"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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neo-liberalism
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February 4, 2008
I've never really got a very clear picture of neo-liberalism as a mode of governance. I see the bits--- the influence of financial markets in the disciplining of state governments in Australia to run budget surpluses and reduce welfare expenditure; I saw the turn to the market; I saw the inequalities and exclusions, then the homelessness and the law and order. But the pieces never clicked into a picture for me. The cities were changed, and we changed but without us really being very conscious of the processes at work.
Well, David Harvey in Neoliberalism and the City in Studies in Social Justice (vol.1 no.1) is able to do this. He says:
If there is a conflict between the well being of financial institutions and the well being of the population, the government will choose the wellbeing of the financial institutions; to hell with the well being of the population....What this leads to is the general idea that neoliberalization, from its very inception, was about the restoration of class power and, in particular, the restoration of class power to a very privileged elite, i.e. the investment bankers and top corporate chiefs. The data show that again and again and again....We have to get a grasp of the process, where it’s coming from, who’s doing it and what’s doing it. In order to get a grasp, we have to come back to some simple strategies. If it looks like class struggle, feels like class struggle, then it is class struggle for God’s sake! And the only way you’re going to deal with it is to fight back in class struggle terms. But, I’m told by my academic friends that class is no longer a valid category.
He says that In order to do something about it I think we have to recognize that cities have always been centres of conflict, change and transformation. There are, actually, movements at work in different cities trying to change things. Cities can be crucibles where new politics can be constructed and emerge.
The biggest difficulty right now is that cities are being divided into microstates. So that even now I’m told that “the city” is not a valid concept either. My answer to that is we have to regain some notion of the city, in the way that Park is talking about, as some kind of body politic through which we can reconstruct, not only cities, but can reconstruct human relations and ourselves. We have to think about it in those terms, and we have to understand that this is a political project, a class project.
The Park reference is to Robert Park, a sociologist writing in Chicago in the 1920s, who implied that the question “what of kind of cities do we want to live in” cannot be divorced from the question of “what kind of people do we want to be,” “what kind of humanity we wish to create amongst ourselves,” and “how do we want to create it?” It is that mutual constitution of the city, of who we are and what we are. that is something
which I think it is very important to reflect upon. Particularly since we look back
historically and ask, were we ever conscious of this task? Were we ever conscious that
we were doing this? I think the answer is that as the cities changed, we changed without
us really being very conscious of it.
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| | Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:02 PM | Permalink |
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