Our capitalist social order is up for debate

The rich northerners can keep the rebellious lower and lower middle classes calm by referring to Greece, the daycare workers can be offered mini wage increases, and pilots and train drivers have had to get by with the same purchasing power for ten years. And the spiral of poverty in Spain and Portugal can be held up to the Italians and the French: further with the drifting apart of the highest and lowest incomes. That is the rationale of the apparent political chaos. Jürgen Habermas names the consequences of doing business after the prevailing economic doctrine, but he wants to alleviate them by overcoming a political deficit and calls for the citizens of Europe to develop a common political will. But in doing so he distracts from the essence of capitalist economic activity; this includes the increasing division into rich and poor and the corresponding division into poor and rich nations. He stirs up the illusion that a simple change from austerity to “deficit spending” would be a solution and that this could be brought about politically. But Keynes is just another face of the capitalist social order. The inappropriateness of this recipe becomes evident if it is to be applied at the international level with unrelated national developments. Habermas does not dare to question our social order.