Economic Analysis
Our financial system is suffering a series of massive strokes. How much movement U.S. capitalism will regain is uncertain, but few expect a full recovery to the Gilded Age ushered in by the Reagan administration. Drifting through our daily routines, thinking, “be happy,” we’ve internalized the utopian fantasies of hyper-materialism. Fantasy #1
Everyone will benefit when restraints are removed from the economy, because financial markets can be trusted to self-correct on their upward path toward ever greater prosperity for all. Reality: the income gap between rich and poor is now the widest in U.S. history, and the land of the free now has the world’s highest per capita incarceration rate, with one of every ninety-nine Americans locked-up.
Fantasy #2
Government is bad. Reality: elites have harnessed the power of big government to subsidize their businesses and line their pockets. Now forced into the open by their own ineptness, these same elites are now grabbing hundreds of billions of our tax dollars to bail-out their privilege.
Let’s study what’s being done to us and respond with alternatives.
In 2007–2008, the five national Voices forums were grounded in an economic analysis postulating that there now exists a form of hyper-capitalism that puts the demands of the free market before a people’s spiritual, intellectual, and emotional well-being.Dr. Jack Tchen first put forward this analysis in his paper, “30 Years and Counting: A Context for Building a Shared Cross-Cultural Commons.” As Tchen writes in the prologue:
In the world of art, culture, and the humanities, the clashes of the 1980s into the '90s and present have been formulated as a series of “culture wars” between “liberals” and “conservatives.” This essay proposes it is more useful to understand these conflicts within the broader frame of a reorganizing political culture of “hypercapitalism,” or what has also been called “neoliberalism.”
This new regime fantasizes “the new world order” as a place like the one depicted in the brilliant Visa Check commercials where we can all happily dance and spend everywhere and anytime as if we all live in a perpetual Hollywood musical. Such are promises of the “free market” and “free trade” for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” at home and abroad.
This dramatic move to privatize all and subject all rewards to the marketplace is a return to “the survival of the fittest” ideology of elites. We are brought back to the world of King Midas and his “touch.” All he touched turned to his coveted gold. At first this seemed to be exactly what he dreamt for, but then even his food and drink, and even his loved ones became dead, frozen wealth — he found himself alone, lonely and devastated.
Such a false system of survival “merit” serves to promote massive individual alienation and social fragmentation. It destroys what we have left of a public commons — a shared, inclusive space not privileging private wealth and power over basic human rights and values. If the Midas touch of neoliberalism creates hollow selves, hollow cities and hollow cultures, we must ask: What can we do about this!?
This is the question posed for those involved in cultural work and the fight for cultural equity and justice around the country — in each region, in each locale we need to listen and talk about what has happened over these past 30 years and brainstorm what we can do to rouse us out of this druggy fairytale fantasy. How can we work together, in all our diversity, to build a shared cross-cultural commons?
The analysis was further developed by Dudley Cocke, Roadside Theater/ Appalshop, by defining several key terms and asking, “What’s at stake?”
Pluralism: The bright future for humankind depends on the universal acceptance of the self-evident truth that all people everywhere are created equal with certain inalienable rights. The call for the development of a durable global pluralism follows from the acceptance of this self-evident truth. What are the highest barriers preventing the acceptance of pluralism as a principle ingredient in the formulation of public policy?
Global Capitalism: The current dominant, so-called “free-market” economic model is based on the unregulated, unrestricted global mobility of capital. It posits that supply = demand = price in a self-regulating mechanism that will result in all of us being better off. This rising economic tide that will float all our boats claims to be natural and inevitable, rather than a carefully constructed and maintained political enterprise that depends on state power. Some historians and economists argue that when any society, whether pre-industrial, industrial, or post-industrial, embeds itself in economy, rather than the economy being embedded in the society, social decay ensues. (See Karl Polanyi’s, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time, 1944.) In short, they argue that such decline results from putting profit before people, market before community. Is unregulated “free-market” capitalism now destroying communities globally?
Cultural Equity: Culture is the distinctive spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and material traditions and features of a society. Equitable means fair and just; thus, cultural equity means that any culture, as a matter of principle, has the right to expect fair and just treatment in relationship to all other cultures. This means that no single culture has the right to dominate, dehumanize, or trivialize another people’s culture. Does this principle of respect for and equitable treatment of the plurality of world cultures conflict with the practice of global “free-market” capitalism? Does this current brand of “hyper-capitalism” insist that nothing – not even a people’s spiritual, intellectual, and emotional life and well-being – is more important than its own perpetuation?
No one has spoken more eloquently than the Kenyan playwright and novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o about the personal and social consequences of cultural destruction. From Decolonizing the Mind (Heinemann, 1986):
“The effect of the cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities, and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other peoples’ languages rather than their own. It makes them identify with that which is decadent and reactionary, all those forces which would stop their own springs of life. It even plants serious doubts about the moral rightness of struggle. Possibilities of triumph or victory are seen as remote, ridiculous dreams. The intended results are despair, despondency, and a collective death-wish.”