Organisation Communiste Libertarie - Courant alternatif #232 - The middle classes in turmoil (fr)

Directly confiscate the money held by a class of relatively or very wealthy people, it is 
ultimately the final plan adopted to save the system. For the very wealthy, and the risks 
are limited by their position within the block of political and economic power, we can 
trust them, their ability to be informed in advance of any confiscatory measures makes 
them safe and allows them to organize the escape of their capital in warmer climates, as 
we have seen in Argentina in 2001 just before the peso devaluation and Cyprus in March 
2013. ---- This is a notch or two below, in the great mass of solvent classes, begins to 
emerge a real threat. In the Spanish state, the indebted banking crisis, the bursting of 
the housing bubble is not resolved even though hundreds of thousands of small and medium 
owners met in the street, while remaining debt.

In Ireland, the financial crash was avoided thanks to the nationalization of financial 
institutions and the transfer of the "private" debt to public debt with, the key, drastic 
measures of budget cuts to finance it. Unlike these two countries, in the case of Cyprus, 
it is no longer just cut in the welfare state, it is no longer only to involve the 
"taxpayers" in general, are the layers wealthy European receiving specifically a serious 
warning from the governing bodies of the EU: your monetary assets, savings, already 
increasingly imposed tax, in our sight and we will action if risk system.

Much of the savings - investment - is in fact actually a receivable, loan companies or 
states, without, however, that savers are well aware [1]. However, the reduction in 
purchasing power and the ability to save the middle class, reducing its economic weight - 
its more or less proletarianization - will have an impact not only on the configuration 
and the viability of the "economic model" European capitalism - if we can still talk in 
these terms - but also on the main balances which hold the social order as a whole as well 
as the degrees of membership and political stability and indexed based on the 
effectiveness of a certain ideal type of social success, even beyond the class or social 
stratum.

As consumers and as investors, members of this stratum can achieve the ideal pattern of 
accumulation in developed countries on the one hand, capital appreciation as consumers 
with high purchasing power and the other providing endless resources for the financing of 
the economy as investors. The resources and uses are many and varied: public financing 
contracted by booklets (social housing) or the purchase of government bonds by the 
majority of life insurance (public debt), private funding business through the acquisition 
of securities, equities, debt ... for example in a part of the life insurance, retirement 
savings, pension funds in Anglo-Saxon countries, etc.. Besides the savings available, 
called "liquid", simple deposits paid books eventually ... allowing banks to "guarantee" 
their loans. Accounting, business administration, in fact, do not forget that bank 
deposits account holders are part of the "passive" banks, that is to say they are a 
"resource" to finance "active", the "jobs", that is to say, loans, purchases of bonds and 
other investments.

It would be wrong to underestimate the role and function that the social, heterogeneous 
layer also plays in the movement of capital in the "model" of capitalism developed 
including the "financialization" and its internal balance. If, of course, history does not 
repeat itself, the hypothesis of a "ruin investors' accompanied by mass unemployment 
little or no compensation, falling incomes, deteriorating conditions, is still big 
dangers, the middle classes generally choose to fight tickets, defend their privileges (in 
alliance with the bourgeoisie against the poor) and not to the class struggle, which 
assumes any alliance with other perspectives, necessarily out with the defense of 
positions acquired when they are gone.

In fact, this reduction, and potentially the virtual disappearance of the "middle class" 
also outlines the still problematic, which is tendentiously witnessing today in Greece, 
Spain, etc.., Mainly reflects a both economic and political breakdown ... on one side, the 
upper faring rather well overall while fearing to be pulled down - and that will probably 
partially with the deepening of the crisis - and on the other, its lower fringes taking 
the brunt of the crisis, is mobilizing - at least for some of them - in the defense of the 
social conquests and Welfare (health, education ...), while that another part seems to 
express his frustration, exasperation and fear under the pretext of so-called societal 
themes to show this dirty old habit of converting the differences, otherness and 
non-conformities with the social norm (the rule) in inequality in exclusions, in desires 
to dominate or eliminate violently (homophobia against marriage for all ... background of 
xenophobia, racism, hatred of the poor, assisted, officials, low ...).

Disorientation and growing exasperation as also expresses the electoral harmless 
phenomenon Beppe Grillo in Italy against the "elites" of political power or the claims of 
a new democratic republic, exercising greater control over elected officials, etc.. as it 
has emerged in Spain amid economic crisis and revelations chain of scandals of corruption 
of politicians and parties "government." And in all cases, ranging in the "center" - this 
is their real place sociologically, and symbolically as a social medium - in the midst of 
the challenges of an ideological battle where mingle, clash, intersect, sometimes 
overlapping, ultra-liberal and anti-liberal themes, nationalist or Europeanists, labor 
usually more or less productivist or environmentalists, authoritarian temptations or 
individualistic aspirations and "libertarian" ... For now.

These multiple confusions have several origins but are easily explained by the same 
transformations of capitalist societies developed as they are a source of shared social 
meanings ("imaginary institution of society" like Castoriadis) themselves. Confusion 
consequent disorientation that reflect the disappearance of large meaningful frameworks of 
the previous period and are expressed in words and references (legalism, democracy ...) of 
the society in which individuals and groups are immersed and that is. Bewilderment at the 
crisis of political representation, not only because of corruption and embezzlement of 
public funds, but also crisis of his promise to reduce, to counterbalance the violence of 
capitalist relations by institutions, mechanisms of redistribution and upward social 
mobility, legal provisions, economic policies that give some reality to social capitalism.

The gradual and continuous disappearance of organized labor (even in its reformist 
version, but who wanted to "class") in Western Europe over the past thirty years, the end 
of the "working centrality", the considerable decrease in the number of days recorded in 
each year [2], the extreme fragmentation and disintegration of what was the working class 
strikes, are additional and determinants of dissipation issues of class, erasing the 
obvious social polarization that could include, express, provide either large conventional 
categories of "middle class" and "working class" until the 1970s.

This gradual disappearance led others: namely the force of attraction and reference that 
"working class" and could mean the ability to compose an identifiable camp, collective 
action power, opposition and rebellion , with its own interests and obvious, and that 
seemed intractable, that defined the historic labor movement: both the immediate struggles 
of resistance to exploitation and the politics of a new world that would abolish this project.

Currently paradox of political polarization between antagonistic classes evaporation even 
though the open but silent, administrative and ground war, against the poor continues 
unabated, relentlessly, even objectively income gaps, levels of life and living 
conditions, social world between rich and poor, between those of "above" and those of 
"down", continue to grow in each developed country or sets regional / continental larger.

The capitalist crisis and economic policies that accompany - just to see what is happening 
in Greece, in Portugal, the Spanish state to be convinced - well appear as a sequence of 
acceleration of this trend .

JF

[1] In Spain, probably elsewhere, thousands of elderly, Alzheimer's patients, gullible and 
naive or simply ignorant of the intricacies of banking jargon people thought they had put 
their savings in banks so that their sold financial products, "securities", hybrid 
securities or "mutants", both obligations (loans) and equity (share capital) or one then 
the other, which are worthless. And then, the 100,000 euros "guaranteed" for each person 
in the euro area are not because it is not saving.

[2] Despite the undervaluation of administrative sources, the number of strike days 
recorded annually in France was 3 million on average in the 1970s. He then fell in the 
1980s and stabilized in the 1990s and 2000s lying in the range from 200 000 to 500 000.