swapping neoliberalism for neosocialism?
…there’s some people who think the problem is so bad, that if you actually recognize the losses, that it’s akin to smashing the equipment in the factory. – Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, September 2008, N+1
Continuing to take stock, in various rhetorics, of the current financial crisis:
N+1 magazine’s latest, typically-sharp issue juxtaposes an interview with an anonymous hedge fund manager (who as each interview takes us deeper into the crisis, grows less sanguine) and David Harvey’s Marxist perspective. Most of the time, these two residents of New York City seem to live on different planets. As one would expect, the hedge fund manager perceives things from within the neoliberal framework. He knows that something has gone wrong, but turns to the same tools and ideas of financialization for the fix. Harvey crashes the party (or better said, crashes the financial crash) with the language of Marxism, which allows him to view the crisis through the lens of political economy. This gives him the ability to see the problems of credit, debt, and asset management as linked to deeper structural and political problems of production, housing, ideology, and class warfare. What is astonishing is to read the hedge fund manager move closer and closer, dimly but inexorably, to Harvey’s way of thinking.
Speaking of class warfare, Washington Monthly featured this nice anecdote about why there is such a swell of populist rage at Wall Street. It’s a seamy example, but part of why the Obama administration should fear this populist rage too. After all, it’s essentially the very same Wall Street neoliberals — Tim Geithner, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers — in charge of economic policy within the White House. Thus far, their use of government power seems to sacrifice the interests of the broader populace to guarantee that this class of financiers remains in power.
Back to David Harvey. He has been out in public more often of late as neoliberal frameworks seem increasingly incapable of explaining what is happening. Here he is on Laura Flanders’s Grit TV in a good discussion with the always-rambling-but-also-entertaining Alexander Cockburn. “Does the left have a plan?” they ask, unsure as to whether the United States in particular can get outside neoliberalism at all.
It would seem that developing alternatives to neoliberalism is becoming increasingly essential. If, as Naomi Klein has argued, neoliberals used crises — or even manufactured them — to remake economic relationships, then maybe this crisis of neoliberalism provides the opportunity to remake the world too, but this time in a more just and democratic way.