It is a
commonplace that since the 1970s, capitalism has left the western working class
as roadkill on the road to globalization. What is new about our contemporary
moment is that the same is increasingly true for the Euro-American middle
class.
Be kind,
forward wind. What if, despite all the recent left’s hesitation about prophecy,
we still feel something is going to happen? Perhaps we are in a similar moment
to the early 1960s – only four or five years away from a ‘May 1968’ moment,
with all its spontaneous eruptions and consequential structural rearrangements.
Do we need
a weatherwoman to recognize the winds of insistence for change blowing through
the Middle East, the Mediterranean basin, the ‘north’ Euro-American cities, and
Latin America, let alone the vastly under-reported tensions elsewhere? If all
these are social trembles, foreshadowing a greater quake, how ought we to prepare
in the streets, the classrooms and all the interconnecting spaces in between?
Some
preliminary answers come through the keywords: neoliberalism, occupy, and
world-system. Within the last decade, ‘neoliberalism’ has replaced
‘globalization’ as the preferred term to describe the latest regime of
capitalist accumulation.
Thanks to
writers like David Harvey and Naomi Klein, we have a common sense about
inequality-producing tactics that overlap and reinforce each other. These
maneuvers include privatization, deregulation, financialization, return to the
watchman state of police surveillance, opportunistic austerity, and crony
collaboration among financiers, civil society institutional administrators, and
political elites.
Neoliberalization
Yet we
still need to consider the difference between neoliberalism and
neoliberalization: not just a matter of academic term splitting. The terms
differentiate between an unchanging, homogeneous thing-form—an ‘ism’— and a
process that involves multiple, sometimes contradictory, processes—an
‘ization’. While social actions do cross thresholds to achieve a nameable
consistency, like neoliberalism, we also need to remember the fluxes of an
“ization” for, at least, two political reasons.
Firstly,
the use of the latter term prevents us from losing our nerve and slipping into
demobilized apathy. While market fundamentalists certainly do have the upper
hand at the moment, they are by no means a juggernaut. Resistance is not
futile, Dorothy!
‘Neoliberalization’
reminds us that social movements of right and left are constructions of tactics
and coalitions. What was built up over decades by the right can also be
disassembled and replaced. The reconstruction of a broadly articulated left
will need a host of generalizing and particularizing analyses and actions.
Secondly,
the term neoliberalization also reminds us that the current moment belongs to a
longer history of capitalist class struggle. Because capitalism is
fundamentally an organization of the circuit of value through commodity chains
of labor-power, raw materials, and energy inputs, neoliberalism has to be
placed in context with prior moments.
Capital volume I’s emphasis on telling a history of
sequential ages of capitalist developments (the Age of Handicrafts,
Manufacture, Large-scale Industry, etc.) looks to define historical
periodization, the differences between one time and another. But Marx also
sought to consider capitalist periodicity, repeating or recurring capitalist
activities. Perhaps neoliberalism seems new only because it presents the return
of capitalist logistics that have not been dominant for some time, or even
within an older generation’s active memory.
Neoliberalism
might be the reappearance of capitalist tactics that have been dormant, but
never forgotten or absent. Consequently, we need to return to the entire set of
Marx’s
Capital and Gramsci’s
Prison Notebooks to relearn the
manifolds of capitalism and the construction of Left coalitions. David Harvey
has encouraged us to relearn the later volumes of
Capital; we still need voices for Gramsci. The so-called posthumous
writings of Louis Althusser, those written after his incarceration, especially
the essay ‘
Marx in his Limits’ or the
shortly to be published Verso translation of
On the Reproduction of Capitalism are good starts.
Gerard Duménil and Dominique
Lévy’s
The Crisis of Neoliberalism
uses long-wave economic theory to provide a longer perspective and argue that
post-1800 capitalism produces two kinds of recurring crises. They call these
inflections a crisis of profitability and a crisis of financial hegemony. Both
types result in shifting alignments as what they call the
professional-managerial class either cleaves to the business class of haute
capitalists or the ‘popular’ (working) class. Crises of profitability have
appeared in the 1890s and the 1970s. When the professional-managerial class
becomes frightened that their prerogatives are being eroded by rising
proletarian empowerment, they grant the business class the right to take profit
in return for managing to subordinate workers.
Duménil and Lévy see neoliberalism as an
interlocking set of tactics arising during the 1970s within a returned crisis
of profitability. They understand privatization, deregulation, and financialization
less as goals in themselves (no matter what capitalist ideologues might
proclaim), than as a means to an end. Capitalists’ target here was the rising
standard of living for labourers and the waves of racial, sex-gender, and
postcolonial democratization signposted by the phrase ‘May 1968.’ As a result,
government was to be transformed into a watchman state mainly dedicated to
securing monopolies of private property and the abandonment of public oversight
into corporate criminality.
The other kind of crisis that Duménil and Lévy
discuss is the one of financial hegemony, seen during the 1930s. In this phase,
the middle classes lose faith in capitalists’ ability to manage society. The
middle classes, often reluctantly, begin to divorce themselves from their
thrall to high capitalists and seek to promote their own members, like John
Maynard Keynes, as having superior technocratic skill in social arrangements.
In order to wrest themselves from control from
above, the professional-managerial classes seek working-class
support by regulating speculators and redirecting speculators’ capital
investment towards social welfare and entitlement schemes in return for a more
stable period of decreased labour unrest. We variously call this realignment
the New Deal (USA), the Welfare State (UK), or the social market (continental
Europe).
The current
moment, especially after 2008, is likewise a crisis of financial hegemony, a
period that allows otherwise technical terms, like neoliberalism, to become
common even outside the academy.
Derivatives
A crisis of
financial hegemony also means that previously held truths become questioned.
One example involves our explanation regarding credit derivatives. The
traditional definition of derivatives is that they are trades based on the
exchange of an underlying commodity. For example, the future price of pork
bellies becomes itself a number to be speculated upon. What was originally a
means of hedging against market unpredictability then become a means to
commoditize risk, a means to sell price variability as if it were the commodity
rather than any actual usable object.
There is a
received history of the rise of derivatives involving the convergence of new
mathematical equations to calculate risk (canonically, the Black-Scholes
equation); the technological revolution allowing for the massification of
computer power that can handle these equations, beginning with the handheld
calculator in the 1970s; deregulation of banking that allowed speculators
access to vast new pools of capital that had otherwise been effectively
illiquid due to post-Depression era restrictions, such as the Glass-Steagall
Act of 1932; and the rise of a new generation of bankers who were culturally
more comfortable with risk than the post-war cohorts.
Yet what
this story still mystifies is that in all likelihood derivatives are probably
no more or less profitable than other kinds of speculation. Derivatives become
seemingly profitable only through the unexamined presence of corporate
criminality that manipulates systemic determinants, as seen with the LIBOR
scandal; the use of offshoring treasure islands, as Nicholas Shaxson calls
them, for tax avoidance purposes; and the generation of lucrative transaction
fees for bankers at the expense of all other parties, who are often reluctant
to whistle-blow, since it would have career damaging prospects for the
corporate executives or government officials who personally negotiated these
agreements.
In this
sense, we do not have to outlaw derivatives, since they effectively only work
through already illegal procedures. If the above lines seem convincing to you
reader, it is because the presence of a crisis of financial hegemony has
already prepared you to consider claims that would have seemed almost
inconceivable had they been written ten years ago.
Occupy Wall Street – a realignment waiting to happen
If Duménil and Lévy are
right that we are amidst neoliberalism’s crisis of hegemony, then Occupy Wall
Street’s fusion of college graduates and labour unions was a realignment of
interests waiting to happen, due to larger structural forces.
Occupy Wall Street came, if anything, too
late. The tenth anniversary of 9/11 had to happen undisturbed, otherwise police
repression in the vicinity of the Twin Towers would have been swift and sealed
by mainstream media consent. Yet the late September start meant the summer
months were lost and from the start they faced the challenges of colder
Manhattan.
Occupy Wall Street’s breakthrough was to
catapult a language about inequality, austerity, and neoliberalism beyond the
containers of the academy or small press left journalism. In an age of the
Murdoch contamination of media, this alone was an achievement and prepared for
the next wave.
In this light, Occupy is best considered as a
dandelion movement: a failure in its own limited terms of composition, but a
success as its dispersed seeds float to root more broadly elsewhere.
The crisis
of 2008 made visible the cracks in the hegemonic culture of neoliberalism
wherein the middle-class was encouraged to assume a lifestyle of the rich,
famous, and wealthy through debt burdens that individuals had been previously
warned against. Yet several left economists, like Michel Roberts in
The Great Recession, suggest that 2008
was only a forewarning of a much greater downfall that may occur in 2014. David
Wiedemer, Robert Wiedemer, and Cindy Spitzer’s
Aftershock makes similar arguments, but they are less willing to
settle on a precise date.
Counterpunch’s
Mike Whitney repeatedly delivers forensic arguments on the fragility of the
post-2008 bandage of fiat fictitious capital for bankers and austerity for the
rest of us.
Middle class realignment come what may
Even if a
cataclysmic moment does not happen over the next few years, the process of
middle-class realignment will continue for reasons suggested by Immanuel
Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi as they argue that we are coming to the end of
a long-wave configuration in the capitalist world-system.
It is a
commonplace that since the 1970s, capitalism has left the western working class
as roadkill on the road to globalization. What is new about our contemporary
moment is that the same is increasingly true for the Euro-American middle
class. For this group is not simply facing a momentary downturn of stalled
wealth accumulation, but a more general developmental crisis as the core of the
capitalist-world-system moves eastward to South and East Asia.
In this new
phase, business interests have themselves sought a new class trophy partner,
abandoning the western bourgeoisie for a more vibrant East and South Asian
nascent middle class. Global capital, consequently, has stopped caring about
the Euro-American bourgeoisie’s present longevity and sees it as little more
than a meat puppet ready for asset stripping by increasing the cost for those
non-negotiable elements taken as defining middle-class identity: home
ownership, higher education, healthcare, and pension security.
As the
certainty of any generational transfer of accrued wealth becomes less tenable,
the middle class becomes more willing to realign and work with the working
class, not because it has become more socially egalitarian, but because it has
become more frightened.
One
cultural expression of this fear of falling is the recent mass popularity of Gothic
tales that hyperbolically display the splatter of a middle-class character’s
stuffing. Neo-Gothic fiction, films, and television conveys less a forlorn
inability to imagine democratic alternatives to apocalyptic release, than an
initial inconvenient self-truth. Many of the most popular, such as AMC’s
The Walking Dead, stage realignments
where the working-class characters, like the “white trash” Daryl rise in
authority and fan popularity, not due to their muscularity or sharp-shooting,
but by the more middle-class characters’ and viewers willingness to listen to
working-class figures and work alongside (or underneath) them.
Similarly,
the popularity of green-thinking and esoteric practices, like yoga, can be read
as a bourgeois means of adjusting to a lack of purchasing power that the
working class always had, through a self-protecting rhetoric that makes it seem
as if downward consumption was the bourgeoisie’s free choice, rather than a response
to structural pressure.
A similar
gesture may exist within all our discussions of neoliberalism. For every
critique of capitalism’s erosion of civil society, no matter how abstruse or
elitist sounding, also prepares the way for what Raymond Williams called a new
structure of feeling.
Truly
progressive change can come about even when some of its most active collective
agents do not necessarily seek the full implications of their own movement. For
this reason, the Left more than ever needs to think once more about the ways in
which we organize within the ongoing transformations.
Whether we call such planning the communist
‘hypothesis’ or ‘horizon’, as
Jodi Dean has
suggested, the main point is that history has no place for regret for those who
tarry.
This article is part of an editorial partnership between
openDemocracy and the Centre for Modern Studies at the University of
York. It was funded by the University of York's Pump Priming Fund, the
British Academy, and York's Centre for Modern Studies.
Foto: “Específica para el dolor de cabeza. Alivia el canscancio físico y mental” 
Fotos: “apoya la salud cardiaca de la mujer” 
Foto: ¡Impensable, imbebible! 
Foto: Ejemplos del aumento de la hipocresía publicitaria de la compañía. 
Foto: Ejemplo de publicidad “sana”. 
Foto: Ejemplos de publicidad “servida en los mejores hospitales”. 
Foto: ¡Impensable Imbebible! 