Two years after the open outbreak of the financial and economic crisis, crisis-management has become a normalized everyday business. Increasingly, leading circles and the mass media of all core capitalist countries even claim that the end of the crisis is in sight. They admit that its effects cannot be overlooked, yet they are sure that the growth figures will once again point upwards. They claim that the worst excrescences of financial-market capitalism have been corrected and that at the same time they have learned how a catastrophe can be avoided through quick and decisive state intervention. At first sight, this is a broad consensus.  But is the crisis over – and is there broad consensus and unity within the ruling elites?

In fact, the anti-cyclic action of the states and the social-political cushioning measures they have taken is much more extensive – and effective – than those taken at the time of the last big crisis. The current stabilization of the economy is therefore not attributable to a durable recuperation of capital accumulation. It is above all the result of the stimulation of the economic cycle and support of the banking sector through national debt and the debt of many private households. The financial crisis and the crisis of the real economy are therefore not over but are proceeding very unevenly on a global scale.

In their just published excellent study “In and Out of Crisis” (Oakland 2010) Greg Albo, Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch state: “… it is pure fantasy to see significant splits between different sections of the capitalist classes or a fracturing of political parties…there has been no significant disunity amongst the main fractions of capital – between industrial capital and finance, between foreign and national capitals, and between big and small capitals. They have all seen their political stake in the resolution of the crisis in a way which reconstitutes neoliberal hegemony.” (p.37). Depicting the capitalist classes and their political expressions in a situation of deep crisis as something monolithic makes sense only in so far as one looks at the structural and static dimension of the power structure. Yet even this is not convincing: in Germany for example there are quite spectacular conflicts between industry and finance and between big and small capitals as well.

However, to include only this structural dimension in one’s field of vision means to miss the dynamic dimension of development. There is much evidence that the crisis has generated a new fragmented crisis-neoliberalism, in which various accumulation models will be contested for a very long time to come. It is the specific model of finance-led accumulation which has come into crisis, and the future of this model is being questioned. The capitalist classes and their political representatives are organizing around exit strategies and dividing along these lines – this means that they are focussing on the old accumulation strategy and on new ones, with the avantgarde and their followers gathering around these new political paradigms. It is therefore true that there is consensus, but at second glance there is also dissent.

First, there is a precarious consolidation of the still dominant financial-market-driven accumulation model, whose life span is not predictable. Consolidation means that bank policy is organizing recapitalization and is fighting insolvency; the central banks are gaining power; there is weak regulation and no action against risky financial-market instruments; fiscal policy is concentrating on redistribution; austerity policies are being exploded.

In Europe, central strata of the skilled wage dependents are being protected from unemployment, though not from significant losses of income, through reduced working hours and cyclical programs. A crisis corporatism was established, with the unions as clearly dependent partners. Nowhere have the unions been able to use the explosion of state intervention for interventions against the investment sovereignty of the owners. Two years after the outbreak of the crisis, neither a switch to an active sectoral and regional structural policy nor the expansion of co-determination to a politics of economic democracy is a theme.

If one looks at the European economy of power, then the dominating position of France, Germany and England in financial markets as in the real economy has clearly been confirmed; even Poland and the northern European states, along with their neoliberal elites, have consolidated their positions in Europe. However, Germany is the winner in the power play – at least for now. Other central players such as India are hardly touched by the financial crisis and are continuing along the path of their brand of neoliberal politics.

The large disparities of income and assets, which grew in the last three decades, have not been reduced, but continue to deepen. Briefly, the German example: For the first time since the founding of the German Federal Republic, the average gross earnings of employees has fallen in the last year to 27,648 euro – the causes were the cutback in overtime, the spread of reduced working hours and the development of unemployment. About 14 % of the population – which means more than 11.5 [million] Germans – lived in poverty in 2008, which is about a third more than 10 years ago. Already in 2008 just under a fourth of the 19-20-year-olds lived under the poverty threshold. The proportion even reaches 36 % for families with four or more children; for single parents with small children the rate of poverty is more than 40 %. This is part of the landscape of the new financial-market-driven crisis neoliberalism.

Second, in the anti-cyclic programs, the rudiments of a state-led Green New Deal are being introduced: “… the countries are striving vigorously to get ahead in the race for pole position in the new green low-carbon economy,” as a just published new report on Germany’s environmental policies says. (Peer Review on Sustainable Development Policies in Germany, Berlin November 2009). Its representatives have no doubt that the country which lags behind in the struggle to establish green capitalism cannot achieve hegemony and profit domination in the capitalism of the future. The race is on.

Third, as a parallel to this, in countries like Brazil and China strong domestic-market-oriented, inclusive growth and accumulation strategies are being pursued, which aim at including enormous hitherto excluded peripheral sectors. They are trying to institute a change away from “fragmented accumulation” and to an inclusion of internal peripheries as a new driving force of global capitalism. Their huge internal markets help in recovering from the crisis and compensate the process of de-globalization.

Fourth: Importantly, in many European countries a weak, labile, ambivalent bourgeois dissident milieu, acting from moral-economic convictions, has appeared, which is in part clearly post–neoliberal and a possible ally for the left. It advocates humanistic, liberal (seldom libertarian), ecological, reformist and sometimes also welfare-state goals especially of the middle class and of some younger elite groups and is often recruited form bourgeoisified Greens, from the vestiges of a social-democratic government left and from humanist liberalism. Politically, it frequently looks to the Obama Administration and even to the left or center-left governments of Latin America. This is a new, very weak and ambivalent realm or culture but in terms of political strategy it is the most interesting development for the left.

In short: in the most recent crisis, the leaders have effected modifications, opened up new options and at least partially integrated challengers. The hegemonic bloc was clearly changed; the power constellations within the ruling classes have been considerably altered – a newly fragmented crisis neoliberalism has arisen. The global shift in favor of Asia has accelerated; in particular the US, Japan and the EU have been hit by the crisis, and the global spatial order of accumulation is changing. In Europe, the social-democratic and market-radical directions have clearly been weakened. A new center-right-wing of crisis-neoliberalism is forming (Sarkozy, Merkel). For them, there is no thought of a fundamental, strategic departure from the neoliberal development model of capitalism. Some nation-states (like Germany) are winners, others (like Greece, Spain, the Baltic States, Hungary) are loosers.

Nowhere has this resulted in a major breakthrough for the left – and in view of the three decades under the shadow of an historic defeat, this was admittedly not to be expected. The left doesn’t fall from heaven.

The left is expecting that, due to tax deficits and state expenditures for the anti-cyclical program, national debt will sharply increase. From 2008 to 2010, the G-20 countries have enacted anti-cyclical programs at a level of approximately 1.1. billion euros. By the end of this year, the debts of these 20 largest national economies will have increased by 45 %. Germany’s state debts have, with 1.7 billion euros in 2009, reached a new record level. Tax revenues in Germany have truly collapsed (minus 5.9 % or about 30 billion (milliard) euros less than 2008.

The great crisis is not over; unemployment and national debt are now at its center. They are the key political questions of the coming years.

This at the same time aggravates the transition to a green capitalism, that is, to another accumulation model for which initial state activities have an importance that can hardly be overestimated. It also complicates the retreat from the hypertrophic export strategy by means of a domestic-market consumption strategy and a policy of income increases. The attempts at strengthening domestic-market accumulation such that so-called automatic recoveries can be achieved and the growth figures and rates of profit of the neoliberal bubble economy can be regained are, in view of the continued increase of national debt and unemployment, from the outset, at best feeble.

No one therefore knows how the further economic development will play itself out. It is to be expected that wage-earners, unemployed and pensioners will bear the brunt of what the financial system has brought about  through higher taxes, service cuts, more private care services. This also means dismantling of the public sector and crushing its strong unions. What is certain is that in a time of exploding debt the dismantling of the social state is seen as the royal road to budget consolidation.

On none of the central questions of the future is the left united:

• On the question of capitalism – do we see its changes also as continuity and conservation or as a break and a radical new constitution?
• On the question of property – are we thinking of it in terms of commons primarily seen as state property or as a mixed economy?
• On the question of classes – how do we think of diversity, difference, unity and hegemony?
• On the question of the state – how do we think of the relation of electoral and parliamentary politics as it relates to the necessity of changing the state and the public sphere?
• On the question of military and security policy – is the left radically pacifist or does it ask for forceful “humanist” democratizing interventions?

At the same time there is consensus within the left analysis of the crisis: the crisis is not local; it is a multiple crisis; it is not conjunctural but structural: it is a crisis of overproduction and overaccumulation; it results in drastic power shifts and a rearrangement of the relation between economy and politics.

Therefore we find drastic splits, heterogeneity, diversity and dissenting factions, positions, commitments and voices, and we have a large left sector – but where is the identity of “The left”? Where does identity or even unity come from? In Germany’s left debate there is even a concept that is making the rounds – that of the “mosaic left” (Hans Jürgen Urban) – that says: what’s needed is a variegated, diverse, broad, autonomous, radical, transformational left around synergies and productive debate, in order to create a new image out of a mosaic – in the language of political theory: around the image of an internally depolarized (Boaventura de Sousa Santos),  plural and diverse left that, when push comes to shove, is in a position to show the class enemy a couple more fangs than usual. Important parts of the left have learned procedures of “antagonistic cooperation” and dialogue as building blocks of a complex left network and culture. In terms of the left’s development of strategic capacities this a fundamental condition for a self-empowerment of the left. The capacity of system building is the outstanding feature of a politics capable of reaching out and dealing with difficult and complex situations and diverse actors, cultures and ideologies.

The Urban/Sousa Santos idea is a necessary but insufficient pre-condition – but how can such a heterogenous left get from here to there – to a common identity? Something has not changed: a crisis changes the perception of society. The new existential insecurity is creating collectivizing  crisis experiences, which however have not consolidated into a profound crisis of society. The politics and culture of individualization and fragmentation, which characterize neoliberalism, have not prevented the critique of capitalism from spreading.The present crisis shows – if we look beyond the fundamental questions – that a series of mostly left-Keynesian proposals on the part of the left is correct and realistic:

• Through work-time reduction employment can be widely ensured – shortening of work time with a partial wage compensation would have the effect that in the German Federal Republic more than a million people could remain employed in 2009.
• A stabilization of the domestic market through increasing purchasing power – see the car-scrappage scheme – is possible
• Activate the social state’s built in stabilizers
• A public anti-cyclical policy brakes [moderates] cyclic crashes and at the same time shows that public investments are more effective than tax reduction; a public industrial policy is faulty whose investments are oriented to the demand fulfillment principle
• Taxes on income from assets secure the resource endowments of the state and decreases the mass of speculation.
• Democratic-participatory entrepreneurial culture is necessary: this is a question of alternatives to capitalism and alternatives within capitalism.

In disparate locations, or also on the regional level, market-limiting, employment-securing redistributive regulation has been carried out. Such counter-hegemonic projects, however, still remain relatively fragmented, unconnected and uncoordinated, they play no role on the multi-lateral, supra-national and global levels – if one excepts Latin America. There a repertory of anti-neoliberal templates, policy guidelines, prototypes, e.g. energy projects, the Banco del Sur, links between ecological and indigenous projects, etc. have arisen, and we have something like a first socialization of an anti-neoliberal structure.

Many cannot bear the pressure for radical change. They resign themselves, focus merely on the smallest steps or the biggest shortcuts or suppress what they see or what they are fleeing from in the romanticism of dreamy utopias. One of the central secrets of capitalism’s evolution is its constantly renewed capacity for the production of such possibilities (and thousands more) of so regulating such realignments that they change capitalism but secure its identity. The left has – and not even first with Rosa Luxemburg – answered this question according to its own evolution in this way: we need to mediate reform and revolution in a process of strategic transformation and thus of radical realpolitik.

Left Forum, New York March 2010. Translation: Eric Canepa.