Plato, the 'Secret' Pythagorean?

The claim that Plato embedded, in the structure of his dialogues, a musical substructure, has been making the rounds lately (even showing up on NPR; I first saw it here). On his website, Jay Kennedy writes that:

Plato used a consistent scheme of symbols to embed a musical structure in each genuine dialogue. In short, each dialogue was divided into twelve parts. At each twelfth, i.e., at 1/12, 2/12, etc., Plato inserted passages to mark the notes of a musical scale. This regular structure resembles a known Greek scale. According to Greek musical theory, some notes in such a scale are harmonious (if they form a small whole number ratio with the twelfth note) and the others are dissonant or neutral.  Plato's symbolic passages are correlated with the relative values of the musical notes. At more harmonious notes, Plato has passages about virtue, the forms, beauty, etc.; at the more dissonant notes, there are passages about vice, negation, shame, etc. This correlation is one kind of strong evidence that the structure is a musical scale. 

This, of course, has prompted not a few skeptical responses (see the comments on Leiter's blog). The most obvious being that, since we have no access to the original scrolls (contra the implication of NPR's shorthand), the author has to make several assumptions to get this thesis off the ground, which introduces a creeping sense of a vicious circle.

I think the second most obvious problem is that it doesn't strike me that Plato was all too secret about his affinities with Pythagoreanism, in like, you know, the Phaedo or the Timeaus.

Which makes Kennedy sound like he's overstated his case. What might be an interesting technique to reopen the 'spurious works' question becomes a technique to discover Plato's secret, positive doctrine, which in turn is crammed into a solution for an already false-dilemma'd-debate about science and religion (I suppose that the reader was expecting that I would take the discussion in this direction). Kennedy again:

Today we hear much of the culture wars between believers and atheists, between those who insist our world is imbued with meaning and value and those who argue for materialism and evolution. For Plato, music was mathematical and mathematics was musical. In particular, we hear musical notes harmonising with each other when their pitches form simple ratios. For him, the perception of this beauty in music was at once the perception of a beauty inherent in mathematics. Thus mathematics and the laws governing our universe were imbued with beauty and value: they were divine. Modern scientists don't ask where their fundamental laws come from; for Plato, the beauty and order inherent in mathematical law meant its source was divine (a Pythagorean version of modern deism). Plato may light a middle way through today's culture wars.  

I don't know exactly where to start with this, but telling people that a mathematical structure underlies the universe (imagine the looks on the faces of today's fundamentalist Christians...) isn't a solution to that debate, because the debate is about legitimating a social sense of normativity. The religious claim that normativity is derived from faith in some objective (though 'revealed' value), while the New Atheists claim that normativity can be derived from science. Despite their differences, both sides avoid granting that people make their own history in conditions that they have not chosen, that political praxis and social struggle enact as much normativity as we're going to get (see also this article by Ronald Aronson). As we know, and Jacques Ranciere never tires of reminding us, Plato wasn't too keen on that.

Is the Dalai Lama a Mean Theocrat?

The Dalai Lama is viewed internationally as a hero and saintly man. This exiled leader of Tibet certainly has a charismatic smile. He has spiritual authority over Tibetans and heads the exile government of Tibet located in India. Tibet has been occupied and controlled by China since 1951.

The Dalai Lama will have his birthday July 6. He has spent most of his life working to get his country's sovereignty back. The Free Tibet website states, "Across the world people will be freely and publicly celebrating the Dalai Lama’s 75th birthday, but in Tibet people are unable to do so without risking terrible punishment. They cannot even pray openly for his long life or burn incense to mark his birthday, as is traditional." The irony is that the Dalai Lama currently enacts the same draconian punishment against Dorje Shugden worshipers. The Western Shugden Society's website says, "In March 1996, in an aggressive and threatening manner, the Dalai Lama stated that there would be a forceful implementation of the ban against those who persisted in the practice of Dorje Shugden....This persecution has been enforced since 1996 and still continues."

This 1998 Swiss Television documentary reveals an unambiguous despotism by the Dalai Lama. In no way does his behavior somehow validate China's occupation of Tibet. It also does not justify China's treatment of Tibetans. Yet, it does deconstruct the Western fantasy regarding Tibet's legacy of mystic feudalism. A theocracy is a theocracy.

Part 1 of 3 (I am only posting two clips)

Part 3 of 3.

David Harvey Animated

I know that Joshua is usually our go-to guy for the weekend Youtube videos (and he should have something up this weekend as well), but the RSA (Royal Society of Arts) Animate has created an animated version of one of David Harvey's recent talks.

I'm sure, as we've been reading through A Brief History of Neoliberalism, that not a few readers have wondered, when confronted with passages such as...

Nevertheless, these configurations of political economy remained difficult to map, although the totality of their relations are typically now referred to as neoliberalism, a concept that encompasses the aforementioned compression of time-space, the conservative counterrevolution that captured state power in various metropoles in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the postmodernization (if I can be permitted such a term) of culture.

  ...if there wasn't some kind of animated précis of the material. And now there is. 

The video jumps at a few crucial moments (where you just know that Harvey's going to start talking about the character of the 'spatial fix,' etc.) but it does summarize the advantages of Marxist analysis, and it does so with a bit of humor.

"A Brief History of Neoliberalism," Chapter 3

Let's face it: the more prominent contemporary continental philosophers have not attempted  too many in-depth analyses of the functions of the neoliberal state form. Given that they are often focused on revitalizing a theory of the subject in our cynical and consensual times, and given that talk about seizing state power evokes whispers about Lenin or Stalin-- that is, authoritarianism-- this makes sense. Nevertheless, it also makes sense that a theory of collective subjectivity should say something about what we are up against, about the interaction of the state and capital in what David Harvey calls neoliberal governance.[1]

Hardt and Negri have already shown us the wrong direction; recall in the heady days when so many people were reading Empire, how misguided their celebration of the end of big government was even then, which they attempted to rectify in Multitude.

Since then, Zizek has taken some interest in delineating the relationship between the state and capital, but he has been unusually tentative. When talking about the use of patents to generate profit through rents, in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, he writes:

Perhaps therein resides the fundamental "contradiction" of today's "postmodern" capitalism: while its logic is de-regulatory, "anti-statal," nomadic, deterritorializing, and so on, its key tendency to the "becoming-rent-of-profit" signals a strengthening of the role of the state whose regulatory function is ever more omnipresent (p. 145).[2]

The general point about rent extraction is correct, but it's addled with enough Deleuzian jargon and inverted commas that its impact is completely muted. I've annotated this passage in my copy; it says that Zizek could straighten this out if he spent more time reading up on political economy rather than Chesterton, Paul, etc. [3] Which is why we're now reading through the third chapter of David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

Probably part of the provisional character of the philosophical analysis of the neoliberal state is derived from its pragmatic variability. While the neoliberal state is relatively simple to define in theory, neoliberal governance often departs from the theoretical template. If we accept what I will call Harvey's 'class power thesis': (neoliberalism is a political project to restore class power), then these pragmatic departures should be expected.

In its theoretical form the state would promote individual choice through the guarantees of property rights, free trade, free markets, and rule of law. Individual choice is contrasted with state decision making, and in all cases-- theoretically-- the interaction of and competition between individuals in the private sphere/market is held to be more efficient and productive than public decision making (of course, more efficient and productive for what end?). The 'free choice' of the individual-- even if this is the legal fiction of the business or corporation as individual-- is "regarded as a fundamental good" (p. 64). Hence neoliberals are "assiduous" when it comes to implementing the privatization of public goods and the deregulation of markets (what, following Harvey, we've called forcing open markets), and they exhibit strong preferences for juridical resolution of individual-social conflicts rather than democratic or parliamentarian means.

Even in theory several contradictions and tensions are present. Harvey notes that neoliberalism has some theoretical difficulty when confronted with monopoly power, market failures (especially regarding environmentalism) that are often conjured away with questionable assumptions, and a fetish regarding the 'technological fix' for all problems (do I have to mention BP here?), even if technology is in some cases socially disruptive.  Nevertheless, these tensions have often been turned to pecuniary advantages through temporary fixes. Rather than resolving crises, neoliberalism provokes them:

There is an inner connection, therefore, between technological dynamism, instability, dissolution of social solidarities, environmental degradation, deindustrialization, rapid shifts in time-space relations, speculative bubbles, and the general tendency towards crisis formation within capitalism (p. 69).

Rather than interpret this situation as an accident, the class power thesis grasps these connections as means for the redistribution of wealth. Even crises, as Harvey discusses in Chapter 4, serve as a mode of redistribution.

In practice, neoliberal governance exhibits two fundamental biases that show how decisions favoring class power trump the theoretical template. First, when faced with a decision between 'fostering' a 'good business' or 'good investment' climate and labor or environmental concerns, neoliberal governance chooses in favor of business and investment. Not that on all levels these decisions are specifically made with class motives behind them. Rather neoliberal political economy is structured to coerce competition between cities, regions, countries; so while not all decisions need exhibit class motive (often at the local levels they are made to preserve a collapsing set of social relationships), the structure does.

Second, neoliberal states "typically favour the integrity of the financial system and the solvency of financial institutions over the well-being of the population or environmental quality" (p. 71). 

The neoliberal reliance (or is this a fetish too?) upon monetarism and the integrity of money means that neoliberal governance "cannot tolerate any massive financial defaults even when it is the financial institutions that have made the bad decision" (p. 73). This is a particularly perverse bias. From a theoretical perspective, the neoliberal ought to hold individual investors responsible for their bad choices, just as neoliberals would want to force people to be responsible for their actions and well-being, their health care, education, pension, etc. As Harvey notes, some "fundamentalist-minded" neoliberals argue that organizations that protect investors, such as the IMF, should be abolished. But they don't prevail over pragmatics Their failure is not unexpected if one uses class analysis.

The protection of finance also benefits the upper class at the expense of the public. Domestically, the general populace is forced to bear the burden of financial failure, just as it happened, most recently, in the 2008 bailout. Since this burden is shifted through the state-- that is, as public debt-- it also constrains future deficit spending on public goods that benefit the majority. [4] Internationally, finance-protection-- brokered through the IMF-- is used to transfer wealth from the global south to the global north through austerity measures,  debt repayment, and the removal of barriers to the flow of goods and capital /foreign investment (although the reverse does not hold).

Of course, the neoliberal response to the movement of organized labor and forms of social solidarity is, as we've already seen, the exception to the rule. One of the prime difficulties of confronting neoliberalism is that it uses competition between regions and improvements in communication and investment flow to break social solidarity. Capital accumulation benefits from uneven geographical development. Even if labor is able to move to regions with better pay and greater benefits, the state can still manage this movement through restricting immigration, or increasing it.

In addition, the state, with its monopoly on violence, can curb certain forms of "redistribution through criminal violence" (what a great phrase) through incarceration (p. 48). It is difficult to ignore both the tendency toward surveillance and incarceration as social policy over the last few decades, especially in the United States. While Harvey does not discuss these social transformations in detail, one of the purposes of reading Harvey is to establish the features of neoliberal pragmatics before turning to how it interacts with other social institutions.

Next Week: We will be working through at least Chapters 4-6.

Notes

1. On 'governance': Harvey writes that one of the pronounced features of neoliberalism is the shift from government ("state power on its own") to governance ("a broader configuration of state and key elements in civil society"). I think this distinction is useful as long as that we add the phrase "... which includes the redistribution of state resources, and transfer of state functions, to private corporations." See p. 77.

2. "Becoming-rent" is discussed in more depth in Christian Marazzi's accessible (although marred by some typographical errors) The Violence of Financial Capitalism. Trans. Kristina Lebeveda (Semiotext(e), 2010), 44-66.

3. Since I'm on the topic, has anybody else noticed how Zizek hardly references Lacan in First as Tragedy? Is this the case in Living in the End of Times as well? Matt, I'm asking you!

4. Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew (Metropolitan Books, 2008) argues that neoconservatives deliberately misgovern in order to later justify privatizing government functions.

White man armed by state compares plight to that of African Americans under Jim Crow laws; courageous white middle class woman has his back.

http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2010/06/04/dnt.coffee.shop.bans.cop.kgw.html

"A Brief history of Neoliberalism", Chapter 2

Neoliberalization being in the most general terms a re-distribution of wealth from the poor to the very rich, Harvey asks in Chapter 2 how exactly such a blatantly unjust process could have been pulled off. The answer is fairly simple when looking at countries like Chile and Argentina: labour leaders, community organizers, socialist politicians, etc, were jailed, tortured and assassinated by police and military. Demonstrators and strikers were beaten, killed, and terrorized. Social wealth and infrastructure were sold off, in short, under truncheon blows and at gunpoint.

But what about the United States and Britain, where neoliberalism "had to be accomplished by democratic means"[39]? Harvey argues that the success of neoliberalism (i.e. from the point of view of the rich) was prepared in these countries by a construction of consent; this implied gaining hegemony over, mobilizing and manipulating what Gramsci calls "common sense", defined not as that which is sensible, but merely as "the sense held in common" [Ibid.]. Cultural and traditional beliefs, values and fears were employed, in short, to "mask other realities" - namely, the brute economic facts of post-Fordist capital accumulation and the dismantling of social institutions to further line the pockets of the wealthy [Ibid.]. Neoliberalism employed ideological tools especially where existing social mores, traditions and institutions posed barriers to neoliberalization by brute force alone.

This is not to say that Reagan and Thatcher failed to use bribery, threat and an increasingly militarized police to great effect. Rather, it is to point out that existing values were also manipulated in such a way as to render the great majority of the American and English populations blind and complicit to the looting of their own hard-earned social infrastructures. Take for instance the ideal of personal freedoms, which, many Americans flatter themselves has long been a hallmark of their country. As Harvey points out, "Any political movement that holds individual freedoms to be sacrosanct is vulnerable to incorporation into the neoliberal fold" [41]. This is because at the level of personal property rights and freedoms, neoliberalism delivers (that is, to the rich and to a certain strata of corrupt labour); moreover, through its media it aggressively drives home the point that there are no other personal freedoms worthy of the name.

The real coup pulled off by neoliberalism with respect to "common sense", however, was to separate the ideal of personal freedoms, i.e. property freedoms, from that of social justice (whereas, for instance in May 68 in France as well as other left-libertarian crests of history, these formed an ideological knot). The ideology of personal freedoms, divorced from social justice, naturally became a bulwark against state intervention in the economy. Note that corporations are considered persons; therefore the personal freedoms of, to take a contemporary example, BP, serve as a legal and ideological barrier to the idea that the company owes anything to anyone for what it has extracted, and the resultant environmental costs. The success of neoliberalism in organizing "common sense" in this way accounts for the ubiquitous and totally bizarre images of poor Americans marching in the streets for their right to not be able to afford cancer treatments. It also accounts for the dominant perception that property destruction by militants (and cops disguised as militants) at the Toronto G20 convergence was violence par excellence, whereas beatings, unlawful detentions and sexual assaults by police officers against peaceful protesters were largely ignored by mainstream media and roundly praised by all levels of Canada's (increasingly neoliberal) government.

As regards what might be called the North American scene, two points especially are noteworthy here: so-called "postmodernism" and Reagan's organization of a Christian conservative "moral majority" to back the GOP. The first, which comprises a kind of cynical-radical chic, Harvey devastatingly critiques in his The Condition of Postmodernity (required reading for anyone dabbling in the often polluted waters of continental theory). Postmodernism as Harvey reads it is an ideology of personal property rights and the "freedom" to pursue petty, amoral pleasures (Coke or Pepsi? Gay porn or straight? You see?? You're free!!!). This hedonistic ideology has hamstrung or at least significantly confused a substantial section of what would otherwise be the radical youth; therefore neoliberalism has proven "more than a little compatible" with it [50]. The flipside of postmodernism is, of course, the organization of the Christian Right. By grafting "family values" onto an economic programme destructive of the very roots of healthy family life among the poor, Reagan ensured the support of those who would have had the most to gain from his deposal. (It should of course also be underscored that the Democrats, who would otherwise represent a cultural and social counter-pressure to the GOP, have long since been compromised to the core. Chances of election under neoliberalism are slim to nil barring deals with the corporate devil, as it were.)

The story in Britain was much the same - strike breaking, bait-and switch maneuvering, selling off bits and pieces of the social safety net - but it's notable that Thatcher's approval was in the dumps prior to the Falklands/Malvinas war. Reagan and other neoliberal leaders were not slow in taking Thatcher's cue; when things look bad for the neoliberal state, organize a war against a country which can hardly defend itself, and be sure to mobilize as much fear and national pride as possible. This is a model we have inherited, with terrible consequences.

Harvey is sure to underscore the failure of the Left to beat the neoliberals at their game in terms of the "common sense" factor. They lacked an adequate response, but also a positive programme. This underscores that the educational and, dare I say it, propagandistic wing of the new social movements has its work cut out for it. But what about Obama, and his audacity of hope? Can't he be called on to save us? Here is what Harvey has to say: "[The genius of Reagan and Thatcher] was to create a legacy and a tradition that tangled subsequent politicians in a web of constraints from which they could not easily escape. Those who followed, like Clinton and Blair [and, evidently, Obama], could do little more than continue the good work of neoliberalization, whether they liked it or not" [63].

"A Brief History of Neoliberalism," Chapter 1

As I mentioned in the prefatory remarks for our reading of A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey sets out to analyze a central contradiction of neoliberalism, between the theoretical project to reorganize capitalism around and extension and intensification of property rights, free markets (especially in the financial sector) and free trade, and a political project to re-establish conducive conditions for capital accumulation and for re-entrenching elite economic power (p. 19).

Harvey argues that the theoretical side of neoliberalism primarily functions as a justification of the larger project. In fact, he calls it a "utopian" project because it is never perfectly realized (as its own proponents often say whenever a neoliberal state runs into economic trouble), but rather implemented through "a very complex process entailing multiple determinations and not a little chaos and confusion" (p. 9). Nevertheless, he argues that the redistribution of wealth to the upper classes of a given country is a consistent structural feature neoliberalism. 

The first chapter introduces both the history of the theoretical project and the political project.* As a theoretical project, neoliberalism emerged after nearly three decades on the ideological fringes as a solution to the crisis of embedded liberalism in the 1970s. Embedded liberalism-- usually called Keynsianism-- was the result of a class compromise between a strong working class and the bourgeois state, and was designed to stave off crises the crises that beset 1930s capitalism. To maintain this compromise the domestic policy of a liberal state aimed for full employment, social welfare (in health care, education, etc.) and economic growth (Harvey does not here discuss how the foreign policies of these same states sometimes involved hyper-exploitation of  the populations of colonial, post-colonial, clientele and/or lesser developed locales). Through the 1950s and 1960s embedded liberalism produced high levels of economic growth, but it was unable to resolve the crises of stagflation in the 1970s, compounded by the war in Vietnam and the OPEC oil embargo.

Neoliberalism, historically speaking and not because its era is over, was, when not implemented by military means (as in Chile or Argentina), proposed as one solution to this crisis. It had "long been lurking in the wings of public policy" (p. 19), and can be traced back to the formation of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, a group that seemed to view any hint of solidarity beyond meeting in exclusive clubs to be a dire threat to civilization itself. The proponents of neoliberalism did, however, possess a sense of purpose, gradually integrating the financial resources of the elite with their intellectual resources, creating think tanks, promoting their work in academia, and networking. By 1976, two neoliberal theorists-- Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman-- had won Nobel prizes in economics, and by 1980 its proponents had found the sympathetic ears of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Neoliberalism secured its place in public policy through an ideological process, but Harvey does not define it through its own credo. Instead, he analyzes the policy transformations that came were implemented by its proponents. I won't be rehearsing many of the details, but there are several features that define the turn to neoliberalism. First: a monetary policy "designed to quell inflation no matter what the consequences might be for employment" (p. 23). However, as Harvey argues, monetarism is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for neoliberalism (p. 24). The implementation of neoliberalism took place--takes place-- in other areas of government policy, such as  privatization and deregulation (forcing new markets open...), shifting the tax burden from the rich to the general populace, and the use of austerity measures to break down the power of social solidarity and union organization. And, most importantly, neoliberalization "has meant... the financialization of everything" (p. 33).

Where financialization has led, I've discussed before in a review of Paul Mason's Meltdown (although the review doesn't cover the 'efforts' of the IMF and WTO in enforcing austerity measures while protecting financial instruments).

Harvey;s account of financialization, unlike Mason, has a much stronger class character. I've used, like Harvey, references to the "upper class" or the "elite" instead of the classic term "bourgeoisie" because one of the features of neoliberalism is the reconfiguration of ruling class power. Along with the usual state-corporate clientelism, the rise of information technology and biotechnology, finance is at the forefront of neoliberalism. The 'financialization of everything' has transformed many Western companies from industrial producers to financial operations (like General Motors...). Harvey writes that

One substantial core of rising class power under neoliberalism lies...with the CEOs, the key operators on corporate boards, and the leaders in the financial, legal, and technical apparatuses that surround this inner sanctum of capitalist activity (p. 33).

In addition, Harvey views financialization as integral to the process and not, as many traditional and Marxists economists view it, as parasitical on real (i.e. industrial) production.

Regarding the working class, however, we largely see (described in Chapter 2) the decomposition of working class power, and disarray in the recomposition of organized resistance to neoliberalism on an international scale. This being said, not all is lost; we do know that there are consistent and local attempts to resist and refuse the exploitation of neoliberalism. The final chapter of A Brief History of Neoliberalism closes with a  general discussion of "Freedom's Prospect."

We've got several chapters to read before getting there. Over the next two chapters we will see how neoliberalism captured hegemony in intellectual, cultural, and political discourses, and how it captures and transforms the state. Through the transformation of state structures neoliberalism could establish its 'inevitability' both ideologically and structurally, "to create a legacy and a tradition that tangled subsequent politicians in a web of constraints from which they could not easily escape" (p. 63).

Later this week: Matt reading Chapter 2, and I will read Chapter 3.

*The usual caveats apply here about the distinction of theory and practice being an analytic tool, etc.

Alain Badiou, "Polemics"

(Verso, 2006)

Unsurprisingly, Canadian mainstream media is near unanimous in its reading of this weekend's G20 protests. The basic picture is that certain "anarchists" have created - you guessed it! - "anarchy" in Toronto, and are now in the process of being duly rounded up and punished. Democracy [sic] is saved! The Ottawa Sun, not fit to line an animal's cage, has even gone so far as to paint the clashes solely in terms of poor, defenceless riot cops harrassed by rocks, molotovs and bottles of urine. No mention of police wading into the supposedly safe "free speech zone", clubbing and pepper-spraying peaceful protesters.

To be clear: there has been violence on both sides. What I take issue with is that whereas property destruction by certain militant factions is almost universally denounced as "violence" or "terrorism" (including from the mouths of certain yellow labour representatives), actual violence against the bodies of those exercising their democratic rights has proven almost unthinkable as such. The headline of a local daily newspaper sums it up nicely: "Law and disorder". You can guess that the "law" has had no part in fomenting the disorder.

In the wake of the protests, the task ahead of the radical Left is legal defence, solidarity actions, community organization, and the dissemination of accurate information contra the mainstream media consensus. But additionally, some of us may also take solace in and gather strength from theory. I've had this argument too many times to repeat here, but I can personally attest to the bewildering and psychologically damaging effects of being at odds with and shut down by the armed wing of the dominant "democratic" situation. Theory is not exactly therapy, but it can be a means of getting one's bearings when this is desperately needed. It is of course not its own end. But in a situation of general police action, there is, I suggest, perhaps no better well at which to quench one's thirst than the writings of Alain Badiou.

Badiou's Polemics reminds us that representative "democratic" politics is not a cuddly affair. It is underpinned by violence and abject fear. His entire philosophical project is, in effect, an attempt to think the coming-to-be of that which is unthinkable within the representative-democratic situation - precisely, a properly communist politics from below - and to delineate an ethics of militancy which defines the human being in positive terms. Badiou promotes such virtues as courage, fidelity and endurance, leaving off with the dominant ethics of eternal guilt in face of the Other. I would suggest that a reading of Polemics will help those in North America to think their situation, despite the fact that there's much in the book that is slightly dated and mostly pertinent to French politics. One finds painstaking dissections of the Paris Commune and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a philosophical engagement with zionism and anti-semitism, and perhaps most importantly for the present, an attempt to think a radical subject-position relative to the dominant consensus.

Organize your communities; but read and think deeply, and as if your lives depended on it.

A Short Thought on the G20

When looking at the cops, the protesters, and the politicians, I think we ought to keep in mind Bertolt Brecht's well-known quip:

What is robbing a bank compared with founding a bank?

A Preface to Reading "A Brief History of Neoliberalism"

One of the central difficulties late capitalism, Fredric Jameson writes in his Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), is cognitively mapping its systematic features. Late capitalism-- what we now typically call neoliberalism-- is, he argues, defined by the compression of time to the point of ahistoricism (although this feature of capitalism was already grasped by Marx in his critique of the Robinson Crusoe stories of classical economists), and the suppression of distance and the saturation of space. This metaphor of 'mapping' itself, however, is paradoxical, because it does not mean that we have recourse to maps to trace this geography, but the very activity of mapping politics in time and space requires grasping the specific reconfigurations of the relationships between history, geography, and political economy in late capitalism.

Jameson's argument, was directed against the anti-systematizing tendencies of the North American reception of postmodernism, the proponents of which often refused to render accounts of politics, culture, and the like, in a systematic totality. His claim-- relevant then as much as now-- is that the variety cultural expressions in late capitalism can only be understood historically as a totality, that accounting for a large set of particular variations is not incompatible with an analysis of the global configurations of political economy.

Nevertheless, these configurations of political economy remained difficult to map, although the totality of their relations are typically now referred to as neoliberalism, a concept that encompasses the aforementioned compression of time-space, the conservative counterrevolution that captured state power in various metropoles in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the postmodernization (if I can be permitted such a term) of culture. Even this brief description itself betrays the difficulty I'm trying to get at; it is as if each feature of neoliberalism suggests a number of exceptions, throwing us back on the problem of particularity and totality: how is it possible to conceptualize neoliberalism as both a set of particular, concrete variations through the history of the past 30 years and across geographical space, and as an increasingly global, and globalized, totality?

Starting next week, Matt and I will be re-reading one of most clear and concise responses to the preceding questions, David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005). There are two reasons why this book remains, for me, a constant reference point as I slowly work out the relationships between philosophy, political economy, and praxis.

First, Harvey's arguments and expressions are clear. His terminological choices reflect his conceptual commitments, and cast a critical eye on 'common sense' phrases. Where so many have been inclined to fight over the extent of deregulation or privatization, or whether they are desirable, which locks the debate into a specific neoliberal conceptual field, Harvey re-politicizes the terms. So, for instance, talking about the role of the state in neoliberal theory, he argues that its partisans aren't against the state in toto, they are against a particular kind of state. They don't mind if the state engages in deficit spending for military action, of if it preserves the integrity of money or private property, nor if the state forces open new markets:

if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary (2).

What is this state action? What is so commonly referred to as privatization or deregulation becomes, in Harvey's terms, a use of state power to accomplish political-economical goals.

This kind of analysis is possible because Harvey does not just analyze neoliberalism as a form of reorganizing  and compressing time-space through capitalism (which is a worth contribution alone), he also, second, argues that this form of capitalism is a way to redistribute wealth upwards; that is, Harvey argues that neoliberalism is a political project to reinforce elite class power, through both structural and ideological means. The force of his argument, I think, is the result of his reference to class analysis...

But we're getting ahead of ourselves here. We're only at the 'Preface,' which introduces the reader to neoliberlism and its history. Therefore, I would like to invite our readers to take their copy down from the shelf and read along, and comment, over the next few weeks as we analyze A Brief History of Neoliberalism chapter by chapter, as we discover the continued relevance of Marxist analysis in the so-called era after neoliberalism.

Next week: Chapters 1-3.

Update: I'm usually on top of these things, but I forgot to mention that Matt reviewed Harvey's Spaces of Global Capitalism" back in April.