But hey Dennis, if your case is that lemon socialism (the latest stage of crony capitalism) is now acceptable in the US, that simply doesn't discount the extreme damage being done to the world by vicious neoliberals running roughshod EVERYwhere. With the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, we've been trying to get some debate going about whether there's really a post-neoliberalism era getting started. The link here doesn't seem to work just this second, at least from my slow SA connection, but you'll see a range of views on the matter here: http://www.dhf.uu.se/FMPro?-db=pub1&-lay=weblayout&-format=/publications/DD/apubddmain.html&pubtype=development&-sortfield=pubyear&-sortorder=descend&-sortfield=pubissuewithoutcolon&-sortorder=descend&-Max=All&-Find
The intro to my chapter starts like this:
Those who declare that the Great Crash of late 2008 heralds the end of neoliberalism are not paying close enough attention, including even the Swedish Bank’s ‘Economic Nobel Prize’ laureate for 2008, Paul Krugman (2008):
Everyone’s talking about a new New Deal, for obvious reasons. In
2008, as in 1932, a long era of Republican political dominance came
to an end in the face of an economic and financial crisis that, in
voters’ minds, both discredited the [Republican] free-market
ideology and undermined its claims of competence. And for those on
the progressive side of the political spectrum, these are hopeful times.
I disagree. It is not time to go ‘postneoliberal’ in policy argumentation within the existing institutional framework, given the adverse balance of forces in the world today, even accounting for the November 2008 US election. Instead, a more realistic – and also radical – approach requires us first to humbly acknowledge that a more dangerous and painful period lies immediately ahead, because of at least three factors:
• public policy will suffer from the financial sector crisis via intense austerity, pressures associated with extreme economic volatility (such as privatisation), and a renewed lobby for micro-neoliberal strategies;
• there remains unjustified faith in the multilateral system (from Kyoto to Bretton Woods revivalism), which distracts us from the national-scale solutions that are both feasible and radical; and
• a new threat arises, in the form of relegitimised neoliberalism and imperialism, via the election of Barack Obama as US president.
South Africa and Africa offer myriad illustrations of these problems. The view I have from Durban leads me to conclude that until we change the power balance, a new era of global-scale postneoliberalism imposed from the top down is a fantasy, whether envisaged from Pretoria, Beijing, Caracas, Washington, New York or European capitals. Moving forward requires hard work, not just a capitalist crisis.
What kind of work will be needed to achieve a postneoliberal political economy, or at least the conditions that would make such possible? In two articles for the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation – ‘Perils of elite pacting’ in Critical Currents no. 1 Bond 2007a) and in ‘Linking below, across and against’ in the Development Dialogue Global Civil Society special issue (Bond 2007b) – I raised two dilemmas, respectively: first, uncoordinated, dysfunctional global intra-capitalist cohesion on major policy problems; and second, the potentials but also serious weaknesses in the countervailing World Social Forum and global justice movements. But if many would share my skepticism about global-scale solutions to problems, then what now requires elaboration (in this article) is the variety of national-scale opportunities and accomplishments on the left. This is a particularly acute time to refocus our attention on sites of genuine power, given the misleading hype about a new Bretton Woods conference under G20 (or even United Nations Financing for Development) mandates, or a 2009 Copenhagen solution to the Kyoto Protocol’s malaise.
In addressing the core problems identified above, the view from South Africa is revealing, if combined with other examples from around the world:
• to counteract the austerity, volatility and micro-neoliberalism, we need to immediately recall and reorganise campaigning associated with defence against financial degradation (cf. Altvater, this volume);
• to transcend fruitless calls for United Nations solutions to environmental, economic and geopolitical problems, we need to reconsider national state powers such as exchange controls, defaults on unrepayble debts, financial nationalisation and environmental reregulation, and the deglobalisation/decommodification strategy for basic needs goods; and
• to assist the re-delegitimisation of US power, we need to insist on a world not addicted to the US dollar and all that it represents economically, and also to provide critical (not dogmatic) support to rising anti-imperialist potentials.
These are some of the crucial strategic orientations that are required to move from an illusory postneoliberal hubris, claimed by progressives in many sites around the world, to a more durable terrain upon which firm foundations are laid for human and environmental rights as political determinants, instead of markets and profits. The rest of the article lays out the problem and pilots for the solutions (due to constraints of space, focusing on financial degradation and the relegitimation of neoliberalism and imperialism), drawing especially upon national (South African) political processes that are realistic in coming months/years.