the rabbit eater

4 Skeletor

2011-11-02T13:17:00.000-07:00

“All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.”

I was reminded of this great quotation by the appearance of supporters of the “Robin Hood Tax” on the news again today. According to Russia Today, Occupy Wall Street protesters want this tax to be implemented. According to Channel Four News, G20 protesters want the same. And according to the BBC, the Archbishop of Canterbury is also promoting this tax, along with the Pope himself. We might imagine, therefore, a motley gang of real and imagined radicals, priests and police spies (maybe!) gathered to invoke rather than exorcise something most people don’t have the slightest interest in.

The “Robin Hood Tax” is, in my opinion, an extremely bad idea. Could one contrive a better system to effect the following:

1. Incentivise people to trade options on shares, untaxed, rather than shares, taxed

2. Dissociate the number of share options from the number of shares: effectively monetise equity shares

3. Establish economies of scale in the trading of options by large financial institutions, because … if you imagine options sold by an institution are backed to an extent by shares held by the institution, a larger broker can make share purchases based on option sales to a greater extent internally, untaxed

4. Establish a system where equity is legally owned by a few large financial institutions, who then sell options to buy the same equity, which are traded in place of equity shares

5. Concentrate control of the economy in the hands of large financial institutions – JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs

This is absolutely not a grass roots initiative. Anarchists are not interested in the tax system. No-one is interested in establishing payroll imputation against output VAT, which is eminently sensible. The government piss away far too much money as it is. It’s like, they expect people to support this because it’s named after Robin Hood and so maybe seems anti-establishment. Anyone convinced by that line of reasoning should perhaps reappraise the proposals, imagining they went under the banner of King Herod, or Skeletor, or some other figure who more closely resembles our intellectual entrepreneurs.

Celebrity groundbait (1) - Katie Price and Alex Reid

2011-10-21T12:07:00.000-07:00

Katie Price and her crossdressed cortejo

Generations of theatrical performers have found themselves confronted with the problem of how best to portray the ghost in Hamlet; that is, how best to convey insubstantiality with substantial means. In the absence of a codified symbolism, such as exists in the Chinese Theatre, our actors have to date managed with stiff legged shuffling, talc, woos, etc.

But perhaps Katie Price has further enriched our culture by elegantly solving a similar problem: how to show symbolically that a lover is haunted and rendered insubstantial by the withdrawal of the sunlight of her attention, and she has achieved this by the simple expedient of marrying a transvestite boxer.

a "new" tax meme

2011-09-21T15:39:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago this tax theory “meme”, launched by a PR company on behalf of undisclosed corporate interests, was officially a Major News Story:

Twenty of Britain's leading economists have urged the Chancellor to scrap the 50p top rate of income tax – for the sake of the recovery

It’s sort of jarring, but at the same time completely predictable, to see wooden 90s neoliberalism once again paraded as serious scientific work. All these people have is a theological rejection of the acquisition and use of resources by the state in furtherance of a social democratic agenda, arguing:

1. That profit at current rate is really a necessary cost of production

2. That all activity for profit is productive

Both are untrue; but the current economic crisis, brought about by the overdevelopment of clearly unproductive activity in western countries, should surely have made a person interested in describing the real world have second thoughts about this inherited dogma.

Pepe Escobar on Russia Today

2011-08-31T16:23:00.000-07:00

One of the ideas appearing on and under the surface of the coverage of the war in Libya concerns "al Qaeda" fighters - this is picked up by Pepe Escober here:

and in the Asia Times:

His name is Abdelhakim Belhaj. Some in the Middle East might have, but few in the West and across the world would have heard of him.

Time to catch up. Because the story of how an al-Qaeda asset turned out to be the top Libyan military commander in still war-torn Tripoli is bound to shatter - once again - that wilderness of mirrors that is the "war on terror", as well as deeply compromising the carefully constructed propaganda of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO's) "humanitarian" intervention in Libya.

(I suppose "Belhaj" was "allegedly" friends with "al-Zarqawi" mkII: it's impossible to pin down any of this)

Also, I can half remember a thing about Benghazi militias being flown from front to front by NATO, like Hollywood extras.

When people were massacred in Tripoli last week, and in some places reportedly only non combatant handcuffed black men, the UK press evidently had to report it; but the same things had been reported months ago in the rebel area, and were excluded from the teevee context of the war in Libya, as if they had ocurred only in "liminal news", and so didn't need to be accounted for.

don't forget ...

2011-08-23T15:50:00.000-07:00

... that this culture's dislike of the middle classes, always for the wrong reasons, ought to be considered alongside its indifference to, and profound estrangement from, unskilled workers considered as human beings

London 2011

2011-08-19T17:19:00.000-07:00

From 1780:

“There is about a thousand mad men, armed with clubs, bludgeons, and crows, just now set off for Newgate, to liberate, they say, their honest comrades. - I wish they do not some of them lose their lives of liberty before morning. It is thought by many who discern deeply, that there is more at the bottom of this business than merely the repeal of an act - which has as yet produced no bad consequences, and perhaps never might.”

Unfortunately, it’s rare that anyone ever gets to the bottom of any of this business. On the 4th of August, Mark Duggan was killed by police, following which, according to the Daily Mail:

“the IPCC was forced to deny reports that Mr Duggan was “assassinated” as rumours spread like wildfire on the internet that he was unarmed, having put his gun down on the ground when he was shot.”

Mark Duggan’s friends and family organised a demonstration in Tottenham on the 6th of August, demanding answers from the police as to what had happened. At this protest, it’s reported that a sixteen year old girl was beaten by the police prompting a confrontation with police. Parked police cars were attacked with apparent impunity, and then shops were attacked and robbed, certainly by people with a different agenda from the initial demonstrators. A large carpet shop and the flats above it were set on fire. Over the following few nights, Londoners who were so inclined, discovering that they could apparently steal with impunity, attempted to do so (social policy for thirty years has been to resurrect nineteenth century social relations: it is almost as if they had brought back the classes laborieuses and the classes dangereuses). Overwhelmingly, unemployed Londoners have been charged with crimes relating to the riots.

But was there any more at the bottom of this business: the killing of Mark Duggan, the girl who got beaten, police permissiveness (followed by a police crackdown)? But also the surreal sentences handed out to rioters and the teevee disinformation? They’re probably just aspects of the British system, along with institutional racism, permanent house price inflation, the war in Afghanistan and the 2012 Olympics, but we can’t be entirely sure.

School of Aphex

2011-08-11T04:04:00.000-07:00

There is a nightclub in London, ostensibly closed and boarded up, from which the Aphex Twin is directing rioters to attack Halfords or Tesco Metro, using two specially grooved cardboard disks, that have been laid out on his decks

That isn’t true. I think it’s just a normal response to think about what happened in London and try to reconcile it with what’s happened in popular culture, as well as what’s happened socially and politically. There is something about the staged inscrutability and desperation in this advert for microwaveable sausages:

But, if anything, Chris Cunningham/Chris Morris inspired adverts are a consequence of the senselessness of modern life, more than an influence on it; just as the “shock and awe” advertising campaign for NATO’s looting of Iraq eight years ago, or Libya now, was a consequence of the political organisation of the US and its satellites, and may not have influenced at all the decisions of Londoners to rob Halfords.

"incidents of civil disorder"

2011-08-10T16:32:00.000-07:00

The Guardian have an incident map up showing incidents of civil disorder in the country over the last week, which I suppose they could eventually turn into a commemorative wallchart.

The media coverage of the riots has focused on events that are understandably upsetting: out of control fires destroying people’s homes, and the destruction of owner-managed businesses. Doing so highlights real incidents of nihilistic criminality: the Guardian today has an article about a woman who works in Poundland who nearly died when her flat was burnt out. If we look at the incident map, it appears that the most common sort of incident is something less shocking: people robbing high street shops.

that "men armed with knives and sticks" meme

2011-08-06T06:29:00.000-07:00

Groups of men armed with knives and sticks attacked thousands of protesters trying to march to the headquarters of Egypt's military rulers Saturday

So … you have to remember, this isn’t a description of a gauzy genre painting, like Goya’s Dos de Mayo, but something that is credibly reported to have actually happened … around the same day this was reported, the BBC were saying Norwegians were demanding a secret trial for Anders Breivik

the horrible society - explained

2011-07-09T16:30:00.000-07:00

The counter-revolution in economics is almost complete. A flirtation with alternative thinking lasted for the six months between the near collapse of the banking system in late 2008 and the London G20 summit in April 2009. Since then, the forces of economic orthodoxy have regrouped and fought back

This was from an article in the Guardian by Larry Elliott which intelligently argues that higher interest rates can hardly make oil or corn relatively cheaper …

… but there’s something horrible about this Keynes meme. It’s another one of those things in modern society that when viewed objectively, and dissociated from the social intercourse in which it sits, has something of the panicked serenity of the train of thought of someone in the middle of a drug overdose.

What Mr Elliot's thing is about: Keynes’ General Theory was a part of a real intervention in British society in the 30s. Keynes developed some new theoretical concepts which lead him to seek to push monetary expansion as a solution to Britain’s economic problems. He articulated his case for this in the context of the deliberately reactionary economics of his time. The general Theory slyly advocates monetary expansion while attempting to reconcile this view with established neoclassical economics. The overall result is a muddled book that contradicts itself and is predicated on a demonstrably false theory of money.

Keynes’ book was successful because, errors and all, it suited a historical context in which socialism was a real threat, in which the British establishment were willing to make concessions to British workers to defend Britain’s imperial role, and in which authoritarian state capitalism was widely admired by this same establishment. These social conditions are not replicated today. It’s hard to judge whether the stupidity and cynicism of neoclassical economists was worse then or now, but their discourse and institutional arrangements were certainly different.

Bringing Keynesianism back now as an establishment practice is not plausible, because the establishment neither want nor need it. Outside of this establishment, one can only hope for a decent analytical tool. The fact that Keynesianism was part of a somewhat progressive rearrangement of society in the past, leads people into adopting a really poor analytical tool, when there’s no good reason to do this.

Really, now, the banking apparatus is cannibalising the entire economy and only nationalisation of banking can prevent this. This idea can have no purchase on established politics: the politics of the bancocratic establishment, but it’s the only realistic analysis of the situation.

(I wrote some proper notes for this piece, with grand 18th century phrases, but then wrote the whole thing from memory in about 20 minutes. The main thing was the distinction between the general interest and the special interests of the possessers of political power, changing historical cirumstances, and Keynes' unreliability - the history of monetary economics that doesn't mention Proudhon, or his critics, for instance.)

Eastenders 1987

2011-06-30T14:39:00.000-07:00

I guess this is around Christmas 1987. The soap opera Eastenders had a story where Arthur stole money from the Christmas club he ran, and this transgression, and its associated guilt and shame precipitated a nervous breakdown. It was something like a Greek tragedy translated into the simple language of teevee drama. And for this kind of thing it was probably pretty good. But could you imagine television being able to articulate this kind of moral delicacy now? How can you demonstrate social horror attending a minor theft, in a society where the establishment steal with impunity every day, and everyone knows it?

If anything pleases me about the current Tory government, and the same goes for New Labour, it’s that it’s only necessary to recall David Cameron’s Mr Punch wickedness, that appalling creep Philip Hammond, or the wretched Gove, for one's own indiscretions to pale into insignificance.

protest in Winchester

2011-06-28T14:28:00.001-07:00

I went to this protest in Winchester at the weekend, which was better attended, from what I saw, than the Echo credits; but even so, considering the thousands of people who work for the Council in the South, it was hardly a mass mobilisation. Maybe most people can’t afford to park in Winchester. The speeches made were extremely lucid, and really deserved a bigger audience.

don't take the blue acid

2011-06-28T14:28:00.000-07:00

Top Tory found dead in Glastonbury toilet

Was Duke of Edinburgh behind black op?

2011-05-09T13:01:00.000-07:00

President Barack Obama and White House staff were today debating the release of a video showing Osama bin Laden being buried at sea.

The dead terror chief was given an Islamic burial in the North Arabian Sea in a bid to stop his fanatical followers turning his final resting place into a shrine.

a what? a sea burial?

are people mad?

2011-05-04T15:04:00.001-07:00

From a survey of support for the alternative vote system:

"The survey predicts a 68% no vote against just 32% for yes and, in line with other recent polls, suggests support for electoral change has slumped further since a Guardian/ICM poll last month revealed the growing size of the no lead. The lead then was 16 points, compared with 36 now.

That suggests the campaign has been overwhelmingly lost by the Yes to AV alliance, which began the year with an apparent lead in the polls. In February, a Guardian/ICM poll put the yes camp ahead by two points"

Are people mad? The only reasons not to vote for alternative vote are 1. possibility of electoral fraud from the introduction of voting machines, 2. the hegemonic role of political parties is seen as beneficial.

Essentially, the outcome of alternative vote ought to be fairly close to having a duopolistic election and an open primary at the same time. It would provide an opportunity to end the situation where people feel obliged to vote for hideous new labour warmongers in order to retard NHS privatisation for a couple more years. It frustrates me when people talk about these things in completely abstract terms, forgetting the forces really in play. This is an opportunity to take out egregiously bad politicians - the people who really voted for bombing Libya last month - I really don't understand why people would want to vote against that.

antfarm

2011-04-25T06:51:00.001-07:00

My colleague E is more senior than I am, and actually important enough for my employer to send her for psychometric profiling. She was genuinely excited by what she picked up on the course she attended. I like and respect my colleague, who is an intelligent and capable woman - probably more capable than I am, and I was genuinely surprised by how impressed she was with the course's teaching - a sort of shoddy totemism with a vaguely Myers-Briggs flavour. You expect individuals to have unusual enthusiasms, but this whole thing is part of the management culture of my company. The whole management thing, apparently, is that a person does not have a proprietorial sense of self, but imagines their world as a kind of antfarm, subject to inspection by improbable experts, who can tell you what you're about.

Maybe the content of the experts' teaching is ultimately reconcileable with management goals. On the other hand, when I get home and think about this, it seems like the way the profiling course was set up would have allowed the wildest extravagances from the experts conducting it. And my colleague would've been calmly writing down the instructions of a wild eyed maniac, frantically chewing betal:

"you are a Beano double page spread - of the floorboards of a Victorian house - and in the maze of floorboards is a cartoon mouse - cowering - and the mouse is your soul"

Inquiry into certain faculties (1)

2011-04-16T12:14:00.000-07:00

Didn't it come out that Egyptian security services had been behind the bombing of a Christian Church at New Year? I'm fairly sure this was on the news, at least reported as an allegation - then nothing. It would be good with these stories to simply collate what's reported in the press at the time. This site features a number a press sources, as well as commentary.

crisis memo (4) - this cat's thesis

2011-04-08T12:33:00.000-07:00

A colleague of mine at work recently graduated, and was telling me about his thesis, which touched on the banking crisis of a couple of years ago. Apparently a credible explanation of this crisis, among economists, and the one my colleague was taught, was that the problems originated with the extension of the right of home ownership to low wage workers. The whole thing was presented as if it was a transgression against nature for workers to own property, which inevitably called down vengeance from heaven.

The crisis certainly followed on from a great period for the issuing of bad mortgages, but both these circumstances were results of the maturation of the underlying asset market. Without bad mortgages the market would have levelled off five or ten years sooner, money would have become tighter, market interest rates would have risen, banks would have become insolvent, (as they periodically do).

tightening of money follows from the maturation of asset markets

ambiguities (3): ressentiment

2011-02-13T13:47:00.000-08:00

What does it mean when intellectuals talk about ressentiment? For instance, when one talks of ressentiment about Dr Slavoj Zizek's marriage to an Argentinian model?

Clearly, we're meant to take ressentiment to convey more than mere resentment. If people resent bankers' bonuses, for instance, this might be upsetting for the bankers; ultimately it could be seen as being not very nice. On the other hand, the resentment could be justified by the bankers' bonuses being wholly undeserved, simply the distribution of an arbitrary levy on the productive economy. The argument either way is entirely prosaic.

When one talks of ressentiment, one attempts to make the condemnation of common or garden resentment absolute and unarguable, by alluding to the unchallangeable authority of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose texts are supposed to permanently avant-garde expressions of unassimilated genius. But if we're to cultivate a sacred awe of unassimilated genius, it remains to be established why one genius ought to be preferred to others. William Blake holds an opinion entirely contrary to Nietzsche's, telling us that the Tygers of Wrath are wiser than the Horses of Instruction. If genius is to be deferred to, there is no way of settling which opinion is correct.

And if we look at the arguments themselves, we might find Blake's argument at least the equal of Nietzsche's, both for cogency and for orthographic invention.

What we need (3) - moralising sermons on the folly of smoking cannabis, and other modern ills

2011-01-13T12:34:00.000-08:00

Often, what ought to have been obvious from the start, only appears so when it is illustrated by personal experience. For instance, that getting along in a society based on unarticulated - unconscious, irrational - norms, is incompatible with the use of a drug which tends to erode the ability to comply with these norms. I remember my colleague X, in all seriousness, asking another colleague, who had attended drama school, whether academic drama didn't tend to include "impressions" of Woody Woodpecker, and Porky Pig, fixed into the text as "radiating singularities":

the-uh uh-uh-the-uh uh-the-uh th-that's all folks,

such extravagencies being undoubtedly authorised by the currently fashionable texts of Deleuze and Guattari, if these texts were taken completely seriously; that is, if the spirit of modern philosophy were allowed to become unmoored from its bureaucratic civil structure, like a tarpaulin torn from its fixtures by a gust of wind, or a stray binliner, suddenly rearing up to its full height.

masked thugs attack student fees protestors

2010-12-16T11:53:00.000-08:00

via

student fees memo

2010-12-06T13:19:00.000-08:00

1. The problem with the government's student fees plan is that they've already allowed tuition fees to expand excessively by maintaining an economic system in which property levies are allowed to compound necessary costs. The final expenditure represented by these fees must be mostly property income (has this even been analysed?). Making students personally responsible for paying these fees can hardly result in a "neoliberally" sound allocation of resources, when students are making decisions based on real costs that might be two or three hundred per cent different from real necessary costs. From the point of view of their own "science", the government are overpricing education, misallocating education by personalising fees, and increasing costs where education represents a necessary component cost (e.g. engineering services).

2. This is according to their own "science", presumably they mean to underwrite a social system with inherited class power.

3. If your MP has a bachelors degree, and they intend to vote for this bill, it might be worthwhile asking them if they intend to refund the £27000 worth of education they've already received, and if not, why not.

as the police decoy van is towed away

2010-11-25T08:32:00.000-08:00

Maybe next time the police will leave out a grand piano, in white, emblazoned with the metropolitan police logo. But the protesters' concrete experience of the state's cynicism and lies has to be worth more than a trashed decoy van, just in terms of citizenship education.

Most people must understand, at some level, that the point of this government is the restitution of nineteenth century social relations. Even their lying propaganda is nineteenth century. Unless one of these protests succeeds, the government probably will.

from Mount Olympus

2010-11-13T17:59:00.000-08:00

"This image has made the front pages because it is exciting. Its violence is liberating to contemplate, in a dangerous, Dionysian way. The ancient Greeks mythologised the irrational, savage, destructive side of the human psyche in stories of the wine god Dionysus and his crazed followers. Down the centuries, pictures of social protest have summoned up those same wine-dark powers or recognised them in moments when the quiet of the city is turned inside out and all the suppressed antagonisms of daily life explode in riot."

A recent column in the Guardian by Slavoj Zizek managed to include a quotation that was anti Jewish in tendency and anti Gypsy in substance. This week, Jonathan Jones's column manages to misrepresent the students' protest against increased tuition fees, and provide an example, in the author's muddled prose, of the priggishness and petty ignorance that the present university system is alleged to inculcate.

Jones attempts to explain Nietzsche's concept of the "dionysian" in art, of which he is reminded by some pictures he's seen of the students' protest. Perhaps imagining himself to be writing from Mount Olympus, he sees no reason to mention Nietzsche, who existed in a particular historical context, preferring to regard his theory as holy writ. Jones either feels his readers don't deserve to know the context of the ideas they're being fed, or Jones wants to take credit for them: either as their originator, or as a Derek Acorah of philosophy, channeling the voices of the ghosts.

The students' protest was entirely rational in intention. It clearly expressed an open antagonism. It didn't coincide with Jonathan Jones's personal plans and intentions, and so is presented as its opposite: "irrational, savage, destructive", "all the suppressed antagonisms of daily life explode in riot". With or without the intervention of all the gods of wine, beer and stout, Jonathan Jones seems to be having trouble getting out of his own head.

quotation for a blaawg post about telesales

2010-11-09T15:55:00.000-08:00

"The biological necessity for morality arises because, for the species to survive, any animal must have, on the one hand some egoism -a strong urge to get food for himself and to defend his means of livelihood; also- extending egoism from the individual to the family to fight for the interests of his mate and young. On the other hand, social life is impossible unless the pursuit of self-interest is mitigated by respect and compassion for others. A society of unmitigated egoists would knock itself to pieces; a perfectly altruistic individual would soon starve. There is a conflict between contrary tendencies, each of which is necessary to existence, and there must be a set of rules to reconcile them. Moreover, there must be some mechanism to make an individual keep the rules when they conflict with his immediate advantage."

Joan Robinson Economic Philosophy

Wild Bean Café

2010-10-25T14:44:00.000-07:00

There are literary revolutions, and there are political revolutions, and they are two separate things; but neither has ever been launched in a Wild Bean Café.

***

A solitary

P.C.S.O.

in the Wild

Bean Café

***

quotation for a "Tea Party" blaawg post

2010-10-20T15:18:00.000-07:00

"The "Cultural Revolution" had nothing revolutionary about it except the name, and nothing cultural about it except the initial tactical pretext. It was a power struggle waged at the top between a handful of men and behind the smokescreen of a fictitious mass movement."

Simon Leys The Chairman's New Clothes

"a pastoral fantasy"

2010-10-18T12:52:00.000-07:00

I learnt from this essay by Benjamin Noys that Foucault wrote about neoliberalism too.

A text by the German economist Wilhelm Röpke from 1950 sets out the objectives of government as allowing access to private property, reducing urban sprawl, to be replaced with private housing, the development of craft and small enterprises (described by Röpke as ‘non-proletarian’), and the organic reconstruction of society on the basis of community, family, and the local; as Foucault says: ‘You will recognize this text; it has been repeated 25,000 times for the last 25 years.’

I will list the objectives he fixes: first, to enable as far as possible everyone to have access to private property; second, the reduction of huge urban sprawls and the replacement of large suburbs with a policy of medium-sized towns, the replacement of the policy and economics of large housing blocks with a policy and economics of private houses, the encouragement of small farms in the countryside, and the development of what he calls non-proletarian industries, that is to say, craft industries and small businesses; third, decentralization of places of residence, production, and management, correction of the effects of specialization and the: division of labor; and the organic reconstruction of society on the basis of natural communities, families, and neighborhoods; finally, generally organizing, developing, and controlling possible effects of the environment arising either from people living together or through the development of enterprises and centers of production.

I was reminded of this by these comments, by former Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin:

"A large number of the Arabs and Turks living in this city (Berlin) has no productive function other than selling fruit and vegetables".

Herr Sarrazin objects precisely to Arabs and Turks' retention of petit bourgeois modes of living, and their failure to enthusiastically take up positions as shelf stackers at the Aldi. Together with Chancellor Merkel's lamentations about these same workers' lack of reverence for Pombär, these comments wonderfully illustrate the decomposition of rational thought among the German élite.

Neoliberalism is an ideology that does not realise its worldview. The Roman Empire, or the Islamic Caliphate, attempted to impose a system their leaders approved. Even the Soviet Union imposed an economic system - the bureaucratic command economy - that its leadership understood and approved. Neoliberalism is a sort of pastoral fantasy, created by Western capitalism's own bureaucracy, in place of the scientific analysis that they are incapable of producing.

a new mystification - Castoriadis

2010-10-18T12:00:00.001-07:00

C.C.: It’s a fact that the passivity of contemporary man rests on the following imaginary signification: technoscience as capable of resolving problems in his stead. Between 1950 and 1980, the main mystification was that of the technical competency [technicité] of politicians: they know—it’s too complicated—how to comprehend nuclear matters, how many bombs the Russians have, etc. An individual picked off the heap, it seems, wouldn’t be able to comprehend what it means for the Russians to have two thousand bombs and the Americans one thousand five hundred. That’s beyond them; one needs a specialist—and not a nuclear specialist but a specialist in “politics”!—in order to understand it. Or this same individual couldn’t understand why the French State has to throw away eight hundred millions dollars for planes that are said to “sniff” oil at an altitude of five kilometers; in order to understand the need for that, you have to have graduated from France’s finest schools of engineering and administration [être polytechnicien, énarque] and be named Giscard. This farce about the technical competency of politicians prevailed for an entire period.

At present, the two elements coexist. Fabius, for example, still embodies the mystification of technical competency: he’s the “expert.” Léotard embodies the other pole, created by Ronald Reagan, even if he hasn’t acted in Westerns, and . . .

Q.: . . . he runs the marathon.

C.C.: There you have it. We are a country with a classical culture; the marathon is Léotard’s Western.

The Pepsi Challenge

2010-10-15T15:31:00.000-07:00

Zizek's latest thing might be thought of as a sort of Pepsi challenge, where Guardian readers get to decide if they like the cool flavours of Robert Brasillach - if reading a newspaper is tasting blind.

Zizek's shoddiest op-ed yet

2010-10-04T15:57:00.000-07:00

A good method for analysing things is, start with what is really happening.

Some British workers get that the point of immigration is to keep wages low. Those that are both self interested and economically literate tend to be opposed to immigration for this reason. The media and government apparatus responds to this constituency by shrilly accusing them of racism, and offering them various ways of expressing this purely economic grievance, involving shrill expressions of racism, in various strengths, and no programme for improving their economic circumstances. The notion that British workers are seeking to preserve a pure British race, or a pristine British culture, is part of this process of recuperation, by which the plutocracy seek to defame or divert people critical of its policies. But this imposture is absurd, because Britain has been racially diverse for a long time, and its culture is capitalism.

Dr Zizek’s shoddiest op-ed yet basically rehashes the British plutocracy’s propaganda, in an attempt to convince Guardian reading “progressives” that the working class are “a paranoid multitude”, subject to violent racist fantasies, with the inference that the “progressive” middle class ought to rally round the oriflamme of plutocratic “liberalism”.

I realise this simple explanation doesn’t account for all of Zizek’s rhetoric: his nonsensical history, his neglected fascist “thinkers”, his collages of disparate ideas dressed up as an argument, and his media personality, apparently delighted to talk about “half-Jews” “and so on“. I’m not sure that Zizek “ironically” represents the true spirit of European plutocracy, while posing as its adversary, or anything like that. Really, I think he’s just a bit of a cock.

fascism with a human face

2010-10-02T08:54:00.000-07:00

naïve and sentimental agencies of control (2)

2010-09-24T15:57:00.000-07:00

In a way, I am mocking professional economists who do not get that their work is as arbitrary, and as unscientific, as the whole Springtime for Germany scene. But I still ought to be able to define my terms reasonably exactly:

An agency of control is the agency responsible for making decisions about the supply of resources,

e.g.: workers, industrial capitalists, landlords, bankers, parliament.

A sentimental agency of control has cognisance over the operations that generate its net income, and can alter those operations in order to maximise that income. This ought to include claims that are necessarily claims on surplus production,

e.g.: capitalists claiming profit, workers claiming wages, and the government imposing taxes on profits, capital gains, and high incomes.

A naïve agency of control does not have cognisance over the operations that generate its income, and can only attempt to claim income arbitrarily, thereby either fortuitously making a succesful para-sentimental claim, or causing unemployment of people or capital,

e.g.: landlords claiming rent, banks profiting from inflation, goverment imposing taxes on necessary consumption or poll taxes.

The point is, that an argument about the naïvety of the administration of a country is not just an argument about the naïvety of its tax system, but needs to take into account the structure of property, and the banking system, and their claims on production.

nihilism today

2010-09-24T15:04:00.000-07:00

Barthes said that while a little formalism takes one away from history, a lot of formalism takes one back to it. One might include, within the scope of formalism, the normative impositions of bureaucratic organisations. The Economist's designers' forgetting, and pretending to forget, what it meant to be a punk, what it meant to be a radical, and what Britain's current government actually represents, finally results in the expression of an unwarranted truth: that the current British government is essentially nihilistic. It really is.

naïve and sentimental agencies of control

2010-09-22T15:52:00.000-07:00

Toward the end of his Confessions of an English Opium Eater, De Quincey discusses a pamphlet he tried to put together about Ricardo's economics. I remembered this story, wrongly as it turns out, as being about how De Quincey tried to apply some sort of method from German Idealism, or some kind of drug wizardry, to perfect Ricardo's system. Actually, De Quincey says his ideas could be expressed with algebra. I understand De Quincey's essay was published with his collected works, so maybe I should check it out.

It might be that the amazing aridity of Ricardo's prose contributed to his book's success, because it invited amateur literateurs to feel they could improve on Ricardo's arguments. People today might reasonably argue that Marx really did apply the wizardry of German Idealism, specifically Hegel's philosophy, to Ricardo, even if De Quincey didn't.

But a better marriage might be made between Ricardo's (actually Malthus's) theory of rent and Schiller's theory of naïve and sentimental art.

The theory of rent effectively hypostises -

naïve and sentimental agencies of control.

Capitalist production ought to have a sentimental agency of control, because the capitalist ought to be able to alter his level of production, methods and inputs to maximise his profit. Ricardo argues that rent should also have a sentimental agency of control, because it's against the landowner's interest to fail to rent his land by demanding an excessive rent that cannot be paid. This counterexample of a landowner trying to impose an unpayable rent is an example of a naïve agency of control. Basically, sentimental agencies are good, in the way economics thinks things are good, and naïve agencies are bad.

With these categories, we can easily state the point of neoliberal economics, which is to replace all naïve agencies of control with sentimental agencies of control. Ricardo insists that rent is always subject to a sentimental agency of control, but this isn't necessarily true, as anyone who's noticed the thousands of empty flats in this country will attest. Neoliberal economists are very keen on the theme of the governments naïvety: its subjection of taxation to a naïve agency of control. But the naïvety or sentimentality of the three main forms of claims on the productive economy ought to be considered together:

property - property income (rent)
banking - inflation
government - taxation

retro cinema review: Beverley Hills Cop

2010-09-17T16:01:00.000-07:00

When Hegel expressed his observation, that consciousness of social forms as historical forms is often coincidental with their decline, with the aphorism "the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk", he had no way of knowing whether this principle might apply to Top Gun, Trading Places and Beverley Hills Cop.

I'm not sure if the popular background of neoliberalism is disappearing. In any case, the systematisation of pop neoliberalism probably won't speed its decline. But during the 80s and 90s a great mass of the Western professional class found it incredibly persuasive, to the extent that it was taken as nonpolitical modern thinking, rather than an ideology among others, and an ideology bound up with the entrenchment of capitalist dictatorship.

These ideas certainly influenced the cinema of that period, to the extent that a lot of 80s and 90s films hardly do anything more than preach pop neoliberalism.

For instance, if we look at Beverley Hills Cop, it seems that the writers of this film had a strong sense of the rottenness of excessive privilege and excessive bureaucracy, demonstrated by Beverley Hills and its ineficient police force. The environment this creates is unstable and malign, producing naïve and jobsworth cops, neo-feudal Eurotrash gangsters, and gay art lovers.

Capitalism as a whole isn't meant to be like this, it's a salutary lesson about the dangers of market failure. The real Beverley Hills is only pleasant at a superficial level; when viewed through the spectacles of pop neoliberalism, it is flabby and inefficient.

Anyway, just as estrangement from the market is seen to have a degrading effect on people, close contact with the market is seen to have an invigorating effect. So, the writers of Beverley Hills Cop seem to have had the idea that a streetwise person from outside their circle of privilege really ought to be able to play out his decadent contemporaries in Beverley Hills, purely on account of having "marinated" in an environment characterised by strong market imperatives.

Beverley Hills Cop would still work without having a black cop playing out decadent white Californians. The film could have had a streetwise Hispanic cop, or an Australian cop played by Paul Hogan. It wouldn't have worked with Eddie Murphy playing a cop who used to be a Trappist monk, or a professor of philosophy. At least it wouldn't have worked for a generation that voted for Reagan.

great books - by crooks (1)

2010-09-12T14:45:00.000-07:00

The Socialization of Money by E. F. Mylius (pdf)

Described by Claude McKay as a "worthless book", Mylius's treatise is like Keynes before Keynes, and without Keynes's mistakes. Proudhon had not come to that learned man's attention.

Anyway, Mylius was the bookkeeper for Max Eastman's Liberator, in which capacity he was able to "privatize" a great deal of money from the magazine's funds. I mention this, but really, why should a person have to have an account of their crimes hung round their neck, like a stupid cow bell? An ordinary person, I mean.

a question about Keynesianism

2010-08-28T01:28:00.000-07:00

In the comments under this post at the blaawg Lenins Tomb someone asks:

"I sometimes see leftists argue that the current bourgeoisie is destroying itself by immiserating wage-laborers. They claim that the capitalist system requires workers to buy wage-goods at a certain level, or production will be unbought and profits unrealized. But couldn't the solution be to reduce wages (and increase exploitation) and then sell more ... capital goods, government goods, and luxury goods"?

This cat is asking, what if the bourgeoisie won't realise their surplus value or allow real wages to increase? I suppose in an economy with a commodity for money, there would be permanent deflation, with effective demand being continually reduced by the hoarding of money, and a certain amount of involuntary unemployment. However, this isn't what we see in contemporary capitalism, where there tends to be unemployment and appreciable inflation.

Suppose we really had the two constraints listed above: the bourgeoisie won't realise as production the whole of the difference between feasible production and necessary production, and they won't pay wages high enough to cover the production they won't realise, could this situation be resolved by the bourgeoisie lending money to the workers?

In this case, it would be possible to achieve full employment in the short term, but to maintain it, it would be necessary for workers' net borrowing to continually exceed their repayments: effectively it would be necessary for workers' borrowing to constantly increase. Since there's a technical limit as to how much workers can repay, this isn't possible. At some point a recession must ensue.

It seems that you can generate cycles of expansion and recession, in hypothetical models, by making the assumption that the bourgeoisie impose an artificial maximum income on themselves. This would be an alternative way of generating cyclical dynamics in a model of capitalist development. It's a different way of getting a Keynes or Minsky type theory. I'm not sure it's strictly correct, though.

***

Actually, re comrade's trip to Bradford, isn't the EDL basically a government scheme to employ ex soldiers with Smallhausen Syndrome? to put off anyone opposed to the war?

help for heroes

2010-08-26T12:40:00.000-07:00

It is very sad when people end up with schizophrenia, because of drug and alcohol problems, because they've served as soldiers in Afghanistan, or when people lose arms and legs serving in this war. But the propaganda line of the charity "help for heroes" - that the war in Afganistan is heroic because it inflicts injury on British Army soldiers - is ridiculous. I suppose people think that the tangible benefits that this charity provides to injured soldiers makes the tacked on propaganda message OK. I would have thought they were two different things. It seems that, if you dole out a few pounds to the needy, you get to decide what's true and what's not true, just like in the middle ages. What might British Army soldiers have done in Afghanistan?

Perhaps they locked up a taxi driver for years in a metal container, on the basis of false rumours,

or, fired missiles at a wedding reception, then paid $500 to the relatives of the people who died,

or, machine gunned a bus, then falsely claimed the people who died were resistance fighters,

etc etc etc

As I understand it, mostly they sit in the base, or patrol half a mile round the base, checking for IEDs. It would have been better to use the name "help for heroes" for a charity providing for retired racehorses, and collect money for former soldiers in British Legion boxes.

Henry Flynt

2010-08-21T08:52:00.000-07:00

AGAINST "PARTICIPATION": A Total Critique of Culture

this is from an archive of articles by Henry Flynt, criticising the pretensions of the artistic culture, so called, into which he'd been - "elevated" - I suppose is the word. There are also some interesting pieces on the Henry Flynt site about Economics and Hill Billy music.

I suppose I'm lucky in being able to be unserious about serious things. Henry Flynt's general attitude is dead right in this picture from 1963. I also find it pretty funny.

lookee here

2010-08-15T05:11:00.001-07:00

I was quite surprised the other week to see that the "Beller Meme" had somehow leapt the syntactic grid from Qlipoth to K-Punk abstractdynamics:

If, to use Jonathan Beller's phrase, "to look is to labour" - if, that is to say, attention is a commodity - then aren't we all "contributing", whether we like it or not?

is this true? The public's attention isn't fulfilling any useful function of itself for the advertiser. The advertiser wants the attention of the public only to achieve higher profits, by selling more or selling at a higher price. But that profit has to be realised from total social production, which is diminished by resources being allocated from production to advertising*. The advertiser's gain is the social product he's able to arrogate to himself. The advertising he commissions does not form part of this product, or anyone else's final product or make active means of production more productive. As a social phenomenon the advertiser makes a deduction from the total social product in order to privately appropriate a larger share, in absolute terms, of that product.

The use of advertising tends to diminish society's privately realised surplus product. Consequently, it tends to diminish the rate of profit on revenue. If Daffy Duck's image rights increase in value through advertising, this doesn't mean that society's total surplus product has increased. The point of advertising is the redistribution of the surplus product, not its creation. In any case, capital values in monopoly capitalism tend to be related to profit values by artificially low rates of discount**.

I don't expect anyone will be convinced by this, but really, looking at ads isn't labouring, and we aren't contributing by doing it.

*leaving aside the unlikely possibility of redistribution improving productivity beyond the deadweight advertising cost that engendered it. Index number problems come up with distribution changes, but one can hardly justify calling advertising productive on account of index number problems.

** i.e. lower than the technically determined rate of profit on the commodity value of active means of production.

parody blaawg review: blaawg theory by Dejan

2010-08-06T12:48:00.000-07:00

As the proletars of the future, we must resist the easy temptation of the web's obsessive cycles, pointless debates, feedback loops and highly addictive porno. As dr. Fossey succintly explains, these things CORRUPT the pure proletarian heart, whose historic Revolutionary Desire dissolves in the internet's diabolical circuits - the drives of seduction, hedonism, tits, ass, and fornication.

Distracted by this virtual capitalist Sodom, we as the proletar subjects of the future fail on our historic mission - mounting the Resurrection of Comrade Stalin from the love handles of Comrade Slavoy Zizek. We DEVIATE, comrades and comradesses, from the path of freedom. Instead of washing our own laundry, we allow the corrupted Capitalist Machine to do it for us.

What's clever about Dejan's parody is that it doesn't just exaggerate Jodi Dean's analysis, but it exaggerates one aspect while forgetting about another aspect.

Essentially, the parody sets up a contrived choice for the sociologist studying American people, between seeing Americans as:

a. dispossessed and disenfranchised proletars

or

b. comfortable and enfranchised citizens

Jodi Dean's picture of Americans as belonging to category a. is portrayed as ridiculous (I don't know if this is Dean's real position: I haven't read her book. I'm just going by the parody). Consequently category b. ought to be correct. But really, somewhere in the middle would be more correct, because most Americans don't have real political representation, and quite a few are really immiserated. The desire for middle class Americans to have political representation really doesn't necessitate them identifying themselves with nineteenth century factory workers.

But, in a daring dialectical twist, Dejan pretends to have forgotten that Dean's apparent category of barelife proletars presupposes a social technology productive of a proletarariat. A second contrived choice is established concerning the degree of autonomy of Americans, who might be:

a. free to choose freely

or

b. constrained in their choices

Dejan allows that Dean's analysis assumes a. rather than b. and that the Americans really want everything they get, from spectacular wars for the benefit of Dick Cheney to abstract digi porn. They are no longer interested in sex with other humans, prefering the endless autistic reprogramming of the fragments of the human sexual past. In reality, most Americans must be fairly constrained in their choices, but some of them probably do really want it.

If we map Dejan's categories onto the sexuation graph, you can see what I mean.

clowns army

2010-08-02T13:23:00.000-07:00

The British government want people to volunteer for the London olympics, with the selling point seeming to be that you get ordered around by McDonalds managers. In times of crisis in the past, Britain's labourers were expected to fall in line behind a landowner with a commission; now they're expected to fall in line behind a clown with a mincing machine.

formez vos bataillons!

Britain shouldn't be allowed to hold the dogging olympics, never mind the olympics proper. It's a country that engages in aggressive war. Perhaps people will reflect on this country's internal and external policy, if they're thinking of working for this lot, for free.

Orwell - official mascot of the London olympics

the labour theory of value

2010-07-17T13:00:00.000-07:00

There was a nice tribute to Joan Robinson in the Guardian the other week, which might just have sold a few copies of her Economic Philosophy (3s 6d, the only Robinson book you can easily get). This is a nicely written, and appropriately sceptical, book about economics for the general reader. But for some reason Robinson has a horrible, mystical understanding of Ricardo's labour theory of value. Since the labour theory of value is the basis for the theory of free trade, I think we had better try to reconstruct Ricardo's theory, in the interests of the continued supply of consumer tat.

1. The price of any good can ultimately be decomposed into profit (Π) and labour cost (Λ) items, by adding up the labour cost and profit items of all componant items back to unaided labour. This procedure gives the totals of decomposed labour cost and profit, which I am writing as Λ* and Π*. Labour cost is taken to be a necessary cost of production, and profit represents surplus production.

I1 represents the cost of intermediate goods. This is meant to demonstrate how the price of beer can be broken down to labour costs and profit. I actually regret using the greek letters now.

2. If profit is a function of capital employed in any industry, and tends to an equal rate, across industries and transhistorically, then the sum of all decomposed profits contributing to the price of a commodity will be related to the total capital employed in its production, or decomposed capital, K*. In this case:

K* = aΠ*

where the coefficient "a" is a constant.

3. In classical economics capital is generally taken to be equivalent to annual costs. Since total necessary costs are equivalent to decomposed labour costs, Λ*, it seems reasonable to assume that capital will be a linear function of decomposed labour costs, Λ*, so that:

K* = bΛ*

if this is the case, profit can be expressed as a function of decomposed labour costs:

Π* = (b/a)Λ*

since a commodity's price is the sum of Π* and Λ*, the price, "p" is equivalent to

(1 +b/a)Λ*

price is a linear function of labour applied if the capitalisation of total decomposed labour costs is a linear function of these costs, and labour performed is proportionate to its cost.

4. However, if production is split between different capitalists, for instance if one capitalist produces malt as an input for another capitalist producing beer, then the capitalist working with the produced input, the beer producer, evidently has direct costs exceeding the decomposed labour of his input cost. His costs also include the profit of the malt producer. If the normal classical rule for capitalisation of costs is applied to each capitalist's direct costs, then total capital will cease to be a linear function of total decomposed labour costs.

5. but the classical rule for the capitalisation of costs is only really applicable to pre-industrial capital, in the mid 18th Century this rule would be about right for agricultural capital, merchant's capital and loan capital. In each of these cases a one-off payment of total costs is made in the expectation of a larger return at a specific time in the future. For industrial capital, rates of capitalisation vary.

I've tried to show that Ricardo's labour theory of value was a reasonable scientific theory, and in no way mystical, and why prices in modern industrial capitalism aren't a linear function of decomposed direct labour costs. This fact doesn't invalidate Ricardo's economics, which works just as well with varying rates of capitalisation and profit, it just complicates things. Marx uses "labour" to describe the sum of profit and labour costs, so the price of any good equals its labour value by definition.

senseless restructuring

2010-07-15T09:50:00.001-07:00

I could have mentioned, with regard to the last piece, that as well as worse patterns of levy on the productive economy, the other main cause of monetarist recessions is senseless restructuring of industry, like the current British government's policy to restructure the nhs.

a thing about Stiglitz

2010-07-02T04:45:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure that this article in The Independent on Sunday represents the best of Joseph Stiglitz. It may be that they just talked to him outside a nightclub.

The guy writing the article is way too impressed with Stiglitz's pseudo-Nobel prize win. They gave this prize to Hayek for a theory of capitalism without profits, which Hayek held to because he thought the notion of profit was communist. The real Nobel committee gives out a prize for genuine breakthroughs in medical research. I would be ashamed of getting the pseudo-Nobel economics prize, and having journalists imagine it was a comparable achievement to curing kids with cancer.

On the other hand, you win enough money to buy a speedboat and a Tuscan villa. Anyway Stiglitz goes on to explain:

"The thing most economists did not fully grasp was the extent to which the banks engaged in murky risk-taking activities. They were taking a risk with our money, their shareholders' money, the bond-holders' money,"

...not to mention the money they generated. The Independent's writer continues:

"Banks were demanding up to 40 per cent of the corporate profits, saying their innovative financing was adding value. But "all this talk about innovation was a sham" because it did not relate to any real increase in the economy's productivity"

I don't think the banks tricked the corporate world out of their profits, exactly. This does approach a theory of an irrational levy imposed by one section of the capitalist economy (banks) against another (productive enterprise). This is important, but it isn't an explanation of crises. It would dampen, rather than exaggerate a boom, and wouldn't of itself generate a crash.

"There was a prima facie case of something screwy going on [with all the] perverse incentives that would lead them to take excessive risk. But there was no way anyone could know or believe that the banks were [conducting themselves] at that level of stupidity. I predicted that there was going to be a collapse because of the information asymmetry problems that were being created."

This is true, but making "information asymmetry problems" the main hinge of the process is sort of silly.

What I wanted to look at in the article is this part:

"If you have a household that can't pay its debts, you tell it to cut back on spending to free up the cash to pay the debts. But in a national economy, if you cut back on your spending, then economic activity goes down, nobody invests, the amount of tax you take goes down, the amount you pay out in unemployment benefits goes up – and you don't have enough money to pay your debts."

"The old story is still true: you cut expenditures and the economy goes down. We have lots of experiments which show this, thanks to Herbert Hoover and the IMF," he adds. The IMF imposed that mistaken policy in Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Argentina and hosts of other developing countries in the 1980s and 1990s. "So we know what will happen: economies will get weaker, investment will get stymied and it's a downward vicious spiral. How far down we don't know – it could be a Japanese malaise. Japan did an experiment just like this in 1997; just as it was recovering, it raised VAT and went into another recession."

The whole problem of current economic policymaking is encapsulated in Stiglitz's ambiguous "you". Does he mean the government or the economy as a whole? Or is he really equating these things? There's no reason to repeat Keynes's mistakes and pretend that effective demand doesn't tend to increase year on year with increases in the money supply. And in a normal capitalist economy with persistant inflation, government spending necessarily imposes real costs on the productive economy, even pure monetary policy: writing off and reextending the government debt or printing banknotes. These are left wing errors. There are also right wing errors: it is believed that capitalism subsists as a single entity that aims to perpetuate itself. This entails a sort of blindness to the reality that banks or monopolies can institute levies on the productive economy as much as government can. A lot of the problems wrought by the IMF's monetarist policies weren't caused by restriction of the money supply, which they always failed to achieve, but by price deregulation imposing a worse pattern of levy upon the productive economy. A further error is the notion that the economy, if adversely shocked, will enter a "downward spiral", because there is no real profit, for which we have to thank, among others, Friedrich Hayek for his prizewinning stupidity.

Neither Washington nor Tehran, readers.

2010-06-27T14:22:00.000-07:00

neoliberalism as cargo cult

2010-06-20T03:02:00.000-07:00

Part of what elevated Robert Harris's bestselling novel, The Ghost, from routine airport thriller to literature proper, was Harris's playing about with a sort of joke that ran through popular culture, that Tony Blair was working for the American secret service. It wouldn't be surprising if a few of the current Labour party apparatus read Harris, who is right out of their milieu, and they might like the joke too, because they seem compelled to replace Gordon Brown with some sort of approximation of Tony Blair. The right wing canditates: David Miliband, Edward Miliband and Edward Balls, are really standing as inheritors of Tony Blair's programme, as if the disasterous consequences of that programme were not immediately apparent. They are apparently unable to understand that the picture of reality drawn by neoliberal economics was completely false, that the policies that it validated created an unproductive boom, a financial crisis, and finally a large scale privatisation of the treasury in order to save an unproductive finance sector. More importantly, they are the same spiders who supported the war in Iraq.

Suppose we admit that there's a contradiction between the Labour Party's members' idea of what they're about, and the quite unreal rightism of their prospective leaders. What is the basis of this contradiction?

Marxists talk about the bourgeoisie as the ruling class of capitalist society, but this is only half right. The bourgeoisie, to which must be added the higher strata of capitalist management, exist in a society in which economic power between capitalist firms is relatively diffuse. The real seizure of power by a section of the bourgeoisie, such as occured in Kuomintang China, for instance, inevitably leads to a dictatorship of bourgeois special interests and the suppression of bourgeois capitalism. The normal functioning of bourgeois capitalism requires a separate political apparatus to rule according to the general interests of the bourgeoisie. This is achieved by an overdetermined political system. The electorate really vote for politicians to rule the country, but of necessity have to vote, in aggregate, for acceptable parties. Capitalists merely sustain a political culture which is amenable to the capitalist general interest, through exercising their special interests: through assimilation with politicians, and through the media, a special capitalist interest. Academia and public sector broadcasting are only partly autonomous, and don't really distort the dominant political culture. And everyone's actions are somewhat affected by living and working under capitalism.

Hence:

1. "normal" bourgeois capitalism can be thought of as the rule of politicians, or the hegemony of an autonomous political culture.

2. "normal" bourgeois capitalism requires the partial coincidence of aggregate capitalist special interests with the capitalist general interest, and the partial coincidence of the interests of the electorate, in a rigged game, with the same capitalist general interest.

So, while we might think it would be more rational for the Labour Party to appoint Diane Abbott, the parliamentary party are likely to have problems moving out of the mainstream of an unpopular and irrational political culture that is nevertheless hegemonic, and also offers lavish pensions. It is unfair to describe neoliberalism as a cargo cult, because it does reward certain special interests, even if in its autonomy it fails to serve the capitalist general interest, or the public interest, even.

ambiguities (2) - quasi-intellectualism

2010-06-11T04:43:00.000-07:00

The process of thinking is, quite evidently, an ordinary human activity, that occurs in, and usually concerns, reality. The idea that human mental activity, when it concerns itself with general or important issues, ought to be divided up into the properly intellectual and the quasi-intellectual, is a quite unreal mystification. The proper intellectuality proposed by this designation represents nothing other than the coincidence of ordinary human cognition with transcendental orders.

A class of Oxford students dutifully copy down what Sir is saying. But a few have glanced up from their copybooks, and noticing their lecturer hatless, immediately and noisily draw lines through what they've written. The others, hearing the commotion, follow suit. Because the lecturer has a removable paper hat, with a letter "i" on the front, which he wears to distinguish proper intellectualism.

The notion that a real intellectual élite not only exists, but is almost coextensive with the British establishment is patently absurd. One need only consider, for a moment, the establishment's intellectual figures. Christopher Hitchens, for instance, whose only noteable achievement has been his transition from the dumb end of leftism to Cheney apologist, a transition carried out with all the dignity of a pac man ghost. Or schools minister Michael Gove, a farmers' fair exhibit of determined credulity, obediently raising his jug head to be filled with lies he immediately teaches, credulous like Tony Blair, but without Blair's polish and Hearst Heiress glamour, a forty year old boy wizard. Imagine this clown teaching kids to read - teaching kids to read his book Celsius 7/7.

Quasi-intellectualism is a description of human reasoning dreamed up by the deluded, or those who seek to delude others. Nevertheless, it might be worth retaining the concept of quasi-intellectualism, for computer systems and social systems that are more or less deliberately set up to mimic human thought.

Nicholas Kaldor's Scourge of Monetarism

2010-05-20T14:28:00.000-07:00

A lot of people are concerned that the Conservative party might deliberately screw up the economy again. I feel like, although before the election might have been a better time, now might be a good time to get to the bottom of Britain's monetarist experiment. This is an an agreable introduction, an article about Sir Keith Joseph, who pushed monetarism in the UK.

"Monetarism has some of the characteristics of Asperger's in its insensitivity and its harshness - that is my point, the man and what he does in life are one. It is important to know this because these people control the destiny of the nation,"

I had a look through Nicholas Kaldor's book The Scourge of Monetarism which is a technical work from the early Thatcher era, rather than a history. Kaldor has some interesting points.

Sir Nicholas Kaldor, the scourge of monetarism

Postulates of monetarism, according to Kaldor

1. prices change in proportion to changes in the money supply
2. the productive economy is not affected by inflation
3. the money supply is determined by the government

Kaldor's critique

I. the money supply as a percentage of income varies widely between countries, or within the same country in different years
II. the money supply is NOT determined by the government

Kaldor's anti-monetarism

III. inflation is caused by the autonomous marking up of prices

With regard to point (1.), the monetarists aren't very far from a Keynesian view that an increase in effective demand will raise prices in normal circumstances, if prices aren't otherwise fixed. The extension of the money supply is an extension of debt, and borrowers are likely to spend a large proportion of borrowed money immediately, otherwise what was the point of borrowing it? The extension of the money supply can be taken for an extension of efective demand. If we accept Keynes's argument that effective demand differs from the money supply, because money can be saved, we can accept that the extension of the money supply increases prices, without supposing proportionality. In addition, we can suppose that Keynesian increases in production with a less marked increase in price are possible in response to an increase in effective demand, and that it's possible for a great proportion of new money to circulate in the purchase and resale of existing assets, without wholly filtering into commodity markets, and increasing commodity prices.

Point (2.) is incorrect, and was held either in order to give the impression that capitalism is amenable to being accurately represented by a Walras type theory that makes it appear perfectly efficient, or the theory of costless inflation was held out of ignorance.

Point (3.) is false, as Kaldor demonstrates. Commercial banks are responsible for changes in the money supply. The government of a capitalist country cannot regulate the money supply itself without risking bankrupting banks, which is politically infeasible. Changes in the central bank's discount rate have some effect on the increase in the money supply, but this is probably best thought of as a benchmark rate set by and for banking capital, which commercial banks can profitably work from. Kaldor's point (II) is correct.

Kaldor's point (I) is certainly correct, but deals with something different from changes in the money supply, changes in effective demand, and changes in prices. It's rather a gratuitous refutation of the pre-Keynesian assumptions of monetarism, and assumes itself that inflation can't be related to increases in the money supply by post-Keynesian arguments. The money supply in toto is related to the capitalisation of costs and opportunities for speculation in existing assets in domestic currency. There is no reason why the ratio of the money supply to income should be the same in 70s Switzerland as in 70s Yugoslavia.

Kaldor's point (III) is incorrect, because it fails to recognise that inflation imposes costs by itself, leaving aside the costs of uncertainty and administering price changes. Kaldor effectively concedes monetarism's point (2.). There is no economic reason why workers can't gear down the rate of profit and improve their real wages. There are several social and political reasons why they don't do this.

public service poster

2010-05-20T14:26:00.001-07:00

a public service poster, for when there's another election

what we need (2): monuments in coloured metal

2010-04-02T15:08:00.000-07:00

I saw yesterday that the mayor of London has proposed the building of a giant artpiece, almost as high as the Blackpool tower, for the London Olympics.

the mayor said the Olympic park had needed something extra to arouse "the curiosity and wonder" of Londoners and visitors.

Kapoor and Balmond's Orbit, which will be placed between the aquatics centre and the main stadium, was chosen from a shortlist of three, beating tower-based bids by the artist Antony Gormley and the architects Caruso St John.

Some people have ventured criticism of Anish Kapoor's proposed tower, either because of the cost, or because they favoured Damien Hirst's design, which was to have been a giant statue of a cod fillet in batter, entitled "Jesus Christ (in the presence of children)". But most of the cost of the new structure is to be met by its sponsor, Arcelor Mittal, and for a relatively modest three million pounds of public money, London can house an impressive representation of modern ideology, in coloured metal.

keynesianism 4

2010-03-23T15:37:00.000-07:00

These are some notes that hopefully clarify, and put into context, the "hydraulic" model of Keynes' theory, I sketched out here.

1. Firstly, I think Keynes' General Theory is overdetermined. In order for the numbers for output, the rate of interest etc generated by Keynes' model to not be determined twice, ie in order to avoid having two contradictory numbers for one thing, some part of the theory needs to be cut. Basically, you can have either the de jure equivalence of savings and investments, or the technically determined schedule of the efficiency of capital, but not both. Orthodox (which for Keynes meant conservative) economics has generally kept the de jure equivalence of savings and investments (in shorthand "S = N") and forgotten about the technically determined efficiency of capital (which Keynes calls the marginal efficiency of capital, "MEC").

2. The MEC schedule basically relates the use of resources to the rate of profit. Keynes' thinking about this is probably somewhat influenced by Piero Sraffa's 1926 paper about the rate of profit in capitalist society, on the basis of which Keynes brought Sraffa to Cambridge. Sraffa's work is strongly influenced by that of Quesnay, Ricardo and Marx. Hence, there's more of a marxist influence on Keynes than one might assume from checking the index of Keynes' book. It's sort of irrelevant to call the schedule of the rate of profit the "marginal efficiency of capital". If capital markets are to be assumed to be reasonably efficient, marginal profit will be the same as actual profit, but calling it "marginal" makes it sound less like marxism.

3. According to the models of Marx or Sraffa, the schedule of the MEC would be upward sloping. Extra investment would increase the rate of profit, calling forth further investment, with a tendency toward full employment. Both writers examine other tendencies in capitalism which are capable of bringing about severe and chronic unemployment, such as has nearly always characterised capitalist society. In the first case technical progress and the business cycle, in the second monopolistic competition.

4. One of Keynes' innovations is in theorising a downward sloping schedule of the MEC, which determines monetary flows such that an economy subject to price rigidities can stall well below full employment, for want of sufficient effective demand. As output increases, the rate of profit falls, and more money becomes idle, setting a brake on the expansion of output. This intelligible, but as we will see false, model was briefly popular in the US after it was exposited in early editions of Paul Samuelson's economics textbook. It is sometimes called hydraulic Keynesianism. Since then, orthodox macroeconomics has been based on the Hicks-Hansen model, which requires that savings must equal investments. Hicks-Hansen essentially drops MEC to include S = N.

5. The notion that S = N is simply false in a credit money economy (it would only be true in very contrived circumstances). Later Keynesian economists, like Kaldor and Minsky, admit this without criticising Keynes very much for perpetuating this error, but whether or not we accept the de jure equality of savings and investments changes everything.

6. In reality there are three factors ordinarily influencing changes in effective demand: debt extended and serviced, saving and dissaving, productivity. Credit money normally expands with accumulation by the banking sector. Inflation is therefore normal in a capitalist economy, and with it the debauch of capitalist profit. Consequently we can only talk about the efficient use of capital in a capitalist economy vaguely and relatively. It is more difficult than Keynes supposed for effective demand to be reversed. A viable model dealing with the problems Keynes was interested in would need to untangle the notions of credit and money that are confused by Keynes, and situate the fluctuations in effective demand in secular history.

7. It might actually be better to think about a capitalist economy as having two currencies: credit money and cash, with a fixed exchange rate. This unfortunately might make capitalism appear bureaucratic, and hence, perhaps, inefficient.

8. I don't believe we can justify the Keynesian welfare state, or, indeed, the Keynesian military economy, on purely economic grounds. Either these things are worthwhile in themselves, or politically useful, or they are not. Keynes' arguments in favour of public works must be somewhat discounted because capitalist finance does anyway what public works were meant to do (l'inutilité, même).

9. Having said that, there might be something in the idea that a more equal distribution of income leads to greater total output. The explanation for this isn't in Keynes though.

inflation and the rate of profit

2010-03-12T11:54:00.000-08:00

Suppose the surplus generated by an economy is a fixed proportion of total production. This might be imagined along the lines of an agricultural economy where a certain amount of the product must be distributed to the labourers involved in its production, and for replenishing the capital used up. We could assign a rate of profit on turnover, Π/Y, based on this information alone, as Quesnay did (or, indeed Sraffa).

If we also know the price level, we can establish the value of working capital, which, ignoring monopoly titles etc, consists of commodities and money. We can consequently calculate the rate of profits proper, Π/C.

The effect of inflation on this economy, if all prices adjust to changes in efective demand at the same rate, will be to increase the values of C, Y and Π proportionately. But real distributable profit: the possible claim on production from profit, is diminished by the increase in the money part of capital. Real profits correspond to Π - ΔMC.

Consequently, inflation can serve to reduce the rate of profit, by a ratio dependant on the monetary composition of capital, and the existing rate of profit.

Possible secondary effects of inflation, through changes in distribution and the scale of production, or changes in methods of finance, have been ignored in order to isolate this primary effect.

"a bad planet"

2010-03-04T12:21:00.000-08:00

Economists have sought to develop a science of economic effects, and because there generally isn't a ready terminology for classifying these effects, they tend to be named after other economists; for instance, the effect by which the value of savings is altered by a change in prices is called the Pigou effect, after Arthur Pigou.

It might be appropriate, therefore, to name the effect whereby social insanity is rendered invisible by the surface appearance of technical competence after former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: "the Greenspan effect".

Greenspan certainly wasn't insane himself, he merely entertained some kooky ideas, but it was crazy to appoint him to such a position, taking into account the interests of American capital, or the American public.

It's interesting that for a long time Greenspan was viewed as a sober technocrat, with a harmless private interest in Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, while subsequent events have demonstrated that he was a confirmed crank who should never have been given such high office. Perhaps in a more rational society Greenspan could have been in charge of the White House stationary budget, but not the Federal Reserve!

At the risk of jeopardising any future career in the banking sector of the British Socialist Federal Republic, I might suggest that the invisibility of Greenspan's eccentricities followed from the technical success, at least in relative terms, of the neoliberal ideology for local managers and bureaucrats, and that it was thought that the success of the ideology at this "common" level implied that it worked at a higher "celestial" level. There was no celestial level, but such is neoliberalism.

These unproven conjectures, running along their own course. can be followed in the opposite diretion, so that correct ideas can be invalidated on account of disharmony with current practice, as much as false ideas can be validated insofar as they are in harmony with this practice. This is what occured to me when I read these comments from the new paper of record, on the subject of Peter Hallward's article in the Guardian about the historical background to the disaster in Haiti.

Perhaps some of the readers of this newspaper imagine that an editorial by a university professor ought to be something like the celestial reflection of a reasonable person's common sense ideas. Hallward is taken to task for writing a piece that isn't consonant with the readers' ordinary experience. The celestiality of Hallward's article is granted, but its genesis and consequences can only be bad, because it sits badly with ordinary experience. Peter Hallward, or perhaps Middlesex University as a whole, appears as a sort of bad planet, interfering with the organisation of things.

A consequence of this way of looking at things is that it might appear that the defence of the victims of the Haitian earthquake ought to involve, in addition to direct aid, defending them from the malign influence of Britain's bourgeois left.

Actually, this attitude does neither any favours. What it defends is the right of Haitians to a thorough British ignorance of Haitian history and politics. But they are necessarily already acutely aware of these things; their innocence does not need to be protected. Haiti is a very polarised society, and different groups might give different answers as to whether or not President Aristide's deposition was a good thing, but the facts aren't really controversial.

So, the British newspaper reader might imagine that Hallward's methodology and political tendency is foreign to Haiti, and as such represents a baleful influence. In fact, Hallward's article is methodologically orthodox, fairly representatitive of majority Haitian opinion i.e. the ideas of the L'Espwa and former Lavalas voters, and decidedly uninfluential for Haitians in Haiti.

If the past thirty years has been characterised by the exploitation of third world countries, facilitated through ostensibly neutral, purely technical, institutions: IMF, World Bank, UN - the institutional reflection of the Washington consensus - this process finds a ready ally in a western popular culture that views third world nations as unruly children: devoid of knowledge and experience, given to episodes of violent temper, requiring instruction.

footnote to previous post

2010-01-07T12:18:00.000-08:00

In a typically wry notebook entry, Marx observes that while credit is protestant, money is catholic. Is money catholic? Insofar as the expansion of money debauches existing wealth, we can say with certainty that it's fundamentally illiberal; it violates the liberal principle that in any transfer of wealth, consideration should be given and recieved: it takes without giving.

a model of broad money expansion and inflation

2010-01-06T08:15:00.001-08:00

Suppose we look at how an increase in the money supply will impact on a commodity economy subject to fiat paper money or credit money. In both cases we assume that money is created in order to be spent; that is, it represents a straight addition to effective demand. In the first case, it's fairly obvious that the increase in paper money represents a sort of tax on other holders of money in the economy, in proportion to the amount of money they hold. In the second case, the expansion of credit money would have the same effect, provided the same rate of net increase in the money supply can be achieved. But since any particular bank loan is eventually paid back or written off, it doesn't seem obvious that anyone in particular benefits from this process.

In terms of the loan principal alone, borrowing and repaying in a period of rising prices ought to benefit the borrower. But the amount of his gain will, one assumes, be more than offset by the interest repayment, which is a straight transfer of income, and does not affect the money supply directly. The interest repayment will, however, contribute to the banks' profits, and so allow them to increase lending in the next period, maintaining inflation and the debauchery of honest capitalist profits.

The diagram below represents a simplified picture of this process, assuming the amount loaned out in 2006 is repaid in 2007 etc. It includes only the principal on loans, but the expansion of the process is predicated on interest payments.

DE - debt extended
DS - debt serviced

ironic diagram via microsoft paint

some notes about money

2009-12-31T13:06:00.000-08:00

1. I want to start with the conventional theory of money. Actually, the use of words like "orthodox" and "conventional" in relation to economic theory is misleading, as Maurice Dobb demonstrates in his classic Theories of Value, the orthodox economic theory at any point in time is whatever is politically efficacious, hence the history of the orthodox theory is a zig-zag between bad ideas that are politically expedient at a particular moment, to shore up an unpopular existing policy; and this is right up to the present day. Anyway, the conventional theory of money has "narrow money": cash in circulation plus central bank liabilities, serving as a basis for "broad money": bank credits. The supply of "narrow money" is thought to be fixed at any particular time, as is the commercial banks' reserve ratio (by custom or law). Consequently "broad money" ought to be fixed. According to this way of looking at the problem of money, money would be "exogenous", a fixed amount, depending on variables amenable to control by the authorities (cash in circulation, central bank deposits, reserve ratio).

2. exogenous money is logically presupposed by the "Cambridge equation", which is meant to establish the relationship between prices and the money supply, and hence inflation and the money supply:

Mv = Y

or, the amount of money multiplied by its velocity of circulation equals income, for any particular period. Since "v" is immeasurable unless we know the other variables, the usefulness of this expression might be thought rather limited. The Cambridge equation is true in as much as it's a tautology, but it certainly isn't proof of the independence of M from Y.

3. Nevertheless, social systems that used a genuine commodity money, such as gold or silver pieces, and had no credit money, have certainly existed. The sort of "monetarist" argument put forward by Ricardo, for instance, sees paper money representing a more or less good claim to the commodity that serves as real money, e.g. gold. The argument that the value of paper money isn't increased by the multiplication of paper in excess of the gold it represents is essentially the same as the argument that the value of gold coins isn't increased by clipping the coins and adding the clipped gold to the clipped coins. Anyway, Geoffrey Ingham's book The Nature of Money clearly establishes that the development of credit money is coextensive with the development of paper money, so the whole school of monetarism is based on a misconception, insofar as it only understands paper-commodity-money, or exogenous paper money. The real thing is capitalist credit money.

4. Marx says somewhere that any attempt to analyse money invariably falls back on the idea that money might as well be thought of as gold. Suppose we tried to analyse inflation in a simple economy where all income is consumed, workers are paid a conventional minimum real wage and paper money is used. If the monetary authority takes it upon itself to print a certain amount of money to finance, say, pyramid building, the final result, after all adjustments have been made will be the same the same commodities in the same proportions being received by workers and capitalists, but higher prices. If the workers are able to continue to claim their minimum wage throughout the period of rising prices, they will suffer no ill effect from it. The cost of the labour appropriated by the monetary authority will fall wholly on the capitalists, who will have to increase their monetary capital, instead of distibuting profits, in order to pay increased money wages.

5. Hence we can see that inflation might appear as a social cost for the capitalist class as a whole, though the effects of inflation would really affect different capitalists or capitalist blocs differently, and some might actually benefit.

6. So, we can situate, as it were, Nicholas Kaldor's concept of endogenous credit money (which does represent a genuine theoretical advance), in the factional squabbles between sections of the western ruling class. The followers of Friedman wanted to end hyperinflation. Kaldor was involved in a sort of rearguard defence of social democracy.

This isn't the whole story though, and if I return to this theme, I might say something completely different about inflation and its causes and consequences.

more about money

2009-12-10T14:27:00.000-08:00

I had pulled out my gold teeth...

is this another contrived dialogue about money?

I had pulled out my gold teeth, and placed them, along with my wedding ring, in the bag provided by Cash4Gold, the internet gold purchasers, because the frightening analyses on this page had convinced me that the economy was in real peril. But on checking your analysis of Keynes, I've noticed some discrepencies, and this leads me to doubt the whole thing. According to what you wrote earlier, Keynes sees "savings" and "investments" as disarticulated processes, leading to inflationary or deflationary pressure when they fail to balance. In fact, in Keynes' chapter seven, Keynes insists that they are equal, or at least that the theory that they are always equal is "sounder" then the theory that they aren't. Doesn't this invalidate what you wrote before?

If you look at the summary of Keynes' book (chapter eighteen), the model described is pretty much the same as I put forward. It's such an intuitively appealing model, with the disarticulated monetary flows, and their tendency to self correct, I still feel like it's central to Keynes' approach. It's a perfectly reasonable model of an economy without reserve banking, or at least in this case it would only commit the errors of any economic model. Maybe Keynes set up his model this way and then wrote chapter four after being criticised for not developing a theory that's able to deal with reserve banking. In other places Keynes seems to think his theory is transhistorical. In that case, his insistance that "savings" equals "investments" would be absurd, because it would not apply to a money economy without reserve banking. The very terms "savings" and "investments" are suggestive of such an economy. If he wanted to talk about modern fractional reserve banking, surely "savings and investments", necessarily equal, should be shown as "debt contracted" a double entry added to a bank's assets and liabilities, the schedule that may or may not meet it could then be "debt serviced", a double entry in the opposite direction.

Are you saying now that Keynes' theory is a theory of commerce in the ancient world, with a few contemporary bourgeois trappings pasted on? Because before, I seem to remember you said the supposedly historical part of Keynes' book described bourgeois England but dressed it up in period costume.

I think the methods I've used were entirely suitable to the things I was looking at before, the ideological apparatus of capitalist society, basically, and these issues around authority etc. Money evidently requires a different approach. I haven't read the secondary literature on Keynes, but anyone who wants an authoritative view could look at Skidelsky's or Harrod's biographies, or the reinterpretations of Keynes by Minsky, Harcourt, Tarshis and Leijonhufvud.

The reinterpretation I read on this site seemed more along the lines of Milton Friedman.

maybe, but this follows logically from the assumption of indestructible money, gold or whatever, which follows logically from the pure model with "savings" and "investments" and the downard sloping schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital. I don't think this theory is right anyway, but the orthodox theory of money doesn't seem to have got much further than where Keynes was in the thirties.

the mysteries of money

2009-12-07T13:53:00.000-08:00

I feel like, last month's entry was just a garbled dialogue about money. Was there any point to it?

yes, the point is, the Conservative party are probably coming back in the next year, and, even though I'm not exactly in love with New Labour, the present time offers an opportunity to give a verdict on the effects of previous Tory economic policy. I mean the effects in a technical sense. Everyone remembers the rotten social consequences of their policies: thousands made homeless, the destruction of UK manufacturing, virtually a state of depression in the North for years, McDonalds jobs, fucking Sky. But, the whole thing was, that they were meant to be benefitting the economy as a whole, admittedly at the expense of the greater part of the population. This is the ideological line that they were happy to defend, and which has carried over into popular culture. They were "tuff choices", to sack binmen and rehire them on two thirds salary, or to sell off the utilities at a discount , and in effect hand the banks a sack full of public money. But these "tuff choices" were meant to have benefitted total output and total income. I think we could prove that these choices actually harmed the economy, and that this was done quite deliberately.

Doesn't Naomi Klein prove this in "the Shock Doctrine"?

Maybe. Maybe David Harvey does, or even Francis Wheen.

But this isn't "official" enough, in some way?

The whole question of what's authoritative and what's heterodox is played out in a peculiar way in a culture dominated by neoliberalism, in which operative political science hides, as it were, behind the constructs of an ersatz popular culture. I think it was right to see neoliberalism as having three aspects: practical policy, theory, popular appearance. It's fairly easy to get value out of attacking the "popular" aspect of the "trinity": to demonstrate the absurd consequences of the popular forms. This can even be extended to attack the theory itself in some places, and attack it effectively, as in Linder's Anti-Samuelson, but this doesn't effectively refute it.

the popular aspect?

Like, Glenn Beck appears in the Observer, here with this

"I am the most enthusiastic capitalist since Adam Smith," he said on one recent show, "If I could sell sponsorship on this chin right here, I would. It would say: 'third chin sponsored by Goodyear'

Glenn Beck does not know what a capitalist is. What he actually wants to be, according to his speech, is not so much a capitalist as a commodity, or more realistically he wants to feel that his existance as a commodity is vindicated by a theory he has never read. Also, he seems to think that capitalists make money by accepting sponsorship from eachother. Even Adam Smith himself, assuming he could make time away from supervising his factory hands, would struggle to explain how such an arrangement could possibly generate profit systemically.

So, the thing would be to look at the theory and practice of modern capitalism in a more direct way, without such comic asides?

yes, probably. And this is why it's crucial to get to the bottom of the mysteries of money.

recession notebook 1.

2009-11-13T13:15:00.001-08:00

The UK has two measures for inflation, the CPI and the RPI, which have diverged as the economy has become more and more tied up with housing speculation. The Retail Price Index has a stronger asset price bias, and serves as a better index for calculating wealth. The Consumer Price Index is less exposed to asset price fluctuations and serves as a better index for measuring production.

Between the second quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of 2009, UK output fell 4.5% in nominal terms, and 6.5% with output adjusted to CPI prices. At the same time the workforce has been reduced by 2%, as 650,000 people have lost their jobs.

So, while workers who managed to keep their jobs are somewhat worse off, as price inflation has exceeded wage increases, workers' "share" of overall production relative to capitalists' "share" of production has actually increased. I mentioned last year that this would probably happen, and that big capital would logically seek to reverse this movement through inflation. The government has certainly instituted classic inflationary policies: tax cuts, targeted corporate aid, reduced interests rates, even printing money, but this hasn't chased through as yet to increased prices.

In arguing that labour's share of production would hold, I mentioned Marx's theory of rigid real wages alongside Keynes' theory of rigid money wages. I was wrong to insist on real wage rigidity, for the simple reason that reduced productivity in a recession, in the absence of money wage increases, will inevitably reduce real wages in the short term. In the medium term, cutting into "conventional minimum" real wages will damage productivity, so these ought to be as "defensible" as Keynes' money wages. The conventional minimum real wage is also partly determined by social and psychological factors, so workers might accept a lower real wage temporarily in a recession, without this reduction sabotaging productivity.

The situation I described above, with labour taking a greater share of reduced production, goes against another of Keynes' hypotheses: that the schedule of the marginal efficacy of capital is likely to be downward sloping. In effect, British capitalism has not been driven back "uphill" surrendering unprofitable sectors, and defending a more profitable hinterland. On the contrary, British capitalism has lost productivity overall. It has retreated downhill, becoming less profitable as it has shrunk. Like Kafka's giant mole, it scuttles back into its burrow.

Predictably enough, some banking interests have actually become more profitable as a result of these upheavals.

These are the government's statistics:

nominal GDP

workforce

CPI index

Mattick's opinion

2009-10-30T13:52:00.000-07:00

"SOMEHOW, AND FOR REASONS known only to himself, Paul A. Samuelson cannot leave Marx alone. His latest concern in this respect is an attempt to have the last word in a long-drawn controversy regarding the relation between value and price in the Marxian system."

Paul Mattick's opinion on the "transformation problem". To be honest, this made me screw up my face more than Samuelson's parade of greek letters.

the transformation problem 2

2009-10-30T13:47:00.001-07:00

This is an illustration of some accounts figures for a single capitalist firm or aggregate of firms, with the red lines illustrating the ratios between these figures

a - accounting rule: assets equals liabilities

b - rate of profit on capital

c - capitalisation rate

d - mark up, or rate of surplus

e - rate of exploitation

f - organic composition of costs (Marx's "organic composition of capital" relates wages to total assets)

Samuelson's argument involves an example in which firms' capitalisation is equal to their total costs over the period in question. This is the same assumption that Marx makes in his example of production price calculation in Capital part three. In reality, capitalisation rates are likely to vary between industries depending on the turnover of stock, depreciation of assets and funding for new assets, cash to pay wages etc, credit extended and received, "good will".

Samuelson proves that for the "hard" version of the labour theory of value to hold, given a positive rate of interest, the rate of exploitation would have to be the same for all firms. It could be argued that different sorts of work cannot possibly produce the same rate of exploitation. For example, if someone packing boxes could be made to generate 10% more profit for the same remuneration, how could the same transformation apply to different sorts of work, like driving a van, sewing shirts, repairing car engines? Or, if we can be sure that some firms have some monopoly power, won't this show up in higher rates of exploitation?

Samuelson's example suggests another reason, that because a, b and c are fixed ratios, d (mark up) must be a fixed ratio. If e (rate of exploitation) is also a fixed ratio then f (organic composition of costs) must also be a fixed ratio. This is a different thing from Marx's "organic composition of capital", which represents the ratio between labour costs and total capital.

Because of this "tradition" of drawing up examples where capital is taken to be equal to costs, certain commentators, like the Soviet Union analyst Alec Nove, sometimes discuss Marx's "organic composition of capital" as if this meant the same thing as "organic composition of costs". This is not the case if rates of capitalisation vary.

Marx's concepts of constant and variable capital aren't really tenable, because a firm's fund out of which labour costs are paid, and which represents the capitalisation of these costs, isn't necessarily distinct from the firm's other cash funds. The same bank account will generally be used for non labour costs and taxation. Hence, variable capital, taken as the average amount of the labour fund isn't really measurable. Also, labour isn't an "asset" in capitalism, it's merely funded out of a firm's stock of cash, which is.

A further disparity occurs in public companies, where the profit rate ought to relate to the market value of the stock, whereas the organic composition of capital will relate to the company's assets, which could be much less. Although arguably, the market value of companies' stock should only exceed the value of their assets in conditions of complete or partial monopoly.

the marxist transformation problem

2009-10-29T15:40:00.000-07:00

I sort of assumed that Marx's labour theory value just meant that all costs could be decomposed into wages and profits, the sum of which is called "labour". But it seems reasonable to think that for each product produced, the decomposition of wages and profits will have the same ratio, i.e. the price of any product produced under perfect competition will be in proportion to the labour expended on it. Paul Samuelson's refutation of the theory of labour proportional prices* is a consistant centre of ideas around the "marxist transformation problem". Below, I try to give an example of how Samuelson's algebraic proof might be played out, using made up numbers. The value of capital is equivalent to funding for the costs incurred, which are all paid at the same time, and the rate of profit is 25%.

Suppose an economy consists of three sectors, of which the first supplies producers' goods to the other two:

First Sector

Capital £160

Revenue £200
Wages £160
Costs
Profit £40

All these goods are sold to capitalists in the consumer goods industries, sectors two and three.

Second Sector

Capital £200

Revenue £250
Wages £50
Costs £150
Profit £50

Third Sector

Capital £200

Revenue £250
Wages £150
Costs £50
Profit £50

The costs paid by sectors two and three represent the income of sector one. This income can be broken down into wages and profit at the rate of 4 : 1. Hence sector two's costs represent £30 of profit and £120 of wages for sector one, and sector three's costs represent £10 of profit and £40 of wages for sector one. Of the total wages cost expended across all three sectors in producing consumer goods, £170 was input into the products of sector two, and £190 into the products of sector three. Since labour is homogenous, the ratio of the wage costs of any two sectors of the economy is the same as the ratio of labour input.

The ratio of the value of the output of second sector to the value of the output of third sector...

...by the price of total output is 250 : 250

...by labour inputs is 170 : 190

This shows that the Ricardian labour theory of value, where commodities' "relative values will be governed by the relative quantities of labour bestowed on their production" is not realistic. The exceptions to this rule, where the theory does hold, are where the interest rate is zero or where all sectors of the economy have the same ratio between direct wages and profit.

Essentially, what skews the values of any output from a value proportionate to the labour input, is that the mere use of the capitalists' assets, themselves products of labour, is exchangeable for other products of labour. That is, the conditions of capitalist production prevent the exchange of commodities at values proportionate to their labour inputs.

*see the Wikipedia page on the transformation problem for Samuelson's argument

keynesianism 3

2009-10-25T06:25:00.001-07:00

The investment and saving schedules theorised by Keynes are meant to represent inflows and outflows of money to or from the real economy over a period of time. Keynes' conception of economic self-correction means the sums of money and their peridisation are not important. An imbalance, according to Keynes, will expand or contract the economy until parity is reached. If government sought to reduce interest rates and expand production permanently via public spending, it would be necessary for this spending to be constituted as a periodised flow also. Funding of this flow of spending would have to come from the ex nihil creation of money. Public works are not a necessary form of this government spending, which could just as well take the form of gratuities handed over to the richest members of the community. Keynes' considers it prudent to fund workers through public works, rather than capitalists, as they are likely to spend rather than save more of their income, and in order to avoid labour unrest. Zimbabwe owes its fabled misery to the adoption of such an expansionary monetary policy.

There remains the idea of adopting a temporary policy of public works financed from outside the supply of circulating money. Such a policy might serve to bridge a temporary slump within the business cycle, maintain output above what it otherwise would be, and by consequence save productive plant that would otherwise be destroyed. Such a policy might reasonably be funded through intertemporal taxation or private sector loans. Whether such a policy would work depends on the validity of the postulates underlying the neoclassical theory: e.g. the idea of perfect competition. Nitzan and Bichler show how firms with market power raised their prices, in relative terms, during the deflationary crisis of the Great Depression.

Keynes has caused a great deal of confusion with his ideas about investment and the investment multiplier. Keynes argues, following Richard Kahn, that a increase in investment at any level of interest will be met by a much larger expansion of production. The money taken from the non-circulating fund is supposed to cause an expansion of production, up to the point where money outflows once again equal money inflows. Ex nihil goverment spending would do the same thing, up to the point where it had to be funded from the real economy, or inflation broke down the condition of money wage rigidity. Government spending is not, however, the same thing as investment in productive plant. Keynes' theory does not seek to ascertain how much money will be spent on investment in productive plant, merely how much money from non-circulating funds will be used this way. It does show how an increase in government spending, through its influence on interest rates, could choke off investment from this second source of funds.

keynesianism 2

2009-10-23T16:18:00.000-07:00

One might have expected that Keynes' General Theory, insofar as it examines how various shocks would impact on an economy in which the money supply does not expand and new plant can be bought but not put into use, could hardly serve as the basis for political initiatives. Nothing could be further from the truth. In order for something like Keynes' theory to serve as a guide to policymaking it is necessary for Keynes' short term model to be extended to a medium term model, in which more variables are subject to change. Keynes offers no clue as to how, for instance, the medium term rate of profit on marginal capital might show the same tendency to decline as the short term rate of profit. He certainly does offers policy makers encouragement to use his theory in precisely this way.

Keynes believes that output and employment can be increased if capitalists are prepared to produce at a lower rate of interest. The increased employment of available resources, including labour, ought can be thought of as a general improvement. Keynes thinks this reduction in the operative rate of interest can be effected in two ways:

1. Increasing the propensity to invest at every rate of interest - shifting schedule "N" down and to the right

2. Increasing the propensity to consume at every level of income - shifting schedule "S" down and to the left

These are surely long term or medium term goals for an administration, and incorporating these changes into Keynes' short term model is, at best, stretching a point. Keynes' model implicitly rules out the use of new industrial plant, and the effect of this increase in capacity on output and interest, as beyond its scope. This feature of capitalist production is excised for formal reasons, even though policy proposals are made, the efficacy of which certainly depend on the growth path of capitalist production.

The ideas mentioned above about psychological propensities to save or invest are the basis for Keynes' reverie about ancient Egypt, which:

"was doubly fortunate, and doubtless owed to this its fabled wealth, in that it possessed two activities, namely, pyramid-building as well as the search for precious metals, the fruits of which, since they could not serve the needs of man by being consumed, did not stale with abundance".

This is probably only half serious, because ancient Egypt evidently was not a fancy dress version of bourgeois England. Keynes' point is that the relatively low amount of saving in ancient Egypt, i.e. hoarding of gold, would have reduced "the interest rate", whatever that was, and increased output. This counterfactual story is not just picturesque, however, because it serves as a rhetorical support for the most celebrated keynesian policy: wholly wasteful loan expenditure.

keynesianism 1

2009-10-22T14:33:00.001-07:00

The specific situation analysed by Keynes, in which a market economy fails to achieve full employent, is based on the the validity of Keynes observations about the rigidity of money wages. An economy with a fixed supply of currency, perhaps based on a more or less fixed supply of gold, would certainly be exposed to deflationary forces if individuals decided to withdraw more and more currency from circulation. If money wages are fixed, monetary deflation will probably be reconfiguered as a contraction of the real economy. The simplest solution to this problem, put into practice by governments everywhere since the abandonment of the gold standard, is for government to progressively inflate the money supply, and so prevent workers from making real wage gains by defending a current money wage. Even Milton Friedman considered this the most realistic response to a deflationary crisis as severe as that of the great depression. Keynes claims to have developed a general theory of the capitalist economy, supplementing the restricted theory of the classical economists (for Keynes, principally Smith, Ricardo and Marshall), which tacitly assumed that the interest rate would be equal to Keynes' "neutal rate" of interest, or a rate of interest maintaining employment "at some specified constant level". In the context of the abandonment of the gold standard, the notion that the economy is subject to deflationary pressure on account of its restricted supply of money is no longer so credible. Keynes' theory itself can be taken as a description of the special case of an economy in which the government does not permit itself to expand the money supply.

The great difficulty with Keynes, and part of the reason why his books are still read, is that while he talking about one thing, he might be alluding to something else. So people think, perhaps he could have meant that real wages were fundamentally stable, or that the interest rate on productive capital might fall for a different reason, or that the medium term processes of the economy might behave like the short term processes, etc etc.

the Keynes meme

2009-10-20T14:57:00.001-07:00

Interest in Keynes' ideas has understandably increased since the last year's great banking bailout and recession. At least, the opinion pieces in the Guardian seem to mainly involve Keynesianism and the "liberal left". Because Keynes' system is fairly complicated, I thought it would be worth restating what it entails, as far as I understand it. This could then be a sort of resource for amateur criticism of the theoretical basis of the Keynesian proposals put forward by playwrights, journalists and celebrity cooks, in the pages of the Guardian.

"N" (investments) represents the value of capital investments to be made from the reserve fund of non-circulating money

"S" (savings) represents the value of money diverted from consumption into the reserve fund of non-circulating money

"MEC" marginal efficiency of capital, i.e. rate of profit on additional capital.

Money wages are fixed in the short run. It is hypothesised that workers will be able to effectively resist cuts in money wages. Because there is involuntary unemployment, it is further hypothesised that an increase in the workforce will not cause money wages to rise. In the terminology of economics, the labour supply is perfectly elastic, within the relevant range, at the prevailing money wage.

"MEC" represents the marginal efficiency of capital. It describes the expected return on capital added to existing capital. The Keynesian "problem" occurs when the graph of MEC is downward sloping. That is, each £100 added to the stock of capital is expected to return a lower percentage of its value each year as profit. Keynes explains this phenomenon as resulting from technical diseconomies of scale. Each additional worker set to work produces output of less value than the last.

Competition between capitalists is assumed to coerce them into setting production where their costs, including normal profits, coincide with their income. Put another way, capitalists increase or decrease production until the industry supply curve, representing their costs, including normal profits, coincides with the industry demand curve, representing their income.

The short run supply curve, representing industry costs, can be taken to be fairly similar to the supply curve for labour, because industry as a whole need only put to work extra labour to increase production. The industry supply curve will have a tendency to rise, however, as production increases, because labour is considered to work with decreasing efficiency. Industry will respond to an increase in demand by expanding production, with a less marked increase in prices. Similarly, industry will respond to a decrease in demand by reducing output, with a less marked decrease in prices.

The economy will only be stable if the sum of money output to the consumers, in the form of wages and profits, exactly equals the money input into industry, in the form of consumption spending and investment. This is the basis of the problem of oversaving. If money is saved from the incomes generated by industry , with no commensurate injection of money from elsewhere, then demand in the goods market will have effectively fallen. Capitalists cannot simply devalue their products, as they cannot devalue their costs, and will be forced into the expedient of reducing production.

"Saving", for Keynes, means the same thing as "hoarding", for Marx. That is, it is either the saving of banknotes, in a shoebox or whatever, or the banks' reserve on bank saving: the percentage of deposits the banks can't relend. Keynes' saving schedule represents net savings: while some people may be saving others may be dissaving. Money is considered to be saved for the usefulness of possessing a liquid asset, entitling the holder to unspecified future production. Keynes assumes that saving increases as national income increases, but that the percentage of income saved also increases as national income increases. At low levels of national income, Keynes expects net dissaving. The money saved might be thought of as accumulating, in a sort of fund of virtual wealth that isn't used as entitlements to current production. Obviously, the money remains in individual private ownership rather than collective ownership. The money saved neither circulates nor yields interest.

"Investment" represents the sum of money spent on additions to the capital stock from the fund of non-circulating money. The amount of money diverted into capital expenditure depends on the rate of interest. If the rate of interest is relatively high a relatively large amount of money will be spent on additional capital. If the interest rate is relatively low, a relatively small amount will be spent.

"Savings" represents money withdrawn from expenditure. "Investment" represents money added to expenditure. If savings exceeds investments, demand will be insufficient and capitalists will be obliged to reduce output. As production is reduced the interest rate increases. Investment, consequently increases, while savings falls. When parity is achieved between savings and investments the economy becomes stable at a lower level of output. Similarly, if investments exceeds savings, the demand is excessive and production expands. The expansion of production reduces the interest rate, until savings once again equals investments.

Hence, Keynes theorises an economic system in which production stalls below full employment, but which is self stabilising with regard to various sorts of shock. The stable level of output and the stable interest rate can be derived, theoretically, from the propensities of saving and investment and the marginal efficiency of capital.

about Egon Schiele

2009-10-04T05:32:00.001-07:00

This month's lecture is about Egon Schiele's expressionist pictures and their relation to ideas of the avant garde in early twentieth century central europe.

"Why must you write these appalling adumbrations?" someone might say. It's a complicated issue. Mainly I wanted not to think any more about Egon Schiele. What interested me in the subject is:

1. that it can be shown that a good deal of the apparently "inexpressible" content of expressionist works is only reasonably rather than absolutely inexpressible, i.e. it certainly can be expressed, if only in overly complicated, tangled prose.

2. the way pictorial modernism works, for example in Schiele, is illuminating with respect to how political or scientific modernism works, for example in Freud.

Maybe the person asking the first question would also want to say some things about Karl Popper's popular theory of science. I doubt Popper would sign any of these speculations off. We are already exercising taste more than science in identifying the dominant motifs in Schiele's work: abstraction, distorted lines and sex. Relating these motifs to theories put forward, not by Schiele, but by his contemporaries, is to indulge speculation more, and more imprudently.

Notes on Schiele:

1. Artists have always been interested in depicting relations of power. In Schiele's pictures social relations, even at the level of private life, are hardly shown. There are only the traces or imprints of social relations on atomised figures. The conformation of the bodies of Schiele's figures, their few scraps of underwear, and perhaps their hairstyles, seem to be charged with an obscure sociological, even physiological importance. I don't believe Schiele was any less interested in relations of power than his predecessors. In Schiele's pictures, I would suggest, power only attains its proper grandeur, is only really power, and is only of interest, when it operates abstractly. Consequently, Austria-Hungary's hundreds of cavalry officers must have seemed to be only a cheap imitation of power, and of no interest. Likewise the giant banks. In a particular theory of the avant garde, developed by Wassily Kandinsky, real political relations are subsumed by ideal relations. From this it follows that the operative ideal political relations are purely abstract. The world, according to this point of view, coheres as a "spiritual" whole. An image of a tart, paid to undress in a rented room, expresses the inner workings of this world no more or less well than a microscopic slide isolating tuberculosis bacteria.

2. The implicit theory of the avant garde already had an invented "upper" and "lower" section, corresponding to what individual consciousness had or had not yet "comprehended", before Freud's invention of similar agencies hemming consciousness in: the superego and id. Schiele's distorted, nervous lines develop the sort of ambiguities developed in Freud's analyses of dreams. Schiele is drawing at his desk, perhaps, and the lines are simultaneously, or alternately, "channeling" the "upper section" or social superego, and dissimulating against it, and perhaps also counterfeiting this imaginary "upper section", for the benefit of his putative bourgeois patrons, no doubt confined to the "lower section."

3. The purported reality of the "upper" and "lower" sections makes sex ambiguous. As an activity of individual interest, it should be, according to Vygotsky's arguments, productive of knowledge at the individual level. Hence it should be attached to the "upper section". But it is, nevertheless, the means by which the personnel occupying the "lower section" are really reproduced. Very mysterious.

mammon, innit

2009-09-16T12:11:00.000-07:00

It's often remarked how President Obama's delivery seems to add depth to whatever he's reading. His gestures really register the nuance that he is able to draw out of his text, which you feel might even have been written by the guy who wrote speeches for Bush. The president is really listening in to his speech. You can hear the same thing in certain Big Youth records, for example (as well as a more realistic political analysis), records which demonstrate more pronouncedly an affect common to inveterate cannabis smokers. I mention this because the text goes no further than blaming the crisis on the profligate tradeurs - officially sanctioned pantomime villains - when the crisis developed directly from the system of mortgaged property.

How different to Bush's speeches! George W seemed to me much more about dramatising how he, Bush, having slugged it out for the prerogative of getting up onto the anthill, could now say without challenge what was the truth, because it was what he was saying.

In the new revolution, Guardian readers

2009-08-29T14:54:00.000-07:00

The Guardian's sub editors came up with a brilliantly counterintuitive title for a think piece they featured this week, looking at "colour revolutions":

"In the new revolution, progressives fight against, not with, the poor"

a sort of echo of that record by the Fall: "hate's not your enemy, love's your enemy".

The writer, David Edgar, doesn't try to justify any such thing, but the article's quite interesting insofar as it reflects the disappearance from common knowledge of the concept of the "bourgeois revolution"; a disappearance the article both testifies to and masks.

I don't know anything about David Edgar, other than that he sometimes appears in The Guardian. He explains that in the last years of the Cold War he was involved with a "marxist" journal, without supporting Soviet-style communism himself:

"In 1989, I was one of two non-communist members of the editorial board of the magazine Marxism Today"

...which might seem as paradoxical as being one of two illiterate members of the editorial board of the London Review of Books, but is entirely reasonable in the context of the decomposition of "the left" from the late 70s onward, which is one of the subjects the article addresses. David Edgar tries to conceptualise:

"the colour/flower-coded revolutions of the 21st: from Georgia's 2003 rose revolution via Ukraine's 2004-05 orange revolution to Kyrgyzstan's initially pink or lemon but finally tulip revolution against another crooked post-communist government, later the same year."

I don't think many people would blame Edgar for regarding marxism like a carthorse regards the whip, and wanting to develop a liberal or liberal-friendly position, but in this case the classic liberal position coincides with the marxist postion. Marx's ideas about the causes of social change were based on a widely accepted liberal or radical analysis of the social and economic causes of the French Revolution; causes which were found to be retrospectively applicable, with due modification, to the American Revolution and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The French Revolution as a whole could be looked at as a "movement" in which the bourgeoisie, having acceded to economic power, exploited popular discontent and thereby acceded to political dominance. Variations on this thesis of the "bourgeois revolution" have been profitably employed by serious analysts from Von Ranke to Poulantzas.

The "20th- century, third-world revolution" represented a quite distinct phenomenon, in which social change in undeveloped countries, already integrated into the world system as undeveloped countries, exerted a different sort of pressure on the existing state and resulted in a different political settlement. As Edgar states:

"Iran in 1979 was a recognisable, 20th- century, third-world revolution, in which the progressive middle class allied with the rural masses to overthrow a hated, foreign-backed autocracy. "

The upheavals Edgar describes in Eastern Europe and in Russia, on the other hand, were classic "bourgeois revolutions" against the bureaucratic "socialist" state, that in no way "presaged a new kind of political movement". They represented the dismantling of the bureaucratic command economy by sections of its ruling class and resulted in its replacement with something approximating the current western version of bourgeois capitalism.

Because Edgar doesn't want to analyse, in retro-marxist fashion, the social structures underpinning the rival groups in the conflicts he describes, he equates the properly bourgeois revolutions in Eastern Europe, and the stalled bourgeois revolution in Iran, with a faction fight in Ukraine and a reactionary coup d'etat in Thailand. The political structure of the state, and the socio-political structure out of which its opponants came, differs in each case. The dynamics of the bourgeois revolution, the genuine "colour revolution", are hardly likely to be replicated in Western Europe, as it already is subject to neo-bourgeois capitalism.

As I said, Edgar's concept of the "21st-century revolution" is as much about replacing the concept of the "bourgeois revolution" as failing to remember it. Extrapolating from the recent events in Iran, Edgar describes a conflict which:

"pits the educated, western-oriented, socially liberal, economically neoliberal urban middle class against the economically egalitarian, socially traditionalist rural poor."

In talking about the "middle class" rather than the "bourgeoisie" Edgar abstracts out the dominant interests on both sides. Hashemi Rafsanjani is no more middle class than his political rivals. The conflict in Iran involves a struggle between two factions of the ruling class, which has been expanded into a struggle for political rights, fought mainly by a section of the "urban middle class" against state power. The entire conflict cannot be reduced to this second struggle.

David Edgar's political aims are good:

"liberty, secularism, free speech, gay rights, civil liberties, enlightenment values and feminism, but also in social diversity, religious tolerance and economic equality"

...and he's right in understanding that the ideas of classic marxism have very little appeal for British newspaper readers. But there is something strange in writing for, as well as about, a middle class "intelligentsia", "progressives"; in effect a putative "class of consciousness", and having to process precise concepts into a sort of ideological babyfood, and so have to talk about a conflict between the "middle class" and "the poor" in the Revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran.

more notes on functionalism

2009-07-21T12:53:00.000-07:00

Without going into the vexed question of functionalism in modern society, and how it is to be reconciled with the idea of "gradations of rank", which is no doubt much more complex than I described...

what I'm interested in is the notion of a functionalism that is imagined to work for a whole society, and a society which is ordered hierarchically, and whose real "gradations of rank" are imaginatively carried over as a necessary organisational principle underlying this functionalism...

since society is to be reproduced as a single intentional entity, a "spiritual" entity, and not a monist system where everything is as important as everything else, or a composite of rather prosaic functionalist parts that do not yet crowd out human subjectivity

We already have a model of "cultural functionalism" (where functionalism works through a hierarchical order etc) in Kandinsky's text. This text makes explicit claims, and its contemporary prestige can be more or less well reconstructed.

According to the logic of "cultural functionalism", truth is concentrated in a single point. This circumstance problematicises humanist culture, the social structure of which is predicated on the idea that people in general are capable of making distinctions between what can be considered "true" and false". If we take humanist culture to be necessarily polyvalent, it might be represented as a horizontal section cut through the "triangle", such that it formally comprehends a "lower section" that supports it and from which its subject matter is drawn, while this culture is itself formally comprehended by an "upper section" it in turn supports.

As I mentioned the question of how an interplay of functionalisms contributes to human culture in any particular society is too complex to adequately address. We can, however, draw some conclusions from the limit case of "cultural functionalism" for which we have Kandinsky's description. What might we expect of a humanist culture inflluenced by these ideas?

1. culturally consistant "upper" and "lower" sections

2. the sacralisation of a practically dormant "upper section" (in bourgeois society, bourgeois humanism would have to invent an imaginary "upper section")

3. the idea that there is a natural trade off between the security of humanism and the inactivity of the "lower section"

Vienna 1900

2009-07-17T15:27:00.000-07:00

These quotations were chosen by more erudite writers, first Stefan Zweig, from his autobiography:

"Everyone knew just what he possessed and what he would inherit, what was allowed and what was forbidden. Everything had its norm, its specific mass and gravity. The man of means could calculate exactly ho much interest per annum his fortune would bring him, the civil servant or officer with equal exactitude the year in which he woud gain promotion and the year in which he would retire ... everything in this great realm had its fixed, immovable place; and in the highest place of all the aged Emperor; but should he die, one knew (or thought one knew) that another would take his place, and nothing would change in all this carefully planned order..."

and from a visitor to the Paris World Exhibition of 1900:

"The Austrian section possesses this great interest - that it represents not only the individual efforts of artists and craftsmen, but also the "official" decorative art movement of the State schools. Viewed from this last standpoint there is nothing in the entire Exhibition more admirable, more thoroughly commendable, than the display in question. Is it not wonderful indeed that a Government should have entrusted to those, and those alone, capable of acquitting themselves with credit, the task of decorating and arranging its Exhibition? And is it not still more astonishing that, instead of contenting itself, as most other nations have done, with the reconstruction of ancient styles, more or less national in character, a country should have displayed so much independence, so keen an appreciation of freshness and modernity?"

I intend to look at the problems of the Viennese Secession style as problems of functionalism.

Functionalism, where it is applied to social formations, can be a productive method for analysing societies that are complex and decentred, where rationalistic logic is difficult or impossible to apply. Hence its use develops alongside the development of capitalism, where capitalist development is attended by increased social compexity and the crumbling of central authority.

In American society, and in the Americanised popular culture predominant in Western society, functionalism tends to validate the actions of the popular classes. This could be called "democratic functionalism". It's expressed almost everywhere, but can be seen very clearly in things like The Economist's fetishisation of McDonalds. It has the advantage of fostering a democratic culture, but has the weakness of tending to discount the undemocratic aspects of modern society: centralisation of corporate power, corporate bureaucracy, waste.

A democratic culture develops alongside the development of capitalism in the US, France, China, even in Britain, a sort of monarchy, where a sort of "high" culture is willed into existance, but nevertheless remains stilted, amateurish, out of place in a resolutely modern society*. In France and the US the idea of excellence also becomes mixed up with the idea of democracy, complicating things further.

In Kandinsky's monograph a different kind of fuctionalism is outlined, in which precisely those aspects of the social system relegated to the subjective by "democratic functionalism", are conversely presented as the truly functional aspects of society.

Looking at it today, Kandinsky's monograph might be seen as indirectly describing the apparent logic of one section of contemporary society: that part of the culture industry that doesn't deal with kitsch. But it's surely intended as an explicit description of the society in which he lived: Imperial Germany at the turn of the Twentieth Century. The composite system of capitalism, government bureaucracy and monarchy that existed in Germany also pertained in Austria-Hungary and the principle cities in Russia, though not Russia as a whole.

I think it might be interesting to look at Viennese culture in the early Twentieth Century as if it was informed by the "cultural functionalism" exemplified by Kandinsky. This is to arbitrarily apply a rather incomplete hypothesis, it is not to establish a historical fact.

Things like last year's banking sector bailout point in the direction of the consolidation of an almost feudal degree of class power. Under these circumstances Americanised democratic culture can only be put under further strain. This raises the question as to whether in looking at Vienna at the turn of the Twentieth Century, we aren't looking at the future, with the possibility of understanding that future, and understanding how it is historical.

*I quite like the idea of just writing "notes" about things, and so displaying the fragments of a polemic outside of their functional order, like pictures of antique rifles in an encyclopedia of weaponry. I could have gone on:

"in this respect Coleridge's epic poem can be seen to metaphorise the threadbare hobby humanism of the useless classes, set adrift on a sea of democratic absolutism."

What a thing to say!

Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

2009-07-17T15:17:00.000-07:00

Klimt seems to be quite innocently eulogising bourgeois princess Adele Bloch-Bauer. Klimt was just as innocently enthused by the possibilities of factory production, so it couldn't be said that for Klimt, polite society and the factory floor represented the contrasting faces of the bourgeoisie. And in 1907 the Austrian bourgeoisie could still be considered a progressive force.

(Does this seem right? To try to be more accurate, I feel like this picture praises unambiguously but messes with the oppositional pairs bourgeois-aristocratic and natural-artificial, if that makes sense.)

I don't think you would do something like this now because you would be tempted to cut the goldleaf out from B&H cartons. Or perhaps tastes have changed as much as technology. A contempory picture showing, say, Tony and Cherie Blair embracing on a haptic field of depleted uranium, might neither praise nor naturalise.

about old man Freud

2009-07-04T04:57:00.000-07:00

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud recounts a story about his father being picked on for being a Jew, in their former home village in Moravia:

"I might have been ten or twelve years old when my father began to take me with him on his walks, and in his conversation to reveal his views on the things of this world. Thus it was that he once told me the following incident, in order to show me that I had been born in happier times than he: "When I was a young man, I was walking one Saturday along the street in the village where you were born; I was well-dressed, with a new fur cap on my head. Up comes a Christian, who knocks my cap into the mud, and shouts. "Jew, get off the pavement!"" - "And what did you do?" - "I went into the street and picked up the cap," he calmly replied."

...which is meant to demonstrate what maturity can be, and how it can be distinctly counter-intuitive. Despite Freud's father having no real choice, and the subsequent history of European anti-semitism, it's hard not to see this story, cut out from history this way, as prefiguring, almost justifying, Mahatma Gandhi's idea of passive resistance,

but on the very next page we learn that:

"One of the first books which fell into my childish hands after I learned to read was Thiers' Consulate and Empire."

So you can imagine old man Freud, suffering being victimised this way, and making his way home, where he sits reading Thiers! I don't think this is an indictment of either Freud, it just illustrates how life is.

...

For various reasons, I was trying to get a copy of Gerard de Nerval's book Visionaries, or the Precursors of Socialism, in English. That it's not available may or may not be a good thing. In restoration France, socialism seems to have been imagined as an obscure menace potentially afflicting the resuscitated old society, somehow mixed up with conspiracy and occultism. Theophile Gautier, somewhere, says all his friends, with the exception of Sainte-Beuve, were medievalists, and this would be a properly medieval outlook. I think it's more disconcerting to encounter people who think we really do live in a total society, than people who think we ought to; like Agamben, who is madder than Cabet ever was. The younger Freud, later author of Civilisation and its Discontents, simply could not understand that societies could exist, had existed, and did exist, in which one faction was permanently pitted against another. Despite that fact that socialism, if it is ever built, can and ought to accomodate aberrant or eccentric behaviour, where possible, the idea of a total society, insofar as it prefigures a rational total society, is a prefiguration of socialism.

notes on Iran

2009-06-26T12:21:00.001-07:00

When people risk violence in order to confront their rulers this is driven by biological need more than strategy. It would be a tremendous achievment if the Iranian people succeeded in further democratising their country, and it's regrettable that democracy has to be fought for this way and at such cost. Ahmedinejad probably won the election, and the reform candidate, Mir Hossain Mousavi seems to be like an Iranian Henry Hunt, except more Thatcherite. This isn't really important. It is to be hoped that these recent events strengthen opinion in the West in favour of non intervention in Iranian politics.

1. Economy

Iran has a GDP of approx $165bn, of which oil and gas exports account for approx $35bn, so oil exports account for one fifth of output. Its greatest resource is labour not oil. Iran is a populous country, in comparison to other middle east oil states, with a population of 70m. The country is practically self sufficient in food production, producing $20bn of agricultural products domestically, with net imports of around $1.5bn.

Iran is therefore unlikely to be a victim in a situation of competitive Hobsonian imperialism, where rival countries try to insource skilled labour and outsource unskilled labour, since it is guaranteed foreign currency earnings, and so capital investment, as long as a competitive market for oil exists. Since these factors mitigate in favour of the country remaining politically independent, rather than passive, it is in the national interest, as long as the capitalist system exists, to maintain that independence by guaranteeing the security of food production as much as possible. Whichever political system the country has, it will always be prudent to maintain the current relatively labour intensive agrarian base, insofar as it maximises output.

The prominence of skilled labour, and to a lesser extent diffuse agriculture, mitigate against the development of a terror society. Hence, we can speculate that if the current regime fell apart to be replaced by a bourgeois "directory", the worst-case scenario of the Western pro-Ahmedinejad lobby, the situation might not degenerate hopelessly.

2. Political system

Iran's corporatist political system was established by Islamic revolutionaries in order to lessen the antipathy of rich and poor: of "oppressor and oppressed" as much as possible. As in every corporatist system, the principle of equanimity toward the various classes that constitute class society, each permitted to reproduce itself as itself and nothing more, works itself out in the fusion of the party bureaucracy with the surviving ruling class. Iran's corporatist bureaucracy is now threatened by its bourgeoisie because in reality it cannot bridge the antagonisms generated by capitalism; because it cannot prevent the accumulation of capital; because it redistributes more to the rich through inflation than to the poor through welfare.

In as much as the bureaucracy is threatened from the right it can be said to represent the interests of those groups also threatened from the right: the peasants and commercial middle class. But the regime represents their interests in a rather circuitous way, it is not simply a magnified image of the dominant ideas of these groups. It is a bureaucratic regime principally occupied with its own bureaucratic goals. Karl Marx wrote of the French peasants of 1851: "they cannot represent themselves; they need to be represented", an historically specific argument based on technology as much as ideology. In Iran the peasants are too dispersed to be mobilised, and their patriotism, in this instance, can be thought doubtful. Since it is the children of the commercial middle class, afforded the opportunity of higher education, who are now in confrontation with the regime, the patriotism of this group can be thought doubtful too.

Disclaimer - these are notes based on reports in the UK press and should be judged accordingly

corrections, links

2009-06-23T16:04:00.000-07:00

I should have mentioned re the "British Jobs/British Workers" strike, after my rather ad hoc comments, that proper reporting ought to have established first of all:

1. whether Total had reneged on an earlier agreement

2. how much the workers earned, and how this might change

The struggle now does not involve patriotism at all, but whether Total can get away with sacking its workers for going on strike.

Comrade Lenjino on the Lindsay strike

I don't think I could piece together a better analysis of the situation in Iran from English language public domain sources than Louis Proyect has:

here

It's a minefield of disinformation!

Whenever I've checked the blog Vineyard of the Saker I've found it accurate - it quotes a source in Iran, and briefs against Mousavi and Rafsanjani.

This piece about the Baseji, I think, rather oversells this organisation. The goon is ultimately the enemy of the worker, structurally, even.

could Ahmedinejad be new "Geordie Messiah"?

2009-06-23T15:13:00.000-07:00

Perhaps as chairman of the beleaguered Tyneside club, the former hardliner could more comfortably display his grandiloquent rhetoric, comparing to an indestructible diamond, new signing Nigel Quashie.

"levers"

2009-06-09T13:56:00.000-07:00

"The fight started here at Lindsey: the fight against discrimination, the fight against victimisation and the fight to put bread on your table for your children. Gordon Brown said it is indefensible. If the prime minister will not defend the working man, if parliament will not defend the working man, then the union will defend the working man."

"discrimination"? "bread"?

I wrote some notes about the "British Jobs/British Workers" protests back in January. I didn't see the point at the time of "virtually" and meaninglessly upbraiding the "British Workers" via the internet, but I think these events might be sociologically important. Firstly, as far as can be ascertained the local construction workers formerly received fairly good wages,

the basis of relatively decent wages in the construction industry depended on:

1. level of activity in the industry

2. number of industry workers unemployed: so called "reserve army"

3. state of competition in the industry

4. time/money trade offs for employers

hence the workers' wages was based on an underlying "mechanism" that was relatively stable for a while, during the growth phase, but changed markedly once the recession kicked in.

The conflict over Italian contractors brought in to work at the refinery was probably related to altered conditions insofar as:

1. the ongoing practice of cheaper foreign labour being brought in, coextensive as it is with the effects of market forces, could be targeted as an aspect of the working of market forces amenable to political intervention

2. or, maybe the local workers erroneously blamed the use of foreign workers for their problems

3. perhaps the altered circumstances in the market allowed the company to deliberately confront local workers

I think for the local workers to take action against their worsened circumstances they probably had to have a credible programme by which the former distributive "mechanism" could be restored, or where something like it could be created, which wasn't really possible. This is what I imagine underlay the "British Jobs/British Workers" aspect: a strange outburst of right radicalism, untidily recuperated by Unite the union, once it already had nowhere else to go.

If the workers had really been on the breadline in the first place, it would have made more sense to fight for council housing indexed to wages, rather than against immigration, once the fight had been extended to a general political struggle. I think the dream of "grabbing the immigration lever" somehow seemed more credible than the dream of "grabbing the social housing lever". Neither was immediately on the cards. Also, the local workers might have pressed the injustice of the deterioration in industry wages/conditions effected by housing workers of any nationality in special "hulks", presumably council approved, without having to "go nationalist" at all. Again, I think the reasons they didn't do this lay in the structure of the industry and the abruptness of recession.

the neoliberal Battleship Potemkin

after Kandinsky

2009-06-02T16:10:00.000-07:00

(a provisional reconstruction of, and development of, Kandinsky's system, outlined in Kandinsky's 1911 monograph Concerning the Spiritual in Art, but considered to have possibly wider sociological relevence.)

1. Initial premises:

Suppose a special case of neo Burkean naturalistic philosophy: the absence of an immanent technical limit. Consider designated artistic masterpieces to represent the precipitate of humanity's self actualising struggle. These designated masterpieces can be called "dominant art". Humanity is considered to be purposive and its dominant art sublative of its purposive struggle.

2a. Since works of art concretely exist, a technical limit must exist for "humanity's self actualising struggle".

2b. hence abstract art: the dramatisation of an imagined technical limit.

2c. dominant art is abstract art (2a).

3a. from the systematisation of dominant art necessarily follows the innovation of new dominant art, since dominant art is necessarily formally unamenable to systematisation (2c), and dominant art represents the precipitate of humanity's ongoing purposive struggle.

3b. hence the stress on systematisation as a political strategy in 20th Century social criticism; or, the imagined political efficacy of art criticism in 20th Century literature.

3c. since dominant art sublates humanity's purposive struggle, humanity cannot purposively effect innovation in art without this new art negating existant dominant art and superceding it in turn.

3d. hence the Hegelian dynamics of late 19th and early 20th Century art and art criticism.

4a. since all instances of dominant art are equally sublative of humanity's purposive struggle, dominant art is not merely art, but only one kind of omnological work. The importance of art subsists in its sublative function rather than its optical merits. The particular form of an omnological work is relatively unimportant.

4b. paintings are equivalent to "the spiritual life".

4c. art is equivalent to philosophy.

4d. sex is equivalent to art; is equivalent to philosophy.

4e. "a chef can discourse on cooking techniques as if they were moments in universal history".

Zizek update

2009-05-30T16:22:00.000-07:00

The world of Zizek studies was rocked this week with the publication of a five year old article by Ian Parker, which was basically sympathetic to Zizek, and which went some way toward explaining his writing, but which also contained an apocryphal anecdote about Zizek. The article is available as an MS Word file here:

www.discourseunit.com/publications_pages/parker_papers/2004%20PINS%20Zizek.doc

According to Parker, one of the themes addressed in Zizek's work is "how it [is] possible to engage in transformative personal change", which, if we really are "caught by ideology" and "caught by fantasy", literally coincides with the problem "how it is possible to be revolutionary". Zizek's greatest wheeze was probably his discovery of a new role model for "transformative personal change", previously unknown in the world of Mind Body Spirit publishing: Vladimir Lenin.

This is Zizek's "mischevious" side. What is strange is that Parker really has to spell it out, for those otherwise gifted souls involved in "artistic practice, personal change and political transformation", not to mention "quite difficult theory", who might otherwise "overidentify" with Zizek's drollery for no good reason whatsoever. In this Parker has done a great service to advanced education. In fact, one wonders whether Zizek himself wanted to signpost the article, in order to reign back some of the Ultra-Zizz graduate students.

The weaknesses of the rest of the article are the weaknesses of advanced education, which is dominated by people who are good at believing anything. One might have thought that pro "philosophers" would be able to decompose the Freudian system into the logical operations that constitute it (i.e. the "Freudian proof" underwrites each otherwise unrelated development of the Freudian system), but apparantly this isn't possible. Instead, all the "advanced studies" are layered on top of each other, as in a Hanna Barbera monster sandwich: "Hegelian phenomenology, Lacanian psychoanalysis", "Marxist politics".

Parker compares Zizek's "lessons" with "hysterical" explanations:

"Psychoanalytically speaking, and drawing on the work of Lacan, we could put it like this. The hysteric finds a way of speaking the truth through lies."

It is precisely the "Freudian proof" that guarantees for the "hysteric", that is, the client, their inevitable, though unconscious, omniscience over their own history. For Zizek to perform the same function for his readers, his particular clients, he would have to have the same omniscience over universal history. Zizek seems to have read maybe two books in the last five years (not counting the books he's written), and he's not really that clever anyway.

(see also Colonel Chabert's latest Zizek studies masterpiece, here.)

Stress by Justice

2009-05-29T12:26:00.000-07:00

What people saw in this video, although its makers intended something else, was a film propagandising against youths from the suburbs of Paris, responsible, apparently, for the troubles in France. But this was to insult the film makers, who only wanted to put their brand on these youths, or their imagined version of them. Because their own milieu in fact responded positively to the idea of youth gangs. Like Barthes said, as a collective project, instead of Gothic Cathedrals...

part of an ongoing collective project: a vast underclass fantasy

were postmods correct?

2009-05-27T13:09:00.000-07:00

People mainly think arts criticism is the preserve of the effete upper classes, who cannot even make it in investment banking; hideous characters, like Batman villains who have not learned how to steal. This may or may not be accurate. We can argue against this negative picture that:

1. arts criticism is just a part of social criticism

2. Our Western Civilisation is heavily "artistic", judging by the resources devoted to the production and consumption of "art"

3. this mythology of social criticism still has to be accounted for - by social criticism

4. popular culture in the 90s wasn't so against it. (History is not just the present tacked onto an imaginary past, loosely based on 50s America)

(Social criticism was more acceptable in the 90s. This aspect of popular culture seems to have been deserted, to some extent, by other sections of popular culture, since popular culture is partly institutionally based, and the priorities of these institutions change, while some disappear. Antoine de Caunes is no longer on teevee. Probably people used to take more drugs in the 90s. Everyone wanted to be an "art terrorist", like Jean Baudrillard. It used to be that it was "kool" to know people who made electro concept albums, about corporal punishment in English Public Schools, for the Mo Wax record label. People still feared Japan, not China.)

A more serious indictment of arts criticism is: that identifying the "real" meaning of "works of art" is a false operation. For example, Lukacs identifies the nineteenth century naturalistic novel as being about reification. This wasn't the dominant impression for the producers or consumers of these novels, so isn't the theory a sort of imposture?

What Lukacs has done, or what I have tried to do, is to assume these "works of art" "reflect", more or less loosely, the concrete conditions in which they have been produced, not just economic events, of course, but memories, the weather, events lost to history. Criticism, then, ideally ought to run parallel to the "art" in "reflecting" these circumstances. That a great deal of guesswork is involved makes approximation and error inevitable. This method is, in principle, formaliseable, hence scientific. It has this advantage over "dominant response" criticism: if the dominant response to a "work of art" is that it's a scam, or just rubbish, or an aspect of our society's totalitarian tendency, this fails to account for its conditions of production.

the social background of confusionism

2009-05-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

I used to work for a company that marketed office supplies, in which capacity I learned that you can get specially laminated Kandinsky prints for the walls of your office or factory, for the purpose of motivating your staff. Even though I am sympathetic to a future in which call centre workers might take their easels and pots of paint into work, and work on their pictures during their lunch hour, or even while they're on the phone, I have some reservations about this enterprise. After all, motivational pictures generally serve to dramatise management turning a deaf ear toward their workers' legitimate concerns.

Jean Arp, whose pictures, duly laminated, might well be available from the same company said: “we had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men's minds”.

I suggested that the regulative idea of art that underlies Kandinsky's paintings follows from the attempt to apply functionalist logic to works that are supposed to have been produced in complete freedom. I don't just mean Kandinsky but his milieu, his class even, who took naturalistic conservatism for granted even as they became interested in the basically anti-bourgeois ideas of romantic anti-utilitarianism.

It is reasonable to explain a great many consumer products on functionalist grounds. A ballpoint pen, for example, can be understood as something that exists to solve a technical problem as efficiently as possible. It conforms to a technical limit, even if this limit involves criteria relating to its function as a commodity as well as as a writing implement. The same principle cannot be applied to so called cultured art, unless the ideas of art pour art are to be abandoned, and for all art to be treated as kitsch art, merely conforming to a need like any other product.

This culture, which could not accept inefficiency or kitsch, compelled its painters to imagine and to show a technical limit for art, at or around the point at which it becomes unintelligible. Such a limit was duly invented. Consequently we have a moral concept: "high art", and a descriptive concept: "abstract art", for the same sort of thing: the confusion and alterisation of culture.

Kandinsky's triangle

2009-05-13T15:45:00.000-07:00

In 1911 the greatest modern painter wrote:

"The spiritual life can be accurately represented by a diagram of a large acute triangle divided into unequal parts, with the most acute and smallest division at the top. The farther down one goes, the larger, broader, more extensive, and deeper become the divisions of the triangle. The whole triangle moves slowly, barely perceptibly, forward and upward, so that where the highest point is “today;” the next division is “tomorrow,” i.e., what is today comprehensible only to the topmost segment of the triangle and to the rest of the triangle is gibberish, becomes tomorrow the sensible and emotional content of the life of the second segment.

At the apex of the topmost division there stands sometimes only a single man. His joyful vision is like an inner, immeasurable sorrow. Those who are closest to him do not understand him and in their indignation, call him deranged: a phoney or a candidate for the madhouse."

Kandinsky's system is to apply the selectively naturalistic logic of Burke or Hayek to the masterpieces of art. The triangle is a metaphor for the sublation of the indefinite. Suppose a masterpiece of art is ordinarily defined along the lines of "an artwork considered to be especially excellent from a set of works of art". According to Kandinsky, masterpieces of art not only represent a kind of "conclusion" to the "syllogisms" of ordinary art. But also, ordinary art itself no longer needs to be submitted to critical judgement. It is formally subsumed by the masterpieces of art, and may remain undefined.

What Kandinsky has done is to apply the functionalist argument from Burke or Hayek to something which is meant to be, by the standards of art pour art, which he also wants to uphold, absolutely functionless. Some strange arguments follow from this...

"the Talisman"

2009-05-11T15:35:00.000-07:00

"Comparison of others' attempts to setting off on a sea voyage in which the ships are drawn off course by the magnetic north pole. Discover that North Pole. What for others are deviations, for me are data by which to set my course."

- Walter Benjamin

Impressionism had always had a mannerist side. It wasn't all about optics. But the idea that it was all about optics was allowed to stand as a total explanation. Sérusier's, or Sérusier's and Gauguin's the Talisman, is meant as a sort of painted manifesto to a style where the mannerist side of impressionism is to be stressed exclusively, and the alibi of optics dropped. In one respect this style stresses the richness of human experience, by showing what would correspond to a superlative form of human experience, and as such can be understood as arguing against the real immiseration of human beings. On the other hand, what is actually shown as a possibility of human experience is an invention, an impossibility. It is as if the work "supposed" a superhuman author given to superperception. Sérusier had been reading Hegel, in whose works such contradictions abound. Gauguin's career in the financial sector had been ended by the recession. He had abandoned his family in Denmark and was working in Pont-Aven, Brittany, which became a sort of hipster Lourdes.

I wanted to explain the theory of avantgardism. If the lead up to this has concentrated exclusively on "celebrity masterpieces" this is because the theory of avantgardism is a theory of "celebrity masterpieces".

British Art

2009-05-08T16:10:00.000-07:00

When people refer to British Art they are not referring to something necessarily brilliant, though this possibility isn't definitively ruled out. The idea of British Art has an affinity with the idea of British Cooking. Some of it may be very poor, but this isn't an inevitability. Referring to British Cooking is not the same thing as referring to Italian Cooking, for example, which is generally considered to be unambiguously good; or Italian Art. The usage is different. For example if Balzac had written to Stendhal:

"what I do, is I do these frescoes; but you, my friend, have made British Art"

Our soldiers, returning from Afghanistan, are to be presented with the best of British Cooking, and the best of British Art.

But Britain did have a sophisticated visual culture at the turn of the Nineteenth Century, best exemplified by satirical cartoons. If these works don't convince enough people, or the right people, that they qualify as art proper, it's probably on account of the absence of obviously irreproducible skill, their opacity to modern viewers, and their puerility. The preponderance of figures engaging with the viewer also plays a part. If, in the style of Garfield minus Garfield, these figures were erased, at least some of these pictures would come across as great modernist renderings of the capitalist city, with the objectivity of Hiroshige prints.

"a great humanist gesture"

2009-05-06T11:14:00.000-07:00

There's a kind of Marxist history where the principal classes in society fight over a common means of cultural production, like a rowing couple each trying to drag a disconsolate baby from the other ones grasp. Intellectual conflict is mapped onto social conflict. This wasn't the Marxism of Edward Thompson, who, in The Making of the English Working Class described the following:

"A witness before the parliamentary committee enquiring into the hand-loom weavers (1835) was asked to state the view of his fellows on the Reform Bill:

Q. Are the working classes better satisfied with the institutions of the country since the change has taken place?

A. I do not think they are. They viewed the Reform Bill as a measure calculated to join the middle and upper classes to Government, and leave them in the hands of Government as a sort of machine to work according to the pleasure of Government.

Such men met Utilitarianism in their daily lives, and they sought to throw it back, not blindly, but with intelligence and moral passion. They fought, not the machine, but the exploititive and oppressive relationships intrinsic to industrial capitalism. In these same years , the great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism was running its parallel but altogether separate course. After William Blake, no mind was at home in both cultures, nor had the genius to interpret the two traditions to each other."

...which in one way suggests two and only two rival positions of two rival classes, but also something else. Because, on what grounds could the workers' criticism of Utilitarianism have been made, if not those underlying "the great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism"? That political economy represented the final denial of man?

The establishment at the time believed and made use of several kinds of ideology. Thompson analyses the traditional or induced attachment to "Church and King" and religious revivalism as well as the much vilified Utilitarianism. I tried to demonstrate that the "modern conservatism" exemplified by Burke's arguments against the French Revolution, selectively and retroactively naturalistic, represented an important innovation, quite distinct from a genuine attachment to tradition or utilitarianism, even if the "spiritualising" tendency of this "modern conservatism" is employed alongside utilitarian arguments, as in most economics texts.

This is to slight the venerable historian somewhat, whose book is pretty good, but the multiplicity of conservative ideologies is a development that underlies and informs the modern political aesthetic, and as such is of some importance.

The great difference between Manet's and Gauguin's treatment of similar subjects is not just historical. The political situation is no longer that of the Second Empire. Gauguin's Anna the Javanese is a depiction of someone on the margins of society, perhaps even defiantly so. The old bourgois conception of sex work has been restored, somewhat. It would be an outrageous insult to call this woman a prostitute. The picture doesn't convince us about where and when it was painted, other than in its style and celebrity. It all looks a bit like a theatre set. It couldn't really be described as a criticism of modern life, unless blurishness is taken to be a political statement.

I used to work nights in a petrol station, and this kid came in about four in the morning to clean the forecourt and replenish the stock. The storeroom in which the stock was kept was a windowless concrete cell impregnated with motor oil. Imagine, it's full of old boxes and cobwebs. And this kid just went to sleep in there. The great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism. It's got to have been like an Eritrean prison cell, except with bottles of Pepsi Max and old boxes of Quavers. And this kid just used to sleep in there. I understand he smoked a lot of weed, but even so.

The pre-critical ambivalence underlying Manet's Olympia is ordinarily political: the vexed relation between bourgeois culture and the sex industry, so the picture can be understood as a partial criticism of society. For Gauguin, ordinary political considerations seem of less importance than the "truth" underlying the "great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism": the defiant assertion of man in the abstract. Even in Gauguin's pictures with "cut out" figures, the mystery of internal depth seems to have a decisive weight: the eyes of the doll rolling back in its head.

If Gauguin isn't quite, or not always asserting the idealism of Berkeley, the impression that comes across is something like Heidegger's overidealised politics: the mystery of Mankind's relation with the Cosmos. As if the frills of Javanese Pagodas, or Gothic Cathedrals, or the frills of this woman's costume, which she is momentarily without, prefigured the intermediate world of Heideggarian froth.

the anti-political communist tendency

2009-05-04T05:19:00.000-07:00

One might have expected the anticapitalist disturbances of the 90s to have generated a voluminous critical literature with the sangfoid of the two undated, apparently online only issues of Letters Journal (whether pro or con):

"With this journal we wish to understand and analyze capitalism and crisis, attack the Left, critically engage with our own ideas and practices, and develop a more dynamic transgression from the political."

The "anti-political communist" tendency might involve a dozen people or so. It has also been articulated in articles under the pen name Monsieur Dupont, the best of which is probably the theory masterpiece Do you want to be or don't you want to be soft like me?

ten franc historical research: Manet's Olympia

2009-05-02T17:05:00.000-07:00

The object of our study is not the nineteenth century, which we have hardly researched, but the contradictions of the present.

In 1864, the year after Manet painted Olympia, and the year before it was exhibited, the Goncourt brothers reflected on the history of prostitution in Paris:

"Our little cousin Labille came to see us this morning. He had a rendezvous with a cocotte who was going to take him out to Asnières in her carriage. There exists a peculiar type of high-class prostitute nowadays who finds her custom among boys still at school, emptying their pocket-books and building up a reserve of men who will keep her in later years.

When the boy had gone, we reflected on the course taken by love in our three generations. The elder of us, at our cousins age, had a girl who stitched shoes for a living. I had a tart who always had a few sous in her chest of drawers. And this youngster has a woman who keeps her own carriage and horses. The world progresses. Here we have the three periods: Louis-Philippe, 1848, and the Second Empire."

In the early years of the nineteenth century conditions were markedly worse. Jules Janin wrote in 1839, with reference to Parent-Duchatelet's earlier study:

"If all orders of society are represented in the convict prisons of Toulon and Brest, just as they are in the Golden Book of the Legion of Honor, does that mean that the novel and the play may concern themselves with those vile heroes, ever cowering beneath the public's contempt or the warder's truncheon? In his Histoire de la prostitution publique M. Parent-Duchatelet , the learned gentleman who, out of pure charity, lived amid filth, that rigid Port-Royal Christian who lived out his whole life in haunts of ill fame out of sheer virtue, tells us that in order to perfect his frightful knowledge of Parisian vice he was once taken to a house where five-score ladies of the night were sleeping promiscuously with thieves on a great pile of rags gathered from all the garbage heaps in the kingdom. M. Parent-Duchatelet saw it; he tells us so; we must credit him. And yet, merely because the thing exists, does that mean that the novel and the play may pore over this den of vice to dredge up choice morsels? No, no, there are some things from which we must avert our eyes..."

Janin's first sentence is reflected years later in Lautrec's obituary notice, whose writer peevishly observed that the list of the artist's thousand conquests could also be found on the desk of the chief of police.

I suppose it is a question at the back of Janin's mind whether Parisian prostitutes constitute a particular "estate" within the social order, and the answer is that they do not.

During the Second Empire prostitution was legalised and subject to police regulation. The Emperor had the character of a procurer, and the bases of the bourgeois conception of prostitution altered. Syphilis was pandemic. Beyond the celebrated courtesans, the Second Empire filles publiques were multiplied and massed together in barracks, like artisans in factories or the destitute in the poorhouse. Prostitution became an integral part of the social machine of the Second Empire.

Political ideas inevitably lagged behind these social changes. Conservatism, admittedly, had already ceased to be purely dogmatic and had become more often reactive and naturalistic. But the idea of a social estate of prostitutes engaged in great factories devoted to their trade must have been necessarily disquieting. Because of the special status these women had, the Second Empire prostitutes, whose profession was somewhat naturalised and somewhat denaturalising, dramatise the contradictions of industrial civilisation as a whole, itself naturalised and unnatural.

If we accept that, intellectually at least, someone like Manet could have contemplated the Parisian prostitute with a kind of excited ambivalence, we can reapply the analysis of Alfred Jarry's poster.

A moment of everyday paranoia is pictured which threatens to be indissociable from paranoia about the whole of society. I have tried to show that this paranoia is the opposite of extreme psychopathology. It is, rather, the excited indifference of the pre-critical mindset. The type of representation involved conveys this paranoia. In place of Jarry's exaggerated double take, Manet has three figures in distinct registers: Olympia, her maid, her cat. The whole effect is something like three seperate "cut outs", assembled in the same picture, or three offkey figures from a diorama, indicating simultaneously the perspectives in which they appear realistic and nonrealistic.

caveat mutant

2009-05-01T13:04:00.000-07:00

Franco Moretti has an ideosyncratic take on "modern monsters": Frankenstein and Dracula. This is from Signs taken for Wonders:

"The fear of bourgeois civilization is summed up in two names: Frankenstein and Dracula. The monster and the vampire are born together one night in 1816 in the drawing room of the Villa Chapuis near Geneva, out of a society game among friends to while away a rainy summer. Born in the full spate of the industrial revolution, they rise again together in the critical years at the end of the nineteenth century under the names of Hyde and Dracula. In the twentieth century they conquer the cinema: after the First World War, in German Expressionism; after the 1929 crisis, with the big rko productions in America; then in 1956–57, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, directed by Terence Fisher, again, triumphantly, incarnate this twin-faced nightmare. Frankenstein and Dracula lead parallel lives. They are indivisible, because complementary, figures; the two horrible faces of a single society, its extremes: the disfigured wretch and the ruthless proprietor. The worker and capital: ‘the whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and propertyless workers.’ That ‘must’, which for Marx is a scientific prediction of the future (and the guarantee of a future reordering of society), is a forewarning of the end for nineteenth-century bourgeois culture."

"They are indivisible, because complementary"? Strangely enough, when I was at school the class was split between two rival gangs. The leaders of the gangs were called Elephant and Dracula. I never learnt their real names!

The main point of my criticism of this piece is, it's all very clever but is Mary Shelley really anticipating Marx's theory of the decomposition of Nineteenth Century class society, which actually didn't pan out exactly as Marx anticipated? Isn't the operative political faultline in 1816 still Radical against Conservative rather than proletariat against bourgeoisie? Why is there only one monster who hardly interferes in society at all, but rather remotely terrorises it? Why doesn't this terrorism relate to the social relations made possible by capitalism, and that made possible the assassination of Spencer Percival, for example?

There might be something in the correspondence between the monster in Frankenstein and a certain way of looking at the destitute, but it surely requires the complete abstraction of the "disfigured wretch" from economic, social and familial relations.

The personal history of the author of Frankenstein ought to be asserted here.

Mary Shelley's mother was involved in a famous controversy of the period whose theme coincides with the theme of the book. More or less, Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense arguing for a rational society. The French Revolution took place, offstage. Edmund Burke came up with a very strange argument against the ideas of Paine and the actions of the revolutionaries. Certain institutions in society should be accepted as being unfathomably efficacious. Acting against these institutions, apparently rationally, would be either futile or disasterous. Reality is a mousetrap; Enlightenment a piece of cheese. Mary Wollstonecraft responded to Burke's pamphlet with Vindication of the Rights of Men. Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein appropriates Burke's theme of the horrific aspect of the new: in modern language, the "mutant".

This is a fairly conventional analysis of Frankenstein. It might appear, from this, that Moretti has failed to understand the significance of the "Burkean" theme. In fact he goes over just this theme later on in his book, in a chapter on Sherlock Holmes.

Having established certain similarities between the treatment of the same theme by Burke and Mary Shelley, it's relevant to stress their differences. The same theme that served as the basis for a polemic by Burke serves as the basis for an imaginitive work by Mary Shelley. It has ceased to be a doctrine to be argued for or against and become somewhat naturalised itself. It has become possible for it to be contemplated with a kind of excited indifference.

how would you like to be kidnapped at Bagram airbase?

2009-04-29T16:08:00.001-07:00

When the British Home Secretary tries to claim as expenses pornographic films that her husband has watched, this is something people censure less because of the tawdriness of this particular episode, than the way in which it encapsulates the rotten complacency of the governing class.

Suppose they did a cartoon satirising this episode, showing the Home Secretary's husband watching a porn film shot in Abu Ghraib. On the one hand this would serve to underline the complacency of our governors, since complacency is complacency whether it concerns big or small things. And it would underline the personal responsibility of those who complacently or otherwise consented to such abuses. On the other hand the cartoon might tend to reduce the status of the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib to that of a stock situation, brought up for laughs.

I wanted to talk about some things from our culture. If I discuss this civilisation's "permanent collection" of images this does not necessarily mean granting them an exaggerated importance, or that the discussion concerns these images only.

I suggested that some of the impetus for Jarry's famous poster comes from the political sociology of modern life. The figures he has carefully drawn represent stylised bureaucrats. People recognise that there's something unreal about government bureaucrats. I've worked in these places and it's sometimes inevitable. People sit behind the counter. They have the job of humanising the blows struck by the great engine of bureaucracy at the public, and sometimes vice versa. Call centres have a similar function. I've worked in these too.

So, a situation presents in itself in real life in which people relate to each other immediately and mediately at the same time, or successively. One relation displaces the other, in an unsettling way, at least until the experience becomes commonplace. This is how people relate to the police or the people phoning from the call centre. This is pictured in Jarry's poster by a kind of double take. An excessive image stands in the place in which a more prosaic image is suggested.

I related this invention rather vaguely to the universal historicist cause: capitalism. This might be correct, even for a year as late as 1896, because the idea of capitalism as a decentred system, to be observed more or less indifferently, has to supplant the older popular idea of capitalism as legalised social warfare against the popular classes.

This might also go some way to explaining the strange situation of Manet, who, in the wintry sunshine of 1863, paints pictures in a similar vein and whose followers seem to have borrowed from him hardly anything at all.

another appalling story

2009-04-24T13:13:00.000-07:00

"In 2008, the Iraqi government went on a military spending spree, signaling its intent to buy large quantities of advanced weapons from the United States — including F-16 fighters and M1 tanks. In 2009, it’s preparing to go further, with Defense News reporting the potential purchase and refurbishment in the United States of 2,000 T-72 tanks. These potential arms deals are worth over $16.6 billion, and if fully realized will mark the re-emergence of Iraq as a major regional military power."

from January this year

what is Badiou about?

2009-04-18T18:27:00.000-07:00

If we consent to compare, say, Marcus Garvey with the English parliamentary reformer Henry Hunt this does not mean we're necessarily committed to a view of the world in which Europe inevitably proposes models that are subsequently imitated in other contexts. The political problems faced by humanity often reoccur, so similar solutions are often proposed. The political conjuncture out of which Latin American populism has developed might well correspond to the European future.

I mention this because if we want to understand Alain Badiou it might be useful to refer back to previous periods in which the prevalent intellectual culture was disconnected from everyday life. If it seems incomprehensible now that working men earnestly attended lectures by people like John Ruskin or William Morris it is sufficient to recall the lectures by Badiou and Zizek attended by fee paying students and future call centre workers. If we permit ourselves to assert that the prevalent intellectual culture is disconnected from the culture of everday life this does not mean we are obliged to find fault with the latter. Intellectuals are not so much expected to say the unsayable (that is, to rationally undermine the hypocrisy and cant of the establishment) as to dramatise the sublimation of language: its "becoming unintelligible". This is a social problem, and does not follow from the excesses or eccentricities of a few writers. Badiou has inherited this situation. This is not to say it doesn't affect his work.

Doesn't this follow from Badiou's quite correct assertion that the organised left, that is, the political structures of the working class, have for some time been in abeyance?

Badiou's article in the New Left Review introducing the ideas he develops in his book on Sarkozy is illustrative of the disjuncture I have mentioned between ordinary culture and a supposed elite culture that certainly shouldn't be mistaken for bourgeois culture tout court. Badiou is celebrated as an inventor of abstruse theory. This is connected, by various personal, social and historical circumstances to his political engagement on behalf of "a minority of the poor". I think both these activities are quite justifiable, but their interplay here results in a decidedly leftfield political theory.

It shouldn't be too surprising that Badiou is able to accurately criticise some of the contradictions of modern politics. The outcome of the election won by Sarkozy:

"affirmed the manifest powerlessness of any genuinely emancipatory programme within the electoral system: preferences are duly recorded, in the passive manner of a seismograph, but the process is one that by its nature excludes any embodiments of dissenting political will. "

"The underlying rationale is, of course, that of the single party: since all accept the logic of the existing capitalist order, market economy and so forth, why maintain the fiction of opposing parties?"

The interest in the essay, and one assumes the book, is the way this social critique connects with Badiou's philosophical system. It's something like a brittle crust overlaying molten Badiouism.

The argument seems to develop like this:

Badiou sees the French public and the capitalist state as mutually determining. The election results demonstrate the public's consent toward their government and political system. The political system is integrated with the capitalist system. The capitalist system molds public opinion:

"We should not underestimate the role of what Althusser called the ‘ideological state apparatus’—increasingly through the media, with the press now playing a more sophisticated part than tv and radio—in formulating and mobilizing such collective sentiments. Within the electoral process there has, it seems, been a weakening of the real."

The mutual determination of public and state might be thought of as a "virtuous circle". It is at least consistant with formal democracy. Nevertheless the foreign policy advocted by the french government is entirely cynical:

"a total consensus reigned on Palestine, Iran, Afghanistan (where French forces are fighting), Lebanon (ditto), Africa (swarming with French military ‘administrators’). Public discussion of alternatives on these issues was on neither party’s agenda."

and blame for domestic problems is fallaciously attributed to:

"ill-intentioned elements of the population—currently, foreign workers and young people from the banlieue."

In effect Badiou has described a political impasse - an "essential conservatism" - and the negative externalities that follow from it. The central problem, for Badiou, appears to involve the authenticity of the electorate and their failure to acheive a universal view of events. It appears that the system of mutual determination constantly recirculates "sad passions", hence the emphasis on fear. At the same time this means the system is abstracted from reality as a whole.

In the theory of avant garde art an abstracted status quo is negated and subsumed by an original form of art. In demonstrating the abstraction of the political status quo Badiou is able to apply the rules of this theory of art to politics. The regime itself understands in what direction its negation lies:

"What is haunting the regime, under the name of May 68? We can only assume that it is the ‘spectre of communism’, in one of its last real manifestations."

from which follows the conflation of disparate popular struggles with "communism" as a "transcendental invariant" and the real avant garde. This is to give history a strange reeducation camp flavour, easily refuted by enquiry into the events involved, for instance the first stages of the Chinese revolution, the Spanish civil war and so on.

The deficiencies in the argument as a whole follow from the failure to recognise the electorate's real economic interests. This allows a wholesale denigration of parliamentary politics, and by implication the customary right of political franchise. What is perhaps a temporary conjuncture is taken for a transhistorical "invariant". The right to vote has been useful in the past and probably will be again. The theory of avantgardism is a strange modern phenomenon that ought to be analysed properly before serving as the basis of some kind of neo-maoism.

Hobsbawm's alternatives

2009-04-14T15:24:00.000-07:00

We ought to be able to show some generosity toward distinguished historian Dr Eric Hobsbawm, who has lived through so many decades of turbulent history and has consistantly supported the working class (even if they're now renamed "a minority of the poor"), as well as intermittantly supporting the bureaucratic elite who used to rule the Soviet Union.

Dr Hobsbawm argues in last week's Guardian that "the basic idea that dominated economics and politics in the last century” is that there are “two mutually exclusive opposites: capitalism or socialism.” and:

"We have lived through two practical attempts to realise these in their pure form: the centrally state-planned economies of the Soviet type and the totally unrestricted and uncontrolled free-market capitalist economy."

Is the current social, political and economic structure of Britain really the result of a "practical attempt to realise" a "totally unrestricted and uncontrolled free-market capitalist economy"? Dr Hobsbawn is referring, presumably, to government policy from Thatcher onwards. Clearly the policies undertaken in this period are consistant with each other but was the goal really the triumph of the free market? We ought to ask for whom these policies were carried out, irrespective of their democratic mandate. Britain's political structure is intertwined with its economic structure, in which power is fairly concentrated. The post Thatcher governments inherited a good deal of corporatist legislation apparently related to welfare state provision and a semi socialised economy through some kind of social contract. The "socialist" parts of the British economy have been relentlessly attacked, corporatist legislation restricting free trade has not, where it is in the interests of big capital.

The monopolistic structure of big capital and its relationship to the government apparatus largely explains the current crisis and why the governments response has been anything but "a practical attempt to realise" a "totally unrestricted and uncontrolled free-market capitalist economy".

Dr Hobsbawm asks "Have we really got away from the assumption" that "the growing chasm between the super-rich and the rest doesn't matter that much, so long as everybody else (except the minority of the poor) is getting a bit better off?" He doesn't think we have. If I was super-rich I don't think I'd think it mattered, even if I wouldn't demand "we" thought it too. The important point surely is how it came to be that "everybody else (except the minority of the poor)" got a bit better off and if this is likely to be a continuing trend. The principal driver of this ameliorative trend has been house price inflation. The prices have inflated because the market is not at all free and was not intended to be so. The continuance of house price inflation will eventually work to make "everybody else" worse off as housing stock becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

Dr Hobsbawm is right that what's needed is "a progressive policy". Better policies could be formulated than those which are on the table, and better policies could be formulated that most people would approve. We ought to ask whether there's any force in play capable of instigating such a progressive policy. There isn't. The likely trajectory of current policy follows from this abdication.

the WKD craze

2009-04-11T13:58:00.000-07:00

As I think I said Rabbiter is only good for pointing out problems. The analysis unfortunately has to be cast into the habitual form of critique. Hence this thing borrows from an institutionalsed culture of critique whose trajectory does not necessarily coincide with the goals and methods of critique per se; but then neither does the culture of everyday life.

Isn't it sufficient to juxtapose the marketing material for the alcopop WKD with the lying apologias for government PFI projects to establish a connection?

There's no mystery as to why people like icepop flavour vodka drinks. The marketing of WKD stands out not because it's original but because it represents an especially egregious example of a trend that's been fairly widespread over the past few years.

It's meant to be a "wicked" drink. People like how its commodified. It isn't marked up with the sticky fingerprints of human activity. Capitalism has subsumed the efficient market and now throws up these products as efficient for their purpose as a cruise missile is to its. WKD is meant to be superior to the previously available and all too human pub drinks, like factory produced lager, because it appears more commodified. You get to participate in a made up imperative that's meant to supercede the always imperfect human capacity to exercise discretion. Participation in a baseless imperative is reimagined as participation in revocable evil: "wickedness", hence the devilry aspect. It is a cynical product that invites you to participate in its cynicism.

An emptied Experience circulates round an Innocence that's meant to have ritualistically subsumed a now generalised pig ignorance.

It is as if Adam and Eve, lead away to a life of perpetual toil, had at least the satisfaction that they could no longer be held up to ridicule by God; or that they were afforded the pleasure of being allowed to refrain from condescending the subsequent inmates in Eden; and Eve with hen night devil horns.

underworld with ghosts

2009-04-06T15:59:00.000-07:00

"If we imprudenty imagine all secular authority to cohere as a unified bloc, it appears that even as they put down demonstrations by force they dream up demonstrations."

Look at the eyes of the people dancing, and those who have not been hired to dance. The T-mobile dancers fairly radiate the grace of their election. The bystanders seem self-conscious. They aren't in on the thing.

The ideas of neoliberalism were constructed on the traditional common sense of the middle classes, which became the common sense of the salaried working class. Society was nothing but an endless grid of hard working families. The political issues of capitalism and the state became moral issues. A moral sensibility developed which validated actions that validated this picture and anathematised actions discrediting this picture.

They were decent people, mainly, who didn't think about consciously constructing their own culture.

The point I am trying to make is that getting paid took on a significance beyond the significance of getting paid. It came to signify the excellence of whatever was paid for in the absence of reasoned inquiry into the goals and methods involved (c.f. our soldiers in Iraq).

The same sense of grace became attached to certain blatantly commodified commodities, like McDonalds and WKD, which conversely did not pay but had to be paid for.

I meant to describe the culture on which late Thatcherism was superimposed. Some of this is a cruel exaggeration.

...a whole society of T-mobile dancers, responding to orders relayed through loudspeakers, by the bleeding Mysterons.

crisis memo (3)

2009-04-02T14:40:00.000-07:00

This is another bailout memo. In light of some of the pitiful clucking directed against yesterday's protestors in the media, I thought it might be worth summarising the issues:

1. The dynamic process underlying the growth phase has been the transfer of notional wealth from labour to capital.

This process has subsisted alongside a more or less consistant division of output. This distribution is hard to change because of political and technical structures that are hard to change.

2. The first process eventually impacted on the structure of the real economy - the costs of socially necessary debt became unserviceable - hence the first process ground to a halt.

This has a deflationary impact on notional capital wealth since capitalists ought to seek to diversify away from insecure unprofitable investments.

This is mitigated by a tendency for capitalists to hold on in anticipation of a further social/political change allowing the first process to continue - i.e. the breakdown of the "homeowner democracy" - or for want of suitable alternative investments.

3. Political power, however, is unduly influenced by banking interests and financialised capital (e.g. the car industry). The banks, through incompetence and systematic fraud are bust if notional wealth is allowed to deflate.

Hence governments are compelled to redistribute money to the finance sector to attempt to counteract the effects of the free market

This is the precise opposite of a fiscal stimulus per the Keynesian/Kaleckian model in which money is redistributed in favour of labour. Here money is redistributed in favour of capital. It has the likely effect of further reducing demand and increasing inflation.

4. The whole point is to carry through a wave of proletarianisation at the expense of damaging the real economy. Big capital may be able to survive, and even profit from this situation by cannibalising small capital.

The general public - the working class, the salaried middle class and the petit bourgeoisie such as it exists - would be better served with piecemeal solutions to the various problems brought up - bank fraud, savings recovery, winding up of the banks, measures against precaritisation. It is surprising that nothing much has been organised.

Hegel's logic, sort of

2009-03-28T13:48:00.000-07:00

"the enveloping wings of the Hegelian dialectic..." Derrida talks about, rather grandly, somewhere. If it's unclear what Hegel means by his "spiritual" we can't assume he isn't referencing the "spiritual" of popular culture, more or less consciously. This is sort of an illustration for my unreadable treatise on logic.

Latouriana

2009-03-23T14:13:00.000-07:00

a critical take on Bruno Latour's thing, here