The fear of collapse is inherently rooted in capitalist logics that are meant to preserve the status quo and deadlock politics into a stalemate.

So, back to the recent Labour victory, one can see how it not only involved a hegemonic reappropriation of a series of motifs which were usually inscribed into the Conservative field—family values, law and order, individual responsibility; the Labour ideological offensive also separated these motifs from the obscene phantasmatic subtext which sustained them in the Conservative field—in which ‘toughness on crime’ and ‘individual responsibility’ subtly referred to brutal egotism, to the disdain for victims, and other ‘basic instincts’. The problem, however, is that the New Labour strategy involved its own ‘message between the lines’: we fully accept the logic of Capital, we will not mess about with it. Today, financial crisis is a permanent state of things the reference to which legitimizes the demands to cut social spending, health care, support of culture and scientific research, in short, the dismantling of the welfare state. Is, however, this permanent crisis really an objective feature of our socio-economic life? Is it not rather one of the effects of the shift of balance in the ‘class struggle’ towards Capital, resulting from the growing role of new technologies as well as from the direct internationalization of Capital and the co-dependent diminished role of the Nation-State which was further able to impose certain minimal requirements and limitations to exploitation? In other words, the crisis is an ‘objective fact’ if and only if one accepts in advance as an unquestionable premise the inherent logic of Capital—as more and more left-wing or liberal parties have done. We are thus witnessing the uncanny spectacle of social-democratic parties which came to power with the between-the-lines message to Capital ‘we will do the necessary job for you in an even more efficient and painless way than the conservatives’. The problem, of course, is that, in today’s global socio-political circumstances, it is practically impossible effectively to call into question the logic of Capital: even a modest social-democratic attempt to redistribute wealth beyond the limit acceptable to the Capital ‘effectively’ leads to economic crisis, inflation, a fall in revenues and so on. Nevertheless, one should always bear in mind how the connection between ‘cause’ (rising social expenditure) and ‘effect’ (economic crisis) is not a direct objective causal one: it is always-already embedded in a situation of social antagonism and struggle. The fact that, if one does not obey the limits set by Capital, a crisis ‘really follows’, in no way ‘proves’ that the necessity of these limits is an objective necessity of economic life. It should rather be conceived as a proof of the privileged position Capital holds in the economic and political struggle, as in the situation where a stronger partner threatens that if you do X, you will be punished by Y, and then, upon your doing X, Y effectively ensues.