What is Neoliberalism?

We live, now, at a genuinely peculiar historical j uncture. The credit crisis has provided us with a vivid illustration of the principle set out in the last chapter: that capitalism cannot really operate in a world where people believe it will be around forever.

For most of the last several centuries, most people assumed that credit could not be generated infinitely because they assumed that the economic system itself was unlikely to endure forever. The future was likely to be fundamentally different. Yet somehow, the anticipated revolutions never happened. The basic structures of financial capitalism largely remained in place. It's only now, at the very moment when it's becoming increasingly clear that current arrangements are not viable, that we suddenly have hit the wall in terms of our collective imagination.

There is very good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism itself will no longer exist-most obviously, as ecologists keep reminding us, because it's impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet, and the current form of capitalism doesn't seem to be capable of generating the kind of vast technological breakthroughs and mobilizations that would be required for us to start finding and colonizing any other planets. Yet faced with the prospect of capitalism actually ending, the most common reaction-even from those who call themselves "progressives"-is simply fear. We cling to what exists because we can no longer imagine an alternative that wouldn't be even worse.

How did we get here ? My own suspicion is that we are looking at the final effects of the militarization of American capitalism itself. In fact, it could well be said that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At its root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world-in response to the upheavals of the 196os and 197os-with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, flourish, or propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win .15 To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and police and military intelligence apparatus, and propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as create a pervasive climate of fear, j ingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Maintaining this apparatus seems even more important, to exponents of the "free market," even than maintaining any sort of viable market ecanomy. How else can one explain what happened in the former Soviet Union ? One would ordinarily have imagined that the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and the KGB and rebuilding the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely the other way around . This is j ust an extreme example of what has been happening everywhere. Economically, the apparatus is pure dead weight; all the guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and really produce nothing, and no doubt it's yet another element dragging the entire capitalist system down-along with producing the illusion of an endless capitalist future that laid the groundwork for the endless bubbles to begin with. Finance capital became the buying and selling of chunks of that future, and economic freedom, for most of us, was reduced to the right to buy a small piece of one's own permanent subordination.

In other words, there seems to have been a profound contradiction between the political imperative of establishing capitalism as the only possible way to manage anything, and capitalism's own unacknowledged need to limit its future horizons lest speculation, predictably, go haywire. Once it did, and the whole machine imploded, we were left in the strange situation of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged . About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.

* * * * *

To begin to free ourselves, the first thing we need to do is to see ourselves again as historical actors, as people who can make a difference in the course of world events. This is exactly what the militarization of history is trying to take away.

Even if we are at the beginning of the turn of a very long historical cycle, it's still largely up to us to determine how it's going to turn out. For instance: the last time we shifted from a bullion economy to one of virtual credit money, at the end of the Axial Age and the beginning of the Middle Ages, the immediate shift was experienced largely as a series of great catastrophes. Will it be the same this time around ? Presumably a lot depends on how consciously we set out to ensure that it won't be. Will a return to virtual money lead to a move away from empires and vast standing armies, and to the creation of larger structures limiting the depredations of creditors ? There is good reason to believe that all these things will happen-and if humanity is to survive, they will probably have to--but we have no idea how long it will take, or what, if it does, it would really look like. Capitalism has transformed the world in many ways that are clearly irreversible. What I have been trying to do in this book is not so much to propose a vision of what, precisely, the next age will be like, but to throw open perspectives, enlarge our sense of possibilities; to begin to ask what it would mean to start thinking on a breadth and with a grandeur appropriate to the times .

Let me give an example. I've spoken of two cycles of popular movements since World War II: the first (1945-1978 ) , about demanding the rights of national citizenship, the second (1978-2oo8 ) , over access to capitalism itself. It seems significant here that in the Middle East, in the first round, those popular movements that most directly challenged the global status quo tended to be inspired by Marxism; in the second, largely, some variation on radical Islam. Considering that Islam has always placed debt at the center of its social doctrines, it's easy to understand the appeal. But why not throw things open even more widely? Over the last five thousand years, there have been at least two occasions when major, dramatic moral and financial innovations have emerged from the country we now refer to as Iraq. The first was the invention of interest-bearing debt, perhaps sometime around 3000 sc; the second, around 8oo AD, the development of the first sophisticated commercial system that explicitly rej ected it. Is it possible that we are due for another ? For most Americans, it will seem an odd question, since most Americans are used to thinking of Iraqis either as victims or fanatics (this is how occupying powers always think about the people they occupy) , but it is worthy of note that the most prominent working-class Islamist movement opposed to the U.S. occupation, the Sadrists, take their name from one of the founders of contemporary Islamic economics, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr. True, much of what has since come to pass for Islamic economics nowadays has proved decidedly unimpressive.36 Certainly in no sense does it pose a direct challenge to capitalism. Still, one has to assume that among popular movements of this sort, all kinds of interesting conversations about, say, the status of wage labor must be taking place. Or perhaps it's naive to look for any new breakthrough from the puritanical legacy of the old patriarchal rebellion. Perhaps it will come out of feminism. Or Islamic feminism. Or from some as yet completely unexpected quarter. Who's to say ? The one thing we can be confident of is that history is not over, and that surprising new ideas will certainly emerge.

* * * * *

The one thing that's clear is that new ideas won't emerge without the j ettisoning of much of our accustomed categories of thought-which have become mostly sheer dead weight, if not intrinsic parts of the very apparatus of hopelessness-and formulating new ones . This is why I spent so much of this book talking about the market, but also about the false choice between state and market that so monopolized political ideology for the last centuries that it made it difficult to argue about anything else.

The real history of markets is nothing like what we're taught to think it is. The earlier markets that we are able to observe appear to be spillovers, more or less; side effects of the elaborate administrative systems of ancient Mesopotamia. They operated primarily on credit. Cash markets arose through war: again, largely through tax and tribute policies that were originally designed to provision soldiers, but that later became useful in all sorts of other ways besides . It was only the Middle Ages, with their return to credit systems, that saw the first manifestations of what might be called market populism: the idea that markets could exist beyond, against, and outside of states, as in those of the Muslim Indian Ocean-an idea that was later to reappear in China with the great silver revolts of the fifteenth century. It usually seems to arise in situations where merchants, for one reason or another, find themselves making common cause with common people against the administrative machinery of some great state. But market populism is always riddled with paradoxes, because it still does depend to some degree on the existence of that state, and above all, because it requires founding market relations, ultimately, in something other than sheer calculation: in the codes of honor, trust, and ultimately community and mutual aid, more typical of human economies .37 This in turn means relegating competition to a relatively minor element. In this light, we can see that what Adam Smith ultimately did, in creating his debt-free market utopia, was to fuse elements of this unlikely legacy with that unusually militaristic conception of market behavior characteristic of the Christian West. In doing so he was surely prescient. But like all extraordinarily influential writers, he was also j ust capturing something of the emerging spirit of his age. What we have seen ever since is an endless political j ockeying back and forth between two sorts of populismstate and market populism-without anyone noticing that they were talking about the left and right flanks of exactly the same animal.

The main reason that we're unable to notice, I think, is that the legacy of violence has twisted everything around us. War, conquest, and slavery not only played the central role in converting human economies into market ones; there is literally no institution in our society that has not been to some degree affected . The story told at the end of chapter 7, of how even our conceptions of "freedom" itself came to be transformed, through the Roman institution of slavery, from the ability to make friends, to enter into moral relations with others, into incoherent dreams of absolute power, is only perhaps the most dramatic instance-and most insidious, because it leaves it very hard to imagine what meaningful human freedom would even be like.38

If this book has shown anything, it's exactly how much violence it has taken, over the course of human history, to bring us to a situation where it's even possible to imagine that that's what life is really about. Especially when one considers how much of our own daily experience flies directly in the face of it. As I 've emphasized, communism may be the foundation of all human relations-that communism that, in our own daily life, manifests itself above all in what we call " love"-but there's always some sort of system of exchange, and usually, a system of hierarchy built on top of it. These systems of exchange can take an endless variety of forms, many perfectly innocuous . Still, what we are speaking of here is a very particular type of calculating exchange. As I pointed out in the very beginning: the difference between owing someone a favor, and owing someone a debt, is that the amount of a debt can be precisely calculated. Calculation demands equivalence. And such equivalence-especially when it involves equivalence between human beings (and it always seems to start that way, because at first, human beings are always the ultimate values)-only seems to occur when people have been forcibly severed from their contexts, so much so that they can be treated as identical to something else, as in: "seven martin skins and twelve large silver rings for the return of your captured brother, " "one of your three daughters as surety for this loan of one hundred and fifty bushels of grain" . . .

This in turn leads to that great embarrassing fact that haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft. More than anything else, the endless recitation of the myth of barter, employed much like an incantation , is the economists' way of fending off any possibility of having to confront it. But even a moment's reflection makes it obvious. Who was the first man to look at a house full of obj ects and to immediately assess them only in terms of what he could trade them in for in the market likely to have been ? Surely, he can only have been a thief. Burglars, marauding soldiers, then perhaps debt collectors, were the first to see the world this way. It was only in the hands of soldiers, fresh from looting towns and cities, that chunks of gold or silver-melted down, in most cases, from some heirloom treasure, that like the Kashmiri gods, or Aztec breastplates, or Babylonian women's ankle bracelets, was both a work of art and a little compendium of history-could become simple, uniform bits of currency, with no history, valuable precisely for their lack of history, because they could be accepted anywhere, no questions asked. And it continues to be true. Any system that reduces the world to numbers can only be held in place by weapons, whether these are swords and clubs, or nowadays, " smart bombs" from unmanned drones .

It can also only operate by continually converting love into debt. I know my use of the word " love" here is even more provocative, in its own way, than "communism . " Still, it's important to hammer the point home. Just as markets, when allowed to drift entirely free from their violent origins, invariably begin to grow into something different, into networks of honor, trust, and mutual connectedness, so does the maintenance of systems of coercion constantly do the opposite: turn the products of human cooperation, creativity, devotion, love, and trust back into numbers once again. In doing so, they make it possible to imagine a world that is nothing more than a series of cold-blooded calculations. Even more, by turning human sociality itself into debts, they transform the very foundations of our being-since what else are we, ultimately, except the sum of the relations we have with othersinto matters of fault, sin, and crime, and making the world into a place of iniquity that can only be overcome by completing some great cosmic transaction that will annihilate everything.

Trying to flip things around by asking, "What do we owe society ?" or even trying to talk about our "debt to nature" or some other manifestation of the cosmos is a false solution-really j ust a desperate scramble to salvage something from the very moral logic that has severed us from the cosmos to begin with. In fact, it's if anything the culmination of the process, the process brought to a point of veritable dementia, since it's premised on the assumption that we're so absolutely, thoroughly disentangled from the world that we can j ust toss all other human beings-or all other living creatures, even, or the cosmos-in a sack, and then start negotiating with them. It's hardly surprising that the end result, historically, is to see our life itself as something we hold on false premises, a loan long since overdue, and therefore, to see existence itself as criminal. Insofar as there's a real crime here, though, it's fraud. The very premise is fraudulent. What could possibly be more presumptuous, or more ridiculous, than to think it would be possible to negotiate with the grounds of one's existence ? Of course it isn't. Insofar as it is indeed possible to come into any sort of relation with the Absolute, we are confronting a principle that exists outside of time, or human-scale time, entirely; therefore, as Medieval theologians correctly recognized, when dealing with the Absolute, there can be no such thing as debt.

* * * * *

In this book I have largely avoided making concrete proposals, but let me end with one. It seems to me that we are long overdue for some kind of Biblical-style Jubilee: one that would affect both international debt and consumer debt. It would be salutary not j ust because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering, but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying one's debts is not the essence of morality, that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy is to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a different way. It is significant, I think, that since Hammurabi, great imperial states have invariably resisted this kind of politics. Athens and Rome established the paradigm: even when confronted with continual debt crises, they insisted on legislating around the edges, softening the i mpact, eliminating obvious abuses like debt slavery, using the spoils of empire to throw all sorts of extra benefits at their poorer citizens (who, after all, provided the rank and file of their armies) , so as to keep them more or less afloat-but all in such a way as never to allow a challenge to the principle of debt itself. The governing class of the United States seems to have taken a remarkably similar approach : eliminating the worst abuses (e.g. , debtors' prisons) , using the fruits of empire to provide subsidies, visible and otherwise, to the bulk of the poulation; in more recent years, manipulating currency rates to flood the country with cheap goods from China, but never allowing anyone to question the sacred principle that we must all pay our debts.

At this point, however, the principle has been exposed as a flagrant lie. As it turns out, we don't "all" have to pay our debts. Only some of us do. Nothing would be more important than to wipe the slate clean for everyone, mark a break with our accustomed morality, and start again.

What is a debt, anyway ? A debt is j ust the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence. If freedom (real freedom) is the ability to make friends, then it is also, necessarily, the ability to make real promises. What sorts of promises might genuinely free men and women make to one another ? At this point we can't even say. It's more a question of how we can get to a place that will allow us to find out. And the first step in that journey, in turn, is to accept that in the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.

babyfinland posted:
The 60s counterculture was instrumental in destroying communities, not creating them. What new communities developed in the 60s?

well i didn't say they succeeded, they clearly failed. but, at the least, there was the whole commune movement. more significantly, they created one of the last original (mostly) organic cultures to come out of america. sure, it was limited mostly to art, sex, aesthetics and some borrowed language, doomed to appropriation due to the lack of any kind of geographical base... but it was something

basically they'd look like shit except for the fact that everything that came after them was shittier

thirdplace posted:
i suppose by my metric i should also give props to the juggalos

and the ccc lol

The Occupy movement has become known for its many, and often contradictory, faces. Now we can add a new group of faces to that list—Ec 10 students. Students in the popular introductory economics class walked out fifteen minutes into the class yesterday in a gesture of solidarity with the Occupy movement and to protest what the event organizers consider a class that promotes a “strongly conservative neoliberal ideology.” We find it troubling that students would protest a class because of its supposed ideological bent at an institution dedicated to academic integrity. Such an action sets a dangerous precedent of ideological discrimination against professors.

While it is true that Professor N. Gregory Mankiw, who was lecturing during the walkout, has conservative views and held a position in the Bush Administration, we take issue with the claim that his class is inherently biased because he is the professor and author of its textbook. The truth is that Ec 10, a requirement for economics concentrators, provides a necessary academic grounding for the study of economics as a social science. Professor Mankiw’s curriculum sticks to the basics of economic theory without straying into partisan debate. We struggle to believe that we must defend his textbook, much maligned by the protesters, which is both peer reviewed and widely used.

Furthermore, the students protesting the class who desire that he give more time to other, less accepted schools of economic thought—like Marxism—would do well to remember that such interrogation is the domain of social theory, not economic theory. Supply-and-demand economics is a popular idea of how society is organized, and Mankiw’s Ec 10 never presents itself as more than that. As such, including other theories would simply muddy the waters of what is intended; Ec 10 is an introductory class that lays the foundation for future, more nuanced, study.

so social theory and economic theory are mutually exclusive domains, yet "supply-and-demand economics" is nothing less than a vision of how society is organized. "They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families."

That being said, even if Ec 10 were as biased as the protesters claim it is, students walking out to protest its ideology set a dangerous precedent in an academic institution that prides itself on open discourse. This type of protest ignores opposition rather than engages with it. Instead of challenging a professor to back up his claims, it tries to remove him from the dialogue.

Furthermore, the students’ attempt to connect their classroom protestations to the Occupy movement illustrates the disjointed and often unfocused nature of the movement. Indeed, it seems ironic that students in an introductory economics course at Harvard feel that by walking out of their completely optional lecture taught by a famous economist on the theme of income inequality feel that their actions ought to be considered a sign of solidarity with the Occupy movement. Such protests don’t show solidarity, they show ignorance and a lack of self-awareness.

intolerance!

Impper posted:
lol. something about this makes me irrationally angry. stuff like this is why the jacobins are necessary and why bf is dumb as shit when he says "revolution is bad"!

‎"I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolt."

thirdplace posted:
my school, like most professional schools, routinely hosts "networking events" without the slightest bit of shame or self-examination. people often agree with me (or at least indulge me) when i point out how perverse this is but otherwise no one even blinks

lol nice job letting your idiot teen morality get in the way of wealth and security, and not over anything major like being asked to look the other way in an investigation, simply that "qq i feel bad that people with money have more job opportunities than people who dont"

thirdplace posted:
it makes perfect sense to me that education would have a significant association with high income levels, as both (american post-secondary) education and exceptionally high income jobs are primarily about nepotism and "networking"

nonono, the idea is that it Creates Value:

Close examination suggests that the single biggest difference between those at or above the top tenth percentile of the income distribution and those below the 50th percentile is that the former have a degree or two while the latter, typically, do not. Technological change and global competition have made it impossible for American workers to get good jobs without strong skills. As Harvard professors Claudia Golden and Larry Katz put it, in the race between technology and education, education is falling behind.

connections are skilled labor

For the first time in almost two years, euro-zone leaders have reason to feel pleased with themselves. The ousting of Silvio Berlusconi as prime minister of Italy and his replacement by a technocratic government under former European Commissioner Mario Monti has been greeted by jubilation in Rome. It comes just a week after euro-zone pressure helped oust Greece's George Papandreou who has also been replaced by a technocratic government. This is exactly the kind of game-changing display of political power euro-zone leaders have promised but failed to deliver since the start of the crisis and is sure to be greeted with similar jubilation in the market Monday.

you see, the problems in The Markets are a result of "governance" issues and "political reform" is needed to solve it.

Any lasting solution to the crisis must address both these governance failings. ECB intervention without accompanying political reform risks leaving the bloc vulnerable to future instability. The past few weeks have highlighted the extent of Europe's democratic deficit. The self-appointed Frankfurt Group—composed of the unelected heads of the ECB, European Commission, European Council and the International Monetary Fund plus the leaders of France, Germany and Luxembourg—was able to force the Greek and Italian parliaments to agree a take-it-or-leave-it list of radical fiscal and structural reforms under pain of national bankruptcy, thereby averting an immediate catastrophe. But the Frankfurt Group cannot provide the political, constitutional and democratic cover required for the ECB to accept the role of lender of last resort being urged upon it.

must feel kinda naked. the notion of "democratic cover" is really interesting. it's like "we need to reassure ourselves that this is just a fluke"