Pocket Rocket Guide to Marxism

Some brief considerations on turnover, circulation, circulation time and labor time:

Capitalists imagine their mode of production as production for exchange and imagines its origins in trade, in the circulation of the commodities between producers and .....producers, between producers and consumers, producers and "circulators," merchants.

Production based on capital is not exactly how the capitalists imagine it.  Capital is more than simply production for exchange.  It is the requirement, the economic compulsion, to realize through exchange the expropriation of alienated labor power, of value.  To that end, and everything is focused on that end, the movement of the commodity to market, its circulation,  is one that both parallels and intersects the movement of the commodity through the production process itself, except... in the production process itself, the commodity's use value, it's specific physical characteristics are the manifest object of labor and its abstract, universal social characteristic, its value in and for exchange are latent, while in the circulation process the concrete is smothered by the commodity's function, its purpose, as the abstract power over labor.

Capital sustains itself in the moment when the intent of production is the compulsion to exchange.   Capitalist production does not arise from circulation, simply from exchange, but rather from a specific exchange between property and labor, between owners and laborers.

Capital  in its circulation can only realize itself as expanded value to the degree that its commodities command greater supplies of "lost" alienated, wage-labor.    Capital produces circulation out of its own condition.  Circulation time becomes a moment in the total social reproduction time.

Marx explains how the circulation time of a specific process, a sector of capitalism, impacts the surplus value that can be expropriated.  It's no mystery.  Takes long or longer to get a return on the capital, takes longer to throw that money back into production and try it all over again.  Circulation time then appears as a barrier, as a deduction to the generation of surplus value.   In the Grundrisse, Marx writes:

This is the nature of capital, of production founded on capital, that circulation time becomes a determinant moment of labour time, for the creation of value.  The independence of labour time is thereby negated and the production process is itself posited as determined by exchange, so that immediate production is socially linked to it and dependent on this link-- not only as a material moment, but also as an economic moment, a determinant, a characteristic form.

Pretty incredible exploration, isn't it?  Capital posits the conditions of its own limitation as part of its total social reproduction.  Circulation is a "characteristic form"-- a whole that both embodies and conflicts with the sum of its parts.

And what can, must the capitalists do?  They must seek to reduce the circulation time.  To that end, capital compresses, as best it can, circulation time, not just by reducing production time to move the commodities to market, not just by reducing the circulation time by moving more commodities more quickly, but by "pre-empting" circulation time through numerous mechanisms, most of which have something to do with receiving, obtaining advances, or credits.   Production is organized around milestones where payments are received prior to the completion of all work,  but as the work progresses.

Contracts for production become exchangeable bills themselves, much like bills of lading, upon which advances are received, amounts are discounted, circulation time is suspended, attenuated, shrunk, but most all transferred.

The expansion of credit, of an instrument acting on the assumption of value, is based on the differences in turnover times, the unevenness of capital's times of and to realization. 

Loans, hedges, futures, options, credits, bank letters of credit are all mechanisms for reconciling the different turnover times, and mitigating the conflicts between production and circulation times.  As with every other exchangeable product, the exchanges themselves serve to distribute, allocate portions of the total available profit.

All of these instruments can be considered "speculative," but the speculation is inherent in the production and circulation of value.  All these instruments can be considered fictitious, but only to the extent that capital unrealized is not capital.  The "fictitious" component in the credit vehicles is not that these instruments do not correspond to "real values," but that the real values cannot be realized quickly enough, massively enough to maintain profitability.

S. Artesian
March 25, 2013

Serious as a Heart Attack

Sometimes, even I have trouble believing how stupid, venal, vicious, brutal, ignorant, miserable, petty, incompetent the bourgeoisie really are.  Not often, but sometimes I have to shake my head and say "You cannot be serious." or "You're putting me on."  or  "Are you out of your minds?" or "You must be kidding me." or "You cannot make this stuff up." or simply "Wow."

Sometimes too many things, too many incidents, too many stories, actions, plans, programs, quotes occur all at once, or nearly all at once, to just be a coincidence.  And that's how I know the bourgeoisie are just that stupid and more; just that venal, vicious, brutal, ignorant, miserable, petty, incompetent, and more.  That's when I recognize just  how arrogant the bourgeoisie are in their venality, their ignorance, their incompetence; how comfortable they are in their obsolescence.  They've been around so long, so too long. 

So having reduced the economy, that is to say the social reproduction of human life, in Greece to ashes, literally, as hillsides have been denuded of trees for firewood; having driven Greece's economy to levels below the lowest point of the Great Depression of the 1930s; having forced Ireland to re-up for another tour of hell; having readied Spain for the killing floor... having done all that and emerged intact, relatively, regaining access even to the commercial paper and money markets; having done all that and emerged, relatively, unchallenged for power, the European bourgeoisie just had to do something.

They did it all right, and it's called Cyprus,  and it's a thing of beauty.

Cyprus has an annual economic output of about e18 billion.  It also has banking deposits of about e70  billion.  Cyprus is a member of the EU and a member of the euro currency union.  It also has a destination for deposits made by various wealthy individuals from Russia.

Given its extensive trading and banking ties with the EU in general, and Greece in particular, the sustained contraction of the EU economy in general, and the EU enforced collapse of Greece's economy in particular,  the admission by the Cyprus government two years ago that the island's banking system (outside the Turkish occupied northern zone) faced collapse was belaboring the obvious.

"Take a number, and wait your turn," replied the EU, which Cyprus did, but not exactly.  In the interim it floated a loan with a substantial dollar value, estimate at $2.5 billion,  from Russia.

Soon enough, it was Cyprus' turn.  The money from the Russian loan was pretty well exhausted, and the EU,  ineptly deft at the tasks of deconstruction, liquidation, impoverishment and having turned Greece into Romania now decided it could turn Cyprus into Haiti..  

So here's what happened.  Cyprus, its president, Nicos Anastasiades,  its finance minister, Michael Sarris,  pockets out-turned, empty hats in hand, and clown noses firmly in place, appealed to the European Union for a bailout.  Hurriedly the finance ministers of Germany, France, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, etc. etc.. along with representatives of the European Commission, the European Central Ban, and with Christine Lagarde, she of the IMF, gathered to plug the leak, fix the sail, repair the mast, utilizing whatever and how many nautical metaphors it took in their tireless efforts to save  "lifeboat Europe."

What the finance minister and president of Cyprus did not yet know was the fact that "saving" lifeboat Europe meant chumming the waters with body parts from Cyprus.

When told that without the bailout, Cyprus would no longer be able to pay for food imports, Lagarde, channeling Meryl Streep channeling Margaret Thatcher channeling a hipster Marie Antoinette declared "Let them eat local!" She then proposed that 30-40% of all amounts in bank deposits in  greater than e100,000 be confiscated to collateralize any bailout.  Joining the spirit of Occupy to the shadow of Eva Peron, Lagarde demanded that Cyprus "make the rich pay!"

Excited beyond all belief by the thought of a French woman making a whole country of swarthy non-Aryans beg,  and by the prospect of authorizing a preemptive drone strike on an entire island if Cyprus refused the deal, or if not that, at least waterboarding its finance minister and president,   Wolfgang Schäuble, finance minister of Germany and winner of the recent Doctor Strangelove look-a-like contest, popped a wheelie on his armor plated personal personnel carrier,  the SS Totenkopf, spun around twice, visions of a whole new meaning to "V-E day" dancing through his death's head, broke into the hochdeutsch version of New Order's "Shell Shock":

Halten Sie an! Es ist nie genug
Es ist nie genug, bis dein Herz aufhört zu schlagen
Je tiefer man wird, desto süßer der Schmerzen
Geben Sie nicht auf das Spiel, bis dein Herz aufhört zu schlagen

Sarris, the Cypriot finance minister, recognizing that he was running out of room to maneuver, phoned home and had his wife electronically transfer all their savings to Norway, (which, because it has a lot of oil, doesn't think it's really part of Europe), leaving just enough in their checking account to not have to return the Ipod Touch they received as a gift when opening the account.  Ipod safe, Sarris then froze all electronic transfers into, out of, and within Cyprus.  ATMs were fried by remotely controlled digital pulse weapons which the president could plausibly blame on Chinese hackers.

Sarris then countered the Lagarde/Schäuble/Draghi axis, attempting to persuade his president to impose a 7.5% "tax" on deposits less than e100,000 and a 12.5% tax on deposits greater than e100,000, but Anastasiades refused, citing his moral objection to harming the life-savings of the hard-working millionaires who called Cyprus, if not home, at least a clearing house.

Anastasiades wondered about devaluing the local currency. "Let's do what Iceland did, only in reverse," he said.  "We'll protect the accounts of the international depositors, sacrificing those of the local depositors."  When it was pointed out to the president by the finance minister that Cyprus no longer had a local currency, the president replied,  "Now you tell me?"

Sarris returned to the conference room, offering instead a 3.5% confiscation rate on deposits less than e100,00 and 7% on accounts larger than that, only to have the  troika reject the offer.

It was at this moment that the "troika" played its ace.  The European Central Bank advised Sarris that the collateral offered by Cyprus' private banks under the EU's Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) Program was no longer of sufficient quality to secure additional loans.  While the ELA is technically administered by the national central bank of the EU country, the ECB retains right of approval over the loans.  The program restricts its loans to "illiquid but solvent" institutions.  In addition, while the program cannot be used to finance a country's government, the government is on the hook as the guarantor of the loans made to the private banks.

Upon receipt of this advice, Cyprus agreed to confiscate 6.75% of all deposits equal to or less than e100,000, and 9.9% of amounts greater than e100,000, the president apparently pleased he had kept the rate below 10% on the wealthy.

In the isolation of their conference room, the troika congratulated itself for once again having vindicated vindictiveness as essential to accumulation.  "The operation will be a success," said Dr. Draghi to Dr.Schäuble, "The patient will die."  Both scanned the room for Ms. Lagarde, expecting to see her wearing her customary post-negotiation victory party black vinyl cat suit.  But Lagarde was gone, flying back to Paris to welcome the police as they raided her apartment in their official search for evidence of  "improper influence." While she was France's minister of finance she approved the award of several hundred million dollars paid by Credit Lyonnais  to a close personal friend of her then boss, French president Nicholas Sarkozy.  It pays to have a friend in the business, or government, doesn't it?

Lagarde tossed off the accusations, as did the IMF press department.  Their press release openly "wondered what's all the fuss about?  It's not like Christine is accused of sexually assaulting a hotel maid, is it?"  Or.. is it?

Anyway, while the troika was celebrating, others, and not just Cypriots weren't.   "Scandalous! Arbitrary! Capricious! Illegal!" said depositors all over Europe and Asia.  "How could they?"

How could they?  Because they could, that's why.  Just as,  five years ago, they, the same collection of finance ministers, bankers, I-MFers, could "guarantee" deposits up to 250,000 dollars/euros; just as they could guarantee bank debt; just as they could proclaim that Greece would never default on its debt; just as they drove down living standards in Greece as the condition of that default, the EU, the IMF, the ECB could confiscate deposits that were supposedly guaranteed, insured, against loss or confiscation.

The Russians were upset, having already loaned Cyprus a couple of billion.  The Russians were incensed that the "troika" had not even consulted with Moscow before this "rescue," before precipitating the electronic freeze-out of all money transfers routed through Cyprus.  The Russian Prime Minister Medvedev likened the proposed "rescue" to the confiscation of private property under Soviet rule.

Russia calling the IMF "Soviet"?  Be still my libertarian, anti-trilateral, beating heart!

Indeed, Russia has reason to feel aggrieved.  In 2012, investment transfers from and to Russia routed through Cyprus amounted to $120 billion.

"Russian?  Where's that?" joked the high-spirited Schäuble.  "Last time I checked, Russia wasn't part of the European Union.  Actually, isn't Russia but a mongrelized mixture of Slavs and Asians with reserves of natural gas?"

"Let me worry about the Russians," Schäuble told his fellow troika-ites.  "I'll have my personal assistant,  Frederick Barbarossa, and my military advisor, General Plan Ost take care of the Russians."

And that worked out so well for the cause of Europe last time, didn't it?

Now what's really stupid about all this... all this "rescue," all this "haircutting"?  The amounts involved are literally trivial.  The troika's confiscations amount to less than six billion euros, while the amount to be "secured" by the confiscation is about ten billion euros.   Six billion, ten billion?  The ten billion amounts to less than 1% of the amount offered by the ECB to banks for extended periods at low interest through its Long Term Refinancing Operation.  

The ECB could probably provide the entire 16 billion from the profits generated by its purchases, and preferential treatment of its purchases of the very sovereign debt of Italy, Spain, Portugal and of Greece, the general devaluation of which put Cyprus between Schäuble's anvil and Lagarde's hammer.

Is it a matter of principle?   For the bourgeoisie?  For bankers?  Come on.  Do we look like we just fell off a truck of pumpkins?

Is there a purpose to the troika's demands?  The demands are the purpose, that's the significance and the stupidity of the program.  The irrationality of capitalism as a relation among human beings for organizing social life overwhelms quantity, size; mocks its own method of accounting; accumulates risk without possibility of reward; engenders cost without benefit; destroys the very notion of private property that gives it half-life. 

Irrationality is the necessity of capitalist reproduction.  Stupidity, arrogance, blindness are the agents of capital's progress.

S. Artesian
March 24, 2013

A Short Course...

...in Balkanizing the Balkans

Turning the whole world into Iraq, more than one country at a time:

Chrysanthopoulos says that the government has hired Blackwater, the American private military firm infamous for its activities in Iraq, which now goes by the name "Academi", along with five other international for-profit security outfits. Explaining why this has happened, he says bluntly: “The Greek government does not trust the police whose salaries have also been cut.”

http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2013/02/greece-promise-army-has-been-obtained-not-intervene-against-civil-uprising



S.Artesian
February 25, 2013

If it is what it is.....

If it is what it is

Dann wird es, was es muss

1.  When the bourgeoisie aren’t, and even when they are, flogging the virtues of responsibility, accountability, attention-to-detail, hands-on-management, they’re usually in court pleading out the latest bit of irregularities,  high and petty crimes, misdemeanors, and assorted felonies, with claims of amnesia (“I have no recollection…”), or  dementia (“I’ m not capable of recognizing my own handwriting”).   Or, they’re busy blaming irresponsible, unaccountable, subordinate rogues for violating “corporate ethics” (sic); abusing the “trust;”  going “too far” thereby turning  the corporate good ship Lollipop into Blackbeard’s  Queen Anne’s Revenge.

When, and better sooner than later, the bourgeoisie are finally eliminated, planted face down and buried in quicklime, a tombstone shall be erected, a two-sided  tombstone being the only appropriate marker for a class that spoke out of both sides of its mouth, and at the same time.  On one side, the tombstone shall read, “Where’s Mine?”  On the other side, it will read, “It Wasn’t Me.”   Epitaph?  Business card?  You make the call.  Me?  I’m saying that it is more than either. The whole is the sum of its parts, and the whole is their business plan.

That’s how the world is for the bourgeoisie.  It’s not just hypocrisy that informs their every utterance.  It’s aphasia.  In their dotage, and their dotage starts a day or two before they ascend to power, the bourgeoisie achieve an historical anti-synchronicity, unable to recognize the content of faces, emails, words, or common economic policies.  They are perfectly out of phase.  Value is the disavowal of reality.

No sooner did The Wall Street Journal run a headline proclaiming “Surging stocks are routing the bears” than the US Bureau of Economic Analysis issued its advance report on the change in the fourth quarter 2012 for the US gross domestic product.  The BEA estimated that GDP decreased at annual rate of .1 percent from the third quarter.  Of course, nothing so vague and imprecise as the advanced estimate of one quarter of GDP change coming from an organization so unreliable as the BEA would be enough to trigger even a minor sell-off on Wall Street.  Only something with a record of real accuracy in predicting economic trends could do that...like if the Baltimore Ravens, the AFC champions, were to win the Super Bowl.  Then the bulls would start to worry.

The conflict between market direction and economic reports provides the basis for two of the bourgeoisie’s favorite activities, making predictions about the economy, and equivocating when making predictions about the economy.  Equivocation is prediction’s chaperone.

Prediction is, for and to a class so consumed with denying history, and disavowing the present, nothing but a market position—long or short.  Equivocation is the hedge on that position—not that long, not too short..  

In the US, the GDP declines and some take a position in the market, warning of a “double-dip” recession.  Europe, of course, is in a double-dip recession, and in the UK, whose position within the common European market has been hedged into isolation, the talk is of a “triple-dip” recession.   If people in hell had ice cream cones, they could be political economists.

The US BEA attributed the 4^th Q GDP decline to decreases in private business inventories, a drop in exports, and the reduction in federal government expenditures.  National defense spending declined 22 percent in the quarter.  Bad news?  Go short?  Hedge?

However, real non-residential fixed investment increased 8.4 percent when compared to the previous quarter.  Spending on equipment and software, as distinct from structures, rose 12.4 percent.  Good news?  Go long?  Hedge?

So everybody wants to know, more or less, what’s up ahead.  How bright or gloomy is the future?  Sunglasses or mourning veils?  Up or down?  On or off?  Buy or sell?  And let’s not forget, is the glass half-empty or is it half-full?

Here’s the answer:  There is nothing in the glass that’s fit for drinking. 

2.  “The real barrier of capitalist production is capital itself,” wrote Marx in Capital, vol 3.   The limit to capitalist production is the very basis for capitalist production.   The conversion of the products of labor into commodities, and the realization of commodities as values,  requires the division of the working day into necessary labor time, the time it takes for the workers to reproduce the means of their own subsistence, or more precisely the value equal to the means of purchasing their own subsistence, and the surplus labor time—that time of production which is aggrandized by the capitalist and which forms the increment of expansion of the total capital , the total costs, of the production.  Necessary labor time becomes both the basis and the limitation to surplus labor time.  The organization of wage-labor, the very existence of the wage rather than simply its magnitude, places a limit, a barrier, and obstacle to the aggrandizement of surplus value in the creation of surplus value. 

The obstacle itself propels capital to overcome the limitation, in the only way it can, compressing further the necessary working time, reducing the reproduction time of the wage by expelling labor from production, substituting already accumulated value, in the form of machinery, improved materials and materials handling, refined control processes; in short adding to the bulk of capital which will necessarily reduce the increment of profit extracted from the surplus value.  The conflict is overcome.  The conflict is recreated.  Things get better.  Things go from bad to worse.  The economy perks up.  The economy crawls. 

The expulsion of labor, the reduction of the necessary time means that the intensified exploitation is not, or cannot remain, intense enough.   The boost to the rate of exploitation is converted anew into capital and consequently the increment of changes in the rate of exploitation shrink.  Necessary labor cannot be eliminated, under capitalism, for to do so will eliminate the basis of surplus value.  Capitalism runs up the inside of the walls of a cage of its own making

The corollary  to Marx’s  “appreciation” of capital, that obstacles and barriers are offsets and stimuli, is that contraction and expansion each take on the characteristics of the other, and become less and less distinguishable.  What it was is what it is and will be what it will be, until it’s overthrown.

3.  In 2006 all was right with capital.  All right, however, is never good enough.  Corporate profits peaked that year.  Profits for the mining, manufacturing, utilities , and construction sectors of the US economy rang in at $354 billion.   That same year, the fixed assets deployed in those industries were valued at $4.976 trillion.   Now we all know, or should know, what fixed capital is:  fixed capital is that capital that is consumed only partially, incrementally, in any single cycle of production.

Oil is not fixed capital.  The value of the oil consumed in the production of any set number of commodities is transferred completely, through cost/price, to the commodities produced with that oil.  The furnace burning the oil is fixed capital.  The value of the furnace burning the oil is not transferred completely to those commodities, as its use value remains beyond any production cycle. 

The value, represented as cost/price, of the fixed capital can only be transferred completely to the cost/price, the exchange value, of the commodities for which it is deployed, through the extinguishing, the using up of its use value.  Increasing the mass of commodities in production and circulation is not determined by competition.  It is the economic necessity dictated by the expulsion of labor from the production process and the shift in the proportion of fixed capital deployed in production, a shift determined by the organization of labor as wage-labor, the presentation of labor as a commodity, the transformation of labor-power into necessary and surplus labor-times, the expression of labor time as value.   

Things, that is to say relations, weren’t quite so all right in 2007, as capital investment had increased the value of the fixed assets to $5.369 trillion, approximately 11 percent above the previous year.  The mass of wages, the mass of production hours had increased also, but much more modestly, by 1 percent.  While revenues increased, both the mass and the rate of profitably declined.   Manufacturing absorbed almost $3 trillion in processed, raw, and packaging materials while claiming just $301 billion in profits.  The reproduction of capital, the ability to compress the necessary labor time at a rate and intensity sufficient to offset the increase in fixed assets, declined.   

So begins the contraction of capital.  The contraction accomplishes what the expansion cannot, precisely that compression of the necessary labor time, by…expelling labor, by…devaluing assets.   Except…this all takes time.  So that in 2008, with profits down some 40 percent from 2006, the manufacturing, mining, utilities, and construction sectors had boosted fixed asset values another 11 percent, driving down their wage bill, however, by only 3 percent. 

In 2009, capital was finally able to synchronize its devaluation of assets with its expulsion of labor, driving down the wage bill by 15 percent, and the value of the fixed assets (through the mothballing, warehousing, retirement) by 5 percent.   This set the stage for the profit recovery of 2010 and 2011.

The profit “recovery” was somewhat modest.  The 2011 mark registered  just 70 percent of the 2006 peak.   Fixed asset valuations, however, recovered and exceeded $6 trillion,  about $1.1 trillion above the 2006 valuation.  Moreover, the wage bill, though below that of 2006, 2007, and 2008, exceeded that of 2009 and 2010. 

The BEA has not yet released its figures for 2012, but the US Department of Commerce (the sponsor of the BEA) doesn’t have all its eggshells in this one basket.    The department produces the Annual Survey of Manufacturers, and the Quarterly Financial Review of  Manufacturing, Mining, Trade, and Selected Service Industries.    This latter document reveals a year to year decline from 2011 to 2012 in the relation of after-tax profits to net property, plant and equipment. 

No matter how the bourgeoisie choose to represent it, capital has not been able to exploit labor at a sufficient degree of intensity to achieve the conversion of assets into expanded values at rates of conversion previously established.

4.   So what?  So this.  Because assets continue to accumulate, and the compression of the necessary labor  time approaches limits that are the very essence of wage-labor, and cannot be overcome by capitalism, by the exchange of  value, by the circulation of commodities, then the assets of production, accumulated and living,  fixed and circulated, breathing and not, have to be destroyed.  The price of labor-power must be driven below the social costs of its reproduction.  This “simple necessity” of capital sentences entire peoples, countries, and decades to devaluation and destruction.  The “Great Recession” is not over.  It has barely begun.  The privation and misery forced upon Greece, Iraq, Ireland, San Bernadino is not a “sometime” thing.   We haven’t seen anything yet…of what capitalism will command, and with that “lack of vision” we’ve seen the future.

S. Artesian 

February 10, 2013

Mucho Frio

When it gets cold like this—(‘How cold is it?’ the disembodied voice of Ed McMahon asks in my very much embodied brain)—like well below thirty degrees (Fahrenheit), and twenty nine is well below thirty when we get down in this range, I know what to do.  At least, I know what I do.

I get out the old Ipod touch (circa 2008, I like vintage issues), jack it into the Bose sound system I bought (equal payments spread over 12 months, which somehow I have turned into a lifetime of debt penury), tap on the playlist called “Surf,” crank up the volume to the point just below where the fillings in my teeth would liquefy, and grab my board. That last bit—about the board—that’s metaphorically speaking.

Not that I don’t have a board…well, actually not that I actually have a board.  I have pictures of boards, lots of pictures of lots of boards, so I grab one or more of them, and that’s close enough, or as close as I care to get.  To the board.  Same-same, as we used to say, back in the day.

I always wanted to be a surfer…ever since I heard surf music.  Even before I could distinguish Dick Dale from Link Wray from the Chantays from the Ventures from the Trashmen.  All that mattered then, as it does now, was that sound, that electrified glass Mexican ukulele equal parts ice and mercury sound.  And the pictures that went along with it; that were produced by it.  Warmth.  Warm water.  Warm sunshine.  Warm sand.  Warm bodies.

How old was I at the time?  Who was counting, back then, especially now when I’m old enough to know better and will never tell?   All I know was that I knew there was a place, there had to be a place where people, kids actually, as kids were the people I cared about, were living the life in the pictures created by the electrified glass Mexican ukulele equal parts ice and mercury sound.

We had kids here, where I lived too, but they weren’t living in any picture of warmth, believe me.  Plus, those kids, over there, had an ocean.  Which we did not. 

And girls.  We had girls too, but these girls, being real, weren’t about to waste their precious time with me.

And their girls were blonde, or blondes, real blondes, not like the suicide blondes that weren’t about to waste their precious time with me.  Those blondes weren’t coming my way.  They weren’t going my way, either.  Which didn’t give me a whole lot of confidence in my way.  As a matter of fact, pretty much nothing was going my way, which, I’m sure, you’ve already figured out is the back story to this back story.

But enough about that.  Nobody’s looking for pity here.  Least of all me and even if I were I wouldn’t look for it from or among you lot.  No way, Jose. 

Those kids had the Pacific Ocean, blondes, bikinis, and wonder of wonder, parents who didn’t mind, or didn’t care, if those kids spent hours, days, school years at the beach exposing flesh to wind, sun, salt, and each other, in excess.  IN EXCESS.  What lovely words.

Where was I?  Here?  There?  Now?  Then?  Whatever.  I wanted to be a surfer for reasons too numerous to mention which I have already enumerated.

And I could have been one, too.  Except… well I hated water.  Still do.  Don’t even drink it, if I can avoid it,   unless it’s convincingly masked by something else, that something else being alcohol whenever possible.

Swimming?  Then?  Only because I had to in order to pass physical education in order to graduate high school, so I could avoid being drafted and go to college and be drafted after I graduated college.  Helluva plan.  

Swimming?  Now?  Out of the question.  Part of being an adult, a senior adult is being able to arrange one’s life to never ever do again the things you always hated doing.  Like high school.  Like dating.  Like getting drafted.  I pity you, you young ones.  Not that I’m gloating.   It’s not nice to gloat, and if you think I am, well go ahead and sue me, pischers.  Take it up with my lawyer.  Hah, hah.

Where was I?  Swimming?  No.  Not swimming?  Correctomundo!  That certainly puts a crimp in the old surfing safari, though, doesn’t it?

And then again, I lived in the Midwest, back in the day when it was the industrial Midwest.  We had rivers and lakes.   We even had something that qualified as a Great Lake, but really, everything’s relative—great compared to other lakes, pathetic compared to the ocean, even if such a comparison could be made, which it should not be. Besides, a lake is water.

Even if I didn’t hate water, I was hardly about to venture into a lake, or worse yet the river, which was truly more industrial canal than river, with rats just a bit smaller than alligators and twice as territorial.

So surfing then?  Not happening.

I didn’t get to California until I was nineteen and by then I thought I was probably too old  and it was probably too late to learn how to surf, surfing being in my mind akin to ballet or Olympic gymnastics—start young or never.

Where did that leave me?  Here?  There?  There it left me on the beach, scanning the beach for real blondes in real bikinis.  That was as close as I got to surfing… then.  And it was close, but no cigar. 

Still, I actually saw the surf, and I heard the sound emanating from the surf,  the  electrified glass Mexican ukulele equal parts ice and mercury sound, with just a touch of crystal meth added for seasoning—this being California and all during that period when speed and crank were like mother’s milk to some. 

There was the music and I never felt that I was betraying my roots in rhythm and blues, soul, Motown, blues by hoarding disc after disc featuring that electrified glass Mexican ukulele equal parts ice and mercury with just a touch of crystal meth sound.  Especially since I pretty much kept it secret from my rhythm and blues, soul, Motown, and blues loving friends.  Then.

Now?  Now I’m an adult, a senior adult, and I don’t care what anybody thinks.  About me.  About music.  About anything.  I thumb my nose at the whole bunch of you.  Go ahead and sue me.  Hah, hah. 

So today, or a day like today, when the high is eighteen degrees (Fahrenheit) and the low is not to be discussed in front of children, I hit that surf playlist and as Shannon sang in another era, the disco era, “let the music play.”

The Ventures. Link Wray, inventor of the power chord.  Dick Dale, the king of them all, who brought the Mediterranean to California, via Boston,  with his “Hava Nagila” as written for and played on a nail gun.  The Looney Tunes.  Who can ever forget that hit by the……uhh, just a second, it’s on the tip of my tongue—yeah the Blazers… called “Beaver Patrol.”  One of my favorites, for obvious reasons.  And the Esquires, from Texas of all places.  Not much surf in Texas but there’s some sort of weird connection between Texas and California.  Texas, after all, was the home to the 13^th Floor Elevators who made the greatest psychedelic rock song ever “You’re Gonna Miss Me,” which was hardly about a summer of love.  That too is another era and another story.

Now? I’m much, much closer to surfing.  Closer than you might imagine.  My wife, you see, was born in Hawaii, honestly.  Even has a Hawaiian middle name, Leilani.  Leilani, believe it or not moved to California, well actually her parents moved but she went with them.  

In California, she surfed.  Honest to god real surfing with a board in the ocean.  In Laguna Beach where she lived and then in Santa Cruz where she lived.

And….Leilani is a real blonde.  Strawberry blonde, to be sure, but that’s close enough.  And she wore bikinis, back in the day.  

I hit that playlist and get my surf on.  I put on a pair of baggies, my huarache sandals, my Hawaiian print shirt (100% rayon, naturally), my sunglasses, and then that thing that pulls it all together, that white stuff on my nose.  

Well the table is set, so to speak, as is the mood, and I’m transported to that time of times which is right now, never was, and always will be, when it might be freezing cold but forever warm.  And my wife, whom I met in New York City, in January, when we agreed to share a cab to get out of a snowstorm… I call to her as the music builds.   “Honey, grab your board and your bikini.  Surf’s up!”

S. Artesian

January 24, 2013

Before We Begin....

...just a word.

I have always said that rock and roll saved my life.  And it turns out, Doc Pomus, creator of "Save the Last Dance for Me,"  "Young Blood," "Lonely Avenue," was the lifeguard.    The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum have premiered a film about the doctor, AKA Doc Pomus, produced by Peter Miller, Will Hechter, and Sharon Felder.

Anyone, and that's probably everyone, who ever turned on, homed in on, the radio, like it was a beacon, like hearing the right tune with the right words and the right music was a flight plan, will want to see this movie...and knows what I'm talking about.

January 12, 2013

That is a Rocket in My Pocket and I'm So Glad to See You Guide to Marxism, 5

Devaluation, Realization, Overproduction:

(3) Looked at precisely, that is, the realization process of capital -- and money becomes capital only through the realization process-- appears at the same time as its devaluation process [Entwertungsprozess], it's demonetization.  And this in two respects.  First, to the extent that capital does not increase absolute labor time but rather decreases the relative, necessary labour time, by increasing the forces of production, to that extent does it reduce the costs of its own production-- in so far as it was presupposed as a certain sum of commodities, reduces its exchange value:  one part pf the capital on hand is constantly devalued owing to a decrease in the costs of production at which it can be reproduced; not because of a decrease in the amount of labor objectified in it, but because of a decrease in the amount of living labour which it is henceforth necessary to objectify in this specific production.  This constant devaluation of the existing capital does not belong here, since it already presupposes capital as completed . [bold added--S.A.]...The devaluation being dealt with here is this, that capital has made the transition from the form of money into the form of a commodity, of a product, which has a certain price, which is to be realized. In its money it existed as value.  It now exists as product, and only ideally as price; but not as value as such.  In order to realize itself, i.e. to maintain and to multiply itself as value, it would first have to make the transition from the form of money into that of use values (raw material-instrument-wages); but it would thereby lose the form of value; and it now has to enter anew into circulation in order to posit this form of general wealth anew.

--Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook IV, The Chapter on Capital: Transition from the process of the production of capital into the process of circulation.--Devaluation of capital itself owing to increase of productive forces. (Competition.) (Capital as unity and contradiction of production process and realization process.) Capital as barrier to production.-- Overproduction. (Demand by the workers themselves.)--Barrier to capitalist production.  Penguin, 1973

What's going on here?  Well, first off, if Marx wants to exclude one process of the devaluation of capital from this discussion, that's OK with me. Temporarily. 

And this other aspect, process, of devaluation?  Marx is once again rotating the commodity, its forced, enforced, unity of the value form through the differing and conflicting moments  that constitute and drive the very expression of value in the process of exchange.

No matter how early or late we go back or forge ahead in Marx, no matter where we turn in his critique of capital, we're never far from the first chapters of Capital, Volume 1.  All that was, is, and will be is there-- in the exploration and critique of value, use value, exchange value, which categories are, after all, nothing other than the categories of the labor process, and the mediation of that process by the social organization that objectifies that labor.

Marx starts this section with his assertion that the money realizes itself as capital through its devaluation, its demonetization, when we know, or thought we knew, that capital realizes itself through its monetization.   M-C-M', right?  Sure.  Of course.  Maybe.

The demonetization of course is the transformation of money into the particular concrete elements of production for the purposes of aggrandizing, absorbing, soaking up, surplus labor time-- expelling labor time, quite literally, as surplus value.

Money capital, money that has accumulated at the end of the circuit of capital, ceases at the very moment of its materialization to exist as capital.  It's miraculous appearance is not just reward, but disappointment; not just a token of success, but a promise of failure in that in its materialization as expanded value, it is no longer value begetting value.  It's angels wings are feet of clay, or rather, need to be exchanged for feet of clay.  It must "de-Midasize" in order to seek out, join with, and engage living labor.

Money loses a bit of its luster as it moves across the ledger page and goes from "NET" to "EXPENSE."

Realization is not simply the realization of capital as money, but the expansion of the network of the exchange of objectified labor for living labor.  Certainly this involves the sale of the commodities extruded by the production process.  However, the sale of the commodities is, in itself, not the realization of capital.  The sale of commodities in order to purchase living labor,  to accumulate the means of production as capital, to "evoke" more surplus value is the realization.

In discussing the creation of absolute surplus value-- that surplus value engendered through prolongation of the work time-- Marx writes:

A precondition of production based on capital is therefore the production of a constantly widening sphere of circulation, whether the sphere itself is directly expanded or whether more points within it are created as points of production.  While circulation appeared at first as a constant magnitude, it here appears as a moving magnitude, being expanded by production itself.  Accordingly it already appears as a moment of production itself.  Hence, just as capital has the tendency on one side to create ever more surplus labor, so it has the complementary tendency to create more points of exchange; i.e., here, seem from the standpoint of absolute surplus value or surplus labour, to summon up more surplus labour as a complement to itself; i.e. at bottom, to propagate production based on capital, or the mode of production corresponding to it.  The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself.  Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome.  Initially, to subjugate every moment of production itself to exchange and to suspend the production of direct use values not entering into exchange, i.e. precisely to posit production based on capital in place of earlier modes of production, which appear primitive [naturwuchsing] from its standpoint.  Commerce no longer appears here as a function taking place between independent producers for the exchange of their excess, but rather as an essentially all-embracing presupposition and moment of production itself.  

--Grundrisse, op cit 

Here Marx has exposed the universe of connections, of exchanges, that every particular capital creates, and requires, in the process of realization.   Certainly, consumption is posited as a category distinct from production; yet the distinction is derivative of production for value, and it is through circulation that capital attempts to overcome the distinction,  to "summon it up" in the service of more surplus labor.

Here too we get a glimpse into the "gravitational pull" of capital commodity production; and the "plasticity" of value, where capitalist commodity production can reflect, project, assign, value to the products of any mode of production it encounters, as if these commodities were the products of capital commodity production.  As if... capital assigns an image of value to these products through the process of exchange.

Here we see that the "unequal exchanges" of capital with non-capitalist modes of production, the exchange of capital's commodities requiring less time of reproduction-- iron bars, or firearms-- with and for those of the non-capitalist modes requiring more time of reproduction--gold, or human beings-- is but capital creating for itself those points of exchange where it depletes of its time that non-capitalist mode, subjugating "every moment of production itself to exchange and [to] suspend(ing) the production of direct use values not entering into exchange."

Turning to the production of relative surplus value, that based on the development of the means of production, on amplifying the productivity of labor through the substitution of already objectified labor for living labor, Marx writes that this requires the

production of new needs and discovery and creation of new use values.... so that the surplus labour gained does not remain a merely quantitative surplus, but rather constantly increases the circle of qualitative difference within labour (hence of surplus labour), makes it more diverse, more internally differentiated.

Labor itself must become more differentiated in the very advance, triumph, of the abstraction labor as value, of human beings rendered, literally, as time.

We thought, or at least I did, that realization was the realization of capital as money and right from jump street Marx straightens us, or me, up and says realization is the realization of money as capital.

And then we thought, or I thought, that the realm of realization, of circulation, created the category of consumption but Marx shows how the process of realization was the creation of those points of exchange where absolute surplus value could be commanded by the as if assignment of value; where the non-capitalist modes could be worked to death.

Now we, okay maybe it's just me, find that the increased consumption required for the realization of relative surplus value is in fact the increasing consumption of differentiated labor.

Realization moves through devaluation, demonetization, to the proliferation of greater, and differentiated capitals, and from these capitals reassembles, realizes itself, as value expanding value.

At each point and moment in this process, overproduction, and unevenness, and disproportion are not only inherent  but are immanent and imminent.  The point, in all senses, of production is the appropriation of surplus value, the compression of the necessary labor for consumption to the minimum and below.

The aggrandizement of labor power as wage-labor, the objectification of labor-time as value,  is the overproduction of capital that encumbers  capital's reproduction, not because production outstrips consumption, not because too little is consumed, but rather because production is for the production of value, and necessary labor is the limit to the production of value.  If necessary labor is maintained, surplus labor time is limited.  If necessary labor is eliminated, then the need for labor to exchange itself with capital has disappeared.  Value itself is no longer necessary to the reproduction of social labor.    In between those two poles, value accumulates,  necessary labor is reduced, expelled,  from production, but the increment of expansion of surplus value decreases.  That increment, of course, appears as profit.

Marx moves  the discussion of realization to the establishment of the general rate of profit.  The point of realization is surplus value commanding new surplus value.  The mechanisms of realization are the distribution of profit, the increments of increase among the capitals.  Price apportions, allocates, allots the profits, so that the price of a commodity, of any numbers of commodities, above or below its value, including the failure to register or capture any price is essential to the realization of capital.

The establishment of the general rate of profit, or rather, that movements toward establishing a general rate of profit, is not a process creating "equilibrium" among capitals.  It is the creation of a dynamic disequilibrium, where capital realizes itself in whole through depreciation of particular capitals and particular capitals realize themselves through the devaluation of capital as a whole.

That "type" of devaluation that Marx initially excluded in his discussion of realization now reappears as an essential element.  Surplus value is transferred among the capitals in accordance with their sizes and relative efficiencies. The commodities of the  most advanced, efficient capitals, those that in general reduce the proportion of the working period consumed by necessary labor to a minimum,  claim a larger portion of the total surplus value by exchanging at prices above their costs of production, but at the general costs of reproduction. 

In a sense, what capital practiced in its encounter with non-capitalist modes of production, its "unequal exchanges,"  it now practices on itself, on elements of itself.

And, Marx, concludes:

Thus, in a crisis-- a general depreciation of prices--there occurs up to a certain moment a general devaluation or destruction of capital. ...In general crises, this devaluation extends even to living labour capacity itself.  In consequence of what has been indicated above, the destruction of value and capital which takes place in a crisis coincides with--or means the same thing as-- a general growth of the productive forces,which, however, takes place not by means of a real increase of the productive force of labour (the extent to which this happens in consequence of crises is beside the point here), but by means of a decrease of the existing value of raw materials, machines, labour capacity....In the same way, on the other hand, a sudden general increase in the force of production would relatively devalue all present values which labour objectifies at the lower stage of the productive forces, and hence would destroy present capital as well as present labouring capacity.  The other side of the crisis resolves itself into a real decrease in production, in living labour-- in order to restore the correct relation between necessary and surplus labour, on which, in the last analysis, everything rests. [bold added, SA].

Everything, realization, circulation, consumption, depends in the last analysis, as it does in the first, on the correct relation between necessary and surplus labor.

That's exactly where we are today.

January 12, 2013


S. Artesian