by
Catalyst
View all notes
[...] precarity gives German companies a means with which to reconfigure their cost structure. Many now operate a dualized employment structure consisting of a core of permanent employees reinforced by a periphery of precarious workers. This structure gives companies two significant advantages.19 Firstly, they can react more flexibly to the demands of a volatile world economy, since the “dismissal costs” of precarious workers are fairly marginal compared to permanent staff. Secondly, they produce conflicting interests within the workforce and therefore in the trade union movement. Precarious workers’ top priority is to enter the permanent workforce. In order to do so, they are often willing to accept relative wage restraint. Permanent workers, however, are interested in improving their working conditions and wages, and sometimes even accept bosses’ arguments justifying precarious employment to protect their more secure jobs. Finally, precarious work is deliberately used as a means of internal social discipline. Precarity constitutes a new form of the “reserve army” described by Marx in the first volume of Capital.20 In the past the unemployed filled the ranks of the capitalist reserve army, exerting an external structural pressure on wages and labor relations. Today, precarious employment internalizes this function within the firm. Though they may work inside the company, temporary workers always have one foot in unemployment. Their mere presence serves as a continual reminder to permanent staff that their futures may very well also become less secure should the company fail to meet its earnings targets.
really amazing how everybody does it, it's almost like there is a system that incentivises such a thing
By contrast, VoC’s overarching message is institutional diversity and resilience. Rather than accepting the Thatcherite teleology, Hall and Soskice suggested that contemporary capitalism had stabilized around distinct institutional models — Liberal Market Economies (LMES) such as the United States and the United Kingdom on the one hand, and Coordinated Market Economies (CMES) such as Germany and Sweden on the other. In each VoC, national-level institutions shape firm-level strategy, promoting market coordination in LMES and nonmarket coordination in CMES. While each of these models shared certain structural features, they were nonetheless appreciably different in their institutional features, and in how they faced market pressures. In addition, coordinated market economies were able to sustain the redistributive and egalitarian thrust of the welfare states. Finally, the VoC framework implied that each model had an obduracy, a staying power, because each one generated stable political coalitions around it. So while CMES and LMES generate comparable levels of economic performance, the kinder, gentler, more egalitarian versions of capitalism were capable of resisting the drift toward the neoliberal American model.
a good summary of the VoC model
Different countries have different “Trajectories of Neoliberal Transformation.” Liberalization takes place as institutional deregulation, institutional derogation, and institutional conversion, and in each country, we find a different mix of these mechanisms. Yet in all countries, liberalization involves an expansion of employer discretion. Employer discretion has three interrelated dimensions: discretion in wage determination, discretion in personnel management and work organization, and discretion in hiring and firing. In each of these areas across a wide variety of different countries, owners and managers have much more freedom to run their businesses and “manage” their employees as they please than they had a few decades ago. VoC’s focus on institutional form draws our attention away from these developments.
Baccaro and Howell place class actors and class power at the center of their argument. Since the end of the 1970s, we have witnessed “a marked shift in the balance of class power,” as “weakened and divided trade unions face resurgent and radicalized employers.”13 In making this case, Baccaro and Howell draw on the power-resources approach, which stresses the importance of the strategic context within which actors operate. Employers are fundamentally unruly, and they will seek an expansion of their discretion at the firm level and a liberalization of industrial relations institutions “unless they are constrained by the power of trade unions or the state. The pace, scale, and scope of liberalization will reflect the relative balance of power between labor and capital.” To recall, VoC scholars portray employers as both rational and strategic as well as cooperative and prosocial in their support of traditional institutions. For Baccaro and Howell, this is misleading: more often, employers play hardball with traditional institutions, transforming them from within. The state, they stress, is far from neutral in this process. On the contrary, it is “the most important agent of liberalization.” They stress that neoliberalism is “not about limiting state intervention …. It is instead about using state power to bring about (and institutionalize) a market order.”15 As Polanyi argued, interventionist states are indispensable for this project.
Hefty reminders of corporeal nature. I’m always amazed by how successfully we do in fact banish all that from daily discourse. We all have our little dramas in the bathroom most days. Something’s not quite right. You can see the way a certain bit is going. And we’ve all got our back pains and our knee aches and so on, and yet people can spend the whole day together and it’s never mentioned—everyone’s got their little cargo of health anxieties, their little cargo of entropy.
in response to: " One motive that recurs again and again is the mortality of the body—the rotting, the decaying, the baldness, the toothaches and so on."
Well, all the voices are mine. All the characters are just shards of the fractured me. That’s why I sympathize with them all, even the monsters.
yes!! in response to a prompt about him using lots of different voices
At this moment I feel obliged to acknowledge a part of life that’s not subject to fantasies or projections and doesn’t care about how anyone sees it. I’m reading from a book of Simone Weil’s letters, Waiting for God. It was introduced by Leslie Fiedler, and he says something that I like very much:
This world is the only reality available to us, and if we do not love it in all its terror, we are sure to end up loving the “imaginary,” our own dreams and self-deceits, the Utopias of the politicians, or the futile promises of future reward and consolation which the misled blasphemously call “religion.” The soul has a million dodges for protecting itself against the acceptance and love of the emptiness, that “maximum distance between God and God,” which is the universe; for the price of such acceptance and love is abysmal misery. And yet it is the only way.
[...] The novel puts people in motion and, in that, tries to render invisible things visible and deal with questions that don’t have easy answers. I think fiction is a space in which you can use naïveté to bump up against ambiguities.
[...] The novel ideally is not reducible to the political. It’s a journey toward meaning that transcends the frame of politics. Blood Meridian—just to think of a great novel that traverses the political—is not simply a book about the violent policies of the American government paying out for scalps on the Western frontier. It takes up subject matter that is inescapably political, but it builds of systemic violence a work that comes to rest only in the territory of art, where the thing built is so elegant and strange that it cannot be justified or even really explained.
[...] the track is not for staying on, it’s for leaping off and then returning to. The notion of the page-turner always seemed foreign to me. I don’t want to be sitting on the edge of my seat waiting to find out what happened next. I want to be falling off my seat in ecstatic pain because of what language and consciousness are doing on the page. With The Ask, the plot may not be up to Grisham standards, but I’m certainly trying to achieve a sense of hurtling that I think all good books have—maybe not toward a plot point, but toward something more devastating.
sam lipsyte