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Love is a Battlefield: Post-Political Control in an Era of Financial Crisis

One of the crucial, take home stories to date of the “Great Financial Crisis” is, of course, that of maddening elite hypocrisy. Not only has neo-liberalism’s long-promised trickle-down growth failed to materialize, but now vast swathes of the population of the Western world have been thrown into financial hardship. Several sovereign European nations stand on the precipice of receivership. And according to the Asian Development Bank, some $50 trillion in global asset values was written down in 2008 alone. That the costs of this disaster are being passed on to the masses is clear: political leaders of the major EU powers have continued to speak openly about the need for “ten years of austerity” and drastic cuts in public spending. Meanwhile leading public figures like Angela Merkel speak now with conviction of the duty of the “good European” to practice tough love, condemning the profligacy on the periphery which she believes has now placed the euro itself “in danger.” In this sense, mainstream debate over the causes of the financial crisis has turned on a discourse of good citizenship, delineated in terms of economic responsibility, and moral courage. What is remarkable about this discourse of responsibility is what it has managed to forget. As Surin reminds us, for example, much of the wayward behavior claimed to be at the heart of the crisis can actually be traced back to successive waves of neoliberal or “supply-side” deregulation of global finance, dating back to the 1970s (p. 70). Those reforms attest to the premium that neoliberals have placed upon privatizing sources of wealth while extending social