Recent elections in Greece and France seem to indicate that the chickens have come home to roost, that the austerity measures so patently designed to keep the global casino afloat are no longer an easy sale to the populace who suffers from their effects. The electorates have said ‘no’ to Sarkozy and to the stunning duplicity of flaunting a celebrity lifestyle while enforcing a policy of devalued labor and authoritarian oppression. And the Greeks have said ’no’ to a series of enforced austerity measures that have brought them to their knees and offers them the bleakest of futures—wages that can buy nothing more than subsistence and the impossibility of release from fealty to the banking houses. ‘No’ to the false realism of neoliberal economics. ’No’ to the attempt to resurrect a newly punitive and righteous Big Other—the symbolic reign of hyper-capital, low wages, and the anhedonia of perpetual production, perpetual efficiency, and perpetual terror.
Superficially at least, this chorus of no’s seems to give cause to rejoice. It seems the electorate has finally and painfully come to its senses, has finally awakened from a long and deep somnambulance as if from a spell cast by Illuminati-type necromancers at work in the vaults of the World Bank.
This somnambulant, coma-like spell cast on the electorate is itself an enigmatic phenomenon and subject to varied and contradictory interpretation. Merkel and Sarkozy would insist that it is nothing more than the spell of economic reality and to say ‘no’ to this is merely to return to the hallucinatory past of socialism—it is an hallucination to believe there is enough for everyone, it is an hallucination to believe that there is a public and a public interest that trumps the rights of free capital.
No comments:
Post a Comment