Recensie voor:
- A short History of Neoliberalism (David Harvey)
- The Shock Doctrine (Noami Klein)
- Inside Job (Charles Ferguson)
Auteur: Sherry Ortner / Bron: http://aotcpress.com
I begin with Marshall Sahlins’s little koan because I remember being somewhat mystified myself by the shift in terminology around the year 2000, from “late capitalism” to “neoliberalism.” Writing this brief review essay has given me the opportunity to think about this, and to suggest an answer.[1] In addition I am interested in bringing together some of the grand narratives of neoliberalism on the one hand, and a range of ethnographic work on the other. I apologize in advance for a certain U.S. bias in the discussion.
From one point of view, there is no hard-and-fast distinction between late capitalism and neoliberalism, and in many ways neoliberalism is simply late capitalism made conscious, carried to extremes, and having more visible effects. The real break is generally agreed to have been between the kind of capitalism in place in the U.S. from about the 1940s to the 1970s (there is no established term for this; Lash and Urry [1987] call it “organized capitalism”), and what came after (i.e., late capitalism or neoliberalism). This break involves two somewhat interrelated shifts. The first is a shift from a so-called Fordist to post-Fordist framework defining the relationship between capital and labor: under Fordism there was a kind of truce between capital and labor, and (organized) labor did fairly well in terms of pay and job security; under post-Fordism, the truce is over, and labor has become dispensable, disposable, and replaceable. The second is a shift from a Keynesian theory of the relationship between the government and the economy, to a post-Keynesian (“neoliberal”) theory: under Keynesianism, the government was expected to play a role in regulating the economy and in sustaining social programs for the general well-being; under post-Keynesianism/neo-liberalism the government is supposed to do neither (key texts from this period were Mandel 1978, Harvey 1989, and Lash and Urry 1987).[2]
But if late capitalism and neoliberalism are two names for more or less the same set of changes in the capitalist system, the terminological shift from the first to the second signals – I suggest – a change in the story or narrative in which the changes in question are embedded. The phrase “late capitalism,” which was the dominant term in the 1980s and 90s, was embedded in a narrative of “globalization,” a concept that had positive as well as negative aspects, while “neoliberalism,” which has become the dominant term since about 2000, is embedded in a much darker narrative, a story of a crusade powered by ideology and/or greed, to tilt the world political economy even more in favor of the dominant classes and nations.
I want to make it clear that the economy known as “late capitalism” in the 80s and 90s was not really much more benign than the economy we now call “neoliberalism.” Either/both emerged from the dual turn from Fordism and Keynesianism, that is, from the metaphoric social contracts that had protected industrial labor as well as the citizenry in general from the worst excesses of capitalism. But in the 80s and 90s, accounts of late capitalism were closely tied up with “globalization,” and while globalization was certainly understood to have its down sides (labor outsourcing, unemployment, and deindustrialization[3] at the sending end; extreme labor exploitation at the receiving end, etc.), there was also a fairly influential set of arguments about the ways in which other aspects of globalization (flows of technology, information, media, etc.) could be seen as positive and liberating (see especially Appadurai 1990). Globalization remains real and indeed as multi-layered and multi-valent as ever (see Hannerz 1996; Inda and Rosaldo 2002; Tsing 2005). But neoliberalism is now embedded in a different, and more consistently dark, set of stories, to which we now turn.
NEOLIBERALISM: THE BIG PICTURE
On the recommendation of a friend, I picked up a copy of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2008) in Heathrow Airport a year or so ago, and read it on the long flight back to Los Angeles. The book gave me nightmares.
Klein tells the story, in deep and extensive detail, of an ideologically driven and often quite intentional campaign of “erasing and remaking the world” (2008:3) on the part of a network of true-believer neoliberal economists and politicians. The book reads like a John Le Carré novel, in which concealed nefarious forces seek world domination, and in fact Le Carré wrote a blurb for the cover. The sober academic might feel the book has a certain paranoid tinge, especially since it starts with some mind-control experiments funded by the American government during the Cold War. But keep reading. When Klein gets into the well-researched and highly specific details of particular cases of economic “shock therapy” that have been imposed on many countries (and some cities) of the world, with mostly disastrous results for almost everyone but the very rich and the banks, the reader comes to know in his or her gut what “neoliberalism” is all about.
By the phrase “disaster capitalism” in her title, Klein means not only the general ways in which extreme free-market capitalism is an economic disaster for many people and countries, but the more specific fact that real disasters (the debt crisis of New York City in the 70s, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Hurricane Katrina in 2005) are explicitly seen as the best breeding grounds and opportunities to transform old economic regimes into neoliberal ones. A large part of “transforming old economic regimes” involves selling off state-operated properties, goods, and institutions to private buyers, and replacing those state operated entities with private, for-profit ones. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, for example, the city of New Orleans was persuaded to sell virtually the entire public school system to private, for-profit operators. Discussing the New Orleans case as her opening example, Klein sets up the premise of the book: “I call these orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities, ‘disaster capitalism’”(p. 6).
If social or natural disasters do not offer themselves up, Klein shows convincingly that they will be manufactured, the war in Iraq being the latest case in point. Let us follow the Iraq war thread into David Harvey’s 2007 book, A Short History of Neo-Liberalism, where it is his opening example. Like Klein, Harvey sees “the management and manipulation of crises” (p. 162), whether floods, wars, or financial melt-downs, as part and parcel of establishing the neoliberal agenda. And like Klein, he provides abundant evidence to show that the war in Iraq was a crisis manufactured to “impose by main force on Iraq… a state apparatus whose fundamental mission was to facilitate conditions for profitable capital accumulation”(p. 7).
Harvey offers a clear definition of neoliberalism as a system of “accumulation by dispossession,” which has four main pillars: 1) the “privatization and commodification” of public goods; 2) “financialization,” in which any kind of good (or bad) can be turned into an instrument of economic speculation; 3) the “management and manipulation of crises” (as above); and 4) “state redistribution,” in which the state becomes an agent of the upward redistribution of wealth (159-164 passim).
Harvey places particular emphasis on the last point, the upward redistribution of wealth. He takes issue with other writers who argue that the enormous growth of social inequality since the beginnings of neoliberalization in the 1970s is an unfortunate by-product of what is otherwise a sound economic theory. Instead Harvey sees the vast enrichment of an upper class of capital owners and managers at the expense of everyone else as an intrinsic part of the neoliberal agenda: “Redistributive effects and increasing social inequality have in fact been such a persistent feature of neoliberalization as to be regarded as structural to the whole project.” (p. 16).
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