College Library Browsing #12: Utopia or Dystopia?

 “Red Planets – Marxism and Science Fiction” edited by M. Bould & C. Miéville, 2009

While a seemingly unlikely duo, Marxism and science fiction (SF) actually have some similarities. Both pay attention to the future and sometimes pay attention in similar ways – specifically world-building versions of 'utopia,' better uses of technology and science and including class or anti-colonial rebellions against exploitative hierarchies. Not all science fiction fantasizes that capitalism will exist into eternity or retreats into medievalism, permanent dystopia or technical fascination. For good reason dystopia is certainly a favorite subject at present, yet some SF dystopias are answered by a rebellion – like Total Recall, The Matrix or The Handmaid's Tale.  “Socialism or barbarism” are both reflected in SF's present output, as they are intrinsically related.

These essays and their subjects, some of which are too abstract or convoluted, cover a range of utopias, rebellions and futurist technology. As the authors note the pure fetishization of 'future' technology is a projection of technology's role under capital. SF literature arose during the rise of capital itself – Jules Verne and H.G. Wells being early positivist examples in the 1800s. Techno-futurism alone is not anti-capitalist or even anti-feudalist, as we can see in Herbert's messianic Dune. Yet there is a reason the genre is called 'science' fiction. That science is sometimes debatable, like the construction of the original Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, or else completely unscientific, but its intent is to create a believable reality without relying on magic.

The editors stand up for SF in its more sophisticated forms against claims it is not real literature or film. Recent examples: Nineteen Eighty-Four; 2001: a Space Odyssey; A Handmaid's Tale; Gravity's Rainbow; Alphaville; Solaris, etc. The founders of SF are Thomas More, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells. SF writers like Edward Bellamy, William Morris, H.G. Wells and Jack London were all socialists and this continues with China Mieville, Ursula Le Guin, K.S. Robinson and others. Even Nemo in Twenty-Thousand Leagues was an anti-colonial rebel. Left theorists like Frederic Jameson, Darko Suvin and Raymond Williams treat SF seriously.

The first essay is on 'anamorphic' (distorted or stretched) images found in SF, similar to Surrealism or in the old painting The Ambassadors by Holbein. The essay is an exercise in academic constipation.

Another analyzes 'utopias' designed by writers like Marge Piercy and Samuel Delany, but in this case Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness (TLHOD) and K.S. Robinson's Blue Mars. The author praises Le Guin for her portrayal of non-commodity music on the utopian / anarchist world of Anarres, as it is now a social product unconnected to intellectual property. Yet he faults her lead character for saying that he has discovered 'his' musical art, using a possessive pronoun, as if art is not always social too. I find this objection absurd, as ideas don't change immediately. He goes on to praise her portrayal of a nearly sexless society in TLHOD as showing how a society can break (almost) completely from capitalist animal spirits. Blue Mars' depicts music, drumming and dance as collective events in a utopian but primitive tribal context, and these same musical methods transported to an urban, post-capitalist environment.

Film is now a haven for SF and this essay investigates the relation between 'deflationary' cynical film noir and 'inflationary' optimistic SF. The SF example The Day the Earth Stood Still (TDTESS) satirizes the 1950s Cold War while 2001 shows the link between the clubs of apes and the spaceships of man. By 'inflationary' the author means something that looks optimistically to the future. Both tendencies are present in Marxism – “the pessimism of the intellect, the optimism of the will” is one way its framed - or the cruel present and the radiant possibilities of revolution and the future. TDTESS ends with an 'interplanetary cooperative association' – which is nothing like space in the present capitalist context. The author cites Dark City and especially Metropolis as fusions of noir and SF, which shade over into the ruined cities of Alphaville and Blade Runner. Dark City raises a utopian revolution against a ruling class called The Strangers and succeeds, achieving a society not of a nostalgic past, but of the future.

Another essay follows an obscure, apocalyptic film by Wim Wenders Until the End of the World (UTEOTW), concentrating on the issues of anti-colonialism, the impossible goal of 'going off the grid,' scientists' emotional stupidity and technical SF spectacles that demand nothing from the viewer. It considers 2001 a colonial, tech-fascinated film, and praises UTEOTW as one of the most substantial and progressive SF films in its decade.

There is an essay on 'the singularity' in a novel called Accelerando.- i.e. when human functioning becomes dominated by computerized AI, creating a supposed 'post-human' world of merged human-robot 'replicants.' This concept of a 'post-humanist' singularity divorces thought and action from the biological and sensuous reality of being human. The only real 'post-humanism' would be the complete Frankenstein victory of The Matrix or of Terminator's Skynet, not some super-intelligent, non-eating, non-shitting, non-baby humans. Human intelligence involves at least 9 functions and most computers can only master one. The author says 'post-humanism' is part of a techno-utopia. Is becoming a machine the goal of socialism? No, but a goal for those billionaires looking for some kind of eternal life. As humans know, machines break down and that is why there is a whole category of economics called depreciation. One commentator called the Singularity - “the rapture for nerds” and the author finally calls it “a fantasy of finance capital.” Oddly, the 'singularity' borrows from the Big Bang's imagined 'dimensionless singularity.'

Another essay assails Marx for raising human labor above animal labor, then links the idea to a SF book. Marx and other Marxists have always seen a link between the treatment of animals and that of human 'underpeople.' The author wishes to forge a bloc between socialists, environmentalists and animal-rights campaigners – which is already coming about without ignoring 'the animal labor theory of value' or the role of nature in human life.

Another essay focuses on the role of Lukac's 'Augenblick' – the Leninist moment when will or overdetermination push humans to a decisive intervention in history. This is demonstrated in the SF quartet “Fall Revolution” by Ken MacLeod. K.S. Robinson says MacLeod is “writing revolutionary SF,” seemingly from an anarcho-socialist point of view, advocating some kind of permanent revolution.

Another essay highlights Marxist film criticism during the German Weimar Republic, which erroneously denigrated mass entertainment like Fritz Lang in favor of Prolecult work. He approvingly cites a mass SF film that showed a woman getting into a rocket as some kind of progressive instance. Well it might have been … then. The issue of 'the rocket,' which is such a foundational icon in SF, has changed. It is now an extension of capitalist methods into space. Space X rockets blow up on the launch pads and litter Texas. Billionaires pay for tourist flights. Thousands of pieces of space junk float around the earth and on the moon. Government science programs are privatized while the globe is circled by privately-owned communication and government spy satellites. The real money pot is to mine asteroids and the moon; to colonize anything corporations touch. The only big stellar science projects recently have been the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, the latter undermining the theory of the Big Bang. It's a project, oddly, which yields no profit to anyone but provides valuable data about the universe.

A further essay looks at the role of the city in SF from a Left urbanist point of view, a la David Harvey. Some 1950s pulp SF thought 'skyscrapers' were symbols of a classless techno-utopia, when they are really examples of corporate dominance and high real estate prices. This is caught by SF writers like William Gibson in The Gernsback Continuum. The author claims cyberpunk SF and Marxist geography map the modern city in similar contrarian ways.

It gets more theoretical in several essays. One posits Althusser versus Jameson on the independence of science from ideology (Althusser) or its role purely as an ideology (Jameson). He brings in anarchists like Cohn-Bendit, Freudians like Lacan and concludes that post-capitalist, utopian SF visions have to completely break with capitalist ideology, impossible as that may be. Another is a discussion on the differences and similarities between SF and fantasy. Suvin and Jameson contended that fantasy was backward-looking and regressive, anti-modernist, magical, religious and proto-fascist. Raymond Williams contended that both built worlds that sometimes criticized the present capitalist condition. The author cites Tolkien and, though not available in 2009, Game of Thrones. After all Hobbiton is a utopia, though a retro, old-fashioned rural one based on horse-drawn farming. Likewise the anti-royalist Wildlings and Freefolk in GoT, products of the 'primitive' far north, are heroes led by John Snow. In the real world, the two genres have almost merged, as seen by SF awards in the 2000s for Harry Potter, Pan's Labyrinth and the Peter Jackson Tolkien series.

Mieville claims that both genres of SF and fantasy are distinct yet related, though SF is a more progressive, forward-looking genre. He looks at the scientific 'truthiness' of SF and says much of it is nonsense, though some is based on a rational extension of present science. The key is the author's ability to make the reader believe, not its actual or possible reality. Take the 'thropters' in the Dune film – could they work with those heavy, flapping dragonfly wings? They are a visual delight and two were actually built – with thrusters – and did fly. So they are 'real,' just as the fantastic vehicles in “Mad Max: Fury Road” actually worked. Mieville ends by showing how the worship of a “middle-brow utopian bureaucracy” in much tech SF is ideological, just as is praising a 'lumpen-postmodernist irrationalism.'  'Rationalism' has been debased by its deadly applicability to warfare, surveillance and profiteering, so it no longer works as a palliative according to him. Mieville is a former or present member of the British SWP and ends by praising both 'red planets and 'red dragons.'

Prior blog reviews on this subject, us blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Squid Game,” “Blade Runner 2049,” “People's Future of the United States,” “The Heart Goes Last” and “Handmaid's Tale” (both by Atwood); “Red Star” (Bogdanov); “Good News” (Abbey); “Hunger Games,” “Matrix,” “Cloud Atlas,” “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (Dick); “Planet of the Apes” (3 movies); “The Road” (McCarthy); “The Dispossessed” and “Left Hand of Darkness” (Le Guin); “Fire on the Mountain” (Bisson); “The Ministry for the Future” (K.S. Robinson); “News From Nowhere” (Morris); “World War Z,” “American War, “R.U.R. And the Insect Play” (Capek), “Mad Max – Fury Road,” “Dune – the Movie,” "October - the Story of the Russian Revolution" (Mieville).  

May Day has a good left-wing fiction section, with some SF.

Da Kultur Kommissar

March 20, 2024

The Fire Next Time

 Fire Season?

Up in the woods of northern Minnesota the snow is almost gone. The lake ice is soft, the creeks and rivers opening up. It's all early. Take a look at a webcam in Ely, just south of the Boundary Waters canoe area and the Canadian border. Mostly bare grass and soil in the open. Its the same across most of Minnesota. There has been one real snow all winter in Minneapolis. My fellow motorcyclists are out and riding. The rinks are shut, the ice fishing done, the skiers and snow-boarders frustrated, the snowmobilers humiliated, the children without a sled. Perhaps a big, wet snow will still be coming, but don't bet on it. There are several days of light rain / flurries in the forecast for the Cities so there's that.

Fort McMurray, Canada fire - 2016

Instead 'ice rescues' have strained the budgets of northern counties. One ridiculous event saw dozens stranded on a floating ice shelf that detached from the lake shore. Heavy pickups venturing out on lakes have taken an ice dive. Contractors who plow by the event are unpaid, except for the smart ones that demanded money up front. City budgets for sand and plow truck gasoline stand full, while heating bills are lower. Every day in March is predicted to be above freezing, in the 40s and 50s. Minnesota was 2.7F (1.5C) hotter this winter, breaking every record. The Great Lakes are at a 1.2% ice coverage now, with a winter average this year of 5.6%. That's it.

Chris Hedges has an excellent interview on Scheerpost about the tragic fire in Fort McMurray, northern Alberta in May, 2016. Fort McMurray is near the wasteland of the toxic tar sands' 'oil' project, which is a massive bitumen strip mine, the biggest carbon bomb in north America. The woods around town caught on fire due to a long, dry drought and burnt down most of the city. You don't hear much about it now. Every wooded area in north America that has not had heavy snow this year – and there are many in the center and east of North America - will face this same fire problem in the spring, summer and fall. In fact the forecast for 2024 is for a hotter, drier year. Now check the wind speeds and you've got a problem.

So what are your fire preparations if you live or spend time in the woods, even if you are in a town? Or if you are downwind from choking fires? What happens if the roads are blocked by fire, fallen trees, power lines or traffic? If there is a body of water, can you get onto it quickly? Do you have powerful hoses to water down your building? A metal roof? Have you thinned the small trees around your exurban or 'wild-urban interface' structure? Is there gasoline or propane stored in your house, apartment, garage or side building? Is your home a carbon bomb waiting to go off: tar shingles, vinyl siding and windows, floor laminates, a gas stove, furnace and water heater, plastic water pipes, carbon-woven textiles & carpets, or full of plastic products? No?

Texas Panhandle 2024.  Not just the cows burned

What is happening is that fires, drought, tornadoes, hurricanes, storms, ground-water depletion and flooding are causing insurance rates to rise steeply in areas like Florida and California, and this is spreading across the country. The Fort McMurray fire cost $6B in insurance costs, the largest in Canadian history. Much of that was covered by the Canadian taxpayer – the government – as private 'insurance' only went so far. In the U.S. small and medium insurers go bankrupt on a semi-regular basis as disasters overwhelm their capital. Others no longer even offer insurance in some places or raise rates so high people have to move or go unprotected. If your structure is heavily damaged or destroyed, there is no going back in that situation. Well, there is always the land left to put up a tent.

So the dark 'spark' for a social revolution looks more and more like it will be the capitalist carbon industry. Carbon extends beyond oil, gas or coal to house construction, cement making, artificial fertilizer, the plastics and rubber industry, insecticides, many retail products and packaging, road surfaces, meat, fish and dairy, even drugs and cosmetics – just about every sector of the economy. (https://energyneresources.com/blog/list-of-products-made-from-petroleum) Present-day capitalism is mostly based on carbon. The hidden exploitation of surplus value produced by every worker is less obvious, though visibly seen in the growing inequality throughout the world. Environmental disasters are more obvious. The rise of authoritarianism is the outgrowth of this capitalist inequality and it's class structure, much as some just want to blame 'bad' people. You want 'democracy?' Capital is actually incompatible with it.

Green capitalism is inadequate to deal with the dominant, market-driven carbon force. The environmental crisis is the most obvious fact that reveals capital functions only for profit, no matter what impact it has on the community or on nature. At the same time the 'pleasure,' comfort and ease of carbon is a massive weight for stasis, as our social lives will be completely different after the main sources of carbon are slowed and reduced to a minimum. Just look at the many who can't reduce meat consumption because of 'taste.'  The market is keyed to the mass carbon dynamic and it can't change. Nor can its political parties and its '2-Party System,' which in the U.S. are both capitalist - something also true in most of the world. This is the reason no 'COP #' run by governments controlled by capital will ever make a real difference.

A transitional program for eco-socialism is the solution that will actually 'work.' The problem is that many people seek pleasure primarily and will object to their lives being made more difficult in the ways of consumerism. Even though after a transition they will be better off in all the ways that matter most – work, health, housing, family, time, education, environment, social health, peace, creativity, psychology, retirement, crime - some things will become more difficult or unavailable. “Fully-automated luxury communism” is a mirage, though it does hint at something in the future.

Heat Map of the U.S. this Winter

Every product will be evaluated for its environmental, health and social impact, as many buildings, products and foods produced now are junk, while replacements are still aborning. Jobs that are useless will disappear. High-end products for the wealthy – yachts, jets, sports cars, multiple homes, expensive jewelry - will disappear. Wasteful adult 'toys' will disappear or be limited. Society will become more rational and less impulsive, with less fetishes, less violence, less mental illness, less nonsense, less bullshit. Yet this will probably happen only after a long period of environmental disasters, human migration and bloody conflict as defenders of the social order lay waste to any forces that oppose them. In that context consumerist mania will be far weaker and the least of our problems. A 'fire sale' will see to that.

Meanwhile we have to adjust, 'adapt' and deal with the shattering impacts. Enjoy the warm winter if you are not an outdoor enthusiast because the payback is coming. Farmers will be experiencing drought. Fires are in the offing. Smoke will fill the air. Houses will burn and animals will die, as they did in Texas. The world will change and not yet for the better.

P.S. - The Guardian on the recent Texas fire in the cattle-filled Panhandle: Texas Panhandle Fire

P.P.S. - 3/18 Star Tribune on Superior National Forest wildfire risk this year in MN - https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/other/lack-of-snow-intensifies-wildfire-risk-in-superior-national-forest/ar-BB1k2z8D

More:  MinnPost on fire risk in MN, WI, MI, NE - https://www.minnpost.com/other-nonprofit-media/2024/03/from-minnesota-to-nebraska-midwest-states-face-early-wildfire-season/

May Day Books has many volumes on the environmental crisis, from Left and liberal angles.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Collapse" (Diamond); "Native Tongue" (Hiaasen); "Tar Sands," "Climate Emergency," "Planning Green Growth," "The Robbery of Nature" (Foster); "We're Doomed," "Reflections on the Environment and Consumerism," "Vanishing Face of Gaia" (Lovelock); "Anthropocene or Capitalocene?" "A Redder Shade of Green," "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" (Malm); "The Sixth Extinction," "x," "Mad Max - Fury Road."  

The Cultural Marxist

March 17, 2024

Bailout Bonds Men

 “The Lords of Easy Money – How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy” by Christopher Leonard, 2022

This is a conventional but enlightening account of how the Federal Reserve has actually worked since the 1970s. It follows the involvement of a long-serving Federal Reserve governor from Kansas City, Tom Hoenig and chairs Arthur Burns, Paul Volcker, Allan Greenspan, Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell, who is still head of the Fed. It basically shows how the issuance of cheap or free money by the Fed created 'asset bubbles' in real estate and farmland, in oil and gas, in the tech and dot.com sectors, in corporate and junk bonds, in mergers, hedge funds and private equity, creating financial crashes since the 1970s as entities searched for high yields. These asset bubbles fueled inequality as cheap money allowed various top financial actors to profit, while closing factories and small businesses, cutting benefits and laying off workers.

The Fed governors and regional bank presidents are appointed, not elected; only 12 vote on a rotating basis in the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC); and they are from the capitalist banking sector, academe or government. It is not a democratic institution. It was created in 1913 because of so many bank and currency failures before that. Private banks own stock in their regional federal reserve banks and Leonard claims it is a 'private-public' partnership, yet the evidence for that is slim.  The Fed is in charge of the 'monetary' side of the capitalist economy; Congress and politicians in charge of the 'fiscal' side. According to Leonard the latter has been in a stalemate since the Tea Party arose in the 1990s and that continues with Trumpism. It is left to the Fed to deal with inflation or unemployment with limited means, while fiscal policy stands relatively stagnant. Leonard ignores the billions poured into the arms industry, tax breaks and financial welfare for corporations and the rich and the protection of Wall Street – all 'fiscal' policies.  He also ignores the falling profitability of many industrial firms. But let's follow his story.

During most of this period money was created by the Fed to pay 24 'primary dealers' through the 'discount window' at zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) or very low interest. These dealers include Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Nomura and Cantor Fitzgerald. In Europe and Japan there was even negative interest. This book looks at 2010's 'quantitative easing' (QE) as an even more egregious version of zero interest money, as it meant buying trillions in bonds by the Fed to prop up the markets and firms. Much of this was secret or not reported on, and in 2008, dwarfed the public Congressional TARP bailout. Of note is how inaccurate Fed predictions go, as Leonard shows the Fed's Ph.D quants getting it wrong and to compensate, speaking in impenetrable “Fedspeak”. At one point they called their policies 'a shot in the dark.'  Hoenig later became assistant secretary of the FDIC in 2012 and advocated breaking up the big banks. He also wanted a return to FDR's Glass-Steagall law to separate commercial from risky capital markets banking. When those policies didn't fly, Hoenig proposed higher capital reserves for each 'too big to fail' bank. After the FDIC Hoenig went on to work at a libertarian think tank at George Mason University, a conservative business school.

No one in the book suggests nationalizing the big banks or the shadow banks - hedge funds, private equity and dark pools - as the real solution to inequality and instability. When a bank is 'too big to fail' it actually means it has become a social entity, a public utility, not a private enterprise. The book notes the high integration of the finance industry, to the point where one failure cascades into others. This shows the social nature of the banking system, which is 'competitive' only to a small degree and is really an oligopoly - and now almost a single entity, a monopoly. This is confirmed when the capitalist state repeatedly rescues, maintains or outright owns major parts of the capitalist banking system, as shown in this book.

Leonard tracks how the Fed, in its role of preventing price inflation, ignored asset inflation and had a tangential record on employment, its other 'responsibility.' It's actual practice pushed money to more risky investments by flooding the big banks with cash. This led to various crises – the Great Inflation of the late 1970s; the vast Volcker interest rate hikes of the early 1980s; the failing bank panic of 1982; the junk bond / S&L crisis of the later 1980s; the tech wreck in the late 1990s; the severe real estate CDO Great Recession of 2008 and years of QE and ZIRP afterwards; a hidden hedge fund meltdown in 2019 over repo basis trades that led to secret billions in bailouts. And lastly the pandemic of March 2020 which affected overly-leveraged and indebted markets across the board and created the quickest bailout in U.S. history. This involved corporate bonds, real estate and commercial real estate loans, commercial paper, collateralized loan obligations (CLOs), stocks, foreign currencies, leveraged loans, repo basis trades and even 'stable' Treasury bonds – just about everything. In 2023 3 of the largest bank failures in history occurred.  This sequence shows the instability, high debt and over-complexity of the capitalist money markets for the last 50 years, but also their insanely privatized profiteering.

A 'dollar' is actually a Federal Reserve Note

In the pandemic case, the Fed had to bring in the U.S. Treasury department led by Goldman alumnus Steve Mnuchin to provide more cash and authority through Special Purpose Vehicles (SPV) – for a total of $3T in aid, almost a record. As one financier put it, these actions “socialized credit risk.” Congress followed with added trillions in aid through the CARES act and the botched 'Paycheck Protection Plan' for businesses, which mostly went to big corporations and rich individuals, saving the jobs of very few. The Fed's 'populist' “Main Street Lending Program” barely worked either, much like Obama's 2008 homeowner mortgage 'bailout.'  Ultimately the Fed ended up owning $7.4T in rescued assets and had saved mostly the wealthy and the large asset owners. Yeah...

Leonard follows the valuable story of Rexnord, an industrial company in Milwaukee. It was first bought by Powell's Carlyle private equity, then Apollo private equity, who merged and burdened it with debt as a fee-producing cash cow that resulted in the closure of a number of unionized Rexnord factories. Of most importance in this story is how the real source of wealth for the owners and managers was no longer ball bearings, gears, chains and conveyor belts - their real products - or improving quality, productivity, better machinery, technology or worker satisfaction.  The real source were financial machinations, mergers and stock buy-backs. The low profits from production and exploitation led Rexnord to the financial markets, proving one of the contentions of Marxist economics as to the real source of 'financialization' – the falling rate of profit in the productive economy. This pattern is shown in a number of other examples in the book. Cheap Fed money was not being used for hiring or factory improvements or even making loans to small entities but for speculation and monetary maneuvers.

Altogether an exciting narrative about U.S. financial disasters! Leonard ends echoing Marxist Michael Roberts' 'long depression' about a “long crash” after 2008 that is still going on. Most people are unaware of how fragile the financial system is and this book will help illuminate that fact. The conventional, complacent argument is that events are 'circular' and will repeat. There will be no 'qualitative' change, so yesterday's Fed and banking solutions – ZIRP, QE and SPV - will always work going forward, even to the point of a hidden but real state 'socialization.' Has liberal MMT actually been proved by the Fed to always work?! 

 Yet that is not how history actually functions. Ever larger financial debts across the board, increasing monopolization and complexity, higher levels of derivatives, the virtual intertwining of nearly every large financial entity and product, the evisceration of the productive economy, massive privatization and inequality, more zombie corporations, short-term thinking, increasing Federal government involvement, growing moral hazard – what could possibly go wrong? This is not a circular pattern, but a spiral upwards... or down.

P.S. - The collaboration between BlackRock and the Fed, as told by Wall Street on Parade:  https://wallstreetonparade.com/2024/03/billionaire-larry-fink-of-blackrock-which-grabbed-fed-bailouts-in-2020-2021-lectures-struggling-seniors-on-making-more-sacrifices/

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “The Deficit Myth,” “These are the Plunderers” (on private equity - PE); “The Big Short,” “Liar's Poker”(on Salomon Bros); “Flash Boys,” (all 3 by M. Lewis); “The Wolf of Wall Street” (Scorsese); “Den of Thieves” (on Drexel); “Liquidated – An Ethnography of Wall Street” (2 part review); “The Ponzi Factor,” “House of Cards” (on Bear Stearns); “Ponzi Unicorns!” “Antitrust” (Klobuchar); “Debt, Prices & Credit,” “Who is Ron Paul?” “Griftopia” (Taibbi); “Who Gets Bailed Out?” “MMT,” “Mean Girl,” "The Long Depression"(Roberts).  

May Day Books has many Left books on financial topics.

And I got it at the Public Library!

Red Frog / March 14, 2024

In a Garden of Good & Evil

 “A Walk in Savannah”

Savannah, Georgia might be the most beautiful city in the U.S. Its very large downtown historic district is unique in its geometric arrangement of streets and squares along the Savannah River – 22 in all, with one cemetery (not Bonaventure) and one large park, Forsyth. All designed by a leading Methodist, James Oglethorpe. The squares are surrounded by enormous houses in various archaic styles – Greek and Gothic Revival, Federal, Italianate, Georgian and Regency. Massive live oaks hung with Spanish moss dominate nearly every square. All this is based on the port of Savannah, and in the 'old' days that meant slave cotton, slave rice and slaves themselves. This was the seed money for the grand houses, their size, their wide porches, their accouterments, their lifestyle. This is almost invisible now though. When Sherman took the city in 1864 he seized 25,000 bales of cotton as part of his 12/22 'gift' to Lincoln for Christmas. This cotton might have mostly been from a wealthy local, Charles Green. More on him later.

We drank at a choice 'dive' bar, ate at a number of good restaurants which are not hard to find and stayed in an idiotic 'art' inn. We walked 14 squares, zig-zagging our way south from the semi-corporatized riverfront through the parks to Forsyth. The Savannah College of Art and Design – SCAD – dominates the town's culture, which is young and hipster. But other cultures lurk. Yes they do and I'll bet you can guess which one. On my first trip to Savannah maybe 10 years ago I took a Civil War history tour, only to discover the 'tour guide' was a member of the Sons of the Confederacy, supported slavery and thought the Civil War was about 'states rights.' I left that tour but not before asking if we were going to Sherman's headquarters in the city, where Sherman stayed for 6 weeks or so. The answer was no.

This time I wasn't missing Sherman's HQ. It is located just west of Madison Square, facing a church, not the square. It's an incredibly unique house, and that was because it was designed by a New York architect who put in a heated and illuminated roof dome that opened, sliding doors in several clever locations, 3 wall-to-high-ceiling 'bay' windows, two 'romance' bay windows, unique ironwork on the porch and very detailed molding downstairs. It is significant that the house bested nearly every other local structure and was designed by a Yankee. It was owned by a worldly British citizen who favored the South, Charles Green, yet who offered it to Sherman. Green was a wealthy cotton merchant and had his hand in many other slave enterprises – shipping, bricks, railroads, lumber, etc. Why this Confederate would offer the house to Sherman as a guest is questionable, but I'd say he could see which way the wind was blowing. Unlike the Lost Causers, which later included his 'literary' Parisian grandson.

The Green House and its Corner Front-room

Special Field Orders #15

I stood in Sherman's bedroom where a distant relative of his actually prepared for her wedding much later. I stood in the large front room where 20 African American preachers and lay people, along with Sherman and Secretary of War Stanton, hashed out Special Field Orders #15 on January 16, 1865. This is one of the most famous orders in the war against slavery, for it is the source of the goal of '40 acres and a mule.' Sherman, not really a friend of African Americans, wanted the freed people to stop following his armies as they hindered his mobility and he could not supply or protect them. This Order, based on Emancipation, gave 18-40,000 African American freedmen 40 acres to farm in the land between modern Jacksonville, Florida and Hilton Head, South Carolina. Since the Union Army was loaded down with requisitioned horses and mules, some mules also went to these ex-slaves. The area has many islands, and the depth of the strip was between 30 and 50 miles inland, about 400,000 acres, so a huge piece of land. He assigned abolitionist general Saxton to organize the program. One of the first things Copperhead President Andrew Johnson did after Lincoln was assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer was to return most of this land to the white owners, though Saxton and the Freedman's Bureau protected some.

This story was partly told to us in the historic front room by an elderly female 'docent' connected to St. John's Episcopal Church, which owns and uses the house. In that room were no pictures of Sherman, Stanton or the 20 African-Americans, just pictures of Jeff Davis, Jeb Stewart, Lee and Stonewall – the moldy, motley crew. There was a newspaper story on the table detailing the event, that was it. The docent said she was 'just beginning' to read about the Civil War. Good for you! This is like giving a tour of the surrender room in the McLean home in Appomattox, and barely knowing what the fuck happened there. In the room with us were two older Georgians who thought Sherman was going to burn Savannah, because, you know, that's all he did. The male was carrying a beginner book on the Civil War. Upstairs the tour was taken over by a former northerner and present civil war buff. He said that Green's slaves used to pump water up to the second story for baths among all their other tasks, like hauling Green's portmanteau across Europe. He made clear that Green was a Confederate ally and in private pointed out that some tour guides do not mention Sherman, as the Church controls who guides tours. This is actually similar to the museum book store in Monroeville, Alabama that hid copies of Harper Lee's second book, “Go Set a Watchman,” under the counter. That book was very clear on Atticus Finch's actual racism. Monroeville was her hometown and the setting for “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Green-Meldrin House now, with Macon St. blocked off

Now if you've noticed the presence of Yankees in this southern city, read on. At the high-end cocktail bar masquerading as a dive bar, an excellent and creative bar-tender – formerly from New York - presided. On our first visit the talkative lead tile mason was from New York too, while on the other side sat an artist originally from Michigan. The next time there we met a design director for Michael Kors in New York, as he was moving to Savannah. The bar was owned by a former Minnesotan. The design director said one of the benefits of moving was to turn Georgia 'blue.' This is similar to the young dark-skinned folks who are moving back to the South, and proletarian Latinos, Asians and others coming to the South. Visits to Atlanta and Athens, Georgia also testify to the increasing presence of non-Southern-born folks in Southern cities. The massive growth of factory and warehouse facilities across the South is having the effect of proletarianizing southern workers too. At some point this will wise them up to the elite, sometimes southern bosses who've pretended to be their 'friends' for years. African-Americans already know this, but now it's other southern workers' turn.

The bar became one of the headquarters on March 8^th for “Slitherin” - a neighborhood street celebration and parade 'of and for snakes' that took place at night with luminous costuming. In effect artists and locals are sick of the drunken orgy of green beer called St. Patrick's Day downtown, full of dumb-ass leprechauns, four leaf clovers and Forsyth Park green fountain water. They decided to do something about it. St. Patrick hated snakes? Well, then they would celebrate them. Savannah has too many churches, perhaps one on every square. This includes the massive Catholic Cathedral of St. John across Layfayette Square from crazy Catholic Southern Gothic writer Flannery O'Connor's childhood home. Some of the locals seem to be full-sick of the Catholic nonsense that sometimes swallows their town, including St. Patrick. Soooo … Slitherin'!

The ruin of Atlanta's military usefulness, the punishing March to the Sea, the occupation of Savannah's valuable port and the march north to corner Lee were final acts in the defeat of the slavocracy. Thankfully the memorials in the beautiful squares of Savannah relate to the U.S. Revolution or the somewhat less brutal settling of the city by Europeans, not to the Southern Confederacy. In Franklin Square is a memorial to black Haitian soldiers who came to fight the English during the Revolution. Others memorialize Casimir Pulaski, Polish general who died fighting the British at Savannah, and another to Revolutionary War General Nathaniel Green. Another contains the body of Chief Tomo Chi Chi of the Yamacraw, who negotiated with Oglethorpe over Savannah's land and is actually buried under the monument at his request.

While Savannah is famous for Forrest Gump, The Garden of Good & Evil and made-up ghosts, I'd say the real ghost is a dead political idea still hiding under the covers in select parts of the city, trying to 'manifest' at any moment.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Civil War,” “slavery,” “Cranky Yankee,” “Sherman.”

You can find a number of books on southern politics at May Day Books.

The Cranky Yankee

March 11, 2024

Happy International Working Women's Day?

 Femicide

In recognition of International Working Women's Day, I thought I'd look at the cheery topic of femicide – the specific targeting of females called 'gender-related killings.' You know, the topic of every detective show you're watching. The U.N. & World Population data are all over the place. Some data is missing, like China or incomplete, like India or old, as far back as 2012, and much is unreported. It is also not clear the role of warfare in the numbers. In 2022 the data reflected a world-wide increase in 'domestic partner' homicides – i.e. by a family member known to the victim. This is the largest subset of murders of females, at 48.8K in 2022, which is about 55% of the total. This means the majority of killings of girls and women was in the home and not by a stranger.

The largest increase was in Africa. There were reductions in some countries, increases in others. The Central African Republic at 10.6 per 100,000 as of 2016; South Africa at 9.0 in 2019 and El Salvador, at 13.8 per 100,000, were some of the highest. The U.S. is at 2.91 in 2021; Russia at 3.3; India at 2.5; Mexico at 6.2. The lowest – at .1 or .2 - were countries like Singapore, Bahrain, Oman, Tajikistan, Belgium and Japan.  Some countries had zero. The 'pattern' underlying the data is unclear. The U.N. has no idea what is behind this wide-spread level of attacks on women and girls but the concepts of the 'patriarchy,' the class system, racism and caste, conservative religion and profiting off women's labor might help to explain women's secondary place in the social structure.

Child Care

It's no secret that child care costs are rising across the U.S. The U.S. Census reports that child care costs range from $5,357 in small 'counties' to $17,171 in large 'counties,' between 8% & 19.3% of income. HHS estimated by a survey in 2024 that families spend an average of 24% on childcare. These figures don't quite match, do they? At any rate, Yahoo Business estimates the value of 'the market' at $59.87B in 2023 and is expected to grow to a $88.2B 'market' in 2033. 23% of children under 5 live in families below the poverty-line in the U.S. The Bipartisan Policy Center estimates that $9,193 is the average cost of child-care or 17% of income. What is clear from these exorbitant costs is that the U.S. needs free or cheap socialized daycare, better family paid-leave policies and shorter hours, not just inadequate payments through AFDC, Head Start, tax write-offs or relying on aging grandmas and grandpas. 27.1% of families rely on child care, while another source, the NAFCC, cites 40%. I'm not sure if they include after-school or park programs in this data, though those are for older children. Pandemic aid is ending and many childcare centers are closing as a result.  This situation impacts women the most, as they are the majority of unpaid caretakers of small children, in the home and out.  It is time for socialized child centers at worksites or in the community.

Femicide memorial in Mexico City 3/8/24

Barbie

As someone whose experience of Barbie was as an oddly-sculpted, too pink, plastic thing with tiny clothes that rip and way too many possessions, an attempt to craft her into a feminist icon was flawed from the get-go. Barbie the movie is a mass-market exercise in girl-boss feminism. Any 'moral' about how oppression is ultimately bad is lost in the cartoon firmament of Barbieland itself – the cars, the houses, the color, the perfection, the girls. The film is the flip-side of a macho film shot in a dirty male locker-room, but instead it's a place where men are homeless, everything is artificial and every woman is almost identical, housed and happy. The airhead men, led by a buff Ken, go macho like an infantile version of Susan Faludi's 'Backlash' and attempt to conquer the professional Barbies, but they thankfully fail. Like Arwen from LoTR, this Barbie eventually chooses reality over being a Mattel doll, or in Arwen's case, an Elf that never dies. This sends Barbie, now called Barbara, off to the gynecologist, which is about the funniest scene in the movie. Welcome to reality, which is the only solid point it makes.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  "FGM, “Socialist Feminism and the New Women's Movement,” “Feminists and Feminists,” Fortunes of Feminism” (Fraser); “Red Valkyries” (Ghodsee); “Weird Conservative Feminism,” “Freedom Socialist,” “Queen's Gambit,” “Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again,” Marxism and the Oppression of Women” (Vogel); “Without Apology,” "Miss Sloane."

More Cheery News on FGM:  https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/mar/08/dramatic-rise-in-women-and-girls-being-cut-new-fgm-data-reveals

May Day Books has many magazines, books and pamphlets on feminist issues from a left point of view.

The Cultural Marxist

March 8, 2024 - Happy International Working Women's Day! The holiday originally brought to you by the 2^nd Socialist International in 1910, Clara Zetkin presiding.

Private Inequity Iniquity

 “These Are the Plunderers – How Private Equity Runs – and Wrecks – America” by Gretchen Morgenson, 2023

This is a series of detailed stories about the ruin private 'equity' firms create when they purchase a medical chain, an insurance company, become a landlord for thousands, buy a newspaper, a hotel or casino, a retail chain or trailer parks. The main culprits are Blackstone Group, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the Carlyle Group and Apollo Global Management, the latter being the worst and the focus of most of these stories. The author is a lover of capitalism and has no understanding 'why' capitalism might produce such monstrosities, but believes the solution is 'more regulation' actually applied and better taxation. Where have we heard this before? 

These investment outfits merge, lay-off workers, move production, load companies with debt, increase fees, severely reduce quality, merge entities, cut benefits, increase work-load, pollute and sell the company for a quick profit. They'll even shut down a company just to sell their real-estate! So if your company is bought or owned by a misnamed private 'equity' firm, look out! The 'equity' is for the owners and investors, or as she calls these firms, “money-spinning machines.” The 'private' means that everything they do is as secret as non-public companies can be.

Their efforts are aided by numerous government legal and policy decisions from both parties: A 1978 Supreme Court decision allowing usury; a 1978 rule killed off employer-run pension funds; a 1978 decision allowed pension funds to invest in private equity deals – all in Carter-time at the beginnings of neo-liberalism. In 1986 debt interest became a primary tax-lowering strategy, very useful in private equity mergers using debt. In the 1980s, the SEC had a light hand on even hostile mergers, blocking very few. That pattern has continued. In 1994 Clinton's Riegle-Neal law allowed banks to merge across state borders.  In 1996 a law opened private equity partnerships to more people while shielding them from state investigation. In 1997 capital gains taxes were cut, allowing a flood of investors into private equity. The rule separating normal banking and investment gambling, Glass-Steagall, was abolished in 1999 by Clinton and Rubin. After the tech wreck in 2000 the Fed dropped interest rates to historic lows, fueling more mergers using cheap debt. In 2010 a rule was passed that helped 'self-dealing' in private equity among their related companies.  In 2020 Jerome Powell, former private equity executive at Carlyle, had the Federal Reserve prop up corporate bonds by buying them, which was an aid to private equity.  In 2020 private equity was allowed to get involved in 401(k)s retirement accounts. These are just some of the decisions that show the 'public' state's involvement in building private equity privateers.

DREXEL to APOLLO

Apollo's head goon, Leon Black, came out of the corrupt junk debt machine Drexel Burnham Lambert in the late 1980s when he started Apollo. Apollo was basically an extension of Drexel, staffed by many of the same people. He remained a buddy of Drexel's Michael Milliken, convicted felon and HY bond assassin of the S&L industry. He later had a tight relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who had provided 'tax advice' to Black for $158M. This scandal led to Black losing control of Apollo in 2021. His own father Eli had committed suicide over a United Fruit tax fraud bribery scheme in Honduras that had been discovered in 1977. So sad!

Morgensen tells the story of how private 'equity' grew out of the junk bond / leverage buyout heyday of the late 1980s. Drexel itself went bankrupt in 1990 after many of its leading players were indicted in 1986 for a wide range of frauds. Black's Apollo first targeted huge insurer First Executive, which he was able to buy for cheap with the help of the incompetent head of California's insurance regulation department in a no-bid, no due diligence process. This was the foundation of Apollo's wealth. As a result many ordinary First Executive insurance policy-holders were deprived of coverage, as they were collateral damage.

RAID TARGETS

The next targets Morgenson focuses on are Samsonite, Noranda Aluminum in Missouri, ManorCare; health outfits like HCA, Jazz Pharma and EmCare; Taminco Chemicals, Bayonne Water, Coastal Gaslink and Athene Insurance. The Noranda deal led to higher electricity rates for residential customers and the later bankruptcy of the firm and workers' pension fund. The effects on health care in hospitals and nursing homes was dire, especially during CoVid. Manorcare went from owning their own land to renting from others after the land was sold by Apollo, which drove it into bankruptcy. Jazz was indicted for illicit uses, creating a date-rape drug and later, engaged in price gouging. Taminco was an example of 'company flipping' – sort of like what you do with houses – but with a company that supplied chemicals to Mexican narco traffickers. The water rates for Bayonne, New Jersey ratepayers went 60% up under Carlyle's private water contract. The pipeline company Coastal Gaslink was a typical carbon polluter, as private equity invests heavily in carbon firms, something they try to hide. Athene is a serial insurance rule-breaker, fined by a number of states.

Studies show that 20% of companies taken over by private equity file for bankruptcy within 10 years, while employment in those firms fall by 16% prior to that. The average time for ownership is 5 years.  At the same time fraud convictions against financial industry players have dropped like a stone. 11% of nursing homes in 2021 were owned by private equity, which is somber news for that industry. These nursing homes were especially deadly during the CoVid pandemic. Pension funds and other private equity investors have to pay 10% management fees to these firms. Many familiar retail names come up in her analysis of private equities' role like Toys R Us, Neiman Marcus, Telemundo, Harrah's Casinos, HCA, Nine West and Linens N' Things.

Hostess workers strike private equity outfit GGH

The overall picture you get from the book is a trail of enormous damage left by these raiders, these modern day pillagers who make actual pirates and Vikings look like reasonable pikers. Also how this private club of financiers seem to turn up everywhere.  Private equity is the apotheosis of neo-liberal financial capital and it was let lose by both capitalist parties, wreaking havoc on the working class and nature. Her book is only focused on the U.S. situation but private equity roams the world, with Blackrock having the most assets. She leaves this international reach unmentioned, as her book focuses on the minutia of miserable U.S. private equity deals. Private equity was very close to the Trump administration in 2016.  It provided some of his leading financial advisors like Steven Schwarzman of Blackstone Group.  This is another picture of the revolving door between the Federal government and the financial industry itself, with Jay Powell being another example.

SOLUTIONS?

Morgenson thinks private equity is an outlier that good judicial decisions like 2020's private equity induced Nine West bankruptcy decision could cure. That decision said that “creditors, workers, pensioners and taxpayers” had to be taken into account, not just shareholders. Morgenson praises the Biden SEC, FTC and other agencies for limiting private equity fees and health-care consolidation. Apollo spent $7.1M lobbying to prevent any changes, and the rest of the industry pitched in too. A 2022 Delaware legal decision exposing corrupt payments to Carlyle and Apollo executives in league with governor and ex-Carlyle CEO Glenn Youngkin was another stone in their shoe.

The industry is putting up cosmetic changes around charity and stock awards to some workers as their answer to their reputation as thieves. Yet stronger bills in Congress against private equity were defeated after heavy lobbying by the industry. The Supreme Court blocked a key SEC rule change that would inhibit EPA pollution rules from applying to a KKR coal and natural gas plant in West Virginia. Instead Morgenson hopes for a block between Tucker Carlson and Elizabeth Warren, much like Ralph Nader's own pleas to 'left & right' and to 'good' billionaires, to unite against fraud, against the privateers, against cannibalizing mergers, in order to mitigate the automatic processes of capitalist consolidation built into the system. There is even evidence these PE firms collude in private about deals.  This “competition” actually creates oligopoly and monopoly, as Marx pointed out long ago, and private equity has proved this once again.

Socialists have a different take. We'd re-institute Glass-Steagal and roll back the laws benefiting the industry. Morgenson singles out one aspect of Wall Street, private equity, for damaging U.S. health care – and yet it's not as if the general capitalist 'health providers' are not also wrecking health care. Like the rest of the banking industry, private equity should be seized without compensation, nationalized, its books opened and its operations put under the control of workers, socialists and a social state. This will actually end private equities' run of madness, and begin to create a stable financial system. Instead of tolerating the Leon Blacks of the world, or chastening them, send them into obscurity and irrelevance.

Pastor Chris Hedges interviews Morgenson 3/2/24 on Scheerpost: Hedges interviews Morgenson

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “The Capitalists of the 21^st Century,” “Capital in the 21^st Century” (Piketty);“Giants – the Global Power Elite” (P. Phillips); “The Big Short,” “Liar's Poker”(on Salomon Bros); “Flash Boys,” (all 3 by M. Lewis); “The Wolf of Wall Street” (Scorsese); “Den of Thieves” (on Drexel); “Liquidated – An Ethnography of Wall Street” (2 part review); “The Ponzi Factor,” “House of Cards” (on Bear Stearns); “Ponzi Unicorns!” “Antitrust” (Klobuchar).

And I got it at the Library!

May Day Books has many books on capitalist financial issues.

Red Frog / March 5, 2024

College Library Browsing #11: Post-Modern Capitalism?

 “Reading Negri – Marxism in the Age of Empire” edited by P. Lemarche, M. Rosenkrantz, D. Sherman, 2011

There's a lot in this book and much of it is irrelevant or too abstract. Here is a sketch of some of Negri's thinking, which parallels his co-thinkers in Italy like Tronti and Hardt. Negri was jailed at least three times for a number of years in Italy for his writings – at one time being blamed for the plot to kill Aldo Moro tied to the Brigate Rosse. His politics were formed in the labor and Left rebellions of the 1950s-1960s in Italy after he broke with liberal Catholicism and moved towards Marxism. He became a professor in France and died in 2023 at the age of 90. I consider him a modern version of some kind of anarcho-communism, with positive and negative approaches, mainly the latter.

1. Negri understands the role of technology in driving down the rate of profit, per Marx. He goes on to consider workers as extensions of machines, not the reverse. Marx made a similar comment in the Grundrisse, but I think it's main point to show how brutalized workers are.

2. He extended the concept of the 'factory' to the circulation of capital in the community, tracking how every aspect of life is now commodified and 'produced' for profit. He calls this 'social capital' – usually a name for the capitalist commodification of the skills or background of an individual worker. This theory obliterates a distinction between the worksite and the community.

3. He opposes any concept of a party or parties or a united front in place of the 'autonomous activity of the workers.' This 'self-organized' current was first called 'workerism,' then 'autonomism.' It did include worksite committees.

4. He believed that capitalism could be fully planned and that a planned economy was not a hallmark of socialism. We have yet to discover a planned capitalist economy. He later saw that corporations had taken the place of the 'planning' state as the key command locus.

5. Negri replaces the 'labor theory of value' with the capitalist need to dominate all of society at all times. The temporal timing of surplus and necessary labor in the work day is overridden and useless to him. Capitalists who want to extend the workday to 24 hours would agree.

6. He contends that the 'law of value' only holds in an actual factory and that has been superseded by 'social value' and social control in general society. As a result economic 'value' can no longer be estimated.

7. He contended that 'immaterial labor' would slowly become dominant over ordinary worksite labor. 'Immaterial' seems a description of very real white collar labor that produces intellectual property, but that is not his definition. It extends beyond commodification to all forms of social creativity, intelligence and help, similar to Marx's concepts of unalienated labor, free creativity and the necessary work of social reproduction.

8. Instead of the proletariat, now the 'poor' or the 'multitude' are the main harbingers of revolution. The nature and analysis of the 'multitude' is left undefined that I can see, but it means just about everybody.

9. Some theories of imperialism posit the nation-state as the main actor, ignoring class. Negri maintains it is still class actors – or at least 'the multitude' - that motivate states.

10. Any class analysis has to look at 'class composition' and 're-composition' – the varied strata, castes, classes and sub-classes found in a country and within a country, along with their shifting nature in response to changes in capital.

11. At one time the duo of Hardt & Negri proposed winning over 'swing' voters by promoting consumerism – 'luxury communism' evidently. They dropped that.

The book includes a bit of history of the Italian New Left and 3 of its key figures during the 'creeping May' or 'years of lead' from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. This was a time when new Marxist groups like Avanguardia Operaia, Il Manifesto and Lotta Cotinua operated widely in northern Italy. Negri and the proletarian New Left worked in the political context of the deep reformism of the Italian Communist Party, but also took advantage of the long anti-fascist, labor and socialist movements in Italy that even reached into the peasantry.

Post-modern Capitalism?

The contributions in this book challenge aspects of Negri's thought and sometimes embrace it. Caffentzis's contributions come from a classical, orthodox Marxist point of view in his overall opposition to Negri. He shows Negri's growing distance from Marxism and closeness to Frankfurt School 'culturalism.' In a way Negri broke with 'workerism' to the point where productive worksites become banal, lost among everything. Others see his turn towards Spinoza as another marker of 'post-Marxism.' One writes of Negri and Hardt's “postmodernization of the global economy.” This means that 'production' is now the production of 'cooperation, social relations and communication' – i.e. the 'production of subjectivity,' combining the 'economic, political and cultural' aspects of society. It is “the creation of life” itself, not just commodities. This leap mashes commodities and social production, which reflects the totalizing effect of world capital but renders any understanding of exploitation, economics and profit moot. It dismantles some basics of Marxism into a vague classless, post-modern hash of general social 'dissatisfaction,' of anti-capitalist morality, of utopian thinking.  In a way, it also partakes of the 'financialization' thesis.

Oddly the book does not look at current knowledge workers as a new strain of labor who have more power than before. They are able to shut down companies quite easily by turning an electronic switch. Like electricians, the techies in the server center have the ability to make everything stop. Many bosses do not understand what their employees are actually doing and this gives employees vast leverage. It also makes them less easily replaced. Skilled blue, pink and white collar labor can now, through knowledge of computers and just about anything, shut down a whole worksite or sector. Given many 'blue collar' and 'pink collar' jobs involve higher-tech training of some kind – retail, service, assemblers, machinists, mechanics, electricians, plumbers, drivers and more – this 'knowledge' is not exclusive to white collar types. It is essential for many workers in complex economies, which means education has an even bigger role to play as complexity grows.

Refuting Marx?

What Negri really tried to do was 'update' and borrow from Marx and refute Marx at the same time. Caffentzis says what he did is really “a broad negation of Marx's whole opus.” Caffentzis' essay is centered on the question of 'what does the anti-capitalist movement need from Marx?' According to him Negri's refutation consisted of rejecting Marx's 'law of value' and everything associated with it. He notes that this supposed 'law' actually involves many things. The general 'laws of value' in Marx are tied to math and time measures, while Negri & Hardt claim that value is now immeasurable, especially after Nixon's Bretton Woods' break with the gold standard. All is speculation! Math and time are irrelevant to analyzing capital because value has burst the bounds of the worksite.

In other words the concepts of the labor theory of value, surplus value, surplus labor, rate of profit, rate of exploitation, organic composition of capital, exchange rate, exports, subsumption, the real value of commodities, work hours, etc. are all impossible to measure because everything is now immaterial social reproduction of the 'general intellect.' Wooo! Caffentzis maintains that this method mixes the concept of labor with that of general 'activity,' approaching a nihilist view that renders the heart of capitalist production invisible. It can be added that social reproduction, like volunteer labor and home labor, can be measured in part, so even these areas are not immune from forms of quantification. Nor did general social labor suddenly appear in 1971.

Every working Marxist economist interested in 'numbers' would laugh at this high-flying misconception. So would the anti-capitalist movement, which by following Negri's plan would drop some heavy weapons in the fight against national and world capital. After all, why do brutal, continual and varied anti-labor measures make sense other than in defense of very real, defined profits?! Child labor? Getting rid of work breaks? Unpaid overtime? Stolen wages? Debt slavery? Social control is only a means to that end, as capitalists 'do the math' too. One contributor accuses the duo of the “fantasy of originality” in trying to substitute for Marx while still claiming Marxism. I won't go further in this book, but if this debate is interesting to you, pick it up somewhere.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “In Letter of Fire and Blood” (Caffentzis); “From the Factory to the Metropolis” (Negri & Hardt – 2 reviews); “The Unseen” (Belestrini); “Capitalism in the 21^st Century” (Roberts-Carchedi); “Democracy, Planning and Big Data,” “Magical Marxism” (Merrifield); “The Voluntariat,” “Cyber-Proletariat,” “Wageless Life,” “Bit Tyrants,” “Fully-Automated Luxury Communism” (Bastani).

May Day has many books on left theory from various viewpoints, old and new.

I got this at the UGA Library!

Red Frog / March 2, 2024