Recording Surface

Wendy Brown, laying out one of the “four lines” along which “the market is the organizing and regulative principle of the state and society,” from her essay “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy”:

b)The state itself is enfolded and animated by market rationality, not simply profitability, but a generalized calculation of cost and benefit becomes the measure of all state practices. Political discourse on all matters is framed in entrepreneurial terms; the state must not simply concern itself with the market but think and behave like a market actor across all of its functions, including law.

Here, Brown briefly hits on one of the chief aspects of neoliberalism, but one that is usually neglected or forgotten. Most accounts of neoliberalism, including influential ones such as David Harvey’s and even, for the most part, Brown’s, primarily see it attempting a destruction of the state’s “traditional” role as a Keynesian redistributor and as the arena of “the political.” But as Brown hints at above, neoliberalism is less about destroying the state than transforming it, less (or not only) about making it completely subservient and in service to capital’s rationality than making it like capital. Under neoliberalism, the state, and with it politics, undergoes a becoming-entrepreneurial in which labor and economic calculations are solely constitutive of desire and self-management is the cardinal virtue.

Brown’s description, helpful as it is, is in the end too metaphorical. And too western. If the neoliberal era in Europe and North America, particularly the United States, has meant the abandonment of welfare guarantees and the transformation of the state into its sole function as supporter of the market, in Asia and elsewhere, particularly China, the state’s becoming-entrepreneurial has been more literal: the actual ownership of the largest and most important capitalist firms by the state, its minute management of capital flows and complete control of exchange rates, its role as the primary regulator of the workforce.

(A placeholder. More on this soon.)

There’s a lot to like about Austin’s culture and politics. There’s also a lot to dislike. This article definitely falls in the latter category. The blend of provincialism, boosterism, and social entrepreneuralism contained in it is, I think (probably provincially), unique to Austin. It’s amazing how proudly amenable to neoliberalism hipsters and creatives are. And yes, a few of those comments are mine.

We’ve been in election mode for some time now. Elections are not a particular locale, nor a particular day in the calendar. They are more like a grid that affects the way we understand and perceive things. Everything is mapped back on this grid and gets warped as a result. The particular conditions of the elections today have elevated the usual level of bullshit.– Gilles Deleuze

As when Deleuze spoke these words thirty-one years ago, we seem to be in an interregnum. Deleuze was writing when, to use shorthand, Keynesianism was dead, killed by, more shorthand, May ‘68, but it successor hadn’t yet had its full birth. Today, the form of governmentality commonly called neoliberalism seems to be exhausted, eluded by strategic worldwide refusals and irretrievable even by declared states of emergency and permawar. Its heir is not exactly apparent just now, but the current global financial crisis might help produce the successor.

Meanwhile, as America and the world wait for a message of some sort — and it really does seem more of a waiting than a suspension, though this acknowledgment doesn’t need to imply, as it does for some, nostalgia for a new revolutionary sequence — elections step in to fill the gap. The latest voting cycles, in Venezuela, France, Australia, and the eternal election in the United States (only seven months to go!), among others, are, because the governmentality that undergirds the election grid is so uncertain, both less “political” and more important than they have been in a few decades. And that, in 2008 in the United States, has also elevated the usual level of bullshit.

I haven’t read Ken MacLeod’s novels, so I can’t vouch for their goodness, but I really like this line about Parecon, Michael Albert’s unutopian economic utopia:

Michael Albert has been slightly miffed to have his utopia encounter the opposite reponse. Most critics, he says, admit that it would work. They just wouldn’t like to live there. Although Albert and his colleague Robin Hahnel have tried to answer their critics, it still looks to me as schoolmarmish an anarchy as Le Guin’s Annares. The invisible hand of the market and the clenched fist of the revolution give way to the pointing finger of the neighbourhood.

A week ago, as my spring break started, team player Az stepped up to the plate and hit me with a movie meme that’s interesting. But alas, my response will have to wait even longer, as I’m extending my break through at least through the weekend. The weather here is beautiful, a friend is in town, my family is not in school, and I’m even going to hold my nose and attend some SXSW music events — the free, nonsanctioned ones, of course. March in Central Texas is a very good thing.

As a sort of followup to the previous post comes this bit of news:

In a short telephone interview with Stalin Perez Borges, a national coordinator of the National Union of Workers and leader of the Marea Socialista union current, news and analysis website www.aporrea.org reported that the Venezuelan National Guard attacked a meeting of workers from Sidor, (Venezuela’s largest steel plant), outside the CVG industrial complex today.

“We want to let everyone know, that while the Sidor workers were concentrated outside the CVG industrial complex, where at 2pm they were to begin an important meeting, members of the National Guard attacked the workers, using among other things, tear gas,” Perez Borges said.

The Sidor workers have been engaged in a dispute for a collective contract for over a year with the management of the Argentine controlled company. Last year, in the framework of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s call to “renationalize everything that was privatized” Sidor workers campaigned for the company to be nationalized and put under worker’s control. However, the company later reached a deal with the government and avoided nationalization.

The key sticking point of the current dispute is the workers demand for a salary increase of 68 Bs. (US$31.6) per day, the company has offered 24 Bs. (US$11.15). In January the Ministry of Labor stepped in to facilitate negotiations between the company management and the United Steel Industry Workers Union (SUTISS), and proposed an intermediary raise of 45 Bs (US$20.9).

SUTISS president José Rodríguez, told the February 27 edition of Correo del Caroni that at first workers welcomed the intervention of the Labor Ministry, however he argued that it is now clear that the Labor Ministry is intervening on behalf of the bosses.

Last week the Labor Minister, criticized a 16 hour strike by the workers on the February 23 as an “error” and proposed a binding arbitration committee, which would have by-passed the union, as a means of resolving the dispute. However, the workers have categorically rejected this proposal and on February 27 activated staggered work stoppages, severely limiting the company’s output. […]

I don’t know many more details about this situation, but it fascinates me. The government encourages nationalization, and when the workers in the factories demand it and worker control, the government, which owns 20 percent of the company, cuts a deal with the company so it can remain private. Then when the workers strike, the government not only sides with the company but sicks the National Guard on them. So the Bolivarian Revolution is, contra the fantasies of many Northern leftists, following the path walked by a thousand and one other revolutions: Taylorism in the factory, redistribution (and, inescapably, repression) by the state. Not that this is a recent development, as the articles collected here make clear, but following on the heals of the defeat of Chavez’s referendum and the fact that suppression is being openly dissected at the usually pro-Chavez Venezuelanalysis.com, among other indications, it seems that the aporias of statist revolution are becoming clearer and more profound.

There’s an interesting geopolitical situation developing in South America, between Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela. Military hero Hugo Chavez is even raising the specter of war, though it seems unlikely to come to that.

On Saturday, Colombia launched air and ground strikes on a FARC hideout along the Colombia-Ecuador border, killing Raul Reyes, FARC’s second in command, and about eighteen other rebels. Initially, when it was thought that the attack was part of an ongoing battle that had accidentally spilled across the Putumayo River, Ecuador was unconcerned. It was soon revealed, however, that the rebels were camped out in Ecuador and were all sleeping when the raid was carried out; not only that, but the ground flank of the attack moved from the south, meaning the Colombian military was operating well inside Ecuador’s territory. Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, cried foul, saying Colombia had violated its borders and sovereignty and committed a massacre, and cut off diplomatic relations. Correa is not content with Colombia’s apology and is demanding a meeting with the OAS’s permanent council to address this “new joke at the expense of the … people of Ecuador.”

Chavez, obviously stinging that a conflict was happening in his neighborhood that he wasn’t a part of, made sure Venezuela got in on the action also. He recalled his diplomatic corps and sent ten thousand troops to the border in case Colombia decided to carry out an attack on Venezuelan territory, which he declared would be an act of war: “Don’t even think about it or I will launch an air attack.” To drive the point home, he called Colombia “the Israel of Latin America” and “a terrorist state that is subject to the great terrorist, the government of the United States and their [sic] apparatus.”

While some have surmised that the State Department must have ordered the attack, such speculation is both specious and tautological: At three billion dollars a year, the United States is almost single-handedly priming the Colombian “civil” war. It’s sometimes hard to figure out why it is, as the almost fifty-year-old conflict is a Cold War relic, with its Marxist-vs.-freedom-fighter taxonomy and long, bloody skirmishes over territory. It could even be argued that Ecuador and Venezuela, with their oil- and export-oriented economies, are much more contained within the circuits of labor and capital and the neoliberal world order than is Colombia, with its narco-dependent and public-sector-heavy economy. But it’s not my place to question the wisdom or logic of the United States, so I won’t.

Ironically (or not), however, despite the fact that up to half of Colombia’s territory is not controlled by the recognized central government, constituted power in Colombia is stronger than in most other Latin American countries: Colombians are caught between an extremely militarized state and an extremely militarized state-in-waiting, with the United States willing to fill the gaps that occur. In Ecuador and Venezuela, things are much different, and it’s here where the significance of the “tension” of the last few days arises. Correa is occupying a post whose last three inhabitants have been driven from office and is administering a population in an almost permanent state of restiveness. Chavez, for his part, has just lost a nationwide referendum and is witnessing massive abstentions from his popular revolution. Both are discovering the challenges of capturing excessive political demanding. And both are meeting the challenges from within in a familiar way: by creating an enemy from without.

Mike has forced me to participate in the page-123 meme that’s been going around. So here it is, some lines from the book nearest me, Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, which Matt sent me over a year ago in a nice, smelly old edition, though I still haven’t read it. I’ve started it several times, and the first few pages are intriguing, but it’s just so damned big. Anyway, here goes.

“Why, it has a crack.”

It sounded on his lips so sharp, it had such an authority, that she almost started, while her colour, at the word, rose. It was as if he had been right, though his assurance was wonderful.

“You answer for it without having looked.”

“I did look. I saw the object itself. It told its story. No wonder it’s cheap.”

Obviously I cheated a bit, since it’s really eight sentences, not five. But it’s wonderfully suggestive, no? Surely they are talking about the titular bowl. Why does she seem to want the bowl and he doesn’t? Why does she seem to be so sensitive to his tone? Well, maybe I should find out soon.

Like all left believers in the essential progressiveness of capitalism, Simon Critchley thinks that the “truth of Marx’s work” lies in its conviction that the “dislocatory power of capitalism must be affirmed.” The alternative, as it’s usually presented is in these stories, is “a retreat into some sort of Rousseauesque and ultimately reactionary romantic anti-capitalism.” Critchley continues:

[T]he more dislocated the ground upon which capitalism operates, the less it can rely on a framework of supposedly natural or stable social and political relations. Capitalist dislocation, in its ruthless destruction of the bonds of tradition, local belonging, family and kinship structures that one might have considered natural, reveals the contingency of social life, that is, its constructed character, which is to say, its political articulation.

But surely there are ways to accept capital’s dislocations without affirming them? That is, a way to recognize the deterritorializations without seeing them as the necessary ground for a new politics? Not for Critchley, who asserts that it’s capital’s ability to demystify social relations that leads to “the emergence of a range of alternative political possibilities.” For all his rejection of Leninism and other traditional Marxisms, Critchley retains a distinctly dialectical view of how capitalism will be overcome. This is so not only in his seeing capitalism’s carcass as the necessary foundation for communism (a word Critchley doesn’t like), but in his Manifesto-Marxist understanding of the “Aufhebung of private property,” that is, “both its maintenance and overcoming”; in his insistence on indigenous identity, which is formed by state repression, as a subjective counter to capitalist universality; and in his tactic of inhabiting an interstitial distance within the state, which is a sort of spatialized withering away of the state.

In the introduction to his Free Trade in the Bermuda Triangle, Brett Neilson makes points similar to Critchley’s about capital’s dislocations:

A simple given fact produced in singular historical circumstances, the currently unfolding globalization of space and time is neither the manifestation of an eternal truth nor an inevitable necessity. Equally, however, there is no going back, no return to a preglobablized world in which the borders of the national and international remain intact. To assert that one is against globalization, antiglobalization, is no less problematic than claiming globablization is somehow predestined and unavoidable. Far from closing down possibilities for revolutionary transformation, the process of globalization opens them up. The increased interconnectedness of the world provokes a crisis in the human appropriation of terrestrial space, pointing to alternatives that arise from within the heart of the global capitalist system itself.

Like Critchley, Neilson sees new political possibilities in a globalized world and believes a return to premodern simplicity is impossible and undesirable. Unlike Critchley, however, he doesn’t buy into various progressivist fictions about creating political mechanisms that can reorient capital’s drive to planetary expansion and rehabilitate its maxims regarding private property and equality. Instead he holds that politics is not the act of harnessing capital’s axioms for the good, but of prying capital from its seemingly natural connection to the entirety of the globe:

To write of counterglobablization is neither to partake in atemporal ethical judgments nor to launch merely contingent attacks against existing forms of economic administration. Rather it is to question the very articulation of globalization to capitalism, to search for alternative forms of transnational connectivity that resist subordination to the imperatives of the market and the state.

There are many things to discuss in connection with this, but I’ll note just a few briefly. First, Critchley sees the demystification of social relations as resulting from capital’s machinations, whereas Neilson says this as the responsibility of anticapitalist political practices. Second, where Critchley’s oppositional identities are created by state repression, Neilson abides by the Deleuzean maxim “Resistance comes first”; that is, resistance precedes the state and is not reducible to it. Similarly, Neilson sees capital as forever and unsuccessfully trying to capture resistant excess — “a counterpower that capitalism can only every hope to reign in but never completely subsume.” Critchley’s Badioun inspirations, on the other hand, posit a colossal state that always overwhelms opposition; the most resistance can aspire to is an ethical appropriation of capital’s drive toward totality.

I watched the Clinton-Obama debate last night, the first one I’ve tuned in for. It’s pretty funny to see the two of them trying to convice people that there are actual differences between them when clearly there aren’t: both are DLC-beholden, centrist Bill Clinton-oids. Which is to say, ideal CEOs of the neoliberal state. The candidates themselves think that their positions on health care are, as Obama said last night, “substantively different.” Indeed. Clinton’s plan makes people who are unemployed or don’t receive insurance from their employers buy government insurance that they can’t afford so that they can pay copays they can’t afford so that they can maybe eventually receive care from a doctor. Obama wouldn’t make people buy government insurance and take on the burden of premiums and copays, but if they don’t and they show up at an emergency room to receive treatment, they will be fined, severely, as he made clear last night. These are the politics that are inspiring such great passion among Democrats this year.

(As an aside, it’s hilarious to hear Clinton rail against medical profiteering, since the lone accomplishment of her health-care reforms of the early 90s was to set in motion the process by which HMOs and drug companies, those mind-bogglingly profitable administrators of life and death in the United States, came to rule the delivery of health care.)

Some people think it’s significant that the two finalists for the Democratic nomination are a woman and a black man. Apparently the candidates don’t, as race and sex seem to be off-limits topics for them. That is, unless you count Obama’s passing references to his growing up without a father (read: I’m just like every other black person) or Clinton’s intimations about her essentially nurturing nature (read: I’m just like every other woman) as vigorous discussions of race and sex. Obviously, I do think race and sex are significant, but the discursive terrain on which this discussion is taking place is so debased and idiotic — Clinton’s voters and supporters are racists, and Obama’s voters and supporters are sexists — that it’s hard to find any purchase that doesn’t entail buying into the banality. The debate about the intersections of race and sex inspired by Clinton-Obama, a debate that should be about difference and dissenion, has already, in its singular way, erased difference and dissension. It’s now about who is the better American.

The Thomas Frank inside of me wants to get worked up about the awfulness of the Democrats. But that would be insincere. They are, after all, just doing their job. It would be like getting angry at leopards because they have spots.