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i am still confused.
if the dominant economic ideology were still more or less keynesian, this would be a non-issue: state debt would be understood as a function of its activities geared toward spurring economic activity in general--which would include infrastructure, etc.
the neoliberal approach, which is a priori opposed to state action in the economic domain (which is posited as a discrete sphere of activity--an assumption that is totally incoherent, but no matter here), frames debt as a problem.
neoliberalism can be seen as a way of refusing to think about globalizing capitalism, an ideolgy that enbales people to pretend that the nation-state is still the operational hub of economic activity. that is increasingly not the case.---but neoliberalism is more than one thing, and the above only obtains for how the question of national debt is framed.
the point is that this question, like many others, seems to me little more than a frame-effect: if you start from neoliberal assumptions, you parse the state in a particular way and read cause/effect relation as a function of that. so what seems to me to be happening in this thread is cycling through assumptions and ways of combining them particular to a specific ideological frameowrk that is not acknowledged.
so: in the present context, characterized by transnationally organized modes of production, within whcih even relatively simple production elements are fabricated in multiple places around the world, what exactly does gdp still mean? what does it measure? i'm not saying it is meanigless, but i do think that it is increasingly a problematic category.
neoliberalism is certainly functional for a period of transition in the organization of economic activity in that is legitimates a stratum of, say, transnational corporate development and the processes of cost externalization---so for example it legitimates the effective dumping of social regulation functions onto nation states---infrastructure development and maintenance costs are dumped onto states--which at the same time find themselves under tremendous pressure politically to contract, following from the same neoliberal assumptions.
even if you assume that these categories are coherent---and i am simply not sure of that, posing questions here only---the main driver of the ational debt at this time (whatever that in fact means) is bushwar--yet somehow this is understood as seperate from other factors. i ont understand that either.
perhaps folk can help me figure this all out...
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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