Interview with Hillel Ticktin

Following up on last year’s Current Moment interviews, today we are publishing an interview with Hillel Ticktin, Emeritus Professor of Marxist Studies at the University of Glasgow. An internationally renowned Marxist scholar, Professor Ticktin co-founded in the early 1970s the journal Critique.  He has published numerous books and articles over the years. In 2010, Critique published a special issue on the current crisis to which Ticktin and others contributed.

Eurozone leaders are going on record saying that the worst of the sovereign debt crisis is over. Are they right to be so optimistic?

No. But then, the Eurozone country politicians are not going to tell the truth as to what they think, as it would spook the markets. Without growth, it will be impossible to solve the indebtedness problem, and Germany is insisting on harsh terms for giving loans, so harsh that there will be negative growth. This is clear in the case of Greece, where the newspapers are talking of the need for a future Third Bailout. But in reality it is highly likely that other countries will require further substantial loans. While Portugal will not be too much of a problem, a Spanish or Italian bailout cannot be financed on present Eurozone funds.

Yields have fallen on sovereign debt as the European Central Bank (ECB) has injected over 1 trillion Euros of liquidity into the European banking system in the form of longer-term refinancing operations. How has the crisis changed the ECB and has the ECB been the saviour of the situation?

The ECB has clearly put off the day when the crisis will have to be faced down. Banks have acquired sufficient liquidity to avoid problems and have invested money in their governmental bonds. The rational solution would have been the issuance of sufficient Eurobonds which would be used to fund the various countries involved. Since the Eurobonds would be backed by the successful Eurozone countries, investors will buy them. The ECB has produced a temporary measure but the amount of money involved is insufficient. Until the ECB can act as the Central Bank of an independent country in order to issue as much liquidity as it sees fit, and can help to issue Eurobonds, it is not fit for purpose.

The European approach has combined the backdoor provision of liquidity to its banking system with a frontdoor assault on government budget deficits and on national labour markets. What is your assessment of this approach overall?

Crazy. It is not really a European approach so much as a Conservative policy supported by the UK Conservative party, the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats in Germany, the Republican Party in the USA etc. It is not supported by the social democrats in France or Germany. Hollande has made that very clear. Of course in practice the social democrats do not live up to their promises, but they would ease the situation and might be pushed further by popular pressure. The question is why such a policy is being adopted at all, given that it cannot possibly work, and indeed is not working. It looks as if a section of the bourgeoisie has decided to take the opportunity to attack the working class so far that they would end up with a 19^th century approach to social relations. That, in turn, would ultimately destroy the social democratic parties and replace them with revolutionary left wing parties. Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad.

A feature of the politics of the Eurozone crisis has been the replacement of democratically-elected governments with technocrats. This occurred in both Italy and Greece. Does this signal a trend of some kind, that economic imperatives are being placed above political ones for instance? And does it suggest that European integration today is really about preserving the Euro?

This is an inevitable feature of the present. Once the majority of the population began to turn to the left, as in Greece, the capitalist system itself began to be threatened. The use of the army is not possible at the present time. Nor is a far right popular movement based on the so-called ‘middle class’, So they have had the ingenuity to invent a new undemocratic category of a non-political government,  which makes a mockery of the Parliamentary system.  This is much like the idea that US judges of the Supreme Court are above politics when they pronounce on political measures, even though they have been specifically appointed for political reasons. It does not fool the working class but people may be grateful that it is not worse. Since it will not work, there will have to be even more undemocratic solutions. In the UK during the Great Depression, there was a National Government. In effect a coalition of all the large parties. The fact is that the Parliamentary system was already cracking, so this is another stake in its heart.

There is no question that ‘economics is being placed above politics’. The only rational way to run a union with a common currency is to accept that the richer areas will help fund the poorer areas, in order both to help them catch up but also to maintain cohesion, based on principles of human rights. European countries usually accept such obligations, unless they accept that parts of their country will break away. After all, Germany taxed the West Germans to help the absorption of East Germany. Today, however, the ruling parties in Germany, the Netherlands and Finland appear to reject such an approach. The reason ultimately lies in the fear of instability in those countries. So, economics is not really being placed above politics, depending on one’s definitions of politics and economics. Instead one politics is replacing another. The reason is discussed in the answer to the next question.

Is there an alternative to this approach of national budgetary austerity combined with a pan-European fund intended to offset any threats to Europe’s banking system.

As the current approach is being widely applied and is widely distrusted, and can only fail, there has to be another alternative if humanity is to survive, whether in or out of the Eurozone.

We are in a downturn of depression proportions. The last Great Depression only ended with the World War. War, on that scale, is however, excluded at the present time. The only way out of the present impasse is for a rationally planned economic reconstructive process, with governments playing a leading role. As the ruling class supports small government and the extension of private enterprise, it will oppose any such move. On the contrary, it is afraid that any attempt to go for reflation with government participation will lead to a political upheaval. In my view, they are right that the population will demand increased economic and political participation under conditions of full employment. That is in effect the immediate alternative, which is why the ruling class wants to take the opportunity, instead, to achieve a defeat of the working class of epochal proportions. Looked at this way, the policy of austerity is a defensive measure to preserve capitalism. Seen this way the policy is not crazy but rational, even if its application is mad.

The future is not as apocalyptic as it might seem from that last sentence, since the most likely result for the present is that the austerity policy will be pulled back, even if only by social democrats. Growth will be low, poverty increasing and discontent rising. Ultimately there will be a denouement, but when is not yet clear.