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 4th 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.
February 10, 2013
