From Crisis To Austerity

A radical anti-capitalist alternative to Eurozone austerity On the 25th January 2015 the Greek people voted in an election of historic importance—not just for Greece but potentially all of Europe. The radical party Syriza was elected and austerity and the neoliberal agenda is being challenged. Suddenly it seems as if there is an alternative. But what? The Eurozone is in a deep and prolonged crisis. It is now clear that monetary union is a historic failure, beyond repair—and certainly not in the interests of Europe’s working people. Building on the economic analysis of two of Europe’s leading thinkers, Heiner Flassbeck and Costas Lapavitsas (a candidate standing for election on Syriza’s list), Against the Troika is the first book to propose a strategic left-wing plan for how peripheral countries could exit the euro. With a change in government in Greece, and looming political transformations in countries such as Spain, this major intervention lays out a radical, anti-capitalist programme at a critical juncture for Europe. The final three chapters offer a detailed postmortem of the Greek catastrophe, explain what can be learned from it—and provide a possible alternative. Against the Troika is a practical blueprint for real change in a continent wracked by crisis and austerity.

Selected as a Financial Times Best Book of 2013 Governments today in both Europe and the United States have succeeded in casting government spending as reckless wastefulness that has made the economy worse. In contrast, they have advanced a policy of draconian budget cuts--austerity--to solve the financial crisis. We are told that we have all lived beyond our means and now need to tighten our belts. This view conveniently forgets where all that debt came from. Not from an orgy of government spending, but as the direct result of bailing out, recapitalizing, and adding liquidity to the broken banking system. Through these actions private debt was rechristened as government debt while those responsible for generating it walked away scot free, placing the blame on the state, and the burden on the taxpayer. That burden now takes the form of a global turn to austerity, the policy of reducing domestic wages and prices to restore competitiveness and balance the budget. The problem, according to political economist Mark Blyth, is that austerity is a very dangerous idea. First of all, it doesn't work. As the past four years and countless historical examples from the last 100 years show, while it makes sense for any one state to try and cut its way to growth, it simply cannot work when all states try it simultaneously: all we do is shrink the economy. In the worst case, austerity policies worsened the Great Depression and created the conditions for seizures of power by the forces responsible for the Second World War: the Nazis and the Japanese military establishment. As Blyth amply demonstrates, the arguments for austerity are tenuous and the evidence thin. Rather than expanding growth and opportunity, the repeated revival of this dead economic idea has almost always led to low growth along with increases in wealth and income inequality. Austerity demolishes the conventional wisdom, marshaling an army of facts to demand that we austerity for what it is, and what it costs us.

"This volume focuses on the state's role in managing the fall-out from the global economic and financial crisis since 2008. For a brief moment, roughly from 2008-2010, governments and central banks appeared to borrow from Keynes to save the global economy. The contributors, however, take the view that to see those stimulus measures as "Keynesian" is a misinterpretation. Rather, neoliberalism demonstrated considerable resiliency despite its responsibility for the deep and prolonged crisis. The "austerian" analysis of the crisis is--historical, ignores its deeper roots, and rests upon a triumph of discourse involving blame-shifting from the under-regulated private sector to public or sovereign debt--for which the public authorities are responsible."--

Given the far-reaching impact of both the 2008 financial crash and postcrash austerity policies on so many people's lives, there exists a need for a succinct, straightforward guide to the situation's causes and its long-term significance. The Global Financial Crisis and Austerity fulfills that need. Written by an expert in political science, this book spans the fields of finance, economics, and politics to demystify the sometimes arcane world of global finance, such as the shadow banking system, and put the recent financial crisis in its historical context. Addressing a number of themes that economists writing on the crisis tend to neglect, David Clark not only outlines the policy responses of Western governments to the crash, the ensuing recession, and in their turn to austerity, but also reviews the crash's larger legacy and asks if the crisis is really over. Supplementing his discussion with a glossary of key terms, processes, and institutions, Clark provides an invaluable overview for all of us affected by the crash, offering a range of possible scenarios for the future.

Austerity has become the new principle for public policy in Europe and the US as the financial crisis of 2008 has been converted into a public debt crisis. However, current austerity measures risk losing past progress towards gender equality by undermining important employment and social welfare protections and putting gender equality policy onto the back burner. This volume constitutes the first attempt to identify how the economic crisis and the subsequent austerity policies are affecting women in Europe and the US, tracing the consequences for gender equality in employment and welfare systems in nine case studies from countries facing the most severe adjustment problems. The contributions adopt a common framework to analyse women in recession, which takes into account changes in women’s position and current austerity conditions. The findings demonstrate that in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, employment gaps between women and men declined — but due only to a deterioration in men’s employment position rather than any improvements for women. Tables are set to be turned by the austerity policies which are already having a more negative impact on demand for female labour and on access to services which support working mothers. Women are nevertheless reinforcing their commitment to paid work, even at this time of increasing demands on their unpaid domestic labour. Future prospects are bleak. Current policy is reinforcing the same failed mechanisms that caused the crisis in the first place and is stalling or even reversing the long term growth in social investment in support for care. This book makes the case for gender equality to be placed at the centre of any progressive plan for a route out of the crisis.

Since its sovereign debt crisis in 2009, Greece has been living under austerity, with no apparent end in sight. This volume explores the effects of policies pursued by the Greek state since then (under the direction of the Troika), and how Greek society has responded. In addition to charting the actual effects of the Greek crisis on politics, health care, education, media, and other areas, the book both examines and challenges the “crisis” era as the context for changing attitudes and developments within Greek society.

This book analyses the popular resistances to austerity politics in Europe following the global financial crisis of 2008-9. It places anti-austerity mobilisations in perspective, comparing the wave of strikes and occupations by citizens and movements to the global justice movement. It was published as a special issue of Social Movement Studies.

The global financial crisis has demonstrated the impact and implications of late capitalism and its bedfellow, globalisation. In the European context, crisis is seen as a threat to the stability of the region, rather than a local or national concern. Post-2008, crisis is social and political, rather than merely financial, as Western countries witness the consequences of consumption, growth and profit. In this book, Tsilimpounidi demonstrates how sociologists must develop new approaches to examining rapid shifts in the social landscape, since crisis is not merely reflected in balance sheets, but is mediated through spectacular imagery of loss, deprivation and increased vectors of marginalisation. Providing focused and valuable insight into the pressing problems of those living in Greece in relation to the wider spheres of the nation and at the level of the European Union, Sociology of Crisis takes an approach that is firmly located within a critical sociological appeal to reflexivity. A timely engagement with the problem of crisis at a macro-level and in dialogue with the everyday experiences of crisis on a micro-level, this interdisciplinary title will appeal to both undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in sociology, social policy, geography, urban studies and research methods (social science).