Now that the managers of the global economic system--politicians, business leaders, big investors, market economists--have decided to restart it without making any major changes to its structures, the squeezing of workers is beginning in earnest. In the budget battle in Wisconsin, Ohio, New Jersey and elsewhere, we can see, as Chris Harman notes in his study Zombie Capitalism, that there are only a limited number of ways in which a capitalist economy can escape from the periodic crises that hit it.
What distinguishes this crisis from recent ones--both the slowdown in the mid-eighties, and the near collapse of credit markets due to overspeculation in the nineties--is the tremendous loss of real value at the heart of the system. This includes not only the banking crash, but the long term effects of four years of frozen credit, the loss in skills and working capital at small businesses, and the drag of high levels of structural unemployment that are evidently now accepted by the managers of the system as part of the "new normal."
Harman relates how the system was restarted in the recent past, during a crisis that was far less in scope than the current one, using a new corporate and government approach to global trade:
"[During the nineties] most multinationals concentrated their investments in a particular advanced industrial country and its neighbors, and then relied on the sheer scale of investment, research and development, and production there to provide an advantage over all competitors. The foreign investment that did take place was not necessarilty 'global' in its character. 'Sixty-six percent of the output of US foreign affiliates' was 'sold locally', that is, within the boundaries of the particular country in which a particular affiliate was based." [Harman's quote from Tim Koechlin, SEE below]
This method didn't, however, provide as much of a boost to the system as it had gotten from using colonial and slave labor at its founding. These externalized sources of value, so important in the period of "primitive accumulation" during the formative Euro-American development of capital, continued to play a role well into the twentieth century in many parts of the world. But once developing economies had been brought more fully into the system, and their productivity had become internalized, these methods no longer provided enough value to arrest the deepest problem trends in the system. As powerful as the comparison of contemporary sweatshop labor in "economic development zones" to colonial slavery might be on a moral plain, the point on an economic, systemic one is that it is not the same, not in terms of its overall effect.
The enforced policies of globalisation, which attempted to harness the further development of certain economies and transfer wealth back to the Euro-American core, were not enough to avoid major crises from emerging. What was necessary, within the logic of capital, was the extension of these policies to include the establishment of outposts in the development zones, an aspect of globalisation often not mentioned by the theory's proponents. Harman explains:
"A multinational could seek to overcome obstacles to exporting to a particular country by establishing plants inside its borders--in a pattern...called glocalisation. Even if it started with 'screwdriver plants' devoted simply to assembling components imported from the multinational's home country, it often ended up turning to local firms to provide components. The multinational gained because local firms effectively became its satellites, supplying it with resources and fighting for its interests against its local or regional competitors. It might even welcome protectionist measures by the state its subsidiary was in, since that would protect its sales there from international competitors."
This last point explains the support one finds for protectionism on the political right in many advanced economies, including the U.S. This isn't just a vestige of some type of post-WWII, pro-nationalist fervor, but rather the very contemporary support of multinationals found more generally on the right.
Furthermore, at the same time that globalisation and glocalisation were used to provide an artificial externality to the system, jobs in the areas of hard manufacturing and other sectors with skills sets that were easy to export, drained away from Europe and America. This side effect in turn required the managers of the system in home countries of multinationals to find ways to extend credit to large portions of their population who otherwise would have faced deep impoverishment.
The search for a solution led to a series of financial bubbles used to support future rounds of production. At the same time, the new wealth in the developing countries was being concentrated in a few hands, through glocalisation and other trends, and this led to the emergence of a second-tier managerial class in the global system--local billionaires, financiers, CEOs, and their political allies, who while not possessed with the same power as those at the Euro-American core, were still able to shape the local direction that things took. The expansion of credit was further helped by the formation of circular structures of support between the developing areas and the old core. China, India, the Asian "tiger economies," along with other emerging powers, lent part of their new wealth back to big Euro-American institutions, largely in the form of bond purchases, and this was used to fuel a credit-based consumer economy and offer a market for the products made in the developing countries.
All it took was a small disruption in the financial system--like the failure of a single hedge fund in the late nineties--and the whole thing started to unravel. Harman describes the precariousness of the system, by the time it reached the early noughts, in hard terms:
"The [present] crisis followed a quarter of a century in which finance had grown on a massive scale to play an unprecedented role in the system. The stock market valuation of US financial companies was 29 percent of the value of non-financials in 2004, a fourfold increase over the previous 25 years; the ratio of financial corporations' to non-financial corporations' profits had risen from about 6 percent in the early 1950s through the early 1960s to around 26 percent in 2001; global financial assets were equal to 316 percent of annual world output in 2005, as against only 109 percent in 1980; household debt in the US was 127 percent of total personal income in 2006 as against only 36 percent in 1952...."
What the managers of the system found in this situation was that certain methods used in the past to avoid or get out of a crisis no longer worked, or at least they didn't work very well. So when the bursting of the dot.com bubble was followed closely by the post-9/11 slowdown, it was discovered that the familiar technique of draining away wealth from the outlying parts of the system to replace losses at the core would not suffice to make up the difference. Besides, the rise of local oligarchies in the developing world, and the outbreak of popular resistance in Latin America and elsewhere, made the process much more difficult. To supplement the neoliberal arm-twisting and sweatshop squeezing, it was again necessary to create a financial bubble, this time in the area of real estate.
The fact that the managers of the system turned to real estate as a source of value is very revealing. It indicates the degree to which they had been reduced to drawing upon the bedrock layer of capital itself to drive the system forward. Housing had been considered a basic amenity of life for most people at the Euro-American core for a long time. It's part of what Harman (and Marx) call "reproductive capital," or the capital needed to provide the conditions for workers' survival--that is, the most fundamental prerequisite for future rounds of production to take place. In a consumer economy, this also meant providing some excess wealth, which was extended to workers in the form of credit, and which was supposed to be used to buy (mostly disposable) products. Workers are also consumers, after all.
However, by the time of the early noughts, these methods no longer worked to restore the value lost at the system's core by the failure of several successive bubbles. With each crisis, fewer and fewer methods were available to deal with problems that seemed insurmountable, and that were largely the result of previous efforts at repair. No wonder that apocalyptic and warmongering thinkers like Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington emerged into popularity to sum up the tenor of the new age. The confusion and contradictoriness in their thinking were direct reflections of the system's own contradictions.
When the banking crisis finally hit in '08, the managers found that the failure of some firms to the benefit of others--one of the main safety valves inherent in capitalism since its founding, which released pressure during crises and brought about stability--was no longer operative. But the "too big to fail" phenomenon was a long time in evolving. It had taken shape over several periods of crisis and renewal. And its origins lay in the very techniques used to prop up the system: financial bubbles, the extension of credit to more and more consumers, and the circular international relationships that undergirded the whole rickety thing.
What is interesting here is that none of the market theorists, and their intellectual-apocalyptic counterparts, ever entertained any other possibilities except those dictated by the logic of capital. And along with this logic comes an ironclad idea of necessity--a necessity that is supposed to be unchanging and predictable, but which is in fact a product, in each period of crisis and recovery, of both the built-in limitations of the system (its absolute material horizon), and the rather short list of methods from which the managers have drawn to try and heal it. This is a changing necessity, an historical necessity, and its ideation is caught up with notions of contingency and determinacy, with how much we think we can change about the system, and how much is simply a given . . .
_____________________
All quotations from:
Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism, Bookmarks, 2009.
On glocalisation:
Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder, The Logic of International Restructuring, Routledge, 1995.
On the rise of finance:
Andrew Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed, Oxford UP, 2007.
Tim Koechlin, "US Multinational Corporations and the Mobility of Productive Capital, A Sceptical View," Review of Radical Political Economy, 38:3, 2006.
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Comments
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kosher - State capitalism was a disaster. It fell apart in the former Soviet republics, in Latin America, in Central Africa. Why would it be any different today? What we need is a conscious, SOCIAL system.
caracalla - I am for Stu Pot, not Pol.
Sarah - No. At some. And you're right, the budget cuts are not prioritized by social need, they're set according to the needs of an unconscious, top-heavy system that serves the super rich almost exclusively now. That's called "freedom" under the present utopian market theories.
Dr Bramhall - Exactly. Although it would be nice to see the bankers twist in the wind. And any restructuring along social lines would have to begin with taxing the rich at a very high rate, to both provide what a new hegemonic alternative would need to function, and to reduce class power--which would never allow such a system to function. The rich have got to be reduced, considerably. So in that sense, I'm all for the stereotyping and scapegoating of a group that is fucking despicable anyway.
I thought you had something in mind more than the old, old, old socialist clap-trap of "tax the rich". Man, where are your brains? When you tax the rich they increase prices to cover that tax and add on a bit more for good measure. We, the purchasers of their products and services, pay that increase. It is all part of the package of illusion, about the rich paying "fair" taxes, to which we are subjected. Socialists are particularly prone to such idiotic, ill-thought-out "solutions".
What happened to your idea of changing "the structure" of our socio/economic system? You only propose another band-aid solution-that's-not a solution while retaining the same socio/economic structure.
The structure is pyramidal in shape. A few at the top benefit from it. The rest support those at the apex. Wage slavery is rampant and "sharing the wealth by those who create it" is non-existent aside from just enough to keep them alive as a labour pool.
Changing the structure means, at a minimum, that the pyramid be torn down. We need a horizontal structure in place of our present vertical one. Fortunately for us it is possible to design a pretty good capitalist system in this format. It is certainly possible, and highly desirable, that we do away with great inequity of UNEARNED wealth. The bricks in the apex of the pyramid of wealth are made up of inherited wealth. That wealth was created by the people of the society - it rightfully belongs to them. If it were returned to them by way of a shared inheritance system, the structure would be horizontal instead of pyramidal. A person who made a piss-pot full of money would actually benefit his society when his wealth was returned to the society from which it came, in the form of private, broadly spread "inheritance".
No socialist "leaders" who are "equal but more equal" than others. Just plain ol' capitalism working the way it ought to work.
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I don't know what you mean by "state capitalism". I'm not suggesting nationalization of industries. What I am suggesting is a much more progressive tax system and enforced regulation of various industries that don't involve such a high proportion of those industries' authorship on their own bills. The mortgage crisis was possible because of insufficient sensible regulation/enforcement. So was the BP oil spill in the Gulf.
At this point, our economy is moving toward a two pyramid model: a conventional one representing the population and an identical but inverted one representing the money. That's what's really untenable, particularly because we're taxing and looking for fiscal solutions based on the population pyramid rather than the money pyramid, a flawed idea because it's money we're after. (I kind of like that image so I reserve the right to use it in a post.)
r
As for "reproductive capital", those of us with simpler minds have our own term -- it's called "seed corn", and in our world, when hogs eat the seed corn, the hogs get slaughtered and eaten. Say, I wonder -- whatever happened to that aspect of capitalism?
a post on issues of contingency? what follows, an essay on "deep modernity"? why you closet Whiteheadian you. the bit on glocalisation is good.
:)
And then there's a labor party you have to build...and some sort of revolutionary apparatus if you really want to threaten the system, and get things off the ground. Otherwise, it's back-to-the-beginning.
rated
I heartily agree with your analysis. However, you failed to mention a very important thing that better scholars than me need to pay attention to, and that is the financialization of worldwide assets as the primary manifestation of late stage capitalism.
Because there are different countries and regions with different currencies ($, yen, euro, pound, etc.), there are potentials for arbitrage between currencies with the potential for bubbles in any one of the economic zones. And of course, one bubble in one zone popping makes it more and more likely that all the other houses of cards will come down in the process.
Until such time as there is a single unified world currency, or there is general agreement between all of the major industrial powers as to a single unified standard of regulation and financial accounting, we will be subject to more and more massive swings in the speculative arc.
It could be argued that World War II didn't end the Great Depression but Bretton Woods. Now that Bretton Woods is old in the tooth, the world is waiting for Bretton Woods II.
RATED
We have to get to making things again. Time to think about building new factories rather than lending money to keep outdated ones open. Same goes for banks.
And we need a new path, a new system like you say. But why do I think that all we're gonna get is another lousy loan?
rate
Tom - I don't see where you disagree with Marx. Of course, he never believed in the inevitability of revolution. He always stressed its contingent nature--that's why he was involved in every major labor movement in Europe in his day.
stu - Whitehead? More like Tarkovsky. I just watched "Stalker." Seen it?
It seems that the idea that “growth is limited” is part of the issue here. Need versus over-consumption, producing for the sake of production, society serving capitalism rather than capitalism serving society; the myth that everyone can be a billionaire.
I think many people see a vision of what needs to be, but do not propose a way to get there; cries to change the system but no explanation of how to achieve that change. It seems you have encountered and addressed this here in the comments.
I think any solutions will be forced upon us, not by design, but by desperate need.
@Tom,
You said it perfectly: As for "reproductive capital", those of us with simpler minds have our own term -- it's called "seed corn", and in our world, when hogs eat the seed corn, the hogs get slaughtered and eaten.
What a great analogy!
RATED
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old new lefty - Crises happened in capital's development long before financialization became a big part of the system. They're caused by inherent contradictions--overaccumulation, underproduction--in capitalism itself. Finance, and the speculative bubbles it creates, including those in currency markets, can be used to blunt the effects of these crises, but not to stop them. And yes, it causes other problems. A standard currency wouldn't solve any of these things. We already have a single global reserve currency, due to the build-up of dollars all over the world, and that only makes the system more delicate and even more prone to crises. The real problem is the falling rate of profit, and the fact that companies, as they grow, find it more and more difficult to de-financialize. Again, necessity exerts itself. We won't be done with it until we break with the logic of capital entirely.
Good distinction. Thanks for reading, and rating.
Rick - All economic systems have an absolute material horizon. They're real, materially so, even though they present themselves to us in the form of ideas, and value commodified. The trick is that this horizon doesn't stay fixed. It keeps moving, and right now it appears to be getting closer at an accelerated rate.
Stu - I thought the same thing about the Beckett influence. In particular the ending, where all three of them are sitting dejected outside "the room." It reminds me of "Endgame."
Think about it.
This has some interesting consequences. First and foremost is the rightwing/capitalist phobia with inflation. They know, but won't admit, that the stock markets have expanded simply because most of the cash from bailouts and stimuli went into the financial markets. Mo money, mo price. They've done quite nicely, thank you very much. Read today's NY Times (if it's still available, I read dead trees version) for articles on their "victory".
Since financial services creates no value added, much less consumable goods, stable (even decreasing) currency is all that matters. After all, there is little barter value to what they produce. The barter aspect shouldn't be ignored. The Original Adam Smith started with pure barter in his argument. Currency, in a true market economy, is merely the oil applied to the gears (physical production). Those who practice in it don't run the show, they merely provide indian clubs and sweep up after the elephants.
The other side effect is the fragility of such an economy. I've been outside the USofA rarely, and the most recent was to Bermuda. Since then, I've been following events there through the on-line "Royal Gazette", and it's a real world petri dish. Not only is Bermuda an isolated, small island, which makes for experimental control; but it has transformed itself (perhaps without forethought) from a tourist based economy to a financial services based one.
Bermuda produces virtually no physical goods, not even for subsistence. A tiny minority of largely foreign actors control the economy, and not generally to better the lives of citizens. There is an overt tension between the wealthy foreigners (overwhelmingly white) of the various insurance companies, and the majority black Bermudians (yes, they add that i) who sweep up after them. Nearly every day there's a story about "International Business", as it's known, making yet another extortionate demand, all the while complaining about the cost of living. At the same time, boasting that Bermuda has the world's highest GDP. I guess they've never heard of localized inflation.
But this is aside from the aspect of technology that I became involved in in the discussion. The inter-relationship of technology to that of management and labor and its aspects in relationship to the market are rather crucial to the violent imbalance now becoming obvious in management’s dependency upon labor and its repugnance of this dependency. The triumvirate interdependence of labor, management and the market form the tripod structure of capitalism and when the labor leg is removed or very badly weakened as in current economics the whole thing collapses. In general, technology is taken as the property of management, and when technology replaces labor, which it rapidly seems to be doing, it shunts away the means for the market to gain the funds to form a viable market. The several financial bubbles which inevitably collapse due to the basically criminal manipulation of the financial sector which generally believes it escapes with monstrous illegal and socially destructive profits, have provided the funds to keep the market temporarily viable but borrowing on unfulfillable promises is a very temporary prop to a bad situation and always results in destructive general misery.
By substituting technology for labor, therefore, management is totally destroying the fundamental the inter-relationship of management, labor, the market, and the general use of the wealth of the Earth to the benefit of humanity. This is not a condemnation of technology, merely an acknowledgement that a totally new social arrangement is necessary to utilize it properly for the benefit of humanity and the safety of the environment and the current wealthy elite are hell-bent on driving civilization over the cliff.
In response to BOKO’s comment it is important to acknowledge and emphasize that technological innovation is not merely an additional labor component but a factor that is violently corroding the entire labor-management-market structure. Compensation to the innovators of new technology is a negligible economic factor in regard to the market in general and yet the innovation that increases labor productivity and thereby eliminates much of labor’s participation in the economy has an explosive effect on the entire social structure and must be reckoned with as something vitally new and dangerous in the way it is currently being applied.
But can a general strike work? Desert Storm showed us the utility of surgical strike warfare. Can this apply to labor unrest and protests, particularly since global distribution chains are so diffuse and attenuated?
A recent NY Times article discussed how the recent disaster in Japan is causing some distribution logistic problems for major companies. Some major component production has redundant industries. Some, though, especially for secondary components, have only 1 or 2 industries and if these are crippled, the global economy takes a hit.
Could past "general strikes" take this into account and be more global and surgical in character and target specific industries so as to have more of a dent on the global economy?
A well-funded and coordinated walk-out at a key industry on a specific date could have major impacts on Capital, for a limited period of time. Of course, it would need to be followed up with other stuff...
However, your thoughts are appreciated; as the changes currently underway with thinkers go somewhat unnoticed.
Having just traveled, again, through Asia and Silicon Valley, I see two responses to the last 500 years of exploitation. One works, a bit, in the short term- A better form of mixed economy, illustrated by the good efforts within the current "system" of the oft-attacked for reasons obviously relating to greed and hate, Ms. Warren. This keeps the long battle a fight. But, more encouraging, is the trend, which actualizes Marx's gut, of the aware and educated small minority of evolving folks who work from home, keep their money in credit unions, use credit that has a social conscious, don't create much trash and don't consume "garbage" in the form of Wal-Mart products, create their own energy, and, most importantly, grow their own food, whether urban, suburban or rural, or get it from nearby- unprocessed. They are learning to live like Hawaiians! Which means the Manifesto's predicted end will actualize, sans the horrid Stalins who hijacked it in the first place.
The really good news is that even people who don't think for themselves are not blind and, once this reaches a tipping point, it will achieve critical mass, leaving the corporations to whither.
IMUA (Onward)
The fact that they turned to real estate is really due to their stupidity, and the fact that they were out of ideas. We're on our own until we get together in a big enough group to depose our new baron von overlords.
Rated.
Jan - Again, the point is getting tortured, but some interesting comments.
I think that for something like this to happen several things need to take place: security forces, including police, and fire and other emergency services, need to join in the stoppages, at least in many of the major city centers; municipal government needs to get involved, with walkouts and refusals-to-act by local councils, legislators etc.; and the largest labor organizations need to walk out, en masse. We've already seen all these things happen in one state or another, here and there, both here and in the Eurozone, but not all at once, everywhere. For instance, the last condition--about labor unions--is what DID NOT happen in France, Greece, Ireland. Instead they tried a more surgical, temporary method, by staging waves of strikes. This was planned, and while it was disruptive, it was not definitive politically--which also gives the lie to the idea that most of the labor leaders saw this as a radical POLITICAL action. For them it was about conditions and wages, and only political in a secondary sense and then mostly as a "statement." Not so for the workers, who shut down the refineries and challenged the government directly.
This is why it's important that workers form their own free associations and start talking about strategy, beyond the strike. I would call this the last condition, and the first one of a new beginning. The final goal, after all, is to get part of the political apparatus moving in a direction against the ruling class.
As an Internet engineer I can assure you that what goes on in SF/Silicon Valley and the Scandinavian countries will indeed become the future, as it has since the 70s, and arguably before, and all the so called conservative will be using it all, to their advantage, as they do their laptops and iPhones and web sites now, and their government social services fought for by the left so dear to them, and the electric Cadillacs they will soon be driving.
I will bet anyone on all this ... and, that the web will bring the final return to communal, yet global, living ... as predicted by his Gutness.
I read an essay in college about "tipping points" regarding the Solidarity Protests in Poland and how they spread to other sectors of the society like wildfire. You are right. Western and EU and US labor protests are too "trade union" like, and they do not spread like wildfire to other sectors, in the way that the Solidarity Protests did.
I think that the Establishment is still very good at dividing the working classes along $ and class-faction lines and playing them off against eachother. These divisions become firewalls of sorts, that prevent agitation and upheaval from sufficiently spreading, such that real, meaningful democratic change can be effectuated.
The knowledge/service economy is a myth. It merely represents a new class-faction emergent in the late 20th/early 21st century. It does not represent the "wave of the future," at least not yet. In many ways, they are just a new sub-group of Bourgeoisie.
And yet the same-old relations and methods of production continue, methinks.
90% of the American workforce will not be able to live or work in this way. They must still, by necessity, produce or "do" stuff.
Let me share some experiences as an old school Internet (pre-web) geek: I, and many others around the world on the old UNIX shell account geek only Net were heavily involved in Solidarity through PeaceNet. We were getting info back and forth from behind the Iron Curtain, in exactly the way it is now, actually more effectively in some ways as they users were very highly sophisticated in every way and the "authorities" at that time were for the most part unaware of how the communications were occurring as it was very clandestine and often encrypted. This is one of the many reasons my experience makes me choke when hearing of Reagan's supposed accomplishments, through mass media brainwashing, over Walesa's. I could go on, but the point is this is the true history.
Your points, and I have a hunch BOKO would agree, though I will leave that to him, about the knowledge/service economy are well taken ... it does exist for the technocrati, it is also not available as described to labor and workers per se ... but, that is not at all what I am referring to. What we are seeing in the Bay Area, Austin, Boston and Scandinavia is Marx's end game, the actual farming and producing mechanisms being controlled, via web communications and commerce, by, well, the workers.
I can only tell you that my friends in Silicon Valley are past even rolling their eyes at participating in the traditional roles- they don't even consider it an option, life is too short and we, the people are too important.
Again, I will wager anyone on this ... I am old enough to see Southerners and Midwesterners over and over and over continually appropriating everything we do, once enough time has passed that they can ignore where it came from, and why.
And I, and my ilk, are fine with that ... as it is progress(ive).
Aloha Kakou
The interview on the Kasama website with Olivier Besancenot, the head of the New Anticapitalist Party, is informative about the actions in France. Unfortunately the NAP decided to support the union bureaucrats when they pulled the plug on the refinery shutdowns. So they proved to be more conservative than the traditional far left, including the ICFI which supported the workers' action and denounced the union leadership for backing down. One could see the AFL-CIO doing the same thing if they thought the summer protests were going to turn into something truly effective, at least beyond their relatively narrow definition of effectiveness...
Here's the link: http://kasamaproject.org/2010/10/26/the-street-speaks-in-france-interview-with-besancenot/
And to Oahu...
I wasn't saying that the activities you describe are all local as phenomena, but rather that they depend upon larger structures for support, and those in turn depend on capital. Strictly speaking, there's no large-scale way to be "off the grid," and besides, why should we try? The grid belongs to us, after all, we built it, and support it all the time. It should be under social control. We need to start talking seriously about mass re-utilitization, a process that should occur under mass democratic control and remain so.
rated
Interesting reference to Bukharin. And you're right about the post-war theories. Nobody got the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc right until Kidron and Benn. The corporation was never as developed a structure as it is today. So...this is something that COULD work, tragically, for a while. Until the ecological and crisis-trend catastrophes catch up to us.
...and did you mean cliff instead of benn?
...And yes, I meant Cliff. I got my Tony's mixed up. I was referring to Cliff's break with the party over his ideas about state capitalism, and Michael Kidron's "Western Capitalism Since the War" and "Capitalism and Theory."
...& you could call cliff by ygael from now on, to tell them apart.
:)
...what's it like over there?
UFPJ, the umbrella group that staged most of the protests and other actions in New York, and helped to organize the big turnout at the march in Chicago on the eve of the Iraq invasion in 2003, has split several ways. So there's disorganization on the antiwar side, too. It'll be interesting to see how the summer protests go, withouth that kind of independent structure and leadership. I expect there'll be a lot of flag-waving by the AFL-CIO folks, and a miniscule left presence...
The really amazing thing is how little came out of the antiwar movement here--action or culture.