Sunday -- 10.09.11 -- Notes on Three Crises -- Brian Holmes
CONTENTS:
1. About this Sunday
2. Three Crises: 30s-70s-Today : the Concept
3. Three Crises: 30s-70s-Today : Chicago Sessions
4. Some questions to discuss on Sunday
5. Links
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1. About this Sunday
What: Three Crises Notes
When: Sunday -- 10.09.11 @ 8:00PM
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th Floor
Who: Free and open to all
On Saturday 10.08.11 evening at 6pm. Brian Holmes will be giving a talk at Liberty Park on "The End of the Financial Mind and the Transformation of Global Class Structure."
We would like to invite you the following night (Sunday) to 16 Beaver. Since our last conversation this summer, we have been contemplating to organize an intensive meeting together with Brian related to three historic crises. In the 30s, the 70s and today.
So much of this work Brian has been doing is precisely to understand the crises in our midst and the challenges it poses on the level of organizing ourselves to combat them.
The aim is to take a closer look at two turning points of economic and social history, to find out where we’ve been and what we have become as the United States and the world traverse a third major crisis. To grasp what’s happening before our eyes, and to gain some influence over the new forms of society that will emerge over the next decade.
We would like to take the occasion of his presence here in New York to think together this possibility in the form of an open discussion.
Below, we have some basic outline of the seminar he has been organizing with friends in Chicago at Mess Hall.
We will begin the evening in the structure of questions and answers. We formulated some questions below, which Brian will try to address directly, after which we can open up to a common conversation and touch more closely issues related to the occupation and the challenges for this movement.
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2. Three Crises: 30s-70s-Today : the Concept
The development of capitalism is marked, every thirty or forty years, by the eruption of extended economic crises that restructure the entire system in organizational, technological, financial and geopolitical terms, while also affecting daily life and commonly held values and attitudes. In the course of these crises, conditions of exploitation and domination are challenged by grassroots and anti-systemic movements, with major opportunities for positive change. However, each historical crisis has also elicited an elite response, stabilizing the worldwide capitalist system on the basis of a new integration/repression of classes, interest groups, genders and minority populations (whose definition, composition and character also change with the times). In the United States, because of its leading position within twentieth-century capitalism, the domestic resolution of each of the previous two crises has helped to restructure not only national social relations, but also the international political-economic order. And each time, progressive demands that emerged from the crisis period have been transformed into ideologies covering a new structure of inequality and oppression. By examining the crises of the 1930s and the 1970s along with the top-down responses and the resulting hegemonic compromises, we will cut through the inherited ideological confusions, gain insight into our own positions within neoliberal society, identify the elite projects on the horizon and begin to formulate our own possible agency during the upcoming period of instability and chaos.
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3. Some questions to discuss on Sunday
1. What brought you thinking about these crises?
2. What is a common ground between the three?
3. What distinguishes the current one we are living through?
4. The question of forms of resistance and organization and of conflictual interests also come to the fore. Has your research also delved into the processes of resistance in these prior crises?
5. If some contours emerge in this archeology of the last crises, what kind of problems become discernible for social movements?
6. There is a geneological moment in every archeological effort, putting the subjugated knowledges into play, in a contemporary light. Given this molecular process unfolding in our midst, could the work you are doing cast a light for the kinds of work that will need to be done for this resistance not to suffer the same fate as in the 70's which gave rise to neoliberalism?
7. In a recent text about the contemporary crisis, by Michael Hardt entitled 'The Two Faces of the Apocalypse', he plots out the centrality of the commons, both in an ecological sense and in terms of production in a post-fordist society today. And there he also outlines some of the commonalities and antinomies between these movements. And one of these antinomies returns to the question of organization. On the one hand, the urgencies confronted by ecological ruin, require urgent action, which could be facilitated by larger forms of organization. On the other, so much of the anti-capitalist struggle for the social-economic commons has struggled for a basic change in the forms of organization. And forms like the general assembly that is being experimented with in wall street or various councils formed in the context of the north african revolts, require time, are slow, and work best when smaller, more accountable, and direct. Can our urgent questions be addressed without sacrificing the necessary struggles for autonomy and greater self-organization? Can we avert a capitalist or statist appropriation of the discourse around and struggle for the dual senses of commons?
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4. Three Crises: 30s-70s-Today : Chicago Sessions
Description of the sessions from the self-organized seminar at Mess Hall in Chicago
1. Introduction: technopolitical paradigms, crisis, and the formation of new hegemonies.
We begin with a theoretical look at more-or-less coherent periods of capitalist development, known as technopolitical paradigms. During twenty to thirty-year periods, technologies, organizational forms, national institutions and global economic and military agreements all find a working fit that allows for growth and expansion, up to a limit-point where the paradigm begins to encounter conditions of stagnation, internal contradiction and increasing crisis. Autonomist Marxism helps us understand the dynamics of grassroots protagonism during the crisis periods. To grasp the mechanisms whereby systemic order is recreated, we turn to Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony as the construction of a set of discourses and practices that can articulate the behaviors of diverse classes and interest groups, in order to secure their consent to a new social hierarchy. The ingredients of a hegemony are moral, aesthetic, philosophical and epistemological; but these abstract categories of thought and imagination soon become intertwined with economic practices and institutional forms. Hegemony is the force of desire and belief that knits a paradigm together and sustains it despite manifest injustices.
2.Working-class movements and the socialist challenge during the Great Depression.
This session describes the emergence of Fordist-Taylorist mass production in the United States, then turns to economic and geopolitical conditions following the Crash of ‘29. We follow the interaction between labor movements and socialist/communist doctrines, while examining the major institutional innovations of the Roosevelt administration. Can the 1930s be understood as a “regulation crisis” of assembly-line mass production? What are the forces that provoked the crisis? Has the “New Deal” become an idealized figure of class compromise for succeeding generations? What does it cover over?
3. The Council on Foreign Relations during WWII and the US version of Keynesian Fordism.
Only after 1938 was the economic crisis resolved through the state orchestration of innovation and production, effected by wartime institutions. Corporate leaders from the Council on Foreign Relations were directly inducted to the Roosevelt government and planned the postwar monetary and free-trade order enshrined in the Bretton-Woods agreements. How was the intense labor militancy of the 1930s absorbed into the Cold War domestic balance? To what extent did the American experience shape the industrial boom in the Keynesian social democracies of Western Europe and Japan? How were the industrial welfare states supported and enabled by neocolonial trade relations and resource extraction?
4. The ‘60s revolts, Third-World self-assertion, stagflation and the monetary chaos of the ‘70s.
The brief convergence of labor movements, student revolts and minority rights campaigns in 1968 was a global phenomenon, spurred on by Third World liberation and the struggle in Vietnam. Wildcat strikes, entitlement claims and the political imposition of higher resource prices (notably by OPEC) were all key factors in the long stagnation of the 1970s. We examine the breakdown of Bretton-Woods and the conquest of relative autonomy by Western Europe and Japan, along with the Third World push for a New International Economic Order. Does the US internalize global economic and social contradictions during this period? Which aspects of the social and cultural revolts posed real obstacles to the existing economic structure? Which ones became raw materials for the formation of a new hegemonic compromise?
5. The Trilateral Commission and the transnational hegemony of Neoliberal Informationalism.
The launch of the Trilateral Commission by Nelson Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1973 is an elite response to the crisis, with concrete political effects: some twenty members of the Commission were named to the Carter administration in 1976. During the decade the coming of “postindustrial society” was announced by sociology, while technoscientific innovations like the microprocessor went into production. Cooperation among trilateral elites was paralleled by financialization, the rise of networks, the creation of transnational futures and options exchanges, etc. However, the Treasury-induced US recession of 1980-82, the “Star Wars” military buildup and the emergence of a new innovation system are specifically American contributions to the new technopolitical paradigm that takes shape in the US in the 1980s, before going global after 1989. What are the defining features of Neoliberal Informationalism? Who are its beneficiaries – and losers? How is the geography of capitalist accumulation transformed by the new hegemony? What sort of commodity is transmitted over the electronic networks? And what does it mean to be a consenting “citizen” of the trilateral state-system?
6. BRIC countries, counter-globalization, Latin American and Middle Eastern social movements.
With the breakdown of the USSR in 1989, followed by the first Gulf War, the world-space is opened up for transformation by the trilateral economic system. The 1990s witnesses the largest capitalist expansion since the postwar industrial boom. It was supposed to be the “end of history” and the universal triumph of liberal democracy – but that soon hit the dustbin. After tracking the expansion of trilateral capitalism we focus on the economic rise of the Gulf states and the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), as well as the political currents of the counter-globalization movements, Salafi Jihad, Latin American Leftism and finally, the Arab Springtime. Do these diverse economic and political assertions mark the end of the trilateral hegemony and the reemergence of a multipolar order?
7. Financial crisis, climate change and elite attempts to stabilize Neoliberal Informationalism.
Here we will examine the inherently volatile dynamics of the informational economy, culminating in the Asian crisis of 1997-98, the dot-com bust of 2000 and finally, the credit crunch of 2008 and the ongoing fiscal crisis of the neoliberal state. Little has been done in the United States to control financial capital, but the debt crisis has massively punished the lower ranks of society and seriously eroded the status of the middle classes, with a major attack on the public university system and a move to cut all remaining welfare-state entitlements. What is the significance of the bailout programs? How have the European Union and Japan faced the crisis? What paths have been taken by the Gulf states, and above all, by China? Do we see the beginnings of new alliances among international elites, outside the traditional arenas of trilateral negotiation?
8. Perspectives for egalitarian and ecological social change in the upcoming decade.
In the absence of meaningful reform and redistribution, continued financial turmoil appears certain, along with a reorganization of the monetary-military order. Meanwhile, climate change is already upon us, advancing much faster than previously anticipated. The result of all this is unlikely to be business as usual. What we face is a triple crisis, economic, geopolitical and ecological, with consequences that cannot be predicted on the basis of past experience. Can we identify some of the central contradictions that will mark the upcoming years? Which institutions and social bargains have already come under severe stress? In what ways will the ecological crisis begin to produce political responses? How will class relations within the United States interact with crossborder and worldwide struggles? Is it possible to imagine a positive transformation of the current technopolitical paradigm?
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5. Links
The Three Crises Seminar at Mess Hall has further readings, texts and recordings.
http://messhall.org/?page_id=771
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