Waht is Matrix-Liberalism?

The End of the World as We Know It

John Gray, The Guardian, September 15, 2007

Over the past few decades, many of the ideas of the far left have found new homes on the right. Lenin believed that it was in conditions of catastrophic upheaval that humanity advances most rapidly, and the idea that economic progress can be achieved through the devastation of entire societies has been a key part of the neo-liberal cult of the free market. Soviet-style economies left an inheritance of human and ecological devastation, while neo-liberal policies have had results that are not radically dissimilar in many countries. Yet, while the Marxist faith in central planning is now confined to a few dingy sects, a quasi-religious belief in free markets continues to shape the policies of governments.

Many writers have pointed to the havoc and ruin that have accompanied the imposition of free markets across the world. Whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America or post-communist Europe, policies of wholesale privatisation and structural adjustment have led to declining economic activity and social dislocation on a massive scale. Anyone who has watched a country lurch from one crisis to another as the bureaucrats of the IMF impose cut after cut in pursuit of the holy grail of stabilisation will recognise the process Naomi Klein describes in her latest and most important book to date. Visiting Argentina not long before the economic collapse of 2002, I found the government struggling to implement an IMF diktat to roll back public spending at a time when the economy was already rapidly contracting. The result was predictable, and the country was plunged into a depression, with calamitous consequences in terms of poverty and social breakdown.

Klein believes that neo-liberalism belongs among "the closed, fundamentalist doctrines that cannot co-exist with other belief-systems ... The world as it is must be erased to make way for their purist invention. Rooted in biblical fantasies of great floods and great fires, it is a logic that leads ineluctably towards violence." As Klein sees it, the social breakdowns that have accompanied neo-liberal economic policies are not the result of incompetence or mismanagement. They are integral to the free-market project, which can only advance against a background of disasters. At times, writing in a populist vein that echoes her first book No Logo, published seven years ago, Klein seems to suggest that these disasters are manufactured as part of a deliberate policy framed by corporations with hidden influence in government. Her more considered view, which is also more plausible, is that disaster is part of the normal functioning of the type of capitalism we have today: "An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial. The appetite for easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency and real estate markets into crisis-creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis and the dotcom collapse all demonstrate."

There are very few books that really help us understand the present. The Shock Doctrine is one of those books. Ranging across the world, Klein exposes the strikingly similar policies that enabled the imposition of free markets in countries as different as Pinochet's Chile, Yeltsin's Russia, China and post-Saddam Iraq. Part of the power of this book comes from the parallels she observes in seemingly unrelated developments. In a fascinating and alarming examination of the underside of recent history, she notes the affinities between the policies of shock therapy imposed in the course of neo-liberal market reform and the techniques of torture that have been routinely used by the US in the course of the "war on terror". Klein begins her first chapter with a moving account of a conversation she had with a victim of a covert programme of mind-control experiments, carried out in Canada in the 1950s, which used people suffering from minor psychiatric ailments to try out techniques of "de-patterning" that aimed to scramble and reshape their personalities.

Employing electroshock therapy, sensory deprivation and drug-induced comas, these experiments helped develop some of the "coercive interrogation techniques" that have been practised in Guantánamo Bay. Klein uses torture as a metaphor, and does not claim any cause-and-effect link between its re-emergence and the rise of neo-liberal shock therapy; but she does point to some disquieting similarities. Individuals and societies have been "de-patterned" with the aim of remaking them on a better, more rational model. In each case, the experiments have failed, while inflicting lasting and often irreparable damage on those who were subjected to them.

But has the free market experiment failed? As Klein sees it, free market shock therapy may actually have succeeded in achieving its true objectives. Post-invasion Iraq may be "a ghoulish dystopia where going to a simple business meeting could get you lynched, burned alive or beheaded". Even so, Klein points out, Halliburton is making handsome profits - it has built the green zone as a corporate city-state, and taken on many of the traditional functions of the armed forces in Iraq. An entire society has been destroyed, but the corporations that operate in the ruins are doing rather well. Klein's message, then, seems to be that - at least in its own, profit-centred terms - disaster capitalism works.

There can be no doubt that fortunes have been reaped from the Iraq war as they have been from other experiments in disaster capitalism. Yet I remain unconvinced that the corporations Klein berates throughout the book understand, let alone control, the anarchic global capitalism that has been allowed to develop over the past couple of decades - any more than the neo-liberal ideologues who helped create it foresaw where it would lead. Rightly, Klein insists that free market ideology must bear responsibility for the crimes committed on its behalf - just as Marxist ideology must be held to account for the crimes of communism. But she says remarkably little about the illusions by which neo-liberal ideologues were themselves blinded. Milton Friedman and his disciples believed a western-style free market would spring up spontaneously in post-communist Russia. They were left gawping when central planning was followed by the criminalised free-for-all of the 90s, and were unprepared for the rise of Putin's resource-based state capitalism. These ideologues were not the sinister, Dr Strangelove-like figures of the anti-capitalist imagination. They were comically deluded bien-pensants, who promoted their utopian schemes with messianic fervour and have been left stranded by history, as the radiant future they confidently predicted has failed to arrive.

The neo-liberal order is already facing intractable problems. The Iraq war may have allowed another experiment in shock therapy, but a failed state has been created as a result of which Gulf oil - which a former chair of the US joint chiefs of staff accurately described as "the jugular vein of global capitalism" - is less secure than before. Faced with defeat in Iraq, the Bush administration seems to be gearing up for an assault on Iran - a desperate move that would magnify the existing catastrophe many times over. At the same time financial crisis has reached into the American heartland as an implosion in speculation-driven credit markets has started to spread throughout the system. It is impossible to know how these crises will develop, but it is hard to resist the suspicion that disaster capitalism is now creating disasters larger than it can handle.

Always Changing (The kid needs to find his lyrical voice)

“Always changing” is the product of the LP’s sense of no-time. Speaking to Mary Travers on April 26, 1975, Dylan commented upon the concept of time, the point he tried to make being not only that “the past, the present and the future all exists”, but that “it’s all the same” — something learned from Norman, Dylan told Jonathan Cott, who used to teach that:

You’ve got yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room, and there’s very little that you can’t imagine happening.

Dylan’s assertion to Malt Damsker that he didn’t perform the songs on Blood On The Tracks particularly well may be surprising but, he went on, “they can be changed... “. In fact, Dylan has continually reworked the songs, changing the lyrics again and again in such songs as “Simple Twist Of Fate” and “Tangled Up In Blue”. Dylan ties up ideas of time and change to the idea of song-as-painting with specific reference to “Tangled Up In Blue” on the jacket notes to Biograph, where he says of the song:

I was just trying to make it like a painting where you can see the different parts but then you also see the whole of it. With that particular song, that’s what I was trying to do... with the concept of time, and the way the characters change from the first person to the third person, and you’re never quite sure if the third person is talking or the first person is talking. But as you look at the whole thing, it really doesn’t matter.

On the hope of an intellectual Tradition Outside of the West (India as the world center of moderation)

"The effort to create wealth in urban areas through export-oriented industries - part of the "let some get rich first" policy announced by Deng and affirmed by his successors - has given the Chinese economy an average growth rate of 10 percent and made it the fourth largest in the world. Yet China remains one of the world's poorest countries. More than 150 million people survive on a dollar a day. About 200 million of the rural population are crowding the cities and towns in search of low-paying jobs.

More than four million Chinese participated in the 87,000 protests recorded in 2005, and these statistics may not fully convey the rage and discontent of Chinese living with one of the world's highest income inequalities and deteriorating health and education systems, as well as the arbitrary fees and taxes imposed by local party officials.

Much of this, Wang said, could be laid at the feet of the "right-wing radicals" or neoliberal economists who cite Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek (advocates of unregulated markets who inspired Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s) and who argue for China's integration into the global economy without taking into account the social price of mass privatization. And it is they, Wang added, who have held favor with the ruling elite and have dominated the state-run media.

Only in the last decade, Wang said, have intellectuals of the New Left begun to challenge the notion that a market economy leads inevitably to democracy and prosperity. China's intention to join the World Trade Organization (which it did in 2001) provoked unexpectedly sharp debates among scholars. As Wang described it, the terms of the debate had changed: "Many people knew by then that globalization is not a neutral word describing a natural process. It is part of the growth of Western capitalism, from the days of colonialism and imperialism."

Which is not to say the New Left embraced an easy antiglobalist position; it has been critical of recent anti-Japanese and anti-American outbursts among urban, middle-class Chinese - of what Wang dubbed "consumer nationalism."

Wang added: "Many people also learned that the reason the Chinese economy did not collapse like the Asian tiger economies in 1997 was that the national state was able to protect it. Now, of course, China with its export-dominated economy is more dependent on the Western world order, especially the American economy, than India."

In January of this year, Wang published a long investigative article exposing the plight of workers in a factory in his hometown, Yangzhou, a city of about one million. According to Wang, in 2004 the local government sold the profitable state-owned textile factory to a real estate developer from Shenzhen. Worker-equity shares were bought for 30 percent of their actual value, and then more than a thousand workers were laid off after mismanagement of the factory led to losses.

In July 2004, the workers went on strike. In what Wang calls an agitation without precedent in the history of Yangzhou, the workers obstructed a major highway, halted bus traffic and attacked the gates of local government buildings.

Wang told me that he was helping the workers to sue the local government. "People claim," he said, "that the market will automatically force the state to become more democratic. But this is baseless. We only have to think about the alliance of elites formed in the process of privatization. The state will change only when it is under pressure from a large social force, like the workers and peasants."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/13/world/asia/13iht-left.3148238.html?_r=1

In the ideas of Hayek and Friedman we seem to meet something that is more than just theory, but a pure force already existent in the world willed into (reality detatched) writing. In their writings we find the intellectual framework for dismantling the hard won gains and support/societal structure of a multitude of varied cultures, and the blank slate generation of upended cultures who find everything they once grasped disappearing in a haze of numbers and business contacts. Those without an interest in the intellectual movements of professors in Anglo-Saxon countries are suddenly being told that they way their lives were organized was a mere illusion and this is the way the world truly works, no matter its unsustainability, your living standards, and your own cultural beliefs. To these people who were not brought up in the framework of western capital movements, neoliberalism came down from their own leadership like a natural disaster, with no rationale in their own traditions to explain it to them. Why does the state owned factory need to be sold off, why the decrease in wages, the reduction in living standards, etc? In western market terms these are explained as becoming competitive, profit generating, etc etc, but to the workers of the factory there is no reason, it is just foolishness. And in the end it was the common sense view of the outside that was right, it was foolishness, but how to explain common sense to the culture of power that no longer saw the world from the point of view of the universal? Neoliberal belief seems to go hand in hand with power, those with power who dont care just getting the jist of it and those who do espousing it. The everybody else is forced trying to fight for minor concessions, for gains we already once had, writing footnotes in the margins of Hayek and Friedman.

What makes this all the more frustrating is this has been what the left has been doing for the last twenty years, and we seem to have gotten nowhere, as we see in this article by a leading Chinese leftist. He is focused on finding a China model of development, but in the end he is just writing in Chinese critiques of Hayek that have existed in the west for the last 40 years. I wish him the best of luck, and I admire that he thinks the communist party can still be a force for change (which I think it can be too, if only because of the symbolic aspect of its origin), but to me it just seems that the intellectual movement has stalled and we are stuck watching the markets repeat the same damn mistakes. Maybe this is what is termed as accelerationism (leftists who believe we should just let captitalism run wild, release it completely, to speed up its ineivitable collapse) but a belief in a socalled accelerationism is a pretty pathetic concession.

In a world where the power of state is dismantled except to protect the anarchy of market forces, what happens to the segments of the population who are not capable of playing the 10% of the world's game?

"The dangers of failing to improve conditions for the majority are clear to Wang: "If we don't improve the situation, there will be more authoritarianism. We have already seen in Russia how people prefer a strong ruler like Putin because they are fed up with corruption, political chaos and economic stagnation. When radical marketization makes people lose their sense of security, the demand for order and intervention from above is inevitable."

This is the new capitalism, the authoritarian based model of Singapore and China which are used to rein in the market's excesses. You can see it even in America, where frustration with congress is at an all time high and there is a strong anger that nobody can take on wall street. If a moderate capitalism once led to an open society, a radical capitalism is leading to a dysfunctional anarchy/failed state or an authoritarian one, a government formed by the market through the money people are willing to invest in it to shape policy. While the situation in Thailand is complicated, I think it is pretty clear that democracy and neoliberalism have failed Thailand. Before you can argue that it merely didnt significantly help 90% of Thailand's population, but with the Red's reterritorialization of the Ratchaprasong area, we have a vision of Thailand as a country straddling the border of failed/authoritarian state.

I don’t really go on the internet, it’s like a ouija board, it’s like letting someone into your head, behind your eyes. It lets randoms in.

When's the third album Burial? Here's a great interview (the only one I can find, there's been none since) from 2007.

http://www.thewire.co.uk/articles/347/print

ALSO a great week, as everyones favourite band Caribou releases there newest album. Dload it here
http://rs957.rapidshare.com/files/361105740/caribou.rar

search and there is always more detail

wat is going on?

http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=402&Itemid=32

amazing

Incapability and Consumption

The Middle East seems infinitely capable of sucking away our bloatedness...


Those sorts of figures define the U.S. military in the Bush era -- and now Obama's -- as the most materiel-profligate war-making machine ever. Where armies once had baggage trains and camp followers, our camp followers now help plant our military in foreign soil, build its housing and defenses, and then supply it with vast quantities of food, water, fuel, and god knows what else. In this way, our troops carry not just packs on their backs, but a total, transplantable society right down to the PXs, massage parlors, food courts, and miniature golf courses. At Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan, there was until recently a “boardwalk” that typically included a “Burger King, a Subway sandwich shop, three cafes, several general stores, a Cold Mountain Creamery, [and an] Oakley sunglasses outlet.” Atypically enough, however, a TGI Friday’s, which had just joined the line-up, was recently ordered shut down along with some of the other stores by Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal as inimical to the war effort.

* Believe it or not, according to a recent report by the Pentagon inspector general, private contractor KBR, holding a $38 billion contract to provide the U.S. military with “a range of logistic services,” has cost Washington $21 million in “waste” on truck maintenance alone by billing for 12 hours of work when, on average, its employees were actually putting in 1.3 hours.

* Believe it or not, for instance, U.S. commanders in our war zones have more than one billion congressionally mandated dollars a year at their disposal to spend on making “friends with local citizens and help[ing] struggling economies.” It’s all socked away in the Commander’s Emergency Response Program. Think of it as a local community-bribery account which, best of all, seems not to require the slightest accountability to Congress for where or how the money is spent.

Though it’s seldom thought strange (and rarely commented upon in the U.S.), the Pentagon practices war as a form of mass consumption and so, not surprisingly, bears a striking resemblance to the society it comes from. Like the Taliban, it carries its way of life to war on its back.

It’s striking, of course, that all this is happening at a moment when, domestically, small businesses can’t get loans and close to 10% of the population is officially out of work, while state governments are desperately scrabbling for every available dollar (and some that aren’t), even as they cut what would once have been considered basic services. In contrast, the Pentagon is fighting its distant wars as if American pockets had no bottoms, the national treasury had no
limits, and there was quite literally no tomorrow.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175228/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_numbers_to_die_for__/#more

The US government as last consumer standing, at least at this point. Where else to go? Just keep handing out the contracts, until carbon trading is up and running. Why the ugly distorted mirror reflections of each other (Taliban and US)? The host defines its virus. Why are the lessons not only not learned, but failed again in an obscene manner? The illusion of necessity is gone. How have we become so disconnected from immediate history? By being able to shape it so easily, a toy, a remix. Where is it going? Where it has been going, where it has been going...