Tag Archive for 'political ideologies'

Living capitalism freely

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by
Mark
5 months, 1 week ago
in Authoritarianism, Culture, International, Life, Markets, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology
. 52 Comments

Steven Shaviro, who blogs at The Pinocchio Theory, has written an excellent piece on the Global Financial Crisis. Shaviro captures how capitalism is lived – and how it produces a demeanour of fatalism. He emphasises the way in which the economy constructs itself as natural, and in so doing, acts as something which is quite inimical to the freedom it is supposed to foster.

There are some juicy quotes from Hayek in Shaviro’s piece. The market, Hayek wrote, subjects “man” [sic] to “the bitter necessity of submitting himself to rules he does not like in order to maintain himself against competing groups.” We are “force[d] to be free”, according to Hayek.

Shaviro’s is the sort of critique of neo-liberalism Kevin Rudd would never write.

It makes clear the deep continuity between the project of neo-liberals such as Hayek and the Enlightenment urge to control and discipline – to remake new humans who are ‘rational’, and thus ‘free’. It would be interesting to compare the sorts of dispositions and attitudes which underlie this logic of governmentality with those of Soviet Marxism.

The real question here is the one of our relation, as individuals, to the economy as a whole — or to the so-called “free market.” We are told that the market is made of individuals just like us. We are told that it consists in nothing more, and nothing less, than the summation of billions of decisions made by billions of autonomous individuals, each of us making choices for ourselves. And yet, we actually experience the market as a vast, ineluctable force. It feels like something entirely alien to us, over which we have no power, and from which there can be no appeal. This is why economic catastrophe is something invisible, impalpable: it affects every aspect of our lives, yet we are unable to “see” it in itself, to discern it as an actual force, behind its all-too-evident effects.

Continue reading ‘Living capitalism freely’

Economics and ideology: u r doin it wrong!

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 2 months ago
in Economics, Markets, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology
. 18 Comments

This post is a sequel to my previous one on economic faith and doctrines. When reflecting further about the ideological construction of “oppressive state intervention” and some of the comments made on the thread, I kept thinking about the fact that the liberal economy needs an enormous amount of state intervention and support to function, and that a social democratic perspective can be non-statist. One of the easiest elisions to make in thinking about politics and the economy is to equate anti-statism with the right and statism with the left. The two binaries do not map on to each other so simply. In fact, it’s a sure sign of thinking that’s really far too prone to ideology to assume that they do.

So I was happy to find this point rather elegantly made by the Canadian academic Leo Panitch:

Continue reading ‘Economics and ideology: u r doin it wrong!’

Is neoliberalism finished?

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 5 months ago
in China, Developing world, Economics, Foreign Elections, Foreign policy, International, Markets, Philosophy, Politics, Sociology, USA and War
. 74 Comments

The question’s in the air at the moment. In the Australian blogosphere, John Quiggin thinks the financial markets crisis has killed it off, while Nicholas Gruen is (rightly in my view) more skeptical. [In response to commenters, Quiggin goes on in another post to define what he means by neoliberalism.]

From my (sociological) point of view, the shorter answer to the question is – no.

In fact, I think the way the question’s posed reflects a number of category mistakes. Continue reading ‘Is neoliberalism finished?’

On the futility of arguing about Hayek, or what’s in a name?

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 6 months ago
in Education, Ethics, History, International, Philosophy, Policy, Politics and Sociology
. 108 Comments

Club Troppo’s Don Arthur and I started a correspondence by email about some of the issues I raised in my post the other day about neo-liberalism and thinktanks, and the very rapid Blairisation of the Rudd/Gillard agenda (which has certainly become even more evident in the interim with the latest instalment in the “education revolution” and the momentum that some liberal and libertarian bloggers are correct to assume is building up towards vouchers in all forms of education). I don’t want to try to represent Don’s side of the discussion, but I did want to talk about a few things that I put to him, and thank him for the very stimulating opportunity to clarify my thoughts.

One argument that’s often raised by liberals in denying that talk of neoliberalism makes sense is the claim that the state is still large as a percentage of GDP, that Howard did redistribution, and so on. That’s a point that Andrew Norton often makes, in claiming that there’s a degree of social democratic consensus still embodied in the governing practices of the Australian state. John Quiggin has made the same, or a very similar point, from a different political position. There’s some truth in this, but only some. No, Margaret Thatcher didn’t succeed in rolling back the state very far. But expecting her to is to make a false assumption – that the ideological objective only has meaning insofar as it achieves its ostensible aims. What she was actually doing was building up a stronger state in some areas to contain the damage from its withdrawal from some areas. You need a strong state to attack the weak, basically.

Continue reading ‘On the futility of arguing about Hayek, or what’s in a name?’

Advance Australia Fair?

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 6 months ago
in Anzac Day, Australiana, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Ethics, History, Indigenous, Markets, Media, Nationalism, Philosophy and Politics
. 23 Comments

At one stage, having read a lecture by Mark Davis in Overland, I thought his new book was going to be an update of Gangland. I’ve just started reading The Land of Plenty: Australia in the 2000s (expect a full review in due course), but it appears very much as if at some point in the course of writing, it turned into an update of the late Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country. Certainly the idea that we’re coasting on our luck, riding on the back of another resources boom, is both enough to set in train a comparison between the Australia of 1964 and the nation of 2008 and to recognise a powerful structure of feeling which Kevin07 articulated all the way to the Lodge.

One of the more interesting arguments Davis makes in the opening chapter is that “being Australian is an ethical project”. He quotes Nettie Palmer, writing in Meanjin in 1944:

A new country that is merely an imitation of its predecessors, that discovers no new thoughts or forms, that contributes nothing to the meaning of the world – would it deserve to exist?

In a way, the dislocations and the sense of insecurity Davis seeks to trace over the past three decades reflect a disjunction between the nation and the state – a disjunction embodied in the casual bipartisanship of the major parties, even if some of the wellsprings of everyday doubt and pain were harnessed by Kevin Rudd and Labor in 2007. If one were to compare political ideologies, both conservatism and social democracy – in quite different ways – want to see the state as a vehicle for creating meanings and symbols, for fostering a shared and collective culture. One looks back, the other forward, but it’s characteristic of both to regard governance as something like steering a ship – while one may tack often, there’s an intention of heading in a determined direction.

Liberalisms of almost all stripes are quite hostile to the idea of a collective vision realised through the state. Continue reading ‘Advance Australia Fair?’