Some of Carl Schmitt's ideas are currently being introduced into Australian conservatism as part of a critique of liberalism. This includes his conception of politics as the existential conflict based on the friend and enemy distinction and the ever present possibility of combat.
Liberalism, for Schmitt desires to dissolve the political, and to eliminate political violence in favour of peace and humanity. The liberal utopia is the the market that is represented by liberalism as a non-political, neutral area that peacefully generates universal prosperity. Schmitt argues that ultimately, the bourgeois liberal:
Does not want to leave the apolitical riskless private sphere. He rests in the possession of his private property, and under the justification of his possessive individualism he acts as an individual against the totality. He is a man who finds his compensation for his political nullity in the fruits of freedom and enrichment and above all in the total security of its use. Consequently he wants to be spared bravery and exempted from the danger of violent death. (The Concept of the Political, 62-3).
The debt slashers are back at work at the G20, which is normally about hot air and photo opportunities.The G20's failure to address any of the structural problems that caused the financial and economic crises of the past three years is well known, as its complete refusal to deal with the challenge of climate change.
The debt slashers cry is austerity ---fiscal discipline and lower public debt. The time for harsh cutbacks is now they say. We need to appease the financial markets they say to one another. In Europe, that fiscal consolidation --- slashing public pensions and other social spending--- means in the context of a recession, economic stagnation and unemployment not economic growth. It will shrink European economies. The way to prosperity is via austerity say the neo-liberal debt slashers.
Their target at the G20 is the US, which challenges Europe's policy of planned economic shrinkage. The Obama administration argues that deficit reduction should not be at the expense of the short-term need to stimulate growth and create jobs. Understandably, because the US recovery is running out of steam and jobs growth have been weak. So the US government wants to maintain the stimulus.
Michael Hudson in New Economic Perspectives says:
Beyond merely shrinking the economy, the neoliberal aim is to change the shape of the trajectory along which Western civilization has been moving for the past two centuries. It is nothing less than to roll back Social Security and pensions for labor, health care, education and other public spending, to dismantle the social welfare state, the Progressive Era and even classical liberalism.
Hudson says that the problem is that there is not enough economic surpluses available to pay the financial sector on its bad loans while also paying pensions and social security:
What really is causing the financial and fiscal squeeze, of course, is the fact that that government funding is now needed to compensate the financial sector for what promises to be year after year of losses as loans go bad in economies that are all loaned up and sinking into negative equity...Somebody must take a loss on the economy's bad loans – and bankers want the economy to take the loss, to "save the financial system." From the financial sector's vantage point, the economy is to be managed to preserve bank liquidity, rather than the financial system run to serve the economy. Government social spending (on everything apart from bank bailouts and financial subsidies) and disposable personal income are to be cut back to keep the debt overhead from being written down. Corporate cash flow is to be used to pay creditors, not employ more labor and make long-term capital investment.
So the financial sector is to be rescued by cutting back social spending on Social Security, health care and education, bolstered by more privatization sell-offs.
The University of East London's Crossing Conceptual Boundaries is an annual publication which seeks to present PhD work in progress within the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. (The pdf file takes a while to download).
Globalization is here to stay. It cannot be rolled back. But that does not mean that we must allow it to roll over Australian businesses and workers as happened in the 1980s and 1990s.
In The Next Globalization in Issue 10 Fall 2008 of Democracy A Journal of Ideas Robert Shapiro makes an interesting point about globalization in the American context:
globalization, and America’s responses to it, have helped drive not only the extraordinary economic progress of China and other developing nations but rapid productivity gains in the United States as well and, until very recently, healthy growth and low inflation. But there’s bad news, too. Globalization is also implicated in the historic slowdown in U.S. job creation, the flat incomes of most American working families, and the recent roller-coaster prices of many assets and commodities, from housing to oil.
In an "idea-based economy" he adds:
the only Americans who will get ahead in the coming decades will be those who can work effectively with the ideas that create value and wealth, in workplaces dense with the technologies that organize, transmit and communicate those ideas. Yet, by one recent estimate, nearly half of Americans cannot handle basic computer and Internet-based systems. The results are evident in patterns of growing inequality
Schapiro's answer is interesting and doable:
make computer- and Internet-related skills universally available, because decent-paying jobs that do not require these capacities are becoming increasingly rare. The good news is that it won’t be hard to do. In 1996, I urged the White House to support a new initiative to give grants to community colleges to keep their computer labs open and staffed in the evenings and on weekends, for any adult to walk in and receive computer and Internet training for free. It wouldn’t even cost very much–perhaps $150 million a year today–because the facilities, equipment, and instructors are already in place
In Against Despair in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas Michael Tomasky questions the progressive liberal reading of history in the US in the context of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. It is rather sobering because it involves questioning the progressive assumptions of social democracy.
Tomasky says:
Too often, when progressives think of American history, we think only of the snapshots: those glorious moments when a historic bill is signed into law, or when the great progressive leader thunderingly confronts the forces of reaction. It’s good to remember those; they are our lodestars. But they are moments. Actual history is slower, more tedious, and certainly less uplifting. It’s not for Obama’s sake, but for liberalism’s over the long haul, that we need to consider this reality and proceed in full awareness of it. It’s only by seeing this fuller picture that we can know how history actually unfolds in real time and place our present experience within that context. We don’t do nearly enough of that. Cable news and op-ed pages and websites are a kind of modern-day camera obscura, giving us an image to be sure, accurate in a way, but upside-down.
This is how it is. This is America. We were once a conservative country. But that was then. We’ve put it away. Progress–progressive progress, if you don’t mind the redundancy–was inevitable...When Reagan came, you thought: aberration. Maybe we did go a bit overboard here and there, and, let’s face it, Jimmy Carter was not an effective president. So this is a corrective. Temporary. Things will sort themselves out...three or so years ago–I started to ask myself: What if all these presumptions I grew up with were wrong? What if Reagan wasn’t an aberration? What if Roosevelt and Johnson were the aberrations?
Tomasky refers to Nick Salvatore and Jefferson Cowie paper in 2008 in the journal International Labor and Working-Class History called "The Long Exception: Rethinking the Place of the New Deal in American History", where they argue that:
on three crucial fronts–labor, race, and religion–the New Deal and the Great Society both represented abnormal (and extremely fleeting) moments of commonality in an arc of American history that otherwise bent strongly away from any notion of a common good and toward the primacy of the individual. Of the Reagan era, they wrote that "it might be more accurate to think of the ‘Reagan revolution’ as the ‘Reagan restoration,’ a return to a more sharply conservative, individualistic reading of constitutional rights and liberties prevalent before the New Deal."
Is it the same in Australia? Certainly the change to a more sustainable economy is going to be blocked by the conservative forces aligned with the Coalition, and it will encounter difficulties inherent in trying to effect this change, involve a readiness to accept half a loaf, and the regular reassurances sent to the moneyed classes that the liberals hadn’t taken over the candy store. It's going to be a mixed bag.
Jacqueline Rose ‘J’accuse’: Dreyfus in Our Times in the London Review of Books says:
The story, because of Dreyfus, so Israel, is not without some truth: what happened in France at the turn of the century was in many ways a forerunner of Vichy. But it is not the only story, and those who tell it risk blinding themselves to what Israel as the nation for the Jewish people did to the Palestinians in order to become a nation, and no less to what Israel has become. If the only lesson we learn from anti-semitism is more and more anti-semitism – of necessity, eternally, and as the core and limit of Jewish life – then we have learned nothing. A different version of the story would instead take from the Dreyfus affair a warning against an over fervent nationalism, against infallible armies raised to the level of theocratic principle, against an ethnic exclusivity that blinds a people to the other peoples of the world, and against governments that try to cover up their crimes.
As the present crisis has mutated from a banking crisis to a fiscal crisis and a sovereign debt crisis, bonuses continue to be paid, while the people of Greece and Iceland suffer huge cuts in jobs and services. Capitalism survives by purging itself of debt and loading the costs of adjustment on the weak and the poor. The financial crash of 2008 has destroyed the credibility of the financial growth model put in place after the last great capitalist crisis in the 1970s.
There is a growing public desire for critical analyses of global capitalism outside of the mainstream neoliberal consensus.David Harvey:
One of the basic pragmatic principles that emerged in the 1980s, for example, was that state power should protect financial institutions at all costs. This principle, which flew in the face of the non-interventionism that neoliberal theory prescribed, emerged from the New York City fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s. It was then extended internationally to Mexico in the debt crisis that shook the country to the core in 1982. Put crudely, the policy was: privatise profits and socialise risks; save the banks and put the screws on the people (in Mexico, for example, the standard of living of the population dropped by about a quarter in the four years after the financial bailout of 1982). The result is what is known as systemic 'moral hazard'. Banks behave badly because they do not have to be responsible for the negative consequences of high-risk behaviour. The current bailout is this same old story, only bigger and this time centred in the United States.
Harvey argues that Periodically, capitalism over-expands and overshoots, encountering limits it cannot immediately transcend. This is a system which must keep expanding by at least 3 per cent a year. What drives it is the hope of profit, and this impulse comes to shape all social relations as well as nature. During booms, capital accumulates very fast, but the amount of surplus generated becomes harder and harder to absorb. The investments that have been made in the boom fix capital in all sorts of ways, in buildings, cities, regions and countries, as well as in labour forces and ways of organising production.
After a time many of these past investments no longer yield a high return and sometimes no return at all. This is what precipitates the crisis.Capitalism survives by socialising losses and distributing gains to private hands. Harvey devotes a large part of his argument to show how this is done through the close ties of the state and finance. He calls it the state-finance nexus.
David Harvey - The Enigma of Capital - Kings College from swpUkTv on Vimeo.
Over at Lenin's Tomb we find this summary of a post on Schmitt and Hayek which explores the influence of undemocratic radical right-wing political theory on neoliberalism:
If the neoliberal project is a restorationist one that consolidates the power of capital with respect to its opponents, it has accomplished this substantially by "hollowing out" the state, by depriving it of democratic and representative capacity, by treating governmentality as a technocratic issue, the efficacy of which can best be measured by its resemblance to market transactions in the private sector. The new rightist radicals, and their assault on the 'special interests' and 'old elites', amounted to an outright attack on democracy. It is to the success of this project above all that we must credit our current democratic impasse, the imperviousness of the state to pressures from below, and the growing disengagement of significant layers of the population from electoral politics.
What emerges is a high-handed social authoritarianism that attacks unions, cuts welfare, baits immigrants and cuts taxes for the rich----Abbott's Coalition whose matey populism abets an elitist agenda and locks in the rule by capital.