Is it possible to reconcile the conflicting imperatives of respect for cultural diversity and sustained democratic legitimacy? So asks Cecile Laborde in From Constitutional to Civic Patriotism. His purpose is to assess whether constitutional patriotism succeeds in reconciling democratic legitimacy and cultural diversity. He says that although he is in broad sympathy with the constitutional patriotic project, he argues that the strategy of the relative insulation of politics from culture that it pursues – at least in its ‘neutralist’ version – is self-defeating.
It turns out to be deficient on the ground of legitimacy – a familiar criticism of constitutional patriotism – but also of inclusiveness – a less common and more damaging criticism. This is because constitutional patriotism fails to take seriously the need for cultural mediations between citizens and their institutions. This need, I suggest, is better accommodated by a more civic form of patriotism, which recognizes the role of particularist political cultures in grounding universalist principles. Civic patriotism is both more ‘situated’ and more radical than ‘neutralist’ constitutional patriotism: it emphasizes the motivational prerequisites of democratic governance, stresses the need to preserve existing ‘co-operative ventures’, and demands that existing political cultures be democratically scrutinized and re-shaped in an inclusive direction. It promotes a mainly political identity, whose political content makes it compatible with a variety of practices and beliefs, but whose thin particularistic form justifies citizens’ commitment to specific institutions.
In Economic Recovery With No Growth Strategy in Logos 2011: Vol.10, Issue 1 Jeff Madrick says in relation to the US that the Obama government did rescue American's from a much worse state, but one year after the alleged end of the recession unemployment is 9.6 percent and there is no sign of a speed up in the economy. He asks: What should be done?
what should be done is more fiscal spending. Instead, what is going to happen is we are going to get more so-called quantitative easing from the Federal Reserve (that is, purchases of long term bonds), which would bring down long term interest rates, help to keep mortgage rates low, help to get business to spend more to borrow more, and help to get banks to lend more. That is what is going to be done. Having been schooled in Keynes, I think that we need both guns working simultaneously. We need fiscal policy, we need spending, and we need monetary policy, the so-called quantitative-easing.
He says that economics became neo-liberalism. It did not become conservative economics and the principle is that economies adjust on their own to optimal rates of economic growth. Keep government out. So they kept keep inflation low and deregulated. The one idea is that economies would adjust on their own. The result are crises in:
1982, 1987, 1989, 1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, and 2007-8. That is eight financial crises. The conventional wisdom has been that we handled all those crises. We did not handle all those crises. They all hurt the American economies significantly. They all cost jobs. They often resulted in recessions. They used up capital that should have been used for more productive purposes. These were the consequence of the blind deregulatory process.
We live in a culture that is now saturated with images of crime, fears of crime, surveillance of our bodies, private policing and the techniques of repression. Behind these images a neo-liberal mode of governance operates in the economy and society. Though a neo-liberal shaping of public policy is most obvious in the economy-- market competition, privatisation, austerity politics, decentred regulation etc --- it also shapes the welfare and penal systems of late capitalist society. Crime is a central concern of a neo-liberal mode of governance. Criminology is booming.
In his Government and Control essay in The British Journal of Criminology (Vol 40, Issue 2, 2000) Nikolas Rose says that the logics of control under neo-liberal mode of governance is concerned with both the shift from reformation to incapacitation and punishment of criminals in the prison regime and the ethical reconstruction of the excluded individual in the welfare regime.
The latter is seen in workfare programmes that seek to micro-manage the behaviour of welfare recipients in order to remoralize them. They stress the need to reform habits as a condition of receipt of benefits, and ultimately, to seek to get get all those physically able to work off benefits entirely. The aim is responsibilization: to reconstruct self-reliance in those who are excluded. This implies that the problems of the excluded person are reformulated as moral or ethical problems; as problems in the ways in which excluded individuals understand and conduct themselves and their existence.
The language of empowerment codes the exclusion as a lack of self-esteem, self-worth and the skills of self-management to steer oneself as an active individual in the world of choice. Subjects are to do the work on themselves, not in the name of conformity, but to make them free. Doing the work means moral reformation through ethical reconstruction of the will and self control, of the habits of independence, life-planning and self improvement so that the individual adheres to the core values of honesty, self-reliance and concern for others and can be reinserted into family, work, and consumption.
Those who cannot be so reconstructed to become responsible, to govern themselves ethically, will be imprisoned. For them--the predator, the pedophile, the psychopath---harsh measures are entirely appropriate as they present a threat to the public.
Whilst welfare budges are cut the penal budgets expand, and the zones or spaces of exclusion---petty theft, drinking alcohol in public, loitering, drugs, etc--- are being effectively criminalized and being managed with an overlay of increased punitiveness.
Matt Waggoner in Giving up the Good: Adorno, Kiergkegaard, and The Critique of Political Culture in the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (6.2, Spring 2005) (highlights the extensive amount of interest that Adorno shows in Kant’s philosophy. This interest had always puzzled me. Why Kant, given Adorno's preoccupation with Hegel?
Waggoner says:
Adorno was clearly not preoccupied with the liberal Kant of popular political philosophy, but instead with the Kant who was also obsessed with contradiction, antinomy and paradox, and who, in Adorno’s estimate, earned his greatness from the fact that he did not rush to resolve the contradictions he encountered. While it is reasonable to characterize this period as suggestive of a “Kantian turn” in Adorno’s thinking, his obvious interest in Kant during this period also demonstrates a turn to paradoxes and a reaction against the tendency of the dialectical tradition to base its ideas on the imminent reconciliation of contradictions in society. Adorno sought to take the experience of contradiction and impossibility much more seriously, and for this reason his pursuit of an ethic of aporia returned him to an entirely Kierkegaardian line of questioning: what lies beyond the logic of moral and ethical reason?
Waggoner says:
Adorno worried that Hegel’s treatment of otherness betrayed elements of subjective idealism, and he respected Kant for preserving rather than reconciling contradiction in the way Hegel did. Even if Adorno noted affinities between Kant and de Sade (as have others, such as Jacques Lacan), he worried most about an “ethical life” closed to the prospect of, as Adorno put it, something new under the sun.
In The Enigma of Capital and the Crisis this Time David Harvey explores the idea of systematic crisis in relation to the internal contradictions of capitalism and the crisis of capital that began in 2007. he says:
Capital, Marx insists, is a process of circulation and not a thing. It is fundamentally about putting money into circulation to make more money. There are various ways to do this. Financiers lend money in return for interest, merchants buy cheap in order to sell dear and rentiers buy up land, resources, patents, and the like, which they release to others in return for rent. Even the capitalist state can invest in infrastructures in search of an improved tax base that yields greater revenues...A part of the profit, for reasons we will take up later, has to be capitalized and launched into circulation to seek even more profit. Capital is thereby committed to a compounding rate of growth.....So the problem for capital is to find a path to a minimum compound three percent growth for ever.
If capital flow stops then the body politic of capitalist society dies. ...When the banks stopped lending and credit froze in the wake of the Lehman collapse on September 15th, 2008, the survival of capitalism was threatened and political power went to extraordinary lengths to loosen the constrictions. It was a matter of life or death for capital as everyone in power recognized. Inspection of the circulation of capital reveals, however a series of potential blockage points any one of which could induce a crisis by constricting capital flow. Let us consider each of these.
There is, therefore, no single causal theory of crisis formation as many Marxist economists like to assert. There is, for example, no point in trying to cram all of this fluidity and complexity into some unitary theory of, say, a falling rate of profit. In fact profit rates can fall because of the inability to overcome any one of the blockages identified here. It is the task of historical materialist analysis to wrestle with the question as to where the primary blockages are this time around. But solutions at one point have implications for what happens elsewhere.The fundamental theoretical conclusion is: capital never solves its crisis tendencies, it merely moves them around. This is what Marx’s analysis tells us and this is what the history of the last forty years has been about. No one now claims that the excessive power of labor is the source of the current problem as it was back in the 1970s. If anything, the problem is that capital in general and finance capital in particular are far too powerful and that the state cannot step in to re-balance affairs because it is captive – politically and economically – to capitalist class financial, rentier, producer and commercial interests.
In Libertarians, health insurance, and rights in the Economist it is stated that:
Essentially, libertarians don't believe in positive rights. They believe that no matter how rich a society may be, no member of that society has a right to demand a minimal share of basic goods from that society. People have the right not to be interfered with, but they don't have the right to actually get anything. One can think of the position in terms of a desert-island castaway analogy. Let's say two castaways wash up on a desert island, along with their trunks. One is fantastically rich, and he has several trunks full of tinned meat, a water filter, and so on. The other guy just has a carry-on bag with a toothbrush. The question is: is the rich guy morally obliged to share his water filter with the poor guy? Does the poor guy have a right to potable water, given that the filter makes adequate water available for everyone? Or would it just be a nice thing, but not a rights-based moral obligation, for the rich guy to share his water?
In Capitalism as Religion: Walter Benjamin and Max Weber in Historical Materialism 17(2009) Michael Lowy analyzes Walter Benjamin's response Max Weber’s famous treatment of Protestantism and capitalism. Benjamin’s fragment sought to demonstrate that capitalism was strengthened by religious culture at key points in its development, and that it was itself a religious phenomenon.
The first is that capitalism is a peculiarly cultic phenomenon, one in which ‘nothing has meaning that is not immediately related to the cult’. The cultic activities – ‘capital investment, speculation, financial operations, stock-exchange manipulations, the selling and buying of commodities’ – are the only ones invested with meaning, as all else is rendered valueless.
The second religious aspect of capitalism is its conception of time. Capital’s time is homogenous, rationalized. It marches steadily forward without interruption, without pause.
The final religious aspect of capitalism is its production of despair. Capital recognizes nothing beyond itself. It forecloses on all futures except its own. This destruction of futurity can be seen as the essence of despair, since any hope is contingent upon the possibility of a future.
Desire Was Everywhere in the is a review of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives by François Dosse, translated by Deborah Glassman by Adam Shatz. Shatz says:
Like Marx in The Communist Manifesto, Deleuze and Guattari portray capitalism as a turbulent system whose revolutionary effects threaten its own need to reproduce itself. On the one hand, it dissolves rigid structures of authority and hierarchy (‘decoding’, they called it), generates new and transgressive desires, and presides over radical forms of what they called ‘deterritorialisation’, which could mean everything from uprooting people from the land to overturning the systems of belief to which they have been anchored. At its most extreme, they suggest, capitalism encourages a kind of generalised schizophrenia, a shatteringly intense fracturing of subjectivity. On the other hand, to survive it has to contain these effects through oppressive fictions like the nuclear family and psychiatry, which attempt to ‘reterritorialise’ desire: to put it safely back inside the home and to keep it there. The project of ‘schizo-analysis’, therefore, would be to harness revolutionary desiring machines that liberate desire from the family and Freudian psychiatry.
Desire, they admit, is not always good.. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused.’ The appeal of reactionary politics lay in its ability to neutralise the ‘deterritorialising’ effects of capitalism with ‘reterritorialising’ narratives of God and country.
Shatz says that the language of desire, multiplicity and all the rest is no longer the language of revolution. It is the language of cyberspace, and of neoliberal capitalism. Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring machines, constantly seeking out new sensations, look a lot like today’s permanently distracted consumers and websurfers.
In In Defense of the Public at In these Times Eve Ewing says:
In Another Kind of Public Education (Beacon Press, 2009), Patricia Hill Collins points out that Americans have come to associate anything “public” with a notion of inferiority. “Ideas about the benefits of privatization encourage the American public to assume that anything public is of lesser quality,” she writes. “The deteriorating schools, health care services, roads, bridges, and public transportation that result from the American public’s unwillingness to fund public institutions speak to the erosion and accompanying devaluation of anything deemed public. In this context, public becomes reconfigured as anything of poor quality, marked by a lack of control and privacy—all characteristics associated with poverty.”
She adds:
The logic of this mode of thought has skewed roots in the principles of supply and demand, and it goes something like this: if something is scarce, it is desirable and valuable; conversely, if it is abundant and readily available it must be cheap or worthless. This calculus can reduce any and all things into commodities, the relative value of which can be determined by their level of unfettered availability to average people.