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Arabica Robusta

The twilight of neoliberalism: can popular struggles create new worlds from below? | op... - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...struggles-create-new-worlds-fr

neoclassical individualism economic neoliberalism industries exploitation development globalization corporate marxism ecology social movements

shared by Arabica Robusta on 01 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • We Make Our Own History rethinks humanist Marxism as a theory of collective action, including the ways in which social movements from below can develop from localised struggles over individual issues to far-reaching projects for social change (a welfare state, an end to patriarchy, an ecologically sustainable society). It also looks at the history of movements from above – those which can draw on the resources of capital, the state or cultural power to impose themselves.
  • If the ideologists of neoliberalism want to present it as the natural order of humanity, a more sober historical assessment points out that it has lasted about as long as Keynesianism did before it – a few decades – and is just as vulnerable to the collapse of the alliances which sustain it.
  • The Latin American pink tide demonstrated US inability, for the first time in a century or more, to impose its will (in military, foreign policy or economic terms) on its Latin American “backyard”. The planned “long war on terror” is basically over, with the original strategy for a rolling series of attacks on rogue states buried in the sand and political support for US wars collapsing not only among US elites, but also their European and Arab allies under the impact of the anti-war movements of 2003 in particular. This has fed into a broader weakness in relation to control of the strategically crucial Middle East and North African region manifested in the “Arab Spring”, in particular events in Egypt, and subsequent failure to secure support for war in Syria. Meanwhile, the Wikileaks and Snowden affairs have highlighted the legitimacy crisis of the supposedly all-powerful surveillance state.
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  • All of this also dramatises the inability of neoliberal elites to offer any effective leadership, or to manage any strategy more complex than “hold on tight and cross your fingers”. The tentative criticisms of neoliberalism made at the start of the current crisis by isolated elite members have had no real implication beyond the narrowly technical (“quantitative easing”, and so on.) There is no significant dissent within elites – political and financial, or their allies in academia and journalism – about the proposal that the only way forward is more austerity, more neoliberalism, more privatisations.
  • We are increasingly in a zombie-like phase of capitalist development (Peck 2010b), in which elites are incapable of solving contradictions through new hegemonic projects. This signals the onset of the twilight of neoliberalism...
  • Many of these aspects of the crisis are closely associated with popular movements: Latin American struggles, revolts in the Arab world, the anti-war movement, protests against the security state, the global justice and anti-austerity movements, and ecological movements for climate justice. This does not mean, however, that movements will necessarily be the beneficiaries of the crisis: as our historical account shows, it is one thing to make a particular hegemonic alliance politically unsustainable but another thing altogether to be able to create a new alliance capable of charting a new direction.
  • These processes of external struggle, internal learning and alliance-building are what matter most, and there is no short-cut (in universities, parties or shouting at the computer screen) that can usefully avoid them.
  • any attempt to shortcircuit the slow development of popular agency, whether through opinion politics or intellectual critique which discuss structures in isolation from the kinds of agency which sustain them – and the kinds of agency needed to overcome them – is doomed to failure. The most effective orientation for change is one which starts from dialogue with practically situated struggles – those that people have to engage in to sustain their lives – and supports their extension in alliances across space but also across the social world, into far-reaching projects for change which are grounded in a wide range of different situations.
Arabica Robusta

Neoliberalism and the revenge of the "social" | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...ge-of-%E2%80%9Csocial%E2%80%9D

neoliberalism corporate globalization individualism neoclassical

shared by Arabica Robusta on 23 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • This also poses questions about the latest manifestation of ‘neoliberalism’. The fact that it is social media that is facilitating this new form of state power, that it is social networks that are the object of its gaze, may indicate that neoliberal government no longer places quite so much emphasis on the market, as a mechanism for organizing knowledge, regulating freedom and achieving transparency.
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 23 Jul 13
       
      Has neoliberal governmentality ever really emphasized the market?  Below the ideological/depoliticized myths, neoliberalism has been about strong government "facilitation" of corporate neo-colonization.
  • States play an important role in making ‘society’ visible and measurable, through collecting and publishing large quantities of statistics. But the claim of social theorists and sociologists in the tradition of Emile Durkheim is that ‘society’ has some reality, over and above the particular statistics through which we come to know it.
  • The social hovers as a paradox, between a space of state coercion governed by law, and a space of market spontaneity governed by individual incentives and price. When acting socially we are both rule-bound and free at the same time. And it was precisely this mysterious and contradictory nature that led pioneering neoliberal thinkers, such as Friedrich Von Hayek, to pour scorn on the very idea. The term ‘social’, he argued, is a “weasel-word par excellence. Nobody knows what it actually means”.
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  • It’s important to stress – as Philip Mirowski does in his new book, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste – that neoliberals were never hostile to the state, which they understood as a necessary source of coercion, for the purposes of preventing political upheaval.
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 23 Jul 13
       
      "Preventing political upheaval."  The mask slips.  States are there to keep the hoi polloi in line while the "technocrats" expertly run the market system.
  • Hayek would be distressed to know that in recent years, there has been an explosion of new types of accounting, governance and policy intervention which come dressed in the rhetoric of the ‘social’. Social enterprise, social media, social indicators, social impact bonds, social neuroscience.
  • I would suggest that, lying between these two interpretations, is a third option: that neoliberalism is being reinvented in ways that incorporate social logic, as a means of resisting critique and delaying crisis.
  • Without other people to guide and support them, provide norms and examples, they start to behave in ways that are self-destructive and destabilizing. This is the central insight of behavioural and happiness economics, which are achieving growing influence in policy-making circles right now.
  • The ‘social’ is brought back in as a way of providing support, such that individuals can continue to live the self-reliant, risk-aware, healthy lifestyles that neoliberalism requires of them.
  • At present, the digital tools used to analyse social life are in their infancy, and are largely attracting interest from marketing firms. But new techno-utopian policy visions, of ‘smart cities’ and digital tracking of health behaviours, look set to make pattern recognition and relationship management a key purpose of government. This represents the coming of what Geoff Mulgan has termed the ‘relational state’, or what I have previously described as ‘neocommunitarianism’
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 23 Jul 13
       
      Also known as panoptical surveillance.
  • But this misses the logic of the emerging technical apparatus of government. Where neoliberalism integrates the logic of the social, it is precisely relationships between actors that are being observed and measured, and not the actors themselves. It is in correlations and patterns where value lies in a 21st century Big Data society, and not in the properties or preference of individuals, as was the case in a 20th century statistical and market society. And it is in the identification of hitherto invisible relationships that networked digital media holds out promise for security agencies. There is nothing innocent about meta-data.
  • In an effort to stave off their opponents, political movements can often end up stealing their clothes. Britain’s Labour Party arguably delivered a better version of Thatcherism than the Conservative Party was ever able to.
  • Neoliberalism’s abiding passion was always to destroy socialism, but in practice it may have ended up with far more of the technocratic elements of ‘actually existing’ state socialism than its ideologues could ever imagine (as I discuss here). When one considers our current predicament, in which our social and private lives are subjected to relentless quantification and optimization, the following prediction looks prescient: “the whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory”. This was in fact expressed as an optimistic vision of what a good society might look like in the future. And the visionary was none other than Vladimir Lenin.
Arabica Robusta

Rebel Cities, Urban Resistance and Capitalism: a Conversation with David Harvey - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...conversation-with-david-harvey

political geography david harvey urbanization neoliberalism

shared by Arabica Robusta on 05 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Now, the reason why Marx is important in all of this is because Marx had an acute understanding of how capital-accumulation works. He understood that this perpetual growth machine contains many internal contradictions. For example, one of the foundational contradictions Marx talks about is between use-value and exchange-value. You can see this worked out in the housing situation very clearly. What’s the use-value of a house? Well, it’s a form of shelter, a place of privacy, where one can create a family life. We can list a few other use-values of the house, but the house also has an exchange-value. Remember, when you rent the house, you’re simply renting the house for what it’s worth. But when you buy the house, you now view this home as a form of savings, and after a while, you use the house as a form of speculation.
  • Marx talks about this contradiction and it’s an important one. We must ask the question: What should we be doing with housing? What should we do with healthcare? What are we doing with education? Shouldn’t we promote the use-value of education? Or should we promote the exchange-value of these things? Why should life necessities be distributed through the exchange-value system? Obviously we should reject the exchange-value system, which is caught up in speculative activity, profiteering, and actually disrupts the ways in which we can acquire necessary products and services. Those are the kind of contradictions Marx was well aware of.
  • My interest in this derives from a very simple contradiction: We’re supposed to live under capitalism, and capitalism is supposed to be competitive so you would expect that capitalists and entrepreneurs would like competition. Well, it turns out that capitalists do everything they can to avoid competition. They love monopolies.
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  • How do you think protestors in today’s society can more effectively disrupt urban economies? Harvey: Hurricane Sandy really disrupted the lives of those living in New York City. So, I don’t see why organized social movements couldn’t disrupt life as usual in big cities and therefore cause damage to ruling-class interests. We have seen many historical examples of this. For example, in the 1960s, the disruptions that occurred in many cities in the United States caused massive disruptions to business. The political and business classes were quick to respond because of the level of disruption and destruction. I mention in the book the immigrant workers demonstrations in the spring of 2006. The demonstrations were in response to Congress attempting to criminalize illegal immigrants. Subsequently, people mobilized in places like Los Angeles and Chicago, and significantly disrupted city business.
  • Participatory budgeting is currently happening in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where the Workers Party developed a system through which local populations and assemblies decide what their tax money should be spent on. Thus, they hold popular assemblies, and so forth, which decide how to utilize public funds and services. Again, here’s a democratic reform that initially took place in Porto Alegre, but has since been passed along to European cities.
  • In Chapter Five, you write, “In the Marxist tradition, urban struggles are often ignored or dismissed as being devoid of revolutionary potential or significance.
  • I take it as symbolic importance that the first two acts of the Paris Commune were to abolish night work in the bakeries, a labor question, and to impose a moratorium on rent, an urban question.” Can you talk about the privileging of industrial workers in Marxist ideology? 
  • This idea of a vanguard struggle leading to a new society has been around for some time. However, what’s fascinating is the lack of alternatives to this vision, or at least variants of its intent and purpose. Of course, a lot of this comes from Marx’s Vol. I of Capital — emphasizing the factory worker. This idea that the vanguard workers party is going to take us to the new promise land of anti-capitalist, let’s call it ‘communist’ society has been persistent for over one hundred years. I’ve always felt that this is too limited a conception of who is the proletariat and who’s in the ‘vanguard.’ Also, I’ve always been interested in class-struggle dynamics and their relationships with urban social movements.
  • When you look at the wide range of urban social movements, you’ll find some are anti-capitalist and others are the opposite. But I would make the same remark about some forms of traditional union organizing. For example, there are some unions who look at organizing as a way to privilege the privileged workers of society. Of course I don’t like this idea. Then, there are others who are creating a more just and equitable world.
  • That way, in Gramsci’s thinking, they could get a better picture of what the entire working-class looks like, not just those who are organized in factories and so forth. Including people like the unemployed, temporary workers and all of the people you previously mentioned who were not in traditional industrial sector jobs. So, Gramsci proposed that these two kinds of political organizing methods should be intertwined in order to truly represent the proletariat. In essence, my thinking reflects Gramsci’s in this regard. How do we begin to care for all of the working people within a city? Who does this? Traditional unions tend not to do this.
  • an you talk about some of those cities, such as Al Alto, Bolivia? Also, I was in Madison, Wisconsin in 2011 during the labor protests, and I must say, it’s been interesting and utterly frustrating to experience the internal dynamics of the labor movement, and how it interacts with non- unionized workers and citizens. Unfortunately,  the union movement stifles serious dissent and resistance.
  • The reason I mentioned Trumka was because I think Trumka and many of those within the organized union movement understand that they can no longer go it alone; they require the help of the entire workforce, unionized or otherwise. This is always the challenge when organizing: How much support do we want from these large entities? And how much of what they’re doing is out of a true sense of solidarity? How much of it is for personal gain? My own experience in Baltimore, surrounding living wage campaigns, mirrors your experience to some extent. The unions were generally hostile to these campaigns and didn’t help, generally speaking. However, we did receive a lot of help from local unions.
  • There’s a moment in the film that’s somewhat funny: The guys can’t picket anymore because of the Taft-Hartley legislation, so the women take over the picketing because there’s nothing banning them from joining the protests. Then, the men have to take over the household jobs. Interestingly, the men quickly begin to understand why the women were asking for running water, and other things from their employer that would make daily life much easier.
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