Market Socialism Continued

A few weeks ago I posted Seth Ackerman's article about market socialism. There were a few responses to Ackerman's article posted to the Jacobin blog, but none that I felt addressed the problems in his original proposal for a market socialism that retained the market as a way to correctly determine prices (particularly for capital) yet completely socialized profits. As my comrade Paul insightfully noted, Ackerman's proposal is grounded in the native tendency of the capitalist system toward "the decoupling of economic ownership and management."

But while Ackerman's market socialism may take its basic plausibility from the immanent contradictions of capitalist society, as Walker argued, the real grounds upon which the realization of this market socialism might be realized politically were never specified, leaving it as little more than an academic exercise. Perhaps more fundamentally, the question remains as to whether Ackerman's proposal earns the name of 'socialism' by fundamentally overturning the basic features of capitalism, or whether it perpetuates these features, the most important of which is wage labor. In other words, this potential form of market socialism envisions a way to reinvest society's surplus more equitably, but leaves intact the basic form of the production of that surplus.

Facing the Killer: On Murderous, Suicidal Rampages in the U.S.

Sandy Hook. Columbine. Aurora. Tucson. Blacksburg. Fort Hood. The names of these places ring out in popular memory as the sites of seemingly random, heinous atrocities that seem to occur with increasing frequency these days. Gun-related violence and death is a hot-button issue at the moment, and for good reason, as the U.S. leads the advanced capitalist world in a trait that is singular in its stupidity: allowing “the market” to work its magic by disseminating, unchecked, huge numbers of guns to an extremely unequal, class-riven and deeply racist society that also worships violence, murder, and mayhem in its popular culture. In this context advocating gun control is the only sane thing to do. However, it would be a mistake to say that the U.S. just has a “gun problem,” because the U.S. has a murderous, rampaging killing-spree problem.

Let me be clear. Every day dozens of people are killed in this country, mostly minority youth and mostly in the poorest and most economically devastated neighborhoods of the major cities. This chronic social crisis only appears in the establishment press as statistics, or else as an ongoing, existential situation that can only be managed but not really addressed. Its root causes and conditions are clear and have been extensively documented. But this ongoing disaster is not the topic of this post, which is another horrendous phenomenon in which the U.S. also leads liberal societies: the individual, suicidal, heavily-armed murder frenzy that seems to be happening about once a month now, on average.

The cosmopolitan imagination of neoliberalism

Regression to the nation form
Part 1 of 2
I’m glad that Paul raised the dangerous new nationalist energies starting to build in East Asia. Last year I started to lay out a historical account of the progressive potential that neoliberalism opened up to overcome the nation form, and the alarming threat to that potential posed by populist attacks on neoliberalism. I still need to come back to that general account; here I will begin to explore the growing tensions within countries that have produced the rise of nationalist politics.

Eyes on East Asia

In A.D. 2013 war was beginning. Well, not exactly, or at least not yet. But things may be creeping in that direction. Amidst all the brainless yammering about the so-called “fiscal cliff,” the hoopla of the Presidential inauguration, the emergence and bloody resolution of the Algerian hostage crisis, and French neo-colonial adventures in North Africa, the escalating geopolitical tension in Southeast Asia has receded into the background of the news cycle. That will probably change in due time, though. With old, nationalist hatreds flaring up and a global economic outlook that is anything but rosy, there is reason to believe that the situation may soon reach a boiling point. In the succinct words of China's own, inimitable Global Times, “Peace Will Be a Miracle if Provocation Lasts.”

Why Obama is so disappointing

Krugman’s column today patiently explains to the skeptics on the left that Obama’s first term was actually (invoking Joe Biden) “a big fucking deal”. But Krugman only betrays the fundamentally static conception of the world that lurks behind his analysis. (This is also the problem with his critique of Stiglitz’s argument for the role of inequality in continuing economic stagnation, and the source of his failure to connect the dots between capital’s growing share of income at labor’s expense and the dysfunctions in the economy, as well as for his far too sanguine view on the prospects of a near-term return to economic health.)

For Krugman, the baseline “normal” for our society is a growing neoliberal economy. When things go wrong, it’s because of policy mistakes: the failure of the Fed to reign in the real estate bubble in the mid-oughts, inadequate regulation of finance, not enough stimulus to put things back on the right track after the crash of 2008. There’s a sort of natural equilibrium of the economy that’s just waiting to be brought into being by the right kind of macroeconomic management. Other realms of society, like cultural trends and popular ideologies, are unrelated to the neoliberal economy, whether functioning normally or not — like any mainstream economist, subjectivity lies beyond the scope of Krugman’s models.

From this assumption, Obama’s first term has been a pretty big deal. Health reform, which had been impossible for decades, was passed. Tax changes will reduce the incomes of the top one percent of earners by 6 percent, and 9 percent for the top one-tenth of the top one percent. A reregulation of the financial industry inconceivable less than a decade ago is now being implemented. To Krugman’s list we could add the consolidation of acceptance for gay rights, the end of the war in Iraq, the successful avoidance of a complete collapse in 2008-2009.

Scuffle in the market

There is a debate about market socialism happening on the Jacobin site. It began with Seth Ackerman’s article that briefly lays out the evolution of market socialism in the Eastern Bloc countries, considers the success of central planning in setting prices, and ends by endorsing a socialized capital market. John Quiggin replied to Ackerman by addressing some of the limitations of Ackerman’s proposal, particularly in regard to the feasibility of such ideas in the current political climate. This isn’t meant to be an adequate summary of the ideas, so please read them for yourself!

It’s very heartening that a discussion like this is happening at all. The neoliberal era has been plagued by an intellectual atmosphere that was ably characterized by Margaret Thatcher in her slogan “there is no alternative.” But I think that there are also important problems in how both Ackerman and Quiggin have approached the question of a socialist economy. Rather than provide an in depth review of these articles, I’d like to present this as an opportunity for discussion. To get things going, I’ll start with a few observations:

• Ackerman places little weight on defining capitalism, simply starting “from the common socialist assumption that capitalism’s central defects arise from the conflict between the pursuit of private profit and the satisfaction of human needs.” But it would be just as relevant, arguably far more so, to start from the assumption that the central contradiction of capitalism is between ever increasing productivity on one hand and the continuing necessity of human labor, on the other. What are the implications of Ackerman’s assumption?
• Quiggin’s reply is helpful in that he raises the current political context as a necessary factor in evaluating what kind of society we can and should be fighting to create. But despite his sensitivity to political issues, Quiggin argues for reforms that hardly seem radical, and may actually be reactionary. Breaking up the big banks, for example, would merely substitute of the tyranny of the market for that of Big Finance, making the industry harder to regulate and forestalling the use of finance for badly needed investment to mitigate environmental destruction and encourage development in poor countries. However, it is worth mentioning that Quiggin has also presented much more interesting ideas elsewhere.
• To what extent is the debate that we need to be having economic, and to what extent should it be critical of the categories in which economics as a discipline grasp the world? It seems to me that Ackerman and Quiggan for the most part take the meanings of these terms, such as profit, to be self evident, even if they find the operation of profit to have some negative outcomes. And how can we bring such a critical perspective to bear on a practical left politics?
• It’s interesting that both authors feel the need to raise participatory economics and then to quickly dismiss it as a desirable economic system with little elaboration. Whether or not they are correct, it might be enlightening to have a fuller account of its merits and flaws.

With those points raised, please feel free to weigh in with your thoughts.

Labor Roundup: The Strike in an Age of Austerity, part I

Permanent Crisis has featured some excellent discussion on the relations between concrete social mobilizations and the potential for the development of radical or critical forms of consciousness (e.g., here and here). This post is an initial contribution to that line of analysis, and takes as its object the evolving nature of the strike both as a social phenomenon and as a specific tactic. I focus here mainly on the recent return of old-school strike tactics and union militancy; future posts will first address the role of the strike in the radicalization of existing unions (e.g., CORE and the Chicago Teachers Union), and then the strange things that happened under the aegis of the “general strike” during the Occupy mobilizations (see here).

As has been extensively documented on this blog and elsewhere, the massive financial collapse that hit the core of the capitalist global economy in the autumn of 2008 kicked off what could turn out to be the terminal crisis of neoliberalism. The intervening four years between then and now has seen the gradual onset of a deep recession of global scope, forcing people all over the world to endure prolonged unemployment, slashed wages, the scaling back or elimination of vital public services, and, in the United States, the renewal of a deeply reactionary, nationally coordinated program to destroy the last ramparts of organized labor through an attack on public employees. Thus far, all the major political parties of the European Union, as well as the Republican and Democratic parties in the U.S., have marched in lockstep in their support for and imposition of these draconian economic measures, which they see as necessary for propping up an economic system that is clearly failing. The broad bipartisan support for these programs across the board, along with a still relatively scarce supply of credit – the main vehicle of economic growth under neoliberalism – suggests that the “austerity state” is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

Casting off the supply chains

On November 24 more than one hundred people were burned alive in the Tazreen garment factory fire in Bangladesh. This was not a tragedy but a crime. The factory did not meet safety standards, and there are reports that managers ordered workers to return to work when alarms were first heard so as not to lose money. It is known that the factory was producing clothing for Walmart and that Walmart had shortly before blocked a move to improve safety in Bangladeshi factories on the grounds of cost. Meanwhile the factory owners have offered compensation to the families of the killed workers at $1,230. Bangladeshi workers have responded with rallies and demands for improvements in safety and compensation in the industry.

Those responsible will of course deny that this is a crime. The factory owners have invoked the strictures of global competition and a lack of state support to justify their inability to maintain a safe workplace. Walmart has distanced itself from the factory, which was merely an outlier with poor management. They claim that a supplier was sending work there against the company’s directions, despite the fact that Walmart’s extensive knowledge, coordination, and influence over its global supply system is well known.

These positions are united in claiming that the fire was a tragedy after all, the result of personal irresponsibility or ‘bad apple’ factory owners who don’t live up to otherwise high standards for production. In doing so, they deny or obscure the fact that the global production system is just that, a unified system that has already embraced all workers and consumers into a semi-rational whole designed to create growth. It seems obvious that this is so, that for hundreds of years the fortunes of workers have been tied to the fluctuations of global markets whose effects national governments could only moderate but could never control. But it is also true that this global system embraces not just the factories operating within legal requirements but all of the various ways in which labor is sweated and money is turned into profit rather than investments in safety. It is a system that in the course of its normal functioning courts the mass death of workers and assigns a dollar figure to their lives.

So how has the movement against Walmart in the US reacted to the factory fire in Bangladesh? This question has a profound importance not only for the direction of labor struggles across the globe, but also our collective capacity to establish standards of acceptable ways for humans to live and work. The situation is ambiguous, with both progressive and regressive possibilities.

The Great Depression from crash to false recovery and on to accelerating disaster

A brief review of the early stages of the Depression in the United States—from the Crash of 1929 to the false recovery of early 1930 to the inadequacies of President Hoover in the face of a resurgent, uncontrollable crisis—will provide the foundations for posts in coming weeks.

Everyone knows that the Great Depression started with the Black Tuesday stock market crash in New York, 1929 October 29. Yet only six months later, President Hoover gave a speech in which he said, “I am convinced we have passed the worst and with continued effort we shall rapidly recover.” Hoover was not alone in this judgment: most commentators at the time agreed that recovery was well underway in the spring of 1930. In reality, the country—and the world—was beginning what would prove to be over a decade of collapse. Ultimately the economic disaster of the Depression was overcome only through the far greater political and cultural disaster of World War II.

Neoliberalism is stealing our time!

The emerging critique of time pressure

Part 2 of 3 | Part 1

When Tim Kreider tries to distinguish between people who have time pressures forced on them and people who choose to put that stress on themselves, he has already lost the means to make sense of why his essay resonated with so many people. If it was just a matter of a few neurotic or self-important people who, against their own best interests, load themselves down with things to do, his critique wouldn’t have been relevant on such a broad scale. But Kreider himself writes, “Almost everyone I know is busy.” When a particular kind of behavior or experience becomes socially general, we can be sure it’s not because of personal idiosyncrasy on a mass scale—which is an oxymoron. Rather, something about society itself is causing that behavior to proliferate.

Today time stress is not simply widespread—it’s hegemonic. It is the normal way of being for everyone in mainstream society. Whether you’re the janitor working three jobs to stave off your family’s hunger, the entrepreneur constantly casting about for capital to fund your project, the college student going to two student group meetings tonight even though you have a 20-page paper due tomorrow, the bodega owner who minds the counter all day long and then does inventory after closing, the corporate lawyer cramming in final preparations to win impunity for the big client, the artist furiously networking at all the parties, the logistics worker forced to move more and more freight every day, the politician making the hundredth call today asking a rich person for money, the food prep worker always coping with short staff—that is, whether on the surface it seems that you have chosen your fate or had it forced upon you—we are all completely overwhelmed.

The long-overdue reaction against being completely overwhelmed

An emerging critique of time pressure

Part 1 of 3 | Part 2

A burst of high-profile essays has recently sought to grapple with the intensifying time pressures afflicting those fortunate enough to be employed. Each of the authors wants to mount a critique of the increasing demands that our work is placing on us, finally giving some visibility to the deadly serious consequences of the seemingly mundane problem of always being busy. Yet if none of them is able to locate the fundamental source of the problem in the neoliberal organization of society, what are the consequences of such critiques likely to be?

From Permanent Austerity to Post-Industry: Thoughts on Nevada's future.

Nevada was barely a state under Fordism, the population of the whole state in 1970 was 496,960, yet the state and in particular Las Vegas became the promised land of Neoliberalism. In Las Vegas work was plentiful and housing was cheap, booms in profits were matched with booms in standards of living, and all this happened with a tiny state presence. Sure Las Vegas was dominated by three industries – gambling, construction, and realty – but no one saw any reason to worry. By 2008 the state population had reached 2,738,733 with 72% of those people living in Las Vegas.

The house of cards collapsed with the rest of the global economy. Tourism declined, heavily leveraged construction projects ground to a halt, housing prices plummeted, workers were laid off, people defaulted on their mortgages, and 15,000 people left the city. I’ll try and make a more detailed analysis how this crisis unfolded in a later post but suffice to say, it’s bad.

Critical(?) Subjectivities: The Greenhorns Part 1

I want to add a different, if perhaps less rigorous (in so far as it takes up the ephemeral), perspective to the conversation. It seems that one issue that has been recurrent through our conversation is current forms of subjectivity and whether they are or not adequate to an overcoming of capitalism, or to a new, more humane regime of accumulation that could better cultivate the conditions for a positive social (as opposed to dystopian asocial) overcoming. But we’ve been debating this issue without much attention to specific current expressions of subjectivity. To begin to fill this lacuna I offer below a close reading of one social movement. I offer my reading less as a definitive statement than as a critically attuned ethnography. It should also be noted that I did absolutely no traditional “reporting.” All the analysis is derived from promotional materials available on the web. Why talk to someone when you can assume they mean what they say?

The object of study is a group I mentioned in a December comment, the Greenhorns, a young farmers’ activist organization. These are not your mom and dad’s farmers. Emerging out of the Berkeley local food movement and now based in the Hudson Valley (elite locales within the foodie world), these are progressive neophytes plugged into social media, producing something that is as much a cultural project as an agricultural one. They eschew hierarchy in a fashion similar to that of the Occupy Movement, and also like Occupy seek to spread in the imitative fashion of a “meme.” Part information-provider, coalition-builder, and social event-organizer, the Greenhorns clearly express the lifestyle politics we’ve come to expect from neoliberalism. The question is, are they, could they be, something more? For while the triumph of lifestyle politics such as this, which advocates non-industrial agriculture, employment, and food for all could very well lead to more a more humane regime of accumulation, it is less clear, but still worth wondering, if it could also point beyond it.

The rise and fall of national capital

The threat of a new nationalism (1)

In a previous post, I worried that left populists would prosecute a war against all of neoliberalism’s hegemonic social forms, neglecting the progressive side of neoliberalism and sabotaging the chance for real progress. This may have struck some readers as counterintuitive: those of us pursuing a vision of human equality, solidarity, and true freedom are not used to thinking about neoliberalism as progressive in any way. The rapacity of economic elites freed from all constraints; skyrocketing inequality reshaping work, politics, and culture so that increasingly we are all reconstituted as servants or dependents of the rich; whole populations rendered unsuitable for participation in mainstream life by the economic disintegration of their social ecology; accelerating environmental degradation; intensifying exploitation – these are our associations with neoliberalism.

But neoliberalism is (or was) a social totality: all the dominant forms of the last thirty years were components of neoliberalism as a coherent system. That includes progressive (but not unproblematic) impulses like gender equality, multiculturalism, and skepticism of authority. Because the crisis of neoliberalism has manifested itself primarily in the economic realm, and these forms of consciousness have no clear connection to the economy, they are for the moment secure (what comes after neoliberalism will, however, reshape them – for better or worse). Under much greater immediate threat is one other progressive side of neoliberalism: the erosion of the nation form.

A Kinder, Gentler, More "Revolution-friendly" Regime of Accumulation?

“The object of our efforts is not “inequality” or “the one percent”, but the social totality and the revival of its animating dynamic on a new, more humane basis.” Walker, "Redistribution is not enough" (italics mine)

“Walker's program, though, is precisely to try and shape those new conditions of accumulation, which does require an active politics that seeks to mobilize rather than interiorize the critique of capital. If I recall correctly, when Walker first proposed that the pressing question was not the overcoming of capitalism, but re-establishing it on a more "humane" basis it was on two grounds: 1) it is unclear that the dissolution of capital under current objective and subjective conditions would lead to a more humane society and not our worst dystopian nightmare 2) that capitalism always tends towards crisis and that when "humane capitalism" did reach its crisis point, conditions would be more amenable for a positive overcoming.” AB, comments on the above.

“I think we can all agree (please correct me if I'm wrong) that popular subjectivity is generated by social conditions, and that present-day social conditions make socialism wildly implausible to the overwhelming majority of the world's population.
On that assumption, a Marxian strategy would aim at achieving social conditions that made the overcoming of capital seem a compelling answer to the insoluble problems posed by modern society.” Walker, additional comments on the above.

The above three quotes provide a succinct presentation of what seems like the predominant perspective on this blog. The goal, “try and shape those new conditions of accumulation” on a more "humane" basis” which also creates “social conditions that made(sic) the overcoming of capital seem a compelling answer to the insoluble problems posed by modern society”, has some very loaded presuppositions which I hope to bring out and unpack.

• The crisis that began in the 1970's can be encapsulated in the concept of Neo-Liberalism as a kind of “regime of accumulation” or maybe better a “regime of the crisis of accumulation previously known as Fordism”.
• Neo-Liberalism is on its last legs and a new regime of accumulation will automatically come into being, and it will either be more or less humane.

The crisis of valorization that crystallized in the 1970's has not ended. For a new period of valorization to begin we would need to see the destruction of even more capital, including human capital, and a degree of immiseration that would enable new capital, with a higher organic composition and new labor processes, to be implemented on a global scale. There are several strong indicators (and that is all I am referring to these as) that a new cycle of accumulation has not begun.