[...]... comment on the controversies with which they were intimately involved For the banks didn’t merely shape the narrative; they partially manufactured the reality that the narrative described The first stage of this was encouraging the city – through the Technical Debt Management Committee and the Board of Directors of the Citizen Budget Commission on which the banks were well represented – to get further and... class-based politics, or whether there was the potential for a powerful fusion of these absolutely heterogeneous elements with the labour movement However, with the withering of the old Left, the decline of the unions, and the gradual disappearance of the tradition of community associations, a new question is posed: how is neoliberalism reconfiguring these social movements and limiting their possibilities?... countries in the world that ‘there isn’t enough money to go round’ The obvious answer, from the perspective of unions and their allies, was to increase the tax base by raising levies on exorbitant financial wealth But this gained little traction The media were largely sympathetic to the agenda of union-busting and cutting services The banks, for their part, carefully extruded themselves from the public... (And I would invite the reader to visit a severe discourtesy on the next person who utters the word ‘sheeple’.) They acted on elements of lived experience, and used their considerable resources to frame the discussion around that experience Framing the issue as one of a fiscal crisis, they generated a significant amount of support for their goals 24.  n the crisis tendencies of the modern state, an... people, alerting them to the dangers and above all posing an alternative ‘rescue’ plan This the unions were not well-placed to do, and they were duly defeated Facing the Catastrophe The New York City crisis was part of a wider conjuncture in which the US entered into a severe crisis affecting both its global dominance (Vietnam) and its economic competitiveness (Japan), in which the 26. Ibid 20 Seymour T02680... commerce, the business and parliamentary lobbies, the newspapers, and so on By the time a demand is articulated – nationalise the banks!, tax the rich! – the austerians have already subtly shifted the agenda and perspective Yes, they concede the point about irresponsible financiers, who must be ‘regulated’, but they are far more concerned about the feckless poor suckling off the welfare teat, maxing out their... get further and further into debt The banks profited from this The second was protecting their own profit margins when the debt became obviously unsustainable They unloaded their own investments in the city’s precarious debts, selling them off while the price was reasonably high Simultaneously, they advised their small investor clients to purchase large amounts of this precarious debt The third was insisting... attention to the generic elements of crisis that are inherent in a normal capitalist economy, arising from intra-capitalist competition and the capital-labour relation, rather than simply exogenous pathologies that can be pinned on various unloveable scapegoats.23 23. On the concept of crisis, see Nicos Poulantzas, The Political Crisis and the Crisis of the State’, in James Martin, ed., The Poulantzas... orthodoxy, but they are far removed from the kinds of austerity programmes implemented by Republican governors And the latter go far beyond spending cuts Take the policies implemented under austerity in the United Kingdom Whether it is cuts to the minimum wage, the introduction of private provision in the National Health Service and schools, or changes in the tax structure to benefit the wealthy, these are... of the Welfare State, Hutchinson & Co, London, 1984 18 Seymour T02680 01 text 18 04/02/2014 09:22 Introduction The unions and the left ran a counter-campaign, highlighting that the banks who were demanding austerity were making exorbitant money from the city In doing so they highlighted one of the oddities of austerity politics – public advocates in tailored suits, telling studio anchors in some of the . h0" alt="" Against Austerity Seymour T02680 00 pre 1 04/02/2014 09:22 Seymour T02680 00 pre 2 04/02/2014 09:22 Against Austerity How We Can Fix the Crisis They Made Richard Seymour Seymour T02680. husbandry, but neither is it simply a short-sighted attempt by the rich to shirk the costs of economic failure. Rather, it is a multi-dimen- sional response to crisis. In the short term, as. the banks!, tax the rich! – the austerians have already subtly shifted the agenda and perspective. Yes, they concede the point about irresponsible financiers, who must be ‘regulated’, but they