Like Boltanski and Chiapello in France (whom however he does not cite), Harvey develops the theme of a growing split, from the late sixties onward, between the traditional working-class concern for social justice and the New Left concern for individual emancipation and ?full recognition and expression of particular identities? (the split between what the French sociologists call ?critique sociale? and ?critique artiste?). With a sense for the complexity of the issues, he remarks that ?neoliberalism did not create these distinctions, but it could easily exploit, if not foment, them.? And he goes on to say that ?Neoliberalization required both politically and economically the construction of a neoliberal market-based populist culture of differentiated consumerism and individual libertarianism? (p. 42). Various kinds of extremely interesting evidence are then adduced to suggest that corporate foundations and think tanks - via works such as Nozick's Anarchy State and Utopia - made deliberate attempts at the inculcation of market-oriented variations on counter-cultural values. Harvey's strongest gesture in the direction of cultural critique comes during his account of the bankruptcy of New York City - which he characterizes as a departure point for the entire process of neoliberalization. Faced with a fiscal crisis, ?a powerful cabal of investment bankers (led by Walter Wriston of Citibank) refused to roll over the debt and pushed the city into technical bankruptcy? (p. 45). What followed was an assertion of upper-class power over a city that had engaged, from the bankers' viewpoint, in excessive provision of public services and excessive concessions to unions. To prove the deliberate nature of this disciplinary project, Harvey quotes then-president Ford's Treasury Secretary, William Simon, who maintained that the terms of any bail-out should be ?so punitive, the overall experience so painful, that no city, no political subdivision would ever be tempted to go down that road again? (p. 46). But what would the new road look like? All those involved in cultural production should pay close critical attention to the way Harvey depicts the restructuring of New York City by the bankers:
``The creation of a 'good business climate' was a priority. This meant using public resources to build appropriate infrastructures for business (particularly in telecommunications) coupled with subsidies and tax incentives for capitalist enterprises. Corporate welfare substituted for people welfare. The city's elite institutions were mobilized to sell the image of the city as a cultural centre and tourist destination (inventing the famous logo 'I Love New York'). The ruling elites moved, often fractiously, to support the opening up of the cultural field to all manner of diverse cosmopolitan currents. The narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity became the leitmotif of bourgeois urban culture.
Artistic freedom and artistic license, promoted by the city's powerful cultural institutions, led, in effect, to the neoliberalization of culture. 'Delirious New York' (to use Rem Koolhaas's memorable phrase) erased the collective memory of democratic New York. The city's elites acceded, though not without a struggle, to the demand for lifestyle diversification (including those attached to sexual preference and gender) and increasing consumer niche choices (in areas such as cultural production). New York became the epicentre of postmodern intellectual and cultural production.... Working-class and immigrant New York was thrust back into the shadows, to be ravaged by racism and a crack cocaine epidemic of epic proportions in the 1980s that left many young people either dead, incarcerated, or homeless, only to be bludgeoned again by the AIDS epidemic that carried over into the 1990s'' (p. 47).
Did the currency of the word ?class? fall at the very moment when a commodified culture began to rise on the postmodern communications markets? What's being sketched out in the passage above is a specific urban history of the way that cultural production was subordinated to financialization, in a process that ultimately leads to emergence of what Saskia Sassen calls the ?global cities.? But to what extent can the debilitation of the Left - or the sundering of ?artists' critique? from ?social critique? - really be ascribed to the corporate instrumentalization of earlier counter-cultural experiments in a Nietzschean transvaluation of values? And to what degree could such a trend be simply reversed, and a trait drawn through both the desire for emancipation and the cultural strategies of identity and gender politics - as Harvey and many other Marxist theorists seems at times to suggest or wish?
These are complex questions which demand thorough examination and strategic responses from everyone whose cultural sympathies lie anywhere near the New Left (and particularly from those who, like myself, do not think that any simple reversal of history is possible). The problem, as Harvey's further analysis indicates, is that for the Democratic Party to ever shift the balance away from the current neoliberal/neoconservative hegemony, and for it to become credible again as a valid opposition, it would have to expand its popular base, even while shrugging off the dependency on powerful financial interests into which it was pushed by the Republican's ability to easily command huge electoral budgets. Such a transformation, which has clearly become urgent, would require reinforcement from every direction - including art and culture. The situation is not so dissimilar in many European countries. To generate the resolve needed to form cross-class alliances and to seriously oppose the agenda that now traverses both sides of the mainstream political spectrum, would middle-class cultural producers and ?symbolic analysts? (to use Robert Reich's phrase) not have to give up every kind of tacit complicity with the corporate program? But could they gain the strength to do this by denying key issues that emerged in the 1960s, and attempting instead to reconfigure an address to working classes that have been so extensively targeted by a reactionary nationalist rhetoric?
The other major cultural issue that arises from consideration of the ways that neoliberal theory translates into popular common sense has to do with the emergence of the neoconservative position, first in the US, but now with an increasing carry-over into Europe, via the repressive strategies of figures such as Blair, Sarkozy, etc. Here, Harvey follows Polanyi in suggesting that neoliberalism - the contemporary form of Polanyi's ?laissez-faire economics? - can only resort to authoritarianism, once its own reduction of all human relationships to contracts has definitively undermined the solidarities and reciprocities that make social life viable. Neoconservativism, he notes, ?has reshaped neoliberal practice in two fundamental respects: first, in its concern for order as an answer to the chaos of individual interests, and second, in its concern for an overweening morality as the necessary social glue to keep the body politic secure in the face of internal and external dangers.... The neoconservatives therefore emphasize militarization as an answer to the chaos of individual interests? (p. 82). It goes without saying that they make an equally strong appeal to religion, to ethnic or even racial identity and indeed to nationalism (which in most countries, for the time being, is still distinct from militarization). How can these appeals be countered? What kinds of beliefs and daily practices - or ?structures of feeling,? as Raymond Williams might have said - can achieve greater persuasive force than the recourse to traditional values, with all the emotion and adherence they can so readily evoke? What sort of political invention would it take to reorient a society which seems to have embarked on a suicidal path to national, commercial and religious heaven?
Early on in his precise and powerful book, Harvey points out how ?common sense? can be ?profoundly misleading, obfuscating or disguising real problems under cultural prejudices.- He goes on to quote Gramsci's conclusion that ?political questions become 'insoluble' when 'disguised as cultural ones'? (p. 39). This was already the position he had adopted in The Condition of Postmodernity, in 1990. His latest study, imbued both with the urgency of looming crisis and with the renewed strength of the oppositional movements that have gathered since that time, goes a good deal further in marshaling the arguments that can convince even the most reticent reader that what we have seen in the last three decades is effectively a restoration of upper-class power, which now demands a concerted response. How can those arguments be translated into what he calls ?good sense? - that is, a reasoned and deeply felt conviction that a more egalitarian and less drastically exploitative way of organizing social relations is both possible and necessary? What transformation in the common language would be required to bring a word like ?class? back to the lips of those who have been so concretely disempowered by the upper classes?
In its Greek etymology, the word ?scandal? designates a stumbling block, a hidden stone on the path before you. Later it came to mean an offense to religion by the reprehensible behavior of a cleric, before taking on the modern sense of a revelation causing damage to a private reputation. Today's secular clerks - who don't call themselves intellectuals anymore, but often prefer the name of cultural producers - have become ashamed to use the word ?class? in conversation with those who, like them, occupy the uncertain middle ranks of society, and wish neither to fall into necessity, nor to be tripped up on a possible path to comfort and ease. But the disproportionate power of those in the highest ranks now appears as a radical offense to any belief in a viable future on the shared ground of this planet. For all the precision and power of its arguments, David Harvey's book may not yet have invented the complex cultural and affective languages - or the renewed understandings of Polanyi's notion of ?freedom in a complex society? - that could help entire populations forge broad alliances against the nakedly clear effects of ruling-class power, in the world of Halliburton, BP, Fidelity Investments, Elf-Total-Fina, Bill Gates, Siemens, Baron Seillières, Carlos Slim, Bloomberg's, Union des Banques Suisses, Telefonica, and all the other proper names that have gradually found their place on our mental maps. But this succinctly written book asserts - with scandalous good sense - the intensifying need and desire for that new tongue.