Brian Holmes — THE SCANDAL OF THE WORD "CLASS"
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A review of David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford UP, 2005)
David Harvey’s new book has four faces on its cover: Reagan, Thatcher,
Pinochet and Deng Xiaoping. It makes one self-evident, yet strangely
scandalous assertion: the rise of neoliberal economics since the late 1970s
? or more precisely, since the bankruptcy of New York City and the
dictatorship in Chile ? is the centerpiece of a deliberate project to
restore upper-class power.
True to its title, the book presents a concise but extremely well-documented
economic history of the last three decades, encompassing not only the usual
G-7 countries but the entire world, with a particular emphasis on the US and
capitalist China. It identifies structural trends of neoliberal governance
that, as the book nears conclusion, serve equally to explicate the present
crisis, both of the global economy and of interstate relations. And finally
it asks the political question of how resurgent upper-class power can
successfully be opposed. Here is where the most benefit could be gained by
examining the aura of scandal that surrounds its central thesis.
But first let us consider in detail how this history unfolds. It is well
known that Chicago-school economists, trained by Milton Friedman, applied
the latter’s free-market utopia to Chile after the consolidation of power by
Pinochet in 1975. “Freedom” was a key word in the economic management
propounded by the dictator. Harvey begins not with that story, but instead
with four orders issued on September 19, 2003 by Paul Bremer, head of the
Coalition Provisional Authority in neoliberated Iraq. The orders included
“the full privatization of public enterprises, full ownership rights by
foreign firms of Iraqi businesses, full repatriation of foreign profits…
the opening of Iraq’s banks to foreign control, national treatment for
foreign companies and… the elimination of nearly all trade barriers” (p.
6). Only oil was exempted from these orders, presumably because of its
status as a strategic (i.e. military) resource. In addition, a flat tax,
long promoted by Republicans in the US, was imposed. Harvey sees these
economic parameters as exemplary of a neoliberal state, defined as “a state
apparatus whose fundamental mission [is] to facilitate conditions for
profitable capital accumulation on the part of both domestic and foreign
capital.” The freedoms embodied by that particular kind of state “reflect
the interests of private property owners, businesses, multinational
corporations, and financial capital” (p. 8).
After drawing a striking parallel between the restructuring of the Iraqi and
Chilean economies, he goes on to recount the sequence, relatively familiar
from his previous books, whereby the postwar social compromise between
capital and labor, instituted internationally by the 1944 Bretton Woods
fixed exchange-rate system and by tariff barriers and capital controls
negotiated within the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, gradually
collapsed in the early 1970s after delivering two decades of sustained high
growth. The central argument in this opening chapter is an account of the
dramatic increase in the income of the upper 1% of the population of the
most developed countries from the mid-1980s onward. By the end of the
century, in the US case, that upper one-hundredth of American society
commanded a full 15% of the national wealth ? up from less than 8% at the
close of WWII, and now very close to the level of 16% that had obtained
before the war. On the same page Harvey offers another figure: “the ratio of
the median compensation of workers to the salaries of CEOs increased from
just over 30 to 1 in 1970 to nearly 500 to 1 by 2000” (p. 16). And he points
to similar concentrations of wealth in Britain, Russia, China and Mexico, as
well as to the widening of the global income gap between the top fifth of
the world’s population in the richest countries and the bottom fifth in the
poorest, which has gaped dramatically from 30 to 1 in 1960 to 74 to 1 in
1997. Over the same period, aggregate global growth rates fell from 3.5% for
the decade of the 1960s to just 1.1% for the 1990s. These statistics support
the assertion that neoliberalism is less “a utopian project to realize a
theoretical design for the reorganization of international capitalism” than
it is “a political project to re- establish the conditions for capital
accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites” (p. 19). In other
words, despite all its purported advantages in terms of lower taxes, renewed
growth, liberty from bureaucratic constraint, expanded job opportunities and
consumer choices for the common man, free- market theory serves in practice
to mask the recapture of state power by the rich.
The usefulness of history in an amnesiac society is simply to remember what
happened in our lifetimes. Take the prolonged economic downturn of the
1970s, when worldwide competition intensified, resource prices rose, global
demand fell, output stagnated, inflation climbed sharply, and the US was
faced with the uncontrollability of its own corporations, which parked their
global profits in offshore “eurodollar” markets rather than taking them home
where they would be taxed. Under the Keynesian logic of domestic economic
management, which traditionally sought to ensure full employment and
effective consumer demand for manufactured goods, the crisis could only be
treated by lowering interest rates and expanding welfare entitlements and
public-works investments. But the result of those policies was an
inflationary wage-price spiral, which combined with persistent low growth
rather than alleviating it. The resulting paradox of “stagflation” was
finally countered in October 1979 by the so-called “Volcker shock.”
Paul Volcker, chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank under Carter, raised
interest rates dramatically, reaching a nominal rate of 20% by July 1981.
One major result was to make the new, fully liquid and negotiable US
Treasury bonds an irresistible destination for investments that poured in
from around the globe, thus re-establishing the central position of the US
in world finance and permitting the unprecedented deficit-spending, or
military Keynesianism, of the Reagan era. But Harvey doesn’t even mention
that here ? because the key effect in terms of the restoration of
upper-class power was to precipitate a sharp recession that broke the
wage-price spiral and weakened the bargaining position of trade unions, as
workers were laid off and business after business failed. Reagan, who fully
approved of Volcker’s approach, would pursue this attack on labor after his
accession to the presidency in 1980, notably by defeating the air-traffic
controllers’ strike in 1981, then going on to promulgate the sweeping tax
cuts and broad deregulation of industry and finance for which he and
Thatcher are renowned. “Tax breaks on investment effectively subsidized the
movement of capital away from the unionized north-east and midwest and into
the non-union and weakly regulated south and west,” notes Harvey (p. 26).
The top personal tax rate fell from 70 to 28 percent. But the Volcker shock
had even more important consequences in the realm of international
relations.
The originality of David Harvey’s books is the way he is able to trace the
dynamics of capital flows across time and across the geographical scales,
from the intimate to the urban, regional, national, continental and world
levels. Here he recalls how the OPEC price hike of 1973 placed huge amounts
of capital in the hands of the oil-producing states; and he refers to Peter
Gowan’s account of the way the Saudis were forced by threat of invasion to
continue pricing their oil sales exclusively in dollars, and to recycle
these petrodollars through New York investment banks. Low US interest rates
in the mid-1970s meant that this capital had to be placed elsewhere, and the
solution was to lend it to the governments of developing countries. “This
required the liberalization of international credit and financial markets,
and the US government began actively to promote and support this strategy
globally during the 1970s” (pp. 28-9). The loans, however, were also
designated in US dollars, with the result that any rise in the US interest
rate could easily force debtor countries into default. This is exactly what
happened to Mexico in 1982-84, in the wake of the Volcker shock ? and it was
at this point that economic crisis became the primary tool of neoliberal
restructuring. Harvey makes this analysis:
“The Reagan administration, which had seriously thought of withdrawing
support for the IMF in its first year in office, found a way to put together
the powers of the US Treasury and the IMF to resolve the difficulty by
rolling over the debt, but did so in return for neoliberal reforms. This
treatment became standard after what Stiglitz refers to as a ‘purge’ of all
Keynesian influences from the IMF in 1982. The IMF and the World Bank
thereafter became centres for the propagation and enforcement of ‘free
market fundamentalism’ and neoliberal orthodoxy. In return for debt
rescheduling, indebted countries were required to implement institutional
reforms, such as cuts in welfare expenditures, more flexible labour market
laws, and privatization. Thus was ‘structural adjustment’ invented” (p.
29).
It is crucial for the overarching thesis of the book that the reader should
remark how institutions controlled by the American state (as is the case of
the IMF) act to further the interests of private banks directing enormous
capital flows for the exclusive profit of a few. The fact is that the US
overcame its stagnating industrial growth by becoming the pivot ? and
policeman ? of global finance. At this point Harvey identifies a key
difference between classic liberal theory and actual neoliberal practice:
“under the former, lenders take the losses that arise from bad investment
decisions, while under the latter the borrowers are forced by state and
international powers to take on board the costs of debt repayment no matter
what the consequences for the livelihood and well-being of the local
population” (p. 29).
If one were to summarize A Brief History of Neoliberalism on a world map
rather than a sheet of paper, by inscribing names and dates on the places
mentioned and then using arrows to retrace capital flows, the result would
be a dynamic picture of many of the hidden tensions that animate
contemporary geopolitics. Yet these capital flows, and the corresponding
transformations in daily life, are not just results of primary changes
originating in the US and Britain. Another strong thesis of the book is that
“the general progress of neoliberalization has… been increasingly impelled
through mechanisms of uneven geographical development” (p. 87). On the one
hand, specific states, regions and cities are upheld as successful models
for capital accumulation, resulting in government programs that strive to
make populations everywhere behave like, say, Japanese, North Italians, or
Singaporeans, or to make our productive environments resemble Ireland,
Silicon Valley or Hyderabad (with the next fashionable role model likely to
be authoritarian China). On the other hand, and far more effectively, each
new crisis ? and these have become increasingly frequent since the mid-1970s
? represents a chance for monopoly concentration, foreign takeover of
assets, and structural adjustment, as exemplified by the case of the
so-called “Asian crisis” that also wreaked its havoc on Russia and Brazil in
1997-98. Harvey lists four main factors to explain the rising turbulence:
the financialization of everything (i.e. the conversion of ownership rights
into titles that can be traded instantaneously, along with all their
derivatives, on electronic marketplaces); the increasing mobility of capital
thanks to international agreements, culminating in the founding of the WTO
in 1995; the pressure to enact neoliberal reforms exercised by the “Wall
Street-IMF-Treasury complex”; and the spread of the new monetarist and
neoliberal orthodoxy in university economics departments the world over,
eliminating the former Keynesian paradigm. These give rise to a world system
where capital accumulation proceeds, not despite, but because of the uneven
geographic fluctuations of continuous crisis.
Incisive studies of the transformations in Mexico, Argentina, South Korea
and Sweden illustrate the vicissitudes of the “Washington Consensus” that
wove these four main threads together into a dominant pattern by the early
1990s, as Clinton and then Blair consolidated the neoliberal paradigm from a
center-left position (which, to be sure, no longer has anything recognizably
“left” about it). One of the advantages of a geographic treatment of history
is to avoid lumping everything together into a uniform global picture: “The
degree to which neoliberalism has become integral to common-sense
understandings among the populace at large has varied greatly depending on
the strength of belief in the power of social solidarities and the
importance of traditions of collective social responsibility and provision”
(p. 116). Implementation of the upper-class agenda varied consequently. Thus
one can speak of a “circumscribed” neoliberalism in the Swedish case, or
note the failure of French elites to reach the income gaps attained in most
other developed countries. Crucially, Harvey draws attention to the
interplay of local capitalist classes and external forces: “It sometimes
seems as if the IMF merely takes the responsibility for doing what some
internal class forces want to do anyway” (p. 117). A phrase which in my view
applies perfectly to the recent crisis in Argentina, among others. The key
to understanding the dynamics of the world system is therefore to pierce the
imbroglios surrounding the ways that national and transnational elites
collude to take advantage, not only of industrial or financial booms, but
also of the periodic busts that inevitably offer a chance for the big fish
to swallow the assets of the smaller ones, while destroying the common
people’s means of livelihood. This type of collusion is central to the
process that Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession.”
The thing we are asked to conceive, therefore, is the way that uneven
geographic development knits itself together into the dynamics of
far-reaching crisis. The geopolitical Gordian knot that appears so clearly
at the end of the book (particularly if you have also read The New
Imperialism) is the one that intertwines the ever-expanding debt of the
United States, the industrial boom of China and the coveted oil reserves of
the Middle East. It would be interesting to hear an informed opinion on the
chapter dealing with China’s economic and social history, since 1978 when
Deng Xiaoping began the privatization of state enterprises and agricultural
collectives, and the opening of coastal cities to foreign capital. What’s
compelling for the ordinary reader is the way Harvey recounts a series of
isolated experiments that gradually fit together into a coherent pattern of
practice (indeed, all his historical accounts adopt this empirical
approach). The Communist Party is credited with managing “to construct a
form of state-manipulated market economy that delivered spectacular economic
growth (averaging close to 10 percent a year) and rising standards of living
for a significant portion of the population for more than twenty years.” At
the same time, the Party is hardly spared critique: “It almost certainly
embraced economic reforms in order to amass wealth and upgrade its
technological capacities so as to be better able to manage internal dissent,
to better defend itself against external aggression, and to project its
power outwards onto its immediate geopolitical sphere of interest” (p. 112).
The authoritarianism of Deng and the successive leadership is repeatedly
stressed. But it is China’s overwhelming growth that takes your breath away:
114 million migrant workers who have left the countryside for the city; a
rate of urbanization of around 15% a year; foreign direct investment at 40%
of GDP in 2002; automobile production of 250,000 a month in 2004 (mostly for
internal consumption, and with ecological consequences one would rather not
imagine…). A phrase from a New York Times report sums it up: “In 2003
China took ’30 per cent of the world’s coal production, 36 per cent of the
world’s steel and 55 per cent of the world’s cement” (p. 139). One imagines
endless highways, skyscrapers, shopping malls, airports. China is now the
world’s second largest oil importer after the US, with its hungry eye on all
the world’s reserves. This phenomenal growth stems from a pattern of
strategically privatizing, profit-driven management, which broadly
corresponds to that of the neoliberal state. “But in one respect the Chinese
Depart glaringly from the neoliberal template,” Harvey writes. And he
continues:
“China has massive labor surpluses, and if it is to achieve social and
political stability it must either absorb or violently repress that surplus.
It can do the former only by debt-financing infrastructural and
fixed-capital formation projects on a massive scale (fixed-capital
investment increased by 25 per cent in 2003)… But all of this requires
that the Chinese state depart from neoliberal orthodoxy and act like a
Keynesian state. This requires that it maintain capital and exchange rate
controls. These are inconsistent with the global rules of the IMF, the WTO,
and the US Treasury…. The enforcement of capital flow controls is becoming
increasingly difficult as Chinese yuan seep across a highly porous border
via Hong Kong and Taiwan into the global economy. It is worthwhile recalling
that one of the conditions that broke up the whole Keynesian post-war
Bretton Woods system as the formation of a eurodollar market as US dollars
escaped the discipline of its own monetary authorities. The Chinese are
already well on their way to replicating that problem, and their
Keynesianism is correspondingly threatened” (p. 141).
What plainly worries Harvey are the possibly violent consequences of a
crisis affecting the US-China relation. For the two continent-sized
countries are now the double engine of world productivity: as the one
constantly struggles to consume what the other struggles to produce,
domestic peace in both comes to depend on the continuity of what looks like
a mad race to nowhere. Harvey, like Giovanni Arrighi and his collaborators,
thinks that a major hegemonic shake-up ? i.e. the displacement of the US
from its now-fragile position as linchpin of the world economy ? may well be
in the offing. But he does not see any way this could occur peacefully:
“A peculiar symbiosis emerges, in which China, along with Japan, Taiwan, and
other Asian central banks, fund the US debt so that the US can conveniently
consume their surplus output. But this renders the US vulnerable to the
whims of Asian central bankers. Conversely, Chinese economic dynamism is
held hostage to US fiscal and monetary policy. The US is also currently
behaving in a Keynesian fashion ? running up enormous federal deficits and
consumer debt while insisting that everyone else must obey neoliberal rules.
This is not a sustainable position, and there are now many influential
voices in the US suggesting that it is steering right into the hurricane of
a major financial crisis. For China, this would entail switching from a
politics of labour absorption to a politics of overt repression. Whether or
not such a tactic can succeed, as it did in Tiananmen Square in 1989, will
depend crucially upon the balance of class forces and how the Communist
Party positions itself in relation to those forces” (p. 142).
Every contemporary conflict can be assessed within this wider panorama. Is
the oil-grabbing Iraq occupation the opening gambit in a long-term struggle
that will violently oppose the two seemingly inseparable trading partners
over the control of the world’s key strategic resource? This was the
question Harvey asked in The New Imperialism. But the current book, having
demonstrated with greater precision the extent to which the neoliberal model
of economic management has become the ruling paradigm across the earth,
tends rather to focus on the balance of class forces that will be decisive
in the resolution of a major crisis. It is here that the political question
of the foundations of the neoliberal consensus becomes crucially important
to the citizens of the purportedly democratic nations, who still may have
some chance to swing the balance of majority opinion towards a rejection of
the worst kinds of decisions (like those taken systematically by the Bush
administration). For the paradoxical and sobering truth (I have to say this
directly to Americans) is not only that we elected those who have brought
the country to the present impasse, but more pertinently, that no one among
the so-called “Left” or “progressives,” and least of all among the
Democrats, has been able to come up with an alternative that can unseat the
neoliberal model. Clinton, in this respect, merely upped the ante of the
speculative boom, thereby ushering in the disastrous crisis-management of
Bush, after the stock-market crash of mid- 2000 and the events of September
2001. The citizens of practically every other developed country can make a
similar self-critique, even if, with the partial exception of Britain, their
governments did not face such tests and do not bear such direct
responsibility. So one crucial question is, where have we gone wrong on the
Left, since the mid-1970s when the neoliberal option first emerged, then the
early 1980s when it already began to take on its definitive political
configuration? And more importantly, what sort of counter-hegemony could
safely steer the world beyond the looming likelihood of a violently imperial
slicing of the Gordian knot, on a scale tragically greater than that of the
current disaster in Iraq?
These are the problems that challenge the reader of A Brief History of
Neoliberalism to overcome sheer fascination with such an intricate account
of the road to capital bondage in the name of individual freedom. Indeed,
this book of exacting historical detail is also a sustained invitation to
consider the different meanings of the word freedom, which, as Harvey points
out with a quote from Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, can be “the
freedom to exploit one’s fellows, or the freedom to make inordinate gains
without commensurate service to the community, the freedom to keep
technological inventions from being used for public benefit, or the freedom
to profit from public calamities secretly engineered for private advantage”
(p. 36). By retracing the way that the very premises of nineteenth century
liberal capitalism led to the disasters of the two World Wars, Polanyi
sought to make the reader consider all the complex economic and
institutional balances that would be needed to insure the justice and equity
of “freedom in a complex society” (which is the title of the last chapter of
The Great Transformation). Harvey’s book has similar ambitions. So let’s
restate the major political questions that it raises. Why did neoliberal
theory gain such a hold over the “common sense” of broad majorities? How
did it then evolve into an electorally effective neoconservativism? What has
halted the formation of a counter- hegemony? Why does the seemingly
self-evident thesis of a resurgence of upper-class power have so little
political currency in today’s debates?
Like Boltanski and Chiapello in France (whom however he does not cite),
Harvey develops the theme of a growing split, from the late sixties onward,
between the traditional working-class concern for social justice and the New
Left concern for individual emancipation and “full recognition and
expression of particular identities” (the split between what the French
sociologists call “critique sociale” and “critique artiste”). With a sense
for the complexity of the issues, he remarks that “neoliberalism did not
create these distinctions, but it could easily exploit, if not foment,
them.” And he goes on to say that “Neoliberalization required both
politically and economically the construction of a neoliberal market-based
populist culture of differentiated consumerism and individual
libertarianism” (p. 42). Various kinds of extremely interesting evidence
are then adduced to suggest that corporate foundations and think tanks ? via
works such as Nozick’s Anarchy State and Utopia ? made deliberate attempts
at the inculcation of market-oriented variations on counter-cultural values.
Harvey’s strongest gesture in the direction of cultural critique comes
during his account of the bankruptcy of New York City ? which he
characterizes as a departure point for the entire process of
neoliberalization. Faced with a fiscal crisis, “a powerful cabal of
investment bankers (led by Walter Wriston of Citibank) refused to roll over
the debt and pushed the city into technical bankruptcy” (p. 45). What
followed was an assertion of upper- class power over a city that had
engaged, from the bankers’ viewpoint, in excessive provision of public
services and excessive concessions to unions. To prove the deliberate nature
of this disciplinary project, Harvey quotes then-president Ford’s Treasury
Secretary, William Simon, who maintained that the terms of any bail-out
should be “so punitive, the overall experience so painful, that no city, no
political subdivision would ever be tempted to go down that road again” (p.
46). But what would the new road look like? All those involved in cultural
production should pay close critical attention to the way Harvey depicts the
restructuring of New York City by the bankers:
“The creation of a ‘good business climate’ was a priority. This meant using
public resources to build appropriate infrastructures for business
(particularly in telecommunications) coupled with subsidies and tax
incentives for capitalist enterprises. Corporate welfare substituted for
people welfare. The city’s elite institutions were mobilized to sell the
image of the city as a cultural centre and tourist destination (inventing
the famous logo ‘I Love New York’). The ruling elites moved, often
fractiously, to support the opening up of the cultural field to all manner
of diverse cosmopolitan currents. The narcissistic exploration of self,
sexuality, and identity became the leitmotif of bourgeois urban culture.
Artistic freedom and artistic license, promoted by the city’s powerful
cultural institutions, led, in effect, to the neoliberalization of culture.
‘Delirious New York’ (to use Rem Koolhaas’s memorable phrase) erased the
collective memory of democratic New York. The city’s elites acceded, though
not without a struggle, to the demand for lifestyle diversification
(including those attached to sexual preference and gender) and increasing
consumer niche choices (in areas such as cultural production). New York
became the epicentre of postmodern intellectual and cultural production….
Working-class and immigrant New York was thrust back into the shadows, to be
ravaged by racism and a crack cocaine epidemic of epic proportions in the
1980s that left many young people either dead, incarcerated, or homeless,
only to be bludgeoned again by the AIDS epidemic that carried over into the
1990s” (p. 47).
Did the currency of the word “class” fall at the very moment when a
commodified culture began to rise on the postmodern communications markets?
What’s being sketched out in the passage above is a specific urban history
of the way that cultural production was subordinated to financialization, in
a process that ultimately leads to emergence of what Saskia Sassen calls the
“global cities.” But to what extent can the debilitation of the Left ? or
the sundering of “artists’ critique” from “social critique” ? really be
ascribed to the corporate instrumentalization of earlier counter-cultural
experiments in a Nietzschean transvaluation of values? And to what degree
could such a trend be simply reversed, and a trait drawn through both the
desire for emancipation and the cultural strategies of identity and gender
politics ? as Harvey and many other Marxist theorists seems at times to
suggest or wish?__These are complex questions which demand thorough
examination and strategic responses from everyone whose cultural sympathies
lie anywhere near the New Left (and particularly from those who, like
myself, do not think that any simple reversal of history is possible). The
problem, as Harvey’s further analysis indicates, is that for the Democratic
Party to ever shift the balance away from the current
neoliberal/neoconservative hegemony, and for it to become credible again as
a valid opposition, it would have to expand its popular base, even while
shrugging off the dependency on powerful financial interests into which it
was pushed by the Republican’s ability to easily command huge electoral
budgets. Such a transformation, which has clearly become urgent, would
require reinforcement from every direction ? including art and culture. The
situation is not so dissimilar in many European countries. To generate the
resolve needed to form cross-class alliances and to seriously oppose the
agenda that now traverses both sides of the mainstream political spectrum,
would middle- class cultural producers and “symbolic analysts” (to use
Robert Reich’s phrase) not have to give up every kind of tacit complicity
with the corporate program? But could they gain the strength to do this by
denying key issues that emerged in the 1960s, and attempting instead to
reconfigure an address to working classes that have been so extensively
targeted by a reactionary nationalist rhetoric?
The other major cultural issue that arises from consideration of the ways
that neoliberal theory translates into popular common sense has to do with
the emergence of the neoconservative position, first in the US, but now with
an increasing carry-over into Europe, via the repressive strategies of
figures such as Blair, Sarkozy, etc. Here, Harvey follows Polanyi in
suggesting that neoliberalism ? the contemporary form of Polanyi’s
“laissez-faire economics” ? can only resort to authoritarianism, once its
own reduction of all human relationships to contracts has definitively
undermined the solidarities and reciprocities that make social life viable.
Neoconservativism, he notes, “has reshaped neoliberal practice in two
fundamental respects: first, in its concern for order as an answer to the
chaos of individual interests, and second, in its concern for an overweening
morality as the necessary social glue to keep the body politic secure in the
face of internal and external dangers…. The neoconservatives therefore
emphasize militarization as an answer to the chaos of individual interests”
(p. 82). It goes without saying that they make an equally strong appeal to
religion, to ethnic or even racial identity and indeed to nationalism (which
in most countries, for the time being, is still distinct from
militarization). How can these appeals be countered? What kinds of beliefs
and daily practices ? or “structures of feeling,” as Raymond Williams might
have said ? can achieve greater persuasive force than the recourse to
traditional values, with all the emotion and adherence they can so readily
evoke? The substance of belief, or better, the sources of shared conviction,
emerges as the ultimate political question.
Early on in his precise and powerful book, Harvey points out how “common
sense” can be “profoundly misleading, obfuscating or disguising real
problems under cultural prejudices.” He goes on to quote Gramsci’s
conclusion that “political questions become ‘insoluble’ when ‘disguised as
cultural ones'” (p. 39). This was already the position he had adopted in The
Condition of Postmodernity, in 1990. His latest study, imbued both with the
urgency of looming crisis and with the renewed strength of the oppositional
movements that have gathered since that time, goes a good deal further in
marshaling the arguments that can convince even the most reticent reader
that what we have seen in the last three decades is effectively a
restoration of upper- class power, which now demands a concerted response.
How can those arguments be translated into what he calls “good sense” ? that
is, a reasoned and deeply felt conviction that a more egalitarian and less
drastically exploitative way of organizing social relations is both possible
and necessary? What transformation in the common language would be required
to bring a word like “class” back to the lips of those who have been so
concretely disempowered by the upper classes?
In its Greek etymology, the word “scandal” designates a stumbling block, a
hidden stone on the path before you. Later it came to mean an offense to
religion by the reprehensible behavior of a cleric, before taking on the
modern sense of a revelation causing damage to a private reputation. Today’s
secular clerks ? who don’t call themselves intellectuals anymore, but often
prefer the name of cultural producers ? have become ashamed to use the word
“class” in conversation with those who, like them, occupy the uncertain
middle ranks of society, and wish neither to fall into necessity, nor to be
tripped up on a possible path to comfort and ease. But the disproportionate
power of those in the highest ranks now appears as a radical offense to any
belief in a viable future on the shared ground of this planet. For all the
precision and power of its arguments, David Harvey’s book may not yet have
invented the complex cultural and affective languages ? or the renewed
understandings of Polanyi’s notion of “freedom in a complex society” ? that
could help entire populations forge broad alliances against the nakedly
clear effects of ruling-class power, in the world of Halliburton, BP,
Fidelity Investments, Elf-Total-Fina, Bill Gates, Siemens, Baron Seilli?res,
Carlos Slim, Bloomberg’s, Union des Banques Suisses, Telefonica, and all the
other proper names that have gradually found their place on our mental maps.
But this succinctly written book affirms ? with scandalous good sense ? the
intensifying need and desire for that new tongue.