De defensa

Dans le florilège des noms qu’on trouve à l’actuelle crise (qui est quasi-terminée, savez-vous), Steve Fraser propose The Great Retrogression (disons “la Grande Régression”). L’explication de l’expression est que la réparation complètement temporaire de la chose n’en est absolument pas une, qu’elle nous offre des conditions bien pires qu’avant la crise (régression, effectivement) et un mécanisme absolument pervers qui lie l’enrichissement des plus riches, responsables de la crise sauvés en priorité, à l’appauvrissement des autres, dont l’argent de leurs impôts habituels a servi à sauver ces plus riches responsables. C’est une sorte de mouvement perpétuel qui est inventé ici.

Le très long essai de Steve Fraser sur “la crise du capitalisme”, mis en ligne le 6 novembre 2009 sur Truthdig.org est particulièrement intéressant par le parcours historique qu’il nous propose de la Grande Dépression à “la Grande Régression”. En voici quelques extraits.

«Every day the media puts on display the official schizophrenia about the current crisis. On the one hand, recovery beckons; it’s about to start, it’s already started, the crisis is over. People in charge—Bernanke, Geithner, Obama himself—are quoted to this effect. Evidence accumulates mainly in the financial sector, where big banks have so much cash on hand that some have paid back the government its bailout money and others are begging to do so. Profits in the FIRE sector [finance, insurance and real estate] are back, lavish bonuses are back: Can a third gilded age be far behind?

»But then there’s the other kind of story, the one about the spreading misery of joblessness, foreclosures, homelessness, wage cuts, furloughs, brute amputations of social services, repossessions, bankruptcies, defaults—the dispossession of a dream. A tale of two cities indeed!

»It ought to be seen as appalling, arrogant, callous, myopic, credulous and maybe most of all morally embarrassing to talk with a straight face about recovery amid all this. What could that word possibly mean; why don’t the bankers, their house intellectuals and the always deferential media choke on the word as they utter it? Who exactly is recovering? What, after all, is the whole point of economic recovery if it doesn’t first of all mean some improvement in general well-being? What is it that licenses this official complacency, which, in a kind of reassuring afterthought, notes that unemployment and other downbeat news may linger for a while, even quite a while, may even grow for a while, or for quite a while, but then again looks at Goldman Sachs and takes heart?

»What allows for this is a long generation of financialization of the economy. Among the many lamentable legacies of that profound economic makeover is this kind of moral and cultural numbness. Economic good health, the notion of prosperity itself, has for a long time now been identified with how things are faring for the banks, the insurance companies, the hedge and private equity funds, their law firms and the legions of satellite enterprises that service that sector. This was always delusional, not just after Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers sent up their distress signals. […]

»Moreover, the point of all this is not merely that we’ve now arrived at a tale-of-two-cities moment, when it’s the best of times for the bankers and the worst of times for the rest of us. It is rather that all along that faux prosperity rested on, depended on the inexorable erosion of other avenues to economic well-being. Some of us grew richer not only while but because a lot of the rest of us grew poorer.

»Perhaps the greatest gulf separating the Great Depression from the Great Recession is the difference between the political economy born back then and the political economy of the last generation. The New Deal articulated the outlook of a new order based on mass consumption industrial capitalism. It was rooted in emerging sectors of mass production and distribution as well as in the insurgent labor movement and among broad circles of social welfare reformers. It helped give birth to a high-wage industrial economy buoyed by strong unions, an expanding system of social welfare, a regulatory regime to dismantle that era’s “money trust” and so open up the sluice gates of private capital and credit, and government pump-priming when called for. Some of the reform legislation of FDR’s first 100 days (the Securities Act, the Glass-Steagall Act, the TVA) and much more of the legislation to follow (the Wagner Act, Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and so on) were designed, by no means always successfully, to bring this new, consumer-oriented industrial capitalism into being. […]

»Since then—beginning with the Reagan years—finance has triumphed over the New Deal industrial order. Financialization, or what some have called financial mercantilism, triumphed by gutting the American industrial heartland. That is to say, the FIRE sector not only supplanted industry but grew at its expense and at the expense of the unions, the high wages, and the capital that used to flow into productive investment, not to mention at the cost of government social supports and government regulation that comprised the understructure of New Deal capitalism.

»More profoundly disturbing is this: Even should those “green shoots” flower, the best that can be expected is a kind of jobless “recovery” and a general lowering of the social wage. After all, recovery of the economy of high finance is not recovery we can believe in, nor is it even an economy. If this happens, then we may have to conclude that the Great Recession gave way to the Great Retrogression.»

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