Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists
N. Pepperell on the ontological dimension of Marx’s critique of capital:
Saving capitalism from the capitalists - the language of gambling, of speculation, of irresponsible and reckless individuals - it’s all over the coverage. There are historical resonances here too - framings that were once used to push through the reforms of the welfare state. I’m also interested, though, in this specific distinction between “capitalism” and “capitalists” - this is a distinction that was, I think, quite important in Marx’s work: individuals as bearers of economic roles - individuals as beneficiaries and as more or less wilful and abhorrent exploiters of social circumstances - but capitalism itself having an ontological status that is in some meaningful sense externalised in relation to those individuals whose actions nevertheless perform the reproduction of capital. For Marx - and I’ll try to write more on this in the future - this externalisation opens up some important options for critique and transformation, while at the same time, and within current circumstances, operating as a form of domination of the collective consequences of social action over the actors. The passage above treats the externalised entity capitalism as distinct from its imprudent bearers - and this entity also becomes an ideal that must be preserved, at the expense of those bearers if needed. The capitalists can go - capitalism, no. The bearers are more contingent that the process they bear - the process is taken to carry, not simply hard force, but a distinctively normative power.
Transcendental Revolution
No Useless Leniency:
How does Deleuze resist the problem Althusser courts – that of functionalism, in which the depth of ideological structuring appears to prevent any rupture with such a ‘system’? Deleuze argues that to perform this rupture requires the power to raise the false existent sociability to the level of a ‘transcendent exercise’ that can break this regime of commonsense. This ‘transcendental object’ is revolution as ‘the social power of difference, the paradox of society, the particular wrath of the social idea.’ (Deleuze 1994: 208)
Who, We?
Jodi Dean:
Ultimately, what bugs me the most about critiques of ‘we’ is the way that they mobilize a suspicion toward collectivity and privilege individualism. To this extent, they are little machines or engines of neoliberalism, neoliberal-bots that drive writers and thinkers to dismantle any collective sense or feeling of solidarity in advance, to suspect such sentiments rather than be responsible to them. Most of us who write in contemporary left political and media theory have been reading and writing about difference for a long time now. It’s time that we redirect the suspicions leveled toward collectivity toward suppositions of individuality and autonomy.
Fed Raises Specter of Class Struggle
World Socialist Website:
The US ruling elite is determined to do everything in its power to transfer its own enormous losses onto the backs of the American working class. The unlimited bailout power being called for by the Treasury and the Fed constitutes one part of this attempt. The systematic drive to slash real wages in order to finance the return to profitability constitutes another.
America: A Nation of Whiners
Posted at 5:10 PM
It is undoubtedly the case that America is a nation of whiners. It is and always has been, how else do you think it came into existence? I don’t think anyone will contend otherwise, which is probably why the media has focused almost solely and unrelentingly on the “America is a nation of whiners” sound-bite from Phil Gramm’s recent diatribe. Even the blogosphere is partly to blame for this. Of course, this focus is essentially a reaction-formation designed to obscure and repress the far more ideological claim on Gramm’s part that economic failure is “psychological,” i.e. subjective.
The subjectivist theory of economics has long been a staple of neoliberal ideology, which argues, for example, that the value of a commodity, rather than being the objective cost of the labor required to produce said commodity, is in fact reflective of its marginal utility. But on the specific issue of the business cycle and economic crises, marginalist theory fails to provide an adequate explanation: instead it has to rely on its late-capitalist ideological counterpart, New Age obscurantism, which promulgates that the problems we experience, and our reality in general, are purely of our own making. And clearly the liberal rejoinder that “it has real consequences!” is not enough. It is a prototypically pathetic response, as it accepts the neoliberal framing of the debate, simply adding that subjective reality can lead to actual, concrete harm to human-beings.
There is obviously a grain of truth to the liberal argument, but the more important issue at stake is whether economic crisis is “psychological” in nature, or part in parcel of an objective process. Marx articulated the latter view in his Theories of Surplus-Value. His formulation of crisis theory, which points to an inherent tendency of capitalism to undergo crises as a result of the over-production of fixed capital, is perhaps one of his most important contributions to the critique of capitalism.1
As Marx writes, “In the crises of the world market, the contradictions and antagonisms of bourgeois production are strikingly revealed.” To take that a step farther, crisis also reveals these very same contradictions and antagonisms within our political discourse. Here the link between Marxism and psychoanalysis becomes quite explicit: it is the goal of the analyst to confront the analysand with the contradictions inherent to her/his discourse in order to fully expose to them their relation to the unconscious truth, a truth which contradicts every discourse, including its relation to itself. The whole debacle involving Gramm points to an unconscious repression of class struggle, which is the sine qua non of the political struggle.
That is why I will be voting for Stalin come November.
The Monstrous Body of Capital
Rough Theory has posted links to and excerpts from Steven Shaviro’s series of reflections on Capital, all of which are worth reading.