Sorry I am late, got sidetracked by yesterday’s awful events in PIttsburgh, as well as a strange pie-fight, (and then there was a personal errand) even as we are now in the throes of authoritarian neoliberalism.
I found a neat new site in Australia to share on the global neoliberal governance crisis that could “end capitalism”.
Despite the severity of the global economic crisis and the widespread aversion towards austerity policies, neoliberalism remains the dominant mode of economic governance in the world. What makes neoliberalism such a resilient mode of economic and political governance? How does neoliberalism effectively reproduce itself in the face of popular opposition?
— States of Discipline: Authoritarian Neoliberalism and the Contested Reproduction of Capitalist Order Edited by Cemal Burak Tansel
Expanding on the important work of States of Discipline, Ian Bruff and Cemal Burak Tansel have brought together an exciting special issue of Globalizations, which further develops their research agenda on ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’. Elsewhere on this blog, I have articulated concerns regarding the emergent conceptualisation of this term and here would like to return to these queries and couch them slightly differently.
[...]
There is, however, one point that we seem to keep coming back to. What is new about ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’? There is no precise definition of the term, or summation of the research pursued under its rubric. Already, four years on from its introduction in Rethinking Marxism, the term has exploded into all sorts of usages, inflections and conceptualisations, indicative of the fertility of its conceptual soil. And while its authors are at pains to stress that authoritarian neoliberalism did not simply spring out of nothing in 2007, periodisation of some kind does seem central to the novelty of the framework. Periodisation hinges on words like ‘more’ (coercion) or ‘intensification’ (of authoritarian state action) or ‘increasing’ (authoritarian entities and practices in, for example, households).
[...]
On periodisation, we note that it is important to remain aware of the tensions created by the political organisation of capitalism which continually build barriers against substantial democratisation, as well as to the fact that many instances of neoliberal reforms across the world materialised through the deployment of highly coercive state strategies. However, we also think that while it is important to take into account systemic imperatives in explaining why capitalism produces authoritarian governance, we cannot reduce all instances and forms of authoritarian practices to a general capitalist law of motion. Doing so obscures a vast spectrum of governance techniques and potential ways to resist and overcome them, and risks producing, in the process of invoking the need to produce a more accurate picture of periodisation, an ahistorical account of temporally seamless authoritarian capitalist statecraft.
—Ian Bruff and Cemal Burak Tansel, ‘Authoritarian Neoliberalism: Philosophies, Practices, Contestations’
upflow.co/…
Ian Bruff and Kathryn Starnes argue that neoliberalism, even in ‘pure’ theory texts by key intellectuals such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, has never been about free markets; states and households play a crucial role instead.
ppesydney.net/...
Needless to say, Trump and other oligarchic kleptocrats represent an authoritarian version of neoliberalism where the authoritarian aspect is supported by organized crime and as we’ve seen with offshored profit and money laundering, enabled more effectively by authoritarian governments. It is about statecraft and global trade is the means by which an “end of capitalism” might arrive. That is because free trade as an exchange should have clearing prices which simply cannot happen except as a system of unrealistic abstractions, given complex exchange rates, tariffs, transaction costs, and cultures themselves.
One example of the kind of authoritarian bait-and-switch is Trump’s attacks on trade and the WTO, among so much other chaos. Trump has couched much of his rhetoric against China, even as his overall goal is to support his Russian benefactors and serve the interests of specific capitalists. See all that idiocy over steel and aluminum tariffs. It remains as much of neoliberal policies, an intersecting battle positioning international trade lawfare of rule-making against the actual trade itself.
The discussions are about more than arcane procedures. In their papers, the EU and Canada argue for an update to global trading rules that have gone largely untouched since the organization was founded in the 1990s. Both also propose a growing use of “plurilateral,” sector-specific negotiations. Those allow smaller groups of members to circumvent the usual requirement for unanimity, thus eliminating the practical veto power that even a small WTO member can wield.
Much of the conversation is aimed directly at China, which the Trump administration complains the WTO has failed to keep in check. “China’s economic model is inconsistent with the norms of the WTO, and this is something that this institution really needs to grapple with if we are going to move forward,” says Dennis Shea, Trump’s ambassador to the organization.
The U.S. is joining Japan and the EU to draw up rules to address common complaints aimed at China over its industrial subsidies, state-owned enterprises, and theft of intellectual property. Also building is a push to tackle WTO rules that allow China to label itself a “developing” economy and gain extra time and flexibility to comply with some regulations.
Chinese officials have made it clear they will resist any U.S.-led attack. “For China, holding our feet to the fire never worked,” Ambassador Zhang Xiangchen told fellow WTO members in July. “Extortion, distortion, or demonization does no good to resolve the issues.”
One problem with Trump’s assault on the WTO is that it’s left the U.S. looking increasingly isolated. As China invests more in the institution, other countries complain of an absent U.S. leadership. They also question Washington’s motives.
[...]
Since the administration of George W. Bush, the U.S. has complained about the appellate body’s “overreach” and the plodding pace of its work, occasionally vetoing individual appointments. But Trump’s bare-knuckle tactics have caused many in Geneva to suspect the administration is trying to cripple the referee that might rule against its controversial China tariffs or its invocation of national security as justification for duties on steel, aluminum, and potentially auto imports.
In Trump and his trade czar Robert Lighthizer, a veteran of the Reagan administration’s Japan trade battles, many in Geneva also see two protectionists fighting to rewind the global trade order to the pre-WTO 1980s. As a lawyer for the U.S. steel industry for much of his career, Lighthizer was on the losing end of a series of WTO cases related to antidumping duties and the U.S.’s method of calculating punitive tariffs. He and his supporters argue that those decisions amounted to violations of U.S. sovereignty.
James Bacchus, a former Democratic congressman and onetime head of the WTO’s appellate body, says Lighthizer and his team are “a bunch of steel lawyers on the protectionist side” targeting the WTO out of spite. “They lost a number of cases they should have lost in the WTO, and now they are seeking revenge,” he says.
While the EU and some countries are suggesting changes to the appellate body’s rules to satisfy U.S. concerns, they’re also contemplating stopgap measures to keep the WTO’s dispute function from coming to a Trump-induced halt. One idea: invoking an article that allows members to resolve disputes via arbitration. Such a move might temporarily stand in for the appeals process.
www.bloomberg.com/...
Considering the chaotic approach to the international economy, the question remains as to whether neoliberalism the myth will get undermined as the actual economic chaos increases, and we might get plunged into some strange neo-feudal crisis prompting economic decay among regional economies because of interstate conflicts.
Wolfgang Streeck enumerates different signs of this decay: lower profit rate, rise of corruption and violence, financialization (profit from financial dealings parasitic upon value production).
The paradox of the financial politics of the US and the EU is that gigantic inputs of money fail to generate production since they mostly disappear in the operations of fictitious capital. This is why one should reject the standard liberal Hayekian interpretation of the exploding debt as due to the costs of welfare state: data clearly show that the bulk of it goes to feed financial capital and its profits.
Has the phasing out of capitalism begun because of the neoliberal crisis pretending that markets will bail out an imperfectly competitive system made even more self-destructive.
Presenting his new book How will capitalism end? on Monday 7 November, Wolfgang Streeck said that the world's phasing-out from capitalism might have already begun, bringing about chaos and fundamental transformations.
'An old order is dying but a new one can't be born yet. And it is a time in which the most bizarre things can happen,' he said. 'If you look at the US elections campaign, I think that is pretty close to bizarre.
In his speech, Streeck went over why he thinks capitalism will die: its constant conflict with democracy might have gone a bit too far.
His argument goes as follows: capitalism needs to expand constantly – initially it was land-grabs and colonialism, then it started expanding into homes, increasing the amount of internal activities families sell 'on the market': cleaning, ironing, taking care of babies and elderly.
But to expand, capitalism needs a stable centre and a degree legitimacy: it needs people with money to buy things, and talented people working to make somebody else rich. To do that, it needs a degree of democratic control and redistribution, so that the inequalities it produces are kept to a level many would tolerate.
But neo-liberalism is undermining democracy and eroding states' power, threatening the balance on which capitalism lived. Its own excesses, not kept at bay in the last few decades, would undermine the system as a whole.
[...]
He said our society might end in a slow regression too, maybe ending up with structures similar to feudalism, with corporations becoming independent structures in the style of feudal lords.
newint.org/...
What seems possible aside from that post-apocalyptic vision we see in Mad Max movies, is that there will be neo-feudal structures, but Trump-land does seem like a non-starter already even as Trump already resembles a character from Fury Road.