Post on 13-Apr-2018
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neo liberalism externalized
Tristan Laing
York University, Canada
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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
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"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?
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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?
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'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"
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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"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"
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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?
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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
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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
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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
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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)
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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.
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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")
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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,
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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
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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....
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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.
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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)
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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)
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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)