|
seaver---we're saying similar things. i just have a peculiar coffee-addled shorthand that perhaps minimized that. anyway, the reorganization of the american economy, the fracturing of the manufacturing sector, the crushing of the union movement, the collapse of the institutional and cultural logics that made collective bargaining arrangements a useful paradigm for thinking wage relations, so that expansions in consumer credit were tied to predictable wage increases in the leading industrial sectors--all the features that made the american/fordist model functional during the period it was in effect from after world war 2 through the 1970s.
the nixon administration was deeply reactionary and full of people so saw in this actually relatively functional model of capitalism some spectre of democratic socialism so the administration moved to fundamentally undermine it, replacing it with more "market" orientations. simplifying a bit (because, well, it's a messageboard) the nixon period opened the way for the reagan thing, and the reagan thing is what descended neoliberalism like a giant fungus over us all.
much of what the tea party is freaked out about seems to follow in a straight line from the implementation of **exactly** the kind of capitalism they continue to endorse.
so they really make no sense in that respect.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|