A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

B. The real origins
a) But it is important to understand this crisis also and above all in terms
of the interaction between the financial and real economy spheres. The
contradictions that the crisis has revealed have long-term roots in the
exhaustion of the motors of economic expansion after the Second World
War, which has led to these profound financial transformations. In the
real economy sphere, the forms of extraction of surplus value and the
organization of production had reached their limits; they had to be replaced
by new methods (of the Kanban type) and given new dynamism
by technological progress (information technology, robotics), which has
upset the social bases of production, particularly by substituting capital
for labour. After the long over-accumulation, concentrated increasingly
in the financial sphere in the form of money capital, excess supply has
accentuated the pressures lowering the rate of profit that has been observed
since the end of the 1960s.
b) In its (fictive) efforts to resolve this problem, the Fed in the United
States, influenced by monetarist policies, had unilaterally increased its
interest rates at the end of the 1970s, which marked the beginning of
the so-called ‘neoliberal’ era (this term has no meaning unless it is given
class content and attached to the power of the oligopolies of modern
high finance).
Certain important factors of the crisis are ‘real’ and linked to austerity:
the subprime crisis, which has caused many poor families to find themselves
defaulting on their mortgages, is also explained by the neoliberal
policies which have been followed for more than thirty years and pursued
implacably, and which have destroyed wages, made jobs flexible,
massively increased unemployment and reduced standards of living.
They are policies which have shattered demand, and set in motion
mechanisms that have rendered demand artificial and unsustainable.
c. The neoliberal regime has thus been unable to maintain growth except
by doping to death the demand of private consumption while promoting
lines of credit to the maximum. It is this exorbitant growth of credit that
has ended by revealing the crisis of over-accumulation in its current
form. In a society where increasingly large numbers of individuals are
being excluded and without rights, the expansion of outlets offered to
93