Yet religious conservatives have long seen the issues of abortion and the national debt as inseparable, and this premise is key to understanding their politics of fiscal obstructionism. Beginning in the 1970s, Catholic and evangelical conservatives came to see the adoption of floating exchange rates, the legalization of abortion, and the growth in US government debt as closely interconnected symptoms of national breakdown. Religious conservatives have a direct line to the sexual unconscious of economic life, so while more mainstream neoliberals might worry about ballooning welfare budgets and wage-push inflation, and more mainstream conservatives might lament the breakdown of the family and the number of unmarried women on welfare, religious conservatives go straight to the heart of the matter: the loss of male sexual control over women. As they see it, the fiscal and monetary future of the nation rests on the subordination of women to the future life of the fetus. As a consequence, they came to understand limits to government indebtedness as a way of limiting abortion, and vice versa.
Melinda Cooper, "The Age of Public Austerity and Private Luxury" at The Nation
The counterrevolution is only inevitable if we accept the premise that there are hard economic limits to the collectivization of wealth. These economic “laws of nature” make communism seem not just dangerous but impossible. Economists of different stripes have different words for these laws. Among neoliberals, it’s the idea that real wage inflation is economically catastrophic and must be reined in by the deliberate creation of unemployment, the so-called non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU). Among Keynesians, it is the idea that national income must be shared between capital and labor without compromising the increase in profits, a trade-off that can only be sustained by constant growth in the national product.
Both currents place a limit on the collectivization of wealth: They get worried when they see any increase in wages relative to profits or any redistribution of social wealth that compromises the value of financial assets. Keynesians, obviously, have more flexibility here, but only so long as they are able to sustain the continual growth in the national product. When growth founders or the labor share of national income is growing faster than the capital share, they resort to corporatist strategies in which trade unions and bosses agree to share the austerity via wage and price controls.
If you want to start imagining what a communist organization of money would look like, the first thing you need to do is to demystify the technical limits to the collectivization of wealth posited, in different ways, by neoliberals and Keynesians. This doesn’t mean that economic uncertainty or natural resource scarcity or the tediousness of essential work disappears as a result. What is eliminated is the immense waste of collective resources currently dedicated to shoring up corporate profits or private wealth.
Melinda Cooper, "The Age of Public Austerity and Private Luxury" at The Nation
The league tables created by conservative thinktanks show that neoliberalism is about ringfencing economic power, says historian Quinn Slobodian
When Walker’s Fraser Institute published its first index in 1996 with a foreword from Friedman, there were some surprises. According to its historical overview, the second freest economy in the world in 1975 was Honduras, a military dictatorship. For the next year, another dictatorship, Guatemala, was in the top five. These were no anomalies. They expressed a basic truth about the indexes. The definition of freedom they used meant that democracy was a moot point, monetary stability was paramount and any expansion of social services would lead to a fall in the rankings. Taxation was theft, pure and simple, and austerity was the only path to the top.
“The ‘right’ to food, clothing, medical services, housing or a minimal income level,” the authors wrote, was nothing less than “‘forced labor’ requirements [imposed] on others.” The director of the index translated the vision into policy advice a few years later, writing in a public memo to the Canadian prime minister that poverty could be eliminated through a simple solution: “End welfare. Reinstitute poorhouses and homes for unwed mothers.”
Not content with mere economics, the Fraser Institute joined up with the Cato Institute in 2015 to publish the first global index of “human freedom”. They included all of the earlier economic indicators and supplemented them with measurements of civil liberty, rights to association and free expression, alongside dozens of others – but left out multiparty elections and universal suffrage. The authors noted specifically that they excluded political freedom and democracy from the index – and Hong Kong topped the list again.
What was going on? One answer is that the project of measuring economic freedom had made some of its authors question their prior assumptions about the natural relationship between capitalism and democracy. By the 1990s, Friedman, who had previously seen the two as mutually reinforcing, was singing a different tune. As he said in an interview in 1988: “I believe a relatively free economy is a necessary condition for freedom. But there is evidence that a democratic society, once established, destroys a free economy.” An enfranchised people tended to use their votes to pressure politicians into more social spending, clogging the arteries of free exchange.
[….]
Pinochet, Thatcher and Reagan may be dead. But economic freedom indexes carry the neoliberal banner by deeming the goals of social justice forever illegitimate and pushing states to regard themselves solely as guardians of economic power. Stephen Moore, who was a favourite earlier this year for Trump’s appointment to the Federal Reserve Board, put the matter simply. “Capitalism is a lot more important than democracy,” he said in an interview. “I’m not even a big believer in democracy.” Hong Kong’s financial secretary made much the same argument two weeks ago in London, when he cited the city’s top economic freedom ranking and reassured his audience that “alongside the protests, the business of business rolls on, unabated”.
By colour-coding nations, celebrating victors on glossy paper stock and giving high-ranking countries a reason to celebrate at banquets and balls, the indexes help perpetuate the idea that economics must be protected from the excesses of politics – to the point that an authoritarian government that protects free markets is preferable to a democratic one that redesigns them. At a time when the casting of ballots may lead to changes that threaten the freedom that capital has long enjoyed, the disposability of democracy in the vision of the index is what haunts us, from Santiago to the South China Sea to Washington DC.
"Because of the smelly, humid conditions down below, the rooftops of Kowloon would turn into a communal hangout during the afternoons and evenings. People would hang out, do laundry or homework, or practice instruments. "It was like a strange, urban garden. There was tons of household refuse. It was a bit of an eyesore, but compared to the area below, the air was light and breezy. It was nice to come up there after living and working on the lower floors," says Girard." - Inside Hong Kong's lawless 'walled city' — the most crowded place on Earth for 40 years, Harrison Jacobs
Photos: City of Darkness: Life in Kowloon Walled City, Greg Girard & Ian Lambot
"It seems we have lost any space there used to be to question the pervasiveness of family as a model of relationality. Much of queer politics these days seems to be about exploring the possibilities of alternative kinship or alternative reproductive economies. It’s striking to me that these questions would become so all-absorbing in a movement that was once more interested in exploring sexual desire and sexual relationships independently of kinship. The shift is very evident when it comes to the incipient normalization of trans people which has occurred almost entirely through an appeal to the family and through an interpolation of “childhood transgenderism” as a developmental problem that can be resolved through hormone therapy and parental understanding. It seems as if the exploration of non-normative gender expression has become more and more acceptable, as long as it is channeled into some kind of aspirational reproductive or familial form. I don’t want to be nostalgic here.Rather, I want to suggest that in hindsight, the affinity between sexual minorities and the critique of the family is beginning to appear historically contingent. In the meantime, the imperative that all relationships pay some kind of tribute to the reproductive familial form implies we are beginning to create new forms of deviance that have nothing to do with gender expression as such but with the simple refusal or failure of reproductive legitimacy. I think this is an important shift to mark."
- Melinda Cooper, "Family Matters" at Viewpoint Mag
"I think a lot of organized left wing politics entails some kind of attachment to reproductive order. It might be the working class family or left nationalism or some kind of ethnic/cultural/racial nationalism or minority fundamentalism. It might be a kind of queer nationalism that makes all kinds of trade offs with white militarism and imperialism. The investment might be upfront and personal or it might express itself by proxy – someone who can spin a radical critique of white nationalism or homonationalism might have no problems romanticizing third world nationalism or religious fundamentalism if it can be rationalized as anti-imperialist. It might be a kind of reproductive maternalism that presents itself as anti-patriarchal but positions women as the guardians of nature or the earth or something called social reproduction. This is a recurrent position on the left, although it can reshuffle itself in all kinds of ways. I think this is what people are getting at sometimes when they critique “identity politics” on the left and I’m sure I’ve used the term in this way, to refer to a kind of reproductive communitarianism. But the term “identity politics” is misleading and seems to suggest that only minorities can be afflicted whereas reproductive communitarianism very obviously takes majoritarian and minoritarian forms.
I think these sentiments are popular because they feel good. What I’m suggesting is that there is no false consciousness here. Perhaps the easiest way to critique some kind of dominant reproductive order is to latch onto an alternative one. It’s the easiest way out, psychologically and politically, and it facilitates political bargains with people who might otherwise find you suspect. The easiest way for any one class of workers to “resist capitalism” is to do something less ambitious – to assert a claim to special protections vis-a-vis other classes of workers by appealing to some imagined prior order of social reproduction, sometimes the nation or the race, sometimes, at a more intimate level, the family. Once you have made that move, you begin to think that what is wrong with capitalism is not the fact that it generates and feeds off all kinds of inequalities, but the fact that it threatens your favorite reproductive order. So capitalism is bad because it destroys the family, or the nation or the community. And you begin to think that if you make a bargain with the state to sustain and subsidize your reproductive order, and the natural hierarchy of inequalities that exist within it, then you can live with it. You start to believe that if you could just stabilize the family or protect your culture or community from predatory outside forces then you would be resisting capitalism."
In the slave-holding South, some in the dominant caste grew so accustomed to the embedded superiority built into their days, and the brutality it took to maintain it, that they wondered how they might manage in the afterlife. “Is it possible that any of my slaves could go to Heaven,” a dominant-caste woman in South Carolina asked her minister, “And I must see them there?”
A century after the slaveholder spoke those words, the caste system had survived and mutated, its pillars intact. America was fighting in World War Two, and the public school district in Columbus, Ohio, decided to hold an essay contest, challenging students to consider the question, “What to do with Hitler after the War?”
It was the spring of 1944, the same year that a black boy was forced to jump to his death, in front of his stricken father, over the Christmas card the boy had sent to a white girl at work. In that atmosphere, a sixteen year old African American girl thought about what should befall Hitler. She won the student essay contest with a single sentence: “Put him in a black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America.
Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson (via ricardianed)
A Qajar Tile Featuring The Virgin Mary and Child, late 19th Century [Qajar Period], possibly Isfahan, Persia, Iran, depicted in shades of green, blue and manganese on white ground amidst floral sprays, 23 x 32 cm, private collection, source: christies.com.
