Demoradical vs Demoliberal Regulation

By Alex Foti

Never a decline of the west has been more apparent. The US and its
European major ally, the UK, supported by minor bushist partners such
as Berlusconi's Italy and Aznar's Spain, have been inflicting
barbarism and spreading ethnic strife in Irak and elsewhere. The
continuous, structural human rights violations inflicted by the US and
its allies, from kidnappings and secret prisons in Europe, down to
Guantanamo, Abu Grahib and Haditha, are a crying shame for all
enlightened westerners: progressives have failed at stopping the
totalitarian forces – namely the salafi brand of sunni fundamentalism,
the neoliberal interpretation of evangelical protestantism, and shia
integralism supported by the islamic republic of Iran – that are
plunging the world in a clash of civilizations, where reactionary and
defensive identities prevail over transnational movements and global
issues of environmental balance and social justice.

Of course, the early XXI-century twilight of American neoliberal
hegemony and its European ramifications, as framed by the monetarist
and pro-corporate philosophy of the EU single currency and market, is
not without geopolitical consequences. On one side, Indian and
Bolivarian America have possibly dealt a lethal blow to the Monroe
Doctrine of unlimited US power on the Southern Hemisphere. On the
other side, China and India are rising giants beating the westerners
at their own game of globalization. Liberalziation of world markets
was set in motion in 1971-1973, when the end of international
Keynesism was officially proclaimed, and incipient energy crises and
financial deregulations started undermining Fordism and the
progressive forces that had developed under its wings. The 1980s and
1990s opened the gates to a new, more turbulent world, the world of
neoliberal regulation. This was an explicit conservative
counteroffensive against the unintended social (and anti-imperialist)
effects of postkeynesian regulation, reasserting the right to manage
and the economic privileges of financial elites in the new digital,
networked, flexible, postindustrial economy. The world of high
profits, high rents and low wages, of massive labor market and
financial deregulations, of large-scale privatization of public
assets, outsourcing and offshoring of manufacturing and services, and
widespread tightening of social spending. My contention is that
neoliberal regulation is now over: the 1999-2003 international cycle
of struggle, 9/11 and 7-7, the bushist rise to power and the invasions
of Afghanistan and Irak, repeated financial instability and
environmental disaster, have all undermined the political bases of the
Washington Consensus that constituted the essence of western policy
and geopolitical projection in the 1980s and 1990s. Globalization is
yielding to global regionalism, neoliberal multiculturalism is leaving
the place to bushist occidentalism, free trade is becoming managed
protectionism, while the professed multilateral internationalism of
the Clinton era has turned into a one-sided and naked (but failed)
attempt to unrivalled world hegemomy.

David Graeber: Anarchist and More

By Rebecca White

From Souldish

David Graeber, intrepid anthropologist and anarchist, talks about the magical battles and spiritual jujitsu of Madagascar, the trials of being a political dissident, and the emerging "Anarchist Century."

It's not often that we get to sneak a peak into the minds that will no doubt be remembered. David Graeber is one such mind. But more than a mind, he is a man whose work has been met with varying opinion in the past few years due to the threatening nature of his anarchist beliefs.

When I met him, I was faced with a slew of discussion topics to choose from. In the scholarly world he's known for his research on Madagascar. In the world of gossip, he's known for being the anthropology professor at Yale who was fired without due cause.

Either way you look at it, David is an anthropological scholar, an anarachist, and an all around witty guy with a wry sense of humor one wouldn't expect from someone so feared by the "ruling class".

Are you an anthropologist that’s an anarchist or an anarchist that happens to be an anthropologist?

I guess it depends on what kind of day it is. In a way, both. I guess I considered myself an anarchist for most of my life, but then I’ve been interested in anthropology for most of my life, too. I imagine they came from the same impulse which was this sort of belief that there’s got to be something better than this. An interest in human possibilities.

Much of your anthropological work was done in Madagascar. Why did you choose Madagascar for your doctoral thesis?

That’s an interesting question. I wasn’t originally thinking of studying Madagascar when I went to graduate school. I was sort of vaguely thinking somewhere in Indonesia. There seemed to be various practical reasons that that wasn’t such a good idea. Polynesia was also an option but I decided not to go there because I didn’t want to eat yams everyday. I don’t really like yams.

Then my advisor mentioned I should take a look at Madagascar, so I started reading about it. I started reading folk tales, actually. I wanted to get an idea of what people were like there. What I found was they’re incredibly subversive. There’s all these stories about people playing tricks on God. It just seemed like these were people whose attitude I would appreciate.