Weekend Economists Ring in the Old, Wring Out the New: Dec. 30, 2011 to Jan. 2, 2012

[Demeter]

118. With the Long Revolution Underway, We Need to Think Big

http://www.truth-out.org/long-revolution-underway-we-need-think-big/1324418230

...The consolidation of power now taking place without regard to national boundaries has had deep impact on the last remaining public investments in very specific, local ways. Major institutional changes are needed that, like the economic crisis itself, run through the social, political and cultural spheres. Stop-gap measures and rhetorical flourishes were seen for what they are - appeasements that do not go to the roots of the problem. How can we best understand the new scale: how protest against local economic policies connects up with the global protests of the Occupy movement?

...Even the givens of life under neoliberalism seem to be unsettled: the usual accommodations of the state to dissent or fluctuation in the capital and labor markets seem to be ruthlessly withdrawn. As intellectuals, we might continue to mine the archive of disciplinary practices, methods, data, and yet there seems a sense of inadequacy and incompleteness in most of our efforts. Public discourse as well seemed, at least until the recent few months, to be trapped in a rhetoric that was palpably dated. Nonetheless, on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Williams "The Long Revolution," I wish to make the argument that cultural studies is eminently adaptable to the historical occasion of the Occupy movement.

Despite its obvious roots in the Britain of the late 50s, "The Long Revolution" allows a particularly useful, wide-frame optic onto how we might approach today's global protests against the obscene concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a tiny minority and the cynical desecration of democracy and the common good under the name of economic necessity. Indeed, much of what Williams remarks upon in his time seems to be eerily familiar. For example, he writes:

Capitalism ... emphasizes the decline in control by shareholders (an ironic comment, of course, on the extension of shares, which is then not a new kind of ownership, but simply an extension of playing the market), and the rise in importance of the managers and technicians. In fact the economy, while not controlled by ordinary shareholders, is not controlled by managers and technicians either, but by powerful interlocking private institutions that in fact command what some Labour politicians wistfully call "the commanding heights of the economy." Even if the managerial revolution had occurred (and the real revolution is the passing of power to financial institutions and self-financing corporations), the original challenge would still be lost, for the direction of our common economic life would have been reduced to a series of technical decisions, without anything more than a market reference to the kind of society the economy should sustain.

While we might ourselves wistfully regard much of what is reported in this passage (that a firewall between private and publicly funded financial entities might be imagined in an era of bailouts whose volume baffles the imagination), we can see how our public lives have been put at the mercy of rational market decisions - or, rather, what is done in their guise...