And they were silent for a spell
Apr. 11th, 2025 04:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cincinnatus_c
Ironically this post of mine from 2011 turns out to be--I mean ironically because it's one of the I guess many in which I say out loud that I really don't know what I'm doing here--one of the more compelling points for the position that doing whatever I was (uh, have been?) doing in this thing over the years was (uh ... is?) not a complete and utter waste of time. (I mean of my time, no guarantees expressed or implied about anyone else's, quite the opposite in fact I'm sure.) Which is to say I'm glad to have this record that I was irritated by Mark Carney, for a vague mist of reasons that have a lot to do with why I will still never vote for anyone in his ballpark unless it somehow comes down to a stark choice between them and the outright bad shit to their right (which reminds me again what a horrendous idea separating the executive from the legislature turns out to be in practice: the economic events of the last week or so are awfully reminiscent of those that led to the lettuce's outlasting Liz Truss, but the American way of electing a king means cooler heads (!!--nice job brain if you somehow did that unconsciously on purpose) simply cannot prevail in their case), going on fourteen years ago. (It's also interesting to look back at that time and see that Carney in Canada was on the leading edge of a watershed in monetary policy: it turned out you could nail interest rates at 0 indefinitely and not cause significant inflation. It's also funny in that regard that my irritation with Carney had to do with his frustration that his low interest rate policy was having too much effect on the demand side, not by increasing inflation (except in housing prices; arguably Canada is still stuck in the Carney housing bubble) but by increasing consumer debt to dangerous levels, when what he was really after was to stimulate supply. And interestingly also you now see progressive economists like Jim Stanford arguing that raising interest rates has an inflationary effect, not only in an obvious way by raising the cost of carrying debt but in a, well, also obvious but traditionally underacknowledged way, namely by stifling supply across the board. Which is to say, I guess, everyone is a supply-sider now (although Stanford for a long time worked for the Canadian Auto Workers/Unifor, and no one in labour is so bought into the supply side of things as autoworkers.)) [ETA: one other funny thing about that 2011 post: the reference to savings accounts, which--in the sense meant there, which is the sense that "savings accounts" has had for most of the history of that term--are things that just don't seriously exist anymore. I keep thinking these days, this lately is (isn't it?) the first serious stock market decline in which most everyone who has "savings" has them largely in the stock market. That, you would think, would have certain practical implications.]
What I've been meaning to write up in here for a couple of months now is something on Foucault and neoliberalism, after finally having been compelled by uh all this to read his neoliberalism lectures from the late '70s. The basic points, at least off the top of my head right now, that I would want to address if I ever got around to it (beyond the meta-point that Foucault may not be the guy you necessarily want to get this history from; contrary to his reputation among people who know nothing about him he's an extraordinarily meticulous scholar, but he's also a rather extreme and meandering generalist (so much for "the specific intellectual" eh)) are these:
1. Neoliberalism in its roots is not the political morality, founded on a commitment to a certain conception of freedom, which it has manifested as since Thatcher and Reagan but a political economics, founded on (a) a skeptical epistemology of political economy (just like the more specific 20th-century "neoconservatism" with its "unintended consequences", with which "neoliberalism" was confusingly synonymous before "neoconservatism" was convoluted into meaning "supporting the Iraq war"), on which rests (b) the central practical principle that prices set by competition (not necessarily "free" competition, as freedom is sometimes in conflict with competition, such that the state has to intervene to ensure a sufficiently competitive economy--this finally explained to me why, as I learned to my puzzlement in the '90s, certain figures on the otherwise apparently libertarian right were in favour of things like antitrust laws) being the means to the most efficient production and distribution of goods and services in the interests of serving the prosperity of the state as a whole.
2. "There is no socialist governmentality." I suspect Foucault said this as a provocation meant to provoke something like "what about China" as a response from his students, but he also means it completely seriously, and while I would have to put some effort into unpacking what it means, it has shaken my view of what's possible in the "West" or whatever we are now calling whatever that is that we are calling something like that. There's a bunch of scholarship about whether or not Foucault himself became a neoliberal and a promoter, however ambiguously, of neoliberalism in the late '70s and clearly if that question were to be put to him directly, and he were to answer it directly, he would say we are all neoliberals now.
3. As a specific aspect of that Foucault addresses the question why Marxist arguments about the exploitation of labour have no purchase on labourers in the West: he says this is because they don't conceive of themselves as natural possessors of labour power forced to sell it for less than it's worth but as entrepreneurs who reap returns on investments made in themselves. I don't know that this is necessarily the right way of putting things at all let alone the whole story, but something like this is something.
The funny thing about points 2 and 3 is that they tie in directly to my first plan for my MA thesis on Foucault, about how socialist or whatever revolution in the West was impossible without a different kind of--in Foucault's term--subjectivation. Of course, as a 22-year-old theoretical political radical what I wanted to do was to figure out how to carry out that different kind of subjectivation. Which I'm pretty sure Foucault would have thought was pretty dumb.
What I've been meaning to write up in here for a couple of months now is something on Foucault and neoliberalism, after finally having been compelled by uh all this to read his neoliberalism lectures from the late '70s. The basic points, at least off the top of my head right now, that I would want to address if I ever got around to it (beyond the meta-point that Foucault may not be the guy you necessarily want to get this history from; contrary to his reputation among people who know nothing about him he's an extraordinarily meticulous scholar, but he's also a rather extreme and meandering generalist (so much for "the specific intellectual" eh)) are these:
1. Neoliberalism in its roots is not the political morality, founded on a commitment to a certain conception of freedom, which it has manifested as since Thatcher and Reagan but a political economics, founded on (a) a skeptical epistemology of political economy (just like the more specific 20th-century "neoconservatism" with its "unintended consequences", with which "neoliberalism" was confusingly synonymous before "neoconservatism" was convoluted into meaning "supporting the Iraq war"), on which rests (b) the central practical principle that prices set by competition (not necessarily "free" competition, as freedom is sometimes in conflict with competition, such that the state has to intervene to ensure a sufficiently competitive economy--this finally explained to me why, as I learned to my puzzlement in the '90s, certain figures on the otherwise apparently libertarian right were in favour of things like antitrust laws) being the means to the most efficient production and distribution of goods and services in the interests of serving the prosperity of the state as a whole.
2. "There is no socialist governmentality." I suspect Foucault said this as a provocation meant to provoke something like "what about China" as a response from his students, but he also means it completely seriously, and while I would have to put some effort into unpacking what it means, it has shaken my view of what's possible in the "West" or whatever we are now calling whatever that is that we are calling something like that. There's a bunch of scholarship about whether or not Foucault himself became a neoliberal and a promoter, however ambiguously, of neoliberalism in the late '70s and clearly if that question were to be put to him directly, and he were to answer it directly, he would say we are all neoliberals now.
3. As a specific aspect of that Foucault addresses the question why Marxist arguments about the exploitation of labour have no purchase on labourers in the West: he says this is because they don't conceive of themselves as natural possessors of labour power forced to sell it for less than it's worth but as entrepreneurs who reap returns on investments made in themselves. I don't know that this is necessarily the right way of putting things at all let alone the whole story, but something like this is something.
The funny thing about points 2 and 3 is that they tie in directly to my first plan for my MA thesis on Foucault, about how socialist or whatever revolution in the West was impossible without a different kind of--in Foucault's term--subjectivation. Of course, as a 22-year-old theoretical political radical what I wanted to do was to figure out how to carry out that different kind of subjectivation. Which I'm pretty sure Foucault would have thought was pretty dumb.
