Class Under Neoliberalism - Kevin Doogan, Esme Choonara and Guy Standing - Introductions

[MrVoulezvous]

I agree with Standing on some points, disagree on others. But there is no doubt that we need to start theorizing about the class structure of the global economy. We've had a global economy for some time now, and evolving, accompanying class structure, even though, as Doogan and Choonara point out, the present system is most fully globalized with respect to finance, while productivity is only a third to half globalized depending on where you're standing in the system...

[MrVoulezvous]

...and due to the very long supply chains of transnationals, total export figures actually lowball the situation--many firms are brought into global capital on a third- or extended-party basis. That said, I would ask Standing: Isn't it true that while you reject the characterization of the precariat as lumpen, that capital will try to multiply their numbers and push them down further--both are basic operations of capital pursuing profit--and so don't they tend in a lumpen direction over time?

[MrVoulezvous]

Technocracy is the problem you keep coming up against, unnamed, in your work. And Chomsky's work is largely a critique of technocracy. What he understands, though, is that calling for a global revolution today means calling for a rule by technocracy over the present mess, a concretizing of the failed, present technocratic solutions, followed exactly that tipping-over into a failed (or aborted) global state that would bring the real potentiality for real fascist rule into being.