Particularidades de la Educación Plástica

The welfare and interventionist state as a form taken by the political sphere was born out of increased competition in the world market, increased concentration of capital and social consolidation after WWII. These factors led to an expanding role for the state in regulating, managing and monitoring the economy145. In class terms, Keynesianism was “a mode of domination, a mode of containing the power of labour”146_{. According to Bonefeld, by the mid-}

1970s, Keynesianism started to appear as “a spent force” since “the spectre of a socially reformed and economically vibrant capitalism” came under pressure due to mounting unemployment, hyperinflation, balance of payments deficits, depressed rates of profit and economic recession147. The inadequacy of the Keynesian mode of domination was felt when

144_{Ibid. p. 125.}

145 _{Joachim Hirsch, “Fordism and Post-Fordism: the Present Social Crisis and its Consequences”, in Werner}

Bonefeld and John Holloway, (eds.), Post-Fordism and Social Form: A Marxist Debate on the Post-Fordist State

(London, Macmillan Academic and Professional, 1991), p. 17.

146_{John Holloway, “The Abyss Opens: the Rise and Fall of Keynesianism”, in Werner Bonefeld and John}

Holloway, (eds.), Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money, p. 8.

147 _{Werner Bonefeld, “Monetarism and Crisis”, in Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway, (eds.), Global Capital,} National State and the Politics of Money, p. 35.

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the welfare system, which absorbed increasing amounts of state spending, became a reason for the fiscal crisis of the state, and when the Fordist structure of accumulation had “begun to become a barrier to the valorisation of capital”148.

Distinctively, the Keynesian form of managing capital-labour relations became a factor of crisis not simply because “it institutionalises certain standards of material reproduction for the working class” but rather because of the limits this form of regulation have in terms of the state’s ability to “pursue a ‘structural policy’ which can promote a socio-technological process of modernisation”, argues Hirsch149_{. As a result, class struggle reached the point where labour}

could no longer be contained by capital due to its institutionalised inflexibility. Therefore, capital responds by seeking to resolve such pressure through overaccumulation on a global level. Building on this, the state experienced the global crisis of accumulation in a national form150.

The expansionary policies of the Keynesian state allowed for the exploitation of labour to be underpinned by credit rather than real exploitation, assuming that the state can secure people’s ability to get their credit translated into money. Consequently, Keynesianism contained labour into production through “speculative” means, the credit issued was not matched by production. What followed then was an inflation and fiscal crisis of the state since the latter finances the deficit in balance of payments mainly from its reserves and revenues but also at a certain point by borrowing from Eurodollar banks which meant an “accumulation of debt”151_{. In order to}

avoid severe economic crisis and recession, which is usually accompanied with a political

148 _{Joachim Hirsch, “Fordism and Post-Fordism”, p. 18 and p. 20.} 149_{Ibid. p. 20-22.}

150 _{Peter Burnham, “Capital, Crisis and the International State System”, p. 109.} 151 _{Werner Bonefeld, “Monetarism and Crisis”, p. 42.}

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crisis, deregulation of income, employment and welfare security becomes inescapable152. As explained by Bonefeld, capitalism under the sponsorship of the welfare state was “living beyond its means”153_.

Therefore, as was the case in many advanced economies, politicians chose to suppress “anything remotely resembling a revolutionary threat”, notes Holloway. The state rolled back its extended arm that accompanied Keynesianism and oppressed trade unionists and excluded them from participating in policymaking which was the hallmark of welfare corporatism154. Eventually, monetarism was adopted in the 1980s as a means to tackle inflation through deflationary means. Monetarism sought to make workers bear the cost through intensified exploitation, low wages, cuts in services, and through breaking up the relationship between public spending and wages while capital was relieved through fiscal incentives. Thus, the state had to prioritise the management of social control - through removing any guarantee on economic and financial security - over easing the impact of unemployment - through further welfare spending155. In consequence, work had to be imposed on the labour army reserved under the benefit scheme as a condition for economic recovery. Moreover, most of the old guarantees associated with the old model had to be abolished. Monetarism is a vote for “market freedom and a natural rate of unemployment” in the Smithian sense156_{. What this meant for the}

working class is that it had to put limits to its expectations. In Bonefeld’s words, the working class expectations had “to conform … to the limits of the market, without the state meddling

152_{Ibid. p. 43.} 153_{Ibid. p. 52.}

154 _{John Holloway, “The Abyss Opens: the Rise and Fall of Keynesianism”, p. 12.}

155 _{Werner Bonefeld, “Monetarism and Crisis”, p. 52 and pp. 36-7. Poulantzas stresses the importance of}

productive capital as having a decisive role in the development of capitalism which is to be ascribed to its direct relation to the exploitation of labour; the “only real source of value”155_{. Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in} Contemporary Capitalism, pp. 110-115.

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in the market through policies designed to guarantee employment and income”157_{. The UK is}

a prime example of such a shift and will be explored in detail in Chapter Eight.

To recap, monetarism promised to be an effective means of servicing debt and avoiding further draining of surplus value as the rate of debt would be higher than the rate of surplus value produced. Otherwise, capital accumulation and profit would stand under massive pressure and would lead to “bad debt and financial crisis”158_{. In other words, expansionary policies}

generated “a massive claim on the future exploitation of labour” rather than exploitation of labour in the present159. To resolve this problem, tight monetary policy would push the labour market towards corresponding to the needs of accumulation and profitability. According to Holloway, this takes place effectively through “the decomposition of the working class into a profitable labour force”160_{. With Bonefeld, he maintains that Monetarism represented a “re-}

shaping or re-composition of the antagonism between labour and capital” which is a reoccurring development throughout the history of capitalism161. As a result, continued and smooth accumulation becomes the rule if the power of the working class is to be contained and fragmented which essentially means re-imposing and restructuring capital domination162.

Once in practice, monetarism and the deregulation of the world market opens the space for capital to accumulate freely which enables the state to “fragment working-class resistance” through allowing capital to fly freely in search for better investment environments163. For the purpose of achieving economic recovery and growth, states deregulated the world market to

157 _{Ibid. p. 37.} 158 _{Ibid. pp. 40-1.} 159_{Ibid. p. 40.}

160 _{John Holloway, “The Abyss Opens: the Rise and Fall of Keynesianism”, p. 47.}

161 _{Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway, “Conclusion: Money and Class Struggle”, in Werner Bonefeld and John}

Holloway, (eds.), Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money, p. 211.

162 _{John Holloway, “The Great Bear: post-Fordism and class struggle. A comment on Bonefeld and Jessop”, in}

Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway, (eds.), Post-Fordism and Social Form, p. 100.

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allow the transnationalisation of capital and started to reconstitute their institutional structures to enhance their competitiveness164_{. States began adjusting their economies to the dynamics of}

an unregulated global economy in which capital is footloose. This changing role for states has turned them towards structuring their economic policies along competitiveness standards. Competitiveness has become the eventual goal of these policies necessitated by the changing structure and conditions of class relations.

However, Holloway argues that the shift to austerity policies achieved its purpose in effectively exploiting labour but only in the short-term where the decreasing rates of inflation were followed by the liberalisation of the financial system which brought the question of labour back up to the surface again. To tackle recession, governments shifted to deficit financing policy which “reintroduced an integration of labour on the basis of deficit financing of demand”165_.

As a result, from 1982 on, the international financial system had started to become unstable which led monetarism to be dropped and replaced by a “policy of fiscal redistribution and credit expansion, containing labour through a renewed speculative deferral of overaccumulation and crisis”. Ironically, the failure to contain labour through a tight money policy led to reinstating the same policies that the New Right who advocated a free enterprise, such as those of the UK and the US, had protested against ˗˗ the expansionary policies of the Keynesian state166. The difference is that from the late 1980s it has become up to the central bank to decide the appropriate monetary and fiscal policies. This policy change essentially means the depoliticisation of the management of state-capital-labour relations as outlined above; it was seen as the only effective way of removing all obstructions affecting the flow of capital and its accumulation transnationally. This unregulated market brought about a synchronisation of

164 _{Peter Burnham, “Capital, Crisis and the International State System”, p. 109.} 165 _{John Holloway, “The Abyss Opens: the Rise and Fall of Keynesianism”, p. 49.} 166_{Ibid. p. 50.}

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crisis tendencies among states, which was evident in falling rates of profits, balance of payment difficulties and instability of the business cycle167_.

To sum up, since the late 1960s, there existed a gap between the rates of productive accumulation and monetary accumulation of capital where the latter surpassed the former. A temporary balance was struck when austerity policies were adopted in the 1980s but later was undermined by the liberalisation of financial banks that gave momentum to further speculation as opposed to the production of surplus value. However, Holloway stresses that monetary speculation was significant as it allowed “the avoidance of a direct relationship with the working class”, it “does not meet with the same resistance that capital encounters in the factory”168_{. Thus, Fordism and post-Fordism should be understood as both patterns of capitalist}

social relations, patterns of class struggle; as “historically distinct forms of labour subordination and capital organisation”169_{. Then, the debt crisis of 1980s, the crash of the}

financial system in 1987, the recession of the 1990s, and the financial crisis of 2008 should be all seen as crises of the “capitalist domination over labour”170_{. Political regulation of the world}

market is a form of regulation that derives from the contradictions of the system rather than being representative of any class interests. Deregulation policies embedded within competitiveness standards, therefore, are centred on the disciplining of the labour market through imposing flexibility171. Hence, what appears as state restructuring along

167 _{Werner Bonefeld, “Monetarism and Crisis”, p. 41.}

168_{John Holloway, “The Abyss Opens: the Rise and Fall of Keynesianism’”, p. 61.}

169 _{Werner Bonefeld, “The reformulation of State theory”, in Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway, (eds.), Post-} Fordism and Social Form,p. 40.

170 _{John Holloway, “The Abyss Opens: the Rise and Fall of Keynesianism”, p. 63. According to Marx, the system}

of capitalist production is characterized with three “cardinal facts”: 1) the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a few members of the society “whereby they cease to appear as the property of the immediate labourers and turn into social production capacities”; 2) the transformation of labour “into social labour”; 3) the establishment of world market. Karl Marx, Capital: A critique of political economy, volume III (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1972[1894], Edited by Fredrick Engels), p. 266.

171 _{See Johannes Agnoli, “the Market, the State and the End of History”, in Werner Bonefeld and Psychopedis,}

Kosmas, (eds.), The Politics of Change: Globalization, ideology and Critique (New York: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 198-9.

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competitiveness standards is in fact a restructuring of the relationship between the state, capital and labour ˗ the disciplining of both capital and labour. It should be noted here that analysing the state as a moment or a political node in the capitalist relation of production is, in Holloway’s words, “the only way in which the development of the state can be analysed as part of the overall development of the capitalist mode of production”172.

Having analysed the social and economic developments of the world economy beginning in the 1970s within an Open Marxist framework, it becomes clear that the rise of neoliberalism, at the expense of Keynesianism, reflects the rise of a new state method to manage the relationship between capital and labour at national and transnational levels. Intense competition and technological change made it hard for capital to accumulate given the lack of labour flexibility necessary for accumulation and profit. Thus, the rise of the competitiveness discourse should be analysed bearing in mind these facts. In the next section, we present an attempt at developing an initial Open Marxist account of the role of discourse in the management of capital-labour relations in a context of the global accumulation of capital. As outlined above, the neoliberal discourse that has accompanied the state restructuring process is as important as the policies adopted themselves. They represent sites where class struggle is conducted alongside the political and economic sites.