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[...] 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
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).
[...] while for some European states internal and external conflicts were a laboratory for new and more productive forms of debt financing, African leaders tended to raise the capital needed to finance authority by selling the means of production, both human and ecological. Historians have located the origins of this strategy in Africa’s relative labour shortage: unable to control subordinates who could easily disappear into the vast tracts of unoccupied land when things got tough, rulers saw forms of ‘outsourced exploitation’, notably the transatlantic slave trade, as an attractive alternative. [...]
[...] while the powerful cultivated their image as a fruitful bough, the gifts made to underlings in these performances were in reality a tiny fraction of the whole, obscuring the fact that most wealth was being funnelled offshore. [...] the African trajectory differs in an important respect from the classic capitalist one. Here the alienation of public debt incurred from foreign loans involved re-shipping it offshore—and thus undermining capital formation. Though it is ignored or pushed to the margins by conventional Africanist accounts, capital flight provides a far more elegant and empirically robust explanation for the failure of accumulation in Sub-Saharan Africa than ‘neo-patrimonialism’ or ‘the politics of the belly’. [...]
[...] scholarship cannot isolate Congo from the dynamics of global capitalism. This is not just a matter of resource privatization and giveaway mineral rents, oiled by multi-million-dollar kickbacks. The channels for funnelling value away from on-shore jurisdictions into a netherworld of ‘treasure islands’ benefit from a state-of-the-art grid that Western elites have a big stake in leaving safely buried. The various tax havens are ‘spider’s webs’ with, at their centre, northern financial hubs like Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland or the USA. The British Virgin Islands, which seem to be the major destination for much of the DRC’s recent capital flight, have a very strong connection to the Square Mile. The flows that have helped sap capital formation in Africa’s giant involve a considerable shift of economic surplus from the many to the few, and from South to North.
[...] You could see the same kind of reaction for our three-person hunger strike in the park by the Government Offices. The same cry went up: ‘Protect the students!’ The belief is that adults should protect young people. Actually, it was we who were protecting them, not the other way around.
powerful stuff
(Joshua Wong speaking)
[...] Our aim is to make society more equal, after we have made it more liberal.
(Joshua Wong speaking)
earlier in the interview he talks about HS students not really caring about social issues ... the most they want is democracy, and for society to become more liberal, but they don't necessarily care about equality
[...] The Chief Executive system has not worked well up to now: if one accepts the CE’s two-fold accountability, to the Central People’s Government and to the Hong Kong population, only one of these—loyalty to Beijing—has an enforcement mechanism, and thus tends to override the other. [...]
on the "one country, two systems" setup in HK
Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement brought together disparate themes in an original way: it combined Occupy Wall Street’s critique of economic hegemony with a form of legal-constitutionalist resistance against an authoritarian state; a call for democracy with an aspiration to a post-modern, post-national identity, going beyond a politics of recognition. It could be argued that these features mirror China’s own contradictions, as a nominally socialist country practicing unbridled crony capitalism, and as a cultural empire dressed up as a jingoistic nation-state. Hong Kong’s simultaneous embrace of democracy and post-national identity and its critique of crony capitalism stand in opposition to China on all counts. [...]
Issues, players, concern, efforts, platforms, dialogue, ground . . . ‘The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness’, wrote Orwell in ‘Politics and the English Language’, and his words are as true today as they were in 1946. The Bank stresses the importance of what it’s saying—key, global, innovative, enlightened—but its words are hopelessly opaque. What is it really trying to say—or to hide?