Thread: Whom do we owe?
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Old 04-22-2009, 07:24 AM   #4 (permalink)
roachboy
 
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well here's yet another of these philosophical problems. in neoliberal land, the economy is understood as a discrete system that floats in the air above everything else, populated by happy rational actors who think only of themselves but manage it in such a way that the rest of us should be grateful, and that floating system is itself thought of as closed and as tending toward equilibrium. so that means the sale of bonds at point a has to correspond to some future situation that will resemble that of point a--not because there's any particular basis for that, but because the way of thinking about the airborne system that is the economy forces you into it. this would not be problematic in itself, because it's always possible for folk to entertain loopy conceptions of things and none of them particularly matter. but neoliberals tend also not to like complexity very much so they tend to assume that there's one and only one way to think about the economy and that they know that one and only one way.

an alternate way of thinking about the economy is as a dynamic, open-ended collection of processes that the state can interact with or direct and that can be kept in motion in such a way that the situation at poin a may not particularly resemble the situation at a future point so that projections forward from point a really don't mean a whole lot--so long as the system continues to operate that is. neoliberals think the economy as a type of thing in any event, so motion is not really in their worldview--activity is, but somehow or another that's different from motion. if it weren't different from motion, you'd be hardpressed to see how this whole equilibrium thing made any sense, and besides it doesn't make sense even for neoliberals because they've against all reason substituted "growth" for "equilibrium" and well just look at the mess THAT created.

anyway, you can see in these conceptions of the future two different ways of basically throwing the dice--one that assumes for aesthetic reasons stasis, even as it likes to blab about growth, and the other that assume motion and/or expansion (they aren't necessarily the same) and debt as an enabling device which underpins the actions of the state, the function of which is (in part) to direct the economic systems toward desirable political and/or social ends. so for neoliberals, debt is scary; for more keynesian types, it's a non-issue.

unless the party stops. but if the party stops, we're all fucked anyway to the extent that we live inside the party.

so i think this is a non-question.

nation-states are emptier and emptier every day emptier and emptier. modern capitalist nation-states are mostly creations of the 20th century in any event, so they haven't been around that long and haven't worked out so well think maybe the same problems as the bourgeois nuclear family. a stupid idea that doesn't work but that does enable a certain illusion of autonomy, most of which is obtained by not thinking real hard about what autonomy might be.

neoliberals typically have an even bigger problem facing the dissolution of the nation-state than they have with the arbitrariness of their positions on the economy, so you can imagine that this transnational bond-holding business is all terribly upsetting to them.

the other structuring fiction for alot of these folk is that they think the state is like a giant individual and that the state's relation to debt is like that of an individual's relation to their credit card. i think that's quaint.
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