The Supermanagerial Reich

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-supermanagerial-reich/

by techer • 10 years ago

82 47 10 years ago

yolesaber• 10 years ago

Very powerful quote:

Many in the United States fear a Trump election because there might be an explosion of state repression against the vulnerable, particularly against specific racial and ethnic minorities. And yet, the neoliberal state has already created a penal system to rival the world’s most authoritarian dictatorships. The United States imprisons more citizens (total and per capita) than any other country on Earth, and African Americans and Latinos at a vastly over-represented rate. Many fear Trump would bring massive deportations of undocumented immigrants. And yet, the neoliberal state already engages in mass deportations, at the level of millions during the current administration, with countless more waiting in dire conditions in the world’s largest network of immigrant detention camps. Many fear a Trump election would bring mass persecution, surveillance, and restrictions for American Muslims. And yet, the neoliberal state already spies on Muslims, administers religious tests at borders, and polices Muslims for nothing more than their religious practices. Many fear a Trump election might bring economic ruin, and yet, for most Americans, wealth is vanishing, wages stagnant, real unemployment steady.

argonaut2• 10 years ago

To be clear, though, "American liberalism" is not "neoliberalism" as the article uses the term. Neoliberalism most closely maps to the fiscal (e.g. non-religious, non-populist), Establishment conservatism of America.

ab5tract• 10 years ago

No, it really doesn't. We used to distinguish between 'neoconservative' and 'neoliberal', but the only line in the sand between them was one was from the Republican party and the other was from the Democratic party.

But since the only significant ideological difference is whether Israel is to be protected for religious reasons (neocon) versus economic ones (neolib), the term neocon has gone out of fashion.

Neoliberalism has always been the term applied to the form of justice-free economic globalization pushed by the "left" (that is, pushed by the leaders who co-opted the institutions of the left, starting with Carter and continued under Clinton and Obama).

Europe does not consider "liberal" as a political category ("liberal on issues like health care") and instead carries only the economic connotations and is more or less a synonym or neoliberalism.

I wish we could push this to "Establishment conservatism", but the truth is that the vast majority of neoliberalisation was initiated under a Democratic president.

bsder• 10 years ago

The United States imprisons more citizens (total and per capita) than any other country on Earth, and African Americans and Latinos at a vastly over-represented rate.

The marijuana legalization votes are striking back at this. It's not a full fix by any means, but it's sure going to reduce the number of people thrown in jail--especially minorities.

rayiner2• 10 years ago

It's not much of a fix at all. Very few of the people in prison are there for either possessing or trafficking in marijuana: http://m.gazette.com/legalization-didnt-unclog-prisons/artic....

In Colorado, drug-related charges are only down 23% post legalization. Of course, marijuana charges rarely resulted in jail time to begin with, so the impact on prison population is a lot less than that.

Even releasing every drug prisoner would only have a modest effect on incarceration rates: http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/releasing-drug-offenders-.... It would drop the prison population by about 15%, but we would still have ten times the incarceration rate of Denmark.

JulianMorrison• 10 years ago

I don't share your optimism. If all drugs were legal, the police would find a busted tail light or something. Or just beat them up and charge "assaulting an officer".

rangersanger• 10 years ago

Indeed, several very powerful quotes. This one was a bit of a gut punch. "Votes exchanged for services rendered" is, retrospectively, exactly how I (and everyone I know) has engaged with our American democracy.

non-participation can (and is) often argued to be perfectly “rational” in a kind of homo-economicus argument pushed ad infinitum. Reducing “democracy” to its most transactional structure — votes exchanged for services rendered, the formal motions of a liberal republican state for at least a plurality of citizens — neoliberalism achieves a feat that the great revolutionary and reactionary movements of the 19th and 20th century never achieved: unique among critiques of parliamentarianism, neoliberalism discourages participation without undermining legitimacy.

ciconia• 10 years ago

What's most striking, of course, is how the Clintons, Obamas, Merkels and Hollandes of the world have wholeheartedly embraced this "supermanagerial" economic and political order, while paying lip-service to socialistic ideology.

The meteoric rise of the alt-right is only matched by the abject failure of the left.

venomsnake• 10 years ago

There is not such thing as alt-right since a lot of people there do support leftist schemes of redistribution for the citizens.

It is nationalism plain and simple.

B1FF_PSUVM• 10 years ago

The 'left' has been captured.

It used to be that aristocrats without money (Grachii, Marius, Caesar) would make promises to the proletariat to gain power, and duly pay off their debt if/when successful.

This ticked off the aristocrats with money, who now - after all these centuries - figured it out. They also make a lot of noise and promises, but, critically, not of monetary value. Just general progress, cheap ...

TheOtherHobbes2• 10 years ago

It's more complicated than that. When I put on my tin foil hat (listen to that crinkling...) I wonder if the old redistributive working class left wasn't deliberately undermined by a push towards a more abstract, more divisive, and less politically coherent academic/intellectual left which focused on tokenism and identity politics over economic enfranchisement.

It's not so much that civil rights and feminism weren't important - because they were. It's more that at some point the third-wayers pushed hard to make them more important than fundamental concerns about class and economic inequality.

The latter affected much larger numbers of voters and ignoring the issues made the left much weaker as a political force.

The reason I'm suspicious is because this is the line taken by some supposedly left-wing newspapers like The Guardian in the UK, and also the DNC in the US.

Whatever the motivation, the political effect is always to keep economic populism off the policy table.

Trump has promised to change that, and voters like that idea. But of course he won't. Given his background and connections, there is no chance at all that he's going to be a firebrand economic populist.

The absolute best his voters can expect is some token payback projects. But he's mostly just going to keep using race and immigration as a misdirection from the problems caused by the establishment's economic policies.

pavlov• 10 years ago

Merkel is part of the left now?

Her party is Christian Conservative, and she is a former East German with bad experiences with the Communist government.

One has to be pretty far on the extreme right to call her a leftist.

adrianN• 10 years ago

She's pretty far left if you compare her to US politicians.

DocTomoe2• 10 years ago

with bad experiences with the Communist government.

Actually Merkel was a fairly loyal follower to the communists in her youth, even being sent to Moscow for her studies (which was a bit of an honour only bestowed upon true believers).

pjc502• 10 years ago

This is what simplistic left/right views that misinterpret everything as "socialism" will mislead you. Merkel leads the centre-right CDU.

You also left out Tony Blair. His "third way" is a good example of how we got here; because unvarnished redistribution and interference in business was unpopular, he decided to run a business-friendly campaign that allowed the existing economic order to continue while taxing it to pay for social programmes. An important part of this was refusing to raise the headline rate of income tax, in order to avoid scaring off middle class voters, while increasing "stealth" taxation in various other places.

As an economic programme it worked brilliantly with genuine broad popularity. It was killed by the response to 9/11, in deciding to join the Iraq war regardless of the actual facts.

doctorpangloss• 10 years ago

The Nazis certainly didn't do anything for the Jewish supermanagers, besides robbing and killing them, and then unsustainably mass-murdering or enslaving their countrymen.

The electoral college discourages participation. People in California, Illinois and New York aren't saying they don't vote "because neoliberalism."

Equating the murder of Jews in Nazi Germany to Black and Hispanic mass incarceration offends the victims of both injustices. The article's equivocating tone about this equating is offensive too. It's like they know they're saying something incredibly flimsy just to push the drama.

Animats• 10 years ago

This seems to be a personal opinion article. Much has been written about the Nazi rise to power. The first four years of Hitler's rule, starting in 1933, were good for Germany. He got Germany out of the postwar depression. If he'd left office after four years, he'd be remembered as the Savior of Germany. After four years, things started to go bad; two more years and WWII was under way.

The Nazi party was closely allied with big companies. That was by design, and there was no secret about it. That's what "national socialism" was all about - industry and government working together. It worked more like crony capitalism in practice, and less well over time.

One of the big problems in a dictatorship is how the second tier of control works. The leader can't decide everything. There has to be delegation. But how? Regional delegation results in regional leaders powerful enough to challenge the national leader. Delegation by subject area (ministries) sometimes works, but the military and security apparatus usually becomes the center of power. Delegating power to businesses is a bit safer, especially if you don't let them become monopolies in their sector. The Nazi Party used all three forms of delegation, which the author describes as a mess. It's not an unreasonable way to run things, though.

lispm6• 10 years ago

None of the first years of Hitler was good for Germany. Many people thought it, but it wasn't actually. It was terrible for many, actually.

neffy• 10 years ago

With any economic policy, including those, it depends on who you are. He did get people jobs, albeit many of which were semi-disguised military training. However, he did it by progressively and systematically pushing the jewish population out, and looting them of their possessions.

A cynical way to look at a fair segment of economic policy is that it exists as solutions to the desire of "I want your stuff"- and at the extreme end of both left and right, the answer is outright theft and murder.

eli_gottlieb3• 10 years ago

The first four years of Hitler's rule, starting in 1933, were good for Germany. He got Germany out of the postwar depression. If he'd left office after four years, he'd be remembered as the Savior of Germany.

Unless you were, you know, Jewish. Or communist. Or a worker in general.

The Nazi Party ... It's not an unreasonable way to run things, though.

Get out.

lispm6• 10 years ago

There are so many things these articles overlook.

Germany was coming out of the WW1 as a loser. The war in Europe was nothing like you've ever seen in America. Germany was paying reparations for many years. Germany lost two million soldiers (out of ten million world wide). Many civilians were killed. Poorness among the families of fallen soldiers. Many were wounded. Several hundred thousand Germans died due to lack of food.

The crisis of Germany in the 20s and 30s was also nothing, literally nothing, you have ever seen in the USA.

In 1923 one Dollar was 4.21 Billionen Reichsmark.

No kidding. 4.21 Billionen Reichsmark. That's a 4*10^12 in US numbers. The equivalent of one dollar.

1929 was another economic crisis which reached into the 30s. Mass unemployment, families looking for food, resignation, ongoing reparations, social security not developed, politicians failing, feeling of a total catastrophe - but this was based real problems. Not in 'the strongest nation with the largest military.'

The problems of the US today are tiny in comparison. There are poor people in the US. But it is nothing compared to the Weimarer Republik and their weak democracy, which was under fire from communists, the Nazi party, conservative parties, ... even the president did not support it and in the end caused its collapse when handing over the government to Hitler.

Mostly the social democrats were supporting the democracy.

If you think the times of the Weimarer Republik are similar to the US today, its political or its economic situation - this is total BS.

wuschel2• 10 years ago

Don't forget the monarchists who held many an important position in the state. Indeed, the first german fledgling democractic state, the Weimarer Republic, still called the "Reich" bei many of its inhabitants, had a horrible economic start in a time of great social change.

lispm6• 10 years ago

Right, the monarchists were mostly against the Weimarer Republik. They lost most of their special rights in 1919/20.

hga6• 10 years ago

The war in Europe was nothing like you've ever seen in America.

I think Southerners might disagree with that point, especially through the post-Civil War Reconstruction AKA military occupation period.

Not saying they're directly comparable, but "nothing like you've ever seen in America" significantly overstates the differences.

DocTomoe2• 10 years ago

I think Southerners might disagree with that point

Trust me, WW1 in Europe makes the American Civil War look like a nice picnic with the kids in a park.

throwanem• 10 years ago

This Southerner wouldn't disagree.

Militarily, while the Civil War is in some ways a prefigure of WWI, the comparison only usefully reaches so far. In particular, Civil War artillery lacked the absolute primacy achieved by later developments, permitting a much more mobile style of warfare and preventing the stasis observed on the Western Front. The Civil War's belligerents were also much more unevenly matched, making it possible for a single engagement to produce a decisive strategic outcome; no such possibility existed in WWI until much later in the war, when new technology came along to counter the primacy of artillery and break the stalemate of the trenches.

Politically speaking, too, we observe a qualitative postwar difference; harsh as the military occupation of the South was in many ways, and in spite of bastards like Butler, there existed a strong desire for conciliation and reintegration of the erstwhile secessionists, which overall found considerable success; while the cultural and economic differences underlying the war largely still exist to this day, we've just passed the sesquicentennial of Appomattox without at any point seeing a serious desire for, or risk of, a new outbreak of warfare. Versailles, by contrast, while no doubt seeming justified to its authors in the astonishingly punitive terms it imposed, produced a new and much uglier war within just a few decades.

So, no, I can't really agree with you here. It's accurate to say that the Civil War is by far the ugliest war whose effects our young nation has ever directly felt. It is not at all accurate to say that those effects are in any way comparable in severity to those of the First World War - which, indeed, was nothing like we've ever seen in America, a fact for which, should you be so inclined, I recommend you nightly thank God.

pc86• 10 years ago

Anyone here who was in the south during post-Civil War Reconstruction is free to share their experiences.

lispm6• 10 years ago

Far from “state capitalism,” where the profit motive is eliminated and production is under the complete control of the state, Neumann noted that under Nazism, business — especially large corporate interests — was given extraordinary leeway. They did not have perfect free rein, but large business interests were relieved of many previous social democratic restrictions. Independent labor organizations were crushed, and business was allowed to coagulate into massive, profit-generating monopolies as long as it produced the necessary goods and services the party and the army required.

No, they were not given 'extraordinary leeway'. Example: 'Ownership' was newly defined.

complete control of the state

That was not necessary. It was set up a structure where people worked on a common goal, in the end the Endsieg. But make no mistake, enemies ended dead. The political leadership made it clear what the goal was: re-arming Germany and beyond. Making the German military 'fit' for a new war.

as long as it produced the necessary goods and services the party and the army required.

That's the key point from where to look. The economy was not having 'extraordinary leeway'. The economy had a purpose: making Germany fit for war in the shortest time possible. From 33 to 39 build up a huge military machine, able to win in the west and the east. In Nazi ideology the plan was to occupy large areas in the east, kill the jews and enslave the slavic - new room, new raw materials, new markets, ...

The economy was a tool. This has very little to do with capitalism, thus the comparison between Nazi economy and a crisis of capitalism today will be misleading.

The Supermanagerial Reich

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