After the most amazing event in 2008—the bailout of the banking sector by the leading proponent of pro-market policies—neoliberalism, as an ideology (the “Washington consensus,” the much imagined benefits of the privatization of everything imaginable), was exposed as nothing more than a bunch of hot air. Yet, this exposure, the fact that everyone now knows that capitalism cannot “go it alone,” has not dealt even a dent on the shell of the neoliberal machine. Neoliberalism is still in full effect. Proof? This very recent BBC report is all the proof you need:
Romania is to cut wages and pensions in the public sector later this year to comply with an IMF-led rescue deal.
Romanian President Traian Basescu said the “programme to cut public expenses was inevitable”.
Public sector wages will be cut by 25% and all salaries, including the minimum one, will be affected. Jobless benefits and pensions will be slashed by 15%.
Romania is the recipient of a 20bn-euro aid package from the IMF, the EU and the World Bank.
The country, as well as two other bailed-out states, Latvia and Hungary, have missed targets for cutting their deficits by significant margins.
“This [cuts] plan was inevitable,” Mr Basescu told a news conference.
“The state sector is like a fat man of 200 kg sitting on the back of a 50 kg little man who is the real economy.”
This is nothing but classic structural adjustment, and it’s imposed despite the fact the leading proponent of such policies, the US government, does not follow them—and it’s not just the bank bailout but also the billions Bush gave in subsides to the cotton industry.
The third cycle of Pop Life at Hidmo (the first cycle was about the cosmopolitan body, the second the status of the inhabitant) wants to examine this amazing turn of events—the continuation of neoliberal policies after the collapse of neoliberal ideology: the body walks without its ghost. Meaning, neoliberalism is functioning sans legitimacy; and it’s possible to see in this a kind of strange mimicry of the very situation of the subject neoliberalism itself produced, the inhabitant: a person who often functions “sans papiers.”
- mlleclo
Tomorrow, the first meeting will focus on the importance or place of ideology in the Marxist tradition. The second discussion will concern neoliberal ideology and its impact on the emerging global culture. The third and final part of the cycle will discuss the ideal subject of this ideology—the kind of person it reflects.
You write about Capitalism as if it were an ideology. It is not. In the same way that Republicans are not an alternative policy machine to Democrats.
Capitalism is the absence of ideology. The Free Market is like Natural Selection. That which survives is the fittest. What is fit is what survives.
Imposing an ideology or control on top of this, will never be successful.
@1 You sound ignorant, Capitalism is an ideology. It posits that states should minimize their control over economic activity and it hopes that this will maximize overall economic growth. Merely because you think it is teh awesome, and state in a conclusory fashion that it not an ideology does not make it so.
An ideology is a framework (a world view if you will) for analyzing policy. Capitalism like its older and younger brothers mercantilism and socialism is merely one framework for looking at the international political economy. That capitalism has become dominant in the post-cold war world does not refute its status as an ideological framework.
Now go off and piss in your own corner if you don’t have anything productive to say.
Capitalism is something that Libs use to call Real Life because otherwise they couldn’t criticize it in their classrooms.
What are you, 18?
Not you, the commenter. It’s like somebody trying to toss out hundreds of years of philosophy, governance and ideology because they’re right… sounds like a teenager.
Fuck, Charles! Write a clear sentence!
And its / it’s ?!
We broke the Soviet Union with military spending and consumer goods. We still have cold war militery budgets. Something Romania and Latvia are not faced with.
The only thing dying in Greece Charles is your socialist dream that people can work 35 hr weeks, get 2 months paid vacation and retire at 55 with full, state pensions.
Poof….just like that it’s vanishing.
@8 Yeah! Fuck working people!
Asshole.
@9 Yeah bankruptcy and 20% interest rates!
Hey, if you don’t like it, tell the Greeks to ditch the euro, devalue their currency, wipe out half the savings in the country, just so state employees can work 10 months a year and retire at 55 on full pension.
“Fuck working people!”
You obviously haven’t been to Greece, because ‘working’ and ‘government sector’ are an oxymoron.
You know the Greeks also invented homosexuality? It’s true.
@9, that’s a rather childish response. Even the rest of western Europe, which takes good care of its workers, knows that Greece has been irresponsible.
In this SLOG post Charles Mudede provides an example of the intellectual leftist equivalent of the teabaggers sloganeering. It’s equally vacuous but with complex syntax, polysyllables and correct spelling.
@12: Childish, perhaps. I just get tired of people (those who don’t own yachts and private jets) coming down on certain members of the working class because they have it so good. Furthermore, who exactly is “Greece” anyway, how is having high standards “irresponsible.” Working people are NOT to blame for the state of the economy in Greece, the U.S., or elsewhere. At all. The real criminals have not only gotten away with such financial ruin but are richer that ever. And (again, unless you own a yacht and a private jet) they are getting richer off your back too. Or are you too busy trashing working people to see that? Fucknuts. (Oops, I’m being childish again.)
@7 Actually, Saudia Arabia broke the Soviet Union by dropping oil prices to the floor and bankrupting them. http://bit.ly/97UGUK
@8 *I* want to work 35 hrs a week and be able to retire. Who wouldn’t want that? What are you, a machine?
Anthropoloigst Marshal Sahlins has surmised that pre-agricultural humans worked 4-5 hours a day for their sustenance and shelter.
Let’s get back to that.
@1 – Capitalism is an ideology, in-so-far as it was an ideological decision to use postive-interest currency and the fractional-reserve banking system. These “rules”, if you will, demand that money operates the way it does: Trickles up, requires the cheap extraction of resources and turns them into money, takes shortcuts on reasonable safeguards (eg. Deepwater Horizon disaster), and the lowest wages/highest “productivity” possible.
The Egyptians used negative-interest currency to store farmer’s agricultural goods in government silos — 10 bushels now was worth 9 bushels later, to account for rats and spoilage. Negative-interest encourages economic activity now before the money itself depreciates, it also encourages purchasing things that will last a long time.
Our postive-interest currency encourages the removal of money from the economy in favor of investment structures; it also encourages purchasing cheap goods that breakdown quickly.
Money as we know it isn’t the only way that the rules around money can be established. It appears like a “natural order” only because we don’t experience any other form of it.
That said, of course neoliberalism continues as the walking dead. The fundamental rules underpinning it –positive interest– have not changed. The game is still on.