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thats why i keep thinking in terms of collapse of empire to talk about the ongoing crisis/transition period within neoliberal-dominated capitalism.
what i think is obvious but which folk aren't talking about because the ideological apparatus in a sense wont let it be talked about is that the primary consequences of the bush period are political and they're playing out across the position of the united states as hegemon within the neo-liberal/"globalizing capitalist" system...i think we're approaching the end of the arrangement that was mapped out of bretton woods across the early 1970s and which managed to function as an institutional framework for what amounted to an american empire--one modelled on neo-colonial forms of domination so in a sense a peculiar type of empire--but an empire nonetheless. maybe because it was predicated on indirect forms of domination (debt) and not on direct military domination--and perhaps because of the spectacular debacles that were bush period american military adventures in particular--the whole system the americans fashioned was rickety to the extent that nothing in particular held american power in place beyond the assumption that american power held the system in place.
so what i think is happening, and has been for some time, is a reconfiguration of power relations within the emergent globalizing capitalist system, one that is happening at the expense of the united states.
at the same time, there's an ideological problem to the extent that the ways of talking about capitalism that have been dominant in the states---the so-called "washington consensus" or this lunacy we call neoliberalism---can no longer provide either a compelling description of the world--the reason for this may well be a simple function of the neoliberal ideological framework in the states presupposes implicitly american domination of the global capitalist order and builds its various illusory schemas of continuity and discontinuity (on which rest the capacity to frame aspects of the world in or out of collective View) out from that...maybe not even as an explicit assumption but as something taken for granted in a kind of way that were it ever conscious would be understood as incredibly arrogant...but this is amurica dammit and basic things happen without anyone making a decision about them all too often, particular when those basic things are discourse-related and not about Objects and their Disposition in the World.
so the ideological frame is out of phase with what its being used to describe.
its out-of-phase nature is self-evident.
but a characteristic of a single dominant ideology is to not frame itself as an ideology. problem with that is all flexibility heads out the window.
so there's at the least a basic power shift happening that cant be talked about domestically.
there's the emergence of the illusory character of other neo-liberal bromides (that churn in mortgages could generate enough economic activity to compensate for the dissolving of the old-style manufacturing base for example)...without any alternatives presented, so there's just dysfunction.
the recurrent disease/recovery tropes that the dominant amurican ideology seems to crank out to avoid talking about its own situation aren't working out so well.
so its kind of a mess, politically.
capitalism yay! no problems with that.
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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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