Re: ripening contradictions?

[Dennis R Redmond <dredmond@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 12 Nov 1997, Doug Henwood wrote:

> The authors don't draw this conclusion, but those three clouds, plus the
> fourth, the fast-trace defeat, look like the ripening contradictions of the
> hypercapitalism of the last 20 years. If the Asian "miracle" is over, then
> the export model is in need of a serious rethink; if the U.S. can't get its
> allies to sign onto a bombing run over Baghdad or the continued isolation
> of Iran, then the New World Order of 1991 seems a lot more disorderly; and
> if some approach to greenhouse gas reduction can't be crafted, then life
> itself is in danger. That, plus a growing political backlash against free
> trade and capital mobility, all suggest some major political quake is
> underway.

Very likely. Probably the backlash has been somewhat delayed
in the United States of Decay, for all the usual post-Imperial reasons --
i.e. a stagnant service economy, and an unusually corrupt corporate media
-- but there's no doubt that neoliberalism as a political project is
crashing and burning before our very eyes (this is not the same thing, of
course, as the crash and burn of the global economy itself, which I
regard as highly unlikely). During my sojourn in Europe 1995-96 I was
constantly amazed at the depth and scale of the popular anger in
France, Belgium and elsewhere in Europe against the marketeers; Maastricht
monetarism was truly a paper tiger from the beginning, but its superficial
gnawing at the (still mostly intact) European welfare states has now
called forth the fearsome dragon of Red-Green mobilization in Central
Europe. Something similar is happening in Eastern Europe, where
20% unemployment and a Great Depression caused people to trash
Hayek and the market idols even faster than they trashed the Stalinist
monuments. And now even the supposedly market-led boom of the
Southeast Asian microbubbles (as opposed to the genuine, state-led boom of
the East Asian core states) has gone bust, which has called forth a spate
of -- savor the dialectical irony, comrades! -- gargantuan
transnational Government bailouts, virtual replays of the 1992-97
Japanese Godzilla-of-all-bank-bailouts.

Theoretically, you could argue that after proletarianizing the bulk of the
planetary working population from 1965-95 and utterly and
horribly smashing the former Second and Third Worlds, capital has unwittingly
created, Frankenstein-style, a transnational proletariat out of the
regional, urban, national and international predescessors of such. This
proletariat consumes global commodities and cultural icons, fights
interlinked class struggles against interlinked comprador elites, works
for the same multinationals in global niche markets, communicates on
global telecom and computer networks, and runs the gamut from graduate
students and computer programmers to Third World women and factory
children. The Old Mole of revolution is quantum-tunneling in the
mazes of e-money and silicon commerce, grubbing the forests of Chiapas
and the development ministries of Malaysia, and scouting the Intranets
of Mitsubishi's corporate HQ and the mansion-fortress of the World
Bank, and though none can say where or when the neon-pixeled
pick-and-shovel icon of the radical critter will surface on the Websites
of the world, the tapping sounds from the Pentium bus are getting louder
and louder.

-- Dennis