Alex at Splintering Bone Ashes asks a good question in a recent post entitled Xenonomics and Capital Unbound:
A question remains open as to the current state of play with the unfolding trans-global financial deleveraging and subsequent mass-governmental bank buyout: Is this a genuinely unprecedented situation or simply the latest facet of business-as-usual, a crisis in the system, or merely a crisis of the system? The pessimism of the intellect suggests the latter, another arresting of the genuinely alien development of the capital-virus, in favour of the maintaining of a stable form. The optimism of the will though suggests that there might be the basis in the opprobrium that finance capital is now attracting (low level intensity but extremely broad in terms of numbers) for some kind of new proletarian leftist movement.
Reed Hundt in Tech Policy and the Financial Crisis at Talking Point Memo's Cafe makes a good point about free market ideology that holds Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem:
This free-market ideology is precisely half right. But a 50% score on this test is not good enough. The ideology correctly sees government failures. But it ignores market failures.
The economist Arthur Pigou gets credit for developing the idea of a market failure early inthe 20th Century. Generations of economists and public policy students learned about externalities, such as when a factory gets to put the costs of its air pollution on the people who live downwind. The Pigouvian answer was for the government to correct the market failure, such as by making the polluter pay for the effects of the pollution. The health, safety, and consumer regulations of the 1960s and 1970s were designed to correct for such market failures.
By the 1980s, think tanks such as the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation were emphasizing the related idea of a "government failure." The general point is important and true -- sometimes there are market failures, but the failures of government regulation can be even larger. In such cases, the market failures are not worth correcting. A related point came from the "public choice" movement, led by Gordon Tullock and Nobel Prize economist James Buchanan, Jr. They criticized the view that regulation was a public-spirited effort to correct for market failures. Instead, they described regulation as "rent seeking," an attempt by interest groups to use the power of the state to enrich themselves. The idea of government failure thus began as a useful correction for over-enthusiastic regulators.
In Philosophy and Real Politics Raymond Geuss defends a philosophy that is in, and concerned with, the everyday political world as opposed to a philosophy as ideal theory. In the Introduction he sketches four interrelated theses that structure the former conception of philosophy.
First, political philosophy must be realist. That means, roughly speaking, that it must start from and be concerned in the first instance not with how people ought ideally (or ought “rationally”) to act, what they ought to desire, or value, the kind of people they ought to be, etc., but, rather, with the way the social, economic, political, etc., institutions actually operate in some society at some given time, and what really does move human beings to act in given circumstances.
about action and the contexts of action, not about mere beliefs or propositions. In many situations agents’ beliefs can be very important—for instance, knowing what another agent believes is often a relevant bit of information if one wants to anticipate how that agent can be expected to act—but sometimes agents do not immediately act on beliefs they hold. In either case the study of politics is primarily the study of actions and only secondarily of beliefs that might be in one way or another connected to action.
historically located: it has to do with humans interacting in institutional contexts that change over time, and the study of politics must reflect this fact...If one thinks that understanding one’s world is a minimal precondition to having sensible human desires and projects, history is not going to be dispensable. The more important one thinks it is to act, the more this will be the case. For as long, at least, as human societies continue to change, we won’t escape history.
Finally, the fourth assumption that lies behind this essay is that politics is:
more like the exercise of a craft or art, than like traditional conceptions of what happens when a theory is applied. It requires the deployment of skills and forms of judgment that cannot easily be imparted by simple speech, that cannot be reliably codified or routinised, and that do not come automatically with the mastery of certain theories.
For Hegel, philosophy’s task is the rational comprehension of the historical present whilst reason while reason, has the incumbent task of bringing the ‘growing contradiction’ of our age to concepts.It aims to grasp conflict, contradiction, and hence historical change, which are fundamental features of the modern world, or modernity. Contradiction is a real force operating in history; is a force moved by its own inner development.
Angelico Nuzzo in Dialectical Reason and Necessary Conflict: Understanding and the Nature of Terror in Cosmos and History says:
The tension catalyzed in contradiction is the mark of an epoch in which all certainty and security has been shattered and the only hope of survival lies in the acceptance of transformation, in the capacity of facing the negativity in which life is immersed. Knowledge by itself cannot effect transformation although it may be one of the conditions thereof. Rather, Hegel seems to suggest that transformation lies somehow in the nature of things, in the inner contradiction that animates the present time once the obstacles to its radicalization and free development are removed and contradiction is let grow to its extreme consequences without being fixated into an unmoved ‘absolute
Now the normality of habit does not allow contradiction to ‘grow’ and hence to produce the ‘need’ for it to be overcome and refuted. Contradiction cannot be pinpointed; it is so diffuse (or globalized, as it were) that being everywhere it is really nowhere. Thus, very generally, I shall characterize our age in opposition to Hegel’s as an age that aims at normalizing conflict and change by neutralizing them into habituation, and at dissolving them by making them all-pervasive. This, in turn, is clearly a corollary of the process of globalization in which contradictions are progressively erased (not solved) and flattened out for the sake of the common, homogenizing imperative of economic profit.
Robert Reich asks 'What brought on the economic meltdown of 2008? He explores the answers:
Besides the bursting of the housing bubble, Wall Street's malfeasance and non-feasance, and Washington's massive failure to oversee Wall Street, fingers are also being pointed at average Americans. Some of them took on mortgages they couldn't afford, of course, but we're also hearing a more basic theme that goes something like this: For too long, Americans have been living beyond our means. We went too deeply into debt. And now we're paying the inevitable price. The "living beyond our means" argument... is technically correct. Over the last fifteen years, average household debt has soared to record levels, and the typical American family has taken on more of debt than it can safely manage. That became crystal clear when the housing bubble burst and home prices fell, eliminating easy home equity loans and refinancings.
The first such mechanism was to send more women into paid work. Most women streamed into the workforce in the 1970s less because new professional opportunities opened up to them than because they had to prop up family incomes....Yet there is a limit to how many mothers can maintain paying jobs.So Americans turned to a second way of spending beyond their hourly wages. They worked more hours. The typical American now works more each year than he or she did three decades ago. Americans became veritable workaholics, putting in 350 more hours a year than the average European, more even than the notoriously industrious Japanese.Yet there is also a limit to how many hours Americans can put into work, so Americans turned to a third coping mechanism. They began to borrow. With housing prices rising briskly through the 1990s and even faster from 2002 to 2006, they turned their homes into piggy banks. Now, with the bursting of the housing bubble, Americans are reaching the end of their ability to borrow and lenders have reached the end of their capacity to lend.
Reich says that the only way to keep the economy going over the long run is to increase the real earnings of middle- and lower-middle-class Americans by investing in the productivity of working people, enabling families to afford health insurance and have access to good schools and higher education, while also rebuilding infrastructure and investing in the clean energy technologies of the future.
Bryan Gould in The Guardian makes the following comment on the way the financial crisis seen the unwilling slaughter of sacred cows of economics. Gone is the view that:
that governments have very limited capacity to manage the economy. Any pretension to extend that power will not only be self-defeating but also – because of the distorting effect on the proper and unfettered operation of the free market – positively damaging. Governments, according to this view, should limit themselves to those aims – such as the defence of the realm and maintaining the value of the currency – that are their proper concern.
government is a major player in the economy, both as an actor in its own right and as a coordinator of other actors and a maker of policy. It should accept, and perhaps seek and welcome, a responsibility for the performance of the economy – a performance to be measured not just according to monetary criteria but according to real phenomena such as output, employment and investment. The economy will perform better if the power of government is harnessed to the needs and interests of industry, and if government undertakes those functions – such as the provision of major infrastructure – that cannot easily be carried out by private industry.
What we have here is neo-liberalism and social democracy. From the perspective of governmentality both forms of the relationship between state and economy are sets of liberal political techniques which are saturated with forms of reasoning and knowledge that aim to shape the conduct of a population. Both are forms of political rationality of government.
On 6 June 2008 the Australian Government appointed a Review Board to conduct an independent and transparent review of the first 12 months of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER) to assess its progress in both improving the safety and wellbeing of children and laying the basis for a sustainable and better future for residents of remote communities in the Northern Territory.
The background to the federal intervention was June 21 2007 when the then prime minister John Howard and indigenous affairs minister Mal Brough, announced the Northern Territory Emergency Response citing the Little Children are Sacred report into the sexual abuse of Aboriginal children. The protection of children from abuse was the catalyst for the Intervention and it received in principle bipartisan support from Kevin Rudd, the then Leader of the Opposition.
The intervention was contentious for a number of reasons. The Howard government proposed to suspend the Racial Discrimination Act for the duration of the intervention because the welfare quarantining measures applied only to indigenous Australians.
Health checks that would have been carried out in the normal course of events by local clinics were administered instead by fly-in fly-out medicos. Though some children received follow-up treatment they then returned to the Third World conditions in their communities that had caused them to contract ear, nose and throat illnesses in the first place. It was also argued that the intervention diminished its own effectiveness through its failure to constructively engage in dialogue and consultation with the Aboriginal people it was intended to help.
The questions the Review Board was seeking to answer included:
What is working?
What isn’t working?
How is each NTER measure performing and how should each be taken forward?
What progress has there been in improving the safety and well–being of Indigenous children?
Will the suite of measures deliver the intended results?
Have there been any unintended consequences?
Will NTER lay the basis for a sustainable and better future for residents of remote communities and town camps in the NT?
What alternative measures should be considered?
Are there other ways of working that would better address the circumstances facing remote communities and town camps?
Public submissions were called for and a report (http://www.nterreview.gov.au/report.htm) has been issued. The Report says that Review Board has heard widespread, if qualified, community support for many NTER measures.
1. Aboriginal people welcome police stations in communities previously dependent on periodic patrols. They want to work cooperatively with police to build greater security and stability in their homes.
2. There is support for measures designed to reduce alcohol-related violence, to increase the quality and availability of housing, to improve the health and wellbeing of communities, to advance early learning and education leading to productive and satisfying employment—these matters are uncontentious.
3. The benefits of income management are being increasingly experienced. Its compulsory, blanket imposition continues to be resisted, but the measure is capable of being reformed and improved. People who do not wish to participate should be free to leave the scheme. It should be available on a voluntary basis and should be supported by services to improve financial literacy.
On the downside the Report says that there is a strong sense of injustice that Aboriginal people and their culture have been seen as exclusively responsible for problems within their communities. These problems have arisen from decades of cumulative neglect by governments in failing to provide the most basic standards of health, housing, education and ancillary services enjoyed by the wider Australian community.
Secondly support for the positive potential of NTER measures has been dampened and delayed by the manner in which they were imposed. The Intervention diminished its own effectiveness through its failure to engage constructively with the Aboriginal people it was intended to help. The Report says that the most essential element in moving forward is for government to re-engage with the Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory.
The Report recommends that NTER should continue and that there is a need for a bipartisan commitment to a sustained national effort, and a sustained commitment of the funds necessary, to provide Aboriginal children and families in these communities with a level of safety and wellbeing
In an editorial in the latest issue of BorderlandsVijay Devadas & Jane Mummery say that they
are not suggesting that concepts such as flows and networks do not mark the condition of the present; indeed they do, but at the same time, there is also, against this current, other markers of the present: borders, differentiated zones and spaces, and immobility....The neoliberal condition, thus paradoxically, while championing the opening up of borders — political, economic, social and cultural — is simultaneously contingent upon the formation of borders....The production of borders in other words is becoming much more acute and much more entrenched.
Over at Monthly Review William M Tab in The Four Crises of the Contemporary World Capitalist System says that these are:
the financial crisis, the loss of relative power by the United States, the rise of other centers of accumulation, and resource depletion and ecological crisis.The U.S. strategy remains to project military power to control oil and other resources. The other wing of the eagle is relying on appropriation of surplus through financial vehicles, but this hardly exhausts its tactics. It also demands the enforcement of protected monopoly rents by international patent and licensing regimes to protect intangible property rights, from Microsoft Windows to Big Pharma claiming ownership of the human genome. The extension of property rights and the enclosing of the scientific commons need to be (and are being) opposed by developing countries, which pay exorbitant licensing fees and are not allowed to use what in the past would be common knowledge inheritance.