don’t like the weather? wait a while; it’ll change
By shag carpet bomb • Mar 19th, 2009 • Category: Books & Book Reviews, Economics, Marxist Theory, Political Economy, Politics, The Great Financial CrisisHave you ever heard that expression? “If you don’t like the weather in this town, just wait awhile. It will change.”
It gets said everywhere I’ve lived. Well, in this town, it’s true. I walked to work, nice morning. The rain finally stopped. In the late afternoon, I sat in a park for a late lunch. It was by the community college downtown. I read Moishe Postone, marveling at the beautiful summer-like weather, after days and days of gray rain, rain, and more rain. Not an hour later, it grew darker in my cewb and I popped up like a prairie dog to look outside: it was pouring. thank dog for the umbrella. By the time I left an hour later, it was 20 degrees colder than it had been two hours earlier.
Which is an episode that happens pretty regularly around here. I was reminded of the way the weather is here as I sat down to write really quickly about John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff’s new book, The Great Financial Crisis which Monthly Review Press sent me to review and it arrived already! *
Their opening remarks reminded me of Gary’s comment to the post I’d written about Jack Welch’s concession that shareholder value shouldn’t be the goal when running a firm.
Gary snarked that Jack Welch was a “smug asshole” because he said, “”The wind was on our backs. Up until 2007, this was easy. Now, it is really difficult”.
As Gary pointed out, Welch was describing the economy as “like the weather”.
I’m not so sure it’s smug since I think this is a dominant way to look at the economy in this country: The economy is like the weather, something we have little control over. Gales of creative destruction are whipped up, for reasons that seem obscure for most of us, and if we come to understand it, it appears as if the economy is something we can’t really change — no more than we can change the weather. And all of its so very unpredictable — which is why R always called them the weather guessers instead of weather forecasters.
So smug, I’m not so sure. However, I reckon a case could be made that he and other powerful people, especially CEOs, know a lot more about how political factors shape the economy since they have an insider’s view of exactly how much power they can wield. Although, I suspect like your average boss, they tend to think that everyone else has their balls in a Mason jar and the poor dears haven’t much power at all.
Foster and Magdoff write:
Although former Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan has likened it to a “once-in-a-century credit tsunami,” the Great Financial Crisis is a historical rather than natural phenomenon. It represents a development both familiar in the history of capitalism and in many ways historically unprecedented.
Of course, as Marxists, Foster and Magdoff are interested in undermining this notion that the economy is like the weather. It is, rather, a very political phenomenon. We create it — and by that, I don’t mean that, somehow, it is through our personal actions and behavior that we create it, and thus we have to undo it by changing personal behavior. NO!
As the say themselves in the Preface:
Our purpose here is to examine the causes and consequences of the present Great Financial Crisis, and the radical changes in society that might be undertaken in response — if the great mass of the population decide that economics is really political economy and hence theirs to choose.
Note the language: — radical changes that might be undertaken because it is our to choose if we want to understand that essentially political character of the economy.
The language is so very different from those who tend to view politics as located in the individual, conceived of a site of ‘radical consumerism’ — that is, as a site that we must mold and shape through techniques of self-administration, self-denial, self-abnegation, self-censoring, self-constraint in order to get this self to be the right kind of clean, morally righteous consumer in spite of this dirty world.
Instead, Foster and Magdoff write about how we have a history and a present and a future — together — and it is ours to make if we choose, together.
I don’t know Eric. Is that macho politics? I don’t think so.
Liberal Political Economy: Don’t like the weather? Wait awhile, it’ll change.
Radical Gardening: Don’t like the weather? Consume something differently!
Radical Political Economy: Don’t like the weather? Get together and remake the world!
* Disclosure: MR is a client.
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That doesn’t sound all that macho to me. It sounds pretty right, in fact, though it’s based on just a few words.
I hope you don’t think I’m defending rad gardening or most other forms of rad consumption. I’m not. My objection to many of the objections to them is that it’s not real politics because it’s not big enough or because it’s based merely on consumption or whatever. Now, I really despise outraged consumerism, but it’s hard to see how the consumption and food, two central features of our lives, is not political. My post was trying to figure out where you stand on this.
I’m not against change and organizing on a large scale, and I certainly don’t think a retreat to the local and the consumptive and the self-reliant is the answer. My problem with politics that insists on a large scale is that it usually draws its lines along the same lines as the nation. Calls for new New Deals, regulation, stopping the U.S.’s decline, etc., are all, strictly speaking, “nationalist” politics. I’m not against drawing lines. In fact, I think might be what politics is. But I do object to leftists when they continually trace the line of the nation. Because the line of the nation is also the line of sex and gender. One of the things I like about Agustin’s work–I haven’t read the book, but based on her blog and the couple of essays I’ve read–is that she recognizes, even if she doesn’t always discuss it directly, that national borders are also racial, sexual, and gender borders. She complicates what the nation is, while many leftists–who do happen to be white males–think they can do away with nationalist exclusions based on sheer will. That is, when they don’t see the nation as a site of liberation.
well, everything’s political, right? i guess, coming from observing feminist bloglandia, what i saw constantly was the exhortation that the personal is political — divorced of the original line that followed: there are no personal solutions at this time.
what that meant was: if you don’t have orgasms and you go get therapy to find out why, when the therapists tells you to work on your “self” so you can have vaginal orgasms like a big girl, that there is something fucked up about that approach. the reasons were political and we could trace them out: therapy, psychoanalysis, gender relations, etc.
these days, the personal is political, because it takes place in the liberal context where it’s kind of unseemly to tell people how to live or demand a certain kind of behavior or to even try to get together to do something, collectively, about a problem, the exhortation is to be “responsible” for your actions.
hummers? political! ass fucking? political. when you do them, you are warped by patriarchy into thinking you like them. well, you don’t.
objections are raised about consent, agency, pleasure.
ok. ok. all we’re saying is: think about it. are you helping out your sisters by encouraging men to think all women like to give hummers and get fucked in the ass? see, when you bare your ass for that nasty sausage, all you’re doing is encouraging him to think that women like ass fucking. ok. ok. so you like it. but most of us don’t. ok? so, look, we’re not saying that you have to stop giving hummers or anything, omilard no. we’re not saying you lack agency or anything. we’re just saying. think about it. be responsible for yourself, and reach down into your self and ask yourself if you really like it.
–
i recall one of these crazy debates, it was over on pandagon, and I said something about, hey, you know, what about working, together, to change things. I can’t find the pandagon post but I reproduced some of it at the old blog:
[pandagon commenter]: There is no other way to enlightenment, than to debate and discuss what we feel.
[Maia from Capitalism Bad, Tree Pretty]L That’s probably the difference. I don’t think feminism is about enlightenment. I think it’s about creating change. That’s done through collective action, because individuals have no strength to change anything, it’s only collectively that we get power.
Of course you can critique women’s reactions to sexual assault if they write about. There’s nothing that’s going to stop you. But I think it’s incredibly anti-woman. Just because you can tell people that they’re wrong doesn’t make it feminist.
most of what’s discussed in the radical gardening i was talking about what just that sort of enlightenment thing. it’s not the the people advocating it disagree with collective action. it is, rather, that the collective action tends to amount to a practice of collective enlightenment conceived of as action.
http://flipfloppingjoy.com/2009/03/06/why-radical-gardening-an-intro/
now, these are al their choices, their way of coping in a world that *is* overwhelming. not much i can do about that — and i prefer reading her stuff to reading dennis p bitch about how no one gets out in the streets to *do* something — when he’s not doing anything himself.
but they are conceived of as individual choices and no one can get anyone to do anything differently and well, this works for me in my life now.
i certainly understand that.
but radical? especially when, in an earlier post, someone actually had the nerve to say that they gardened so they could afford organic produce and, somehow, this was an act of solidarity with migrant field workers. essentially, boycotting organize produce was an act of labor solidarity.
how the fuck does THAT logic make any sense at all?
anyway. i’m ranting. it’s freezing. i’m going to jump back under the blankets, watch the science channel or something and read The Great Financial Crisis.