Professors puzzle over Europe's fate.

Niall Ferguson, professor at Harvard U and author of 'Civilisation: the West and the Rest' and Nouriel Roubini, professor at New York U and chair (needless to say) of Roubini Global Economics, have written

'The EU was created to avoid repeating the disasters of the 1930s. It is time Europe's leaders - and especially Germany's - understood how perilously close they are to doing just that.'  (FT 9/10 June.)

It's certainly true that Obama's re-election chances depend today more on Chancellor Merkel's decisions than those that any american might make. Perhaps, if she bails out the Euro, we will see a return match from the 1960s where she could go to New York and say 'I am a New Yorker'.

Meanwhile the professors' article, despite its prominence in the FT, is a muddle of generalities and unoriginal thoughts about what a bail out of the Spanish banks might look like. When it gets to politics we are left with dire warnings from history without any serious attempt to tie the economics of the EU's crisis with the politics of the EU's crisis. It is therefore impossible to tell how the articles' authors see the links between Europe of the 1930s and today.

The truth is that the economic crisis in Europe today has reached such a pitch that it can only be understood, and then overcome, through the prism of politics. The greatest understanding of Europe's crisis is not shown by the professors but by the increasing numbers of the Greek people that will vote on June 17 for an anti-austerity government.

This is the heart of it. A huge contest between the classes is underway. It has been brewing for a generation in Europe - a continent that since the 1950s was broadly able to export its violence, unemployment and insecurity. The main social and economic system of capitalism in Europe has become misshapen and is cracking across a range of its contradictions and imbalances. Accordingly the main classes in society have to be reordered so that the system can be rebalanced; more in line with the  new way Europe is inserted into the world market and the crueler requirements of big capital. So the contest in Europe between the classes cannot be resolved at anything other than at the expense of one or the other of them.

Everything becomes a weapon in this new fight. The immediate fate of the Spanish banks is, frankly only one detail in a much wider reality. The institutions of the EU are now exposed as empty - from the point of view of the needs of the people of Europe. Rather they serve as the advanced guard for austerity. However, the Greek election fills with a different content. It has become a means, the first in Europe, to not only organise a fight back, not only to encourage one, but also to represent that fight back to us all. It is the most important event in Europe since the French events of May '68.

And the parallels with Europe in the 1930s? Well ... there are the obvious ones. Capitalism congenitally produces crises and war. The defeat of the working class movement does not return us to pre-existing forms of politics, it creates new ones, like fascism.

And then there are the new lessons we learn from old battles. We need to create and sometimes recreate our democratic institutions so that they are able to genuinely reflect what people want. We need to extend the political principle into economics. If majority rule is right for our laws then it is right for our work, our prices, our services, for the way we produce and for what we produce. These are the arguments and discussions that will burst onto the streets in Greece on June 18. Perhaps our professors will be able to learn something.