naked capitalism

YankeeFrankee says:

If you watch Harvey, his main point is that what we had from the 40s to the 70s is no longer workable — that 3% compound growth per year is fundamentally unsustainable — and we need a new way.

CS says:

What nonsense. Both the individual entrepreneur and the corporation (ie GM) were stymied by the freeze of credit caused by the failure of the banking system. The billionaire hedge fund officers were enabled by the bailout of the financial system on the backs of the very people who suffered due to the freeze of credit.

Didn’t uber-capitalist Jamie Dimon explain to his daughter that a financial crisis was “something that occurs every five to seven years”? Direct quote from Marx. Sorry, Karl is the only one to provide a durable explanation for the behavior of the capitalist system. Republicans like to confuse American workers with the notion that they are “entrepreneurs”. Booshwah. Labor is a commodity which along with raw materials and tooling, capitalists use to produce products. The surplus value is capital, which they use as Harvey explained, to expand in one way or another.

Richard Kline says:

So AllanW, you have a cogent basis for all of the criticisms you raise. Despite that, it is my regret that I’m going to disagree in detail with practically all of your resultant contentions.

As a point of context, I concur with you in the various points of agreement you have with Harvey’s remarks. I’m more partial to anarchist critiques myself, but I’ve read in Harvey’s works with a good deal of sympathy. He is, to me, an intellectual who is a Marxist rather than the other way around, and the clarity of his perspective follows from this in my view.

You characterize Harvey’s later critiques here as backward-looking in two cases, and in that respect faulty. With regard to the issue of the broad costs of the global penetration of capital-accumulative enterprises, this is not something ‘in the past’ but rather an ongoing process, of result yet indeterminate. By definition, critiques of this cannot be backward looking then, unless one considers the outcome inevitable and that all should simply lie down and let the bulldozers roll over us. If such a state of affairs is formulated as ‘globalism is bad,’ whether by those opposed to the it’s process or those who would mislabel the opposers, of course such simplistic capsules distort more than they reveal. Your additional remarks concerning the reach of First World capital in the 19th century are both true and false. As an absolute measure, more capital may have been deployed then, true. The extent to which that capital penetrated and reshaped many local societies, to their loss and capital’s gain, was significantly less in that era, even if one only considers the economic dimension. A Marxist analysis is more likely to look at the composite result here than to try, and fail as in this example, to reduce it to a single meaningful number or set of tables: it’s the picture of forces which matters.

What it is of globalism, 21st century version, that is bad, that is to the point to consider. Financialization is not even working well for highly ‘developed’ countries, and promises less to those on the periphery. Global financializaion has little constructive to offer any society however much it profits a very few. Over-extraction of resources and environmental degradation in pursuance of the advantage of mass-capital penetration of distant regional economies is problematic at best: the income is soon gone, the externalized costs remain locally dumped (and cumulate), and the gains land in distant pockets of distant peoples. This is as true for Montana and Australia as it is for Papua and Niger. An advantage of a Marxist critiques is that it sees the situation in all four places similarly rather than, inaccurately, as unique sets of unrepeatable circumstances. There is more in this vein, but I’ll let that stand for objection here.

In respect of your second criticism, I would agree with you that an economic analysis pivoting on the status and trajectories of manufacturing industries is significantly backward looking yes; very 20th century so to speak. You contend, however, “that the wheel has turned and we are in a knowledge economy not an industrial economy.” Who is that ‘we’ in your counter conjecture to Harvey (and many others)? Said knowledge economy is never going to employ close to a third of the present population in even ‘developed’ societies, as manufacturing did in recent times; not anything like 70-90% of the population in subsistance economies. Yes, yes, ‘knowledge workers’ think they are the new cocks-of-the-walk, and that the world turns on their joystick, but by any historical comparison this is self-centered rubbish. Their share of revenue, production of any kind and all the rest isn’t going to approach historical norms. (Unless one lumps in the financial ‘industry’ as knowledge workers rather than largely parasitic rentiers and arbitragers, a characterization I take to be far more cogent, and one which separates them from knowledge trafficers strictly spoken.)

But that isn’t even the main point of a critique leveraged upon the status and trajectory of knowledge workers which is: what of the rest? What of those who have no subsistence agriculture or manufacturing ‘to go back to’? This, to me, is the point to considerations of the productive balance in contemporary society. All those others are not going to become knowledge workers. They are not even going to become servitors to self-appointed knowledge workers. Marxism is about the _political_ economy of societies _as wholes_ rather than about the political fortunes or economic sweet spots of specific groups whose trades are in expansion or contraction. The balance in contemporary society trends away from ‘those who also produce’ even with respect to the recent past of heavy manufacturing generations. This to me is the entry into the discussions Harvey makes, but a subject which cannot be effectively condensed into the time Harvey has in this particular presentation, no. And regarding those ‘knowledge workers,’ if someone doesn’t produce their breakfast, chip out their gadget guts, or truck the coal to their gigawatt power plant, they’re all little nowhere men because their skills don’t cut bait in any other societal context. (Which points lead us back to the globalization of capital critique because increasingly all such remaining ‘productive production’ process are dominated by large capitalist enterprises who proceed _entirely to their own benefit_ with precious little control by said knowledgistas or anyone else.)

My broadest differences with you, AllanW are exactly in the area of your perspective on the cyclicality of societal trajectories, or I should say your view on the lack of same. I say my largest regrets are here as well because you have clearly engaged in this particular issue at a non-trivial level, and your analogies to dimensions of action are very much to the point. But faulty as deployed I may say, and in part because not followed through logically. There are indeed cyclical process very potently at work in societies, and rather more diffusely in the economic behaviors of societies; I advance that view that as one having closely studied the issue. The Marxist position on this is frankly defective, I’ll say that up front if with lament. It is not my view that there is a single trajectory of change; there are multiple if society-specific vectors, a point the lack of understanding of which has short-circuited most meaningful analysis of this phenomenon. Nor are cyclical processes rooted in economic behaviors I think I can conclusively state (though not substantively prove at this point since I’m distant from publishing work on this), despite the fact that economic activities manifestly fluctuate over time. The why and the how of this would take a book-length discussion, a book I am not presently writing.

I’ll turn to the framing of the issue then, for your consideration and that of others. The discussion of cycical processes at the level of ‘x is back in fashion’ trivializes the process. Specifics do not meaningfully recur, this is a pervasive but fragmentary view on cyclicality. Societies maintain a repertoire of ideas and behaviors which changes only gradually over time. In this regard, yes indeed there is a cumulative aspect to societies over time, and secondarily to humanity over time. Some things once learned are not forgotten; seed hybridization as a possibility, for example. In this sense, societies can ‘progress.’ But specific societal stands can discard things they do as well. The Maya make a good example of a complex society which discarded much of that complexity. [This last is a time-intensive discussion rather over-simplified as stated which I won't detail here.] Your characterization of the trajectory of change as upward is not proven, either in the short term—centuries—nor the long term. It is in fact, an intellectual artifact from late Greek thought ported via early Christianity, that is a philosophical position with a really quite fascinating intellectual history. That ‘philosophy’ of upward progress has underwriten a great deal of modern intellectual thought; it was embedded in Hegel and quite remarkably borrowed into Marxism, but certainly wasn’t limited to those perspectives. But it is not an analytical construct, that is my point here. And something to closely consider in this regard is that, yes, many in the world live less closely at subsistence level conditions due to contemporary production processes. Wildly unsustainable production processes, that is. We kill the sea, exhaust the land, and expend what’s below the soil for good and all. The sustainability of what we do isn’t merely debatable, it is not evident. That is a critque of the 21st century left, both of anarchist, and contemporary Marxist thought, dismissed under the ‘globalization is bad’ rubric in your remarks. You and I and we sit at the top of an arc, and all I hear you talk about is ‘more up.’ If those knowledge workers think up a new Rapunzel’s Wheel for us, well then there’s that. If not, I think Harvey’s critique of the pitiless folly of global capital is much closer to the view our descendants ten generations since will hold, because it is the facts of such conditions which will shape their lives one the pixel-wash of today has powered down.

Your remarks on the dimensionality of change over time, however are well-considered initially. We do not have a useful way of integrating in a single perspective these different vectors of social process simultaneously in action. Having studied how to do this, I would start as you with a figure of a helix; consider one extending in time-space horizontally. Time-x is back-forward, past-future. This is the vector of cumulation of thought, material, and experience. A time-x.1, voila, the Constitution of the US; at time-x.230 or so, the present conservators of it peeling off shreds to light their cigars. (Or choose your own invective.) Look across the helix from the side; that is time-y, the moment of the unique instance. A specific action; and time-dependent historical context; a non-repeatable singular running together of things; an unexpectable *oops*. Or whatever, but this is the dimension of the contingent. Consider the vertical dimension, then; this is time-z, the scale of wax-wane. Modeling smartphone adoption on a temporal scale? This is your plot. Modeling ahua-dominated political connectivity in the Yucatan a millennia ago? This is your plot. Ther is yet one more dimension (at least) fundamental to analysis, though. Consider the substance of the helix itself. At one point is swells, only to shrink again; at one point it is dense and concentrated; at another a fleck-cloud and chaotic. This is the dimension of actual cycliality in societies. I have my own terminology for this dimension, which I will not inflict upon anyone without the analysis behind it to make it meaningful, but consider the perspective is what I suggest. In understanding cyclicality, one must hold _at least all four dimensions in the mind at one time_ with regard to any single event. Barack fires Stan? Place it four-ways. The Napoleonic Wars in part or whole? Locate similarly? Genghis goes ballistic? Well that was amongst the most singular events I have ever studied, but yes one can still locate it in a 4-space.

What does that have to do with Harvey’s discussion? Little directly; more with your counter-analysis to the (rather limited) framing of cyclcality in Marxist thought you feel defective. To my conclusion it’s more accurate to call it incomplete (withough parsing the very extensive details here). It is your characterization of our present trajectory as “on with up” that I disagree, taking Harvey for the stronger there. We are at the top of the turn in many things: on _isn’t_ up.

Having put that concept in motion, I think that I’ve expended my share of pixels for this good night.

Progressive Ed says:

AllanW: An excellent post. Thank you. On a more general level (i.e. from a more general perspective), you might enjoy the work of Ken Wilber.