(noon. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
Dear readers, I would like to call your attention to the analysis of David Harvey in this weekend’s Counterpunch — “Is This Really the End of Neoliberalism?” Harvey’s analysis points to a further consolidation of class power in light of the failure of the financial system to expand asset bubbles and in light of the collapses in lending.
Harvey is important as one of the main thinkers of “neoliberalism,” the period of recent history in which the wealthiest interests have been separating the rest of us from our assets through what Harvey calls “accumulation through dispossession.”
(crossposted in Big Orange)
OK, first, David Harvey. David Harvey is famous as a professor of Geography (tho’ Wikipedia lists him as a Professor of Anthropology), who wrote a book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, which serves as one of the primary texts on the economic history of the neoliberal era (1973-present day). Important stuff. (There’s also this video, tho’ it’s not much of a video.) Harvey’s stuff ranks up there with Robert Brenner’s The Boom and the Bubble, Levy and Dumenil’s Capital Resurgent, and (my favorite, for its clear style) Harry Shutt’s The Trouble With Capitalism.
The text featured in Counterpunch is, however, not the most recent thing he’s put out. If you go to his webpage, you can see a very cool video of Harvey’s interview with Laura Flanders with Alexander Cockburn sitting in, as a response to the Geithner plan for rescuing the economy.
In the interview video with Flanders, Harvey suggests that US financial power is in steep decline. Remember, Minqi Li argued (as we saw in my earlier diary) that no other nation (China included) could really substitute for the United States as the global hegemon. In this interview, Harvey also projects massive labor unrest. Of course, unrest doesn’t have to amount to much of anything; it could just as well be another sign of social decay. Cockburn’s suggestion that “back then there was a real Left” might be the right way to go, or we might have to invent a different movement entirely. But we do need a movement.
Now for a brief summary of the article. As Harvey points out, the financial powers-that-be have further consolidated their power in light of the crisis. This isn’t really a crisis for them:
What happened in the US was that 8 men gave us a 3 page document which pointed a gun at everybody and said ‘give us $700 billion or else’. This to me was like a financial coup, against the government and the population of the US. Which means you’re not going to come out of this crisis with a crisis of the capitalist class; you’re going to come out of this with a far greater consolidation of the capitalist class than there has been in the past. We’re going to end up with four or five major banking institutions in the United States and nothing else. Many on Wall Street are thriving right now. Lazard’s, because it specialises in mergers and acquisitions, is making megabucks. Some people are going to be burned, but overall it’s a massive consolidation of financial power.
Of course, neoliberalism was itself a tool for consolidation of power. There is, one big difference between the present period of crisis and the neoliberal period:
The collapse of credit for the working class spells the end of financialisation as the solution for the crisis of the market.
The Keynesian solution, as Harvey points out, will probably not work out. He doesn’t really say why, here, but my guess, reading from his piece on the stimulus, is that he thinks that dollar hegemony is too weak these days to allow the US the deficit spending necessary to allow for some massive stimulus to bail out the economy. That, and organized labor is too weak, thus the banks and the corporations will gobble up what is left of the US government’s credit rating.
Thus Harvey concludes:
What I think is happening at the moment is that they are now looking for a new financial set-up which can solve the problem not for working people but for the capitalist class. I think they are going to find a solution for the capitalist class and if the rest of us get screwed, too bad. The only thing they would care about is if we rose up in revolt. And until we rise up in revolt they are going to redesign the system according to their own class interests.
The problem, of course, is that the “movement,” so far, is much too small, and so things are going to get worse until there actually is a movement, and so meanwhile Obama spends his time placating capitalists. Sure, what else is he supposed to do, that’s where the power is, and that’s where it’s going to be unless we band together and grab off a chunk of it for ourselves.
Harvey also has another suggestion which makes a lot of sense: reconfiguring the cities.
If I could develop an idealised system now I would say in the US we should create a national redevelopment bank and take $500 billion out of that $700 billion they voted and the bank should work with municipalities to deal with neighbourhoods which have been hit by the foreclosure wave, because the foreclosure wave has been like a financial Katrina in many ways; it has wiped out whole communities, usually poor black or Hispanic communities. You go into those neighbourhoods and bring back the people who used to live in those communities and re-house them on a different basis of tenure, residency rights, and with a different kind of financing. And green those neighbourhoods, creating local employment opportunities in those fields.
I mean, sure, this sounds great, especially insofar as it addresses the problem of people in cities, people who were attracted to cities by the last century-and-a-half of urbanization but have suddenly discovered that the global neoliberal economy is a big Ponzi scheme and that the scheme is now up and the winners have suddenly just run away with the winnings, and have moreover retained control of government. One just has to wonder how much suffering urban people will have to endure under such a set-up before the will to effect comprehensive social change arises within the masses.
I would say, though, that what you really need to make this work, though, is a general de-urbanization of the cities and suburbs, and a return back to the land, possibly accompanied by some sort of urban/suburban land reform with the added blessings of French Intensive/ Biodynamic gardening.
At any rate, this stuff deserves our focused attention, since Harvey is one of the main chroniclers of our times.
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“back to the land.” I don’t have the links readily available, unfortunately: but there are ways of greening cities, and well-run cities are more ecologically friendly than exurban sprawl. For example: mass transit as opposed to the one-commuter-per-car culture we now have.
For example: parklands & protected ecologies surrounding those cities.
For example: fewer strip malls, more centralized business districts.
For example: more walking around the downtown areas; less driving to big-box stores.
When I was a kid, most of this county was farmland, and that was great. Now? Big-box stores, strip malls, ugly developments (often in bottomland that is flood-prone–great for farms, not so good for the housing developments that arose there–although I admit these developments are terrific news for the retailers of sump pumps. But of course that means that much of the best farmland has been paved over…why? To enrich the developers).
People who live in cities use less than half the electricity of people who don’t. Because of heat radiation patterns, studies have shown that large buildings use roughly one fifth as much heating fuel as single family residences (this effect is greater when large buildings are in clusters, such as in Manhattan). For a wide variety of reasons, urban living is the most environmentally responsible form of living known to man.
thing to fall already! How can neoliberal nasty ass capitalism regroup? There is no money to be made on people who have no jobs no housing no money. Who will buy their stuff be it investments in bad debts or overpriced slums of the future even the toxic food and crap from China Becomes unaffordable. Like the USSR if it doesn’t pay anyone but the top, then it doesn’t work. Gangsters, extortionists, and con men need a mark and they have bled the suckers dry.
Whether you live in a city a suburb or the country, The only thing people can do is form communities local economies. We used to laugh at my nephew who in the 90’s kept saying we should tear up the streets and plant gardens. Lately I’ve been planning my patch on 48th Av. Bio regions and smaller units are more sustainable then this too big to fall centralized system which seems only to produce debts prisons and war. Mass movement would entail what? Taking over the big mess the cappies created with a new set of power hungry sharks? Cascadia sounds pretty good at this point. The burbs are where I wouldn’t want to be, either physically or mentally they are the toxic wasteland.
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Actually, it’s all been happening over a long period of time now, just smaller increments and then went on to really, really big increments. What do I mean?
Over time, we have seen small companies being “eaten up” by large companies, in just about any arena you can think of — ultimately, we have the creation of huge conglomerates — who set the pace, the price, the service, etc. — basically, controlling us in so many insidious ways, in a sense — lobbyists, etc. And dare we to have a problem, we can scream our bloody heads off to someone in India or the Philippines, etc. I think everyone can relate to that experience.
Back when the banks were faltering, there was a huge “push” via Bush and the huge conglomerates to see to it that that faltering turned into failure. I am reminded of Washington Mutual, which, according to what I’ve heard had a good customer base and was well liked for their customer services. They were “forced” into failure, and who picked them up, Bank of America, as I recall. Chase, picked up Merrill, Lynch (I believe it was), etc. So, think about it, this all happened almost simultaneously — with Bush screaming and crying the sky would cave in, if we didn’t help the banks and the fat cats on Wall Street. By now, everyone should know where that took us and what chumps were made of us. But, I digress. The point of it is that, yes, we are now pretty much controlled by Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, etc. — they have the MONEY!
So, in my view, we need to push the anti-trust laws and try to break up some of these huge conglomerates. The anti-trust laws are a joke. That’s just one of the things we need to do.
But, all in all, for a long time now and, most particularly, with the Bush Administration and their enabling of the huge corporations, there has been a deliberate attempt to marginalize the so-called “middle-class” to a “poor-class” status. Is that the reason they want to be rid of immigrants? So we, the former middle-class can perform the jobs the immigrants perform? You know, pick the fields for fruit and vegetables, wash dishes, etc. Poor educational standards — on and on and on!