Capitalism in our Time: Crisis, Austerity and what Spaces for Change?

The present crisis scenario —which came into being with the 2007/8 financial meltdown triggered by the US sub-prime mortgage crisis and which, by 2009, had turned into an economic contraction of worldwide proportions— is ever more pervaded by insistent calls for austerity politics. In some countries, such as Greece and Italy, these politics are being implemented by so-called technical governments, as if such a label could ratify the supposed ineluctability, as well as the neutrality, of austerity measures. As a matter of fact, while the spaces for politics may appear to be all the more shrunken in the face of the austerity dogma what with the vast majority of the political spectrum in many different countries sadly echoing Margaret Thatcher’s famous slogan, «there is no alternative» —austerity politics are fundamentally affecting the labour arena. The increasing normalization of the process of labour precarization, together with the rise in unemployment levels, is in fact accompanied in the core capitalist countries by a new wave of cutbacks casting a gloomy shadow over the social entitlements of the labouring classes. With a severe shrinking of social welfare and pension systems, this politics looks like a bitter farewell to the welfare institutions that came into being during the «golden age» of capitalism and constitutes a major setback in the struggle for social rights.