On Sep 30, 2007, at 7:10 AM, John Gulick wrote:
> This piece had me arching my eyebrows until I got to the end, where
> Bello kicked it in to neo-Marxist gear and began to delineate the
> impossibilities of a global new deal, given the abiding
> contradicition between world accumulation and inter-imperial
> competition.
What inter-imperial competition? There's not really much of it that I can see. Things looked little dicey in the run-up to the Iraq war, but Sarkozy's France and Merkel's Germany don't seem all that much at odds with Bush's America now. And things are likely to get better if Hillary takes Bush's place.
> But I do have one comment... isn't his model of "neoconservative
> neoliberalism" more or less universally applicable to wherever
> WashCon has been implemented?
What is the Bush admin's economic foreign policy? I don't see much of one. There's nothing comparable to the days when Rubin and Summers were running around the world persuading countries to liberalize their financial markets. We've got Henry "Hank" Paulson trying to get China to open up and revalue, but that's not going very far, at least for now.
> That is, with precious few exceptions (are there ANY?) it is
> usually an ideological cover for advancing the interests of a
> fraction of capital or particular capitals with favorable access to
> the state and hence the various favors the state can dole out on
> behalf of those fractions and/or interests? I don't have a clearly
> formulated thesis but it seems to me that the critical literature
> on neo-liberalism (which continues to be churned out despite the
> passing of neo-liberalism's heyday some ten years ago) too often
> implicitly presumes that Friedmanite doctrine is actually followed
> in practice. One merit of Harvey's book is that he doesn't fall
> into this trap.
What fraction of capital was the Clinton admin acting on behalf of? Finance, for sure, but that's commanding heights stuff, and it's where the U.S. has a strong competitive advantage. Agribusiness and Hollywood, ditto. But add those up, and a few more, and we're talking a pretty big formation. The Bush admin seems more narrowly focused on oil and weaponry, but that's post-neoliberal.
What aspects of Harvey you thinking of?
Doug