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i watched some of the hearings last night on c-span and was struck by bremmer's intervention in which he outlined what is actually at stake here---whether the united states is to begin catching up to most other industrialized nations and have an industrial policy. he kept alluding to miti...the problem here is organizational first, competences second---what mechanisms will be responsible for formulating such policy, how will information be gathered which is required for that activity, who will do the gathering, what objectives are being pursued, what powers will be granted to accomplish them.
this is obviously a problem situationally---the automobile manufacturers are in a total short-term liquidity crisis--the go to washington and say give me 30 billion. we'll do something good with it, don't worry. you'll do this because if you don't, we collapse.
what is notable in this seems to me to be the realization that what detroit is asking for is beyond the limit of the present conservative "policy" of ad hoc, reactive measures.
what seems to follow from this is a deferral of action from congress and a series of ad hoc, reactive measures behind which will follow some kind of basic alteration in the public/private relationship at the level of co-ordination.
among the consequences of this will probably be, judging from the way the hearings went (until i fell asleep) is a merger between chrysler and gm. what appears to be a driver for this follows from (a) previous negociations on such a merger based on the famous "synergies" that would result among which would be (b) increased flexibility at the level of production through the consolidation of existing platforms from which would follow (c) very considerable job loss. now what was odd about this in the hearing was the way these job losses were pitched as affecting management first and primarily. there was an oddly inarticulate gentleman from the uaw present who functioned mostly to prompt this emphasis on middle-to-upper management being a primary "victim"....
i write all this because i think we're seeing a change in outlook at the level of the senate anyway. moving away from the context of the bailing out of the financial sector to something more structural. so i think the debate is changing. i think it has to change, because the financial sector as a context guarantees continued incoherence.
what i didn't really see emerging yet is a coherent stand relative to employment as a political question. if the american states gets involved in industrial policy without a politics that ties it to employment levels, the involvement will be nothing more than an accelerator of the fragmentation and deterritorialization of production that is already well under way. what will matter in that context is the activity of capital and jobs will be understood as a secondary consequence. if employment is a primary consideration, then a quite different logic of state action would follow.
one of the possibilities that comes out of the pulverization of the neo-liberal world is a re-regionalization of production--a rethinking of scale--a shift in the understanding of the linkages which connect capital flows to the socio-economic systems which enable it. the multiplication of centers is a multiplication of nodes of power. in that kind of context, i think the options for the american automobile industry look interesting. so it is hard to say what "should happen" at this point because the logic that will shape what's possible is changing very quickly.
for example, there is obvious consternation about "outsourcing" which gets treated as some kind of alien phenomenon and not as the extension of a model of capital accumulation that subordinates *all* social contexts and implications to the movement of capital flows. the greater the recognition that the problems detroit faces result from *both* the model itself *and* the decisions made in the context of that model by the american manufacturers, the more possibilities open up for changing the model itself.
so another factor that seems at play here is the ending of the political consensus around flex accumulation/neo-liberal globalization. but this ending has not yet acquired an adequately sharp expression, so operates like a haze around discussions.
so what looks to be happening within this discussion about detroit/the auto industry is:
a) the beginnings of a serious break with neo-liberal assumptions that is at least now being framed for what it is.
b) the posing of a real Problem for the american state: how to proceed, which mechanisms to create, what objectives to put into place, etc.
c) FINALLY there is at least the start of a recognition of the Problems that neoliberalism has generated for decent=paying employment in the production of actual stuff.
that's what i think is going on, based on a non-representative sample of the hearings yesterday.
the question of what should happen is tied up with these shifts, in whether and how they issue into something new. the fate of the auto industry is out of its hands now.
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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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