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Man, I like a conversation. So cheers. This post will be looser than my last (apologies)...

Cranius wrote:But the Nation State itself has also been threatened by the escape of capital to a global scale and has definitely seen a decline of sorts.

You know, I've become outright skeptical about this claim; at the very least I think it needs to be modulated. I guess it depends on what we mean by "decline." Do we mean a reduction in national sovereignty and state control of "domestic" affairs? Because those on the receiving end of U.S. and European "interventions" (neo-imperialism) have never been sovereign (especially in economic terms). One nation's vigorous sovereignty is another's subjection. Free trade agreements, etc, have been authored and accepted by national governments themselves. What's happened, if anything, is that "national interest" has begun to become visible as the ruling class interest it always was (as you have emphasized); citizens of "the West" have begun to understand what others have known for a long time (while, inversely, figures like Chavez and Morales have ascended with truly popular and democratic support). There's a lot more to say on the subject, but I'm unsatisfied with the nation-state-in-decline assumption (I think it's wishful thinking for many)... While I agree with this:

What globalisation has done is throw into sharp relief the fundamental nature of State's most miserable functions (its desire to subordinate and exploit its own populations, to marshal its citizens to war and to concentrate it's own power, the "coils of the serpent"). Moreover the Nation State still seems to be the biggest obstacle to wider solidarities.

But there's a baby/bath water element to the "new politics" stuff insofar as it rejects not just nationalism but solidarity itself. If there's been a "gap," one place I see it on "the left" is in the move to postmodern and posthumanist theories which come close to vilifying solidarity w/o building new forms of functional organization. "Organization" is a dirty word for the Hardt and Negri crowd, and I think that's a form of "infantile disorder" (to repeat Lenin w/o intending to validate vanguardism or centralism). And, again, the post-solidarity angle was in response to the essentializing strain in identity politics and so on (and thus natural). And I find a lot of merit in the posthumanist stuff (if not politically; same with Deleuze: I love it but politically it's irrelevant [it's anti-political]).

I think "solidarity" demands serious re-engagement and reinvention (e.g., I don't think "globalization" has made it easier for farmers in Iowa to align themselves with farmers in Uruguay or in Cornwall England than previously, much less workers in call centers in Mumbai with those in Minneapolis). I'm unconvinced that a rejection of solidarity in academic and pomo theory is anything but symptomatic. And that's depressing. The World Social Forum is more hopeful in this respect, perhaps.

One doesn't dispense with nationalism by disavowing it (this is one of my major beefs with Italian theorists in particular); you cede the territory w/o offering new ground (hence Hardt, Negri, and others' investment in speaking from nowhere, from the "non-place."). I'm not convinced belonging and "imagined communities" are any less important for most people than they were 40 years ago. Witness Obama's "we're all one people" nationalism... it's as forceful and affective an appeal as ever. Americans have been longing for a version of it they can get behind.

You seem to say that a slowing down, perhaps brought about by environmental sustainability, will eventually check the excesses of capitalism as it stands. Is that right? That the material constraints of the ecosystem will have the final say?

No, I didn't intend this. Things are amping up, if anything. Unbridled industrialization and consumer culture in China and India are ascendant, while green capitalism is an exploding avenue of profit which pretends to - but doesn't actually - move us away from unsustainable infrastructure and ways of life. I don't think environmental catastrophe(s) will bring about a salutary economic crisis for capitalism (such that it will reform itself). The most devastating thing about capitalism is that, in the final instance, it cannot be reformed. It's the hardest thing to grasp and hold onto about it. Especially in the context of a social reality which has no outside or visionary reference other than capitalism itself.

John Bellamy Foster wrote:As the German Greens have said, the system will recognize that money cannot be eaten only when the last tree has been cut—and not before. We should not underestimate capitalism’s capacity to accumulate in the midst of the most blatant ecological destruction, to profit from environmental degradation (for example through the growth of the waste management industry), and to continue to destroy the earth to the point of no return—both for human society and for most of the world’s living species. In other words, the dangers of a deepening ecological problem are all the more serious because the system does not have an internal (or external) regulatory mechanism that causes it to reorganize. There is no ecological counterpart to the business cycle.

Look for some acknowledgment of capitalism as an essential ingredient in the recent apocalyptic Pentagon report on global warming. It's all about military provisions, fortresses, mass migration, resource wars, etc. This is how the most powerful capitalist state in the world thinks about climate change.

Andrew. wrote:I don't think environmental catastrophe(s) will bring about a salutary economic crisis for capitalism (such that it will reform itself). The most devastating thing about capitalism is that, in the final instance, it cannot be reformed.

Surely eventually it will be.

Or are you saying that it will eventually just consume and destroy everything, including itself?

Earwicker wrote:

Andrew. wrote:I don't think environmental catastrophe(s) will bring about a salutary economic crisis for capitalism (such that it will reform itself). The most devastating thing about capitalism is that, in the final instance, it cannot be reformed.

Surely eventually it will be.

Or are you saying that it will eventually just consume and destroy everything, including itself?

With finite resources, capitalism would eventually reach a limit and stop being able to be itself. David Graeber thinks this limit will be reached within 50 years and we'll end up with something which, by definition, could not be capitalism, because capital itself, by definition, requires unlimited resources. Graeber emphasizes that what we end up with might and likely will be worse than capitalism, unless we build alternative post-capitalist futures in the present. As I said, I'm not sure if that's a valid timeline or not.

But this is why it's important to understand what capitalism actually is. And it's understanding this that leads to the conclusion that, while capitalism goes through major transformations (in order to overcome internal limits and maintain profitability), it cannot ultimately be reformed and made sane.

Start with the most basic insight into capitalism as a system. Capitalism is a system with only one ultimate goal: the generation of capital. That's it. That's all capitalism needs and wants to be able to do: turn things into capital ("commodify"). Capitalism needs to extract value from things - land, bodies, minds, relationships - in a "valorization" process that abstracts that value for exchange ad infinitum.

It might be useful here to specify that commodification does not consist in the acts of buying and selling ­ which obviously predate capitalism. Rather, commodification means the application of a universal standard of measure that relates and reduces qualitative differences ­ of bodies, actions, work ­ according to the abstract measure of money. Abstract equivalence, without its idyllic depictions, presupposes and produces hierarchy, exploitation and violence. Formally, which is to say juridically: neither poor nor rich are allowed to sleep under bridges.

There is no capitalism without economic growth. Capitalism must expand without end in order to exist. That's not a controversial claim. It's a basic fact about capitalism. And a very rudimentary explanation of why there can never be such a thing as a closed, national economy (that is capitalist).

Here's a quote from a discussion of Teresa Brennan's book, Globalization and its Terrors:

we imagine, in this era of capitalism, that technology is the main source of profit, but what technology does for profit is really something else. The system, in reality, feeds off of human labor and natural resources, and technology allows us to consume that labor and those resources more competitively, such that we’ve created a capitalist system that is devouring the planet far faster than it can regenerate itself. As technology advances, the devouring process accelerates. Society separates more and more into a structure of winners and losers.

To return to reform: why was the welfare state dismantled - a form of reformist capitalism often thought to soften capitalism's blunt? For a host of reasons, no doubt, but a major factor was profitability. Any structural checks on profitability will hit the cutting floor if the system demands it for expansion (I touched on this at the end of this post).

The "flexibilization" of work and labor conditions characteristic of the service industry has given rise to the neologism "precarity," to capture employment conditions under neoliberalism. Angela Mitropoulos has a great discussion of the term, which includes this insight:

On a global scale and in its privatised and/or unpaid versions, precarity is and has always been the standard experience of work in capitalism. When one has no other means to live than the ability to labour or ­ even more precariously, since it privatises a relation of dependency ­ to reproduce and 'humanise' the labour publicly tendered by another, life becomes contingent on capital and therefore precarious.

The experience of regular, full-time, long-term employment which characterised the most visible, mediated aspects of Fordism is an exception in capitalist history. That presupposed vast amounts of unpaid domestic labour by women and hyper-exploited labour in the colonies. This labour also underpinned the smooth distinction between work and leisure for the Fordist factory worker. The enclosures and looting of what was once contained as the Third World and the affective, unpaid labour of women allowed for the consumerist, affective 'humanisation' ­ and protectionism ­ of what was always a small part of the Fordist working class. A comparably privileged worker who was nonetheless elevated to the exemplary protagonist of class struggle by way of vanguardist reckonings. Those reckonings tended to parallel the valuations of bodies by capital, as reflected in the wage. The 'lower end' of the (global) labour market and divisions of labour ­ impoverishment, destitution or a privatised precariousness ­ were accounted for, as an inherent attribute of skin colour and sex, as natural. In many respects, then, what is registered as the recent rise of precarity is actually its discovery among those who had not expected it by virtue of the apparently inherent and eternal (perhaps biological) relation between the characteristics of their bodies and their possible monetary valuation--a sense of worth verified by the demarcations of the wage (paid and unpaid) and in the stratification of wage levels.

http://www.metamute.org/en/node/7057/print

dbl-post

Cranius wrote:I'm not sure that the naming of the agents is that effective when it's the reform of systems, particularly the least democratic ones, such as the IMF, WTO and World Bank--which have historically engineered markets to allowed global capital to operate as smoothly as possible. More transparency and democracy would be a start.

Apologies, don't have time right now for a longer response but there's this...

when you look at these organisations you see that over the last 30/40 years they have been ran by the same group of people. People who have the same economic/political agendas.
They have not operated in the last 30/40 years as they were originally supposed to.

You seem to suggest that 'the engineering of markets to allow global capital to operate more smoothly' is something that just emerged organically out of the system but that absolves the actual individuals who undermined the transparency and democracy that you call for.

Now whether apportioning blame to those individuals is worthwhile or not is something you could argue about but I don't see how you can't point the finger.
How can you just assign responsibility to a system rather than a human decision if an examination shows the grubby fingerprints of human decisions all over the place.
Your view (if I'm understanding it clearly) suggests that all of us in the same position as those running those institutions would have behaved in the same way.

It's amusing how Rick in his plays comes across as most reasonable and diplomatic.
I see myself this way also when arguing but people often tell me later that I came across as aggressive and intimidating - I imagine myself twiddling a bow tie and sipping a martini but appear to others as Animal from the muppets.

Rick's writing around his plays is like an explosion of raw id

- it makes me chuckle.

Andrew. wrote:With finite resources, capitalism would eventually reach a limit and stop being able to be itself.

I think when you look at, for example, the recent (booming) "cap and trade" in carbon dioxide emissions, that there may be room for a sustainability which may be not all that foreign to the internal logic of capitalism itself. Not saying that it is entirely unproblematic, or anything, and with regards to that, your links re: biofuel are much appreciated (and depressing), but I think that capitalism, much like organized crime, is possibly more flexible than you make it out to be, exactly because there is commodity to be found in pretty much anything, including the checks on trade and production themselves.

(I realise that all this is more pertinent to the "rhineland" model than it is to capitalism, the American variety, though)

Now, if we can get rid of the World Bank...

This is an excellent conversation to eavesdrop. Andrew.: pretty bleak, no?

Earwicker, I think the point r.e. individuals is this: the current system and hierarchies roll on and adapt as demanded by the flow of money. Whilst there is some merit in trying to castigate individual people and organisations, their removal will not prevent similar or the same replacing them without wholescale - global - reconfiguration of the way we live our lives. I said it elsewhere: at its simplest, this approach simplifies history to a revenge thriller where everything will be fine once the hero kicks down the door and shoots the baddies.

(Which in turn makes me wonder about the ideological content of the revenge thriller. Forgive me, it is late and I am delaying packing.)

I haven't got much of worth to add to this at present. However, I did read something today that chimed with these thoughts of capitalism and its infinite hunger. It was in the same old copy of The Economist that the Ike Turner obituary was in:

The Economist wrote:Lighten up, Pat

What about Mr Buchanan's particular bugbear, immigration? For all the passion that this is igniting, America is blessedly free from the alienated immigrant populations that so trouble France and other European countries. America still has a genius for employing and assimilating newcomers. English classes are crammed and English-language tuition is a giant business. And America's ability to suck in and assimilate immigrants is part of a bigger and better story. European economies face profound long-term problems because of their citizens' reluctance to reproduce. Americans have the highest fertility rate of any rich country. That is a long-term vote of confidence in the country's future.

In other words, just keep eating! (And fucking, buying cars, iPods, etc etc)

(Edits for link and last line.)

sunlore wrote:

Andrew. wrote:With finite resources, capitalism would eventually reach a limit and stop being able to be itself.

I think when you look at, for example, the recent (booming) "cap and trade" in carbon dioxide emissions, that there may be room for a sustainability which may be not all that foreign to the internal logic of capitalism itself. Not saying that it is entirely unproblematic, or anything, and with regards to that, your links re: biofuel are much appreciated (and depressing), but I think that capitalism, much like organized crime, is possibly more flexible than you make it out to be, exactly because there is commodity to be found in pretty much anything, including the checks on trade and production themselves.

Is the argument that the commodification of the checks would enable them to survive? I think that I can see that. But I can also see this commodification leading to the checks being applied inconsistently and ineffectively. I fear that I might be reverting back to an old-fashioned advocate of State-intervention on this.

Now, if we can get rid of the World Bank...

Yeah.

Edit: Lourens: Organised crime is capitalism!

Ok, I'll get my coat...

sparky wrote:I fear that I might be reverting back to an old-fashioned advocate of State-intervention on this.

Absolutely agreed, which is why I referred to the rhineland model of capitalism at the end of my post.

I don't necessarily view the entrenchment (do I correctly use this word as an ambiguity here?) of capitalism by politics as dialectical, or the two as mutually exclusive at all, though. Even the US government constantly intervenes with the economy at business level. And yeah, my point was that there just may be room for more sustainable global markets in that dynamic. Maybe.

Andrew.: pretty bleak, no?

Andrew's radicalism is 100% more manly and robust then some of our co-poster's bloated (and blatantly self-congratulatory) manliness and robustness. But you probably agree.