the neoliberal vision of the future

[Nylock]

All too true

 

[camouflage]

What is the neoliberal vision of the future?

The picture often given by neoliberal apologists is a happy market run society, free from government control etc etc. However, I am not really interested in the views of idiot apologists.

What I want to think about is the views of the people directing policy, the people who directly benefit from neoliberal policy, because I get the feeling that at least some of them know better than that.

They seem to be risking their future survival for very short term gain. What kind of future to neoliberal policy makers envision?

Ghostly palaces of oligopoly floating above an endless sea of commodified totalitarianism, battered endlessly by blizzards of hot money beneath a dark and carbon-smothered sky.

 

[DotCommunist]

Maybe I is not up with the latest political lingo, but liberalism is essentially about the freedom of ideas, no?

.

no, and no.

 

[butchersapron]

There's a few interesting thoughts (if not fully developed here - they are elsewhere, see short list at end) as to what neo-liberalism might be forced to try and do (and that's one serious weakness of much discussion on this, narrowing the view of what's happening down to simply what neo-liberals intend to do as if they had complete freedom of movemnt and aren't themselves being forced by counter-vailing pressures) in the 2nd part of this Werner Bonefeld article/talk:
Werner Bonefeld: ‘What is the alternative?’

It is against this background that Martin Wolf argued in 2001 ‘what is needed is honest and organised coercive force’. He said that in relationship to the developing world. And Martin Wolf is right – from his perspective. In order to guarantee debt, in order to guarantee money, coercion is the means to render austerity effective. Or as Soros said in 2003: ‘Terrorism provided not only the ideal legitimisation but also the ideal enemy for the unfettered coercive protection of a debt ridden free market society’, because, he says, ‘it is invisible and never disappears’.

Martin Wolf’s demand for the strong state does not belie neo-liberalism, which is wrongly caricatured as endorsing the weak and ineffectual state. Neo-liberalism does not demand weakness from the state. ‘Laissez faire’, said the late Sir Alan Peacock, formerly a Professor of Economics, ‘is no answer to riots’.

‘Law’, says Carl Schmitt, the legal philosopher of Nazism, ‘does not apply to chaos.’ For law to apply order must exist. Law presupposes order. Order is not the consequence of law. Law is effective only on the basis of order. And that is as Hayek put it in the ‘Road to Serfdom’: ‘Laissez faire is a highly ambiguous and misleading description of the principles on which a liberal policy is based.’ ‘The neo-liberal state’, he says, ‘is a planner too, it is a planner for competition’. Market freedom in other words requires the market police, that is the state, for its protection and maintenance.

 

[camouflage]

Or to put another way, you'll need some sort of coercion-services provider to ensure consumers pay for their rain-water. These guys look suitably competitive...

Liberate, Liberalize, and Profit.

 

[butchersapron]

No, that's not what Bonefeld is saying at all. Neo-liberalism relies on free producers and consumers, not people forced to act at gunpoint. It's perfectly possible to have a strong state, fully and aggressively committed to establishing and then upholding market freedom without the mad max stuff - let's talk politics here.

 

[nino_savatte]

Maybe I is not up with the latest political lingo, but liberalism is essentially about the freedom of ideas, no?

To ask what their view of the future is is like asking a million people about cheese... you might find that Dairylea is popular, but you aren't going to get much more use out of it than that.

The point of liberalism, I think, is that planning for the future is a specific task of the individual, governmental responsibility is to ensure that there as few barriers as possible.

In that context it's contrary to the ethos of it to have concrete plans for the future since that inhibits freedoms.

Neoliberalism is a late 20th century variant of classical liberalism. Its key features are choice, personal responsibility and law and order. If you want to see the pure version of neoliberalism, then look no further than Pinochet's Chile. This is what neolibs have in mind for us.

Oh, I forgot, there is also reification: the magical transformation of social relations into marketised relations.

 

[CyberRose]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism

Pretty much the most extreme form of liberal/capitalist ideology

 

[camouflage]

No, that's not what Bonefeld is saying at all. Neo-liberalism relies on free producers and consumers, not people forced to act at gunpoint. It's perfectly possible to have a strong state, fully and aggressively committed to establishing and then upholding market freedom without the mad max stuff - let's talk politics here.

But the Mad Max stuff is so interesting and dystopian.

Seriously though, look at Bechtels water contract in Bolivia in the 90's, surely taken to its conclusions neoliberalism will lead to state enforcing 'market freedom'. You actually had the Bolivian government enforcing a corporations right to charge for water, all water, even rain water. Horrific.

And again taken to conclusions the functions of state itself would as far as possible be commodified? Not so much a monopoly on violence as a monopoly on the outsourcing of violence.

Ok that's not what Bonefield is saying but it's what I reckon at any rate.

 

[LLETSA]

Neoliberalism is a late 20th century variant of classical liberalism. Its key features are choice, personal responsibility and law and order. If you want to see the pure version of neoliberalism, then look no further than Pinochet's Chile. This is what neolibs have in mind for us.

Oh, I forgot, there is also the reification fallacy.

As Butchers hints at above though, it's possible in most western countries without a Pinochet-type regime.

Of course, we may well see the conditions that enable us to have relative political freedom swept away sooner than we think, but the disappearance of those conditions will also put paid to neo-liberalism as both a political project and as an abstract ideal.

Add to that, a dictatorship isn't actually what most neo-liberals or neo-conservatives do want to see, as they explain in those Adam Curtis documentaries I referred to. As with the radical left, social collapse and/or dictatorship is an unfortunate but sometimes unavoidable stage on the road to freedom.

 

[phildwyer]

Oh, I forgot, there is also the reification fallacy.

You wot?

 

[Idris2002]

No, that's not what Bonefeld is saying at all. Neo-liberalism relies on free producers and consumers, not people forced to act at gunpoint. It's perfectly possible to have a strong state, fully and aggressively committed to establishing and then upholding market freedom without the mad max stuff - let's talk politics here.

Earlier today I read an interesting paper in Cultural Anthropology which argued that youth participation in the Sierra Leone and Liberian civil wars was a form of neo-liberal 'just in time destruction', a flexible, post-fordist violence. Executive Outcomes - the SA mercenary company that had big minerals interests in SL - was thus lumped in with the floating population of disenfranchised youth for whom joining a militia (and killing people) was one survival tactic among many.

Which means (if true) that in some areas of the world-system 'the mad max stuff' is functional for capital, but in other places, eh, not so much.

The brief representation of the kamajor militia in the 2006
Hollywood film Blood Diamond is comically absurd, but illustrative of the contrast
between the imaginary of the mercenary as embodied in the EO contractors versus
the imaginary of the community defense militia embodied in the kamajor. In one
relatively brief scene in the film, the white protagonist and his allies in themovie are
suddenly confronted by a group of young men costumed in vaguely “tribal” dress.
They emerge silently from the forest and protect the film’s heroes in their rural
hideout. The kamajors in the film imaginary are forest spirits more than human
belligerents. They are all culture, uniting the rural African village with the natural
landscape in a kind of pure, depoliticized ideal of manly defense.

By contrast, EO personnel are unfailingly discussed as part of a new security
labor force. Both their supporters and their detractors, those who call them mercenaries
and those who call them contractors, think of these foreigners as workers
for hire who raise complicated questions about the intersection of politics and
the global economy. Unlike the kamajors they have no culture. Instead they are
products of a new form of militarized “disaster capitalism” (Klein 2007).

In reality these two forces need to be understood as qualitatively similar. The
young men who made up the conflict’s irregular fighting factions are in fact the real
subcontractors of warfare today. The important attention that has been devoted
to understanding the rise in global security corporations, most of which owe some
debt to the success of Executive Outcomes in Sierra Leone has tended to miss this
fact: that the actual labor of war is more often done by a floating and available pool
of unskilled local young men for whom war fighting has become one piece of a just
in time mode of political, social, and economic production.

 

[DotCommunist]

would that not suggest there where there is a strong existing rule of law/police/courts etc the easier and more logical way is to use them- with all the supposed legitimacy they have- rather than calling in the dodgy paramilitaries for hire. So it means in the strongholds the existing policing structures will (already are) used to enforce the aims when a poulace doesn't like it but where there are no such institutions the work of dealing with annoyed people can be farmed out to ex-miltary hired hands.

 

[Idris2002]

Pretty much, yes.

 

[butchersapron]

Earlier today I read an interesting paper in Cultural Anthropology which argued that youth participation in the Sierra Leone and Liberian civil wars was a form of neo-liberal 'just in time destruction', a flexible, post-fordist violence. Executive Outcomes - the SA mercenary company that had big minerals interests in SL - was thus lumped in with the floating population of disenfranchised youth for whom joining a militia (and killing people) was one survival tactic among many.

Which means (if true) that in some areas of the world-system 'the mad max stuff' is functional for capital, but in other places, eh, not so much.

Idris, that doesn't make any link between the first being functional for neo-liberalism, it just uses neo-liberal managerial jargon to describe something. Two different things.

That's another problem of this discussion - it's totally isolated from what neo-liberalism actually is, a system of extraction of surplus value through wage-labour and financialisation of previously non-commodified stuff. To talk of neo-liberalism without talking of capitalism is...(I'm trying to find the quote asking how you can talk about Auschwitz without talking about capitalism). What we see is stuff that poses neo-liberalism almost as if it's an old style empire - missing the point by a few millennia.

 

[butchersapron]

would that not suggest there where there is a strong existing rule of law/police/courts etc the easier and more logical way is to use them- with all the supposed legitimacy they have- rather than calling in the dodgy paramilitaries for hire. So it means in the strongholds the existing policing structures will (already are) used to enforce the aims when a poulace doesn't like it but where there are no such institutions the work of dealing with annoyed people can be farmed out to ex-miltary hired hands.

Which is nonsense. Where is the surplus value being extracted in this scenario? People with guns being cunts does not equal neo-liberalism, it not even reached the stage of capitalism yet. There's a confusion here of policing issues with fundamental questions about production, consumption and how a neo-liberal society might function.

 

[Idris2002]

Where is the surplus value being extracted in this scenario?

When the mining companies allied to Executive Outcomes got licences from the SL government (such as it was).

I said that the paper was interesting, I didn't say it was something I 100% agreed. There seems to be a tendency in studies of these conflicts to rationalise, and maybe over-rationalise, participation in war and war atrocities.

To address your final point, I suppose that if we look at the actual consequences of neo-liberalism for different societies, we see that neo-liberal societies may function in a variety of styles, including a variety of ways of organising production and consumption.

And to update the SL scenario, since the end of the war in 2002, the government has been to able to enhance mass participation in education, despite massive problems relating to infrastructure, teachers' salaries etc. The advice from the World Bank is to find some way to build public-private partnerships into the education system. How this might function in practice is left unclear - but the experience of South African attempts to use PPPs in building houses for people trapped in shanty towns and so on is that it resulted in big subsidies to developers, but an utterly inadequate supply of actual houses. I suspect that the attempt to use PPPs in education provision in Sierra Leone might have similiarly perverse outcomes.

 

[DotCommunist]

Which is nonsense. Where is the surplus value being extracted in this scenario? People with guns being cunts does not equal neo-liberalism, it not even reached the stage of capitalism yet. There's a confusion here of policing issues with fundamental questions about production, consumption and how a neo-liberal society might function.

this is a question, and thinking about it- with reference to high yield low cost industry like illegal diamond mining, might not an unscrupulous force be perfectly happy to allow a state of lawlessness occasionally backed up by merc support for those who can keep the wealth flowing? If anything that is the sort of laissez fair approach your quote above was arguing that is not neoliberalist. That rather neoliberalism relies on already policed polities who produce stable and modest (in context when looking at niche stuff like diamond mines) before bothering with markets that cannot produce a theivable surplus unless someone first puts something other than a 'friendly warlord' figure in place. I E a police and court system.

 

[butchersapron]

It's just old style force then. Old style empires. Old style pre neo-liberalism ways of extracting a profit. Neo-liberalism is capitalist or it is not neo-liberalism.

 

[Idris2002]

Sure there are continuities alright. Laurent Kabila got a lot of sponsorship from a Canadian mining corporation when he started his march on Kinshasha in 1996, if memory serves. But the patterns of violence and of control aren't necessarily the same as in the old empires, which had at least to maintain the ideological pretense that they were doing it for the betterment of the natives. There's that Orwell line about British rule in Burma - 'the policeman holds down the Burman while the businessman goes through his pockets'.

 

[butchersapron]

But how did he go though his pockets?

 

[Idris2002]

But how did he go though his pockets?

It varied from case to case. In Southern Africa, poll taxes were used to drive people into the mines and factories, where they became an exploited proletariat. In Sierra Leone, however, the interior of the country was dominated by agricultural practices that were effectively slavery - which was not formally abolished until 1927, under pressure from the League of Nations. Here, exploitation of rural youth by chiefs didn't involve proletarianisation: and it continued after decoloninsation as the new elite needed the stability provided by the chiefs to assist it in looting the country.

 

[butchersapron]

It varied from case to case. In Southern Africa, poll taxes were used to drive people into the mines and factories, where they became an exploited proletariat. In Sierra Leone, however, the interior of the country was dominated by agricultural practices that were effectively slavery - which was not formally abolished until 1927, under pressure from the League of Nations. Here, exploitation of rural youth by chiefs didn't involve proletarianisation: and it continued after decoloninsation as the new elite needed the stability provided by the chiefs to assist it in looting the country.

So to go back to:

Earlier today I read an interesting paper in Cultural Anthropology which argued that youth participation in the Sierra Leone and Liberian civil wars was a form of neo-liberal 'just in time destruction', a flexible, post-fordist violence

In what way is destroying the producers and potential consumers anything to with neo-liberalism? A holdover from old style clientelist extraction and so on, sure, no argument, but neo-liberalism? Surely not - not unless we take all the defining characteristics out of the concept.

 

[Idris2002]

OK, I'm looking at Hoffman's paper again, and lays emphasis on the flexibility inherent in the artisanal mining practices in which many young men tried their luck before the war. This he says, is a classic form of post-Fordist enterprise:

Unlike the classic Fordist
factory, specific duties are replaced by multiple, shifting demands, and the single,
repetitive task is supplanted by workers charged with innovating on multiple
fronts.

Which furthermore,

In this regime of production the workday is ill-defined, if not perpetual. Social
life outside the factory also becomes the site of necessary labor. The separation
between “work” and “non-work” disappears. The activities of the everyday outside
of work are not just training for the new demands of labor in this kind of economy;
life itself is increasingly about innovating in ways that will be useful on the job.
“Only one who is experienced in the haphazard changing nature of the forms of
urban life,” writes the Italian theorist Paolo Virno, “knows how to behave in the
just in time factories” (2004:85).
If theories of factory production are not a perfect fit historically for the resource
extraction economies of this part of West Africa, they nevertheless describe a
condition of labor that seems very much in keeping with those facing laborers in
the Mano River region. As Hardt and Negri have argued, after all, since 1968, the
logic of post-Fordist production was also the logic of guerrilla warfare the world
over (2004:79–91).5

Now, you know the Italian debates better than I do, and I be interested to see what you think of this. What's at the heart of Hoffman's paper is an attempt to explain violence in the Mano River region (Liberia and Sierra Leone) in the absence of any 'identitarian' purpose to the war, violence and killing. These wars were not about one tribe killing another, but involved 'equal opportunities atrocities'. Hoffman says that he's trying to see what we can learn 'if we think of violence as a mode of production'. Making war is one career opportunity among many, one requiring physical activity that is a form of labour. Do you think he's on to something - or is he talking through his hole?

 

[butchersapron]

Ooh, that opens things up. (The use of H&N is disgusting as well - as badly chosen and as slippery possible). The idea of the social factory is well useful - but not applied here, it uses an idea of a very specific constructed contemporary social relation to describe an historical/situational one. There are so many ways to view what you've quoted on class terms, but that is really not the fit. I know it's been a popular theme for academics going to Africa for the last ten years - and in certain places it fits (SA). Not here, at least not on this model

Also there's still a massive gap between that lack of 'identitarian' purpose' on an individual or collective level and the concepts he's using - in fact, there's nothing at to connect the two. And on the last question - a simple flat no. A mode of production can be streched to fit things like consciousness or whatever if you're subtle enough - but not killing. Killing as a side-product of the operation of a MOP, but not a MOP. It would kill what a MOP is.

 

[Kizmet]

Where is the surplus value being extracted in this scenario? People with guns being cunts does not equal neo-liberalism, it not even reached the stage of capitalism yet. There's a confusion here of policing issues with fundamental questions about production, consumption and how a neo-liberal society might function.

As in Pinochet's Chile... a cunt with a gun policing ostensibly liberalized economic policies.

So what's so 'neo' about it?

Liberals in that context don't and can't have social order ambitions or a vision of the overall future because, as I said, it's contrary to the movements of the free market. So how do neo-liberals differ?

it seems to me to be a pejorative, not a philosophy.

 

[Ibn Khaldoun]

So to go back to:



In what way is destroying the producers and potential consumers anything to with neo-liberalism? A holdover from old style clientelist extraction and so on, sure, no argument, but neo-liberalism? Surely not - not unless we take all the defining characteristics out of the concept.

Neo-lib relies on primitive accumulation to impost itself politically, like the emergence of capitalism from Europe.

 

[butchersapron]

There's a confusion here of policing issues with fundamental questions about production, consumption and how a neo-liberal society might function

How did capital in Chile extract surplus value?

Oh so provocative.

 

[butchersapron]

Neo-lib relies on primitive accumulation to impost itself politically, like the emergence of capitalism from Europe.

Explain how that happens then and why it's relevant to what i said?

And no, you're terribly confused about political and economic - these terms mean something.

 

[Ibn Khaldoun]

Explain how that happens then and why it's relevant to what i said?

Violence stemming from monopoli isn't just an excess, it's about the battle of histories.

And no, you're terribly confused about political and economic - these terms mean something.

We know they have several meanings, so a boundary between is being negotiated.