The feeling of capitalism's largest historical cog turning a notch or two is currently over-whelming. There are now three dates with which to call time on the twentieth century - November 1989, September 2001 and September 2008. Take your pick. Marxists, especially with a regulationist bent, will be competing over the coming years to try and define the next settlement or 'fix' that will succeed the neo-liberalism of the past thirty years.
The state's function, from a Marxist point of view, is to defend capitalism from its own contradictions and prevent capitalism expanding to the point of meltdown. Once capitalism cannot grow any further, it collapses, hence one of the state's roles is to set its limits in order to protect it from this totality. This role is also inherently contingent - there is no necessary logic to what the capitalist state actually does. However regimes of accumulation will be sustained for limited periods, with the state acquiring a certain role within them (e.g. Fordism + Keynesianism).
Taking all that as read, it strikes me that what succeeds neo-liberalism (and maybe what succeeds, in Bob Jessop's analysis, the 'Schumpeterian Workfare State') may not be immediately recognisable. It also strikes me that many people are getting a little duped by the current behaviour of the state. A few observations:
- Western states are (obviously) not currently behaving in a way that reflects a new political economy or some shift to the left. They are trying to navigate a crisis, and have no rule-book for how to do it. They literally do not know what they are doing, through little fault of their own. Once they arrive at a situation where they do know what they are doing, there is no reason to think that nationalisation or traditional leftwing policies will have anything to do with it.
- The post-1929 and post-1973 settlements both emerged thanks partly to a confident, rationalist political economy. In the case of the latter (monetarism), it was actually waiting in the wings, precisely because Chicago-style neo-liberalism was a critique of Keynesianism. Can we really assume that another will emerge or succeed? It is not only the particular technocratic paradigm that has been discredited (neo-liberalism) but also perhaps the excessive faith in a single economic creed. Just because the crisis of the 1930s and that of the 1970s were dealt with through the wholesale adoption of a rationalist economic paradigm (a plan in the case of the former; an anti-plan in the case of the latter), I don't see that this crisis will necessarily end in the same way. The twentieth century Western state opted to wear a single economic logic in the same way that a mod opts to wear clothes - trouser hems x inches wide, suit with three buttons - but there have been plenty of capitalist states in history that have not been so rule-bound.
- As John Gray has consistently argued for some years (recently here), the ideology of neo-liberalism rests on the distinctly American illusion of economic globalisation as Enlightenment. Meanwhile, both Keynesianism and neo-liberalism depended for their enaction on American hegemony - the former via the concerted action of Bretton Woods, the latter via the equally concerted dismantling of Bretton Woods. This poses two questions - what happens when there is no hegemon, and what happens when capitalism becomes divorced from Enlightenment? As has been widely pointed out, the wealth-creating, creditor states of the next epoch will not be in hoc to Western Enlightenment myths of progress, nor to any Western economic rationalism regarding policy. They will be more Schmittian in their political economy (mercantilist, if you like), and none of them will have much interest in acting as the hegemon. Even if a new Keynes (or Friedman) were to arise, there would be no equivalent of twentieth century America to employ the new rationality to any great effect.
- The centre-left's nostalgia for the Keynesian era means that, perversely, there is a low-level excitement about what is currently taking place, as if more government intervention were automatically desirable. But government to what end? If the answer is a Keynesian macroeconomic one - raising demand - then fine, but while we don't even know if there is a macroeconomic rationality at all, let alone whether it shares anything with Keynesianism, surely we ought to face the next few decades with considerable trepidation.
So for the time being, it will be easiest to understand events using analogies to 1929 and the emergence of Keynes. In time, however, I wonder if we will come to see both Keynesianism and neo-liberalism for what they were: rationalist sticking plasters, that disguise the fact that the capitalist state doesn't have to abide by a set of political-economic rules at all.
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