05/01/2010

Moody's framework for understanding the rise of neoliberalism is quite different from the work that's currently appearing. This work tends to focus on 'electoral coalitions'--the decline of old voting blocs, understood in pluralist terms. Understood as the reintegration of old constituencies into new voting blocs (David Mayhugh). In sociology, there has been good work—it has looked at data on PACs and funding sources for politics. But predominantly it looks at it through two lenses: (1) institutions—no real theory, Vivek is arguing; (2) thinktanks—so the idea is that thinktanks generaate ideas, ideas float into the heads of politicians, and hence you have shifts. Political economy has been shifted off the table.

It's trivially true that there were shifts in the 'meaning' universe. But thinktanks were creatures of the corporate community, and the 'causal arrow' definitely runs the other way.

The approach that Moody presents proposes to situate these factors in an analysis of shifts in political economy—underlying all these shifts, he argues, was an underlying shift in the balance of power between classes. The escalation of an attack on labor in the late 70s, and the coming together of business in a class project.

Underneath this is another mechanism—what triggers the corporate onslaught is an underlying crisis of profitability. This, of course, addresses the question of why corporations mobilize at this point? ('leftish' answers have been given: the 'compact' between Capital and Labor was broken by the social upheavals of the late 60's, or by globalization, etc. Common to this view is that this resolution solved some problems—“Fordism”. Misleading for several reasons, Vivek is arguing: Capital didn't 'agree' to anything. It agreed to 'live' with what was imposed upon it. It never was a compromise. It was 'muted hostility'. The only reason it put up with it was because attacking labor would have been two costly, both in terms of direct costs and opportunity costs. What changes in the 60s is the profits crisis.

Thus we are alerted to the fact that 'politics' is always 'political economy'--the space for political contestation and political alliances was affected by the tempo of capital accumulation (greater space in the 50s, less in the 60s/70s).

This is the theoretical framework of Moody's argument: that 'class struggle' proceeds in the context of shifting economic facts.

It is the shift in these social forces that explains the tectonic shift in American politics as a whole. What Moody is explaining, in short, is why everything shifts to the Right.

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1. active labor market requires serious political strength, no?

nationalization as a strategy is threatening to capitalists. so the Swedes thought that they couldn't have both an active labor movement and nationalization, in the 1930s. the Fre7nch bourgeoisie, on the other hand, could live with nationalization, because you didn't have a labor movement mobilized in the same way.