A Spectre, Haunting by China Miville;

Author:China Miville; [Miéville, China]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786692023
Publisher: Vearsa

NEOLIBERALISM, ADAPTATION, UNIVERSALISM AND TENACITY

The iteration of capitalism that has defined the last four decades, neoliberalism, is characterised by a ruthless prioritisation of fast-moving financial and rentier capital, and a brutal intensification of class struggle – overwhelmingly one-sided in the ruling class’s favour – and exploitation. The neoliberal approach to capitalism’s complex balancing act with regard to capitalist realism, of judging how much reform to offer when, and how and when to insist that no change is possible, has been characterised by an aggressive campaign to collapse the boundaries of the possible, an ideology of eternal exploitation most vividly expressed in Margaret Thatcher’s notorious formulation: There is no alternative – TINA.

The TINA nostrum has recently come, to various extents, to be challenged. Though the anglophone Left’s most exciting and vibrant projects for years – the Corbyn and Sanders campaigns in the UK and US – have been soundly defeated, the horizon of social possibility isn’t quite so constrained as it recently was. Such questioning has also occurred from the other pole of politics, with the profound crisis into which the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed it, forcing capitalism’s partisans to hurriedly offer the kind of massive, systemic support they scoffed at as impossible scant weeks earlier. It’s increasingly whispered that neoliberalism is over.

In fact, the chaotic jostling for strategy by the managers of global capitalism, particularly in the UK and US, have often represented an attempt to square neoliberalism with new realities. But the scale of transformation necessary in capitalism’s accumulation regime, in the new reality dictated by Covid in the context of weak underlying economies, is such that whatever shape of economy the British state (and others) cobble together will likely not be recognisable as the neoliberalism that has defined the last four decades.13 But even for those of us sickened by the system of brutality neoliberalism has installed, this in itself isn’t ground for optimism. There’s no particular reason to hope that the most cruel specificities of recent capitalism will be lessened. They are at least as likely to be made worse.14

US capitalism, one of neoliberalism’s playgrounds, having grown without a mass reformist movement, a workers’ party or a welfare state, is unusual for the savagery of its exploitation among ‘advanced’ countries. It has been resistant even to these social reforms that might stave off the social collapse or upheaval unconducive to capital accumulation. The country has been increasingly marked by the structural power of its short-termist and narrowly venal bourgeoisie, and, concomitantly, the overtly barbarous sadisms and vulgarities of its ideology. Along with which, of course, come its realities, such as its vicious, racialised, carceral regime, for example, with more (poor) people in jails than in any other country in recorded history.15 These aren’t ‘imperfections’ or pathologies of late capitalism: they are its excrescences and symptoms. They bring advantages – in capital’s terms – such as a weak working-class movement. But such structural rigidity comes with disadvantages, too. Cracks in the ideological edifice can have more shattering effects than they would in a more flexible version of capitalism, for example.

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