↪Cavacava The problem is not inequality per se, but the differences in growth. In the US case, numbers released the other day show that between 2008 and 2016, growth in real income (not wealth mind you, but income) was 10.6% for the 90% percentile of the population, but 0.4% for the bottom 10%. Or to put it in starker terms, in the seventeen years since 1999, median household income increased by exactly $384. One ought to track these numbers along along with standard of living measures to get a fuller picture of course, but on the face of it they are insane to me.

Please provide reference. I looked but did not see this information. I have no way to compare it, it may be that these are excellent results compared to other countries, or dismal, without reference it is impossible to know. Also the time period referenced included the largest depression since the Great Depression of 1930. You are talking about an 18 trillion dollar GDP economy, which can yield unexpected numbers especially when you are talking about average per capita information.

The article you reference explains the effects of Quantitative Easing with the Central Bank initialed in response to the sharp down turn that was experienced between 2009 and 2012. The author states:

There are distributional effects that occur with monetary policy. When we lower interest rates, there are definitely some people worse off. The people that are worse off are people that are saving. But the people that are better off are the people who are borrowing. So take my daughter, who is in medical school, with student loans, and wants to buy a house, wants to buy a car, wants to buy new clothes, and then look at how many houses, cars and new clothes you [savers] are looking to buy.
So you are affected by the fact of low interest rates, but your consumption pattern probably won’t be dramatically affected as her consumption pattern. What that means is that when I am trying to get a good effect for the overall economy, the people who are borrowing tend to do more consumption than the people who are saving. And as a result, lower interest rates do tend to result in a stronger economy than we otherwise would have.

As far as Black, and other minority attendance in college. The following from Pew Research


This information does not jive with your worry. What I find disturbing is how expensive college, medical and other assets such as homes, autos and the rest have become. The amount of debt many have to incur to live the "American Dream', is obscene. At the same time the United States is spending more on defense that all other countries combined.



Why? We could have free medical and more for all with a third this money, instead we use it to protect our self from what? It is a great country that is all screwed up because the majority of its politicians are power hungry idiots, who are more interested in getting reelected then governing wisely . I also worry about the military, I simply do not trust them, how can two battle ships costing around a billion dollars each run into tankers which are several times their size...something is really very fucked up with the military.

The real burden or failure of the critic of the current socio-economic policy and system is to provide a better alternative than that what we currently have.

We've seen what socialism and communism have resulted in, poverty for the masses. Should we try and revert to the gold standard and disregard the fiat system? I don't think so. Debt is a moral neutral. It doesn't enslave as people can default.

Regarding health, we do take a proactive measure to ensure it is in good standing, what's wrong with that?

In essence, the default variable is swapped: one is not a healthy person who is currently not-sick: one is a always-potentially-sick person, who, at this point time, happens to be healthy (were it not for the continual self-intervention into the state of one's salubrity). One is essentially ones' biological risk profile. — StreetlightX

I'm not buying this as a central issue. Our biological risk profile feels very secondary to our true modern concern, which is for "the self" - the Romantic agent expressing every variety of power.

So sure, our bodies are part of that. Beauty and muscles and vigour are all potencies that concern us. And the modern world does promise us their availability in abundance or surplus. For a while - ever since Victorian notions of physical culture and self-improvement - the way to achieve that kind of perfection as a physical agent was to really work at it. A lot of sweat produced the results. Now the promise is that money can buy you the steroids, the plastic surgery, the personal trainer to provide the motivation. Or actually, have enough money - be a billionaire - and everyone will treat you as the most georgeous stud.

But again, this is one facet of the larger concern. It is worth exploring as a theme, however it is not central.

Think again about Romanticism as the response to the Enlightenment. Newtonian mechanics, and then Darwinism, painted a new vision of the human condition. We were reduced to meat machines. That was an actual biologicalisation of humanity - a change wrought by new science.

Humans really are more than biology in being fundamentally socio-linguistic beings. We do represent something new on Earth in being formed by a further grade of semiosis, a further step in the evolutionary story. After genes and neurons came the new code of words. And so H Sapiens became the symbolic species, regulated by a new realm of conceptual abstractions.

We are cultural beings - as well as biological ones. And then along comes the Enlightenment that both recognised this clearly - the moral philosophy of Hobbes, Locke and others got the fact of the social contract - and yet also, the more telling lesson of science seemed to be how much we were actually just "smart apes", and "meat machines", driven by the "survival of the fittest".

So the Enlightenment saw us as socialised animals - and a lot of good moral, political and economic theory flowed from understanding that individual human agency is essentially a culturally forged phenomenon. But then the emphasis fell more on the scientific shock of discovering we were really "just animals" at base.

Romanticism was the confused reaction to that shock. But at the core of Romanticism was the dualistic repost that human agency was sacrosanct. It stemmed not from biology, or even sociology - all that mundane materialistic machinery - but from another dimension to existence, the mind, the spirit, the will, the Platonic Good. The true answers lay within the self - its feelings, its values, its striving.

So when it comes to any modern obsession with "biological risk profiles", it is dream bodies we are talking about, not real ones. Our actual physical health is quantifiably better. At least for the baby boom generation - not so much for the junk food and couch potato generation perhaps. But modern life - driven by Romanticism and its dreams of unbound selfhood, limitless personal agency - does ask us to judge our bodies by the impossible standards of new cultural mythologies.

Shit. Just watch a youtube clip of dudes doing parkour and feel your self-esteem plumet. What they can do is physically inhuman. And you can't unsee it. It is always going to be a benchmark lurking in the back of your thoughts. Multiply that by n other examples of bodily prowess or agency and it is easy to see why you wind up in a state of generalised disatisfaction.

The variety of the modern world - its surplus of personal opportunities - means that in fact everyone can be good at something. We can all train and excel in some way. Yet if everyone is indeed doing that, then we also wind up enveloped by the knowledge of all the million other skills we never personally mastered. We end up both with high self esteem with what we have achieved - perhaps a six-pack or being great at salsa - and low self esteem because the number of things we didn't and never will achieve is inevitably far greater.

And neoliberalism basically does the same thing in terms of one's credit risk profile. — StreetlightX

Again, I would now go back to the bigger picture of nature at the thermodynamic level. The real story of humanity - post the Industrial Revolution - is how we in fact evolved yet a further semiotic step. We invented mathematical language. Ordinary language was about cultural organisation, social interaction. Then it actually became talk about abstraction. This enabled agency - formal and final cause - at a pure technological level.

It seemed that by discovering nature's laws, that put us humans in control of nature. But nature got the last laugh there. It led to the forming of a new system of control that was supra-human. We did become enslaved to a new thermodynamic imperative. Neoliberalism, globalisation and financialisation are just now the symptoms of our having uncovered the possibilities of technology, and those possibilities then flowering as a new level of semiosis/dissipative structure. A new planetary super-organism.

The key is entropy. Until the industrial age, humanity lived of the daily solar flux. We survived on what sunshine had to give. Well, that was also an already mechanised and industrialised existence of a kind. Agriculture had already been through its technological revolution. But it's precarioiusness was tied very tightly to the environment. The rains, the pests, the soil fertility. And then the accompanying social perils of raiding tribes, feuding neighbours, tyrant kings.

But with the Industrial Revolution, humanity plugged itself into the new energy dense fossil fuels that could be dug out of the ground. That completely changed the course of history. Entropically, we were no longer constrained by the daily solar flux. We became politically and economically enslaved to the new globalised mission of "drill, baby, drill".

The financialisation of the world economy was just part of removing the final social barriers to our alignment to that thermodynamic imperative. As you say, derivatives seemed a rational mechanism for producing safe liquidity. They allowed the risks of capital investment to be socialised - spread over the whole of society ... the society which was then meant to benefit.

So what went wrong? Mostly that folk just haven't realised that we are not in control of our own desires. Romanticism misled us about the true nature of being human. We bought into the mythology of being self-actualising agents rather than culturally-evolved creatures. And so because we fundamentally have rejected "society" as the source of our being, we completely fail to recognise the super-societal emergence of a new world order - the one founded on the wants of fossil fuel ... its very natural desire to be combusted as fast as humanly possible.

Our era is the great conflagration. And we are looking the other way. We think it needs to be all about the dawn of H.Romanticus. We are looking forward to achieving the ultimate self-actualised agency where we can all be the best we can be. It is all self, self, self. And mostly that is great fun.

And philosophy is not immune to this distracting vision. Just like science, or politics, or economics, it has become thoroughly aligned with the secret entropic project of fossil fuel. In talking about the need for romantic re-enchantment - the human project where everyone achieves full agency - it is just playing into the great conflagration. Modern society, as a dissipative structure, depends on that "self-making" mythology as the way to ensure it does it best to remove each and every obstacle standing in the way of accelerating "production".

You can look at Dubai and see amazing skyscrapers erupting out of bare desert. Just add dollars and watch it all grow. But eyes properly atuned can see oil speaking directly about its desires. Dubai represents a safe haven for capital in the world's most precarious setting - the oil rich Middle East. It is the symbol that says everything is just fine. The machine is still running even as all the surrounding nations with their installed dictatorships start to burn their societies to the ground.

So the question is what is really going on and where does it lead?

I say we have to first understand this is all about nature - and the entropic imperative is what is natural. Philosophers especially have the least excuse to be fooled by the thought that neoliberalism/financialisation/etc are unnatural responses. We can't get caught up in the Romantic analysis of the human condition. We have to start with the blunt truth the Enlightenment was right about our biological and social being. From there we can examine our current story with accuracy.

And so what is that story? It is that a super-social level of organism has formed - the one busy burning its way through a finite glut of cheap fuel. The future of this super-organism is either catastrophic collapse or a managed transition to some replacement entropic environment. Maybe our inventiveness can keep the game going by green tech, fusion reactors, solar panels, etc. The physics at least tells us this is a possibility.

But the fact that a cartoon character like Trump now leads the free world (no worse, a reality show character) shows how dismal the prospects of being the ones to effect the change really are.

Trump resonates because he is saying the illusion of control and potency is enough. We can take our hands off the wheel and let events whisk us along while we posture and pout, play our little charades of being in charge of where the entropic imperative of fossil fuel wants to take us.

In both cases what is at stake is a kind of massive intensification of individuation: there's nothing about you, even right down to your biosusbtance itself, that escapes the circuits of potential risk (sickness, debt). The precacity is built-in, as it were, right from the beginning of life itself. And again, this has the profound effect of basically completely altering the temporal order: because risk is the default orientation, the mitigation of risk no longer becomes the management of the possible but the management of the inevitable. — StreetlightX

This is what I object to. It is both right, but also missing the bigger point.

Putting a finger on it, you are speaking to what is right for the individual. It is all about the injustices and foolishness of modern life from the personal viewpoint. And my response is that there really is no such thing as the individual as imagined by Romanticism. We are always going to be formed as conscious agents by the semiotic systems of which we must partake.

Remember how you were taken by the enactive or ecological turn in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. It is all about being embodied in a real lived relationship with a world. This is a continuation of the same understanding.

There is no choice but to be entropic beings. That starts with being biological. And socially it continues. We can never transcend that materiality. But what we have lost sight of - through being caught up in the mythology of personal agency - is that there is a debate to be had, a practical one, about what control over Homo entropicus would look like.

What would it be like to be self-aware humanity able to formulate public policy that best befits our actual entropic situation?

Everyone is certainly moaning about the state of things. But few people are really asking the right kind of questions.

The disorientation you describe I think is present, but not 'new', — fdrake

Just wanted to pick back up on this comment as well. I agree that this much of what is described here is not necessarily new - one thinks of Marx's comment, in 1848, regarding 'all that is solid melting into air' (a reference, again, to capital's ability to abolish all mediations bar it's own need to accumulate) - but this is why I think (following Melinda Cooper), that something has changed with the birth of biopolitics. Basically, there was a point at least in which the body itself could be relied upon as a kind of fall-back in the face of any socio-political tumult: the body at least offered a kind of refuge or shelter from the devastation wrought 'out there' ("whatever happens, I least I have my health").

With the birth of biopolitics however, not even the body is exempt form the circuits of built-in precarity: what you essentially get is a kind of collapse of one of the central orienting distinctions of intelligible life, which is that between the 'inside' and the 'outside' of one's self, which enters into - to use Agamben's favoured phrase - a zone of indistinction. This is what's at stake in the medicalization of life. And once this happens, the categories that once used to exempt the body from it's circuits now begin to capture it: beyond the much mentioned 'commodification' of the body (in terms of say, stem cells, DNA sequences, and other, now 'patentable' biological 'innovations'), you also get - as again charted by Cooper - the militarization of biology, where the body itself becomes a site of security concern -

Cooper: "The domains of life that neoliberalism has sought to incorporate into commercial and trade law over the past two decades are now being forcibly recruited into an expansive politics of military security. Increasingly, then, any counterpolitics of health, ecology, and life will need to engage with the pervasive reach of the war on terror; to contest, in other words, the growing collusion between neoliberalism's politics of life and the imposition of a permanent state of warfare." This is also why, for someone like Agamben, the state of civil war counts as the dominant paradigm of our age: not international war but civil war, in which the boundaries again between the enemy 'out there' and the enemy' in here' are left indistinct, thus again licensing the most awful of atrocities. Roberto Esposito has in turn characterized our present condition as one of a generalized 'auto-immunity', where the body - whose distinction between the biological and the civic has been rendered inoperative - now attacks itself.

Beyond commodification and warfare, one can imagine other places in which categories once applicable to non-humans gradually shade into human considerations - I have in mind Agamben's other studies on the growing indistinction between animal and human, law and life, the sacred and the profane, etc.

So again, while it's true that this represents a culmination of long-term trends, what's changed is the specificity of that movement which has now increasingly encircled even the body, which at least at one point could be left out of it. In Marxist parlance, capital has set it's sights not only on the means of production, but on the means of (biological) reproduction as well. This change needs also to be tracked in tandem with the temporal shift in which capital, generalizing the debt form, now beings to place more and more importance on not just the mode of production, but on the speculative mode of prediction which underlies it's upheaval of temporal categories as well (cf. the work of Ivan Ascher on the 'portfolio society' which we now inhabit). But this last is a larger point that needs elaboration.

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Replies to others later, when I have the time.

Why — Cavacava

Why all this defense spending? Obviously, there is the self-perpetuating military-industrial complex which lobbies hard to keep all sorts of contracts flowing. Then there is the money we spend to do something on behalf of other people. What we do for the Europeans is presumably clear, what we are doing for the Iraqis and Afghanis is exceedingly unclear (at least to me). Plus there is the task of patrolling the open seas so that wicked nations like China or Russia don't decide to assert their self-interests. Then we need to be ready to totally destroy either the armed might of, or the mere existence of the North Korean state.

This from 1953

One reaction to the crisis of 2008, for example, has been (in my opinion) for right-wing public discourse to problematise levels of public debt that are not at all dangerous. This is a neo-liberal attack on the State, procaliming the need for 'austerity', not an increasing problem of debt. — mcdoodle

Yeah, this is very true: debt isn't in and of itself a problem, but it matters when placed in the context of a whole host of other developments. Specifically, the expansion of credit and debt needs to be balanced out by expanded capacity for income growth. But this is exactly what isn't happening. In fact, the expansion of credit was proposed precisely as a solution to stagnating wage increases for the low and middle classes. Couple this with the divestment in public goods, the dismantling of the welfare state, and the slow death of labor law, and you have recipe in which debt becomes dangerous.

And again, the other dimension here is the securitization of debt by banks enabled by the deregulation of financial markets: this basically means that debt now becomes a source of income which is used in turn to fund projects such that it becomes a structural part of the market; the creation of debt is both incentivized and necessary. And because banks - the very institutions that supply credit - are one and the same institutions that make tremendous amounts of money on this securitization, a market failure translates not merely to the crippling of this or that industry, but the very banking system itself. In essence what this means is that any shock to the system can no longer be localized, but ramifies throughout the economy, which has become more and more fragile. It's this interlocking system - of which debt is a part - that makes it so dangerous. The stakes of default are higher.

Otherwise I think you're right that the focus on public debt, and the almost total eclipse of any focus on private debt is, in fact, an utterly skewed approach to things. And again at stake is at kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that neoliberalism sets into motion: the demand for privatization and tax cuts is incoherently coupled with a demand for keeping public debt low at all costs: the very avenues of revenue raising are forcelosed at the exact same time as the state is asked lower it's debts. It's madness. And where this leads is by now well known - the cruelty of austerity which further entrenches states into cycles of debt, while at the same time destroying the state's capacity to encourage economic growth and placing them into what effectively amounts to a relation of debt imperalism. Greece is a well known case, but this is happening too in other places like - most recently, Sri Lanka. So again it's not debt as such that's the issue, but the economic complexes in which it functions to make it problematic.

So again: debt is OK if coupled with the ability to raise revenue/incomes. But in absence of the latter, it becomes fatal. And neoliberalism does exactly this.

It's not a socio-economic problem. Global poverty is at an all time low. Access to food, shelter, clean water and medical resources has never been as good.

People paint things as socio-economic because they think that they're poor if people have more than them. Homicides rates are extremely highly predicted by social inequality (not poverty). It isn't that people are poor, it's that some people have way too much, and that makes everyone feel like they don't have enough. This is a problem with status. Because we paint it as a money and stuff problem just shows how much we equate status with money and stuff. There are shit-ass wastes of space that are highly respected because they have so much stuff.

It wouldn't matter at all what it was that signified status, as long as it existed, and could be accumulated and displayed, there would be the haves and the have nots.

I don't see a solution, all I see in these discussions is Cain, plotting.

Please provide reference. — Cavacava

On middle class income growth:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/us-middle-class-incomes-reached-highest-ever-level-in-2016-census-bureau-says/2017/09/12/7226905e-97de-11e7-b569-3360011663b4_story.html?utm_term=.bf4157d9abbf



On black American median wealth:

https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/sep/13/median-wealth-of-black-americans-will-fall-to-zero-by-2053-warns-new-report

Re: the Wapo article, I was actually directed to it by a political scientist who noted that the celebratory tone of the title actually betrays the facts I listed above Re: the 'highest ever level' is a tiny increase in when measured against the 1999 high.

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And for Australia - which I don't imagine too many people care about but which matters to me!:

http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/a-coffee-a-year-how-much-australian-incomes-have-grown-since-2008-20170919-gyk983.html

"Australian weekly household incomes have grown by less than the price of a coffee a year since 2008" - i.e. AUD $3 over 9 years. coupled with: "At the same time, house prices in Sydney and Melbourne have risen by 100 per cent to reach medians of up to $1 million". One can only imagine the abysmal debt to income growth ratio.

I'm not buying this as a central issue. Our biological risk profile feels very secondary to our true modern concern, which is for "the self" - the Romantic agent expressing every variety of power. — apokrisis

You misunderstand: it's not so much that this this is a 'central issue' so much as that it marks the crossing of a threshold that was previously uncrossed, and indeed, uncrossable. And this crossing relieves us of the last bastion we had of excluding ourselves from the immediacy of risk that has always marked the 'cultural' realm. See my reply to fdrake above on what I mean. If you follow it, I'm entirely on board with the fact that we are more than our biology: in fact, it was this 'more than' that was co-opted into the circuits of risk long before the body. What is new is the introduction of the body into those circuits in the form of biopolitics. So you're preaching to the choir here in insisting that we're socio-cultural beings no less than biological ones. I not only agree, but the entirely line of reasoning presupposes it.

So I appreciate your entropic perspective which I think quite nicely compliments much of what I wrote here. As I said, this is a relatively new area of exploration for me, so I'm very much open to these ideas. I've had Robert Biel's the Entropy of Capitalism on my reading list for a few months now since discovering it's existence, which I'm hoping will fill out some of the pieces here. But as it stands my interest is in the confounding of categories of the intelligible, the collapse of temporal distinctions and the kinds of actions they licence. I'm interested in tracing the specific modulations of 'the human' which require a closer attention to sociology and historical ontology (in the vein of Foucault) - changes in our understanding of risk, of time, etc, and the specific, concrete mechanisms which enable them - than it does entropy, even as they (can) compliment each other.

To pin the blame on these sorts of things - 'skepticism', 'cynicism', etc mistakes a symptom for a cause. In this regard, I'm an old school historical materialist: look at the conditions - the political economy and beyond - which give rise to such attitudes, and direct change at that level. — StreetlightX

And I'm an old school spiritualist :P - look at the spiritual climate of the times and try to adjust to it, for you can certainly not change it by yourself. In my view, material circumstances - what you call political economy and beyond - are driven by spirit. Thus, to really succeed with any significant change, one needs the help of the gods as the Ancients would say. If they are on your side, nothing can stop you, and if they're not, then nothing can help you.

Yes, but you of course ignore how that spending relates to a country's economic power. When we compare it to GDP, we'll see that the US rests around 3% of GDP. That's where most countries are, give or take. Russia, Saudi, and Israel all have a greater military spending given their economies for example.

But of course, propagandists will never look at the facts as they really are. Just put a nice graph showing total value, and show how the US eclipses everyone else put together.

The real question though should be, if the US spends so much on military, why doesn't it completely dominate the world? Its military should be many tens of years ahead of everyone else. But I don't think this is actually the case.

If the problem is relative equality, then consider that it simply isn't possible to elevate everyone to the top, the only thing that is possible is to carve off the top. Participation trophies, no such thing as better and worse, only wicked people attain mobility to to the top, etc. This is what attempts to solve the inequality equates to.

It is definitely a noble mission to feed the starving, and cloth the naked, as it were, but beyond those bare minimums, nothing that doesn't become terrible, and destructive is foreseeable to me. People cannot be made equal in any way that matters significantly.

And China? It is close to USA in GDP, but no where near US in defense spending. It has maintained it at 1.3% of GDP for last several years. Less than half USA defense spnding, so much for your argument (N)
As stated, USA does not get what it pays for in defense spending.

And China? It is close to USA in GDP, but no where near US in defense spending. It has maintained it at 1.3% of GDP for last several years. Less than half USA defense spnding, so much for your argument (N)
As stated, USA does not get what it pays for in defense spending. — Cavacava

Yes, the US could possibly reduce defense budget to 2-2.5%. My only question is why US military is not tens of years ahead of everyone else already...

...this crossing relieves us of the last bastion we had of excluding ourselves from the immediacy of risk that has always marked the 'cultural' realm. — StreetlightX

Sorry but I'm still not seeing any clear issue of concern. Let's look at the examples you offer:

This is what's at stake in the medicalization of life. And once this happens, the categories that once used to exempt the body from it's circuits now begin to capture it: beyond the much mentioned 'commodification' of the body (in terms of say, stem cells, DNA sequences, and other, now 'patentable' biological 'innovations'), you also get - as again charted by Cooper - the militarization of biology, where the body itself becomes a site of security concern - — StreetlightX

So I take it the argument is the body used to be your own property - some kind of refuge. But now that aspects of human biology are now ownable as intellectual property somehow that becomes a new source of unease for ordinary individuals?

I'm not getting the ring of truth.

If you could claim patents on my genetics and go clone a whole bunch of me's, making profits and not needing my permission, then maybe I would freak out. Or maybe I might be so narcissistic as to think great, those guys will be good company.

But anyway, the point is that biotech can't do that. In the real world of today, it is commodifying stuff I would regard as generic and not personal. It wouldn't feel like an existential threat unless I start to feel left out in some fashion. Like maybe when I can't afford the vast benefits of stem cell injections into my brain that are making everyone else so much smarter (like next step Gattaca).

But knowing biology is being exploited commercially on a generic way does't sound like something that would make folk feel insecure within their own bodies. I don't see a connection.

Increasingly, then, any counterpolitics of health, ecology, and life will need to engage with the pervasive reach of the war on terror; to contest, in other words, the growing collusion between neoliberalism's politics of life and the imposition of a permanent state of warfare." — StreetlightX

OK, to take this quote, the suggestion here is that there is a health-affirming politics that is in a tussle with some neoliberal need for permanent destabilisation of the otherwise self-actualising individual. Pretty classic Romantic guff I would reply. Already we are expected to side with the good guys who stand for true individualism vs the always oppressive constraints of society,

Yes, the war on drugs and the war on terror are familiar scare tactics. Orwell predicted them. But they seem more inspired by the personal political insecurities of presidents - the need to bind a nation like the US by presenting a "visible enemy", a collective existential threat. Why would we think they advance the agenda of neoliberalism? At best, they a justification to mask a grab for control over resources. So an economic (and existential) agenda perhaps. But not one that is actually neoliberal in philosophy, more old fashioned colonialism.

Again, I see some extreme language but little to justify that rhetoric. And no link back from any general eco-fuzzy counterpolitics vs Kleinian shock doctrine arm-wrestle to your thesis about a resulting personal sense of biological precariousness.

In Marxist parlance, capital has set it's sights not only on the means of production, but on the means of (biological) reproduction as well. — StreetlightX

What does this mean? If capital is doing anything, isn't it just suppressing reproduction - as no one can afford time off for having kids? Reproduction seems only something capital hasn't thought through very well. So what do you have in mind here?

(cf. the work of Ivan Ascher on the 'portfolio society' which we now inhabit). — StreetlightX

Yep. It is true that quite a few countries are run by former financial market whizzes now, and literally economies are being run along portfolio investment lines. Derivatives are used to create nation-level liquidity. The theory is then that money will flow freely into the best national investment opportunities. A nation can then choose its own appetite for risk. Does it want to run a conservative or an aggressive fund.

So that is an important new development arising out of neoliberal thinking - the financialisation of national balance sheets.

But it seems way distance from any biopolitics or bodily precariousness. You haven't actually drawn a connection I can see.

I'm not getting any reason to see some link between the logic of neoliberalism and a new bodily sense of individual precariousness. And it is not because I don't want to see.

I agree that neoliberalism is about turning everything that composes life into a tradable commodity. That sounds a good idea, but then always results in an opaque and weakly regulated system that is easy to game. So that is a huge source of psychic instability. It erodes personal or community level control. The economy becomes as impersonal and capricious as the weather. We become helpless in its tides.

But where is the overt risk of your biology being monetised by impersonal forces? So far, there is not a single example of what this might mean in a way that is a notable fact.

The real question though should be, if the US spends so much on military, why doesn't it completely dominate the world? Its military should be many tens of years ahead of everyone else. But I don't think this is actually the case. — Agustino

Yeah, it's an interesting question. When you consider that the US has spent more than the rest of the world combined on its military year after year after year, and yet its observable military is only fractionally larger than other militaries, it makes me think secrete weapons (although not so secret now that I've told everyone).

Romanticism was the confused reaction to that shock...The true answers lay within the self - its feelings, its values, its striving. — apokrisis

Us individual humans are caught up in forces beyond our control and simply have to hang on for the ride as best we can. — apokrisis

I think these two ideas are related. Let's put ourselves in the shoes of the individual. Let's say he's educated, thoughtful, but not rich. He has one vote in a democracy. He is politically negligible. Maybe he's charismatic. But unless he's famous, this charism is also negligible. His voice is a voice lost among millions of voices.

Our individual is faced with a choice. Should he spend his free time away from work reading and thinking about how his nation or even global civilization could and should be improved or even saved from collapse? If he expects no power, than such knowledge is of little value for him. It's not only arguably of little value, the attainment of such knowledge is highly uncertain in the first place. What he is educated enough to know is that the intellectuals do not agree. Those who specialize either can't come to a consensus or cannot be sorted out by the non-specialist.

Do you see where I'm going with this? He can justify a selfish "Romanticism." He can embrace something akin to stoicism, skepticism, hedonism --attempt an individual solution. He can view his actions in the world as a stupidity to be endured. He can climb the career ladder by playing along with structures he doesn't believe in. He can pay his bills, hide in his little house, and pursue his idiosyncratic notion of happiness. Perhaps for you this is the opposite of Romanticism, since it is cynical. But abandoning the folly of the world aligns with the Christian component in Romanticism.

In short, I think you're saying that Romantics resist admitting things are out of their control. If so, I disagree. Or at least there is a "fuck the world" component to some Romanticism.

People cannot be made equal in any way that matters significantly. — Wosret

I agree. Freedom leads to economic inequality. If we could somehow start everyone with the same property and offer them the same education, tiny differences in genetics and the evolutions of their personality (in which chance will play) a role will "snowball" into bigger personality differences. Grasshoppers and ants. Most significant perhaps is the inequality (lack of sameness) of the hierarchies these individuals use to evaluate self and others. This factor is probably how massive economic inequality is possible in a democracy. Why doesn't the poor majority just tax the rich and take it wants legally? Because they identify themselves and their position in their private hierarchies in terms of culture, religion, race, etc., as much as they do via class.

The modern obsession with self-help, motivational and inspirational books and speakers and so on are basically signs of resignation, another emblem of depoliticization which aims to change individual to fit structure, rather than structure to fit individual, as it were. — StreetlightX

I complete agree. But "obsession" is slightly pejorative. It's easier to put a coat on than the heat the entire building, especially if we share the building with strangers with different notions of cold/hot. Depoliticization can also stem from the perception of a stalemate. In the US, for instance, there just is not a dominant vision of how the world should be in the first place. Maybe I'm sick of wearing my coat in the building but see the futility in trying to build a consensus.

Perhaps I see others arguing about the thermostat to no great effect. I certainly agree that the problem relative to any image of the way things should be is going to be systematic. But the problem itself can be described as a function of an idiosyncratic notion of cold/hot.

Do you see where I'm going with this? He can justify a selfish "Romanticism." He can embrace something akin to stoicism, skepticism, hedonism --attempt an individual solution. He can view his actions in the world as a stupidity to be endured. He can climb the career ladder by playing along with structures he doesn't believe in. He can pay his bills, hide in his little house, and pursue his idiosyncratic notion of happiness. Perhaps for you this is the opposite of Romanticism, since it is cynical. But abandoning the folly of the world aligns with the Christian component in Romanticism. — n0 0ne

I agree with you there. We do wind up having to make personal meaning of our own existence. But then the general political issue becomes how much of a burden that is for "ordinary folk".

This is the real question we would be asking of neoliberalism (if we can just set aside for the moment that larger question of whether it should be allowed to rape the Earth the way it is doing).

We all want to live lives that are meaningful. And our social system should deliver us that. Neoliberalism's promise on that score is we are given an unlimited possibility of the self-actualisation of our choice. It sounds just like the Romantic dream of being allowed to express our own personal potential to its fullest extreme.

But just as obviously, that neoliberal promise is pretty hollow and burdensome in practice. Who really needs its version of self-actualisation which is mostly about extreme consumption or extreme capital accumulation (power now being monetised via the new economics)?

So then the question becomes what should the average person do to construct personal meaning within a world that basically looks to be going mad (or as I put it, developing its own supra-human identity)?

Stoicism and cynicism seem like a response. But I would say that is retreating inwards and living in sufferance.

It does have some advantages so is not completely wrong. But there is the alternative of reaching out consciously to reforge local community. That is a positive response which would then collectively start to become an actual counterpolitical movement to roll back neoliberalism.

And indeed re-localisation has been a major theme among political activist for a decade now. If the problem is that globalisation has resulted in a life denominated in US dollars, then you can grab back power by creating local community time-banks and local community currencies.

The theory is just obvious. And you will find people trying to do that in every smart town or city now. But of course it does seem like a token scale effort for the most part. Neoliberalism still holds sway over the majority of lives. It is the way ordinary folk think. They have internalised the oppressor if you like (although, as I say, neoliberal theory itself is more neutral, less black and white, than its practice). So the current counter-politics is trialling change in small fashion. But it is also pretty vocal and clear about its approach.

And in fact - manifesting as the social enterprise approach beloved of Millenials - it is itself quite neoliberal in philosophy. So the economic model isn't really so much the problem. It is the lack of a place for social values and green values within a "market" approach to living life that creates a systemic ill.

This is why the kinds of authors cited in the OP make me despair. It's retreaded Marxism. And Marxism was retreaded Romanticism. We already know that model of socio-politics to be a dismal failure, consigned to the dustbin of history.

The way forward is to use neoliberalism against itself by building back in the local social and green values that the globalised version has managed to strip out. There is an actual pragmatic philosophical discussion going on out there in the real world, within every town and city with any intellectual capital, that goes right over the OP's head.

Of course then I have to go back to the larger fossil fuels story. We are still screwed unless a localised neoliberalism can connect us financially to a post-fossil fuel productive economy.

Again, that is why the OP prompts hair-pulling. We really don't need Marxist theorists fighting the same old class wars when they are dealing with things - like debt and entropy - about which they are philosophically clueless. They only muddy the water with their meandering musings at a time when utter clarity of thought is what's required.

Why doesn't the poor majority just tax the rich and take it wants legally? Because they identify themselves and their position in their private hierarchies in terms of culture, religion, race, etc., as much as they do via class. — n0 0ne

Actually, they did do that. While the US, like every other society, has always had hierarchies and inequality of wealth, there were two episodes of extreme inequality -- the Gilded Age (so named by Mark Twain) anding in the early 20th century, and the person time, which started around 1975 (give or take a few years). What was it that allowed these things to happen?

Mostly governmental policy. A huge amount of money was made in the dominate industry of the 19th century -- railroads -- and it was mostly made by government grants to the railroads, which were then milked for cash. Plus, there was no income tax at the time. That came about in 1920. By then a reform period had cooled off the railroad/iron/steel industries.

What triggered the second, current feeding frenzy by the rich (making them super richer) were changes in tax law, allowing them to keep and shelter much more wealth. (There were also some new digital industries which made a lot of people quite rich).

Outside of these two episodes, the ratio between the highest paid executive and the average worker in a company was stable and not absurdly exaggerated.

What triggered the second, current feeding frenzy by the rich (making them super richer) were changes in tax law, allowing them to keep and shelter much more wealth. — Bitter Crank

But what triggered or allowed these changes in tax law? I'm not trying to imply that there is a simple answer. I doubt there is.

Yes, the US could possibly reduce defense budget to 2-2.5%. My only question is why US military is not tens of years ahead of everyone else already... — Agustino

Because defense spending has followed a pattern first pioneered by the railroads back in the late 19th century. A handful of extremely avaricious railroad entrepreneurs (aka thieves) lobbied congress to build, and over build, railroads through the largely empty great plains to the economically small west coast -- the "transcontinental railroads". They were mostly a complete economic failure.

The failed because there was little demand for the transportation the several transcontinental roads offered. Once the railroads imported a few million European settlers into North Dakota to Kansas, the Missouri river to the Rockies, they produced a glut of agricultural products that exceeded the demand, depressing the ag market they depending on. Similarly, the silver mines opened near the railroads in the SW exceeded the demand for silver. The real purpose of the railroads was to get cash from the government for the "entrepreneurs".

Transcontinental railroads would have been needed anyway, just 30 to 50 years later.

President Eisenhower warned the American people of the Military Industrial Complex in his farewell address. His advice was ignored. Industry would use the military to milk procurement budgets, and the military would use industry to accumulate cargo that enhanced their sense of power, but generally didn't work all that well.

We have had repeated rounds of procurement in major weapons systems that just didn't deliver performance. Compare the B52 with numerous high tech bomber and fighter systems. The B52 has been flying for 60 years and still works well. The fighters sometimes show up dead on arrival. Too complicated, not reliable, waaaay too expensive, difficult to repair and service, crash-prone, etc.

Granted, not everything the military and industry work together on turns to shit. The nuclear arsenal seems to be very reliable. The AWACS have turned out well. We have a number of systems that are quite good, and quite a few that are so-so.

The corporations and military leaders got what they wanted the same way the railroad thieves got what they wanted. They descended on congressmen en masse, out maneuvered the objectors, a bribe or two here, a very generous donation there, maybe a junket onboard a bomber or submarine... you get the picture. Heavy duty lobbying.

But what triggered or allowed these changes in tax law? — n0 0ne

Two things. #1, pressure from wealthy individuals and businesses. How do wealthy people pressure congress? They underwrite their campaign costs, they give them gifts (under the table), they supply congressmen's staff with texts for tax bills with all the details worked out, and so forth. They also threaten congressmen with a loss of the goodies, or that they will move a plant out of their district, or will invest somewhere else--and that they will make it clear the congressman was responsible.

#2. Political parties are sometimes swayed by seductive economic theory, like supply-side economics, and trickle down economics. Lowering taxes on the rich will produce a wave of new investment which will benefit everyone. The economic benefits given to the rich trickle down to everyone. Win win. The trouble is that these schemes do not always work. Once in a while they do, but lower taxes on the rich too much while increasing spending is a sure-fire way to increase the annual deficit and the national debt.

Look, the masses only need to be appeased enough to keep them from rioting. The rich have to be pleased and be given plenty of real treasure, not just bread crumbs which the poor get. Since the wealthiest 1% control so much of the wealth, they are in a very real position to punish congressmen who get in the way.

I agree with you there. We do wind up having to make personal meaning of our own existence. — apokrisis

I take it that you don't fear the heat death. Neither do I.

I will be dead long before then. I'm just making a point of the gulf between private and public concern. Why do some work toward changes that they will not live to see? Perhaps for their descendants. Perhaps for other humans in general. Perhaps because it is "the" great outstanding problem. It's public intellectual's Mount Everest. Of course it's fascinating, too. Like picking a scab.

I don't know whether I am proud or ashamed to say that I feel pretty adapted to this mad world. I treat the madness I see lurking on the edges of my daily life as I might see a snake under a rock in the woods on the way to the well. I run my calculated risks, take pleasure in thinking my situation (writing this sort of thing) along with the normal pleasures, and hope the system doesn't disintegrate completely on my watch.

Truth be told, I worry more about lower back pain and skin cancer than global warming.
I have listened to the cacophony of voices for many years. Differing diagnoses, differing cures. If I am choose among Hellenistic descriptors for myself, I should probably go with skepticism. They enjoy serious conversation with a certain detachment --or "selfish" attachment to the local and private.

Where are you in this? Are you passionate about local communities? Or are you more of a Zizek? The world exist, messy as hell, as an opportunity to theorize about it?

Look, the masses only need to be appeased enough to keep them from rioting. The rich have to be pleased and be given plenty of real treasure, not just bread crumbs which the poor get. Since the wealthiest 1% control so much of the wealth, they are in a very real position to punish congressmen who get in the way. — Bitter Crank

Good point, this contrast between appeasing and pleasing. Still, one might think that a political party (after a rough start) could actually swell by delivering on its promises to tax the rich. The novel 1984 comes to mind. Winston sneaks off to talk to a "prole" about history and the prole blathers on about how his local bar used to serve a much bigger or better beer (something like that.) But that's not quite right for today. Some are completely tuned out, but others quite tuned in --except to the culture war and not the class war.

My thesis would be that the rich can only buy the government by dividing the poor. The poor are not innocent victims here, though. They just find alternative measures of human worth. Piety/religion on the one hand, perhaps, and a progressive humanism on the other hand. Part of my thesis is that this culture war is made possible by its participants actually having enough for the most part. A well-fed human (or even a stuffed-with-Cheetoes human) shifts quite naturally to symbolic hierarchy.

If we were truly as materialist (obsessed precisely with possessing enviable property) as some insist, the culture war would be dwarfed by pure economic envy. A grassroots party would explode and there would be a (perhaps permanent) bloodless revolution. Of course this would be a disaster. We would be machines utterly absorbed in a point system.

Where are you in this? Are you passionate about local communities? Or are you more of a Zizek? The world exist, messy as hell, as an opportunity to theorize about it? — n0 0ne

Well I have certainly lived a life of wealth and selfish privilege. I have been doing my own thing from an early age. :)

So yes, I don't get my hands dirty much in actual community practice. Partly because the theoretical value of that is a recently recognised thing, but mostly because I'm too lazy to spend evenings on committees or weekends on working bees.

Yet then I am recognised and even earn a living from offering what enough people find to be useful analysis. And selfishly that feels like a reasonable contribution.

So the honest answer would be that I started out in cynical mode and turned that into a paying gig. And I'm still a disengaged cynic at heart. Or at least by long habit. But that is also a good basis for understanding the world as it is and as it could or should be.

Thanks for a well-written, honest answer. That you make a living offering your analyses is enviable! I continue to indefinitely postpone writing "my book" (without expectation of pay). My career is intellectual but not philosophical. So it's one kind of thinking at work and another at play (the detached and form-fascinated contemplation of "terrible" ideas). But, anyway, lots of thinking. So small-talk, however friendly, moves a little slow for my taste. Hence no longing for lost community, but only a desire for rich, "serious" or intense conversation as is sometimes found on forums like this and among good friends.

I can't say that I envy the rich much. If I have health, quiet, some food, and an internet connection...then I'm OK. Happier than most.

Still, one might think that a political party (after a rough start) could actually swell by delivering on its promises to tax the rich. — n0 0ne

They did in the early 1900s -- the Progressives were fed up with graft and corruption. They elected reformers to the presidency (Theadore Roosevelt), progressives to congress, governorships, and the state legislatures. Milwaukee had 3 socialist mayors, one serving from 1916 to 1940. That one, Daniel Hoan, was considered the best, most effective mayor Milwaukee had. Farmers formed the Nonpartisan League in the upper midwest to fight for a fairer deal for agriculture; women won the vote, prohibition was instituted, and an income tax was instituted, to replace the revenue the government had received from taxes on alcohol. The trusts were attacked; Standard Oil was was broken up; so were the railroad trusts, and some others.

WWII happened in the middle of all this, as did the Russian Revolution in 1917. The RR of 1917 started a "red scare" which along with the KKK set back some reform elements, such as labor and civil rights reformers.

The Great Depression decade saw a resurgence of labor organizing, communist agitation in many social justice areas, and of course things like Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, and other New Deal programs. Then WWII, and an economic boom which benefitted many working class people. But, the good times couldn't last, and Republican--who by Reagan had migrated considerably towards a more extreme conservative position--started lowering tax rates on the rich while wasting a lot of money on the fucking Star Wars Initiative -- a trillion dollar boondoggle. (Before Vietnam, the US was pretty much out of debt.) Now were in very deep doo doo.

The socialist mayors of Milwaukee. See, no horns!

Thanks for the info. I don't read about this stuff often, but I was under the impression that class-consciousness was stronger once than it is now. I've watched some Chomsky documentaries, etc. It is indeed quite fascinating, but (for reasons sketched above) I never waded in that deeply.

As no one from nowhere special with no connections, I grew up experiencing the economy as another layer of nature. I adapted to it as individual. Give me just "enough" though and I'll immerse myself in the matrix of abstract non-revolutionary thought. Or maybe it's revolutionary, but it's a private revolution --a leaning in to the atomization that capitalism arguably encourages.