Highly recommend this great website titled “WTF Happened in 1971?”
On this blog we all know what happened but the website is still really good. Seeing it all together like this really brings the point home.
Now consider that 2021 is part 2 of that process. Because it is. What started in 1971 set the stage for what we are seeing today.
// On this blog we all know what happened
Do you mean that technological developments freed capitalism from being tied to specific physical locations?
Thus, the decline of the middle class?
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Yes, neoliberalism was being born. And today it’s giving birth to a new form of statehood to substitute for the one it’s destroyed.
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The website favourably quotes Hayek, it’s not a slam against neoliberalism.
It’s a Bitcoin website, the claim is that 1971 is significant because that’s when the dollar was decoupled from the gold standard. The purported causal chain here is not governmental power being eclipsed by corporate power, but of governmental power over currency and inflation rate being able to covertly extract value – productivity rises, prices rise to maintain a pre-productivity spike purchasing power, and the difference is pocketed by gov & friends.
To the best of my knowledge, Bitcoin – a decentralized digital private currency, the makers and supporters of which are ideologically opposed to government meddling in economic matters – is about as neoliberal project as one can conceive.
Not doubting the value of the data as of standalone interest, but if it can support two seemingly incongruous interpretations at once, it can’t really be said to clearly indicate anything.
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In 1971, at the birth of neoliberalism, it was way too early for the nation-state to die off, so of course you won’t be able to find evidence of that.
The fact that somebody gathers information to support a stupid project doesn’t mean the information is flawed.
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Also, a collapse of the nation-state doesn’t mean no state. It means a different form of governmentality. It’s a government that has broken its compact with the citizens, disregarded the concept of citizenship, and has joined a different team. It didn’t go away. It abandoned us but joined somebody else.
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“is about as neoliberal project as one can conceive”
Well IINM Philip Mirowski claims that neoliberalism is not laissez faire at all. It’s actually about the government actively intervening in the economy to serve the largest private interests. So in that 1971 marks an increase in government participation in the economy…
As for Bitcoin I don’t know what to make of it or think of it. Part of me thinks it’s liquid capital dripping out of the governments that made it flow in the first place and part of me thinks it’s a bunch of spergheads getting hot and bothered about the thought of removing human interactions from one more area of life and part of me thinks it’s a giant scam that’s going to make a few people a little money for a while and then economically eviscerate them .
Yes! The government isn’t going away at all, like we’ve seen with COVID. It’s actively pumping out the gigantic amounts of money it extracts from us to a tiny global elite. It restricts our movement to free up communication routes for this elite and its capital. This is a quote from Zygmunt Bauman back in 2003 that I’m clumsily retelling.
The confusion between “the nation-state is dying” and “any form of state is dying” is the bane of my existence. The bio-security state is being born. And its as violent and scary as any state form of the past with a bunch of added kinks.
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You have seen the film Network, right? Mid 70s. About the rise of mega corporations and end of nation state.
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“seen the film Network, right? Mid 70s.”
1976 to be exact. There’s a lot wrong with it, but boy was it prescient. I knew there was something going on and went to the movie theater to see it a second time (about 30 miles away).
It should be absolutely required viewing to understand the…. zeitgeist of the 1970s (at least as much as Taxi Driver I think)
Also Nashville and the Conversation (1975 and 1974 respectively).
OK, now I’ll watch. Asking me if I watched something is like. . . I don’t even have an analogy strong enough. I haven’t watched anything.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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