We are now at the end of an Indian summer of reflated American imperial power. What power(s) will be able to uphold and constitute the interests of the world capitalist system as a whole in the coming period? These general interests can only ever have approximate embodiments in the hegemonic centres that stand in for this absent universal dimension. Very few incumbent powers are willing to concede that their particular interests might have to be sacrificed to the universal interests of the larger field of accumulation. If no inter-imperialist struggle to determine a new hegemon is possible, can there be a coordinated multilateral devaluation of debts and inflated assets? It is not clear what kind of system will emerge if neither this nor any functional surrogate to this process occurs.
Giovanni Arrighi’s three geo-political projections, laid out in The Long Twentieth Century, were that the flight forward into financialized neo-liberalism would only bring a brief prolongation of American hegemony and would have to yield eventually to either a West-run global empire, an East-inflected world market-society, or long-term systemic chaos. [11] A full-fledged version of the first possibility can probably be ruled out. But following the logic of Arrighi’s historical narrative, the emergence of a new hegemonic centre seems equally improbable. After all, each of the successive hegemons in his account was a larger and more advanced capitalist economy than the one that preceded it. By that standard, there is obviously no power in the world that could supersede the US, neither China—at present a considerably smaller and more backward economy—nor ‘Europe’, which is not even a state, and will soon perhaps begin to abort its historically anomalous quasi-statehood. Japan, once thought to be the nation most likely to succeed, has long since been eliminated from consideration. The most likely development is a combination of possibilities one and three: a concert of powers to stave off financial meltdowns, but incapable of orchestrating a transition to a new phase of sustainable capitalist development.
We are entering into a period of inconclusive struggles between a weakened capitalism and dispersed agencies of opposition, within delegitimated and insolvent political orders. The end of history could be thought to begin when no project of global scope is left standing, and a new kind of ‘worldlessness’ and drift begins. This would conform to Hegel’s suspicion that at this spiritual terminus, the past would be known, but that a singular future might cease to be a relevant category.
Gopal Balakrishnan, “Speculations on the Stationary State,” New Left Review
Comments 38
WTF?
October 25th, 2009 at 10:44 am
Is it my imagination or is he pissed off?
October 25th, 2009 at 10:45 am
Say, how about having Biden plagiarize this for his next big speech? That would really freak everyone out.
October 25th, 2009 at 10:57 am
I picture a typically arrogant upper class Indian guy warning in dire tones that unless the governments of the world stop stop stop, and do exactly as he says, we’re in for a world of trouble.
Sure, especially with thuggish 0bami in charge here, things could get a whole lot worse, unimaginably bad.
But then, which intellectuals ever predicted how wonderful things would get with the internet, and all of the other progress we have made?
October 25th, 2009 at 11:44 am
He doesn’t mention the world of Islam. Two car bombs exploded in Baghdad recently, killing 132 people at last count, showing how powerful and beautiful the world of suicide bombing is. The bombs served no purpose, and so once again jihadists showed how selfless they are.
And in Saudi Arabia, a woman reporter was sentenced to 60 lashes for interviewing a man who mentioned sex. The American press is running the story in tiny articles in the middle of the newspaper. They wouldn’t want readers to think they were neocons.
Is Islamism the future? We have reason to be afraid.
October 25th, 2009 at 11:57 am
He’s a post-”Late Capitalism” Marxist without a world revolution. So he’s deeply pessimistic – and comes out where many conservatives start. To me he seems much more resigned than angry. If you can make it through the rest of the article, you’ll find him puncturing numerous “neo-liberal” fantasies. His comments on the unlikelihood of “green capitalism” rescuing the global order, or of a ’30s like wave of extreme reaction disciplining the populations and paving the way for total war, were I thought quite succinct.
I like his characterization of the current situation and its most likely outcomes – which you get if you take the first sentence of the last paragraph and the last sentence of the second paragraph, and reverse order:
He’s speaking from a global perspective, of course. When you look around the Age of Obama, do you see the energies gathering for a great global capitalist leap forward? Or the material and psychological basis for a global re-assertion of American neo-imperial political/economic/military hegemony? I’m not trying to be argumentative or defensive, and the perspective certainly doesn’t make me want to re-read Das Kapital and start a Trotskyist study group, but I’m wondering what alternative and politically relevant scenario you’d offer in its place.
October 25th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
@ George Jochnowitz:
I’d say he doesn’t believe that Islamism offers an alternative for the role of global hegemon, but can contribute to “systemic chaos.” Again, he’s not the only one with that view. He happens to be writing at the New Left Review, but there are many on the right who strongly agree with him, even if they might disagree about the best way to deal with the challenge.
One of the things that’s interesting and perplexing about Islamism – we were just discussing it the other day in reference to Israeli-Turkish relations – is that it conjures up what amounts to an alternative reality for its adherents. Part of the feeling of “worldlessness” that the author describes comes from the sense that, without a unifying human project, it’s almost as though we live on a different cultural and intellectual planet. That can be extremely dangerous. Einstein predicted that we’d have either “one world or a thousand tribes.” If “one world” isn’t available – as a political, military, economic, or cultural product – the question might be how to keep the competition between tribes from spiraling out of control in an age of proliferating WMD.
October 25th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
I assume he’s frustrated because he thinks the dialectic has stalled. That’s different from the pique of an old-fashioned conservative who believes society is in decline. Personally I’ve always suspected that grand predictions, presuming they’re sincere, are, like dreams, more a road map of the predictor’s soul than a measure of objective reality. But I’ll go so far as to predict that the quest for a uniform global project will be about as successful as Einstein’s quest for a unified field theory.
October 25th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
The problem is that decentralized entrepreneurial capitalism — small capitalism as opposed to monolithic global companies — has to spend so much of its time fighting off the predations against it of all centrally-organizing ideas. Marxism was the big one of the last century, and it persists in various forms today, although it doesn’t have explicit hold of a “Soviet Union” any more (and that matters greatly in material ways).
Islam is another one, but has yet, since WWI, to get hold of a usefully vast land empire. I’m not convinced it’s compatible with technocratic empire in its current incarnation. While I do tend to agree with George Jochnowitz that Islam and Marxism have no trouble making common cause, Islam isn’t the administrative monolith Marxism has so often been.
“Soft,” nanny-state socialism has made war on entrepreneurial capitalism much less kinetically than either armed Marxism or Islam, but it has been very effective over a lot of the globe. Great chunks of Latin America and Asia remain in thrall to it. The ideas of globalism being pushed through the UN and the various international forums (on climate change, status of women, labor and employment, etc; the list is endless) — these ideas in the aggregate represent a long-term assault on entrepreneurial capitalism and the individual liberty and opportunity that are integral to it.
The unique role of the US has been to make more of the world than ever before safe for some level of entrepreneurial capitalism. There have always been big companies, and collusion between governments and the biggest ones; this pattern has been observable everywhere on earth since the beginning of recorded history. What there have NOT always been are the numerous smaller and mid-size companies, right down to individual contractors and home businesses, that are able to look across borders for markets. Small producers have more market power and choice today, and have had for the last century, than in all of the centuries preceding it back to the dawn of time.
The main thing no other nation but America will do is prioritize and foster this powerful engine of opportunity and prosperity. The vast majority of peoples throughout history have lived in a world in which no nation or empire acted in this manner. The Brits did to a lesser extent, in the century or so before WWI, and there were some features of the Pax Americana in the early centuries of the Roman Empire. But for the most part, administration of centralized human power has always emphasized economic controls and limitations, the enrichment of a few, heavy taxation on many, and the systematic imposition of barriers to entrepreneurial success.
If nothing occurs to reverse the current trend toward regionalism, more and more of the world’s people will be subject again to that longstanding pattern of centralized sclerosis. Leftists wouldn’t put it in these terms, but everyone understands that no other nation will enforce America’s economic priorities, because no other nation that conceivably has the military might wants to. Russia and China are natural resource predators and state-power economists, and they have no theoretical commitment, and never have, to the economic liberty of their people.
October 25th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
@ Seth Halpern:
Such a deconstructionist you are! Any given essay is as likely an act of projection as a description of some (mythical) objective reality – where you stand depends upon where you sit – the eye altering alters all – etc. But if we proceed from such general propositions, mustering all due skepticism as to any would-be piece of the truth encompassing the whole truth, and if we don’t want to descend all the way into nihilistic no-reality schizo-politics in the mode of certain past-trendy Frenchies, then we’re left with sets of facts that we can try to agree on, and a world or set of worlds intent on impressing us with their objectivity whether we like it, or predicted it, or not.
So you agree with the essayist in this central point, although I think you might want to re-consider the term “uniform”: A unifying global project wouldn’t have to be uniform down the day-to-day existence of every individual, it just would need to be led, enforced, extended by an effectively hegemonic power – either a most powerful nation with global reach, or an alliance. It wasn’t too long ago, following the fall of the Soviet Union, that just such a future was being optimistically sketched by the proponents of democratic capitalism. Democracy was on the march and “everyone” agreed that markets were best. Contrast that gay 1990′s outlook with the current sense that, to use the author’s term, “financialized neo-liberalism” has led the world’s most advanced nations into a cul-de-sac of insolvency and illegitimacy, with no visible prospect for a restoration of economic and political vitality. From the central bankers’ perspective, if everything goes very well, we’re looking at a decade of global stagflation, with the declining hegemon and former engine of dynamic growth, the U.S., led by a “stationary statist” who seems determined to make that decline permanent and irrevocable.
There are a thousand ways those plans could go awry – fail, be repealed and revoked and overwhelmed – but some substantial percentage of those thousand ways do not include a relatively painless re-assertion of American political, economic, and cultural supremacy.
October 25th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
And thus one of the conservatives whom I most respect ends up in the same place as a nearly (but not quite!) unreadable New Left Review global pessimist.
Add friction on the periphery – or peripheries – and you get something rather similar to the “most likely” scenario that Mr. Balakrishnan outlines.
The main questions for us in America would be, I think, as follows: 1) what level of adjustment in our way of life a world of regional centralisms surrounded by zones of entropy, misery, chaos, and conflict will require – can, for instance, an economy based on global supply chains and globalized finance function efficiently amidst surging regional threats and dysfunctions? – and, relatedly, 2) how vulnerable will whatever steady state be to terminal catastrophic disruption – “system chaos” amidst a global tragedy of the commons overwhelming the “concert of powers”?
I guess the third possibility is one or another technological deus ex machina. I don’t completely discount this possibility, but wouldn’t it take more than one miracle to alter the picture very substantially on any short time scale?
October 25th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
@CK: Oy. Okay, what you said.
No, seriously, since when is any critical human endeavor painless? Typing on this goddamned BlackBerry isn’t painless, even.
I was never an End of History guy, not then, not now. Meaning, yes, I did/do think market capitalism was/ is best, but, no, I never believed its triumph to be inevitable, or a universally (or uniformly)(or unifyingly) shared human aspiration.
Maybe the complacency attending endofhistoryism contributed to our financial unraveling. How’s that for a dialectic?
October 25th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
P.S. Did you ever think of conducting show trials for a living?
October 25th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
No attachment for a full-grown keyboard?
That’s one way of lookin at it.
October 25th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
You know anyone who’s hiring?
October 25th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Some outfit in Geneva maybe
October 25th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
CK won’t let me wear a belt.
October 25th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
@ CK MacLeod: You won’t be surprised (I imagine) to hear that I don’t think retro-regionalism is inevitable. It’s not dictated by any irreversible trend. It’s entirely a matter of political will in one nation: the USA.
We’re not nearly as poor and ineffective as many are starting to think we are. Everything we’re failing to do at the moment is a matter of will, not means. Our biggest problem, in my view, is that we are hamstringing our own economic and political power with excessive regulation, and predation against the productive by the political class.
We don’t have to adjust to a world of tribute-demanding regional hegemons. That’s up to us. It may be that, as so many times throughout our history, it will not be until a would-be hegemon demands tribute that we are galvanized to action. One thing we can count on is that this will happen; the question is only when.
October 25th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
And likewise, JED, I hope it doesn’t surprise you if I agree that global decline/entropy of that or any other particular sort is inevitable.
October 25th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
But it’s worth keeping in mind that the author was referring to the “interests of the world capitalist system as a whole.” To use your word, there’s certainly a question – reinforced by the results of our most recent national election – whether the will exists here any longer to safeguard and extend those interests, or even the understanding and belief that they can and should be effectively safeguarded, over the long term, at a cost we’re willing to pay.
October 25th, 2009 at 10:31 pm
Well I think the hangover from that rush decision is slowly coming due. What does the world economy and political outlook look with us out of the picture. Not a nice place, some
would say ‘extra brutish and short’
October 26th, 2009 at 12:11 am
@ CK MacLeod:
Exactly. The question is about will. That’s actually an enduring truth of the human condition. It’s always about will.
One other comment, though: the “capitalist system as a whole” is a misnomer if it is thought of as an analogue of a posited opposite of some kind, such as a “Marxist/socialist system.” Capitalism doesn’t set up systems of political control the way socialism does. Capitalism either thrives or doesn’t, under political systems that are set up for purposes that may or may not include fostering the conditions for it.
There is no overarching vision inherent in capitalism for the government of mankind. There IS such a vision inherent in socialism.
So I don’t accept the terms on which the author refers to the “world capitalist system.” What it is is a system with a dominant political, economic, and military power that has sought to systematically resist regional restraints on trade, and on the freedom of peoples to travel, conduct commerce, exchange ideas, and so forth. The quiescent system we have today has been highly tolerant of local socialism and domestic political constraints of various kinds; its mission has not been to force capitalism on the world, but to keep barriers to it low, with the idea that it will naturally flourish under that condition.
This is simply not the same kind of vision or guide to political action that government-directed collectivism, or industrial dirigism, is. It is less centralized, less prescriptive, and requires less imposition of artificial constraints rather than more. You can’t direct the Invisible Hand; you can only agree that it’s a force for good, and let it work. Very different from socialist collectivism.
October 26th, 2009 at 12:27 am
@ J.E. Dyer:
I’m not sure whether you fought your way through the entirety of the essay, or for that matter looked up the author’s other works. (The latter is something I haven’t done yet, but look forward to doing, since the author and I seem to have some interests in common.) When he speaks of the “world capitalist system as a whole,” he seems to be deploying what amounts to a technical definition, apparently as typified in the current period by “Financialized Neo-Liberalism.”
I don’t know if the terminology looks like gobbledygook to you, but I find it fairly descriptive of the political-economic system of the post-Reagan years – a leftist in-the-looking glass way of expressing somewhat the same thing that, say, a Mark Levin complains about in regard to “statism” and “neo-statists,” with a perhaps useful emphasis on the role of finance capital in driving and defining the system at its highest levels. As you probably know, the Trotskyist-Gramscist tradition that Balakrishnan appears to be writing within originally defined itself in opposition to the “state capitalism” of the Eastern Bloc, which was often depicted as on a course of convergence with Western Capitalism.
Anyway, I don’t think you need to outline a socialist-collectivist utopia in order to make sense of a Marxian critique of transnational capitalism. I don’t see Balakrishnan indulging in some vulgar Marxist claim that the system’s internal contradictions are leading inevitably to revolution or to collapse. He seems to discount the likelihood of the former completely – a cardinal sin for a traditional Marxist, but a familiar stance for non-affiliated Marxian thinkers – and he muses about eventual system collapse as only one of several alternatives for the still hazy future. I didn’t get the sense from his piece that he looks at impending difficulties for the capitalist system with much glee, either.
Apparently, he’s at UC Santa Cruz, so I suppose we could go ask him someday to explain himself.
October 26th, 2009 at 1:51 am
@ narciso:
I get what you mean, but let’s not exaggerate: We’re far from “out of the picture.” We and a lot of other people may be more vulnerable, relations may be getting more messy and muddled, but we’re still involved all over the place.
October 26th, 2009 at 2:49 am
Our ‘holiday from history, will end soon enough, CK, but do you see a leadership team willing to
acknowledge much less follow true when it does
October 26th, 2009 at 8:30 am
Marxism isn’t about economics but about thought control. Marx’s central theory is the Labor Theory of Value, which says that a product is worth the value of its raw materials and the value of the time spent on the labor to produce it. That means that a movie with a big cast and lots of scenery is more valuable than one with a smaller cast and less scenery. The Labor Theory of Value isn’t economics; it’s nonsense.
Socialism antedates Marxism and includes the existence of public streets and highways, the post office, the police and fire departments, and the army.
Marxism said he opposed capitalism but what he really wanted to get rid of was free thought and democracy.
Democracies are inherently stable because they have built-in methods of changing rulers. They are inherently wealthy because free thought and argument lead to creativity. Economic systems don’t really matter. All our discussion about capitalism shows that we have been seduced by Marx’s pattern of thinking.
October 26th, 2009 at 9:11 am
@ CK MacLeod:
CKM — I do understand what you’re saying, but I maintain that referrring to “world capitalism” in Balakrishnan’s terms implies some level of conscious organization or imposition. I’m not conveying that he is deliberately or overtly using the schematic outline of Marxism to define everything, but that he is doing it — as most of us do now — unconsciously.
It is not necessary to think in terms of world systems of anything in the terms popularized by Marx. But everyone does now. Marx has taken over our modes of thought, and people don’t even realize there is an alternative.
As George J. says, Marxism has a strong element of “thought control.” It is about economics, but it’s not a benign theory that is ready to accept defeat by the march of reality. It’s the tool of the determined, to subvert the consciences of many and leave them defenseless against a collectivizing power idea.
In my view, references to “world capitalism” are a largely misleading shorthand that invokes a whole schematic idea that’s false at its core. A beautiful illustration of this is the use of the word “capitalism,” which was never defined by pre-Marx adherents of free market entrepreneurialism. To Adam Smith, the essential point was freedom of markets — including low barriers to market entry — and the “invisible hand.” What Marx later defined as “capital,” and endowed with a whole universe’s worth of political freight, Smith considered a variable that was interesting, even important, but not definitive.
Yet now we all speak of “capital” and “capitalism,” and when we do we are speaking in inherently Marxist terms. Regarding the world as organized around “capital” is a Marxist way of seeing things, and the fact that it has been mainstreamed does not make it less so — nor does it mean there is only one way to draw the outlines of your weltanschauung. (I.e., the Marxist way.)
Marx maintained that politics flows from economics; I maintain that that materialistic view is a matter of will, not inevitable fate. Economics can flow from politics, and in fact does, under the political organization on which the United States was founded. The unique opportunity people have had here to wield small amounts of capital and leverage big rewards is the by-product of a political idea about individual rights and freedom. It was not produced by conscious application of an overarching principle for economic organization.
The same can be extrapolated to free trade, which is maintained by steady armed resistance to those who are inevitably, and continuously, trying to get hegemonic control of it and restrain it. What do all empires do? They restrain trade. They demand tribute and taxes, they foster administrative corruption, they post armed guards over natural resources and extort political concessions for access to them, and they use access to profit as a reward mechanism for family, cronies, and political loyalists.
Resistance to that pattern, which various world actors are constantly trying to revert to, has been a major political thread in US foreign policy, since our earliest days of nationhood. We have been motivated by a political idea that sets of hegemonic restraints are inherently bad — not by the mere intention of putting our own set of restraints in place. We are not an analogue of closed-loop systems.
Marx set up capitalism as the antithesis of socialism, but Western liberalism is much more than that. Committed socialists know, viscerally, that they can’t live with Western liberalism, because it’s more like their antimatter than their antithesis. There is no extra-systemic optimism under socialism; there is only an equation that has to solve, and the certainty of vengeance on on side of it or the other.
Western liberalism is not fettered in that sense. It does admit of optimism and uncertain outcomes, based on the moral and political choices of humans. It can’t be adequately described or analyzed, nor can its outcomes be predicted, by the terms of determinism. When I say Balakrishnan views the “capitalist system as a whole” as too much an analogue of Marxist socialism, that’s where I’m coming from.
October 26th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
George, you’ve said that before, and I have to say again that your understanding of the Labor Theory of Value is what’s nonsensical – all the more so in the interpretation of LTV under which I’m presuming Balakrishnan operates.
For many Marxist economists virtually the entirety of a movie production, to use your example, falls under consumption rather than productive labor.
I’ll direct the rest of this comment to JED as well as to George, but first let me say that it’s been years since I worked my way through Mandel’s Late Capitalism, so my summary will inevitably include some heavy vulgarization: Anyway, it is a leading feature of much recent Marxian economics (I use the term “Marxian” in an attempt to distinguish between ideological Marxists on the one hand and “writers influenced by Marx” on the other) to portray the economies of the advanced capitalist countries as extremely attenuated, you might say hyper-attenuated, versions of of the mode of production described in classic Marxism: Most of the day-to-day economic activity that takes place within the advanced capitalist countries is technically non-productive in this sense – consumption rather than production. That goes for lawyering, insuring, advertising, and much else that makes up a “service economy.” Robots, computers, and other advanced technological means of production are in this view largely based on “dead labor”: Most of the productive labor, under the LTV, that is realized in your computer or TV set, for instance, is labor performed years or even generations ago.
In this analysis, the challenge to “world capitalism” as a system is continuing to produce real profit (i.e., based on authentic surplus value derived from productive labor rather than on fleeting contingencies of exchange) on a macro level when so much of its activity is, in this sense, the dead burying the dead. “Financialized neo-liberalism” is a formulation that someone came up with after I sold off most of the Marxian texts on my bookshelf years ago. It appears to relate to the strategy by which late capitalism as a world system managed to stave off the effect of declining rates of (real) profit on its continued functioning. It could be mere chance, but the much-abused followers of this school might be forgiven if they see our current economic difficulties – especially the “discovery” that large sectors of our economic life had taken on the character of a gigantic Ponzi scheme – as bearing out their analysis and their predictions. They’ve been pointing to this Ponzi character of the advanced economies through thick and thin for quite some time. Certain 99.6% non-Marxian economists of distinction have made similar assessments.
Of course, in this view, the bankers and transnational industrialists were consciously doing what they believed they had to do in order to continue to function – so in that sense they’re depicted as “responsible” in the way that JED finds objectionable. But the capitalist fat cat is more a character of vulgar Marxist polemics than of the critique of Late Capitalism, just as the demonization of the “petit bourgeois” and other non-proletarians is more a feature of Communist propaganda and governance than of New Left Review-style academic Marxism. A chief element of their critique is that the system has a nearly mechanical character – it runs mostly on auto-pilot: A favorite formulation of Mandel’s is “rationality of the part-processes, irrationality of the whole.” Those part processes would include the economic activity of the vast majority of the citizens of the advanced industrial nations. We are to be forgiven not just because we know not what we do, but because we don’t really, objectively have any other choice.
On that note, it is true that Marxian analysts will tend much more than most of us here to focus on the “wretched of the Earth,” and to depict them as victims whose miseries are conveniently ignored or discounted by the chief as well as the less than chief beneficiaries of the world system (the latter including comfortable UC Santa Cruz perfessers, of course). Still, I’ll continue to maintain that another difference between Marxians and Marxists is that the former do not necessarily presume that the ills of the world that they identify can be corrected, and even less that the terms of a critique are likely to be immediately transferable into the terms of a program or praxis (to me that latter assumption is the fundamental error of Marxists beginning with Marx himself). The Trots in particular (the non-crazy ones) have long historical experience of cures that were as or more costly than the diseases.
October 26th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Marx wrote what he wrote, not what Marxian economists wrote.
October 26th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
@ George Jochnowitz:
And your summary of the Labor Theory of Value, applied even to the most primitive versions of Marxist economic thought, remains simplistic and distorted. Also, Marx had very little to say about movies ;).
JED, forgive me if I’m boring you with things you already know, have been through, and have left behind, but here’s how one Marxian thinker, in a rather famous passage (written while the author was in exile in L.A., at the end of WW2, implicitly while viewing “what the Germans [had] done”) discussed the proper place of utopianism in contemporary thought:
In brief, the Marxian without revolution, asked to provide a positive definition of his utopia, his ultimate goal, redemption itself, ends up somewhat like the Kabalist asked to give the name of God. He cannot do so without betraying himself and his beliefs: Thus Adorno’s “negative dialectics,” a forerunner of Deconstruction, and a kind of modern, secular gnosticism, or a Marxist quietism. To simplify, it’s not the responsibility of this kind of intellectual to announce a utopian program – it’s his fundamental responsibility to avoid doing so. Otherwise, he fatally compromises his own thinking (become a traitor to that which you most want or need to communicate), and, to the very extent he’s effective, ends up an apologist for the worst kind of evil – a Heidegger or a Sartre, to pick two of Adorno’s main intellectual adversaries (His Negative Dialectics was written largely against Heidegger; “On Commitment” was an important essay on aesthetics written against Sartre).
October 26th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
@CK MacLeod:
Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, Chavez, and Kim Jong-il all read Marx the way I do.
Why on earth does criticizing Marx make you so angry?
October 26th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
@ George Jochnowitz:
Who’s angry? I’m enjoying myself. I also don’t take responsibility for how the monsters you named interpret or interpreted Marx, just as I don’t take responsibility for how the Inquisition interpreted scripture, how Nancy Pelosi interprets the Constitution, or how John Hinckley Jr interpreted Jodie Foster.
October 26th, 2009 at 6:10 pm
By their fruits ye shall know them (Matthew 7:20).
October 26th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
@ CK MacLeod:
Of course, this is paramount only if the principal proposition relates to forgiveness (whatever may be assumed in that) as opposed to some form of effective decision-making.
Your statement of the proposition here is determinism in a nutshell. Producing a different outcome through the use of will and decision is assumed away; the operative goal is — whatever occurs to us, maybe forgiveness, maybe the release of moral constraints, maybe the relinquishing of hopes and objectives that, under a less deterministic mindset, we would think we “ought” to have. Escaping the discomfort of the “oughts” and “shouldas” is one of the longest-running projects of human philosophy.
It is, as I will reiterate one more time, not necessary to think in these deterministic terms. Whether we call it Marxist or Marxian, doing so is a modern refinement that was popularized by Marx and his holistic theory of the relation of man to the means of production.
Consider, for example, that the heavy borrowing against the future that you cite as a phenomenon of “late-capitalism” can be seen (and this is how I see it) as the product of numerous individual decisions that were made for various reasons, not all of which were poorly considered. There is nothing inherent in “capitalism” (or “financialized neo-liberalism”) that drives people to borrow money for purposes other than investment from which a return is expected. If you read the Old Testament you find that borrowing money to live on is an age-old practice; if you read the Code of Hammurabi you discover that the Babylonians administered breaches of contract relating to borrowed monies five millennia ago. Borrowing just to borrow is as old as bookkeeping.
Many, many people did not get overextended in consumption-oriented debt, over the past 50 years; how do we account for their very different decisions under the same conditions of “financialized neo-liberalism”? Many businesses have avoided overextension in debt as well, good or bad.
Equally informative, the world’s most abject and lowest-rated debtors are all nations mired in dictatorship and blunt, syndicate-like collectivism, whether that collectivism is overlaid with any serious swipes at an ideological covering or not. The potential for bad debt and bad credit is realized much faster under a suspicious and initiative-discouraging centralization than under financialized neo-liberalism, where the continuing fact of individual choice means that it never has to be realized at all.
Abstraction has its uses, but it really breaks down at the point where we want to suggest that people who have a genuine, actionable choice of occupation and lifestyle are fated in some deterministic fashion to borrow more than is good for them. Common sense must prevail here. Choice quite obviously does exist and is real: wherever people and institutions are not overextended in debt, it is being exercised.
I don’t mean to meander on saying the same thing over and over. The bottom line is that I don’t find deterministic theories interesting, because they have to dismiss too much that we know to be real — very often our own power of choice. Even Immanuel Kant, who made much of eschewing the tutoring of the ages in favor of a deck-clearing investigation of phenomena and noumena, acknowledged in the end that human choice is real, for every purpose within our purview. We are responsible moral actors. Our choices are not dictated to us by our relation to the means of production, or by how our system of monetary accounting is organized. Our economic behavior flows from our moral and political selves, not the other way around.
October 26th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
The question of forgiveness related to any imputed responsibility for the status of the wretched of the Earth – artisans or farmers, say, whose livelihoods may be annihilated by more efficient industrialized manufacture or agriculture. This isn’t a new story, of course.
Similarly, the Ponzi nature of high finance may be, at most, only secondarily a responsibility of individual debtors. (I’m not aware of any Marxist or Marxian statement on the morality of debt per se.) Rightly or wrongly, the decisions of individual citizens of the advanced industrialized nations aren’t terribly significant in a critique of Late Capitalism – whether you or I form a Global Warming non-profit or sell remaindered tennis shoes on eBay or get a normal job.
It’s when the system as a whole, the macro-system or system of systems, is seen to depend not just on debt, but at some critical margin on arcane manipulations of debt and debt-related instruments, based on nothing or less, piled up in such a way as to extract vapor profits, or, as now, to inflate asset bubbles of various types shored up against a continually deferred and re-deferred accounting, that the notion that something like a classic crisis of capitalism is under way gains credibility.
And I reiterate, there’s much in this critique that’s shared by non-Marxist, essentially non-ideological or at least unaffiliated economists and others. I don’t see anything in Balakrishnan’s bottom line that’s much more radical than you’ll see at a Tea Party or hear from Glenn Beck – or, with alterations in terminology and phraseology, in the op-ed pages of financial newspapers across the world.
How we react to the crisis, or act to fend it off, is something else. I don’t think there are many if any good answers to be found in the works of the Balakrishnans of the world, but at least they steer their readers away from the incredibly bad answers we’re getting from those to their right, our left.
October 26th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
I’d argue, of course, that this “system of systems” is an artificial construct and not any underlying essence of “financialized neo-liberalism.” In some sense, it’s a parasite on financialized neo-liberalism, not an internal organ. Debt is a useful instrument of investment, but it is not in any sense necessary to assume excessive debt to leverage the power of capital-based entrepreneurialism. Nor is debt necessary to prosperity. Take away everything Americans have bought with debt in the last 30 years, and we would still be by far the most prosperous population on the planet.
Bottom line is that I don’t buy collective overextension in debt as the bathwater that the baby of individual liberty, economic or poltical, has to be thrown out in. I see no value in even couching the discussion in those terms, because it’s predetermined to come out badly for individual liberty.
The American enterprise has been affirming that individual liberty is an absolute good, and not conditional on corporate (i.e., group, or collective) outcomes. I know my reasons for believing that individual liberty remains an absolute good — and that all attempts to associate it with evil outcomes, as against the “corrective” of limiting and leveling centralized coercion, are freighted and suspect.
Liberty does not create a propensity to excessive debt, nor does collectivism “correct” the problems created for either individuals or a whole civilization’s economy by excessive debt. It’s not our freedom to access and wield capital that has created problems for us — this is not a “crisis of capitalism.” It’s a revelation of human weaknesses. But we can learn from and correct our weaknesses by our own action; and we do so most efficiently when central governnment is not trying to either shield us from some outcomes or prescribe for us others.
What we may be in the midst of is a crisis of will — a crisis of the spirit of our civilization. But there is no eschatalogical sense in which “capitalism” is experiencing a crisis dictated by its nature. (I’m sure you recognize that as really Marxist thinking.) Free-market entrepreneurialism has had decades’ worth of public burdens and morally-distorting assumptions overlaid on it – that is the problem we are dealing with now.
October 26th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
Not entirely sure why, but I think we’re talking past each other, JED, and short of settling all questions with a duel – for which you’re no doubt much better trained than I – I’m not sure we’ll resolve our differences.
I’ll also say that, if I had more time, I’d try to go shorter – better organized, more succinct, better evidenced.
What I’ve been wanting to say is that, when a dude like Balakrishnan goes after CAPITALISM (to the relatively small extent that he does for a Verso author), he’s attacking something that’s not entirely the same as what you’re defending.
Maybe the difference is that when a guy like Professor B points to the stock market bubbles, the still unsettled real estate and finance/derivative bubbles, the Greenspan contribution, Fannie & Freddie, TARP, the bailouts and takeovers, Obama-Bernanke-Geithner economic inflatulence, 800 zillion in unfunded and theoretically unfundable liabilities, trillion dollar deficits, the dollar, foreign-held debt, etc., etc., he sees the whole complex as suggesting a systemic crisis within contemporary transnational capitalism. He then resorts to a largely Marxian analysis to explain – or maybe just to organize – the macro-level development of the crisis. The resultant critique doesn’t have much to do with supporting or opposing entrepreneurial capitalism, small business, the middle class responsibility and aspirations, many individual large businesses, consumers and so on – not that these and other groupings and actors don’t in the aggregate have a significant role economically and politically, just that they’re not the core problem.
Thus, for instance, I believe it’s fair to say that you and he both see the auto and bank takeovers as contradictory to capitalism. He’s perhaps more willing to take the Obamaist story (essentially that we have to destroy capitalism in order to save it) at closer to face value in the sense that the resort to corporatism, and public acceptance (at least til now) of the resort to corporatism, are symptomatic of how deep the problems in the system are. My personal opinion is that whether the failure of will or the failure of the employment, housing, and credit markets came first is a chicken and egg question, however.
From this perspective – the critique of financialized (you migh say “globally financed”) neo-liberalism – Bush’s compassionate conservatism, like Clinton-Gingrich centrism, like GHWB and late Reagan economic bipartisanship all would represent in general terms roughly the same axis of compromise – which has been diagnosed by ideologically diverse observers as unsustainable over the long term. You, as a liberty-minded conservative, and Prof B as an anti-statist Marxian, would also likely both be highly dubious of any “command economy” or “industrial policy” pseudo-answers to the predicament.
Where you might differ the most would be over what the real answers would be: You describe a revivified commitment to freedom – an accelerated withering away of the state, if you will – on the context of an unburdening of free markets and free enterprise. I think you’d probably acknowledge that the actual direction of American policy in the present period has tended even under Republican government towards greater aggrandizement of the state, leading finally to the Obamaist agenda which basically takes everything we’ve done wrong over the last 100 years or so and doubles down on it.
I’m not sure what Prof B’s absolute druthers would be, but I think he looks at the same history and roughly similar prospects, and concludes that what he might want doesn’t matter much – since no one’s asking now anyway. For all I know, he sees the same potential futures that you do, but, as an internationalist, remains more concerned about the friction and disruptions that would have to be undergone on the way to a new equilibrium; by the resistance put up by the same forces currently backing Obama-Geithner-Bernanke; and by the potentially very great costs displaced to other parts of the world.
What’s clear beyond that is that you both see the situation as amounting to a crisis: Just the other day, you were suggesting on your blog that the current debate over the direction of the country might be as consequential as any since 1860. If 1860 doesn’t qualify as a crisis, then what does? And, if the US is undergoing a once in a century crisis, and is the leading economic and political power in the world, and is a capitalist country, then, QED, we’re in the midst of a global crisis of capitalism.
So what would be left is a largely academic question of whether the crisis is a crisis that just happens to be expressed in the capital markets of the major capitalist countries, or whether there’s something about it that’s intrinsic and fundamental to capitalism itself (presuming there is such a thing). For my own part, I don’t think you have to be an anti-capitalist to concede that capitalist economies, today functioning within a relatively highly globalized economic system, under imperfect democratic republican governance, are subject to intermittent crises – just like all other complex dynamic systems. So in that sense, yes, I believe it’s fair to say that (democratic) capitalism’s current crisis, experienced simultaneously as an emotional or spiritual crisis, an economic crisis, and as a complex of international diplomatic and military crises, is “dictated by [the system]‘s nature.”
What wouldn’t necessarily pre-destined is that this is a terminal crisis.
October 27th, 2009 at 1:32 am
@ CK MacLeod:
Since that’s what I’ve been trying to say too, maybe we’ve been complementing each other rather than talking past. Yeah, that’s our story.
That’s a supporting point to my main point, which is that I won’t argue “capitalism” on Balakrishnan’s terms, because the difference in his terms and mine matters tremendously.
One general point I would make is that derivative financial instruments have increased in sophistication, frequency, and apparent distance from “production” not because “that’s capitalism” but because technology has enabled them to. Their tether to an underlying productivity has never really been cut, though. And the greater the distance between the underlying productive activity and the derivative, the greater the inherent (as opposed to conditional) risk of the derivative. Derivatives are a cool way to make money, but they do, in fact, map back to underlying value that comes from productivity and nothing else.
A lot of individuals can make poor judgments about the risk of derivatives. But “capitalism” didn’t drive people to do that over the past 20 years. It was government’s choice to prop up derivatives with “low risk by fiat” that enabled a lot of lazy choices. And even so, many people (bank and financial investment managers) did NOT get overextended in inherently risky derivatives.
Government intervention is invariably at the heart of systemic weaknesses in an economy. It’s a fantastic rule of thumb: cherchez le gouvernement.
Amen, my brother. So would I.
October 27th, 2009 at 10:57 am
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