Viser opslag med etiketten kapitalismekritik. Vis alle opslag
Viser opslag med etiketten kapitalismekritik. Vis alle opslag

mandag den 29. november 2010

Tim Jackson on Prosperity Without Growth.

Every society clings to a myth by which it lives. Ours is the myth of economic growth. For the last five decades the pursuit of growth has been the single most important policy goal across the world. The global economy is almost five times the size it was half a century ago. If it continues to grow at the same rate the economy will be 80 times that size by the year 2100.

This extraordinary ramping up of global economic activity has no historical precedent. It’s totally at odds with our scientific knowledge of the finite resource base and the fragile ecology on which we depend for survival. And it has already been accompanied by the degradation of an estimated 60% of the world’s ecosystems. For the most part, we avoid the stark reality of these numbers. The default assumption is that – financial crises aside – growth will continue indefinitely. Not just for the poorest countries, where a better quality of life is undeniably needed, but even for the richest nations where the cornucopia of material wealth adds little to happiness and is beginning to threaten the foundations of our wellbeing.

The reasons for this collective blindness are easy enough to find. The modern economy is structurally reliant on economic growth for its stability. When growth falters – as it has done recently – politicians panic. Businesses struggle to survive. People lose their jobs and sometimes their homes. A spiral of recession looms. Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. But question it we must. The myth of growth has failed us. It has failed the two billion people who still live on less than $2 a day. It has failed the fragile ecological systems on which we depend for survival. It has failed, spectacularly, in its own terms, to provide economic stability and secure people’s livelihoods.

Today we find ourselves faced with the imminent end of the era of cheap oil, the prospect (beyond the recent bubble) of steadily rising commodity prices,the degradation of forests, lakes and soils, conflicts over land use, water quality, fishing rights and the momentous challenge of stabilising concentrations of carbon in the global atmosphere. And we face these tasks with an economy that is fundamentally broken, in desperate need of renewal.

In these circumstances, a return to business as usual is not an option. Prosperity for the few founded on ecological destruction and persistent social injustice is no foundation for a civilised society. Economic recovery is vital. Protecting people’s jobs – and creating new ones – is absolutely essential. But we also stand in urgent need of a renewed sense of shared prosperity. A commitment to fairness and flourishing in a finite world.

Delivering these goals may seem an unfamiliar or even incongruous task to policy in the modern age. The role of government has been framed so narrowly by material aims, and hollowed out by a misguided vision of unbounded consumer freedoms. The concept of governance itself stands in urgent need of renewal.

But the current economic crisis presents us with a unique opportunity to invest in change. To sweep away the short-term thinking that has plagued society for decades. To replace it with considered policy capable of addressing the enormous challenge of delivering a lasting prosperity.

For at the end of the day, prosperity goes beyond material pleasures. It transcends material concerns. It resides in the quality of our lives and in the health and happiness of our families. It is present in the strength of our relationships and our trust in the community. It is evidenced by our satisfaction at work and our sense of shared meaning and purpose. It hangs on our potential to participate fully in the life of society.

Prosperity consists in our ability to flourish as human beings – within the ecological limits of a finite planet. The challenge for our society is to create the conditions under which this is possible. It is the most urgent task of our times.

From "Prosperity without Growth" by Tim Jackson, Economics Commissioner, Sustainable Development Commission, March 2009.

onsdag den 10. februar 2010

Degrowth economics: Why less should be so much more

by Serge Latouche

Last December we published an article about contraction economics - décroissance or ’degrowth’- a topic that has become a major subject of debate, not just within the counter-globalisation movement but in the wider world. The big question is: how should ’degrowth’ apply to the South?

THE logic of advertising so dominates the media that it views anything new - material, cultural or otherwise - as a product launch. And in any product launch, the key word is concept. So as discussion of décroissance (literally "degrowth", that is economic contraction or downscaling) spread, the media naturally started to ask what was the concept. We are sorry to disappoint the media, but degrowth is not a concept. There is no theory of contraction equivalent to the growth theories of economics. Degrowth is just a term created by radical critics of growth theory to free everybody from the economic correctness that prevents us from proposing alternative projects for post-development politics.

In fact degrowth is not a concrete project but a keyword. Society has been locked into thought dominated by progressivist growth economics; the tyranny of these has made imaginative thinking outside the box impossible. The idea of a contraction-based society is just a way to provoke thought about alternatives. To accuse its advocates of only wanting to see economies contract within the existing system rather than proposing an alternative to that system, and to suspect them (as do some counter-globalisation economists) of wanting to prevent the underdeveloped world from resolving its problems reflects at best ignorance and at worst bad faith.

Proponents of contraction want to create integrated, self-sufficient and materially responsible societies in both the North and the South. It might be more accurate and less alarming if we replaced the word degrowth with "non-growth". We could then start talking about "a-growthism", as in "a-theism". After all, rejecting the current economic orthodoxy means abandoning a faith system, a religion. To achieve this, we need doggedly and rigorously to deconstruct the matter of development. The term "development" has been redefined and qualified so much that it has become meaningless. Yet despite its failings, this magical concept continues to command total devotion across the political spectrum. The doctrines of "economism" (1), in which growth is the ultimate good, die hard. Even counter-globalisation economists are in a paradoxical position: they acknowledge the harm that growth has done but continue to speak of enabling Southern countries to benefit from it. In the North the furthest they are prepared to go is to advocate slowing down growth. An increasing number of anti-globalisation activists now concede that growth as we have known it is both unsustainable and harmful, socially as well as ecologically. Yet they have little confidence in degrowth as a guiding principle: the South, deprived of development, cannot be denied at least a period of growth, although it may cause problems.

The result is a stalemate where neither growth nor contraction suit. The proposed compromise of growth slowdown follows the tradition in these debates in that it lets everyone agree on a misunderstanding. Forcing our economies to grow more slowly will never deliver the benefits of a society free from constant growth (that is, being materially responsible, fully integrated and self-sufficient) but it will hurt employment, which has been the one undeniable advantage of rapid, inequitable and environmentally catastrophic expansion. To understand why the creation of a non-growth society is so necessary and so desirable for North and South, we must examine the history of the idea. The proposal for a self-sufficient and materially responsible society is not new; it is part of the tradition of development criticism. For more than 40 years an international group of commentators had analysed economic development in the South and denounced the harm it has done (2). These commentators do not just address recent capitalist or ultra-liberal development: for example, they have considered Houari Boumediene’s Algeria and Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania, which were both officially socialist, participatory, self-reliant and based on popular solidarity. And they have also noted that development has often been carried out or supported by charitable, humanist NGOs. Yet apart from a few scattered success stories, it has been an overwhelming failure. What was supposed to bring contentment to everyone in every aspect of life led only to corruption, confusion and structural adjustment plans that turned poverty into destitution.

Degrowth must apply to the South as much as to the North if there is to be any chance to stop Southern societies from rushing up the blind alley of growth economics. Where there is still time, they should aim not for development but for disentanglement - removing the obstacles that prevent them from developing differently. This does not mean a return to an idealised version of an informal economy - nothing can be expected to change in the South if the North does not adopt some form of economic contraction. As long as hungry Ethiopia and Somalia still have to export feedstuffs destined for pet animals in the North, and the meat we eat is raised on soya from the razed Amazon rainforest, our excessive consumption smothers any chance of real self-sufficiency in the South (3).

If the South is to attempt to create non-growth societies, it must rethink and re-localise. Southern countries need to escape from their economic and cultural dependence on the North and rediscover their own histories - interrupted by colonialism, development and globalisation - to establish distinct indigenous cultural identities. The cultural histories of many societies reveal inherently anti-economistic values. These need to be revived, along with rejected or forgotten products and traditional crafts and skills. Insisting on growth in the South, as though it were the only way out of the misery that growth created, can only lead to further westernisation. Development proposals are often born of genuine goodwill - we want to build schools and health clinics, set up water distribution systems, restore self-sufficiency in food - but they all share the ethnocentrism bound up with the idea of development. Ask the governments of countries what they want, or study surveys of populations duped by the media, and they do not ask for the schools and clinics that western paternalism considers fundamental needs. They want air conditioning, mobile phones, fridges and, above all, cars (Volkswagen and General Motors are planning to start producing 3m vehicles a year in China, and Peugeot is also investing heavily there). For the benefit of their governing elites, we might also add nuclear power stations, fighter jets and tanks to the wish list.

Or we could listen to the exasperated Guatemalan leader cited by Alain Gras (4): "Leave the poor alone and stop going on about development!" All the leaders of popular movements, from Vandana Shiva in India to Emmanuel Ndione in Senegal, say the same thing. Advocates of development may pontificate about the need to restore self-sufficiency in food; but the terms they use prove that there was self-sufficiency and that it has been lost. Africa was self-sufficient in food until the 1960s when the great wave of development began. Imperialism, growth economics and globalisation destroyed that self-sufficiency and make African societies more dependent by the day. Water may not have come out of a tap in the past, but most of it was drinkable until industrial waste arrived to pollute it.

Are schools and clinics really the right ways to achieve and maintain good standards of education and health? The great polemicist and social thinker Ivan Illich (1926-2002) had serious doubts about their effectiveness, even in the North (5). As the Iranian economist Majid Rahnema puts it, "What we call aid money serves only to strengthen the structures that generate poverty. Aid money never reaches those victims who, having lost their real assets, look for alternative ways of life outside the globalised system of production which are better suited to their needs" (6).

There is no prospect of just returning to the old ways - no more than there is a universal model of progress on contraction or non-growth lines. Those millions for whom development has meant only poverty and exclusion are left with a weak mixture of lost tradition and unaffordable modernity, a paradox that sums up the double challenge that they face. But we should not underestimate the strength of our social and cultural achievements: once human creativity and ingenuity have been freed from the bonds of economism and development-mania, there is every reason to believe that they can tackle the task.

Different societies have different views of the shared basic aim of a good life. If we must give it a name, it could beumran (thriving or flourishing), as used by the Arab historian and philosopher Ibn Kaldûn (1332-1406); Gandhi’s swadeshi-sarvodaya (self-sufficiency and welfare); bamtaare (shared well-being) in the language of the West African Toucouleurs; or fidnaa/gabbina (the shine of someone who is well-fed and free of all worry) in the vocabulary of Ethiopia’s Borana people (7). What really matters is that we reject continuing destruction in the name of development. The fresh and original alternatives springing up point the way towards a successful post-development society.

However, neither North nor South will overcome their addiction to growth without a collective and comprehensive detoxification programme. The growth doctrine is like a disease and a drug. As Rahnema says, Homo economicus had two strategies for taking over virgin territories: one operated like HIV, the other like a drug pusher (8). Growth economics, like HIV, destroys societies’ immune systems against social ills. And growth needs a constant supply of new markets to survive so, like a drug dealer, it deliberately creates needs and dependencies that did not exist before. The fact that the dealers in the supply chain, mainly transnational corporations, benefit so much from our addiction will make it difficult to overcome. But our ever-increasing consumption is not sustainable; sooner or later we will have to give it up.


Le Monde Diplomatique November 2004

torsdag den 25. december 2008

The Coming Capitalist Consensus - Walden Bello

Not surprisingly, the swift unraveling of the global economy combined with the ascent to the U.S. presidency of an African-American liberal has left millions anticipating that the world is on the threshold of a new era. Some of President-elect Barack Obama’s new appointees – in particular ex-Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to lead the National Economic Council, New York Federal Reserve Board chief Tim Geithner to head Treasury, and former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk to serve as trade representative – have certainly elicited some skepticism. But the sense that the old neoliberal formulas are thoroughly discredited have convinced many that the new Democratic leadership in the world’s biggest economy will break with the market fundamentalist policies that have reigned since the early 1980s.
One important question, of course, is how decisive and definitive the break with neoliberalism will be. Other questions, however, go to the heart of capitalism itself. Will government ownership, intervention, and control be exercised simply to stabilize capitalism, after which control will be given back to the corporate elites? Are we going to see a second round of Keynesian capitalism, where the state and corporate elites along with labor work out a partnership based on industrial policy, growth, and high wages – though with a green dimension this time around? Or will we witness the beginnings of fundamental shifts in the ownership and control of the economy in a more popular direction? There are limits to reform in the system of global capitalism, but at no other time in the last half century have those limits seemed more fluid.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has already staked out one position. Declaring that “laissez-faire capitalism is dead,” he has created a strategic investment fund of 20 billion euros to promote technological innovation, keep advanced industries in French hands, and save jobs. “The day we don’t build trains, airplanes, automobiles, and ships, what will be left of the French economy?” he recently asked rhetorically. “Memories. I will not make France a simple tourist reserve.” This kind of aggressive industrial policy aimed partly at winning over the country’s traditional white working class can go hand-in-hand with the exclusionary anti-immigrant policies with which the French president has been associated.

Global Social Democracy
A new national Keynesianism along Sarkozyan lines, however, is not the only alternative available to global elites. Given the need for global legitimacy to promote their interests in a world where the balance of power is shifting towards the South, western elites might find more attractive an offshoot of European Social Democracy and New Deal liberalism that one might call “Global Social Democracy” or GSD.

Even before the full unfolding of the financial crisis, partisans of GSD had already been positioning it as alternative to neoliberal globalization in response to the stresses and strains being provoked by the latter. One personality associated with it is British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who led the European response to the financial meltdown via the partial nationalization of the banks. Widely regarded as the godfather of the “Make Poverty History” campaign in the United Kingdom, Brown, while he was still the British chancellor, proposed what he called an “alliance capitalism” between market and state institutions that would reproduce at the global stage what he said Franklin Roosevelt did for the national economy: “securing the benefits of the market while taming its excesses.” This must be a system, continued Brown, that “captures the full benefits of global markets and capital flows, minimizes the risk of disruption, maximizes opportunity for all, and lifts up the most vulnerable – in short, the restoration in the international economy of public purpose and high ideals.”

Joining Brown in articulating the Global Social Democratic discourse has been a diverse group consisting of, among others, the economist Jeffrey Sachs, George Soros, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the sociologist David Held, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, and even Bill Gates. There are, of course, differences of nuance in the positions of these people, but the thrust of their perspectives is the same: to bring about a reformed social order and a reinvigorated ideological consensus for global capitalism.

Among the key propositions advanced by partisans of GSD are the following:

Globalization is essentially beneficial for the world; the neoliberals have simply botched the job of managing it and selling it to the public;

It is urgent to save globalization from the neoliberals because globalization is reversible and may, in fact, already be in the process of being reversed;

Growth and equity may come into conflict, in which case one must prioritize equity;

Free trade may not, in fact, be beneficial in the long run and may leave the majority poor, so it is important for trade arrangements to be subject to social and environmental conditions;

Unilateralism must be avoided while fundamental reform of the multilateral institutions and agreements must be undertaken – a process that might involve dumping or neutralizing some of them, like the WTO’s Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPs);

Global social integration, or reducing inequalities both within and across countries, must accompany global market integration;

The global debt of developing countries must be cancelled or radically reduced, so the resulting savings can be used to stimulate the local economy, thus contributing to global reflation;

Poverty and environmental degradation are so severe that a massive aid program or “Marshall Plan” from the North to the South must be mounted within the framework of the “Millennium Development Goals”;

A “Second Green Revolution” must be put into motion, especially in Africa, through the widespread adoption of genetically engineered seeds.
Huge investments must be devoted to push the global economy along more environmentally sustainable paths, with government taking a leading role (“Green Keynesianism” or “Green Capitalism”);

Military action to solve problems must be deemphasized in favor of diplomacy and “soft power,” although humanitarian military intervention in situations involving genocide must be undertaken.

The Limits of Global Social Democracy

Global Social Democracy has not received much critical attention, perhaps because many progressives are still fighting the last war, that is, against neoliberalism. A critique is urgent, and not only because GSD is neoliberalism’s most likely successor. More important, although GSD has some positive elements, it has, like the old Social Democratic Keynesian paradigm, a number of problematic features.

A critique might begin by highlighting problems with four central elements in the GSD perspective.

First, GSD shares neoliberalism’s bias for globalization, differentiating itself mainly by promising to promote globalization better than the neoliberals. This amounts to saying, however, that simply by adding the dimension of “global social integration,” an inherently socially and ecologically destructive and disruptive process can be made palatable and acceptable. GSD assumes that people really want to be part of a functionally integrated global economy where the barriers between the national and the international have disappeared. But would they not in fact prefer to be part of economies that are subject to local control and are buffered from the vagaries of the international economy? Indeed, today’s swift downward trajectory of interconnected economies underscores the validity of one of anti-globalization movement’s key criticisms of the globalization process..

Second, GSD shares neoliberalism’s preference for the market as the principal mechanism for production, distribution, and consumption, differentiating itself mainly by advocating state action to address market failures. The kind of globalization the world needs, according to Jeffrey Sachs in The End of Poverty, would entail “harnessing…the remarkable power of trade and investment while acknowledging and addressing limitations through compensatory collective action.” This is very different from saying that the citizenry and civil society must make the key economic decisions and the market, like the state bureaucracy, is only one mechanism of implementation of democratic decision-making.

Third, GSD is a technocratic project, with experts hatching and pushing reforms on society from above, instead of being a participatory project where initiatives percolate from the ground up.

Fourth, GSD, while critical of neoliberalism, accepts the framework of monopoly capitalism, which rests fundamentally on deriving profit from the exploitative extraction of surplus value from labor, is driven from crisis to crisis by inherent tendencies toward overproduction, and tends to push the environment to its limits in its search for profitability. Like traditional Keynesianism in the national arena, GSD seeks in the global arena a new class compromise that is accompanied by new methods to contain or minimize capitalism’s tendency toward crisis. Just as the old Social Democracy and the New Deal stabilized national capitalism, the historical function of Global Social Democracy is to iron out the contradictions of contemporary global capitalism and to relegitimize it after the crisis and chaos left by neoliberalism. GSD is, at root, about social management.

Obama has a talent for rhetorically bridging different political discourses. He is also a “blank slate” when it comes to economics. Like FDR, he is not bound to the formulas of the ancien regime. He is a pragmatist whose key criterion is success at social management. As such, he is uniquely positioned to lead this ambitious reformist enterprise.

Reveille for Progressives

While progressives were engaged in full-scale war against neoliberalism, reformist thinking was percolating in critical establishment circles. This thinking is now about to become policy, and progressives must work double time to engage it. It is not just a matter of moving from criticism to prescription. The challenge is to overcome the limits to the progressive political imagination imposed by the aggressiveness of the neoliberal challenge in the 1980s combined with the collapse of the bureaucratic socialist regimes in the early 1990s. Progressives should boldly aspire once again to paradigms of social organization that unabashedly aim for equality and participatory democratic control of both the national economy and the global economy as prerequisites for collective and individual liberation.

Like the old post-war Keynesian regime, Global Social Democracy is about social management. In contrast, the progressive perspective is about social liberation.

Copyright © 2008, Institute for Policy Studies

-------

Walden Bello is a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus, a senior analyst at the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition, and a professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines.

onsdag den 15. oktober 2008

This Stock Collapse Is Petty When Compared to the Nature Crunch

Published on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 by The Guardian/UK


This Stock Collapse Is Petty When Compared to the Nature Crunch
The financial crisis at least affords us an opportunity to now rethink our catastrophic ecological trajectory

by George Monbiot


This is nothing. Well, nothing by comparison to what's coming. The financial crisis for which we must now pay so heavily prefigures the real collapse, when humanity bumps against its ecological limits.

As we goggle at the fluttering financial figures, a different set of numbers passes us by. On Friday, Pavan Sukhdev, the Deutsche Bank economist leading a European study on ecosystems, reported that we are losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year as a result of deforestation alone. The losses incurred so far by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion. Sukhdev arrived at his figure by estimating the value of the services - such as locking up carbon and providing fresh water - that forests perform, and calculating the cost of either replacing them or living without them. The credit crunch is petty when compared to the nature crunch.

The two crises have the same cause. In both cases, those who exploit the resource have demanded impossible rates of return and invoked debts that can never be repaid. In both cases we denied the likely consequences. I used to believe that collective denial was peculiar to climate change. Now I know that it's the first response to every impending dislocation.

Gordon Brown, for instance, was as much in denial about financial realities as any toxic debt trader. In June last year, during his Mansion House speech, he boasted that 40% of the world's foreign equities are now traded here. The financial sector's success had come about, he said, partly because the government had taken "a risk-based regulatory approach". In the same hall three years before, he pledged that "in budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers". Can anyone, surveying this mess, now doubt the value of the precautionary principle?

Ecology and economy are both derived from the Greek word oikos - a house or dwelling. Our survival depends on the rational management of this home: the space in which life can be sustained. The rules are the same in both cases. If you extract resources at a rate beyond the level of replenishment, your stock will collapse. That's another noun which reminds us of the connection. The Oxford English Dictionary gives 69 definitions of "stock". When it means a fund or store, the word evokes the trunk - or stock - of a tree, "from which the gains are an outgrowth". Collapse occurs when you prune the tree so heavily that it dies. Ecology is the stock from which all wealth grows.

The two crises feed each other. As a result of Iceland's financial collapse, it is now contemplating joining the European Union, which means surrendering its fishing grounds to the common fisheries policy. Already the prime minister, Geir Haarde, has suggested that his countrymen concentrate on exploiting the ocean. The economic disaster will cause an ecological disaster.

Normally it's the other way around. In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond shows how ecological crisis is often the prelude to social catatrosphe. The obvious example is Easter Island, where society disintegrated soon after the population reached its highest historical numbers, the last trees were cut down and the construction of stone monuments peaked. The island chiefs had competed to erect ever bigger statues. These required wood and rope (made from bark) for transport, and extra food for the labourers. As the trees and soils on which the islanders depended disappeared, the population crashed and the survivors turned to cannibalism. Diamond wonders what the Easter islander who cut down the last palm tree might have thought. "Like modern loggers, did he shout 'Jobs, not trees!'? Or: 'Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we'll find a substitute for wood.'? Or: 'We don't have proof that there aren't palms somewhere else on Easter ... your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering'?".

Ecological collapse, Diamond shows, is as likely to be the result of economic success as of economic failure. The Maya of Central America, for instance, were among the most advanced and successful people of their time. But a combination of population growth, extravagant construction projects and poor land management wiped out between 90% and 99% of the population. The Mayan collapse was accelerated by "the competition among kings and nobles that led to a chronic emphasis on war and erecting monuments rather than on solving underlying problems". (Does any of this sound familiar?) Again, the largest monuments were erected just before the ecosystem crashed. Again, this extravagance was partly responsible for the collapse: trees were used for making plaster with which to decorate their temples. The plaster became thicker and thicker as the kings sought to outdo each other's conspicuous consumption.

Here are some of the reasons why people fail to prevent ecological collapse. Their resources appear at first to be inexhaustible; a long-term trend of depletion is concealed by short-term fluctuations; small numbers of powerful people advance their interests by damaging those of everyone else; short-term profits trump long-term survival. The same, in all cases, can be said of the collapse of financial systems. Is this how human beings are destined to behave? If we cannot act until stocks - of either kind - start sliding towards oblivion, we're knackered.

But one of the benefits of modernity is our ability to spot trends and predict results. If fish in a depleted ecosystem grow by 5% a year and the catch expands by 10% a year, the fishery will collapse. If the global economy keeps growing at 3% a year (or 1,700% a century), it too will hit the wall.

Iam not going to suggest, as some scoundrel who shares a name with me did on these pages last year, that we should welcome a recession. But the financial crisis provides us with an opportunity to rethink this trajectory; an opportunity that is not available during periods of economic success. Governments restructuring their economies should read Herman Daly's book Steady-State Economics.

As usual I haven't left enough space to discuss this, so the details will have to wait for another column. Or you can read the summary published by the Sustainable Development Commission (all references are on my website). But what Daly suggests is that nations which are already rich should replace growth - "more of the same stuff" - with development - "the same amount of better stuff". A steady-state economy has a constant stock of capital that is maintained by a rate of throughput no higher than the ecosystem can absorb. The use of resources is capped and the right to exploit them is auctioned. Poverty is addressed through the redistribution of wealth. The banks can lend only as much money as they possess.

Alternatively, we can persist in the magical thinking whose results have just come crashing home. The financial crisis shows what happens when we try to make the facts fit our desires. Now we must learn to live in the real world.
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

tirsdag den 14. oktober 2008

'The United States Has Essentially a One-Party System'

The linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky has long been a critic of American consumerism and imperialism. SPIEGEL spoke to him about the current crisis of capitalism, Barack Obama's rhetoric and the compliance of the intellectual class.

By Gabor Steingart

13/10/08 "Spiegel" --
Chomsky: The times are too difficult and the crisis too severe to indulge in schadenfreude. Looking at it in perspective, the fact that there would be a financial crisis was perfectly predictable, its general nature, if not its magnitude. Markets are always inefficient.

SPIEGEL: What exactly did you anticipate?

Chomsky: In the financial industry, as in other industries, there are risks that are left out of the calculation. If you sell me a car, we have perhaps made a good bargain for ourselves. But there are effects of this transaction on others, which we do not take into account. There is more pollution, the price of gas goes up, there is more congestion. Those are the external costs of our transaction. In the case of financial institutions, they are huge.

SPIEGEL: But isn't it the task of a bank to take risks?

Chomsky: Yes, but if it is well managed, like Goldman Sachs, it will cover its own risks and absorb its own losses. But no financial institution can manage systemic risks. Risk is therefore underpriced, and there will be more risk taken than would be prudent for the economy. With government deregulation and the triumph of financial liberalization, the dangers of systemic risks, the possibility of a financial tsunami, sharply increased.

SPIEGEL: But is it correct to only put the blame on Wall Street? Doesn't Main Street, the American middle class, also live on borrowed money which may or may not be paid back?

Chomsky: The debt burden of private households is enormous. But I would not hold the individual responsible. This consumerism is based on the fact that we are a society dominated by business interests. There is massive propaganda for everyone to consume. Consumption is good for profits and consumption is good for the political establishment.

SPIEGEL: How does it benefit politicians when the populace drives a lot, eats a lot and goes shopping a lot?

Chomsky: Consumption distracts people. You cannot control your own population by force, but it can be distracted by consumption. The business press has been quite explicit about this goal.

SPIEGEL: A while ago you called America “the greatest country on earth.” How does that fit together with what you've been saying?

Chomsky: In many respects, the United States is a great country. Freedom of speech is protected more than in any other country. It is also a very free society. In America, the professor talks to the mechanic. They are in the same category.

SPIEGEL: After travelling through the United States 170 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville reported, "the people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe." Was he a dreamer?

Chomsky: James Madison’s position at the Constitutional Convention was that state power should be used "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." That is why the Senate has only a hundred members who are mostly rich and were given a great deal of power. The House of Representatives, with several hundred members, is more democratic and was given much less power. Even liberals like Walter Lippmann, one of the leading intellectuals of the 20th century, was of the opinion that in a properly functioning democracy, the intelligent minority, who should rule, have to be protected from “the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd.” Among the conservatives, Vice President Dick Cheney just recently illustrated his understanding of democracy. He was asked why he supports a continuation of the war in Iraq when the population is strongly opposed. His answer was: “So?”

SPIEGEL: “Change” is the slogan of this year’s presidential election. Do you see any chance for an immediate, tangible change in the United States? Or, to use use Obama’s battle cry: Are you "fired up”?

Chomsky: Not in the least. The European reaction to Obama is a European delusion.

SPIEGEL: But he does say things that Europe has long been waiting for. He talks about the trans-Atlantic partnership, the priority of diplomacy and the reconciling of American society.

Chomsky: That is all rhetoric. Who cares about that? This whole election campaign deals with soaring rhetoric, hope, change, all sorts of things, but not with issues.

SPIEGEL: Do you prefer the team on the other side: the 72 year old Vietnam veteran McCain and Sarah Palin, former Alaskan beauty queen?

Chomsky: This Sarah Palin phenomenon is very curious. I think somebody watching us from Mars, they would think the country has gone insane.

SPIEGEL: Arch conservatives and religious voters seem to be thrilled.

Chomsky: One must not forget that this country was founded by religious fanatics. Since Jimmy Carter, religious fundamentalists play a major role in elections. He was the first president who made a point of exhibiting himself as a born again Christian. That sparked a little light in the minds of political campaign managers: Pretend to be a religious fanatic and you can pick up a third of the vote right away. Nobody asked whether Lyndon Johnson went to church every day. Bill Clinton is probably about as religious as I am, meaning zero, but his managers made a point of making sure that every Sunday morning he was in the Baptist church singing hymns.

SPIEGEL: Is there nothing about McCain that appeals to you?

Chomsky: In one aspect he is more honest than his opponent. He explicitly states that this election is not about issues but about personalities. The Democrats are not quite as honest even though they see it the same way.

SPIEGEL: So for you, Republicans and Democrats represent just slight variations of the same political platform?

Chomsky: Of course there are differences, but they are not fundamental. Nobody should have any illusions. The United States has essentially a one-party system and the ruling party is the business party.

SPIEGEL: You exaggerate. In almost all vital questions -- from the taxation of the rich to nuclear energy -- there are different positions. At least on the issues of war and peace, the parties differ considerably. The Republicans want to fight in Iraq until victory, even if that takes a 100 years, according to McCain. The Democrats demand a withdrawal plan.

Chomsky: Let us look at the “differences” more closely, and we recognize how limited and cynical they are. The hawks say, if we continue we can win. The doves say, it is costing us too much. But try to find an American politician who says frankly that this aggression is a crime: the issue is not whether we win or not, whether it is expensive or not. Remember the Russian invasion of Afghanistan? Did we have a debate whether the Russians can win the war or whether it is too expensive? This may have been the debate at the Kremlin, or in Pravda. But this is the kind of debate you would expect in a totalitarian society. If General Petraeus could achieve in Iraq what Putin achieved in Chechnya, he would be crowned king. The key question here is whether we apply the same standards to ourselves that we apply to others.

SPIEGEL: Who prevents intellectuals from asking and critically answering these questions? You praised the freedom of speech in the United States.

Chomsky: The intellectual world is deeply conformist. Hans Morgenthau, who was a founder of realist international relations theory, once condemned what he called “the conformist subservience to power” on the part of the intellectuals. George Orwell wrote that nationalists, who are practically the whole intellectual class of a country, not only do not disapprove of the crimes of their own state, but have the remarkable capacity not even to see them. That is correct. We talk a lot about the crimes of others. When it comes to our own crimes, we are nationalists in the Orwellian sense.

SPIEGEL: Was there not, and is there not -- in the United States and worldwide -- loud protest against the Iraq war?

Chomsky: The protest against the war in Iraq is far higher than against the war in Vietnam. When there were 4,000 American deaths in Vietnam and 150,000 troops deployed, nobody cared. When Kennedy invaded Vietnam in 1962, there was just a yawn.

SPIEGEL: To conclude, perhaps you can offer a conciliatory word about the state of the nation?

Chomsky: The American society has become more civilized, largely as a result of the activism of the 1960s. Our society, and also Europe's, became freer, more open, more democratic, and for many quite scary. This generation was condemned for that. But it had an effect.

SPIEGEL: Professor Chomsky, we thank you for this interview.

Degrowth economics: Why less should be so much more

By Serge Latouche

Last December we published an article about contraction economics - décroissance or ’degrowth’- a topic that has become a major subject of debate, not just within the counter-globalisation movement but in the wider world. The big question is: how should ’degrowth’ apply to the South?

THE logic of advertising so dominates the media that it views anything new - material, cultural or otherwise - as a product launch. And in any product launch, the key word is concept. So as discussion of décroissance (literally "degrowth", that is economic contraction or downscaling) spread, the media naturally started to ask what was the concept. We are sorry to disappoint the media, but degrowth is not a concept. There is no theory of contraction equivalent to the growth theories of economics. Degrowth is just a term created by radical critics of growth theory to free everybody from the economic correctness that prevents us from proposing alternative projects for post-development politics.

In fact degrowth is not a concrete project but a keyword. Society has been locked into thought dominated by progressivist growth economics; the tyranny of these has made imaginative thinking outside the box impossible. The idea of a contraction-based society is just a way to provoke thought about alternatives. To accuse its advocates of only wanting to see economies contract within the existing system rather than proposing an alternative to that system, and to suspect them (as do some counter-globalisation economists) of wanting to prevent the underdeveloped world from resolving its problems reflects at best ignorance and at worst bad faith.

Proponents of contraction want to create integrated, self-sufficient and materially responsible societies in both the North and the South. It might be more accurate and less alarming if we replaced the word degrowth with "non-growth". We could then start talking about "a-growthism", as in "a-theism". After all, rejecting the current economic orthodoxy means abandoning a faith system, a religion. To achieve this, we need doggedly and rigorously to deconstruct the matter of development. The term "development" has been redefined and qualified so much that it has become meaningless. Yet despite its failings, this magical concept continues to command total devotion across the political spectrum. The doctrines of "economism" (1), in which growth is the ultimate good, die hard. Even counter-globalisation economists are in a paradoxical position: they acknowledge the harm that growth has done but continue to speak of enabling Southern countries to benefit from it. In the North the furthest they are prepared to go is to advocate slowing down growth. An increasing number of anti-globalisation activists now concede that growth as we have known it is both unsustainable and harmful, socially as well as ecologically. Yet they have little confidence in degrowth as a guiding principle: the South, deprived of development, cannot be denied at least a period of growth, although it may cause problems.

The result is a stalemate where neither growth nor contraction suit. The proposed compromise of growth slowdown follows the tradition in these debates in that it lets everyone agree on a misunderstanding. Forcing our economies to grow more slowly will never deliver the benefits of a society free from constant growth (that is, being materially responsible, fully integrated and self-sufficient) but it will hurt employment, which has been the one undeniable advantage of rapid, inequitable and environmentally catastrophic expansion. To understand why the creation of a non-growth society is so necessary and so desirable for North and South, we must examine the history of the idea. The proposal for a self-sufficient and materially responsible society is not new; it is part of the tradition of development criticism. For more than 40 years an international group of commentators had analysed economic development in the South and denounced the harm it has done (2). These commentators do not just address recent capitalist or ultra-liberal development: for example, they have considered Houari Boumediene’s Algeria and Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania, which were both officially socialist, participatory, self-reliant and based on popular solidarity. And they have also noted that development has often been carried out or supported by charitable, humanist NGOs. Yet apart from a few scattered success stories, it has been an overwhelming failure. What was supposed to bring contentment to everyone in every aspect of life led only to corruption, confusion and structural adjustment plans that turned poverty into destitution.

Degrowth must apply to the South as much as to the North if there is to be any chance to stop Southern societies from rushing up the blind alley of growth economics. Where there is still time, they should aim not for development but for disentanglement - removing the obstacles that prevent them from developing differently. This does not mean a return to an idealised version of an informal economy - nothing can be expected to change in the South if the North does not adopt some form of economic contraction. As long as hungry Ethiopia and Somalia still have to export feedstuffs destined for pet animals in the North, and the meat we eat is raised on soya from the razed Amazon rainforest, our excessive consumption smothers any chance of real self-sufficiency in the South (3).

If the South is to attempt to create non-growth societies, it must rethink and re-localise. Southern countries need to escape from their economic and cultural dependence on the North and rediscover their own histories - interrupted by colonialism, development and globalisation - to establish distinct indigenous cultural identities. The cultural histories of many societies reveal inherently anti-economistic values. These need to be revived, along with rejected or forgotten products and traditional crafts and skills. Insisting on growth in the South, as though it were the only way out of the misery that growth created, can only lead to further westernisation. Development proposals are often born of genuine goodwill - we want to build schools and health clinics, set up water distribution systems, restore self-sufficiency in food - but they all share the ethnocentrism bound up with the idea of development. Ask the governments of countries what they want, or study surveys of populations duped by the media, and they do not ask for the schools and clinics that western paternalism considers fundamental needs. They want air conditioning, mobile phones, fridges and, above all, cars (Volkswagen and General Motors are planning to start producing 3m vehicles a year in China, and Peugeot is also investing heavily there). For the benefit of their governing elites, we might also add nuclear power stations, fighter jets and tanks to the wish list.

Or we could listen to the exasperated Guatemalan leader cited by Alain Gras (4): "Leave the poor alone and stop going on about development!" All the leaders of popular movements, from Vandana Shiva in India to Emmanuel Ndione in Senegal, say the same thing. Advocates of development may pontificate about the need to restore self-sufficiency in food; but the terms they use prove that there was self-sufficiency and that it has been lost. Africa was self-sufficient in food until the 1960s when the great wave of development began. Imperialism, growth economics and globalisation destroyed that self-sufficiency and make African societies more dependent by the day. Water may not have come out of a tap in the past, but most of it was drinkable until industrial waste arrived to pollute it.

Are schools and clinics really the right ways to achieve and maintain good standards of education and health? The great polemicist and social thinker Ivan Illich (1926-2002) had serious doubts about their effectiveness, even in the North (5). As the Iranian economist Majid Rahnema puts it, "What we call aid money serves only to strengthen the structures that generate poverty. Aid money never reaches those victims who, having lost their real assets, look for alternative ways of life outside the globalised system of production which are better suited to their needs" (6).

There is no prospect of just returning to the old ways - no more than there is a universal model of progress on contraction or non-growth lines. Those millions for whom development has meant only poverty and exclusion are left with a weak mixture of lost tradition and unaffordable modernity, a paradox that sums up the double challenge that they face. But we should not underestimate the strength of our social and cultural achievements: once human creativity and ingenuity have been freed from the bonds of economism and development-mania, there is every reason to believe that they can tackle the task.

Different societies have different views of the shared basic aim of a good life. If we must give it a name, it could beumran (thriving or flourishing), as used by the Arab historian and philosopher Ibn Kaldûn (1332-1406); Gandhi’s swadeshi-sarvodaya (self-sufficiency and welfare); bamtaare (shared well-being) in the language of the West African Toucouleurs; or fidnaa/gabbina (the shine of someone who is well-fed and free of all worry) in the vocabulary of Ethiopia’s Borana people (7). What really matters is that we reject continuing destruction in the name of development. The fresh and original alternatives springing up point the way towards a successful post-development society.

However, neither North nor South will overcome their addiction to growth without a collective and comprehensive detoxification programme. The growth doctrine is like a disease and a drug. As Rahnema says, Homo economicus had two strategies for taking over virgin territories: one operated like HIV, the other like a drug pusher (8). Growth economics, like HIV, destroys societies’ immune systems against social ills. And growth needs a constant supply of new markets to survive so, like a drug dealer, it deliberately creates needs and dependencies that did not exist before. The fact that the dealers in the supply chain, mainly transnational corporations, benefit so much from our addiction will make it difficult to overcome. But our ever-increasing consumption is not sustainable; sooner or later we will have to give it up.

The Secret History of the American Empire The Truth About Global Corruption

John Perkins, author of Confessions of An Economic Hit Man.

Perkins zeroes in on hot spots around the world such as Venezuela, Tibet, Iraq, Israel, Vietnam and others and exposes the network of events in each of these countries that have contributed to the creation of the American Empire and international corruption in "The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth About Global Corruption"

Yunus: 'Capitalism Has Degenerated into a Casino'

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus says that greed has destroyed the world's financial system. SPIEGEL ONLINE spoke with him about the profit motive, social consciousness and what should be done to end the financial crisis.

10/10/08 "SPIEGEL" --
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Yunus, for years you have been preaching a more socially conscious way of doing business and have denounced the narrow focus on maximizing profit as harmful. Now, the entire financial system is wobbling ...

Yunus: The current turn of events makes me sad. It is certainly not something I am happy about. The collapse has hurt so many people and has suddenly made the entire world unstable. We should now be concentrating on making sure that such a financial crisis does not happen again.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What should be done?

Yunus: There are huge holes in the current financial system that need to be plugged. The market is clearly not able to solve these problems itself, and now people are having to run to the governments to ask for emergency assistance. That is not a good sign because it shows that trust in the markets has evaporated. At the moment, there is unfortunately no other option than for government takeovers and government support. That is currently the method being used to combat the crisis -- a method kicked off with the $700 billion bailout package passed in the US. In Germany, the government has likewise jumped into the fray.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Where exactly do you see the problem with such a strategy?

Yunus: The point is that we have to return as soon as possible to market mechanisms that can ameliorate the crisis and solve problems. Solutions should come out of the market and not from governments.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: But you just said yourself that the market is not capable of doing so.

Yunus: That is exactly what we need to work on. For a long time, the main priorities have been the maximization of profits and rapid growth -- but that focus has led to the current situation. Each day, we have to look to see if there is potentially harmful growth somewhere. If we find there is, then we need to react immediately. If something grows unnaturally quickly, then we have to stop it. Why don’t companies all pay into a fund that buys up securities that have become too risky? I can even imagine a business model for such a program.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: On the one hand, you say that the market has to solve the problem itself, on the other hand, though, you criticize overly quick growth. That sounds like you think that profit-oriented capitalism has failed.

Yunus: Not at all. Capitalism, with all its market mechanisms, has to survive -- there is no question. What I excoriate is that today there is only one incentive for doing business, and that is the maximization of profits. But the incentive of doing social good must be included. There need to be many more companies whose primary aim is not that of earning the highest profits possible, but that of providing the greatest benefit possible for human kind.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: And you think that those two incentives are mutually exclusive? The bank you founded, Grameen Bank -- which led to your receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 -- both helps people and earns healthy profits.

Yunus: It is a company which is focused on the social good and which makes a profit, but it is not focused on maximizing its profits. I am not interested in turning all profit-oriented companies into socially conscious operations. They are two different categories of companies -- there will always be businesses whose primary goal is that of earning as much money as possible. That is okay. But earning as much money as possible can only be a means to an end, not an end in itself. One has to invest money in something meaningful -- and I would make a case for it being something that improves the quality of life for all people.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What, though, does an increase in the number of socially minded companies have to do with the financial crisis?

Yunus: Were there more socially minded companies, people would have more opportunities to shape their own lives. The markets would be more balanced than they are today.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You are talking about saving the world with altruism ...

Yunus: There are many philanthropists in this world, people who help people by providing them with homes, education, etc. But that is a one-way street. The money is spent and never comes back. Were one to invest that money in a socially minded company, it would stay in the economy and would be much more effective because it would be used according to the criteria of the market and would thus develop a certain amount of market leverage.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Who do you think is guilty for the current financial meltdown?

Yunus: The market itself with its lack of adequate regulation. Today's capitalism has degenerated into a casino. The financial markets are propelled by greed. Speculation has reached catastrophic proportions. These are all things that have to end.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The current financial crisis began as a credit crisis -- homeowners in the US could no longer pay down their mortgages. At Grameen Bank, which provides microloans, the repayment rate is close to 100 percent. Do you think your bank could be a model for the entire finance world?

Yunus: The fundamental difference is that our business is very connected to the real economy. When we provide a loan of $200, that money will go to buy a cow somewhere. If we lend $100, someone will maybe buy some chickens. In other words, the money goes to something with concrete value. Finance and the real economy have to be connected. In the US, the financial system has completely split off from the real economy. Castles were built in the sky, and suddenly people realized that these castles don't exist at all. That was the point at which the financial system collapsed.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is it now time for governments to intervene in the market economy and strengthen regulation?

Yunus: There has to be regulation, but governments should not be allowed to steer the market. On the other hand, it has become clear that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" which supposedly solves all the market's problems doesn't exist. This "invisible hand" has completely disappeared in the last few days. What we are experiencing is a dramatic failure of the markets.

Interview conducted by Hasnain Kazim. Translated from the German by Charles Hawley.

mandag den 13. oktober 2008

Byen er fremtidens kampplads

Kampen mod nyliberalismen flytter ud i byrummet, hvor fælles værdier skabes og ejes, hævder Antonio Negri og Michael Hardt i deres kommende bog.


Nyliberalismens projekt er at privatisere fællederne [common wealth], de værdier der skabes og ejes i fællesskab. Det siger Michael Hardt, litteraturprofessor ved Duke University i USA.

Sammen med den italienske politiske filosof Antonio Negri har Hardt under en postmoderne fane skabt furore på venstrefløjen med bøgerne »Imperiet« (Empire, udkom i 2000) og videreudviklingen »Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire« fra 2004. Nu har duoen afleveret manuskriptet til en tredje bog om kapitalismens former og potentialet for modstanden mod disse, med titlen »Common Wealth«. Bogen forventes at udkomme næste år.

»Common Wealth« er sidste del af en trilogi, et 15 år langt projekt, siger Hardt, da vi møder ham under Europas Sociale Forum i Malmö. Projektet har affødt mange studiekredse og har skabt både beundring og irritation i miljøer som definerer sig som del af den globale retfærdighedsbevægelse. Eller alterglobaliseringsbevægelsen, som den også kaldes.

Hardt og Negri er hyppigt blevet kritiseret for ikke at forholde sig til realitetene i »basis« og i stedet drive begrebsgymnastik langt ind i overbygningen. Michael Hardt mener imidlertid, at begreberne om det nye imperium (en serie af nationale og internationale organismer forenet under en dominerende ideologi) og multituden (en sammenhængende pluralitet af sociale subjekter, som ikke kan reduceres til en enhed, et begreb Hardt og Negri sætter i modsætning til ideen om »folket«) blot er blevet styrket af den seneste udvikling på verdensscenen.

JPG - 19.1 kb
Fra nationalstaten til imperiet og fra fabrikken til metropolen. Sådan kan man opsummere forandringen i kapitalismen, hvis man spørger den amerikanske filosof Michael Hardt. Hardt var en af hovedtalerne på det nyligt afholdte European Social Forum i Malmø. Forfatterkollegaen Antonio Negri skulle også have talt, men måtte melde afbud på grund af sygdom.

»Da vi skrev »Imperiet«, så vi en ny global verdensorden, der var i støbeskeen, en orden med nye styringsformer. De nykonservative i Washington har forsøgt at kuppe denne orden: gennem krigen mod terror troede de, at de kunne genskabe den traditionelle imperialisme.«
Mislykket unilateralisme

Det er blevet hævdet, at krigene i Irak og Afghanistan tilbageviste centrale præmisser i »Imperiet«. Du virker fortsat ikke særlig entusiastisk overfor modstanden mod krigen?

»Fjendens fjende er ikke nødvendigvis vores ven, og jeg føler ingen forpligtelse til at hylde krigsmodstanden. Det er muligt jeg er stædig, men jeg har ikke ændret syn efter disse krige. Irak og Afghanistan er klassiske imperalistiske eventyr udført af en idiot [George W. Bush]. Koncepterne vi brugte i »Imperiet« er i virkeligheden blot endnu mere gyldige i og med, at Bush har bevist at denne form for imperalisme er død. Det, vi ser nu, er begravelsen af unilaterialismen.«

Alligevel synes USA at fortsætte på samme måde?

»De har forsøgt, men er mislykkedes. F.eks. vil der ikke blive tale om en invasion af Iran. Måske vil nogen indvende, at det nye blot er, at USA ikke kan, men at Kina kan. Det er diskutabelt, for det ikke blot aktørerne, men selve formen, der er forandret.«
Tre faser

Hardt og Negri har distanceret sig fra klassiske teorier og termer (selv ville de måske sige omfortolket og generobret) og kritiserer modviljen mod teorifornyelse.

»I 2003–05 handlede meget af venstrefløjsanalysen om, at dette var god, gammeldags imperialisme, og folk pustede lettede ud – nu behøvede de jo ikke lede efter nye begreber og modeller«, siger Hardt.

Ifølge ham burde alle kunne se, at USA’s imperialistiske pretentioner har slået fejl, både militært og økonomisk. Han påpeger også, at nationalstaterne fortsat er vigtige, men at de fungerer i et netværk, hvor de må agere sammen med koncerner, finansinstitutioner og massemedier.

De to forfattere deler alterglobaliseringsbevægelsens hidtidige historie ind i tre faser.

»Den første gik omtrent frem til G8-mødet i Genova i 2001, og det specielle var, at man ikke demonstrerede mod for eksempel Det hvide hus, men mod forskellige institutioner. Dette »topmødehopperi« er senere blevet kritiseret, men der var tale om en ekstremt intelligent teoretisering af, hvor magten lå i det nye imperium. Pluralismen i bevægelsen indså og eksperimenterede med magten ved netop at være mangfoldig. En mangel var at bevægelsen ikke blev virkelig global«, siger Hardt.

Han mener, at den anden fase, fra 2003 til 2006, var helt dominert af antikrig og anti-Bush, hvorfor den mistede sin mangfoldighed af agendaer, taktikker og organisationer, en tilbagegang for bevægelsen.

»Nu er vi i den tredje fase, en fase der begyndte efter at Irak-krigen slog fejl. Vi ser mangfoldigheden af grupper, arbejdsformer og agendaer gøre sin re-entre, og en genfødelse af kampen i og om metropolen«.
Ud i byrummet

Netop metropolen er et centralt begreb i »Common Wealth«, og i vanlig stil lancerer Negri og Hardt en snedig hypotese: Metropolen er for multituden, hvad fabrikken var for industriproletariatet.

Hardt forklarer:

»Før forgik produktionen i fabrikkens lukkede rum. Nu foregår den på tværs af åbne rum, og vi har et skifte i den hegemoniske produktionsform.«

Når den industrielle produktionsform tidligere var hegemonisk skyldtes det ikke, at et flertal af samfundsmedlemmerne arbejdede i industrien, men at den industrielle arbejdsmåde blev påført alle andre dele af samfundet.

»Nu er det den biopolitiske produktion, som er hegemonisk. Med det mener vi alt fra at skifte sengetøj og udvikle datakoder til at arbejde i Burger King. Denne produktionsform bygger på og udvikler fælleden (eng. »The Common«), som er de ideer, fælles værdier, sprog og følelser, vi alle sammen producere i fællesskab. Fælleden kan også karakteriseres ved, at den ikke kan underkastes hverken privat eller statsligt eje uden at forringes kvalitativt«, siger Hardt.

Hardt og Negri præsenterer deres forståelse af fælleden i kontrast til dikotomien mellem det private og det offentlige. Hvis man ser det private som udtryk for kapitalismen og det offentlige eller statslige som udtryk for socialismen, mener de, at fælleden er en social og politisk form som udgør basis for kommunismen.

Metropolen er altså den biopolitiske produktions hjemsted og følgelig også det sted, hvor udbytningen finder sted – for eksempel i form af privatisering af fællederne.

»Et eksempel er den udnyttelse af fællederne, der finder sted på boligmarkedet. Tag en gade hvor kunstnere flytter ind. Der sker ting. Det bliver attraktivt at bo dér. Caféer og restauranter flytter efter for at profittere på det, som skabes i fællesskabe. Lidt efter lidt flytter de rige ind. Gentrificeringen af byen er en ekspropriation, og netop det at privatisere fællederne er nyliberalismens projekt. Og i det samme de privatiseres, bliver de mindre produktive«, hævder Hardt.

Men metropolen er samtidig et sted, hvor der kæmpes tilbage. Den er hjemsted for modstand og antagonisme på samme måde som fabrikken var det i sin tid.

»Der er ikke bare tale om en kamp i byen, men en kamp om byen, om dens form og udtryk. Tænk på piqueteroerne i Argentina. De var arbejdsløse og aktivister, uden nogen fabrik at strejke eller aktionere imod. De tog kampen ud i gaderne, til byen. Også 2005-optøjerne i Paris’ forstæder – banlieuerne – rettede sig mod byens eksklusionssymboler, mod biler, busser og skoler.«
Glæden ved at være kommunist

Michael Hardt undrer sig over, hvorfor revolutionsbegrebet er blevet så miskrediteret i bevægelsens egne rækker.

»Der er to måder at tænke revolution på, som står sejlt overfor hinanden. Den ene er at erstatte en styrende elite med en andre – og ofte bedre – styrende elite. Men på den måde skaber man et aristokrati, ikke et demokrati. Den anden måde er når revolutionen giver magten tilbage til folk, troen på at når de undertrykkende strukturer fjernes, så vil folk styre demokratisk – en slags anarkistisk drømmebillede. Jeg synes det er mere frugtbart at se på revolution som en måde at forandre menneskesindet på«, forklarer Hardt og trækker Lenin frem.

»Lenin talte om en overgangsfase, hvor folket skulle sættes i stand til at styre sig selv, om at ændre menneskets natur under proletariatets diktatur. Men man kan ikke træne folk i demokrati ved at indføre diktatur. Menneskenesindene må ændres gennem positiv praksis og deltagende strukturer. Her ligger nøglen til at »rehabilitere« revolutionen.«

Hardt karakteriserer ofte sig selv som marxist – noget mange selverklærede marxister fnyser højlydt af. Han lægger vægt på, at demokrati og kommunisme – i den betydning han bruger ordet, som noget der er intimt knyttet til fællederne – hænger uløseligt sammen.

»Jeg bruger megen energi på at tagebageerobre begge disse begreber, begreber som er blevet både forvrænget og tømt for indhold.«

En af flere vigtige inspirationskilder for Negri og Hardt er den franske filosof Michel Foucault, blandet andet hans »Introduction to the Non-Fascist Life« (Introduktion til det ikke-facistiske liv, Foucaults forord til Deleuze og Guattaris Anti-ødipus, red.). Michael Hardt mener, at forsøget på at gøre det politiske liv attraktivt og ikke så negativt fokuseret er blandt alterglobaliseringsbevægelsens vigtigste resultater.

»Fokus på kreativitet og glæde er måske den bedste vaccine mod facisme. Ja, det er netop dét, der er selve glæden ved at være kommunist«, ler han.

Eline Lønnå og Ali Esbati er begge redaktører på den norske avis Klassekampen, hvor interviewet har været bragt den 27. september 2008.

Oversat fra norsk af Niels Fastrup

søndag den 12. oktober 2008

Slavoj Žižek: Don’t Just Do Something, Talk

One of the most striking things about the reaction to the current financial meltdown is that, as one of the participants put it: ‘No one really knows what to do.’ The reason is that expectations are part of the game: how the market reacts to a particular intervention depends not only on how much bankers and traders trust the interventions, but even more on how much they think others will trust them. Keynes compared the stock market to a competition in which the participants have to pick several pretty girls from a hundred photographs: ‘It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligence to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.‘ We are forced to make choices without having the knowledge that would enable us to make them; or, as John Gray has put it: ‘We are forced to live as if we were free.’

Joseph Stiglitz recently wrote that, although there is a growing consensus among economists that any bailout based on Henry Paulson’s plan won’t work, ‘it is impossible for politicians to do nothing in such a crisis. So we may have to pray that an agreement crafted with the toxic mix of special interests, misguided economics and right-wing ideologies that produced the crisis can somehow produce a rescue plan that works – or whose failure doesn’t do too much damage.’ He’s right: since markets are effectively based on beliefs (even beliefs about other people’s beliefs), how the markets react to the bailout depends not only on its real consequences, but on the belief of the markets in the plan’s efficiency. The bailout may work even if it is economically wrong.

There is a close similarity between the speeches George W. Bush has given since the crisis began and his addresses to the American people after 9/11. Both times, he evoked the threat to the American way of life and the necessity of fast and decisive action to cope with the danger. Both times, he called for the partial suspension of American values (guarantees of individual freedom, market capitalism) in order to save the same values.

Faced with a disaster over which we have no real influence, people will often say, stupidly, ‘Don’t just talk, do something!’ Perhaps, lately, we have been doing too much. Maybe it is time to step back, think and say the right thing. True, we often talk about doing something instead of actually doing it – but sometimes we do things in order to avoid talking and thinking about them. Like quickly throwing $700 billion at a problem instead of reflecting on how it came about.

On 23 September, the Republican senator Jim Bunning called the US Treasury’s plan for the biggest financial bailout since the Great Depression ‘un-American’:

Someone must take those losses. We can either let the people who made bad decisions bear the consequences of their actions, or we can spread that pain to others. And that is exactly what the Secretary proposes to do: take Wall Street’s pain and spread it to the taxpayers . . . This massive bailout is not the solution, it is financial socialism, and it is un-American.

Bunning was the first publicly to give the reasoning behind the GOP revolt against the bailout plan, which climaxed in its rejection on 29 September. The resistance was formulated in terms of ‘class warfare’, Wall Street against Main Street: why should we help those responsible (‘Wall Street’) and let ordinary borrowers (on ‘Main Street’) pay the price for it? Is this not a clear case of what economists call ‘moral hazard’? This is the risk that someone will behave immorally because insurance, the law or some other agency protects them against any loss that his behaviour might cause: if I am insured against fire, for example, I might take fewer fire precautions (or even burn down my premises if they are losing me money). The same goes for big banks, which are protected against big losses yet able to retain their profits.

That the criticism of the bailout plan came from conservative Republicans as well as the left should make us think. What left and right share in this case is their contempt for big speculators and corporate managers who profit from risky decisions but are protected from failures by ‘golden parachutes’. In this respect, the Enron scandal of January 2002 can be interpreted as an ironic commentary on the notion of a risk society. Thousands of employees who lost their jobs and savings were certainly exposed to risk, and had little choice in the matter. However, the top managers, who knew about the risk and also had the opportunity to intervene in the situation, minimised their exposure by cashing in their stocks and options before the bankruptcy. So while it is true that we live in a society that demands risky choices, it is one in which the powerful do the choosing, while others do the risking.

If the bailout plan really is a ‘socialist’ measure, it is a very peculiar one: a ‘socialist’ measure whose aim is to help not the poor but the rich, not those who borrow but those who lend. ‘Socialism’ is OK, it seems, when it serves to save capitalism. But what if ‘moral hazard’ is inscribed in the fundamental structure of capitalism? The problem is that there is no way to separate the welfare of Main Street from that of Wall Street. Their relationship is non-transitive: what is good for Wall Street isn’t necessarily good for Main Street, but Main Street can’t thrive if Wall Street isn’t doing well – and this asymmetry gives an a priori advantage to Wall Street.

The standard ‘trickle-down’ argument against redistribution (through progressive taxation etc) is that instead of making the poor richer, it makes the rich poorer. However, this apparently anti-interventionist attitude actually contains an argument for the current state intervention: although we all want the poor to get better, it is counter-productive to help them directly, since they are not the dynamic and productive element; the only intervention needed is to help the rich get richer, and then the profits will automatically spread down to the poor. Throw enough money at Wall Street, and it will eventually trickle down to Main Street. If you want people to have money to build, don’t give it to them directly, help those who are lending it to them. This is the only way to create genuine prosperity – otherwise, the state is merely distributing money to the needy at the expense of those who create wealth.

It is all too easy to dismiss this line of reasoning as a hypocritical defence of the rich. The problem is that as long as we are stuck with capitalism, there is a truth in it: the collapse of Wall Street really will hit ordinary workers. That is why the Democrats who supported the bailout were not being inconsistent with their leftist leanings. They would fairly be called inconsistent only if we accept the premise of Republican populists that capitalism and the free market economy are a popular, working-class affair, while state interventions are an upper-class strategy to exploit hard-working ordinary people.

There is nothing new in strong state interventions into the banking system and the economy in general. The meltdown itself is the result of such an intervention: when, in 2001, the dotcom bubble burst, it was decided to make it easier to get credit in order to redirect growth into housing. Indeed, political decisions are responsible for the texture of international economic relations in general. A couple of years ago, a CNN report on Mali described the reality of the international ‘free market’. The two pillars of the Mali economy are cotton in the south and cattle in the north, and both are in trouble because of the way that Western powers violate the same rules that they impose so brutally on Third World nations. Mali produces cotton of the highest quality, but the US government spends more money to support its cotton farmers than the entire state budget of Mali, so it is small wonder that Mali can’t compete. In the north, the European Union is the culprit: the EU subsidises every single cow to the tune of five hundred euros a year. The Mali minister for the economy said: we don’t need your help or advice or lectures on the beneficial effects of abolishing excessive state regulations; just, please, stick to your own rules about the free market and our troubles will be over. Where are the Republican defenders of the free market here? Nowhere, because the collapse of Mali is the consequence of what it means for the US to put ‘our country first’.

What all this indicates is that the market is never neutral: its operations are always regulated by political decisions. The real dilemma is not ‘state intervention or not?’ but ‘what kind of state intervention?’ And this is true politics: the struggle to define the conditions that govern our lives. The debate about the bailout deals with decisions about the fundamental features of our social and economic life, even mobilising the ghost of class struggle. As with many truly political issues, this one is non-partisan. There is no ‘objective’ expert position that should simply be applied: one has to take a political decision.

On 24 September, John McCain suspended his campaign and went to Washington, proclaiming that it was time to put aside party differences. Was this gesture really a sign of his readiness to end partisan politics in order to deal with the real problems that concern us all? Definitely not: it was a ‘Mr McCain goes to Washington’ moment. Politics is precisely the struggle to define the ‘neutral’ terrain, which is why McCain’s proposal to reach across party lines was pure political posturing, a partisan politics in the guise of non-partisanship, a desperate attempt to impose his position as universal-apolitical. What is even worse than ‘partisan politics’ is a partisan politics that tries to mask itself as non-partisan: by imposing itself as the voice of the Whole, such a politics reduces its opponents by making them agents of particular interests.

This is why Obama was right to reject McCain’s call to postpone the first presidential debate and to point out that the meltdown makes a political debate about how the two candidates would handle the crisis all the more urgent. In the 1992 election, Clinton won with the motto ‘It’s the economy, stupid!’ The Democrats need to get a new message across: ‘It’s the POLITICAL economy, stupid!’ The US doesn’t need less politics, it needs more.

Slavoj Žižek: Resistance Is Surrender

One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death. Even Mao’s attempt, in the Cultural Revolution, to wipe out the traces of capitalism, ended up in its triumphant return.

Today’s Left reacts in a wide variety of ways to the hegemony of global capitalism and its political supplement, liberal democracy. It might, for example, accept the hegemony, but continue to fight for reform within its rules (this is Third Way social democracy).

Or, it accepts that the hegemony is here to stay, but should nonetheless be resisted from its ‘interstices’.

Or, it accepts the futility of all struggle, since the hegemony is so all-encompassing that nothing can really be done except wait for an outburst of ‘divine violence’ – a revolutionary version of Heidegger’s ‘only God can save us.’

Or, it recognises the temporary futility of the struggle. In today’s triumph of global capitalism, the argument goes, true resistance is not possible, so all we can do till the revolutionary spirit of the global working class is renewed is defend what remains of the welfare state, confronting those in power with demands we know they cannot fulfil, and otherwise withdraw into cultural studies, where one can quietly pursue the work of criticism.

Or, it emphasises the fact that the problem is a more fundamental one, that global capitalism is ultimately an effect of the underlying principles of technology or ‘instrumental reason’.

Or, it posits that one can undermine global capitalism and state power, not by directly attacking them, but by refocusing the field of struggle on everyday practices, where one can ‘build a new world’; in this way, the foundations of the power of capital and the state will be gradually undermined, and, at some point, the state will collapse (the exemplar of this approach is the Zapatista movement).

Or, it takes the ‘postmodern’ route, shifting the accent from anti-capitalist struggle to the multiple forms of politico-ideological struggle for hegemony, emphasising the importance of discursive re-articulation.

Or, it wagers that one can repeat at the postmodern level the classical Marxist gesture of enacting the ‘determinate negation’ of capitalism: with today’s rise of ‘cognitive work’, the contradiction between social production and capitalist relations has become starker than ever, rendering possible for the first time ‘absolute democracy’ (this would be Hardt and Negri’s position).

These positions are not presented as a way of avoiding some ‘true’ radical Left politics – what they are trying to get around is, indeed, the lack of such a position. This defeat of the Left is not the whole story of the last thirty years, however. There is another, no less surprising, lesson to be learned from the Chinese Communists’ presiding over arguably the most explosive development of capitalism in history, and from the growth of West European Third Way social democracy. It is, in short: we can do it better. In the UK, the Thatcher revolution was, at the time, chaotic and impulsive, marked by unpredictable contingencies. It was Tony Blair who was able to institutionalise it, or, in Hegel’s terms, to raise (what first appeared as) a contingency, a historical accident, into a necessity. Thatcher wasn’t a Thatcherite, she was merely herself; it was Blair (more than Major) who truly gave form to Thatcherism.

The response of some critics on the postmodern Left to this predicament is to call for a new politics of resistance. Those who still insist on fighting state power, let alone seizing it, are accused of remaining stuck within the ‘old paradigm’: the task today, their critics say, is to resist state power by withdrawing from its terrain and creating new spaces outside its control. This is, of course, the obverse of accepting the triumph of capitalism. The politics of resistance is nothing but the moralising supplement to a Third Way Left.

Simon Critchley’s recent book, Infinitely Demanding, is an almost perfect embodiment of this position.[*] For Critchley, the liberal-democratic state is here to stay. Attempts to abolish the state failed miserably; consequently, the new politics has to be located at a distance from it: anti-war movements, ecological organisations, groups protesting against racist or sexist abuses, and other forms of local self-organisation. It must be a politics of resistance to the state, of bombarding the state with impossible demands, of denouncing the limitations of state mechanisms. The main argument for conducting the politics of resistance at a distance from the state hinges on the ethical dimension of the ‘infinitely demanding’ call for justice: no state can heed this call, since its ultimate goal is the ‘real-political’ one of ensuring its own reproduction (its economic growth, public safety, etc). ‘Of course,’ Critchley writes,

history is habitually written by the people with the guns and sticks and one cannot expect to defeat them with mocking satire and feather dusters. Yet, as the history of ultra-leftist active nihilism eloquently shows, one is lost the moment one picks up the guns and sticks. Anarchic political resistance should not seek to mimic and mirror the archic violent sovereignty it opposes.

So what should, say, the US Democrats do? Stop competing for state power and withdraw to the interstices of the state, leaving state power to the Republicans and start a campaign of anarchic resistance to it? And what would Critchley do if he were facing an adversary like Hitler? Surely in such a case one should ‘mimic and mirror the archic violent sovereignty’ one opposes? Shouldn’t the Left draw a distinction between the circumstances in which one would resort to violence in confronting the state, and those in which all one can and should do is use ‘mocking satire and feather dusters’? The ambiguity of Critchley’s position resides in a strange non sequitur: if the state is here to stay, if it is impossible to abolish it (or capitalism), why retreat from it? Why not act with(in) the state? Why not accept the basic premise of the Third Way? Why limit oneself to a politics which, as Critchley puts it, ‘calls the state into question and calls the established order to account, not in order to do away with the state, desirable though that might well be in some utopian sense, but in order to better it or attenuate its malicious effect’?

These words simply demonstrate that today’s liberal-democratic state and the dream of an ‘infinitely demanding’ anarchic politics exist in a relationship of mutual parasitism: anarchic agents do the ethical thinking, and the state does the work of running and regulating society. Critchley’s anarchic ethico-political agent acts like a superego, comfortably bombarding the state with demands; and the more the state tries to satisfy these demands, the more guilty it is seen to be. In compliance with this logic, the anarchic agents focus their protest not on open dictatorships, but on the hypocrisy of liberal democracies, who are accused of betraying their own professed principles.

The big demonstrations in London and Washington against the US attack on Iraq a few years ago offer an exemplary case of this strange symbiotic relationship between power and resistance. Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protesters saved their beautiful souls: they made it clear that they don’t agree with the government’s policy on Iraq. Those in power calmly accepted it, even profited from it: not only did the protests in no way prevent the already-made decision to attack Iraq; they also served to legitimise it. Thus George Bush’s reaction to mass demonstrations protesting his visit to London, in effect: ‘You see, this is what we are fighting for, so that what people are doing here – protesting against their government policy – will be possible also in Iraq!’

It is striking that the course on which Hugo Chávez has embarked since 2006 is the exact opposite of the one chosen by the postmodern Left: far from resisting state power, he grabbed it (first by an attempted coup, then democratically), ruthlessly using the Venezuelan state apparatuses to promote his goals. Furthermore, he is militarising the barrios, and organising the training of armed units there. And, the ultimate scare: now that he is feeling the economic effects of capital’s ‘resistance’ to his rule (temporary shortages of some goods in the state-subsidised supermarkets), he has announced plans to consolidate the 24 parties that support him into a single party. Even some of his allies are sceptical about this move: will it come at the expense of the popular movements that have given the Venezuelan revolution its élan? However, this choice, though risky, should be fully endorsed: the task is to make the new party function not as a typical state socialist (or Peronist) party, but as a vehicle for the mobilisation of new forms of politics (like the grass roots slum committees). What should we say to someone like Chávez? ‘No, do not grab state power, just withdraw, leave the state and the current situation in place’? Chávez is often dismissed as a clown – but wouldn’t such a withdrawal just reduce him to a version of Subcomandante Marcos, whom many Mexican leftists now refer to as ‘Subcomediante Marcos’? Today, it is the great capitalists – Bill Gates, corporate polluters, fox hunters – who ‘resist’ the state.

The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfil. Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem for those in power: ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to make do with what is possible.’ The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.

lørdag den 11. oktober 2008

Finanskrisen er reaganismens endeligt af Francis Fukuyama

Reagans og Thatchers version af kapitalismen er brudt sammen. Troen på, at skattelettelser er selvfinansierende og finansmarkedet selvregulerende, er død. Resultatet er en krise, der rækker langt ud over, hvem der vinder præsidentvalget i næste måned, skriver Francis Fukuyama, der i sin tid skrev liberalisme-biblen 'Historiens afslutning'

Amerikas velrenommerede investeringsbanker går konkurs. Over en billion dollars i aktiemarkedsværdier forsvinder på et enkelt døgn. De amerikanske skatteydere får udskrevet en regning på 700 milliarder dollars. Dimensionerne af 2008-krakket på Wall Street kunne næppe være mere overvældende. Nu spørger mange amerikanere, hvorfor de må betale så svimlende summer for at hindre økonomien i at bryde sammen. Kun få er imidlertid begyndt at diskutere de mere uhåndgribelige, men for USA potentielt langt større omkostninger - nemlig hvor stor skade den finansielle nedsmeltning har gjort på Amerika som varemærke.

Ideer hører til Amerikas vigtigste eksportartikler. Og lige siden Ronald Reagan blev valgt til præsident, er der især to fundamentalt amerikanske idéer, som har domineret den globale tænkning. Den første var en bestemt opfattelse af kapitalismen, ifølge hvilken lave skatter, svag regulering og en slanket statsmagt ville være drivkræfter for økonomisk vækst. Reaganismen brød og vendte en århundrede lang tendens i retning af stadig stærkere og stedse mere omfattende statsmagt. Deregulering blev tidens slagord - ikke blot i USA men i hele verden.

Den anden store idé var ideen om Amerika som en global forkæmper for udbredelse af det liberale demokrati, som blev anset for at være den bedste vej til en mere velstående og åben international orden. USA's magt og indflydelse hvilede ikke kun på militær supermagtsstyrke og dollars, men på det faktum, at de fleste mennesker følte sig tiltrukket af den amerikanske form for selvforvaltning og ønskede at omforme deres samfund i samme retning - en faktor, som politologen Joseph Nye betegner som 'blød magt'.
Et afgørende valg

Det kan være svært at se i øjnene, hvor slemt disse signatur-træk ved Amerikas særlige varemærke nu er bragt i miskredit. Mellem 2002 og 2007, mens verden endnu nød godt af en enestående periode med vækst, var det ingen sag at ignorere de europæiske socialister og latinamerikanske populister, når de stemplede den amerikanske økonomiske model som 'cowboy-kapitalisme'. Men nu er lokomotivet for denne vækst - den amerikanske økonomi - kørt af sporet og truer med at trække resten af verden med sig. Og hvad værre er: Synderen er ingen anden end den amerikanske model selv. Under mantraet 'mindre stat' afstod Washington fra at foretage den adækvate regulering af Amerikas finansielle sektor og gjorde det dermed muligt for denne at forvolde enorm skade på resten af samfundet.

Allerede før krakket var demokratiet kompromitteret. Da Saddam viste sig ikke at besidde masseødelæggelsesvåben, forsøgte Bush-regeringen at retfærdiggøre sin Irak-krig ved at knytte den til en bredere dagsorden om at 'udbrede frihed'. Pludselig var fremme af demokrati det vigtigste våben i krigen mod terror. Men for mange mennesker verden over lød USA's retorik om demokrati snarere som et påskud for at udbrede USA's herredømme.

Det afgørende valg, Amerika nu står over for, rækker langt ud over, hvilken økonomisk hjælpepakke, der vil virke bedst, eller hvem der vinder præsidentvalget. Det amerikanske varemærke sættes nu på en hård prøve på et tidspunkt, hvor andre modeller - det være sig den kinesiske eller den russiske - opleves som stadigt mere attraktive. Genoprettelsen af vort gode navn og genoplivelsen af vores varemærkes dragende magt er på mange måder en lige så stor udfordring som at stabilisere den finansielle sektor. Barack Obama og John McCain kommer med hver deres potentiale til at løfte til opgaven. Men uanset hvem af dem, der vinder, vil der forestå en årelang kamp op ad bakke. Og vi kan ikke tage fat på denne kamp, før vi klart har indset, hvad der gik galt, hvilke aspekter af den amerikanske model, der er bevaringsværdige, hvilke der skal forbedres, og hvilke der skal kasseres helt.
Reaganismens impuls

Mange kommentatorer har bemærket, at nedsmeltningen på Wall Street markerer afslutningen på Reagan-æraen. Det er utvivlsomt en korrekt konstatering - også selv hvis det skulle lykkes at få McCain valgt til præsident i november. Store ideer kommer til verden inden for rammerne af særlige historiske epoker. Og kun de færreste store ideer overlever, når konteksten ændrer sig dramatisk, hvilket er grunden til, at de politiske paradigmer er tilbøjelige til at skifte fra venstre til højre og tilbage igen i cykliske forløb, der kan strække sig over generationer.

Reaganismen - eller dens britiske variant, thatcherismen - var den nødvendige impuls for sin tid. Siden Franklin Roosevelts New Deal i 1930'erne havde statsmagten kun vokset sig større i nationer verden over. 1970'ernes store velfærdsstater og økonomier var ved at blive kvalt af bureaukrati. De fungerede håbløst. Dengang var telefoner dyre og vanskelige at anskaffe, flyrejser var en luksus for de rige, og de fleste mennesker satte deres opsparing ind på bankkonti med lave, regulerede rentesatser. Gavmilde velfærdsprogrammer, der skulle støtte eneforsørgere, gjorde det lidet attraktivt for fattige familier at arbejde og forblive gift, og mange familier gik i opløsning. Reagans og Thatchers revolutioner gjorde det lettere at ansætte og fyre arbejdere, hvad der ganske vist gav voldsomt smertelige gnidninger, efterhånden som traditionelle industrier måtte indskrænke eller lukke ned. Men de lagde også grunden til næsten tre årtier med vækst og fremkomsten af helt nye sektorer som informations-og biotek-branchen.

Sin internationale platform fik Reagan-revolutionen med det såkaldte Washington Consensus, ifølge hvilket Washington - og de institutioner, der står under dets indflydelse som Den Internationale Valutafond og Verdensbanken - skulle anspore udviklingslandene til at åbne deres økonomier. Men skønt Washington Consensus rutinemæssigt bliver hånligt forkastet af populister som Venezuelas Hugo Chávez, formåede denne politik i nogen grad at lette de smertelige følger af den latinamerikanske gældskrise i begyndelsen af 1980'erne, da hyperinflation plagede lande som Argentina og Brasilien. Lignende markedsvenlige politikker er også en del af forklaringen på, at Kina og Indien har udviklet sig til de økonomiske kraftcentre, de er i dag.

Hvis nogen skulle savne yderligere belæg, behøver de blot kaste et blik på verdens mest ekstreme eksempler på statsstyrede, centraldirigerede økonomier - nemlig dem, man havde opbygget i det tidligere Sovjetunionen og de øvrige kommunistiske stater. I 1970'erne var disse i næsten alle henseender sakket agterud for deres kapitalistiske rivaler. Deres totale sammenbrud efter Berlinmurens fald leverede beviset på, at sådanne velfærdsstater på steroider var en historisk blindgyde.

Som så mange andre samfundsforandrende bevægelser kørte Reagan-revolutionen af sporet, fordi den for mange tilhængere blev til en uangribelig ideologi frem for en pragmatisk reaktion på velfærdsstatens excesser. To principper var hævet over enhver tvivl: Skattelettelser blev regnet for selvfinansierende, og de finansielle markeder blev regnet for selvregulerende.
Globaliseringen skjulte fejlene

Før 1980'erne var konservative regeringer skattepolitisk tilbageholdende, forstået på den måde, at de var uvillige til at bruge flere penge, end skatterne indbragte. Men med Reaganomics vandt den tanke, at stort set alle skattelettelser ville stimulere vækst, så regeringen i sidste ende ville få større indtægter. Men faktisk var den traditionelle opfattelse den korrekte: Sænker man skatterne uden at beskære udgifterne, bliver resultatet underskud. Reagans skattenedsættelser i 1980'erne skabte da også et stort underskud, mens Clinton skattestigninger i 1990'erne frembragte et overskud. Bushs skattelettelser i begyndelsen af det 21. århundrede medførte et endnu større underskud. Den omstændighed, at den amerikanske økonomi voksede lige så hurtigt i Clinton-årene som under Reagan, formåede af en eller anden grund ikke at ryste den faste konservative tro på skattelettelser som den sikre vej til vækst.

Mere væsentligt var det, at globaliseringen i årtier skjulte fejlene i det neoliberale ræsonnement. I udlandet var man tilsyneladende uendeligt villige til at beholde de amerikanske dollars, som gjorde det muligt for USA's regering at køre med underskud og samtidig fastholde en høj vækst - noget, intet udviklingsland ville kunne slippe afsted med. Og derfor skal vicepræsident Dick Cheney allerede fra begyndelsen have beroliget præsident Bush med, at læren af 1980'erne var, at "underskud spiller ingen rolle".

Den anden trosartikel fra Reagan-æraen - den om finansiel deregulering - blev drevet frem som gældende politik af en uhellig alliance mellem sande troende og Wall Street-virksomheder og blev i 1990'erne sågar også accepteret af demokraterne som sandhedens evangelium. Dens fortalere hævdede, at gamle faste reguleringslove som Glas-Steagall-loven fra depressionstiden (som satte skel mellem banker og investeringsbanker) stod i vejen for innovation og undergravede konkurrenceevnen i Amerikas finansielle institutioner. Det var helt rigtigt set. Der var bare det ved det, at dereguleringen fremkaldte en strøm af nye innovative produkter som f.eks. de investeringspakker med subprime-lån, som udgør kernen i den nuværende krise. Nogle republikanere har stadig ikke forstået sammenhængen, hvilket fremgår af deres alternative forslag til en hjælpepakke, som involverer endnu større skattelettelser for hedgefonde.

Problemet er, at Wall Street fungerer meget anderledes end f.eks. Silicon Valley, hvor en svag regulering er så abs0lut er formålstjenlig. Finansielle institutioner bygger på tillid, som kun kan trives, hvis statsmagten sikrer deres gennemsigtighed og sætter grænser for de chancer, som de kan tage med andre folks penge. Sektoren adskiller sig også derved, at et sammenbrud i et pengeinstitut ikke blot skader aktionærer og ansatte, men tillige en mængde uskyldige udenforstående (som i økonomernes lidenskabsløse fagsprog betegnes som 'negative eksternaliteter').
10 års advarsler

Der har i det seneste årti været klare tegn på, at Reagan-revolutionen var slået ind på et farligt vildspor. Et tidligt varsel var Asiens finanskrise i 1997-98. Efter amerikansk rådgivning og pres havde lande som Thailand og Sydkorea i begyndelsen af 1990'erne liberaliseret deres kapitalmarkeder. En masse 'varme penge' begyndte strømme til disse økonomier, hvorved de skabte en spekulativ boble og derpå skyndte sig at trække sig tilbage igen, da de første tegn på problemer meldte sig. Lyder det som noget, vi kender? Derimod kunne lande som Kina og Malaysia, som ikke fulgte de amerikanske råd, men holdt deres finansielle markeder lukkede eller strengt regulerede, konstatere, at deres position var langt mindre sårbar.

Et andet advarselssignal var det strukturelle underskud, som Amerika begyndte at ophobe. Kina og en række andre lande begyndte efter 1997 at opkøbe amerikanske dollar som led i en bevidst strategi for at undervurdere deres valuta, holde hjulene i gang på deres fabrikker og beskytte sig mod finansielle chok. Efter 11. september passede dette Amerika fint, for det betød, at vi kunne sænke skatterne, finansiere en forbrugsfest, betale for to dyre krige og køre videre med et budgetunderskud på samme tid. De kolossale og stigende handelsunderskud, som dette resulterede i - 700 milliarder dollar om året i 2007 - var åbenlyst uholdbare, og det stod klart, at før eller senere ville man i udlandet beslutte sig for, at Amerika nok alligevel ikke var så godt et sted at anbringe sine penge. Den faldende amerikanske dollar indikerer, at vi nu har nået dette punkt. Det turde nu være indlysende, at underskud - i modsætning til hvad Cheney hævdede - i høj grad spiller en rolle.

Selv på hjemmefronten var dereguleringernes bagside åbenlys, længe før sammenbruddet på Wall Street. I Californien kom elpriserne helt ud af kontrol i 2000-2001 på grund af dereguleringen på det statslige marked for energi, som skruppelløse selskaber som Enron forstod at spille på til egen fordel. Enron selv og en lang række andre virksomheder gik i 2004 konkurs efter fusk med regnskaberne. Og i USA steg uligheden i det forgangne årti, fordi gevinsterne fra den økonomiske vækst i uforholdsmæssig grad kom til rigere og bedre uddannede amerikanere til gode, hvorimod indkomsterne for arbejderklassen stagnerede. Til sidst kom så også den forkludrede besættelse af Irak og den lige så forkludrede reaktion på orkanen Katrina, der eksponerede den offentlige sektors svaghed oppefra og ned - et resultat af årtiers underfinansiering og den lave prestige, som offentligt ansatte måtte lide under fra Reagans tid og frem.
Skelsættende

Alt dette kunne unægtelig tyde på, at Reagans æra burde have været afsluttet for et godt stykke tid siden. Men det gjorde den ikke, dels fordi Det Demokratiske Parti ikke forstod at stille med overbevisende kandidater og argumenter, men også på grund af et særligt aspekt ved Amerika, der stiller vort land meget anderledes end Europa. I de europæiske lande stemmer de mindre veluddannede borgere af arbejderklassebaggrund konsekvent på socialistiske, kommunistiske og andre venstreorienterede partier, ud fra den forventning at dermed er deres økonomiske interesser bedst tjent. Men i USA kan de tilsvarende samfundslag svinge enten til venstre eller højre. De bakkede op om Roosevelts stordemokratiske koalition under New Deal - en koalition, som holdt helt frem til Lyndon Johnsons Great Society-velfærdspolitik i 1960'erne. Men de begyndte at stemme republikansk under Nixon og Reagan, gik over til Clinton i 1990'erne og vendte så atter tilbage til den republikanske fold under George W. Bush. Når så mange fra disse lag stemmer republikansk, skyldes det, at kulturelle spørgsmål som religion, patriotisme, familieværdier og retten til at eje skydevåben kan overtrumfe de økonomiske temaer.

Denne gruppe vælgere kommer til at afgøre valget i november, ikke mindst på grund af deres talstærke tilstedeværelse i en håndfuld svingstater som Ohio og Pennsylvania. Vil de svinge i retning af den noget reserverede Harvard-uddannede Obama, hvis politiske dagsorden i højere grad afspejler deres økonomiske interesser? Eller vil de holde sig til mennesker, de bedre kan identificere sig med som John McCain og Sarah Palin? Der skulle i sin tid den økonomisk krise af enorme dimensioner fra 1929 til 1931 til for at bringe en demokratisk regering til magten. Meningsmålingerne i begyndelsen af oktober 2008 kunne tyde på, at vi har nået til lignende skelsættende punkt.
Demokrati som brand

Den anden afgørende komponent i det amerikanske varemærke er demokratiet og De Forenede Staters erklærede vilje at støtte andre demokratier i verden. Denne idealistiske ledetråd i USA's udenrigspolitik har været konstant igennem forrige århundrede, fra Woodrow Wilson's Folkeforbund over Roosevelts Four Freedoms til Reagans opfordring til Mikhail Gorbatjov om at "nedrive denne mur".

At fremme demokratiets udbredelse - gennem diplomati, støtte til grupper i civilsamfundet, frie medier og lignende, har aldrig været kontroversielt. Men nu er problemet, at da Bush-regeringen brugte 'demokratiet' til at retfærdiggøre Irak-krigen, blev dette af mange opfattet som et kodeord for militær intervention og regimeskift - det kaos, der udløstes i Irak, gjorde ikke ligefrem demokratiets sag en tjeneste. Navnlig Mellemøsten er et minefelt for enhver amerikansk regering, i og med at USA støtter ikkedemokratiske allierede som Saudi-Arabien, men afviser samarbejde med grupper som Hamas og Hizbollah, der kom til magten gennem valg eller bygger deres indflydelse på stor folkelig tilslutning. Vi har ikke megen troværdighed i USA, når vi forfægter en 'frihed-dagsorden'.

Den amerikanske model er også blevet alvorligt plettet af Bush-administrationens brug af tortur. Efter 11. september viste amerikanerne sig i foruroligende grad at være rede til at ofre den forfatningsmæssige beskyttelse af hensyn til sikkerheden. Og siden har Guantánamo Bay og de hætteklædter fanger fra Abu Ghraib i mange ikke-amerikaneres øjne erstattet Frihedsgudinden som symbol på Amerika.
Tabte positioner

Uanset hvem der vinder præsidentvalget om tre uger, vil skiftet til et nyt paradigme i amerikansk og international politik allerede være sat i gang. Demokraterne vil sandsynligvis kunne øge deres flertal i Parlamentet og Senatet. En enorm populistisk vrede er under opsejling, efterhånden som Wall Streets nedsmeltning forplanter sig til Main Street. Allerede nu er der en voksende enighed om behovet for at re-regulere store dele af økonomien.

Globalt vil USA ikke længere kunne nyde godt af den dominerende position, som det har indtaget indtil nu, hvilket understreges af Ruslands invasion af Georgien. Amerikas evne til at forme den globale økonomi gennem handelsaftaler, IMF og Verdensbanken vil også blive mindsket. Det samme vil vore finansielle ressourcer. Og i mange dele af verden vil amerikanske rådgivning, ideer og tilmed bistand være mindre velkommen end nu.

Hvilken kandidat vil under disse omstændigheder være i den bedste position til at give Amerikas et nyt og bedre ry?

Barack Obama er åbenlyst mindst belastet af den førte politik og den nylige fortid, og hans forsonlige og bredt appellerende stil forsøger at bevæge sig ud over dagens politiske fronter. I hjertet synes han snarere at være pragmatiker end ideolog. Men hans evne til at skabe konsensus vil blive sat på en hård prøve, når han skal træffe svære valg for bringe ikke kun republikanere, men også oprørske demokrater ind i folden.

John McCain har på sin side ført sig frem i de seneste uger som en moderne Teddy Roosevelt, tordnet imod Wall Street og forlangt at få udleveret chefen for New Yorks Børs, Chris Coxs hoved på et fad. Han kan meget vel være den eneste republikaner, der - under megen skrigen og sparken - vil kunne bringe sit parti ind i en post-Reagan æra. Men man får let det indtryk, at han i sit hoved ikke helt har besluttet sig for, hvilken slags republikaner han helst vil være, eller hvilke principper der skal definere det nye Amerika.
Ud af spændetrøjen

Amerikansk indflydelse kan og vil blive genoprettet. Da verden som helhed må forventes at blive ramt af et økonomisk tilbageslag, forekommer det ikke indlysende, at den kinesiske eller russiske model vil klare sig mærkbart bedre end den amerikanske version. USA er tidligere kommet sig efter de alvorlige tilbageslag i 1930'erne og 1970'erne, takket være vort systems tilpasningsdygtighed og modstandskraften i vor befolkning.

Ikke desto mindre vil endnu et comeback forudsætte, at vi har evnen til at gennemføre grundlæggende ændringer. For det første må vi bryde fri af Reagan-æraens spændetrøje i forhold til skatter og regulering. Nok vækker skattenedsættelser behag, men de stimulerer ikke nødvendigvis væksten eller betaler for sig selv. I lyset af vor finanspolitiske situation er det helt nødvendigt, at nogen ærligt og redeligt fortæller amerikanerne, at de fremover selv kommer til at betale mere for at få vort samfund på ret køl igen. Flere dereguleringer eller flere myndighedssvigt i forhold til at følge med markeder, der udvikler sig hastigt, kan blive utrolig kostbare, som vi har set. Hele den amerikanske offentlige sektor er underfinansieret, afprofessionaliseret og demoraliseret. Der er brug for at genopbygge den og indgive den en ny følelse af stolthed. Der findes visse opgaver, som kun statsmagten kan varetage at løse.

Når vi gennemfører disse ændringer, vil der naturligvis være en vis risiko for, at den statslige indblanding bliver for stor. Finansielle institutioner har brug for et stærkt tilsyn, men det står ikke klart, at dette også skulle gælde andre sektorer af økonomien. Frihandel er fortsat en stærk drivkraft for økonomisk vækst og vil forblive et instrument for USA's diplomati. Vi bør give bedre bistand til, at arbejdstagere kan tilpasse sig de skiftende globale vilkår frem for at forsvare deres nuværende job. Nok fører skattelettelser ikke automatisk til større velstand, men det gør en uhæmmet vækst i de offentlige udgifter heller ikke. Omkostningerne ved hjælpepakkerne og den langsigtede svage dollar betyder, at inflation vil være en alvorlig trussel i fremtiden. En uansvarlig finanspolitik kan nemt forværre problemerne.

Og selv om færre ikke-amerikanere formentlig vil ønske at lytte til vore råd, vil mange stadig kunne drage fordele af at efterligne visse aspekter af Reagan-modellen. Dette gælder dog helt sikkert ikke i forhold til deregulering af finansmarkederne. Men i det kontinentale Europa får arbejdstagere stadig tilbudt lange ferier, korte arbejdsuger, jobgarantier og en lang række andre fordele, som svækker deres produktivitet og ikke er økonomisk bæredygtige.
En vanskelig ny virkelighed

Det lidet opbyggelige svar på Wall Street-krisen må være, at den største forandring, vi må gennemføre, er af politisk art. Reagan-revolutionen brød de liberales og demokraternes 50 år lange dominans i amerikansk politik og åbnede op for nye tilgange til tidens problemer. Men som årene er gået, er det, som engang var banebrydende nye tanker, degenereret til stivnede dogmer. Den politiske debats kvalitet er blevet forringet af en polariserende diskurs, hvor ensidige politikere ikke blot drager deres modstanderes ideer i tvivl, men også deres motiver. Alt dette gør det sværere for os at tilpasse USA til den nye og vanskelige virkelighed, vi står overfor. Så den ultimative duelighedsprøve for den amerikanske model vil være dens evne til at genopfinde sig selv forfra. God branding er, for nu at citere en præsidentkandidat, ikke et spørgsmål om at smøre læbestift på en gris. Det handler om at have det rigtige produkt at sælge i første instans. Dette er en opgave, som Amerikas demokrati nu har fået skåret ud i pap.

Francis Fukuyama er professor i international politisk økonomi på John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.