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IPPR Progressive Review 25(2)
IPPR Progressive Review 25(2)
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
IPPR Progressive Review 25(2)
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
[...] modern capitalism is always a space of fictions and myths. As explored by the German sociologist Jens Beckert, commercial activity is constantly reliant on what he terms 'fictional expectations' - that debts will be paid, business plans realised, consumers be satisfied, all in line with certain plans, promises and predictions. Advertising, for example, produces a kind of everyday mythology of what a better life might look like. Venture capitalists invest in stories about technologies and processes that may not even exist.
At a macroeconomic level, everything politicians and economic policymakers do and say is geared towards some set of assumptions and beliefs about how the economy will be in the future. Where capitalism hits some kind of crisis, or else where politicians and policymakers cease to be credible story-tellers, the opportunity arises to talk differently about the economy. New fictions can be introduced. Different ways of describing markets, firms, households and corporations become possible. This is giddying, sometimes frightening, but can also be politically liberating.
[...] an intellectual circles that pays certain lip service to the ideals of Frankfurt School, interdisciplinary quasi-Marxian inquiry, that is actually more and more doing what I call 'freestanding moral and political and legal philosophy'. As if you could talk about morality, politics and law without talking about capitalism, without talking about the economy, without talking about the institutional structure of society, about the mechanisms through which relations of domination are entrenched.
[...] one side of the story is this creeping liberalism. The other reference was to postructuralist anti-normativism, and this is a reference to a French version of critical theory. It's a group of people who are also very brilliant and extremely interesting thinkers, but who have got the idea that the normative perspective of the moral critique of society was essentially useless. And so here you have two equal and opposite ideas. One is that morality is everything and ca be done frmo on high, and the other is that it's some kind of a ruse.
What is left out of this picture? Can I tell you in two words? Left Hegelianism, which is the idea that the people's moral indignation about living in the kind of world we live in actually comes out of a historically situated experience and, when developed, can point beyond it to a better world. [...]
[...] they tended to reduce capitalism to the narrow idea of an economic system [...] capitalism is not an economy. It is something much bigger.
Think of it as something that would be as big as, say, feudalism. It's not about one sector of society, it's about how all the different sectors fit together. And that means that if you want to talk about capitalism, you can't talk about production without talking about social reproduction [...] ca't talk about the economy without talking about the political order that shapes and channels and supports the economy. [...]
[...] it's not that production has disappeared, but the geography of financialised capitalism is very different from the geography of those previous capitalisms. A huge amount of manufacturing is now located in the global South, in the so-called BRICS.
Those parts of the world used to be the hunting grounds for exactly the sort of extractivism and expropriation that you're describing. They were just places to be looted for dependent coerced labour, for land, for mineral wealth. So the form that capitalism took there was not premised so much on the exploitation of free labour power as on the expropriation of unfree, independent populations, who lacked a state to protect them.
I would describe financialised capitalism today as scrambling what used to be a sharper distinction between exploitation and expropriation. It used to be that expropriation was over there, and that was something that you did to people of colour, basically. Exploitation of the free worker, who receives the socially necessary costs of his, and maybe even his family's, own reproduction, that's whites, those are Europeans, that's over here.
These two worlds are completely scrambled now. There is plenty of exploitation over there and there's plenty of expropriation over here, and even the colour line that used to divide these things is mixed up, as workers in the global North, supposedly free workers, are often not paid the full socially necessary costs of their reproduction. They are forced to go into debt in order to meet their present day living costs.
So we have student debt, we have pay day loans we have credit cards, we have mortgages, microcredit. That's not even talking about sovereign debt, which is part of that scrambling. You can be exploited and expropriated at the same time, and most of us actually are. That strikes me as historically new. It's not that production disappears, but it's done by others.
this is SO GOOD
I would want to separate the question of the technology itself from the question of its social organisation. Who controls it? Who profits from it? Who decides how to use it, and where? These are the important social and political questions. [...] the problem with capitalism as a form of social organisation is that it completely removes all those questions from the collective self-determination of the people who have to live with this system. It just hands them off to 'market forces'.
In contrast to relying on an art of administration to set strategic goals, RAND wanted to develop a science of top-level decision-making: rigorous, formalised and technical. The technologies of management that emerged were designed to mathematically model executive decisions and ground them in apparently objective facts.
It was an ambition that drew not fro the needs of profit-maximising private industry, but from the necessity of organising and refining America's cold war strategy. RAND had been established precisely to capitalise on the innovations in statistical analysis and military planning made during the second world war. Weapons system analysis (soon renamed systems analysis) was its key development. And from this sprang many of the neoliberal managerial techniques that revolutionised the public sector over the second half of the 20th century. [...]
this is interesting. should ask Sahil more about this at the reading group next week
Indeed, the rhetoric of technocratic management and cold data analysis underpinned the depoliticisation of discussion around public sector management that we witness in the neoliberal age. By insisting governance was simply a data-led assessment of performance, responsibility for the continued failures could be passed onto lower orders, while responsibility for decision-making was reinforced at the top.
The deployment of the new management science, with its suite of metrics and decision technologies enabled a new form of control at a distance. Top managers cast themselves as neutral arbiters, who simply allocated resources to those who performed. [...] the managed competition that characterises neoliberalism belongs firmly within a framework intended to empower managers, rather than enforce 'the market'.
From the beginning, proponents of systems analysis shad doubted the ability of market-like mechanisms to adequately assess the information it was given [...]
For that reason, public sector reform was built on new techniques of costing and performance assessment, so as to compensate for the inability of the market to correctly assess needs and costs. The point was not to 'let' competition choose winners and losers. Instead top managers expected to arrive themselves at a verdict on what performance indicators really meant and what their implications should be. [...]
gotta think about this more in the context of tech's fetish of data-driven decision making
There is a difference between authority in the structure of political movements, and authority in the wider society. Symbolic prefiguring does have its place, but left movements' internal eschewal of hierarchy, the transferal of attention away from social inequality and onto organisational forms themselves, removes their ability both to critique the predicament we are in as a society and strategically to organise to do anything about it. I believe that we need to assess what it is about those traditional qualities of structure and hierarchy - both in the movement, and in politics and society - that is valuable and that we'd like to retain.
We need to separate authority from privilege, and work out ways to ensure that authority is constituted by experience, knowledge and expertise, and underpinned by democratic validation. [...] recognise the need to value everyone equally, while also recognising that people differ in their skills and levels of experience and also their time and inclination to participate.
hmmm this is interesting
The requirement for most of us to sell our labour and be ever more productive is compensated for by enabling us to increase our consumption. Given this dynamic, it makes little sense to forgo environmentally damaging behaviour when we know we have to work harder in the future regardless of our choices. Consumption is the payback for being ever-more productive at work. We often tell ourselves that we deserve the that lunch of foodstuffs sourced from hundreds of miles away, the highest high-tech gizmo, or long-haul holiday. We say: I'm working hard, I've earned it.
unbidden, that one Zizek quote springs to mind - about how you can recognise ideology but still not be impervious to its effects
A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. She writes radio plays and edits a magazine on the same subject. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.
i like how surprising this feels. a sense of the unknown