Prime Minister George Papandreou has declared the government’s intention of—among other things—reducing the budget deficit to the Maastricht limit of 3 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) within four years. The budget provides for a new deficit of 9.1 percent of GDP in contrast to 12.7 this year.

The World Bank considers Yemen "one of the most water-scarce countries in the world" where only 125 cubic meters of water are available yearly per capita compared to the world average of 2,500 cubic meters. Just 46 percent of Yemen's rural population has direct access to an adequate water supply and the number is only slighter better in cities, according to the German Development Service (GDS), which is working with the Yemeni government to improve water management.

This was perhaps the first time that a senior US official has openly flagged China as the US's rival in the energy politics of Central Asia. US experts usually have focused attention on Russian dominance of the region's energy scene and worked for diminishing the Russian presence in the post-Soviet space by canvassing support for Trans-Caspian projects that bypassed Russian territory. In fact, some American experts on the region even argued that China was a potential US ally for isolating Russia.
(...)
China has the huge advantage of financial muscle. It can simply outspend the US or European countries. Short of stoking the fires of militancy and ethnic unrest in Xinjiang, the US may have run out of options to disrupt China's emerging leadership in Central Asia. On its part, Beijing knows that the stability of Xinjiang is crucial for China's Central Asia policy - and vice versa. The two have become inextricably linked in the Chinese regional strategy. Beijing knows that "foreign devils on the Silk Road" - militant groups with foreign backers - can harass China by blowing up long stretches of the pipelines which are impractical for Beijing to protect in Xinjiang's vast mountains and deserts. That is one solid reason why Beijing has not been taken in by the US overtures for cooperation in Afghanistan nor is enamored by Obama's standing invitation to step into South Asia as the arbiter of peace and regional security.

There is something fundamentally wrong with Pakistan’s constitutional structure regarding distribution of taxation powers between the federation and the federating units. In all major federations — the US, Canada, and India — the federating units have the exclusive right to levy tax on goods and services transacted within their geographical boundaries. In Pakistan, the Constituent Assembly took away the right of levying sales tax on goods from provinces in 1948. In the seventh award as well all the four provinces conceded that forthcoming Value Added Tax (VAT) on goods will be levied by the Centre.

The United Auto Workers' (UAW) embrace of the Obama administration's proposal to restructure General Motors and Chrysler has led to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs, the elimination of union work rules built up over decades, big cuts in benefits and a six-year ban on strikes. At Ford, workers recently voted to reject those concessions. But the UAW, once the pacesetter for a steadily rising standard of living for U.S. workers in the decades following the Second World War, is still collaborating with employers in a race to the bottom.

If the paradox of military engagement in such a conflict is that the more you fight the more you lose, then the paradox of political engagement is that the more you rule the weaker the native component of the government becomes, and the more likely it is to collapse when you leave, as the South Vietnamese government did in 1975.

Afghan Ambassador to the US Said T Jawad on Tuesday met the Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Velez to expand security and development cooperation between the two countries.

It was not entirely surprising. South Punjab is a region mired in poverty and underdevelopment. There are few job prospects for the youth. While the government has built airports and a few hospitals, these projects are symbolic and barely meet the needs of the area. It’s in areas like this, amid economic stagnation and hopelessness, that religious extremists find fertile ground to plant and spread their ideology.

herbert marcuse, one-dimensional man (1964)

(390): speaking of freedom of speech, etc. -- "the achievement cancels the premises"

(390): "new modes of realization are needed... such new modes can be indicated only in negative terms because they would amount to the negation of the prevailing modes. thus economic freedom would mean freedom from the economy... political freedom would mean liberation of the individuals from politics over which they have no effective control..."

(391): yes -- "the unrealistic sound of these propositions is indicative, not of their utopian character, but of the strength of the forces which prevent their realization."

(391): true vs. false needs

(391): "the distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation--liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable--while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society."

(392): "the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy, it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls..."

(392): "it is desublimation practiced from a 'position of strength' on the part of society, which can afford to grant more than before because its interest have become the innermost drives of its citizens..."

(394): this is more-or-less the main point, the integration of desire into reproduction--"technical progress and more comfortable living permit the systematic inclusion of libidinal components into the realm of commodity production and exchange. but no matter how controlled the mobilization of instinctual energy may be... no matter how much it may serve as a prop for the status quo -- it is also gratifying to the managed individuals, jsut as racing the outboard motor..."

(394): speaking of the "mobilization and administration of libido [which] may account for much of the voluntary compliance, the absence of terror, the pre-established harmony between individual needs and socially-required desires, goals, and aspirations.'

(395): "to be sure, there is pervasive unhappiness... this unhappiness lends itself easily to political mobilization; without room for conscious development, it may become the instinctual reservoir for a new fascist way of life and death..."

(396): possibility of total, controlled desublimation: "it seems that society's growing capacity to manipulate technical progress also increases its capacity to manipulate and control this instinct... then social cohesion would be strengthened at the deepes instinctual roots. the supreme reisk, and even the fact of war would meet... with instinctual approval on the part of the victims. here too, we would have controlled desublimation."

(396): the ascent of the happy consciousness--"the belief that the real is rational, and that the established system... delivers the goods... the people are led to find in the productive apparatus the effective agent of thought and action to which their personal thought and action can and must be surrendered..."

(396): "one man can give the signal that liquidates hundreds and thousands of people, then declare himself free from all pangs of conscience, and live happily ever after..."

(397): "those who identify themselves with the whole, who are installed as the leaders and defenders of the whole can make mistakes, but they cannot do wrong--they are not guilty..."

the culture industry: enlightenment as mass deception (1944)

(385): "under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through..."

(386): "movies and radio no longer pretend to be art. the truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce."

(386): "no mention is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. a technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. it is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself."

(386): "the step from the telephone to the radio has clearly distinguished the roles. the former stillallowed the subscriber to play the role of subject, and was liberal. the latter is democratic: it turns all participants into listerners and authoritatively subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same."

(386): interesting, and possibly problematic--"the attitude of the public, which ostensibly and actually favors the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse for it."

(387): "the whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry."

(387): brilliant--"the entertainments manufacturers know what their products will be consumed with alertness even when the customer is distraught, for each of them is a model of the huge economic machinery which has always sustained the masses, whether at work or t leisure -- which is akin to work."

(387): "this promise held out by the work of art that it will create truth by lending new shape to the conventional social forms is as necessary as it is hypocritical."

(388): "to speak of culture was always contrary to culture. culture as a common denominator already contains in embryo that schematization and process of cataloging and classification which bring culture within the sphere of adminstration."

(388): yes--"in front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is finally set no more than a commendation of the depressing everyday world it sought to escape... the secret of aesthetic sublimation is its representation of fulfillment as a broken promise."

(389): brilliant--"but the original affinity of business and amusment is shown in the latter's specific significance: to defend society. to be pleased means to say Yes. it is possible only by insulation from the totality of the social process... Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, bur from the last remaining thought of resistance. the liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and from negation."

(389): but this verges on indulging what is worst in the intellectual--"even when the public does--exceptionally--rebel against the pleasure industry, all it can muster is that feeble resistance which that very industry has inculcated in it."

(389): "personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions. the triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them."

the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (1936)

(363): "the transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas of culture the changi n the conditions of production..." what follows are "theses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production..."

(365): "the situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated."

(365-366): the notion of "aura," or what is lost in the reproduction process...

(367): key--"for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. to an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility.... but the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice--politics."

(368): "by the absolute emphasis on its exhibition value the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental."

(368): "when the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever. the resulting change in the function of art transcended the perspective of the century; for a long time it even escaped that of the twentieth century, which experienced the development of the film."

(370): "man has to operate ith his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura."

(371): "so long as the movie-makers' capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today's film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art."

(372): "the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character."

(373): important--"magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. the painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant thatn that of the paitner, since it offers, precisely because of the theoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. and that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art."

(373): "mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. the reactionary attitude toward a picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a chaplin movie. the progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert."

(374): "painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience, as it was possible for architecture at all times, for the epic poem in the past, and for the movie today.... thus the same public which responds in a progressive manner toward a grotesque film is bound to respond in a reactionary manner to surrealism."

(375): "then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder..." (!)

(375-376): the film and dadaism

(376-377): "clearly, this [referring to the haughty critique of film] is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. that is a commonplace. the question remains whether it provides a platform for the analysis of the film. a closer look is needed here."

(377): "since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. today it does so in the film. reception is in a state of distraction... the film makes the cult value recede into the background not only bu putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at ht movies this position requires no attention. the public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one."

(378): important--"the growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right but instead a chance ot express themselves."

(378): "all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war."

(378): the Futurist Manifesto

(378): "the horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in th e process of production--in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets."

(378): "Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches."

(379): "Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art."

traditional and critical theory, max horkheimer (1937)

(347-348): tracing the rise of theory as the science of society ("all this adds upt o a pattern which is, outwardly, much like the rest of life in a society dominated by industrial production techniques...")

(348-349): weber's attempt, too, he is arguing, is not substantively different--it is also "traditional theory"

(349): key--"beyond doubt, such work is a moment in the continuous transformation and development of the material foundations of that society. but the conception of theory was absolutized, as though it were grounded in the inner nature of knowledge as such..., and thus it became a reified, ideological category."

(349): "the traditional idea of theory is based on scientific activity as carried on within the division of labor at a particular stage in the latter's development... in this view of theroy, theferfore, the real social function of science is not made manifest; it speaks not of what theory means in human life, but only of what it means in the isolated sphere in which for historical reasons it comes into existence... "

(350): seems to want to emphasize the perpetual situatedness of theory -- it is always unfolding in concrete historical and social contexts, but cannot see that itself

(350): towards ideology--"the world which is given to the individual and which he must accept and take into account is, in its present and continuing form, a product of the activity of society as a whole. the objects we perceive in our surroundings... bear the mark of having been worked on by man. it is not only in clothing and appearence, in outward form and emotional make-up that men are the product of history."

(350): "to the extent then that the facts which the individual and his theory encounter are socially produced, there must be rationality in them, even if in a restricted sense."

(351): reading Kant's honest contradictions as a product of the general contradiction of bourgeois society: "the collaboration of men in society is the mode of existence which reason urges upon them and so they do apply their powers and thus confirm their own rationality. But at the same time their work and its results are alienated from them, and the whole process with all its waste of work-power and human life, and with its wars and all its senseless wretchedness, seems to be an unchangeable force of nature, a fate beyond man's control..."

(352): key passage--"the two-sided character of the social totality in its present form becomes, for men who adopt the critical attitude, a conscious opposition... in recognizing the present form of economy and the whole culture it generates to be the product of human work..., these men identify themselves with this totality and conceive it as will and reason. it is their own world. at the same time, however, the experience the fact that society is comparable to nonhuman natural processes, to pure mechanisms, because cultural forms which are supported by war and oppression are not the creations of a unified, self-conscious will. that world is not their own but the world of capital."

(352): "...at the same time they consider it rank dishonesty simply to accept the interpretation; the critical acceptance of the categories which rule social life contains simultaneously their condemnation..."

(352): "reason cannot become transparent to itself as long as men act as members of an organism which lacks reason..."

(353): a bit like what Weber was stressing--theory must take its contingency, and the contingency of its larger context, as its starting-point. "for men of the critical mind, the facts, as they emerge from the work of society, are not extrinsic in the same degree as they are for the savant or for members of other professions..."

(353): "if activity governed by reason is proper to man, then existent social practice, which forms the individual's life down to its least details, is inhuman, and this inhumanity affects everything that goes on in the society."

(354): important, and true--it's not to be simply subordinate to what the 'proletariat' thinks, but rather ought to facilitate the making of that true, universal subject: "...it must be added that even the situation of the proletariat is, in this society, no guarantee of correct knowledge... the intellectual is satisfied to proclaim with reverent admiration the creative strength of the proletariat and finds satisfaction in adapting himself to it and in canonizing it. he fails to see that such an evasion of theoretical effort (which the passivcity of his own thinking spares him) and of temporary opposition to the masses (which active theoretical effort on his part might force upon him) only makes the masses blinder and weaker than they need be. his own thinking should in fact be a critical, promotive factor in the development of the masses..."

(355): just like the ideas bourgeoisie can't really tell you what's going on, it is also the case that a "systematic presentation of the contents of proletarian consciousness cannot provide a true picture of proletarian existence and interests..." instead, one must pursue a "dynamic unity" with the oppressed class.

(355): the necessary 'obstinacy' of fantasy

(355-356): critical theory begins with capital, in effect

(356-357): yes--"but the critical theory of society is, in its totality, the unfolding of a single existential judgment... the theory says that the basis form of the... commodity economy on which modern history rests contains in itself the internatl and external tensions of the modern era... after an enormous extension of human control over nature, it finally hinders further development and drives humanity into a new barbarism..."

(357): again, the object of theory cannot and must not exist outside of us: "a consciously critical attitude, however, is part of the development of society: the constructing of the course of history as the necessary product of an economic mechanism simultaneously contains both a protest against this order of things, a protest generated by the order itself, and the idea of self-determination for the human race, that is the idea of a state of affairs in which man's actions no longer flow from a mechanism but from his own dcsision... if we think here of the object of the theory in separation from the theory, we falsify it and fall into quietism or conformism."

(358): as such, a different understanding of 'necessity'--"both elements in this concept of necessity--the power of nature and the weakness of society--are interconnected and are based on the experienced effort of man to emancipate himself from coercion by nature and from those forms of social life... which have become a straitjacket for him..."

(358): stability of critical theory owing to the endurance of class society

(359-360): speaking of 'monopoly capitalism'--"the end reslut of the process is a society dominated no longer by independent owners but by cliques of industrial and political leaders." liberalism is dead--"the individual no longer has any ideas of his own. the content of mass belief, in which no one really believes, is an immediate product of the ruling economic and political bureaucracies..."

(360): "it is possible for the consciousness of every social stratum today to be limited and corrupted by ideology, however much, for its circumstances, it may be bent on truth... the critical theory has no specific influence on its side, except concern for the abolition of social injustice. this negative formulation, if we wish to express it abstractly, is the materialist content of the idealist concept of reason..."

ideology and utopia, karl mannheim (1929)

(336):two distinct and separable meanings of the term 'ideology'

1. the particular-- when "we are sceptical of the ideas and representations advanced by our opponent"
2. the total-"the ideology of an age or of a concrete historico-social group..."

(337): some distinctions between the two

• particular calls into question specific assertions; total calls into question Weltanschauung
• particular implies, still, a shared thought-system (psychological); total denotes an opposite system of beliefs (noological, or theoretical)
• particular is pscyhological and individual, total more structural and functional (and social)

(338): critical--"...conditioned by the same social situation, they are subject to the same illusions. if we confine our observations to the mental processes which take place in the individual..., we shall never grasp in its totality the structure of the intellectual world belonging to a social group in a given historical situation. although this mental world as a whole could never come into existence without the experiences and productive responses of the different individuals, its inner structure is not to be found in a mere integration of these individual experiences. thd individual members of the working class, for instance, do not experience all the elements of an outlook which could be called the proletarian Weltanschaung..."

(338): "the aim of the analysis on this level is the recontstruction of the systematic theoretical basis underlying the single judgments of the individual."

(339): the problem of false consciousness--"compelled by the dialectical processes of thought, it is necessary to concentrate our attention with greater intensity upon the task of determining which of all the ideas current are really valid in a given situation..." [even as we have conceded, entirely, the premise that all ideas are socially and historically determined. the justification, he seems to be saying, will recall pragmatism]

(339): interesting--"an ethical attitude is invalid if it is oriented with reference to norms, with which action in a given historical setting, even with the best of intentions, cannot comply. it is invalid then when the unethical action of the individual can no longer be conceived as due to his own personal transgression, but must be attributed rather to the compulsion of an erroneously founded set of moral axioms... a theory then is wrong if in a given practical situation it uses concepts and categories which, if taken seriously, would prevent man from adjusting himself at that historical stage..." [notion of 'adjustment' seems particularly important, here--examples given include lending without interest]

(340): a further form of 'ideological distortion', he's arguing, come when one employs "ideology as a form of knowledge[which] is no longer adequate for comprehending the actual world..."

(340): important--but distinction between this kind of incongruity, and the incogruity of utopian ideology -- which is "oriented towards objects which do not exist in the actual situation... [and which] when they pass over into conduct, tend to shatter... the order of things prevailing at that time"

(341): utopias, of course, can get integrated into the establishment ideology, once purged of revolutionary implications [heaven]

(341-342): 'existence' as a 'concretely-operating order', for the sociologist

(342): very true--the importance of contradictory character of prevailing 'order of things' and attendant ideology--"every 'actually operating' order of life is at the same time enmehsed by conceptions which are to be designated as 'transcendent' or 'unreal'. part of this, he's arguing, is the fact that "living consistently... in a society which is not organized on the same principle is impossible."

(343): this is the key distinction between 'ideologies' and 'utopia'--the latter is committed to transformative political practice. and something revolutionary is invariably deemed utopian by the powers-that-be (always meant, then, "in the relative sense").

(344): "by calling everything utopian that goes beyond the present existing order, one sets at rest the anxiety that might arise from the relative utopias that are realizable in another order."

(344): "only in utopia and revolution is there true life, the institutional order is always only the evil residue which remains from ebbing utopias and revolutions. hence, the road of history leads from one topia over a utopia to the next topia..."

(345): key, though, that this not be abstractly formulated--"it is our intention not to establish purely abstractly...some sort of arbitrary relationship between existence and utopia, but rather if possible to do justice to the concrete fullness of the historical and social transformations of utopia in a given period."

(345): sounds quite orthodox--"the existing order gives birth to utopias which in turn break the bounds of the existing order, leaving it free to develop in the direction of the next order of existence." [only this denotes a never-ending process--'utopias are often only premature truths']

(346): well-put: "it is always the dominant group which is in full accord with the existing order that determines what is to be regarded as utopian, while the ascendant group which is in conflict with things as they are is the one that determines what is regarded as ideological." [caveat that same group/project can contain both utopian and ideological elements--bourgoisie and freedom]

(346): for historical study, realization is the criteria that determines what was ideology and what was utopia.

lenin, socialism and religion (1905)

[ah...] The proletariat of today takes the side of socialism, which enlists science in the battle against the fog of religion, and frees the workers from their belief in life after death by welding them together to fight in the present for a better life on earth.
(...) We demand that religion be held a private affair so far as the state is concerned. But by no means can we consider religion a private affair so far as our Party is concerned. Religion must be of no concern to the state, and religious societies must have no connection with governmental authority. Everyone must be absolutely free to profess any religion he pleases, or no religion whatever, i.e., to be an atheist, which every socialist is, as a rule. Discrimination among citizens on account of their religious convictions is wholly intolerable. Even the bare mention of a citizen’s religion in official documents should unquestionably be eliminated. No subsidies should be granted to the established church nor state allowances made to ecclesiastical and religious societies... Complete separation of Church and State is what the socialist proletariat demands of the modern state and the modern church.
(...) Even they are joining in the demand for freedom, are protesting against bureaucratic practices and officialism, against the spying for the police imposed on the “servants of God”. We socialists must lend this movement our support, carrying the demands of honest and sincere members of the clergy to their conclusion, making them stick to their words about freedom, demanding that they should resolutely break all ties between religion and the police. Either you are sincere, in which case you must stand for the complete separation of Church and State and of School and Church, for religion to be declared wholly and absolutely a private affair. Or you do not accept these consistent demands for freedom, in which case you evidently are still held captive by the traditions of the inquisition...
(...) So far as the party of the socialist proletariat is concerned, religion is not a private affair. Our Party is an association of class-conscious, advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class. Such an association cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs. We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able to combat the religious fog with purely ideo logical and solely ideological weapons, by means of our press and by word of mouth. But we founded our association, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, precisely for such a struggle against every religious bamboozling of the workers. And to us the ideological struggle is not a private affair, but the affair of the whole Party, of the whole proletariat.
(...) If that is so, why do we not declare in our Programme that we are atheists? Why do we not forbid Christians and other believers in God to join our Party? The answer to this question will serve to explain the very important difference in the way the question of religion is presented by the bourgeois democrats and the Social-Democrats. Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook. An explanation of our Programme, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog.
(...) [absolutely right] But under no circumstances ought we to fall into the error of posing the religious question in an abstract, idealistic fashion, as an “intellectual” question unconnected with the class struggle, as is not infrequently done by the radical-democrats from among the bourgeoisie. It would be stupid to think that, in a society based on the endless oppression and coarsening of the worker masses, religious prejudices could be dispelled by purely propaganda methods. It would be bourgeois narrow-mindedness to forget that the yoke of religion that weighs upon mankind is merely a product and reflection of the economic yoke within society. No number of pamphlets and no amount of preaching can enlighten the proletariat, if it is not enlightened by its own struggle against the dark forces of capitalism. Unity in this really revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of a paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven.

luxemburg, socialism and the churches (1905)

It is true that we do meet churchmen of another kind. There exist some who are full of goodness and pity and who do not seek gain; these are always ready to help the poor. But we must admit these are indeed uncommon and that they can be regarded in the same way as white blackbirds. The majority of priests, with beaming faces, bow and scrape to the rich and powerful, silently pardoning them for every depravity, every iniquity. With the workers the clergy behave quite otherwise: they think only of squeezing them pity; in harsh sermons they condemn the “covetess” of the workers when these latter do no more than defend themselves against the wrongs of capitalism.
(...) The Social-Democrats want to bring about the state of “communism”; that is chiefly what the clergy have against them. First of all, it is striking to notice that the priests of today who fight against “Communism” condemn in reality first Christian Apostles. For these latter were nothing else than ardent communists.
(...) Further, to make the people forget their hardships it offered them free circus shows. Unlike the proletariat of our time, which maintains the whole of society by its labours, the enormous proletariat of Rome existed on charity.
(...) In this crumbling society, where there existed no way out of their tragic situation for the people, no hope of a better life, the wretched turned to Heaven to seek salvation there. The Christian religion appeared to these unhappy beings as a life-belt, a consolation and an encouragement, and became, right from the beginning, the religion of the Roman proletarians. In conformity with the material position of the men belonging to this class, the first Christians put forward the demand for property in common - communism. What could be more natural?
(...) [institutionalization] In the beginning, when the number of Christians was small, the clergy did not exist in the proper sense of the word. The faithful, who formed an independent religious community, united together in each city. They elected a member responsible for conducting the service of God and carrying out the religious rites. Every Christian could become the bishop or prelate. These functions were elective, subject to recall, honorary and carried no power other than that which the community gave of its own free will.^[9] In proportion as the number of the faithful increased and the communities became more numerous and richer, to run the business of the community and to hold office became an occupation which demanded a great deal of time and full concentration. As the office-bearers could not carry out these tasks at the same time as following their private employment, the custom grew up of electing from among the members of the community, an ecclesiastic who was exclusively entrusted with these functions. Therefore, these employees of the community had to be paid for their exclusive devotion to its affairs. Thus there formed within the Church a new order of employees of the Church, which separated itself from the main body of the faithful, the clergy. Parallel with the inequality between rich and poor, there arose another inequality, that between the clergy and the people. The ecclesiastics, at first elected among equals with a view to performing a temporary function raised themselves to form a caste which ruled over the people... . From the 4th Century, the ecclesiastics of the communities met together in Councils. The first council took place at Nicaea in 325. In this way there was formed the clergy, an order apart and separated from the people. The bishops of the stronger and richer communities took the lead at the Councils. That is why the Bishop of Rome soon placed himself at the head of the whole of Christianity and became the Pope. Thus an abyss separated the clergy, divided up in the hierarchy, from the people. At the same time, the economic relations between the people and the clergy underwent a great change. the clergy and running the Church. Before the formation of this order, all that the rich members of the Church offered to the common property belonged to the poor people. Afterwards, a great part of the funds was spent on paying
(...) From the 6th century, the clergy imposed a special tax, the tithe (tenth part of the crops), which had to be paid to the Church.
(...) Ecclesiastical positions therefore offered the best opportunities to obtain large revenue. Each ecclesiastic disposed of the property of the Church as if it were his own and largely endowed from it his relatives, sons and grandsons. By this means the goods of the Church were pillaged and disappeared into the hands of the families of the clergy. For that reason, the Popes declared themselves to be the sovereign proprietors of the fortunes of the Church and ordained the celibacy of the clergy, in order to keep it intact and to prevent their patrimony from being dispersed. Celibacy was decreed in the 11th Century, but it was not put into practice until the 13th Century, in view of the opposition of the clergy.
(...) When the country and town proletariat rose up against oppression and serfdom, it found in the clergy a ferocious opponent. It is also true even within the Church itself there existed two classes: the higher clergy who engulfed all the wealth and the great mass of the country parsons whose modest livings brought in no more than 500 francs to 2,000 francs a year. Therefore this unprivileged class revolted against the superior clergy and in 1789, during the Great Revolution, it joined up with the people to fight against the power of the lay and ecclesiastical nobility.
(...) In fact the cloisters profited considerably from this benevolence; having the reputation of opening their doors to the poor, they received large gifts and legacies from the rich and powerful. With the appearance of capitalism and production for exchange, every object acquired a price and became exchangeable. At this moment the convents, the houses of the lords, and the ecclesiastics ceased their benefactions. The people found no refuge anywhere. Here is one reason, among others, why at the beginning of capitalism, in the 18th Century, when the workers were not yet organised to defend their interests, there appeared poverty so appalling that humanity seemed to have gone back to the days of the decades of the Roman Empire. But while the Catholic Church in former times undertook to bring help to the Roman proletariat by the preaching of communism, equality and fraternity, in the capitalist period it acted in a wholly different fashion. It sought above all to profit from the poverty of the people; to put cheap labour to work. The convents became literally hells of capitalist exploitation, all the worse because they took in the labour of women and children. The law case against the Convent of the Good Shepherd in France in 1903 gave a resounding example of these abuses. Little girls, 12, 10 and 9 years old were compelled to work in abominable conditions, without rest, ruining their eyes and their health, and were badly nourished and subjected to prison discipline.
(...) To sum up, it is the labour of millions of exploited people, which assures the existence of the Church, the government, and the capitalist class. The statistics concerning the revenue of the Church in Austria give an idea of the considerable wealth of the Church, which was formerly the refuge of the poor. Five years ago (that is, in 1900) its annual revenues amounted to 60 million crowns, and its expenditure did not exceed 35 million. Thus, in the course of a single year, it “put aside” 25 million – at the cost of the sweat and blood shed by the workers.
(...) Your cruelties and your calumnies in former times could not prevent the victory of the Christian idea, the idea which you have sacrificed to the Golden Calf; today your efforts will raise no obstacle to the coming of Socialism. Today it is you, in your lies and your teachings, who are pagans, and it is we who bring to the poor, to the exploited the tidings of fraternity and equality. It is we who are marching to the conquest of the world as he did formerly who proclaimed that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.
(...)[the key in understanding this entire text, though, is that the 'priest' represents a very specific representative of institutionalized christianity, and not religion writ large] And here is the answer to all the attacks of the clergy: the Social-Democracy in no way fights against religious beliefs. On the contrary, it demands complete freedom of conscience for every individual and the widest possible toleration for every faith and every opinion. But, from the moment when the priests use the pulpit as a means of political struggle against the working classes, the workers must fight against the enemies of their rights and their liberation. For he who defends the exploiters and who helps to prolong this present regime of misery, he is the mortal enemy of the proletariat, whether he be in a cassock or in the uniform of the police.

gilbert achcar, religion and politics today from a marxian perspective (socialist register 2006)

(60): "it is this 'elective affinity' between Christianity in its charismatic phase and a communistic social programme that explains the ability of a Thomas Muntzer in the early 16^th century to formulate in Christian terms a programme that Friedrich Engels described, in 1850, as an 'anticipation of communism by fantasty.'" [this makes no analytical sense, whatsoever. The implication here, then, is that other traditions would not have made this 'programme' available to Muntzer (who, remember, was a radical cleric that justified Peasant rebellions that were already underway; not a leader of the rebellions themselves). Is that really a Marxist claim? The notion that more than a thousand years later, the ideology he mobilized still bore the imprint of its origins? It seems to me that this fundamentally misunderstands ideology. millenarian peasant revolts abound through history--the fact of their millenarianism is hardly enabled or explained by Christianity (throughout chinese history, most notably)]

(64): "it is this same 'elective affinity' between original Christianity and communistic utopianism that explains why the worldwide wave of leftwing political radicalization that started in the 1960s... could partly take on a Christian dimension..." [very odd. (1) surely you will admit the fact that leftwing demands can be expressed through alternative religious registers, a la shi'ism? (2) if the claim is that this gets co-opted, then this claim obviously applies to christianity as an ideology of left-wing latin american movements, a la nicaragua? i just cant' make sense of the argument]

(64-65): pointing out facts that seem to explain the necessarily co-opted character of islam (its integration into juridical/political networks; the fact it wasn't touched by colonial powers; the fact it wasn't challenged by rebellions against western domination (really? nasser?); etc., etc.); the whole discussion is thoroughly ungrounded and unconvincing. and in fact it suggests an extraordinarily stagnant conception of the middle east that makes the non-islamic into an aberration, which is quite confusing, since he would not want to say that otherwise.

(66): the central problem of the article is that he compares christianity's best-foot forward, to islam's worst-foot forward, in essence. why not reverse the situation, compare shariati (or somebody else, for goodness' sake) to ratzinger, or something? would we still be screeching about 'elective affinities', then? the notion that the 'fundamentalist' affinity of the two traditions in his model (muntzer and islamic 'fundamentalism' writ large) can tell us anything, at all, and that the notion of stripping away accumulated superfluity is unique to these two, is nonsense of the highest order.

(66): "by no stretch of the imagination..." he wants to argue, could islamic fundamentalists want to return us to a society where class differences no longer exist. fine, but islamic fundamentalists do not, at all, monopolize the islamist tradition; you could very easily imagine many islamic thinkers that would mobilize islam to make that case. what's more, if you asked ratzinger to go to the basics, you think that would give us communism? this is just so nonsensical.

in sum, really: the idea that his notion of 'elective affinity' has any analytical purchase seems a classic example of assuming that ideologies can do work outside of material context and practice. it is categorically not marxist.

david mcnally, from financial crisis to world slump (2009)

(37): feedback loops, of course: "So, if the first phase of the global crisis centred on the financial sector, with a stunning series of bank-collapses, the second phase is concentrated in manufacturing, with a wave of failures, bailouts and massive downsizing ofnon-financial corporations. But downsizing and restructuring will, in turn, trigger big drops in global demand (as laid-off workers cut back consumption and corporate demand retrenches), which, in turn, will hit firms in services (such as hotels and business assistance) and hammer the current-account balances and financial systems of scores of nation-states, sparking yet further banking crises."

(38): this fact will be important to the larger indictment, of course: "Meanwhile, East Asia, which was the heart of the neoliberal wave of expansion (1983–2007), to be discussed below, is now the centre of the overaccumulation storm."

(38-39): China: "The centre of the wave of accumulation of the past twenty-fi ve years,
as global production-chains ran through its manufacturing base, China is now at the nexus of the overaccumulation-crisis. While predictions that Chinese industry is running at only 50 per cent of capacity may be extreme, there can be little doubt that huge numbers of factories have closed, while many are operating at dramatically reduced levels... Trying to manage an economy that needs economic growth rates of eight per cent a year just to absorb the massive fl ows of rural migrants into industrial centres, Chinese offi cials now describe the still worsening employment situation as ‘grim’ and worry openly about social unrest."

(39): the spectre of deflation: "Overaccumulation, asset-defl ation and price-cutting now threaten a downward spiral in prices and profi ts that would spell a seriously prolonged global slump."

(40): the size of the bailout, globally (see FN 18): "And we are very far from the endpoint. Despite a stunning series of bailouts of the banking system in the Global North approaching $20 trillion, or 30 per cent of world GDP, the international fi nancial system continues to stagger."

(40): "More banks will fail, more countries will be forced to turn to the IMF in order to stay afl oat." [what to make of this? especially since it was widely agreed that the IMF's time had passed? is this empirically realistic?]

(41): KEY--"[unlike] the savings-and-loan meltdown of the early 1990s, the collapse of Long Term Capital Management (1998) or the bursting of the dot.com bubble (2000–1) – this one has moved from a fi nancial meltdown to a eneralised economic crisis. And, unlike crises that were regionally confi ned – East Asia (1997), Russia (1998), Argentina (2000–1) – this is a globalising crisis at the heart of the system. We confront, in other words, a generalised global crisis in the reproduction of capital and of the relations between capital and global labour that have characterised the neoliberal period. Th e neoliberal reorganisation of world-capitalism is now undergoing a systemic shock."

(41): this, clearly, he sees as his central contribution: "In what follows, I argue that we need a more dynamic, historical and nuanced account of what has happened to world-capitalism over the past quarter century than has been generally off ered. Too many radical analyses focus either on regulatory frameworks or the crisis of profi tability of the 1970s to explain what is happening today. In so doing, each approach ignores crucial features of the dramatic processes of restructuring and accumulation that ran across the neoliberal period – and that laid the basis for the current crisis. I further argue that this crisis should be analysed in terms of a breakdown in prevailing valueforms, including models of value-measurement, and that this breakdown opens up new spaces for value-struggles – struggles over the very forms for reproducing social relations – that could trace the outlines of a radical and systemic counter-project to that of capital."

(41-42): not, in other words, in these two camps: "On the Left, most analyses of the crisis have tended to fall into one of two camps. On the one hand, we fi nd a series of commentators who view the fi nancial meltdown as just the latest manifestation of a crisis of profi tability that began in the early 1970s, a crisis that has eff ectively persisted since that time. In another camp is a large number of commentators who see the crisis as essentially caused by an explosion of fi nancial transactions and speculation that followed from deregulation of fi nancial markets over the past quarter-century."

(42): absolutely right--"Th ey [the latter approach] confuse policy reactions to the globalisation of production and fi nance with causes of the current crisis. It is, of course, true that fi nancial deregulation is a contributing factor in the current crisis. But, rather than driving the process of fi nancial liberalisation, deregulation followed and responded to structural transformations... proponents of the deregulation-thesis lack an explanation as to why this crisis has not been restricted to fi nancial markets; they are unable to probe its interconnection with problems of global overaccumulation. Secondly, because these commentators are prone to describe the problem in terms of neoliberal policychanges, rather than capitalism, they advocate a return to some sort of Keynesian re-regulation of fi nancial markets."

(42-43): important--i accept this, but we still have to be able to explain generalized stagnation: "Those analyses that eff ectively read the current crisis in terms of a decline in the rate of profi tability from the mid-1960s to early 1970s have the merit of focusing on deeper problems at the level of capitalist accumulation, and, for this reason, I will engage them at considerably more length. For the most part, however, these approaches tend to be amazingly static, ignoring the specifi c dynamics of capitalist restructuring and accumulation in the neoliberal period. Th ere is a particularly unhelpful tendency in many of these analyses to treat the entire thirty-fi ve year period since 1973 as a ‘crisis’, a ‘long downturn’, or even a ‘depression’. Yet, such assessments downplay the dramatic social, technical and spatial restructuring of capitalist production that occurred across the neoliberal period, all of which signifi cantly raised rates of surplus-value and profi tability, and led to a volatile – indeed ‘turbulent’ – but nonetheless real process of sustained capitalist expansion, centred on East Asia."

(43-45): three methodological protocols:

1. "I insist, first, that we need to treat the world-economy as a totality that is more than the sum of its parts... Much discussion of the neoliberal period has focused on a number of capitalistically developed nations – most frequently the US, Germany and Japan – and treated the world-economy as largely an aggregate of these parts."
   
2. "Secondly, it is vital to recognise that an assessment of world-capitalism cannot make its focus the performance of national economies per se. Capital does not invest in order to boost Gross Domestic Product (GDP), national income, or aggregate national employment. It invests in order to expand itself via the capture of shares of global surplus-value (although what individual capitalists attend to are rates of return on total investment)."
3. "Th ird, the unique quarter-century long postwar-boom (1949–73) ought not to be the benchmark against which everything else is deemed a ‘crisis’. Th at great boom was the product of an exceptional set of social-historical circumstances that triggered an unprecedented wave of expansion. But, prolonged expansion with rising levels of output, wages and employment in the core-economies is not the capitalist norm; and the absence of all of these is not invariably a ‘crisis’. It is utterly misleading to imagine that capital is in crisis every time rates of increase in world or national GDP fall below fi ve or six per cent per annum. Indeed, where wage-compression characterises a phase of capitalist expansion, this may be favourable to profi tability while suboptimal in terms of the growth of consumer-demand and annual rates of national economic growth. Yes, capitalist expansion under such conditions throws up limits to itself. But this is what we should expect of all capitalist ‘régimes of accumulation’. Th e capitalist mode of production is inherently contradictory at multiple levels; every pattern of capital-accumulation involves self-generated limits."

(45): My analysis will build upon three main theses:

1. "Following the recessions of 1974–5 and 1980–2 and the ruling-class off ensive against unions and the Global South that took off in this period, severe capitalist restructuring did generate a new wave of capitalist growth, albeit a much more uneven and volatile one than occurred during the great boom of 1949–73... [E. Asia is important to this story, again--see actual text for details...]"
2. "Alongside and interacting with these changes, a wholesale reorganisation of capitalist fi nance occurred, stimulated by a metamorphosis in forms of world-money (analysed in Section 4 below)"
3. [so this crisis has its origins in 1997, rather than in a long, thirty-year downturn] "Th e upward trend in profi t-rates from the early 1980s sustained a wave of capitalist expansion that began to falter in 1997, with the crisis in East Asia. The East-Asian crisis signalled the onset of new problems of overaccumulation that shape the contours of the present crisis."

THESIS ONE

(47): CRITICAL: "Central to my argument is the claim that intense processes of capitalist restructuring throughout the neoliberal period created a new social-spatial reconfi guration of capital and a new, uneven and volatile wave of capitalist expansion (and drove key processes of the phenomenon known as ‘globalisation’). Th rough a dialectic of global restructuring that has reconfi gured labour and capital both within and outside the core, the world-capitalist economy has been decisively remade. I will take diff erent sides of this dialectical process in turn. While some commentary often seems to suggest that very little restructuring of capital has occurred at the core of the system since the crises of 1973–82, it is clear that major re-organisations of work-process and technology have in fact taken place."

(48): "Th e cumulative eff ects of these processes were profound. In the fi rst instance,
they involved a sustained and signifi cant rise in the rate of exploitation... [Secondly,] Th is increase in the rate of surplus-value in the US went hand in hand with major improvements in the productivity of new capital-investment. As both Mohun and Edward Wolff further show, the tendential rise in the organic composition of capital35 that characterised the period 1947–82 was abruptly reversed during the period of vigorous neoliberal expansion (1982–97) and the productivity of new investment rose."

(49): seems important--"In the absence of such powerful class-resistance, crises will serve as moments of reorganisation that create conditions for increases in labour-productivity and rates of profi t – which, in turn, make renewed expansion possible." [in other words, capitalism cannot self-destruct]

(49): tracking the profit-rate (see graph; not from article): "And it is decidedly clear in this regard that, after falling consistently from 1964–82, profi t-rates experienced a signifi cant recovery after 1982, as detailed studies for both the US and Europe have shown. True, profi tability did not return to the levels of the mid-1960s. But sustained recovery at lower levels is still that – sustained recovery that makes possible ongoing accumulation."

(49-50): "Th e mid-1980s are a decisive turning point in this regard, as capital based in Japan and Germany... turned outward in dramatic fashion... " [globalized production chains in E. Asia, etc.]

(51): CRITICAL--"Across the quarter century 1980–2005, the world’s ‘export-weighted’ global labour-force quadrupled. Most of this growth occurred after 1990 and about half of it took place in East Asia, where the working class increased nine-fold – from about 100 million to 900 million workers. South Asia, too, saw significant growth in both industry and the number of industrial workers.45 While the accuracy of these calculations can be debated, more conservative estimates still suggest that the world working class doubled in size over the past two decades."

(52): fair enough, this is one of his interventions (and it's fair, especially because it addresses the lacuna identified by Arrighi, without becoming Arrighi's narrative)--"Th e fact that, by 2002, there were twice as many manufacturing workers in China than in the G-7, where the number has been in a pretty steady decline for decades, is indicative of major structural transformations that have taken place in the global economy throughout the neoliberal period. Without accounting centrally for thesedevelopments – that is, by setting them at the heart of an account of the neoliberal period – we fail to grasp key dynamics of the system in recent decades."

(53): important--"It will not do to say that, for twenty-fi ve years, crisis was ‘postponed’ because credit was pumped into the system... sustained asset-infl ation – the ‘bubble economy’ – takes off from about 1996 on, not from 1982."

(55): "So, while the entire period after 1982 cannot be explained in terms of credit-creation, the postponement of a general crisis after 1997 can. But as the accompanying credit-bubble burst, beginning in the summer of 2007, it generated a major fi nancial crisis. And, because of underlying problems of overaccumulation, this fi nancial crisis necessarily triggered a profound global economic slowdown."

THESIS TWO

(56): "However, in many respects, the term fi nancialisation can be, and has been, highly misleading. To the degree to which it suggests that fi nance-capitalists and their interests dominate contemporary capitalism, it is especially so. And, where it has been taken to imply that late capitalism rests on the circulation rather than the production of goods – as if we could have one without the other – it has contributed to absurd depictions of the world-economy today. Moreover, the lines between industrial and fi nancial capital are, in practice, often quite blurred, with giant fi rms engaging in both forms of appropriating profit."

(56): "What the term ‘fi nancialisation’ should capture, in my view, is that set of transformations through which relations between capitals and between capital and wage-labour have been increasingly fi nancialised – that is, increasingly embedded in interest-paying fi nancial transactions. Understanding this enables us to grasp how it is that fi nancial institutions have appropriated ever larger shares of surplus-value."

(56): refers to three phenomena, in fact:

1. (57-59) the mutation in the form of world-money that occurred in the early
   1970s: "value-forms have been extended at the same time as value-measures (and predictions) have become more volatile. Th is has given neoliberal globalisation a number of distinct characteristics and a propensity to enormous credit-bubbles and fi nancial meltdowns of the sort we are witnessing at the moment...
   
2. (59-62) the financial effects of neoliberal wage-compression over the past thirty
   years: "Five dynamics fi gure especially prominently here: i) the geographic relocation of production, with signifi cant expansion of manufacturing industries in dramatically lower-wage areas of East Asia and, to a lesser degree, India, Mexico, Eastern Europe, and so on; ii) the downward pressure on wages triggered by a huge expansion in the reserve army of global labour resulting from massive dispossession of peasants and agricultural
   labourers, particularly in China and India; iii) the increase in relative surplusvalue brought about by the boosts to labour-productivity (output per worker per hour) resulting from the combined eff ects of lean-production techniques and new technologies; iv) increases in absolute surplus-value triggered by an increase in work-hours, particularly in the United States; v) sharp cuts to real wages brought about by union-busting, two-tiered wage systems, and cuts to the ‘social wage’ in the form of a reduction in non-wage social benefi ts,
   such as health-care, food- and fuel-subsidies, pensions and social-assistance programmes... Just as the wealthiest households demanded a plethora of fi nancial instruments in which to invest, large numbers of working-class people turned to credit-markets – particularly in the context of dramatically lowered interestrates after 2001 – in order to sustain living standards."
   
3. (62-66): the enormous global imbalances (revolving around the US currentaccount defi cit) that have flooded the world-economy with US dollars: "two interconnected phenomena become crucial to postponing a general slump: monumental growth of debt-loads; and the US current-account defi cit (its shortfall in trade in goods and services and interest-payments with the rest of the world), which combined to allow the American economy to operate as the ‘Keynesian engine’ of the global economy over the past decade. And, here too, as we shall see, the new form of world-money played a central role... Having driven down costs through the course of the crisis, East-Asian fi rms were soon exporting their way back to growth, developing huge trade-surpluses and soaring international reserves (mainly dollars). But this export-led growth was sustained overwhelmingly by the growing trade- and current-account defi cits in the US. As commentators have noted, the American economy eff ectively became ‘the consumer of last resort’. By 2000, for instance, US imports accounted for almost one-fi fth of worldexports, and four per cent of world gross domestic product. But this level of consumption of foreign goods could only be sustained by 2006 at the cost of an $857 billion US current-account defi cit... Th e recovery after 1997, in other words, was built on the pillars of exceptio nally low US interestrates, particularly from 2001; steady growth in consumer-indebtedness; and a swelling US current-account defi cit."
   

(60): "Whereas, in 1991, the wealthiest one per cent of Americans owned 38.7 per cent of corporate wealth, by 2003 their share had soared to 57.5 per cent."

(61): wow: "All of these trends led to a quadrupling of private and public debt in US, from slightly more than $10 trillion to $43 trillion, during the period of Alan Greenspan’s tenure as President of the Federal Reserve (1987–2005)"

(62): important to the larger argument: "The investment-boom in East Asia created enormous excess-capacity in computer-chips, autos, semi-conductors, chemicals, steel, and fi bre-optics. ‘A persistent trend to overcapacity’, observed the World Bank at the time, had induced ‘price wars and intense competition’. One key indicator of these problems of overcapacity and price-wars is the consumption defl ator, which measures prices in consumer-goods. Th at index shows that US prices for consumer-durables – electronics, appliances, cars and more – began to decline in the autumn of 1995. Th is signal of rising productivity and overproduction off ers an important clue as to the structural underpinnings of the crisis that broke out in East Asia (the centre of themanufacturing boom of the neoliberal era)."

(64): facts of overcapacity in China: "According to the Chinese government’s National Development and Reform Commission, China’s steel industry had developed an annual capacity of 470 million metric tons at a time when actual output equalled only 350 million metric tons. Th is excess-capacity of 120 million metric tons was greater than the total real output (112.5 million metric tons) of the world’s second-largest steel-producing country, Japan. Even worse, problems of overaccumulation haunted the ironalloy industry, where capacity-utilisation had slumped to a mere 40 per cent by 2005. And significant overcapacity plagued the auto-, aluminium-, cementand coke-industries. Detailed studies suggested, for example, that by 2005 China’s home-appliance market had overcapacity-rates of 30 per cent in washing machines, 40 per cent in refrigerators, 45 per cent in microwave ovens and a mind-blowing 87 per cent in televisions."

(65-66): problem of re-starting, given the problems that set in with American indebtedness and slowdown: "But private capital had spoken. Belief in the US ‘boom’ was evaporating. Th e real-estate bubble began to defl ate, mortgage-backed securities entered their free fall, hedge-funds (fi rst at Bear Stearns) collapsed, followed by investment-banks. Th e rout was on – and it is far from over. In the process, the capacity of whopping US current-account defi cits, underpinned by debtfuelled consumer-spending, to buoy the world-economy appears to be exhausted. Yet, to rebalance the global economy, to eliminate huge US defi cits and enormous East-Asian surpluses, means to destroy the source of demand that enabled growth in a period of overaccumulation – and it would also mean much larger falls in the US dollar. For this reason, short of a long slump that destroys huge amounts of capital, it will be extremely diffi cult for the world-economy to find a new source of demand suffi cient to restart sustained growth..."

(67): "Th is is what it means when Marx says a crisis involves a destruction of capital. Th e ‘values’ of fi ctitious capitals – stocks, bills and all kinds of paperassets – which were previously treated as if they were real assets (and against which fi nancial institutions borrowed), enter a freefall."

(68): explaining credit default swaps: "But, whereas death-rates are relatively constant (at least for those whose lives can actually be insured), in the midst of a fi nancial crisis defauly-rates are not. To make matters worse, any investor can buy a Credit Default Swap, even if they do not own a single share of the company in question. Th is encourages speculators to literally bet on the failure of a particular company. If you think GM will default on its debt, for instance, buying a CDS on GM debt is a great way to get a payout many times higher than what the CDS costs. As a result, as speculative bets build up, the insuring party (the seller of CDSs) is on the hook for a growing number of claims in the event of default. In crisis conditions, however, the insurer can quickly go under, unable to pay out to every claimant. But, in that event, nobody is protected any longer against default of the toxic waste they might be holding. And that means complete and total fi nancial-market panic."

(69-70): the usefulness of derivatives in a floating-exchange rate regime: "After all, the profi ts made by foreign branches of a corporation – say in Korean won or Turkish lira – can be completely wiped out when repatriated to the home offi ce, as a result of drops in the values of those currencies. Derivatives, by allowing corporations to contract to buy a currency at a particular exchange-rate some time in the future – or to purchase the right to borrow at a certain rate of interest in a given currency – have played a crucial role in helping capitalist enterprises manage these risks."

(71): this is another of McNally's specific claims, which he sees as his contribution: "Yet, by deploying reifi ed, mathematical concepts of space and time, the models which guided derived pricing have eff ectively imploded. As a result, a classic crisis of capitalist measurement is manifesting itself, in part in the form of a breakdown in risk-measurement and derivatives-pricing. During every crisis, value-measurement is radically disrupted and destabilised. Pressures of overaccumulation and declining profi tability induce a destruction of values that re-organise the foundations of capitalist production. In the process, existing capitals are de-valued, until a new and relatively stable valuation is found. In fact, for Marx, an essential feature of crises is that they destroy the old value-relations that persisted through a period of boom, overaccumulation and declining profi tability in order to lay the basis – through destruction and devaluation of capital and labour-power – for a new set of value-norms. Today, as we have seen, derivatives off er an indirect way of trying to measure value by way of measuring risk. But, in the midst of this crisis, the risk-measurement models that have guided derivatives-markets have completely and utterly failed."

(72): and labor? -- "crises are also moments in which the subordination of labour to capital must be re-organised, and in which new spaces of resistance can be pried open. Th ey are also moments in which capital violates its own free-market nostrums and uses public resources to bail out the system, thus opening up space for debates about alternative uses of public powers. Systemic crises are, therefore, moments of great danger and opportunity for the world’s workers."

(72): "Debt, of course, is one of the oldest class relations; repayment of loans has been a great mechanism for transferring wealth from direct producers to landlords and moneyed capitalists. In the neoliberal context, debt has become a powerful weapon for disciplining the working class in the Global North."

(73): this needs to be made much more specific, but is still interesting as a general formulation: "As prices plummet for food and raw materials (copper, oil, coff ee, cocoa, timber, rubber and more) dozens of poorer countries will encounter big drops in their export-earnings. Th is will inhibit their capacities to import food, medicine and other essentials, as well as to service existing debts. Moreover, as private-capital fl ows into ‘emerging market economies’ plummet by about two-thirds in 2009, rates of investment and job-creation will turn down sharply. Trade and currency-crises may ensue, driving poor nations into the dreaded hands of the IMF. Already, Iceland, Hungary, the Ukraine, Latvia and Pakistan have had to turn to the IMF. And more will follow. Once again, the IMF will join with governments and banks in the North to set loan-conditions that open countries in the South to plunder of their assets. Th e only alternative
will be to repudiate debts, as Ecuador rightly plans to do, and to mobilise against the imperial order embodied in the domination"

(74): this is interesting, even if it may not dramatically change anything: "However much they can be derailed or diverted, all such struggles implicitly challenge the domination of society by the capitalist value-form. Th ey assert the priority of life-values – for land, water, food, housing, income – over the value-abstraction and the violent economic and social crises it entails. And one
of the tasks of the Left is to highlight this confl ict – between life-values and capitalist imperatives – that comes to the fore dramatically during times of crisis, in order to pose a socialist alternative that speaks directly and eloquently to the most vital needs of the oppressed."

(74): "It is, as we have seen, the logic of the value-abstraction to express utter indiff erence to use-values, notably to the needs of the concrete, sensuous beings who are bearers of labour-power. What matters for capital is not the capacity of a given commodity to satisfy specifi c human needs;"

(75-76): "While that was a paltry sum, even more paltry is the amount that was actually delivered – merely one tenth of what was pledged, or $2.2 billion, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. Yet, somehow, governments in the Global North have in short order come up with about $20 trillion to bail out financial institutions – nearly 10,000 times as much as they have anted up to feed the world’s poor. Compressed in that simple fact is the most basic case for socialism."

(76-): a few things, he's arguing, are emerging as clear consequences of this crisis:

1. First, the crisis will induce an enormous centralisation of capital... [many examples given in the article, itself]
2. Second, this crisis will also pose again the question of the balance of global
   economic power and the role of the dollar...
3. Third, centralisation of capital and competition between blocs will also be
   played out by way of attempts to spatially re-organise capital, so that economies
   in the Global North can displace the eff ects of crisis onto ‘emerging market
   economies’ and nations in the Global South... Those economies may then encounter their own version of the Asian crisis. And, if the IMF is called in, Western governments will press
   to buy up assets on the cheap, as was done to South Korea in particular in 1997, after IMF loan-conditions facilitated perhaps ‘the biggest peacetime transfer of assets from domestic to foreign owners in the past fi fty years anywhere in the world’.
   
4. Fourth, just as nations at the top of the imperial order will try to infl ict greater hardship on the South, so we can anticipate moves toward even more draconian restrictions on the movement of migrant-labour...
5. Finally, this crisis also puts a premium on left responses that are clearly socialist in character. Th e notion of calling for a ‘leashed capitalism’ in the face of such a colossal failure of the capitalist market-system represents an equally colossal failure of socialist imagination...

COMMUNICATION AND THE MIND
The “development of the individual’s self, and of his self- consciousness within the field of his experience” is preeminently social. For Mead, the social process is prior to the structures and processes of individual experience.
(...) It is, however, out of the conversation of gestures that language, or conscious communication, emerges. Mead’s theory of communication is evolutionary: communication develops from more or less primitive toward more or less advanced forms of social interaction. In the human world, language supersedes (but does not abolish) the conversation of gestures and marks the transition from non-significant to significant interaction.
(...) However, it is the conversation of significant symbols that is the foundation of Mead’s theory of mind. “Only in terms of gestures as significant symbols is the existence of mind or intelligence possible; for only in terms of gestures which are significant symbols can thinking — which is simply an internalized or implicit conversation of the individual with himself by means of such gestures — take place” (Mind, Self and Society 47). Mind, then, is a form of participation in an interpersonal (that is, social) process; it is the result of taking the attitudes of others toward one’s own gestures (or conduct in general). Mind, in brief, is the use of significant symbols.
(...) The essence of Mead’s so-called “social behaviorism” is his view that mind is an emergent out of the interaction of organic individuals in a social matrix. Mind is not a substance located in some transcendent realm, nor is it merely a series of events that takes place within the human physiological structure. Mead therefore rejects the traditional view of the mind as a substance separate from the body as well as the behavioristic attempt to account for mind solely in terms of physiology or neurology.

THE ACT
(...) There are two models of the act in Mead’s general philosophy: (1) the model of the act-as-such, i.e., organic activity in general (which is elaborated in The Philosophy of the Act), and (2) the model of the social act, i.e., social activity, which is a special case of organic activity and which is of particular (although not exclusive) relevance in the interpretation of human experience.
(...) What is of interest in this description is that the individual is not merely a passive recipient of external, environmental influences, but is capable of taking action with reference to such influences; he reconstructs his relation to his environment through selective perception and through the use or manipulation of the objects selected in perception (e.g., the path of escape mentioned above). The objects in the environment are, so to speak, created through the activity of the organic individual: the path along which the individual escapes was not “there” (in his thoughts or perceptions) until the individual needed a path of escape. Reality is not simply “out there,” independent of the organic individual, but is the outcome of the dynamic interrelation of organism and environment.
(...) The human individual, then, is a member of a social organism, and his acts must be viewed in the context of social acts that involve other individuals. Society is not a collection of preexisting atomic individuals (as suggested, for example, by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau), but rather a processual whole within which individuals define themselves through participation in social acts. The acts of the individual are, according to Mead, aspects of acts that are trans- individual. “For social psychology, the whole (society) is prior to the part (the individual), not the part to the whole; and the part is explained in terms of the whole, not the whole in terms of the part or parts” (Mind, Self and Society 7). Thus, the social act is a “dynamic whole,” a “complex organic process,” within which the individual is situated, and it is within this situation that individual acts are possible and have meaning.

SELF AND OTHER
(...) This social conception of the self, Mead argues, entails that individual selves are the products of social interaction and not the (logical or biological) preconditions of that interaction. Mead contrasts his social theory of the self with individualistic theories of the self (that is, theories that presuppose the priority of selves to social process). “The self is something which has a development; it is not initially there, at birth, but arises in the process of social experience and activity, that is, develops in the given individual as a result of his relations to that process as a whole and to other individuals within that process” (Mind, Self and Society 135).
(...) While there is a form of pre-reflective consciousness that refers to the “bare thereness of the world,” it is reflective (or self-) consciousness that characterizes human awareness. The pre-reflective world is a world in which the self is absent (Mind, Self and Society 135-136).
(...) Self-consciousness is the result of a process in which the individual takes the attitudes of others toward herself, in which she attempts to view herself from the standpoint of others. The self-as-object arises out of the individual’s experience of other selves outside of herself. The objectified self is an emergent within the social structures and processes of human intersubjectivity.
(...) Mead’s account of the social emergence of the self is developed further through an elucidation of three forms of inter-subjective activity: language, play, and the game. These forms of “symbolic interaction” (that is, social interactions that take place via shared symbols such as words, definitions, roles, gestures, rituals, etc.) are the major paradigms in Mead’s theory of socialization and are the basic social processes that render the reflexive objectification of the self possible.
(...) The self emerges out of “a special set of social relations with all the other individuals” involved in a given set of social projects (Mind, Self and Society 156-157). The self is always a reflection of specific social relations that are themselves founded on the specific mode of activity of the group in question. The concept of property, for example, presupposes a community with certain kinds of responses; the idea of property has specific social and historical foundations and symbolizes the interests and values of specific social groups.
(...) Mead delineates two types of social groups in civilized communities. There are, on the one hand, “concrete social classes or subgroups” in which “individual members are directly related to one another.”
(...) Mead’s description of social relations also has interesting implications vis-a-vis the sociological problem of the relation between consensus and conflict in society. It is clear that both consensus and conflict are significant dimensions of social process; and in Mead’s view, the problem is not to decide either for a consensus model of society or for a conflict model, but to describe as directly as possible the function of both consensus and conflict in human social life.

TEMPORAL STRUCTURE OF HUMAN EXISTENCE
The temporal structure of human existence, according to Mead, can be described in terms of the concepts of emergence, sociality, and freedom.
(...) Emergence, then, is a fundamental condition of experience, and the experience of the emergent is the experience of temporality. Emergence sunders present and future and is thereby an occasion for action. Action, moreover, occurs in time; the human act is infected with time — it aims at the future. Human action is teleological. Discontinuity, therefore, and not continuity (in the sense of mere duration or passage), is the foundation of time-experience (and of experience itself). The emergent event constitutes time, i.e., creates the necessity of time.
(...) Like Edmund Husserl, Mead conceives of human consciousness as intentional in its structure and orientation: the world of conscious experience is “intended,” “meant,” “constituted,” “constructed” by consciousness. Thus, objectivity can have meaning only within the domain of the subject, the realm of consciousness. It is not that the existence of the objective world is constituted by consciousness, but that the meaning of that world is so constituted. In Husserlian language, the existence of the objective world is transcendent, i.e., independent of consciousness; but the meaning of the objective world is immanent, i.e., dependent on consciousness. In Mead’s “phenomenology” of historical experience, then, the past may be said to possess an objective existence, but the meaning of the past is constituted or constructed according to the intentional concerns of historical thought. The meaning of the past (”what has happened”) is defined by an historical consciousness that is rooted in a present and that is opening upon a newly emergent future.
(...) Mead’s point is that all such reconstructions and interpretations of the past are grounded in a present that is opening into a future and that the time-conditioned nature and interests of historical thought made the construction of a purely “objective” historical account impossible. Historical consciousness is “subjective” in the sense that it aims at an interpretation of the past that will be humanly meaningful in the present and in the foreseeable future. Thus, for Mead, historical inquiry is the imaginative-but-honest, intelligent-and-intelligible reconstruction and interpretation of the human past on the basis of all available and relevant evidence. Above all, the historian seeks to define the meaning of the human past and, in that way, to make a contribution to humanity’s search for an overall understanding of human existence.
(...) Thus, the principle of sociality is the ontological foundation of Mead’s concept of emergence: sociality is the ground of the possibility of emergence as well as the basis on which emergent events are incorporated into the structure of ongoing experience.
(...) From the standpoint of Mead’s description of the temporality of action and his emphasis on the importance of problematic situations in human experience, emergencies or “crises” in one’s life are of the utmost existential significance. I am a being that exists in relation to a world. As such, it is essential that I experience myself as “in harmony with” the world; and if this proves difficult or impossible, then I am thrown into a “crisis,” i.e., I am threatened with separation (Greek, krisis) from the world; and separation from the world, from the standpoint of a being- in-the-world, is tantamount to non- being. It is in this context that the loss of one’s freedom, the experience of lost autonomy, becomes a real possibility. Encountering a crisis in the process of life, the individual may well experience himself as paralyzed, as “stuck” in his situation, as patient rather than as agent of change. But it is also the case that the experience of crisis may lead to a deepened sense of one’s active involvement in the temporal unfolding of life. From Mead’s point of view, a crisis is a “crucial time” or a turning-point in individual existence: negatively, it is a threat to the individual’s continuity in and with his world; positively, it is an opportunity to redefine, broaden, and deepen the individual’s sense of self and of the world to which the self is ontologically related.

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Historical thought is a reconstruction of a communal past in an attempt to understand the nature and significance of a communal present and a (potential) communal future. Historical accounts are never final since historical thought continually restates the past in terms of newly emergent situations in a present that opens upon a future.
(...) Mead’s description of the Romantics’ reconstruction of self-consciousness on the basis of a reconstructed past is a concrete illustration of his conception of historical consciousness as developing with reference to a problematic present. The Romantic historians and philosophers, confronted with the disruption of experience, which was the result of the early modern revolutionary period, turned to the medieval past in an effort to redefine the historical and cultural identity of European man. The major characteristic of Romantic thought, according to Mead, was an attempt to redefine European self- consciousness through the re-appropriation of the historical past.
(...) The ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity are, from Mead’s standpoint, abstract ideals that could not survive the post-revolutionary struggles for political supremacy and the control of property.
(...) The failure of “the revolution” left Europe in confusion. The European’s ties to his medieval past had been severed, but his revolutionary hopes had not been realized. He was caught between two worlds. He could not be sure of his identity. His sense of self was in crisis. The Romantic movement was an attempt to overcome this crisis by returning to and reconstructing the European past. Romanticism, then, was an effort to reestablish the continuity between the past, present, and future of European culture.
(...) The upshot of this point of view, according to Mead, is an activist or pragmatic conception of mind and knowledge. Knowing is a process involving the interaction of self and not-self. Knowledge is a result of a process in which the self takes action with reference to the not-self, in which the not-self is appropriated by the self. In this analysis of the Romantic epistemology, the germ of Mead’s own “philosophy of the act” is apparent. The interaction of self and not-self is the foundation, not only of our knowledge of the world, but also of our knowledge of the self. Self-consciousness requires the objectification of the self. The Romantic elucidation of the polarity of self and not-self makes self-objectification (and therefore self- consciousness) theoretically comprehensible. In action toward the not-self, self-discovery becomes possible.
(...) The idea of evolution is central in Mead’s philosophy. For Mead, experience is fundamentally processual and temporal. Experience is the undergoing of change. Mead’s entire ontology is an expression of evolutionary thinking. His concept of reality-as- process is ecological in structure and dynamic in content. Nature is a system of systems, a multiplicity of “transacting” fields and centers of activity. The relation between organism and environment (percipient event and consentient set) is mutual and dynamic. Both organism and environment are active: the activity of the organism alters the environment, and the activity of the environment alters the organism. There is no way of separating the two in reality, no way of telling which is primary and which secondary. Thus, Mead’s employment of the concept of evolution is an aspect of his attempt to avoid the behavioristic and environmentalist determinism that would regard the organism as passive and as subject to the caprices of nature.
(...)

Far from the working class internationally contracting, it has continued to grow. And the distinctions between this enlarged working class and other oppressed groups, far from becoming marginal, are as central as when Lenin and Trotsky polemicised against the Narodniks.
(...) Filmer concluded that the overall number of employed people worldwide was about 880 million, compared with around 1,000 million people working mainly for their own account on the land (overwhelmingly peasants), and 480 million working for their own account in industry and services. The figure for 'employed people' includes some non-workers' groups as well as workers. There is a section of the bourgeoisie in receipt of enormous corporate salaries, and below that the new middle class who get paid more value than they create in return for helping to control the mass of workers. These groups probably amount to 10 percent of the population.¹⁴ That reduces the size of the employed world working class to around 700 million, with about a third in 'industry'and the rest in 'services'.
(...) But the total size of the working class is considerably greater than this. The class also includes those who are dependent on income that comes from the waged labour of relatives or savings and pensions resulting from past wage labour--that is, non-employed spouses, children and retired elderly people. If these categories are added in, the worldwide total figure for the working class comes to between 1.5 and 2 billion. Anyone who believes we have said 'farewell' to this class is not living in the real world.
(...) Add these 'semi-workers' or 'peasant workers' to the numbers of people completely dependent on wage labour, and you get a figure which must be somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of the world's population. In other words around the core of 1.5 to 2 million proletarians there are a similar number of semi-proletarians.
(...) Industrial employment has fallen sharply in a number of countries over the last three decades--in Britain and Belgium by a third, and in France by more than a quarter. But these do not represent a deindustrialisation of the whole of the advanced industrial world, but rather a restructuring of industry within it. The number of industrial jobs in the advanced industrial countries as a whole was 112 million in 1998--25 million more than in 1951 and only 7.4 million less than in 1971. There is a great danger of looking at the world through British or French glasses, and not seeing what is really happening on a global scale. So Toni Negri's Italy may not be in the same league as the US or Japan, but the industrial workers have certainly not disappeared. There were 6.5 million four years ago, down only one sixth since 1971.
(...) But that is not all. The usual distinction between 'industry' and 'services' obscures more than it reveals. The category 'services' includes things which are of no intrinsic importance to the capitalist production (for instance, the hordes of servants who provide individual capitalist parasites with their leisure). But it has always included things which are absolutely central to it (like the transportation of goods and the provision of computer software). What is more, some of the shift from 'industry' to the 'service sector' amounts to no more than a change in the name given to essentially similar jobs.
(...) But even Rowthorn's figures considerably underestimate the size of the working class--that class whose labour is essential for the accumulation of capital. Many of Rowthorn's 'free standing services' are essential to such accumulation in the modern world. Two in particular are absolutely indispensable for capitalist accumulation today--health provision and the education service.
(...)There is a widespread myth that the 'service' workforce consists of well paid people with control over their own working situation who never need to get their hands dirty. So Guardian columnist (and former SDP member) Polly Toynbee writes: 'We have seen the most rapid change in social class in recorded history: the 1977 mass working class, with two thirds of people in manual jobs, shrunk to one third, while the rest migrated upwards into a 70 percent home-owning, white collar middle class'.³⁷ So Hardt and Negri claim:

The jobs for the most part are highly mobile involving flexible skills. More important, they are characterised in general by the central role played by knowledge, information, affect, and communication. In this sense many call the post-industrial economy an informational economy... Through the process of post-modernisation all production tends toward the production of services, toward becoming informationalised.³⁸

In fact, however, any proper breakdown of the figures for 'service' employment provides a very different picture to this. Some of the most important 'services industries' employ overwhelmingly 'manual workers' of the 'traditional' sort.
(...) Altogether there are a minimum of 42 million 'service sector workers' in manual or routine white collar occupations in the US. These, it should be added, are the occupations that have been expanding most rapidly recently with the 'creation' of a mass of low wage jobs. On top of them, many workers in other occupational categories would have been doing work which was little different--for instance, many of the 3.2 million 'sales representatives' and the 4.3 million 'technicians and related support' workers. So would many of the 'health assessment and treating occupations' (83 percent female, unlike the 'health diagnostic' category above them which is 75 percent male), and many of the 5.3 million school teachers (75 percent female). Together these groups constitute well over half the 'service sector'. Add to them the 33 million workers in traditional manual industries, and you have some three quarters of the US population made up of workers. If the 'working class' has 'disappeared from view' for people like Hardt and Negri, it is because they have been looking in the wrong direction.
(...) A central theme of all those who see the working class as disappearing is that the jobs that remain are so precarious that little remains of the permanent working class organisations and communities that used to exist. The argument has been a continual feature of 'post-Marxist' arguments for the last 15 years both from 'Third Way' social democrats and those on the 'autonomist' left.
(...) But this does not mean that in reality capital has been able to destroy workers' resistance to such flexibility, or even that it itself can keep accumulating without continually reproducing relatively permanent labour forces within particular workplaces. One recent study for Britain shows:

Many of the commonly held assumptions about today's world of work need to be seriously questioned. A wide gulf exists between the over-familiar rhetoric and hyperbole we hear daily about our flexible and dynamic labour market and the realities of workplace life. The evidence simply does not sustain the view that we are witnessing the emergence of a 'new' kind of employment relations, seen in the 'end of the career' and the 'death of the permanent job for life'.⁴⁸

People often do not see the limits to what capital can achieve in terms of 'flexible labour markets' because they lump together quite different forms of employment: part time employment, temporary employment, employment on short term contracts, and self employment on behalf of firms. But part time employment can also be permanent employment--as it usually is among women in Britain. Similarly, those working on short term contracts can find them renewed month after month, or year after year. They lack long term rights and are the first to go when crises hit, but they do not move into and out of jobs all the time in between. Finally, those in genuinely temporary employment may be indispensable to production and be provided on a long term but intermittent basis by agencies which are themselves large firms and dependent on maintaining a permanent pool of labour to supply to other firms.
(...) Across Western Europe as a whole, 'one out of five jobs has been precarious during the last five years'--but that still leaves four out of five jobs as 'permanent'.
(...) The figures do, however, show that 'average job tenure has remained relatively stable since 1975'. The idea that the working class has been 'flexible-ised' out of existence is completely mistaken. Most people continue to work in the same place, and to be subject to exploitation by the same employers for quite long periods of time. By the same token, they have the time and opportunity to connect up with the people around them to fight back against that exploitation.
(...)

The claim that the 'permanent' worker is a thing of the past is often connected with the claim that employers can move production--and jobs--at a moment's notice.

So Hardt and Negri write:

The informatisation of production and the increasing importance of immaterial production have tended to free capital from the constraints of territory, and capital can withdraw from negotiation with a given local population by moving its site to another point in the global network... Entire labouring populations, which had enjoyed a certain stability and contractual power, have thus found themselves in increasingly precarious employment situations.⁵⁷

This vastly exaggerates the movement of capital, and the ease with which firms can move their operations from one place to another... As I have explained elsewhere,⁵⁸ capital as money (ie finance) can move at the touch of a computer key from one location to another (although determined governments can still impede its movement). But capital as means of production finds it much more difficult to do so. Physical equipment has to be uninstalled and reinstalled, transport has to be arranged for goods produced, a reliable workforce with the requisite skills found, and so on. It is a process that is usually expensive, taking years rather than seconds. What is more, physical production depends upon transporting goods to markets, and therefore closeness to markets is an advantage. The result is that most of the restructuring of industry over the last three decades has usually been within the world's existing industrial regions.
(...) There has, of course, been a shift in certain manufacturing industries to states which were not industrialised 40 years ago--otherwise the phenomenon of the Newly Industrialising Countries (NICs) and of certain expanding industries in 'underdeveloped' countries would be inexplicable. But there is little evidence to support the claim that 'advanced countries are abandoning the production of manufactured goods. Many labour-intensive manufacturing activities in the advanced economies, such as clothing or routine assembly, have been put out of business by rising imports from developing countries', but these imports have been financed 'not by the export of services' but 'by the export of other manufactures, especially capital goods and intermediate products such as chemicals'.
(...) Restructuring means that much of this production does not take place in the old industrial centres, such as those in and around Detroit, but in the 'sun belt' states of the west and south. So most US auto workers no longer work directly for the 'Big Three' of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, but for 'trans-plant manufacturers' like Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi and Daimler Benz, or for new parts manufacturers spun off by GM so as to weaken the union.⁶³ This is a far cry from the picture sometimes presented of all US auto jobs disappearing over the border into Mexico.
(...) But it is not 'fluid' in being able to move effortlessly from one location to another. The general trend for capitalism today is still for production to be concentrated in the advanced countries. Some sorts of production have shifted to a few favoured areas of the Third World--the NICs of east and south east Asia, and eastern China. But capital still finds it more profitable, in general, to locate itself in the regions which had industrialised by the mid 20th century. Workers may usually be better paid there, but a combination of established skills levels and existing investments in plant and infrastructure mean they are also more productive, providing much more surplus value for the system than most of their poorer brothers and sisters in the Third World. This explains why the picture for most of Latin America has been one of very slow average growth or stagnation, and of most of Africa of absolute decline.
(...) Capitalism has created a world working class in the last century and a half. Industry and wage labour exist today in virtually every part of the globe. The industrial working class has a worldwide presence. But the combined and uneven development of the system means it is very unevenly distributed between regions. Rough calculations indicate that 40 percent of the world's 270 million or so industrial workers are in the OECD countries, around 15 percent each in China, Latin America and the former USSR, around 10 percent in the rest of Asia, and around 5 percent in Africa.
(...) Sub-Saharan Africa is the exception rather than the norm for the world system as a whole, or even for its vast, impoverished regions. In Asia and Latin America there has been a growth of wage labour. But it has often been outside what is usually called the 'modern' sector, and has often been accompanied by an equally rapid rise of self employment.
(...) Most of the self employed are by no means privileged. A survey of Ahmedabad shows only one tenth of the male self employed as having a 'separate business place'. A third worked on the streets, as vendors, rickshaw drivers, cart pullers and the like. There are 200,000 rickshaw men in Mumbai, 80,000 in Ahmedabad, and 30,000 in Bangalore, while Calcutta has around 250,000 street hawkers and Calcutta more than 100,000.
(...) In addition to--and often merging into--those in the informal sector, there are everywhere those denied any opportunities for employment by modern capitalism: the unemployed. Their numbers vary considerably from region to region and country to country--depending, in part, on the ease of people making some sort of livelihood in the informal sector.
(...) Capitalist accumulation is causing the rapid growth of cities across wide swathes of the globe, and of occupations involving production for the market. In most regions (although not in most of Africa) there is also a growth of the number involved in wage labour of a relatively productive sort in medium to large workplaces. But even more rapid is the expansion of the vast mass of people precariously trying to make a livelihood through casual labour, selling things in the streets, trying to survive through working on their own account. At one extreme this mass merges into the petty bourgeoisie proper of small employers, at the other into the desperate poverty of those who can hardly get a livelihood at all--48 percent of the urban population of Brazil live below the poverty line, and two out of five of these below the 'indigence' income needed to satisfy food needs but nothing else.
(...) There is one widespread, very simple, and very mistaken, answer. That is to see the workers with permanent jobs as 'privileged', as some sort of 'labour aristocracy'. This is certainly how it can seem to those driven into the informal sector. In the formal sector there are usually considerably higher wage rates and often sickness benefits, paid holidays, and pensions of sorts as well... Employers have not, however, provided such things out of the goodness of their heart. They need a certain stability to their labour force, particularly when it comes to skilled workers who they do not want to be poached by rivals during times of boom. States often want such stability as well, seeing welfare provision for a section of the urban workforce as a way of protecting themselves against sudden explosions of popular discontent.
(...) It often seems counterintuitive to argue that groups of workers who have better conditions than others do not benefit at their expense--whether the argument is used about Western workers and workers in the Third World, or formal sector Third World workers and informal sector workers. But in this case the 'counterintuitive' argument is correct. In many industries, the more stable and experienced a workforce, the more productive it is. Capital is prepared to concede higher wages to certain of the workers in those industries because by doing so it is able to make more profits out of them. Hence the apparent contradiction--some sections of the world's workers are both better paid than others, and more exploited. It is this alone which explains why capitalists, motivated only by the drive for profit, do not usually invest on any great scale in regions like Africa, where wages are lowest.
(...) That, of course, does not prevent capital from continually trying to hold down what it has to pay--and from seizing on new technologies and restructuring production to reduce its labour costs drastically. Hence the pattern in much of the world for the established 'formal' workforce to remain more or less intact, but for there to be some chipping away round the edges and for many new jobs to be in the 'informal' sector.
(...) [mike davis + a rejoinder to hardt/negri, more or less] The great mass of the informal workforce in 'developing' countries today are people who are new to the urban workforce--either from the countryside (as with the more than 100 million peasants seeking employment in China's cities) or women and young people seeking paid labour for the first time. But the pattern of capitalist accumulation over the last couple of decades means that the labour demands of modern, productive industry have not expanded on anything like the scale needed to absorb them into its workforce. Competition on a global scale has caused capitalists to turn to 'capital intensive' forms of production (with what Marx called a rising 'organic composition of capital') which do not require massive numbers of new workers. As a result, the only ways for most new entrants to the labour force to gain a livelihood are through the most meagre forms of self employment or through selling their labour power at such a low price and under such arduous conditions that small capitalists at the margins of the system can profit from exploiting it.
(...) That is not, however, the end of the matter. Capitalism has one important use for those it refuses to allow to make a proper livelihood. It uses them to put increased pressure on those it does exploit in the most productive areas of the economy. Far from the growth of the informal workforce benefiting the workforce in the formal sector, it has been accompanied by an increased exploitation of workers in this sector--and in many cases by a deterioration. [empirical proof follows]
(...) In both India and Latin America something else has been happening--the shifting of certain jobs in big industry from the formal to the informal sector. This allows management to cut some of their wage costs--and to put pressure on the remaining 'formal' sector of the workforce to accept worse conditions.
(...) It is wrong, as people like Paulo Singer do, to write of 'deproletarianisation'.119 Rather, what is happening is a restructuring of the workforce, with the hiving off by big firms of some tasks (usually relatively unskilled and therefore easily performed by a floating workforce) to small firms, labour-only contractors and the supposedly self employed. It should be added that this phenomenon is by no means new in the history of capitalism. Casual employment has often played an important role in certain industries--for instance, in the docks in Britain until the late 1960s. And forms of contract labour are very old--it was common in the textile factories of the industrial revolution. In the mines in both the US and Britain in the 19th century, overseers or foremen ('buttymen') would recruit workers and pay them out of a sum given to them by the mine owners. These casual groups of workers may not always have felt themselves to be part of the working class. They were often detached from the struggles of other sections of that class for years, even decades, at a time. Yet the potential for struggling with those sections was always there, and when it turned into reality the struggle could be very bitter, with an almost insurrectionary tinge.
(...) [citing engels on dock workers] The point is very important. Internationally we are just emerging from more than two decades of defeat and demoralisation for workers right across the world. This bred a fatalism about the possibility of fighting, which was reflected in a mass of studies which depicted the suffering of the poor and the oppressed, showing them always as victims, rarely as fighters. Thus there are tons of materials sponsored by the International Labour Organisation on 'social exclusion'--a theme which suits the bureaucrats who run such bodies. In these studies themes like the 'casualisation' and 'feminisation' of the workforce become stereotyped, academic ways of dismissing possibilities of struggle--even if some of those carrying through the studies try to escape from the paradigm in which they are trapped. The stereotypes then provide trade union officialdom with excuses for avoiding struggle on the grounds that it cannot work. What begins as a mistaken assessment of the possibility of struggle becomes a real obstacle to unleashing such struggle.
(...) [naomi klein on EPZs] Such accounts provide a brilliant exposure of the greed and inhumanity of those who run the multinationals. But like many orthodox academic studies on the informal workforce (especially those sponsored by the International Labour Organisation) they are too pessimistic when it comes to the possibilities of fighting back. First, the multinationals cannot afford simply to mistreat their workers. It is not as easy as the multinationals would like people to think for them to close down their facilities and move elsewhere if the workforce does explode in bitterness. Setting up the links in a global production chain takes a lot of effort by the multinational... When Henry Ford pioneered mass production, assembly line methods in the auto industry, he saw that the most effective form of exploitation lay in stabilising a handpicked workforce under tight managerial control. Thomas O'Brien has told how some of the first US multinationals to operate in Latin America took efforts to stabilise their workforces by providing minimal welfare facilities--providing accommodation in company towns, health clinics, schools, sports facilities, even paid holidays. The aim was to combine maintaining the workers at a minimal level of fitness with extending managerial discipline over workers to the home as well as the workplace...
(...) This element of stability in the workforce is important because it means such workers can fight back, and win. Conditions in many South Korean clothing and footwear plants in the 1960s were exactly as Naomi Klein describes them. George E Ogle has told of 'the sweat, blood and tears of young women who worked in the export industries during the 1960s and 1970s--textiles, garments, electronics, chemicals'
(...) [strategy matters, in other words] So, for instance, an account of the great Bombay textile strikes of 1982-1983 paints a different picture to that in Korea. The strike began as a semi-spontaneous upsurge from below (workers demonstrated outside the residence of Datta Samant, who was to become the strike figurehead, demanding that he 'lead' them) and developed into one of the biggest prolonged strikes in world history, lasting a year, involving hundreds of thousands of workers and dominating the political life of India's commercial and industrial capital. But it never spread from the 'organised' sector of the larger workplaces to the small workplaces and the impoverished self employed weavers--indeed, many strikers began working in the informal sector without anyone regarding them as scabs. This enabled the employers to hold out for a year and defeat the workers, since they were never short of finished cloth.
(...) [too easy? but important regardless] The victories in Korea show the possibility of organising informal and maquiladora workers, of pulling them behind struggles initiated by larger and more secure groups of workers. The defeat in Bombay showed the dangers for the more secure groups of not going out and bringing the informal workers into the struggle. The dangers are not simply a matter of wage cuts, job losses and deteriorating working conditions. Defeat can have a devastating impact on wider society. During the strike there was unity between the different religious and caste groups that make up the mass of Bombay's lower classes. The aftermath of defeat saw the rise to a dominating position in wide areas of the city of the Sriv Sena, a political organisation based upon turning Hindus against Muslms, culminating in murderous riots against the Muslim population in 1992. Unity in struggle had created a sense of solidarity which then exerted a pull on the vast mass of the informal workers, self employed, the unemployed poor and the impoverished sections of the petty bourgeoisie. The defeat led to the sectional attitudes and communal conflicts of the petty bourgeoisie influencing the self employed, the unemployed and wide layers of workers.

[CONCLUSION]
(...) The overall picture is not one of a disintegrating or declining working class. It is one of a working class that on a world scale has grown bigger than ever, even if the rate of growth has slowed down with the successive crises in the world economy and the tendency everywhere to 'capital intensive' forms of production that do not employ massively new numbers of people.
(...) Neither is the picture one in which working class employment is being transferred on a massive scale from the old industrial economies of the 'North' to the previously agrarian economies of the 'South'. The new international division of labour is developing mainly within the 'triad' of North America, Europe and Japan--with a lesser part being played by the NICs of East Asia and eastern China. There is also an expansion of industrial employment within some of the burgeoning cities of the 'South'--but the expansion is uneven, barely touching whole regions, and is not mainly through transfer of jobs from the North.
(...) A twofold change is taking place now. There is the growing importance of the production of certain 'immaterial' commodities which are often classified as part of the service sector, but involve forms of work very similar to those in industry. And there is the growing importance of forms of labour which do not themselves produce commodities, but which serve to maintain and increase the productivity of the direct producers.
(...) The working class is not disappearing. It is not becoming bourgoeisified. It is not turning into a privileged layer. It is not gaining somehow from the impoverishment of wide sections of the Third World, especially Africa. It is growing even while it is restructured globally.
(...) The anti-capitalist movement itself has some of the same characteristics. Its initial base, like that of the first movement of the late 1960s, has been among people not firmly rooted in the productive process--students, school students, young people not yet trapped into permanent jobs, workers who take part in its activities as individuals without any clear sense of class identity, lower professionals. As a descriptive term for such movements, 'multitude' is not completely misplaced. A disparate coalition of forces has come together to provide a new and massively important focus for the struggle against the system after two decades of defeat and demoralisation. But the glorification of disparateness embodied in the term prevents people seeing what needs to be done next to build the movement. It does not recognise that what was so important about Genoa and Barcelona was the beginning of the involvement of organised workers in the protests. It fails to locate the most important deficiency of the movement in Argentina to date--the ability of trade union bureaucracies to build a wall between employed workers on the one hand and the neighbourhood and unemployed workers' movements on the other.
(...) The mistake is to see movements of disparate social groups as 'social subjects' capable of bringing about a transformation of society. They are not. Because their base is not centred in collective organisation rooted in production, they cannot challenge the control over that production which is central to ruling class power. They can create problems for particular governments. But they cannot begin the process of rebuilding society from the bottom up. And in practice, the workers who could begin to do this only play a marginal role in them. Talk about 'rainbow coalitions' or 'multitudes' conceals that relative lack of involvement in the movement of those working long hours at manual or routine white collar jobs--and with extra hours of unpaid labour bringing up children. It underplays the degree to which the movements remain dominated by those whose occupations leave them most time and energy to be active. Fashionable theories about 'post-industrial society' then become an excuse for a narrowness of vision and action that ignores the great majority of the working class.