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This is a personal project by @dellsystem. I built this to help me retain information from the books I'm reading.

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Showing results by Anders Stephanson only

[...] Market fundamentalism is self-evidently false. Contra Karl Polanyi’s classic account, he says, capitalism does not homeopathically reform itself. Pure capitalism may be impossible, as Polanyi insisted; but in Mann’s view it needs actively to be tamed, regulated and modified and for that to happen there has to be struggle and countervailing forces, above all a vigorous lib-lab and union presence. The golden age was the product of just such a regulated capitalism put to good uses in the context of authoritative nation-states and powerful socio-political movements. Conversely, the Great Recession was a graphic example of what happens in the absence of such countervailing forces. Yet Mann also seems to say that the crisis of the time was real and that the golden age was over no matter who was in charge. If so, there were no progressive solutions to it, only bad ones, of which the neoliberal was the worst. At the same time, he suggests that causation also worked in the opposite direction. The question then becomes how far the crisis, once underway, was ultimately an ideological product of irrational neoliberalism and the obverse fatigue of the neo-Keynesians. It is hard to tell. Moreover, it is not apparent what could have been put forth instead, except defensive action and hoping for the best. Mann is perfectly aware that the essentials of ‘the golden age’ were no longer present and could not be recreated.

on Michael Mann's book

—p.130 Kaleidoscopics of Power (127) by Anders Stephanson 6 years, 7 months ago

If the golden age is gone, its larger historical framework nevertheless remains, albeit precariously. This is the structure that has marked, unevenly, the leading edge of collective power ever since the Middle Ages, for which Mann’s infelicitous term is a ‘multipower actor civilization,’ decentralized and on the whole non-imperial, productively as opposed to lethally competitive: first Europe, then the West, then perhaps the World. Today the space for marcher lords—outsiders or borderland primitives who could suddenly take over the advanced centres and turn them into something more powerful and dynamic, only to fall to new outsiders—has vanished. The last marcher lords were the empires of the US and USSR, which took centre stage as a result of World War II. However powerful China has become, it will not be another marcher lord. For the PRC is already on the inside. It may well become the new ‘leading edge’, but it is and will remain part of a multipower actor civilization (recent US unilateralism being doomed to failure).

—p.132 Kaleidoscopics of Power (127) by Anders Stephanson 6 years, 7 months ago

Showing results by Anders Stephanson only