In an interview in early 2012, doom-mongering Swiss Hedge Fund manager Marc Faber cast a jaundiced European eye back over the last thirty years and constructed a “conspiracy theory”, which appeared strikingly similar to the bog-standard Marxist reading of the period under scrutiny. American average wages increased year on year throughout the post-war period up to the late 1960s, then came the dismal 70s, a decade of shocks and crises out of whose seemingly terminal decline the Republican party offered the possibility of rebirth, a new morning in America. How was this to be achieved? Firstly by targeting inflation (the “Volker Shock” of the late 70s and on into the Eighties) secondly by piling up debt. As Dick Cheney, the Vice President under George W Bush later remarked, “Reagan taught us deficits don’t matter.”
This is what Faber suggested: “In order not to disappoint the household income recipients the U.S. essentially printed money and had a huge debt expansion. If you have an economic system and you suddenly grow your debt at a high rate, it’s like an injection of a stimulant, of steroids” (italics mine).
The phrase “on steroids” is commonplace these days to describe any form of excessive increase or gigantic shift/acceleration. Steroids are mostly used in body-building as a way of gaining and maintaining massive bulk, a size arguably unattainable through conventional or natural methods, a way of surpassing the natural limits on muscular growth. Steroids came to the fore in the 1970s through the resurgence in the popularity of body-building and then through the influence of “weight-training” (read, steroid use) in sports, on into baseball, American football and other competitive arenas, before becoming part of the general lifestyle choice of the 80s as the male body became a major area of new investment opportunities, and the Fitness industry in all its forms took off. The Sixties’ hippy emphasis on the natural is replaced with an eighties emphasis on the more-than-human, the hyper-real. As the economy “booms” in the Eighties, a host of films appear that emphasise this shift from the grinding social realism of Seventies' cinema into a glossy, comic book fantasy land filled with superheroes. One way of viewing this would be to look at the distinction between two of the most popular films of their respective decades, Ridley Scott’s Alien and its sequel, James Cameron’s Aliens.
Neoliberalism may have heralded a rebirth in America, seen it rise phoenix-like from the ashes of the 70s, but this is a baptism in steroids, cocaine (and cocaine money) egotism, debt, cheap oil (and Arab oil money funnelled through American banks) deregulation and offshoring. In what sense are the questions of the Seventies, the environmental and social concerns, the Limits to Growth posed by the 1977 Club of Rome reports, actually addressed and solved by Neoliberalism, and to what degree are they simply ignored, held at bay in an essentially infantile thirty-year fantasy of growth and restructuring, that collapses along with the housing bubble of the late 00s? It seems that the financial crises along with numerous jobless recoveries have left us faced with the same set of problems that Neoliberalism was assumed to have permanently solved. The end of class struggle, the move away from manufacturing to services in the “core” economies (there is much talk at the moment of needing to “rebalance” the economy) the end of boom and bust.
Note: how to read it.
Note: how to read it.
