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It has been just over a year since the great cataclysm of the crisis hit us. Early on, around last September, there was an initial burst of enthusiasm amongst the left that years of rampant neo-liberal, free market capitalism had come to an end. We had finally been vindicated in our criticisms of free market economics and policy-making after years of what seemed to be one of the longest booms in Capitalism’s history. However, hope for a possible re-balancing of socio economic priorities and a shift of class forces, potentially via a so-called “ ‘new’ new deal” proved short lived.


Mike Davis pointed out early on that the New Deal solution to the 1929 crisis rose in large part as an adaptive response to an organized, militant labour force in the US, with the ideological threat of the Soviet Union looming ahead, and with Marxism still an important inspiration in American intellectual life, pressures that do not exist currently.


There has been of course the so-called nationalization of major sectors of the Anglo American banking system. For many commentators this in itself has been the major proof that neo-liberalism has ended as a ruling ideology. Yet this assumes the state interventions into markets, and government regulations are antithetical to neo-liberal governance. Rather than constructing neo- liberalism through the dichotomy of markets versus states, deregulation versus regulation, it is perhaps more constructive to see it as a specific form of state intervention into societal, economic and other relations. There has been a history of large state interventions to avert financial crisis and bail out banks in the global north during the neo-liberal era and the latest interventions by the Bush and Obama administrations can only been seen as the most drastic manifestation of that.


It could be argued that the size of the recent governmental interventions will at least manage to challenge neo-liberalism’s own hegemonic self-representation as an ideology of de-regulated economies, free markets and minimal governmental interference. Here again we need to exercise caution. Neo-liberalism seems to survive time and again in the face of it’s own glaring contradictions. Most recently we can think of how the massive bank bailouts where justified by the maxim of ‘too big to fail’. Yet recent data shows that those same firms that received bailout money have as a result grown even bigger. J.P. Morgan Chase now holds more that $1 of every $10 on deposit in the US.


A particularly uncomfortable reality for progressives has been the sporadic and weak response of the working classes to the crisis, at least given the magnitude of events. Historically, labour has never been strong against finance, partly because financial crisis are experienced as such an impersonal abstract force. Some of the authors in this issue take this abstraction seriously, and see it as an invitation to explore the more intimate spaces and emotions that this crisis has come to occupy in people’s everyday lives.


To date, the hegemonic interpretation of the crisis has largely been a moralistic one; greedy bankers and a corrupted ‘wall street’ versus an honest ‘main street’. This discourse has plagued a lot of concrete analysis as well. There has been an underlying notion by many commentators that the crisis was sparked because of financial excesses that were out of sync with the real productive economy.


The essays in this issue all in their own way eschew such binary forms of thinking. Many begin by exploring how our relationship to the market is framed, and how this affects our general perception of the crisis as individuals.


Some of the contributors help us to dissect the fantasy that honest regulation can revert us back to a less malign form of capitalism and challenge the idea that the ‘real/ fictive’ economy divide is a productive one through which to interpret the crisis. Also in the pages of this special issue, readers will hopefully find careful appraisals of some of the emergent populist responses to the crisis, within the cultural industries and mainstream media, responses that so far seem to foreclose the emergence of more collectively empowering discourses for dealing with the issues at hand.


Arlen Dilsizian, guest editor

Special issue: introduction, representing the crisis
Tags: arlen dilsizian, economic crisis

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