Against Austerity: How we Can Fix the Crisis they Made

Against Austerity

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Against Austerity How We Can Fix the Crisis They Made Richard Seymour

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First published 2014 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010 Copyright © Richard Seymour 2014 The right of Richard Seymour to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978 0 7453 3329 8 978 0 7453 3328 1 978 1 7837 1019 5 978 1 7837 1021 8 978 1 7837 1020 1

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Text design by Melanie Patrick Simultaneously printed digitally by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, UK and Edwards Bros in the United States of America

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Contents Preface vi Acknowledgements viii Introduction: The Bad News Gospel

1

1 Class

29

2 State

66

3 Ideology

110

Conclusion: Strategy

151

Index 189

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Preface If the case for austerity was an email, it would be the rough equivalent of one of those badly spelled inducements to join an organ trafficking ring or give your bank details to a penis enlargement specialist.

Most people would have figuratively clicked ‘delete’ and moved on to some other specimen of the exhausted culture of late capitalism – a veritable lolocaust. But the rulers of the world aren’t so easy to ignore. Their resources are infinitely more sophisticated than spammers, their appeals are insidiously effective, as are the false cues and misdirection.

I hope this book can be useful in disentangling some of this. Each chapter does indeed attempt to unfold the real processes behind the convenient label, ‘austerity’. However, it shouldn’t be seen as one of the many volumes debunking austerity. The crucial problem which this book addresses is that the current opponents of austerity – primarily Left and labour movements – are in the main poorly placed to stop it, or even significantly impede it. How can it be, for example, that we have come this far without – figuratively, of course – ornamenting the major financial centres with the entrails and severed heads of bankers? I said, figuratively. And how is it that, far from expunging this swarm of parasites, we are more dependent on them than ever before? Doesn’t such dependency make a mockery of the term ‘parasite’?

I think our analysis of what austerity is, how it works, and what strategies can best stop it, has been badly wrong. But it is not simply a question of flawed perspectives – this is merely symptomatic. There are a range of political styles on the Left, a set of discursive habits, and models of organisation, which were inherited from past failure.

These need to be broken with. This is not a cause for resignation, but for reviewing and rethinking. It is a cause for breaking with consolatory ideology and convenient forgetting. Understanding the problem is an essential part of overcoming it. vi

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Preface I should warn the reader to expect a certain sneering negativity to very occasionally peep through in this book. That is because, well, I’m frankly a bit fucked off about all this. Like practically everyone else on the Left, I expected to be able to meet the worst crisis of capitalism in generations with more aplomb than has hitherto been evident. Particularly when our opponents are, as Glen Cullen put it in The Thick of It, a bunch of ‘six-toed, born-to-rule ponyfuckers’.

But this is good news. Gramsci said that he didn’t like to throw stones in the dark. He needed something to oppose in order to stimulate his thinking about situations, historical controversies, philosophical problems, or political struggles. The advantage of writing a polemical book like this is that there is no danger of throwing stones in the dark. Highly visible targets are everywhere: and as Daphne and Celeste would put it, they ain’t got no alibi.

There is also a certain familiar use of esoteric political theory and rococo ornamentation that some readers will find off-putting. I hope so anyway. Those readers would be far better off reading something else. (Or, alternatively, stay and have your middlebrow sensibilities challenged.) This book comes with swearing and unapologetic intellectual swagger.

I imagine you’re scanning this page while still in the bookshop, calculating whether you’d be willing to be seen reading this book on the train. If the above appeals to you, you’re probably a bit ‘wrong’ in some way, but I welcome you. If it doesn’t, then make your way to the holy apotheosis of bookshops that is the ‘3 for 2’ section. And buy yet more inconsequential shit with which to line your shelf of good intentions.

vii

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