by From a comment by Ikonoclast “A truth is permitted only a brief victory celebration between the two long periods where it is first condemned as paradoxical and later disparaged as trivial.” – Arthur Schopenhauer. As they break new ground, the Capital as Power theoreticians will encounter the “Schopenhauer Effect” over and over. When you point out something clearly for the first time, or even again after a long interregnum when few could see it, then everyone will say, “Oh, we always knew that.” To widen the focus, I think a big part of what is happening now is the increasing collaboration, or rather collusion, between big government and big capitalism. I think what we have in the modern neoliberal system is a symbiotic relationship between big government and big corporations. It is
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from a comment by Ikonoclast
“A truth is permitted only a brief victory celebration between the two long periods where it is first condemned as paradoxical and later disparaged as trivial.” – Arthur Schopenhauer.
As they break new ground, the Capital as Power theoreticians will encounter the “Schopenhauer Effect” over and over. When you point out something clearly for the first time, or even again after a long interregnum when few could see it, then everyone will say, “Oh, we always knew that.”
To widen the focus, I think a big part of what is happening now is the increasing collaboration, or rather collusion, between big government and big capitalism. I think what we have in the modern neoliberal system is a symbiotic relationship between big government and big corporations. It is common enough for people to believe that under neoliberalism we have been moving to small government. I don’t think that is the case.
The government may be “getting out of people’s lives” but only in the sense that it won’t spend (adequately) to help poor and ordinary people or to protect the environment. When it comes to helping big business with big money (corporate welfare) and tax breaks, the government is right there with the spending spigots wide open and the return valves (for taxes on big business) turned right down.
I doubt that government spending has gone down under this system. It simply has been redirected to aid business (especially big business) above all else. Where welfare spending remains in the system, it occurs under a regime (rental rather ownership, in essence) where the money simply passes rapidly through welfare recipients’ hands for necessities and up to wealth accumulation for the rich. Here, measuring the change in stocks (wealth accumulation) is probably more revealing than measuring flows. It’s not where it flows that matters so much as where it ends up accumulating.
I wonder if this is an area worth looking at from a CasP perspective.