25 January 2012

The insignificance of billions of people

In a previous post, I argued that outside the three main value complexes of the global economy – Europe, North America, and East Asia – other parts of the world were essentially irrelevant to the immediate prospects for the expansion (or contraction) of global capital, except for what might happen in the commodities markets. The argument was both empirical – these two-thirds of the global population produce only one-fourth of global output – and conceptual: because the economic activity in these regions is small-scale, fragmented, and technologically backward, they are poor platforms for the accumulation of capital.

This was something of a provocation, because one of the noteworthy features of the neoliberal age has been a fascination among many critical and even many uncritical intellectuals with the peripheries and margins of capitalist society. It has often been taken as a progressive political act simply to pay attention to those parts of the world that are economically, and so politically and culturally, insignificant. Simply recognizing that these societies are insignificant is often considered unacceptable.

But their insignificance does not follow from racist or colonialist prejudice (though the existence of these phenomena is certainly bound up with it). Rather, it is a result of their marginality to the central processes of modern global society, above all the production and circulation of value. The inattention of the global media, the lack of representation in transnational organizations, the absence of global influence for their cultural products: these are all reflections of the real insignificance of peripheral countries as measured by the necessarily hegemonic standards of capitalist society.

Far from endorsing prejudice, this recognition contains a very strong critical potential: how can a form of social life that renders billions of people insignificant be considered even minimally desirable? To deny the insignificance of the periphery, then, is to address the problem only in thought, leaving the real horrors of this condition unchallenged.

Another problem with the affirmation of the periphery is that it fails to grasp how the periphery, though it seems to stand outside of or even against modern global society, is actually constituted within and as an effect of that society. The dependencia and world system theories popular in the 1970s were a crude attempt to grapple with this issue, but with the rise of East Asia as an important value complex over the last thirty years, the problems with these approaches became more and more glaring. While there was some good critical work on these issues related to the so-called antiglobalization movement of the late 1990s, it always remained rooted in an unsophisticated class struggle framework, which could only see the privileged and the exploited. It was never really capable of grasping global society as a totality that generates both sides of that dichotomy.

None of this is to say that analyzing peripheral societies on their own terms is pointless. But to fully understand what’s going on in these countries also requires a wider perspective that can situate them in the global processes of domination that shape life there – processes of domination that are both direct and immediately visible (“imperialism”) and abstract. Even recognizing this abstract dimension is very difficult, and it is generally grasped only through its reified (directly visible) forms such as “cultural imperialism”, nationalism, multinational corporations’ penetration of “domestic” markets, or the opposition between “traditional” and “modern” or “Western”. The deeper social forms that produce these directly visible manifestations – and set them crashing against each other – go unrecognized, leading to all kinds of counterproductive political responses.

If we wanted to end the insignificance of the periphery not simply in thought but in reality, what would we have to do? One route would be to end capitalist modernity, the form of life that itself establishes the criteria of significance. A worthy goal, but not realistic in the near-term.

The other possibility would have these societies follow the path blazed by the handful of successful late developers: constituting the people of the periphery as modern subjects – workers, consumers, citizens – by turning their countries into sites for the accumulation of capital. In its simplest form (though rarely very simple in practice!), this means industrialization.

Global neoliberalism is not capable of achieving such a transformation; it has, instead, forced most of these people to collect the scraps left by the rich world, to bargain over the sale of raw materials with some of the most powerful organizations in the world, or to scratch out a living in semi-subsistence agriculture, petty trade, or crime. The question is, on what terms will these societies be integrated into the world that succeeds neoliberalism? And will this world facilitate or frustrate the production and circulation of value in the periphery? This is a profoundly important question both for the future of capitalism and for the prospects of an alternative to it.

19 comments:

  1. Two quick questions:
    How is the analysis offered here different from that of, lets say, Jeff Sachs? (Beyond the fact of Sachs' technical knowledge.) http://books.google.com/books?id=bfYdpG7IQaQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=jeffrey+sachs&hl=en#v=onepage&q=jeffrey%20sachs&f=false

    What is output? How is it measured? Is it a tally of use values? What is its relationship to value? Can one move from the endpoint categories of bourgeois economics, such as GDP, to Marxian categories like value or capital?

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  2. To look past Deckard's sarcasm for a second, I can't answer the first question only Walker can. It is essentially what differentiates his account from left liberal political economy? On the final part of the second question, opinions vary and I am curious about Walker's opinion. My understanding is that Robert Brenner, Andrew Kliman (he may pop up in a few months and correct me) and to a certain extent David Harvey believe you can. Moishe Postone has argued-- I am not sure this is published, but certainly in person-- that such a move is impossible. He contends that categories like GDP or profit margins work at a very different logical level than capital (in the marxian sense) and value. Furthermore, he argues that one cannot work backwards from rates or profit to rates of surplus value. Walker is making a claim here in the first paragraph of this post and I would be interested in seeing him flesh out that argument.

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  3. Sorry if my comment came off as unpleasant, it wasn't intended that way. These are huge questions, so I'm interested in what Walker has to say, and interested in what you have to say as well. I think our discussions here could be enhanced by a bit more good humor.

    I wish I could contribute toward this point, but for now I'll have to follow the discussion and hopefully increase my understanding that way.

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  4. I haven't read the Sachs book, so I'll have to get back to you on that. But you seem very taken with this polemical accusation that I'm left liberal or Keynesian (except not as knowledgeable, and sometimes Stalinist), which I've already briefly responded to. Certainly there's some overlap since Keynesianism does grasp certain features of contemporary capitalism, though often in a one-sided or transhistorical way. But it should already be clear that I have a very different approach, given my use of the regime of accumulation framework and the (admittedly still limited) attempt to integrate historically generated subjectivity into economic phenomena. Keep in mind that, given the scope of the project and the fact that I'm almost alone in pursuing it, many aspects of this approach are still undeveloped. If there's a particular issue you'd like to raise, I can give you a more precise response.

    The second question really is essential. I've given it some thought but I don't think I've really resolved any of the key issues. It seems clear to me that we must be able to move from value and capital to gdp and profits - if theory can't explain empirical reality, it's not really worth anything. But the complexity of the intervening determinations makes it extremely difficult to sort out. In any case, we're not going to make much progress in the comments section of a post directed at other matters. At some point I'll come around to this problem, but it's likely to be awhile. If you want to write a full post laying out the issues, that might be a good entry point for exploring what remains a key difficulty.

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  5. To deal with the second issue first, I am at a loss about how to pursue my concern further. Essentially, I am encouraging you to be more rigorous and critical with the categories you are _already_using_, such as "neoliberalism" or "output." Each time I try to push you on this, on working in a more critical mode, your response is that that is a separate topic. To take the post above, for example: you use the term "output" but do not problematize what is being put out. Is that a measure of value? a quanitity of use values? some (unknown) quantity of both? How does the organic composition of capital affect this "output"? These are not external issues to your analysis.

    "Regimes of accumulation" is an argument about historical periodization and is not necessarily a critical category. Harvey tries to appropriate it from liberals like Block who tried to appropriate it from romantics like Polanyi. However, it can also be used in an affirmative fashion-- and trying to promote a particular next regime strikes me as affirmative.

    Stalinism and Keynesianism are not so different in a political economic sense. The most important difference is subjective. The Keynsian technocrat understands him/her self for what he/she is, a technocrat. The Stalinist technocrat understands him/herself as a revolutionary, but ultimately is a technocrat. (This is part of the reason why the category of "Fordism" has purchase.)

    I think the order of operations is important. One can move from value and capital through many mediations to categories like GDP, but I find Postone's argument convincing that one cannot go in the opposite direction. (In your post you move from output to value and in your comment you discuss moving from value to GDP.)

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  6. To deal with the second issue first, I am at a loss about how to pursue my concern further. Essentially, I am encouraging you to be more rigorous and critical with the categories you are _already_using_, such as "neoliberalism" or "output." Each time I try to push you on this, on working in a more critical mode, your response is that that is a separate topic. To take the post above, for example: you use the term "output" but do not problematize what is being put out. Is that a measure of value? a quanitity of use values? some (unknown) quantity of both? How does the organic composition of capital affect this "output"? These are not external issues to your analysis.

    "Regimes of accumulation" is an argument about historical periodization and is not necessarily a critical category. Harvey tries to appropriate it from liberals like Block who tried to appropriate it from romantics like Polanyi. However, it can also be used in an affirmative fashion-- and trying to promote a particular next regime strikes me as affirmative.

    Stalinism and Keynesianism are not so different in a political economic sense. The most important difference is subjective. The Keynsian technocrat understands him/her self for what he/she is, a technocrat. The Stalinist technocrat understands him/herself as a revolutionary, but ultimately is a technocrat. (This is part of the reason why the category of "Fordism" has purchase.)

    I think the order of operations is important. One can move from value and capital through many mediations to categories like GDP, but I find Postone's argument convincing that one cannot go in the opposite direction. (In your post you move from output to value and in your comment you discuss moving from value to GDP.)

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  7. "It has often been taken as a progressive political act simply to pay attention to those parts of the world that are economically, and so politically and culturally, insignificant."

    Leaving the rest aside, this strikes me as a fairly crude reductionism. Political and cultural significance is not reducible to economic significance, much less to gross output. The Arabian Peninsula is not in the view of your analysis, and yet because the countries there play a crucial role in global oil production, their significance politically and economically is tremendous.

    Islamism is predominantly significant in a region you have marked as insignificant, and yet it is has had a rather potent effect on global politics.

    It also seems that the tendency of your analysis is to focus on countries and regions at the expense of global dynamics. I think it is impossible to understand the rise of reactionary populist politico-religious tendencies globally in this manner.

    You call world systems theory crude, and yet it evinces a far deeper sense of the unity of capital at a global level.

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  8. Two points strike me in relation to the relationship of value and price, that is, whether or not you can understand price in value terms.

    The first is expressed by Postone quite clearly:
    "…[I]n volume 1…[Marx] maintains that surplus value is created by labor alone; in volume 3, however, he shows how the specificity of value as a form of wealth and the specificity of the labor that constitutes it, are veiled. Marx begins by noting that the profit accruing to an individual capital unit is not, in fact, identical to the surplus value generated by the
    labor it commands. He attempts to explain this by arguing that surplus value is a category of the social whole which is distributed among individual capitals according to their relative shares of the total social capital. This means that on the level of immediate experience, however, the profit of an individual capital unit indeed is a function not of labor alone (“variable capital”) but of total capital forwarded…hence, on an
    immediately empirical level, the unique features of value as a form of wealth and social mediation constituted by labor alone are hidden." Postone, TLSD,

    The second aspect of the problem follows from the sheer complexity and indirectness of the mediation through which value appears as price. Share of total capital is only one, if clear and very important, moment. There is also the inability in capitalist society to clearly differentiate between labor power which is "productive" and that which is "unproductive". There is the problem that everything has a price, even if it is not a value (unique art works, for example). There is also the impossibility of reckoning the amount of unwaged labor which goes into total reproduction. The changing value of currencies enters into this as well.

    Overall, attempting to apply value and price as empirical categories misses the difference in their status in Marx's work, between the value-form as social essence and price as a form of appearance or mode of existence of value (never mind that what might be a mode of existence or appearance in relation to an earlier form may become a social-form in relation to its own form of appearance, as with value-form\money-form\price.)

    It is a fundamental misapprehension to think that Marx's critical categories are meant to provide a consistent rendering of an inconsistent, inverted social form. This would imply that Marx acted just like every other political economist, rather than as a critic of political economy which tries to eradicate in thought the actual contradictions.

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  9. I think Walker brings up an important point when he reminds us that "the periphery, though it seems to stand outside of or even against modern global society, is actually constituted within and as an effect of that society," and I think there may be something to his effort to link this peripheral status to the ways in which scholars pay attention to such parts of the world. It is in such parts that concepts of culture and religion are deployed as means of explanation, which works to reify them as universal, ahistorical categories of analysis without considering the relationship between these categories and global capital as well as their content and capital. As the post points out, it would seem that in so far as areas of the world appear to stand "outside" of capital in terms of capital accumulation, the attempt is not commonly made to understand them in relation to capital (except as an alterity). But I can think of some very interesting work by current anthropologists and anthropology grad students that is precisely showing how at the level of social forms "capital" can be located within "cultures" that otherwise appear to be governed by "traditional" practices and logics. (In other words, this work moves contra the assumption that because these places don't look like the developed world, therefore a purely "local" framework of analysis must be employed.) Such efforts, when successful, raise the question of the posited marginality. If the construction of death houses in Zululand is being mediated by alienation (in the strict Marxian sense of the manuscripts) then isn't the relationship to capital much deeper than output and capital accumulation? I am not so much questioning the observations made about output, but wondering if that is an adequate yard-stick by which to measure imbrication with global capital. As noted in the beginning of this comment, the post does acknowledge that what seems to be outside capital is itself produced by capital. But to take this further than say, world systems theory, which itself was biased towards political-economic definitions of center and periphery, if we pay attention to social forms, rather than the production of use-values (output) and their sale (GDP: market value of all final goods and services produced within a country in a given period), which as categories of circulation are epiphenomenal, I am not so sure these societies are insignificant. Nor do I take the post to be saying they are. But whereas the post finds their significance in the critique of the economics of capitalism they enable and the challenge they present to a new regime of accumulation, I see another kind of significance in the possibility for understanding the dynamic of capital vis-a-vis social and political life, where its structuring forms of practice may be centrally at play, but perhaps not in ways that are immediately visible.

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  10. Let me first say that I really appreciate all the responses here. You have raised significant gaps and difficulties in what is, hopefully you all understand, only an initial step in moving this blog beyond the limits of examining the crisis within the US and Europe.

    What I would like to see more of is your own contributions to trying to theorize these issues. Given the limits of my own time and expertise, we simply will not have a very satisfactory discussion here if I'm the only one writing posts. Add to that the less than comradely responses that have sometimes followed from my engagement with what is, in essence, an elaborate distraction from the best interests of my career, and my own enthusiasm for the project has taken a real beating.

    There are at least three, and probably more, extremely interesting full posts in embryonic form in the comments above. It would take a lot of pressure off of me, and more importantly significantly advance the goals of the project we're pursuing here, if you could all develop them and post them.

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  11. I think my piece is almost done. I have been working on it since we talked, but because I am approaching the matter in a rather different way, I am trying to give it a bit more polish.

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  12. Great, Chris, I look forward to reading it. I would like to respond to your point about the criteria of significance. One could, of course, argue that Saudi Arabia's political and cultural significance is precisely a result of its economic importance as the central oil state of the world, which guarantees an audience from the great powers and gives it the resources to spread its brand of Islamism. That wouldn't be wrong, but it would be one-sided and a kind of vulgar economic reductionism. So I admit that the line you quoted is much too simple, and not only that, the categories I invoked - the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of global life - don't do a good job grasping the social forms that AB did a much better job discussing above.

    But I do think there has been something specifically about neoliberal conditions (this phenomenon was greatly suppressed under Fordism) that has made the statement basically accurate for very large parts of the world. Economic success at the level of the nation - as at the level of the individual - in general came to signify merit and to demand emulation. This was not universal, but it was a hegemonic condition. Explaining why this happened would require going far beyond the very preliminary statement I made above. But it's something we should think about, and we should also be paying attention to whether it's changing.

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  13. Hi all. Long time reader, first time commenter.

    Concerning Islamism--in what sense might it count as significant? I'm not sure I'm even familiar with a use of the term "Islamism" according to which I'd say it names a unified phenomenon.

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  14. @Callicles
    Islamism is a somewhat dubious word. I could as well have said "Political Islam", but I believe two points are at issue.

    The first is that a significant part of the right-wing populism which has spread globally has a specifically religious character. The "Political Christianity" if you will is obviously a significant feature in the U.S., but also in Latin America.

    Secondly, these right-wing Populisms draw heavily on the religion of choice, but often with all manner of local, sectarian, etc. particularities. So there is obviously no unified expression of these Populisms such that we would have to distinguish carefully in discussing any particular instance, but they do share similar features as a significant kind of communitarian politics that is both populist and openly reactionary (there are also obviously non-religious versions of this as well.)

    @Walker
    Some of this discussion is difficult because I don't accept the validity of Fordism or Neoliberalism as "regimes of accumulation" because I don't really agree with the whole notion of "regimes of accumulation" coming out of the Regulation School, Harvey, etc. I can at best use Neoliberalism as a short-hand for the present, and even then I find it awkward. After all, I don't think it refers to a cycle, much less a regime with all of the unitary qualities that implies, of accumulation, so much as an extended period of devalorization marked by the attempt to re-start accumulation without incurring the kind of global bust and crises of the period from 1917-45.

    @AB
    For my part, I've been working under the assumption that we all understood that we live in a capitalist totality and that the dominant social relation in almost every square inch of the world is the capital-labor relation.

    My goal at least is not to deploy "concepts of culture and religion... as means of explanation, which works to reify them as universal, ahistorical categories of analysis without considering the relationship between these categories and global capital as well as their content and capital." I am far more concerned that the concepts of capital, economy, politics, etc. are being reified (I take this as Frank's point as well, he may correct me if I am wrong.)

    It's a bit like talking about class.

    Actually, it is talking about class, as the capital-labor relation is the class relation as such. But I don't think it is something to which we belong like being sorted into the right box. It's not about a location in the means of production or between "center and periphery".

    This, like the question of "regimes of accumulation", is a disagreement over the very meaning of the categories being used, and as long as we skirt that we will have problems talking because we won't be cognizant of the roots and we will just appear to talk past each other.

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  15. Not to ignore the very interesting lines of thought in this comment thread, but I want to reply more directly to the post.

    I think the political conclusion of the "insignificance" of the economic periphery is off. The idea that the lack of technological development and integration into capitalist subjectivity makes the peripheral world less revolutionary seems very off base and contrary to empirical reality. I'm thinking here of the enormous energy third world liberation struggles demonstrated in the Fordist period. Granted these movements were largely lead by an authoritarian, inhumane Stalinism I think work like James Scott's suggests this was not essential. The fact that peripheral peoples are further outside capitalist hegemony both in their consciousness and material reality (i.e. the existence of pre-capitalist economic forms) makes them more capable of rejecting the essential forms of capitalism. Their rejection is from the standpoint of resistance to integration into hegemony, regardless of the fact that they are not "outside" of capitalism. It seems to me to be an open question whether a resistance to capitalism from this perspective can articulate the emancipatory potential of capitalism, but the massive amount of militant energy and material attachment to alternative forms of life make me not want to close the door on that possibility.

    Additionally we shouldn't forget that most of the movements revolutionaries in the US and Europe count among the most radical where just such resistances to further integration. Specifically I'm thinking of E.P. Thompson and David Montgomery's excellent book The Fall of the House of Labor and it's account of the Homestead Strike.

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  16. I don't however think the argument that the periphery are "insignificant" from the point of capital is wrong or wrong-headed.

    Rather I think that it means resistance in the periphery alone cannot lead to emancipation. Their insignificance means that capital can afford to lose them and can afford mass emiseration and even large scale economic disruptions there. As such alone these movements can only win their further isolation from the progressive potentials of capitalist development.

    This means that the revolutionary potential of the periphery can only come with a correspondingly revolutionary condition in the core. Given my skepticism American and European revolutionary movements today it doesn't look promising.

    This however does not mean that we should demand or condone the complete subsumption of these countries to the logics of capital accumulation. The program I've been trying to outline is that we push for a regime of accumulation that is more conducive to emancipatory struggle than we're at now. This certainly wouldn't do it.

    Instead I think we need to listen for (notice I didn't say figure out), and think through ways that the material attachments to alternative forms of production and consciousness could be part of and developed under a regime of accumulation that increased freedom and living conditions. I'm thinking here both of the cooperatives in Argentina and various self-management and collective ownership styles being developed in African farming communities (though I can't remember where I was reading about that). These things might able to be funded by Sachs style development projects, but sometimes they're not.

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  17. "Rather I think that it means resistance in the periphery alone cannot lead to emancipation. Their insignificance means that capital can afford to lose them and can afford mass emiseration and even large scale economic disruptions there. As such alone these movements can only win their further isolation from the progressive potentials of capitalist development."

    I am somewhat curious who some of these "responses" are "responding" to.

    The first italicized phrase challenges an idea I have not heard anyone raise.

    The second italicized phrase strikes me as something close to what I have already said, and which I already find resonance with in the earlier work of Robert Kurz, for example (see "A World Without Money" and "Marx 2000" at the EXIT! web site.)

    Did I miss something in someone else's comments?

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  18. @Chris

    That second comment of mine was just clarifying what I said in my first comment. I basically agree with Walker's analysis of the economic condition of the periphery so I didn't want my first comments to seem like I was endorsing a form of Third Worldism and saying it's actually THE place for the revolution.

    As far as the second part you italicized I think Walker said as much in his post as well. If you mentioned it too sorry I didn't name check that. With long comment threads like this I usually get lost at some point.

    Sorry for any confusion!

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