Neo Liberalism Externalized

7/27/2019 Neo Liberalism Externalized

1/29

neo liberalism externalized

Tristan Laing

York University, Canada


2/29

Goals

How do we understand ourselves as workers subject to effects of

neo-liberalism, but also understand ourselves as close/closer to

centres of imperial/financial power, and this means that we

experience neo-liberal reforms differently than M.E. workers

How should we understand the power of critique in relation tofinancial and political forces

Implications for how we engage/respond/resist the systems which

we critique, and how we build solidarities


3/29

"Neo liberalism externalized"

Neo-liberal reforms imposed on the

periphery by the centre

Conflict is displaced from the centre to the

periphery (since 2nd world war)

Also, neo-liberal reforms externalize costs

from the centre to the periphery within the

societies on which they are imposed

Is "externalization" or "displacement" the

central phenomenon of neo-liberalism?


4/29

Roadmap

History of neo-liberalism in the middle east as the background

to the Arab spring

Franco Berardi - the transformation of the European/American

worker after 1977, and how to understand the uprisings of

2011 Interpreting contexts in resistance: how do we understand our

own context in relation to other neo-liberal contexts?


5/29

'Economy'

eco - oikos - "household"

nomy - nomos - "law"

"household management"

oikos also means dwelling, settling, building

nomos: appropriation and distribution, division,

capturing,

"the appropriation and distribution of building and

settling" "The capturing of dwelling"


6/29

Political Economy

after M.E. colonies got their independance, former colonial powers immediately

began strategies of coercion to prevent autonomous strategies of development

that would threaten Euro/American access to central oil resources

military strategies well known ('56, '67, '73 but always hand in hand with

financial strategies

initial strategy: tie newly independant colonies to forms of financial and militaryaid

example: King Hussein dismisses a Nasserist government led by Suleiman al-Nabulsi

in 1957 who had cancelled a treaty with Britain and called for closer relations with

China, USSR, and Egypt. Hussein dismisses government, bans political parties,

declares martial law, expresses support for US and recieves US military and financial

support The Nasserist threat: arab nationalism/arab socialism as a threat to foreign

control of middle eastern states. 1958 formation of UAR. "Arab Union" of

(monarchist) Iraq and Jordan formed directly after in response. Ended after 6

months by a coup in Iraq inspired by Nasser's 1952 free officer's revolt.


7/29

Curbing Nasserism

US "Food for Peace" program - explicitly political food aid for Egypt

starting in Early 60s turned Nasser's egypt (temporarily) into a

"moderate" state in the non-aligned movement (judgement of US

diplomats). This was dropped in mid 60s because of Egypt's support

for republican forces in Yemenese civil war (fighting royalists from

Saudi with British technical support). Huge debt from 67 and 73

wars pushed Nasser's successor to the US and gulf states for loans,

creation of Gulf organization for the development of Egypt (GODE) -

this meant the end of Soviet influence on Egypt (friendship treaty

annulled 1976)

GODE conditioned loans on US treasury, IMF and World Bankmandated reforms: deregulation of currency, repatriation of profits,

free capital flows, tax-free holidays, lifting some subsidies

Egyptian wheat self sufficiency dropped from 70% in 1960 to 23%

in 1980


8/29

Oil and non-Oil states

Oil-importing states hurt when price of oil spiked

Oil-exporting states hurt when demand for oil dipped

aid/debt is entering the region in this context (aid being the politically

motivated sale of goods below market rate)

debt, from both loans and aid, meant that an increasing amount ofexports from middle eastern/north african states was simply

servicing the debt

example: by the mid 80s, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and

Tunisia were all spending between 30-65% of their exports on debt

servicing. New loans being taken out to roll over the debt, total debtrising each year despite extremely high service payments

think about this when you buy your jam from Euro-mart

rolling over of debts gives financial institutions oppertunities to

pressure states to implement economic policies


9/29

first wave of neo-liberal reforms

in order to continue to renew loans, by the late 80s/early 90s all

indebted M.E. states had to submit to Egyptian style liberalizing

reforms: currency deregulation, capital flight, deregulate labour,

moves towards privatizing state industry

Inclusion into US/European interest framework not just a matter ofpolitical realignment but a process of class formation: the state-

fostered bourgeois class came together with military elites and

private capital as partners sharing interests.

How do they share interests? labour reforms improve efficiency, betters the

position of the class that benefits from exploiting labour (even if they are not

strictly owners of production), military development increased (Egypt 2nd inmost years only to Israel in US military aid) especially in area of counter-

insurgency (also national pride, and the militaries remain big employers),

domestic capital benefits from capital flow liberalization and from state

privitization


10/29

second wave neo-liberalism

late 80s international financial institutions predicted a looming crisis in the

middle east due to a labour market projected to grow at 3% per year

between 2000 and 2010. Looming high unemployment, urban slums,

informal labour. Youth and women to suffer the most. Ferment social

discontent

This analysis ignored two centuries of imperialist intervention (going back toNapoleon), and perhaps most importantly the coercive debt situation.

Money flowing out of the region, both debt and other capital flows, either

ignored or described as a consquence rather than cause of the region's

situation

The (predictable) prescription was to create a period of intense growth

through the "engine of of strong and sustained growth" - the private sector.

This meant the beginning of large scale privatization.

Privitization 1988-1999 totalled 8 billion, from 2000-2010 totalled 27 billion


11/29

"Employee Shareholders

Associations" Discursive innovation that helped with privatization in Egypt: ESAs

were framed as "democratizing" capital ownership

Workers offered to purchase a share in their companies

Used to turn worker opposition to privitization into support

ESAs employed in "debt for equity" swaps: US government wouldexchange equity in privatized state company for debt owed to it by

that country

USA would turn around and sell the equity to Egyptian workers

This means the Egyptian debt burden was being directly (well,

indirectly) offloaded from the state onto workers USAID noted this method had the advantage of uniting interests,

"reduces likelihood of strikes and other stoppages"


12/29

Labour de-regulation

Loan packages through the 90s and the 2000s identified "labour market

deregulation" as top priority

World Bank perersely argued that maternity leave in the middle east

was a cause of female unemployment

Public sector wages and benefits targetted to ease lowering of wages

and benefits in the private sector, this would increase efficiency and

attract investment

Labour deregulation reforms met with signficant opposition in Egypt,

Jordan, Morroco and Tunisia, but pressure from world bank and other

international financial institutions. All passed laws introducing temporary

contracts, lifted limits on repeated use of these contracts, and made iteasier to fire public sector workers


13/29

Debunking the "free" market

Neo-liberal reforms implemented by middle eastern governments as a

result of pressure from external financial institutions have all been

extremely unpopular. Population can't resist these policies through

elections, only direct action

Kings and dictators such as Mubarek in Egypt, king Hussein in Jordan

were willing to turn their own security and military forces against theirown populations (during Egyptian revolution, every single police station

in Cairo was burned to the ground.)

Increased authoritarianism coupled with a change in how decisions are

made: increasingly centralized decisions made by individuals or small

unaccountable committees. States acted to obscure decisions until longafter the fact, reducing the possibility for public debate


14/29

Food subsidies: the final straw

Food subsidies represent the lowest

protected social floor

Affordable access to basic means of

subsistence have been a major factor in

regime legitimacy since the period of

independance

These subsidies slashed across the region

as part of structural adjustment packages

imposed by international finance


15/29

Arab Spring?

Food: 2007-2009 food prices increased 40-50% in Tunisia, Egypt

and Syria and 20% in Jordan

Youth unemployment above 60% in Egypt and Syria

Regional unempoyment 11% - highest in the world

Shift to export-oriented production meant decline in global demandwas more painful

Global Crisis: curtailment of worker remittances

dependence on foreign direct investment devestating: FDI fell

drastically in most M.E. countries


16/29

What was the point of this?

are there similarities in the ways neo-

liberal reforms and austerity agendas were

imposed on M.E. states compared to

Ireland?

are there differences in the levels of

disenfranchisement, and the willingness of

a state to use violence against its ownpopulation?


17/29

Berardi

"Soul at Work" is a powerful account of how the nature of

labour in western developed nations has transformed from

"temporary death" to "self actualization of your life"

According to Berardi, prior to the 1980s the key problem was

alienation. For Marcuse, the form of alienation is historical, itcan be overcome. For Sartre alienation is the human

condition, a function of the basic conditions of scarcityt and

alterity in human life.

In 1977 there was a movement in Italy that saw the practice of

happiness as subversive. This was resistance against the

factory model of production and the social/disciplinary

structure based on this model


18/29

This was followed by two major transformations

1) Digital technology - transforms possible arrangements of

productive labour, undermines the need for the traditional factory

hierchy model of workplace authority 2) Factory model of social orgagnization/discipline collapses. No

longer revolutionary to "be happy" or to be "self realized". Example:

"Be all that you can be, in the army" commercials. If your workplace

("carreer") is a site of self-actualization, being "happy" or self fulfilled

no longer revolutionary or anti-social. The "soul" is put to work. The"Soul" is "the vital breath that converts biological matter into an

animated body" (21)

These transformations create something Berardi calls

"Semiocapital", which is capital detached from materiality, the pure

circulation of information, signs

No more "class", but "virtual class" - workforce no longer materially

or socially structured

The "cognitariat" - Berardi's name for the semiotic labour flow from

the standpoint of its social corporiality


19/29

how does digital technology

transform labour? Labour stops being the material transformation and arrangement of

things, and becomes the immaterial transformation and

recombination of information/signs

We work in the transfer, elaboration, decoding, translation of

information

Workplaces can be "non hierarchical" because the order becomes

distributed throughout the network

Work becomes cellular - we think we're independant but actually

maximally inter-dependant. Autonomous, self-regulating workers

Cell phone is a metaphor and the highest immanent example of this:it absorbs every molecule of possible work time, we prepare our

bodies to be receptive to the cellular device every moment of the

day


20/29

soul at work to semiocapital

Prior to the soul being put to work, the gap between the soul and labour was a site of

reflexive, interpretive construction - the generic intellect. This was the intellectual

basis of resistance to the oppressive structure of labour

When the soul is put to work, it is no longer possible to ground resistance in the locus

of desire and thought, because this locus is occupied by work

This is the fundamental reason for the failure of "the critical power of political reason"

(Uprising, 7)

"The disproportion between the arival rate of new information and the limited time

avialable for conscious processing generates hypercomplexity. Therefore projects

that propose to rationally change the whole social field are out of the picture" (10)

"feminine fortuna can no longer be subjected and domesticated by the masculine

force of political reason, because fortuna is embodied in the chaotic flows of the

overcrowded infosphere and in the chaotic flows of financial microtrading"(10)

Berardi: we need to begin to see politics not as the critical application of reason to

problems, but as a therapudic shift in the constellation of desire (Soul at Work, 140)


21/29

Berardi's two key insights

De-regulation is the political inscription of indeterminacy, an

indeterminacy which is essential to the fragmented and cellular

nature of post-factory work, and the radically fragmentary

character of semio-production. We can try to resist de-regulation,

but we should be honest with ourselves: we are no longer

contesting the particular way production will be regulated

(capitalism benefited from the regulation of production - labour

peace, stability etc), but we are in conflict with the form of

production itself

Precarity is not just one more element in the social relation, butthe transformative element in the digitalized cycle of production:

to "be independant" means "become your own boss, subjugate

yourself". The precarity of existence replaces all previous forms

of disciplinary workplace measures.


22/29

Berardi and the Middle East

What Berardi describes as happening within European/American

societies is in some sense a repetition of the neo-colonial dynamic

that has played out between the power centres (both political and

financial) and the subjugated post/neo-colonies

In both cases: forms of direct external domination have been

progressively replaced by self-regulating submission, which is

carried out "out of one's own interest", and for the benefit of part of

the person/society

And, in both cases, this externalization of the locus of agency of

repression is actively engaged in undermining itself

And, in both cases, forms of resistance are so far insufficiently

powerful and organized to "succeed" (assuming we know what

success "looks like")


23/29

Occupy Everywhere

Berardi, 2012: "the uprising against financial capitalism that began in

the European countriesin 2011 can be seen as a mantra, as an

attempt to reactivate the conjunctive body, as a form of therapy on

the disempathic pathologies crossing the social skin and social

soul."

People talk about the revolutions in Egypt and Syria in words like

"breaking through the walls of fear", and of creating political

societies where before there was none because of a combination of

cultures of fear and cultures of focussing only on your own path and

your family (and if you go back, this is so often a response to

violence in an earlier generation)

End by 4 things: Revolution vs Paradigm Change, Poetry and Poetic

Resonance, Solidarity, Fairness or Civil War,


24/29

Revolution vs Paradigm

"The concept of revolution no longer corresponds to anything, because

it entails an exaggerated notion of political will over the complexity of

contemporary society. Our prospect is a paradignmatic shift: to a new

paradigm that is not centred on productive growth, profit, and

accumulation, but on the full, unfolding power of collective intelligence"

(64) All of the Revolutionary and Occupy movements have been based not

on revolutionary institutions like the Jacobins, but on mobilizing

collective, interpretive wills in public spaces, trying to gather those

people together based on mantras arrived at through local (endotic)

processes Echoes of Heidegger's Holderlin: "Where the danger grows, the saving

power also." - Where it is no longer possible to think anything differently

(en-framing), it becomes possible to think something entirely different


25/29

Poetic Resonance

"Poetry is language's excess: poetry is what in language cannot be

reduced to information, and is not exchangable, but gives way to a new

common ground of understanding, of shared meaning: the creation of a

new world. Poetry is that singular vibration of the voice. This vibration

can create resonances, and resonances may produce common

space..." Poetry played a huge role in the Egyptian revolution, Sheikh Imam (and

Fouad al Negem) enjoyed a huge rennaisance of popularity

Do we have poets of the crisis?

Are dominant accents of English (American, posh British) deadening of

the resonances of language? Shakespear in RP vs OriginalPronunciation....


26/29

Solidarity

"Solidarity has nothing to do with altruistic self-denial. In materialistic

terms, solidarity is not about you, it's about me. Like love, solidarity

is not about altruism: it is about the pleasure of breath and the space

of the other. Love is the ability to enjoy myself thanks to your

presence, to your eyes. This is solidarity. Because solidarity is

based on territorial proximity, you cannot build solidarity betweenfragments of time" (55)

For the cognatariat, solidarity no longer comes easily - we must transform our capacity to

be affected, and put ourselves in situations where we can experience solidarity, if we

want to bring these kinds of affects into being.

I would say it is possible to be in solidarity with the revolutions which are taking place in

the middle east, but not without learning something about those places, without

learning the histories, the revolutionary traditions, the songs. If you condition your

solidarity only towards movements that fit your idea of an appropriate revolutionary or

reformist cause, and if this is preventing you from participating in the re-activation of

the social body, then youu might be part of the problem.


27/29

two paths

"One path would be to accept a deal that redistributees wealth and

resources; that opens Europeans borders to the crowds coming

from Africa and Asia; that implies a reduction in the Western,

consumptive lifestyle, heading towards a nongrowth of production

and consumption. This option would not imply the idea of sacrifice

and renunciation, but rather the enjoyment of time without anyexpectation of competitive acquisition and accumulation

The other would be an intensification of the interethnic civil war

whose first signs are already visible. The majority of European

people are deseperately defending their privilege accumulated

during the centuries of colonialism, but this privilege has been

deteriorating since the fall of colonialist empire sin the past century,

and is now falling apart in the course of the global recession" (69)


28/29

Violence? "The uprising will frequently give way to phenomena of psychopathic

violence. These shold not surprise us; we should not condemn these

acts as criminal. For too long has financial dictatorship compressed the

social body, and the cynicism of the ruling class has become repugnant.

The uprising is a therapy for this kind of psychopathology. The uprising

is not a form of judgement but a form of healing. Tthis healing is made

possible by a mantra that rises, stronger and stronger, as solidarityresurfaces in daily life" (132-3)

"In the upcoming years we can expct the diffusion of widespread ethnic

civil war...no one will be able to stop or guide the insurrection, which will

function as a chaotic reactivation of the energies of the body of the

socius....the task of resistance movements will not be to provoke but

rather to create autonomous structures for knowledge, existence,

survival, psychotherapy, and give life meaning and autonomy." (49-50)


29/29

Neo-Liberalism Externalized

The most brutal austerity regimes imposed by western financial institutions have not been

the ones imposed on Ireland

The centre-periphery distribution of oppertunity and welfare remains fundamentally a

legacy of European colonial violence,

In relation to systemic violence, conflict is interpretive (Fanon)

Conflict is not necessarily a "bad" thing - Micheal Cronin's distinction between exotic and

endotic violence - community deliberation is a form of violenc: "Conflict from an

endotic viewpoint is not confrontation, it is conflict as engagement with the

multidimensionality of human beings, their texts, languages, cultures....The ultimate

triumph of dictatorships...is to present their opponents as pure adverseries" (43)

I like Cronin, but we don't have the right to hold this as a binary distinction, all forms of

conflict have endoticand exotic elements. Fanon's theory of revolutionary

anti-colonial violence is a theory of transitioning from reactive violence

against the enemy (nationalism) to interpretive collective intelligence to

confront problems in the post-colonial society (national-consciousness)

Neo Liberalism Externalized

Documents

Transcript of Neo Liberalism Externalized