BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Head Shop >

Capitalism, neoliberalism and democracy

  
 
sdv (non-human)
17:51 / 13.12.05
Haus said on the waste question:

"...I think we need more on the interplay of capitalism, neoliberalism and democracy before we can decide whether or not democracy is an active contributor or simply a historical accident now being used by marketing...."
 
 
Quantum
18:25 / 13.12.05
So?
 
 
*
18:40 / 13.12.05
Could someone point me to a reliable definition of neo-liberalism? Because I haven't had a good one yet.
 
 
Lurid Archive
19:47 / 13.12.05
sdv: I think that Haus was inviting you to expand yourself on the possible relationship between the concepts of "capitalism, neoliberalism and democracy"; regardless, I think it would be a good idea if you were to share your thoughts and opinions more fully, so that we have a basis for the discussion and an idea for how you see the context of the discussion.

FWIW, it is more or less apparent that these concepts have been assumed to be intertwined by, most obviously, the current US administration. In fact the US policy towards the Middle East seems to revolve around the idea of planting a democracy, which it is then hoped will spread to bring peace and prosperity to the region. In fact, I think that this is a missing concept that usually gets thrown in, namely peace. I can't help but think of the Thomas Friedman quote "No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's", which more or less sums up a certain point of view that sees all the 'good stuff' - peace, democracy, neo-liberal economics - as intertwined.

Certainly, when Bush (though this isn't all that particular to Bush) talks about democracy it is understood that this is meant to exclude theocracy or Marxist governments, for instance, even if they are *actually* democratic. Democracy is a package that must include McDonald's, if not Haliburton. This was reasonably clear, for instance, in the way that Arafat was always considered illegimate *despite* having been elected. They same holds for the recent election of Chavez in Venezuela.

But to what extent does is this supportable? Are different versions of democracy possible and what examples are there of different successful democracies operating in completely ways?

Finally, sdv, as a thickie in the back row can you explain to me what this sentence means,
or has the concept of democracy been completed absorbed by technostratum of capital??

Because I'm not sure I have any idea what the "technostratum of capital" is. Thanks.
 
 
quixotic
14:00 / 14.12.05
Hi. I'm new to Barbelith but already have mounds of questions. I understand what neoliberalism means according to the above explanations and definitions I looked up on the internet. BUT, while I consider myself a well educated person, I obviously have a lot to learn in the area of politics. I am continually confused. I thought I was a liberal, which to ME means that women should have the right to choose, people should have the right to commit consensual crimes (thus they aren't really crimes except by definition of law), we should have taken a more passive, or rather communicative approach to the situation in Iraq (regardless if the situation was "believed weapons of mass destruction" or "dictatorship affecting the quality of lives in Iraq" whether that outlook be delusional or reality. These are only a few of the things I perceived as liberal. On the same page, I THOUGHT the basic core of liberalism was to make your own choices so long as they do not impede on others lives. With that being said, isn't free trade a no no? I mean, I know the effects of free trade, and there are positives and negatives. But isn't it just like the Latin American fruit companies in yesteryears? The immediate reaction by those workers in foreign lands is one of relief. Relief new jobs are being created and they can feed their families. But isn't that a paternalismo relationship with the companies? These rich companies know they can "get over on" poor nations by supplying them with low paying jobs. Of course we all want things to be cheap for our purchase. But when does it become cheap to hire poor people and say to yourself "They don't know any better or they just don't care". Can someone help me here? Am I correct in both assumptions? Does liberalism support two drastically opposing characteristics?

P.S. I just reread the question and funny enough, I think (correct me if I'm wrong) that my questions and perceptions restate the question. Democracy and liberalism has been overshadowned by capital. Agreed.
 
 
grant
16:36 / 14.12.05
I don't know if this is a good definition, but my sense of "neo-liberalism" is that it's an ideology that holds that government intervention is good when it's overseas and bad at home. Smaller government as far as domestic programs here (wherever "here" is -- generally the U.S.), coupled with big defense and hawkish overseas policies to spread democracy/smother socialism/topple leftist regimes. Beetle-browed libertarians with large clubs, in other words.

The wikipedia definition sort of follows my sense, with the added caveat that it tends to be a term used by opponents -- people never really describe themselves as neoliberals.
 
 
grant
16:58 / 14.12.05
Now this: On the same page, I THOUGHT the basic core of liberalism was to make your own choices so long as they do not impede on others lives.

Actually, that's the basic core of conservatism, but something magic has happened in political discourse over the past 50 or so years where words that meant one thing now mean the opposite. Or each other.

From wikipedia again, a "classic liberal" is roughly the same thing ideologically as a modern conservative, while what we think of as a liberal (or "progressive") is defined mostly in opposition to classical liberal ideas (illustrated best by the origins of and opposition to the Vietnam War).

Too many people use the word "liberal" to mean too many different things for it to be useful for much except as a way of gauging the character of the person using it.
 
 
sdv (non-human)
18:45 / 14.12.05
Neoliberalism like all the other concepts (globalization, neoconservatism, antimarxism, fundamentalism) which broadly make up the counter-reformation that began at the end of thre 1970s and which arguably still continues today, exists as a direct response to the gains and victories that transformed aspects and whole domains of western society.

So then I'd argue that Neoliberalism can be considered as the key concept for an understanding of the counter-reformation that took place at the end of the 1970s. Without it we would not have recently suffered the shift towards primative accumulation which marks the resurgence of western imperialism. In short then neoliberalism is the term that defines the ideological counter-offensive the damage of which we are only now beginning to reassess and interrogate. A task which only ever seems to take place in the darkest hours...

This differs from the classic understanding of liberalism in that neoliberalism constructs a holy allaince between the state and the mass commodity market of opinions - within which we as citizens of the central neoliberal states are supposed to have individual interests in harmony with neoliberalism, capital in other words. Neoliberalism has transformed into a fierce struggle over profits and wages, whereas as Grant implies liberalism was precisely about softening that struggle across the divide.
 
 
quixotic
20:38 / 15.12.05
So is liberal = democrat = leftist? And if the basic core of conservatism is make your own choices so long as they do not impede on others lives, aren't republicans conservative? And don't they attempt to make laws banning abortions and so on and so forth? If conservatism is as previously stated, then what is liberalism? I get that you said it's an ideology that holds that government intervention is good when overseas but bad when it's at home but I am further confused as to what political stance I choose because the lines are not clearly drawn for me. Is there any material on the internet I could research further? Oye, I didn't realize I knew so little about the associations people created for politics. I just started to get more interested in media bias (I have background in media and wanted to contribute somehow to the perceived state of media) and these terms are constantly being battled the liberal v. conservative media bias and whether either or none of them exists....another whole ball of wax. Nonetheless, it's hard for me to determine a focus when I don't REALLY know what the words mean.
 
 
Jack Fear
11:26 / 16.12.05
if the basic core of conservatism is make your own choices so long as they do not impede on others lives, aren't republicans conservative?

The modern Republican version of conservatism is a bit more specialized than that—because in this, too, economics enters the mix. The core value, if you can call it that, is that you should have the right to make your own decisions about what you do with your money. Your personal behavior, though, is pretty much up for grabs. It's theocracy minus tithing, essentially.
 
 
Jack Fear
11:33 / 16.12.05
The fun quiz at this link lets you determine your political leanings according to commonly-accepted definitions, BTW: the questions themselves are a little dated, but the definitions are pretty fair, with a minimum of stereotyping.
 
 
quixotic
13:46 / 16.12.05
Hey! Thanks a lot! Last night I asked a friend the same question in my attempt to solve my confusion and he pretty much said the same thing! It's all more clear to me now. Republicans in the purest form believe that people should, as you stated, be allowed to do what they want with their money but shouldn't be allowed to do anything THEY think is immoral socially speaking. I don't mean to step on toes but that sounds a little hypocritical to me. My friend tells me I'm really just a libertarian or moderate libertarian (?) and I just don't know it yet. About to do some research on that. Thanks for the quiz. So what about Democrats? What are they accused of by opposition?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
15:12 / 16.12.05
God, pretty much everything.

More on this when I get a moment, but this:

Democracy and liberalism has been overshadowned by capital.

Reminded me of a comment Nick Revell made last night about capitalist democracy. We get to vote once every five years, we go to the supermarket every other day. Possibly giving equal weight to both words is fooling ourselves.
 
 
grant
17:51 / 16.12.05
quixotic: I think an awful lot of confusion might be cleared up if you start thinking in terms of modernity, especially modernity as a project, as a kind of goal-oriented ideology that came into its own sometime between 1900 and 1950. This was an outgrowth or distillation of the same kind of thing that has been going on since the Enlightenment.

To a certain degree, at the time (the "modern" decades?), a liberal was someone who embraced modernity and a conservative was someone who reacted against modernity. G.K. Chesterton, when he said he likes the fact that so many people are becoming pagans because the last thing the pagans did was convert to Christianity, was voicing a conservative sentiment. Basic idea: we have traditions in our culture for a reason -- they've been tested by time, and are likely to be more effective than some wild-eyed theorizing from some crackpot academic.

This is why contemporary conservatives are so concerned with morality & government controls over social freedoms -- because of the weight of tradition.

Left (concerned with class/capital issues) isn't always the same as liberal (more concerned with modern/traditional issues), and liberal (in the American two-party system) isn't always the same as Democrat. Over the last 20 years, they've roughly coincided. Between the two Roosevelt presidencies, a lot of Democrats were staunchly conservative, although vaguely leftist. (If I'm wrong on that, fix me!)

------


Trying to steer back on topic, what's interesting is that more and more, capitalism is pulling away from what conservatives call "family values." Tradition. When I was a teenager, Al and Tipper Gore (Democrats) had that whole PMRC deal with the censorship of the rock and roll and the dude from Twisted Sister testifying in Washington that ended up with little yellow stickers getting put on records with naughty words. Record industry leaders (capital) saw the ratings system as interfering with sales, so they were the bad guys as far as (social) conservatives went. That was the pitch to the voters.

Today, the same execs are the good guys for the neoliberals (a group that largely overlaps with but doesn't exactly map onto social conservatives) when it comes to issues of file-sharing and piracy. Piracy is not a family value. Sharing, on the other hand, is -- but it's no good for capital. Computers are also changing concepts of "tradition" in weird ways.

I'm not sure what that illustrates, except that something's definitely up. Looking at the topic abstract, I don't think there's any "complete absorption" going on. I do think capital can frame debates along that liberal/conservative/neoliberal axis, but that's perpendicular to "the concept of democracy."
 
 
sdv (non-human)
09:15 / 17.12.05
Nicely put Grant, I wasn't attempting myself to produce a non-capitalist, non-democratic thought. But perhaps...the aspect that is worth mentioning is that there has been no necessary relationship between liberal and leftism. People on the left have always been as critical of liberals (whigs) and conservatives (tories). The key to the seperation between liberalism and the left (communism and socialism) has always been that liberalism was a 'conservatism with a caring face'. Whereas the left emerged out of a total critique of democracy, not in terms of the current conservative desire for libertarianism or the dark authoritarian shadow of fascism, but rather in terms of a total critique of democracy and capital.

Whereas a liberal may critique the excesses of capitalism and democracy, as such they may be considered to be anti-capitalists but they can never leave the ground of capitalism and democracy. The point about Marx's construction of communism is that it functions as a total critique of democracy/capitalism by constructing the alternative of communism so that the question of communism's democratic credentials is irrelevant. Which is another way of saying that forms of leftism that approporiate the concept of democracy actually remain on the same territoriy as democratic capitalism. (Which given the current scale of the problem that we have is a bit of problem).

This might remind us through and appropriation of Deleuze and Guattari's constructivism that each creation of a new concept always presupposes the production of a plane immanent to the concept. It is through this that we can differentiate the democratic softening of the communist alternative from the plane immanent to communism itself. For example - the terrian of human rights and duties has been constructed by liberals, neoliberals and conservatives into a territory defined by human alienation and consumption.

In the last case I am thinking in terms of mainstream UK politics which on the Right thinks of itself as libetarian - the point of which is to remind Grant that here in Europe to be a libetarian is to be an authoritarian tory, thatcher, portillo and so on nasty people.
 
 
sdv (non-human)
09:26 / 17.12.05
oh - forgot...

techno-stratum = plane of immanence, as in a slight reference towards D&G's rather delightful Mechnosphere... But perhaps better to admit that it's a reference towards capital as a technicity. As a technology capital has existed since the 17th, not before only after...

So then...For me at least this began/begins with Deleuze and Guattari's mapping of human history after the first industrial revolution and the simultaneous emergence of the city/state (ref: Lewis Mumford's work) – the identification of the three basic types of social machine ' primitive territorial machine' , ' barbarian despotic machine' and the 'civilized capitalist machine' - these are founded on Marx's three primary modes of production – primitive, Asiatic and Capitalist. It's crucial to understand that all three modes of production are forms that came into existence after the first industrial revolution and the founding of the first city/states. D&G forcibly suggest that each and every known state was a subset of the despotic machine. They sensibly accept the core of the Marxist model and then mutate it to accept the overlay of capital. [others have argued that they suggest capital functions as a sort of after-state machine - but this logic seems ludicrously optimistic] – better by far to accept that they are negotiating the radical immanence of the state-form, the 'Spiritualized Urstaat'. However the not to ghostly spectre of Nietzsche is haunting this like a timely reminder that we are dealing here not just with the death of god but also the death of man..

either way that's the 'root' of the emphasis of capital as a technology... a nasty assemblage.
 
  
Add Your Reply