There are two sorts of policework. In one you investigate crimes and try to establish who is responsible for them, in the other you identify suspicious characters and try to establish whether they have committed any crimes. So these two methods might appear to be represent the logic of induction used in contrary directions. Psychoanalysis is a heuristics of suspicion. It resembles the second kind of policework.
Sometimes an hour or so passes between me writing one sentence and writing the next sentence, such is the nature of working life. I find the fragmentary style this engenders quite appealing. It seems appropriate to the world of today. Don't be surprised if the police metaphor is suddenly dropped.
The argument in notes on Fourier is precisely psychoanalytical. The rhetotic of psychoanalysis has for a long time been unmoored from the domain of psychotherapy, which it no longer needs for support. Slavoj Zizek can sell his books psychoanalysing the products of complex social relations - films or historical events - precisely because the minimum requirement for the deployment of psychoanalytical rhetoric is a minimally paranoid spectator. Psychanalysis can proceed perfectly well without having to analyse the psyche.
Karl Marx thought Fourier deserved respect as a precursor of future proletarian literature and as a heterodox critic of bourgeois civilisation. Consequently aren't the notes on Fourier somewhat unfair?
Psychoanalysis has two aspects:
1. the multiplication of perspectives
2. the evaluation of these perspectives according to their degree of suspiciousness
the classic style of psychoanalytical explanation maintains a certain tension between disbelief and suspicion; that is, it plays on the discontinuity between the results of reasoning by two sorts of induction.
So, it can be assumed that we started off with a perfectly reasonable explanation for Fourier's utopian fantasies:
1. that Fourier really wanted to solve society's problems
we invented an alternative explanation:
2. that the problem Fourier is really trying to solve is the literary problem of the petit bourgeoisie
The first explanation is correct but falls short of a complete explanation. The heuristics of suspicion favour the second explanation - it makes Fourier's motives more suspicious. Psychoanalysis.
Monday, December 01, 2008
Saturday, November 29, 2008
notes on Fourier
1. According to Walter Benjamin "Fourier appears, at many points, to prefigure a new type of human being, one conspicuous for its harmlessness". I agree he represents a new type of human being insofar as he represents a new kind of writer. It isn't too much of an imposition to state that Fourier represents a kind of writer whose career is made possible by the rise of the bourgeois economy in France. Fourier is a petit bourgeois writer; as such he gains access to the means of pursuing a literary career but without access to the traditional channels of patronage such as existed for bourgeois writers until much later. Fourier writes for the anonymous audience established by the commodification of literary culture even though he does not write works intended as commodities. Hence what distinguishes Fourier is not so much his harmlessness as his unusual earnestness.
2. The writers of the petit bourgeoisie in France in the early nineteenth century are already contributors to the spectacular society. The writers of the bourgeoisie, all the great writers, are not. The writers of the petit bourgoisie for the most part lack talent and have compelling commercial reasons to not analyse their condition in its metaphysical aspects. They are a class who cannot claim authority. Central authority has crumbled, for this class but not all the others.
3. In Fourier's ideal society class distinctions are not abolished but further exaggerated. The classes that existed in early nineteenth century France are to be further fragmented. Class mobility will be a matter of volition, rather like mobility between mystical states in Swedenborg.
4. Fourier's refuse collectors carry flags like the actors in Jiang Qing's revolutionary model operas. The flags represent the coincidence of theory and practice. They sound musical instruments to signify that their work is carried out under their own volition. So:
“The charge of the Little Hordes is sounded by a din of alarm bells, carillons, drums, trumpets, barking dogs, and mooing cows. Then the Hordes, led by their Khans and their Druids, rush forth with great cries, passing before the patriarchs, who sprinkle them with Holy Water. They gallop frenetically to labour, which is executed as a work of piety, an act of charity toward the Phalanx, the service of God and of unity.”
They think about and approve their actions. Harmony, therefore, has two aspects: it can be understood as the harmonisation of labouring classes or as the harmonisation of thinking classes. Since each class has both attributes: it is simultaneously a labouring class and a thinking class, both problems are simultaneously solved in Fourier's overall solution.
5. Fourier's problem as a writer is the crumbling of central authority, as much as it's the problem of later bourgois writers such as Beckett or Sartre. He is in a position somewhat analagous to that of a child delivering a lecture for adults, a lecture that nevertheless must urgently be given. His utopia is conceived as a solution to precisely this problem: how the institutional forms of endemic ignorance can be reconciled with each other and with society as a whole. Graduate students love to hear about the little hordes in which they recognise their veritable image.
6. The real solution to the problem consists in bypassing the commodity spectacle, obviously.
2. The writers of the petit bourgeoisie in France in the early nineteenth century are already contributors to the spectacular society. The writers of the bourgeoisie, all the great writers, are not. The writers of the petit bourgoisie for the most part lack talent and have compelling commercial reasons to not analyse their condition in its metaphysical aspects. They are a class who cannot claim authority. Central authority has crumbled, for this class but not all the others.
3. In Fourier's ideal society class distinctions are not abolished but further exaggerated. The classes that existed in early nineteenth century France are to be further fragmented. Class mobility will be a matter of volition, rather like mobility between mystical states in Swedenborg.
4. Fourier's refuse collectors carry flags like the actors in Jiang Qing's revolutionary model operas. The flags represent the coincidence of theory and practice. They sound musical instruments to signify that their work is carried out under their own volition. So:
“The charge of the Little Hordes is sounded by a din of alarm bells, carillons, drums, trumpets, barking dogs, and mooing cows. Then the Hordes, led by their Khans and their Druids, rush forth with great cries, passing before the patriarchs, who sprinkle them with Holy Water. They gallop frenetically to labour, which is executed as a work of piety, an act of charity toward the Phalanx, the service of God and of unity.”
They think about and approve their actions. Harmony, therefore, has two aspects: it can be understood as the harmonisation of labouring classes or as the harmonisation of thinking classes. Since each class has both attributes: it is simultaneously a labouring class and a thinking class, both problems are simultaneously solved in Fourier's overall solution.
5. Fourier's problem as a writer is the crumbling of central authority, as much as it's the problem of later bourgois writers such as Beckett or Sartre. He is in a position somewhat analagous to that of a child delivering a lecture for adults, a lecture that nevertheless must urgently be given. His utopia is conceived as a solution to precisely this problem: how the institutional forms of endemic ignorance can be reconciled with each other and with society as a whole. Graduate students love to hear about the little hordes in which they recognise their veritable image.
6. The real solution to the problem consists in bypassing the commodity spectacle, obviously.
Friday, November 21, 2008
historicism (2)
Another example of historicism: C.P. Fitzgerald writes in The Birth of Communist China:
"Confucianism was not, however, a dynamic creed. It looked back in a half-antiquarian spirit to a supposed golden age in the distant past. It did not attempt to arouse enthusiasm, to inspire the mass. It was quite content to let the "stupid people" worship any manner of god as and how they wished. The Communists being by definition the party of the people must make a religion which will satisfy the people, but which must be no more "superstitious" than the ethical system which used to be the privilege of the scholars. The people have no reason to think that they were happy in the remote past, any more than today, so the new heaven must be cast into the future, to which all may strive, even if few will see it come to pass.
The gods must be overthrown, since they promised nothing in this life and the Communists are only concerned with this world, to them the only reality. The people must also be aroused, given purpose and hope, simple ideas and clear manifestations of the improvements which the Communists seek to bring about. This is achieved by making the people into a God. The people are themselves God. They can do nothing wrong, because by their doing it it becomes necessarily right. They cannot be identified with any one or two fallible human beings; even the party, the chosen instrument, may make a mistake, may fail to do the will of the people. The fact that it has made a mistake is itself evidence that it has not done the will of the people, just as its triumph is evidence of the "correctness" of its line"
and
"Nothing against the will of the people can ultimately triumph"
Fallibility was formerly thought to especially afflict the common people: the labouring classes. Now it is understood to afflict the higher cadres; the labouring classes are no longer to be thought of as fallible, if not individually then certainly as a class.
This change in the way people think certainly does track a change in the way society is. But is this the same kind of historicism as the example from the textbook of European philosophy? Perhaps what C.P. Fitzgerald has noticed shouldn't be counted as historicism at all. But why not? The only reason to exempt it is that it's overly correct: the periodisation of history (empire - interregnum - communism) is obvious, and part of the mechanism by which ideas are reproduced obviously exists (CP indoctrination, for one thing). The underlying process is exactly the same in Fitzgerald's book and the Chinese textbook. The real difference is in the style employed. And the distinction between between what Fitzgerald writes and what we normally think of as historicism - fairly free speculations about human existance - is also stylistic. Fitzgerald is not in the business of writing after dinner paradoxes - that's it, mainly.
It is a matter of judgement, a weighing up of efficacy against accuracy, as to how far it is prudent to advance with speculative historicism. Onto thinner ice: it's noticeable that the new paradigm in Chinese political thought shows a marked similarity to European liberalism, with the minor variation of the market standing in for the people in liberal thought. The change in both cases tracks that slippery category, the advent of modernity (China had a modern bureaucracy for two thousand years but not a political structure subserviant to commodity production). It could be argued that with the advent of the commodity system (principally in the domain of the intellectual class), one no longer reasons by ordinary induction from human nature to social institutions but by a special kind of induction from social institutions to human nature. This, inevitably, is speculation.
"Confucianism was not, however, a dynamic creed. It looked back in a half-antiquarian spirit to a supposed golden age in the distant past. It did not attempt to arouse enthusiasm, to inspire the mass. It was quite content to let the "stupid people" worship any manner of god as and how they wished. The Communists being by definition the party of the people must make a religion which will satisfy the people, but which must be no more "superstitious" than the ethical system which used to be the privilege of the scholars. The people have no reason to think that they were happy in the remote past, any more than today, so the new heaven must be cast into the future, to which all may strive, even if few will see it come to pass.
The gods must be overthrown, since they promised nothing in this life and the Communists are only concerned with this world, to them the only reality. The people must also be aroused, given purpose and hope, simple ideas and clear manifestations of the improvements which the Communists seek to bring about. This is achieved by making the people into a God. The people are themselves God. They can do nothing wrong, because by their doing it it becomes necessarily right. They cannot be identified with any one or two fallible human beings; even the party, the chosen instrument, may make a mistake, may fail to do the will of the people. The fact that it has made a mistake is itself evidence that it has not done the will of the people, just as its triumph is evidence of the "correctness" of its line"
and
"Nothing against the will of the people can ultimately triumph"
Fallibility was formerly thought to especially afflict the common people: the labouring classes. Now it is understood to afflict the higher cadres; the labouring classes are no longer to be thought of as fallible, if not individually then certainly as a class.
This change in the way people think certainly does track a change in the way society is. But is this the same kind of historicism as the example from the textbook of European philosophy? Perhaps what C.P. Fitzgerald has noticed shouldn't be counted as historicism at all. But why not? The only reason to exempt it is that it's overly correct: the periodisation of history (empire - interregnum - communism) is obvious, and part of the mechanism by which ideas are reproduced obviously exists (CP indoctrination, for one thing). The underlying process is exactly the same in Fitzgerald's book and the Chinese textbook. The real difference is in the style employed. And the distinction between between what Fitzgerald writes and what we normally think of as historicism - fairly free speculations about human existance - is also stylistic. Fitzgerald is not in the business of writing after dinner paradoxes - that's it, mainly.
It is a matter of judgement, a weighing up of efficacy against accuracy, as to how far it is prudent to advance with speculative historicism. Onto thinner ice: it's noticeable that the new paradigm in Chinese political thought shows a marked similarity to European liberalism, with the minor variation of the market standing in for the people in liberal thought. The change in both cases tracks that slippery category, the advent of modernity (China had a modern bureaucracy for two thousand years but not a political structure subserviant to commodity production). It could be argued that with the advent of the commodity system (principally in the domain of the intellectual class), one no longer reasons by ordinary induction from human nature to social institutions but by a special kind of induction from social institutions to human nature. This, inevitably, is speculation.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
introduction to historicism
People find our marxism inconsistant and our avant gardism passé. But just as an A rated investment can be made out of several B rated investments, a single valid genre can be made up out of these two discredited genres: historicism.
Historicism seeks to pin changes in consciousness to changes in the structure of society.
From marxism is borrowed the idea that social structures determine patterns of thought and the periodisation of history. From the theory of avant gardism (e.g. Hegel) comes the idea that history can be profitably considered as a series of avant garde movements that progressively succeed each other. Because they have a necessary relation to social structures, the particular mechanisms by which they develop out of these structures (which are obscure in any case) do not need to be given.
For instance, Simon Leys writes about a Chinese history of European philosophy, printed subsequent to the Cultural Revolution:
"the introduction of the class struggle into European philosophy turns that history into a shooting gallery where no one is spared"
Leys then translates part of the section on Nietzsche, which is meant to represent a particularly crass example of historicism:
"Nietzsche pursued and developed the esoteric voluntarism of Schopenhauer. He announces fascism. He publicly defended enterprises of cruel oppression and aggression launched by the reactionary-bourgeois class, having developed to the point where it could shed its democratic trappings, openly adopted a policy of violent dictatorship: it developed in the last part of the nineteenth century when capitalism was changing into imperialism"
In some ways this might be useful information if the reader were permitted to actually read Nietzsche. The major fault, by my reckoning, is treating a casual relationship between Nietzsche's writings and Imperial policy as a necessary one (in the pantheon of Nietzsche's muses Bismarck looms inordinately over Syphilis). But that's not really the point. The premises of historicism are necessarily faulty: material structures determine thought in ways too complex for us to understand; the periodisation of history is an exercise of taste; Hegel's avant gardism is second cousin to horse racing systems. The point is that history can be simplified to the point at which it becomes useful, acording to the necessarily unscientific application of the faculty of taste.
Historicism seeks to pin changes in consciousness to changes in the structure of society.
From marxism is borrowed the idea that social structures determine patterns of thought and the periodisation of history. From the theory of avant gardism (e.g. Hegel) comes the idea that history can be profitably considered as a series of avant garde movements that progressively succeed each other. Because they have a necessary relation to social structures, the particular mechanisms by which they develop out of these structures (which are obscure in any case) do not need to be given.
For instance, Simon Leys writes about a Chinese history of European philosophy, printed subsequent to the Cultural Revolution:
"the introduction of the class struggle into European philosophy turns that history into a shooting gallery where no one is spared"
Leys then translates part of the section on Nietzsche, which is meant to represent a particularly crass example of historicism:
"Nietzsche pursued and developed the esoteric voluntarism of Schopenhauer. He announces fascism. He publicly defended enterprises of cruel oppression and aggression launched by the reactionary-bourgeois class, having developed to the point where it could shed its democratic trappings, openly adopted a policy of violent dictatorship: it developed in the last part of the nineteenth century when capitalism was changing into imperialism"
In some ways this might be useful information if the reader were permitted to actually read Nietzsche. The major fault, by my reckoning, is treating a casual relationship between Nietzsche's writings and Imperial policy as a necessary one (in the pantheon of Nietzsche's muses Bismarck looms inordinately over Syphilis). But that's not really the point. The premises of historicism are necessarily faulty: material structures determine thought in ways too complex for us to understand; the periodisation of history is an exercise of taste; Hegel's avant gardism is second cousin to horse racing systems. The point is that history can be simplified to the point at which it becomes useful, acording to the necessarily unscientific application of the faculty of taste.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
"the inexplicable is enthroned in bourgeois society"
Art criticism ought to be written in the knowledge that it is basically beside the point. Any valid explanation ought to be verifiable from the picture (or sculpture or whatever) itself, making the written explanation redundant. The same applies to the criticism of social institutions: shopping precincts or the social services for instance. The following paragraphs attempt to explain Alfred Jarry's poster for Ubu Roi via a historical analysis of changes in the way authority is articulated. But history is written within history. I wrote the whole thing at work with no research whatsoever.
Authority is reconfigured in bourgeois society. The system by which authority is relayed becomes entangled in the system of commodity reproduction. Social control over the greater part of the day is taken over by capitalist firms. Direct orders take on a puritan simplicity.These firms altogether constitute a diffuse network of control with no fixed centre. The weakened state apparatus floats above this. Later, the the state expands serving to underwrite the system of capitalism. The state apparatus becomes swollen with thousands of bureaucrats. Social control over the remaining part of the day hardly exists since it hardly needs to exist. The stark world of direct commands that scaffolds a society in which commodity production predominates is supplemented by a mass culture made out of commodities. Since this culture is based on the commodity form it is determined by the consonant or conflicting interests and ideas of its proprietors and audience and by the exigencies of commodity reproduction: the imperative that costs be more than covered by revenues. Authority, then, appears in a second form, contextualising its first appearance as direct command.
The task of propagating a higher culture eventually falls to a specialised clerissy. The collaborative product of this class is a vast system of structuralism: a heaven of structuralist thought floating above the secular realm of the giant bureaucracy. It hardly advances beyond an officialisation or a rendering orthodox of notions from capitalist mass culture. Its solidity is also a reflection of the clerical disavowal of initiative. Practice is reified as BestPractice. Structuralism can be recognised from the works of Renan or Taine to a modern psychotherapy that does not recall its originators.
Authority in the developed form of clerissese tends toward pure abstraction. It comes to resemble medieval thought, itself concerned with "structures", with the important distinction that the substance of medieval authority was not held to be perfectly interchangeable. The worldview of the clerissy is like a cardboard theatre with interchangeable characters and interchangeable sets.
It would be all too easy to demonstrate the ways in which the above paragraphs fail to conform to professional historiography. At best they could be a sort of parody of the compressed style of Hegel. No matter.
To return to the poster, Jarry is able to point to, criticise and lampoon this interchangeability of the substance of modern clerical authority. The improper object of veneration, Père Ubu, appears as an unexpected profanation of veneration unexpectedly rendered contentless.
Authority is reconfigured in bourgeois society. The system by which authority is relayed becomes entangled in the system of commodity reproduction. Social control over the greater part of the day is taken over by capitalist firms. Direct orders take on a puritan simplicity.These firms altogether constitute a diffuse network of control with no fixed centre. The weakened state apparatus floats above this. Later, the the state expands serving to underwrite the system of capitalism. The state apparatus becomes swollen with thousands of bureaucrats. Social control over the remaining part of the day hardly exists since it hardly needs to exist. The stark world of direct commands that scaffolds a society in which commodity production predominates is supplemented by a mass culture made out of commodities. Since this culture is based on the commodity form it is determined by the consonant or conflicting interests and ideas of its proprietors and audience and by the exigencies of commodity reproduction: the imperative that costs be more than covered by revenues. Authority, then, appears in a second form, contextualising its first appearance as direct command.
The task of propagating a higher culture eventually falls to a specialised clerissy. The collaborative product of this class is a vast system of structuralism: a heaven of structuralist thought floating above the secular realm of the giant bureaucracy. It hardly advances beyond an officialisation or a rendering orthodox of notions from capitalist mass culture. Its solidity is also a reflection of the clerical disavowal of initiative. Practice is reified as BestPractice. Structuralism can be recognised from the works of Renan or Taine to a modern psychotherapy that does not recall its originators.
Authority in the developed form of clerissese tends toward pure abstraction. It comes to resemble medieval thought, itself concerned with "structures", with the important distinction that the substance of medieval authority was not held to be perfectly interchangeable. The worldview of the clerissy is like a cardboard theatre with interchangeable characters and interchangeable sets.
It would be all too easy to demonstrate the ways in which the above paragraphs fail to conform to professional historiography. At best they could be a sort of parody of the compressed style of Hegel. No matter.
To return to the poster, Jarry is able to point to, criticise and lampoon this interchangeability of the substance of modern clerical authority. The improper object of veneration, Père Ubu, appears as an unexpected profanation of veneration unexpectedly rendered contentless.
Thursday, November 06, 2008
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
les derniers mohicans du neoliberalism
After first being described as a bail-out, the bill was now being called a rescue package, and all those lobbying to push it through were emphasising that this was meant to help the average American on Main Street, not the bankers of Wall street.
Wasn't this a dog of a bill? According to a strict application of the rules of analogy the partisans of pure neoliberalism disappointed by this bill could be compared to the supporters of the socialism of the third international, disappointed by the Nazi-Soviet pact. In both cases the directorate of a political tendency abruptly changed course and adopted a line wholly contrary to that which it had hitherto taken and the line advocated by its erstwhile supporters. Consequently in each case the directorate was revealed as less the providential expression of the will of its supporters than an appendage of other interest groups (respectively: Wall Street; the Kremlin). Nevertheless it would be unjust to make this comparison. While it is legitimate to consider the Republican Party and the PCF to be equivalent in the matter of disappointing their supporters, the existance of many generic similarities that are not consequential to the main point of comparison serves to blur a limited comparison into a general comparison. Hence one can suggest a general analogy between the Republican Party and the PCF without having to substantiate an explicit claim to this effect by establishing an accurate limited analogy.
The operatic struggle in the House of Representatives told us some things about the nature of the links between the economic and legislative powers in the US. Principally House Republicans fought to derail the bill or at least to gallantly appear among the defeated when it inevitably passed. The Democrats mainly caved in. The "rebels" could have framed their objections in the cold style of the professional economist but did not. They could have put together a credible manifesto and tried to defend it. The science of economics, as is well known, is hardly effective without the warranty of finance capital: of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs etc. It appears that the Representatives took seriously their role as conduits between the people and the executive and framed their objections in folksy populism, to judge from the comments of those whose minds were changed:
Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Missouri who voted "no" on Monday, said: "America feels differently today than it did on Monday about this Bill."
Sue Myrick, a Republican, returned from her North Carolina district having changed her mind after an array of local banks told her that they were at risk of collapsing.
John Boehner, the House Minority Leader, held back tears: "I think most Americans realise we are facing a serious crisis. It's time to act on behalf of the American people. It's about their savings, about their jobs."
They have some autonomy but the gravitational pull of economic power makes real independence onerous, unpalatable, eccentric.
Wasn't this a dog of a bill? According to a strict application of the rules of analogy the partisans of pure neoliberalism disappointed by this bill could be compared to the supporters of the socialism of the third international, disappointed by the Nazi-Soviet pact. In both cases the directorate of a political tendency abruptly changed course and adopted a line wholly contrary to that which it had hitherto taken and the line advocated by its erstwhile supporters. Consequently in each case the directorate was revealed as less the providential expression of the will of its supporters than an appendage of other interest groups (respectively: Wall Street; the Kremlin). Nevertheless it would be unjust to make this comparison. While it is legitimate to consider the Republican Party and the PCF to be equivalent in the matter of disappointing their supporters, the existance of many generic similarities that are not consequential to the main point of comparison serves to blur a limited comparison into a general comparison. Hence one can suggest a general analogy between the Republican Party and the PCF without having to substantiate an explicit claim to this effect by establishing an accurate limited analogy.
The operatic struggle in the House of Representatives told us some things about the nature of the links between the economic and legislative powers in the US. Principally House Republicans fought to derail the bill or at least to gallantly appear among the defeated when it inevitably passed. The Democrats mainly caved in. The "rebels" could have framed their objections in the cold style of the professional economist but did not. They could have put together a credible manifesto and tried to defend it. The science of economics, as is well known, is hardly effective without the warranty of finance capital: of JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs etc. It appears that the Representatives took seriously their role as conduits between the people and the executive and framed their objections in folksy populism, to judge from the comments of those whose minds were changed:
Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Missouri who voted "no" on Monday, said: "America feels differently today than it did on Monday about this Bill."
Sue Myrick, a Republican, returned from her North Carolina district having changed her mind after an array of local banks told her that they were at risk of collapsing.
John Boehner, the House Minority Leader, held back tears: "I think most Americans realise we are facing a serious crisis. It's time to act on behalf of the American people. It's about their savings, about their jobs."
They have some autonomy but the gravitational pull of economic power makes real independence onerous, unpalatable, eccentric.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
notes on Keynes
the extremists want to telescope the period of the seven barons with the Thermidor of the Lubyanka; the moderates conceive of two distinct stages
Against the recent enthusiasm in Britain for Keynesian deficit financing, notes on the same:
1. That Britain is so open to imports obviously weakens the relationship between consumer spending and domestic production. Nevertheless we know deficit financing works in a way because the recent period of alleged prosperity was based on consumers' deficit financing. The only problem has been the accumulation of massive debt.
2. The change to Keynesianism would essentially involve the government taking on the function of generating the debt, servicing it, and directing spending. I suspect the banks want precisely this change and nothing more: the old regime now underwritten by the state.
3. Keynesianism isn't strictly the application of Keynes' system - it would not be possible to calculate the various functions that supposedly determine the economy's headline figures. What we mean is a system of deficit finance understood pragmatically by the relevent actors and rather loosely based on Keynes' theory.
4. The more likely reason for the effectiveness for deficit finance in some conditions is that the distribution of income and the distribution of goods sold affect overall output - the Kaleckian rationale for deficit finance. Hence the valid theory of the practice arguably ought to abandon Keynes' designations of output as effectively homogenous and employment as effectively homogenous.
5. Any positive effect through redistribution can be offset by inflation redistributing incomes the other way - again this isn't part of Keynes' theory.
6. Since we know that the private regime of deficit finance has crowded out real capital investment we shouldn't expect the public version to be any different.
7. There's no reason to expect that the public version of deficit finance won't result in the accumulation of unserviceable debts or massive debts that distort government policy if they are to be serviced. This has been the experience of virtually every African country, for instance.
8. The accumulation of massive public debt triggering a payment crisis can actually serve to facilitate the consolidation of ruling class power, as happened in Russia in the nineties. I shouldn't think this is the plan but it's a possible outcome of a vain policy getting out of control.
Against the recent enthusiasm in Britain for Keynesian deficit financing, notes on the same:
1. That Britain is so open to imports obviously weakens the relationship between consumer spending and domestic production. Nevertheless we know deficit financing works in a way because the recent period of alleged prosperity was based on consumers' deficit financing. The only problem has been the accumulation of massive debt.
2. The change to Keynesianism would essentially involve the government taking on the function of generating the debt, servicing it, and directing spending. I suspect the banks want precisely this change and nothing more: the old regime now underwritten by the state.
3. Keynesianism isn't strictly the application of Keynes' system - it would not be possible to calculate the various functions that supposedly determine the economy's headline figures. What we mean is a system of deficit finance understood pragmatically by the relevent actors and rather loosely based on Keynes' theory.
4. The more likely reason for the effectiveness for deficit finance in some conditions is that the distribution of income and the distribution of goods sold affect overall output - the Kaleckian rationale for deficit finance. Hence the valid theory of the practice arguably ought to abandon Keynes' designations of output as effectively homogenous and employment as effectively homogenous.
5. Any positive effect through redistribution can be offset by inflation redistributing incomes the other way - again this isn't part of Keynes' theory.
6. Since we know that the private regime of deficit finance has crowded out real capital investment we shouldn't expect the public version to be any different.
7. There's no reason to expect that the public version of deficit finance won't result in the accumulation of unserviceable debts or massive debts that distort government policy if they are to be serviced. This has been the experience of virtually every African country, for instance.
8. The accumulation of massive public debt triggering a payment crisis can actually serve to facilitate the consolidation of ruling class power, as happened in Russia in the nineties. I shouldn't think this is the plan but it's a possible outcome of a vain policy getting out of control.
Friday, October 24, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, October 20, 2008
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.
"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.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
"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
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
Tuesday, October 07, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, September 12, 2008
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.
"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.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Friday, August 08, 2008
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.
"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.
Tuesday, August 05, 2008
"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.
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.
Monday, August 04, 2008
"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"."
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"."
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