Friday, January 23, 2009
Friday, January 16, 2009
Books You Should Read III
Herbert Marcuse
"Counter-revolution and Revolt"
Slavoj Zizek
"Violence"
Christian Marazzi
"Capital and Language"
Sinclair Lewis
"It Can't Happen Here"
Göran Therborn
"What Does The Ruling Class Do When It Rules?"
"Counter-revolution and Revolt"
Slavoj Zizek
"Violence"
Christian Marazzi
"Capital and Language"
Sinclair Lewis
"It Can't Happen Here"
Göran Therborn
"What Does The Ruling Class Do When It Rules?"
Excerpts From "The System of Objects" By Jean Baudrillard
Credit
Credit customers [have learned] how to make use of objects in complete freedom as though they were already "theirs". The difference, of course, is that while such objects are being paid for they are simultaneously wearing out: the final payment-due date is not unrelated to the "replacement-due" date - indeed, as we know, firms strive to make the two intervening periods coincide exactly. There is always the risk, therefore, as in the event of defectiveness or loss, that an object will be, so to speak, used up before it is paid up. Even when credit seems to have been perfectly integrated into everyday like, this danger is the basis of an insecurity that was never experienced in connection with the "patrimonial" object. Such an object was mine: I owed nothing. An object bought on credit will be mine when I have paid for it: it is conjugated, as it were, in the future perfect...
We are forever behindhand relative to our objects. They are here before us, yet they are already a year away, located either in that final payment or else in the next model by which they are bound to be replaced. So credit simply transfers a basic psychological situation onto the economic plane; the obligation to follow a sequence is the same at both levels, whether it is economic, as with successive hire-purchase payments, or psycho-sociological, as in the systematic and ever-accelerating succession of series and models. In any event, we experience our objects in a predefined, mortgaged temporal mode. If there are now barely any restrictions on the use of credit, perhaps the reason is that all our objects today are apprehended as if they were obtained on credit, as debts incurred to society as a whole - debts that are always susceptible of adjustment, always fluctuating, always prey to chronic inflation and devaluation...
Credit must be viewed as far more than a financial arrangement, for it is nothing less than a fundamental dimension of our society and in effect a new ethical system.
The Precedence of Consumption: A New Ethic
...Until our parents' generation, objects once acquired were owned in the full sense, for they were the material expression of work done. They were, in short, a capital. Today objects are with us before they are earned, they steal a march on the sum total of effort, of labour, that they embody, so that in a sense their consumption precedes their production.
The Obligation to Buy
Today a new morality has been born. Precedence of consumption over accumulation, forward flight, forced investment, speeded-up consumption, chronic inflation (implying the absurdity of saving) - these are the motors of our whole present system of buying first and paying off later in labour. Credit has brought us back to a situation that is in fact feudal in character, reminiscent as it is of the arrangement under which a portion of labour would be allocated in advance, as serf labour, to the feudal lord. There is a difference, however, for our system, unlike feudalism, reposes on complicity: modern consumers spontaneously embrace and accept the unending constraint that is imposed on them. They buy so that society can continue to produce, this so that they can continue to work, and this in turn so that they can pay for what they have bought.
"Buy days mean pay days - and pay days mean better days!"
"Buy now - the job you save may be your own!"
"Buy you way to prosperity!"
The illusionism is truly remarkable: society appears to extend credit to you in exchange for a formal freedom, but in reality it is you who are giving credit to society, alienating your future in the process. Of course the system of production still depends fundamentally on the exploitation of labour-power, but today it is strongly reinforced by the circular consensus or collusion whereby subjection itself is experienced as freedom...
* * *
...A fundamental truth about the present system emerges here too: objects now are by no means meant to be used but solely to be produced and bought. In other words, they are structured as a function neither of needs nor of a more rational organization of the world, but instead constitute a system determined entirely by an ideological regime of production and social integration.
Credit customers [have learned] how to make use of objects in complete freedom as though they were already "theirs". The difference, of course, is that while such objects are being paid for they are simultaneously wearing out: the final payment-due date is not unrelated to the "replacement-due" date - indeed, as we know, firms strive to make the two intervening periods coincide exactly. There is always the risk, therefore, as in the event of defectiveness or loss, that an object will be, so to speak, used up before it is paid up. Even when credit seems to have been perfectly integrated into everyday like, this danger is the basis of an insecurity that was never experienced in connection with the "patrimonial" object. Such an object was mine: I owed nothing. An object bought on credit will be mine when I have paid for it: it is conjugated, as it were, in the future perfect...
We are forever behindhand relative to our objects. They are here before us, yet they are already a year away, located either in that final payment or else in the next model by which they are bound to be replaced. So credit simply transfers a basic psychological situation onto the economic plane; the obligation to follow a sequence is the same at both levels, whether it is economic, as with successive hire-purchase payments, or psycho-sociological, as in the systematic and ever-accelerating succession of series and models. In any event, we experience our objects in a predefined, mortgaged temporal mode. If there are now barely any restrictions on the use of credit, perhaps the reason is that all our objects today are apprehended as if they were obtained on credit, as debts incurred to society as a whole - debts that are always susceptible of adjustment, always fluctuating, always prey to chronic inflation and devaluation...
Credit must be viewed as far more than a financial arrangement, for it is nothing less than a fundamental dimension of our society and in effect a new ethical system.
The Precedence of Consumption: A New Ethic
...Until our parents' generation, objects once acquired were owned in the full sense, for they were the material expression of work done. They were, in short, a capital. Today objects are with us before they are earned, they steal a march on the sum total of effort, of labour, that they embody, so that in a sense their consumption precedes their production.
The Obligation to Buy
Today a new morality has been born. Precedence of consumption over accumulation, forward flight, forced investment, speeded-up consumption, chronic inflation (implying the absurdity of saving) - these are the motors of our whole present system of buying first and paying off later in labour. Credit has brought us back to a situation that is in fact feudal in character, reminiscent as it is of the arrangement under which a portion of labour would be allocated in advance, as serf labour, to the feudal lord. There is a difference, however, for our system, unlike feudalism, reposes on complicity: modern consumers spontaneously embrace and accept the unending constraint that is imposed on them. They buy so that society can continue to produce, this so that they can continue to work, and this in turn so that they can pay for what they have bought.
"Buy days mean pay days - and pay days mean better days!"
"Buy now - the job you save may be your own!"
"Buy you way to prosperity!"
The illusionism is truly remarkable: society appears to extend credit to you in exchange for a formal freedom, but in reality it is you who are giving credit to society, alienating your future in the process. Of course the system of production still depends fundamentally on the exploitation of labour-power, but today it is strongly reinforced by the circular consensus or collusion whereby subjection itself is experienced as freedom...
* * *
...A fundamental truth about the present system emerges here too: objects now are by no means meant to be used but solely to be produced and bought. In other words, they are structured as a function neither of needs nor of a more rational organization of the world, but instead constitute a system determined entirely by an ideological regime of production and social integration.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Capital Disaster
The daily reports of economic doom and gloom just amount to mass media's diagnosis of various symptoms of "free" market capitalism in its death throws. Save your money, do not invest, and above all do not believe anything economists, bank analysts or politicians say about the state of the economy. Casino capitalism is imploding from within.
The internal contradictions of late-stage capitalism which are solely responsible for the impending economic implosion have been widely discussed. Most recently, Christian Marazzi makes some excellent observations in "Capital and Language." He links the roots of the New Economy's boom and bust cycles to the shift towards financialization in the 1980s and 1990s. "The financialization of household economies, the diversion of an increasingly larger part of family savings to securities markets around the world in the hopeful search for increasing returns... constitutes a globalization or worldwide distribution of risk... which must be read together with the downsizing of the national welfare state." In effect by turning the worker/consumer into a petty investor, the economy was able to grow exponentially, but at the expense of spreading the risks of investing to those with the least amount of capital at their disposal. Making any gains for the vast majority very tenuous, especially during the bust portion of an economic cycle. Concurrently, by dismantling the welfare state, the safety nets designed to help those who have fallen victim to market fluctuations are eliminated, further eroding the consumer base.
With the simultaneous rise of market value and corresponding decrease and indebtedness of the worker/consumer base, the most fundamental contradiction of the New Economy or late-stage capitalism becomes apparent in the form of excess inventories and market bubbles.
"The question of excess inventories has been associated by many observers with the perverse effects of overtrading: the more fever-pitched the rising phase of the [economic] cycle as an effect of increased consumption fueled by debt, the more violent the recessive demand phase and, therefore, the higher the volumes of unsold stock."
To be sure, bust cycles are fed in proportion to the preceding rise of the economic cycle and are dependent on the amount of unsold surplus-value stock which cannot be translated into liquid capital. This is exacerbated by the collapse of market value, which eliminates consumer investment capital and consumer spending resulting in ever higher volumes of unsold inventories and worthless market shares. This can only result in a downward spiral of layoffs, bankruptcies, and further market devaluation. Only those with vast amounts of money can survive an economic bust cycle of a magnitude proportionate to that of the preceding market bubble, the last of which is the greatest the world has ever known.
According to Marazzi, "The euphoria of the financial markets raises the specter of a worldwide financial crash. The financial-economic indicators and comparisons with the stock market performance in the 1920s justify the fear of a crash of epic proportions. In such situations, the reason of those who see increasing stock prices not as the irrational exuberance of speculation, but as the real growth in social production, is not at all sufficient to protect us from the risk of catastrophe..."
In other words even if you are a true believer in the system, which is what the system itself unquestioningly requires in order to function, your belief still cannot delay catastrophe.
To further quote Marazzi;
"The financialization of the 1990s generated additional incomes but, beyond distributing them unequally, it created them by destroying occupational stability and salary regularity, thus helping to exacerbate the attention deficit of worker-consumers by forcing them to devote more attention to the search for work than to the consumption of intangible goods and services.
The condition imposed by the financial markets for the creation of financial gains has in fact been the promotion of downsizing, reengineering, outsourcing, and mergers and acquisitions, which have made the work force less secure by allocating more attention to the risk of losing exchange value than to the loss of the use value of the workforce. In the post-Fordist economy, the capital necessary to the production of goods has been subtracted from the remuneration of the work force. It has not been taken into account that the work force is not only a producer but a consumer, not only salary cost but also income."
A wildly skewed income distribution ends up destroying the consumer base, forcing people to go into debt in order to prop up the economy. When credit is no longer available the system implodes. Those who have milked the system retain all the wealth, those who consume are left with nothing. It's time to wake up.
The ruling elites are scared and do not want to cause panic among the multitude, so they are not telling us how bad things really are. The only solution to the current economic holocaust is a new social, economic and political paradigm. Either we can try to fix a system that is inherently undemocratic and unjust and find ourselves back on track in a rat race of ever increasing, ever intensifying boom and bust cycles which will only continue the transfer of wealth from the majority into the hands of the few, or we can choose complete non-compliance in the status quo and unequivocally demand something better.
Given the impending collapse of the gigantic derivatives market, the only way to transform our economy is through the elimination of debt, credit and the entire parasitic financial structure and by transferring ownership of the means of production to the workers.
Since people are already paying for corporate bailouts in the form of deficit spending and taxation by governments with their future wages, why not just bypass the government / corporate interface and own the companies outright without the managers and executives who are the cause of the problem to begin with and the accompanying debt that will be transferred to an already broke consumer base?
It won't be long now, and the choice will not be up to the elites.
The internal contradictions of late-stage capitalism which are solely responsible for the impending economic implosion have been widely discussed. Most recently, Christian Marazzi makes some excellent observations in "Capital and Language." He links the roots of the New Economy's boom and bust cycles to the shift towards financialization in the 1980s and 1990s. "The financialization of household economies, the diversion of an increasingly larger part of family savings to securities markets around the world in the hopeful search for increasing returns... constitutes a globalization or worldwide distribution of risk... which must be read together with the downsizing of the national welfare state." In effect by turning the worker/consumer into a petty investor, the economy was able to grow exponentially, but at the expense of spreading the risks of investing to those with the least amount of capital at their disposal. Making any gains for the vast majority very tenuous, especially during the bust portion of an economic cycle. Concurrently, by dismantling the welfare state, the safety nets designed to help those who have fallen victim to market fluctuations are eliminated, further eroding the consumer base.
With the simultaneous rise of market value and corresponding decrease and indebtedness of the worker/consumer base, the most fundamental contradiction of the New Economy or late-stage capitalism becomes apparent in the form of excess inventories and market bubbles.
"The question of excess inventories has been associated by many observers with the perverse effects of overtrading: the more fever-pitched the rising phase of the [economic] cycle as an effect of increased consumption fueled by debt, the more violent the recessive demand phase and, therefore, the higher the volumes of unsold stock."
To be sure, bust cycles are fed in proportion to the preceding rise of the economic cycle and are dependent on the amount of unsold surplus-value stock which cannot be translated into liquid capital. This is exacerbated by the collapse of market value, which eliminates consumer investment capital and consumer spending resulting in ever higher volumes of unsold inventories and worthless market shares. This can only result in a downward spiral of layoffs, bankruptcies, and further market devaluation. Only those with vast amounts of money can survive an economic bust cycle of a magnitude proportionate to that of the preceding market bubble, the last of which is the greatest the world has ever known.
According to Marazzi, "The euphoria of the financial markets raises the specter of a worldwide financial crash. The financial-economic indicators and comparisons with the stock market performance in the 1920s justify the fear of a crash of epic proportions. In such situations, the reason of those who see increasing stock prices not as the irrational exuberance of speculation, but as the real growth in social production, is not at all sufficient to protect us from the risk of catastrophe..."
In other words even if you are a true believer in the system, which is what the system itself unquestioningly requires in order to function, your belief still cannot delay catastrophe.
To further quote Marazzi;
"The financialization of the 1990s generated additional incomes but, beyond distributing them unequally, it created them by destroying occupational stability and salary regularity, thus helping to exacerbate the attention deficit of worker-consumers by forcing them to devote more attention to the search for work than to the consumption of intangible goods and services.
The condition imposed by the financial markets for the creation of financial gains has in fact been the promotion of downsizing, reengineering, outsourcing, and mergers and acquisitions, which have made the work force less secure by allocating more attention to the risk of losing exchange value than to the loss of the use value of the workforce. In the post-Fordist economy, the capital necessary to the production of goods has been subtracted from the remuneration of the work force. It has not been taken into account that the work force is not only a producer but a consumer, not only salary cost but also income."
A wildly skewed income distribution ends up destroying the consumer base, forcing people to go into debt in order to prop up the economy. When credit is no longer available the system implodes. Those who have milked the system retain all the wealth, those who consume are left with nothing. It's time to wake up.
The ruling elites are scared and do not want to cause panic among the multitude, so they are not telling us how bad things really are. The only solution to the current economic holocaust is a new social, economic and political paradigm. Either we can try to fix a system that is inherently undemocratic and unjust and find ourselves back on track in a rat race of ever increasing, ever intensifying boom and bust cycles which will only continue the transfer of wealth from the majority into the hands of the few, or we can choose complete non-compliance in the status quo and unequivocally demand something better.
Given the impending collapse of the gigantic derivatives market, the only way to transform our economy is through the elimination of debt, credit and the entire parasitic financial structure and by transferring ownership of the means of production to the workers.
Since people are already paying for corporate bailouts in the form of deficit spending and taxation by governments with their future wages, why not just bypass the government / corporate interface and own the companies outright without the managers and executives who are the cause of the problem to begin with and the accompanying debt that will be transferred to an already broke consumer base?
It won't be long now, and the choice will not be up to the elites.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
