by
Sasha Lilley
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[...] The deregulation of financial services really followed structural transformations within the world capitalist economy. As capital went global, particularly in the form of the multinational corporation, it encouraged the growth of lending institutions which could operate outside of national boundaries, in the so-called offshore banking system. Particularly through the Eurodollar market, in which banks could deal in dollars in unregulated spaces, like the Caymans, we got a financial system that was responding to a much more internationalized production system. As a result, regulated financial markets like the U.S. and the UK were losing a lot of business to these offshore banks. Sooner or later they pressed to have liberalization and deregulation so they could get into some of these financial operations from which they had been excluded.
What I’m tracing for you here is a process by which first comes the great global reorganization of manufacturing industries through the multinational corporation, then come forms of financing that fit that new world economy, and then comes the deregulation in the major centers. To reregulate you have to imagine that somehow you could wind it all back and that you could have capitalist economies that were predominantly national again—not based on multinational production and the financial arrangements that go with it. So I think the problem for the people that emphasize deregulation is that they are really unable to account for these structural changes—not just policy changes by some evil characters in government. Of course, I do think they are quite evil characters in government, but they were responding to structural changes. If that’s true, then no attempt to reregulate could possibly work in a new world of globalized production and finance.
responding to arguments that think re-regulating the finance sector is the answer
When I speak of neoliberalism, I’m talking about a package of policies—if you were going to date it, the transformations begin in China in 1978, and accompany the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain in 1979, and Ronald Reagan in the U.S. in 1980—where, under the banner of rolling back socialism and the welfare state and letting markets reign supreme again, they cut back social service spending dramatically. They privatized state-run utilities, industries, and so on. And they attacked the power of unions. In the British case the battle over the coalmines was crucial in terms of rolling back the unions and driving down the wage levels that workers in the North can command.
That’s the first side of the neoliberal agenda. The second is the attempt to impose enormous hardship on the Global South—to use the debt crisis, which comes to a head with the recession on 1980–82, to go in and essentially rewrite the rules of the game in the Global South through structural adjustment programs orchestrated by the International Monetary Fund and to some degree the World Bank. Where they literally go and say, “You have $450 million in debt that you could never possibly pay with your little economy; well, guess what? You can have new loans that will allow you to make your payments, we’ll lend you the money, but you’re going to have to do all the things that I’ve just described and worse. You have to lay off 20 percent of all public employees. You must get rid of any subsidies for fuel and food for the poor. You must massively privatize, you must open up your financial industries, so that Western banks can come in and essentially gobble them up.”
That offensive against labor in the North and against the peoples of the Global South generally did lay the basis for a new wave of capitalist expansion. They boosted profits by cannibalizing the South on one hand and by driving down wages in the North on the other. And then they began to relocate production facilities to low-wage zones of the South.
a nice accessible + broad definition of neoliberalism. saving in case i want to share
[...] When we talk about financialization, all we’re really talking about is that the provision of a larger share of all goods and services involve financial transactions—more of education, healthcare, housing is provided through the market and through credit markets in particular—and that more of the profits made from the production of goods and services are staying in the hands of the financial sector. In fact the financial sector’s share of profits rose from about 10 percent of profits some thirty years ago to 40 percent in the last few years. So what financialization really means is that financial transactions are becoming more and more prominent in everyday life and they are becoming more and more lucrative, more and more profitable.
basic def of financialisation that may come in handy
UH: It’s to the benefit of the employers of service workers. What’s happened is that the service industries have become more and more Taylorized, in order to maximize the productivity of service workers. The time they spend on eachtask has to be minimized. The tasks become more and more routinized, more and more speeded up. You can talk to anybody who works in a call center and they’ll tell you what the pressure is to keep the length of the calls down, to deal with as many calls a possible, to meet performance targets, et cetera. Now the way that that is done, the time that is saved hasn’t just disappeared into nowhere. It’s been transferred onto the consumer, so paid time has been turned into unpaid time.
The same thing has happened in supermarkets. In the early years of the twentieth century lots and lots of people worked in retailing and they stood behind counters and literally waited on people. They stood there with their aprons on doing nothing until a customer came along and when a customer came along, they said, “What do you want, Madam?” and then bagged up the vegetables, weighed them, did all the labor and handed them out and it was actually physically delivered by a kid on a bike. In my childhood in Britain in the 1950s you’d be sent down to the greengrocers with an order, and then later that afternoon a boy would come along on a bike and deliver it all.
Now all that labor of delivering and all that waiting time and all that time spent bagging up the vegetables and so on have been transferred to the consumer. And also a lot of the cost of transport and storage that used to be born by the industry is transferred to the customer. And this they call increasing productivity—it’s pressurizing and Taylorizing the work of the paid workers, squeezing as much labor out of them as possible. But it’s also transferring all the squeezed-out labor onto all of us as consumers.
And it’s not just that it’s the amount of work has been increased, but it’s also the quality of that work has changed as well. So the kind of autonomy that people used to have in terms of how they structure their consumer experiences has increasingly been ironed out because of the Taylorization of service workers.
i see her point, but i also feel like this analysis is too negative in not recognising that the previous situation wasn't good either. sure, some work has been transferred to the consumer, but otherwise the consumer would have just been standing around waiting for the clerk
[think about this more - rebuttal-proof my take on this against pro-automation dorks]
Government plays an enormous role in manufacturing cyberspace magic because much of its legitimacy today is based on identification with this future wave. This is certainly understandable. The transfer of power from government to the private sector in the last 30 or so years and the spread of free trade, deregulation, and the creation of global trading blocs administered by private-sector-controlled bodies has diminished the authority of national governments substantially. [...] One of the few areas left for it to establish a genuine, universally recognized allure is with the new technology. [...]
[...] For Fukuyama, the freedom in liberalism and the choice in politics do not include the freedom to choose to oppose the singularity of a global market system, even to the meager extent of opposing by strengthening the nation state, let alone by daring to choose something other than capitalism. His is the freedom to choose after all the major political, economic, and social decisions have already been made.
[...] Even as myths of cyberspace reveal the unique power that people attribute to this age, these myths also mask the continuities that make the power we observe today, for example in the global market and in globe-spanning companies like Microsoft and IBM, very much a deepening and extension of old forms of power. These patterns of mutual constitution between culture and political economy, specifically between myth and power, suggest not a mythic radical disjunction from history, but a strengthening, albeit in a different mythic client, of old forms of power.
Looking at the history of technology literally puts us in our place by suggesting that rather than ending time, space, and social relations as we have known them, the rise of cyberspace amounts to just another in a series of interesting, but ultimately banal exercises in the extension of human tools. They are potentially very profound extensions, but not enough to warrant claims about the end of anything, other than the end of a chapter in a seemingly never ending story. [...]
Digitization takes place along with the process of commodification or the transformation of use to exchange or market value. The expansion of the commodity form provides what amounts to the material embodiment for digitization. It is used first and foremost to expand the commodification of information and entertainment content, enlarge markets in the audiences that take in and make use of digitized communication, and deepen the commodification of labor involved in the production, distribution and exchange of communication. Digitization takes place in the context of powerful commercial forces and also serves the advance the overall process of commodification worldwide. In other words, commercial forces deepen and extend the process of digitization because it enables them to expand the commodity form in communication. From a cultural or mythic perspective, cyberspace may be seen as the end of history, geography, and politics. But from a political economic perspective, cyberspace results from the mutual constitution of digitization and commodification.
Digitization expands the commodification of content by extending opportunities to measure and monitor, package and repackage entertainment and information. [...] Initially, commodification was based on a relatively inflexible system of delivering a batch of channels into the home and having viewers pay for the receiver and for a markup on products advertised over the air. The system did not account for different use of the medium; nor did it make any clear connection between viewing and purchasing. It amounted to a Fordist system of delivering general programming to a mass audience which was marketed to advertisers for a price per thousand viewers. Each step along the way to the digitzation of television has refined the commmodification of content, allowing for the flow to be "captured" or, more precisely, for the commodity to be measured, monitored and packaged in increasingly more specific and customised ways. [...]
really excellent
[...] Nortel's product also reflects a fundamental contradiction besetting the business of cyberspace, i.e., the conflict between he goals of building consumer confidence to turn the Internet and its users into a universal market and commodifying without government intervention whatever moves over the Internet, including personal identity [...]
basically sold consumer internet behaviour tracking software. privacy activists shut it down. its behaviour was totally sensible - it needed to "expand the commodification of its major resource, the Internet"