|
ok so first off, what i think this will help collapse is the ideology of neo-liberalism, the dominant economic ideology in the united states of the post-reagan period, the premises of which you all know because they're repeated often enough as if they were informational elements and not ideological statements--markets, rational, state=distortion blah blah blah.
neoliberalism is an ideology within capitalism and is no more capitalism itself than those evangelical protestants who claim to *be* christianity are the entirety of christianity.
i have never believed the neo-liberalism was about anything beyond reducing political risk for the state by withdrawing it from economic sectors in response to heightened uncertainty--my assumption has been that crisis, which is more then norm in the actual history of capitalism than is the contrary, would be addressed by a rolling-back-in of the state as regulatory agent.
i figured this could happen in an incoherent manner--if handled by republicans--or a less incoherent manner, if handled by anyone else. except libertarians, who really should be nowhere near power ever.
and this is what you're seeing.
even in the benighted political context that is the united states, which seemed to be summed up for me by cnn's website today, which headlined a story about a trainwreck in los angeles and relegated a Real Problem for the entire financial order to sentences off the the side--even here i think the veneer is off neoliberalism. maybe it'll even get named---everywhere else on the planet, the dominant ideology in the united states has a name--here, it is a natural phenomenon, like the weather.
none of the banalities about capitalism as channelling avarice and short-sightedness and self-interest in a constructive direction should make any sense any longer--yet the repetition continues, like there's some little machine in your skull that just does the same things over and over until it runs down independently of anything happening in the world. this crisis is a direct *result* of the ways in which capitalism since reagan has channelled avarice and short-sightedness, and demonstrates the reality of the directions it has taken.
what i hope in the short run is that not only does this strip the veneer off neo-liberalism, but that it also forecloses any hope mc-cain/palin may have had to being elected. i don't expect any great change from obama, but he HAS to be a more rational alternative, given the mess that reality is at the moment, than more of the same idiocy from the bush period.
i think there will be significant pressure to increase the types and enforcement of regulation on banking and on the grey market in derivatives etc,. in particular. the republicans are ideologically opposed to regulation and so cannot rationally be expected to implement it in anything like a coherent manner.
so i don't see this as the end of anything in particular apart from a particularly incoherent view of capitalism and the cowboy capitalism it has spawned.
i also think that alot of regular folk are fucked as well...
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|