Below are the concluding paragraphs from Doug's paper, "On Panitch & Gindin and American decline," published in Jacobin last fall.
***** And now onto the psychological realm. I've been thinking lately about what we might call the neoliberal self. Gone seems to be the classically bourgeois executive ego, a relatively stable, if sometimes anal-retentive structure to guide the subject through life. In its place is a much more fragmented thing, adaptable to a world of unstable employment and volatile financial markets-but unable to think seriously about long-term things like social cohesion or, god save us, climate change.
The material basis of this transformation looks to be the replacement of the relationship by the transaction, to steal the language of corporate governance. Workers are told to run their lives like little entrepreneurs, moving from one ill-paying short-term job to another, or maybe holding two or three at a time. And at the top of the society, we see the erosion of the planning function, and any rationality beyond the most crudely instrumental. It's been a long time since I read Polanyi, but this seems to me a perspective on the social rot produced by market-regulated societies, from the macro level of investment down to the socially shaped psychology of how we think and feel. I don't see how the imperium can long survive this sort of pervasive rot.
****
At the present time the U.S. is carrying out an extensive invasion of Africa, supporting utterly ruthless regimes whose only merit is their subservience to global capital in general, to U.S. policy in particular. Also Obama has now renounced in practice every single campaign pledge directed at "progressive" voters. The repressive power being built up is quite unneeded at the present, but that build up is certainly evidence of rational long-term planning on the part of our ruling elites. Also the NYT has boldly devoted several pages to publicizing Piekety's book - evidence, I should thing, of considrable confidence on the part of those same ruling elites. The NYT has never betrated the interests of U.S. capital.
"Rot" simply makes no sense in respect to capitalist society; it may or may not have been a relevant category on social orders that depended on a hereditary ruling caste (not class: see Tamas, "Telling the Truth About Class). The "decay" or self-destruction of particular capitalist families or enterprises is no threat whatever to the health of the capitalist order.
They know what they are doing - and it works.
Carrol
P.S. August 21: With the approval even of the liberal icons Sanders & Warren Israel is happily carrying out a slaughter which may yet surpass "The Final Solution" in numbers. There is widespread outrage but (considering the event) little organized response to events in Ferguson, events which underline the continuing centrality of race in maintaining the "American Empire" (or the Empire of Capital).