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that's hardly the point ace. try to stay focused.
the fact is---again----that the fragmentation of production and its reorganization into supply pools linked by just-in-time style arrangments (which presuppose complex transportation systems) is a long-term process; it is one of the main features of "globalizing capitalism"--it is the what that is being globalized. capitalist production, capitalist exploitation if you like. which it is. all the more than previously because the brave new world of supply pools can make union busting or more repressive laws that prevent working people from organizing into a "competitive advantage" which is then justified by free marketeers in the north for whom exploitation is a good thing so long as commodities are cheap and the free marketeers themselves dont feel that they are being exploited. and it's all a force of nature in free marketeer world, not a result of choices that have and will continue to have disastrous social consequences for the metropole. which is where you and i live.
the main claim in the brenner piece i linked above is that the underlying characteristic of contemporary capitalism is quite feeble, driven nearly to inertia through over-capacity so through over production which is of course the recurrent problem with capitalism isn't it? results from the standardization of processes, yes? anyway, you have real economies that just cant motor themselves and this is a persistent feature. you have this in the context of a new spatial arrangement which is absolutely not in the interest of the metropolitan working class at all at all---the end of nation-states, the end of the politics of nation-states in some ways---it doesn't matter that alot of us conservatives have such a blinkered view of history that they do not even recognize what's been given away here without so much as a whimper--somehow they've been conned into thinking that the interests of capital and their own interests are the same, more or less, and this despite the fact that the contemporary crisis demonstrates that this is self-evidently NOT the case, just as the history of neoliberalism does.
brenner argues that in a way the first pure neoliberal administration was clintons.
one of the hallmarks of neoliberal monetarism has been a series of bubbles (dot com, credit, housing etc) that have been sold as if bubble activity represented the states of affairs in the real economy--which they in the main did not. but these bubbles resulted from actions undertaken by the fed which reassured itself (greenspan was great for this) with bromides like "the fundamentals of the economy are strong"---which of course they werent and aren't, but hey who needs reality that affects most people when you're hypnotized by the reality that affects the holders of capital. and besides, that's the only reality you see routinely on tv.
among the ideas was that these bubbles would translate somehow, trickle down, into investment in new economic activities and infrastructure....which of course they didnt. why would they?
by the end of bush 2 we had reached the end of a series of bubbles, including the epic housing one and its correlate in the mortgage-backed securities fiasco (strange how these bond rating firms still exist. how is that possible? standard and poor's? moody? what the fuck are these outfits doing still in business?) and the realities that these bubbles were either supposed to address (unlikely--didnt happen in any event) or obscure (now we're talking...republican reality management...dont like something? pretend its not there. remember what the "great communicator" did to control inflation in the 1980s? he stopped counting things that caused inflation in the index. its paradigmatic) are still here.
and conservatives STILL want to pretend there's no problem.
there was a "jobless recovery" under clinton i think...what links the two is that they both happened inside the same basic capitalist geography. american socio-economic policy has not caught up with this geography in large measure i think because the still-dominant pollyanna neoliberal ideology doesn't allow for frank confrontation with real social problems of any magnitude, particularly not if confronting them pushes you to conclude the obvious--that capitalism left to itself does not produce anything like optimized social outcomes.
there's alot more to the brenner piece, btw. it's worth reading.
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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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