corbyn’s commitment to democratic engagement and openness, and to doing politics in a different way, as well as his rejection of individual celebrity status, is a real strength.

How about something that captures the dominance of finance and financialisation in our lives and society? If the experience of Podemos is anything to go by, this will be a long-debated issue.

It may be that Jeremy Corbyn will somehow be hounded out. If he is, and if the party returns to the comfort zone of pale imitation of the Tories – in a context whereby the centre will inevitably move yet further to the right – the Labour Party may well face extinction as any kind of progressive force. We must do everything we can to keep this initiative growing and to play our part in the wider movement that keeps on bubbling up.

Greeks responded by heavily voting “no” to further austerity. The Syriza government then did a remarkable about-face. Eight days later, Prime Minister Tsipras signed an agreement even more unfavorable that what had been demanded by the troika. More than half of Syriza’s central committee signed an opposition letter and most Syriza members were furious. This was ignored.

You cannot build a left when you trash the very basis of our beliefs. It came from a mix of blatant opportunism, genuine confusion, psychological distress, and postmodernist sophistry.

That this is a “you are there” document from a personalized standpoint does not at all mean that The Syriza Wave is anything other than a serious political analysis. The work could have been strengthened in two ways: one, a deeper discussion of the economic issues, including the ramifications of staying in (or exiting) the eurozone, and, two, a discussion of how virtually every euro of the troika loans are going to creditors and banks rather than to the Greek people, a topic barely mentioned in passing only once. These are topics that would have added to the narrative.