Abstract
Political responses to the C-19 pandemic in the European Union (EU) but also beyond have consisted of various corporate rescue packages and massive state aid as part of a broader revival of industrial policy, as well as unseen levels of quantitative easing by central banks. The talk will embed these measures into the context of the ‘Wall of Money’ searching for yield and the continued debt-led accumulation patterns that have prevailed during more than thirty years of neoliberal capitalism. The crises responses at EU-level have so far not led to investments in the production sphere. Instead, corporations are building up debt to finance share buy backs, make dividend payments to shareholders, or conduct mergers and acquisitions. In many industrial sectors, such activities exceed greenfield investments or investments in R&D. We seem to find ourselves in a phase of capitalism that Karl Marx described almost 170 years ago as a phase where everybody is seized with a sort of craze for making profit without producing. What will be identified as ‘the zombification of the economy’ is reinforcing class, gender, racial, and geographic divisions not only in Europe but also beyond. In this context, the invocation of the 2017 ‘White Paper on the Future of Europe’ that the hard-earned human dignity, freedom and democracy in Europe can never be relinquished, appears as a mere platitude. The talk will not only discredit, de-legitimize and politicize the crisis management from a critical political economy perspective, but also sketch the contours of a progressive alternative.
