L'INTERNAtionale

The Real Debt Crisis

2011-08-01T23:19:00.000-07:00

While Obama plays electoral politics with the Tea Party and Congress over the "debt ceiling," the real movement of capital continues its precipitous course.

Toxic Waste Dumps for Credit

Robert Kurz

Anyone retaining a bit of memory capacity might be wondering where the enormous mass of unrecoverable credit finally ended up. After the financial crisis of 2008, the most inconspicuous resting place was found for it. These debts were never payed for; on the contrary, every imaginable form of debt continued to grow. The game of pretending to pay off old loans with new ones, and the new ones with newer ones, ended long ago in the private sector. And, because of their enormous magnitude, the famous "toxic assets" couldn't be written off entirely (with the exception of some cosmetic operations by the banks). In the finance gurus' own words, this would have caused the "nuclear meltdown" of the global financial system. For accounting purposes the banks were allowed to jettison their toxic waste. But nothing was said about the "bad banks," which had to rely on state guarantees to temporarily offset the collapse of the shadow banking system after the housing bubble burst.

The official hope and expectation was that state guarantees could quickly restore "confidence" so that the long-worthless bonds could once again fetch a reasonably decent price. The condition was that the US housing sector, where the wave of crashes began, would recover strongly. Nothing need be said about this. But the guarantees of the State weren't payable. This simply couldn't happen, because the "nuclear meltdown" would have happened in the State's budget. So where did the highly toxic effluvia of the financial system go? They ended up in a final repository: the central banks. As everyone knows, these banks are presently flooding the world with dollars, euros, etc. in order to keep the clinically dead world economy on the respirator. While they're not yet throwing money from helicopters, they're extending credit to commercial banks at low interest rates, or even at no interest. Just as with any loan, the banks must provide "guarantees." And where are these? In these same toxic paper piles, which the central banks accept gladly, as if they were crown jewels.

Not even three years have passed since the crash of the financial markets, and now the public finances of an increasing number of countries are up in the air after being overburdened by anti-crisis policies. Basically, what happened to private financial bonds is now happening to sovereign debt holdings. A hard-to-control and growing portion of debt has been transferred to shadow budgets. As happened previously with home mortgages, more and more sovereign debt holdings are being turned into toxic waste. And the central banks eagerly buy these, too. So the Asian banks are buying fewer treasury bonds from the US? It doesn't matter, since the American Federal Reserve itself is hoarding them like grain in time of famine. In addition, the European sovereign debt crisis would have worsened despite all the rescue packages, if the European Central Bank hadn't begun snatching up piles of worthless bonds from the countries in crisis. Ironically, the central banks, the supposed guardians of financial stability, have become toxic waste dumps for the global financial system. This is the final home for these assets, their final resting place, because no entity lies behind the central banks to free them from this burden. The façade of normality erected after 2008 rests on a political adventurism that creates money from "guarantees" based on unpayable debt.

Deutsch: http://www.exit-online.org/link.php?tabelle=aktuelles&posnr=527

Português: http://o-beco.planetaclix.pt/rkurz392.htm

Das Grinsen der Verkäufer

2011-01-10T22:06:00.000-08:00

Towards a New Theory of Fascism or a Theory of Neo-Fascism or Something Else Entirely but Certainly Less Ambitious

2010-10-12T21:36:00.000-07:00

These notes were inspired by a Twitter conversation (or what passes for conversation in bite-size sentence fragments). I was going to post this on Tumblr, but seeing as though I've already used this space to obsess about fascism and plug Wertkritik, it seems appropriate to pin it up on the wall here.

I asked if neofascism was on the rise, and got a range of responses from my faithful interlocutors @santacruztacean, @johnbcannon and @wurmnetz. The conversation, thus far, has centered on whether fascism/neofascism arises in the presence or the absence of a strong left. @johnbcannon, on one hand, thinks that an organized left is a kind of precondition for the rise of fascism.

On the other hand, @wurmnetz thinks that fascism can sometimes appear as a result of a failure of the left, or its weakness...

On this question, @santacruztacean falls somewhere in the middle.

I take a kind of outlier position here, because, like @wurmnetz, I believe that an organized left is not a precondition for fascism (the right will simply invent a phantom left--e.g. "Obama is a socialist"--in the absence of a concrete one), but I also question the notion that the left (absent or present, weak or strong) has anything at all to do with the appearance of fascist movements.

@johnbcannon will probably want to dispute this assertation; it's not really one I'm fully committed to (yet), but in the interests of debate I'll state it as strongly as possible: the historical possibility for the rise of either fascism or the radical left has nothing to do with political configurations, understood in terms of party dynamics, popular support, etc.

@johnbcannon wonders about my characterization of fascism as reactionary anticapitalism and wonders if I'm not rushing to conflate the two.

A brief explanation of my thinking on this point (which also serves as provisional support for my previous assertion) is simply to say that fascism is a form of reactionary anticapitalism that has succeeded in becoming socially general and that depends on essentialist views of national and/or racial "character" and a pervasive paranoia about "foreign" threats. These movements tend to coalesce around charismatic figures because, being based purely on affect and lacking any positive political program, they require a "prophet of deceit" (Leo Löwenthal) to give them moral and psychological guidance. Not all reactionary anticapitalism becomes fascist, but I think the "logic" of these movements pushes them inevitably in that direction. As an aside, I think that the "putsch" merely serves to consummate what is already the case: the fascist domination of one or more bourgeois (if we can still use the term) political parties. It's worth thinking about the fact that the Republican party and the business class it represents are not really in control of the Tea Party tendency they have conjured up.

I suppose I should say that my position is strongly influenced by Moishe Postone's essay "The Holocaust and the Trajectory of the Twentieth Century," which attributes modern anti-Semitism to an irrational reaction to the abstract dimension of capital, misidentified as the Jews. Since we are all in fact dominated by the "real abstraction" of capital, a kind of structural propensity towards conspiracy theories exists, because, absent a proper categorial critique of capital, one is left only with a desperate search for "guilty parties." Robert Kurz, of the Wertkritik circle, has also argued that a critique of capital that focuses exclusively on the financial system amounts to a "structural anti-Semitism." Both Postone and Kurz tend to pro-Zionist positions because of their diagnosis of this immanent tendency toward anti-Semitism in capitalism; I take a more critical position on Zionism and Israel, in part because I differ from Postone in that I see no reason to imply that reactionary anticapitalism manifests itself inevitably or exclusively as anti-Semitism. I think a whole host of ethnicities, religious creeds, political ideologies, and other identity formations can potentially become "biologized" as the target for irrational anticapitalism.

There were some other interesting points brought up, and I'd like to think about how they might be related to the rise of the right, but I suppose they are best left for another day or for the comments: @wurmnetz mentioned Keynesianism and arguments about overpopulation; @santacruztacean and @johnbcannon both reference constitutional frameworks, I think, implying a way to distinguish between Ur- and eigentlich fascism.

On Loren Goldner

2010-09-01T14:22:00.000-07:00

Some curious folks made their way to the Niebyl-Proctor library in Oakland to listen to Loren Goldner talk about the crisis in capitalism and possible forms of organization to overthrow commodity-producing society. Goldner spoke for about an hour, then answered questions for another hour. Goldner devoted the first part of his talk to explaining the current economic crisis as part of a historical series of such crises. Fortunately, he does not share the opinion of many so-called Marxists that capitalism will work its way out of the current crisis. Goldner is correct in saying that only large-scale destruction of fixed capital (in, say, a catastrophic war) would allow capital a temporary reset, similar to what happened in WWII. A contradiction exists, however, in Goldner's thinking when it comes to organizing and political action. On one hand, the crisis is terminal and the downfall of capitalism is inevitable. On the other, the working class must organize to overthrow it. Concerning this matter, we would like to ask the obvious but nevertheless perverse question: why bother overthrowing something that is going to collapse anyway? This is like digging up the corpse to kill it again. But there were plenty of necrophiliacs in attendance (one shouted: "How dare you say that trade unions have not won victories against capital in the last decades?), so perhaps that's just how they roll. Now, there is no doubt that capitalism is still (barely) alive, but it has been placed on the respirator of credit (a.k.a. fictional capital). We must pull the plug, and we sure as hell aren't going to consult the family members. We agree with Goldner that we must organize to create a capitalist alternative, not because capital will not die if we don't, but because the Right will create its own version of a post-capitalist society, and it won't be pretty. Goldner is wrong about the centrality of organized labor in the creation of socialism. He and most of those in attendance still think that labor will lead the revolution. Dead labor was always dead, but since the 70s, living labor has also been dead. The zombie banks have their counterpart in the zombie labor movements that every so often are jolted back to life by austerity programs and factory closures. But these, by and large, are sad spectacles, pale specters of the massive strikes that were once possible when the proletariat (i.e. industrial working class) still existed. Strike! Strike! Strike! The imagination of the necrophiliacs is chained to the corpse of big labor. They are unable to conceive of an anti-capitalist social movement that does not feature the labor strike as its chief component. Now, it must be said that Goldner has a more nuanced view of labor then some of its apostles who were in attendance. For instance, Goldner takes seriously the notion that labor time must be reduced to an absolute minimum. Therein lies emancipation. For him this is a matter of reconfiguring productive activity to 1) eliminate socially superfluous production (e.g. stop building two cars per second globally, stop producing rafts of cheap plastic shit to sell at WalMart) and 2) incorporate greater numbers of peopleinto the workforce to divide the necessary labor equally. These are ideas worth considering, along with the institution of a basic living wage, the universal right to food, housing, and medical care, etc. But it is unclear how these goals will be achieve by a labor movement. As alluded to above, Goldner recognizes the failure of trade unions to achieve substantial victories against capital. On the basis of comments he made throughout the night, it can be inferred that he attributes this failure to two things: 1) the corruption of labor leadership and its too-cozy relationship with management/capital; 2) the inability of labor movements to break out of the narrow confines of their various industries or, in other words, labor's failure to move beyond localized struggles to create international solidarity among workers in all sectors. We ask, though, how this could be otherwise? What is a trade union and its leadership if not a necessary mediation between labor and capital? Could labor and capital somehow confront each other in an unmediated fashion? Marx described the struggle between workers and capitalists as capital itself working out its own internal laws.

This is why no labor movement has ever consciously abolished its own industry. Autoworkers' unions, in desperate back-room deals with management, have made huge concessions, agreeing to sacrifice vast numbers of their rank and file, in order to preserve the industry for the few workers lucky enough to remain. This midget-sized proletariat is hardly going to form the base of a social movement large enough to act as the subject of history. It is impossible to imagine any labor movement, of any size, saying: "You know what? Society doesn't really need the product of our labor. In fact, our industry is harmful to the environment, undermines our quality of life and health, and, by consuming vast amounts of energy and mineral recourses, as well as time, acts as a barrier to the full, creative development of our productive potential. Let's hang 'em up."

To seriously consider Goldner's proposition to reduce necessary labor to a minimum (or eliminate it entirely!) requires understanding the inseparability of abstract labor and capital. But this is too much for those who fetishize the working class. Goldner is one of these. When an audience member queried Goldner on the possible relation between his proposal to eliminate necessary labor and the theories of the German Wertkritik circle and the American Moishe Postone, who argue that the abolition of capital requires the simultaneous abolition of labor, Goldner launched into a critique of Postone which ended with him admitting that he "didn't think much" of Postone's ideas. It is indeed unfortunate that Marxists like Goldner are unable to accept Postone's interpretation of Marx. We have read Goldner's review of Postone's Time, Labor, and Social Domination and find it to be little more than a litany of petty complaints about the book's lack of proper respect for Marxist luminaries like Luxemburg and Lenin, and straw man arguments ("In some sense it can be said that Postone’s book comes down to a critique of most previous Marxists for not having read, or integrated, the so-called “Unpublished Chapter Six” of vol. I of Capital"; see also Goldner's contention that Postone's relative lack of attention to the nuances of the "state capitalism" debate about the Soviet Union compromises his theoretical argument about abstract labor and value). There is a moment, however, in Goldner's review in which he seems on the verge of comprehension, only to revert to his reflexive faith in the proletariat.

Marx’s work is a phenomenology of the self-abolition of the proletariat, the latter being the commodity form of labor power. Postone is certainly right that “traditional Marxism” by and large did not see this, and glorified the working class and the industry produced by capitalism as a healthy substratum to be “freed” in “socialism”.

After making this concession, Goldner concludes that Marx supported the Paris Commune, therefore he must have thought that the working class could overthrow capital, therefore it is absurd to think that the proletariat is not the subject of history. A few points are in order. First, it is perhaps too much to expect absolute consistency, even from a peerless thinker like Marx. The Wertkritik writers (whom Goldner, by his own admission, has not read) distinguish between the exoteric and the esoteric Marx (this distinction first appears in the work of Stefan Breuer). The former is the 19th century man of letters and partisan of the labor movement; the latter is the theorist of value who drove himself to the very limits of the speculative possibilities of his era. These two aspects of Marx's thought are often in tension. Second, even if during Marx's time it was feasible to imagine that the industrial working class, through collective action, could negate capital, it does not necessary follow that it could do the same today. Third, related to the second point, if the proletariat (whatever is left of it) retains the ability to end capital, its ability to do this lies in its potential refusal to work ever again, not in temporary work stoppages (strikes) designed to wrest concessions from capital, thereby making workers happy again qua workers. Goldner reproaches Postone for having made "capital the subject of history, and fail[ing] to come up with a subject that will go beyond it." But Goldner does worse, because he fails to understand that capital, the subject of history, is a social totality than includes labor as one of its moments or aspects. Labor is not merely opposed to capital. Its opposition to capital is a necessary one. Labor is a real abstraction (possessing both abstract and concrete dimensions), unique to capitalism, that functions (in both its subjective form "labor" and its objectified form "value") as the universal nexus of social cohesion. The problem with conceiving of the proletariat as the subject of history that will overthrow capital, then abolish itself or somehow wither away (as in traditional Marxist accounts of the proletariat-led State) is that it ignores the notion of determinate negation and provides no alternative mode of production. It imagines that labor, in some new, emancipated form, will outlive capitalism. If fails to explain how the new proletarian production will differ from the old. Plus ça change... Despite Goldner's claims to the contrary, Postone does provide some answers about the new subject of history, precisely by invoking the Hegelian notion of determinate negation. It is uncontroversial, even among necrophiliac Marxists, to say that the new society must be born out of conditions immanent to capitalism. That is, capitalism must create the conditions for its supercession. Postone's book, in its much-maligned and nearly universally misunderstood third section, explains this process.

The understanding of the determinate negation of capitalism implied by the unfolding of Marx's categories in Capital parallels what he presents in the Grundrisse. In the latter, he characterizes a possible postcapitalist society in terms of the category of "disposable" time: "on the one side, necessary labour time will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all."[127] Marx defines "disposable" time as "room for the development of the individual's full productive forces, hence those of society also."[128] This is the positive form taken on by that extra time, freed by the forces of production, which under advanced capitalism remains bound as "superfluous." The category of superfluous time expresses only negativity -- the historical nonnecessity of a previous historical necessity -- and therefore still refers to the Subject: society in general in its alienated form. The category of disposable time reverses this negativity and gives it a new referent: the social individual.[129] It presupposes the abolition of the value form of social mediation: only then, according to Marx, can (nonalienated) labor time and disposable time complement one another positively as constitutive of the social individual. Overcoming capitalism, then, would entail the transformation not only of the structure and character of social labor but also of nonworking time, and of their relation. In the absence of the abolition of value, however, any extra time generated as a result of the reduction of the workday is determined negatively by Marx, as the antithesis of (alienated) labor time, as what we would call "leisure time": "Labour time as the measure of wealth posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time."[130]

The trajectory of capitalist production as presented by Marx can be viewed, then, in terms of the development of the social division of time -- from socially necessary (individually necessary and surplus), through socially necessary and superfluous, to the possibility of socially necessary and disposable (which would entail overcoming the older form of necessity). This trajectory expresses the dialectical development of capitalism, of an alienated form of society constituted as a richly developed totality at the expense of the individuals, which gives rise to the possibility of its own negation, a new form of society in which people, singly and collectively, can appropriate the species-general capacities that had been constituted in alienated form as attributes of the Subject.

These developments would produce a new Subject, not the proletariat but, simply, humanity, which for the first time would be able to consciously direct its collective capacities and write its own future. This is what Marx meant when he called all human history prior to socialism its prehistory.

It is up to us to create the new organizational forms that will enable us to grasp the possibilities immanent to the present crisis. We suspect these forms will not resemble past labor movements, even if they include those who can still call themselves workers.

Mobilization Against UC Crisis Administration

2009-09-09T22:33:00.000-07:00

In a now-familiar series of events, the collapse of the housing finance bubble in 2008 led to what is generally considered the worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

In California, the recession has meant drastic losses in both state revenue (based primarily on personal income and sales taxes) and local revenue (based partially on property and other taxes). Some municipalities, which have a greater ability to raise user fees or surcharges to partially compensate for the loss of tax revenue, have been able to adjust to the economic downturn better than the state itself, whose tax provisions require voters' approval in order to be altered. The inflexibility of the state's tax code and its excessive reliance on personal income tax (due to cuts in property taxes implemented in 1978) have combined to make California extremely vulnerable to a recession.

One of the myths perpetuated by media is that California is a 'welfare state' with high taxes and that its budget crisis was precipitated by excessive government spending on education and social services. In fact, California's personal income tax is below average for industrial states, its per-pupil spending for K-12 education is 47th in the country, funding for the University of California system has decreased by 40% since 1990, and uninsured children are being dropped from state health programs.

Much political hay has been made of California's budget crisis. The state's economic problems are not unique, however. They have only been exposed somewhat earlier than in other places, due to the state's tax structure and legislative gridlock. As the world's seventh-largest economy goes, so goes the nation.

In reality, California's problems stem from a much broader trend. Since the late 60s, the global economy has undergone massive transformations, often subsumed under labels like globalization, deindustrialization, or post-Fordism. One interpretation of these transformations is that they respond to an underlying crisis of value, in which the efficiency of productive labor has developed to the point that the profitability of commodity production in general can no longer be sustained. Whatever the case may be, the global economy has grown increasingly dependent on speculative bubbles to create the illusion of growth. As the events of the past year have shown, this sort of fictional economic expansion does not lend itself to stability.

The University of California's response to the current crisis has largely mirrored that of governments around the world, with an important difference. States can disguise the nature of their 'stimulus packages' by printing money or promissory notes to increase cash flow to moribund financial institutions. The real impact of these stimuli is thus deferred, and will appear sometime in the future in the form of higher taxes or runaway inflation. Unlike national governments, a university cannot set monetary policy and must simply adjust to the crisis by firing employees, slashing wages, cutting programs, and raising fees. Just as the UC system has inherited California's budget crisis, it inherits many of its methods of dealing with decreased revenue.

The University of California has other revenue streams. A direct result of the state of California's disinvestment in its public universities has been the privatization of higher education. Some campuses, especially the medical centers, receive considerable funding from industry. But corporate funding is no substitute for California's commitment to providing quality post-secondary education to its residents. It favors certain disciplines (it's hard to imagine Raytheon funding Berkeley's English Department) and cannot hope to offset the decline in state support. Likewise, astronomical fee increases for students cannot prevent the inevitable decline in educational quality. Universities in dystopian, neoliberal Texas are already salivating at the thought of attracting top-notch faculty otherwise destined for UC. If the trend of privatization continues, the University of California will be public in name only.

The University of California Office of the President, in concert with the Regents and Governor Schwarzenegger, instead of attempting to reverse these damaging trends, have tried to accelerate them. By portraying a crisis that has been decades in the making and is the result of a policy of progressive defunding of California's institutions of higher learning as an emergency, the board of Regents granted President Yudof 'emergency powers' to impose cuts without normal oversight procedures. UC faculty are now mobilizing against these administrative maneuvers which pay lip service to the ideal of shared governance while laying bare their fundamental fiction. With what remains of their illusory autonomy, professors are beginning to resist privatization, which has gone a bridge too far.

http://ucfacultywalkout.com/

Graduate students, under union protection and not directly affected by the imposed furloughs, are nevertheless organizing in support of the faculty walkout, scheduled for 24 September. We have already begun to see our funding move upstream to administrative units to protect the vested interests of managers in a process that employs accounting arcana to cloak the looting. We have seen the MENE, TEKEL, PERES appear before us as President Yudof promises to perpetuate budget cuts beyond the current academic year. We are forming a coalition, composed of students, faculty, and both union and non-union workers, to oppose the UC crisis administration. This coalition transcends mere class and labor interests and seeks to draw attention to the gaping abyss between economic pragmatism and the needs and desires of people. We must exhibit absolute intransigence in the face of the budgetary logic of the crisis managers.

***

Davis Grads: There will be an assembly in Voorhies 126, Monday 9/14 @ 6p

We write because we're concerned about the destructive cuts that the UC administration has begun to implement in response to declining state funding. Our experience of these cuts is various, as their application is diffuse. Some of us have lost teaching positions, or face steep pay cuts; some of us have lost fellowships; some of us are simply uncertain, and worry we too may soon face like losses; some of us see the wolves at the door. We all share concerns about what this means for our future prospects. The threat to our livelihoods—along with the livelihoods of undergraduates, faculty and staff—is equally real for all of us.

In this threat we face a crisis both real and artificial: real in that the severe recession and the regressive California tax structure has meant an $813 million drop in state funding; artificial in the sense that furloughs and layoffs for faculty and staff, as well as increases to undergraduate tuition and fee hikes—all mandated by UCOP and the Board of Regents—vastly exceed the $813 million shortfall. This is the case even as undisclosed and unrestricted funds remain allocated to revenue-generating wings of the university. The issues are many and complex, but depend upon a principal confusion: The state fiscal crisis and the "state of emergency" declared for UC are not one and the same.

These cuts announce an appalling retreat by the administration from the 1960 California Master Plan and its vision of tuition-free education for all Californians. The state of emergency declared by the Regents signals a drastic re-imagining of the mission of the University, under cover of a real economic crisis. The drive to privatize the University of California is an attempt to shift state costs of education and job training directly onto the shoulders of students and their families.

As graduate students, we are curiously positioned in this state of affairs. Currently staff, undergraduates, and faculty bear the brunt of cuts and job losses. It is clear, however, that as departmental budgets are slashed, faculty and lecturers released, staff laid off, and undergraduate tuition increased while enrollments are decreased, the precarious positions we occupy are being made less way-stations for us than permanent realities for everyone in the UC system. As a result graduate students systemwide have begun organizing in concert with faculty, staff, and undergraduate groups, to protest decisions made by the administration in our absence.

They made the crisis—as political as it is economic. We make the University.

Major collective actions are already being planned for the first day of classes: On September 24, UC faculty are planning a systemwide walkout, in solidarity with 12,000 UPTE represented employees who will strike that day. As TAs we can legally honor UPTE's picket lines by refusing to teach on that day and by joining all workers, including faculty, in their protest actions. Graduate students at UCB and UCSC have already joined together to support this joint faculty and union action.

Never before have staff, undergraduates, graduate students, lecturers and faculty joined ranks to stand for the rights of all to education and decent treatment in the workplace. The crisis we face is already a major moment in the history of the University of California: The only question is what we make of it.

If you want to be involved, but can't make this meeting, please send an e-mail to tckreiner@ucdavis.edu or jondettman@ucdavis.edu.

Sincerely,

The Organizing Committee

Inflation or Deflation?

2009-05-30T14:25:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman's latest op-ed seeks to quell fears about inflation. Krugman claims that media coverage has overstated the dangers of inflation and that, in the near term, deflation is much more troublesome. Moreover, he says, Japan faced a similar situation less than a decade ago and was able to recover without suffering the predicted post-depression inflationary period. Krugman, no doubt, has very good reasons to think that inflation poses no danger. Lacking any background in traditional (viz. bourgeois) economics, I won't argue with him. But I was reminded of a piece by Robert Kurz that appeared in January of this year. Kurz sees inflation and deflation as two sides of the same coin, and reminds us that, in the face of a general disaccumulation of capital, strange things can happen. So if a currency is devalued faster than, say, durables or food commodities, you have price inflation.

My hastily completed (and never revised) translation follows:

---

Deflation and Inflation

Robert Kurz

If just a while ago inflation seemed out of control, now this phantom is again in the distance, now that the interest rate of 2.6% is the highest yet of the last 14 years [Trans. note: Kurz is referring to the German/EU context here]. But, inversely, now the threat is that of deflation, the price freeze due to a crash in sales. The fears of inflation and deflation alternate in ever shorter periods. The ascent and descent of prices is just an external signal. A movement of prices in both directions is also caused by the habitual oscillation of the relationship between supply and demand. The terms of inflation and deflation are distinguished in two aspects. On one hand, it's not a price variation out of step with time, now in one sector, now in another, but rather a simultaneous, global social development. One the other hand, the dimension of the oscillations, upward and downward, also surpasses a mere change in the market situation.

In fact, inflation and deflation are just different manifestations of a devaluation of total capital, or of its different phases. Thus, since the beginning of the 3rd industrial revolution, labor power, as an integral part of capital, has been devalued throughout the world, bringing a gradual deflation in real salaries. Such a situation can only result as an advantage for the valorization of capital from a stingy, entrepreneurial point of view. For the system as a whole, though, the decline in salaries is fatal, because purchasing power is eliminated. The simulation of buying power by financial bubbles, in parallel with the deflation of real salaries, brought about an inflation in assets and credit bonds, with no real backing. The consequence could only be the deflationary shock of the devaluation of this fictional monetary capital, in which billions of dollars and euros have already evaporated. With the ever-increasing growth in productivity, the deflation of salaries and property earnings makes visible an enormous excess of worldwide production of goods, of which there have been indicators for a long time. The result is the rapid extension of the devaluation of real capital, whether productive capital (stoppage of machines, closing of factories), or commodity capital (depreciation and destruction of unsaleable products). Drastic reduction, risky discounts, free consumer credit, as well as commodity price deflation (for example, in the automotive industry) are just temporary attempts to slow this kind of devaluation.

Now that States advance directly to the printing of notes to absorb the disaster of deflation, they are preparing a big new surge of inflation, that will radically devalue money in general as the universal capitalist medium of life. The deep cause is that the 3rd industrial revolution devalued, in an unprecedented way, the "labor substance" of all phases of "value". Because of that, global capital moves toward a situation in which inflation and deflation no longer alternate, but in which all forms of value are equally and simultaneously devalued: labor power, industrial capital, commodity capital, credit capital and money as all-embracing medium. Humanity confronts the question of knowing whether to voluntarily cease living due to lack of possibilities of valorization, or whether to put an end to the "mode of production based on value" (Marx).

Moishe Postone: Interview

2009-05-12T09:33:00.000-07:00

I recently discovered an interview with Moishe Postone online at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota. It seems to have been conducted in May of 2008, but I haven't seen anyone linking to it. So, here goes: Video Interview with Moishe Postone.

There are some strange sound effects (crickets!) during the intro, and the interviewer is verbose and seems ill-prepared, but Postone is his usual, lucid self.

Dry Tinder

2009-04-18T20:31:00.000-07:00

Pharisaical conservatives, in blogs, newspapers, and television, express apoplectic indignation at Janet Napolitano's report about the rise of right-wing extremist political groups. It's richly ironic that these "culture warriors" now take recourse to a critique based mainly on the same "political correctness" for which they have often mocked progressives. The idea that right-wing groups are inherently moderate in their aims and methods fits nicely into the logic of the American political system, in which the "center" is decidedly right of center due to the absence of a strong socialist movement. Some will say that this changed with the election of Barack Obama, that the public has shifted left, and that Obama is himself a socialist. This is wrong.

Clear-eyed observers will note that Obama protects corporate interests, just as his predecessors in the Oval Office have done. Even though George W. Bush's swaggering, bull-in-the-china-shop approach to domestic and foreign policy had worn out its welcome,Obama's election victory was more about a successful marketing campaign than about ideology. Bizarre rhetoric about socialism (often conflated with fascism) serves only to obscure the fact that Obama takes marching orders, not from individual bankers or institutions, but from the systemic imperatives of capitalism itself. The public, conditioned by corporate media, doesn't know what socialism means. Socialism, in the public mind, is vaguely equated with Europe and higher taxes, notwithstanding actual economic policies. This "socialism" is of course never thought of as an actual mode of production differing from capitalism, and basically includes all of northern and western Europe, especially Sweden and France. Nevermind the presence of the neoliberal Sarkozy in the Palais de l'Élysée.

"Socialism" gets redefined as anything to the left of the neoliberals, conveniently preventing it from acquiring anything like a real political program. Economic policy debate now is waged between the ideologies of the latter two stages of world capitalism: Keynesianism and Neoliberalism. Some poor bastards are so confused that they try to combine the two, e.g. Brad DeLong. The name Karl Marx is rarely uttered, usually as the punch line to some bourgeois, apolegetic rhetoric about "green shoots" and "bottoming out." The point to all this is that, with actual, Marxian socialism relegated by media and policy debate to the supposedly lunatic fringe, the real lunatics now find themselves close to the so-called center. This provides a false legitimation to the plaintive wails of conservatives who find themselves "unfairly maligned" by the Department of Homeland Security's report.

According to the injured parties, "right-wing extremism" is surely an oxymoron. Because Timothy McVeigh did not exist, and neither do skinhead groups, the Ku Klux Klan, anti-immigrant militia groups, or conspiracy theories about the North American Union. No veteran of the military has ever been radicalized by the government's failure to provide promised benefits. Likewise, Fox News appeals only to moderate, but desperate, individuals who have been driven to "teabagging" by Obama's radical, "socialist" plans for altering the tax code to resemble something like it did during the Reagan era.

Back on planet Earth, these things exist, inverted, as real problems. To ignore them based on some misguided political correctness or injured feelings threatens to allow them to metastasize. Attempts by the left (if the Democrats can be considered leftists), including Napolitano, to retain "political capital" by backing off the language in the report likewise risk ignoring the danger. An economic crisis as severe as the present one causes both immense suffering and popular anger at the perceived culprits. Scapegoats are sought especially among groups, since such a widespread economic collapse cannot possibly be the work of a single individual. Thus, public anger at someone like Bernie Madoff is mostly satisfied with a prison sentence, and no one seriously considers him to be at fault for the depression. But the social domination of capital has a subjective quality that is not immediately attributable to the capitalist system itself, since it appears as the objective, unchanging conditions of life itself. It is far easier to blame Jews, Gypsies, Mexican or North African immigrants, gays, Muslims, or investment bankers than to look beyond surface phenomena. In this context, mindless punditry now becomes dangerous demagogy.

I invite you to read Moishe Postone's essay, "The Holocaust and the Trajectory of the Twentieth Century," to understand the ever-present danger of genocide generated by capitalism itself.

Crash Course

2008-11-19T16:40:00.000-08:00

Finally, some English-language analyses with a value-critical approach to the current crisis are emerging. A translation of the Gruppe Krisis' "pamphlet on the financial crisis" titled "Crash Course" outlines the true nature of the impending collapse. The Krisis Group is, along with Robert Kurz et al. (now associated with Exit! magazine), at the forefront of the Wertkritik (value critique) tendency in Marxist theory. Their work deserves to be considered, now more than ever. Unfortunately, much of it remains untranslated and unknown outside of Germany. When these theorists and their ideas crop up in Anglo-American Marxist debates, they are generally pooh-poohed by the likes of Louis Proyect as "crisis mongers" whose work is, at best, a curiosity. In point of fact, they are more aware than most that the crisis is not cause for celebration, and they are among the only theorists whose work can contribute to the unlikely possibility of a better society emerging from the rubble of capitalism.

For Kurz, Hemlock; for the Crisis Administrators, the Guillotine

2008-11-10T14:22:00.000-08:00

Obama's victory has provoked contrary sentiments. On one hand, his partisans feel buoyed by a wave of optimism and hope. Finally, change has come. On the other, his opponents are deeply suspicious of his rock-star status. This suspicion is rather odd, considering that it forms part of the subterranean wave of negative populism that the McCain campaign tried to exploit. One person's populist is another's demagogue, I suppose. In the midst of all the optimism, tears, and cries of "We made history!", there are a few dissenting voices. Popular sentiment would like to ignore these naysayers and, if that becomes impossible, to force them to drink their cup of hemlock for daring to speak what no one wanted to hear. As Obama takes power and the crisis deepens, the pessimist in me expects his most ardent supporters to become the vociferous leaders in calling for his head.

My very unprofessional translation of Robert Kurz's recent article in A Folha de São Paulo, is reproduced below.

***

The Last Messiah

[Original German title: “Das Charisma der Krise” ‘The Charisma of Crisis’]

Why Obamania is condemned to failure

Robert Kurz

There is an old debate about the role of personality in History. Structural theorists point to objective social processes; the only possible conclusion is that great figures are the expression of these processes. Action theorists contradict this: in the beginning there was the Deed. Faith and Will can move mountains. Both are only partially correct. Social developments don’t happen on their own; they require interventionary action. On the other hand, action is related to pre-existing structural conditions as long as a blind dynamic underlies society, as is the case in capitalism. Because of this, great crises are precisely what creates the need for charismatic personalities that can generate a stimulating atmosphere of wakefulness. The religious moment of this mechanism is unmistakable. Hopes, desires, and fears are linked to a political messiah when a rupture shakes society. The question is whether charisma will be capable of upholding the new, or whether it will just give a new form of development to the catastrophe of the old.

Barack Obama, the “Black Kennedy,” doesn’t represent the overcoming of global capitalism but, rather, it’s renewal. His charisma didn’t arise in the context of a social movement with emancipatory goals, but instead as a mask in the context of media activities and dominant politics. If Obama became the receptacle of the entire planet’s good will and brings the people of the USA to tears, this was because he represents the belief in the State’s return to a substantial and prudent growth, that creates good job opportunities and saves the environment. This is the simultaneous belief in the overcoming of old conceptions about enemies, the balance of power, and the participation of the races that make up the majority of humanity. The gravitational force of these hopes is produced by the global middle class that, having glimpsed the crisis, wants to change everything so that, fundamentally, everything can stay the same. But this faith won’t move mountains. The rupture of 1989 brought about the transformation of old State capitalism into global, financial capitalism. Unlike 1989, the rupture of 2008 signals the internal limits of the world system itself. Obama will become the most powerful man in a world that, in all probability, will no longer be able to transform itself on its own grounds.

The power that the 44th President of the USA has to configure social relations is limited, if we just consider the State’s destitute budget. This is not, however, merely the consequence of the Bush administration’s misguided policies, like many wish to believe. It is the result of deep structural crisis in world capital. Obama can’t turn the rudder sharply; he can only administer the uncontrollable dynamic of the crisis. Instead of creating new jobs, the foreseeable global depression will destroy the precarious job opportunities created by “financially induced” growth. Among those affected will be precisely those African-Americans who ascended socially in the USA and the new middle class in Asia. And, if the climate is to be spared, it won’t be due to political agreements becoming finally effective, but because the deficit conjunture will extinguish itself. Apropos, it will be something like the failure of State capitalist industry in the Eastern Bloc during the 1990s, that temporarily diminished the global emission of greenhouse gases.

The balance of political powers also runs the risk of arriving at an impasse. The end of the wars for the world order in Afghanistan and Iraq isn’t heralded by peace treaties, but by the forseeable failure of the capacity to finance the military. The withdrawal of the American military machine could therefore result in a chaotic series of events. In the same way, the political understanding among petroleum and gas-producing countries like Russian and Venezuela would be useless in the face of local regime collapses since, with the drop in energy prices, the basis of their negotiations is undermined. Even more likely, a new balance of power in relation to China would require that the unilateral exportation corridor in the Pacific remain open. In reality, however, this reciprocal dependency will disintegrate as soon as the (very probable) inflation of the dollar devalues the astronomical monetary reserves of the Asian exporters. A smooth realignment of power relations will probably be illusive, as State finances and the currencies of a growing number of countries become unsustainable. After Iceland, now Hungary, Ukraine, and again Argentina are candidates for State bankruptcy. More countries will follow in sequence.

Obama has the job of global fire chief, but the fires cropping up are innumerable, and the water with which to extinguish them is drying up. Faith and love, hope and determination are nice things when they find a “condition of possibility.” The global system of finance capital offers them no foundation. The global enthusiasm of Obamania threatens to fall flat on its face with great disappointment. A personality whose charisma rests on false assumptions should not be made responsible for this, however. The crisis of the world system isn’t a novel whose happy ending can be staged by the media. Just as the USA is the last capitalist world power, maybe Obama will be the last political messiah. Humanity must again learn the lesson propagated by the “International” in another historical constellation: “No higher being can save us, no Kaiser, nor tribune; Saving ourselves from misery, we ourselves alone must do.” The extinct pathos of this affirmation is different than the pathos of Obamania.

Published in Portuguese in Jornal Folha de S. Paulo

Published in German at <www.exit-online.org>

A Picture is Worth 150 Words

2008-11-02T19:26:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of MRZine, a word cloud of the 150 most common words in Capital, vol. 1. It's funny, I don't see "class struggle" or "dictatorship of the proletariat" in there anywhere. I guess I'll keep looking. Nothing about "distribution," either. What the hell? Labour, value, production, capital. Hmm.

Crisis

2008-09-25T09:03:00.000-07:00

Speculators, regulators, and treasury officials all gaze anxiously into their magic eight balls as a message becomes distinguishable: “Signs point to that we are fucked.” Banks fail, homes and pensions are lost, and as the economy spirals into what may be its terminal crisis, panic grips financiers and helots alike. Bush and McCain provide comic relief to the spectacle. The former, in a statement that will eventually be considered among his most absurd, opines publicly that “Democratic capitalism is the best system ever devised.” Devised? By whom? All for the best in this best of all possible worlds. McCain, on the other hand, continues his campaign by pretending not to, supposedly returning to Washington to deal with the financial crisis, even though he is the last person one would want behind the curtain, pulling the levers that have at any rate ceased to provide even the semblance of control over a system of world capital that has reached a velocity that threatens to send it off the tracks. Congress quibbles about moral hazard while those who comprehend the extent of the crisis, if not its nature, make desperate calls for bailout funds, hoping that enough liquidity will prime the pump of valorization. Some observers on the left (those who haven’t capitulated to pragmatism and joined forces with the lion tamers at the Fed) understand the rescue plan as socialism for wealthy speculators at the expense of the working class. While it is undoubtedly true that class relations will determine the “winners” and “losers” in the newly emerging configuration of global capital, this interpretation rests on the assumption that capitalism will survive the crisis, an outcome that is by no means certain. What seems clear is that governments have begun to roll the dice at the table where they once placed side bets, desperately wagering future GDP on the attempt to kickstart the motor of valorization that sits stalled on the tracks, staring into the headlights of the collapse bearing down on it. Government’s greatest hope may be to control the rate of contraction, or postpone it until preparations are completed for population control and suppression of dissent. Even now, U.S. army brigades are preparing for “Homeland tours,” training for crowd control by adapting techniques developed in Iraq, flouting the Posse Comitatus Act while touting repression as the “most noble mission.” Even if the rescue plan succeeds, it seems to merely prolong the definitive crisis of capital. The abolition of the labor/value doublet is more urgent then ever: if capital is allowed to reach dizzying new heights it will only increase the damage of its fall when the valorization of value comes up hard against its internal limits.

Oil and America

2008-06-22T17:48:00.000-07:00

While people suffer the effects of flooding and the increase in fuel and food costs, the oil industry continues to post record profits. In the past week, the oil industry has seen its fortunes improve further, owing to a couple of new developments. First, the oilmen have gained a toehold in Iraq, as the "government" there just approved service contracts for multinational energy firms. Second, the industry just made a big push to expand its drilling operations to the outer continental shelf.

Regarding Iraq, it seems that the Bush administration's goals are finally being realized. That is, its goals other than furnishing democracy (i.e. puppet governments) to the Middle East and ridding the world of the deadly threat of Hussein's famous (and ephemeral) weapons of mass destruction. The protesters who, amid the calls for war in early 2003, protested with signs reading "No blood for oil" and were ignored or derided at the time by the corporate media propaganda machine, now seem rather prescient. The general public, spoon-fed lies by the administration and its enablers in the media, perhaps should not be blamed for its ill-founded faith in government. After all, Colin Powell, always feted in the media, said that the intelligence showed that there were WMDs. Who were we to mistrust such a man of integrity? Now, however, the lack of anything resembling material improvements in the lives of Iraqis belies the supposedly good intentions that motivated the invasion. Democracy, in Iraq, looks a lot like a Hobbesian state of nature, and the WMDs were somehow spirited away to Syria or a backyard in middle America. For our amnesiac media, Al Qaeda in Iraq becomes the ex postfacto reason for the invasion, instead of its consequence. The public no longer has an excuse. Lied to repeatedly by the media and government, it has the obligation to be skeptical about everything. The public must realize that the oil laws being drafted in Iraq represent a step towards realizing the Bush administration's true goal: to denationalize the Iraqi economy and open up its natural resources to multinational corporations like the oil companies and Halliburton, which has profited greatly by the war. These are the true victors of the Iraq war, raping and pillaging at the expense of Iraqis, American soldiers, and the public, including future generations who must foot the bill.

Likewise, the oil companies have announced, through their spokespuppet George W. Bush, their intention to drill the hell out of the ocean floor by lifting the ban on platforms on the outer continental shelf (OCS). This is necessary, it is said, to combat rising oil prices. In this way, the oil corporations present themselves as the solution to problems to which they themselves contributed: high fuel costs, global warming, national security, etc. In this twisted logic, drilling on the OCS will lower the price of gasoline (even though it would take years for platforms to begin producing), and lower our dependence on foreign oil, which in turn improves national security. However, this makes less sense when one considers that our oil comes largely from countries that we control directly or by proxy. Gone are the days when OPEC could dictate fuel prices by manipulating production: now Saudi Arabia bows to demands to increase daily yield. What is causing the increased prices? Fingers point to India and China, whose accelerating economies demand more fuel, and whose emerging spending class aspires to Americans' ultra-consumerism and car-driven lifestyles (promoted, you guessed it, by the oil industry). There are signs of congressional resistance to OCS drilling, but the K Street gang will soon whip those pesky Senators into line. If not, the Bush administration can always find some intelligence reports that show that the OCS is sponsoring terror or is insurrectionary. The New York Times will print a series of editorials detailing the threat, the major networks will gravely express concern (Fox News will openly advocate the use of tactical nukes), and invasion will ensue. In the aftermath, once "reconstruction" begins, benchmarks will be established, one of which details that drilling must occur on the OCS before troop withdrawal can commence. This will address the need for oil in the long term, since it will take years for the platforms to come on-line. In the short term, Iran.

In November, the corporations will hold free and democratic elections to determine whether Mr. McCain or Mr. Obama will become the next overseer. Get out and vote, slaves.

Reading Capital with David Harvey

2008-06-17T17:24:00.000-07:00

David Harvey, renowned geographer and professor at CUNY, has begun posting videos of his class on Marx's Capital. These are definitely worth checking out. Harvey has been reading Capital for about 40 years and, unlike some other professors, is capable of giving a clear lecture. I invite you to dust off that copy of Capital, vol. 1 that has been sitting, unread, on your shelf. If you don't have a copy, obtain one by a method that doesn't involve value-producing labor, and begin your life of resistance to social domination.

The first two lectures are already online, so start reading! I've listened to the first and, while Harvey says some things I don't quite agree with, I can't think of a better (free) introduction to Marx's magnum opus. Besides, Harvey has read Capital a few more times than I have, so I'll prudently withhold my criticisms. Go read!

Captains of Stupidity and the Misuses of History

2008-05-18T19:00:00.000-07:00

Bush II's recent foray into the electoral race, speaking before the Knesset, has prompted me to stop referring to him with the usual profanities. Instead, I'll simply refer to him from now on as "Captain Stupid" (with a nod to Suicidal Tendencies). The Captain's argument is, essentially, that Iran is really, really bad (Axis of Evil) and that any willingness to establish diplomatic relations (such as that expressed by Mr.Obama) is a form of appeasement. The Captain draws the hackneyed analogy to Hitler, saying that History has taught us that appeasement inevitably fails to prevent really bad people from doing really bad things. It is ironic to receive "History" lessons from a man who has clumsily connected the "killing fields" of Cambodia and the rise of the Khmer Rouge to the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam, when in fact their presence in Cambodia was the key factor. Even if one accepts the Captain's first statement as factually correct, that Iran (its theocracy or Ahmadinejad) is bad and hell-bent on destroying Israel, it does not follow that the best way to prevent Iran from carrying out its evil plans is to continue to refuse to enter into diplomatic negotiations. Take the recent example of North Korea. Captain Stupid originally reversed the Clinton policy of maintaining diplomatic relations with that country. The result of the reversal was that North Korea completed a nuclear test and has created, according to intelligence estimates, at least six nuclear weapons. These developments led the Captain to resume the negotiations he had suspended. Is this appeasement? Returning to the Captain's comments on Iran, I'll simply reproduce some comments by Jack Beatty on WBUR's On Point radio program.

"President Bush has done as much for Iran as if he were a paid agent. Look at the record. He has got rid of the Taliban, he has got rid of Saddam Hussein, we have installed a Shiite government, Iran-friendly, in Baghdad, and he has with his, you know, Axis of Evil speech given the hardliners there another card to play. You could argue that all these things, if they've done anything, they have endangered Israel. So his policies, it seems to me, are the ones that have produced such good results for Iran. And as to his analogy, you know, all my life this Munich analogy has been paralyzing thought...all through Vietnam we heard that. It was wholly inapposite then and it was mischievous and policymakers, George Bundy , said he would never forget the terrible Spring of 1940, with Hitler marching into Paris. Well, applying that to Vietnam did nothing, did nothing but set us wrong, and it was invoked in the first Gulf War and it was invoked, repeatedly, through this Gulf War, and we simply have to retire that inapposite, mischievous, ahistorical analogy."

Given these facts, and given that the Captain finds "appeasement" unacceptable, the curious observer might wonder why indirect, strategic aid seems to be our government's de facto policy on Iran.

Captain Stupid's comments are, unfortunately, just one example of the misapplication of historical events to present political and economic realities. Our politicians constantly hark back to supposedly Utopian moments in American history to pinpoint just where we went wrong. The Republicans lament the betrayal of Reagan's legacy, and the Democrats mourn the New Deal, systematically rolled back since at least the early 70s. For these "traditional" Republicans, who distinguish themselves from the Captain's Neoconservative coterie, America's economic prosperity is mystically connected with its moral authority. The "Reagan Revolution" was a conservative reaction to the economic upheavals of the late 70s and was an attempt to roll back the clock to the "golden age" of the 1950s, when Americans enjoyed a relatively high standard of living. The Reagan Administration marked the increasing liberalization of market controls, justified by the idea that the welfare state created a kind of dependency syndrome and corrupted people's morals and undermined their self-sufficiency. The limitations of Reagan's economic policies didn't become fully apparent until he had left office, leaving Bush I to deal with the economic downturn. For this reason, many conservatives still look to Reagan's presidency as a kind of Utopian moment, ignoring the many repressive aspects of his two terms (suppression of progressive academics, draconian drug enforcement policies, support for murderous right-wing regimes, etc.). This Utopian view of the Reagan years, however, conveniently ignores that the "golden age" of the 50s, which Reagan purportedly recovered, was not itself a result of the kind of policies that Reagan implemented, but was a function of America's privileged position as the most advanced industrial economy after WWII devastated Europe's industrial centers, and of the State's management of distribution. Democrats point to this and claim that the New Deal policies were (and are) a better form of political economy, but they, too, are missing the point.

The observable fact that globally, regardless of the kind of political leadership (liberal, social-democratic, authoritarian, socialist), the last three and a half decades have seen the systematic dismantling of state-interventionist economies in favor of neoliberal, market-driven economies, points to an underlying dynamic, or evolution, of capitalism, that has unfolded independently of political ideologies. This indicates that the Left's political critique of the neoliberal order is insufficient, because even leftist governments have been powerless to stop the transition to a global, free-market economy. Those on the Right who celebrate the "triumph" of neoliberalism, recurring to a kind of economic Darwinism to demonstrate the supposed superiority of this latest incarnation of capitalism, are simply apologists for a status quo that constantly demonstrates its own inadequacy and inhumanity. Witness the constant warfare, the growth of marginalized populations, and the increasing number of ecological disasters that are the hallmarks of our era.

Lamentably, politicians and critics alike focus exclusively on these symptoms, or surface phenomena, without inquiring into what lies beneath these problems or into what causes these historical changes in the economy. They refuse to admit that Capital, the automatic subject, is the root cause, whose dynamic allows it to engender radical economic and social changes while retaining its own key features. They remain convinced that Marxism represents a kind of simplistic, economic determinism and that categories like politics, ideology, and culture are able to provide a more adequate critique of society. While here I have only briefly touched on the political, I hope to have pointed to its inadequacy, both as a standpoint for critique and as an agent of social change.

Panglossianism and the Erasure of Class Difference

2008-02-10T10:27:00.000-08:00

A recent editorial in the New York Times would have you believe that there isn't really much difference between the rich and the poor in America. Basing its conclusions on household consumption statistics, it finds that "the gap between rich and poor is far less than most assume, and that the abstract, income-based way in which we measure the so-called poverty rate no longer applies to our society". All for the best, in this best of all possible worlds.

These conclusions depend on a rather blatant manipulation of statistical data. Let's take a look at one of the article's more bizarre claims.

"The bottom fifth earned just $9,974, but spent nearly twice that — an average of $18,153 a year. How is that possible? A look at the far right-hand column of the consumption chart, labeled “financial flows,” shows why: those lower-income families have access to various sources of spending money that doesn’t fall under taxable income. These sources include portions of sales of property like homes and cars and securities that are not subject to capital gains taxes, insurance policies redeemed, or the drawing down of bank accounts. While some of these families are mired in poverty, many (the exact proportion is unclear) are headed by retirees and those temporarily between jobs, and thus their low income total doesn’t accurately reflect their long-term financial status."

What this means, on the article's own terms, is that so-called poor families aren't really poor, they just have access to non-taxable income or are in transition, temporarily skewing the statistics. That is, the statistics are reliable only insofar as they are interpreted correctly. The authors, with an act of hermeneutical violence and a bit of logical legerdemain, have actually based their conclusions on their own personal authority, while making them appear to rest on objective data.

Even if the data are to be trusted, one could draw quite different conclusions. Presumably, an impoverished household, mutatis mutandis, requires the same basic necessities for its maintenance as a rich household. After all, we live in the same communities (although some sections are gated), and have the same essential requirements for survival. Left out of the article's analysis, however, are many other factors that contribute to what is prosaically known as "quality of life". Education, for instance, is not mentioned. Savings, pensions, 401k plans, are not mentioned. Hours worked each day are not mentioned. Quality of child care is not mentioned. One could go on. More importantly, the bottom fifth of households are spending nearly twice as much as they earn. The article attributes this to a rather mystical self-generation of wealth: sale of homes and cars, redemption of insurance policies, etc. One wonders how much property the lowest fifth of income earners have to sell. Even if the authors' assumptions are legitimate, property sales among the lower class do not necessarily represent a positive development. Only an economist could see the liquidation of property as being intrinsically good. From the point of view of the seller (often forced by circumstances to sell at an unfavorable price), these transactions look and feel like dispossession. Besides, the gap between spending and income is more easily attributable to credit spending.

The low-wage earner, after spending interminable hours at work, has few pleasures other than those she obtains from creating at least the illusion that her labor has not been in vain. From television we know that successful people have "pimped rides" and luxurious "cribs". The typical laborer, in order to repair his damaged dignity, will try to replicate the trappings of wealth valorized by the culture industry. Meanwhile, expenditures for education, health care, and other important indices of "quality of life" are out of reach. The article myopically points out that the poor and the rich spend a similar amount on health care. The difference is obvious: the rich buy insurance while the poor pay for emergency room visits.

At a deeper level, the article reinforces the manufactured belief that shopping equals happiness. As long as we all have access to cheap cars and electronics, all is well in the world. (Laughably, the authors present the VCR as exhibit A in their defense of global capitalism; its price has dropped, so the globalization of free-market ideology must be beneficial. Who still has a VCR?) This ignores macroeconomic factors such as exploitative labor conditions in the less-developed countries that supply us with cheap goods and ecological factors like the environmental cost of ever-increasing consumption. More troubling is the intentionality of the article: to erase class difference vis-à-vis blind optimism. This echoes the neoliberal economic logic of this and previous administrations: what Bush I, before joining the Reagan administration, criticized as "voodoo economics". Our Papa Legba is Capital, and we are all his serviteurs.

What can the article's authors, one of whom is president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, presume to tell us about poverty? Once again, the New York Times reveals who its masters are. They are also our masters, unless we are to naïvely believe, as the article would have us do, that we are all sailing smoothly in the same boat.

Debate in a Box

2008-01-18T22:48:00.000-08:00

Dennis Kucinich was excluded from MSNBC's Nevada Democratic Candidates' Debate on January 15th. Now, this is not the first debate he has been excluded from, nor is he the only candidate to have been excluded from a debate, but it illustrates how narrow the primary debates have become, and the media's role in reducing the presidential field. Ostensibly, the reason for excluding Kucinich and other "fringe" candidates is that they have no hope of winning and must be thrust aside to make room for the more "serious" contenders (the level of seriousness increasing proportionally to the thickness of a candidate's wallet). Polls are used to assess a candidate's viability. As the race progresses, candidates deemed to be flagging are simply not invited or locked out of the debate venues. One might presume, however, that lack of television time might have something to do with a candidate's low poll numbers. Even in the early debates, it is painfully obvious who the media favorites are, since very few questions are posed to the "second-tier" candidates, strategically positioned at the edges of the stage. The defenders of this system of exclusion point out that the networks are simply responding to public preference. This is democracy in action, they say. In this strange form of democracy, an abstract "people" express their desires through the mediation of pollsters and network executives. An endless repetition of empty signifiers (like "change") takes the place of policy dialogue, and we are led to believe that the pageant-like spectacle of heavily made-up lawyers and career politicians is a reaffirmation of democracy.

Yet, in this "democratic" process, certain candidates are allowed to continue; others are not. There are obvious monetary concerns for the networks at play here: media corporations make millions from the campaigns. It's smart economic practice to ensure that the richest contenders (read "ad sponsors") remain in business. But there is something else at work. Take, for instance, MSNBC, the network that left Kucinich in the lurch. NBC's parent company is GE (whose subsidiary is Raytheon, a major defense contractor). The fact that Kucinich has promised to end all military operations in Iraq (and presumably elsewhere) if elected President couldn't lead a company like NBC/GE/Raytheon to keep him silent, could it? Those billions of dollars they get for building missiles and jet engines don't mean as much to the company as promoting free speech, do they?

Ironically, NBC argued (successfully) before the Nevada Supreme Court that being forced to include Kucinich was, in fact, a violation of its First Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution. As Kucinich has correctly pointed out, though, broadcast networks (operating under license on public airwaves) are regulated by the FCC to ensure the responsible use of these airwaves in the public interest. NBC's lawyers maintain that the matter concerning candidates' inclusion in debates falls under the purview of the FCC, and not that of the courts. In this, they may be correct, but this leaves the public no recourse, since the FCC, under Bush, has effectively become a deregulator in the interests of the communications industry. Don't let any of this bother you, though. NBC knows what you want, and it's not Dennis Kucinich or an end to war.

While Kucinich's policy stances seem strangely anachronistic (even from a radical standpoint) in our neoliberal, globalized era, and even though he may, indeed, stand no chance of winning, his exclusion serves to confine the debate to tightly defined, comfortable channels. Just how narrow the discourse has become can be seen by glancing at any nightly news program. When commentators aren't spouting banalities (for example, about whether a candidate's show of emotion is an indication of her ability or inability to be a strong leader), they fall into commonplaces about the high cost of "universal" health care (never mentioning universal war) or how Republican candidates must appeal to their "base", the evangelical right. CNN (supposedly a "liberal" network) has Glenn Beck wondering why John Edwards isn't wearing an ushanka with a red star. By these standards, Kucinich must be Lenin himself, even though he is clearly a long way from being a Marxist. The media's myopic tunnel-vision has a focus decidedly right-of-center.

(For more information, see Democracy Now!'s coverage of this issue).

Our America: Neoconservatism and Ur-Fascism

2007-12-29T10:09:00.001-08:00

Observing our presidential election cycle, vulgarly (yet aptly) known as the "horse race", one is struck by the preference, in the general public and in media, for the so-called populist candidates, along with a concomitant distaste for those candidates who are perceived as "professional politicians". These preferences are exploited in different ways by all the candidates, and (perhaps unconsciously) affect commentators on both the left and the right: a recent article in The Nation responded to Mike Huckabee's rising popularity by portraying him as a cynical political player, and one can almost taste the bile rising in Glenn Beck's throat whenever he is forced to pronounce Hillary Clinton's name. This proclivity for the "people's candidate" seems to be confirmed (however unreliably) by recent polls in Iowa that show a "surge" in Edwards's and Huckabee's respective campaigns. Ron Paul's unconventional campaign also seems to be gathering momentum, having achieved remarkable fundraising feats backed by so-called "net-roots" supporters. Reinforcing and perhaps confirming our penchant for populist rhetoric, less homey candidates like Clinton, Obama, Romney, et al. pour on the charm with belly laughs (Clinton), Oprah appearances and self-portrayals as a politico-cultural everyman (Obama), and hunting stories (Romney). Part of all this populism is natural enough and reflects the public's deep-rooted desire for genuine democracy, but when viewed in a broader context (beyond immediate concerns of "electability") it begins to acquire more sinister overtones.

Italian novelist and scholar Umberto Eco once wrote a short article outlining the basic features of Fascism. While we in the United States may not yet have descended into autocratic nationalism, many of its necessary conditions seem to exist in this country. It may be instructive to draw a few parallels between Fascist politics and the current American political climate, focusing on that pool of illustrious statesmen (and woman) who are vying for the presidency. Bracketing, for the moment, the Democratic candidates' intellectual hamartia, it is among the Republicans where one finds the most overt gestures toward what we might, with Eco, term Ur-Fascism. Let us take, in the first instance, Ron Paul. He has perhaps the broadest appeal among conservative voters dissatisfied with the Republican party, an appeal that also reaches into the more liberal, Libertarian portion of the electorate. Paul identifies himself as a "constitutionalist", fetishizing a two-centuries-old piece of parchment as the unassailable foundation of our democracy, created by our now completely mythologized Founding Fathers, who descended from the Sinai-like heights of the Philadelphia Convention to emplace a sacred and eternal "balance of powers" in the halls of government. This hypostasized consensus, the Constitution, serves much the same purpose for constitutionalists and "paleoconservatives" as the Koran does for fundamentalist Islamic sects –dubbed Islamofascist by the George W. Bush administration– like Salafism and Wahhabism: the basis for all law. This constitutional idolatry has the effect of positing a historical consensus as an unchanging model for the present, a situation that evokes Walter Benjamin's image of the Angel of History, propelled inexorably into the future while gazing fixedly on the past. The political ramifications of constitutionalism belie its promise. Since reliance on an idealized historical document necessitates a specialized sort of reader, the Judicial Branch of government has jettisoned its former reliance on English Common Law (that living body of precedent) in favor of a constitutional exegesis which increasingly and inevitably serves the Executive who appoints its Nine practitioners. What this all means is that the Constitution, initially created in an attempt to create public political consensus (whether all sectors of society were ever part of this consensus is another matter), has become the bridle by which the public is led by political elites in the Executive Branch. Hence the recent rollback of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education desegregation cases by a Court led by George W. Bush's appointee John Roberts, a decision that reflects the de facto class warfare of this President's economic policies. Returning to Ron Paul, it could be said that his "constitutionalism" meets Eco's first criterion of Ur-Fascism: the "cult of tradition", of universal truth and its interpretation, a cult that plays into the hands of elites, facilitating their concentration of political power.

Eco also points to irrationalism and the cult of "action for action's sake" as hallmarks of the Fascist zeitgeist. One needn't look far for signs of these. John Kerry's failure to unseat Bush in the 2004 election is partly attributable to Kerry's apparent indecisiveness on issues the media presented as weighty (e.g. the Iraq War; Homeland Security). While Kerry didn't do himself any favors, the "Swift Boat" propagandists successfully created dualing images –the Decider vs. the Waverer– out of public personae that could just as easily have been construed as the War Hero and the Draft Dodger. In all this, the idea that Kerry, with his more nuanced views on world politics, might make a better President was lost. A similar preference for "macho", decisive leaders was seen in the 2003 California recall election, which witnessed the meteoric political ascent of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who easily won despite alleged ties to Nazism and accusations of sexual abuse and misogyny. Presumably, to the public, an action hero appeared more capable of governing the Golden State than a pasty-white bureaucrat who received the lion's share of blame (deserved or not) for the California energy crisis. (This crisis was in fact caused in the main by the machinations of the Enron boys, themselves associates of both Bush and Schwarzenegger.) The flip-side to the kind of hero worship that benefited the "Governator" is an anti-intellectual tendency that has been a well-documented characteristic of the Bush II presidency. This anti-intellectualism goes hand-in-hand with populist appeal, in which intellectuals are portrayed as elitist and out-of-touch, and has the pernicious effect of limiting debate to well-defined channels and clichéd catchphrases, distributed ad nauseum by the media and consequently becoming part of "public" jargon. Hence, anyone who challenges the outlines of this "debate" is depicted as either mad or dangerous, or both. David Horowitz writes a book about the menace of radical academics, pundits remind us that "the time for debate has ended", and Bush II constantly excoriates Congress for delaying votes, that is to say, extending deliberations. The point is not to think but to do, "disagreement is treason". The spectre of Hitler is summoned to justify pre-emptive war, and William Kristol patiently explains that doing too little is more dangerous than doing too much. This all sounds rather Nietzschean; indeed, Nazism's overt appropriation of Nietzsche mirrors Facism's hidden debt to the philosopher, and an intellectual genealogy can be traced from Nietzsche to leading neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz.

Ron Paul's recent comments about Huckabee's "floating cross" campaign ad are appropriate, but should be taken with a grain of salt from a candidate who himself exhibits so many proto-fascist tendencies. In addition to his traditionalism, Paul's anti-immigrant stance places him squarely in the xenophobic tradition of Fascism. To be fair, nearly all the Republican candidates have embraced this stance, spearheaded by Tom Tancredo, the erstwhile candidate from my home state of Colorado. Tancredo's rhetoric has been particularly virulent, characterizing Miami as a third-world city, presumably because of its high percentage of Latinos. Perhaps Tancredo has forgotten that his own 6th Congressional District is adjacent to Colfax Avenue, Colorado's most notorious street. It is revealing that Eco's seventh feature of Fascism is a nationalism fomented by fears of international conspiracy. Lou Dobbs reports on Mexicans' desire to reconquer the Southwest, and Al Qaeda's ability to be simultaneously ubiquitous and intangible reminds one of the fantastic qualities attributed to International Jewry prior to the Holocaust.

So, we have our "clash of civilizations", our "culture wars", our demonic Muslim Other to trouble our democratic slumber, and our conservative candidates who are quite willing to echo these ideas in order to mobilize an equally phantasmagorical evangelical Christian constituency. Appeals to the public, viz. George W. Bush's constant evocation of the American people, are really just appeals to an abstract citizenry, one represented by a particular group, certainly not a majority, in what Eco terms "selective populism". The Republicans are outdoing themselves to pander to that "base", which purportedly stands in opposition to that other Base: Al Qaeda. Ron Paul disavows evolution, Mitt Romney cloaks his Mormonism in the language of evangelical Christianity, and Mike Huckabee brandishes his theological credentials, acquired at the reknowned Quachita Baptist University. Meanwhile, the Democrats have their own populist problems, positioning themselves to represent the "average American", whose supposed concerns are corruption in government, jobs, the Iraq War, health care reform, the environment, or education, depending on whose version of the average American is being peddled. These issues, which all appeal in one way or another to the fading "American Dream", also tend toward Fascism, which relies on its attractiveness to what Eco calls the "frustrated middle class".

None of this is to say that our next President will be a Fascist. That is still an unlikely scenario. After all, George W. Bush's bungling makes a Republican victory unlikely. We will be spared the corruption and militarism of a Guiliani regime, the corporate cronyism of a Thompson presidency, the oppressive social policies of a Romney/Huckabee cabal, and the upheavals of Paulite tax reforms. For now. Post election, we will of course be in a self-congratulatory mood, having assuaged our collective guilt vis-à-vis segregation and sexism by designating either the woman or the slave (as an acquaintance of mine crudely puts it) as our next President. Meanwhile, beneath the progressive veneer of a Clinton (or Clintonesque) centrist coalition, more of the same, as we slouch towards an increasingly authoritative executive, broader global military ventures, and greater corporate influence in government (one should remember that the Bill Clinton presidency, despite its populist self-presentation, brought us NAFTA, and prosecuted the Iraq War by the less obvious method of punitive economic sanctions). These are of course symptoms of deeper problems, perhaps inherent in our particular republican (n.b. lower case) formation, perhaps endemic to modernity itself. A search for deeper causes, however, is always inhibited by image-driven campaigns, our culture of instant gratification, our (post)modern superficiality, in sum, what Guy Debord called the Society of the Spectacle. Fascism is not inevitable, but (alluding to those deeper problems I mentioned) it lurks outside our consciousness like the proverbial barbarian at the gates. And I suspect it may have already entered the city under the guise of a protector.