Media Matters:

Fox News Asks If Evictions Of Occupy Protesters Are A "Victory For Capitalism"


The problem is this: Is anyone asking to leave capitalism? Is anyone presenting a program to replace the dominant economic system? No, this is not what Occupy Wall Street is about, nor the substance of this conjunction. What is it? A writer, Jean-Marie Harribey, for Le Monde Diplomatique put it perfectly in a nutshell:

“Globalisation” stands for the redeployment of capital at a global level, to solve the profit margin crisis that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the supremacy of the dominant classes, whose financial interests take precedence over ordinary people’s wages, and pressure on the regulatory authorities to conform to the demands of the markets.

It has taken just 20 years to bring down this edifice: in the mid-2000s profit margins in the US stopped rising and loans to the poor, to compensate for insufficient wages, were no longer enough to absorb US industrial over-production. The shockwaves spread as fast as capital was shifted.

so far, only two solutions to capital's current crisis have been presented. The one by the right is more of the same (more privatization, more budget cuts, more tax cuts for the rich). The left has demanded a return to the post-war paradise of Keynesian demand-side economics. Both, however, will not do—though the Keynesian return is far better than the continuation of the failed supply-side program. Jean-Marie Harribey claims to have a third way, "alter-globalisation":
The question remains where to begin the task of dismantling neoliberal capitalism. In the short term, it is a matter of urgency to declare most public debts illegitimate and to announce that they will not be honoured, prioritising countries at a European level according to the severity of their problems. The order of priority must be based on an audit of public debts. The entire European banking sector must be collectivised. And strongly progressive taxation must be restored. None of this is impossible in practical terms...
What is offered here is Keynes without the state. Not sure how this would work but it seems to be saying this: We have had capitalism without a state for 20 years and so now (as a correction) we need social democracy without the state. What I think is right in this thinking: We need to redefine globalization. We need to understand this process not as a market but as a mode being with others in a limited world. This to me is the real agenda of our post-neoliberal moment.