krebscycle

Most of the time when some earnest leftie uses the word “neoliberalism”, he (and it is almost always a “he”)  means to imply nothing more than that he is a smart person in  possession of some  deep knowledge about how things work with the cool nomenclature. Sadly the more sophisticated academic marxist story on neoliberalism is similarly uninformative. David Harvey’s explanation in Jacobin Magazine is typical.

I’ve always treated neoliberalism as a political project carried out by the corporate capitalist class as they felt intensely threatened both politically and economically towards the end of the 1960s into the 1970s. They desperately wanted to launch a political project that would curb the power of labor.

In many respects the project was a counterrevolutionary project. It would nip in the bud what, at that time, were revolutionary movements in much of the developing world — Mozambique, Angola, China etc. — but also a rising tide of communist influences in countries like Italy and France and, to a lesser degree, the threat of a revival of that in Spain.

That is, Harvey abandons the real intellectual accomplishment of the Marxian school of history/economics, the premise that major changes in history result from changes in the base economy and social structure and not from the decisions of a few people at the top of the social structure. Before the socialists starting writing history, most accounts were heroes and villains and  went like “King so and so bravely defeated Prince such and such .. “.  Marx and Engels (and some of their critics) began to look at how the operation of society, the ways people made a living, the methods for creating and distributing wealth, technology, social mores, and so produced a context in which history moves like a current dragging Kings and peasants along with it.

The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch
– Fred.

The argument is not that people are just puppets of economic change, it’s that the material conditions of life are both constantly in flux and constraining. The great French historian Braudel, for example, showed a long series of upheavals in Italian cities in the 1500s could be correlated with wind conditions in the Mediterranean that either facilitated the flow of grain from North Africa or precipitated famines. It turned out that although Prince So-And-So might have brilliantly plotted to take over Pisa or some other town, the winds determined the probability that he would be cut down at the gates or march in against token resistance. Bloch, Braudel, Wallerstien,  Abu-lughod, Thompson, Arrighi, and many other historians dug through the archives, correlated weather information, looked at birth and death rates, read account books, studied changes in social mores and customs and ideas and tech and tried hard to see how all these things interacted. Historians even eventually began to look at culture and family and gender and race as well as economics. All of that is gone in Harvey’s formulation. The capitalist elites, like Prince So-and-So, suddenly decide that they don’t want to continue to tolerate the impudence of laborers and cast us out of the paradise of 1950s American life into the neoliberal dark ages of Reagan and Thatcher.  What a pile of horseshit. And that’s even before we get to the nostalgia of today’s Western Left for the good old days of Jim Crow, Cold War, and Empire.

The Marxist tradition has always suffered from the contradiction between the methods of historical materialism and the limitations of people using that method to try to see outside of “the dominant ideas of the dominant class”. Because intellectually understanding that all of us are steeped in the ideas of our own society does not magically grant one an exit from those ideas. So Marx carried Victorian prejudices about “asiatic despotism” and the mob into his own work (see this and that) and Engels assumed manufacturing necessitated autocratic factory discipline.  The role of women in economic production and social operation didn’t even occur to either of them. But the left of our time has reached an intellectual dead end and replaces historical materialism  with illuminati level gossip about how Prince So-And-So came up with a neoliberal plot to bring down the left.  Boring.