[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., Policing the boundaries of the rent society
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2014 posted revenues for $90 billion and a $271 million loss. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites].
Extremely serious book, allegedely in the "political and critical tradition of British cultural studies best exemplified by the work of Stuart Hall" (p.215), but actually drawing heavily on Rancière's aesthetics of politics and Agamben's philosophy of law, and also paying tributes to Klein, Federici and Graeber. The resulting analysis is therefore a bit halting and too deferential to its diverse cultural authorities to make a strong, coherent case, but the evidence collected along the way is arresting.
The core thesis is that the manufacturing of a "politics of disgust" is instrumental to state-crafting in neoliberal societies. The author analyses the mediatic campaigns against asylum seekers, Irish Travellers, 'chavs', and disabled people in the UK and identifies a common thread in the creation of consensus in the governed over the contaminating threat of despicable 'others', which explodes in dissent when the despicable others disagree to agree and revolt.
Why is this politics of disgust particularly relevant to the neoliberal state? If we follow Foucault, Agamben and Rancière, we do not get an answer, because they posit that racism (a particularly severe form of politics of disgust?) is inherent to sovereignty per se, over the centuries.
Beyond the scope of cultural studies, we should probably distinguish between democracies and authoritarian states, and between class-divided and single-class societies, in the Marxian meaning of class. Neoliberal states are single-class, democratic societies - having deproletarianized the economy through delocalization and off-shoring of production. Whereas racism in authoritarian and class-divided Nazi Germany was used for nation building purposes to distract from a class war that was dangerously economically grounded (peasants, workers, bourgeoisie and rentiers having clearly diverging interests), in the neoliberal democratic state a politics of disgust is used to underpin the ideology of meritocracy. Where everyone is fundamentally a rentier - Buckingham Palace to council estate - the problem you have is one of wealth distribution. The neoliberal ideology of meritocracy states that your share in the pie has to be deserved and is by definition deserved.
Look at the 'chavs' (essentialist label designating workless people living on council estates): they have nothing because they are worth nothing (watch on Youtube "Little Britain", a revolting spoof of this British brand of "white trash" - to use the equivalent American term from the segregated South of the Sixties). The middle income earners have what they have because they are polite. The rich deserve their wealth because they 'aspired' to it, etc.
It has to be clear that only members of the national society can claim a share (in consideration of their worth) in the national rent. So non-members (asylum seekers, immigrants) have either to be excluded or to earn every penny they get through hard work.
The neoliberal state therefore squanders inordinate amounts of money on the maintenance of boundaries separating the haves from the have-nots and the haves from the have-mores, to ensure that no contamination take place, to the point that ‘the council estate’ would come to mark the moral boundaries of the nation-state." (p. 160).
Asserting - as was the case in the 2011 riots - that the have-nots can aspire to the same share in the pie as the bright young things (that selfrighteously helped to clean up the mess after the revolt) just because they exist, and not for any specific merits, is totally unacceptable, the taboo par excellence, as the hysteria in the aftermath of the revolt showed. The boundaries have to be protected physically but also ideologically, and any breach in the "Because I'm worth it/because you're worth it" discourse is to be staved off as an attack even more dangerous than physical looting.
In this context, the Occupy movement (not covered in this book) can be understood as perfectly aligned to the neoliberal ideology: what it said was, "we, the 99%, the single-class society, want a bigger share of the national rent, because we are so nice and well educated". It's like when an employee asks for a pay rise because they are worth it. The employer smiles.
The most melacholic, because totally useless, of all the revolts captured in the book are however the massive 2003 anti Iraq war protests. The indifference of power to this huge single-class display of dissent is revealing of the impotence of democracy when decoupled from class struggle (everyone protesting is no one protesting).
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But the author, loyal to cultural studies to the end, does not take the point: "The task of political action, therefore, is aesthetic in that it requires a reconfiguration of the conditions of sense perception so that the reigning configuration between perception and meaning is disrupted by those elements, groups or individuals in society that demand not only to exist but indeed to be perceived." (p. 149)
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Disciplining the home team
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2014 posted revenues for $90 billion and a $271 million loss. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites].
The book is intended as a primer on neoliberalism for the British masses fallen prey to establishment-manipulated media and therefore in need of an "eye-opening" account of how power is really wielded - undemocratically, i.e. not in the interest of the masses - in the UK.
It is this assumption that I find worn-out, cheesy and totally unconvincing, not least because it offends the intelligence of those masses the book aims to liberate. It is offensive to think that a bunch of ridiculous right wing think-tanks can manipulate the electoral decisions of millions of people, and Jones' respect for their supposed influence is embarassing.
My competing assumption is that voters have a clear, material (not ideological) grasp of the side of the class war they are on. Contrary to Owen Jones, who sticks to traditional Labour boilerplate, Thatcher's success was not due to neoliberal propaganda (which was and still is odious), but to a material shift of class war's goal posts. Thirty years of US funded welfare state had turned the working class into a new bourgeoisie (or working aristocracy) inhabiting a "new Jerusalem" increasingly reliant on third-world commodities and work, as had already been the case during the British Empire, but with US-backed sovereign debt now acting as a multiplier of wealth. In the Eighties then new unregulated private debt kicked in and from the Noughties a dramatic surge in purchasing power thanks to ever cheaper containership goods completed the separation of the British (and in general western) working classes from their developing counterparties, and their "antagonization".
Voters know what side they are on when banks are bailed out and the NHS privatized. They know that materially they are on the same side as the Etonian idiots in office, or the American auditing firms who have captured the Commons and HMRC. They know they are just being "disciplined", for their class's sake.
What is awesome is the international, invisible legal, financial and technological infrastructure that constitutes the real establishment - not the people that from various political angles, but a single class standpoint, contribute to its development.
Jones' contribution to the establishment consists in perpetuating the illusion that nothing is structural, that it is only a matter of democracy being temporarily betrayed by bad press and greedy politicians looking forward to their next revolving door appointment. And also in nurturing the view that the UK is a self-contained economy and society, not depending on other economies and societies, which are mentally tucked away in a remote, foggy "overseas" no one cares about, preferring to think that sound left wing politics is to keep the NHS in public hands - as if it made any difference on the real class war front.
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on No such thing as coherence
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2014 posted revenues for $90 billion and a $271 million loss. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites].
The 1980s are embarassing: not 'heroic' like the 1970s, not 'global' like the 1990s. Provincial years, where reckless experiments were made, without preparation or the right tools, at the expense of a trusting body politic.
But even when looking back in embarassment at this cacophonic, messy decade, we should brace ourselves and make an effort to separate the ends from the beginnings, what died in those years from the seeds that were planted. The book is entertaining and serious, but lacks structure - maybe in a bio-mimicry of its subject - and leaves unanswered the basic question: "what happened between 1980 and 1990, in reality"?
My answer would be that in the 1980s the decoupling of form and substance was made systematic. In order of appearance in the book: Live Aid - all dream, no substance; Lady Di's phoney marriage; The Falkland "triumph"; the loadsa(borrowed)money; the much touted roll-back of the state, in reality strengthened by the defeat of local authorities and trade unions; Thatcher's - and this book's - silence on North Sea oil's revenue streams. A screen was introduced between the actual workings of power and its pervasive, distorted external manifestations: neoliberalism was born. You won't find here any reference to it....more
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., Something is cool in the state of Denmark
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites].
In Copenhagen last week. Advertising is very limited. For the benefit of the tourist, being in English, there was this Carlsberg sign: "Success is temporary, loyalty is forever". In Denmark, maybe. For our British author, a TV addict, Denmark exists only through its most recent and coolest export products: TV series, star chefs, wind farms, the UN-sanctioned "happiest country in the world" reputation, and - why not - the Mohammed vignettes crisis. The rest is edited out.
If the Lonely Planet guides' style does not make you queasy....more
Nothing more neoliberal than 'theories of justice' - nothing less political. Politics is about power, and theories of justice are The justice fallacy
Nothing more neoliberal than 'theories of justice' - nothing less political. Politics is about power, and theories of justice are philosophical exercises fundamentally aimed at avoiding the issue of power.
Our neoliberal author is awesomely intelligent, learned and subtle - five stars for the lucidity, unprecedented in my reading experience, with which he frames the bourgeois revolutions and their ideologies - but he has a master to serve, and he serves them loyally....more
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which Diagon Alley London
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites].
Great audiobook, and an idiosyncratic choice of voices to portray London as a huge door, giving people access to all possible kinds of hereafters, transitions, metamorphoses or initiations.
The obvious comparison is Calvino's Invisible Cities, but there's no trace of philosophy here. Only the voices of real individuals, each with their own very quirky point of view.
There's the interview with an actual witch, owner of an esoteric bookshop in Covent Garden. The member of the Angling Society. The transgender guaranteeing that eighty per cent of male-to-female transgenders are electronics buffs. The eyewitness who saw a girl 'disintegrate' in the impact with a train. The funeral director busy with the repatriation of corpses. The teacher who has to teach only bottom level students. The wholesale greengrocer revealing the tricks and jargon of his trade. The artist who makes sculptures out of the human hair he collects in the tube. Even the City is represented through the voice of the owner of a tiny trading boutique, who tells you about his initiation, and a forex trader who had a calling for currency markets when he was a boy and lived in the desert. The city planner tells you that people go to pubs only to overhear secrets as they wait for their guinness.
You can understand why the cultures of remote places, as related to anthropologists by 'informants', sound so strange.
The highest moment to me is when a civil servant remembers the days when civil partnerships were introduced, in 2005, and her office struggled to cope with the requests for same-sex marriages from couples in their seventies, who had spent thirty, forty years together. It's the only place in the book where you get the impression that society matters, and justice matters even more, even in the hypothetical collection of eleven million nerds that goes here under the name of London.
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which Carbon democracy
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites].
More Doctor Who than class struggle, but the facts are there. With trade unions to be "bought off until the North Sea oil comes on stream", you get the industrial picture of a country that for being far removed from the Soviet threat had been allowed to live off coal much longer than its continental peers, actively encouraged by the US to shift to oil two decades earlier, through the Marshall plan.
The power that coal dependence bestowed on the miners is inconceivable today. To meet the power shortage brought about by the miners' overtime strike, the UK was on a three-day business week for the first months of 1974 and power cuts had been the norm during all of Edward Heath's legislature.
Coal dependence also dwarfed the oil shock, or better - the oil shock gave the impression that there was no actual alternative to coal. Surprisingly, the British workers' monster contractual power and relentless picketing did not seem to back anything more than salary claims, which is testament to the long-standing "one nation" UK tradition, and to an atmosphere of world wars and Britain's "finest hour" never really left behind. With a fraction of that power, workers' struggles in Italy were to bring the country on the verge of revolution. ...more
Ms Thatcher was a post-structuralist, or the birth of non-politics
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and Ms Thatcher was a post-structuralist, or the birth of non-politics
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites].
I suggest reading this from the end, where the problem eventually emerges that justified that whole 'project', i.e. the difficulty encountered by political theorists to situate 'new' movements such as feminism and environmentalism on the map of traditional political antagonisms. To solve the problem, the authors in the central part of the book have no other option but to say that a definition of society is not possible, even though it has family resemblances with a precarious web of subjectivities without centre and fixed geometries. Which is probably existentially accurate and epistemologically true.
But poltics is not the field of the epistemologically true. Politics is the domain of what you want (aka 'desire', somewhat unconvincingly). The authors frame very well what the Right wants and accurately describe an ideology that by 1985 has gained the upper hand (aka 'hegemony') by promoting a crystallized vision of social order and the economy that is the more powerful for lacking any epistemological foundation whatsoever.
Why is the Left losing ground then? Because of its obsession with the epistemologically discredited ideas of 'revolution' and 'class'. Democracy - which never gets a proper epistemological treatment (the authors thus betray having a conscience) - demands instead to embrace pluralism and to make alliances across pluralistic struggles (e.g feminism-environmentalism-anti-capitalism) to engage not in a revolution but in a war of position.
All of the above is not Gramsci's fault though - he had other problems to solve.
Thirty years later, under triumphant neo-liberalism and collapsing environmental conditions, it is too easy to see the world divided - quite undemocratically - between exploiters and exploited, in a truly zero-sum game played on a global scale. Two classes. If you're an exploiter, does it really matter who washes the dishes? Can the exploited 'articulate' an 'hegemony' with those among the exploiters who no longer want to wash up?
What is certainly not fixed is how you define your antagonistic classes - this is politics' job. But denying antagonism in favour of a thousand flowers supposed to bloom is to mistake participation - within the safe boundaries of one's class (non-politics) - for a game that cannot be safe for everyone (politics). Ms Thatcher saw the wondrous potential of the 'non-politics in a non-society' rhetoric and touted it, while engaging in a very political game of her own....more
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