By Katherine B. Hankins and Emily M. Powers

By Sam Binkley, Emerson College

Rich Dad Poor Dad is a best selling book on financial advice written by Robert T. Kiyosaki. Originally self-published in 1997 as supporting material for Kiyosaki’s financial advice lectures, and later picked up by Warner Business Books in 2000, the text relates a rich allegorical narrative about the mental hard wiring required for financial success, and the concealed “ways of thinking” practiced by the wealthy. Kiyosaki’s method is comparative: he tells of his childhood relationships with two fathers; one a biological parent, the other a friend’s father who undertook the task of young Robert’s financial education. Each father presented radically distinct outlooks on financial life. His own father, the poor dad, was a government man, head of the Department of Education for the state of Hawaii who, in spite of his impressive qualifications and career accomplishments, remained “poor” his whole life, snarled in a plodding, credentialist faith in institutional advancement as a slow climb up the ladder of bureaucratic hierarchy. The rich dad, on the other hand, was a self-made millionaire with an eighth grade education who held a deep distain for the naïve approach to wealth generation practiced by the majority of Americans—one that conceived of earned reward in terms of educational credentials and the patient advance to higher salaried positions within a single firm. Throughout the book, poor dad’s dour lectures on the virtues of patience, loyalty and circumspection were contrasted with rich dad’s exhortations to swashbuckling fiscal adventurism, self-interest and self-responsibility. Kiyosaki compares the advice offered by his two dads:

My two dads had opposing attitudes in thought…
One dad recommended, “study hard so you can find a good company to work for.”
The other recommended, “study hard so you can find a good company to buy.”
One dad said, “the reason I’m not rich is because I have you kids.”
The other said, “the reason I must be rich is because I have you kids.”
One said “when it comes to money, play it safe, don’t take risks.” The other said,
“learn to manage risk.”

At first blush, the case of Rich Dad Poor Dad might seem innocuous enough: another proselytizing tome in a long tradition of entrepreneurial boosterism extending from Horatio Alger through Norman Vincent Peale to Donald Trump—a discourse on fis-cal self-realization extolling the virtues of entrepreneurship and voluntarism as a personal ethic. Yet what distinguishes this example is not just its timeliness given the current zeal for anti-welfarist, anti-statist rhetoric, and its veneration for market cowboyism, (nor it’s stunning popularity, becoming a New York Times best selling title in 2002), but the specific way in which it dramatizes the dynamism within this space, what we might describe as the inner life of the neoliberal subject. This space is characterized by a specific tension between the inertia of social dependency and the exuberance and vitality of market agency—a tension that is, in Kiyosaki’s prose, barbed with exhortations to mobilize the latter against the former.

In what follows, the provocations posed by Kiyosaki’s tale of two dads will provide a backdrop for an inquiry into debates around what has come to be termed “neoliberal governmentality.” I take this term to indicate the ways in which subjects are governed as market agents, encouraged to cultivate themselves as autonomous, self-interested individuals, and to view their resources and aptitudes as human capital for investment and return. Neoliberal governmentality presumes a more or less continuous series that runs from those macro-technologies by which states govern populations, to the micro-technologies by which individuals govern themselves, allowing power to govern individuals “at a distance,” as individuals translate and in-corporate the rationalities of political rule into their own methods for conducting themselves. However, in much recent work on governmentality, the emphasis has fallen on the institutional logics, the assemblages, technologies and dispositifs, as Foucault called them, through which the rationalities of neoliberal governmentality invest populations, while less emphasis has been placed on the practical, ethical work individuals perform on themselves in their effort to become more agentive, decisionistic, voluntaristic and vital market agents. The tale of Rich Dad Poor Dad reminds us of the dynamic practices by which neoliberal governmentalities are incorporated. Moreover, it suggests that these practices are ethical, in the sense that Foucault used the term in his later work: they involve daily work performed upon specific objects or features of the self held to be problematic—“ethical substances,” as Foucault called them, which in this case implicates and acts upon the embodied, moribund collectivist dependencies and dispositions that are the legacy of poor dad’s mode of existence.

Read full article at Foucault Studies

By Michael Katz

“The April 25, 2006, death of Jane Jacobs was one of the events that prompted me to rethink my narrative of recent urban history. If any one person can be anointed patron saint of urban studies, Jacobs deserves the crown. Her 1961 Death and Life of Great American Cities must be the most widely read and influential book ever written about American cities. After more than forty years, it retains its powerful impact. I have assigned it often to students, who invariably find it moving and convincing. Death and Life resonates with their ideal of urbanism and gives them a set of criteria for identifying a good city. With the book as a yardstick, they find that current-day cities come up short. Although the book has the same effect on me—new delights emerge every time I read it—recently, I wonder if it does as much to inhibit as to advance our grasp of American cities today. Its identification of mixed use, short blocks, multi-age dwellings, and density as defining a healthy neighborhood is based on models of old cities like Philadelphia, New York, Boston, or many of the cities of Europe. At least implicitly, this makes recapturing the past the goal of urban reform. Yet, the growing, dynamic, vibrant components of urban America are more like Phoenix and Los Angeles than the old East Coast cities. With Jacobs’s criteria, they never can qualify as good cities; mutant forms of urbanism, they repel rather than attract anyone who loves cities. But is this a useful assessment? Is the fault with these cities or with the criteria? Did Jacobs bequeath us a definition of urbanism or do we need a different set of markers to characterize what makes a city—and a good city—in earlytwenty-first-century America? Certainly, the former view—the belief in a core set of ideas defining healthy urbanism—underlies one of the most influential urban design movements of today: new urbanism. New urbanism does not take Jacobs’s criteria literally, although her spirit is visible in its emphasis on density, mixed residential and commercial use, pedestrian-friendly streets, and vibrant public spaces. Its charter defines a set of principles it considers adaptable to a wide array of places from suburbs to shopping malls.
(…)
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cities tried to respond to these issues with active government—what historians have labeled progressivism. Despite the persistence of corruption, widespread poverty, and racial discrimination, cities increased municipal expenditures, professionalized their administrations, and constructed buildings and infrastructures that supported the most vibrant and successful era in American urban history. In the late twentieth century, by contrast, the response to similar issues was the withdrawal of active government, evident in reduced federal funds, reliance on market-based solutions to urban problems, and the need to turn to private initiatives, like special service districts, to carry out public functions, such as street cleaning and security. The results are everywhere to be seen, in homelessness on city streets, poverty spreading outward to inner suburbs, uncontrolled sprawl eating up open space, crumbling infrastructure, gross inequity in spending on public education, the future of urban finance mortgaged to casino gambling, the incapacity to prevent or respond effectively to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the subprime mortgage crisis. The widely heralded comeback of American cities is thin and fragile.”

Read full article at Dissent Magazine

Un modèle menacé para la dépendance finacière

English version here

Par Renaud Lambert

En Equateur, grâce à une politique qu’il qualifie de « sociale et solidaire », et qui renforce le rôle de l’Etat, M. Rafael Correa a été réélu dès le premier tour de l’élection présidentielle du 26 avril. Au Panamá, le 3 mai, après le mandat décevant en matière de réduction de la pauvreté du social-démocrate Martín Torrijos, la candidate du Parti révolutionnaire démocratique (PRD), Mme Balbina Herrera, a été battue par M. Ricardo Martinelli, un homme d’affaires au profil berlusconien. Se démarquant de la gauche « radicale » du continent, Mme Herrera se réclamait du Brésilien Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva et de la Chilienne Michelle Bachelet. Ce constat d’ensemble n’a rien d’anodin dans la perspective des scrutins présidentiels de 2010, tant au Chili qu’au Brésil. Dans ce pays, et au-delà de quelques réformes sociales appréciables, la non-remise en cause du legs économique de ses prédécesseurs — même s’il le qualifie d’« héritage maudit » — par le président Lula pourrait bien mettre cette gauche en difficulté.

(…)

On perd à l’entrée, on perd à la sortie

Dans ce domaine, la seule véritable réussite aura été de renforcer le poids relatif des vingt mille familles brésiliennes qui détiennent 80% des titres de la dette, dont la rémunération accapare 30 % du budget fédéral. Un budget dont moins de 5 % vont à la santé et 2,5 % à l’éducation.

(…)

Les rapatriements à l’étranger de profits et de dividendes s’élèvent à près de 34 milliards de dollars en 2008 — environ 3 % du PIB —, une hausse de 50 % par rapport à 2007 et de… 500 % par rapport à 2003. La balance des comptes courants affiche ainsi, en 2008, son déficit le plus important depuis dix ans (28,3 milliards de dollars, soit 2,5 % du PIB).

(…)

Brasília met en avant des réserves internationales d’environ 200 milliards de dollars pour rassurer les investisseurs quant à un éventuel risque de crise de la balance des paiements. Pour l’heure, le Brésil estime disposer d’une marge de manœuvre conséquente — son taux directeur avoisinait 11 % en mars 2009. Toutefois, selon l’économiste Paulo Henrique Costa Mattos, le passif à court terme atteindrait 600 milliards de dollars. Alors que la plupart des pays du monde cherchent à s’endetter massivement, la compétition fait rage sur le marché de l’emprunt d’Etat : les taux finiront par remonter et le poids des dettes contractées d’ici là ne manquera pas de peser, à son tour, sur la balance des paiements et, donc, sur les épaules des Brésiliens.

Le phénomène de « dépendance » n’a rien de nouveau. En 1969, déjà, le ministre chilien des affaires étrangères Gabriel Valdés interpellait le président américain Richard Nixon : « Pour l’Amérique latine, l’investissement privé a toujours signifié, et signifie encore, que les sommes qui sortent de nos pays sont plusieurs fois supérieures à celles qui y sont investies. (…) En un mot, nous savons que l’Amérique latine donne plus qu’elle ne reçoit. »

Dans le passé, certains gouvernements, pas forcément de gauche, ont défendu des programmes de développement plus autonome, basés sur une substitution des importations. De tels projets reçurent les critiques de ceux qui estimaient que, pilotés par des « bourgeoisies nationales », ils étaient voués à l’échec. Pour ceux-là, une seule voie : celle de la révolution sociale. Le sociologue Cardoso était des leurs. Le syndicaliste Lula da Silva aussi.

Si ce dernier avait réellement souhaité, une fois au pouvoir, œuvrer au « découplage » de l’économie brésilienne, peut-être aurait-il dû choisir une autre option que celle d’épouser le programme économique de son prédécesseur. En y renonçant, il allait incarner la mue d’une partie de la gauche latino-américaine, que l’économiste de l’OCDE Santiso — enthousiaste — décrit en ces termes : « Des expressions telles que “lutte de classes”, “planification économique” et “stratégies de substitution des importations” ont été remplacées par d’autres, telles que “consensus démocratique”, “consolidation institutionnelle”, “dérégulation économique” et “ouverture au libre-échange”. »

C’est donc équipé d’une telle boîte à outils que M. Lula da Silva s’attaque aux difficultés économiques du Brésil. Aux Etats-Unis, il demande plus de commerce, aux Brésiliens de se serrer la ceinture. A Dieu, on l’a vu, une « reprise » des économies du « centre ». Aux investisseurs étrangers et aux détenteurs des titres de la dette ? Rien, ou si peu.

Récemment interrogé sur la question des responsabilités face à la crise actuelle, le président brésilien estimait : « Nous n’avons pas créé le problème mais nous faisons partie de la solution.  » Vraiment?

Read it full at Le Monde Diplomatique

By Margaret Somers

“We have seen the enemy and it is us. No longer should we blame neoliberalism’s starvation of the public sector and its privatizing restructuring of the economy for escalating rates of poverty, skyrocketing inequality, or the constriction of democracy. No, it is the fault of your and my delinquency in our bowling league attendance, our neglect of neighborhood barbeques, and in our lapsed faith-based church activities. Along with the privatization of citizenship has come the privatization of responsibility – yours and mine, that is – and we are shamed by our loss of moral fortitude.

Clearly, the appeal of the social capital concept for the neoliberal imagination is its dismissal of the usual sociological and institutional suspects as responsible for the current problems of poverty and politics – the decline of the welfare state and its ancillary social supports on the one hand, and the privatizing restructuring of the economy on the other. But what makes the concept so resonant, timely, and appealing to a world-wide audience less interested in pointing fingers at America’s bowling leagues and church barbeques, and more in exploring the dramatic reorganization of global markets and politics, is its apparent convergence with that celebrated source of Eastern Europe’s democratic revolutions, namely civil society – that sphere of social organization made most famous by its pragmatic, explanatory and normative revival in Eastern Europe’s revolutionary era of the 1980s. In that context, civil society was idealized as a space of democratic participatory empowerment, horizontal social ties and rights-oriented social movements. Its most notable feature, indeed its constitutive meaning, was its identity as a ‘third sphere’, independent of both the power of the administrative and coercive state as well as the competitive individualism of capitalist market societies.

In its glorious heydays of the Gdansk-based Solidarity movement, civil society was the nurturing ground for democratic associations of rightsclaiming citizens. More than a decade after the fact, however, and in the larger context of global privatizations, the civil society concept has come to represent less rights-oriented democratic politics than merely an anti-statist appendage for the ‘compassionate’ side of market society. And piggybacking on much-heralded shoulders, the social capital concept has taken the same path. Militant anti-statism, appropriate for Eastern Europe’s repressed trade unions and social movements fighting heroically against Communist Party tyranny, cannot be justified in the case of social capital. The exclusion of power and rights from the social capital agenda should alarm us. Like the golden glitter of the Trojan horse, we have been dazzled by the social in social capital to collude with a tragicomedy of social science: Neoliberalism has turned Gdansk into a Bowling Alley.”

Read it full at Thesis Eleven

By Tim Di Muzio

“The technologies of the self found in global slums aim to cultivate the capacities of the poor and range from educating the self about sanitation and hygiene to undertaking skills training and learning to be responsible debtors, savers, and entrepreneurs. For instance, one of the most widespread modes of subjectification in informal settlements is entrepreneurial. Associated with the microcredit revolution, this approach encourages poor women and men to give their lives an entrepreneurial form as a way of generating income and securing the livelihood of their household. Although microcredit, over its thirty-five-year history as an antipoverty strategy, has been heralded as a panacea for people living in deep poverty—and one of its key spokespersons, founder of the Grameen Bank Muhammad Yunus, won the Noble Peace Prize—there has been little evidence of microlending’s success. What is certain is that microlending schemes help privatize and individualize peoples’ responsibility for earning a livelihood, thus lessening their dependence on the state or subnational governments. In this way, encouraging the poor to participate in their own survival strategies by accumulating personal debt and creating small businesses displaces any sense that poverty and unemployment may be structural or that the state has any responsibility for collective welfare.”

(…)

“The built environments of global slums are a testament to the ongoing dispossession of people around the world and to a more commodified, liberalized, and marketized world order facilitated by neoliberal policies. Thus,any discussion of biopolitical campaigns must take care to recognize how these interventions to improve life are informed and ultimately constrained by neoliberal policies and the forms of capital accumulation they are meant to encourage and secure. In some senses, this twenty-first-century indictment of neoliberalism is reminiscent of Karl Polanyi’s condemnation of an earlier period of economic liberalism. Polanyi argued that a rationality of rule centered on the belief in free markets, and the price mechanism implied a “stark utopia” where the natural and human substance of society would inevitably be annihilated if society did not take measures to protect itself. For Polanyi, this stark utopia was averted only after World War II, when governments abandoned economic liberalism in favor of social planning and collective welfare schemes. The growth and proliferation of global slums could be taken as both the spatial instantiation of this stark utopia and the apartheid of life chances that has accompanied neoliberalism. The scale of this problem is tremendous and represents one of the key governance challenges of the twenty-first century—one that seems increasingly unable to be met without a radical turn away from neoliberal policies and an overreliance on nongovernmental and community-based organizations.”

Read if full at Global Governance

By Anna-Maria Murtola

Read if full here

“What Newtown actually is, is an interesting issue to consider. It is a new kind of retail-concept – a crossbreed between a shopping centre, an exhibition centre, and a travelling destination providing the visitor with an experience. It has also been presented as a green business city, the idea of which can be seen as an alternative to the much talked about overpower of the hypermarkets and shopping centres. The idea of Newtown has furthermore been presented as resembling a real city. A point has been made very determinedly of distinguishing Newtown from traditional shopping centres – the key PR-folder begins with the very words Newtown is far from any traditional shopping centres. In reference to Newtown the concept experience centre has also been brought forward as a contrast to traditional shopping paradises. (…)
Though a city can be many things, it is usually defined somewhere along the lines of size, population, culture and commerce, as in being a center of population, commerce, and culture; a town of significant size and importance. Newtown is certainly a centre of commerce, and it might even be thought of as some kind of a centre for culture, but it does not take a genius to figure out that Newtown actually lacks one very important aspect of urbanity – the residents of the city. At daytime it certainly crawls with life, but at night-time it is a desolate place. This does not, however, prevent the entrepreneurs of Newtown from talking about a population of Newtown. The inhabitants of the city, as alluded to in one of the PR-brochures, lack the permanence of inhabitants of a traditional city. The concept is nevertheless used.
In creating Newtown the city has been used as a guiding light. Newtown could actually be said to have been created in the image of a town or a city. As the architect of the project explains, a town must have a wall, a tower and be built around a town square. In Newtown these correspond to the semi-circular outer wall of the building, the planned -storey hotel to be incorporated into the building, and the central park (or central square) at the heart of it. At the heart of Newtown the Old Town can be found, which is where craftspeople of traditional arts have their small work/shops and where market activities take place in traditional style. This is also from where the city can be thought to have expanded.”

By Nasser Abourahme

“The slum in and of itself creates a different kind of governmentality;
AlSayyad and Roy point out that the apparently unregulated practices of
squatting are in fact a distinct form of regulation, “a set of tactics
that recreate informality as governmentality” [2006: 8]. This
informality operates through the constant negotiability of value (as
opposed to the fixing of value that characterises formality) and can be
seen as an expression of the sovereign power to establish the state of
exception – i.e. in the sense that the legal and planning apparatus of
the state enact suspension and define what is informal and what is not.
Informal squatting, then, is in fact a highly regulated practice with
distinct forms of governance and particular forms of negotiated
citizenship. This negotiation does not only, or even necessarily,
involve state actors: “non-state actors have emerged as the de facto
state in informal settlements in various world-regions” [ibid: 10].
Davis [2004] points to the role religious groups play in providing
urban services in slums across cities in the global South; in parts of
Cairo and other Arab cities Islamic groups provide almost all social
services as well as popular leaders, in Mumbai the Hindu
fundamentalists Shiv Sena are involved in acquiring and transferring
habitable land and in Latin American slums Pentecostalism has emerged
as the “main logic of governance and politics” [Alsayyad and Roy 2006:
11; Davis 2004]. Even when religious groups are not involved slums
develop their own distinct politics, regimes of rule and institutional
dynamics. Balbo highlights the example of Villa el Salvador, a famous
barriada of Lima “where the 300,000 residents have given themselves a
set of norms and laws of local bosses over which the state has hardly
any control” [1993: 25]. In slums the state, religious associations,
NGOs can all compete as different territorialized forms of association
and patronage [Alsayyad and Roy 2004: 12].
Gated communities embody
a similarly “distinctive territorialisation of citizenship” or a new
“spatial governmentality” [ibid: 6]. Key here is the fact these
enclaves are usually governed by private bodies as exemplified in
‘community associations’ or ‘common interest developments’. Both
involve “reciprocal rights and obligations enforced by a private
governing body” [ibid]; they are “contractual associations that deliver
some form of neighbourhood-level governance in the forms of regulations
and local civic good and services on the basis of assessments (fees)
collected from members” [Webster et al 2002: 315]. In this sense gated
communities, with their internal regulations and codes, represent new
forms of private government in which “contract law is the supreme
authority; property values are the foundation of community life; and
exclusion is the foundation of social organisation” [AlSayyad and Roy
2006: 6]. As such they are more than just the ‘effects’ of neoliberal
urban reform but active “technologies of subjectivation, sovereignty
and spatiality” [ibid]. Or as Jeremy Seabrook puts in a nicely sardonic
polemic: in “gilded captivity” Third World Elites “cease to be citizens
of their own countries and become nomads belonging to, and owing
allegiance to, a superterrestrial topography of money; they become
patriots of wealth, nationalists of an elusive and golden nowhere”
[cited in Davis 2006: 120].
Slums and gated communities, thus, can be read as part of a process
that carves up the city into different orders of citizenship in which
the “logic of patronage becomes the logic of rule” [ibid: 11-12].
Neither slum nor gated community fall wholly under the domain of
nation-state regulation; they both straddle a fuzzy inside-outside
nexus.”

Read it full at http://www.occupiedlondon.org/

By Slajov Zizek

“A “postmodern” boss insists that he is not a master but just a coordinator of our joint creative efforts, the first among equals; there should be no formalities among us, we should address him by his nickname, he shares a dirty joke with us… but in all this, he remains our master. In such a social link, relations of domination function through their denial: in order to be operative, they have to be ignored. We are not only obliged to obey our masters, we are also obliged to act as if we are free and equal, as if there is no domination – which, of course, makes the situation even more humiliating. Paradoxically, in such a situation, the first act of liberation is to demand from the master
that he acts as one: one should reject false collegiality from the master and insist that he treats as with cold distance, as a master. From my military service, I remember how I rejected a commanding officer’s friendly offer to drop the formalities in our communication, which made him explode in rage… The same goes for patriarchal domination over women: in modern societies, this domination is no longer admitted as such – which is why, one of the subversive tactics of the feminine resistance is to act as mockingly subordinated…”

Read full article at International Journal of Zizek Studies, Volume 3, Number 1, 2009.

By Robert Kurz

“Oggi tutti noi ci comportiamo “autoregolativamente” come robot della responsabilità personale dell’economia di mercato.Quell’antico concetto di “libertà” cui mirava l’autonomia sociale appare oggi primitivo e preindustriale. Naturalmente noi non possiamo e non vogliamo ritornare ad un angustomodo di vivere agrario, da contadini ed artigiani. Ma il prezzo del progresso deve consistere nella degradazione sociale dell’uomo a “cane di Pavlov” della macchina del mercato? Davvero l’umanità è incapace di regolare le moderne forze produttive attraverso l’autodeterminazione e il cosciente accordo, invece di consegnarsi ad un cieco automatismo economico? l’assolutismo di mercato non rappresenta un’alternativa all’assolutismo di Stato. Il nostro compito per il 21° secolo è quello di reinventare l’antico concetto di “libertà sociale” contro la “libertà orwelliana” del liberalismo.”

Reat full article at Exit-Online