False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism

August 9, 2010John Gray, who has studied politics, economics and philosophy at Oxford and was a Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics until his retirement in 2008, has won praise from some unlikely places, such as Bloomberg News and from two mainstays of the Economist magazine, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. These globalization celebrators devoted several pages to Gray's career in their 2000 book A Future Perfect, tracing his path from the 1980's when he was "a member of Margaret Thatcher's informal brain trust. As the Conservative party collapsed in the 1990's however, so did Gray's faith in free markets, and he embraced a succession of alternatives, ranging from communitarianism to environmentalism and culminating in antiglobalism." Nonetheless, he remains "one of globalization's most searching critics."We're pleased to say we've "field tested" this book in Maryland when we led a discussion in a progressive book club in Montgomery County. This was during those dark days when Democrats had their heads down, when they weren't scratching it in puzzlement, after the 2004 election. The consensus on the book was that it was not an easy read, but worth it, because people felt that they hadn't seen anything quite like it. Grey writes in a very direct style, some would say blunt, for a philosopher, in a declarative, assertive manner, stating in a paragraph of propositions what it might take another author a whole book to work up to. So the reader will still be digesting the last assertion when Grey moves on, in the very next paragraph, if not the very next sentence, to serve the next dish on his political economy menu.As we were thinking about our own selection process for this summer's little reading list, about what the books actually shared in common, it struck us that aside from three of them being directly about "political economy," they all took a historical approach to their subject matter, reaching far back in time to eras and centuries which preceded ours, but which help to illuminate a new rise of utopian thinking which has come to represent the Right's universal free market project of the 1975-2008 period. With Gray in particular, it is his philosophical training that gives his writing its bold insights, adding further depth to the historical perspective he adopts. To an American audience accustomed to a short, tightly drawn news-cycle and tweeting, the book's almost other-worldly grounding in the long flow of the Western intellectual tradition is enormously refreshing. Yet it will be disorienting to some, especially those who believe that America has been exempted from previous patterns in history, or that all utopian visions occur on the left. In some ways, he reminds us of a much milder centrist version of William F. Buckley Jr., although those who remember the late star of the TV series Firing Line will see a much lower key John Grey in this interview with Australian public television, from 2008, at [...], which is 54 minutes in length.If the Economist's placement of Gray on the political spectrum was not exactly precise, we think you'll understand why that's the case, since Gray was a student and admirer of the late Isaiah Berlin, who was hard to place, but whom he reminds us was in turn a "Rooseveltian Liberal." We believe you will both appreciate and benefit from the way Gray leads his readers out of the narrow policy boxes that both major parties in America have constructed for their members and the general public. Here are some examples to whet your appetites.First, Gray makes an important distinction about globalization, separating out two distinct streams of influence, one recent, and one much older: "Much current debate confuses globalization...a trend that can be dated back to the projection of European power into other parts of the world in imperialist policies from the sixteenth century onwards...with the ephemeral political project of a worldwide free market."(Page 215.) And then we have this startling, out-of-the-blue comparison, which American audiences never hear or read. It gets its power from the fact that America's identity is at least partly based on its belief that it has a special mission and a unique way of life, which Presidential office seekers are required to swear allegiance to, our "American Exceptionalism." Gray sees it as reinforcing something else though, a continuation of the 18th century Enlightenment's "project of a universal civilization," one marked, however, with its late 20th, early 21st Century stamp as the quest for "a single global market...in what is likely to be its final form." And now comes the shocker: "it is not the only variant of that project to have been attempted in a century that is littered with false Utopias. The former Soviet Union embodied a rival Enlightenment Utopia, that of a universal civilization in which markets were replaced by central authority. The human costs of that defunct Utopia were incalculable." (Page 3). And now for the further shock waves.Not the Perfect Marriage: Free Markets and Social StabilityWithout in any way suggesting that the costs of our current Utopian quest approach or mirror those so cruelly inflicted on the peoples of the old USSR, Gray nonetheless reminds his readers of the costs of the Right's attempts at "social engineering," a term heretofore held under patent by the Right, and hurled against liberals, and indeed which is still being hurled about in revisionist histories of the New Deal. We have mentioned in other essays the Right's success at using wedge issues to try to break apart what remains of the Democrats old New Deal coalition (not much), and it's commonly thought that they have had a permanent lock on "law and order" and "family values" issues, to mention two of their most familiar "monopolies." Listen now to Gray's assertions about what has been going on inside the US and Britain under the influence of the conservative revolution: "The innermost contradiction of the free market is that it works to weaken the traditional social institutions on which it has depended in the past - the family is a key example. The fragility and decline of the traditional family increased throughout the Thatcherite period...Birth's outside marriage more than doubled during the 1980's. One-parent families increased from 12 percent in 1979 to 21 percent in 1992...By 1991 there was one divorce for every two marriages in Britain - the highest divorce rate of any EU Country....Is it coincidental that no EU country apart from Britain has imposed American-style deregulation on its labour market? In those British cities in which Thatcherite policies of labour market deregulation were most successful in lowering rates of unemployment, rates of divorce and family breakdown were correspondingly highest." (Pages 29-30.)That's some, but not complete preparation for this take on what has been happening inside the US. Can you imagine the reaction to a scholar going before any number of America's family value religious organizations and making the following findings:In the United States free markets have contributed to social breakdown on a scale unknown in any other developed country. Families are weaker in America than in any other country. At the same time, social order has been propped up by a policy of mass incarceration. No other advanced industrial country, aside from post-communist Russia, uses imprisonment as a means of social control on the scale of the United States. Free markets, the desolation of families and communities and the use of the sanctions of criminal law as a last recourse against social collapse go in tandem. (Page 2).The Great IncarcerationAnd prior to this, you thought that all those criminals in American jails were there because, even four decades later, of the value devastations the sixties had wrought, the spread of terrible work habits amidst the American urban underclass, those lousy liberal-union dominated public schools, especially the urban ones, and, in the eyes of much of the religious Right, the fact that we had just raised a lot of "bad" individuals under all that liberal "permissiveness." But this is a charge, and a line of reasoning which has grown less and less convincing as decade by decade the 1960's recede, replaced in turn by Nixonland, the Reagans and the Bushes, by the law and order touting, welfare abolishing, end-of-big-government proclaiming Bill Clinton, and decades of conservative judges who have indeed set records for incarceration, locking "them" up and throwing away the key, even as crime rates peaked in 1992, and then steadily declined.(Editor's Note: Readers who don't want to take Grey's word for it, might enjoy any of the following, starting with James A. Morone's Hellfire Nation, which is reviewed later in this essay - just a taste now: "The most startling neo-Puritan product is the army of Americans in jail;" the 86 page essay by Glenn C. Loury, with commentary by others, Race, Incarceration and American Values, 2008; Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics by Katherine Beckett, 1997; The Great Disruption by Francis Fukuyama (2000);The Origins of the Urban Crisis by Thomas J. Sugrue, 1996; and last, but not least, a winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History, Roger Lane's Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860-1900, 1986.)Grey's work threatens the very categories which define American politics in 2010; in his view, the carte blanche written to free market capitalism and its embrace by American "conservatives" is actually a project in the inversion of their proclaimed values:Free markets are the most potent solvents of tradition at work in the world today. They set a premium on novelty and a discount on the past...the free market is most recklessly short-termist in its demolition of the virtues that it once relied upon. These virtues - saving, civic pride, respectability, `family values' - are now profitless museum pieces. They are bits of bric-a-brac, dusted off for public display from time to time by the Right-wing media, but having few uses in an economy founded on ephemera. The most enduring icon of the free market in the late twentieth century will not be Margaret Thatcher. It may well turn out to be Madonna. (Page 38, from the Chapter "Engineering Free Markets.")Grey on Target, Before the Crisis of 2008-2009Pretty outrageous sounding, isn't it? Now who is John Gray to dispute with the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, William Bennett and the voices from thousands of pulpits equating conservatism - and the current neoliberal economic system - with the preservation of conservative values? Well, consider these brief insights, published in 1998, so formulated a year or two earlier - on the trends in the world economy - and remember, John Gray is not a professional economist:* "This virtual financial economy has a terrible potential for disrupting the underlying real economy, as seen in the collapse in 1995 of Barings, Britain's oldest bank. Together with the accelerating development of global capital markets on which it stands, the virtual economy is a phenomenon unknown in the world's economic history. Nothing like it existed pre-1914." (Page 62.)* "Ricardo (Editors Note: David Ricardo, that is; English "classical" economist who lived 1772-1823) recognized that technological innovation could be job-destroying. He did not share the modern faith that new employment will always arise automatically from the side-effects of new technologies." (Page 86.)* "Global laissez-faire may break down in an unmanageable crisis of the world's stock markets and financial institutions. The enormous, practically unknowable virtual economy of financial derivatives enhances the risks of a systemic crash. How would America's fractured society cope with a collapse in the stock market such as occurred in Japan in the early 1990's?" (Page 198.)We'll close our brief on behalf of Gray's False Dawn by visiting with his "Postscript" thoughts, on some themes we've been writing about since January of this year, especially about our economy's failure to pursue, much less achieve, anything even approximating "full employment." He also directly addresses two other values which are often thought to be old "conservative" ones. Here's how Gray goes about it: Amongst the human needs that free markets neglect are the needs for security and social identity that used to be met by the vocational structures of bourgeois societies...A contradiction has emerged...the chronic insecurities of late modern capitalism...corrode some of the central institutions and values of bourgeois life. The most notable of these social institutions may be that of the career...Few can now harbour any such hope. The deeper effect of economic insecurity is not to multiply the number of jobs each of us has in a working lifetime. It is to make the very idea of a career redundant... The post-war trend to embourgeisment is being reversed, and working people are being in some degree re-proletarianized. (Page 217, our emphasis.)William R. NeilRockville, MDAugust, 2010

Son like it!

THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN IN 1998, ALMOST A QUARTER OF CENTURY AGO , NEVERTHELESS HISOBSERVATIONS ARE MORE VALID THAN EVER.THE NEO LIBERALS ECONOMISTS AND POLITICIANS OF THE RIGHT HAVE SAID AND THEY KEEPSAYING THAT THE GLOBAL FREE MARKET IS THE SOLUTION OF THE WORLD PROBLEMS, THAT IT WILLCREATE PROSPERITY AND IT WILL REDUCE POVERTY, BUT AS THE AUTHOR POINTS OUT NOTHING CAN BE FARTHESTFROM THE TRUTH, THE UNFETTERED FREE MARKET, WHICH HAS BEEN THE DOGMA OF THE POLITICALESTABLISHMENT IN WASHINGTON SINCE THE EIGHTIES AND IS ABETTED BY THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND AND THE WORLD BANK. HAS BEEN A TOTAL FAILURE, RATHER THAN CREATE PROSPERITY, IT HAS WRECKED APART WHOLE NATIONS, CREATING MASS UNEMPLOYMENT,THE OBLITERATION OF THE MIDDLE CLASS THAT HAS BECOME PROLETARIANIZED AND THE FORCEFULHOMOGEINIZATION OF THE CULTURES TO FIT THE GLOBAL MARKET.AS THE AUTHOR DEMOSTRATES , THE NEO LIBERAL CAPITALISM IS AN HUBRISTIC IDEOLGY AS IT WASMARXISM, BOTH HAVE BEEN A PRODUCT OF THE ENLIGHTMENT THAT HAVE AIMED TO CREATE ANUNIVERSAL UTOPIA, INSTEAD BOTH SYSTEMS HAVE CREATED AN UNIVERSAL DYSTOPIA.THE CHAPTER IN RUSSIA IS VERY INFORMATIVE, DURING THE COLD WAR WE HAVE BEEN MADE TO BELIEVE THAT IT WAS AN EAST-WEST CONFLICT, HOWEVER IT WAS UNTRUE, RATHER IT WAS A CLASHOF TWO DIFFERENT WESTERN SYSTEMS, WHICH AS I SAID BEFORE WERE THE PRODUCT OF THE ENLIGHTMENT, IN THE CASE OF RUSSIA BOTH WERE TRIED ( IN 1917 AND 1991) BRINGING A LOT OFSUFFERINGS AND HARDSHIPS, ESPECIALLY THE COMMUNIST SYSTEM WHICH WERE RESPONSIBLE OFMILLIONS OF DEATHS AND THE LONG STAGNATION OF THE COUNTRY.IN THE CHAPTER OF ASIA THE AUTHOR DEMOSTRATES THAT THE ECONOMIC MIRACLES OFJAPAN, SOUTH KOREA, TAIWAN AND SINGAPORE WERE THE PRODUCT OF MIXED ECONOMIES FAR REMOVEDFROM THE DOGMAS OF BOTH COMMUNISM AND LIBERAL CAPITALISM, THE RESULTS HAVE BEEN NOT ONLYTHE ECONOMIC SUCCESESSES OF THESE COUNTRIES ,BUT ALSO THAT THEY HAVE BEEN THE MOSTEGALITARIAN SOCIETIES OF THE WORLD, MUCH MORE THAN THE THE WEST AND NEEDLESS TO SAYLATIN AMERICA; IN THE CASE OF CHINA THE COUNTRY HAS MOVED FROM THE TOTALITARIANISM OF THE MAOIST PERIOD, THAT PRODUCED MILLIONS OF VICTIMS ,MORE THAN IN THE USSR, TO ANAUTHORITARIAN STATE, STILL THE COUNTRY IS MIRED IN POVERTY , SOCIAL INEQUALITY ANDENVIRONMENTAL DEGRADATION,A LEGACY OF THE MAOIST NIGHTMARE.THE AUTHOR CONCLUDES THAT THE COUNTRIES SHOULD SHED OUT BOTH SOCIAL MARXISMAND NEO LIBERAL CAPITALISM, A QUATER OF CENTURY LATER THIS HAS NOT HAPPENED,ESPECIALLYIN LATIN AMERICA , WHICH HAS BEEN TRAPPED IN THESE TWO DESTRUCTIVE IDEOLOGIES; THE NEO LIBERAL AND PRO AMERICAN RIGHT THAT PROMOTES UNBRIDLED AND WILD CAPITALISM AND THENEO SOCIALISTS OF THE LEFT THAT WANTED TO IMPOSE A NEW MARXISM, HOWEVER NOWADAYS BOTHHAVE BECOME JUXTAPOSED TO THE POINT THAT THEY ARE ALMOST UNDISTINGUISHED.

Why are we working on zero hour contracts without pension, sick leave, vacation pay and medical insurance? Read this book to find out.

Quality is not good . Sheet is not transparent . They packed the items with two folding, which created a scratch on the foders

Thanks

Never heard of this book until recently. A shame as it is concise well argued and extremely interesting.I am not qualified to asses all the arguments put forward but that did not stop this book form casting current events in a new light. Glad I have read it.Deserve a wider readership even more now than when first written 20 years ago.

As I said in my Immortalization Commission review, I bought this title after reading his most renowned work Straw Dogs. I began to read it but, as I found other titles that requested my attention, I haven’t finished it.