Just to add to Yoshie's comment: looks to me as though the real "finish of neoliberalism" is necessarily the extensive privatisation of government debts, but in a specific way. Suppose you have these government institutions, and they have large debts. How then can you balance the budget ?
In New Zealand, demagogue lawyer, preacher and ex-premier David Lange (of whom Jagdish Baghwati is an Indian clone) discovered through experience that the options were limited. You could: - reduce government expenditure, so you reduce the amount of new debt incurred - reschedule the old debts to reduce repayment burden, and share out liabilities - enforce a monetary discipline which wipes out all enterprises not competitive in the world market - increase your revenue, through additional taxes and charges, widening the tax-base and more cost-plus activities - sell off indebted government institutions altogether, so they're off your books - restructure and reconsolidate government accounts, through merging or splitting different government services - apply new accounting principles, which make the deficit look smaller, and revenue look greater (including real asset accounting, of a type which creates new assets where you didn't think you had them) - propagandise "no gain without pain", confidence and "things will get better in the future" The real competitive market advantage which the federal government has here as player in the market, vis-a-vis the corporations, is that the federal government can, to a much larger extent, be a law unto itself. That is, it can not only make up its own rules and change its own rules, it can also impose new rules on the rest of the population. That is the principle Dick Cheney is utilising. "Democratisation" is basically a couple of bisexual girls, or two girls one of whom wants to, but the other one doesn't and you have to guess which one it is. But the latest rage in the financial world is really "debt management". What this means is that, instead of seeing debt as something terrible, a liability incurred by inferior people, you apply a bit of judeo-christian profundity and see it as an opportunity to make an extra profit while appearing charitable. How does that work ? Well, the existence of a debt means, that a statutory obligation exists for a debtor to pay a certain amount of money in a certain amount of time, and a statutory entitlement exists for a creditor to receive a certain amount of revenue, according to the law of the land, an obligation which can be enforced as such. Now suppose that you are able to trade in these "obligations" as a commodity like any other, and renegotiated terms. This of course already happens on a grand scale. In that case, a government could sell off its debt obligations to private enterprise, simply by changing the law, such that a debt liability can be sold off. Maybe the debtor can pay, or maybe the debtor cannot pay. But if he cannot pay, they you could always renegotiate debt repayments in some way. And you can keep on renegotiating endlessly, and through that renegotiation process force people into a behavour which respects the rules of the capitalist market. It's really the greatest scam there is: first you tax citizens, and transfer an increasing portion of tax money to private investors who see your government as a secure source of income, insofar as it has a large army which can enforce financial claims. Next, if your deficit becomes to large in comparison to the tax revenue you can levy with a revolt of the population and massive capital flight, you private the debt obligations themselves. Being able to pull off this scam depends on your ability to enforce the repayment of debt obligations, but so long as you have very large armed forces, you should be able to do it. Many socialists object to the debts of poor countries on the ground, it's unfair and unkind, those poor hardworking people shouldn't have to pay back all that money, and so on. But this misses the real dynamic of late bourgeois society, namely the utilisation of the instrument of indebtedness, to change or renegotiate the terms of exchange themselves (what really trades against/for what), and the growth of real slavery. The Dutch National Geographic (Sept 2003 issue) featured an article about slavery. It said there are now 27 million people on earth living in conditions defined as slavery, as slaves, men, women and children, and they earn a mere 13 billion euro. That's a funny statistic, because what definition of slavery is involved here ? Basically, de facto forced labor, on the basis that the worker is himself/herself is owned by someone else, and can be bought and sold. Then you're talking 0.4 percent of the world population, or nearly 1 percent of the world's workforce (3 billion people earn an income of 2 euro or less per day, i.e. less than 730 euro a year). Now, this really implies that approximately one in 115 people within the world's paid workforce is a slave. The article also claims that in Greece with its great Hellenistic culture and philosophical tradition, between 1990 and 2000 the amount of money earnt from trafficked prostitution alone was about 5.5 billion euro, and voluntary prostitutes earnt about 1.5 billion euro. here you have the real content of the christian complaint about normlessness. The FAO has estimated that the number of chronically hungry human beings around the world rose to 842 million in 2000, an increase of 18 million. Around 25 million human beings die annually from hunger. Developing countries account for nearly 800 million undernourished human beings, and this number is climbing at a rate of almost five million a year. Currently world unemployment is steadily increasing and stands at about 180 million people, according to the ILO, including 50 million in the industrialised countries. A billion people (a third of the world's work force) are unemployed or underemployed. Some 550 working poor live on US$1 or less per day. In the next decade, however, there will be 460 million young workers streaming onto the job market. Adrienne Germain, director of the International Women's Health Coalition in New York in fact notes that there are more adolescents in the world today than there have ever been before in history, and behind that cohort, is another cohort of one billion children between 0 and ten years old. One third of the world population is younger than 19 years. Forget for a moment about the postmodernist wankers and think of it this way. The question is how all these young people emerging in the world can be integrated into the market. How can the market be made sexy and attractive ? The problem here really is, that just as the market has no intrinsic morality of its own beyond what's required to settle a contract, just so sex has no instrinsic morality of its own, beyond what is necessary to have sex. This is the real role of the new middle classes and their semantic superiority: to prosytelise new sexual boundaries which define access to sex, and incalculate new trade cultures, trading rules. "In July 2003 Larry Ellison, the full-blooded American boss of software giant Oracle, said [cheerfully]: "Isn't it remarkable that right now Oracle employs 3,000 Indian citizens, paying constantly increasing salaries, providing a very high standard of living and helping to create a new middle class?". It will be even more remarkable when one of those 3,200 is running the company from his office in Bangalore. Don't doubt it. That day is not far off." Source: Tim Hindle, "The third age of globalisation", in: The Economist's "The world in 2004" (London, February 2004), edited by Daniel Franklin, print edition, p. 107-108. Ellison sees Oracle's efforts as constructive, but just think of how many Indians there are in total, compared to this initiative ! Well, at Falkland Road in Mumbai, female prostitutes stand in cages to attract customers, often trafficked in. These women get bought and sold by their parents or husbands, so they aren't even free workers. How many ? About 50,000, of which half are trafficked from Nepal. So then you have these 3,000 Oracle employees as against 50,000 prostitutes. And this raises a real question about the future of world capitalism: if it is possible to earn more money faster through sexwork, commercial deals and speculative ventures and property development than expanding real production output in a way that develops the economic infrastructure of less developed countries, what else can happen other than an even faster increase in socio-economic inequality ? A yuppie distributional theory of sexual effort, in contrast to a religious theory of the duty to provide, assumes there is something to distribute, which must be produced, but a sexual effort by itself does not produce it, it can at most create a new entitlements to products which must be produced by somebody else. That's the rub. To repeat what I said on 14 January 2003: strictly speaking, social science does not exist for neo-liberalism because there is really no scientific object of study for social science (see Hayek on this). For neo-liberalism, strictly speaking, society does not exist, macroeconomics does not exist, they are unknowables. You just have more or less cultured individuals, businesses and markets, which you can describe. You can describe them statistically, but some social phenomena you simply cannot count, because they do not exist, they are just malabstractions. Statistical classifications should reflect the market process and nothing else, because the only thing that is objective is actual prices paid. "Social" just refers to an aggregate of individuals, or taking a cooperative, receptive attitude in interactions between individuals. History has no dynamics or laws or specific direction, all you can do is relate particulars to other particulars, with regard to a specific question you have in mind, but you cannot make statements about "the big picture" beyond stochastic inference. So then neoliberal cultural studies focus on cultural markets, cultural transactions and transactors, the buying, owning and selling of culture, culture as a product which is produced and consumed on a market basis. From a neo-liberal point of view, more market means more culture, the market is the great driving force of cultural development, and the question then is how we can convert non-market cultural activity as much as possible into market activity. Michael Camdessus said in the bubbly days of the 1990s that "the market is in our genes" (or was that our jeans ?), an elaboration of an original idea by Adam Smith about the natural propensity of human beings to "truck, barter and exchange". Out of this you get the neo-liberal personality, which is basically a human transactor, a product of (successfully) negotiated transactions, which requires learning various haggling techniques to produce specific outcomes. Extending this idea, you could say simply that culture is all about negotiating deals, negotiating life, negotiating everything. To be "cultured" is simply to be a good negotiator, somebody who is good at exchanging, in such as way that he gets what he wants. To be a good negotiator requires above all being able to engage in meaningful communication so that a successful deal results. So "culture" is important in neo-liberalism in the sense of understanding the meanings required to do deals. Psychological problems arise when negotiation is unskillful, and these require market adjustment. Problems for neo-liberal cultural studies are such questions as: how well are we negotiating ? Are impediments to cultural markets being removed ? Flirtation is then essentially an attempt at opening a negotiation. So how does elitism fit into this ? Well, the consumer knows what s/he wants/needs, if not, s/he would not buy the product or service. If therefore, let us say, you criticise his/her consumption (or lack of it), you are making subjective value judgements about other people's consumption, but there is no serious epistemic basis for doing that, because one cannot say in any objective sense that one form of consumption is superior to another, it is a question of personal taste. That is, there is no special or privileged vantage point from which consumption can be objectively evaluated, beyond describing what people actually do produce, buy and sell, and consume (within appropriate categories which exclude fictitious social entities). Therefore, all that is happening in leftist "cultural critique" is that one is telling somebody else what they need or what they want, from an allegedly superior vantage point which doesn't really exist. Insofar as one is actually able to enforce or impose a consumption norm, this is moreover a restriction of freedom which has totalitarian implications. I don't see however why cultural critique has to be Manichean or non-sensual, this makes sense only from the vantage point of a purely subjective theory of value. In bourgeois society, people can of course subscribe to a subjective theory of value, except when their own money is concerned, then all of a sudden value becomes an "objective reality". Marx pointed the way beyond these dualisms. In reality, while the post-Marxists may discard value theory in favour of price theory, based on a stupid view of what prices are, value theory is about the very nature of the market. Bourgeois ideology discovers the verity that you cannot consume anything without trading to obtain it (engage in exchange). But the insight of classical political economy is that you cannot exchange something if you haven't got it, and to get it, you must either produce it or take it from somewhere or somebody else. The only thing that sustain subjective value theories is enough money in one's bank account to claim articles of consumption. If that money is not there, objective reality forces a specific valuation scheme on social relations. That is what "culture wars" are, ultimately, all about. Here in Holland, the latest issue of unemployed rights newspaper goes the whole hog and carries the argument to its ultimate conclusion: they've published a story on the new Miss Holland, Sanne de Regt (a visagiste from Zealand province), who initially didn't even want to be Miss Holland anyhow. What does Miss Holland have to say about herself ? "Since about four years ago I have really good friends. Previous to that it was just trying to cope. It was difficult for me sometimes in the past. But now I feel more like: I know who I am." In previous years, it was trendy to say there was no excuse for enjoying life. But the really trendy thing in postmodernist culture now is knowing who you are. Jurriaan I wanna dance with Harry Dean Drive through Texas in a black limousine I want a piece of heaven, before I die I wanna pair of pink high heels that catch the lights up on the ferris wheel, but what I really want, I just can't buy. Here comes the twenty-first century. It's gonna be much better for a girl like me, cuz I want everything I can, but most of all I want that man, I want that man. I wanna move like, what's his name. I'll keep the money, you can have the fame. Everything that's yours will soon be mine. Yeah, I wanna be the queen of the USA. You could send me roses, every other day, but what I really want, I just can't buy. Here comes the twenty first century. It's gonna be much better for a girl like me, cuz I want everything I can, but most of all I want that man, I want that man. Hey! I wanna be kissed from head to toe by that man in the very back row but he won't even look me in the eye. Ah, I want his love to rain right down on me. I want him to be king of all my dreams, but what I really want I just can't hide. Here comes the twenty first century. It's gonna be much better for a girl like me, cuz I want everything I can, but most of all I want that man. I want that man.
