Saturday, December 6, 2008
Thursday, December 4, 2008
There has already been an enormous destruction of capital. In the last number of months, more than $7 trillion has been wiped off the U.S. stock market. Indeed, $1.1 trillion was wiped out in a single day on October 15. As of mid-October, $27 trillion had been erased from stock markets worldwide. Housing values in this country have already declined by $5 trillion; pension funds by $2.5 trillion; and bank write-offs are now at $600 to $700 billion and expected to be $1.4 trillion. Large, conservative, seemingly stable companies have disappeared. Lehman Brothers, which had been capitalized at $30 to $40 billion, has gone bankrupt, and AIG, which until a few months ago was capitalized at between $150 and $200 billion, required a $123 billion lifeline from the government to survive. This has led to a massive credit crunch. Banks and other financial institutions now no longer trust each other not to totter and collapse underneath the weight of toxic debt, and refuse to lend to each other, producing a credit meltdown affecting the entire global financial system.
(...) The banks are also being de-leveraged, that is, they are being forced to pay off some of their debt and to cut back on the risky loans they’ve made over the past several years. Rather than loaning ten times more than their capital, they were loaning thirty and forty times their capital; and in Europe the banks were leveraged at an even greater rate.
(...) The current crisis is a product of the contradictions of the twenty-five-year-long neoliberal boom, which started in 1982. The postwar boom ended in 1973, and from 1973 to 1982 there were three recessions in the United States. The restructuring that went on in the United States, and to a lesser extent internationally, with the introduction of neoliberal, free-market measures, led to a twenty-five-year-long boom. It is the contradictions of those neoliberal measures that have produced this crisis.
(...) The first contradiction to note was the creation of a giant debt bubble. The increase in debt during the Clinton and Bush years was staggering. Over the two decades preceding 2007, credit market debt roughly quadrupled from nearly $11 trillion to $48 trillion, far exceeding growth rates. To put it in perspective: according to the Wall Street Journal, since 1983 debt expanded by 8.9 percent per year, while GDP expanded by only 5.9 percent.
(...) The second contradiction was that the United States became a buyer of last resort, establishing a trading system with Asia in which the Asian countries exported to the United States, which kept up spending through debt. The American balance of payments went from approximately $200 billion a year to $700 to $800 billion per year. All of this was borrowed. The U.S. government had a budget surplus under Clinton. But under Bush, with the tax cuts and war spending, the budgetary surplus disappeared, and the U.S. went from having a $250 billion government surplus in 2000–2001 to a $300 billion deficit in 2002. This stimulated the economy, but it meant that the United States became dependent on foreign capital, since the savings rate in this country had collapsed and was negative in the last years of this boom. Foreign capital, in particular from China, Japan, and the Middle East oil exporting countries, financed the American debt. When the dot-com bubble collapsed and recession came in 2001, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan lowered interest rates to between 1 and 2 percent for three years. This led to massive asset inflation, particularly in housing prices.
(...) The neoliberal boom was the result of a shift in the balance of class forces, in which the rate of exploitation was increased, real wages were depressed, and almost all wealth created went to capital. Some figures will indicate how dramatic the shift was. In 1973, GDP per person, in constant non-inflationary dollars, was $20,000 a year. By 2006, it was $38,000 a year—a more than 90 percent rise. Wages, however, in that same thirty-three-year period, declined. Real wages in 1973 were $330 per week; and in 2007, wages were $279—a decline of 15 percent.
(...) This shift of wealth from the working class to the capitalist class produced a tremendous amount of capital for potential investment. But in this last business cycle, that capital could not find all that many profitable outlets domestically. There was no expanded reproduction, no accumulation of capital in the U.S. during the 2000s. In this last business cycle, there were fewer factories at the beginning of the recession a year ago than there were in 1999. Instead of investing in new technologies, new plants and equipment, capitalists invested money overseas. Domestically, investments went to the most profitable industries—housing, construction, and finance. “In 1983, banks, brokerage houses and other financial businesses contributed 15.8 percent to domestic corporate profits,” writes James Grant in the October 18 Wall Street Journal. “It’s double that today.”
(...) These investments stimulated the housing and debt bubble. Between 2000 and 2005, housing prices increased by more than 50 percent, and there was a frenzy of housing construction. Banks and other financial institutions went on a mortgage-lending spree, creating a massive market in subprime mortgages—adjustable rate mortgages sold to borrowers with weak credit. There was also a big increase in housing speculation, with small investors buying second and third homes with the expectation that housing prices would keep rising and that these houses could be resold at a profit. Merrill Lynch estimated that in the first half of 2005, half of economic growth was related to the boom in the housing sector.
(...) Meanwhile, workers tried to maintain their standard of living despite the decline in real wages. In the 1980s and 1990s, they worked longer hours, took on more than one job, and increased the number of family members working. This could prop up household income to some extent. Yet even household income declined from 1998 through the boom of the 2000s. The only way to maintain living standards in the midst of declining wages was by borrowing against the rising value of their homes through home equity loans and mortgage refinancing. In the period of the last boom, homeowners took $5 trillion out of their home equity ($9 trillion since 1997), fueling an increasingly unsustainable debt structure that finally popped with the decline of inflated asset prices in housing.
(...) In this shadow system, banks did not have to put up adequate capital reserves. As a result, they were able, through this unregulated system, to borrow thirty, forty, or fifty times above the value of their capital in order to invest in the stock market and in various new exotic debt products, such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), credit-default swaps (CDSs—essentially a form of insurance against debt default), and various other financial swindles, many of which were based on the packaging and repackaging of housing mortgages. These were bundled and sliced up into investment vehicles that contained a good deal of potentially toxic debt—$900 billion worth of subprime loans, for example.
(...) Now that the world has entered recession, the U.S. is going to be running higher budgetary deficits. Those deficits will be increased also by the expansion of U.S. military spending, which has increased from $300 billion a year in 2000 to more than $800 billion a year now, if you include the supplemental costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On top of this spending, the U.S. has introduced a hugely expensive bailout plan. That means it will in all likelihood be running deficits of three-quarters of a trillion dollars, and possibly more, in the coming years. Where will the money for that come? At the moment there is no savings in this country, though that may change dramatically. But it is highly unlikely that China, Japan, and other countries are prepared to continue to finance an American trade deficit to the tune of $700 or $800 billion a year when the balance sheet of American finances, the huge national debt, has gone from $5 trillion when Bush came into office to $11 trillion today. It is unlikely that the Chinese and others are going to continue to finance this debt—although at this point in time U.S. treasuries are still a safe haven. This is particularly true because China’s trade surplus is going to contract considerably as a result of the world recession.
(...) The Chinese population only consumes 35 percent of what it produces. The rest goes for reinvestment and export. China’s economy has the highest rate of exploitation in the industrial world. But its export markets are going to constrict—they’ve already started to decline. As a result, China’s desire to lend greater amounts to the United States is problematic, particularly if interest rates in the United States are low. The United States therefore can no longer continue to run an enormous trade deficit while it is building an enormous budgetary deficit, and sustain both of them on the basis of foreign borrowing. There will have to be a restructuring and reordering of the system. At the same time, the U.S. may become more dependent on direct foreign investment from countries like Japan and China that, as we’ve mentioned, have developed large cash reserves. That is what we mean when we say that this is not just a typical cyclical crisis of capitalism. All of the contradictions of the neoliberal boom have burst asunder and now have to be addressed.
(...) In their ad-hoc attempts to solve the crisis, officials took this to be a liquidity rather than an insolvency problem—a problem simply of getting money into the banking system so that the banks would loan. But the banks refused to loan to each other because they knew that other banks had assets on their books that were as bad as their own—and which might lead to defaults. This is called counterparty risk: banks are afraid that the other banks are on the verge of bankruptcy and so won’t give them loans. This aversion to risk reached a crescendo when Lehman Brothers was allowed to go bankrupt in mid-September. This is what led to the credit meltdown of late September into mid-October that roiled markets all over the world.
(...) Estimates are that the U.S. has so far committed $4 to $6 trillion in tax dollars to bailout efforts, and Europe has committed $2.3 trillion. But this isn’t so much cooperation as it is an attempt by each state to keep pace with its national rivals. Everyone understands to some extent what happened in the 1930s—that the recession became a world depression when the international banking system collapsed and states imposed beggar-thy-neighbor policies that further contracted world trade and deepened the world depression. Yet at the same time there are limits to what states can do because they also compete with each other. Each one only controls a small patch of an integrated world economy. State intervention can therefore mitigate the effects of the crisis, but it cannot prevent the recession.
(...) The U.S. in the late 1980s and 1990s improved its competitive position in the world economy and attempted to assert its role as the sole superpower. Though it secured better rates of growth than its competitors in Japan and Europe over the past twenty-five years, it fell behind the growth rates of emerging nations like China, and in order to sustain its own economy it fell into debt. The result is that in the last decade, the United States has lost its competitive position on the world market. Now it will have to restructure, which will involve attempting to raise the rate of exploitation—increasing productivity while lowering wages and benefits even further. We’ve already seen it in the auto industry, where wages have already been cut in half in many cases. The United States will become a cheap labor country compared to its competitors. Auto wages in this country are probably about a third of what they are in Germany. The minimum wage is half of what it is in Britain, France, Germany, and Ireland. The contradictions of neoliberalism have increased the immiseration and the poverty of the American working class. And to get out of the crisis they are going to attack workers’ living standards even further.
(...) On the other hand, there’s an enormous opening for a Left that has been marginalized for decades. The disaster of the free market makes it easier for us to argue about the failure of capitalism and the need for an alternative based on human needs. The free market, which supposedly triumphed in 1989 and brought us the “end of history,” has led to nothing but misery and the ruin of millions of people, who are mired in poverty, hunger, unemployment, and ill health, but thanks to the free-market mania of the past decades, face a shredded safety net that doesn’t begin to address these problems.
(...) The banks are also being de-leveraged, that is, they are being forced to pay off some of their debt and to cut back on the risky loans they’ve made over the past several years. Rather than loaning ten times more than their capital, they were loaning thirty and forty times their capital; and in Europe the banks were leveraged at an even greater rate.
(...) The current crisis is a product of the contradictions of the twenty-five-year-long neoliberal boom, which started in 1982. The postwar boom ended in 1973, and from 1973 to 1982 there were three recessions in the United States. The restructuring that went on in the United States, and to a lesser extent internationally, with the introduction of neoliberal, free-market measures, led to a twenty-five-year-long boom. It is the contradictions of those neoliberal measures that have produced this crisis.
(...) The first contradiction to note was the creation of a giant debt bubble. The increase in debt during the Clinton and Bush years was staggering. Over the two decades preceding 2007, credit market debt roughly quadrupled from nearly $11 trillion to $48 trillion, far exceeding growth rates. To put it in perspective: according to the Wall Street Journal, since 1983 debt expanded by 8.9 percent per year, while GDP expanded by only 5.9 percent.
(...) The second contradiction was that the United States became a buyer of last resort, establishing a trading system with Asia in which the Asian countries exported to the United States, which kept up spending through debt. The American balance of payments went from approximately $200 billion a year to $700 to $800 billion per year. All of this was borrowed. The U.S. government had a budget surplus under Clinton. But under Bush, with the tax cuts and war spending, the budgetary surplus disappeared, and the U.S. went from having a $250 billion government surplus in 2000–2001 to a $300 billion deficit in 2002. This stimulated the economy, but it meant that the United States became dependent on foreign capital, since the savings rate in this country had collapsed and was negative in the last years of this boom. Foreign capital, in particular from China, Japan, and the Middle East oil exporting countries, financed the American debt. When the dot-com bubble collapsed and recession came in 2001, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan lowered interest rates to between 1 and 2 percent for three years. This led to massive asset inflation, particularly in housing prices.
(...) The neoliberal boom was the result of a shift in the balance of class forces, in which the rate of exploitation was increased, real wages were depressed, and almost all wealth created went to capital. Some figures will indicate how dramatic the shift was. In 1973, GDP per person, in constant non-inflationary dollars, was $20,000 a year. By 2006, it was $38,000 a year—a more than 90 percent rise. Wages, however, in that same thirty-three-year period, declined. Real wages in 1973 were $330 per week; and in 2007, wages were $279—a decline of 15 percent.
(...) This shift of wealth from the working class to the capitalist class produced a tremendous amount of capital for potential investment. But in this last business cycle, that capital could not find all that many profitable outlets domestically. There was no expanded reproduction, no accumulation of capital in the U.S. during the 2000s. In this last business cycle, there were fewer factories at the beginning of the recession a year ago than there were in 1999. Instead of investing in new technologies, new plants and equipment, capitalists invested money overseas. Domestically, investments went to the most profitable industries—housing, construction, and finance. “In 1983, banks, brokerage houses and other financial businesses contributed 15.8 percent to domestic corporate profits,” writes James Grant in the October 18 Wall Street Journal. “It’s double that today.”
(...) These investments stimulated the housing and debt bubble. Between 2000 and 2005, housing prices increased by more than 50 percent, and there was a frenzy of housing construction. Banks and other financial institutions went on a mortgage-lending spree, creating a massive market in subprime mortgages—adjustable rate mortgages sold to borrowers with weak credit. There was also a big increase in housing speculation, with small investors buying second and third homes with the expectation that housing prices would keep rising and that these houses could be resold at a profit. Merrill Lynch estimated that in the first half of 2005, half of economic growth was related to the boom in the housing sector.
(...) Meanwhile, workers tried to maintain their standard of living despite the decline in real wages. In the 1980s and 1990s, they worked longer hours, took on more than one job, and increased the number of family members working. This could prop up household income to some extent. Yet even household income declined from 1998 through the boom of the 2000s. The only way to maintain living standards in the midst of declining wages was by borrowing against the rising value of their homes through home equity loans and mortgage refinancing. In the period of the last boom, homeowners took $5 trillion out of their home equity ($9 trillion since 1997), fueling an increasingly unsustainable debt structure that finally popped with the decline of inflated asset prices in housing.
(...) In this shadow system, banks did not have to put up adequate capital reserves. As a result, they were able, through this unregulated system, to borrow thirty, forty, or fifty times above the value of their capital in order to invest in the stock market and in various new exotic debt products, such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), credit-default swaps (CDSs—essentially a form of insurance against debt default), and various other financial swindles, many of which were based on the packaging and repackaging of housing mortgages. These were bundled and sliced up into investment vehicles that contained a good deal of potentially toxic debt—$900 billion worth of subprime loans, for example.
(...) Now that the world has entered recession, the U.S. is going to be running higher budgetary deficits. Those deficits will be increased also by the expansion of U.S. military spending, which has increased from $300 billion a year in 2000 to more than $800 billion a year now, if you include the supplemental costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On top of this spending, the U.S. has introduced a hugely expensive bailout plan. That means it will in all likelihood be running deficits of three-quarters of a trillion dollars, and possibly more, in the coming years. Where will the money for that come? At the moment there is no savings in this country, though that may change dramatically. But it is highly unlikely that China, Japan, and other countries are prepared to continue to finance an American trade deficit to the tune of $700 or $800 billion a year when the balance sheet of American finances, the huge national debt, has gone from $5 trillion when Bush came into office to $11 trillion today. It is unlikely that the Chinese and others are going to continue to finance this debt—although at this point in time U.S. treasuries are still a safe haven. This is particularly true because China’s trade surplus is going to contract considerably as a result of the world recession.
(...) The Chinese population only consumes 35 percent of what it produces. The rest goes for reinvestment and export. China’s economy has the highest rate of exploitation in the industrial world. But its export markets are going to constrict—they’ve already started to decline. As a result, China’s desire to lend greater amounts to the United States is problematic, particularly if interest rates in the United States are low. The United States therefore can no longer continue to run an enormous trade deficit while it is building an enormous budgetary deficit, and sustain both of them on the basis of foreign borrowing. There will have to be a restructuring and reordering of the system. At the same time, the U.S. may become more dependent on direct foreign investment from countries like Japan and China that, as we’ve mentioned, have developed large cash reserves. That is what we mean when we say that this is not just a typical cyclical crisis of capitalism. All of the contradictions of the neoliberal boom have burst asunder and now have to be addressed.
(...) In their ad-hoc attempts to solve the crisis, officials took this to be a liquidity rather than an insolvency problem—a problem simply of getting money into the banking system so that the banks would loan. But the banks refused to loan to each other because they knew that other banks had assets on their books that were as bad as their own—and which might lead to defaults. This is called counterparty risk: banks are afraid that the other banks are on the verge of bankruptcy and so won’t give them loans. This aversion to risk reached a crescendo when Lehman Brothers was allowed to go bankrupt in mid-September. This is what led to the credit meltdown of late September into mid-October that roiled markets all over the world.
(...) Estimates are that the U.S. has so far committed $4 to $6 trillion in tax dollars to bailout efforts, and Europe has committed $2.3 trillion. But this isn’t so much cooperation as it is an attempt by each state to keep pace with its national rivals. Everyone understands to some extent what happened in the 1930s—that the recession became a world depression when the international banking system collapsed and states imposed beggar-thy-neighbor policies that further contracted world trade and deepened the world depression. Yet at the same time there are limits to what states can do because they also compete with each other. Each one only controls a small patch of an integrated world economy. State intervention can therefore mitigate the effects of the crisis, but it cannot prevent the recession.
(...) The U.S. in the late 1980s and 1990s improved its competitive position in the world economy and attempted to assert its role as the sole superpower. Though it secured better rates of growth than its competitors in Japan and Europe over the past twenty-five years, it fell behind the growth rates of emerging nations like China, and in order to sustain its own economy it fell into debt. The result is that in the last decade, the United States has lost its competitive position on the world market. Now it will have to restructure, which will involve attempting to raise the rate of exploitation—increasing productivity while lowering wages and benefits even further. We’ve already seen it in the auto industry, where wages have already been cut in half in many cases. The United States will become a cheap labor country compared to its competitors. Auto wages in this country are probably about a third of what they are in Germany. The minimum wage is half of what it is in Britain, France, Germany, and Ireland. The contradictions of neoliberalism have increased the immiseration and the poverty of the American working class. And to get out of the crisis they are going to attack workers’ living standards even further.
(...) On the other hand, there’s an enormous opening for a Left that has been marginalized for decades. The disaster of the free market makes it easier for us to argue about the failure of capitalism and the need for an alternative based on human needs. The free market, which supposedly triumphed in 1989 and brought us the “end of history,” has led to nothing but misery and the ruin of millions of people, who are mired in poverty, hunger, unemployment, and ill health, but thanks to the free-market mania of the past decades, face a shredded safety net that doesn’t begin to address these problems.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
President Obama and His People
From anti-politics, to politics.
The self-evidence which assimilates democracy to a representative form of government resulting from an election is quite recent in history. Originally representation was the exact contrary of democracy. None ignored this at the time of the French and American revolutions. The Founding Fathers and a number of their French emulators saw in it precisely the means for the elite to exercise power de facto, and to do so... in the name of the people that could not exercise power without ruining the very principle of government... 'Representative democracy' might appear today as a pleonasm. But it was initially an oxymoron.
--Jacques Rancière1
As we approach the end of the inaugural month of Barack Obama's reign as president-elect, one can't help but recall the feel-good eulogizing that greeted the news of his election. The Kenyan president, for example, declared November 6th a public holiday in Obama's honor,2 Magic Johnson told us he wept through the night,3 and Nicholas Kristof, that titan of the mainstream “Left,”4 relayed the widespread impression that America had “powerfully revitalized” the “idea[s] of equality and opportunity.” Even for those whose man lost, the historic consequences of Obama's victory were impossible to ignore: the “greatest democracy in the world,” it seemed, had proven the glory of its foundation by demonstrating the resilience of its ideals. As a black family arrived to claim an office once built by black slaves, America expiated its Original Sin.
To leftists, the colossal partiality of these and accompanying narratives, I think, has always been evident. Never was it true, for example, that only America could crown a son from the sea of those it systematically oppresses; after all, Evo Morales—who has told stories of, many years ago, savoring orange peels flung from the speeding cars of rich Bolivians—became his country's first indigenous president three years ago this month. Nor was Obama carried into the presidency by a tide of revolutionary agitation (as Morales was). Instead, as the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) recently celebrated, he was produced, by astute campaign-managers and sedulous staffers, as an ideological “place-holder” onto which millions of consumers projected their radical aspirations.5
It is a dynamic evident in these myriad forms of myth-making, I think, that speaks to the heart of what the Obama era threatens to represent. As Simon Critchley argued recently, “Obama’s politics is governed by an anti-political fantasy. It is the call to find common ground, to put aside our differences and achieve union.... It is a powerful moral strategy whose appeal to the common good attempts to draw a veil over the agonism and power relations constitutive of political life.”6 Though, of course, this tactic hardly has its origins in Obama's campaign, the fact of his election as an oppressed black man in particular, I think, threatens to re-brand the iniquities of an entire political system (and, particularly, the history of its formation) with this fantasy of perpetual union. This, again, is the negative significance of his blackness: his ascent to power, through the electoral system, has vindicated American democracy—when allied to the “anti-politics” at the heart of his campaign, then, it threatens a terminal form of forgetfulness. Far from encouraging us to reproduce the spirit of those masses who have struggled against the State that now readies itself to crown him, Obama instead comes to embody the cosmic judiciousness of that very State apparatus.
Against this, it is the Left's duty to, as Walter Benjamin wrote, “articulate what was past...” in the knowledge that “not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.”7 Much as we must, as Critchley argues, foreground the “agonism and power relations constitutive of political life” in the present, we must also, against Obama, decry the fatuous re-making of the history of American government into a celebration of the foresight of its forefathers. These days who takes time to remember, for example, that the contours of the American Constitution were determined by fifty-five white men anxious to establish a Federal Government strong enough to safeguard their fortunes?8 Or that throughout the history of bourgeois democracy, only pitched battles have forced the gradual extension of the franchise9—and this, too, as ruling elites adjusted to the arrival of the lower classes by concentrating instead on purchasing their hearts and minds?
Of course, in the heady bliss following Obama's victory, few wanted to be the grouchy dogmatists insisting that the arrival of this black man was far too contrived, aside from being too little, too late. Yet this is the price of responsible participation in today's political life: to re-introduce, partly by remembering, the fact of “agonisms.” When, at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Alexander Hamilton proposed that the President and Senate be appointed for life based on his estimation that “the people are turbulent and changing... they seldom judge or determine right,”10 his callous elitism expressed the timelessness of the wealthy man's desire, however sublimated, to sustain the class cleavages that make privilege possible. (Indeed, in James Madison's famous words, this brand of “peace” was to be the primary responsibility of government: “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”)11
Similarly, when today, in Obama-land, the doctrine of “anti-politics” moves many an eager liberal to obviate past struggle in the name of “all-the-progress-we've-made,” it falls to the Left to recover histories of mass movements battling against State obstinacy. Indeed, the fantasy of agonism-free politics depends quite squarely on this notion that America has “arrived”—on the idea that the need for protracted struggle against entrenched interests is obsolete. Indeed, much like corollary talk of politicians' expertise serves to secure the distance between assemblies and the demos they discipline, the doctrine of anti-politics works to obscure the very immediate inequalities at the heart of modern American society.
In this sense, I suggest, the question on which many thoughtful Leftists have hung their hopes for Obama's presidency—namely, the dim prospects of the enraged electorate which voted for him transcending his candidacy and becoming a progressive social movement—really depends on the possibility of shattering the myths that furbished the “anti-political” pulse of his campaign. In other words, this distinction between anti-politics and politics really marks the difference between Obama's voters, as an electorate mobilizing around him as an empty signifier, and Obama's voters, as a mass movement prepared to stand, against power, for principles.
Only once America can be convinced, against Obama's best efforts, that the world we carry in our hearts will not be engineered by the men and women assembling on Capitol Hill, but won by the world-historical agitation of those these representatives exclude from politics proper, will the dream of the “Obama Left” be possible. It scarcely needs to be said that, for those establishment hacks invested in the permanence of anti-politics, the new First Man's baby steps have been win-win: not only did the success of his candidacy “restore” the reputation of a democratic system tarred by the iniquities of the Bush cabal, but his politicking has banished worries that he himself may have carried “Change” into the White House. For those of us, on the other hand, hoping for the restoration of a movement ethic to a civic life neutered by corporate electioneering, much seems to rest on the possibility that, in a time of crisis, Obama's unapologetic pragmatism will prove intolerable to the electorate he promised to empower.
-----------------------------------------
1Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, pg. 53
2http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7710394.stm
3http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/27565680/
4Nicholas Kristof, “The Obama Dividend”
5 http://adage.com/moy2008/article?article_id=131810
6Simon Critchley, “What's Left After Obama?”
7Thesis VI, http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/ThesesonHistory.html
8Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, pg. 90-91
9Chris Harman, A People's History of the World, pg. 390
10Zinn, A People's History of the United States, pg. 96
11Noam Chomsky, “Consent Without Consent,” http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ConsentPOP_Chom.html
notes on capital
chapter 25: the general law of capitalist accumulation
(763-764): a passage critically important to the question of marx's position on absolute immiseration. ceteris paribus, marx is suggesting that periods of buyoant capitalist growth will lead to increased wages, precisely because growth in capitalist demand for labor-power will outstrip the natural growth of its supply. KEY, again, to note that this explains the narrative of the apologists, without becoming it. for first, this eventuality is highly contingent, and can be combated by variegated tactics on the part of capital (in particular, agitating for artificial growth in labor supply through immigration). secondly, it is periodic--in other words, prone to the contradictions of capitalism, more generally. (note, it may make less sense to separate these two points theoretically, than it does in terms of the presentation. that question, perhaps, depends on how one wants to understand the relation of systemic ebbs and flows to class agency). perhaps most importantly, marx is also calling attention to the contradictions immanent in expansive capitalism--namely, that it cements more widely labor's "enslavement to capital... accumulation of capital is therefore multiplication of the proletariat" as oppressed soul.
(766): in passing, it needs to be made explicit that this discussion for the need of an ever-larger permanent "underclass" is a direct response to malthus' "principle of population." (see FN 6)
(769): on the golden chain in the golden age: "a rise in the price of labor, as a consequence of the accumulation of capital, only means in fact that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-laborer has already forged for himself [sic] is loosened somewhat."
(769): in essence, marx is demanding that we orient our analysis around "the absolute law" of capitalist production: the production of surplus-value. in this sense, the imperfections of the apologists' narrative can themselves be systematized and made coherent. the abiding question, of course, is how we retain this analysis in the face of the alleged success of Capital in the golden age. in other words, that question, again, of whether capitalism has proved more resilient than marx imagined. though i think 1968 often puts paid to those questions, no?
(770): constructing the rate of accumulation as always the independent variable--in this sense, while exploding malthus' principle, marx is, more generally, endeavoring to demonstrate the contingency of all dynamics putatively "natural."
(771): lambasting the currency school, but revealing, in the process, the contingency of his own analysis. for it is certain that monetary phenomenon have become more central to the dynamics of 21st century capitalism--how do we integrate that fact into his argument here? and still, i am tempted to suggest that his scorn here can show the way toward more holistic analyses of the monetary world.
(771-772): the critical passage: roughly, marx is suggesting that the process of capital accumulation, and the process of the growth of the working-class, cannot be theorized independently. rather, the latter follows the ebbs and flows of the former. in the sense that, if capital accumulation proceeds swimmingly, capital requires (by demanding) more laborers at factories (more hands needed to utilize additional capacity, to valorize the additional capital). if, however, profits are low and accumulation is stop-start or stagnant, capitalism corrects itself--a comparatively smaller amount of "paid" labor is needed as a consequence of the slow-down, and wages fall (because labor supply now exceeds demand). [reminder: this is all a "special case", in that marx has not introduced the notion of the decline in the composition of capital]
(772): "just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand."
(773): this commitment to complicate the relationship between the extent of the means of production and the increasing productivity of labor--this assertion that the decreasing organic composition of capital is both the cause of as well as the consequence of the increasing productivity of labor--affirms harvey's attempts to foreground marx' refusal to theorize these dynamics in strictly causal terms. the dynamism of a dialectical framework, if invigorated by history and science, refutes the tired positivism of the liberals.
(776): the endlessness, the limitlessness: "every accumulation becomes the means of new accumulation."
(776-777): here, an exposition of the contingent relationship between the proccesses of accumulation and concentration. concentration, marx is arguing, is not a necessary result of the process of accumulation; rather, it can be interrupted and repelled by the intervention of alternative dynamics. though he admits the tendency to concentration (in the sense that these increases in individual capitals are the very bases of the corresponding capitalist enterprises), they meet with limits. here he names two: (1) "the degree of increase of [presumambly others'] social wealth," which i interpret to refer to the competition of other capitalists as well as, perhaps, the increasing demands made by a progressively better-fed, clamoring under-class. and (2) "the part of the social capital domiciled in each particular sphere of production"--in other words, the impact of laws of inheritance and intra-familial competition on individual capitals. none of this, it must be said, contradicts the general readiness to associate accumulation with concentration (see the succeeding paragraph), but, again, it opens up the general theoretical framework to challenges by specific histories (and, in a sense, immunizes it from the entrepreneurial sorts who, while seizing on these various opportunities (or 'moments), inveigh against the "awful universalisms" of marx' analysis). NB: it would be important, i think, to assess all this with more recent theories of monopoly capitalism in mind.
(777): in fact, here marx seems to suggest an alternative term, centralization, in order to refer to the "transformation of many small into few large capitals." while i have always understood this as concentration, this passage defines concentration, instead, as something akin to the consolidation of capitalist relations--i.e., the concentration of the means of production, which begin as scattered in a medley of capitalist and pre-capitalist relations of production (the intermediate forms, let's say), in the hands of individual capitalists. centralization refers to "the next stage", in a very definite sense, where "capital grows to a huge mass in a single hand in one place, because it has been lost by many in another place." needless to say, this triplet of accumulation, concentration, and centralization is critical (but also confusing, given the tendency to use the second to signify the third). (see 779, where engels clarifies the definitions: centralization as concentration in fewer hands, concentration as "another name for reproduction on an extended scale")
(777): barriers to entry, economies of scale--it's all here.
(778-779): further discussion of the triplet. important to complicate my primitive observations above.
(780): centralization as pooling of capitals, not simply cannibalization: "the world would still be without railways if it had had to wait until accumulation had got a few individual capitals far enough to be adequate for the construction of a railway"
(781-782): the dynamics underlying the creation of a "relatively redundant working population"--have to better understand what is necessary and what is contingent in this process. but it is all here, of course.
(782-783): marx here highlights how the pejorative consequences of capitalism's dynamism--the "violent fluctuations"--conspire to produce, "temporarily", a surplus population. importantly, though each of these moments is individually fleeting, their systemic origins means that the assemblage of redundancies they represent is emphatically permanent. it is in the failure to substantively theorize the latter fact, i think, that lies the rub.
(783): the tragedy of simple reproduction: "the working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing"
(784): repudiating, again, malthusian attempts to pinpoint a 'natural' law of population increase. this is, of course, monumentally obvious--one cannot understand the relationship of man to nature (or, rather, humans to their reproduction) without history. but critical to re-assert against the population planners.
(784): the latent question, i suppose, remains: how does one understand the fact of this necessity of an industrial reserve army while also appreciating the fervent honesty of these ideologues fixated on population control? as always, i suspect this is not really a question for the economists, but rather a topic to be tackled by the theorists of conscoiusness. why do well-meaning people hold--really hold--patently mistaken beliefs?
(785-786): here marx mentions the relationship between the formation of this reserve army and the industrial cycle, but not in much detail. there is some confusion, i think, over what he identifies as the independent variable--though perhaps we're moving past causal-talk, in general? (there is much to close-read here, i think--especially in conjunction with volume III)
(786): clearly, these pages lay the groundwork for theorizing emigration in capitalism: while a source of bolstering this reserve army, of course, it interacts in complicated ways with the sanctitiy of identities which sustain capitalist hegemony by feeding forms of false-consciousness. indeed, in the latter dynamic, contradictory forces are at play: on the one hand, the immigration of non-nationals threatens the stability of that national identity (through diffusion, assimilation, cross-national solidarity)--this may be a boon for workers, in a long-term sense, but in the short-term it surely appears as any number of individual injustices ("they're stealing our jobs!"). in this way, it helps divide and rule. on the other hand, the restriction of immigration, marx is pointing out, threatens the very fabric of capitalist production--the existence of a reserve army is foundational to the healthy functioning of the system. this bewildering skein of competing considerations (along with whatever i have ommitted), of course, implies a masterful agency, the likes of which it would impossible to track, i suspect (this, in a sense, is the abiding impression of this section--there is an overriding logic to the system's operation which is at once rational and efficient yet also decidedly destructive and violent (NB: even the former is not at all the neoclassical narrative)).
(788): under capitalism's watch, the 'natural' limits to population growth are malleable, moulded to its aims.
(789-790): overwork and enforced idleness as twin symptoms of the same systemic patterns.
(791-792): an explicit critique of bourgeois analysis, arguing that the ideologues extrapolate from a local rise in wages to claim the infallibility of capitalist production, whereas the pattern really needs to be theorized and understood in the context of its place in the overall assemblage (i.e., its definitively local origins and ramifications--which sphere of production, etc.). in other words, "local oscillations" are mistaken for universal, timeless trends.
(793-794): there are here some interesting (though fragmentary) observations on the process of working-class 'awakening'--not chronologically, exactly, but more systemically. marx speaks also of the role that the iron, objective laws of capital play in stifling this tendency to subjective organization. and where these alliances can't be stifled objectively (and this industrial reserve army formed naturally), he alludes, Capital calls summons the Iron Fist ("forcible means"). (see also 808)
(796): Marx deploys these concepts in order to theorize the migration of masses from rural to urban areas, as "capitalist agriculture takes possession of agriculture." Needless to say, this is immensely relevant to the present plight of the Third World--in fact, the whole dialectics of technology (as presented in this and earlier chapters) presage the approach most suited to tackling the corporatization of rural areas today. We simply must be directly concerned with labor absorption.
(797): "along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth"--it is important to note here that Marx's theory of modern poverty (pauperism under capitalism) is inextricably linked to this fact of the necessity of a relative surplus population. Can our classless neoclassicals even compete?!
(798): a summary of "the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation"
(798): underlying all this is the uneasy question of what an "actually-existing" socialist society might do with the question of population.
(799): an explicit normative appraisal of the situation of the worker in capitalist society: "it follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse." the objections to this claim seem obvious. yet, in marx's defense, one has to (a) situate this in the context of the importance of dialectics to his general argument, and (b) clarify that he is here employing a much more holistic normative measures than GDP/capita allows. Yet perhaps it is important to complicate his observation, not simply empirically but also theoretically?
(799, FN 23): this prefigures the implications of development-of-underdevelopment analyses, insofar as Marx is here emphasizing the 'modernity' of misery and poverty--it is not that these are symptoms of backwardness waiting to be swept away, but rather that they are emphatically 'modern' phenomenon which are indelible features of a modern capitalist economy.
(800): some words from an apologist, who celebrates the parasitism of his ilk: "'it seems to be a law of Nature that the poor should be to a certain degree improvident... that there may always be some to fulfil the most servile, the most sordid, and the most ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human happiness is thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate are not only relieved from drudgery... but are left at liberty without interruption to pursue those callings which are suited to their various dispositions" (Rev. J. Townsend, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws. By a Well-Wisher of Mankind).
(812): prefiguring, in fragmentary form, the relationship between capital accumulation and space--between development and slum-dwelling. the "developing" city has no place for its poor. (in the pages that follow, he explores this in depth--needless to say, on the "planet of slums," the underlying theoretical framework and consequent empirical investigation are both immensely relevant.)
(815): this continues, as Marx substantiates again the claim that the liberal doctrine of equal rights masks the deep asymmetries at the heart of capitalist society: while the rich displaced by railways and industry receive comfort and compensation, the poor working-classes are indicted for crowding in alternate locations as a result!
(822): lest anyone need be reminded, Marx is under no illusions that the industrial working-class is uniform; here he speaks explicitly of an "aristocracy" of the working-class. though this isn't exactly the michael albert objection, this observation suffices, i think, to show that albert battles a straw-man.
(827): whole working families live worse than sailors, soldiers, and even prisoners (this is Belgium, where the State has not yet interfered with the freedom of Capital).
(833): important section for exploring Marx and the agrarian question--other than the fact that he explicitly complicates the narrative of linear progress (not just by highlighting its non-linearity but also by demonstrating its space-less-ness), he here very directly excoriates the effects of 'labor-saving' technologies on the agricultural populations of 18th and 19th century England. (see particularly 848-849, where all this is tied directly to the concept of the relative surplus population--"there are always too many agricultural labourers for the ordinary needs of cultivation, and too few for exceptional and temporary requirements")
(840): reminder that the study of migration is not as simple as the study of the exodus from country to city, but also must theorize the changes occuring within rural areas (be it intra-rural migration or reconfiguration of rural areas)--again, this only re-emphasizes, against the lie of the modernists, the fact that everything is "modern" (backwardness, rurality, etc.).
(861-862): all this is applied specifically to Ireland and the mass emigrations of the mid-19th century--Marx is tracking the growth of the relative surplus population, and the consequences of this process for the average Irish laborer (much of this is the story of the transition, in Ireland, from arable to pasture land--to a less labor-intensive method of production. as Marx puts it, "the revolution in agriculture has kept pace with emigration").
(866): the comparative argument here (between the distinct roles of the surplus agricultural populations in industrial England and agricultural Ireland) begets a further comparison, for the contemporary third world. in Ireland, Marx argues, though the relative surplus population accumulates in the towns, it is constantly needed in the fields (at harvest time or boom time). crudely put, the story of the contemporary third world is not too distinct, with one exception--the agricultural revolution having proceeded farther (the corporatization of farming, etc.) in this day and age, we see instead a burgeoning informal sector (and mass under and un-employment). the similarities are striking, of course: as in 19th century ireland, the relative surplus population in towns across the third world plays a dual role, depresing urban wages while also filling shortages at harvest time (having said that, one needs to think about where, specifically, this labor comes from at harvest time--this can further complicate the schema, requiring a distinct appraisal of emigration to larger and smaller cities). in sum, i suppose, one again needs--as Marx has demonstrated throughout this chapter--a concrete assessment of hard data pertaining to a particular place and time.
chapter 25: the general law of capitalist accumulation
(763-764): a passage critically important to the question of marx's position on absolute immiseration. ceteris paribus, marx is suggesting that periods of buyoant capitalist growth will lead to increased wages, precisely because growth in capitalist demand for labor-power will outstrip the natural growth of its supply. KEY, again, to note that this explains the narrative of the apologists, without becoming it. for first, this eventuality is highly contingent, and can be combated by variegated tactics on the part of capital (in particular, agitating for artificial growth in labor supply through immigration). secondly, it is periodic--in other words, prone to the contradictions of capitalism, more generally. (note, it may make less sense to separate these two points theoretically, than it does in terms of the presentation. that question, perhaps, depends on how one wants to understand the relation of systemic ebbs and flows to class agency). perhaps most importantly, marx is also calling attention to the contradictions immanent in expansive capitalism--namely, that it cements more widely labor's "enslavement to capital... accumulation of capital is therefore multiplication of the proletariat" as oppressed soul.
(766): in passing, it needs to be made explicit that this discussion for the need of an ever-larger permanent "underclass" is a direct response to malthus' "principle of population." (see FN 6)
(769): on the golden chain in the golden age: "a rise in the price of labor, as a consequence of the accumulation of capital, only means in fact that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-laborer has already forged for himself [sic] is loosened somewhat."
(769): in essence, marx is demanding that we orient our analysis around "the absolute law" of capitalist production: the production of surplus-value. in this sense, the imperfections of the apologists' narrative can themselves be systematized and made coherent. the abiding question, of course, is how we retain this analysis in the face of the alleged success of Capital in the golden age. in other words, that question, again, of whether capitalism has proved more resilient than marx imagined. though i think 1968 often puts paid to those questions, no?
(770): constructing the rate of accumulation as always the independent variable--in this sense, while exploding malthus' principle, marx is, more generally, endeavoring to demonstrate the contingency of all dynamics putatively "natural."
(771): lambasting the currency school, but revealing, in the process, the contingency of his own analysis. for it is certain that monetary phenomenon have become more central to the dynamics of 21st century capitalism--how do we integrate that fact into his argument here? and still, i am tempted to suggest that his scorn here can show the way toward more holistic analyses of the monetary world.
(771-772): the critical passage: roughly, marx is suggesting that the process of capital accumulation, and the process of the growth of the working-class, cannot be theorized independently. rather, the latter follows the ebbs and flows of the former. in the sense that, if capital accumulation proceeds swimmingly, capital requires (by demanding) more laborers at factories (more hands needed to utilize additional capacity, to valorize the additional capital). if, however, profits are low and accumulation is stop-start or stagnant, capitalism corrects itself--a comparatively smaller amount of "paid" labor is needed as a consequence of the slow-down, and wages fall (because labor supply now exceeds demand). [reminder: this is all a "special case", in that marx has not introduced the notion of the decline in the composition of capital]
(772): "just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so, in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand."
(773): this commitment to complicate the relationship between the extent of the means of production and the increasing productivity of labor--this assertion that the decreasing organic composition of capital is both the cause of as well as the consequence of the increasing productivity of labor--affirms harvey's attempts to foreground marx' refusal to theorize these dynamics in strictly causal terms. the dynamism of a dialectical framework, if invigorated by history and science, refutes the tired positivism of the liberals.
(776): the endlessness, the limitlessness: "every accumulation becomes the means of new accumulation."
(776-777): here, an exposition of the contingent relationship between the proccesses of accumulation and concentration. concentration, marx is arguing, is not a necessary result of the process of accumulation; rather, it can be interrupted and repelled by the intervention of alternative dynamics. though he admits the tendency to concentration (in the sense that these increases in individual capitals are the very bases of the corresponding capitalist enterprises), they meet with limits. here he names two: (1) "the degree of increase of [presumambly others'] social wealth," which i interpret to refer to the competition of other capitalists as well as, perhaps, the increasing demands made by a progressively better-fed, clamoring under-class. and (2) "the part of the social capital domiciled in each particular sphere of production"--in other words, the impact of laws of inheritance and intra-familial competition on individual capitals. none of this, it must be said, contradicts the general readiness to associate accumulation with concentration (see the succeeding paragraph), but, again, it opens up the general theoretical framework to challenges by specific histories (and, in a sense, immunizes it from the entrepreneurial sorts who, while seizing on these various opportunities (or 'moments), inveigh against the "awful universalisms" of marx' analysis). NB: it would be important, i think, to assess all this with more recent theories of monopoly capitalism in mind.
(777): in fact, here marx seems to suggest an alternative term, centralization, in order to refer to the "transformation of many small into few large capitals." while i have always understood this as concentration, this passage defines concentration, instead, as something akin to the consolidation of capitalist relations--i.e., the concentration of the means of production, which begin as scattered in a medley of capitalist and pre-capitalist relations of production (the intermediate forms, let's say), in the hands of individual capitalists. centralization refers to "the next stage", in a very definite sense, where "capital grows to a huge mass in a single hand in one place, because it has been lost by many in another place." needless to say, this triplet of accumulation, concentration, and centralization is critical (but also confusing, given the tendency to use the second to signify the third). (see 779, where engels clarifies the definitions: centralization as concentration in fewer hands, concentration as "another name for reproduction on an extended scale")
(777): barriers to entry, economies of scale--it's all here.
(778-779): further discussion of the triplet. important to complicate my primitive observations above.
(780): centralization as pooling of capitals, not simply cannibalization: "the world would still be without railways if it had had to wait until accumulation had got a few individual capitals far enough to be adequate for the construction of a railway"
(781-782): the dynamics underlying the creation of a "relatively redundant working population"--have to better understand what is necessary and what is contingent in this process. but it is all here, of course.
(782-783): marx here highlights how the pejorative consequences of capitalism's dynamism--the "violent fluctuations"--conspire to produce, "temporarily", a surplus population. importantly, though each of these moments is individually fleeting, their systemic origins means that the assemblage of redundancies they represent is emphatically permanent. it is in the failure to substantively theorize the latter fact, i think, that lies the rub.
(783): the tragedy of simple reproduction: "the working population therefore produces both the accumulation of capital and the means by which it is itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to an extent which is always increasing"
(784): repudiating, again, malthusian attempts to pinpoint a 'natural' law of population increase. this is, of course, monumentally obvious--one cannot understand the relationship of man to nature (or, rather, humans to their reproduction) without history. but critical to re-assert against the population planners.
(784): the latent question, i suppose, remains: how does one understand the fact of this necessity of an industrial reserve army while also appreciating the fervent honesty of these ideologues fixated on population control? as always, i suspect this is not really a question for the economists, but rather a topic to be tackled by the theorists of conscoiusness. why do well-meaning people hold--really hold--patently mistaken beliefs?
(785-786): here marx mentions the relationship between the formation of this reserve army and the industrial cycle, but not in much detail. there is some confusion, i think, over what he identifies as the independent variable--though perhaps we're moving past causal-talk, in general? (there is much to close-read here, i think--especially in conjunction with volume III)
(786): clearly, these pages lay the groundwork for theorizing emigration in capitalism: while a source of bolstering this reserve army, of course, it interacts in complicated ways with the sanctitiy of identities which sustain capitalist hegemony by feeding forms of false-consciousness. indeed, in the latter dynamic, contradictory forces are at play: on the one hand, the immigration of non-nationals threatens the stability of that national identity (through diffusion, assimilation, cross-national solidarity)--this may be a boon for workers, in a long-term sense, but in the short-term it surely appears as any number of individual injustices ("they're stealing our jobs!"). in this way, it helps divide and rule. on the other hand, the restriction of immigration, marx is pointing out, threatens the very fabric of capitalist production--the existence of a reserve army is foundational to the healthy functioning of the system. this bewildering skein of competing considerations (along with whatever i have ommitted), of course, implies a masterful agency, the likes of which it would impossible to track, i suspect (this, in a sense, is the abiding impression of this section--there is an overriding logic to the system's operation which is at once rational and efficient yet also decidedly destructive and violent (NB: even the former is not at all the neoclassical narrative)).
(788): under capitalism's watch, the 'natural' limits to population growth are malleable, moulded to its aims.
(789-790): overwork and enforced idleness as twin symptoms of the same systemic patterns.
(791-792): an explicit critique of bourgeois analysis, arguing that the ideologues extrapolate from a local rise in wages to claim the infallibility of capitalist production, whereas the pattern really needs to be theorized and understood in the context of its place in the overall assemblage (i.e., its definitively local origins and ramifications--which sphere of production, etc.). in other words, "local oscillations" are mistaken for universal, timeless trends.
(793-794): there are here some interesting (though fragmentary) observations on the process of working-class 'awakening'--not chronologically, exactly, but more systemically. marx speaks also of the role that the iron, objective laws of capital play in stifling this tendency to subjective organization. and where these alliances can't be stifled objectively (and this industrial reserve army formed naturally), he alludes, Capital calls summons the Iron Fist ("forcible means"). (see also 808)
(796): Marx deploys these concepts in order to theorize the migration of masses from rural to urban areas, as "capitalist agriculture takes possession of agriculture." Needless to say, this is immensely relevant to the present plight of the Third World--in fact, the whole dialectics of technology (as presented in this and earlier chapters) presage the approach most suited to tackling the corporatization of rural areas today. We simply must be directly concerned with labor absorption.
(797): "along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth"--it is important to note here that Marx's theory of modern poverty (pauperism under capitalism) is inextricably linked to this fact of the necessity of a relative surplus population. Can our classless neoclassicals even compete?!
(798): a summary of "the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation"
(798): underlying all this is the uneasy question of what an "actually-existing" socialist society might do with the question of population.
(799): an explicit normative appraisal of the situation of the worker in capitalist society: "it follows therefore that in proportion as capital accumulates, the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse." the objections to this claim seem obvious. yet, in marx's defense, one has to (a) situate this in the context of the importance of dialectics to his general argument, and (b) clarify that he is here employing a much more holistic normative measures than GDP/capita allows. Yet perhaps it is important to complicate his observation, not simply empirically but also theoretically?
(799, FN 23): this prefigures the implications of development-of-underdevelopment analyses, insofar as Marx is here emphasizing the 'modernity' of misery and poverty--it is not that these are symptoms of backwardness waiting to be swept away, but rather that they are emphatically 'modern' phenomenon which are indelible features of a modern capitalist economy.
(800): some words from an apologist, who celebrates the parasitism of his ilk: "'it seems to be a law of Nature that the poor should be to a certain degree improvident... that there may always be some to fulfil the most servile, the most sordid, and the most ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human happiness is thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate are not only relieved from drudgery... but are left at liberty without interruption to pursue those callings which are suited to their various dispositions" (Rev. J. Townsend, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws. By a Well-Wisher of Mankind).
(812): prefiguring, in fragmentary form, the relationship between capital accumulation and space--between development and slum-dwelling. the "developing" city has no place for its poor. (in the pages that follow, he explores this in depth--needless to say, on the "planet of slums," the underlying theoretical framework and consequent empirical investigation are both immensely relevant.)
(815): this continues, as Marx substantiates again the claim that the liberal doctrine of equal rights masks the deep asymmetries at the heart of capitalist society: while the rich displaced by railways and industry receive comfort and compensation, the poor working-classes are indicted for crowding in alternate locations as a result!
(822): lest anyone need be reminded, Marx is under no illusions that the industrial working-class is uniform; here he speaks explicitly of an "aristocracy" of the working-class. though this isn't exactly the michael albert objection, this observation suffices, i think, to show that albert battles a straw-man.
(827): whole working families live worse than sailors, soldiers, and even prisoners (this is Belgium, where the State has not yet interfered with the freedom of Capital).
(833): important section for exploring Marx and the agrarian question--other than the fact that he explicitly complicates the narrative of linear progress (not just by highlighting its non-linearity but also by demonstrating its space-less-ness), he here very directly excoriates the effects of 'labor-saving' technologies on the agricultural populations of 18th and 19th century England. (see particularly 848-849, where all this is tied directly to the concept of the relative surplus population--"there are always too many agricultural labourers for the ordinary needs of cultivation, and too few for exceptional and temporary requirements")
(840): reminder that the study of migration is not as simple as the study of the exodus from country to city, but also must theorize the changes occuring within rural areas (be it intra-rural migration or reconfiguration of rural areas)--again, this only re-emphasizes, against the lie of the modernists, the fact that everything is "modern" (backwardness, rurality, etc.).
(861-862): all this is applied specifically to Ireland and the mass emigrations of the mid-19th century--Marx is tracking the growth of the relative surplus population, and the consequences of this process for the average Irish laborer (much of this is the story of the transition, in Ireland, from arable to pasture land--to a less labor-intensive method of production. as Marx puts it, "the revolution in agriculture has kept pace with emigration").
(866): the comparative argument here (between the distinct roles of the surplus agricultural populations in industrial England and agricultural Ireland) begets a further comparison, for the contemporary third world. in Ireland, Marx argues, though the relative surplus population accumulates in the towns, it is constantly needed in the fields (at harvest time or boom time). crudely put, the story of the contemporary third world is not too distinct, with one exception--the agricultural revolution having proceeded farther (the corporatization of farming, etc.) in this day and age, we see instead a burgeoning informal sector (and mass under and un-employment). the similarities are striking, of course: as in 19th century ireland, the relative surplus population in towns across the third world plays a dual role, depresing urban wages while also filling shortages at harvest time (having said that, one needs to think about where, specifically, this labor comes from at harvest time--this can further complicate the schema, requiring a distinct appraisal of emigration to larger and smaller cities). in sum, i suppose, one again needs--as Marx has demonstrated throughout this chapter--a concrete assessment of hard data pertaining to a particular place and time.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)