2.The Persistence of Obsolescence
The history of modern capitalism is the history of its attachments to, entanglements with, destruction and recreation of it pre-modern, "archaic," ante-bellum property forms. History is class struggle. Economics is concentrated history. The history of capitalism, its past and future economics, the class struggles waged by its ruling classes, is the persistence of the obsolescence of private property. Perpetual backwardness defines the bourgeoisie, permanent counterrevolution is final product of capital's imagined progress.
The history of Brazil is the persistence of the history of Portugal; of Portugal in Africa; of Portugal navigating the Atlantic. The history of Brazil is the history of the persistence of slavery.
Of the estimated 54,000 voyages undertaken during the Atlantic slave trade, Portugal and Brazil account for 30,000.
An estimated 13,000,000 Africans were enslaved and shipped west.
Of that 13,000,000 Portuguese factors and traders supplied an estimated 6,000,000 from Benin, Congo, Angola, and Mozambique.
Of the 13,000,000 African people enslaved and shipped west, an estimated 11,000,000 survived the passage.
Of that surviving 11,000,000, an estimated 4,000,000 were transported to Brazil.
And of that estimated 4,000,000...........?
In the period 1576-1590, an estimated 50,000 slaves arrived in Brazil, yet in 1600 the total slave population measured just 15,000.
In the triangle trading of sugar, rum, slaves; of cowries, slaves, molasses; of cloth, slaves, cotton; of guns, slaves, tobacco, the triangles formed a pyramid with a base of bones. It is the extermination of labor, not just its aggrandizement, not just its consumption but its actual direct extermination in the production processes that defines the "backwardness" of Portugal in Brazil, the backwardness of mercantile capitalism; that persists in the development of capitalism in Brazil and defines the backwardness of private property for once and for all and forever.
S. Artesian December 10, 2006
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Sunday, November 05, 2006
Brazil: Colony, Empire, Capital
1. 1500, a Portuguese fleet enroute India anchored at what is now known at Porto Seguro in the Bahia area of what is now known as Brazil. Off course and on target, the Portuguese established a fortified trading outpost.
In the 16th century, Portugal was lightly populated, with numbers measuring below those of the indigenous people inhabiting the coastal and interior areas of pre-Brazil. These indigenous peoples were organized as tribes, trading and competing with each other for subsistence.
Portugal was a mercantile monarchy, with the king as the merchant- monarch. Titles to land and court were handed out to temper, bait, discipline, and isolate the nobility. Commercially, Portugal functioned as both a maritime and land-based itinerant peddler, conveying goods, and brokering trades for others and its own account, among Africa, Asia and Europe.
The outposts established by the Portuguese in Brazil were isolated points of contact for trade and barter with the indigenous people. Initially, iron pots, bracelets, tools, and fabrics were traded for brazilwood. This wood was the source for the red dye so important to the emerging textile industry of Normandy and Flanders.
Barter might support subsistence based economies and even an itinerant peddler or two, dressed in rags or royal robes, but barter is not commerce.
A critical determinant of Portuguese mercantilism was the lack of internal development, the isolation and separation of city from countryside, the meager surpluses extracted and available from the domestic markets based on subsistence agriculture. These limitations determine mercantilism in Portugal, and everywhere, and are reproduced at every point of its history, in its expansion and decline. Mercantilism staves off its own obsolescence through "horizontal expansion," but the expansion of trade, of mercantile extraction, requires expansion of the need to trade.
Barter contains no such necessity. There is no necessity to reproduce the process of exchange beyond the use of the products bartered. Expanding the need to trade requires a compulsion to labor. Barter contains no compulsion to labor in the service of, on behalf of, trading itself.
The Portuguese commercial outposts quickly became staging areas for the hunting, capture, enslavement, and ultimately, the extermination of the indigenous peoples. With every advancement of its mercantilism into Brazil, Portugal reproduces the content of its own "advanced backwardness;" Portugal's internal imbalance sustains the advance of the "world markets;" Portugal in Brazil proves that compulsory labor is the historical underpinning of free trade.
S.Artesian, November 5, 2006.
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
In the 16th century, Portugal was lightly populated, with numbers measuring below those of the indigenous people inhabiting the coastal and interior areas of pre-Brazil. These indigenous peoples were organized as tribes, trading and competing with each other for subsistence.
Portugal was a mercantile monarchy, with the king as the merchant- monarch. Titles to land and court were handed out to temper, bait, discipline, and isolate the nobility. Commercially, Portugal functioned as both a maritime and land-based itinerant peddler, conveying goods, and brokering trades for others and its own account, among Africa, Asia and Europe.
The outposts established by the Portuguese in Brazil were isolated points of contact for trade and barter with the indigenous people. Initially, iron pots, bracelets, tools, and fabrics were traded for brazilwood. This wood was the source for the red dye so important to the emerging textile industry of Normandy and Flanders.
Barter might support subsistence based economies and even an itinerant peddler or two, dressed in rags or royal robes, but barter is not commerce.
A critical determinant of Portuguese mercantilism was the lack of internal development, the isolation and separation of city from countryside, the meager surpluses extracted and available from the domestic markets based on subsistence agriculture. These limitations determine mercantilism in Portugal, and everywhere, and are reproduced at every point of its history, in its expansion and decline. Mercantilism staves off its own obsolescence through "horizontal expansion," but the expansion of trade, of mercantile extraction, requires expansion of the need to trade.
Barter contains no such necessity. There is no necessity to reproduce the process of exchange beyond the use of the products bartered. Expanding the need to trade requires a compulsion to labor. Barter contains no compulsion to labor in the service of, on behalf of, trading itself.
The Portuguese commercial outposts quickly became staging areas for the hunting, capture, enslavement, and ultimately, the extermination of the indigenous peoples. With every advancement of its mercantilism into Brazil, Portugal reproduces the content of its own "advanced backwardness;" Portugal's internal imbalance sustains the advance of the "world markets;" Portugal in Brazil proves that compulsory labor is the historical underpinning of free trade.
S.Artesian, November 5, 2006.
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Trick and Treat
Eager, as always, to make both first call at the bar and an early getaway, the bicameral two ring circus of embezzlers, extortionists, buffoons, car dealers, and lawyers known as the US Congress stirred itself last week to raise its right arm and wield its mighty rubber stamp.
With Sunday football, Halloween, and elections dangling in front of its nose/trunk like a carrot in front of the proverbial elephant's ass, the 109th convention of bozo millionaires passed the Bush administration's military tribunal proposal-- finally bringing bourgeois theory finally into line with bourgeois practice by abrogating the "principle" of habeas corpus.
Then, warming to its task, and dedicated to keeping the mean in mean green, Congress passed the defense appropriations bill, a cool $448 billion in guaranteed cost overruns secured through the sale of US Treasury bonds to Japan, China, Russia, and various petroleum exporters. $70 billion or so is committed to ensuring that the destruction of the Iraq and its people can continue in the style to which Americans have become so accustomed, at least for the next 6 months.
But it was the House committee on Commerce and Energy that provided the anti-comic relief to this carnival of vicious venality. The committee, whose members have received some $24 million in campaign donations from the corporations, associations, and individuals subject to its inquiries, investigations, and legislations, called on the former chairperson of Hewlett-Packard, Ms. Patricia Dunn, the company's current CEO, Mark Hurd to explain certain irregularities committed by the corporation in its investigation into the leak of sensitive information. The "irregularities" included the transmission of "tracer" emails to track any secondary distribution made by the recipient, the surveillance of employees and journalists, the use of "pretexting" (the use of fraudulent identities and pretenses) for obtaining personal phone records, and other tactics used so spectacularly, dismally, and everyday by... by the US government.
In the second grandest tradition of American corporate leadership, Ms. Dunn denied any responsibility for the conduct of the investigation. Not only did the buck not stop with her, it didn't start with her, and she never got to keep even a measly quarter. Ms. Dunn was guided in all these matters by HP's general counsel, HP's former general counsel, Ann Baskins. Ms. Baskins resigned her position on the day of the hearings.
In the grandest tradition of American corporate leadership, Ms. Baskins declined to testify before the committee, citing her constitutional right against self-incrimination. While refusing to testify under oath, however, Ms. Baskins did manage to negotiate a separation agreement with Hewlett-Packard. In return for her cooperation with HP's unsworn investigations and her agreement not to sue the company, Ms. Baskins will retain her rights to vested stock options worth $3.7 million, and the company will accelerate her vesting in stock options worth an addition $1 million. America the beautiful for sure of thee I thing.
Hewlett-Packard stated that in taking this strong stand against rewarding unethical and illegal behavior by its employees, it will rightfully resume its position as the brand name in business ethics.
Meanwhile, it's not the crime that bothers the representatives, it's the competition. Stings? Surveillance? Obtaining personal phone records? Sifting trash? False pretexts? Just exactly who do Dunn, Hurd, Baskins et al think they are? Unelected government officials? Missing the kidnappings, the secret prisons, the digital pictures of torture emailed home, and the disappeared bodies, the unhabeased corpses, Hewlett-Packard was really only missing one thing-- the government contract to do all those things.
Somewhere in some corporate executive offices, some corporate executives are wondering why they should continue to absorb the expense of supporting Congress, which shows how little some corporate executives understand of the political economy of modern capitalism.
One of the less brilliant presentations used to explain and bolster Keynes theory argues that the bourgeois economy could be maintained and the value of money retained if half the population was put to work digging holes into the side of a mountain, with the other half put to work filling in the holes. This assertion ignores the criticality of use, of use value, to the bourgeois and to all economies; it ignores the very conflict of use and exchange value in the identity of the commodity, at the very core of capitalist reproduction. But....
But Congress is exactly that Keynesian exercise for corporate capitalism, just that exercise of throwing money into holes, so that money and more money can be taken out as Congress redistributes incomes, sanctions the liquidation of pension funds, authorizes the destruction of countries abroad, and the sacking of cities and populations at home. As the committee members and their cohorts race out of DC, fright wigs on and bags in hand, to ring the corporate doorbells, get their corporate candy, they represent, almost too perfectly, the uselessness of capital.
S. Artesian October 1, 2006
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
With Sunday football, Halloween, and elections dangling in front of its nose/trunk like a carrot in front of the proverbial elephant's ass, the 109th convention of bozo millionaires passed the Bush administration's military tribunal proposal-- finally bringing bourgeois theory finally into line with bourgeois practice by abrogating the "principle" of habeas corpus.
Then, warming to its task, and dedicated to keeping the mean in mean green, Congress passed the defense appropriations bill, a cool $448 billion in guaranteed cost overruns secured through the sale of US Treasury bonds to Japan, China, Russia, and various petroleum exporters. $70 billion or so is committed to ensuring that the destruction of the Iraq and its people can continue in the style to which Americans have become so accustomed, at least for the next 6 months.
But it was the House committee on Commerce and Energy that provided the anti-comic relief to this carnival of vicious venality. The committee, whose members have received some $24 million in campaign donations from the corporations, associations, and individuals subject to its inquiries, investigations, and legislations, called on the former chairperson of Hewlett-Packard, Ms. Patricia Dunn, the company's current CEO, Mark Hurd to explain certain irregularities committed by the corporation in its investigation into the leak of sensitive information. The "irregularities" included the transmission of "tracer" emails to track any secondary distribution made by the recipient, the surveillance of employees and journalists, the use of "pretexting" (the use of fraudulent identities and pretenses) for obtaining personal phone records, and other tactics used so spectacularly, dismally, and everyday by... by the US government.
In the second grandest tradition of American corporate leadership, Ms. Dunn denied any responsibility for the conduct of the investigation. Not only did the buck not stop with her, it didn't start with her, and she never got to keep even a measly quarter. Ms. Dunn was guided in all these matters by HP's general counsel, HP's former general counsel, Ann Baskins. Ms. Baskins resigned her position on the day of the hearings.
In the grandest tradition of American corporate leadership, Ms. Baskins declined to testify before the committee, citing her constitutional right against self-incrimination. While refusing to testify under oath, however, Ms. Baskins did manage to negotiate a separation agreement with Hewlett-Packard. In return for her cooperation with HP's unsworn investigations and her agreement not to sue the company, Ms. Baskins will retain her rights to vested stock options worth $3.7 million, and the company will accelerate her vesting in stock options worth an addition $1 million. America the beautiful for sure of thee I thing.
Hewlett-Packard stated that in taking this strong stand against rewarding unethical and illegal behavior by its employees, it will rightfully resume its position as the brand name in business ethics.
Meanwhile, it's not the crime that bothers the representatives, it's the competition. Stings? Surveillance? Obtaining personal phone records? Sifting trash? False pretexts? Just exactly who do Dunn, Hurd, Baskins et al think they are? Unelected government officials? Missing the kidnappings, the secret prisons, the digital pictures of torture emailed home, and the disappeared bodies, the unhabeased corpses, Hewlett-Packard was really only missing one thing-- the government contract to do all those things.
Somewhere in some corporate executive offices, some corporate executives are wondering why they should continue to absorb the expense of supporting Congress, which shows how little some corporate executives understand of the political economy of modern capitalism.
One of the less brilliant presentations used to explain and bolster Keynes theory argues that the bourgeois economy could be maintained and the value of money retained if half the population was put to work digging holes into the side of a mountain, with the other half put to work filling in the holes. This assertion ignores the criticality of use, of use value, to the bourgeois and to all economies; it ignores the very conflict of use and exchange value in the identity of the commodity, at the very core of capitalist reproduction. But....
But Congress is exactly that Keynesian exercise for corporate capitalism, just that exercise of throwing money into holes, so that money and more money can be taken out as Congress redistributes incomes, sanctions the liquidation of pension funds, authorizes the destruction of countries abroad, and the sacking of cities and populations at home. As the committee members and their cohorts race out of DC, fright wigs on and bags in hand, to ring the corporate doorbells, get their corporate candy, they represent, almost too perfectly, the uselessness of capital.
S. Artesian October 1, 2006
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
Sunday, September 10, 2006
96 Tears, Part 3: Restricted Reproduction, Restored Profits
1. The destruction of assets is no more an index to the weakness of capitalism than the accumulation of assets is an index to its strength. Capitalism is necessarily nothing about assets and necessarily everything about value. Exchange value, capital's value, exists necessarily as private property. Capital is everything about the reproduction of value and the preservation of private property.
The strengths and weaknesses of capitalism are not going to be found in the myriad of measures, tables, charts, graphs issued by governments, corporations, economists and pored over by governments, corporations, economists, consultants, traders, hedgers, speculators. That world of numbers constructed by the ideologists of capital is flat; and the "universe" supporting that world begins and ends with the whimper, not the big bang.
The strength of capital exists in its maintenance of its social relation of production; in its organization, and continued organization of labor as wage-labor; in the preservation of labor as destitute, detached, deprived, useless, labor.
The devaluation of assets, given its public, ceremonial, spectacular form in the events of September 11, is the preservation of private property, and in equally spectacular form demonstrates the deprivation, destitution, expulsion of labor essential to every moment of capital's existence.
The essential expulsion of labor is given its spectacular form in ongoing attacks on immigrant laborers.
The devaluation of assets is matched, paralleled, accompanied by the breaking down and up of the alliances, the pacts, the institutions for mediation of the particular interests in trade, production, of capitalism-- the failures of the WTO, the rejections and defiance of IMF/WB loan conditions-- in another public, ceremonial presentation, of the preservation of private property. The lack of "consensus," "hegemony," "convergence" are no more the end to capital, than consensus, hegemony, convergence were the beginning of capital.
2. Expanded reproduction, increased accumulated assets, accumulated as asset values, were the measure of the growth of the 1992-2000 period; expanded reproduction, the accumulated asset values, had exhausted capital's ability to turn the trick of accelerating profits.
Reduced reproduction, restricted investment are the measure of the 2001-2005 period. Or at least part of the measure. The other part is, of course, the redistribution of profits through the pricing of oil.
In the period 1996-2000, private fixed non-residential investment grew by 50 percent. For the 2000-2005 period, the growth measured 4 percent. The measures and relations between investment and growth become at once and simultaneously more complex and revealing when focused on manufacturing investment. That, annual amounts invested in manufacturing in the US had actually peaked in 1996. By 2000, the annual investment in manufacturing was 28 percent below the 1996 level. The amount invested in 2005 was 40% below the 2000 level, and 57 percent below the 1996 peak.
Growth in the value of the net stock of privately produced fixed assets was significantly reduced. Between 1992 and 1997, the average annual rate of growth of this net stock was 4.5 percent. The rate accelerated to 6 percent between 1997 and 2000, falling to 3 percent for the years following 2000. Annual investment amounts to 2000 were consistently 40-50 percent above the amount required to replace the consumption of fixed capital. The over-replacement rate has since fallen to 25 percent .
What had been restored were profits, and more than profits, profitability, rates of profit, rates of return on investment. Corporate profits, fed by the restrictions on investment, the 20 percent reduction in manufacturing employment, inflated by the pricing mechanism of oil, recovered in 2002 from a 2 year decline. In 2004, after-tax corporate profits were 50 percent above the 1999 mark. Profitability, measuring corporate profits against the current costs of net stocks of private non-residential equipment, software, and structures, rated 6.26 percent in 1997, 4.83 percent in 2000, 4.54 percent in 2001 before recovering to 6.7 percent in 2004. After the 20 percent gain profits in 2005, the profitability rate had climbed to 7.69 percent.
In that rate is compressed the predicament of the bourgeoisie's economy-- asset rich, profit poor; cash rich, profitability restored, reproduction encumbered. The great recovery in profitability in 2005 is in fact just one more index of ongoing overproduction and an immediate future of reduced profitability. Profit restored, growth slowed is capital preserved, but preserved inadequately as overproduction increases when reproduction is constrained.
3.The strength of capital is maintained in the midst of its many predicaments, as the decomposition of all its previous "achievements," "harmonies," "alliances," is nothing but the recomposition of profits, the preservation of property, the ongoing expropriation of wage labor.
All those measures of capital's weakness-- the decline of the dollar, the rising price of oil, the supposed "peak" in oil production and exploration, the trade conflicts between "North" and "South," the very notion of a "South," the supposed "defiance" of a supposed "Washington Consensus," the "national salvation" governments of Bolivia, Argentina, and South Africa, the mythic flight from US securities-- were/are in fact elements of capital's reproduction, restoration, preservation. The obvious, painful, corollary is that the political embrace of these supposed alternatives to capital by the left opponents of capital, makes those opponents critical, essential, necessary to the maintenance and restoration of private property against the workers' struggles.
S. Artesian September 23, 2006
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
The strengths and weaknesses of capitalism are not going to be found in the myriad of measures, tables, charts, graphs issued by governments, corporations, economists and pored over by governments, corporations, economists, consultants, traders, hedgers, speculators. That world of numbers constructed by the ideologists of capital is flat; and the "universe" supporting that world begins and ends with the whimper, not the big bang.
The strength of capital exists in its maintenance of its social relation of production; in its organization, and continued organization of labor as wage-labor; in the preservation of labor as destitute, detached, deprived, useless, labor.
The devaluation of assets, given its public, ceremonial, spectacular form in the events of September 11, is the preservation of private property, and in equally spectacular form demonstrates the deprivation, destitution, expulsion of labor essential to every moment of capital's existence.
The essential expulsion of labor is given its spectacular form in ongoing attacks on immigrant laborers.
The devaluation of assets is matched, paralleled, accompanied by the breaking down and up of the alliances, the pacts, the institutions for mediation of the particular interests in trade, production, of capitalism-- the failures of the WTO, the rejections and defiance of IMF/WB loan conditions-- in another public, ceremonial presentation, of the preservation of private property. The lack of "consensus," "hegemony," "convergence" are no more the end to capital, than consensus, hegemony, convergence were the beginning of capital.
2. Expanded reproduction, increased accumulated assets, accumulated as asset values, were the measure of the growth of the 1992-2000 period; expanded reproduction, the accumulated asset values, had exhausted capital's ability to turn the trick of accelerating profits.
Reduced reproduction, restricted investment are the measure of the 2001-2005 period. Or at least part of the measure. The other part is, of course, the redistribution of profits through the pricing of oil.
In the period 1996-2000, private fixed non-residential investment grew by 50 percent. For the 2000-2005 period, the growth measured 4 percent. The measures and relations between investment and growth become at once and simultaneously more complex and revealing when focused on manufacturing investment. That, annual amounts invested in manufacturing in the US had actually peaked in 1996. By 2000, the annual investment in manufacturing was 28 percent below the 1996 level. The amount invested in 2005 was 40% below the 2000 level, and 57 percent below the 1996 peak.
Growth in the value of the net stock of privately produced fixed assets was significantly reduced. Between 1992 and 1997, the average annual rate of growth of this net stock was 4.5 percent. The rate accelerated to 6 percent between 1997 and 2000, falling to 3 percent for the years following 2000. Annual investment amounts to 2000 were consistently 40-50 percent above the amount required to replace the consumption of fixed capital. The over-replacement rate has since fallen to 25 percent .
What had been restored were profits, and more than profits, profitability, rates of profit, rates of return on investment. Corporate profits, fed by the restrictions on investment, the 20 percent reduction in manufacturing employment, inflated by the pricing mechanism of oil, recovered in 2002 from a 2 year decline. In 2004, after-tax corporate profits were 50 percent above the 1999 mark. Profitability, measuring corporate profits against the current costs of net stocks of private non-residential equipment, software, and structures, rated 6.26 percent in 1997, 4.83 percent in 2000, 4.54 percent in 2001 before recovering to 6.7 percent in 2004. After the 20 percent gain profits in 2005, the profitability rate had climbed to 7.69 percent.
In that rate is compressed the predicament of the bourgeoisie's economy-- asset rich, profit poor; cash rich, profitability restored, reproduction encumbered. The great recovery in profitability in 2005 is in fact just one more index of ongoing overproduction and an immediate future of reduced profitability. Profit restored, growth slowed is capital preserved, but preserved inadequately as overproduction increases when reproduction is constrained.
3.The strength of capital is maintained in the midst of its many predicaments, as the decomposition of all its previous "achievements," "harmonies," "alliances," is nothing but the recomposition of profits, the preservation of property, the ongoing expropriation of wage labor.
All those measures of capital's weakness-- the decline of the dollar, the rising price of oil, the supposed "peak" in oil production and exploration, the trade conflicts between "North" and "South," the very notion of a "South," the supposed "defiance" of a supposed "Washington Consensus," the "national salvation" governments of Bolivia, Argentina, and South Africa, the mythic flight from US securities-- were/are in fact elements of capital's reproduction, restoration, preservation. The obvious, painful, corollary is that the political embrace of these supposed alternatives to capital by the left opponents of capital, makes those opponents critical, essential, necessary to the maintenance and restoration of private property against the workers' struggles.
S. Artesian September 23, 2006
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
Sunday, August 27, 2006
96 Tears, Part 2
1. The events of September 11, 2001 cleared the air, literally, and settled, figuratively, the immediate, and always present issue confronting political economy and political economists: "Is the economy head for a hard landing or a soft landing?"
A day of infamy... of rejoicing...of atonement...of better being lucky than being better... a day of consequence and convergence... Santiago, Chile 1973, New York, New York 2001.. a day more and less like any other day where and when the truth of free markets, of the "new" "global" "information" economy is made manifest, is uncovered, not in and not by, but made manifest as the rubble around, within, and of private property. A day like all others, a day made of all other days...
(Dinah Washington in the background singing "What A Diff'rence A Day Makes")
The bourgeoisie meet to commemorate their air express guaranteed on time delivery door to door arson, their global insurance fire : "Why was this day different than all others?"
And from a seat unoccupied, the place left open for the expected/unexpected arrival of a prophet, a Messiah, a drunken frat boy, rich drunken frat boy, an answer "Not one bit different. Samey-same. Just like all the others. Just closer to home." Moron/messiah, prophet/frat boy, samey-same indeed.
2. Destruction of assets, immiseration of accumulated and immediate social labor; reproduction of the elements of destruction and immiseration has always part and whole of capital expanding, capital contracting, capital flowering, capital withering, capital advanced and capital recalled.. and of capital overthrown and capital restored.
...So that the growth of the 1990s does not occur without the destruction of assets in the former Soviet Union; does not occur absent the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and and the demolition of Serbia.
...So that the capital expanded after 1992 could not occur without the previous contraction, the previous destruction of assets of the "lost decade," the globally lost decade of the 1980s, that monument to the venality, viciousness of Reagan and Thatcher.
...So that the restoration of profit after 2001, and only the restoration of profit explains the "recovery," the persistence of capitalism in general, and of of US capitalism in particular.
...So that the restoration of profit required destruction of assets in part, reducing the rate of accumulation in whole.
...So that expansion and contraction, recovery and decline lose their meanings in and of themselves and only have meaning in their organization in each other, in a composed identity.
...So that cash is trash becomes, determines cash is king.
S. Artesian August 27, 2006
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
A day of infamy... of rejoicing...of atonement...of better being lucky than being better... a day of consequence and convergence... Santiago, Chile 1973, New York, New York 2001.. a day more and less like any other day where and when the truth of free markets, of the "new" "global" "information" economy is made manifest, is uncovered, not in and not by, but made manifest as the rubble around, within, and of private property. A day like all others, a day made of all other days...
(Dinah Washington in the background singing "What A Diff'rence A Day Makes")
The bourgeoisie meet to commemorate their air express guaranteed on time delivery door to door arson, their global insurance fire : "Why was this day different than all others?"
And from a seat unoccupied, the place left open for the expected/unexpected arrival of a prophet, a Messiah, a drunken frat boy, rich drunken frat boy, an answer "Not one bit different. Samey-same. Just like all the others. Just closer to home." Moron/messiah, prophet/frat boy, samey-same indeed.
2. Destruction of assets, immiseration of accumulated and immediate social labor; reproduction of the elements of destruction and immiseration has always part and whole of capital expanding, capital contracting, capital flowering, capital withering, capital advanced and capital recalled.. and of capital overthrown and capital restored.
...So that the growth of the 1990s does not occur without the destruction of assets in the former Soviet Union; does not occur absent the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and and the demolition of Serbia.
...So that the capital expanded after 1992 could not occur without the previous contraction, the previous destruction of assets of the "lost decade," the globally lost decade of the 1980s, that monument to the venality, viciousness of Reagan and Thatcher.
...So that the restoration of profit after 2001, and only the restoration of profit explains the "recovery," the persistence of capitalism in general, and of of US capitalism in particular.
...So that the restoration of profit required destruction of assets in part, reducing the rate of accumulation in whole.
...So that expansion and contraction, recovery and decline lose their meanings in and of themselves and only have meaning in their organization in each other, in a composed identity.
...So that cash is trash becomes, determines cash is king.
S. Artesian August 27, 2006
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
Sunday, August 06, 2006
96 Tears, Part 1
1.Back in the day.... the days when Greenspan was a genius, when Clinton was an empath, feeling pain with benefits; back in the days when markets were efficient, elastic, ever-expanding, almost perfect; back in the days when investment was everything, when profit was every bourgeois' birthright.. a token of god's esteem... a foreskin returned... sewn back on to expanded reproduction, god's covenant with those pious souls practicing the virtue of selfishness... Back in the day, cash was trash.
Back in those days capital tricked itself out in its poser A-list VIP room, Armani, beach wear, wrestlemania, stock-jobber best and vogued its way across a billion integrated-circuit boards, a billion 200mm wafers, a million miles of unused fiber optic cable, broadbanding its way to nowhere, all the time lip-synching to Irene Cara's "Fame..."
"I'm gonna live fo-ev-ah!" Forever.
2. Meanwhile, a minor "financial crisis" erupted in Asia... a momentary, and mere, wobble in the walk of the super-model capitalism, the cost of doing business in stilettos on uneven payment.
"SOS, " sang the central bankers of Seoul, Jakarta, Bangkok, Taipei... meaning "Save Our Spreads." But the financial genius, godlike in his persona as the stammering obscurantist, divine in the practice of extreme equivocation; a man who started every sentence with the religious incantation "On the one hand....," a man who imagined himself the Kierkegaard of political economy where the words "yes" and "no" were the fear, the trembling, the sickness unto death, a man for whom fiscal policy was a leap-of-faith based exercise, and the empath, now standing not undressed but exposed, so human, so needy of understanding himself, a cheeseburger libertine, a modern Fatty Arbuckle with an air force... these icons of modern decrepit capitalism heard the SOS and thought it was from the song by their favorite girl group, ABBA, which wasn't even a girl group.
"SOS?" said Greenspan. "Where's the Waterloo?"
"SOS?" said the libertine empath zipping up and brushing off the crumbs, "Give me the Dancing Queen."
Only capital can turn bagmen into savants, and sleezebag men into heroes, idols, victims.
Speculation and spectacle are capitalist creation crowned.
3. The wobble, as wobbles will, expanded. What appeared in 1997 as financial crisis, as speculative excess, as currency panic in the "new tiger" economies of Asia was not financial in origin, speculative at core, nor currency driven in sum.... at least no more than any of the other panics, runs, crises that form and inform the shabby history of capitalism.
The assaults of the short sellers were the market, and marketing, reflection of the overproduction that had accompanied, determined, the recovery from the 1991-1992 contraction. More precisely, the rate of overproduction had overtaken, as it always does, the increased profits and profitability initiated in the expansion of capitalist production. As always and forever, sooner and later, expanded capital accumulation, production for the appropriation of value through exchange, had undermined the very purpose of expanded capital accumulation.
The overproduction in the "emerging, industrial" Asian economies, overproduction of semiconductors, cement, electronic components was not separate and apart from the underlying overproduction in the established industrial economies of Europe and the United States.
The assaults on the currencies of the Asian economies were, but not just, indexes to the vulnerability of these economies to overproduction within their "national" markets, indexes to their vulnerability to the overproduction of capital in the world markets. The currency assaults were also essential destruction. Capital and capitalists required a pitiless devaluation of the assets, instruments, means, and objects of production.
Capital has no equilibrium. It oscillates. The frequency of its oscillations is a dynamic disequilibrium; a destruction of labor and the means of labor, devaluation, through speculation, hedges, margin calls, death squads, and carpet bombing, is ever present.
Back in those days capital tricked itself out in its poser A-list VIP room, Armani, beach wear, wrestlemania, stock-jobber best and vogued its way across a billion integrated-circuit boards, a billion 200mm wafers, a million miles of unused fiber optic cable, broadbanding its way to nowhere, all the time lip-synching to Irene Cara's "Fame..."
"I'm gonna live fo-ev-ah!" Forever.
2. Meanwhile, a minor "financial crisis" erupted in Asia... a momentary, and mere, wobble in the walk of the super-model capitalism, the cost of doing business in stilettos on uneven payment.
"SOS, " sang the central bankers of Seoul, Jakarta, Bangkok, Taipei... meaning "Save Our Spreads." But the financial genius, godlike in his persona as the stammering obscurantist, divine in the practice of extreme equivocation; a man who started every sentence with the religious incantation "On the one hand....," a man who imagined himself the Kierkegaard of political economy where the words "yes" and "no" were the fear, the trembling, the sickness unto death, a man for whom fiscal policy was a leap-of-faith based exercise, and the empath, now standing not undressed but exposed, so human, so needy of understanding himself, a cheeseburger libertine, a modern Fatty Arbuckle with an air force... these icons of modern decrepit capitalism heard the SOS and thought it was from the song by their favorite girl group, ABBA, which wasn't even a girl group.
"SOS?" said Greenspan. "Where's the Waterloo?"
"SOS?" said the libertine empath zipping up and brushing off the crumbs, "Give me the Dancing Queen."
Only capital can turn bagmen into savants, and sleezebag men into heroes, idols, victims.
Speculation and spectacle are capitalist creation crowned.
3. The wobble, as wobbles will, expanded. What appeared in 1997 as financial crisis, as speculative excess, as currency panic in the "new tiger" economies of Asia was not financial in origin, speculative at core, nor currency driven in sum.... at least no more than any of the other panics, runs, crises that form and inform the shabby history of capitalism.
The assaults of the short sellers were the market, and marketing, reflection of the overproduction that had accompanied, determined, the recovery from the 1991-1992 contraction. More precisely, the rate of overproduction had overtaken, as it always does, the increased profits and profitability initiated in the expansion of capitalist production. As always and forever, sooner and later, expanded capital accumulation, production for the appropriation of value through exchange, had undermined the very purpose of expanded capital accumulation.
The overproduction in the "emerging, industrial" Asian economies, overproduction of semiconductors, cement, electronic components was not separate and apart from the underlying overproduction in the established industrial economies of Europe and the United States.
The assaults on the currencies of the Asian economies were, but not just, indexes to the vulnerability of these economies to overproduction within their "national" markets, indexes to their vulnerability to the overproduction of capital in the world markets. The currency assaults were also essential destruction. Capital and capitalists required a pitiless devaluation of the assets, instruments, means, and objects of production.
Capital has no equilibrium. It oscillates. The frequency of its oscillations is a dynamic disequilibrium; a destruction of labor and the means of labor, devaluation, through speculation, hedges, margin calls, death squads, and carpet bombing, is ever present.
Changes in capital are changes in the rates of the competing, composed, contradictory yet identical process of accumulation and devaluation, where the rates of the topsy quicken that of the turvy and the system of reproduction becomes systematic destruction.
4. So...the wobble of the emerging tigers was the stumbling of capitalism as a whole, and the eventual response of the premiere capitalist economy, the US, was in fact to lock down a certain rate and mass of devaluation of capital as an offset to reinflating the overall accumulation of capital. The lockdown, of course, took place mostly offshore. It was, as many things are, outsourced, secured in the contraction of the Asian economies, despite the rebound impact on US farm exports; applied less than lightly to the economies of Brazil and Venezuela; let loose like a plague against the fixed assets, the standards of living, the social welfare of the former Soviet Union.
But the U.S. of thee I sing? Accumulation restored and maintained. The AARG of the GDP (year to year rate of growth) measured at 3.7% in 1996, 4.5% in 1997, 4.2% in 1998, 4.5% in 1999. Real private fixed non-residential investment increased so much so that by 2000 the real amount invested in equipment and software was 60% above the 1996 level. Investment in transportation equipment was 30% above the 1996 level. Changes in the net stock of produced assets increased 27.5%. But.......
But corporate profits were not quite capable of recovering in mass or in proportion to the expanded accumulation. In 1997, profits had reached and peaked at $552 billion, declining to $470 billion in 1998, recovering to $517 billion in 1999. And the rate of profit was similarly unable to achieve the ecstacy of 1997 level, declining from 6.26% of net value of the stock of non-residential equipment and software to 5.22% in 1999 ... whereupon the empath and the genius almost heard the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince singing 1999... "2 thousand zero zero, party over oops out of time, so tonight I'm going to party like it's 1999." Almost. The libertine had programmed the CD player for continuous replay of "Little Red Corvette."
Into that quandry of expanding investment and reduced profits, the US bourgeoise brought their trusted battering, bartering, ram, OPEC. Once, twice, third charming time, the US had used oil price changes, up and down, to rearrange, redistribute profits; to devalue the overaccumulated fixed assets. The 1998 collapse of oil prices below $10 per barrel, a collapse triggered by the emerging identity of expanded reproduction and overproduction, where price and value converge, made OPEC's actions more than inevitable. It made them mandatory.
Cash was trash all right, but OPEC was, is the US's garbage collector.
5. Two thousand zero, zero, and ONE, the departing Pres greets the arriving Pres. They meet, naturally, in the entrance ramp to the official White House garage. The departing Pres and the first lady on their matching Harley's, wearing their matching maroon leathers, bouncing the noise of the engine revs off the concrete. The arriving Pres and that first lady show up in their Cadillac, the very same one driven by James Dean in Giant, this time sporting stolen Florida plates.
"Nice ride," says the outbound Prez.
"Like it?" says the inbound Prez, powering down the window. "Gift from my brother."
The outbound nods. "Here," he says, handing over the keys to to the official White House Hummer, code-named 'The Big Lewinsky' by the Secret Service. "The tank is half-full."
"Or half-empty," says the inbound.
Outbound nods again, throttles down his Harley, listens to the music coming from the Cadillac's stereo.
"Sam the Sham? Wooly Bully?" he asks.
"Yeah," says the inbound. "More than music. My role model. Whole way of life in Texas. And as in Texas so too in America. What about you?" asks the inbound. "What's playing in your headphones?"
"Jr. Walker and the All-Stars. My favorite tune, "Pucker up, Buttercup."
Inbound nods too.
"Word of advice?" offers outbound.
Inbound puts his finger to his lips and blows.."Ssshh. Don't ask, don't tell."
"Egg-zackly," says outbound. He and Mrs. Outbound then wheelie out of the garage, heading for the nearest drive-thru window before hitting that big ribbon of concrete called I-95.
August 13, 2006
S. Artesian
address all comments to sartesian@earthlink.net
Sunday, June 25, 2006
The Importance of Being Ecuador, 10
1. The discovery and development of petroleum fields in the Oriente reprised the theme of export capitalism, export enclave capitalism, but with a vengeance. What was to have been a cash asset, a capital plow, turning over the rotted remains of the hacienda, of the mita, of the conquest economy, became instead the vector, the vehicle for the infiltration and subjugation of the entire economy by international debt. In this modern form of capital, debt, there was preserved, secured, the impossibility of national, capitalist development. It, the petroleum based expansion of the Ecuadorean economy, was the old rags to new oil-soaked rags story.
Earnings are a sometimes thing, but debt is forever. Between 1967 and 1974, Ecuador's foreign exchange earnings increased tenfold. The average annual rate of growth (AARG) for real GDP during this period exceed nine percent. Manufacturing GDP AARG exceeded 13 percent. But the growth of external debt far outstripped GDP growth and foreign exchange earnings. By 1979, external had grown to $4.5 billion dollars, an AARG of 60 percent in a decade.
Ecuador's debt doubled again between 1979 and 1986. Petroleum revenues increased in relation to GDP while revenues from non-petroleum commodity exports declined by 25 percent. The government increased public expenditures as a portion of the revenues from oil exports were used to subsidize consumption and finance public works. Transportation and utility infrastructure were improved as were water, and sewer systems.
By 1989, 50 percent of the goverment's budget was financed by oil export revenues, and 38 percent of expenditures were dedicated to foreign debt service.
OPEC 2, the oil price spikes of were the overture to the contraction of the world markets and the collapse of rates of growth. More than overture, OPEC 2 was the coda, signifying more than the end of the post WW2 expansion, more than the end of the post OPEC 1 recycling of petro-dollars, and more than just the inability of capitalism to sustain reproduction of capital. The coda of capital was announced in the attack on living standards, in the transfer of wealth from poorer to richer, in the creation of a "lost decade"stretching in space and time through the 1980s and from Seattle to Buenos Aires.
Overproduction of oil, overexpansion of the productive assets for extraction, transportation, and distribution of oil; overexpansion of manufacturing as a whole, of the assets for production, transportation, and distribution, created a declining rate of return on investment and production, and had created that decline globally.
The decline of oil earnings after OPEC 2, slowly at first, then dramatically in 1986, and then catastrophically in 1988-89, was marked by the usual government efforts of devaluation, austerity, and the attack on living standards. The sucre was devalued twice between 1981 and 1983. Government spending was reduced and domestic interest rates climbed. IMF debt was rescheduled which then allowed the government to reschedule foreign private bank debt in 1985.
In 1987, however, the decline in oil revenues forced the government to suspend interest payments to the private lenders and impose import surcharges. The Trans-Ecuadorian Petroleum Pipeline was partially destroyed by the earthquake of March, costing the economy approximately $700 million in export revenues. GDP declined 5.2 percent from the 1986 level, despite increased government spending to stabilize the contracting economy.
2. The cycle of austerity, constrained economic recovery, expanding debt continued for Ecuador throughout the 1990s. AARG of manufacturing reached 6.9 percent in 1995. The percentage of gross fixed investment dedicated to machinery and equipment climbed from 43 percent in 1990 to 60 percent in 1995 and was maintained at 60 percent until 1999.
The financial crisis of the Asian economies in 1996-97-98, in reality the result of the peak and decline in the rate of profit throughout capitalism as a whole, and in the US in particular, worked its way east and west. The determinant of this contraction, overproduction, was particularly acute once again in petroleum production. Oil prices again head down, this time falling below the $12 a barrel mark touched a decade earlier.
Capital stumbled. Ecuador's capitalism staggered and neared collapse in 1999. The contribution of external financing to domestic investment actually turned negative. The negative net transfer of resources in 2000 was 20 times larger than the 1995 measure. Per capita growth of GDP, barely positive 1991-1995, turned negative and stayed negative 1996-2000.
With each successive iteration of commodity nationalism, the capitalism of Ecuador has become always and only that much more integrated into and dependent upon the world market, upon international capital. The economic collapse of 1999 and the dollarization of the economy were not actually variations on a theme, but the theme itself.
The theme of course is the maintenance of capital through the assault on wage rates and living standards, by the deconstruction of even the incremental development afforded by the "upswing" in world markets. Between 1997 and 1999 labor income declined by half. Even after the "recovery" of 2000, 2001, labor income was still 30 percent below its 1997 mark.
The dollarization of 2000 "stabilized" the economy, in effect, by guaranteeing the value of debt repayment.
With the contraction of world markets in 2001 and its reduced rate of growth since then, capital, international and national, in Ecuador, is at it was: the heir and the servant to the conquest economy and its legacy. Capital, international and national, in Ecuador, find its task to be more and more, and never less, the constraint of the very expansion of growth that requires an actual reorganization of property to move development out of an enclave, out of a concession, out of zone. Those concessions require more and more and never less military bases, and military organizations to "protect" the pipelines, the production facilities in the Oriente, in Sucumbios, Orellana; bases and organizations that will be used to "pacify" Putumayo, to sever Beni and Santa Cruz from Bolivia.
The UN in its 2006 report on the state of the world's cities wrote: "Around the world, the wealthy have created an architecture of fear by retreating behind fortified residential enclaves." Residential property is merely the reflection of the private property in production. It is in the hacienda that capital finds its security, its lost future.
S. Artesian
July 15, 2006
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
Earnings are a sometimes thing, but debt is forever. Between 1967 and 1974, Ecuador's foreign exchange earnings increased tenfold. The average annual rate of growth (AARG) for real GDP during this period exceed nine percent. Manufacturing GDP AARG exceeded 13 percent. But the growth of external debt far outstripped GDP growth and foreign exchange earnings. By 1979, external had grown to $4.5 billion dollars, an AARG of 60 percent in a decade.
Ecuador's debt doubled again between 1979 and 1986. Petroleum revenues increased in relation to GDP while revenues from non-petroleum commodity exports declined by 25 percent. The government increased public expenditures as a portion of the revenues from oil exports were used to subsidize consumption and finance public works. Transportation and utility infrastructure were improved as were water, and sewer systems.
By 1989, 50 percent of the goverment's budget was financed by oil export revenues, and 38 percent of expenditures were dedicated to foreign debt service.
OPEC 2, the oil price spikes of were the overture to the contraction of the world markets and the collapse of rates of growth. More than overture, OPEC 2 was the coda, signifying more than the end of the post WW2 expansion, more than the end of the post OPEC 1 recycling of petro-dollars, and more than just the inability of capitalism to sustain reproduction of capital. The coda of capital was announced in the attack on living standards, in the transfer of wealth from poorer to richer, in the creation of a "lost decade"stretching in space and time through the 1980s and from Seattle to Buenos Aires.
Overproduction of oil, overexpansion of the productive assets for extraction, transportation, and distribution of oil; overexpansion of manufacturing as a whole, of the assets for production, transportation, and distribution, created a declining rate of return on investment and production, and had created that decline globally.
The decline of oil earnings after OPEC 2, slowly at first, then dramatically in 1986, and then catastrophically in 1988-89, was marked by the usual government efforts of devaluation, austerity, and the attack on living standards. The sucre was devalued twice between 1981 and 1983. Government spending was reduced and domestic interest rates climbed. IMF debt was rescheduled which then allowed the government to reschedule foreign private bank debt in 1985.
In 1987, however, the decline in oil revenues forced the government to suspend interest payments to the private lenders and impose import surcharges. The Trans-Ecuadorian Petroleum Pipeline was partially destroyed by the earthquake of March, costing the economy approximately $700 million in export revenues. GDP declined 5.2 percent from the 1986 level, despite increased government spending to stabilize the contracting economy.
2. The cycle of austerity, constrained economic recovery, expanding debt continued for Ecuador throughout the 1990s. AARG of manufacturing reached 6.9 percent in 1995. The percentage of gross fixed investment dedicated to machinery and equipment climbed from 43 percent in 1990 to 60 percent in 1995 and was maintained at 60 percent until 1999.
The financial crisis of the Asian economies in 1996-97-98, in reality the result of the peak and decline in the rate of profit throughout capitalism as a whole, and in the US in particular, worked its way east and west. The determinant of this contraction, overproduction, was particularly acute once again in petroleum production. Oil prices again head down, this time falling below the $12 a barrel mark touched a decade earlier.
Capital stumbled. Ecuador's capitalism staggered and neared collapse in 1999. The contribution of external financing to domestic investment actually turned negative. The negative net transfer of resources in 2000 was 20 times larger than the 1995 measure. Per capita growth of GDP, barely positive 1991-1995, turned negative and stayed negative 1996-2000.
With each successive iteration of commodity nationalism, the capitalism of Ecuador has become always and only that much more integrated into and dependent upon the world market, upon international capital. The economic collapse of 1999 and the dollarization of the economy were not actually variations on a theme, but the theme itself.
The theme of course is the maintenance of capital through the assault on wage rates and living standards, by the deconstruction of even the incremental development afforded by the "upswing" in world markets. Between 1997 and 1999 labor income declined by half. Even after the "recovery" of 2000, 2001, labor income was still 30 percent below its 1997 mark.
The dollarization of 2000 "stabilized" the economy, in effect, by guaranteeing the value of debt repayment.
With the contraction of world markets in 2001 and its reduced rate of growth since then, capital, international and national, in Ecuador, is at it was: the heir and the servant to the conquest economy and its legacy. Capital, international and national, in Ecuador, find its task to be more and more, and never less, the constraint of the very expansion of growth that requires an actual reorganization of property to move development out of an enclave, out of a concession, out of zone. Those concessions require more and more and never less military bases, and military organizations to "protect" the pipelines, the production facilities in the Oriente, in Sucumbios, Orellana; bases and organizations that will be used to "pacify" Putumayo, to sever Beni and Santa Cruz from Bolivia.
The UN in its 2006 report on the state of the world's cities wrote: "Around the world, the wealthy have created an architecture of fear by retreating behind fortified residential enclaves." Residential property is merely the reflection of the private property in production. It is in the hacienda that capital finds its security, its lost future.
S. Artesian
July 15, 2006
address all comments to: sartesian@earthlink.net
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