roachboy

reactions like those of the bolivians are not about being nice, nor are they about some touchy-feely alternative to manly capitalist short-term thinking and the resulting plunder of resources (natural and human).

if you do not have an adequate level of social stability heroic investors cannot extract profit at all...capitalism is a social system, not an accumulation of abstract markets. the social and political consequences of capitalism are part of the system itself--they are not outside, they are not externalized costs, they do not disappear simply because investor viewpoints/neoliberal ideology does not account for them.

reacting to political pressure, modifying the arrangements that constitute markets are significant aspects of the history of actually existing capitalism. the bolivian case is simply one of a long chain of such reactions. the tension that drives this is obvious: capitalism requires system stability to operate in fact--the activities of the system itself tend to undermine the requirements for stability---whence the space for political action. that the ideology of those who cheerlead for capitalism regardless of consequences fails to accont for the effects of their own position is an index of the defucntionalized character of neoliberalism--which is simply the name of the ideological position that you, dragonlich, espouse.

the most sustained phase of capitalist organization--the one with the widest benefit to the greatest portion of the population, was fashioned fully in place after world war 2--at its center was a strong union movement that was co-ordinated with the functioning of the system as a whole via collective bargaining. the union movement--even in its bankrupt american form--constituted a feedback loop that checked the myopia-driven excesses of capitalist types of organization. such feedback loops are required for the system to function. even hayek argued that capitalist agents are not transparent, that firms are not transparent to themselves, and so required indices generated within/by the context to gauge what and how they operated. political opposition is such a feedback loop. that neoliberlism is incapable of understanding this basic historical fact is yet another index of its incoherence.

so manly investors scour the world in search of profits. so these same manly investors see only factors directly related to their narrow strategies and prefer to pretend that the political and social fallout of their actions are irrelevant. this extends to situations like those linked above: attempts to privatize water supply--the attempts to privatize other infrastructures--the attempts to force states to dismantle mechanisms that redistrubute wealth in the name of free trade, on and on--all disasters in situ. but who cares, really? if capitalism implodes in one place, manly investors can simply migrate to places where it hasnt. somehow, a tiny ideological world has developed in which that is seen as a rational response.
but it sounds like old-school colonialism, doesnt it? plunder, pillage, move on. the human cost is irrelevant--all that matters is the green.
if you like capitalism, you should oppose all this.


btw, the us is not outside these problems. at the level of action within the global capitalist order, the us is a prime mover in the generalized defunctionalization of capitalism itself--internally, the american neoliberal model is creating and has created conditions not unlike those which obtain in bolivia for a significant segment of the population--the main difference is that in the states, the dominant ideology--that around which both political parties converge--has persuaded folk that the incoherence of the economic order, and the range of the social consequences of it, are somehow normal, and so there is little in the way of mass politics at the moment that works to alter the system. from this viewpoint, the americans are well behind the bolivians and have much to learn from them.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite