the decline of stockholding efficacy

The rate of profit has had a falling trend over the past fifty years. This is an alarming feature of capitalist development. I might not have taken this as seriously as I should have since the consequences of a true decline in the rate of profit would be very serious indeed. I'll come back to what these consequences would be. The phenomenon was analysed in The Economist a while ago and they saw it in terms of a transfer of property income from capitalists proper, that is: shareholders, to technocrats, including the celebrated company CEOs. As such it was seen to be not entirely unhealthy; but what would they find unhealthy outside an imminent crisis? I don't want to be overly focused on the history of trends in marxism, but inevitably this phenomenon of falling profits has to be related to Karl Marx's "tendency of the rate of profit to fall". While the theorists of the political movements that held to marxist ideas (basically, Trotskyists) have tended to interpret falling profits as an expression of Marx's "tendency", proponants of revisionist "Sweezy type" marxism, sticking closer to liberal economics, have argued that property income as a whole has in fact risen (as "profit" has been displaced into other income streams, chiefly into income from interest). I think the Sweezyists are probably right about this (but not inevitably and not inevitably for all time). For reference the two things are graphed in Nitzan and Bichler's GPE Israel - figures 2.3 and 2.4. Sweezy was right to point out that the "tendency of the rate of profit to fall" is a political problem for capitalists and as such can be solved by political means, namely: monopolies and corporatism.

In Britain and the US a limited range of corporatist policies came into effect alongside a limited range of welfare state measures, as the organised left gained some limited political influence, as if these represented the mutual liabilities of some sort of social contract. That there is no such social contract is demonstrated by the fact that welfare measures have been rolled back while corporatist legislation has not. Under the heading of "planning laws" they don't seem so bad, but they have a massive influence of the world we live in and consequently over human conduct. To give an example of their effect they completely curtail free trade by preventing the sale of goods in cities except from shops such as those owned by Hammerson and Great Portland etc, so except with heavy leveraging. I'm not interested in condemning these laws, some of them have positive effects, only in asserting their importance.

Now, supposing the rate of profit falls with each passing decade. Investors have a lower and lower putative return on their capital. Housing can be construed as a type of alternative investment, whether rented or mortgaged, insofar as it generates an income stream and has an asset cost. The income stream from housing depends on the tenants (or "owner's") income and can expand up to the difference between actual income and necessary expenses. As the rate of profit falls the notional rate of profit from housing will fall in line with it. In a free market, as investors opt for those assets with the highest rate of return, asset costs will vary to equalise the rate of profit. Since the income stream for a house is more or less fixed the asset price, i.e. the house price will increase as the rate of profit falls in the wider economy. Since getting a mortgage depends on your income, house prices will eventually move outside the mortgage limits (e.g. lending six times income). This will erode the levels of owner occupancy since fewer and fewer workers will be able to afford a mortgage. Secondarily pressure will be put on the corporatist structure of society (look at its implementation today in Brazil, for instance). All of this will fundamentally change the class structure and political structure of society.

As I said I tend to favour Paul Sweezy's revisionist ideas about the actual rate of "surplus", i.e. profit and quasi profit rising. It is alarming though to look at graphs of falling profits and rising house prices and draw the inference. If the logic of the example above held, the current credit crisis would involve the teething problems of the change in ownership of housing stock from the middle class to capitalists or some kind of corporate/government amalgam. This could be glossed as "capitalism against corporatism" but would inevitably carry through corporatism of a different kind, congruent to the new social bases.

two sorts of profligacy

The remarks of Guardian Economics Editor Larry Elliott, quoted below, were made in the context of efforts by government and media to fob off the public with inadequate, partial explanations of the source of the current economic crisis. These explanations have tended to isolate one aspect of the overall story, taking it to be an explanation sufficient in itself. And this can serve as the basis for a moralising story against wickedness or stupidity. The blame is placed upon, for instance "predatory lenders" or "profligate traders". Larry Elliott does not do this (for that matter neither does Mark K-Punk), but he does make an inventory of spontaneous, popular explanations of the crisis (and like any good economist feels quite justified in taking these from the front pages of the newspapers):

"The changed mood is evident from the media backlash against hedge funds and short-sellers. One headline this week screamed: "Don't let the spivs destroy Britain". It appeared not in the Socialist Worker but in the Daily Express. For Middle Britain, the traders who bragged about their £1,000 bottles of Krug have now become as loathed as the bolshie shop stewards of the 1970s."

This could be working toward one of two things:

1. A sociology of popular explanations of the crisis

2. A sociology of media disinformation about the crisis

It would be relevent to carry out the former task, but this isn't really what Elliott is doing. It is more like he's substituting the latter category for the former. The second task strikes me as the more relevent one. This implies that one ought not to occlude disinformation by taking it to be popular error. One expects disinformation in the press but also some effort to repudiate the most threadbare disinformation. It is more important to isolate deliberate manipulation from popular error because the former is often presented as the latter and because there is some feedback between them. Disinformation could just consist of the skilled arrangement of ideas from popular culture. "May one hundred disinformers blossom!" Chairman Mao might have put it.

After all that, I'm not entirely sure for what reason the "profligate trader" is meant to be beyond the pale. It could be that these traders are meant to be profligate in the way they conduct their business or that they are profligate in the way they spend their money. In the second case this could be a way of suggesting that their income derives from monopolistic super profits rather than normal profits. Hence it could be that the game they're involved in is overly volatile, or it could be that it's rigged.

No one is talking about the rigged game. I don't see much appetite among politicians for breaking up Goldman Sachs or Lloyds TSB. In fact they seem willing to consent to greater consolidation. But it isn't that their way of thinking precludes having a theory of monopoly, (which is just an aspect of petit bourgeois common sense,) rather it is no longer the done thing to talk about monopoly.

To conclude, since the crisis began the political spectacle has more or less weened itself off the neoliberal theory that used to explain everything. There are two sorts of profligate traders you could blame for the crisis, but blaming neither represents an adequate explanation. One of these acts of scapegoating challenges the new orthodoxy, one of them doesn't. Neither is incompatible with the formerly orthodox neoliberal theory.

"to the witch's castle"

Mark K-Punk is a kind of prophet of dystopian neoliberalism; an anti-Thatcher. In this society everyone inevitably breathed in Thatcherism, ate Thatcherism and drunk in Thatcherism. Seriously, it would be good for a lot of people whose premises really are in line with neoliberalism to follow the yellow brick road of neoliberal theory direct to the witch's castle. In this respect I find Mark K-Punk's work commendable.

Suppose the free market did pertain. Given the normal functioning of the free market the zone of proximal development of the individual will coincide with that of the media, hence:

"What we're seeing is not the collapse of capitalism, but the disintegration of the illusion that capitalism is about the untrammeled free market. The developments over the last few weeks only underscore Alex Williams's point that the State, far from being exterior to capital, is a "vital element of stabilisation" which prevents capitalism from accelerating to the point of self-destruction.

Which isn't to say that nothing is happening. It could well turn out, as Larry Elliott argues, that this is a sea change moment. "For Middle Britain," Elliott claims, "the traders who bragged about their £1,000 bottles of Krug have now become as loathed as the bolshie shop stewards of the 1970s." New political movements require a shared object of loathing, the emergence of which indicates a symbolic shift at the level of the political unconscious. The uneasy dreamwork alliance of neoliberalism and neoconservatism has depended on a shared object of revulsion: the nonproductive outsider, the asylum seeker/ welfare recipient. Could a new settlement emerge organised around the symbolic abjection of the figure of the profligate trader?"

Unfortunately I think the profligate trader is to modern capitalism what the drunken, lecherous Friar was to the Catholic Church in the late middle ages. Anyway, let's look at Larry Elliott's comment:

"For Middle Britain, the traders who bragged about their £1,000 bottles of Krug have now become as loathed as the bolshie shop stewards of the 1970s."

I think people like David Harvey underestimate the extent to which neoliberalism is a genuinely popular phenomenon at least in Britain and the US. Harvey rightly points out the dissonance between neoliberalism as a theory of society and guide for government policy (Samuelson, Friedman and Friedman, Hayek et al) and neoliberalisation: the actual policies pursued that followed a distinct yet coherent logic. Harvey neglects to look at the the way both the theory and practice of neoliberalism are supported by the popular culture of the modern salariat, which could reasonably considered outside the scope of his book*. We've certainly looked at this before: the way the contemporary salaryman or salarywoman has an interest in developing a worldview that's coherent with respect to the prosaic details of work and consumption and hazy with respect to the overall development of society. Baroness Thatcher liked to imagine society as a series of Family Businesses, multiplied or arrayed, laid out in grid form like the pictures on sheet acid. This is the basis for various illusions about the "free market" functioning universally etc.

These are fine things for the Family Grocer to believe in around 1930 but their continuation and their spread today depend on other structural factors. A lot of ready made ideas evidently come through the media. Now, there are two sorts of limiting factors on the content of media discourse: those that relate to the maximisation of profit and those that do not. Broadly speaking there is economic censorship and political censorship.

The popular form of neoliberalism, the heir to traditional petit-bourgeois culture, has always included a theory of monopoly and a revulsion against it. Super profits, market failure and exploitation are associated together as aspects of monopolisation. The academic form of neoliberalism has, over several years, made various attempts to declare monopolies either non existant or benign. Hence, one can see in the way popular culture becomes aligned over the issue of monopolies the relative effects of the two forms of censorship, where they find themselves in contention.

This has become rather convoluted. What I find unconvincing about Larry Elliot's analysis is that what he designates as a new phenomenon is just the old monopoly theory, which hasn't gone away. Which is to say we're still in the suburbs of neoliberalism.

*David Harvey A Brief History of Neoliberalism

crisis memo (2)

This is how an economic crisis develops in a rich country:

1. An abundance of cheap imports based on heavily exploited labour leads to a fall in the cost of consumer goods.

2. The economy is in a growth phase and as such wages remain stable.

3. As a consequence of 1. and 2. the costs of housing rise reflecting changes in supply and demand of housing stock given the political situation of the housing market. House prices increase.

4. People invest in housing to profit from increasing house prices. Speculation inevitably takes place multiplying the increase in housing costs (3.). House prices and housing costs are bound together. The spread between them increases on account of speculation. Capital relatively fixed in the form of institutions or "machinary" comes to depend on the second order of income: growth, or even growth of growth e.g. the specialist mortgage banks. Leveraging may accentuate this process but is only a way of purifying an investment based on second order income; it is not constitutive of second order investment. Leveraging is not somehow inimical to functional capitalism. Capitalism essentialy is a system of "leveraging" the productive class. This is how it differs from feudalism. Nor is speculation the result of individual profligacy. Speculation includes quite rational attempts by erstwhile workers to de-leverage themselves.

5. Since gains and losses from the growth in housing costs/house prices depend as much on the time the initial investment was made as income (which correlates to social class) the effect of this growth in housing costs/house prices is to confuse and attenuate the previous class structure.

6. Another effect is to crowd out investment in new productive capital: factories.

7. Eventually wages can no longer support further growth in housing costs. House prices cease to rise.

8. A great deal of the machinary predicated on second order income becomes redundant: useless. This is the source of the deadweight loss in a recession. Failure of productive capital is constitutive of recession.

9. Capitalists then orient their strategy toward a recession phase based on consolidation through fire sale acquisitions and cartelisation. The orientation of the state changes to reflect this.

The workers ought to have fought the increase in housing costs (3.) for the same wretched housing but the attenuation of the class structure (5.) mitigated against this. We know that the banks aren't spiritual entities but consist of capital fixed in institutional form for the purpose of distributing finance capital for profit. Likewise the institutions of the ostensible "left" (unions and political parties, publications and intellectuals circles) consist of more or less fixed "machinary". They struggle to adapt to changed conditions. This situation is in the process of working itself out. Human progess, as before, depends on the amelioration of working conditions in China, Indonesia etc.

swindlers' list

"You're asking my opinion as an economist," Bernanke told New York senator Charles Schumer, who has proposed a phased bailout with an initial price tag of $150bn. "Unfortunately, this is a matter for psychologists."

Mr Bernanke's economic science, impartially applied, would of course discredit this "bailout", even as this science is itself discredited by both the crisis former policy has precipitated and the plan to relieve it. Like any squirming Maoist apparachik Mr Bernanke would prefer not to be precisely implicated in the results of this perhaps momentary political conjuncture.

We're interested in the politics of this bailout, to explain it we need to look at the business cycle and its relationship with the political process.

As the US economy is to some extent competitive it tends to have parallels with the Victorian economy as analysed by Marx. Put another way, the best model of the current US economy would be significantly in line with the classic Marxist model. What we're taking from Marx here isn't any kind of nonsense about Five Year Plans, which isn't there anyway, but the notion often observed in reality, that there is effective resistance of workers to real wage cuts (Keynes had a similar idea about workers' resistance to nominal wage cuts, which was uncontroversial for a long time). In Marx this means resistance to wage cuts by the lowest class of unskilled workers. To the extent that this class exist the pattern is nevertheless transferred to the macro level of all workers. This is simply the inverse of the common formula that productivity increaes accrue in total to the owners of capital.

Once we understand the "natural" pattern of redistibution of wealth in a recession we can understand the political changes that come in to prevent it, and so understand the likely eventual redistribution of wealth. Following Marx's idea partially, this way, would suggest that during a cyclical recession, while all members of society will lose out, the owners of the economy will lose out relatively as well as absolutely.

Now, the arrival of recession has effects on the economic and political behaviour of dominant groups. Politically they are likely to close ranks to some extent in order to defend more effectively their privileges as a class. This is discussed in one of the first books to attempt to scientifically analyse the business cycle in its political and economic aspects: Vilfredo Pareto's The Transformation of Democracy. Pareto was an extreme, slightly crazed reactionary, and a precurser to the Italian Fascists (as well as the ideologists of neoliberalism), who unusually had a pronounced hatred of all kind of apologetics.

The likely changes in the behaviour of the institutions of capitalist society in a recession are analyses by Nitzan and Bichler in their book Global Political Economy of Israel, which is built around a liberal theory of capitalism that does not borrow from Karl Marx.

Nitzan and Bichler argue that dominant capital can retain and even strengthen its position through the mechanism of inflation. This can be used as a weapon to devalue workers' remuneration and to pressurise smaller capitalists. Dominant capital can strengthen its hand by cannibalising smaller firms. With government panicked and embattled the cartelisation of dominant capital can be renewed more effectively. The banking industry can be effectively subsidised through various inflationary,and then anti-inflationary swindles.

The current proposal to "bail out" the US finance industry with $700bn of taxpayers money doesn't even aspire to such artfulness. This is straight off primitive accumulation.

The Dedalus MS

Intellectuals rarely explain the purpose of their work: its goals and how their methods relate to them. Joyce famously outlines the goal of his semi-autobiographical character Stephen Dedalus's putative future project:

"to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race"

which is a rare moment of candour. These intellectuals often just go about their business like people hypnotised. This statement's often quoted because it's candid, it's concise, and it's an interesting piece of writing. It's tempting to treat it as an explanation of Joyce's own project and forget about the displacement into the imaginary diary of an imaginary character whose ideas may or may not reflect those of the author. There may be good reasons for doing this.

This kind of candour invites crude mockery. For instance you could have:

"to manufacture, in the stalls of mental labour, the ineluctable product of imaginative contemplation"

or a bit cruder:

"to force into being, in the outhouse of the intellect, the as yet unformed content of human race consciousness"

This would be to construct primitive comedy around a level contingency in the statement left unexamined by the author. Either the statement lacks perfection as a summary of the author's activities, basically writing things down in an exercise book, or these activities lack perfection in relation to some implied criteria. In either case the statement comes to be determined, secondarily, as a pure abstraction. Joyce's smithy opens onto the infinite, or has this possibility, like the Tardis in Dr Who, or Mrs Thatcher's Family Grocer's, not through any mystical operation but through this process of abstraction.

Anyway, this was the mission statement of the young Joyce. The real mission statement of the mature Joyce might not be too far from this, to the point of accepting the same choice of words, but with their crude parody implied also. This might be step forward, but it also involves the repudiation of the idea of progress through synthesis implied in the formula as it stands in Portrait of the Artist, which again may or may not be a good thing.

Hatherlee Dub Version

an historical novel

Writing The Historical Novel Lukacs describes the characteristics of great popular writers as commensurate with those of great political leaders, whose:

"genius manifests itself in the unusual rapidity with which they are able to perceive in quite small and insignificant reactions a change of mood, in the people or a class, and to generalise the connection between this mood and the objective course of events. This power of perception and generalisation forms the basis of what leaders customarily call "learning from the masses". Lenin in his pamphlet Will the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? describes a very instructive instance of of this interaction. After the suppression of the July rising of the Petrograd proletariat in 1917 Lenin is forced to live in illegality with a worker's family in the suburbs. He describes the preparation of the midday meal. "The wife brings in the bread. The husband says: "Look at this lovely bread. They don't dare give us bad bread now. We had almost forgotten that there was good bread to be had in Petrograd"," Lenin adds:

"I was amazed at this class estimate of the July days. My thoughts had revolved around the political significance of those events ... As a person who had never known want, I had never given a thought to bread...Thought follows an uncommonly complicated and intricate path to reach what is at the basis of everything, namely the class struggle for bread."

Here we can see such an interaction in wonderful plasticity. The Petrograd worker reacts with spontaneous class-consciousness to the events of the July days. Lenin learns from these reactions with the greatest sensitivity and turns them to account with remarkable speed and precision in the consolidation, substantiation and propagation of the correct political perspective."

I was going to put together some kind of historical argument as per why Lenin's role as an intellectual would be coherent in 1917, by Lukacs standards, but may not serve as the basis for a transhistorical theory of "the intellectual and masses". Evidently one of the premises in Lukacs' example is that the workers constitute a political force (collectively, piecemeal or mediated some way). Experience shows this is not always the case. Also, there's something strange in Lenin as democratic intellectual writing Will the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? We're perhaps obliged to see this as some kind of novel Lukacs wrote in which Lenin appears.

This isn't a very good analysis, but we could be back there again, tomorrow, with the worker's family, at the table, with Lenin making notes.

"circuitous paths"

The circuitous paths of council estate buses could be said to materially embody the inefficiency with which this society is permeated, and which it disavows. Reverend Roy Walker often uses these buses to attend outlying churches. He's one of the few passengers today. Where the motion permits he jots down a few words in an exercise book. I've been on these buses when kids have chucked stones at the bus, walked across in front of the shops, and chucked stones at the bus again as it came back round the corner. Revd. Walker is composing a prayer:

D.L.W.P. (dear lord we pray) for pensioners struggling with fuel costs at this time. The bus rocks on its gearing and descends the next street.

&W.P.O.L. Past rhodedendron bushes. Our soldiers in Afghanistan.

&W.A.P. (we also pray) Our soldiers in Iraq, that they may be returned. Past blurred out front gardens kids playing on a swing.

&W.A.P. People in hospitals, and awaiting operations.

The bus lurches onward.

T.W.P.O.L. - Amen.

"Let us finish with a classic example in this connection, from Eisenstein's masterpiece Battleship Potemkin: the montage of the three lightning shots of the stone lion with those salvoes from the battleship in revolt, and its effect. It is not just, as Pudovkin says, that this effect can be "reproduced in words only with difficulty": it is impossible to reproduce it or translate it into words or verbal "values" without entirely losing its filmic-visual artistry. Phrases such as "revolutionary lion" or "the very stones rise up and shout" and the like, into which we might and in fact do translate this celebrated visual metaphor, are generic, banal and impoverished by comparison with the montage of these shots of the lion. For the latter possess a far superior power of individuation, attained by the artistic use of plastic expressive force: an optical-expressive force achieved precisely in the modes of montage of photo-dynamic idea-images. By the same token, it would be impossible to turn Dante's lion

holding its head high and furious with hunger so that the air seemed in dread of it (Inf. I,II.47-48)

into filmic or pictorial or sculptural idea-images without entirely losing its artistry, which is of a poetic and literary character."

- G. della Volpe Critique of Taste

(sequence mentioned at 9:00, you may want to turn the sound off.)

Galvano della Volpe's theory of literature

Poetry, according to della Volpe, constitutes an autonomous sign-system, borrowing the meaning of its terms from the general social sign-system: itself ranged between precise technical language and ordinary social language, which possesses some autonomy without acceding to a properly poetic level of autonomy. This sign-system is to be distinguished from Saussure's la langue which abstracts out sociological factors.

This semiological analysis permits della Volpe to criticise the dominant contemporary schools of aesthetic criticism:

1. Romantic criticism, which failed to analyse literary works as sign-systems and so failed to recognise writers as being engaged in formalistic work, subject to various social and historical constraints. Consequently romantic criticism ended up perpetuating various mysticisms.

2. Marxist literary or art criticism such as that of Lukács, which pursued an overly restricted appraisal of literature based on its sociological determination. Consequently this criticism failed to recognise the relative autonomy of writers, and developed a theory of literature restricted to validating:

a. the specific form of the 19th century novel

b. partisanship at the level of content, and this understood in a peculiar way, i.e. the positive portrayal of characters whose social position coincided with that valorised by communist party propaganda, at the time Lukács wrote this meant workers and peasants.

della Volpe explains his approach:

"If criticism is to be rigorous and scientific, rather than a matter of chance impressions, it can only be a comparison of two elements: to start with, the ordinary thoughts and ordinary meanings and the instrumental "form" related to them (the totality of their lexical-grammatical and phonic elements), which are the specific and technical basis of the poetic text; and then, the un-ordinary thoughts and meanings which are developed in the poetic text from the ordinary. The originally denotative lexical terms are developed into connotative terms, while, running parallel, certain related phonic developments may also occur - the two resulting in what can be defined as stylemes. The comparison between ordinary and un-ordinary is to be executed through paraphrases of the un-ordinary meanings and the connotative terms in which they are expressed. Such paraphrase, however, being relational and dialectical, must be discriminatory. The object of its discrimination will be nothing less than the switch, the separation or progress, of meaning or thought or (poetic) cognitive value, realized (expressed) by the stylemes, with respect to the values realized (communicated) by the glossemes, or elements of the linguistic-instrumental "form". Critical paraphrase/paraphrase as criticism in short. Paraphrase, which hasalways been a heresy for critics of a mysticizing bent indifferent to language, ceases to be one. The ingenuous conception these critics have of paraphrase has never extended beyond an unrelated, undialectical, uncritical paraphrase, which they see as an alien interference with aesthetic raptus or poetic "ineffability"."

"If we were to restart theory"

I read quite an interesting article the other day "If we were to restart theory", whose title summarises precisely enough Georg Lukács' Soviet era literary-philosophical project: a project that today appears rather odd.

Lukács' subsequent political trajectory as well as his voluntary acceptance of Soviet citizenship and patronage ought to convince that his works do not merely passively reflect his circumstances as Soviet apparachik. Amid a vast polemic against "decadent" bourgeois civilisation that does not fail to denounce what were supposed to be its most "beautiful" "artistic" representatives, in the harshest terms, is a defence of the most bourgeois, individualist genre of all: the novel. Lukács evidently did not feel, as Gramsci did, distate at the thought of a lone individual exceeding the influence of an entire university.

It seems probable that Lukács' politics didn't fundamentally change between Hungarian Revolution and Hungarian Revolution. The way these politics were played was obviously largely dependent on historical circumstances, hence the apparent inconsistancies.

At the core of Lukács' politics is the notion that progress finally demands that the mass of people consciously participate in the reproduction of the social environment in accordance with their needs. This requires the mass of people to be able to exercise such control, but as a preliminary condition it requires the mass of people to "see the specific qualities of their own age historically" to "comprehend their own existence as something historically conditioned, for them to see in history something which deeply affects their daily lives and immediately concerns them".

The role of the intellectual, that Lukács is determined be retained, is coherent with respect to this project of facilitating "history as a mass experience". To adopt a metaphor, the intellectuals are to undertake reconaissance work on behalf of the masses, themselves steadily advancing like Napoleon's Grand Armée. They will carry out investigations, analyse information and present results. The masses whom they serve act, on this and other information, and consequently dissolve the existing situation, at which point the process starts again. The Soviet authorities apparently did not realise, or chose not to realise that this relationship is only valid in a pre-revolutionary period.

The problematic in Joyce's Ulysses is something like an analysis of how this organic model of intellectuality can break down, in a word its "disorganisation".

adumbration of the week

"The site will further proceed as a regular movie reviewing site."

Dejan Nikolić, having abandoned what were loosely called "parodic activities" announces his reinvention as an autistic auto-retarded wall-eee character, pathetically turning over junk in a post futuristic wasteland.

what is metaphor?

Enjoy opaque writing? This is Galvano della Volpe's account of metaphor from Critique of Taste, initially citing Aristotle (parentheses and references omitted):

"In Rhetoric we are told that metaphor provides us with easy instruction and knowledge "through the genus" - in other words in so far as it is a general notion or idea. The same conception is repeated today, after Castelvestro and others by I.A. Richards when he summarizes the principle of metaphor as "a combination of general aspects". Again, in the Poetics Aristotle says that "the right use of metaphor means an eye for resemblances", that is, that "metaphors should be drawn from objects which are proper to the object, but not too obvious; just as, for instance, in philosophy it needs sagacity to grasp the similarity in things that are apart". Given these premises, Aristotle concludes by showing under the heading of Logic in the Topica that similarity in metaphor, "for those who use metaphors always do so on account of some similarity" is the same categorical norm as the similarity or sameness which regulates inductive, hypothetical and definitional reasonings. To limit ourselves to the latter, we are told that: "(The consideration of similarity) [=sameness] is useful for the assignment of definitions because, if we can see what is identical in each particular case, we shall have no doubt about the genus in which we must place the subject under discussion when we are defining it; for, of the common predicates, that which falls most definitely in the category of essence must be the genus"."

Two things are abstracted to the degree they constitute equivalents; this also means: such that each possesses a function common to both. Then potentially each can be decomposed into parts contrasting with or consonant with this function.

"Sierra"

Jack and Sarah exist in the front room of a middle class house. In the centre of the room stands a Ford Sierra, purring unremarkably. It cannot be said to complain.

Sarah: Millions of people in this world get by without complaining, or at least without endlessly playing out their complaining: without trying to make this complaining into avant garde theatre.

& you feel cheated?

Jack: I do feel fucking cheated

Sarah: & you sit there with all this "our social problems are political problems"

Jack: smaller versions of

Brecht's method you know, it's a mistake to see these things as somehow optional. Drama merely recapitulates existing social drama, itself simply expressing these political problems.

Sarah: All our drama sublates does it? Why don't you put that on your fucking C.V.?

Jack: I don't know if I've got the vocation for missionary work among them. I have this aversion you know. Especially the whole thing links back. You have to justify it from your former employer. These Himalayan Nuns, you know, didn't have to justify their thing out of local sources.

Sarah: These adolescence!

Jack: Society does not recapitulate the logic of the school.

Sarah: Schoolmasters against school! I'll write that one down. Society does not what?

Sarah walks round distractedly and finally settles in the front seat of the Sierra. The electric windows are raised almost noiselessly.

When I arrived I read them, just for fun, one of the poems I wrote during the strike:

"It started as a metaphor/
but now persists/
as system staged to conjure/
its original referent/
She's swirling a red flag."

ambiguities (1): "economic determinism"

C. Wright Mills' book was written fifty years ago but it's still worth reading now. In the intervening years the language with which modern society explains itself has undergone some changes. The rationale of economics is relatively more important; politics is now apparantly subordinate to economics rather than the other way round (imaginatively if not really). Ideology is more worked over and is more diffuse.

Nevertheless what Wright Mills calls "economic determinism" fairly characterises how many contemporary radical socialists* see the state functioning. Wright Mills aims to extend this notion:

"We do not accept as adequate the simple view that high economic men unilaterally make all decisions of national consequence. We hold that such a simple view of "economic determinism" must be elaborated by "political determinism" and "military determinism"; that the higher agents of each of these three domains now often have a noticeable degree of autonomy; and that only in the often intricate ways of coalition do they make up and carry through the most important decisions."

Evidently people have good reasons for ignoring the hegemonic language of economism ("it's a composite of lying sophistries" would be one) but this "economic determinism" is no such thing: it's not consistant with our current ideas of economics. It's assumed that there is one kind of mechanism of control that in the modern period is providentially taken over by the economic élite rather than an élite of a different sort. "Economic determinism" if it is to mean anything ought to be concerned with the determination of the channels of control and the technology of control with respect to tangential transactions carried out via a more or less open market. Hence one could talk about the economic determination of the comprador régime in Afghanistan etc.

*I dislike calling things "radical" but since the former socialist parties of Western Europe defected to neoliberalism all proponants of socialism are marginalised from mainstream politics, hence are, de facto, radical socialists. I will end this footnote without going over the ambiguities inherent in the terms "open market" and "mainstream politics".

workhouse without walls

The BBC reports new plans under which the long term unemployed will be made to carry out community work.

"Claimants will have to carry out four weeks' community work once they have been unemployed for more than a year. After two years, they will be ordered to work full-time in the community. People who have been signed off sick will have a new medical check with someone who is not their own GP."

The Work and Pensions secretary had this to say:

"The longer people claim, the more we will expect in return. At three months and six months, claimants will intensify their job search and have to comply with a back to work action plan,"

"Work works and it's only fair that we can ensure that a life on benefits is not an option."

Inevitably private contractors will be organising the community work details.

The economic rationale of this is that it's meant to shift the supply schedule for labour across a bit, increasing those in work and decreasing wages: some of those out of work will presumably find jobs, others will accept their punishment. Workers are supposed to benefit because the government's overheads will be reduced.

Johann Hari praised the "reeducation" aspect of this work, but I'm more interested in these contractors. The overheads charged by employment contractors like Manpower and Carlyle Group are around £7 per hour on top of salary paid. Isn't it going to be the government ends up paying a lot more than current benefits provision, into a slush fund for these gentlemen?

I find it hard to believe these proposals please anyone except big capital and historians of the victorian era, who get to see their source material brought to life, but there you are, that's the new thing.

The Power Elite

"Ruling class" is a badly loaded phrase. "Class" is an economic term; "rule" a political one. The phrase "ruling class," thus contains the theory that an economic class rules politically. That short-cut theory may or may not at times be true, but we do not want to carry that one rather simple theory about in the terms that we use to define our problems; we wish to state the theories explicitly, using terms of more precise and unilateral meaning. Specifically, the phrase "ruling class," in its common political connotations, does not allow enough autonomy to the political order and its agents, and it says nothing about the military as such. It should be clear to the reader by now that we do not accept as adequate the simple view that high economic men unilaterally make all decisions of national consequence. We hold that such a simple view of "economic determinism" must be elaborated by "political determinism" and "military determinism"; that the higher agents of each of these three domains now often have a noticeable degree of autonomy; and that only in the often intricate ways of coalition do they make up and carry through the most important decisions. Those are the major reasons we prefer "power elite" to "ruling class" as a characterizing phrase for the higher circles when we consider them in terms of power.

- C. Wright Mills The Power Elite

mute copy

Perhaps Damien Hirst's in vitro installations satirise the reification implicit in Mark Wallinger's copy of Brian Haw's "Stop the War" stalls. Or vice versa. It's easy to read into these works ideas that aren't intended, as per Rorschach inkblots, because they are inconclusive.

Our contempories in the visual arts are not just the children of Saatchi, but of a vast spectacle growing out of several grand institutions: universities, museums and their trusts, publishing houses. The equivalent institutions in Paris had, in recent memory, produced a new international style, not in the visual arts but in literature; Alain Badiou talks about "a French philosophical moment of the second half of the 20th century which, toute proportion gardée, bears comparison to the examples of classical Greece and enlightenment Germany." The British institutions sought to mimic this.

The work of the British Artists is coloured by its reproducibility via art spectacle as much as commodities are marked by their reproducibility via the commodity market. In a way there was only one sort of work conceived at a high level of abstraction; talked about essentially in vague terms; only contingently materialised in a different way: as art in London, as literature in Paris.

Given this parallel each can be understood as an indirect criticism of the other. The success of the Republic's doctors of thought rested on a fetishisation of the individual genius, and an evaluation of content following from it: consequently on an implied expressionism absent from the manifest content of their work. Likewise the British Artists derived their sales pitch from their university work: reproducing its style but without any particular content. The British version is a mute copy.

It is as if in response to the Beatles' success the French made stars of four young men who were dressed exactly as the Beatles, but unable to conjure music from their plywood instruments instead insolently chewed gum.

Tracey Emin's Bed

philosophy so far has only interpreted these bedclothes; the point is to change them.

current public sector workers strike

We've been on a very exciting wildcat strike in solidarity with town hall bureaucrats, care assistants, binmen etc, on official strike. The protests, which I didn't attend, were nothing like the Vallotton picture, more like this sort of thing. Unison seem to be militating for a 50p/hour rise, across the board, which seems fairly left wing in the context of their set up. Hardly anyone seems to buy the official inflation figures as a genuine measure of the change of cost of living anymore, or the economists' line that employees can't effectuate wage rises this way, as the effects of inflation supposedly come in to restore "structural balance" automatically. Evidently ordinary people have no input in the central bank creating money to redistribute to the finance sector, should they choose to go down this road.

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when contrasted

veritable portrait of the real face of Our Western Civilisation

Christopher Hitchens' latest wheeze: discussed here and here

It's perplexing that people who were really against the war sometimes want to treat Hitchens as some kind of worthy adversary. There's a danger here of approaching moral equivalence. He is an ideologue, and his writing is as full of pathetic compromises as one would expect. He merely personalises a set of received ideas he does not formulate himself: appends them to a photograph and a biography. His appeal is that of style: a relative freedom compared to that afforded to more lowly ideologues. Celebrity journalists like Christopher Hitchens and Tom Friedman are permitted a degree of liberty in their subject matter. They operate like cavalry squadrons behind the front lines of ideological production, ready to sally forth wherever the line seems weakest, no matter how lame their charges. According to Hitchens:

"When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint."

When contrasted to actual foreplay, waterboarding is more like torture. I suppose Mr Hitchens has two rhetorical devices here and has inadvertantly mixed them up, in a mélange even he could not possibly understand:

1. All reality is subsumed into a confrontation of antithetical forces: the US security services are on one side and the murderers of Daniel Pearl on another. The actions of the US security services can therefore only be judged by themselves or the murderers of Daniel Pearl.

2. Waterboarding is called torture, but is less bad than other actions called torture, therefore it is no torture.

Both are still fallacies unmixed, but the effect would be less strained if they weren't allowed to bleed into eachother this way.

These idelogues; I don't believe they really love this society, or trust its economics, since they lard their analyses with such ersatz humanism. They refuse to recognise a process of falsification they themselves have a part in. The grandeur of Our Western Civilisation consists precisely in the materiality of a public rhetoric as acidtripped as that of the Olmecs.

A similar situation as below. The Daily Mail isn't the only publication to have a weird relationship with its imagined working class; they find Banksy's work faulty, as pastoral.

"Vautrin was greater than this"

Johann Hari doggedly asserts that Vautrin does not reside in Cheltenham.

Empson's pages on Gay put forward the idea that the pastoralisation of the criminal milieu in bourgeois society: its effective presentation as a network possessing apparent organisational consistancy, could be achieved by substituting a version of the old aristocratic social world in the place where an accurate picture of the criminal world would otherwise be. A dissapearing class is made to stand in for one newly "discovered" or at least unearthed. Sentimentalised ideas about the old aristocracy were not in short supply and were of less and less use in real life. Acquiring real knowledge about the criminal world has always been difficult, dangerous and distasteful. But the purpose of the exercise isn't in any case the passing on of accurate information rather its the dramatic effect of menace. A certain vagueness has its part in the overall effect. The shift is from mere crime to criminal underworld.

Balzac's Vautrin is likewise a cod aristocrat: Vautrin, we are told, commands the loyalty of ten thousand men, as by feudal bond; he is pledged to a fearful code of honour such as persists in a degraded half remembered form among Balzac's bourgeois aristocrats; his ambition is to set up a slave colony in Louisiana: grotesque caricature of the feudal system. Again, the effect is to suggest criminality as a black menace offstage, with which this character communes and from which he draws his stregnth. Second thing is, once a degree of uncertainty is induced the eccentricity of this character commutes from his individual self, as if a line of cartoon ants, and comes to signify the vagueness of the milieu in which he's apparently so surely planted. Shakespeare may have had the same idea with Falstaff, who knows?

One of the reasons for valorising so called "materialism" is getting away from these sorts of effects, when they appear not in forms of entertainment but in apparently serious ideas about real life; ideas that are really acted on. The idea of the world that makes the social group of criminals* an effective class with perfect "conductivity" on the basis of a few tricks is surely an idea opposed to materialism. The act of the gauging this "conductivity" might as well be "materialism", since the name might as well be used.

*other groups from which an exoteric network can be contrived or has been historically: the Police; Freemasons; the Catholic Church; Jews; Gypsies; the upper ten thousand; circus performers; the working class; drug addicts; communists; bourgeois leftists.

Announcement

"we used to do that kind of physical, hand-to-hand training, to build confidence and push people through their internal barriers. It's the same reason we waterboarded each other. It's a wake up call, and quite liberating."

This is a strange sort of announcement; in all probability contrived as part of a wider strategy of the gangsters in power in Washington, but with a sort of mutability: it could after all really be just this deranged apparachik. There's a setting up of provisionality. It's a bit like the introduction of new soap opera characters, put forward for public evaluation: "Do you like this guy? How did you feel about the mutual waterboarding backstory? Did you find any of it convincing? Oh, he doesn't have to come back, not if you don't want." I said before I thought the propaganda strategy had changed because they used to try to avoid revealing the very bad things they'd done (e.g. shooting down of Iran Air flight IR655). There was a tendancy to squirm and equivocate until the position being held became untenable. Now, I suppose, the idea is to give you time to get used to the bad news: present it first in this provisional way.

There's one moment of humour:

"He needs to get a briefing in the morning, like the threat matrix briefing that POTUS gets each morning. A miserable summary of what has gone wrong".

Taxable income in the UK

UK Income Tax statistics for 2004/2005 are listed here as cited by Leninushka here. Apparently around half of the total population paid Income Tax. Of these 45% earned less than a "disqualified" rate of £15000 for a year working full time. 39% acheived a "middle class" salary of £20000 per year or more. 16% sold some form of qualified labour without being especially well rewarded for it or worked excessive hours. These conclusions would be suggested if we imported Joe Bain's idea that the outcome in a particular market reflects the structure of competition within it. Statisticians might pick at a few things here: there's no distinction relating to hours worked and there's an incentive to minimise the figure one gives on a tax return, but that's what's in the books.

"Data from HMRC 2004/2005; incomes are before tax for individuals. The personal allowance or income tax threshold was £4745 (people with incomes below this level do not pay tax). The mean income was £22,800 per year with the average Briton paying £4060 in tax"

Earnings Less Than £	Number of Taxpayers (000s)	Percentage
6000	1440	4.76
7000	1160	3.83
8000	1590	5.25
10000	2950	9.75
12000	2760	9.12
15000	3650	12.06
20000	4950	16.36
30000	6000	19.83
50000	4090	13.51
70000	859	2.84
100000	410	1.35
200000	300	0.99
500000	89	0.29
1000000	16	0.05
Total	30264	100

"It's like Serco started doing burgers"

Lenin's pal offers a pretty fair assessment of New Labour's electoral strategy:

"What happened was the Labour Party could no longer build the alliance it thought it needed for its project, based around elections and the British state. It went off to build a wider coalition to the right of its considered natural constituency. Based on the theory of triangulation, its leaders considered traditional supporters would have nowhere else to go and so follow them. As far as they wouldn’t follow the party to the right, the leaders came up with some interesting (and deeply ideological) justifications for what they were doing. All sorts of things became “socialist”, from PFI to the Iraq war to (in one case) copyright law etc, etc..."

I don't know why this theory is called "triangulation" when it involves the adjustment of only one variable. I suppose it makes it sound more complicated! Basically it's the application of Harold Hotelling's principle of minimum differentiation. The only problem with this is that middle class voters have a visceral aversion to the Labour Party. The doxa of neoliberalism's ingrained in their emotional life. Labour imaginatively represents surplus, in the form of state handouts or Lesbians' Theatre. The Tories represent austerity; in ideal terms: the birch! It doesn't matter that this putative austerity doesn't necessarily trade off against greater efficacy in the pursuit of society's goals (if such goals can be conceived). It doesn't matter that many among the middle class owe their few privileges to the state's corporatist policies. Or that Michael Foot was twenty odd years ago. New Labour's actual fasho responses to more or less imaginary "harsh realities" do not persuade. They dislike the Labour Party, and not for the right reasons. That's what I reckon. Anyway what an interesting article from "Lenin"'s "pal".

Islands

Spinoza's version of monism may have taken on some of the characteristics it had in that it was argued against the religious and pragmatic ideas of the Dutch intelligentsia, and not the animism it was thought was professed by the headhunters of the East Indies; the islands that constituted the economic basis of the civillisation in which Spinoza played a supporting role. According to Russell, Spinoza "is led to a pure and total pantheism". In truth Spinoza's philosophy is rather more restrained than "everything is everything"; it's a restricted monism. Spinoza would find nothing good or necessary in a child purposelessly dropping eggs from a roadbridge to smash on the motorway below; his philosophy can legitimately be called monism insofar as more extreme versions of monism lack literary adaptability.

Ray Brassier's thesis (pdf) puts forward some brilliant ideas about materialism (appropriately enough of "the type inaugurated by Parmenides"), followed up with a half-arsed injunction to adapt a version of monism to political economy. Nevertheless the real weakness of works like The Open Society and its Enemies, that improperly abstract two hostile parties out of the whole set of social relations, are such that Brassier's methodology would have some revelatory value.

The Open Society as Spinoza pastiche:

1. capitalism is a thing conceivable abstractly

2. given the supplementary axioms:

"the purposive nature of abstractions in pragmatic theorising"

and its corollary:

"the presumed perfection sui generis of the same"

(as per previous analyses)

a. capitalism is found to have a purpose

b. capitalism expresses this purpose perfectly

c. the directors of and ideologues for capitalism, as moments in the realisation of this purpose, perfectly express this purpose without constraint (2.b.), hence their real function aligns with their ostensible function. Since the function of the directors is to direct production it follows that this formal relationship expresses the real relationship.

3. capitalism since it has a purpose (2.a.) has as its purpose the reproduction of itself as capitalism

it follows that it also has as its purpose the non reproduction of itself as anything other than capitalism

4. capitalism and the open society are found to coexist. Since capitalism reproduces itself as itself etc (3.) capitalism reproduces and has as its purpose the reproduction of the open society.

5. Since capitalism has as its purpose not reproducing that which negates it (3.) and expresses this purpose perfectly (2.b.) such a workers movement as has as its purpose the negation of capitalism cannot itself be caused by capitalism.

6. such a workers movement in seeking to negate capitalism also seeks to negate the open society, which is purposely reproduced by capitalism (4.)

Social Ecology Partnerships present

Museum of the Psychology of the Bully

opening soon

telephone

Programme for retitling Tarkovsky's Stalker: the telephone lets you talk to God. Turns out to be the voice of a department secretary recounting a laundry list of irrelevant details (cracked monologue of servant or fellow servant). No affectation of superiority and no interaction. A touch of de te fabula, maybe. An effective enough parody of the voice of capitalism (distinct enough from the pronouncements of capitalists such as one sometimes finds in the financial press). None of which is intended in Tarkovsky's film.

No to George Terrorism

Of all people Brian Eno was delivering a speach about the failure the press and television to bother reporting what's going on when the PA system cut out. There were maybe 2500 people on Parliament Square most of whom moved toward the blocked entrance to Whitehall, where President Bush was apparently taking tea with Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Some of the pictures in the press suggest a seething mob, really this was a fairly restrained cross section of the British public, even the British intelligentsia were represented by Owen Hatherley. The Metropolitan Police seemed to have left the defence of Whitehall to a couple of dozen nervy local coppers positioned behind two lines of flimsy steel barriers, some of which were held together with cable ties. One guy went over the barrier and was robustly subdued by the cops. As the crowd started shifting the barrier forward (it was dismantled or fell apart at one place), the police engaged in clubbing protestors with their batons. A standoff of sorts ensued. The police tactic to deal with this was put into effect a while later when the riot police consented to appear. This involved the heavy duty cops selecting protesters, seemingly at random, to be carted off at Her Majesty's pleasure. This is supposed to be "intelligence based" policing, signposted by a special cop taking pictures with an oversized victorian camera. If so it's intelligence that noticeably approximates randomness. It should be stressed that these tactics were possible because the police were in no danger whatsover, 99% plus of the people there having done nothing to threaten them.

There are hundreds of good reasons to oppose G W Bush's corporato-militarist campaigns, as detailed elsewhere.

the unanswerable

"Do you believe your own theory?

-No, Stephen said promptly."

the seventh chapter of Ulysses, set in the newspaper office finds a section of Dublin's intelligentsia discussing the perfection of a rhetoric independent of lowly particulars. The adman Leopold Bloom appears briefly to beg a favour and is sent packing. Mr Bloom brings a quiet dignity to an undignified day of scrabbling around after various errands. These events could be said to illustrate the prehistory of modern advertising, before its accession to logical, ethical and aesthetic preeminence. A new messiah for Ireland indeed.

One of Joyce's devices is an advertising style. As is well known, Ulysses makes few concessions to its audience in terms of intelligibility. I'd suggest that the implied receiver of this work is no longer a supposed other person, with particular involvements in events, rather it's as if the work is submitted to a purely abstract agency, mirroring the abstract style of advertising, or more precisely an imagined abstract agency reconstructible from advertising. Later, (in chapter nine) Ireland's real intellectuals will be satirised. One ought to ask: for whom? Or, who exactly is supposed to really get this bravura display of erudition and pseudoerudition?

We could say, rather preliminarily, that modernism denotes such works as are produced not for people but for an abstract agency of receivership, and that are stylistically sprung round this abstraction. Advertising produces works that evoke the same effect, by other means, since it's proved valuable to be able to show commodities abstacted or reified fom quotidian misery, not least that of their conditions of production. The trick is to appear to have channeled Abbadon, or whoever might be said to represent the impersonal voice of the world of commodities. In fact advertising seems to have perfected the stylistic innovations of modernism formerly applied to art: photomontage, juxtaposition of text and image, absurdism etc.

The most modern relations are impersonal relations. Rebecca West considered the aerial bombing of civillians in the second world war to be, in terms of form and content, an expression of the impersonal relations characteristic of modern industrialised society, and an unfocused resentment this society inculcates, according to her, among those it does not benefit. From a historical point of view this is doubtful, since civillians were first bombed from the air in colonial wars, and this argument that fascism really affranchised the disenfranchised of modern society, who continued to channel an attitude rooted in disenfranchisement - all this seems fairly illogical. The value of this argument is that it expresses clearly and concisely a real impression of these abstract, impersonal relations.

Rousseau's sandwichman pleads his own case: "Though the rain wets the earth/ I wear on my back/ The unanswerable advertisement/ of the broadsheet Éclair"

Lenin's take on immigration

"Lenin" has a serious point to make about the governing party's current orientation:

"Given that New Labour were the ones who tried to stoke up anti-immigrant xenophobia in Crewe and Nantwhich, on the assumption that the 'white working class' is basically racist and authoritarian, we can almost bet that the government will place themselves to the right of the Tories on this question at the general election despite the evident failure of this strategy by yesterday morning"

The supposed "rational kernel" of a xenophobia that New Labour cannot quite will to materialise, is the idea that immigration results in lower wages. Lenin writes:

"When we are told by some who should know better that immigration pushes wages down, empirical refutation isn't difficult to find. For example, a recent study for the Low Pay Unit found that overall pay tends to increase a bit as a result of immigration, although the lowest paid might experience a slight fall."

giving short shrift to the idea that immigration might weaken the bargaining power* of labour. The writers of this study express their conclusions this way:

"although the arrival of economic migrants has benefited workers in the middle and upper part of the wage distribution, immigration has placed downward pressure on the wages of workers in receipt of lower levels of pay. Over the period considered, wages at all points of the wage distribution increased in real terms, but wages in the lowest quarter would have increased quicker and wages further up the distribution would have risen more slowly if it were not for the effect of immigration."

Historically economic immigration tends to be positively correlated with output. Evidently adding to the work force will boost output, but this isn't likely to have constituted the sole or principle reason for rising real wages in recent years, if we accept that such a thing has occured**. The distribution of output largely depends on political factors. The term "wages" in Lenin's formulation is amenable to some ambiguity. Average wages may have increased but workers aren't paid average wages. "Wages" can reasonably taken to mean working class wages, which can rightly be said to have stagnated on account of immigration.

Perhaps Lenin ought to put Marx aside at this stage. For better or worse the sisuation in the UK isn't really consistant with Marx's predictions of a vast proletarian class with the capitalists and their retainers living like plantation owners among their slaves. Instead there's something like a working class amounting to 35% of the population, with perhaps 55% of the population belonging to a middle class whose income is subsidised (tactically or accidentally rather than for reasons of social justice etc) by property income.

Considering the middle class and the working class together as a marxist type proletariat results in the following sort of formulation:

"Marx speaks of reproducing the means of subsistence, but here he clearly refers to a historically produced subsistence as opposed to the minimum amount of nutrition, clothing and so on that one could possibly live with. The means of one's subsistence can include sufficient wages to use the internet, purchase a car, mortgage a house or pay rent on a flat, have the normal range of consumer durables, including a washing machine and perhaps any other labour-saving device that allows you to get to work on time and have sufficient hours after the working day to unwind and recuperate for the next eight hours. It would also include support for a family, which is after all the unit through which the labour is replaced. If you look at the UK national minimum wage, or the US mimimum wage, the level is determined not by reference to some ahistorical level of bare subsistence, but by how much it costs to reproduce one's labour in the here and now"

This implies a kind of social reasoning on behalf of employers that isn't supported by reality. The inclusion in wages of funds that can cover items such as washing machines depends on a number of other factors:

1. the overproduction of these items at lower and lower cost

2. low inflation resulting from persistant real growth

3. the ability of workers to resist wage cuts

all of which depend more on capitalists failing to collude in their own interests than somehow colluding in the workers' interests.

In the absence of effective unions resistance to wage cuts comes down to passive resistance: going off sick, sudden defection from the workplace, working inadequately, refusing to work or being made incapable of work.

Having pointed out that employers are bound to follow this conventional minimum, Lenin introduces a class of employers who do not:

"If the rate [of the minimum wage] is far too low" then "this is a concession to the needs of poverty employers whose margin of profit is slight. In comparing the wages of migrant and 'indigenous' workers, one therefore has to look at the determinants of the cost of labour power."

The problem here comes out of construing middle class wages as working class wages. Hence we end up with the following formulation, bizarrely amenable to the kind of xenophobic nonsense Lenin rightly deplores:

"The combined costs of reproducing one's labour power as a Polish worker is lower than the cost of reproducing one's labour power as a British worker."

and which isn't correct.

Anyway, Lenin's right to advocate "free movement" as a civil liberties issue and to reject the idea of Gaza type walls defending our priviliges as tame retainers of capitalism as detestable and practically impossible.

*Lenin raises a different bargaining power argument here:

"At the moment, European capital supposedly requires 8% unemployment - the 'natural' or 'non-accelerating inflation' rate of unemployment. Anything lower and the bargaining power of labour pushes up the cost of labour power (that's the 'accelerating inflation'), which is disadvantageous to the employers. However, we don't necessarily fancy being appendages to the machinery of capital, and that is what we become when migration is restricted to suit its interests."

The NAIRU is basically nonsense because inflation historically tends to fall as output rises. What the gentlemen advocating its use as a tool for informing policy mean is that given significant inflation capitalist profit depends on aggressive action to reduce the bottom line.

**the calculation of real wages tends to systematically underestimate the costs of housing. The Low Pay Unit believe the cost of accomodation in the UK to amount to £30 per week. pdf

pay attention!

Tom Friedman's pronouncements: if you pay attention to the content of what he says and at the same time his social position, the means at his disposal, there's a real and obvious discrepancy. He can come across like someone wearing a mink coat in a sauna. On the other hand insofar as Friedman isn't a retained spokesman of the US government*, and that his work is really reproduced through the market, one can suppose a normalising tendency prevails to some extent, such as colours the sale of commodities generally. I'm assuming Friedman's schtick becomes normalised the same way Pepsi Cola is. But of course as much as he lauds Our Western Civilisation he also exemplifies its public discourse.

It is not quite a matter of condescending to the public. There's a real affectation of a homely style but nothing to suggest that this is merely a matter of expediency. No sense of someone really calculating. This communication is fundamentally unilateral but also strives for a democratic effect, as if aiming for consensuality. And so this univocality is presented as an unfortunate result of a regrettable pervasive childishness.

It's a matter of historical record how the US government's foreign policy (which may have led to the death of one million Iraqi citizens, sanctions plus occupation, some reports suggest twice this amount) has been presented in this mawkish, childish manner. It remains to be established to what extent these apparent exercises in style actually influenced policy making.

*Friedman is independently wealthy but likes to play act a money grubbing style

lottery

I've had some respect for Dominic Fox since he cut Communication House, (rightly) protesting the British Government's contemptible policy of imprisoning asylum seekers. Anyway I'm arbitrarily singling him out as exemplifying a baleful trend; Dominic writes in the comments section at Limited Inc:

"Circulation and exchange can take other forms besides those they take within a regime of commodification; they can take, for example, the form they take in gift exchange. But circulation and exchange in whatever form shift the object between value-schemes, detaching it from its value-in-use, and assigning to it a value-in-circulation (the value of the gift for example is not just that of the use it will find in the hands of the receiver, but something additional: the social, symbolic value of its being given). Iterability means that the object has no natural home in any one value-scheme, that it finds a home by circulating into place (so to speak)."

As far as I am aware this business of the gift was either of purely anthropological interest (Mauss) or served as a heuristic device for analysing capitalist society (Bataille, after his own fashion). But what really insults my postmod sensibilities is the failure to "privilege" for example Huizinga's ideas about play (the debate at Limited Inc was somewhat along the lines of Huizinga's polemic against Burckhardt) which are certainly no more nonsensical than Derrida freebasing Mauss. Or, from another perspective the idea of basing a society on lotteries as per Borges' Lottery of Babylon. It's conceivable that for no good reason Huizinga's work could be consigned to the dustbin of history.

It seems plausible that in a society with only one good, which serves for essential and luxury consumption (as the only possible realisation of money wages and profits), in which market exchange and private ownership of the means of production predominate, that a pattern of the distribution of goods would pertain along the lines of that outlined in Marx's Capital; at least this outcome seems more plausible, given these preconditions, than a neoclassical type distribution. What's needed for this piece of educational theatre is a plausible single good. I haven't tried to work out the details but you could maybe use - lottery tickets.

Anyway, what a shame for the esteemed writer of Communication House to have never read Borges!

panic

& panic was evident, effectuating or following from a rigid interpersonal distance, one imagined, gridded these floors and floors of offices. Maybe we could talk about it? We could wear sunglasses indoors, in the manner of Billy Idol, or maybe we could talk about it.

Ron Paul/Ben Bernanke exchange

(The army and police in Ron Paul's imagination have a status comparable to Tiepolo's angels)

Do Republican voters believe in progress?

People sometimes think I have an unnecessarily dystopian view of the future. Brazilian development: favelas, palm trees, ten percent of the population owning seventy five percent of the wealth. To what alternative view could one realistically subscribe? It's possible to isolate, within the spectacle, a "vision" of exogenous "waves of progress": the specific basis of trickledown economics. I recall at university this being pushed as the dominant view: that which is actualised, the most modern, the most scientific. It's worth asking to what extent this view is accepted.



America's CEO

I don't pretend this is especially scientific, but I think the recent recent Republican contest in the U.S. approximately gauges assent to neoliberal ideas (against a limited pallette of alternatives) within a bloc of the population important for the manufacturing of consent: America's middle class. Support for Romney could be taken to more or less track approval of these ideas as explanation, narrative, packaging. Support for the other two main candidates would track dissent from this.

For no good scientific reason I'm persuaded that for most people Romney's very comportment radiates the "stable waves" of neoliberalism:

"your boss is a worker like you. He just works more productively. This work benefits everyone. You ought to vote for your boss"

(My paraphrasing. And I think it's right to stress this aspect of his campaign. It's surely a mistake to think Romney's neoliberalism is polluted in some way by a militarism in contradiction with it, or at another level, his mormon beliefs.)

I suspect the failure of these ideas to be adequately persuasive is testified to by thousands of now useless "America's CEO" mugs, caps and mousemats piled up in a warehouse somewhere in Michigan.

But what on earth can the platforms of McCain and Huckabee represent if they are obliged to depart from the dominant ideas of the dominant classes whose interests they aspire to serve?

Again, rather subjectively, McCain strikes me as a proponant of disaster movie rhetoric; the whole thing in The Towering Inferno, security guards improvising a useable system, the bourgeois system having melted into air. An odd relation with bourgeois civilisation and it's institutions, this imagination exceedingly pleased by the thought of setting up a control checkpoint in MOMA or the central library; making up a barricade from a Richard Serra installation or amid an Ice Age diorama: "The Museum's under control Maam". A reified pragmatism, basically.

liberalism in contradiction (2): the Gaza blockade

Back in January Hamas managed to bring down the Gaza/Egypt border, only for a few days. This was driven by necessity of course, but also demonstrated a sophisticated sense of contradiction (which costs nothing and unfortunately isn't exchangeable); possibly a sharper sense of contradiction than various "leftists" might have employed.



What was demonstrated? Massive hypocrisy. The technocratic rationale of the various networks of power that happen to be ranged against the residents of Gaza: the administration of Israel, but also that of Egypt and the United States; this rationale is starkly contradicted by a practical policy of mass social imprisonment. We're used to being presented with an imaginary trade-off between vague humanitarian concerns, to be appraised in a manner unfortunately approximating aesthetic criticism, and the more positivistic, and so more apparently real concerns of the economy; here both are being curtailed.

Of course Israel's administration isn't known to be particularly liberal; and it isn't, but it's important to recognise what are really secondary phenomena; e.g. the strange religious parties are more or less peripheral to a power structure that ressembles that of other highly developed countries: business, journalism, academia, banking.

The point is that in the situation in Gaza one is presented with the apparently universal language of modern technocracy in contradiction.

Nitzan and Bichler wrote an excellent book about, among other things, Israel's power structure. This is their take on a tengentially related issue, the contradictions of the Likud party(and Kadima deserve no greater charity):

"When preaching economic liberalisation, Likud members usually meant exactly what they said. Most of them were socialised during the British Mandate era, and many of them, even today, remain locked into the petty bourgeois mentality of "free markets" and "small government". But that is precisely the point. In their imagination, they were removing the shackles of government from an otherwise competitive economy. What they did in practice, though, was deregulate an oligopolistic war economy, effectively inviting dominant capital to take the lead. Viewed from this perspective, their "political folly" no longer seems senseless. On the contrary, it looks as if their actions, unbeknown to them of course, were in fact serving a broader "latent function". For Israel's dominant capital, stagflation, rising military spending, growing dependency on the United States, and a ballooning debt, were the basic ingredients for successful differential accumulation. These very policies were also consistant with the interests of dominant capital groups in the United States, particularly those related to armaments and oil, which benefitted from the escalating regional conflict, and which played an important role in shaping U.S.-Israel relations. The most promising political platform for achieving these results was a combination of laissez-faire economics and racist militarism; and the party which believed in these principles, was ready to implement them, and, most importantly, was to never fully understand their consequences, was Likud."

from The Global Political Economy of Israel

There's actually a decent BBC report on the situation in Gaza here

what we need (1): a new logo for deconstruction

I didn't get so far with literature studies. It's sort of like, the premises in contradiction, and the materiality of that. Why not make this image up as a flag to display outside your place of study? wherever deconstruction is practiced.

liberalism in contradiction (1): Camp Bondsteel

Camp Bondsteel, Kosovo. Even the Serb nationalists who suspect it to be a facility for processing heroin concede it is productive

The success of neoliberalism is expressed in the contrived aura of rationality that surrounds these institutions. The development of Kosovo during the SFRY period is, not without good reasons, often considered to have been particularly inefficacious. For example, Misha Glenny writes of Priština:

"The Grand Hotel itself is an unmistakeable monument of late Titoism in Prishtina. It was constructed in the 1970s at a time when the federal government in Belgrade pumped endless funds into Kosovo in the hope of curbing unrest among poor Albanians in the region. These monies fell into the hands of the Kosovo League of Communists bureaucracy, largely Albanian, whose ideal of infrastructural renewal was to erect many grandiose buildings in the capital. Such white elephants, however, should have been built after investment in jobs and primary requirements, such as improved road and rail access to Kosovo. Of the many pompous buildings which litter this provincial backwater, the Grand Hotel takes pride of place as the most ridiculous of all."



Reliable official statistics concerning Kosovo are difficult to find. According to a "marxist resource" "unemployment grew from 18.6 to 27.5 percent in the ten years from 1971 to 1981". The rate among the majority Albanian population would have been considerably greater.

Nine Years after the Kosovo war unemployment in this country may exceed 50%. Some of these unemployed have "jobs" in an unofficial economy probably more than half the size of the official one.

Camp Bondsteel, whose efficacy is beyond challenge, cost an estimated $350 million dollars to build and around $50 million dollars to run per year. Kosovo's annual budget in recent years has been around $1 billion dollars.

(more about Camp Bondsteel here)

note on liberalism

In the essay Why I am not a conservative Hayek mentions the changes in that which is denoted by the word "liberalism":

"Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called "liberalism" was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense. This already existing confusion was made worse by the recent attempt to transplant to America the European type of conservatism, which, being alien to the American tradition, has acquired a somewhat odd character. And some time before this, American radicals and socialists began calling themselves "liberals." I will nevertheless continue for the moment to describe as liberal the position which I hold and which I believe differs as much from true conservatism as from socialism. Let me say at once, however, that I do so with increasing misgivings, and I shall later have to consider what would be the appropriate name for the party of liberty. The reason for this is not only that the term "liberal" in the United States is the cause of constant misunderstandings today, but also that in Europe the predominant type of rationalistic liberalism has long been one of the pacemakers of socialism."

The liberalism with which Professor Hayek aligns himself conceptualises an attitude toward a social order in transformation, consonant with the attitude of conservatism before the French Revolution toward a society imagined static. A conservatism restored is likely to exhibit as odd a character as one transplanted. Hayek's tradition covers a relatively brief period. It consists principally of such ideas as were useful to the ascendant capitalist class.

(This isn't meant as some kind of unconscious censorship, in a psychoanalytical vein, just a rather banal admission of ordinary social politics. For example Marshall writes concerning Ricardo and his Principles of Economics: "He was with difficulty induced to publish it; and if in writing it he had in view any readers at all, they were chiefly those statesmen and business men with whom he associated. So he purposely omitted many things which were necessary for the logical completeness of his argument, but which they would regard as obvious".)

Similarly the adoption of the tag "liberal" by "radicals and socialists" relates back to an older, more general liberalism as well as the Latin American tradition that has followed its own distinct course.

We will look at Hayek's logic in due course, but we could perhaps say, rather provisionally, that Hayek's method, which works backwards from institutions to human practice, has something in common with the experience common to people in modern cities, drawn into the decipherment of giant billboards.

Bill Turnbull Update

Apparently my review of the BBCs Bill Turnbull Programme from several months ago was written in an overly cryptic way and impossible to understand. At any rate this wretched programme has still not been cancelled. Basically the Bill Turnbull Programme is a news programme on BBC1 and BBC News 24 that's on for two hours or so each morning, at a time when people are getting ready to go to work and is devoted almost entirely to fatuous news stories. It also has a strong middle class feeling insofar as the stories are not only fatuous but boring rather than salacious, as per tabloid journalism.



I'm saying, imagine a fishmongers shop, for instance, that only stocks a few distressed undersized fish. You would probably infer from this that better quality fish were comparatively difficult to source.

The same with this programme, which evades reporting the excesses of, for instance, the British state that underwrites its existance, not through standard tactics of disinformation, but through a kind of militant irrelevantism.