Europe and the bull

Franco 'Bifo' Berardi
April 12, 2010

European Union is on the verge of collapse.
This is what many economists think and some journalists say, while political and intellectual life is agonizing on the continent, heading towards the darkness of cynicism and racism.

“The European monetary Union, the basis of the euro, began with a grand illusion,” wrote Joachim Starbatty in the Herald Tribune on March 29th 2010. (Leave the Euro Zone) “On one side were countries – Austria, Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands – whose currencies had persistently appreciated, both within Europe and worldwide; the countries on the other side – Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, and Spain, had persistently depreciating currencies. Yet the union was devised as a one-size-fits-all structure.”

Just a small note: the Protestant countries, predictably, are on the side of economic virtue, the Catholic and the Orthodox are on the other side. Things are worsened by the financial crisis that started in September 2008 and never really ended.

“The Greek crisis is only the first of what could be several tremors resulting from the Euro’s original sin. While few are willing to say it yet, the solution is clear. The only way to avoid further harm to the global economy is for Germany to lead its fellow stable states out of the Euro and into a new and stronger currency bloc. The notion of a single Euro zone economy is false.”

Not only the well behaving Protestant, actually are endangered by the belonging to the Euro sphere, but also the lazy and unreliable Greeks (and their fellow Catholic countries whose failure is expected next) have not so much to gain from being subjected to the Euro obligations.

“These countries are not competitive in the global economy, as shown by their high trade deficits. Germany has decided not to help them, and prefers to see the International Monetary Fund intervening in the continent, rather then break the European Central Bank dogma, and help the guilty lazy southerners. So, for the Greeks, problems are only worsened by Euro membership. If Greece were outside the Euro zone, for example, it could devalue its currency to make it more competitive, and its foreign debts could be renegotiated in an international conference.”

The rationale of Starbatty’s predicament is hard to dismiss if you accept the neoliberal dogma and the monetarist ideology that are the unquestionable foundations of the European Union. So the final collapse seems approaching. As I am not a patriot I could say: who cares?

I care about European union for reasons that have very little to do with patriotism. First because it has been the first gesture towards forgetting and leaving behind the plague of nationalism which has brought the continent into the abyss of violence and mass murder during the last two hundred years. Secondly because it creates a ground of communication for the cognitariat, the main force of progress and social recomposition in the post-fordist age of deployment of the general intellect.

Particularly I care about Europe now, in the wake of the collapse, because the collapse of the European Union will oblige everybody to finally look at the dilemma: either we get free of the neoliberal dogma and of the financial dictatorship of the European Central Bank, or we fall into the hell of ethno-civil war, of a new coming form of Nazism that is ready to spread all over Europe, after first surfacing in Italy, the country where the degeneration of capitalism has found its laboratory during the last century.

European union is far from being a democracy because the political will and the social culture means nothing, and the decisions of the financial oligarchy is the only effective power. The paranoid obsession of unlimited economic growth and financial stability are the core of the EU. In the past decades social solidarity could coexist with financial dogmatism and the obsession of growth, but now this coexistence is over.

We are facing a choice: either we get free of the neoliberal obsession or the EU collapses and the doors of the hell will be open.

In the ancient Greek mythological imagination Europe is a young beautiful girl.

Driven by the desire to rape her, the hyper-testosteronic Jupiter came to the Earth disguised as a bull. But she managed to escape, flying from the Mediterranean lands towards the cool tolerant north.

The bull of finance has been the main actor of the European drama, so far. Social solidarity and intellectual freedom, the beautiful girl named Europe, has been barely permitted to survive, hiding in the underground environment of social movements. No more. Now it is the moment of the final clash. Now we have to face the bull and openly criticize the financial dictatorship of the European Central Bank. Now we have to call for the emancipation of social creativity of the cognitariat from darkness of dogma and of greed. Now we have to launch a political movement for the basic income, for a general reduction of the labor time.