|
a couple more general comments:
you can think about the detriot manufacturers as having done more or less the same thing as the american steel industry after world war 2, at the point they had exported continuous casting technologies in the context of the marshall plan---short term profits--in the long term, you go away. the technology puts you under, once logistics and trade rules and--particularly--reactionary politics relative to labor change the rules of the economic game away from the social and toward the movement of capital understood as autonomous.
the regulation school folk characteried the united states in a general sense as being trapped in a nostalgia for fordism, unable to come to terms with flex accumulation even as they became the main driver for globalizing capitalism/cowboy capitalism...one way of thinking about this is through the shift from the type of dominance the united states exercised under bretton woods to a different type, the conditions of possibility/outline of the project for which was put unto place by the nixon administration--the states shifted from a more socially oriented regulatory function to that of a governor for a system which gradually took shape that substituted capital flows for social consequences...
this second model was never sustainable--it was not even about sustainability.
you can see initiatives like the bush people's "ownership society" as attempts to use debt as political coercion explicitly...if the socio-economic consequences of cowboy capitalism were increased economic instability within the united states, the reconfiguration of manufacturing in many sectors whcih soon gave way to an logic of concentration concentration concentration, you'd think people would react politically to this politics of the economy--but they didn't---primarily i think because of the extension of debt as a device to enable folk to sublimate their politics into consumption.
the automakers are an almost perfect symptom of all this.
that you can run out this type of narrative while drinking a cup o joe in the morning is in a circular relation with how you see what's happening--i keep arguing here and elsewhere that the current economic and social problems--crises--that the americans face are the direct result of the model of capital accumulation that was put into place across the 1970s and 80s, and so is the result of the history of the united states since that period. so contrary to what you read in the american corporate press, the problem is not only a few sectors or individuals (madoff) who come to symbolize excess, but rather the entire model within which they operated.
it is interesting in this regard to notice the extent to which the mainstream press, particularly the newspapers (television seems to have a medium-specific form of ADD in this respect) are already focused on obama's economic agenda as if all that we need do is stumble from here to there and thigns will be hunky dory. but what i think is going on beneath that is a discourse shift. this is what the pulverization of neoliberalism looks like---a change in discursive weather.
i am surprised by the lack of reaction on the part of the people to this--you know, out in the streets kind of reaction. i think this passivity does not bode well. i think this passivity is a real problem.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|