A Time and a Place for Abstraction, Research Time, 12/06/2018

Over the last few years, I’ve read a decent chunk of marxist theory. I’ve read the good stuff – some of the original, a lot of Gramsci, too much Zizek, Laclau, Mouffe, a little bit of Lenin; the anarchists too, like Bakunin, Goldman, and the uncategorizable Rancière.

I’ve also come across scattered essays of the bad stuff. A lot of it is contemporary – not to say that it’s bad because it’s contemporary. It’s bad because it’s the casually-written stuff.

Even 100 years ago when political revolutionaries really did argue matters of profound philosophy in journals and magazines, most of those essays were kind of shit. We don’t remember the many, many people who filled the pages of those journals every day, the ones who only looked good when Gramsci hadn’t written that week.

The gold-plated promises of wealth and power.

Quality is always rare. Make of that what you want.

There’s one trend that I find unfortunate in a lot of the everyday theory writing in the marxist tradition. The word ‘capital’ gets taken for granted. A catchall term whose conception grows more and more vague every time it’s used. Which, in the sloppiest of marxist writing, is an omnipresent and omnipotent force controlling everything.

Anyone who treats the shorthand as anything more than shorthand isn’t worth reading. The point of understanding capital as the basis of a lot of social and economic problems isn’t to blame capital – it’s to understand the machineries of capital.

That’s why you always need to be an empiricist when you’re writing political and economic philosophy. You need to look at real engines of wealth to see what produces all that cash.

In Gilbert’s history of Cultural Studies, he writes that the field pretty accurately identified one serious problem with capital today. The major engines of wealth have become the boardrooms and trading floors of investment companies and stock exchanges.

They move the most money around the world. They power the global movement of money – even though it’s turned out that they can’t control it.

The dystopia is real. The dystopia has always been real.

More than that, the investment industry doesn’t even really create anything, says Gilbert. Not quite true, of course. The investment industry does create analytic, algorithmic, and other mathematical tools to manage and regulate those capital flows. But those are machines to move the money – not what actually powers the movement.

No, the sources of power for the financial industry come from the traditional industries of making things. Laboratories, streets, studios, factories, offices – these are the types of things that the investment industry invests in, speculates on.

As global money and trade flows move faster and faster, they grow fractally complex – new cultural, communication, and technological products develop at faster rates and spread more quickly around the world.

Communications technologies open up more possibilities and diversity in what’s on offer to people. More bandwidth means more niches – for cultural products like movies and television, and for all commodities, as people make themselves increasingly unique as more possibilities for expression become available.

The financial industry provides a massive and powerful flow of money to channel into this increasingly intense production. But the real crisis – corruption, embezzlement, breakdown – comes when the financiers think they’re the creators, not the funders. The money circles through the same few hands, expanding by handshake, while the actual creators of material and conceptual wealth are starved.

Then the collapse comes.

Whither Capital V: An Alliance Is No Friendship, Research Time, 05/06/2018

Being a revolutionary academic already puts you in a strange and possibly hypocritical position. You depend on an important institution in the social-economic system you want to change, for your publication platform.

Worse – because most of your theoretical publications are in heavily paywalled research journals, they aren't even physically accessible to people outside university institutions.*

* Which is why you should just steal these publications. I encourage theft of intellectual property in purposely inaccessible venues. Steal every journal article you can – it’s not like anyone who writes them ever gets paid.

No matter how much politicians like Bill Clinton may have genuinely
wanted to improve the lives of people through the actions of their
governments, they fell to the corruption of their offices. Institutions
that foster authoritative power encourage elitism and indulgence.
The inability to perceive the real consequences of your actions.

Nonetheless, thanks to their university positions, those intellectuals are regarded as leaders of the social movement against the rapaciousness of industrial capitalism. We can’t have a social movement without its leaders, after all. Any revolution needs a vanguard.

Please be aware of how sarcastic I was being in that last paragraph. Social movements don’t need leaders. In fact, it’s better that social movements don’t have leaders at all.

I’m going to follow up on this point farther down the road, when I go through Negri and Hardt’s Assembly on the blog. But the basic idea that movements don’t really need centralized leaders – and tend to work better without them – has been gathering steam since the start of this century. Because they do work better.

Here's how Jeremy Gilbert set things up in his history of Cultural Studies. The breakup of the USSR pretty much solidified the triumph of new liberal politics and economics. The authoritarian, centrally-controlled, ideally autarkic state economy failed miserably. That meant marketizing liberal individualism was the only kind of economy worth having.

Please be aware that the sentence ending that last paragraph was extremely sarcastic. I’m trying to explain what the mainstream liberal economic position was – the globalization of trade networks and the reliance of the planet’s economy on the financial sector. In the West, this stream of politics dominated the American state through an uneasy alliance with grassroots Christian nationalists.

The progressive side of politics over the turn of the century was a similarly uncomfortable alliance. The leaderless ‘movement of movements’ was kicking into gear in critical hubs around the world. The other head of the hydra was the Third Way of politicians like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.

In 1999, you could make a fairly reasonable argument that the
theatrical protest and occupation actions of anti-capitalist social
movements couldn't be productive. You could argue that they needed
leaders to guide their protest activity, translate their desires into state
policy, negotiate on their behalf with the powerful for concessions. But
nearly 20 years later, it's turned out that what the organizers of
alternative community spaces – protests, occupations, art events –
needed wasn't leadership to calm their energy. They needed to intensify
and grow their followings until there were actions nearly every day.

The Third Way was basically a program of governance of concession to the economics of new liberalism, which refused to bow to the Christian nationalists. In the more positive light, you can call it concessional. In the more critical light, you can call it a capitulation.

These days, I think most people would call it capitulation. Throughout the West at the turn of the century, all the major political parties agreed with some version of the new liberal idea.

Let all sectors of the economy organize themselves by market networks, subsidize everyday purchases with debt and credit, raise all dimensions of the cost of living by futures and derivative speculation. Call the bulging of stock portfolios an accurate measure of GDP.

We know now that these policies laid the conditions of the global economic depression of 2008. But the major political parties cleaved apart along social and religious moralities – economic policies were indistinguishable where it counted. The secular parties just wanted slightly higher capital gains taxes.

These Third Way concession leaders share one thing in common with orthodox marxists – they still believe that political movements need leaders to guide them. Executives to guide their political programs and force them into coherence.

Was there ever any coherence among the political programs of Christian nationalists and financial oligarchs? Political alliances are marriages of convenience. Let’s be honest with ourselves.

How Do You Stop a Doomsday Machine? Research Time, 01/04/2018

There are a lot of popular misconceptions about progressive politics and generally left-wing people. Most of those misconceptions spread through a feedback loop of edgelord culture with mainstream alt-right and white nationalist press.

This stock image used to represent work in the stock market looks
benevolent on its own, but the practices of the global financial
industry can be terribly dangerous.

One of those stereotypes is that progressive people are anti-market, that we want an entirely centrally-planned economy. Now, that’s ridiculous, but one of the main purposes of far-right messaging is to make everyone who thinks there should be state-provided health insurance out to be a full-on Stalinist out to send us all to labour camps and collective farms.

Look at the contemporary left with a little more focus and forethought, and you’ll see a lot of complexity. For instance, anti-capitalism – broadly speaking – today is a critique of the culture of profiteering. Not any act of commerce for profit – starting a business and using its profit to reinvest in its activities or save for your own retirement is one of the best ways to run a business.

When I say profiteering, I mean outright financial piracy. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Ian Buchanan spoke in different works about the financial mechanics of profiteering capitalism – in particular, the short sell. An investment fund ploughs a ton of money into share purchases of a company, which inflates its stock price.

Remember, that higher stock price isn't a function of the company's own activity – it’s the effect of a large share purchase. Investing a lot of money in a company’s stock makes the company appear to be worth more than it is. When the fund sells the company’s shares at that higher price, the overall value plummets. The fund’s clients make a huge profits, and the folks still holding the rest of those shares have lost a ton.

Don't blame the retail apocalypse on online sales platforms, which
still only accounted for less than ten percent of all purchases of
goods in the United States for the last couple of years. The
doomsday machine is large-scale financial capitalism.

There are even more insidious methods of profiteering that lays waste to the lives of thousands, even millions of people. The best illustration is the destruction of Sears, but pretty much any of the financial explosions of the retail apocalypse will do.

So Eddie Lampert’s hedge fund buys Sears. He orders the company to accept millions of dollars in loans it doesn’t need. But now Sears has to pay it back, as well as all kinds of interest and service fees that go to Lampert.

He also forces Sears to split its real estate holdings – the physical store locations – with his own real estate company. So now Sears also has massive rent bills of US$200-million to pay to Lampert’s company, which it’s also paying back the loans Lampert forced it to take. Once the company’s debt service overcame its operating costs, bankruptcy and restructuring was the only way to go, and Lampert collected a ton of money from those asset sales.

This is the capitalism folks on the progressive side are talking about when we say we’re anti-capitalism. You want to start an actual business that sells people things they need and want – like everything you could find in department stores like Sears – that’s awesome.

We want you to make profits from your sales. Reinvest them in your company – pay your workers well, open more locations or warehouses, import products from around the world. Take some of that corporate income to save for your retirement. Start another business. Give a starting entrepreneur some seed money to start her own company. Build a charity.

Do something productive with it, that will enrich the communities from which your wealth grows. This is the model of investment banking that a progressive person believes in. The basic philosophy has only been around for a few thousand years.

Stopping the doomsday machine of investment fund piracy – the
machine that powers the life of Eddie Lampert – will take more than
just blowing up a damaged starship inside it. We need a complete
ethical transformation of humanity – a revaluation of values.

What about that destructive profiteering? Frankly, it’s wrong. Each investment firm holds millions and billions of dollars in assets. The entire industry holds trillions in all the stocks, bonds, derivatives, and futures throughout the Earth.

A few people leading all those firms control all those funds. Chance and circumstance alone prevents those investment industry leaders from shorting or bleeding every company on Earth.

The most unscrupulous will destroy whatever they can get their hands on to squirrel away more wealth. Working people from minimum wage earners to upper management will have their careers upended or ended altogether.

Laws can be written to prevent or impede this kind of predatory investment. But ultimately, it’s a matter of ethics.

Do you want to be a pirate leaving economic destruction and the personal misery of thousands as your legacy? Then there are extremely high-paying jobs for you, that will leave you so obscenely wealthy that you’ll have more power over others than ancient emperors could barely imagine.

Do you want to build businesses that uplift thousands of people through their material success? Indirectly and systematically, those successful ventures will contribute to community and global economies that uplift millions and bring them happiness. You probably won’t end up as insanely wealthy as that other guy, but you’ll still do pretty alright.

What kind of person do you want to be?