Europe, debt and ecological crisis

La Fondazione “Rosa Luxemburg” ha organizzato, a partire da settembre scorso, un percorso di approfondimento teorico e politico, su scala europea, intorno ai nodi dell’ “indebitamento, land grabbing e proprietà” all’interno della crisi. Si tratta di un contributo importante che l’autorevole struttura di ricerca della sinistra tedesca intende offrire al confronto tra studiosi e attivisti, esperienze sindacali, partitiche e di movimento che, nel nostro continente, sono impegnati nella costruzione di un’alternativa radicale allo stato di cose presenti, a partire dalla critica delle forme contemporanee dello sfruttamento capitalistico. Tutti i materiali (in lingua inglese) di questo percorso sono reperibili in rete a questo indirizzo: http://debt-issues.blog.rosalux.de .

Qui di seguito proponiamo il testo dell’invito a questo percorso a firma di Lutz Brangsch, Judith Dellheim, Joachim Spangenberg, Frieder Otto Wolf dell’Institut fuer Gesellschaftkritik della Fondazione “Rosa Luxemburg” e il testo (anche in .pdf allegato) degli interventi di Beppe Caccia e Gianmarco de Pieri, rispettivamente, ai primi due seminari che si sono svolti a Berlino dal 2 al 4 novembre e dal 30 novembre al 2 dicembre scorsi.

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Lutz Brangsch, Judith Dellheim, Joachim Spangenberg, Frieder Otto Wolf

(Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung)

Invitation to partecipate

“Debt”, “land grabbing” and “property” – the struggles associated with these terms continue to be fiercely debated and reinitiated in the context of the global financial and economic crisis. Along with the associated energy and resource crises. A practical political question is whether such debate can lead to to new protagonists against the global rulers and main perpetrators of the crises. The related theoretical question is to what extent, or what new insights into the modern capitalist mode of production can be gained in order in order to achieve a social-ecological transformation. This is a special challenge for theorists – including and especially those critically committed to sustainable development and/or the heritage of Marxian political economy.

“Debt”, “land grabbing”, and “property” are variously interpreted and interpretable concepts, and they are not least of all economic categories. For millennia, individual, collective, societal and global problems have been linked to them, including in the most recent crisis; and will certainly continue in the future: Expulsions, wars, murder, immeasurable suffering, incredible concentration of wealth; family, social and global divisions, colonialism and Neo-colonialism in its many forms, suppression of indigenous cultures and traditional ways of life and livelihoods, the destruction of nature – the list is endless. Similarly endless are the struggles, uprisings, revolutions, acts undertaken by the disenfranchised, actions taken by people who have defended themselves against the injustice connected to “debt”, “land grabbing” and “property” and who continue to defend themselves – who express freedom, emancipation, justice, recognition of value diversity, equality and solidarity as values and ideals and who strive for human dignity.

The struggles are related to concepts from religions and intellectual, cultural and political tendencies, among them “communism”, “socialism”, “independence”, “anti-colonialism”, “left”, “globalisation criticism”, “alter-globalism”.The slogans concerned with “debt”, “land grabbing”, and “property” are myriad, rallying people in all ages past and present, for a self-determined life, for the future of their children and for social futures worth living for. “Jubilee 2000”, “the debts of the north to the south”, “ecological debts”, “environmental justice”, “pay reparations”, “audit the debt”, “common goods”, “anti-privatisation”, “re-appropriation”, “nature belongs to all”, “stop land grabbing”, “referenda” against privatisation or for re-municipalisation”, “save your savings (austerity) programmes”, “we won’t pay for your crises”are only some examples.

With the discussion around “Rio+20” and green growth, three aspects (debt, land grabbing, property) of this problem again become manifest: In combating poverty and in struggling for the preservation of the natural conditions of life, it is a question of land for food, biofuels and the acquisition of pollution rights; of the possibilities and limits of technologies for the solution of social, ecological and global problems; of the limits of the economic calculus and its impacts like destructive growth, accelerated even further with the excuse of the need to reduce deficits and for new public-sector loans for allegedly necessary large-scale projects such as dams, prestige building projects and objects for more “security”. At the same time what is involved is the financialisation and reproduction of capital oligarchies – special networks of proprietors and representatives of highly concentrated capital centralised in the affluent countries – of managers, political, military, scientific and artistic elites of the North and their branches in the South – who, via the financial markets, continuously appropriate the income and resources of the rest of the population. These processes are not parallel and separate; they reciprocally strengthen and buttress each other in the context of a mode of reproduction.

We are especially interested in two questions:

1) To what extent, and how, do theorists, who work more or less directly on the issue of “debt”, “land grabbing”, and “property”, support emancipatory movements that have developed on the basis of these problem areas, and reflect the experience gained by these movements? More concretely, we are asking what this means for actors working on left/socialist “Europe policy” (i) in an European perspective (where it is necessary to differentiate between the “European Union” and “Europe”), and at the same time (ii) in a global view, which demands dealing with in Europe and US-based capital oligarchies/ corporations involved in debt creation, dispossession and land grabbing. Consequently we see the EU, its member states and those who live here as together being confronted with the problems of “debt”, “land grabbing”, “property” and “growth” and as protagonists who intensify – partly ignorant, partly nonchalant – the worldwide social, ecological and global problems. Where are the elements connecting these crisis processes situated; and where are the common interests of the counter-protagonists? Under what conditions does a reciprocal reinforcement of the various defensive battles take place?

2) Through a targeted open exchange among theorists/researchers and with the global environmental justice and similar movements is it possible for new scientific knowledge, discussions and/or simply communication and cooperation exchanges to occur? What consequences does this knowledge have for work on social alternatives and for theoretical work itself? What challenges does this present not only to the discipline of economics but also to the related disciplines such as philosophy, sociology and political science? Are they able to accommodate the lines of argumentation of the global civil society into their disciplinary frameworks, and if not, what is missing to enable them to do so?

We would like to enter into an exchange of ideas and experience with people who are interested in these problems. To do so we are planning three events:

1. a discussion among experts on the European Union, its policies and agents on November 2-4, 2012;

2. an international workshop of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation on questions of political and ecological economy on November 30 – December 2, 2012 and

a joint event with Environmental Justice Organisations (EJOs) and other civil society representatives during the next World Social Forum in November 2013.

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Beppe Caccia(Venice, Italy)

Financialization and debt as private grabbing of "common wealth":

The crisis of local governments and the search for alternatives in Europe.

I am grateful to the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung for this invitation.

In my contribution I will try to highlight, first of all, which are the effects of financialization process on local governments all over Europe.

Why do I suggest adopting this perspective too, among the others? Because it is relevant for our search for alternatives to the dominant “crisis management” and to the current austerity policies.

Let me look back to the beginning of this century: in the global movement against the neoliberal globalisation, following the experiences of Porto Alegre and other Latin-American cities, we thought that the promotion of a large democratic participation on municipal level and the building of transnational networks of self-ruled towns could constitute a sort of “counter power” to the global neoliberal governance. And that it could contribute to the construction of “another possible world”.

What about now?

Let us begin with the European case. Several years before the “fiscal compact” was approved applying on a national level of the “steel cage” defined by the Maastricht Treaties through the Financial Stability Pact, the still on-going shortage of economic resources’ transfer from national central States to the local authorities began.

In Italy, for example it was calculated that in the last five years, in order to comply with the regulations of the European Stability Pact, the Italian national governments charged eighty per cent (80 %) of the entire cost of the Internal Stability Pact to the local level, in particular to the cities. The budget of local governments is therefore one of the main targets of austerity policies.

This choice carries with it plenty of hard social consequences. You have to take into consideration that, in Italy, Municipalities guarantee seventy per cent of the total expenditure for social Welfare services and interventions, and the Health services are exclusively the duty of Regional authorities.

For this reason, any massive cut in State transfers to local governments, under the rule of Internal Stability Pact, is immediately a direct attack against the Welfare system.

And not only this.

I think that the process of financialization of capitalistic accumulation has implied, and still is implying, a structural constitutional transformation, (I mean in the material constitution) of the role of local governments in Europe. What does this mean?

Insufficient transfers of economic resources from the national States to Cities determine an effective shrinkage of the democratic spaces of local autonomy, of self-determination and self-ruling. I believe we are witnessing an undeclared “constituent process” on the European level, a sort of “revolution from above”, in Gramsci’s words, lead by the logic of dominant financial markets and by unelected institutions like Troika, andthishas a precise consequence on the local governments: it reduces local autonomies to nothing more than dependent variables, or purely executive functions, subordinate to the financial and technocratic governance.

This is part of a designed plan; a strategy for reducing public spending and transferring more and more socially produced wealth from their larger redistribution to the private income (rénte) and to worldwide circuits of financial capitalism.

Again, the cuts in the transfer of economic resources from national States to Cities has increased local public debt and explicitly pushed local administrations into the global financial markets, mainly into the market of derivative financial products.

Since 2001, for example, the level of debt of French regions and departments increased in the measure of fifty per cent (50 %). We all know the historical experience of “good administration”, left-wing coalitions and participatory democracy of Seine-Saint-Denis, in the banlieu north of Paris. Well, in January 2011 the debt of Conseil general de la Seine-Saint-Denis amounted to more than nine hundred-fifty two millions Euro, seventy-two per cent (72 %) of which was made up of so called “toxic assets”.

Another example: in Italy, up to the year 2002, in order to finance public works, the local authorities resorted to loans only, strictly and only through a Public Investment Bank, the “Cassa depositi e prestiti” (CDP), whose capital is based on popular postal savings. In 2002, major Italian private banks came with a share of thirty per cent in the stake of CDP. In the same year, the Berlusconi government, his Finance Minister Tremonti, has fully liberalized the purchasing of derivative securities products by local governments on global financial markets. You can just imagine the budget impact and the current financial situation of many Cities after the subprime crisis in 2008. And now the Monti government is endowing the CDP with the tasks of a private investment bank.

But there is another important point I want to emphasize: the logic of Financial Stability Pact, transposed from top to bottom, from European to national level, was to force local governments to the privatization of public goods and public services, determining a process that we can define as "commons grabbing". Look at the example of the struggle for “water as common good”. In Italy, in June 2011, twenty-seven million citizens voted in the referendum to keep the water resource management away from any process of privatization. Despite such a large democratic pronunciation, after the letter of intent signed by the former and current presidents of the European Central Bank, Mr Trichet and Draghi, the Italian government tried again and again, with five different laws and decrees, to force the local authorities to privatize not just water, but all the local public services. In different ways a lot of Municipalities, all around the country, are trying to resist these attempts.

Let me go to the conclusion, which is an open one. In our search for alternatives, we have to think that there cannot be a “ready and packed” solution. We also need a permanent “constituent process”, but acted from below. And this process can only be a complex, multilevel one connecting different levels of action and a multiplicity of social and political actors. I think that local governments could be a crucial part in such a process; and that they could hinder the processes of “common grabbing” I described above. They could, that is, if they looked for a strict connection, in a dialectical (and sometimes inevitably based on conflict) relationship, with social struggles, movements and citizens’ participation, if they managed to contribute to re-inventing democracy as a conflictive practice, re-gaining spaces of autonomy and self-determination for everybody.

And, in a renewed democratic European framework, local governments could build innovative and concrete alternative policies, such as a communitarian Welfare, fit for the needs of the new social class composition, hinged on basic income, and a radical ecological conversion of the economic and productive model.

A final consideration. To do all this, we need to accumulate force; we need more power. Throughout its centuries-old history, capitalism redistributed richness only when it was afraid of strength the class could exert. The last time it happened was during the “glorious thirty years” after the Second World War, because of October 1917 revolution, anticolonial liberation movements, and mass working class struggles in Western Europe. We rightly hate Thomas Hobbes’ idea that fear should be the fundamental political sentiment: fear was, every time, an instrument of the ruling classes. But now, in a totally new social situation due to finacialization, we need for the capitalistic elite to try again the taste of fear.

Berlin, 3. November 2012

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Gianmarco de Pieri (Bologna, Italy)

Commons and debt: polar opposites in a new paradigm

The aims of the paper are to introduce the new role of the debt, family and state ones, as a general key tool useful for the ruling class to structure the so called austerity political economical european trend, and to highlight the great opportunity of the commons theory to give us the chance to imagine a new way to work over the pincers “private or state- controlled”. Ecological critical theory could provide an helpful toolbox.

All over the European Union we face a spending review for the welfare state, with the objective to define a  new governance model, where monetarism and new liberalism are the milestones and the crisis (and its shock effects) is the context where it happens.

According to Antonio Gramsci, what it is happening under that's grey sky, it is a subversion from the top where finance-capitalism is surfing the crisis figuring out a new paradigm from the economical perspective; in the meantime a technocratic post-democratic is substituting the old way of representation in its without end crisis.

The shocking encourages that revolution from the top and currently the status of the art of the political system in the EU seems to be under the Carl Schmitt's state of exception.

The use of the debt is similar to the one made by IMF in dealing with Argentina in '00; it means less budget for social protection, no more public intervention in economic management, tightly technocratic governance at european level, enlarging the contradiction between society and representation system.

The so called capitalism crisis seems to be followed by few weak growths but where there are in place, we recognized the hegemony of rentier and jobless business.

We could opinion not only the system crisis but the crisis of the growth model as well.

It appears a new type of human being, a so called in debt human being (cit. Lazzarato 2012), introducing a new anthropological type; it looks like a new stage after the Hayek's homo oeconomicus.

As per Marx analysis, we are in the real subsumption stage and also the exploitation is at biopolical level (cfr. Marx, Negri, Hans Jurgen Krahl); as a consequence exploitation embraces all the life and all the resources moving from what was a right in having a good or service (education, pension, house, ect.) to a new “social intervention” where those goods and service are bought like a leasing.

We can not criticize capitalism only from the “working” side; instead we should assume a large point of critics where, for instance, the ecological issue could be crucial. We could argue, the innovative role of environmental struggle is similar to the one had by the feminism.

On the other hand, debt is not (only) a money issue; it is a firstly a capitalist relationships and as per Marx words it shows us the political role of money and currency.

In the neoclassical theory the environmental resource is not cited. For instance in the Marshall's balance it does not appear.

Later, some theories highlighted that point (Pigou, Georcescu Roegen) and argued some new ways to evaluate the consumption of environmental resources. Refer to the issue of the Pigou's tax for instance, but remember that is a way to adapt the neoclassical economical theory to a new context (the UN conference on climate change seem to pursue that way).

By my opinion, that is a way to bring the environment under the financial dictature as happened for the other side of living.

The fiscal compact translates the old european republican constitutions in new ones where monetarism is the milestone.

Using other words, we can assume the fiscal compact and the new public budget rules as the bricks of a new way -post democratic of course- for building a constitutional framework; those are not a tactical initiatives, but a medium and long term strong strategy for the european constituency from the top.

On the other hand, we note the crisis of the political and social representation where, as an instance, in Italy people have faith in parties and parliament system less then 5% at all according to recent polling. From a helicopter view there is in place a de-democratization process, according to Wendy Brown, where the new point of balance is not achieved.

Within social movements is growing the commons hegemony under a olystic perspective (polical, economical, ecological). It emerges from the struggles that commons are a general convergence point for embracing the change where commons enable us to work over the trade off between private way of living and the old socialism paradigm (definitely both are property systems).

Neither private nor state: commons, also, and commonwealth is the public sphere.

The '70 crisis extended the exploitation to all the life, overcoming the job time. Now all the lifetime and all the sides of living are under the capitalism dictature, that is true for the humang being as well for the ecological sphere.

Therefore, we can not imagine an outside, but all is under a closed ensemble where the rules of play are the same.

The debate about commons is more advanced in the ecological one where twenty or more years ago some intellectuals and movements have started a discussion around the common goods and wealth of the ecological resourse.

For instance, i mention the 2010 huge and successful battle for maintaining water reserves and management as public in Italy; in the meantime the theory has developed some important categorization on law of commons, according to Ugo Mattei (2011)

Public spaces, new institutions, environmental resources as well as portions of the old welfare state could be thought under the commons theory thinking and reviewed as new claims against the monetarism and post-democratic governance by the social movements.

Some trends in value creating are supporting this kind of arguing. I cite the mature tendencies of the role of distributed and socialized way of production value in the post-industrial economy; the crucial role of languages -what could be more commons then languages?-, the new professions based on knowledge and the importance of relationships as well the people reproduction.

Those are example of the biopolitical categoziation.

From that perspective, it seems that the battle for copyrighting is a new stage on enclosure the commons, as occurred for land and forest in XVIII century in UK

Privatizations of the old public managed goods and services are the first track; the other one is the tendency to enclosure knowledge and exploitation environment resources (see the Ilva case history below).

Some people are claiming for a new cart of forest, like the one obtained in the XIII century, and highlighting the importance of commons in the open process for a new european constitution from below.

Those tendencies and issue could help us in developing theories and practices for imaging and make them real.

Focus on ecological debt

Taranto, the work and the environmental disaster.

A case study: ILVA steel plant in south Italy

with the contribution of Alessandro Terra

That part aims at provide key concepts over the importance of the ecological crisis, a crucial side the global crisis. The ecosystem is under exploitation and capitalism use the ecological common resource as a key in value chain building.

Taranto is a town of 200.000 people in the south of Italy, on the Jonic Sea.

In the past Taranto was been the Capital of the Magna Greece and one of the most important  city on the Naples kingdom, for the  strategical location, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, after the unification of the Italy became the main harbor  of the Italian Navy and in the 1889 was opened the military arsenal.

The economy of the city was based on the fish and mussel cultivation and the farming, but with the Arsenal we can see the first attempt to transform the town in an industrial hub.

In line with the alleged industrial vocation in the 50‘s the Government decided to build the most important steel hub of the country.

With the policy of the States industry the idea of the Government is to accelerate the development of the South Italy following the pattern of the North.

The agreement about this kind of policy was supported, for several reason, from the Christian Democrats and the Communist Party, so in the 1960, was opened the Italsider, in the 1970 it was doubled.

The Italsider is the biggest steelworks in Europe, it covers an area equal to twice that of the city of Taranto and until the 1995 employs about 30thousand workers.

The steel plant is characterized by the complete cycle of the production, from the mineral to the finished product (pipes and rolled steel) through a series of transforming process highly polluting.

In the same industrial area there are other companies that contributes to the pollution of the air, the sea and the farm of the country, in fact there are: the oil refinery, a cement factory, the navy arsenal, 3 landfill of special wastes and a waste incineration plant.

For these reasons Taranto was recognized as a high environmental risk area by the World Health Organization in 1986, and by the Italian Ministry of Environment in 1991. 

In the 1995 the Riva Group buy the State company at a very low price and start the downsizing of the workforce, the workers nowadays  are around 12.000 and  5.000 of induced activity, despite the number of employees so high, in the territory of Taranto, the unemployment rate is  around the 30% according to the average of southern Italy.

On july 26 a judge ordered the closure of ILVA’s key production sections, in practice blocking the entire  production process, in addition, eight executives of the Riva Group  have been placed under house arrest. Among them are the head of the group, Emilio Riva, and his son Nicola.

 They are accused of culpable and intentional disaster, an intentional lack of precautions against industrial accidents, poisoning of food substances, aggravated damage against public goods, air pollution, dumping of dangerous substances and corruption. 

 During these  years  ILVA produced the 90% of the dioxine of the entire Italy,  8.8% of the total dioxins emitted in Europe, over and abovea mix of minerals and metals,  inhabitants of Taranto inhale 2.7 tons of carbon monoxide and 58 tons of carbon dioxide every year, the cancer death rate in the area is 15% above the national average and lung cancer deaths at 30% higher.

There isn't a family in Taranto  without a sick or dead member thanks to ILVA, farmers were put out of business when grazing was banned within 20km, the animals can’ t be  butchered and dispose as a toxic waste, the dioxine entered in the food chain, in the breastmilk.

However the ILVA  produces the 75% of the entire GDP of the province. In Taranto, the people’s only choice is between work at the factory, unemployment , emigration or death.

On August 2,  two demonstration have crossed the city, one led by the three major italian unions CGIL, CISL, and UIL  which called the strike, and the other by social movements;  the first  asked for the sequestration to be revoked and for the reopening of the plant, the second one asked for a social justice, without the blackmail between health/ environment and work, this demo sponsored by the” Committee of the citizens and workers” interrupted the speech of the Unions and has taken word to  say that they are not represented by unions and  parties.

Political and union representation is in crisis because they  have always defended the production and profit and never the citizens and workers issues,  because they have defended an humbling work and prevented from living dignified lives.

In the next weeks of August the Committee have disputed the environment minister Corrado Clini and sponsored a lot of  public meetings in the neighborhoods of the town, especially in Tamburi,  the nearest one to the steel plant.

A lot of people attended to the mobilizations of the Committee and now  they’re working on the knowledge needs to start to build a different city from below.

The policy program based on the needs of an environmental  justice, right to health , a basic income to protect citizens from poverty and a sustainable development, free from the blackmail of the work of that factory of death.

This struggle talk about democracy, the real one, from below, the only one able to protect the common goods, this struggle is inspired by other similar struggles like the NO TAV and the movements against the landfill in Campania.

There is a common line which crosses from the movements that defend themselves and their  territories from the land grabbing, the idea born in the Seattle movements that  a best world is possible, right now necessary.

Berlin, 1. December 2012