The Less Said........

I had no intention, honestly, of writing a single word about the "event" sponsored on November 14 by the Platypus Society at the New School in New York.  Platypus?  New School?  NYC?  I mean put it all together and what do you have?  A hit squad out to kill an evening.  Really. 

In my experience, the less said about, and to, the Platypus Society and its Platypus Review, the more better.   What can you say about a review that thinks its central task is to address the "disorientation of the left" and thinks that address represents some sort of break with the left, and the disorientation? What can you say except  "get me the f**k out of here"?  Seriously.

But the best laid plans of mice and men, and recombinant DNA versions of both... as the saying goes. 

Hell, I didn't even plan to attend the "event," the Radical Interpretations of the Present Crisis panel featuring Loren Goldner, David Harvey, Andrew Kliman and Paul Mattick, but again best laid plans etc. etc. etc.  Blame it on fate.  I know I'm blaming it on somebody I don't even know in Egypt. 

So there I was walking the half-mile or so to 11th Street to witness Loren Goldner, David Harvey, Andrew Kliman, and Paul Mattick present their "radical interpretations of the present crisis." 

(Full disclosure:  I know Goldner and we consider each other friends. Disagree completely with his emphasis on permanent crisis, fictitious capital, primitive accumulation, but a friend is a friend.  Don't know David Harvey from beans-- read some of his stuff in the past and was convinced by that experience that Harvey isn't a Marxist, and doesn't think Marx should have been a Marxist.   So I no longer pay much attention to his work.  Don't know Paul Mattick at all.  Know the name but not the man, but I heard he's a snappy dresser.  Don't know Andrew Kliman but I sure do like his books, as I hope I have made clear. He, it seems to me, maintains a fidelity to Marx's critique, using the actual categories of that critique to explore and explain the present predicament, expression, manifestations of capital as the historical outcome, the historical necessity of capital's origin and reproduction as capital. )

So there we all were, maybe two hundred of us, waiting for the show to begin. 

First a word about the sponsors, or actually the format envisioned by the sponsors.  The sponsors proposed six topics to be addressed, and the six topics included approximately twenty five separate questions to be answered. 

The six topics were:  1) Do we live in a crisis of capitalism today, and...  2) Why are sophisticated leftists understandings of the world seemingly unable to assist in the task of changing it, and ...3) Did Occupy betoken a renewed salience of class, and...4) How does this present crisis compare with past crises of capital, and...5)How do your political views influence your understanding of capitalism and crisis, and...6)What is the extent of the present crisis and how has it been distributed globally, and...

Note:  5 is my personal favorite, evoking echoes of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle-- the act of observation creates a disturbance thus rendering impossible any calculation.  

Each of the panel participants was allotted 12 minutes to present his [these are all men, obviously] radical interpretation.  Being a whiz at simple math, that works out to 2 minutes per topic, and about 28 seconds per question. So to set the stage, let's just say we begin with an impractical format overcrowded with topics requiring answers to an inordinate number of questions in a ridiculously inadequate allotment of time.  Other than that, everything was arranged perfectly. 

Goldner led the parade as the panel members took their turns in alphabetical order.  Assisted by a hand-lettered visual aid that was rendered less than aiding by the fact that Goldner's handwriting is basically unreadable, Goldner rolled out his stump presentation about reduced social reproduction due to, or accompanied by, expansion of "fictitious capital" and continued "primitive accumulation."  Those familiar with Goldner already know that this analysis of capital is derived from Rosa Luxemburg's Accumulation of Capital as channeled through certain modern interpreters. 

According to Goldner, the "problem" for capital is that, in order to keep itself from collapsing, capitalism essentially engages in a continuous, and sequential, series of "bubbles," "balloons," speculative hyper-expansions.  And then?  And then we get the accumulation of "too many titles."  According to Goldner, the bourgeoisie accumulates its wealth as a mass of titles, of claims, but with the growth of fictitious, bubble, capital, the titles are produced without any corresponding "hard asset" in production. 

From that we get the inevitable excess, overshooting, and devalorization as profit migrates out of less profitable production of such hard assets and into the financial flows. 

There's more than one problem with this type of analysis.  First, it posits capital's "health" as being in the production of "hard assets," as opposed to "financial assets," when in reality no such discontinuity, opposition, exists in capitalism.  The bourgeoisie may or may not accumulate their wealth as "titles," but in so doing, all the bourgeoisie are doing is establishing the rule of private property.  The problem is not in the "inflation" of fictitious capital, or fictitious values, as an offset to the self-devaluation of capital.  The problem is that the speculative capital is essentially irrelevant to both the expansion and devaluation of the accumulation process.  For example, the flows into and out of the mortgage-backed securities markets did not determine the post 2003 expansion of US capitalism.  These flows did not determine the contraction of US capitalism beginning in 2007.  

Speculative instruments, Goldner's "fictitious capital," do not base themselves on a claim to hard assets.  The bourgeoisie are not competing over the ownership of the means of production.  Indeed, the entire purpose of such instruments, such as structured investment vehicles, asset-backed securities, credit derivatives, options, futures, is in fact to never take possession of a hard asset, but rather to liquidate the position without claiming the asset.  The speculative instrument does not need to correspond with any accumulation of assets as its claim is the claim against revenues, against earnings.  When the earnings decline, the holders of the instruments may seek to squeeze the dried blood from the dead stone by insisting on the liquidation of the hard assets, but the problem is not the shortage of hard assets, but rather the overproduction of such hard assets.  This is exactly what occurred in the period leading up to the recession of 2001-2003, and again in the recovery from that recession, particularly in 2006-2007, leading to the collapse of 2008.

Goldner was followed by David Harvey who demonstrated a remarkable ability, and agility to belabor the obvious, convert insight into banality and then repackage the banality as erudition.  Harvey presented the audience with the bombshell realization that Marx talks about contradictions of capital, and that he, Harvey, thought a primary contradiction was between use value and exchange value.  Surprise! 

Harvey then  informed the audience that housing under capitalism is produced as a commodity (audible gasps, "No!"  "Yes!"  "Say it ain't so!") and that the use value of housing is then lost by the conditions of exchange value.

Well, strip my gears and call me shiftless.  Who would ever have thunk that?  But Harvey was just warming to the subject as he made clear later in the session.

Harvey was followed by Andrew Kliman, who pretty much stayed to the territory he had examined in his The Failure of Capitalist Production.  He effectively dealt with the usual left-narrative about the "shift" in the conditions of capitalist reproduction occurring around 1980 with the election of the pitchmen and pitchwomen of the "free market,"  of those Pinochet laissiz-faire-ists,  to political power in the US, and Great Britain; about "financialization" encumbering the capitalist economy's  profits from industrial production.  Most importantly, Kliman identified the source of the current predicament in the accumulation of capital as capital; in other words in its very great success in exploiting labor.   

(Note:  Though no fault of his,  I am unable to remember a single thing Paul Mattick said.  I'm sure he made remarks of some importance, but damned if I can recall a single one.  I can verify, however, that he is a sharp dresser).

After the first round of presentations there followed a round of 2 minute rejoinders and questions from each panelist to other panelists.  And then once again, "fictitious capital" claimed the spotlight as David Harvey seemed to compress the entire irrationality of capitalism into the creation of this  the escapee from box of Pandora, the credit system. 

First and foremost, the credit system is generated and regenerated by capitalism in the lags, delays, and differences in the rates of turnover of the various capitals.  The movement of credit allows the production process to maintain itself in, and as part of, the circulation process.  The movement of credit allows the circulation process to maintain itself in the midst of the production process.  Credit is no more fictitious, and no more irrational, than the wage relation; that is to say it is no less fictitious, no less irrational than private ownership of the means of social production.  Credit is no less essential to the production of value, to the self-expansion of value than the organization of capitalist property is to that production. 

However, the "separation" of capital into rational bits and irrational bits is Harvey's substitute for Marx's critique of the whole of capital's self expansion.  His is the classic "on the one hand......, while on the other hand.." interpretation, "understanding" of contradiction.    Harvey conflates social labor with value, ignoring the element fundamental to Marx's analysis that the subordination of all production to the production of values is an historically specific condition, defined by specific class relations, by a certain organization of labor that reproduces the conditions of its own dispossession, its own loss through the valorization process. 

Harvey wants to maintain on the one hand, value, while on the other hand, doing away with accumulation, ignoring with both hands that value is the social expression of social labor forced to present itself as wage labor; that wage labor is brought into being precisely for the purpose of accumulation of capital.   The production of value cannot exist separate and apart from the accumulation of value; and the accumulation of value cannot exist without the command over, and aggrandizement of,  the labor of others.

Harvey actually argued for a "new money"-- a money of "anti-accumulation,"  an "oxidizable" money as opposed to the money of the royal metals.  If I still smoked cigarets, or had had matches with me, I would have pulled out a dollar bill and set it on fire, pointing out that we have had "oxidizable" money for years.  Oxidation is burning, plain and simple.

 As a matter of fact, paper is so much more effective than gold for the purposes of capital-- easier to transport, easier to circulate, easier to recreate, and easier to devalue during that devaluation of all values so essential to capital's reconstitution. 

As it was, I no longer smoke and I don't carry matches, so I interrupted the proceedings to point out that my money's been oxidizing at an increasing rate for several years now without doing much to deter the bourgeoisie in their quest for accumulation.  Then I left.

I need to add just one more thing to my review of this dreary affair.  The presentation was incapable of, and oblivious to the need for, stirring the passion of the audience.  That Marx and the critique of capitalism can be made to appear so unengaged with, and so apathetic to the venality, bombast, pettiness, brutality, greed, and cowardice that define the bourgeoisie; so disengaged from the actual movement of the people who labor in the maquiladoras across the globe; so disengaged from the millions upon millions of (mostly) young women who have left village and countryside, migrating  to the SEZs of Asia, Latin America, Africa; to El Norte; that the word "bourgeoisie" was not uttered with unreserved contempt, not more spat than spoken,  shows how far off-target such efforts truly are.

Unfair criticism?  After all, you might say, the panel participants are more or less academics, intellectuals, who incorporate various degrees of activism into their professional investigations of capitalism?  Exactly my point.  The criticism is not of the panel members.  It is of those who stage these events and who boast in so doing of addressing the "disorientation of the left."

Oh... and for the record, those "contradictions of capital"?  They are all, each and every one, derived from a single contradiction:  the conflict of the labor process with the valorization process. 

S.Artesian
November 17, 2012
sartesian@earthlink.net

While I'm Away...

...I don't want you to be bored, or lack for humor so I thought I would leave you with this, remarks from a denizen of Mr. Proyect's list and the other of "recommended readings for beginners" interested in Marx's work:

 Re: Immanent Critique

From: Angelus Novus 

Capital is pretty much a self-contained work, but other than that, Marx's work is basically a fragmentary hodge-podge, much of it topical to contemporary political and philosophical disputes of Marx's time. To say that people should just dive into the enormous fragmentary body of Marx's writings without any context is to promote confusion rather than understanding.

Dingbat Trotskyist sects are always forcing texts like the 18th Brumaire or The German Ideology onto people who have no idea who Louis Napoleon or Bruno Bauer are. If decontextualized reception of holy writ is your idea of Marxist education, have fun.

P.S. I notice you don't offer a comment function on your blog. Nice way to immunize yourself against critique.

And of course, in the eternal struggle to have the last word, something which I intend to achieve even beyond the grave,  I responded thusly:

Dance around the issue any way you want, but the bottom line is to understand Marx you have to read Marx. You don’t need to read somebody else’s reading of Marx. 

 

Your remarks might have some validity if you bothered to offer even 1 volume of the “hodge-podge”—which BTW is complete bullshit, an attempt at justifying not reading Marx— even something as accessible as the EPM, or A Contribution to the Critique.... But no, you know better, and that it’s better to read what others think Marx meant, because that’s so much easier. And besides, it saves time.

 

PS. I don’t give a fuck about what you think about a comments function. Anybody wants to discuss anything with me, they know how to contact me... anybody wants a chat room... they’re welcome to Proyect’s list and Proyect’s blog. 

 

Well, I hope that provides you with a bit of comic relief. 

Immanent Critique of Marxists...

...available at Louis Proyect's so-called 'Marxmail,' where recommendations for readings to a beginner's 'Marxist Study Group" fail to include a single work by Marx.   Read it and weep/laugh.

November 9, 2012

Word

The street lamp pouring its dead-dog yellow light into my bedroom has never looked and felt so good.

November 4, 2012

Just a minute, please. We'll be right back

Note:  The following assumes you have read Andrew Kliman's The Failure of Capitalist Production, Pluto Press, 2011.  If you haven't read it, you should.  You should read it before you read these comments.  You should read it before you read your newspaper tomorrow.   Kliman's grasp of the categories of Marx's critique, his application of those categories in the process of critique is....uh.... pretty damn good.  His writing his clear, clean, transparent.  He's not perfect.  After all, who is?  Present company excepted, of course.  But...uh.... he's pretty damn good.

I've now read the book for the 3rd time. He demonstrates, clearly, cleanly, transparently that"

1. The "predicament" of capital does not begin in the 1980s with the "neoliberals" capturing political power.

2. The predicament is first made manifest in the early 1970s and is based on a drop in the rate of profit.

3. While the attacks on the working class and the poor are real enough, as has been the asset stripping, liquidationism, and shoveling buckets of money into the personal pockets of corporate executives, stockholders etc.  "financialization" is not the cause of the current predicament.  Financialization is, at its worst, like all speculation, simply a distributive mechanism.

4. While I don't agree with Kliman that pension contributions, given the manipulation thereof by corporations for their own gain, and in addition the approximately $800 billion shortfall in state and local govt. pensions amount to real compensation to workers, I am more than willing to accept Kliman's point that the real impact of "neo-liberalism"  has been to slow the rate of growth of workers compensation from its previous rates, despite the increases in "total compensation."

5. I also maintain that Kliman provides in chart 8.3 evidence for a decline in the real wage 1972-1994, a recovery 1994--2000 (or 2002), that never reaches the level of the 1970 wage, some oscillation around this "penultimate" high before its downturn.   

Now for where I think the weaknesses are:

1. The weaknesses are actually in the area of recovery of wages, 1994--2000 (and again after 2003).  Rather than examining what drives each of these period of recoveries, the recoveries  are more or less dismissed, subsumed under the umbrella of the persistent trend of the rate of profit to decline.

2. Ignoring those recoveries is a bit too close, for my liking, to an argument akin to "permanent crisis" a la the ICP, Goldner etc.etc.  Yes,  Kliman explicitly rejects such a notion, but the fact that he does not try to account for the upturns, other than to dismiss, more or less the 1990s as a "dot.com" bubble comes too close to the other side of that coin of "permanent crisis"-- "fictitious capital."

3.  For example, table 4.4, page 55, growth rate of industrial production US, shows an uptick, beginning around 1992 or so, falling, then beginning a sustain rise for 1995-2001, reaching a 20+ year high.  Chart 4.5, page 56, growth of industrial capacity US, similarly shows the growth in US industrial capacity, annual percentage change, spiking up through the period 1993-1999, achieving annual rates of growth that are the highest since the metric was initiated.   

4. I think that growth is extremely important.  I think we need to be able to account for that, in the midst of a persistent fall in the rate of profit.  But, basically, what Kliman offers as an explanation is simply "the investment boom that accompanied the dot-com bubble." -- which is not adequate.

5. Such growth was not the product of a bubble, and was the product of increasing profitability, and increasing wages, driven by applications of new technologies to production.

6. Which brings us to the next point, --Kliman "explains away" the increased profitability, particularly  the spikes after 1981, by   moral depreciation [as distinguished from oral depreciation].  Kliman quotes Marx:  "It [fixed capital] loses exchange-value, either because machines of the same sort are being produced more cheaply than it was, or because better machines are entering into competition with it."   The increased moral depreciation is attributed to the increased portion of business spending devoted to computers, peripherals, software, information and communication technologies. Rather than check the growth of "moral depreciation" against the determinants of  cheaper production or better production, somehow this moral depreciation, which is nothing other than real domination of capital over the labor process, is utilized to dismiss the reality of the profit boost provided by such improvements when applied to communication, transport, production, warehousing etc. etc.

7. If in fact digital technologies are being applied on an increased and accelerating scale to the accumulation process then we should keep in mind Moore's law { number of transistors on a integrated circuit will double every two years; basically processing power will double}; that the density of the transistors will increase at [i]minimum cost[/i]; Kryder's law {same conclusion for storage capacity of hard drives}; Butler's law of photonics that says the costs of data transmission will be halved every 9 months.  All these processes have been confirmed over decades. 

8. Consequently, the widespread application of these technologies, and the software revisions needed to take advantage of these increased capabilities will lead exactly to what Marx called increased rates of moral depreciation.  This increased moral depreciation does not mean that the profits driven by these accelerated processes are illusory, or a "one-off."  It does mean these processes will lead to a massive overproduction beyond the ability of the means of production as capital to exploit labor at a sufficient intensity to offset the very decline in the rate of profit brought about by the processes themselves.  And that too is what happened; that is what produced the dot-com bubble.  The dot-com bubble did not produce the increased investment nor the increased rate of "moral"-- real-- depreciation, the real overproduction and self-devaluation of capital.

9. Corporations do not depreciate their capital, do not replace it unless they must replace those components to reduce costs, maintain parity with competitors, achieve an "edge" in prices, the "social necessary" prices of production.  Software, digital equipment and technologies depreciate much more quickly than automobiles because of the greater impact these technologies have on the costs of production than the depreciation of say automobiles [which Kliman uses as a point of contrast].  The increased depreciation was product of the "revolutionizing" of the production processes. Increasing rates of moral depreciation are precisely what we should expect from applications of new, and accelerating, technologies.

10.  The fact that Kliman offers no explanation for this is, IMO, a critical weakness, in that is exactly that technological alteration that makes the current contraction so much stronger, persistent, intractable than the previous ones within the persistent downward trend. Capital remain inherently cyclical within its persistent trends.

11. The book itself is, however, of critical strength in that it properly locates the predicament of capital in the profitability of value production itself. 

S. Artesian

October 9 2012

Rocket in My Pocket Guide to Marxism

Continuing

Uneven and combined development: the practical overthrow of the "stage theory" of history and the ideology that packages "historic tasks" discretely as property belonging forever to the class owning that property, in that problems, requirements, functions of economic development at any moment in any locale are irresolvable, unsatisfiable, separate or apart from the emancipation of labor from  capital at all moments in all locations.

Uneven and combined development of capitalism is the conflict between the means of production organized as values absorbing, requiring unpaid labor, and the relations of production, where labor itself is encapsulated, sequestered, restricted by value production's preservation of private property.

Uneven and combined development of capitalism does not determine, and is not determined by, the particular obsolescence of a particular form of private property in commodity production, but rather
determines, and is determined in,  its own obsolescence, and the inadequacy of all forms of private property, including that form of private property called state property.  


Much, much more to come.


S.Artesian

September 1, 2012

I'm Happy to See You and Yeah That's a Gun in My Pocket Guide to Marxism

First of a series

Commodity fetishism, description: powers that are derived from the relations of labor are attributed to the products of that labor rather than the classes that determine and are determined by the conditions under which that labor is undertaken.

Commodity fetishism, example: The commodity embodies "wealth." What is wealth? Marx defines its as the disposition over time. The commodity, the exchange of commodities, now appears to dictate the distribution, allocation, of time. That is the fetish. In reality, the organization of labor as a commodity means the time is lost to the producers and reappears as a means of subsistence that requires the reproduction of that sacrifice of time.

copyright S. Artesian, but feel free to reproduce at will citing the source.  

September 1, 2012