Invisible Man #1 Cover

*Not based on H. G. Wells.

How entrenched is Neoliberal thought in the United States? Consider these examples:
* would you say that the average person has a positive or negative view of unions?
* how close was the United States to privatize social security?
* why, when the US medical system is half as efficient as that of France, Canada, or the UK, does our private health care system continue?
* which is more important - protecting the public interest or protecting Bear Sterns from collapsing?

David Harvey’s work, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (see my notes from his recent visit to UT), examines in depth the history of Neoliberal thought and action, the principles of Neoliberalism, the difference between theory and practice, and a criticism of Neoliberalist practices.

Traits of neoliberalism

First, what is neoliberalism? It is, essentially, a belief that market forces and private property interests are the preferred, most efficient method of managing all economies of scale. That is, “Free Market Above All.” Corollaries include:

1. 1. Government intervention is inefficient. Market forces can more efficiently handle traditionally (Keynesian) governmental roles, such as welfare, city services, or pollution (ie, using pollution credits to reduce pollution.)
2. 2. Privatization is preferred over public interests. This is echoed in
   

   There is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women.
   — Margaret Thatcher, 1987

   Intense privatization is the cornerstone of Neoliberalism. Removing the public aspects of life (unions, public spaces, public welfare) allows private property to become more liquid - thus allowing better control through market forces. And everything - from pollution, to space, to the lawmaking process, can be privatized and marketed.

3. 3. Putting together corollary one and two, Neoliberalism advocates the privatization of almost all (save military) government spheres, which dismantles the agency and effectiveness of government programs.

Neoliberalism in practice

In practice, Neoliberalism has several key characteristics:

1. 1. Because Neoliberalism concentrates private ownership, public/social forces have to be dismantled. In many cases, this has happened violently and with authoritarian means. The coup d’etat in Chile in 1973 was the first militaristic Neoliberal action, and the US invasion in Iraq and subsequent governmental structure (where every industry, including the military and excepting oil, is private) is simply the latest and most sever form. In the US and UK, Neoliberalism has meant the decline of trade unionism and the removal of public spaces. Authoritarian measures in the US emphasize a strong military and domestic and international espionage.
2. 2. Unlike Keynesian policies which encouraged government interventionism to promote economic equality, Neoliberalism concentrates wealth into the upper classes.
3. 3. Although Neoliberalism discourages government intervention, policy-makers have not been afraid to use it when it helps their cause. Since 1982, the International Monetary Fund has been co-opted to require Neoliberal development policies in countries (water in Bolivia and Ecuador, telecommunications in Mexico, etc) that take loans from the IMF. In this way, Neoliberal policies are forced onto developing countries which then must pay them back at high interest rates. That is, the rich are feeding off the poor. (For more, see Making Development Geography and Accumulation by Disposession, below.
4. 4. Market forces are used for all transactions, including those for which information is not universal (a prerequisite under Adam Smith’s free market theories). Financialization means continually creating new markets and speculations, which encourages unsustainable financial environments while accumulating wealth at the top.
5. 5. Deregulation runs rampant and favors those in power. Because social networks are diminished and social power legally removed, cronyism and money replace social power as the means to power in government.
6. 6. Neoliberalism, like most forms of capitalism, requires huge deficit spending to continue adequate growth. Crisis must continually be followed by crisis, either real or manufactured, to remove social structures and produce a willing constituency for privatization.
7. 7. Democracy itself (the public institution) becomes critically impaired. By removing institutions from government (ie, public) control into private hands, democracy becomes impotent. Ironically, the cries of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ have been used to promote the Neoliberalist agenda.

8. 8. Finally, when having to make a choice between repaying public interests or paying the banks - the banks win. Over and over again, Neoliberalism protects financial institutions (the Bear Sterns buyout, anyone?) over public interest.

Accumulation by dispossession

After discussing the rise and history of Neoliberalism, Harvey concludes with two chapters of examples, including one specifically on the embrace of Neoliberalism in China, and the final critique of Neoliberalism’s problems. Neoliberalism, as a theory, is not sustainable except through authoritarian means.

The internal economic and political contradictions of neoliberalization are impossible to contain except through financial crises. So far these have proven locally damaging but globally manageable. The manageability depends, of course, upon departing substantially from neoliberal theory.

– David Harvey

Accumulation by dispossession is the removal of public assets (which many depend on) into private hands in the wealthiest classes. It is managed through three methods:

1. 1. Privitization and commodification.
2. 2. Financialization.
3. 3. The management and manipulation of crises.
4. 4. Government redistributions.

Neoliberalism has not generated wealth, but has redistributed upwards, as Harvey claims.

My Thoughts

Harvey’s work is dense, thoughtful, and compelling. He presents his arguments in both the form of a critical geographer while retaining readability or a wider audience. As an entry point into his work, I found it readable while containing the complexity and nuance needed for such a difficult and detailed subject.

My next thoughts, as a geographer, is that of scale - how does Neoliberalism reproduce itself at the local, regional, national scales? What about at the personal scale? What forces interplay to stop (social reproduction?) or reinforce (national discourse?) it? And if Neoliberalism is a global, crisis-enforced phenomenon, what measures can be used to recreate and amplify social constructs?

Something to think about.

Book Review: Roads

Roads

Larry McMurtry
Touchstone Books, 208 pages, June 2001
ISBN: 0684868857; $13. Purchased at the Book Stop in Central Market, Austin,
TX, and read in Austin and Dallas.

May 9, 2001 –

Larry McMurtry. One usually sees his name next to the phrases
“Pulitzer prize winning” and “Lonesome Dove”, most often with an “author of”
sandwiched somewhere in between. His reputation precedes him. He’s well-known
in literary circles and beloved by fans of the Western. In addition to being
an author, he owns a large antique bookstore in Archer City, Texas, known
for it’s immense selection of impossible to find titles. Next to Powell’s
Books in Portland, it’s the bibliophile’s Mecca. People travel great
distances to visit the bookstore that has encompassed all of downtown
Archer City.

But where do the people of Mecca go on their travels? It was with this
question in mind that Roads spoke to me. I can’t claim to have
read even 1/5 of the number of travel books Mr. McMurtry has read (more than
3000), but I can tell that this book would please none but the most
ardent McMurtry fans. McMurtry describes in no detail his brief dashes
along some of America’s most crowded interstates. He reminisces about
traffic jams he’s had in past Los Angeles. He recalls the names of some
of America’s greatest writers and travelers while failing to evoke even
the briefest sense of place or scenery. In it’s place, McMurtry provides
some quick notes made driving back to his house from business trips in
Duluth, Washington, Florida, and San Diego.

It’s the same imagery one would get looking out at America from the window
of a 757 leaving a fast-moving shadow over the heartland between the time
the peanuts are passed out and the drink cart finally arrives. A cursory
view at best, and certainly not an interesting travel book.

McMurtry details at the beginning of the book his plan — to travel
America’s roads; and in particular, the lonely US-281, which runs all the way
from Texas to Manitoba past farms and McMurtry’s ranch home. One comes to
expect an exploration on the themes of place and of America, of travel and
hardship. The cliches of travel writing demand this. McMurtry avoids these
idioms. Perhaps age or time would not allow a enough travel to achieve depth
of place. Even though McMurtry only travels on interstates (except for a
brief trip on US 2, the only worthy passage in the book), in the end, even
these are too tiresome for him; most of his trips are cut short and he
arranges a flight home. Even his trip down US-281 ends in Nebraska, hundreds
of miles ahead of his goal.

If one were inclined to do so, Roads could be taken to represent the
current American lifestyle. Our technology and mass transit systems allow
great personal freedom and movement. Highways and mega-highways carry
people faster and farther but with no sense of time or place. Places become
map markings, odometer readings, and road signs. Wind shields become mobile
view-masters. Places are lost in favor of time and distance. Perhaps
McMurtry’s writing warns of an age where travel is nothing more than a line
of cars on the fastest roads going quickly nowhere.

One would have to be pretty bloody loopy to pull that out of this shallow
volume. Perhaps McMurtry should avoid listening to the publishers who agree
to print anything he places on paper. After all, some papers are meant to
be flushed, not published.

Book Review: About a Boy

About a Boy

Nick Hornby
Riverhead Books, 307 pages, May 1999
ISBN: 1573227331; $12.95. Purchased at the Book Stop in Central Market, Austin,
TX, and read in Dallas.

May 11, 2001 –

Nick Hornby’s successful followup to his first novel High Fidelity is
clever without pretension. About a Boy shifts in perspective between
a 36 year-old layabout do-nothing (Will) and a 12 year-old boy of divorced
parents (Marcus), both of whom are isolated and adrift in London’s suburbs.
The novel is a “coming-of-age” story for both characters as they begin to
learn the delicate steps necessary to connect with their families, friends,
and each other.

About a Boy continues where High Fidelity left off, by exploring
the complex relationships of emotionally stagnant 30 year-old men. Since
inheriting the rights to his father’s
popular Christmas carol, Will has lost his reason to be. His days are spent
shouting answers at television quiz shows and listening to Nirvana. He’s
stylish, cool,
but without depth or meaning. When he falls into a sex-only relationship with
a time-harried single mother, he considers it perfect; he can spend a few
minutes pretending to be a parent between sexual interludes. All the fun
without the mess.

Attempting to duplicate this relationship, Will joins a support group for
single parents, even going to lengths to pretend to have a two year-old
son. (In one funny scene, he buys an expensive car seat for his imaginary
child, and then dumps food over it when he realizes that no two year-
old has a clean car seat, all to complete the illusion.)
His plans go awry when he meets the quiet, strange, and dutiful Marcus.

Marcus is neither a child nor an adult. He doesn’t have a fully realized
sense of self, but he isn’t a complete dependent, either; he’s in the twilight
years of middle adolescence.
When Marcus’s parents split, he and his mother move to
London, where she begins an full-blown depression. Picked on at school and
isolated from his mother, Marcus looks out toward adult Will for guidance.

At first, Will’s relationship is like that of older brother to Marcus. Will
explains what music is cool, how to wear one’s clothes, and buys him shoes
and CD’s. Marcus gives Will an “in” to meeting more single mothers. Their
friendship is augmented by family and step-family, Will’s girlfriends and the
single parent support group. Through Marcus, all of these people are connected;
they become his “village.”

Marcus slowly develops into a teen. He breaks rules and asserts himself,
characteristics of independent thought and a developing personality. If Marcus
finally arrives at pubescene, then Will finally leaves it; through his
relationships, he develops a sensitivity he lacked before.
If Nick Horby’s portraits are accurate, then he owes it to his time spent as a
English teacher in London’s suburbs.

Hornby’s “Will” character in About a Boy is his “Rob” from
High Fidelity, loosely redrawn. They are men who not men, stuck in
advanced adolesence, who mature by learning to value people over their
personal hipness quotient. What makes the subject matter endearing is
Hornby’s omniscient and witty narration — the reader’s view into the
characters’ thoughts make them appear even more hapless than their actions do.
We laugh at what they do; we laugh even more at why they do it.

Hornby’s disfunctional, English world of single mothers and do-nothing men
illustrates a modern (and not universal) view of family. When divorce is
so common that children rarely have fathers, family is where you find it.
The characters in this story survive because of their willingness to reach
beyond traditional means of support. Even so, the effect is incomplete; while
Marcus and Will (and Marcus’s mother, Fiona) mature, the reader senses
a lack of resolution.

If Hornby’s novel has a fault (and it does), it is this: his characters’
flaws and foibles are much more interesting than their perfections, so he
glosses over the ending.
Will and Marcus are suddenly much older for two pages at the end of the book.
The pace is lost and the change is jarring. Hornby refuses to resort
to a sentimental ending, but in doing so, the characters don’t ring true to
the rest of the book.

About a Boy suggests that support groups and friends have replaced
extended families as the tertiary influencer of children (behind their parents
and their peers). While Hornby’s view is humorous and embracing, it’s also
disquieting. In the end, Marcus gains a toughness against the pain of his
parents’ split but loses his childhood. Is that a price worth paying?

The Clumsiest People in Europe: Or, Mrs. Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World Todd Pruzan, Favell Lee Mortimer Bloomsbury, 2005, 208 pages Amazon Powells

I first heard of Mrs. Mortimer, or the author of the Peep of Day as she’s more widely known, via a Little Gray Books Lecture entitled The Countries of Europe Described. Todd Pruzan discovered one of Mrs. Mortimer’s many books for children in a garage sale in New York and thus entered Mrs. Mortimer’s dim, sad world.

For the complete on-line text of one of her works, Far Off, you can visit Project Gutenberg. For an example of her text, let’s visit Hindoostan and see what she has to say…

It is a miserable thing to be a Hindoo lady. While she is a very little girl, she is allowed to play about, but when she comes to be ten or twelve years old, she is shut up in the back rooms of the house till she is married; and when she is married she is shut up still. She may indeed walk in the garden at the back of the house, but nowhere else.

Mrs. Mortimer’s world is bleak indeed. There are very few countries or people that she doesn’t dish it out on. The Irish are dirty; the Roman Catholics are evil and worship Satan; the Jews are greedy; the Mexicans are lazy… her world speaks in harsh, strict, authoritarian tones of which she is sadly informed. (Only once did she ever leave Britain - to go to Belgium when she was young.) Her authority is questionable, yet one can’t help but laughing at the seriousness with which she displays her opinions.

In fact, it’s almost refreshing to read someone so distinctly opinionated. In this day in age, every idea is tempered and questioned. While I wouldn’t want to live in Mrs. Mortimer’s world, it is fun to travel briefly through it.

Just don’t drink the water in Scotland, Germany, Brazil.. or anywhere, really.