Here’s the abstract:

There has been a significant expansion in Canada’s Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) over the past ten years. The Pilot Project for Occupations Requiring Lower Levels of Formal Training (PPORLLFT), a sub program of the TFWP, has been leading this expansion. Drawing upon testimony given to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration, this thesis examines the development and expansion of the program, since its inception in 2002, and shows that it is connected to the ongoing process of neoliberalisation in Canada. One significant example of this connection is the program’s support for increases in two-step immigration streams that involve employer sponsorship for successful transition to permanent residency; this increase represents a privatisation of citizenship decisions. More than this, the neoliberal aspects of the PPORLLFT have increased inequality and the ability of employers to have a more disciplined workforce. This has decreased the ability of working people to have influence in their workplace and over economic policy more generally.

]]> http://www.andycragg.ca/wordpress/thesis-abstract/feed/ 0 http://www.andycragg.ca/wordpress/jim-stanfords-economics-for-everyone/ http://www.andycragg.ca/wordpress/jim-stanfords-economics-for-everyone/#comments Thu, 17 Feb 2011 15:01:16 +0000 admin http://www.andycragg.ca/wordpress/?p=328 This book is a great, comprehensive, and accessible overview of the economics of capitalism.

Two things I learned from this book:

The purpose of a corporation is to protect the individual wealth of the corporation’s investors and owners.

The fundamental conflict between employers and workers. Employers pay the workers to do a task; they are buying task completion. But workers aren’t selling task completion, they are selling their time.

The use of the word free does have a crucial double meaning. It suggests that a balance of power exists between capital and labour, that they face each other as equals, otherwise any bargain struck could scarcely be viewed as one which was freely achieved. It also suggests that the state’s role is akin to that of an umpire who works to be involved in applying, interpreting, and adjusting impartial rules. In the case of the first meaning, the structural inequality between capital and labour is obscured; in the second, the use of the state’s coercive powers on behalf of capital falls from view. (13)

In Canada, the right to freedom of association underpins the ability/right to bargain collectively

Myth of gradualism, that things get gradually better over time. Inevitable progress.

On the certification process:

The certification approach to union recognition did more than just weaken the apparent importance of militant organization. It directed the efforts of union leaders away from mobilizing and organizing and toward the juridical arena of the labour boards. In this context different skills were necessary. It was crucial, above all, to know the law–including legal rights, procedures, and precedents. These activities tended to foster a legalistic practice and consciousness in which union rights appeared as privleges bestowed by the state, rather than democratic freedoms won, and to be defended by, collective struggle. The ban on strikes during collective agreements and the institution of compulsory arbitration to resolve disputes while agreements were in force has a similar effect. Under these circumstances it was unnecessary to maintain and develop collective organization between negotiations. (21)

This recalls to me two things. First, the idea of rights being bestowed rather than taken or enacted is something that I wrote about in my paper on the low-skill TFWP in relation to citizenship. Second, the effects of the institutionalization and bureaucratization union activities is something that I learned about recently in a conversation with a fellow student who is involved with the IWW. The IWW sees the elaborate legal processes surrounding the labour board and labour law in general as a strategy for the control of the labourer’s essential and greatest power: the right to withhold his or her labour.

I’ve seen statistics about the stagnation of real wages since the early 1980s. Given what the authors describe was happening in the 1980s (i.e. the legislation of wage stagnation) it seems that the changes in wage levels (or restraints in wage levels) that occurred then have never been overcome–they laid the groundwork for the lack of increase in real wages.

The 1980s featured ‘permanent exceptionalism’ where along with supposedly temporary wage restraints, public and private sector employees’ workplace rights were restricted in a long-term manner.

Another crucial aspect of this book is its focus on the public sector employees and their relationship to their employer, i.e. the state itself. There is an inherent conflict of interest that the state has in so far as it is both an employer and at the same time is the highest authority in the land. Employers in the private sector are beholden to labour laws set out by the legislature and the courts, but the state as employer is not restricted by the law insofar as it can change laws that it sees undesirable. In order for free collective bargaining to take place, both sides of the table (i.e. employers and employees) must be in a relatively equal place. But this can never be the case with public sector employees. Panitch and Swartz demonstrate that since the early 1980s the state in negotiations with its employees the state has increasingly exploited its position as a super-employer, mostly by enacting back-to-work legislation and restricting the right to strike, a right which trade unionists see as a fundamental right of workers. One way that the government has increased its control over the ability of its workers to strike has been by designating certain occupations as essential services, thereby removing their right to strike. The extent to which successive governments have pushed the definition of essential services has even come to the attention of the International Labour Organization (ILO); from 1974 to 1991 fully 34% of all complaints to the ILO of violations of trade union rights in the G7 group of countries came from Canada.

The The tone of the ILO rulings are invariably diplomatic expressing “concern” and suggesting appropriate “ammendment,” but a degree of exasperation has crept in even here. As one ruling pertaining to Nova Scotia put it:

‘The Committee of Frreedom of ssociation recalls that the right to strike could be restricted in the strict sense of the term, i.e. services whose interruption would endanger the existence or well-being of the whole or part of the population. The ban on strike activity for employees of the Art Gallery, Boxing Authority and Communications and Information Centre appears to the Committee to go far beyond this criterion.’

By the end of the 1980s, this tone of exasperation was unmistakable even in relation to the federal government. in their ruling on complaints two against two instances of federal back-to-work legislation enacted within two months of each other in 1987, the ILO dismissed out of hand the federal government’s defense that such legislation was ‘relatively uncommon’ in Canada, and flatly asserted that the Canadian government’s actions were “not in conformity with the principles of freedom of association.” (57)

Challenges by unions to this increasing use of coercion by the state have mostly come via asserting that the freedom of association guaranteed in the charter must imply the right to strike and bargain collectively.

The development of liberalism as a political idea is closely conjoined with the end of feudalism and the beginnings of capitalist modes of production. Besides the social aspects of liberalism, like support for individual rights, fair treatment under the law, and democracy, liberalism is also fundamentally about the sanctity of private property and the superiority of the so-called free market as a means of organizing economic exchanges. Neoliberalism is a reinvigoration of the economic aspects of liberalism, drawing upon the branches of economic theory known as neoclassical economics and monetarism. Fundamental economic principles of neoliberalism, as described by one of its best proponents, Thomas Friedman, include a set of so-called ‘golden rules’ like,

making the private sector the primary engine of [a nation’s] economic growth; maintaining a low rate of inflation and price stability; shrinking the size of [the] state bureaucracy; maintaining as close to a balanced budget as possible, if not a surplus; eliminating and lowering tariffs on imported goods; removing restrictions on foreign investment; getting rid of quotas and domestic monopolies; increasing exports; privatizing state-owned industries and utilities; deregulating capital markets; making [the] currency convertible; opening industries, stock and bond markets to direct foreign ownership and investment; deregulating [the] economy to promote as much domestic competition as possible; opening up [the] banking and telecommunications systems to private ownership and competition; and allowing citizens to choose from an array of competing pension options and foreign-run pension mutual funds. (Qtd in Albo 2002, pp. 46-47)

Put in less economistic terms, by David Harvey, neoliberalism is,

in the first instance, a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. (Harvey, 2007, p. 2)

Neoliberalism arguably extends these economic principles into the political, cultural, and social realms in ways that support and encourage its economic policies. Philosopher Slavoz Zizek describes that “for most people under twenty in Europe and North America, the lack of alternatives to capitalism [and its current form, neoliberalism,] is no longer an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable” (Fisher, 8). It has become difficult to see the forest for the trees; indeed, it is difficult to imagine in the current era of cutbacks and austerity, a time in Canada when the creation of massive public programs like medicare and the Canadian Pension Plan were even thinkable let alone politically achievable. Privatization of public goods; commodification, especially of the previously uncommodified, like water and air; privileging the individual over the collective; free trade agreements; increasing inequality the world over; increasing presence and acceptance of advertizements; ubiquitousness of fears of liability; the marketization of environmental movements and international aid; all of these disparate processes are characteristic of neoliberalism, but what connects them all?
There is nothing obviously or directly connecting all of the ideas associated with neoliberalism but there is a “family resemblance” between all of these ideas. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his explorations of the workings of language in the book Philosophical Investigations, develops this idea of family resemblance. Rather than looking for one common trait that runs through a set of obviously connected words, he postulates that the members of this set would all have a connection to each other that is like the common physical traits that make members of the same family look like each other. Two sibling might have similarly-shaped noses, while one of them shares a jaw line in common with a cousin, and the other has similar eyebrows to a different cousin. All of these traits combine to create a family resemblance. Another metaphor is the construction of rope: there is no one long strand that runs through a length of rope; rather, the rope is made up of a number of shorter strands that combined make up the longer rope. All of the concepts and processes that describe neoliberalism are like the strands of a rope or particular family traits: though these concepts and processes do not share any one thing in common, they combine to describe a coherent whole.
But how coherent is neoliberalism really? As described by its proponents as a set of economic principles that will lead to the creation of an ideal society, neoliberalism is not coherent. There is no connection between the way that neoliberal policies are supposed to work and the way that they are actually enacted and received. Neoliberalism in theory is utterly different from neoliberalism in practice. This is because neoliberalism is not fundamentally about economic policies for sustained growth. It is really about the restoration of elite class power. In Harvey’s words, neoliberalism can be interpreted “either as a utopian project to realize a theoretical design for the reorganization of international capitalism or as a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites” (2007, p. 19). Greg Albo insists that, “neoliberalism cannot be reduced to a discourse about market society, ‘golden rules’ for public policy… It is a particular form of class rule within capitalism” (2002, p.?). Stephen Gill, echoing the ideas of Karl Polanyi, calls neoliberalism starkly utopian arguing that “a pure market system is a utopian abstraction and any attempt to construct it fully would require an immensely authoritarian of political power through the state” (1995, p. 420). So, on the one hand neoliberalism could be about rejuvenating (international) capitalism in response to the economic crises that occurred in the 1970s, which is how it is described in the mainstream, or on the other hand it could be seen as opportunism designed to counter the general progress that had been made between the end of the Second World War and the 1970s towards a more equitable distribution of wealth and power within a capitalist system (i.e. Keynesianism and ‘embedded liberalism’). Only if seen in this light, as intentional elite opportunism, can a coherent description of neoliberalism be constructed.

Stream it for free here: Finding Farley

“We live in a contradiction, a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian—where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone—is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we’re lucky that we don’t live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it’s better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it’s not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don’t cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc.” (5)

A key point of departure for Fisher is the idea from Zizek that it is becoming impossible to imagine what a future without capitalism could even look like. ”For most peope under twenty in Europe and North America, the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable” (8). True or defeatist? Rather, there has always been, since the post-war period anyway, a mainstream majority that does not challenge capitalism. Perhaps the global scale of this majority is new (although I know that Capitalism is less entrenched in the so-called developing countries).

A, or maybe the, challenge for Fisher is to be able to imagine an alternative to capitalism that is not born out of, and therefore co-optable by, capitalism and that is not just a rehashing of previous non-capitalistic societies. He writes about the former in relation to the anti-globalization struggles in Seattle (see ch.2, “What if you held a protest and everyone came?”). The latter  it seems to me must not be totally what he is saying, as Polanyi and any economic historian would easily point to the existence of pre-capitalistic societies. Also relating to Polanyi, and I think Fisher would like this, culture would seem to be crucial; cultural creations that are non-capitalizable are crucial if only because they would signal the embedding of the/an economic system in society and not visa versa. In the few pages of the last chapter of the book Fisher starts to lay some of his ideas about how to effectively challenge “late capitalism”.

“It’s well past time for the left to cease limiting its ambitions to the establishing of a big state. But being ‘at a distance from the state’ does not mean either abandoning the state or retreating into the private space of affects and diversity which Zizek rightly argues is the perfect compliment to neoliberalism’s domination of the state.” (77) So we don’t want to focus on capturing and running a big state, but we also don’t want to ignore the importance of the state and leave it do be dominated by neoliberal ideals. This dual concern comes out of for one thing Fisher’s concern about what he calls ‘reflexive impotence’, which occurs when people “know [upon reflection that] things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it.” (21) This feeling of impotence, of ‘passive observation’, becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. This idea also brings to mind another striking passage from Fisher. He, apparently following Zizek, sees a distinction being drawn between internal and external beliefs, and that “Capitalist ideology in general…consists preceisely in the overhauling of belief–in the sense of inner subjective attitude–at the expense of beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behaviour. So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange.” (13) And, interestingly, Hollywood films that appear to be anti-capitalist and/or anti-corporatist like Wall-E, Blood Diamonds, Syriana, etc. actually “exemplify what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film[s] perform our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.” (12)

There is an interesting section in the book about not blaming corporations for their misdeeds, but blaming government instead. In this way we treat the state as the nanny? We still expect everything from the state, so individualism does not carry over and apply to corporations even though they are treated as individuals in certain contexts. Corporations exploit this state of affairs in order to avoid blame, accountability, and mass backlash.

Does Bolivarian Latin American present an actually existing alternative to capitlism, and therefore, in contrast to Zizek and Fredric Jameson, the possibility of imagining a different world that isn’t just the end of the world? Fisher (7) claims that the end of actually existing socialism is a premise of his preferring the term “capitalist realism” to “postmodernism”. Is Bolivarianism not good enough, for him, to be a counter to “cultural and political sterility”(7)? is this Eurocentric?

pomo vs cap realism p7

Universals: “Freedom of expression can not be sought indiviously in one territory and ignored in another.” (89)

There need to be universals otherwise everyone would do what they think is right. ["In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did that which was right in his own eyes." (90) This sounds very unappealing and distopian to me.] Chomsky’s writing is a great example of this, because he holds all sides to account, where other so-called intellectuals decry the trampling of freedoms in other countries, but defend the USA’s own imperialist actions (e.g. Michael Ignatieff).

Freedom of opinion:

“uncompromising freedom of opinion and expression is the secular intellectual’s main bastion: to abandon its defense or to tolerate tamperings with any of its foundations is in effect to betray the intellectual’s calling.” (89)

A question that I have is whether people should be able to say/write whatever they want? (should intellectuals?) clearly no. (hate speech etc.) But an intellectual for Said, and I agree, is someone who challenges authority; if you are conformist professionalist then you arent an intellectual, which means that Judy Rebick and Chomsky are intellectuals but Ignatieff and Tom Flanagen aren’t. (or is Flanagen? no, because he does not stand up for the weak and non-powerful).

The task of the intellectual:

“What truth and principles should one defend, uphold, represent?” (89)

“The intellectuals representations–what he or she represents and how those ideas are represented to an audience–are always tied to and ought to remain an organic part of an ongoing experience in society: of the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the unrepresented, the powerless.” (113)

The intellectual represents, “an individual vocation, an energy, a stubborn force engaging as a committed and recognizable voice in language and in society with a whole slew of issues, all of them having to do in the end with a combination of enlightenment and emancipation or freedom.” (73)

Amateurism vs. Professionalism:

“By professionalism I mean thinking o your work as an intellectual as something you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five with one eye on the clock, and another cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional behaviour–not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or limits making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial and unpolitical and ‘objective.’” (74)

“amateurism, literally, an activity that is fueled by care and affection rather than by profit  and selfish, narrow, specialization.” (82)

“Amateurism means choosing the risks and uncertain results of the public sphere–a lecture or a book or an article in wide and unrestricted circulation–over the insider space controlled by experts and professionals.” (87)

“the intellectual, properly speaking, is not a functionary or an employee completely given up to the policy goals of a government or a large corporation, or even a guild of like-minded professionals. IN such situations the temptations to turn off one’s moral sense or to think entirely from within the specialty, or to curtail skepticism in favour of conformity are far too great to be trusted.” (86)

This all reminds me of Chomskey’s argument about people being trained to not feel qualified to comment on political matters because they are seen to be too complex, even though these same people make detailed arguments about, for example, baseball games based on their ability to understand complex statistics, player histories, and probabilities.

“Everything I have written in these lectures underlines the importance to the intellectual of passionate engagement, risk, exposure, commitment to principles, vulnerability in debating and being involved in worldly causes. For examples, the difference I drew earlier between a professional and an amateur intellectual rests precisely on this, that the professional claims detachment on the basis of a profession and pretends to objectivity, whereas the amateur is moved neither by rewards nor by the fulfillment of an immediate career plan but by a committed engagement with ideas and values in the public sphere.” (109)

The Intellectual as an Exile:

“A condition of marginality, which might seem irresponsible or flippant, frees you from having always to proceed with caution, afraid to overturn the applecart, anxious about upsetting fellow members of the same corporation…I am saying that to be as marginal and as undomesticated as someone who is in real exile is for an intellectual to be unusually responsive to the traveller rather than to the potentate, to the provisional and risky rather than to the habitual, to innovation and experiment rather than the authoritatively given status quo. The exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of the conventional byt to the audacity of daring, and to representing change, to moving on, not standing still.” (63-64)

So, the first question, is neoliberalism a system of social and economic regulation in the way that Keynesian-Fordist policies were, mediating and structuring relations between different classes and interests? Taking a historical perspective, the neoliberalism of Thatcher and Reagan was destructive and based on a ‘roll-back’ of prevailing policies, rather than being an alternative per se. Into the 90s, economic crises forced neoliberal policy makers to become more creative and to ‘roll-out’ policies designed to moderate and/or discipline social resistances to the system [e.g. Mike Harris' policies like workfare: an alternative to, not just a destruction of, previous welfare policies].

But describing the characteristics of the institutions of neoliberalism is difficult. In the Keynesian era there were various institutions like, for example, labour relations boards, policing services, hospitals, etc. Peck and Tickell propose that these sorts of institutions could be seen as ‘hardware’ and that, at least initially, neoliberalization changed the ’software’, the rules that determine the functioning of these institutions. ”Neoliberalism was playing a decisive role in constructing the “rules” of interlocal competition by shaping the very metrics by which regional competitiveness, public policy, corporate performance, or social productivity are measured—value for money, the bottom line, flexibility, shareholder value, performance rating, social capital, and so on. Neoliberalism therefore represented a form of regulation of sorts, but not a form commensurate with, say, the Keynesian-welfarism that preceded it in many (though not all) cases.” (387)  But eventually, more recently, the hardware is changing too, as neoliberalism becomes entrenched and the ’software’ becomes normalized. Ideas like, for example, ‘fiscal responsibility’are no longer debated, they are just assumed, and so whole new institutions can be created [e.g. department of homeland security, the G8 (vs. UN), others?] and destroyed or attacked [e.g. Canadian Wheat Board, others?].

The ultimate thrust of Peck and Tickell’s argument, and, I think, their answer to the question of whether or how neoliberalism regulates is that it regulates the spaces between. One thing about neoliberalism is that, like Brenner and Theodore’s ‘path-dependency’, neoliberalization manifests itself in different ways in every different location. Peck and Tickell call this ‘local neoliberalisms’. Neoliberalism gains its strength, its robustness, in controlling and ordering the rules that govern and create competition between these local neoliberalisms. Here’s an example that I think relates; the current obsession with insurance. Small-scale organizations, from community centres to public elementary schools, are worried sick about not being liable in the case that someone gets seriously injured on their property, and so they go to serious and bizarre ends to counter this, demanding waiver forms, limiting access, destroying/replacing perfectly good playgrounds, etc. How did this culture of paranoia develop? Perhaps it comes out of neoliberalism regulating not directly regulating these local organizations, but by existing in the space between these organizations in the creation of a the culture of fear and competition or at least isolation between these organizations as individual units, rather than part of a collective that gains strength from being mutually supportive–a community centre would not be so concerned about liability if all community groups were strong as a collective, besides which, more importantly, the risk of someone cracking their head open and also suing are very low but neoliberalism exaggerates this fear by valorizing financial liquidity and individual responsibility while at the same time removing support systems that would dissuade fears. I’m not sure that that ended up being a very coherent example. Here is what Peck and Tickell say about neoliberalism shaping contexts:

Contemporary politics revolve around axes the very essences of which have been neoliberalized. As such, neoliberalism is qualitatively different from “competing” regulatory projects and experiments: it shapes the environments, contexts, and frameworks within which political-economic and socio- institutional restructuring takes place. Thus, neoliberal rule systems are perplexingly elusive; they operate between as well as within specific sites of incorporation and reproduction, such as national and local states. (400)

If this is true about neoliberalism, that its rule systems are elusive because they shape environments, contexts, and frameworks, then resistance to neoliberalization must be properly focused not just on creating alternatives to manifestations of local neoliberalisms and their rule-structuring effects:

This is not to say that the hegemony of neoliberalism must necessarily remain completely impervious to targeted campaigns of disruption and “regime competition” from progressive alternatives, but rather to argue that the effectiveness of such counterstrategies will continue to be muted, absent a phase-shift in the constitution of extralocal relations. This means that the strategic objectives for opponents of neoliberalism must include the reform of macroinstitutional priorities and the remaking of extralocal rule systems in fields like trade, finance, environmental, antipoverty, education, and labor policy. These may lack the radical edge of more direct forms of resistance, but as intermediate and facilitative objectives they would certainly help to tip the macroenvironment in favor of progressive possibilities. In this context, the defeat (or failure) of local neoliberalisms—even strategically important ones—will not be enough to topple what we are still perhaps justified in calling “the system. (401)

Leading up to the G20 protests, I had a sense that the organizers of the large protests that were to take place had managed to create a broad coalition of labour, socialist, and anarchist groups that respected each other’s ‘diversity of tactics’.² At the big ‘Shout Out For Global Justice’ event on Friday night organized by the Council of Canadians, there was a, I thought, a noticeable tension between the labour speakers and the anti-poverty, indigenous rights, social justice speakers (e.g. difference b/w Leo Gerard, United Steel Workers president,and Naomi Klein). But I was hopeful that these differences were being broached by a shared commitment to justice and ending capitalism.

Regardless of the amount of destruction committed by police agents provocateurs, some anarchists embrace black block tactics, and it is worth thinking about whether their actions are helpful and strategically useful, or if they are individualistic and strategically poor.

I was going to write/think about this more, but this article called “In the Aftermath of the G20: Reflections on Strategy, Tactics and Militancy” does a better job.

1. here’s an interesting article on anarchism by Noam Chomsky; qt: “The problem of ‘freeing man from the curse of economic exploitation and political and social enslavement’ remains the problem of our time. As long as this is so, the doctrines and the revolutionary practice of libertarian socialism [aka anarchism] will serve as an inspiration and guide.”
2. Toronto chief of police Bill Blair (shame!) at a press conference recently said “They embraced a euphemism they call the diversity of tactics. That is their diversity of tactics,” and pointed to a display of captured implements of destruction.

Harvey backs up his belief in neoliberalism as a project to restore class power mostly by analyzing the track record of neoliberalism during the last 30 years: has human well-being increased in general? has society become more equitable? has the distribution of wealth become more even? has the world become more democratic? A number of indicators show that by these standards the record of neoliberalism is abysmal, which does not necessarily mean that neoliberalism is an elite class project–it could just mean that neoliberals have failed in their utopian project (the goal of which is to bring freedom and prosperity to all via the free-market and extreme individualism). However, given the rapid transfer of wealth from the poor to the wealthy, and given the large gap between neoliberalism in theory and neoliberalism in practice, it seems that freedom and prosperity for all may not be the true goal of those who influence policy. This is, I think, where Harvey’s theory of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ comes in. Here is a long passage about it:

“The main substantive achievement of neoliberalization, however, has been to redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income. I have elsewhere provided an account of the main mechanisms whereby this was achieved under the rubric of ‘accumulation by dispossession’. By this I mean the continuation and proliferation of accumulation practices which Marx had treated of as ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ during the rise of capitalism. These include the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations (compare the cases, described above, of Mexico and of China, where 70 million peasants are thought to have been displaced in recent times); conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights (most spectacularly represented by China); suppression of rights to the commons; commodification of labour power and the suppression of alternative (indigenous) forms of production and consumption; colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); monetization of exchange and taxation, particularly of land; the slave trade (which continues particularly in the sex industry); and usury, the national debt and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession. The state, with its monopoly of violence and definitions of legality, plays a crucial role in both backing and promoting these processes” (159)

One of the earlier examples of accumulation by dispossession is the Mexican debt crisis in the early 1980s when Mexico declared that it could no longer pay off the massive debt that it had acquired to foreign banks:

“What the Mexico case demonstrated, however, was a key difference between liberal and neoliberal practice: under the former, lenders take the losses that arise from bad investment decisions, while under the latter the borrowers are forced by state and international powers to take on board the cost of debt repayment no matter what the consequences for the livelihood and well-being of the local population. If this required the surrender of assets to foreign companies at fire-sale prices, then so be it. This, it turns out, is not consistent with neoliberal theory.” (29)

Just who are the elite who are actively securing their own class power? Taking ‘accumulation by dispossession’ as a premise, the economic recovery during the neoliberal era is not based on the generation of (much) new wealth through the expansion of industry. Rather, new ‘wealth’ and accumulation are the result of finanzcialization (numbers games), enclosure of commons (e.g. the commodification and privatization of water), and the diminishment of the power of organized labour (e.g. the decline of wage rates in real terms). Thus, “one substantial core of rising class power under neoliberalism lies…with the CEOs, the key operators on corporate boards, and the leaders in the financial, legal, and technical apparatuses that surround this inner sanctum of capitalist activity” (33). Another group of highly influential elites are the owners of the massive corporations that have come to dominate the world economy, for example Rupert Murdoch, Bill Gates, Carlos Slim in Mexico, perhaps Conrad Black in Canada, and the Walton family. “the incredible ability not only to amass large personal fortunes but to exercise a controlling power over large segments of the economy confers on these few individuals immense economic power to influence political processes. Small wonder that the net worth of the 358 richest people in 1996 was ‘equal to the combined income of the poorest 45 per cent of the world’s population––2.3 billion people’. Worse still, ‘the world’s 200 richest people more than doubled their net worth in the four years to 1998, to more than $1 trillion. The assets of the top three billionaires [were by then] more than the combined GNP of all least developed countries and their 600 million people’”(43).

“While this disparate group of individuals embedded in the corporate, financial, trading, and developer worlds do not necessarily conspire as a class, and while there may be frequent tensions between them, they nevertheless possess a certain accordance of interests that generally recognizes the advantages (and now some of the dangers) to be derived from neoliberalization. They also possess, through organizations like the World Economic Forum at Davos, means of exchanging ideas and of consorting and consulting with political leaders. They exercise immense influence over global affairs and possess a freedom of action that no ordinary citizen possesses” (45).

There are a lot of other interesting parts in this book, including the influence of neoliberalism on ethics and rights (e.g. the connections between negative rights, privatization, and individualism); on postmodernism as a symptom of neoliberalism (the idea that “postmodern intellectual currents…accord, without knowing it, with the White House line that truth is both socially constructed and a mere effect of discourse,”(198) or in other words that there are no absolute moral truths so we can/should do whatever we want or whatever best suits our interests or acquisition of power); on democratic processes (e.g. the rise of NGOs, which are essentially private sector (i.e. not democratically accountable) groups); on the current tendency towards neoconservativism, which has less interest than neoliberalism in disguising its embrace of authoritarianism; the contradictions caused by neoliberal policy (e.g. the tendency toward large monopolistic companies like walmart and google, rather than increased innovation through competition); on Polanyi and the value of alternative, collective rights (e.g.”the the right to life chances, to political association and ‘good’ governance, for control over production by the direct producers, to the inviolability and integrity of the human body, to engage in critique without fear of retaliation, to a decent and healthy living environment, to collective control of common property resources”(213)); and more.

I haven’t offered any critical comments on Harvey’s book here, possibly because I think that it is pretty much right on. I thought that the chapter on China was very dry and economistic, and I tend to twinge whenever I read sweeping condemnations of China, entirely as a result of the influence of SLE. This is a very unpopular stance though these days. It is interesting though that Harvey’s criticism of China and its ‘human rights record’ is not coming from the usual place of (hypocritical) outrage about how draconian China is compared to the free and liberal west. Harvey is critical of Deng’s neoliberal turn, and the whole idea of ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ which has involved the destruction of the iron rice bowl, the creation of an elite class, increased privatization of services, implementation of user fees, the dislocation of millions of peasants, and the destruction of the power and influence of organized labourers. Hmmm, it seems that I ended up being uncritical of Harvey again…