The Chemical Elements

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Fri, 17 May 2013 19:40:33 -0400

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Fri, 17 May 2013 19:40:18 -0400

"the way to provincialize Europe is not by continually harping on some unbridgeable gap that..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 19:14:23 -0400

“the way to provincialize Europe is not by continually harping on some unbridgeable gap that separates East from West, but by showing that both parts of the globe are subject to *the same basic forces* and are therefore part of *the same basic history.* The forces I refer to are what I have called the two universalisms – the universal logic of capital (suitably defined) and social agents’ universal interest in their well-being, which impels them to resist capital’s expansionary drive. These forces impinge on both East and West, even if they do so with different intensities and in different registers. This means that there *is* a universal history, in which East and West are both full-time participants. But while both East and West are part of the same history, and subject to the same forces, it does not follow that they lose their distinguishing characteristics… recognizing the reality of capital’s universalization is perfectly consistent with an appreciation for the persistence of difference. It is unnecessary to rehearse those arguments here. But if we accept them, then we can also agree that a recognition of the two universalisms does not automatically generate a blindness to difference…. *The history of Marxian analysis in the twentieth century is the history of doing just this – understanding the specificity of the East.* There is probably no project to which Marxist theorists have devoted more energy and time since the first Russian Revolution of 1905 than to understand the peculiar effects of capitalist development in the non-West…. Many of these theories [of those cited by Lenin, Kautsky, Trotsky, Gramsci, Mao, articulations of modes of production, Cabral, dependency theory, world-systems theory], of course, are deeply flawed and can be criticized on various grounds, but never on the grounds that Subaltern Studies associates with Enlightenment – especially Marxian theories. If they are wrong, it is not because they are teleological, or deterministic, or stagiest. Indeed, every one of these theories was developed as an explicit rejection of these very modes of thought” (pp. 291, 293).”

- Vivek Chibber’s new book.

"Wherever appropriate, NLR aims to be a scholarly journal; but not an academic one. Unlike most..."

Tue, 14 May 2013 14:18:48 -0400

“Wherever appropriate, NLR aims to be a scholarly journal; but not an academic one. Unlike most academic—not to speak of other—journals today, it does not shove notes to the end of articles, or resort to sub-literate ‘Harvard’ references, but respects the classical courtesy of footnotes at the bottom of the page, as indicators of sources or tangents to the text, immediately available to the reader”.”

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Mon, 13 May 2013 23:30:38 -0400

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Mon, 13 May 2013 20:35:45 -0400

"You know how it goes in a recession: the rivers stop flowing, the factories collapse, the banks..."

Mon, 13 May 2013 11:04:43 -0400

“You know how it goes in a recession: the rivers stop flowing, the factories collapse, the banks crumble and the crops dry up. Or, to put it in another more accurate way, none of that happens. Everything we need to feed, house and clothe everyone is still there. The crisis is a failure of the way we organise society.”

- http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/13/tax-havens-hidden-billions

"The changes in the form of property ownership brought about by neoliberalism, which did not in any..."

Sun, 12 May 2013 16:37:44 -0400

“The changes in the form of property ownership brought about by neoliberalism, which did not in any fundamental sense alter capitalist relations of production, nevertheless had effects on human subjectivities. Hannah Arendt once suggested that the most terrifying aspect of Nazi and Stalinist rule was not that the conceptions of human nature they held were true, but that it could be made true.255 Some writers, including the late Pierre Bourdieu have argued that this is also true of neoliberalism.256 And indeed, if it were possible to create societies in which people think of themselves primarily as consumers, individually responsible for their fate, employment prospects, health and even personal happiness, then we would have reached the apotheosis of neoliberalism, the final perfection of the type of human that Michael Kidron called “Market Being”.257 This is unlikely to happen for a number of reasons to which I will return below; but the damage which is being done to actual human beings in the attempt has been considerable, and continues to this day.”

"The other area where theory and reality have been at odds is in relation to the role of states...."

Sun, 12 May 2013 16:21:42 -0400

“The other area where theory and reality have been at odds is in relation to the role of states. Privatisation notwithstanding, neoliberal capitalism could not dispense with their services–a truth upon which the Chief Executives of many an ailing financial institution has had occasion to reflect since September 2008. Unlike their neoclassical predecessors, however, neoliberals tended to emphasise anti-state rhetoric, whatever their record in practice. As a result, some critics of neoliberalism argue as if the latter really do see states and markets as antipodes, and consequently invert the supposed value judgement involved, treating the state as a welcome restraint on market excesses rather than a destructive interference
214 Toynbee and Walker, Unjust Rewards, 5. 215 Bukharin, The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class, 23-33; Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1-189. 216 Napoleoni, Rogue Economics, 45-56. Napoleoni is not alone in invoking Veblen when drawing similarities between the contemporary scene and that of a hundred years ago. See, for example, Frank, Richistan, 123.
66 Chapter One
with the market creativity. Tony Judt, for example, highlights the way in which totalitarian regimes always destroy all intermediary institutions between the state and the citizen, and claims that neoliberal regimes have a similar ambition, although in their case it is to remove any institutions which lie between the market and the consumer. In both cases, he argues, the objective is to produce atomised individuals unable to mount collective resistance. For Judt, however, the triumph of neoliberalism has changed the significance of the state, which he claims “is now an intermediary institution”:
When the economy, and the forces and patterns of behaviour that accompany it are truly international, the only institution that can effectively interpose itself between those forces and the unprotected individual is the national state.217
But, as we have seen, the opposition of interventionist state and free market is false. Indeed, in some respects states under neoliberalism have accrued even more power to themselves than they did during the Keynesian era. The measures of nationalisation and state control in response to the present crisis are therefore not a return to state interventionism, since it has never ceased. Indeed, even though the neoclassical and neoliberal schools both see an important role for states– enabling market activity on the one hand, disabling collective opposition on the other–their actual role in direct economic terms has gone much further than either theoretical tradition allows.
Both the size of states and the level of state expenditure remain substantial, as Bernard Wasserstein notes in the context of the longer-term history of capitalism:
The tentacular extension of the state, mainly as the result of two wars and the costs of social welfare, health and education, showed no signs easing in the late twentieth century in spite of the “neo-liberal” trend. … The proportion of workers in public employment grew from between 2 and 5 per cent in west European countries in 1913 to between 15 and 30 per cent by the 1990s. From the mid-1990s, however, growth in public expenditure as a proportion of GDP eased in most countries. In “Euroland” total government outlays peaked at 49 per cent in 1995 and then declined to 45 per cent by 2000.218”

"Sects are justified (historically) so long as the working-class is not yet ripe for an independent..."

Sun, 12 May 2013 12:09:42 -0400

“Sects are justified (historically) so long as the working-class is not yet ripe for an independent historical movement.”

- Marx to Bolte.

"The neoliberal programme benefited individual members of the capitalist class by increasing their..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 23:39:14 -0400

“The neoliberal programme benefited individual members of the capitalist class by increasing their personal wealth, at the expense of the living standards of the poor and the working class, as the following figures demonstrate.
The Gini coefficient expresses inequality as a number between 0 and 1, with 0 representing absolute equality (everyone has the same income) and
204 Viner, Thatcher’s Britain, 9. 205 Pollard, The Wasting of the British Economy, 2-3. 206 Dumenil and Levy, Capital Resurgent, 139. 207 Saad-Filho, “Marxian and Keynesian Critiques of Neoliberalism”, 342-343.
64 Chapter One
1 (or sometimes, as used below, 100) representing absolute inequality (one person has all the income and everyone else has none). As Branko Milanovic writes, at a global level:
…the Gini coefficient of the GDPs per capita of all countries in the world, after being roughly stable during 1960–78, has inexorably risen since 1978, from a Gini of about 46 to a Gini of 54 today––a huge increase of almost 20%.208
Claims that neoliberal policies have reduced income inequality among nation states and increased economic growth in the Global South depend almost entirely on the single case of China.209 Although several analysts have claimed that China has achieved this by departing from the neoliberal model, these claims both underestimate the extent of Chinese neoliberalism and exaggerate the extent to which the developed world itself follows the policies it imposes on the Global South: the European Union Common Agricultural Policy or the American aerospace industry are no more run according to the principles of neoliberal theory than the Chinese Township and Village Enterprises.210
Inequalities have not only risen between nations, but within them. Take the USA, the society to which neoliberals always pointed as the model for all others to follow. Some statistics suggest the extent to which these increased bourgeois living standards have been accomplished at the expense of the working class. Between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 per cent of US taxpayers fell by 7 per cent, while that of the top 1 per cent rose 148 per cent and that of the top 0.1 per cent rose 343 per cent, excluding capital gains.211 In 1965, during the last full decade of the post-war boom, the ratio of Chief Executive Officer income to that of an average worker was 35:1; by 1980, the opening of the first full decade of the neoliberal era, it had risen to 80:1, and by 2005 to 450:1.212 To express the gap in another way; between 1968 and 2005 the salary of the highest paid CEO in the USA went from 127 average workers and 239 minimum waged workers to 7,443 average workers and 23,282 minimum waged workers.213 In Britain, even after ten years of
208 Milanovic, “The Two Faces of Globalisation”, 674. 209 Freeman, “The Inequality of Nations”, 70-73. 210 Milanovic, “The Two Faces of Globalisation”, 674-676; Wade, “Financial Regime Change?” 17-19. 211 Berman, Dark Ages America, 59. 212 McNally, Another World is Possible, 54. 213 George, Hijacking America, 214.
What was Neoliberalism? 65
Thatcherism, the average CEO of one of the FTSE top one hundred companies in 1988 earned “only” 17 times the wage of an average worker; by 2008 it had risen to 75.5 times.214”

"As John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff show: For those families on median-income percentiles..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 23:28:05 -0400

“As John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff show:
For those families on median-income percentiles (40.0-59.9), debt burdens have now their peak levels for the entire period 1995-2004. These families have seen their debt service payments as a percentage of disposable income increase by about 4 percentage points since 1995, to almost 20 per
197 Irvin, Super Rich, 190. 198 Shaw, “Work”, 30. 199 Phillips, American Theocracy, 327. 200 Ibid, 325.
62 Chapter One
cent–higher than any other income group. The lowest debt burden is naturally to be found in those in the highest (90-100) income percentiles, where it drops to less than 10 percent of disposable income.
As these authors point out: “All this points to the class nature of the distribution of household debt.”20”

"Has the accumulation of debt simply been a means for “consumers” to add to their possessions as..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 23:21:14 -0400

“Has the accumulation of debt simply been a means for “consumers” to add to their possessions as moralistic accounts like this imply? In so far as better-off working class people have spent borrowed money on commodities which are above the minimum needed to reproduce their labour, it is a response to their situation under neoliberalism. As Madeline Bunting notes, “the overwork culture interconnects with the drive to consume” in that it is only in the latter activity that people are treated with the respect denied in the workplace:
The harder you work, the longer and more intense your hours, the more pressure you experience, the more intense is the drive to repair, console, restore, and find periodic escape through consumption.195”

"Without industry producing commodities for profit, Wall Street would have nothing to invest, while..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 23:10:32 -0400

“Without industry producing commodities for profit, Wall Street would have nothing to invest, while producers in turn need Wall Street to float their stocks, issue credit, bankroll company takeovers, and so forth. Densely interlocking directorates weave these sectors together, and globalization, widely if not accurately seen as emanating from the financial sector, is just as much about the international reorganisation and expansion of commodity production.”

- Neil Smith.

"Constant use of the Great Boom as a reference point is problematic for two reasons. First, it has..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 22:03:23 -0400

“Constant use of the Great Boom as a reference point is problematic for two reasons.
First, it has led critics to expect that any subsequent boom must involve similar consequences for workers in terms of rising living standards, expanding welfare provision and increasing class confidence. Since the period after 1974 had precisely the opposite characteristics, the temptation has been to read back from the condition of the working class to the condition of the capitalist system, and claim that the entire period has been, if not one of crisis, then at least one of stagnation. But it is deeply implausible to think that a system as dynamic as capitalism could exist in a state of permanent crisis (or even stagnation) between 1973/4 and 2007/8–indeed, it would be difficult to understand why the events of the latter date could have had such significance had they not been preceded by a period of growth and expansion. There have been booms before, such as that of the 1920s, during which most workers did not benefit and indeed continued to be subjected to generalised attacks on their wages and conditions. One of the objectives of the neoliberal assault, after all, was precisely to weaken trade unions to the point where they would be unable to take advantage of any improvement in economic conditions.
177 Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, 268. 178 Wade, “Financial Regime Change?”, 11. 179 McNally, “From Financial Crisis to World-Slump”, 45.
56 Chapter One
Second, unlike Marxist economists, capitalists do not tend to look back over a forty-year period to compare conditions then with their current situation. On the contrary, they respond to demands from shareholders to produce immediate returns greater than their own performance compared with last year, or with those of their competitors from the current year. The decisive issue is instead whether the rate of profit is sufficiently high for them to continue to invest in production and be confident of an acceptable return and between 1982 and 2007/09 this was largely the case. In part this was the result of the partial recovery from any recession caused by the destruction of some capitals and the rationalisation and re-tooling of those which survived. More specifically, however, recovery was punctuated by a succession of short-term booms as a result of five factors, each of which had, however, in-built limitations. These factors overlapped with each other in time, but their maximum impact on the system occurred in this order.”

"Middle-class codes are verbal, not physical; language is the agent of control and we is the key."

Sat, 11 May 2013 21:44:00 -0400

“Middle-class codes are verbal, not physical; language is the agent of control and *we* is the key.”

- Stephen Foster.

"In ideological terms, the collapse of the Stalinist regimes did not so much “prove” as confirm the..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 21:00:20 -0400

“In ideological terms, the collapse of the Stalinist regimes did not so much “prove” as confirm the already widely held belief that any alternative form of economy to neoliberal capitalism was impossible. As Alan Sinfield has pointed out, by 1989, virtually no-one, especially not on the post-1968 revolutionary left, regarded the Stalinist regimes as “a model for socialism”. The real ideological shock, although one which was more slow-acting, had been the earlier revelation that the welfare state in its post-1945 form was incompatible with capitalism, at least as anything other than a short-term expedient.155 Gerassimos Moschanos summarises the current politics of the former social democratic parties as “the ‘economic’ state withdraws in favour of the market and the ‘philanthropic’ state timidly re-emerges to reduce the social costs to the market””

"The recognition that formal democracy was desirable, but that substantive democracy was problematic,..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 20:15:06 -0400

“The recognition that formal democracy was desirable, but that substantive democracy was problematic, suggested a second solution. In 1939, Hayek recommended that economic activity should be removed as far as possible from the responsibility of politicians who might be expected to deploy it for electoral purposes.133 And in this respect at least, neoliberalism has attempted to implement the programme of its theoretical antecedents. Ellen Meiksins Wood rightly identifies the current attitude of the US ruling class to democracy as consisting of two strategies:
One is to find electoral processes and institutions that will thwart the majority in one way or another. The other–and this is ultimately the most important–is to empty democracy of as much social content as possible.134
This has been openly admitted by the ideologues of neoliberalism. Phillip Bobbit, an adviser to the White House under Bill Clinton, has argued that we are entering a period in which the nation-state is being replaced by what he calls the “market state”, a formation characterised by “paradoxes”. I will return to Bobbit in due course, but one of his paradoxes is that, “there will be more public participation in government, but it will count for less, and the role of the citizen qua citizen will greatly diminish and the role of citizen as spectator will increase”. 135
One of the key successes that neoliberalism has achieved for capital has indeed been to render inconceivable alternatives to the economic
132 Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, 52-53; “Letter to The Times”. 133 Hayek, “The Economic Conditions of Interstate Federalism”. 134 Wood, “Democracy as Ideology of Empire”, 21. 135 Bobbit, The Shield of Achilles, 234.
What was Neoliberalism? 43
policies established by the initial regimes of reorientation–or at any rate, alternatives to their left. Conservative MP John Redwood noted of his time in the Conservative Research Department during the early 1980s: “In our policy discussions we would always include the question of whether the changes we were proposing could be made irreversible.”136 In Britain, for example, each successive phase of the neoliberal experiment saw the incremental abandonment of the repertoire of measures through which governments had traditionally influenced economic activity, beginning with Geoffrey Howe’s abandonment of exchange controls in 1979 and concluding (to date) with Gordon Brown’s transfer of the power to set interest rates from the Treasury to an unelected committee of the Bank of England. Perry Anderson described the former as the Thatcher regime’s “first and most fundamental act on coming to power”, but the same may be said of the second in relation to Thatcher’s successor.137 As the Italian journalist Antonio Polito wrote: “After the neo-liberal revolution the economy is by definition outside the range of politics.”138”

"The successful onslaught on the labour movement by the vanguard regimes allowed all the other..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 19:51:39 -0400

“The successful onslaught on the labour movement by the vanguard regimes allowed all the other components of the neoliberal repertoire that Chris Harman calls “anti-reforms” to be implemented.120 Some of these proved to be either irrelevant in practical terms or of a purely temporary significance and are now seen as intellectual curiosities. For example, monetarism, or governmental control of the money supply, was never seriously adopted by any state, least of all by the USA, which maintained an impressive record of deficit financing from the mid-1960s onwards that actually peaked during the vanguard neoliberal presidencies of Reagan and Bush the Elder. Any catalogue of those policies which proved more enduring would have to include the following, although the following list is by no means exhaustive: privatisation of state-owned industries and utilities, flexible labour markets, outsourcing of non-core functions, deregulation of financial markets and the removal of exchange controls, abolition of protective tariffs and subsidies on essential goods, commodification of services once provided free at the point of use, the shift from direct and progressive to indirect and regressive taxation, and a monetary policy dedicated to the maintenance of low levels of inflation. But neoliberalism as a system incorporating these elements only emerged in a piecemeal fashion, after many false starts, accidental discoveries, opportunistic manoeuvres and unintended consequences.”

"Thatcher was in a minority among the leadership of her party which had itself been elected (as it..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 19:49:03 -0400

“Thatcher was in a minority among the leadership of her party which had itself been elected (as it would subsequently be re-elected) by a minority of voters. She nevertheless had several advantages. One was the financial support provided by revenues from the export of North Sea oil, the price of which had soared as an unintended consequence of the Iranian Revolution, and which began to make a serious impact on the balance of payments around the time of the 1979 General Election. If this windfall can genuinely be described as a happy accident in terms of her project, the same cannot be said for the fact that the Conservatives faced a compromised and incoherent Labour Party, a section of whose membership and voting base had shifted to the newly formed Social Democratic Party. It rather reflected the crisis of an entire social democratic tradition which depended on the continuing health of the capitalist system to provide reforms, the possibilities for which had now ended. Finally, the real enemy of the Conservative government, the broader labour movement, was in ideological and organisational turmoil, already disillusioned by the previous Labour government and weakened by unemployment (although offered some relief by the emergence of the economy from the depths of the 1981-2 slump).114 Thatcher’s position only became unassailable through two victories.
The first was over the Argentinean military in 1982. The “Falklands factor” did not have any lasting popular impact, although it was widely believed to have done by writers around the then influential journal Marxism Today. The real impact was to consolidate Thatcher’s supremacy over the Conservative Party. The war was a gamble for Thatcher, not in the sense that there was ever much likelihood of the British forces losing; their relative weight compared to the Argentineans, the military balance of forces, was far too one-sided for that to be plausible. The real risk was that victory would come at the price of so many British casualties as to be publicly unacceptable. It did not.115
The second victory was over the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in 1985, which finally consolidated the neoliberal regime in Britain. In order to win Thatcher was quite prepared to abandon market principles and use the state, in Georg Lukacs’s words, “as a weapon”.116
114 Harvie, Fool’s Gold, Chapter 10; Young, One of Us, 298. 115 Sanders et al, “Government Popularity and the Falklands War”; Viner, Thatcher’s Britain, 143-146, 150-153. 116 Lukacs, Lenin, Chapter 5.
36 Chapter One
She later revealed that in 1990, when her government began to consider further pit closures as a prelude to privatisation, she “never had regard to the commercial aspects alone”. This, she claims, was partly from a sense of “loyalty and obligation” to the working miners who had scabbed on the 1984-5 strike, but there was another reason:
I knew we might have to face another strike. Where would we be if we had closed the pits at which moderate miners would have gone on working, and kept more profitable but left-wing pits open?117
Thatcher at any rate understood that the general interests of her class sometimes required the adoption of strategies which were contrary to particular economic doctrines.
These victories demonstrated that Thatcher was the genuine embodiment of the bourgeois vanguard, an anti-Lenin prepared to take risks before which more cautious but less decisive members of her class would have retreated or sought compromise. She was necessary to capital in Britain in a way that, say, Ronald Reagan was not to capital in the US, his role being that of a charismatic but replaceable front-man for the collective leadership of neoconservative ideologues and corporate representatives which actually directed White House policy during his presidency.118 In that sense Kelman was wrong. Neoliberalism could not have been introduced at the speed and intensity it was without Thatcher or a similar personality. But Beckett is also wrong. Even if Callaghan had successfully sought re-election in 1978 as originally planned, or the Argentinean navy’s missiles had been aimed with greater accuracy, the crisis in which British capitalism was engulfed would have forced whichever party was in office to move in neoliberal directions, albeit more slowly and with greater caution; there would be no return to the final years of the Golden Age, which Beckett is concerned to defend. The only event which would have resulted in an alternative vision of the future would have been the defeat of the government by the labour movement; in concrete terms, the victory of the NUM in the Miners’ Strike. This was by no means the impossibility that tends to be argued by those who–openly or not–welcomed the actual outcome; there were crucial turning points at which the NUM could have achieved victory as late as six months into the
117 Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, 686. 118 Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-establishment, Chapter 9; Wolin, Democracy Incorporated, 271-272.
What was Neoliberalism? 37
strike.119 Neoliberalism could have suffered a reverse in Britain, as it was later to do in France, and this would have spared many people from the ravages which in fact occurred. What is less clear is whether resistance within Britain would have qualitatively shifted the balance in international terms to the extent of preventing neoliberalism becoming established as the dominant regime of capitalist organisation at the international level. Once the neoliberal order had been established in the USA and imposed on the transnational economic institutions which it controls, the model acquired a cumulative force: in the developed world, the need to compete with the USA compelled other states to try to adopt the organisational forms which seemed to have given that economy its advantage; in the Global South, states accepted conditions which restructured their economies in neoliberal ways in order to obtain access to loans and aid.”

The Chemical Elements

Photo

Photo

"the way to provincialize Europe is not by continually harping on some unbridgeable gap that..."

"Wherever appropriate, NLR aims to be a scholarly journal; but not an academic one. Unlike most..."

Video

Video

"You know how it goes in a recession: the rivers stop flowing, the factories collapse, the banks..."

"The changes in the form of property ownership brought about by neoliberalism, which did not in any..."

"The other area where theory and reality have been at odds is in relation to the role of states...."

"Sects are justified (historically) so long as the working-class is not yet ripe for an independent..."

"The neoliberal programme benefited individual members of the capitalist class by increasing their..."

"As John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff show: For those families on median-income percentiles..."

"Has the accumulation of debt simply been a means for “consumers” to add to their possessions as..."

"Without industry producing commodities for profit, Wall Street would have nothing to invest, while..."

"Constant use of the Great Boom as a reference point is problematic for two reasons. First, it has..."

"Middle-class codes are verbal, not physical; language is the agent of control and *we* is the key."

"In ideological terms, the collapse of the Stalinist regimes did not so much “prove” as confirm the..."

"The recognition that formal democracy was desirable, but that substantive democracy was problematic,..."

"The successful onslaught on the labour movement by the vanguard regimes allowed all the other..."

"Thatcher was in a minority among the leadership of her party which had itself been elected (as it..."

"Middle-class codes are verbal, not physical; language is the agent of control and we is the key."