Within this framework, the first panel, consisting of David Harvey, Duncan Foley, Beverly Silver, and Immanuel Wallerstein, offered a state-of-the-field view on our understandings of the present crisis with reference to capitalism as an economic system effecting society through the mediation of the political sphere.
A brief, and likely partial, summary of their presentations follows:
Harvey
Clearly working within his training as a geographer-cum-social theorist Harvey discussed “crisis” as a thing, appearing, disappearing (much like a plague), shifting geographically and within the system of capitalism itself. Here one day in the New York financial markets, gone the next to appear in Greek state finances. He pointed out, however, that “global” is perhaps misapplied to the crisis, as it has not appeared to effect places such as Brazil, Argentina, or Australia, all states that have substantial economic ties to China, which appeared in his talk, as the potential center of an alternative orientation of capital. The crisis, he argued, being a distinctly North American and European problem, is a crisis of joblessness, with a net loss of nearly 20 million, 7.5 million of which were in the US alone. He remarks that the crisis, at one point, economic, demanding state intervention to prevent a complete collapse of financial institutions and markets, has shifted into a political crisis. The significance of this shift is that it means the decisions being made currently about how to address the “crisis,” are not taking place in reference to “economic necessity,” but are political choices. The two possible choices he saw were deficit reduction, a la Cameron in Great Britain, or Keynesian intervention a la China and India. He then proceeded to critique the deficit reduction avenue on the grounds that it was an expression of capital’s long term project to unload the social reproduction costs, which most recently it was forced to bear during the Fordist period. On these grounds he linked today’s political choices to both the fundamental nature of capital to externalize such costs and to the post-1970s rise of “plutocratic politics.” In reference to the latter, he argued that the politics of creating huge deficits (with arms development, military aggression, and tax cuts), has intentionally created the grounds on which to attack the social programs developed during the Fordist period. Quoting Warren Buffett’s claim that there is class warfare, and the rich are waging and winning it, Harvey placed much emphasis on the role of capitalists themselves in both creating the crisis and propagating politics that will continue to impoverish the vast majority of the world’s peoples in order to perpetuate profits. The capitalists are building arks, he said, while it would seems the rest will drown in the coming deluge.
Foley
Foley’s talk had three parts: first, he related the current crisis to Marx’s theories of crisis; second, he discussed the last 30-40 years of political economy and macroeconomic policy; third, he speculated about where we will go from here.
In the first part, Foley distinguished between crisis caused by falling rate of profit, which is about upward pressure on wages, and crisis caused by a rising rate of exploitation, which is associated with falling wages. Both, he pointed out, are problems of aggregate demand, which is the necessary counterpart to capitalist production. He identified four major periods of crisis in capitalism -- the 1890s, 1930s, 1970s, and 2007-08. The 1890s and 1970s, he argued, were crises of the falling rate of profit. Those in the 1930s and 2007-08 are crises of the rising rate of exploitation.
The second part of Foley’s presentation discussed how globalization and financialization worked to resolve the crisis of the 1970s. Globalization allowed firms to reduce costs not through advances in productivity, but by relocating production to areas in the world with reduced labor costs. This enabled huge surplus value creation, which in turn fed financialization. Two problems pervaded this system, however. The first was a problem of sufficient world aggregate demand; the second was the pressure on the financial system to transform money into investment. (In concrete terms these seem to be the stagnation/fall in the middle-class standard of living and the increasing complexity and speculative nature of financial instruments. Foley did not concretize them.)
In the last part of the talk, Foley raised three problems for moving forward. The first is the uneveness of the crisis and the problem of world aggregate demand. The second is the dilemma of what will happen with the dollar. As the major reserve currency the US cannot control its own exchange rate, which has hampered its ability to resolve the economic problems it faces. Secondly, floating exchange rates enable competitive devaluation of currencies, which is enabling some states, such as China, to maintain an artificially high share of world demand. The final problem Foley foresees is that of U.S. hegemony. In so far as this hegemony has kept internecine capitalist warfare at bay (and implicitly, kept the system working), he wonders if the U.S. can continue to do so. The appearance of the inevitable decline of the U.S. raises the question of whether the world economic system can operate without a hegemon, and whether a place like China, which again appears as the potential center of a future capitalist system, sufficiently understands the nature of the problems of the capitalist world system so to take on such a role.
Silver
Silver’s presentation provided a Braudelian long-duree (500 year) and Schumpeterian short-term (100 year) perspective on the 2007-2008 crisis. Silver presented capitalism as possessing a cyclical rhythm, in which a systemic cycle of accumulation comes into being, rises (going through a golden age), and peaks. Its fall is synchronic with the rise of the preconditions for the next systemic cycle of accumulation. The end of a particular cycle is marked not by a single crisis, but a period of crisis. On this model Silver hypothesized the 1970s as the beginning of the end of the current cycle of accumulation and the crisis of 2007-08 as a potential end-point. This would mean that a new systemic cycle of accumulation is starting, and Silver, like Harvey and Foley sees in China a potential new center of a cycle of accumulation. She was not prescriptive however.
Silver’s Schumpeterian perspective on patterns of crisis emphasized shifts in the cause of crisis and policy responses. She identified the four same moments of crisis as Foley, and noted a pattern of pendulum swings in both the cause and response:
1896: the exploitation of labor was too low from the point of view of capital and the response was the consolidation and centralization of (monopoly) capitalism
1930s: the exploitation of labor was too high from the point of view of capital and the response was the “Global New Deal”
1970s: the exploitation of labor was too low from the point of view of capital and the response was the redistribution of capital
2007-8: the exploitation of labor was too high from the point of view of capital, and we might assume a swing back to state intervention and assistance for labor, but Silver was not deterministic.
Siliver’s Braudelian perspective analyzed the dominant political form of cycles of accumulation. It began with the city-state of Genoa in the fifteenth century, moved through to the Dutch of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the British in the eighteenth and nineteenth and the ended with the US in the twentieth. Her analysis highlighted that the increasing size and complexity of the dominant political unit in a given cycle, moving from city state, to nation-state, to empire, to a potential “world state,” envisioned, but not achieved, by the US.
In conclusion she observed that to ever get beyond the continuous crises of capitalism the labor reducing and resource consuming tendencies of capital would need to be replaced with labor absorption and resource conservation. This was to say that reversion to the Keynesian model of the mid-twentieth century would not be the solution.
Wallerstein
Citing his multiple publications on the topic of capitalism and crisis, Wallerstein summarized the five premises which run through his work and concluded with speculation as to tactics that may move society beyond capitalism.
Premises:
“All systems have lives.” Systems have properties and relations that determine their normal functioning. This normal functioning runs in cyclical rhythms that are always moving outward from the original point until their reach the point of structural crisis. This is to the say that the normal functioning of any system eventually causes its end.
Endless accumulation drives the capitalist social system. This accumulation is driven by quasi-monopolies supported by states, which are both a necessary feature and self-liquidating. This frameworks firmly ties the fate of states with the fate of capitalism, meaning no state is wholly sovereign, and that favored economic zones are constantly slowly shifting as quasi-monopolies rise and fall. A hegemonic power always work to maximize the benefits of the system to its own economic interests, but “true hegemony” only lasts about 25 years, and is also self-liquifying.
Between 1945 and 1970 the greatest period of global economic expansion ever took place under the ascendency of US hegemony. Since 1970 the shift from production to finance has produced the greatest number of speculative bubbles and levels of indebtedness ever seen. Since 1970 US hegemony has had the “swiftest and most total” decline.
In the political sphere, the revolutions of 1968 marked the rejection of centrist liberalism, which splintered the left and gave rise to a “reinvigorated world right,” that has asserted itself more effectively than the left, and whose objective has been to reduce all the gains of the lower classes.
Chaos is the primary character of structural crisis. Wallerstein described chaos as constant and rapid fluctuations within the parameters of a system; a period in which uncertainty if the defining characteristics of all areas of society, state, and economy. Such uncertainty produces a subjectivity that demands protection, looks for scapegoats, tends towards extremism and thus produces gridlock.
In moving from an analysis of the nature of the crisis of capitalism to its overcoming, Wallerstein warned that in the short term we face only the ability to choose between the lesser of the evils. In the mid-term he argues the world can choose to organize itself either in a the “Spirit of Davos” (site of the meeting of the annual World Economic Forum)or the “Spirit of Puerto Alegre.” Both are potential modes of post-capitalist social organization. The former he argued is a spirit of hierarchy and exploitation; an iron-fist with a homogenizing vertical structure. The latter is a spirit of democracy and egalitarianism. To promote the “Spirit of Alegre” Wallerstein recommended the following tactics:
- intellectual discussion in an open spirit
- rejection of economic growth for a goal of decommodification
- global equalization of standards of living in such a way that emphasizes autonomy of peoples and communities
- an end to all foreign military bases
- an end to all social inequalities
The striking feature of all the presentations, a feature to which Moishe Postone, in his presentation, tried to bring attention, was the way that the presenters understood the categories capitalism and labor. Capitalism, for them, was merely ever renewed profit seeking and labor was merely an eternal physiological interaction with nature. As a consequence, none seemed to have an idea of what lay beyond capitalism other than the abscence of a market, private property, and profit. None also seemed to have a sense of what in capitalism was generating the capacity to overcome capitalism. This was pointed to, again, by Postone, but Harvey, the only one to respond, misunderstood. Postone noted that Harvey had presented a largely structural account of the movements of capital, but at key moments gave an agentive account of the actions of capitalists, without explaining the possibility of their agency and the relationship of their agency to the dynamic "structure" of capitalism. When the category of labor was actually address-- generally it was assumed-- it was done in a way that sought to preserve and deepen labor as a mediating force in post-capitalist life. Silver argued that in a post capitalist society we need to move from, to roughly paraphrase, a labor extracting economy to a labor absorbing economy, and she held of China as a place were this might in fact be occuring. From a Marxian perspective, this misses what is extracting labor and what is absorbing it-- both are a function of capital, not the former a function of vampiric capitalists and the latter of productive workers. What a post capitalist society as a labor absorbing society would mean was very unclear and how China, oft repeated in her talk, represented an alternative, beyond that it was a different geographic location with a different culture, never was made clear.
ReplyDeleteA final point from Postone's commentary worth bringing into this discussion was that populist anti-capitalism does not need to be of a left-wing character; it can be right wing, and in a moment of crisis, often is right wing.
In regards to a vision for what would count as ending capitalism I think we should take note of two things. First something Wallerstein said, and second something Harvey said.
ReplyDeleteFirst was the positive vision that Wallerstein gave. He outlined that the "Spirit of Porto Alegre" has a number of thematic priorities; a rejection of the necessity for growth, staunch upholding of local self-sufficiency, and a belief in a global scale based on “multiple interconnected autonomies.” I think that this position is Wallerstein's most important contribution to the conversation, not because it is particularly clear, but because it is very accurate in its diagnosis of the anti-capitalist currents in the a certain segment of the communities of "social-justice-people" who see themselves as a kind of global left. It draws from the successful practices and ideologies that have dominated many resistance movement in the global south (i.e. Zapatismo, Abahlali baseMjondolo (the shack-dwellers movement), and North American Anarchist traditions (i.e. the core milieu for Seattle 1999). My impression is that it’s been articulated in lots of different ways but most clearly by the Social Forum organizers, to a certain extent Hardt and Negri's work, and veterans of the “summit hoping” days following 1999, and other people I don’t know about. If we take popularity and being "common sense" as indicators of some level of historical appropriateness, or even effectiveness, then I think we have to take this kind of stuff seriously.
That being said, I think there are number of tasks to be done to accomplish this. First we have to critically examine the material roots of these ideas, both in their relations to Neoliberalism and as inheritors of older Left discourses. We can't forget that Subcomandante Marcos (lead theoretician of the Zapatistas) comes out of Maoist student organizations.
The next task is taking seriously their historical effectiveness in successfully wining demands and organizing small scale social relations whose logics appear to differ from normal capitalist logics (this also includes to what extent they actually do).
Another important task is simply to determine how one might talk about this "spirit" in a unified way. The Social Forum is hardly a unified body with a "program," and a lot of the focus on autonomy, horizontality place a certain stigma (or at least hesitancy) around organization. This also means evaluating which practices that subscribe to this vision count as radical, since the social forum draws everyone from fair-trade activists to Maoists.
The last task is determining the relation between this vision and the historical possibilities that capitalism in general and at this moment opens up. Here I personally think there's something to be said from a Postonian perspective about whether it draws from a critique of the sphere of circulation or production. It strikes me that the concern for democratic decision making and egalitarianism in resource distribution are concerned more with the failures of the market to provide for everyone, and less concerned with the nature of the production of those resources. Here Frank is completely right in highlighting the presenters implicit perspectives on human labor.
This comment is going to have to be in several parts. Sorry.
ReplyDeleteIn regards to a vision for what would count as ending capitalism I think we should take note of two things. First something Wallerstein said, and second something Harvey said.
First was the positive vision that Wallerstein gave. He outlined that the "Spirit of Porto Alegre" has a number of thematic priorities; a rejection of the necessity for growth, staunch upholding of local self-sufficiency, and a belief in a global scale based on “multiple interconnected autonomies.” I think that this position is Wallerstein's most important contribution to the conversation, not because it is particularly clear, but because it is very accurate in its diagnosis of the anti-capitalist currents in the a certain segment of the communities of "social-justice-people" who see themselves as a kind of global left. It draws from the successful practices and ideologies that have dominated many resistance movement in the global south (i.e. Zapatismo, Abahlali baseMjondolo (the shack-dwellers movement), and North American Anarchist traditions (i.e. the core milieu for Seattle 1999). My impression is that it’s been articulated in lots of different ways but most clearly by the Social Forum organizers, to a certain extent Hardt and Negri's work, and veterans of the “summit hoping” days following 1999, and other people I don’t know about. If we take popularity and being "common sense" as indicators of some level of historical appropriateness, or even effectiveness, then I think we have to take this kind of stuff seriously.
That being said, I think there are number of tasks to be done to accomplish this. First we have to critically examine the material roots of these ideas, both in their relations to Neoliberalism and as inheritors of older Left discourses. We can't forget that Subcomandante Marcos (lead theoretician of the Zapatistas) comes out of Maoist student organizations.
ReplyDeleteThe next task is taking seriously their historical effectiveness in successfully wining demands and organizing small scale social relations whose logics appear to differ from normal capitalist logics (this also includes to what extent they actually do).
Another important task is simply to determine how one might talk about this "spirit" in a unified way. The Social Forum is hardly a unified body with a "program," and a lot of the focus on autonomy, horizontality place a certain stigma (or at least hesitancy) around organization. This also means evaluating which practices that subscribe to this vision count as radical, since the social forum draws everyone from fair-trade activists to Maoists.
The last task is determining the relation between this vision and the historical possibilities that capitalism in general and at this moment opens up. Here I personally think there's something to be said from a Postonian perspective about whether it draws from a critique of the sphere of circulation or production. It strikes me that the concern for democratic decision making and egalitarianism in resource distribution are concerned more with the failures of the market to provide for everyone, and less concerned with the nature of the production of those resources. Here Frank is completely right in highlighting the presenters implicit perspectives on human labor.
The second point I wanted to make was about Harvey. Harvey responded to one question someone had about the growing militant resistances in Europe and elsewhere since the crisis. Harvey's response was very smart I felt. He said basically that spontaneous action in response to immediate economic concerns is to be expected, but that what we've seen lacks any collective vision about what to do next or how to move beyond capitalism.
ReplyDeleteI find this interesting for two reasons. First because I think it's a very compelling reading of the situation and what falls flat about these movement even if their militancy can be spectacular. Though I wonder to what extent Harvey's perspective implies an old-left desire to end this incoherence through the unification of these struggles in a revolutionary party.
The second reason why I find this interesting is the fact that the instances of mass struggle being sighted do not seem to draw on the same energy as the "spirit of Alegre." None of the language of "another world is possible" or "build the alternative" have infiltrated these large scale battle grounds around economic demands. Even the student struggles have kept their demands and rhetoric clear of these kinds of radical slogans, even while getting more and more militant. It strikes me that we need to think seriously about how this discourse of the spirit of Alegre relates both to scale and struggle. Does it have the potential to point beyond capitalism on the global scale? Can "build the alternative" ever be a central motto of trade unions? This is not about their relation to “the working-class” as viable revolutionary ideologies, but instead their ability to be essential roots for transformative struggle, regardless of the social actor. Are these visions merely theoretical, or can they actually be the foundation for a revolutionary practice?