Economic crisis and political decision: words and meaning

Economic crisis and political decision: words and meaning

“…It is important to highlight that the crisis we are talking about, and which we will discuss here, has had different forms of expression, themselves associated with different narratives, as if they were different and disconnected phenomena (Teles 2017, 53-54). It was first named a crisis in financial systems, thus referring to a global financial crisis that resulted from the implosion of the us financial market, which had grown speculatively due to the strong flow of foreign capital to that country (Varoufakis 2015). What followed, clearly from 2011 on, was the public debt crisis in the Eurozone, which was therefore given a distinct geographical scope and also a different explanation -that of the imbalance between creditor and debtor countries, with the latter suffering the most penalizing consequences.…”

“…It is not a question of declaring the existence of a definite intentionality, let alone trying any conspiracy theory (Thompson 2011, 43), but the mere replacement of the belief in the virtuous balance generated by the market by the idea that successive imbalances are systemic and the result of structural inequalities between individual agents and collective entities, such as countries. If we put debt at the heart of the capitalist economy (Thompson 2011, 33), we can see the crisis as the extreme manifestation of the structural imbalance between debtor and creditor (Varoufakis 2015), bringing to life the market, levelling and egalitarian, as an essential fantasy for the health of the capitalist system. 6 Seen through these lenses, the crisis, any crisis, but also this one in which we still live, acquires another expression, losing neutrality to assume a definite political sense: that of managing inequalities, naturalizing them, and emptying them of their arbitrary contents.…”

“…A direct relationship can be established between these two acts of crisis: "the crisis has undergone a metamorphosis: what was apparently a financial crisis in 2007-2008 -the banking freeze and the credit crunch -became an explosive political crisis because states were directly involved in solving the financial crisis, with the burden being transferred to states and governments"(Thompson 2011, 38) [our translation].2 Equally inseparable from the 2007/8 crisis, especially if we see in the slowdown in growth of these countries as a consequence of the collapse of the financial surplus recycling mechanism, as proposed byVaroufakis (2015).3 If the "crisis of the financial systems" hardly escapes a critical evaluation of the performance of banks and the greed of financial agents, its transmutation into a "public debt crisis" places moral judgment on the reckless behaviour of ordinary citizens -"We lived beyond our means. " The "genesis amnesia", pointed out byBourdieu (2000, 16), has a clear illustration here.…”