Debt slavery (private)
In the Twitter muck I found this pearl bestowed by a friend of ours:
We hadn't thought of that! Indeed, the vicious circle of financial globalization, which we had described here :
it also has this further nuance: indebted workers (see under "need to support demand with debt") lose bargaining power, because if you run into the installments of one or more mortgages it is dangerous to run out of liquidity, so it is better to get few ( cursed and immediately) than to go on strike.
As much as "financialization" (debt) increases, as much as claims (strike), and consequently remuneration (salary), decreases, which however makes it complex to repay the debt, but this is another matter, i.e. the usual matter (crisis financial).
Our scheme is therefore enriched by a further (vicious) feedback loop between the "need to support demand with debt" and "collapse of the wage share". These two elements reinforce each other once we embark on the wonderful world of financial hegemony, unconditional freedom of capital movements, debt financing of demand.
It could also be said like this: when voters accept that markets discipline governments, they are actually accepting that markets discipline them as well.
The legitimacy of the markets (which are men) to discipline anyone remains mysterious, given that the third station of this Calvary is always a financial crisis, that is, a more or less blatant, more or less painful demonstration that the markets are the first to not know invest their money well (and when it happens that the knots of their stolid conformism come home to roost, for a while they stop lecturing Governments, since they have to rely on the leniency of the latter to save their skin…).
For nerds , the paper is here and even those who don't understand tables will find the figures interesting. For example, Figure 1, which shows the trend of trade union conflict (hours, duration, participation in strikes), plastically shows us the futility of certain petitions of principle which were discussed in the last a/symmetrie webinar with Elisabetta, in particular of the idea that yesterday's society was more "stable" than today's, less characterized by "changes and discontinuities".
In yesterday's society the norm was conflict. Today the norm is blackmail. They are two different forms of instability.
The impassioned perorations of the candidates for the secretariat of the Democratic Party in favor of work, the recovery of a political initiative in support of the most disadvantaged social classes, etc., also make a smile for those like me who have inattentively listened to them in the car. The world in which workers are afraid to strike because they are blackmailed by debt, they wanted and built it in exchange for the perennial usufruct of a piece of established power. Unfortunately it went wrong, but none of them are culturally equipped to understand why.
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2023/01/la-schiavitu-del-debito-privato.html on Tue, 24 Jan 2023 15:48:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.