Reading Terry Eagleton is like drinking in an Irish pub with some smartass bloke who says the funniest shit that proves you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Fortunately this particular drunken bloke plays for Team Marx. Eagleton's newest book, Why Marx Was Right, is organized like a succession of these drunken arguments--each chapter is a response to a commonly held assumption or argument against Marxism. It's not a great book: the title is actually misleading and it should be called Why Marx Wasn't Wrong (or at Least Not for the Reasons You Think He Was). But it packs a whole lot of Eagleton wittitude into one volume, so allow me to quote some of the passages that caused me to put a smiley-face in the margins of my copy:
So we are speaking here of the actions of a majority, not of a small bunch of rebels. Since socialism is about popular self-government, nobody can make a socialist revolution on your behalf, just as nobody can become an expert poker player on your behalf. As C.K. Chesterton writes, such popular self-determination is a "thing analogous to writing one's own love letters or blowing one's nose. These are things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly." (p.188)
In this sense, Marx was more of an antiphilosopher than a philosopher. In fact, Etienne Balibar has called him 'perhaps...the greatest antiphilosopher of the modern age.' Antiphilosophers are those who are wary of philosophy--not just in the sense that Brad Pitt might be, but nervous of it for philosophically interesting reasons. They tend to come up with ideas that are suspicious of ideas; and though they are for the most part entirely rational, they tend not to believe that reason is what it all comes down to (pp.130-31)
Think of contemporary capitalism, in which the commodity form has left its grubby thumbprints on everything from sport to sexuality, from how best to swing oneself a front-row seat in heaven to the earth-shattering tones in which U.S. television reporters hope to seize the viewer's attention for the sake of the advertisers. The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which his case is becoming truer as time passes. It is capitalism, not Marxism, which is economically reductionist (pp. 115-16)
Tribal societies have their fair share of violence, rivalry and hunger for power, but these things cannot take the form of imperial warfare, free-market competition or mass unemployment, because such institutions do not exist among the Nuer or the Dinka. There are villains everywhere you look, but only some of these moral ruffians are so placed as to be able to steal pension funds or pump the media full of lying political propaganda. Most gangsters are not in a position to do so. Instead, they have to content themselves with hanging people from meat hooks. In a socialist society, nobody would be in a position to do so. This is not because they are too saintly, but because there would be no private pension funds or privately owned media. Shakespeare's villains had to find outlets for their wickedness other than firing missiles at Palestinian refugees. You cannot be a bullying industrial magnate if there isn't any industry around. You just have to settle for bullying slaves, courtiers or your Neolithic workmates instead. (pp. 89-90)
In a similar way, it does not matter if I regard my work as a biochemist emplyed by a private pharmaceutical company as a glorious contribution to the advance of science and the progress of humanity. The fact remains that the main point of my work is to create profit for a bunch of unscrupulous sharks who would probably charge their own toddlers ten dollars for an aspirin. What I feel is neither here nor there. The meaning of my work is determined by the institution. (p. 89)
Starting from where we are may not sound like the best recipe for political transformation. The present seems more an obstacle to such change than an occasion for it. As the stereotypically thick-headed Irishman remarked when asked the way to the railway station: 'Well, I wouldn't start from here.' The comment is not as illogical as some might think, which is also true of the Irish. It means 'You'd get there quicker and more directly if you weren't starting from this awkward, out-of-the-way spot.' Socialists today might well sympathise with this sentiment. One could imagine the proverbial Irishman surveying Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, about to embark on the task of building socialism in a beseiged, isolated, semidestitute country, and remarking: 'Well, I wouldn't start from here.' (pp. 70-71)
Marxists want nothing more than to stop being Marxists. In this respect, being a Marxist is nothing like being a Buddhist or a billionaire. It is more like being a medic. Medics are perverse, self-thwarting creatures who do themselves out of a job by curing patients who then no longer need them (p. 1)
The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they're winning. Then it moves in with its water hoses and paramilitary squads, and if these fail with its tanks. Nobody doubts that the state can be violent. It is just that Marx gives a new kind of answer to the question of who the violence ultimately serves. (pp. 197-98)
There are times when the possessing class directly runs the state. George Bush and his fellow oilmen were a case in point. One of Bush's most remarkable achievements, in other words, was to prove vulgar Marxism right. He also seems to have worked hard to make the capitalist system appear in the worst possible light, another fact which makes one wonder whether he was secretly working for the North Koreans. (p. 206)
Unlike a great many liberals, Marx was not allergic to power as such. It is scarcely in the interests of the powerless to be told that all power is distasteful, not least by those who already have enough of the stuff to spare. Those to whom the word 'power' always has a derogatory ring are fortunate indeed. Power in the cause of human emancipation is not to be confused with tyranny. The slogan 'Black Power!' is a lot less feeble than the cry 'Down with Power!' We would only know that such power was truly emancipatory, however, if it managed to trnasform not only the present political set-up, but the very meaning of power itself. (p.207)
For Christmas I used to give the gift of music. Now music is free. Consider this your guide to the most theftable music of 2011.
1. The Rapture, In the Grace of Your Love
I think it was 2003 when the Rapture's debut Echoes was awarded album of the year by Pitchfork, heralding the dawn of a new age of Brooklyn disco hipster punk. In the ensuing years, however, the Rapture floundered while LCD Soundsystem, MGMT, TV on the Radio, and a cottage industry of indie (whatever that means these days) bands from Williamsburg moved into the spotlight. In recent times the Rapture lost one of its key members and nearly broke up, but with this new album they seem to have gained in maturity what they have lost in energy and edge. The mother of their singer, Luke Jenner, recently committed suicide, leading him to join a men's choir, and it certainly shows, because whereas dude used to have a scratchy punk yelp, now DUDE CAN SING. The opening track, "Sail Away," is an outstanding example, as is the title track and some of the dancier songs, like "How Deep Is Your Love" (which actually could pass as a gay disco anthem). There's some lame semi-religious or "spiritual" allusions in the music, as suggested by the album's title, but I'm willing to let that slide if your mom commits suicide. Don't call it a comeback. Actually, do call it a comeback. Echoes is indeed one of the greatest albums of the past 10 years, IMHO, but In the Grace of Your Love marks their transformation into one of the greatest bands of our time. Don't get me wrong, nobody cares right now and the hype machine passed the Rapture by years ago (I'm not sure if Pitchfork even reviewed this album) but one day we recognize its greatness and you'll want to tell everyone how you were sooooo into that album before everyone else was. Bonus=music video for "Miss You" featuring kitschy 80s aerobics movie that doubles as softcore porn.
2. Girls, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
Perhaps the most misleading band name in the history of music: Girls is actually just some guys, and as far I can tell pretty much just this one dude who plays guitar, sings, and writes the songs, all with a needle dangling out of his arm or neck or wherever he can still manage to find a working vein. Dude also looks a lot like a taller Kurt Cobain and seems to hail from San Francisco. I hear there's some crazy story about how dude was born into a cult of aliens or some bullshit like that. This is Girls' second full-length album, and it's a great rock album in an age when nobody makes great rock albums anymore. There's chunky Black Sabbath guitar riffs, an Elvis Costello snarl, and some moody power ballads to boot. Enjoy dude while he's still alive. Based on this video I would estimate he's currently about 6'2" and 75 lbs. Let's hope the video doesn't make crop tops fashionable for male hipsters, but then again how could it if it doesn't even look good on dude.
3. Tyler The Creator, Goblin
How can you call this kid anything except the black Eminem? Well, for one Tyler is more like an alienated skateboarding punk or devil-worshipping headbanger than an inner-city gangsta or wigga. In other words, he's much, much more white than Eminem in a cultural sense. But Tyler is also much like Eminem in the sense that his psycho-pathology is on full display for the listener and constitutes the raw material of the music. And it's really, really fucked up. On some songs (e.g., "Transylvania") I wish he rapped in French or something because I love the music (and sorry Tyler but how can anyone describe that your music as anything except "horrorcore?) but it's so grotesquely misogynist and homophobic that it simply becomes simply unlistenable. Some of the misogyny and homophobia is extremely juvenile--eventually he'll have to grow out of the stage of making "jokes" about butt sex and telling everyone that so-and-so can suck his dick, right? At least for now, he just sounds like what he is, which is a 19 year-old boy who lives in his grandmother's house, a teenage boy who's fashioned his rap persona into something that's more like a video game avatar (a "wolf gang"? really, Tyler?). The misogyny, unfortunately, clearly runs much deeper, is comparable to that of Eminem, and is absolutely violent to the core (Tyler's rape and serial murder fantasies are obviosuly hyperbolic yet reveal a profoundly disturbed psyche). That said, "Yonkers," "Radicals," and "Sandwitches" are surely 3 of the best songs of 2011, and IMHO total game changers for the future of hip hop music. If nothing else, we should be thankful that Tyler and some of the other Odd Future rappers have managed to make Jay-Z and Kanye West's Watch the Throne sound nothing less than a thousand years old this year. The (odd) future of rap has arrived, so get used to him; it ain't gonna be pretty, but the best is yet to come. Best chorus of 2011= "kill people/burn shit/fuck school," prefaced by the disclaimor "if something happens don't blame me, White America. Fuck Bill O'Reilly."
4. Trash Talk, Awake
Ok, so it's only an EP, 5 songs and a total of 9 minutes. But to paraphrase Johnny (or was it Dee Dee?) Ramone, they're actually long songs played quickly. Sixteen year old Ryan Moore thinks this may be the most important 9 minutes in the history of recorded music, perhaps rivaled only by "The Call of Ktulu," the lengthy instrumental that closes Metallica's Ride the Lightning. Plus, they're from Sacramento, which I have always called Excremento because I assumed that nothing good could come from it. Trash Talk consists of two black guys (who knew they were black people in Excremento? much less ones who play thrash punk??), a drummer who plays at simply inhuman pace, and a crowd-surfing singer with an unholy scream who I'm pretty sure is the next Iggy Pop. The shape of punk to come in a post-apocalyptic world of skateboarding in the empty swimming pools of foreclosed houses in decaying suburbs. So yeah it's only 9 minutes, but there's at least 10 times the amount of punk rock here as in that Fucked Up "David Comes to Life" bullshit. Best song="Gimme Death," but why are you still reading this when you could have listened to the entire record by now?
5. Black Lips, Arabia Mountain
Last year it was the Black Keys who released an album I really liked on the heels of an apparently long career of releasing an albums that I really couldn't give a shit about. It looks like Black Lips is sliding nicely into that category this year, so perhaps I will need to create a separate category called "Back in Black" or something stupid like that. Next year's top candidate is the Black Heart Procession, because I can't see how the Black Eyed Peas are going to do anything remotely musical anytime soon. I don't know much about the Black Lips (or is it simply Black Lips?) except that they all look like they really need to get their ass kicked by someone who is doubly qualified to remove facial tattoos. Anyway....I hate to say it but this is one of those really infectious albums that you find yourself humming all day after one listen. Best songs="Mad Dog," "Bone Marrow," and "New Direction." It's not rocket science, but there's a sweet fucking horn section and you can clap along at home, just like I'm doing now as if I were a toy monkey with a pair of cymbals.
6. The War on Drugs, Slave Ambient
We need to take a moment to talk about band names. This was a good year for music, but not for band names, and this one may be the worst of all. Who wants to risk being overheard to say, "Yeah, I really like The War on Drugs" or "Have you seen The War on Drugs live?" I mean Girls, Cults, The War on Drugs....it's as if musicians are deliberately trying to make themselves non-Googleable. The thing is that this is a really great album, and from a band I had never even heard of until recently. Its sound is fuzzy and distorted and refracted and ambient (like in the album title, duh) but it's also really good rockin' road trip-across-the-country music, so when you put the two together it sounds like meat-and-potatoes rock 'n' roll but in the new America where the heartland has been gutted into a hollow image of its former self. Think Springsteen or Petty in a new century where no one can be that earnest unless it's a truck commercial. Now about that band name....it seems that this guy Kurt Vile was once in this band, and his punky homage to the German composer gets my vote for best name of the year, but I wasn't as crazy about his album (still good overall, see below) as this one that get my vote for worst name of the year.
7. EMA, Past Life Martyred Saints
EMA stands for Erika M. Anderson, a young woman from South Dakota and clearly of some kind of Nordic descent who moved to Los Angeles and has now recorded what I think is her first solo album. I'm gonna describe her as a cross between Courtney Love and Robyn, and I think that description generally applies both to her look and style and her sound. There's some good hipster dance tracks like "Mailman" (video below) sandwiched between two fantastic, sprawling, almost Zeppelinesque alt-rock epics that begin and end the album ("The Grey Ship" and "Red Star," respectively). She's very young, the album is pretty raw and has some uneven moments, and so clearly this is still a work in progress. But I believe the ceiling of talent and creative vision is extremely high and that this is one who's going to be fun to watch and listen to for many years to come. Let's hope she doesn't cut or vomit herself to death before then.
8. Tom Waits, Bad as Me
OK, so I'm middle-aged and middle-class, and I like Tom Waits, so fucking sue me, but he released an amazingly vital album this year, beginning a opening song called "Chicago" that chugs along like a great blues song worthy of its name. The accompanying video below, featuring sepia-toned footage from Chicago during its industrial heyday, is also excellent. Other standout tracks="Talking at the Same Time," "Bad as Me," and "Hell Broke Luce." I know Tom Waits has turned himself into a caricature of the bohemian poet-bum, but I still find something compelling about that, and this could be his best album since Bone Machine.
9. St. Vincent, Strange Mercy
I sort of wish I didn't like this album as much as I do. I'm pretty sure St. Vincent is just this one woman, and she's just so damn vanilla, I think her real name is Annie to boot. Few things annoy me (not to be confused with the things that anger me, which is multifold and growing) more than fake edginess, you know that Urban Outfitters, Zooey Deschanel brand of "hip." Just so precious and so cute it makes me want to strangle a kitten in the middle of an Ikea. I would say the next four artists and albums on this list fit that bill perfectly, so perfectly that I could see them on some sort of Urban Outfitters compilation CD: St. Vincent, The Weeknd, M83, and Cults. I put them on this list because I enjoyed their music this year but felt like a complete tool while doing so. Drake and Bon Iver would probably be asked by Urban Outfitters to curate that compilation, but they're both off my list because I detest the former and believe that the latter's album from this year is totally overrated. As far as St. Vincent, to me the standout tracks are "Cruel," "Northern Lights," and "Have Mercy." The video for "Cruel" is sorta cool, but then again it's just so vanilla-edgy, like ooh the Brooklyn hipster lady doesn't want to be trapped in a nuclear family, ooh she equates it with being kidnapped, how subversive! Someone alert the guardians of patriarchy, we've got another defector on the loose!!!
10. The Weeknd, House of Balloons.
, Did any album get more hype this year than this one? To me the sound is very reminiscent of Massive Attack and Tricky, but with a more soulful singer in the tradition of Prince. Every song is about drugs, or coming down from drugs, or having sex on drugs, or having sex while coming down on drugs. This album has some great tracks (especially "House of Balloons-Glass Table Girls") and some weak filler, and the constant references to drugs and the party life get old really fast. Yeah we get it, you did so many drugs that the "e" fell out of the Weeknd. You almost had me thinking that the balloons were of the 99 and red variety, but really you mean the kind that have drugs in them. Gotcha. Winkwinknodnod. That said, the video below is one of the greatest pieces of audio-visual awesomeness assembled this year, mixing "Glass Table Girls" with the footage of that guy who walked on a high wire between the twin towers, the Baquiat documentary, and some goovy 70s slow-motion dancing. Enjoy!
11. M83, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming.
M83 is basically this French dude (but does France have dudes?) who has mastered the sound of 1980s O.G. MTV pop and soundtracks from John Hughes films, so if you close your eyes while listening to this album you can almost picture scenes for an ill-advised sequel to the Breakfast Club. The opening track with the singer Zola Jesus is outstanding. The next song, "Midnight City," is obviously a big fat pop single (video below), and it's already being used in a Victoria's Secret commercial of all places. From there the rest of the album has its high and lows but mostly just goes on for too damn long, and that's the risk you take when you do a double record--it can go either to the white album or use your illusion end of the spectrum. My favorite song has some French title but it basically has a little kid telling a story about psychedelic toads that make you see and hear things vividly after you lick them. It's so cute it almost makes me want to have a kid just so we can do drugs together.
12. Cults, Cults
I blame it on the White Stripes. There's this new cliche in white indie hipster culture where boy meets girl, but instead of going to a tree and k-i-s-s-i-n-g, they sublimate all that frustrated sexual energy into making music and forming a band. So like the 50% divorce isn't enough, the new generation has to take the battle-of-the-sexes to another level where now couples have to try to keep a band together too? I don't know what the story is with these two in Cults. They sound somewhere in between Sleigh Bells and Beach House if you want to stay within boy-meets-girl genre. Thankfully they sound nothing like the Moldy Peaches. Their scruffiness is, however, suspiciously attractive, and I'm pretty sure they're a couple of rich kids who met at NYU or some other wretched part of Friends-ified Greenwich Village. I want to hate them, and I think we can all rest assured with the knowledge that I probably will learn to hate them in time, but for now I can't deny the catchiness of "Go Outside" or "Abducted." Video mixes "Go Outside" with cool video footage from Jonestown (cuz they're named Cults, duh).
13. Frank Ocean, Nostalgia, Ultra
Frank Ocean is a key member of Tyler the Creator's "odd future" collective, but his music ventures from hip hop into the more soulful style of D'Angelo, even sometimes drifting into the perverse (and certainly diseased) territory of R. Kelly. Frank Ocean's style is 70s retro funk meets hip hop hedonism, sort of like if Marvin Gaye actually sang about all the drugs he was doing during his heyday. The sound of the album is also formatted to sound like a mixtape, with the sound of a tape ejecting evidently having replaced the crackle of the needle on a record as the new retro sonic fetish of choice for this odd future of musicians (the Weeknd also released House of Balloons as a mixtape). This yields some amusing moments, like when Frank Ocean raps his own song about a wedding directly over a recording of "Hotel California," or when we hear a snippet of Radiohead followed by the complaints of his girlfriend, who wants to hear Jodeci. Then, again, the sound of a tape being ejected. Standout tracks= "Songs for Women" and "Lovecrimes," the latter of which ends with Nicole Kidman's seething monologue from Eyes Wide Shut.
14. Iceage, New Brigade
Imagine a Joy Division or Clash cover band of 18 year-old boys living somewhere in Scandinavia where there's nothing better to do than try to perfect your covers of Joy Division or Clash songs. Day after day, these kids just bash away at their instruments in some abandoned factory or warehouse. Then gradually their rehearsal sessions develop into some songs, and much to everyone's surprise they start getting a lot better, very suddenly. That's where we're at with this band Iceage--exciting, but very raw. They play as hard and fast as a hardcore band should when they're young, and there's lots of upside from them as they get a little older. The next great industrial band for a post-industrial age. Standout tracks: "White Rune" and "New Brigade," remainder of album is uneven.
15. Wilco, The Whole Love.
Another year has come and gone, and Wilco has released yet another album, just like Radiohead, the Foo Fighters, and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Do you care? No, you don't. Actually, it's one of their best in many years, and the first song in particular ("The Art of Almost") has all kinds of cool rawk guitar shit that they haven't done since the similarly underrated A Ghost Is Born. Do you care now? No, you don't. At times it sounds like Jeff Tweedy is jumping up and down like "Hey guys, check me out, I'm doing some different over here. You haven't heard this shit! I'm being experimental." To which average Wilco fan replies, "That's great Jeff, but I gotta run the kids over to school now, maybe I can sneak in a listen later today while the kids are napping in the minivan on the way to soccer practice." To which Jeff protests, "No man, don't do that, this album is way too loud and rocking, it'll wake the kids!"
16. TV on the Radio, Nine Types of Light.
Like Wilco, TV on the Radio released what I believe is their 43rd or 44th album (fun fact check=only their 4th) and it's good in the way that every other TV on the Radio album has been good but never quite great.Each album has maybe two or three great, great songs, and this one's are "Second Song" and "Caffeinated Consciousness." Dude's singing is still amazing, especially on the former. But basically I'm going to just add these to an ongoing playlist of TV on the Radio songs like "DLZ" "Wolf Like Me" and "Staring at the Sun" that together make up one helluva greatest hits album. Unfortunately, once you've come to believe that some band is always going to be good but never great, it gets harder and harder to get excited about each new release. Sorry to hear one of their members died from cancer this year.
17. Kurt Vile, Smoke Ring for My Halo
Like I said, I love this guy's adopted moniker for being punk yet slyly refencing the German composer. The album is certainly good but I don't think it deserves all the praise it's getting from Joe and Jane Pitchfork. Unfortunately, when singing about religious freaks or being a puppet for the man, Kurt Vile seems like one of those guys who thinks he's a lot smarter than he really is. Lots of the same things apply from the War on Drugs review, basically this is heartland music for a land that has no heart. Standout tracks: "In My Baby's Arms," "Smoke Ring for My Halo." Cool hair.
18. Everymen, Blood's Thicker Than Water
What the fuck, I'm gonna throw out some props to my friends in the local Lake Worth scene who made a pretty good first album this year and have done well on their various tours across the U.S. They're good guys and they're still dealing with an awful tragedy where their washboard and guitar player fell off a balcony and sustained some serious brain damage. I've heard both both the demo version from last year and this full-length, and I've saw them play live more than I saw the members of my own family this year, so it's been nice to watch them progress and root for their success. The album is genuinely good, a kind of hobo-punk sound featuring banjos and violins and washboards yet played at a frenetic hardcore pace. Imagine a troupe of tattooed vagrants doing Minor Threat covers with banjos. Actually this album might rank higher on this list except for the fact that they went into the studio and totally butchered my favorite song of theirs, a tune called "Bottle of Tears" that used to be performed as a let's-all-get-drunk-and-sing-our-blues-away-together type of anthem, and for some inexplicable reason they turned it into a slower, allegedly darker, melodramatic and overproduced piece of shit. Fortunately I just substituted its place in the mix with the demo version, but you can't. Standout tracks: "Yellow Porch Blues," "Not a Good Long Term Plan," and "Don't Rain on My Parade." Video from last summer's Lake Worth festival:
19. Cerebral Ballzy, Cerebral Ballzy
I've already written one blog about this band and Trash Talk and the revival of early 80s American hardcore, and you can read that here. Basically if dig this revival the bands are like Black Brains or Black Threat, if you don't then they're Minor Brains or Bad Threat. You know how I feel about Trash Talk. This one I'm on the fence about, though still excited. First of all, as many people have already pointed out to me, we have yet another case of a terrible band name. But this black kid who's on the vocals is really compelling to watch, and someone in that band has a good sense of punk roots because they too released a mixtape this year with all kinds of classic punk bands that kids today wouldn't necessarily know about, like Stiff Little Fingers. Yet they are also intimately linked with the Adult Swim channel, who released their album through their website. This is a thoroughly commercial entity, but their first song is "Don't Tell Me What To Do" with lyrics about how people are always telling them do this, drink that, blahblahblah--in short, they could be the new face and sound of corporate "non-conformity" and all the contradictions that go with it. I foresee a new line of skate shoes with the slogan "don't tell me what to do" emblazoned on the side. Other standout tracks: "Cutting Class," "Insufficient Fare."
20. Metallica and Lou Reed, Lulu
This album didn't really make my list, it's more of a "dishonorable mention." Do you realize how amazingly terrible this is? The ill-advised collaboration between these two seemingly incompatible artists who are long past their point of relevancy is bad enough. But it gets worse. Evidently the album also has some theatrical basis, whereby Lou Reed wrote a bunch of lyrics based on the work of some misogynist German playright. So alongside Metallica's metal we have lots and lots and lots of words, words about doing violence against women, but also words that don't make any sense together, and not in that cool Dadaist, Captain Beefheart kind of way. It sounds like a bunch of middle-aged douchebags woke up one day and decided to relive their old glories as a metal band, and then while they were warming up some homeless schitzophrenic guy wandered in and started saying a bunch of random shit on the microphone. From day one I have been totally enthralled with the horribleness of this album in the same way I was enthralled with Gigli. Standout tracks=none, although the 95 minute (!) album does begin with Lou Reed "singing" this gem: "I would cut my legs and tits off when thinking of Boris Karloff."
As David Harvey and many others have since argued, the downturn of the 1970s presented not only a crisis but also an opportunity for the ruling classes to break with the compromises with organized labor and the regulatory state that had been instituted after World War II. In 1979, the richest 1% of Americans owned only approximately 20% of the nation's wealth and about 8% of its income--the lowest figures we've seen either before or since. As we know, that was about to change in dramatic fashion. Harvey describes the crisis facing the capitalist class at this juncture:
To have a stable share of an increasing pie is one thing. But when growth collapsed in the 1970s, when real interest rates went negative and paltry dividends and profits were the norm, then upper classes everywhere felt threatened. In the US the control of wealth (as opposed to income) by the top 1 per cent of the population had remained fairly stable throughout the twentieth century. But in the 1970s it plunged precipitously as asset values (stocks, property, savings) collapsed. The upper classes had to move decisively if they were to protect themselves from political and economic annihilation (A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 15)
Enter neoliberalism. The main tenets of neoliberalism were initially developed by the economists Frierich Hayek and Milton Friedman during the post-war period, when Keynesianism was the dominant paradigm in an economic system where state intervention and regulation played a key role. In opposition, Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom (published in 1962) argued that governments should remove all restrictions that might impede the accumulation of profits, sell off any public assets to the private sector and privatize public services, and substantially decrease funding for social welfare and programs. The discourse of neoliberalism touts "freedom" in the sense of free trade and free markets, though of course they don't mean free trade and free markets so much as the freedom of monopolistic corporations to maximize their profits wherever and however they can. Likewise, neoliberalism posits the individual as a hypothetical entrepreneur seeking to maximize his or her rational interests, and its concept of liberty basically boils down to the right to earn, keep, and spend money. As a matter of faith, neoliberalism maintains that economies grow and societies as a whole benefit when the allegedly natural urges of competition are unleashed from government or any other form of social control. The tenets of neoliberalism are not very consistent with the original economic theories of Adam Smith, but the neoliberals did appropriate Smith's idea that the market is guided by an "invisible hand" that, if left to its own, will regulate itself and "naturally" return to a state of equilibrium.
During the 1960s, Friedman was a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and his ideas were still relatively marginal in a world where Keynesianism was still orthodox. However, students from across Latin America but in particular from Chile came to the University of Chicago--assisted by U.S. government funding--to study economics with Friedman, leading them to be nicknamed the "Chicago Boys" when they returned to Chile (who alone sent one hundred students to pursue advanced degrees in economics at the University of Chicago between 1957 and 1970) or Argentina, Brazil, or Mexico.
On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet and his right-wing supporters in the Chilean military and government staged a brutal coup d'etat that overthrew the democratically elected and socialist-leaning administration of Salvador Allende. They did so with a substantial assist from the Nixon administration and the CIA, which had been spreading anti-socialist throughout Chile following the election of Allende in 1970 and his efforts to nationalize some key industries including the phone company, whose majority owner was the U.S.-based International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT). Following the coup--in which tens of thousands were arrested and imprisoned in Chile's football stadiums, untold numbers were tortured, executed, or "disappeared," and Allende shot himself inside the presdential palace following his farewell speech--the Chicago Boys who had been trained in Friedman's brand of neoliberalism, previously rebuffed in the 1970 election, were now suddenly given the keys to the Chilean economy by the Pinochet regime. This came on the heels of a proposal published on the day of the coup by the Chicago Boys to restructure Chile as a kind of laboratory of neoliberalism. In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein reveals this connection that links Friedman and his Chicago School with the new Pinochet regime's economic policies:
The proposals in the final document bore a striking resemblance to those found in Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom: privatization, deregulation and cuts to social spending--the free-market trinity. Chile's U.S.-trained economists had tried to introduce these ideas peacefully, within the confines of a democratic debate, but they had been overwhelmingly rejected. Now the Chicago Boys and their plans were back, in a climate distinctly more conducive to their radical vision. In this new era, no one besides a handful of men needed to agree with them. Their staunchest political opponents were either in jail, dead or fleeing for cover; the spectacle of fighter jets and caravans of death was keeping everyone else in line.
***Check out the short (7 minutes) film version of Klein's TheShock Doctrine with filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron, but it is disturbing so consider yourself warned***
Latin America's laboratory of neoliberalism got off to an inauspicious start, as the rates of inflation and unemployment each skyrocketed during the initial years of the new regime. However, Chile did, at least by mainstream economic indicators, begin to turn things around and eventually delivered some of the highest rates of growth and greatest increases of wealth in Latin America, leading neoliberal economists to proclaim a "miracle." But if the characteristics of this "miracle" actually look quite familiar and even typical to us today, it is because Chile provided a blueprint that would be carried out across most of the world during the next few decades. The increase of wealth was mostly concentrated among the country's elites along with financial speculators and foreign investors, making Chile one of the most unequal countries on Earth. Naomi Klein describes Chile as a harbinger of things to come in the rest of the world:
Chile under Chicago School rule was offering a glimpse of the future of the global economy, a pattern that would repeat again and again, from Russia to South Africa to Argentina: an urban bubble of frenetic speculation and dubious accounting fueling superprofits and frantic consumerism, ringed by the ghostly factories and rotting infrastructure of a development past; roughly half the population excluded from the economy altogether; out-of-control corruption and cronyism; decimation of nationally owned small and medium-sized businesses; a huge transfer of wealth from public to private hands, followed by a huge transfer of private debts into public hands. In Chile, if you were outside the wealth bubble, the miracle looked like the Great Depression, but inside its airtight cocoon the profits flowed so free and fast that the easy wealth made possible by shock therapy-style "reforms" have been the crack cocaine of financial markets ever since. And that is why the financial world did not respond to the obvious contradictions of the Chile experiment by reassuring the basic assumptions of laissez-faire. Instead, it reacted with the junkie's logic: Where is the next fix? (The Shock Doctrine, pp. 86-7)
Neoliberalism represents its ideas as a socially neutral means for curing and improving some homogenous entity called THE ECONOMY, which is bestowed with magical powers that could benefit all of humanity while correcting itself if those meddling and inefficient governments, unions, and other social institutions would just stay out of the way. But if we reflect on what has happened around the world since the 1970s, it seems that every time a society has put its faith in this doctrine, the “invisible hand”reaches into the wallets of the working masses and hands over their money to corporations and a small class of people who were wealthy to begin with. Then the invisible hand slaps us in the face, reminds us that we still owe more money, and orders us to get back to work. In this sense, we should consider neoliberalism as an ideology--not as an outright lie but as a collection of half-truths that make universal claims but are in fact designed to favor an elite class at the expense of the majority. Neoliberalism has created a social crisis in our world not because of its failures but because of its successes in redistributing more wealth to the wealthy. Here is David Harvey's pespective:
We can, therefore, interpret neoliberalization 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...I shall argue that the second of these objectives has in practice dominated. Neoliberalization has not been very effective in revitalizing global capital accumulation, but it has succeeded remarkably well in restoring, or in some instances (as in Russia and China) creating, the power of an economic elite. The theoretical utopianism of neoliberal argument has, I conclude, primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal.(Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 19)
Neoliberalism is both an economic technique for restoring the class power of the richest capitalists (especially in finance) and an ideological smokescreen that disguises this upward redistribution of wealth in a haze of pseudo-scientific propositions. For his argument, Harvey draws on data accumulated by the French economists Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, who have documented the increasing holdings of wealth and national income among the richest of the rich in every part of the world where neoliberal "reforms" have been enacted since the 1970s.
***In the video below, Duménil discusses Neoliberalism 101 with Real News in a 9 minute interview that is worth watching if for no other reason than to hear a French academic say "bullshit" with his cute little accent around the 7 minute mark***
In the United States, neoliberalism became a dominant ideology with the ascent of Ronald Reagan to the Presidency in 1980, but its tenets were first imposed through non-democratic measures during the fiscal crisis of New York City in 1975. The city had been running a budget deficit due to a combination of rising expenses and a declining tax base resulting from deindustrialization and decades of white flight. In the final hour before the city was to declare bankruptcy in 1975, a group of investment bankers led by Walter Wriston--Citibank CEO and future economic adviser to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush--arranged a bailout on terms that cut deeply into the power of municipal unions, imposed wage freezes, defunded social services, and charged tuition on students in the city's public university system. This proved to be the first instance of neoliberal "shock therapy" applied on American shores, again without any sort of democratic mandate. In David Harvey's words,
This amounted to a coup by the financial institutions against the democratically elected government of New York City, and it was every bit as effective as the military coup that had earlier occurred in Chile. Wealth was redistributed to the upper classes in the midst of a fiscal crisis.
As discussed in my book, the social chaos that ensued in New York during the second half of the 1970s spawned, at roughly the same time, the growth of punk at CBGB's in Lower Manhattan and the hip hop subculture in the South Bronx. The 1975 fiscal crisis has proven to be a decisive turning point in the destruction of the Keynesian welfare state in favor of neoliberal policies imposed primarily by financial interests. As Harvey says,
The management of the New York fiscal crisis pioneered the way for neoliberal practices both domestically under Reagan and internationally through the IMF in the 1980s. It established the principle that in the event of a conflict between the integrity of financial institutions and bondholers' returns, on the one hand, and the well-being of the citizens on the other, the former was to be privileged. It emphasized that the role of government was to create a good business climate rather than look to the needs and well-being of the population at large.
Capitalism has grown to a fundamentally unsustainable state. Only fools try to forecast economic futures, but the fact is that there's a significant chance that sometime in the not-too-distant future the entire capitalist system is going to collapse in a crisis of truly global proportions. At that point, humanity will be at a crossroads between some new system cooked up by the existing powers-that-be who will seek to preserve and even increase their control, or an alternative organized on the basis of truly participatory democracy with a socialist approach to the production and distribution of resources. Basically, we are going to be forced to decide Rosa Luxemburg's old question--socialism or barbarism?
What does it mean to say that capitalism has become fundamentally unsustainable? In the years before and after the financial crisis of 2008, a series of economic and historical works by scholars including David Harvey, John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, Robert Brenner, Chris Harman, Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, Richard Wolff, Dave McNally, and Ellen Mieskins Wood have demonstrated the enduring utility of Marxist analysis for understanding capitalism today. Whereas mainstream economists were caught off guard by the crisis of 2008 (after her personal fortunes took a huge hit, the Queen asked the academics at the London School of Economics "why did nobody notice it?"), Marxist economists had been warning for some time that capitalism was becoming increasingly unsustainable and therefore crisis-prone, principally because finance has been decoupled from production. Since 2008, nothing has been done to rein in the financial system--the same class of thieves and sociopaths who wrecked the economy before receiving a bailout are still in charge and out of control, and if anything their power is more concentrated today--and so until there is fundamental change we will continue to periodically witness catastrophic meltdowns of the financial system that devastate an increasingly interdependent world economy.
What does it mean to say that finance and production have been decoupled from one another? In brief, it means that capital has been faced with shrinking profits and a shortage of profitable investment opportunities in traditionally "productive" sectors of the economy, and has therefore turned to financial forms of speculation on debt and currency trading in what basically amounts to gambling among billionaires. When finance is decoupled from production and becomes the predominant method of investment for future profits, then we might say that the only thing capitalists are making is money. Here's how Bellamy Foster and Magdoff summarize it:
Currency and futures speculation, trading in complex derivatives, the emergence and growth of hedge funds, and the stunning increase in debt are all responses to the same phenomenon. As the economy of production of goods and services stagnates, failing to generate the rate of return...that capital desires, a new type of 'investment' emerged. It seeks to leverage debt and embrace bubble-like expansions aimed at high, speculative profits through financial instruments. The depth of stagnation, and its tenacious hold on the mature capitalist economy, is amply testified to by the flight of investment into what we have called "the giant casino." (60-61)
So yes it is like high-stakes gambling, but in a really fucked up casino where the gambler gets to keep all his winnings but the losses are paid for by the 99 people who serve him drinks, prepare his food, and clean his room. The more exact way to say this is that profits are privatized while risks are socialized. When capitalists win, they tell us not to be jealous of their success and try to convince us that taxes are an infringement on the liberties of not only themselves but all of us. When capitalists lose, they demand to be bailed out and threaten to take their chips to another casino, and those of us who work at the casino will ultimately foot the bill by taking on deeper debts that force us to work that much harder and longer in our jobs. Bellamy Foster and Magdoff put it this way:
The huge explosion of debt and speculation provide ways to extract more surplus from the general population and are, thus, part of capital's exploitation of workers and the lower middle class (61).
For more than 20 years after the end of World War II, the United States experienced a period of unprecedented prosperity. There were high rates of growth, American businesses raked in huge profits, and American workers also took home significantly larger incomes and enjoyed a higher standard of living. While higher wages ate into profits on the production side, the increasing disposable income fueled greater levels of demand for consumer goods of all sorts. During these years, capitalism was able to overcome the crisis that had crippled it during the 1930s: namely, the crisis of underconsumption fostered by inequalities of wealth that limited the purchasing power of the working masses. After World War II, the combination of military expenditures and state investments in education, housing, and highway construction advanced the process that had begun in the Progressive era and the New Deal into a full-blown "Keynesian Welfare National State." This post-war system of state management and class compromise--variously called "Fordism," "organized capitalism," or "embedded liberalism"--enlarged the ranks of the American "consumers' republic" based on mass consumption that resolved the problem of demand.
These domestic policies were complemented on an international level after World War II by the Marshall Plan implemented in Western Europe and comparable means of foreign aid to Japan. The U.S. government poured billions of dollars into the reconstruction of a war-torn world and accomplished two objectives at once: they buffered states and ruling classes against the threat of communist revolutions, and they enlarged the international market for the export of American products. The United States emerged from World War II as the hegemonic center of the non-communist world, an economic, military, and political powerhouse with an affluent "middle class" whose lifestyle was envied and emulated throughout the world. However, the further we are removed from those years, the more they look like a "golden age" that represents an exception rather than the rule of American capitalism.
So what the fuck happened? It began with a perfect storm of economic, political, and military crises that coalesced around 1968. The American war machine got bogged down in Vietnam, with the Tet Offensive of January 1968 exposing major chinks in the U.S. armor. The costs of the war along with rising state expenditures for domestic programs (the Johnson administration wanted both guns and butter) had also begun to provoke an inflationary spiral in the American economy. Meanwhile, the Japanese and the Germans had caught up with the United States and begun to contest its dominant position in world trade. Immanuel Wallerstein explains the significance of the Vietnam War as a turning point for the beginning of the end of American hegemony, both in the geopolitical arena of nation-states and the economic system of global trade:
But Vietnam was not merely a military defeat or a blight on U.S. prestige. The war dealt a major blow to the United States' ability to remain the world's most dominant economic power. The conflict was extremely expensive and more or less used up the U.S. gold reserves that had been so plentiful since 1945. Moreover, the United States incurred these costs just as western Europe and Japan experienced major upswings. These conditions ended U.S. preeminence in the global economy (The Decline of American Power, p. 18).
In 1971, rising rates of inflation brought on by increasing government expenditures and America's emerging deficits in world trade and balance-of-payments led President Nixon to disconnect the value of the dollar from the gold standard in what is sometimes called "the Nixon Shock." This has turned out to be a crucial event in the financialization of capitalism, for the end of the gold standard allowed currencies to be traded and speculated upon in a deregulated system of floating exchange rates. With the benefit of a historian's hindsight, we can now see the 1970s as the critical turning point marking a break with the post-war system and a turn to the more unfettered forms of capitalism we find today. The developing crisis of capitalism in the early 1970s was further compounded in 1973-74 when OPEC--emboldened after witnessing U.S. defeat in Vietnam--proclaimed an oil embargo directed against American support for Israel and thereby dramatically increased the price of oil on the world market. By the mid-1970s, the stagnation of capitalism on a global scale had become evident to all and showed no signs of reversing course. As David Harvey has described those times:
Signs of a serious crisis of capital accumulation were everywhere apparent. Unemployment and inflation were both surging everywhere, ushering in a global phase of 'stagflation' that lasted throughout much of the 1970s. Fiscal crises of various states (Britain, for example, had to be bailed out by the IMF in 1975-76) resulted as tax revenues plunged and social expenditures soared. Keynesian policies were no longer working. (A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 12)
As Harvey and many others have since argued, the downturn of the 1970s presented not only a crisis (the graph above illuminates the declining rate of profit and increasing frequency of recession in the mid-late 1970s) but also an opportunity for the ruling classes to break with the compromises with organized labor and the regulatory state that had been instituted after World War II. In 1979, the richest 1% of Americans owned only approximately 20% of the nation's wealth and about 8% of its income--the lowest figures we've seen either before or since. As we know, that was about to change in dramatic fashion. Harvey describes the crisis facing the capitalist class at this juncture:
To have a stable share of an increasing pie is one thing. But when growth collapsed in the 1970s, when real interest rates went negative and paltry dividends and profits were the norm, then upper classes everywhere felt threatened. In the US the control of wealth (as opposed to income) by the top 1 per cent of the population had remained fairly stable throughout the twentieth century. But in the 1970s it plunged precipitously as asset values (stocks, property, savings) collapsed. The upper classes had to move decisively if they were to protect themselves from political and economic annihilation (A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 15)
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