by
Sasha Lilley
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[...] Neoliberalism depended on drawing women into wage work, often low-wage service jobs, as falling salaries meant that the "family wage" of a single (male) wage earner could no longer support a family. [...] feminism left behind the social justice dimension of its earlier agenda to focus on women getting a leg up in the job market, breaking the glass ceiling, and finding emancipation through entry into the market. Undoubtedly this gave women a new sort of power, as members of the waged working and middle classes with the ability to act collectively in the workplace - as white- and blue-collar workers, women had a potential strength that differed from the atomized unwaged work of the home. But such priorities were no longer framed within an anticapitalist agenda or struggle, and overlapped easily with the drive to tap into a pool of labor hitherto outside of the market.
drawing on Nancy Fraser
something i just realised: how analogous is this to 'free software' getting co-opted (or overtaken, superseded, destroyed) by 'open source'? is that a useful comparison?
[...] It appears increasingly obvious that the ecological systems on which life depends cannot endure the ravages of capitalism indefinitely. To be sure, we need to guard against seeing the crises we are living through as automatically auspicious moments for radicals - after the deluge, us. Crises unleash many things, a great deal of them not the least bit amenable to the left, much less to an overarching radical vision of social transformation. Capital is in the process of resolving the crisis by imposing ever more neoliberal austerity, which ensures that the type of capitalism ahead will be a particularly unstable one. The triumphalism of capitalism, however, has crumbled away and pessimism may be lifting. The future is unwritten. One can only hope that a route out of the darkness will be navigated, where the discontents are finally able to seize control of their collective destinies.
pretty!
[....] The whole capitalist system is operated by market imperatives, the compulsions of competition, profit-maximization, and capital accumulation.
Why don't commerce or trade in goods constitute capitalism, as some might assume?
EMW: I make a distinction between market opportunities and market imperatives. And I think it’s only in capitalism that you have a system in which people are obliged, are compelled, to enter the market simply to guarantee their own existence and their own self-reproduction. There have been markets throughout history in which people have brought their surpluses to sell, but there’s never been a system before capitalism in which producers and appropriators both were absolutely dependent on the market for their most basic conditions of life and therefore compelled to follow the dictates of the market in order to sustain themselves.
What was the chain of events that helped facilitate the process of developing countries becoming beholden to institutions like the IMF and the
World Bank which dictated neoliberal policies—starting with the OPEC oil crisis of the early 1970s and the petrodollars that were produced by those countries in the Middle East that had oil?
DH: There’s a very interesting story to be told about that and I’m not sure it has been fully elaborated upon yet. With the OPEC oil price hike in 1973, a vast amount of money was being accumulated by the Saudis and other Gulf states. And then the big question was: well, what’s going to happen to that money? Now, we do know that the U.S. government was very anxious that that money be brought back to New York, to be circulated back into the global economy via the New York investment banks, and persuaded the Saudis to do that. Why the Saudis were persuaded to do it remains a bit of a mystery. We know from British intelligence sources that the U.S. was actually prepared to invade Saudi Arabia in 1973, but whether the Saudis were told: recycle the money through New York or you get invaded … who knows?
Now, the New York investment banks then had vast amounts of money. Where were they going to invest it? The economy wasn’t doing very well at all in 1974–75, as, all over, it was in depression. Citibank head Walter Wriston came up with the comment that the safest place to invest the money is in countries, because countries can’t disappear—you always know where they are. And so they started to make the money available to many countries like Argentina, Mexico—Latin America was very popular—but also places like Poland even. They lent a lot of money to those countries.
That worked out quite well for a while, but then in 1982 there was this general fiscal crisis, particularly after Volcker had raised the interest rate. What this meant was that the Mexicans who had borrowed money at 5 percent were now having to pay it back at 16 percent or 17 percent, and they found they couldn’t do it. Mexico was about to go bankrupt in 1982. That was the point at which neoliberalism kicked in. The U.S. via the International Monetary Fund and the U.S. Treasury said: we’ll bail you out, but we’ll bail you out on condition that you start to privatize and open up the country to foreign investment and start to adopt a neoliberal stance. Initially the Mexicans really didn’t do that very much, but by the time you get to 1988 they start to do it sort of big time.
But here’s the interesting thing: it’s unreasonable to think that actually the U.S. imposed neoliberalization on Mexico. What happened was that the U.S. was putting neoliberalizing pressures on Mexico and an elite inside of Mexico seized the opportunity to say: yes, that’s what we want. So it was a coalition between the elite in Mexico and the U.S. Treasury/IMF that put together the kind of neoliberalization package that came to Mexico in the late 1980s. And actually, if you look at the pattern, it’s very rare for there to be a straight imposition of neoliberalizing policies through the IMF or the U.S. It’s nearly alwaysan alliance between an internal elite, as it had been in Chile, and U.S. forces that put this thing together. And it’s the internal elite who are as much to blame for neoliberalization as the international institutions.
shieeet
DH: Accumulation by dispossession is, to me, a very important concept. And it doesn’t simply apply in the periphery of the global capitalist economy. For example, in Mexico, the reform of the land system there, privatizing land, has forced many peasants off the land. The result is the land has gone into few people’s hands. So you get concentration of wealth and power in agriculture in Mexico going on very fast and the creation of a landless proletariat asa result. Now, in this country we have analogous things going on in terms of what’s happening to family farming. That lot of family farmers can no longer make it and they’re being taken over by agribusiness. One of the mechanisms there, of course, is through indebtedness, that people borrow, they get into debt, they can’t pay off their debts, and in the end they have to sell out sometimes at rock bottom prices.
Accumulation by dispossession takes many local forms. I think, for example, the whole use of eminent domain in this country to dispossess people of their housing is a very good example of this. But then also we have the loss of pension rights. People who thought they had very good pensions with United Airlines suddenly find they don’t, because the company went bankrupt and then shed its pension obligations. The same thing happened through Enron and the like. So there’s a tremendous amount of dispossession of wealth and assets going on around the world. And then when you ask yourself the question, how is it, for instance, that healthcare has become less and less affordable in this country, more and more people are being dispossessed of the right to healthcare? You ask yourself the question, who is getting rich in this situation? Well, it’s those very, very small elite who are getting so much money they don’t know what to do with it. You look at the Wall Street bonuses, or something of that kind, you say, how come they’re getting bonuses of millions of dollars when people are losing their healthcare? And I want to say we have to connect those things.
[...] Has globalization become a euphemism for imperialism or are these distinct phenomena?
LP: I think one should try to retain these terms in somewhat of a separate way. I don’t think that we should transfer all the meaning that the word capitalism or global capitalism or even globalization has to the term imperialism. I think imperialism is very much a state thing. It is associated with the stage of capitalism we’re in, and its global nature, but it’s not quite the same thing.
I think globalization or global capitalism is about some of the things that Doug referred to at the beginning, this massive increase in the proportion of world gross national product that is traded internationally—the enormous flow of capital, including foreign direct investment, both of which entailed therefore the need for the flow of money for financial capital to grease the wheels of trade and foreign direct investments and of course on the basis of that, one gets a whole lot of financial capital feeding on itself. Not all of which is speculation. Some of it is risk management and so on. So you get this enormous body of financial capital at a global level, always centered primarily on Wall Street, to some extent, and the City of London. And a lot of the surplus of what is produced in the world ends up back in those places where it’s reallocated, even if it’s produced in China or wherever.
So I think globalization is a real thing and I think it’s also associated to some extent with this fourth industrial or technological revolution we’re living through—the digital revolution or the computer revolution. I don’t think it’s caused by it but it’s an element in it that is part of this process of globalization. And a lot of people point to that calling it things, like Manuel Castells does, the “network society” and so on, which may be going too far, but it’s an important element in it.
[...] 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]