more on Hayek

[Peter McLaren <mclaren@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think Henry is right on target in his assessment of Von Hayek. Part of the
problem faced by the educational left today is that even among the most
progressive educators there appears to exist an ominous resignation produced
by the seeming inevitability of capital, even as financial institutions
expand capacity in inverse proportion to a decline in living standards and
job security. It has become an article of faith in the critical educational
tradition that there is no viable alternative to capitalism. When class
relations are discussed, they are not talked about in the Marxist sense of
foregrounding the labor/capital dialectic, surplus value extraction, or the
structure of property ownership, but instead refers to consumption,
lifestyle politics, theories of social stratification in terms of access to
consumption, or job, income, and cultural prestige.  The swan song for
Marxist analysis apparently occurred during the intellectual collapse of
Marxism in the 1980s after the Berlin Wall came crashing down and along with
it a bipolar imperialist world. Capitalism was loudly proclaimed to be the
victor over socialism.  The globalisation of capital was to be the savior of
the world¹s poor and powerless. But as it is now known, its function, far
from supplicatory or transitive, has been deadly alienating. Gobbling up the
global lifeworld in the quest for an endless accumulation of surplus value,
capital has produced some world-historical  excretory excesses, turning the
world into a global toilet of toxic waste while adding legions to Marx¹s
reserve army of labour. The cutbacks in government expenditure on health,
education and housing investment, the creation of shantytowns in urban
industrial areas, the concentration of women in low-wage subcontracted work,
the depletion of natural resources, the rampant de-unionisation, the growth
of labour discipline, the growth of temporary and part-time labour, the
pushing down of wages and the steady decline of decent working conditions
have proceeded apace but the rule of capital is not challenged, only its
current ?condition¹. In Russia today, the prikhvatizatisiya (grabitization)
that has been bequeathed to the masses by a kleptocratic capitalism that
dragged itself out of the carrion house of economic shock therapy has led to
?blitzkrieg liquidations¹, the destruction of industry, the disappearance of
health benefits and housing, the slashing of salaries, and the transfer of
wealth to a dozen or so private owners who now commandeer one public
property. As poverty shifts from 2 percent to 50 percent, Western freemarket
fundamentalists keep reminding the Russians how awful it must have been to
live under communism. Western countries that had established their economic
fiefdoms by protecting key industries and subsidising some domestic
producers continue to preach the gospel of free trade and deregulation to
other countries. Even when the messianic monopoly fantasies of Enron,
WorldCom  and Global Crossings CEOs end in bankruptcy disasters that shake
the very pillars of the marketplace, the belief in the sanctity of the
market remains undisturbed. Capital stealthily hides behind Neitzsche¹s
veil, maintaining its secret of reversibility?that its economic assistance
to the Third World reproduces underdevelopment and ensures the continuity of
dependency.

When you stop to think about it, the belief that there is no alternative to
capitalism had pullulated across the global political landscape before the
fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, attaching itself like a
fungus to regional and national dreams alike.  The winds of the Cold War had
spread its spores to the farthest reaches of the globe.  After laying
dormant for a decade, these spores have been reactivated and have seemingly
destroyed our capacity to dream otherwise. Today most nations  celebrate
capital as the key to the survival of democracy. Watered by the tears of the
poor and cultivated by working-class labor, the dreams that sprout from the
unmolested soil of capital are those engineered by the ruling class. Plowed
and harrowed by international cartels of transnational corporations,
freemarketeers, and global carpetbaggers poised to take advantage of Third
World nations in serious financial debt to the West, the seeds of capitalism
have yielded a record-breaking harvest. The capitalist dream factories are
not only corporate board rooms and production studios of media networks that
together work to keep the capitalist dream alive, but a spirit of mass
resignation that disables the majority of the population from realizing that
capitalism and exploitation are functional equivalents, that globalisation
of capital is just another name for what Lenin  termed imperialism. United
States imperialism--what Tariq Ali  calls "the mother of all
fundamentalisms"?has decamped from its Keynesian position of
pseudo-liberalism to fully embrace a fanatical  neo-liberalism. Just to add
to Henry's notion of Von Hayek's "repugnant social philosophy" Ali notes
that this grand mullah of neo-liberalism, who served as an avatar to both
Thatcher and Reagan,
"favored military actions to defend US interests abroad. On the domestic
front he favored the invisible magic of a manipulated market. No state
intervention against the interests of capital was to be tolerated. But the
state was vital to undertake military operations in the sphere of
international relations." Ali also reports that
 Von Hayek¹s neo-liberal followers
"were staunch defenders of the Vietnam war. They supported the US-backed
military coup in Chile. In 1979, Hayek favored bombing Tehran. In 1982,
during the Malvinas conflict, he wanted raids on the Argentinian capital.
This was the creed of neo-liberal hegemony most favored by its founder."
Henry is on target. Hayek is wrong to believe that prices are the best means
to
 take account of what people need or
deserve, because it operates in an ethical vacuum where overcapacity almost
assumes a metaphysical bearing.
Peter


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