The European crisis that is starting
In @communalia, our news channels, we try to follow, among other things, the major economic trends that are often lost in the noise of new data. Today, everything indicates that Germany, the largest European industrial power, is immersed in a structural crisis.
In a short channel entry we summarized the causes with a profusion of labels, trying to show to what extent the German crisis is the result of the set of trends that shape the current historical moment:
China has reached its second wave of industrial development (automotive, chemical, machinery), energy and capital intensive sectors, at a time when the US has imposed a war on Germany that deprives it of cheap gas and oil sources from Russia and when Biden's new policy of attracting capital based on protectionism and the Green Deal (IRA law) in addition to high interest rates, sucks capital from the EU to the US.
Two posts later, we published a graph and a couple of links to daily newspapers with the caption:
Germany. Fixed capital formation has stagnated since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine and dividends are already falling... the fall in investment is the next step and recession is on the horizon.
There is already talk of the danger for Germany of becoming a new Greece. But in reality the German recession is just one moment in a much deeper process. The dynamic that is now emerging - closing industrial facilities in Europe to transfer investments to China or to the US - may accelerate over the next few years, driven by the growing weight of militarism in trade policies and, probably, due to the drop in European demand itself.
The latent threat under the coming German recession is that it creates a snowball effect that produces an industrial stampede throughout Europe. If we add to this picture the impact on the countryside - and the territory - of the integration of Ukraine into the CAP, without which the EU will not be able to continue to sustain the war against Russia, the threat is complete.
That is to say, the possibility of an economic, social and territorial crisis throughout Europe during the second half of this decade is open. A crisis that could surpass the effects on the well-being and income of families in 2008, marking the end of Europe as a space of relative tranquillity and prosperity between the two great global powers.
The role of cooperatives
We must not close our eyes. The threat is there. Most likely it will materialise to a greater or lesser extent depending on a set of factors over which we cannot influence. That is, it will be a tsunami or a flood, in the best case a torrential rain. But it will hit us. And in the end, the depth and ultimate consequences of its effects on our cooperatives and on the communities in which we live will depend on how we have prepared ourselves to withstand the first blows and whether or not we have a firm foundation to be able to do something more than lament when those first blows have passed and the aftershocks and hangovers come.
Work cooperatives and our environment of associations and foundations have a job to do here and now. Just as when we incubate a cooperative we make a contingency plan, now is the time to design and implement resilience plans for our cooperatives, our networks and our towns and neighborhoods.
These plans should act on four axes:
- Within the cooperatives: reserving investment capacities. Not only to finance falls in demand, but to launch new projects when the time comes.
- Between the cooperatives: creating joint projects that allow us to develop new lines and increase the scale and efficiency of cooperative offers.
- In our communities: creating deliberative and coordination spaces with the social and productive fabric that surrounds us, with a view to being able to face and promote collective responses.
- In our actions towards society as a whole, promoting campaigns, projects and local associations that encourage and support the formation of new work cooperatives through incubation programs. That is, by previously preparing models, protocols and analyses that allow us to respond to a rapid increase in the demand for cooperative self-employment.
It is no small task. And even if, hopefully, the global context were to change and the threat of a European crisis did not materialize with the violence that we fear, it would make all the sense in the world. That is why there is no one left over. There are not enough hands. Will you join us in working with us?