I am not a Communist — Crooked Timber

An interesting discussion on the meaning of innovation in the era of social networking. Namely that the most interesting work being done today is communal and shared, and implicitly anti-capitalist but noone wants to admit it for fear of being branded a Marxist. Except, as Henry points out:

The degree to which Marx and Engels might or might not have approved e.g of the methods employed by Russian Communists to come into power is still the topic of vigorous controversy. The degree to which Marx and Engels invented, or ‘helped invent’ the command economy is not. Neither had any role whatsoever in inventing it, except as conveniently dead sources of rhetorical justification to those who came after them. They were themselves extremely vague as to exactly how the economy would work after socialism.

So the future could look increasingly communistic without necessarily moving toward a scary command economy and leading us down the path to Hayekian serfdom.

Busted: Stories of the Financial Crisis | The Nation

The problem with the economy, is that no one is willing to come to terms with the failures of Capitalism:

This raises our last question; fittingly, it is the same as the first, the part Lanchester never quite answers. We know why everyone owes everyone: because there was fresh dough to be made in extending credit, until there wasn't. What we don't know is, Why can't anyone pay? Why didn't property values ascend forever? Why didn't the market just keep expanding? This is not a question answered by Johnson and Kwak either. It is, let's say, above their pay grade (or perhaps far below). To tell the story, one would need an account of where value actually comes from. This is not impossibly complex; unlike the niceties of derivatives, it's not rocket science. If value is generated by people laboring to produce stuff that gets sold, and profit comes from exploiting the productive value of labor—this is a simplification, of course, but not a mistake—sooner or later people will have to labor productively to make good on any extended credit. By people I mean people.

But this becomes decreasingly likely, until it is impossible. Promises to do all that work later will reach limits, particularly as companies cut labor costs, replace workers with machines and outsource work to overseas markets. New value, arising only from the discrepancy between wages and productivity, appears elsewhere when it appears at all (witness the growth of India and China). Or it appears to glimmer in the future: credit is the name for spending it now. But even the future has a limited number of hours, technically. Meanwhile, over in the finance sector, where the money seemed so recently to reside, there is only a genteel, bloody struggle over how existing value is divided; no new value is created. The gap between value that can be realized and "fictitious capital"—claims on future value, all those derivatives purling through the purportedly new economy—has become a chasm. No one can vault over it any longer.

But the economy made its tiger's leap out of the stale factory and into the open air of finance for a reason; we can't just return to the fading industrial base with an oops shrug. We have no new line of widgets to labor over and sell. This is why ours is a real crisis, not just a panic. This is why we have seen exactly what the analysis grimly promised: shortages cheek by jowl with surpluses, unemployed workers stacked up next to unused factories. We deferred this reckoning once, twice, three times, depending on your measure. Certainly the most recent credit bubble was pure deferral, pure delusion: Wile E. Coyote out over the gap, legs spinning. He hovered there for a while, and lots of people pretended the laws of physics had been revised, even as he started to plummet. Boom. By boom I mean bust.

Versions of this plaint have been made frequently enough by "mainstream" economists, seemingly unaware they're borrowing the lineaments of an account they've spent careers disavowing as a mystery cult. Well, there are no atheists in foxholes. Or, as a friend says, Marxism is like gold; in an economic crisis, everybody runs to those who have it. Not surprisingly, economists cannot borrow, even at low levels of interest, the insights most needed: the basic understanding that capitalism's flaws are internal to its own logic and can't be whisked away by another round of financial regulation or everybody promising to be less of a creep. It is indeed a compulsion, and it ends poorly.

n 1: On Your Marx

We are all Marxists now -- which is to say, we are all keen observers of the failure of capitalism and free markets in the age of peak oil, government bailouts, and corporate incompetence:

Marxists differ in the details of their accounts of the postwar economy, but the story, which ends for now in the cliffhanger of the first contraction of the world economy since 1945, goes something like this: The so-called Golden Age of postwar capitalism from 1950–70—a time of rising wages, profits, and investment—was the product of special and perishable circumstances. The wartime destruction of the Japanese and German productive base meant that, with the resumption of peace and renewed growth in demand for non-military goods, all the major industrial economies could for a time thrive without threat to one another. But the maturation of European and Japanese industry toward the end of the ’60s spelled the return of mutually destructive competition. Firms producing internationally tradable goods (cars, electronics, et cetera) could only survive by reducing prices, which in turn reduced profitability. And yet the capital sunk in manufacturing plants was enough to make capitalists reluctant to exit a given product line in spite of reduced profitability. Besides, governments don’t like to see big firms fail even when they can’t compete. (The Obama administration has lately proved almost as indulgent of GM as the state-directed Japanese banks have always been of Japanese industry.) And the more recent advent of China as a manufacturing power only exacerbated the situation, as the Chinese (to quote Brenner) “continued to expand capacity faster than it could be scrapped system-wide and to rain down torrents of redundant, increasingly high-tech goods upon the world market.”

The orthodox story blames declining profitability (and price inflation) during the ’70s on the excessive demands of labor—a plausible enough explanation until you consider that the worldwide defeat of labor since the ’80s has failed to restore prior levels of growth. The high wages of the early ’70s are long gone. What has endured and intensified since then is a systemic bias in favor of short-term financial speculation over longer-term productive investment.

Terry Eagleton on Bakhtin

Though he can't avoid taking a few pointless swipes at Saussure and Postmodernism, Eagleton has an interesting review in the LRB and Bakhtin is always an interesting subject.

In Rabelais and His World, this orgy of signification takes to the street in the form of a carnival. In the Russian tradition of the holy fool, the ancient art of the people debunks all transcendental signifiers and submits all official values to satiric parody. Like the novel, it celebrates flux and mutability, the dynamic and unstable. All absolute values are ridiculed and relativised. Against the high-mindedness of official doctrine is pitted the lethal power of laughter. Travesty, disfigurement and inversion (nose/phallus, face/buttocks, sacred/profane, man/woman, high culture/low culture) rampage for a euphoric moment through the byways and marketplaces. Rigid oppositions are scabrously dismantled. Birth and death, destruction and renewal, body and spirit, wisdom and folly, the anal and the angelic are sent packing with their tails in each other’s mouths. Orifices are seen as the places where bodies breach their boundaries and merge ecstatically into each other. Everything about the practice is ambiguous, Janus-faced, too slippery to be pinned down. Carnival deflates the sublime and portentous; and behind this desublimation lies the bathos of the Christian gospel, for which salvation comes down to the gift of a cup of water. As the first movement in history to consecrate the common life, Christianity stands at the source of Bakhtin’s preoccupation with the everyday, just as it lurks distantly behind the current fascination with popular culture.

This a wonderfully descriptive paragraph with all sorts of amazing ideas to unpack. Debunking transcendental signifiers. Ridiculing and relativising absolute values. Travesty, disfigurement, and inversion. Dismantling rigid oppositions. This all sounds very postmodern to me and its a shame that Eagleton can't get past his bias and distaste. Perhaps it is the insistence that Eagleton reads through Bakhtin that there must be something behind the Carnival, a source for his preoccupation with the everyday. Some find Christianity, others would try to replace it with Marxism. For a postmodernist, there is nothing behind the desublimation. It is hyperreal, it is simulated, it is self-referential. The everyday and the fascination with popular culture is the life we have, nothing more. Travesties and monsters are there to remind us that language and art are themselves the forces that "make for human misery and oppression [and the forces that] can also make for emancipation and wellbeing".