Cooptation

In this post from a year ago, I quoted Franco Berardi: “Only the social force of the general intellect can reset the machine and initiate a paradigm shift, but this presupposes the autonomy of the general intellect, the social solidarity of cognitarians.” Bifo seemed to have in mind a communization that would save the world, or create one, but it’s also the case that capitalism needs this autonomous subjectivity to lead the way to a new regime of accumulation. It can’t do it itself. That’s always been so, but financialization has created a governance problem that is especially unbridgeable: The strategic scattering of production, the nullification of unions, and the destruction of welfare state provisos, among other things, have put the workforce and, to a lesser extent, its reproduction beyond capital’s direct command. As long as the subjects of debt adhere to the convention of this arrangement, it works, but once they start taking advantage of their not being managed, the equilibrium becomes upset. What capital needs right now is what it has fought against for thirty-plus years: mediation.

With this in mind, and without holding it up as a vanguard, it seems to me that the worst thing that could happen to the occupy movement is cooptation. The danger of cooption isn’t that it will make the movement fizzle out or that it will mean a taming of its agenda and a bringing into the Democratic fold. Those are, at least in softer forms, inevitable and are just symptoms of the real danger: the capturing of autonomous subjectivity to create a new regime of accumulation. It’s impossible to know what that would look like just now, but it was just as hard to imagine Fordism arising from, say, the CIO sit-down strikes of the 30s.

In a sense, all the debates that have surrounded the occupations revolve around the question of cooptation: demands and “organization,” “violence” and civil disobedience. The forces that have held the line against the former pair and refused to the condemn the latter pair have been waging a fight against cooptation. This isn’t to say that those who question the commitment to those strategies are craven sellouts, but it does seem to be the case that those who want demands and a program, and who question, for example, black bloc tactics and even occupation in general, are also eager to seek solutions to problems: full employment, greater social benefits, financial regulation, etc. That is to say, they want state management of the economy.

And for their political purposes, they are right. But other protesters, I would even venture to say most others, know that state involvement would in the long run benefit not the 99% but capital. Because even though the increased repression of the last few days might indicate otherwise, the occupations present capital with an opportunity it’s been needing but unable to create the conditions for on its own. I don’t think, at this point, that the movement is politically powerful enough to instigate a new kind of production, but it soon could be. If so, the question then becomes, Will capital be able to capture this new subjectivity and transform it into a mode of accumulation. If autonomy means anything, it means keeping this cooptation at bay.

Filed under: Control, Economy, Work

Anarchists and occupation

I’ve been a little surprised at the critical reactions by some anarchists to Occupy Wall Street and its hundreds of spinoffs. Not that there isn’t room for criticism. There’s plenty: to the extent it has a critique of capital, OWS errs on the side of the populist — parasitic finance, evil capitalists, biased governance; the 99% slogan is problematic not just because it elides difficult issues about difference but because it assumes that structural forces (the police, for example) can be overcome with shame or rational argument; some of its elements are too hasty to call for reregulation and are ripe for co-optation; and this just begins the list.

No, the problem with certain anarchist reactions, besides the fact that they sometimes fail even to make the basic points outlined above, is not criticism in general but the kinds of criticisms, which are primarily ideological and programmatic, and reterritorializing. For instance, this article from the Workers’ Solidarity Movement, which I’ll take as exemplary here, claims that “the [occupy] movement’s unwillingness to attempt to agree on a coherent set of positions” indicates a sort of generalized depoliticization. Perhaps, but isn’t the work of movements precisely to formulate those positions? Entering a struggle with already-formed positions and tactics smacks of vanguardism, with the attendant necessity of adhering to the ideological program. Acts of resistance and refusal are nothing if not the time to experiment with tactics and devise (or at least reformulate) positions and principles.

For WSM, the occupations and assemblies are problematic because they operate from the assumption that “no two people experience oppression in the same way, and thus any attempt to unite people under a political programme inevitably ends up erasing some people’s perspectives,” which in turn “produces a vague and weak politics.” While I agree that so far a sort of happy tolerance and an evasion of disagreement too strongly animate the occupations, there’s something admiral and even novel about this stubborn refusal to eclipse difference in favor of a muscular political agenda. And even though this sometimes makes the events seem like giant self-help sessions, something is being enacted that, at least in the United States, hasn’t been seen in awhile: the act of being together, the reminder that doing politics is possible only in a group, and the enacting of a politics that isn’t only adversarial. Faced with the challenges of doing that work, political programs and demands can wait.

“Bring back the working class!” WSM says: “One of the major victories of neoliberalism is the eradication of the working-class from the popular consciousness. One of the results of this is the prevalence of the idea among certain sections of the left that the working-class is no longer relevant to understanding power in the modern world – an outdated idea clung to by old-left dinosaurs.” Well. OWS’s avoidance of this sort of reterritorialization should be praised, not mocked. Sure, the evasion could be primarily attributed to its incompetence and bland acceptance of everything under the sun, but it’s nonetheless there and it’s why, unlike, say, antiwar protests and syndicalist workplace action, it keeps open the possibility of a movement that encompasses not just wage earners but everyone who is striated by capital, and does so without curing those subjects of their singularity: the unemployed, the unemployable, the incarcerated, the homeless, students, and others.

Some anarchists, like the state-happy Marxists they criticize, assume that people gather for political reasons and then articulate political positions that correspond to the aims of that organization. There is some of that, for sure, but in many ways it also gets the relationship backwards: people organize because they already share political concerns and ideology, even when they are never articulated. What marks the work of political organization is less programs and ideology formation and more resonance and affect, the doing together and the interaction of bodies. If occupy movements have something to recommend them, it’s that they haven’t foreclosed this aspect of politics and have in fact deliberately made it their primary concern.

Filed under: Opposition, Subjectivity, Walls and Lines

Not getting it

Corey Robin, in that patronizing tone left-liberals (the kind who self-identify as socialists to distinguish themselves from the liberals they are barely, uh, distinguishable from) have adopted since Occupy Wall Street began:

In the last few months, I’ve had a fair number of arguments with both libertarians and anarchists about the state. What neither crew seems to get is what our most acute observers have long understood about the American scene: however much coercive power the state wields—and it’s considerable—it’s not, in the end, where and how many, perhaps even most, people in the United States have historically experienced the raw end of politically repressive power. Even force and violence: just think of black slaves and their descendants, confronting slaveholders, overseers, slave catchers, Klansmen, chain gangs, and more; or women confronting the violence of their husbands and supervisors; or workers confronting the Pinkertons and other private armies of capital.

Robin trots out as his “acute observers” de Tocqueville and DuBois, whom he ventriloquizes violently, and himself and his own liberal take on the national state, specifically that it is absolutely separable and actually autonomous from capital. So for Robin, the Pinkertons are definitively not of the state because they were deployed and employed by capitalists. But this overlooks the Pinkertons’ origins: the agency was created because businesses thought the state was not up to its designated task, of policing labor disputes, and in fact the agency’s first notorious achievement came when it stopped a plot to kill the head of state, Abraham Lincoln, who then employed the Pinkertons for his own security. Then as now, the lines separating state and capital are suppler and more complicated than Robin pretends they are; the assignation of functions and duties is always changing and crossing, and stark ownership distinctions between capital and state, between public and private, can’t begin to approximate the ways the effects of policing are lived by its subjects.

Of course I wouldn’t really expect left-liberals to appreciate these dynamics — after all, their whole political philosophy is predicated on a belief that the state can be a neutral arbiter between labor and capital — but I wish they wouldn’t be brusquely tone-deaf in laying them out. Even on his own terms, Robin’s distinctions don’t hold, and are condescending and insulting to the people he presumes to speak for. For instance, grouping the Klan with capital is disingenuous at best — it is nothing if not a quasi-state organization; ditto for chain gangs. Ridiculously, he seems to think that slavery existed purely economically, that there was not a state apparatus — laws, policing, the judiciary, etc. — that enforced its micropolitical and macropolitical operations. In a more contemporary vein, he doesn’t even seriously consider the war on drugs or a penal system that directly monitors and regulates almost half of all black men to be a serious expression of “repressive political power.”

Maybe if the criminal justice system were fully privatized he’d “get it.”

Filed under: Walls and Lines

China, contracts, and capture

There have been a couple of interesting articles on China recently. One at Mute, by Sander, registers skepticism that China, the workshop of the world, can save world capitalism by transforming itself into a consumer economy, the household of the world.

And if [China] were to use its hoard not for massive investments but to finance a general rise of purchasing power, the consequences would be equally catastrophic: the price of labour power, which remains its main competitive weapon, would shoot up, inflation and speculative investment, which already have reached alarming levels because of the accelerated monetary creation, would become unstoppable. It’s as if there was a curse on China’s hoard: these trillions of dollars will keep their value only as long as they remain untouched.

The other article, by Mouvement Communiste, focuses on labor rather than capital, specifically the wave of strikes that hit the coastal manufacturing sector, particularly foreign-owned automakers like Honda, in the summer of 2010 – though really it was the continuation of increased militancy that dates to around 2005 – and theorizes that the “working class emerging from this process, more skilled, more urbanised and more militant, represents the risk of a political crisis (in the sense of class relations) for capital.”

Both are interesting reads. But I think they also miss the mark in some important ways. Sander’s article is good on the economic factors that would make China’s transformation to a consumption-led economy difficult, but he also underestimates both the vision of its state planning and the fundamental ways the state has already altered labor relations to make that transformation possible. MC rightly notes and praises the novelty and fierceness of the 2010 industrial strikes, but overlooks that the actions were tolerated – to what degree is debatable, of course – by the state as part of a strategy for making the transformation. Though I generally sympathize with MC’s employment of the autonomist hypothesis, I don’t think the strikes can simply be reduced to an intractable antagonism between labor and capital. Maybe I should explain.

Over the last decade or so, the largest wage gains in China, by a fairly large percentage, have been enjoyed by workers employed by state-owned enterprises. Private and foreign firms, not surprisingly, have increased wages at a much slower pace. There are a few problems with this from the state’s perspective (even aside from capital’s many ideological objections to the SOEs). First, the wage gains have not been accompanied by any increase in productivity; in fact, productivity at SOEs is stagnant or even declining. So the state has financed a disproportionate share of income increases, relative to its output, which, in service of transforming the economy, it likely wouldn’t mind if it weren’t so clearly unsustainable fiscally in the long term. (It also needs money to finance its spectacular investment rates.) Second, even though the pace is slow (especially if you are an impatient western capitalist intellectual), the state does indeed want to shift all but the most “sensitive” of industries to private and/or foreign ownership, which is why it has spent the last twenty years mothballing SOEs at a phenomenal rate. China wants to be relieved of direct responsibility for its workers.

Putting these two elements together reveals a third problem: SOEs are responsible for most of the increased income of Chinese laborers, but they are a decreasing share of the national economy, and are trying to get out of production altogether (aside from those sensitive industries). Obviously, this has profound effects on the possibility of China’s transformation. If the state, directly through its enterprises, is less able to control the wage-directed financing of consumption, how does it create conditions for the realization of the transformation? That is, if the state can no longer artificially inflate purchasing power, how does it create the wage increases necessary both to pacify workers and to accomplish the move to a consumption-based economy?

Well, the obvious way would be for the state to dictate large, universal (or, conversely, targeted) rises in minimum wages. But between the hard laws of trade agreements and the soft laws of market opinion, such a move would be dangerous in that it could trigger litigation and capital flight. So, since the state can’t force higher incomes out of private enterprises, it has turned to a strategy of encouraging them, and it is capturing increased worker militancy to help accomplish a general rise in wages. This is why, for instance, as MC notes, the CEO of China’s state-owned automaker negotiated a settlement to the Honda strike that was beneficial to the workers. This is why the same CEO is in favor of laws that would legalize strikes by workers. This why the state strictly bans labor actions against SOEs but tolerates, to varying degrees, actions against foreign and domestic private firms. Generally, this is why, after years of suppressing labor actions, the government has turned to managing strikes rather than putting them down.

Of course China would be in trouble as a nation if it just allowed these wage increases to outpace productivity, which would cause investors to flee. So while it is allowing wage inflation, via its hands-off approach to settling labor conflicts, along the southeast coast – the first part of the country to liberalize and the destination of tens of millions of migrant workers – it has been pushing the interior, the large cities that dot the vast rural regions where labor unrest has been less tolerated, as the new site for foreign-owned industry. And by push, I mean both publicize and, more importantly, build the needed infrastructure for: the government has invested hundreds of billions linking interior nodes of production to the rest of the country, especially the southeast coast, with transportation and communications networks. The workforce of the interior cities, which is largely fed by migrants from the nearby countryside, will form the new low-wage centers, making possible the coast’s transformation to consumption-based, service-led industries while retaining the country’s industrial, manufacturing, and exporting base. (I won’t go into detail, but a shift in the site of production might also help China deal with its internal-migration problems and the disintegrating hukou system.)

The state, then, is planning the Chinese economy as much as it ever has, or at least it is engineering the movement and locations of its workforce. But at the same time, through rapid privatization, it is subjecting more and more workers to the discipline of the market. More central planning, yet also more of the invisible hand. There’s no contradiction here, as capitalist powers have always developed this way, though the Chinese state might be a bit more active and interventionist than its forebears. But just a bit.

So China is managing its workforce and using it to make changes to the national economy that can help make it a mature capitalist power. Nothing special there. But it is worth noting how it is managing the transformation, the techniques being utilized, because they amount not to repression of workers but to a capturing of their energy. As noted above, the state is harnessing, or attempting to, the power of workers’ actions and of industrial strikes to increase income levels and, eventually, consumption levels. The government is also increasing the welfare state by pushing toward universal health care, by doubling pension payments since 2005, and by increasing workforce retraining and unemployment payments. Generally, the state has embraced a, for lack of a better term, Keynesian/Fordist philosophy for forging new relations with labor, which will be based not on necessity and repression but on contracts, rights, and even unionization.

This is technique is perhaps most evident in the law governing contracts that came into effect in 2008. Whereas previous to that year laws governing labor agreements were liberal and, where they even existed, locally enforced, the 2008 law made contracts universally mandatory: every employer in China must provide employees with a written contract. And the law is strict: contracts are for life and only employees can nullify them; short-term arrangements are strictly limited, and in the case where a contract has lapsed, the employee retains rights to re-employment; employees have the right to sue for wrongful termination, and severance packages are mandatory; etc. China’s policy on labor contracts is as all-encompassing as anything in Europe.

And as in Europe, despite the law’s formal universality, its real effects and its enforcement are distinctly segmented. According to an analysis by a U.S. consulting firm:

Enforcement will likely be less strict away from the major coastal cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. In addition, inland provinces often have lower non-labor costs and lower minimum wage requirements. For this reason, many foreign companies have begun plans to shift production inland to such provinces as Hunan and Anhui.

Already contained in the law is the understanding that it will be selectively enforced and that it’s being used to relocate the nodes of industrial production.

Regardless, the shift to contracts and an independent workforce is real. The development of China’s economy and, more importantly, its workforce, while not as novel as some have it, is nonetheless notable because it represents a shift to, as Deleuze/Foucault might say, techniques of inciting, inducing, and seducing. This path of development contradicts the imaginations of many westerners, for whom China is a brutally suppressive place where labor rights, like political rights, are nonexistent. The sweatshop of the world. No doubt there’s still plenty of that, but the recent state policy changes show that something else is afoot: instead of repressing, which the strike wave of the last few years has shown to be impossible anyway, the state now wants to manage proletarian productivity. It is meeting workers’ demands for rights and benefits and using them to transform the economy. It is tolerating workers’ organization and revolt to craft new kinds of exploitation. Its governance is now typified less by repression and more by capture.

Filed under: Control, Economy, Work

Marx at the Margins

Kevin B. Anderson’s Marx at the Margins, and especially the promise of its subtitle, “On Nationalism, Ethnicities, and Non-Western Societies,” sounds like just what I’ve been looking for — an explication of race and nationalist politics that reduces neither to a subset of economy, and a portrait of Marx that shows him pushing against the European origins of his thought.

And in some ways, Anderson delivers on the promise. He details better than most the evolution from Manifesto Marx to Capital Marx, that is, from Marx the cheerleader of real subsumption to the Marx of multiplicities. (More on this below.) He also paints Marx as someone who was animated about and by politics, even of the parliamentary/electoral variety, and who thought that proletarian struggles couldn’t be successful if they were fought only against capital, that they had to be waged politically also. So while Marx’s official works manifestly elided politics for the most part, his letters, journals, and articles show him to be intimately knowledgeable of contemporary political events, and not just of politics in general but of movements and events in their singularity. In Anderson’s telling, each of Marx’s political investigations and researches of marginal populations — of India, the U.S. civil war, China, Poland, Russia, and Ireland — rebounded, to varying degrees, on the economic-theoretical work he was carrying out simultaneously, including, for example, his insertion of the conditions of Irish workers into the sections on the working day in Capital and his incorporation of his studies of Russian society into later revisions of the primitive accumulation chapters. In short, Anderson presents a Marx who did not consider the political to be secondary to or derived from the economic.

Of course there are problems with this presentation. One of them is that for a book that purports to uncover a concealed, secret Marx — one that is less European than is often supposed, both by his critics and his fans — a great deal of the material he uses is not new, and the stuff that is new is less than convincing. Not that novelty is essential, but for a text that wants to cast in a brighter light the marginalized Marx thinking about marginalized struggles and events, Anderson does very little to alter debates about colonialism, nationalism, and racism. Mostly he’s interested in clarifying Marx’s position in those debates and how Marx eventually came to hold the correct position.

For example, to use the most famous instance that Anderson elaborates on, Marx’s views on Indian struggles against British colonialism, Marx started off, in the early 1950s writings on India, largely as a colonial chauvinist: India was backwards because it was culturally and politically passive and conservative, as indicated by its historical acceptance of the caste system, which paved the way for easy colonial conquest. For the early Marx, this rule did have an upside: It would bring the requisite levels of civilization and progress to India, which would, after they gained full purchase, allow socialism to succeed. By the late 1950s Marx had modified this position — though, as Anderson’s silence on the matter indicates, he never truly renounced it — and toned down his rhetorical denunciations of the passivity and savagery of the Indian population, eventually deciding that Indians do resist, in their way, and hypothesizing that “Asiatic” systems could be the locus of revolution and socialism just as much as nations of advanced capitalism could be.

Another example: Anderson holds out Marx’s 1879-82 notebooks, which have never been printed in English and barely at all in other languages, as another example of how his thought evolved and how he came to see non-European societies as capable of accomplishing socialism. In these notebooks, Marx quotes the work of anthropologists and archaeologists who were investigating Native American and other marginal societies. Marx, Anderson says, was trying to expand the scope of his anticapitalist project to investigate why socialist revolutions hadn’t yet come about and to discover if there were perhaps other, less progressive paths to socialism. Anderson gives great significance to these notebooks because they show Marx employing a “multilinear” approach to social questions and dropping the “unilinear” approach that typified the earlier, more Eurocentric Marx. This transformation, for Anderson, makes Marx relevant to today, when capital has become nearly universal and traverses the entire globe; Marx’s eventual acceptance that socialism can arise from a wide variety of circumstances makes him a contemporary thinker, a premature theorist of globalization.

I’m less than convinced by the argument. One reason is that the 1879-82 notebooks are almost exclusively made up of quotations, with only scattered, brief, and nonsystematic commentary by Marx, which Anderson somewhat scurrilously says shows that Marx was radically reshaping his early thought, implying that if he had lived longer he might have laid out a much different, more expansive (global) take on capitalism. But even accepting that Marx did change his mind on some of these important questions, Anderson in no way shows that the framework Marx operated in moved one bit. We are left with the same Marx that vulgar Marxism has given us: the telos of capitalism is socialism and the route to that end will be revolution. Anderson can only chart how Marx came to occupy the more humanist position within that framework, and the question of how to bypass the many blindsides of the traditional Marx is never addressed.

Anderson’s failure is due in no small part to his drily empirical, antitheoretical approach, which allows him to notice the early Marx’s Orientalism but doesn’t allow him to be critical of the form and boundaries of debates about national politics, ethnicity, and states. To his credit, Anderson does a fine job of clarifying Marx’s positions and how they changed, but he does nothing to contemporize and interrogate those debates themselves. They exist for us as they existed for Marx, and we can all be thankful that Marx came to his senses. The Marx Anderson gives us is the morally correct one, not a politically astute one.

For my purposes, the disappointing aspect of the book is its gloss of nationalism, which appears in the subtitle but is treated in a completely perfunctory way. For Anderson’s Marx, nations are given things, mostly neutral spaces where the contestation of local and global capitals can occur, formless containers for bourgeois-proletariat struggles. So, for instance, Marx sided with Irish nationalists because they fought Britain and its capitalists, and he only criticized them for “going to far” in their activities when they either angered or failed to appeal to the British working classes. But what Marx didn’t acknowledge or recognize was that Irish struggles for national recognition would, at various times, necessarily contradict and work at cross purposes with proletarian universality. Nations have their own dynamics, demands, and aporias, and in struggles over them, national subjectivities will inevitably conflict with and depart from proletariat subjectivities. In Marx, the national as such is never investigated, and the fact that the national and national movements follow closely the striations of metropolitan capital — i.e., its boundaries, identities, territorial divisions, etc. — is taken as natural and unproblematic.

It’s an understandable oversight by Marx, who after all was of his time, when modern national movements were in their infancy and did perhaps contain an anticapitalist impulse. But Anderson’s oversight, and his refusal to criticize Marx for it, is less understandable. For Anderson, it is enough that Marx moved forward in his career, from particularism to universality, from disdain for non-Western societies to sympathy and enthusiasm. For this reason, his book works better as textual exegesis than it does as a tool for today.

Filed under: Marxology

Resonance, representation, revolt

There are probably a thousand things to say about the revolts in the Middle East and North Africa, and I think concepts such as resonance nicely capture their effectiveness, novelty, and rapid expansion. But what also strikes me about the revolts is an “older” problem, that of representation, for lack of a better term. The difficulty for so-called totalitarian states — a terrible label, I know, mostly because of the orientalist assumptions behind it, but if used strictly it is descriptive — is that by banning or limiting independent movement(s) and making all institutions coterminous with the party/leader, there are no substrata to draw from when the people become ungovernable. Of course, organization exists, but totalitarianism makes it exist in the margins, in forms that can’t be transformed into governance.

It’s this inability of organization to jump the gap between modes of marginal creation and democratic capture that movements can use to their advantage. Of course the moment can just as easily be decided by restoration with a different face, but as the Egyptians have taught us, the insisting on a single demand, which is nearly the same as making no demands at all, can hold open the gap, the moment of undecidability, so that no forces of reterritorialization can step in. It’s fragile maneuver, filling the space with the barest of anything, and can be difficult to maintain when the crisis wanes or shifts (as the Egyptians are finding out now under military rule), but delaying the imposition of representation makes governability and statecraft much more difficult. And that marks the difference between revolt and revolution.

Filed under: Minor, Walls and Lines

August dignity

But were the coming narrative to reveal, in any instance, the complete abasement of poor Starbuck’s fortitude, scarce might I have the heart to write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose the fall of valor in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, so far within us, that it remains intact though all the outer character seem gone; bleeds with keenest anguish at the undraped spectacle of a valor-ruined man. Nor can piety itself, at such a shameful sight, completely stifle her upbraidings against the permitting stars. But this august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. Thou shalt see it shining in the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike; that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality! — Moby-Dick

Filed under: Democracy

Ungovernable

Look at the discourse of the European political class (almost without exception): If deregulation produced the systemic collapse with which the global economy is now confronted, we need more deregulation. If lower taxation on high incomes led to a fall in demand, let’s lower high-income taxation. If hyper-exploitation resulted in the overproduction of unsold and useless cars, let’s intensify car production.

Are these people insane? I don’t think so. I think they are incapable of thinking in terms of the future; they are panicking, terrorized by their own impotence; they are scared. The modern bourgeoisie was a strongly territorialized class, linked to material assets; it could not exist without a relationship to territory and community. The financial class that dominates the contemporary scene has no attachment to either territory or material production, because its power and wealth are founded on the perfect abstraction of a digitally multiplied finance.

This last part, from Franco Berardi’s intriguing and insightful article “Cognitarian Subjectivation,” misstates the change financialization enacts and comes close to repeating populist finance-as-parasite arguments. Finance is linked to both territory and material production: private equity attaches to productive companies, some of which even make things you can hold in your hands; currencies are translated between markets that align with the borders of nations; investments in public securities depend on the (fiscal, financial) health of states. Certainly the relationship between finance and territory/production has changed, just as the territorialities and modes of production have changed, but Berardi’s claim of “no attachment” goes against the work, by Christian Marazzi and many others, that assumes that the distinction between the real economy and the financial economy no longer holds, if it ever did. Finance is less of a “perfect abstraction” than it has ever been.

Or maybe what Berardi is registering here is a difference between Europe and the United States, where a mania for (industrial) deregulation, lower taxation, and hyper-exploitation reigns that can’t be attributed to financial-class domination. If anything, in the United States finance leads the (admittedly feeble) calls for more regulation and taxation (though not of its sector, of course), while the political, industrial, and merchant classes scream for more freedom for capital. This freedom for capital includes two components, two demands: for the unrestricted exploitation of labor, and to be rid of its “obligations” toward nonproductive subjects — those too old, young, or disabled or otherwise unable to produce. The unemployed and the unemployable.

It’s this, I think, that gives rise to the “insane” and frightened political responses: not the lack of connection to community or country but the inability to command labor and populations and to direct financial resources. The root of the crisis lies in the realization that “empire is ungovernable.”

And this digital-financial hyper-abstraction is liquidating the living body of the planet, and the social body. Only the social force of the general intellect can reset the machine and initiate a paradigm shift, but this presupposes the autonomy of the general intellect, the social solidarity of cognitarians. It presupposes a process of autonomous subjectivation of collective intelligence.

Yes. As has happened at other times, the impossibility of command means that capitalism can only rely on the autonomous activity of workers (broadly speaking) and then hope to capture their subjectivity for a renewed sociality. The problem right now is that the general intellect seems tilted toward the pole of machinic enslavement and away from the pole of social subjection that could produce new value and create new subjectivities. The fear comes from not knowing if the tilt will ever reverse itself.

Filed under: Control, Economy

Suicidal

 

“For the moment, at least, most capitalists are no longer even thinking about capitalism’s long-term viability. It is terrifying, to be sure, to understand that one is facing a potentially suicidal enemy.” — David Graeber

What Graeber gets at here seems essential for understanding what’s going on now: the repression, austerity, and intentional devalorization that have constituted capital’s response to the crises. What’s happening now can’t be ascribed to rot, decay, stupidity, or lack of leadership, all of which assume eternal modes of recovery, and extant but unobtained logics to accompany them. The New Deal was a historical event, not a blueprint. Capital today seems bent on suicide, and no amount of proof of its intellectual and moral defects will cure it of its death-wish. It has to be fought, not shown its errors. Antagonism, not therapy.

Graeber’s wish to “snap the productivist bargain” is a political program that expresses this desire to maintain the antagonism, not dissolve it into newer deals. I don’t share his imperative to “expose … pernicious illusions” about money — since illusions are an inextricable part of the money relation — but I agree that refusing productivism sharpens the conflict and recognizes a largely unacknowledged fact: bargains will only ever benefit a very small portion of the world, while surrendering the rest of it to a strengthened market.

Filed under: Economy, War, Work

Capital flows and nations

The previous post doesn’t imply that resistance to nation-based solutions has been the only response to the crises. That’s not been the case, as the recent explosion of nationalist idiocies — to use just some of the proper names: tea parties, Germany’s program of austerity in defense of its exports, and France’s explusions of the Roma — show clearly enough. Not surprisingly, the twin crises, of the economy and of finance, have produced autarkic fantasies everywhere, and not just on the political right.

The key word here, I think, is produced. It’s become standard analysis to describe nationalist upsurges in the last few decades as reactions to the increasing borderlessness of capital. The implication is that older economic forms that used the nation as the primary determining economic and political boundary actually tamed, or at least rationalized, these latent tendencies, while globalization’s deterritorializations have loosened them. But even though such views give the nation a certain amount of autonomy that is missing in economistic accounts, they still assume that nationalism is natural, eternal even, and overlook how it is created and maintained, however fragilely and imperfectly. It would be better to investigate how the global movement of capital has produced these nationalisms — in both their quotidian and evental expressions — rather than relegate them to the status of mere anachronism.

Of course that’s a big project, one definitely worth researching but more than I will or can do here. For now I’d like to look at just one aspect of the recent crises and its relation to a nation: the flow of foreign capital into the United States. Obviously it’s impossible to draw definitive conclusions from these very partial figures, but I think the flow of money is certainly a matter worth investigating.

 

As this first chart shows, at the onset of the crises, the flow of private capital into the United States completely stopped. Of course in one sense this is hardly a revelation: as everyone already knows, in 2008 private credit flows completely froze. But less frequently acknowledged is that their immobility was due in large part to the fact that the multibillion dollars coming into the United States each day, which was required to sustain the current world dynamic, dropped to below zero. (Significantly, it was also at this time that another incoming flow turned negative: the flow of labor.) Nonstate investors everywhere held on to their cash.

In the absence of flows, the world economy started living off its stock.

 

The next chart shows this in more detail: In 2008 and 2009, there was no incoming capital from private sources for private investment. But notice also that as total inflows dropped off massively, the levels remained the same or increased dramatically in three areas: foreign official (i.e., government) purchases, U.S. Treasuries, and U.S. currency. In other words, though foreign private capital fled away from the United States (and back to its “home”), foreign states still invested strongly in the United States and they did so by resorting to safe-haven investment: government bonds and currency. (This turn to certainty was mirrored by domestic private investors, who either hoarded their money or parked it in nationalized instruments.)

The intertwinement between the U.S. government and foreign governments grew ten-fold in five years, and this relation became almost exclusively based on conservative modes of investment, became directly correspondent with and even determinative of national regimes of production and accumulation, and became the primary mover of capital. Without the government’s direction of flows, there would have been almost no movement of capital at all. So Tea Party delusions about Obama’s socialistic expansion of government are not entirely fanciful, but they ignore that their beloved market turned to government, not vice versa, and that the state only performed its historic role both as chief reterritorializer, and added to its resume the role of only efficient allocator of capital.

It’s probably also worth pointing out that also in 2008 foreign ownership of total U.S. Treasuries decisively topped 50%, after hovering around 35-40% for most of the aughties.

So private capital is largely staying to its national territory while public capital seeps more fully into the pores of global capitalism, looking primary for safe, nation-based investment. Meanwhile, within the United States something else notable is happening: an immense increase in the rate of domestic/household savings, and to a lesser extent business savings. As the following chart shows, U.S. households underwent an epochal transformation from huge deficit spender (“the consumer of last resort”) to huge saver almost overnight.

 

As soon as the crises hit, Americans withdrew from the world, holding onto their cash and not spending either on investment or consumption. This hoard of money became, I think, the basis for the moral revulsion of government debt and of the foreign lenders who enabled it.

So what does this very brief statistical sketch indicate? Well, as I said, drawing exact conclusions directly from the figures would elide the contingencies of politics, but it might be possible to draw a (segmented, perhaps convoluted) picture from the flow of money. As private capital stopped flowing productively, as it either sought safe (i.e., national) foreign investments or (along with the flow of labor) returned home, the U.S. government became the de facto receiver and director of capital flows. This increase in state-directed investment was largely underwritten by foreign investors, particularly foreign governments. It’s not coincidental that this (foreign-financed) state became so hated in the political imaginary, a hatred no doubt magnified by the U.S. president’s race and complicated, enigmatic national history. Rhetoric about Kenyan-Islamist-Marxist-Nazis crept in, but what produced it was as much the decisiveness of foreign capital in the U.S. economy as a president with suspect loyalties.

As the state became so despised, questions about national orientation became primary. There are right-wing versions (kill state socialism!) and left-wing versions (where’s the new New Deal?) of the questions, but the aspirations of independence and self-renewal were fueled by the huge surge in the household savings rate and the government’s increased role in directing industrial policy.

And so from this something like the current situation emerges: a bunch of material (monetary) factors have increased the importance of national economies, which has given rise to politics that are bounded by those national dynamics. The increase in nationalism is not limited to the exceptional varieties I listed at the beginning of this post. The everyday mechanisms of national difference — currency differentials, central bank policy, etc. — which never disappeared even during the high point of “globalization,” are becoming more, not less, decisive. As the recent quantitative-easing flap between the United States, China, and Germany shows, nations’ function of projecting or protecting their economies remains a central element in the world economy. It’s no surprise that political programs would follow from these national requirements.

Filed under: Economy, The State, Walls and Lines