[lbo-talk] Firesale of the Empire

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Fri Dec 18 11:14:46 PST 2009


It is quite likely I'm reading Harvey so that he says what I want him to say, that what he says confirms my sense of things. I read all of Harvey's neoliberalism stuff as a variation on a theme by the Condition of Postmodernity argument that treating post-Fordism as if it didn't have maybe even a majority of Fordist and/or pre-Fordist production in it, or post-modernity as if there weren't a condition built on an overweaning modernism... in short, neoliberalism represents neo-liberalism - an romantic and ideological effort by capital to return to a bygone era... to desocialize, dedemocratize and reallocate surplus value.

This, I think, goes with much of what many folks have argued here on the list about Democrats... no matter what moderate-to-social democratic spin they put on national and international political economic processes, it is still capitalism we're dealing with and the Democrats are inextricably bourgois in their interests and ideology.

I'd be willing to argue that things like house-flipping, derivatives, etc. ARE the zeitgeist of the neoliberal era because it is the spirit of the time. I'd have to go back and read Harvey closely but it seems to me that neoliberals drank their own Kool-aid, along with the idealist silliness of our living in a post-industrial, post-materialist world. But, in fact, it is worse than that. The terrain of acquisitions and mergers - an integral part of business and investment under neoliberalism has been explicitly about the liquidization of fixed capital stocks. These liquid assets are then reinvested in derivatives, hedge funds and beyond. The problem, as I think everyone here agrees, is that this zeitgeist of dematerialization/liquidification is destructive of the production of value while simultaneously representing and elite parasitism relative to the post-War pattern of wealth distribution.

All this aside, I'll say it again, I may be reading Harvey to say what I think he oughta be saying rather than what he is actually saying... AND, I may misunderstand the situation deeply enough to want him to be saying the wrong thing.

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 12:21 PM, Eric Beck <ersatzdog at gmail.com> wrote:


> On 12/17/09, Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Am/was I wrong? It feels to me that some here are taking very specific
> > discourses focused on the politics of neoliberalization and extending
> them
> > farther than Harvey would if asked.
>
> I can't say you are wrong, but I don't read him that way. Harvey
> nominally ties accumulation by dispossession to (re)production, but he
> also makes it clear that under neoliberalism the former is easily
> dominant (I think he says this in the chapter on ABD in The New
> Imperialism). Finance provides the link, and so for Harvey
> house-flipping, in which poor people are fleeced of their savings, is
> the zeitgeist of the era. Apparently those people labor for nothing.
>
> Oh, and the pithiest definition that I can recall Harvey giving of
> both ABD and neoliberalism is this: The “main substantive achievement
> of neoliberalization [...] has been to redistribute, rather than to
> generate, wealth and income.” The dominant capitalist mode rearranges
> value, it doesn't create it.
>
> While I disagree strongly with Michael that primitive accumulation is
> a localized, one-off act -- I think it is very much a process, never
> done with for good, that always affects production -- I can't follow
> Harvey in saying that the current era mostly feeds off the labors of
> the previous era. That why in this article
> <http://www.rhizomes.net/issue19/beck.html> I called ABD an
> end-of-history narrative for anticapitalists.
>
> None of this means that I don't think financialization isn't important
> -- it is, and it's why I think Randy Martin's book on it describes the
> present better than anything Harvey's done -- or that I'm convinced
> labor is the origin of all value, but Harvey's way of doing it strikes
> me as all wrong.
>
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