Bello on meltdown
Flying into New York Tuesday, I had the same feeling I had when I arrived in Beirut two years ago, at the height of the Israeli bombing of that city — that of entering a war zone.
The immigration agent, upon learning I taught political economy, commented, “Well, I guess you folks will now be revising all those textbooks?”
The bus driver welcomed passengers with the words, “New York is still here, ladies and gentlemen, but Wall Street has disappeared, like the Twin Towers.”
Even the usually cheerful TV morning shows felt obligated to begin with the bad news, with one host attributing the bleak events to “the fat cats of Wall Street who turned into pigs.”
This city is shell-shocked, and most people still have to digest the momentous events of the past two weeks…
Legume Sam:
This article contains a very concise explanation of the neoliberal era of political economy, & thus is good reading for newcomers to this discussion. The Philip O’Hara statistic is pretty useful, too. Bookmarked.
11 October 2008, 1:18 pmBruce F:
BBC - Nature loss ‘dwarfs bank crisis’
11 October 2008, 6:15 pmStan:
The big story under the big story.
Thanks for this reality check, Bruce.
11 October 2008, 8:37 pmBruce F:
I’m trying to make sense of all this. From there it’s another challenge to talk about it with like minded people. Further yet are those who are indifferent, or hostile.
I like how Chris Floyd put it. “The money was there all along”.
12 October 2008, 9:52 amStan:
I am having a conversation with a friend who is writing a paper for divinity school. So I’m using this space to work through some thoughts that run into cycles oreality different from but related to the mechanics of money and value. The layers of mystification we have to dig through, when we start with the insipid propaganda that passes for public discourse and economics, are deep and varied.
Even the critics of neoliberalism are (by necessity or default) leaving a number of assumptions unexamined — understandably, because all of us who give a shit about other people are vitally concerned with the kinds of suffering that will be caused sooner than later; and there is a tendency to focus our interrogations on the policy and practice implications to the questions raised (questions some of us have been raising for some time, but now in the public eye like a giant thumb).
The kind of clarity we need, imo, for the long haul requires that deeper — less immediate, more philosophical — look. Because it is the unexamined assumption that will bite us in the ass every time.
One of those issues is the relation between abstraction and disembeddedness. It hasn’t been part of the thought streams of the Enlightenment and modernism in general, partly because this relation and its implications run counter to modernism, liberalism, and the myth of progress. Even the left — I refer here to my own marxist background — in its hostility to many apsects of liberalism (which it rightly identifies with capitalism) — has copped to modernism’s pernicious myth of progress, which is itself closely related to the fetishization of technology. By that I mean seeing technology as a free-standing phenomenon, somehow innocent of the social relations which brought it about.
Bello mentions Rosa Luxemburg’s thesis (linked on this site) that capitalism cannot sustain itself merely though the accumulation of value described by Marx; but that it constantly renews itself in the face of local exhaustion by reaching into more distant spaces for access to what she describes as “primitive accumulation” to refuel. This is the basis for much world systems theory (Bello is of this school), that divides the world into core and peripheral societies (sometimes broken further into semi-peripheries and peripheries). The point being that the system is supranational, with the national polities of the core operating Marx-described profit-taking enterprises, and using the plunder of peripheries to externalize the exhaustion and crisis inhering in capital accumulation through the productive relation in the core.
Ironically, Luxemburg herself saw this as a progressive tendency; and she had rather ruthless views on why primitive societies needed to be modernized. So she was right on the mechanics at one level, but copped to the myth of progress on another.
Money has been described as a universal value equivalent; but there are lots of different kinds of money, and many degrees of universality. What general-purpose money does is create an abstraction of values.
Sometimes we coast over this point, which is a mistake, I think. We assume we know what abstraction is. Wiki sez:
“Abstraction is the process or result of generalization by reducing the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon, typically in order to retain only information which is relevant for a particular purpose. For example, abstracting a leather soccer ball to a ball retains only the information on general ball attributes and behaviour. Similarly, abstracting happiness to an emotional state reduces the amount of information conveyed about the emotional state.”
Money reduces many specific use-values to a single exchange valuation, differing only in quantity (not quality). Political Economy 101. I want an eggplant, a box of tissues, a paperback novel, a box of safety pins, and a Leer jet. I have access to each via one medium — general-purpose money. The eggplant costs $1.75, the box of tissues costs $2.50, the safety pins $0.80, the Leer jet $10,000,000. Quantitatively very different, but qualitatively all $. It’s like a piano that plays one note. Ding. Ding ding ding ding. Ding ding ding ding ding ding.
It’s very convenient; and that’s why it has a tendency to spread. Convenience is a virus… or more accurately, a disembedding, delocalizing solvent. It inherently and inevitabley dissolves the bonds of community.
(Hornborg, The Power of the Machine, p. 163)
(Hornborg, pp. 170-171)
(Hornborg, pp.181-182)
NOTE: “Fetishization” refers to the process of percieving a thing independent of specific context and history. Marx coined the term to describe how commodities appear to us — as if my magic — with the exploitative relations of production that made them rendered invisible.
12 October 2008, 2:21 pmStan:
Among the things modern money systems accomplish is not exactly abstraction, but rather tend towards the reduction of all things to quantitative criteria to the detriment of qualitative criteria and values. The tendency towards the quantification among other things creates a “bottom line” mentality that is properly barbaric.
As for abstraction, that is precisely what thought does. To think is to abstract. Not to abstract is to remain at the level of the senses alone. This is why the old philosophers said that man is a reasoning animal. Reason, however, cannot operate in the void; it has need of data. The quality or nature of the data and the initial assumptions are everything.
12 October 2008, 7:25 pmLegume Sam:
Stan says:
My response: The distinction between “primitive accumulation” and accumulation through appropriation of the surplus should be a part of this discussion. Primitive accumulation is “primitive” because, rather than being an appropriation of the surplus created through the exploitation of labor-power, primitive accumulation is a mere taking of resources, products of labor, people themselves, and so on. Thus Marx’s famous reflection that “In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part.”
Primitive accumulation has not been employed to the same extent in all phases of history. Here I refer to the segmentation of capitalist history given at the beginning of Kees van der Pijl’s Transnational Classes and International Relations, which I discussed on DailyKos.com some time ago. Keynesian regimes have historically been able to satisfy the cultural prerequisites of “progress” (e.g. John F. Kennedy’s maxim that “a rising tide lifts all boats”) through the exploitation of labor (yet of course at a high environmental cost) without lots of “primitive accumulation” — they could do this because the Keynesian regime of middle-era capitalism could manage circulation more effectively than that of any other stage of capitalist development. The capitalist pretext obliges the thieves in power to conduct their relations through business, and business requires circulation, which must take place through sales, even if the masses are being reduced (at any point in the historical development of capitalism) to being instruments of cheap labor.
This current phase of capitalist history, neoliberalism, has however reached its ecological limits, with James O’Connor’s “second contradiction of capitalism” in full swing. Meanwhile the need to squeeze profit out of the system has multiplied itself a thousandfold in elite corridors such as Wall Street. In this era we can therefore see an era of primitive accumulation reminiscent of that which occurred during the conquest of the Americas, thus Harvey’s “accumulation through dispossession.”
12 October 2008, 8:18 pmStan:
“To think is to abstract.”
I might not be that categorical about it; but your point is taken. Abstraction can take two paths in Hornborg’s account — one toward ultimate concern and the Sacred, and another that disembeds and disenchants. His point is not to eschew abstraction, but to remain critically suspicious of it. Its tendency to reificiation being the epistmeological problem, because how we “know” operates in a cycle of reproduction (and mystification) for existing praxis. It’s a pretty basic marxian notion, esp as it relates to fetishization — a form of reification… that is, treating an abstraction as if it were a concete reality, then reasoning based on the false premise.
Sam’s point identifies exactly the problem we constantly encounter because of this general mystification. We are standing on a bifurcation-point in history of unimaginable scope; yet we have no collective imagination beyond the unexamined assumptions that reproduce the system we are leaving (speaking in historical-kairos time). It is the scope of the problem that makes this disconnect so urgent. The protean future we imagined (on the left) that gave us time and space to imagine many possibilities is now being constricted more each day… economically and ecologically.
For my own part, I see a spiritual aspect to this crisis that is little remarked by the left and grotesquely distorted by the right. Human beings who have lost any sense of enchantment, or of the Sacred, either with regard to the biosphere or with each other, are pre-disabled by a lack of the ability to “care.” The egoism of modernism, metastasized in late capitalism, has stranded individuals on the islets of self-interest. As the god of the market and the idol of homo economicus fail, and bring down the house on us all, we are faced with the Abyss that was lurking unseen — but sensed as a generalized anxiety — behind the malls, the entertainment spectacles, the deracinated culture, and the manicured lawns.
The hopeful aspect — from where I sit, at least — is that we are not merely obliged to redesign society by stark necessity; there are ways — in community — to cure this spiritual sickness as part of the same praxis that is required for some sustainable way of survival. We were never going to “defeat” this system. It has to exhaust its own possibilities… and it has now.
But if we constrain our activity to the continued goal of “achieving state power” and the like, we will reproduce the generalization, the delocalized abstraction, and the desacralization that inhere in a homogenizing, trans-local state. Russia already tried this state power route. It was a blood-drenched disaster.
There is also an inherent enemizing in any ideological blueprint; and history bears this out in the most direct and brutal ways.
Love-of-neighbor as an ethos, then, becomes a kind of sacred duty; and this can only be practiced locally. Unless someone believes that people will behave altruistically while they are still the captives of egoism.
13 October 2008, 7:25 amStan:
Chris Floyd and I must be channeling the same metaphor today.
13 October 2008, 9:21 amShaukat:
An excellent book I just finished reading, which dicusses many of the processes described above, is David Harvey’s The Limits to Capital. I hope you all check it out.
13 October 2008, 2:04 pmRichard:
As always, this is great stuff. I’ve been especially conflicted… no, not conflicted… I’ve been self-defining as non-progressive for a while now, because of this myth of progress of which you speak (if “progressive” simply means being in favor of a better world, I’m all for it, but I think the word “progress” and all it entails is not to be overlooked at the root). As a computer programmer who hates computers, who commutes 2 hours each way to work (by train, thankfully), I’ve been struggling with how to change my own way of living and working, against the mode of living I’m accustomed to, alongside friends and family who don’t all see what I think I see–also as someone who does NOT know how to grow his own food, or build something. I don’t know where I’m going with this comment. I just read the first volume of Derrick Jensen’s Endgame, and I was duly depressed and by and large convinced… I suppose the conflict is there: between what I know, and what I can (or, rather, do) change about my behavior.
so many of the articles I read, even the ones that recognize radical problems (like that Michael Pollan one you linked to recently, the “Farmer in Chief”) still seem to posit technological solutions of some kind, of which I am extremely doubtful.
Sorry for babbling.
That BBC article that Bruce linked to above, about the “nature loss dwarfing the bank crisis” was interesting for its assumptions and language used, beyond just the obvious ecological disaster it reports. For example, this quote: “So whereas Wall Street by various calculations has to date lost, within the financial sector, $1-$1.5 trillion, the reality is that at today’s rate we are losing natural capital at least between $2-$5 trillion every year.” Natural capital! Worse: “as forests decline, nature stops providing services which it used to provide essentially for free.” It’s all about what nature does for us, since its only role is to “serve” or “provide for” us. The tension between disaster and conservation efforts reminds me of a fascinating article by Jerome Lewis in the new issue of Radical Anthropology (found here on p.11: http://www.radicalanthropologygroup.org/journal_02.pdf ). Lewis writes about the Yaka hunter-gatherers in the Congo, and their traditional mode of sharing with the forest, and how this has come under attack by both loggers (obviously) and conservationists, but also how their way of life could be a model for us all (if only we could stop capitalism in its tracks, though, right? as I read articles like this, I am constantly aware that each moment means another destroyed forest, or another closing off of a once-viable way of life).
16 October 2008, 1:56 pmcharles:
the deeper fetish is the fetishism of commodities
17 October 2008, 3:19 pmcharles:
As it relates to commodities specifically, commodity fetishism is the belief that value inheres in commodities instead of being added to them through labor. This is the root of Marx’s critique relating to conditions surrounding fetishism–that capitalists “fetishize” commodities, believing that they contain value, and the effects of labor are misunderstood.
Marx’s use of the term fetish can be interpreted as an ironic comment on the “rational”, “scientific” mindset of industrial capitalist societies. In Marx’s day, the word was primarily used in the study of primitive religions; Marx’s “fetishism of commodities” might be seen as proposing that just such primitive belief systems exist at the heart of modern society. In most subsequent Marxist thought, commodity fetishism is defined as an illusion arising from the central role that private property plays in capitalism’s social processes. It is a central component of the dominant ideology in capitalist societies.
Marx’s argument
According to Marx, people value objects that they can use (i.e. objects that have “use-value”), and most things people can use are produced through human labor. In market societies, however, people can use one object to acquire another through exchange; goods thus take on “exchange-value”. Even when people barter or exchange gifts, such exchanges can be used to cement or extend social relationships.
In capitalist societies, however, there is a labor market; rather than being seen as the source of use-values, labor itself becomes another commodity and takes on an exchange-value. Thus, labor is devalued. Conversely, commodities are seen as having power over the people who produce them.
A simple example will illustrate this process: the person who owns a Cadillac (or Lexus or Bentley) has more prestige than the people working on the assembly-line that produced it. But commodity fetishism refers to more — the belief that the car (or any manufactured object) is more important than people, and confers special powers (i.e., beyond the power to travel sixty miles in an hour, or flatten hedgehogs) to those who possess it.
In general, commodity fetishism tends to replace inter-human relationships with relationships between humans and objects: for example, the relationship between producer and consumer is obscured. The producer can only see his relationship with the object he produces, being unaware of the people who will ultimately use that object. Similarly, the consumer can only see his relationship with the object he uses, being unaware of the people who produced that object. Thus, commodity fetishism ensures that neither side is fully conscious of the political and social positions they occupy. The object of Marxist critique is to reveal the social relations that are hidden behind relations among objects … and to reveal the creativity of the worker hidden behind the objectification of human beings.
17 October 2008, 3:35 pmcharles:
Marx and Marxism subscribe to a thesis of _social_ progress ,i.e. the abolition of private property, the abolition of exploiting/oppressing anc exploited/oppressing classes, not a notion of _technological_ progress or that any and all technological development is an advance for humanity. There is the practical need for socialist societies to keep pace with capitalist societies’ technological development until there are no more capitalist socieites, because otherwise the capitalist societies can destroy the socialist societies, as happened with the Soviet Union.
17 October 2008, 3:52 pmStan:
Did capitalists attack the Kulaks or empty whole stretches of the Ukraine into labor camps to die of typhoid?
The greatest delusion of state socialism, as Mark Jones stated more than once, was that socialism can never flourish in a capitalist world system as anything except barracks socialism… as an instantiation of that capitalist system (which survives only as China… the workers’ biggest paradise). And Lenin did not critique industrial technology; he supported it enthusiastically, including Taylorism. Engels is full of “progress” talk, as is Marx, calling stages of human history things like “savagery” and “barbarism.” Luxemburg was brutally in favor of sweeping away small-holding, pre-capitalist societies. The whole pantheon nattered on about conquering nature at one point or another, talking about the progressive kernal within capitalism, blah blah blah.
The cycle you describe of “keeping up to survive” is exactly why the whole project becomes at some level as pointlessly cruel as capitalism. It becomes part of a technological escalation, based on competing states… and in that process exterminates vast biospheric networks as it places boots on the necks of buffer states and clients.
Gosh, I’d much rather be shot by a Kalashnikov than an M-16.
Been there. Done that. Will the last Marxist-Leninist please turn out the lights.
17 October 2008, 4:46 pmLegume Sam:
The critique of commodity fetishism and the critique of Marxist-Leninism must both be viewed as against the larger historical trajectory which gives both phenomena their power.
Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism is a reversal of the 19th century European anthropological gaze, as worked so powerfully by the later Thorstein Veblen in his classic (1899) work Theory of the Leisure Class. The possession of commodities grants to owners the socially-abetted impression of self-importance granted to the feudal nobility, especially if such commodities happen to be capital assets, thus the fetishism of value-accumulation.
One can even observe homeless people wandering through America’s cities dragging shopping carts full of discarded junk, as if the possession of anything at all would preserve its possessors from the feelings of nothingness that overwhelm all who live in a society in which the commons has been practically abolished. The rest of us can console ourselves with the possession of more functional bits of “junk” in fancy shopping-carts which we ourselves romantically call “houses.”
Now, as for the contribution of labor to the production of commodities, “dead labor” is the term given to the labor-power granted to functioning commodities in the Marxist lexicon. One can see, then, that as capitalism develops historically, one can see ever increasing layers of dead labor applied to the fortification of the system, in a universe in which the power of all those accreted layers of dead labor threaten the integrity of the human beings who represent living labor. One can imagine, for instance, the layers of dead labor which go into the modern police state: manufactured surveillance devices, spy satellites, fiber optic cables, computer equipment for databases, factory-built guns and bullets for pointing at heads, brick-laid prisons for political prisoners, metalsmithed concertina wire to decorate the perimeters, and so on, all fashioned through once-living labor by the working class itself. The living labors of the FBI appear as a super-powered cherry atop the massive sundae of dead labor represented by the machineries of repression.
This reality contravenes the apotheosis of labor or of the working class as it stands in Marxist hagiography. Anyone who is paying attention can see that the working class has built what Theodor Adorno called the “administrated society,” a “Panopticon” of Jeremy Bentham’s invention and Michel Foucault’s sweeping vision, composed (in world-systems jargon) of an urban, capitalist core which is rapidly sucking the life out of planet Earth’s peripheries. The thermodynamic vision of Paul Prew contributes at least this to our perspective, if it does anything. Capitalist labor is laying the seedbed not for socialism, but rather for a neofeudalism in which commodity fetishism will be all we have left of what was once capitalism.
From the perspective of the neo-Gramscian thinker Kees van der Pijl, the Soviet Union was a “contender state,” a state outside of (and resistant to) the inner circle of imperialist heartland states (e.g. Britain, the US) attempting in broad gestures to compete with them in the race for capitalist development through forced-march authoritarianism. Stalin’s atrocities must be seen in such a light. Not only can we say that the socialist ideal was vastly abridged in the context of the process of engineering the Soviet Union, as Johann P. Arnason (The Future That Failed) emphasized. Since Marx did not supply contender states with a theory of how to run an economy in competition with capitalist core-nations, the “Marxist” contender regimes had to cobble together contender-state policies out of Marxist jargon, without reference to their role as contender states. Thus Deng Xiaoping’s regime announced to its subjects after Mao’s death that the socialist utopia had been achieved at last and that all that was left was for its residents to “grow rich” through capitalist means. History, then, shows that the Marxist faith in the power of contender states was misplaced. Whether the system of competing nation-states under developing capitalism could have produced a genuine socialism is a moot question. Nobody cares anymore if Lenin was a good guy or a bad guy.
In a world in which the Bank of China owns $1 trillion in US-Dollar-denominated assets, the system of capitalist heartland states competing with authoritarian contender states can be said to be going “out of style.” Not only is there no ideological competition between “different” systems of commerce — but rather you have a general shrinkage of idealisms across the board, as neoliberalism preserves its hegemonic power through a revolution of lowered expectations. Today we face a political-economic environment which may offer half a chance for a realistic socialism, which can hope to bring that bottom 40% of humanity (now living on less than $2/day) an interface with the realization of basic needs.
19 October 2008, 9:07 amStan:
And the various masks fall away. Some optimistic catastrophists are suggesting that Chicago-Econ neoliberalism is dying in this crash. Time will tell. Looks more to me like they are trying to find some way to reflate the bubble… will it be through eco-capitalist initiatives? The alternative energy bubble? The devil bobs and weaves.
19 October 2008, 3:47 pmLegume Sam:
But Stan, how are they going to reflate the bubble while impoverishing the great mass of the public to zero? No amount of bubble reflation will restore lender confidence if the public has no means to pay back and credit ratings lie in ruins…
19 October 2008, 4:59 pmStan:
I said they’re trying… thrashing is more like it.
My own theologically-imprinted notion is that we are entering a very scary period of kairotic opportunity.
Even Hudson is using the term Jubilee.
19 October 2008, 6:30 pmLegume Sam:
I have to admit, however, to some degree of skepticism as regards the “end of neoliberalism” thesis making its rounds through the punditosphere. Even the Economist, regularly skewered for their dogmas by Jerome of DailyKos.com, now has a cover story called “Capitalism at bay,” in which a crisis is admitted. Yet here one can see the old dogmas recycled for the new situation. Neoliberalism was never anything the elites really believed in; rather, it was a “noble lie” intended to hold the neoliberal economy together. Nobody needs to know that “laissez-faire” economics has been dead since the downturn of 1929-1932; we are all supposed to believe that it is a global reality because doing so complies with the revolution of lowered expectations that will comfort the working class with its lot in life while the owning class continues to profit off of economic bubbles.
Okay then. Since neoliberalism is a mere noble lie, presumably all the owning class has to do is invent a new noble lie to make up for the failure of the old one, and all the presumed masses will, presumably like sheep, believe what they are told and capitalism can go marching happily forward. Right? Well, maybe not. The Economist, for its part, can’t seem to think of anything all that new to say.
19 October 2008, 8:16 pm