N Jett on Mon, 8 Jul 2002 23:54:01 +0200 (CEST)


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[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Stiglitz is not the Answer



Stiglitz is not the answer to the question of what replaces the market. But 
he is the answer, or at least part of the answer, to the question of how the 
market can be upgraded (i.e. What is wrong with the market system, and what 
can we do to repair market-based economics).
Perhaps I am being dense or need to reread your essay but I don't quite get 
why you say Stiglitz is not the answer? Is it because you reject the market 
outright? Or is it because you don't think his criticisms are accurate?
You see Stiglitz as the harbinger of (global?) Neo-Keynesian? I am confused. 
What was the question again?





>
>Stiglitz is not the Answer
>by Soenke Zehle
>
>Joseph Stiglitz, nobel laureate and ex-World Bank economist, has become one
>in a series of official dissidents whose criticism of the "Washington
>Consensus" of trade-liberalization attracts the attention of the so-called
>"anti-globalization movement." With all the credentials of a convert,
>Stiglitz has entered the spotlight of mainstream as well as movement media.
>The story he tells, however, is yet another variety of the "market failure"
>argument. Given proper information and the internalization of whatever we
>deem problematic (cost of environmental "remediation", for instance - this
>is where market theorists see the role of the public), self-regulation and
>self-optimization will run their course. Ah yes, the Global South: let's
>open our markets so their restructured, export-oriented economies can
>finally sell their products to us. Access for all, if you will.
>
>This vision of self-organization is based on the assumption that markets 
>are
>essentially rational. But once you break down the "world market" into its
>components, it becomes pretty confusing. Trying to map the constituent
>elements of the arms trade, I think of national security, the politics of
>military supranationalism (NATO-expansion), the indispensability of
>organized crime, corruption, double standards, competition for subsidies
>among political reps and their constituencies - no way to extricate the
>rational from the irrational. Same with tourism, waste, and any number of
>others.
>
>But along with "reformers" like Stiglitz, a great deal of NGOs seek
>redemption in "open" institutions, transparency, accountability and have
>become major advocates of free trade. They will find it difficult to
>extricate themselves from the embrace by ex-WB-Stiglitz, IMF-Köhler, even
>the World Economic Forum. Hey, Bono thought they were nice people once he'd
>joined them on stage. But then, Greenpeace did pull out at the last minute
>because the economic elite wasn't quite ready to commit to new standards of
>automotive emissions. You have to draw the line somewhere.
>
>On the other hand, many NGOs have been reluctant to criticize corrupt
>ethnocracies in part because that'll sound quite a bit like the discourse 
>of
>"good governance" at the heart of G8 paternalism toward Africa. One
>consequence has been that their is plenty of homogenization in the
>"movement" analyses of "globalization. So the language of Third Worldism 
>and
>tricontinental solidarity survived, first the emergence of OPEC and the
>Newly Industrializing Countries, then the disintegration of the
>Non-Alignment Movement and the inability of the G77 to accomplish anything
>substantial to cover up its own heterogeneity, and now seems to go into a
>third round at the World Social Forum. Even Negri, who doesn't generally
>have a problem with his own generalizing/homogenizing concepts, finds this
>troubling.
>
>In the academy, postcolonialism has become an acceptable conceptual
>substitute for Third Worldism. I am not sure if observers of the
>geopolitical crisis of "Third Worldism" have found a comparable solution.
>But at least someone ought to write a an obituary so we can move on. The
>2001 UN World Conference on Racism, Xenopobia, and Related Intolerance 
>would
>be a good date, I think. If we accept the 1955 Bandung Conference as the
>date of birth, the Third World would have died in her mid-40s, way above 
>the
>average life-expectancy in the Global South but still before the mid-life
>crisis that has given us the post-political populism of middle-age
>parliamentarism. At the end of Bandung, five pages sufficed to give birth 
>to
>the political identity of a "Third World" modeled on the Third Estate of 
>the
>French Revolution. In Durban, in the country that barely buried apartheid,
>almost 200 pages spelled out the global paralysis of identity politics.
>
>But things get too complicated, so maybe the "Third World" is alive and 
>well
>after all, at least in the movement imagination. In India, for instance, 
>the
>"movement" chooses to focus on the KRRS (known for their spectacular
>anti-biotech actions) and Vandana Shiva to make the case against Bio-IPR
>etc. - but the KRRS is but one of the major farmers' organizations and
>actually the only one to resist green-revolution-type agricultural
>modernization. Needless to say, "they" don't want what "we" want. But then
>the "people of Seattle" are mostly white and middle-class anyway. They were
>taken by surprise, for instance, when a global rift within the movement for
>debt cancellation appeared. Maybe it's time to rethink movement agendas 
>from
>the color line.
>
>So how do you shift the controversy to a new terrain? What are the terms? 
>Is
>it really a matter of sovereignty and self-determination for all, as parts
>of the NG0-Declaration at the World Social Forum seem to suggest? That's 
>how
>Europe dismantled Yugoslavia, yet another ethnocratic state is about to
>emerge from the NATO/EU-protectorate Kosovo. Is it the language of
>transnationalism, along with a simultaneous acknowledgement of cultural
>diversity? The Golden Arches already rose over the Falafel Burger. Is it 
>the
>language of a human rights universalism? Just make sure you're white before
>you ask CNN to organize an intervention. And then there were Michael
>Chossudovksy, Noam Chomsky, Walden Bello, Susan George who continue to
>"expose" the "contradictions" of all the market rhetoric. Well, once again
>we are OUTRAGED to hear that capitalism is just that - capitalism.
>
>The glue of anti-neoliberalism will not hold much longer. Not only because
>Stiglitz, Köhler, even Tom "Free Trade" Friedman are ready to concede that
>the market - as a mechanisms for resource allocation, as a model of
>socio-political organization - has its limitations. Also because
>neoliberalism is not what it used to be when Reagan was still riding off
>into the sunset. Keynes returned to office. The stock market Keynesianism 
>of
>drastic interest-rate reductions is alive and well, National Missile 
>Defense
>announces a parallel return to military Keynesianism. The level of private
>and corporate debt is too high, however, for a rerun of the
>reaganomics-cum-speculative-bubble-economy experience, dollar inflation
>already looms on the horizon - the Euro/Dollar parity might just be the
>first stage. That is to say, transnational capital will not be able to
>replace the state, restructuring is on everyone's agenda.
>
>This includes most quarters of resistance, neo-Keynesian recipes all over
>the place. The Tobin-Tax is only its most prominent example. Some say it's
>because of the dominance of an older leftist expertocracy which continues 
>to
>monopolize macroecenomic controversy, so the demand for a renewal of the
>regulatory state appears to unite the heterogeneous bunch that moves from
>summit to summit. Leftist-Keynesian recipes will make protesters a mere
>junior partner in the process of capitalist restructuration. States are
>already resorting to Keynesian recipies which serve only to socialize the
>tremendous losses of the corporate sector. And you don't need Keynes to
>argue your case against the WTO or in favor of debt cancellation, and the
>incommensurability of positions within the movement is certain to surface
>before too long.
>
>This is not to rain on anyone's social forum. But maybe we should simply
>admit that "globalization" - including theorizations of a global "movement
>agenda" - is actually not the best point of departure for that kind of
>discussion. I'm just wondering whether the official "critique" is not
>already losing some of its steam.
>
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