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there's alot of problems with monetarism, not least of which is that its central rhetorical categories don't refer to anything. "fiscal responsibility"---what the hell is that? how is it that a state, which is a kind of governor that directs or shapes a multiplicity of social processes, can come to be evaluated along the lines of an individual check-book? why isn't it just as important to think about what the policy choices are, the politics of state action, to ask whether those ends are socially desirable and whether the actions or institutions that follow from policy are advancing the system toward those ends?
"fiscal responsibility" is one of the more powerful conservative memes, but it's nothing more than that.
it's curious: i think the basic proposition that we, collectively, really need to reconsider how capitalism operates as a mode of production so as a form of life (so here as a social type and not a specific system of ownership and organization of production). but i don't think it's going to happen. a significant explanation for that seems to me to be the ways in which political language and infotainment delivery has changed since the vietnam period in reaction (and this in every sense of the term) against that period: political language has been made into a consumer object and political action into a type of consumption. politics is a matter of opinion management. there's no space for recursion, so no space for critical thinking. the meta-discussions that happen on television and which arguably (chomsky--manufacturing consent) set the limits of legitimate debate are in the main shabby sad-to-idiotic affairs in which memes are circulated rather than discussed. all this---i think---as a function of a fear of deliberation, and a fear of critique so a fear of genuine dissent which, from a reactionary viewpoint, got "out of hand" during the 1960-early 70s. this is what gave the hooverites space to crawl out from under their rock--that and the groundwork laid by the nixon administration. and the organizational work done by the christian coalition to get the petit bourgeois rightwing vote out.
i think that conservative domination has incapacitated debate itself. it has wrecked the self-regulating mechanisms inside of american pseudo-democracy. and i think we're seeing some of the consequences of that in a kind of amazing ideological paralysis. it's not absolute, because there are people who see it and talk or write about it at lots of levels---but in the main, it's like deer in front of the headlamps of an oncoming truck.
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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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