This is one of your more complex articles, so I need time to digest a lot of it. I did pickup some salient points. We as individuals need to be able to survive 3 months (minimum) or more without any government intervention. Many of our adversaries are joining together and making alliances to help themselves when things become dire. These adversaries are already stockpiling foods to become self sufficient. By doing this the country/s are putting itself in a stronger position because it can take care of their population should a variety of events happening ie: wars, natural disasters, immigrant influx, whatever is thrown in the current mix of things.
We are not taking the necessary steps in our own county. Not at the federal, state or local level. This is a warning bell to get yourself as self sufficient as possible.
Thanks for reading, Pbr! I'm not 100% sure that the strategies that apply to nations or communities as a whole--e.g. stockpiling--can be fully translated over to individual households, but, yes, in general stocks are insurance policies of sorts, protecting the entity that creates and uses them from fluctuations in prices and supplies of necessary goods. It's one of the oldest agricultural risk management strategies there is. While full self-sufficiency (autarky) is probably not attainable for any of us, nations or households, the benefits of holding stocks of necessary goods have been forgotten over many decades of relatively peaceful and reliable international free trade. Recent shocks and crises are a good reminder of how and why economies looked different in other historical periods...global markets can be unreliable and are prone to disruption.
I have a different interpretation of both "neoliberalism" and "globalization."
Neoliberalism was not really a revival of classical liberalism, it was an Americanization of communism. Neoliberal globalization was communism with Anglo-American characteristics, just as Deng Xiaoping in China was (according to David Harvey) a neoliberal with Chinese characteristics.
Globalization was a radicalization of market collectivization, no longer collectivization via national empire but now via private property market fundamentalism. Production processes were fragmented, yes, but the new global economy was collectivized and centralized via the US Dollar and global finance. Bankers and financiers are a remarkably transnational class with firm class consciousness that they exist above nation-states. Neoliberals were political bolsheviks i.e. they were a political minority that prevailed over the social majority. That's what bolshevism means, a minority revolution against the majority.
Another way to think about neoliberal globalization is as denationalization. The neoliberals did not overthrow the nation-state in the same way that the Leninist bolsheviks overthrew the emperor-state. They carried out the neoliberal revolution through the agency of nation-states which became merely figureheads for a global bolshevik party or "capitalist condominium" (co-dominion). Free trade agreements such as NAFTA were revolutionary policies of denationalization. The nation-state was transformed into a multinational corporation.
The bolsheviks in the USSR were defeated in the 1980s, but the bolsheviks in Beijing were incorporated into the new American neoliberal regime. It was a Sino-American bolshevism that triumphed in the 1990s, and the Russian bolsheviks were not integrated into the new regime, so they retreated to their own neoliberal oligarchy in Eurasia.
I think the usual interpretive paradigm of the neoliberal era is completely wrong. I don't agree with the narrative that America and China had a rapproachment in the 1990s and things simply soured. I think the 1990s was a "neobolshevik" or "neocommunist" era in which the bolsheviks in DC (i.e. the Washington Consensus executives of the multinational corporation) allied with the bolsheviks in Beijing.
Since 2008, we've seen a bolshevik split between the neoliberals in the US and the neoliberals in Beijing. Now China has doubled-down on its own national communist party, while the US is struggling to preserve its own form of communism aka neoliberal globalization.
The government in Washington DC is a bolshevik government, just like the government of the USSR in the 1980s. They are not accountable to a nation-state, they are accountable to the multinational corporation or "capitalist condominium" represented by the G7. BRICS is an alternative multinational corporation led by the bolsheviks in Beijing. Trump, of course, is an outsider to this bolshevik regime and he represents the nation-state that was overthrown in favor of the capitalist condominium i.e. multinational corporation aka the G7.
Thanks so much for reading and for taking the time to write back here! Really appreciate it. Agree that contemporary "free markets" aren't free in the way that their proponents suggested they would be, much like contemporary communist economies aren't really free in the way proponents suggested. In both cases, problems arise with concentrations in wealth and power, accumulation and centralization of resources in a way that fundamentally undermines individual freedoms. To my mind, in communist societies, it is the state and the party apparatus that tends capture wealth and power. But in capitalist ones like ours, ones that are "monopoly capitalist" in practice, it is major corporations that play that role. So, overall, I agree that "freedom" is bedeviled in both cases by powerful entities that capture and centralize wealth and power. A major difference is WHO is in control, the government or Big Business? This is clearly oversimplified, but I wanted to share this perspective so that we can chat a bit here if you'd like to keep doing so. Thanks again for reading!
Just to clarify terms, I would define a “market economy” in two senses. First, a market economy is a political system based on decentralized sources of economic initiative, as opposed to a communist system based on politically centralized economic initiative and planning.
And then more generally, I would say that a market economy is a political system based on low-level trust among social actors, governed principally by property and contract law. (My thinking here is drawn largely from the work of Roberto Mangabeira Unger at Harvard.)
I say a market economy is a “political” system rather than an “economic” system because from an economic perspective, there is no single or necessary form of a market society. The political form of the market society that prevailed under neoliberalism was based on a particular legal regime which defines property and contract in absolute terms. In other words, unequal concentrations of wealth and power are enforced and reinforced by a legal regime of absolute or “consolidated” property rights.
So in this sense, even though neoliberalism was ostensibly based on the decentralized “freedom” of economic initiative and activity, it was also a political regime based on the legal protection of an economic elite (a mafia, let’s call it) that was beyond the political control or interference of state or society. Neoliberalism was a political revolution of an economic minority against the social-democratic political settlement that had prevailed in America and Europe since the 1930s. That political minority had as its aim the private or exclusive concentration of wealth and power in much the same way as the bolshevik communists in Beijing and Moscow.
So the institutional structure of social life under neoliberalism was legally constructed to prevent any interference with the exclusive enjoyment of property rights to concentrated wealth and power. Neoliberalism placed private property beyond any political or social control or interference, in other words. We see the same dynamic in private corporations where majority shareholders want to create new shares to raise capital, but without the pesky “democratic” interference of minority and retail shareholders.
You made the contrast between a “party” elite in a communist state versus a monopoly “market” elite in a capitalist state. But in my view, there isn’t much of a difference between communist and capitalist systems in this sense. Communist states are politically centralized whereas capitalist states are politically decentralized. But economically, both are designed for the same purpose which is the concentration of wealth and power in a political elite with absolute rights to consolidate and control economic property, initiative and activity.
Social democracy was based on a political model in which a nation-state acts in the public interest. But social democracy failed for a reason, it was based on a supposedly benevolent state that could “control” the many decentralized sources of economic initiatives in society and correct for inegalitarian market outcomes after the fact through retrospective tax and transfer of wealth. But society today is uncontrollably complex, the social democratic model belonged to a now-extinct world of homogenous and industrial nation-states. Today’s world is no longer national but multinational and transnational and even post-national as well as post-industrial and post-Fordist.
Social democracy was a solution to the problem you raise of monopoly capitalism, in fact the monopoly capitalists were the ones who supported social democracy to save their concentrated wealth and power after the unrestrained liberalism of the long nineteenth century. But after the 1970s, the monopoly capitalists no longer wanted to be restrained by this archaic social settlement of the social-democratic nation-state, and thus the Thatcher-Reagan neoliberal revolution was an “unmuzzling” of capitalism. But it wasn’t in order to decentralize society and fragment wealth and power, the neoliberals were not utopians who imagined a world of freedom and equality and decentralized power. They wanted it all for themselves.
What the neoliberals wanted was to establish the absolute rights of private property over political economy and over social democracy. They wanted to consolidate the economic world in their own private hands, and to do so it wasn’t necessary to fight the government. Just the opposite, they successfully realized a political revolution within the government, and they reinvented the government (in my argument) from an industrial nation-state into a multinational financial corporation. This is the sense in which I argue that neoliberalism cannot be understood except as a bolshevik revolution entirely aligned with the bolsheviks in Beijing in the 1990s, it was a political revolution of a minority over the majority, but simultaneously in the name and cause of the majority.
So, bringing this back to your argument about deglobalization, when I hear the word “deglobalization” what I interpret it as is “deprivatization.” In other words, deglobalization implies some sort of reversion of power to the nation-state and the voluntary breakup of empire or hegemony. But I don’t think national empire or hegemonic rivalry was the root of neoliberal globalization, as I’ve argued neoliberalism was precisely a solution to national empire which was already fading by the 1970s, not least of all in the decolonial movements of Africa and Asia. In Anglo-America, Thatcher and Reagan were not national imperialists but rather neoliberal bolsheviks, globalization was a renunciation of national imperialism in favor of private transnationalism of an economic elite, and the political basis of their private economic power was the legal regime of absolute property rights.
I agree with your more general argument that yes, there is an alternative, contrary to Margaret Thatcher’s hubris. But I think it’s the wrong lens to view this in twentieth century terms of nation-states/governments versus big business/monopolists. I don’t think the alternative is deglobalization but rather institutional imagination that is capable of structural transformation.
One practical example is the emergence of financial derivatives which have “split the atom” of the consolidated property right. It’s a practical example of how a market society can be organized on the basis of “disaggregated” property rights, allowing for state and social claims on private property without having to return to the politics of public versus private property. The way forward lies in a new legal regime in which property is not simplistically owned by either the state or the individual, but rather there are innovative ways to manage property that preserves the decentralized market economy while preventing concentrations of wealth and power based on absolute property rights of a political elite, whether that elite is the G7 or the CCP.
So, in other words, the key to it all is precisely what you indicated in your article: innovation. The real question is whether policy makers have the brains and spirit for the innovation demanded of them. On this point I’m pessimistic. The way politics operates in the West is that policy makers just preserve the status quo and repeat time-worn ideas until they are forced to do something different by some major crisis. Clearly, as you argue, we have reached the point of crisis (or “polycrisis”) in the environment, food shortage, etc., but there’s no guarantee that the polycrisis will provoke the policy makers to think of new and different ideas. It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a political actor to make any bold innovations in thought or action.
Ultimately, I think the impetus for radical transformation will have to come from below, our only hope is a rejuvenation of democracy. Like I said, I’m not optimistic, but I am hopeful.
This is one of your more complex articles, so I need time to digest a lot of it. I did pickup some salient points. We as individuals need to be able to survive 3 months (minimum) or more without any government intervention. Many of our adversaries are joining together and making alliances to help themselves when things become dire. These adversaries are already stockpiling foods to become self sufficient. By doing this the country/s are putting itself in a stronger position because it can take care of their population should a variety of events happening ie: wars, natural disasters, immigrant influx, whatever is thrown in the current mix of things.
We are not taking the necessary steps in our own county. Not at the federal, state or local level. This is a warning bell to get yourself as self sufficient as possible.
Thanks for reading, Pbr! I'm not 100% sure that the strategies that apply to nations or communities as a whole--e.g. stockpiling--can be fully translated over to individual households, but, yes, in general stocks are insurance policies of sorts, protecting the entity that creates and uses them from fluctuations in prices and supplies of necessary goods. It's one of the oldest agricultural risk management strategies there is. While full self-sufficiency (autarky) is probably not attainable for any of us, nations or households, the benefits of holding stocks of necessary goods have been forgotten over many decades of relatively peaceful and reliable international free trade. Recent shocks and crises are a good reminder of how and why economies looked different in other historical periods...global markets can be unreliable and are prone to disruption.
I have a different interpretation of both "neoliberalism" and "globalization."
Neoliberalism was not really a revival of classical liberalism, it was an Americanization of communism. Neoliberal globalization was communism with Anglo-American characteristics, just as Deng Xiaoping in China was (according to David Harvey) a neoliberal with Chinese characteristics.
Globalization was a radicalization of market collectivization, no longer collectivization via national empire but now via private property market fundamentalism. Production processes were fragmented, yes, but the new global economy was collectivized and centralized via the US Dollar and global finance. Bankers and financiers are a remarkably transnational class with firm class consciousness that they exist above nation-states. Neoliberals were political bolsheviks i.e. they were a political minority that prevailed over the social majority. That's what bolshevism means, a minority revolution against the majority.
Another way to think about neoliberal globalization is as denationalization. The neoliberals did not overthrow the nation-state in the same way that the Leninist bolsheviks overthrew the emperor-state. They carried out the neoliberal revolution through the agency of nation-states which became merely figureheads for a global bolshevik party or "capitalist condominium" (co-dominion). Free trade agreements such as NAFTA were revolutionary policies of denationalization. The nation-state was transformed into a multinational corporation.
The bolsheviks in the USSR were defeated in the 1980s, but the bolsheviks in Beijing were incorporated into the new American neoliberal regime. It was a Sino-American bolshevism that triumphed in the 1990s, and the Russian bolsheviks were not integrated into the new regime, so they retreated to their own neoliberal oligarchy in Eurasia.
I think the usual interpretive paradigm of the neoliberal era is completely wrong. I don't agree with the narrative that America and China had a rapproachment in the 1990s and things simply soured. I think the 1990s was a "neobolshevik" or "neocommunist" era in which the bolsheviks in DC (i.e. the Washington Consensus executives of the multinational corporation) allied with the bolsheviks in Beijing.
Since 2008, we've seen a bolshevik split between the neoliberals in the US and the neoliberals in Beijing. Now China has doubled-down on its own national communist party, while the US is struggling to preserve its own form of communism aka neoliberal globalization.
The government in Washington DC is a bolshevik government, just like the government of the USSR in the 1980s. They are not accountable to a nation-state, they are accountable to the multinational corporation or "capitalist condominium" represented by the G7. BRICS is an alternative multinational corporation led by the bolsheviks in Beijing. Trump, of course, is an outsider to this bolshevik regime and he represents the nation-state that was overthrown in favor of the capitalist condominium i.e. multinational corporation aka the G7.
That's my interpretation.
Thanks so much for reading and for taking the time to write back here! Really appreciate it. Agree that contemporary "free markets" aren't free in the way that their proponents suggested they would be, much like contemporary communist economies aren't really free in the way proponents suggested. In both cases, problems arise with concentrations in wealth and power, accumulation and centralization of resources in a way that fundamentally undermines individual freedoms. To my mind, in communist societies, it is the state and the party apparatus that tends capture wealth and power. But in capitalist ones like ours, ones that are "monopoly capitalist" in practice, it is major corporations that play that role. So, overall, I agree that "freedom" is bedeviled in both cases by powerful entities that capture and centralize wealth and power. A major difference is WHO is in control, the government or Big Business? This is clearly oversimplified, but I wanted to share this perspective so that we can chat a bit here if you'd like to keep doing so. Thanks again for reading!
Thanks for your response!
Just to clarify terms, I would define a “market economy” in two senses. First, a market economy is a political system based on decentralized sources of economic initiative, as opposed to a communist system based on politically centralized economic initiative and planning.
And then more generally, I would say that a market economy is a political system based on low-level trust among social actors, governed principally by property and contract law. (My thinking here is drawn largely from the work of Roberto Mangabeira Unger at Harvard.)
I say a market economy is a “political” system rather than an “economic” system because from an economic perspective, there is no single or necessary form of a market society. The political form of the market society that prevailed under neoliberalism was based on a particular legal regime which defines property and contract in absolute terms. In other words, unequal concentrations of wealth and power are enforced and reinforced by a legal regime of absolute or “consolidated” property rights.
So in this sense, even though neoliberalism was ostensibly based on the decentralized “freedom” of economic initiative and activity, it was also a political regime based on the legal protection of an economic elite (a mafia, let’s call it) that was beyond the political control or interference of state or society. Neoliberalism was a political revolution of an economic minority against the social-democratic political settlement that had prevailed in America and Europe since the 1930s. That political minority had as its aim the private or exclusive concentration of wealth and power in much the same way as the bolshevik communists in Beijing and Moscow.
So the institutional structure of social life under neoliberalism was legally constructed to prevent any interference with the exclusive enjoyment of property rights to concentrated wealth and power. Neoliberalism placed private property beyond any political or social control or interference, in other words. We see the same dynamic in private corporations where majority shareholders want to create new shares to raise capital, but without the pesky “democratic” interference of minority and retail shareholders.
You made the contrast between a “party” elite in a communist state versus a monopoly “market” elite in a capitalist state. But in my view, there isn’t much of a difference between communist and capitalist systems in this sense. Communist states are politically centralized whereas capitalist states are politically decentralized. But economically, both are designed for the same purpose which is the concentration of wealth and power in a political elite with absolute rights to consolidate and control economic property, initiative and activity.
Social democracy was based on a political model in which a nation-state acts in the public interest. But social democracy failed for a reason, it was based on a supposedly benevolent state that could “control” the many decentralized sources of economic initiatives in society and correct for inegalitarian market outcomes after the fact through retrospective tax and transfer of wealth. But society today is uncontrollably complex, the social democratic model belonged to a now-extinct world of homogenous and industrial nation-states. Today’s world is no longer national but multinational and transnational and even post-national as well as post-industrial and post-Fordist.
Social democracy was a solution to the problem you raise of monopoly capitalism, in fact the monopoly capitalists were the ones who supported social democracy to save their concentrated wealth and power after the unrestrained liberalism of the long nineteenth century. But after the 1970s, the monopoly capitalists no longer wanted to be restrained by this archaic social settlement of the social-democratic nation-state, and thus the Thatcher-Reagan neoliberal revolution was an “unmuzzling” of capitalism. But it wasn’t in order to decentralize society and fragment wealth and power, the neoliberals were not utopians who imagined a world of freedom and equality and decentralized power. They wanted it all for themselves.
What the neoliberals wanted was to establish the absolute rights of private property over political economy and over social democracy. They wanted to consolidate the economic world in their own private hands, and to do so it wasn’t necessary to fight the government. Just the opposite, they successfully realized a political revolution within the government, and they reinvented the government (in my argument) from an industrial nation-state into a multinational financial corporation. This is the sense in which I argue that neoliberalism cannot be understood except as a bolshevik revolution entirely aligned with the bolsheviks in Beijing in the 1990s, it was a political revolution of a minority over the majority, but simultaneously in the name and cause of the majority.
So, bringing this back to your argument about deglobalization, when I hear the word “deglobalization” what I interpret it as is “deprivatization.” In other words, deglobalization implies some sort of reversion of power to the nation-state and the voluntary breakup of empire or hegemony. But I don’t think national empire or hegemonic rivalry was the root of neoliberal globalization, as I’ve argued neoliberalism was precisely a solution to national empire which was already fading by the 1970s, not least of all in the decolonial movements of Africa and Asia. In Anglo-America, Thatcher and Reagan were not national imperialists but rather neoliberal bolsheviks, globalization was a renunciation of national imperialism in favor of private transnationalism of an economic elite, and the political basis of their private economic power was the legal regime of absolute property rights.
I agree with your more general argument that yes, there is an alternative, contrary to Margaret Thatcher’s hubris. But I think it’s the wrong lens to view this in twentieth century terms of nation-states/governments versus big business/monopolists. I don’t think the alternative is deglobalization but rather institutional imagination that is capable of structural transformation.
One practical example is the emergence of financial derivatives which have “split the atom” of the consolidated property right. It’s a practical example of how a market society can be organized on the basis of “disaggregated” property rights, allowing for state and social claims on private property without having to return to the politics of public versus private property. The way forward lies in a new legal regime in which property is not simplistically owned by either the state or the individual, but rather there are innovative ways to manage property that preserves the decentralized market economy while preventing concentrations of wealth and power based on absolute property rights of a political elite, whether that elite is the G7 or the CCP.
So, in other words, the key to it all is precisely what you indicated in your article: innovation. The real question is whether policy makers have the brains and spirit for the innovation demanded of them. On this point I’m pessimistic. The way politics operates in the West is that policy makers just preserve the status quo and repeat time-worn ideas until they are forced to do something different by some major crisis. Clearly, as you argue, we have reached the point of crisis (or “polycrisis”) in the environment, food shortage, etc., but there’s no guarantee that the polycrisis will provoke the policy makers to think of new and different ideas. It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a political actor to make any bold innovations in thought or action.
Ultimately, I think the impetus for radical transformation will have to come from below, our only hope is a rejuvenation of democracy. Like I said, I’m not optimistic, but I am hopeful.