“After the Crisis”

[marmar]

from Dissent magazine:




“After the Crisis”
Richard Wolin - September 28, 2011 2:00 pm

The concept of progress is premised on the idea of catastrophe. That “things have gone so far” is the catastrophe. Catastrophe is not something that awaits us, it is that which has already come to pass.

-Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

As of 2011, in the aftermath of the Greek financial crisis, there exists a new “lost generation” in Europe. In France it has been euphemistically dubbed the “Kleenex generation.” It consists of a contingent of youth whose hopes for a better future have been dashed. It is a generation that has become “disposable,” whose expectations and dreams have been sacrificed on the twin altars of European monetary union and globalization. It is a generation that, as a rule, is overeducated and underemployed. Its members now face the prospect of low-paying, part-time jobs, and having to live with their parents for the foreseeable future—possibly until their forties—since they cannot afford their own dwellings. As the German literary critic Walter Benjamin, quoting August Strindberg, observed appositely: “Hell is nothing that awaits us; it is this life in the here and now.”

Benjamin’s apercu suggests that the contemporary European crisis is a semi-permanent condition. It raises the specter that, “after the crisis,” things will continue to look much as they do now.

In Greece and Spain, youth unemployment hovers around an unprecedented 45 percent. Last spring, European youth, numbering in the tens of thousands, demonstrated peacefully across the continent—in England, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain (the so-called 15-M movement, which began in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol). But their efforts were to no avail. The European governments and financial institutions that are responsible for the crisis remain wholly unmoved by the younger generation’s plight. European elites who have attained affluence and financial security are, unconscionably, washing their hands of responsibility and closing the doors behind them.

To make matters worse, the fortunes of Europe’s social democratic parties, once the champions of “capitalism with a human face” and a strong “social state,” have recently plummeted. They are out of office in all major EU countries—England, France, Germany and Italy—and there are few signs that their return is imminent. In a sense, they are merely paying the price for having abandoned, during the 1990s, their strong postwar commitment to social rights and social justice. In many respects, their programs have become indistinguishable from the platforms of their center-right opponents who now hold office in almost all EU nations, Greece and Spain excepted. (In Denmark, a coalition led by the Social Democrats surged to victory in elections last month, ending ten years of conservative rule.) ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/atw.php?id=562

[ixion]

1. that implies we've reached the end of the crisis

we have not.

[Syrinx]

2. not by a long shot

And it's going to be blamed on Obama, even though it is Republican "conservative" policies that got us here... and there.

[MannyGoldstein]

3. Self delete

Never mind...