Keynesian Fordism: global political economy of a passive revolution

Antonio Gramsci

This is the second in a series of three texts retracing the historical roots of present-day economic institutions and class relations. The previous post examined the institutional crisis of American society in the Thirties. It characterized the New Deal as an arrested transformation of monopoly capitalism, in which attempts at egalitarian reform were blocked by interest groups operating through both major parties.

This text explores the rise of state capitalism during WWII. It shows how the redoubled technological and organizational capacity of the corporate state was able to generate a global political economy maintained by force of both money and arms, but also based on the new social compact that emerged from the depression and the war. To analyze this global political economy I’m going to use the concept of hegemony, as developed by Antonio Gramsci. I’ll extend that concept to international relations, following the lead of Robert Cox in his book Production, Power and World Order.

Rand Paul’s route to victory and the transformation of the Republican Party

A path to the triumph of American reaction
Part 1 of 2 | Part 2

This is disturbing:
President Rand Paul: Watch out, he’s becoming a better politician every day

If Rand Paul were able to assemble an unlikely coalition of reactionaries and discontented youth, he would be in a position to win the presidency in 2016, fundamentally transform electoral politics in the United States, and bring down the corporate-state elite. There’s a lot of assumptions in that scenario, but it’s hard to imagine a bigger disaster for the country or the world if those assumptions prove well-founded.

Culture as a Historical Problem, Part I: The Folk Tradition of the Classical Workers’ Movement

“Solidarity forever, the union makes us strong!”

Ralph Chaplin/Traditional

“We all shall die.”

Metallica

I once heard a prominent leftist academic suggest that “the problem with the left today is that it has no soundtrack.” For whatever reason, that has stuck with me over the years, and this post is an initial attempt to understand why that might be so.

Skepticism is warranted. Of course it would be absurd to reduce the whole complex problem of the left’s dysfunctionality to the question of a shared culture. That’s certainly not the idea here. Instead, I’d like to pose a few questions that have to do with culture and radical politics, and hopefully set the stage for further reflection on the relationship between them in a way that throws light on our current predicament.

What is an Institutional Crisis of Capitalism?

Lessons from the Thirties

How do corporations fit into society? And what happens when they don’t?

The answer to the second question is “an institutional crisis of capitalism” – like the one we’re currently experiencing.

An institutional crisis can be defined as a break in the continuity of social reproduction, which is never fulfilled by commercial relations alone, but always requires public intervention into the daily lives of citizens, through schooling, health care, policing, urban amenities and retirement provisions as well as multiple forms of regulation conditioning the activities of businesses. Every major crisis (of the kind that come around once every forty to fifty years) is marked by institutional breakdowns at various scales, whether local, national or international. Their severity interrupts capital accumulation itself: thus the crisis, including today's. Yet to understand the causes and outcomes of these breakdowns we also need to answer the first question, about the institutional “fit” that prevailed – for better or worse – in the decades preceding the turmoil. And that, in turn, entails gaining some understanding of the forces and social relations of production as they have evolved to maturity in each successive era of capitalist development.

Training Rebranded: Internships and the Value of Work

Unless you are under 14 or have been living on a desert island for a few decades, you know what an internship is. But just in case, internships offer young people the opportunity to work for businesses and institutions for little or no monetary compensation to gain references and experience in the process. The modern internship system began in the ’60s and ’70s as a fast track into certain elite financial industries, but starting in the mid ’80s they appeared in other industries. Thirty years later they have become not just a prerequisite for future employment but a hoped-for opportunity for millions of enterprising youth searching for a way into a future desk job.

Decades ago they might have been a relatively benign educational opportunity nestled in the comfort of the Fordist economic system. Today internships represent economic trends that raise disturbing questions about the present and future of capitalism, especially with respect to training, experience, and the devaluation of labor.

The Weakest Link

Spain in the Circuit of European Capital

PAH protester: "I don't fit into your law."

 An elder woman with a yard-long wooden spoon stirs a huge pan of paella bubbling over a ring of blue flame. Wine bottles pop, music pulses from the loudspeakers and the neighborhood gathers around long tables set up in the street. Today – May 18, 2013 – eleven families are celebrating their departure from the squatted building where they’ve spent the last eighteen months. The bank that owns it, Caixa Catalunya, has been forced into granting them five-year leases in other homes left empty by the crisis. This is a major victory for the Platform of People Affected by Foreclosures, known as the PAH (Plataforma de afectados por hipotecas). For the first time, they are rehousing people at a “social rent” of 150 euros per month. It’s a benchmark. The idea is to create new rights from the ground up, in defiance of rapacious economic practice and repressive legislation.

In a country with 27% unemployment, two million vacant housing units and a foreclosure rate of some five hundred per day, the PAH is a rising political force. According to recent national polls, an overwhelming majority finds it more competent to resolve the housing crisis than either of the two main parties, the conservative PP and the pseudo-socialist PSOE, whose ratings have fallen to historic lows. Here as in the rest of Southern Europe, the popping of the real-estate bubble led to a banking collapse, government bailouts, the specter of national insolvency, European rescues, a flood-tide of austerity measures and finally, a deep crisis of legitimacy affecting the entire political mainstream. How that all happened is a revealing bit of history. What happens next could change the course of the global capitalist system.

Value and Politics

What is "value?" People are aware and argue about "values," in the plural, all the time. Not as many are aware of the fact that value, as such, exists, and that it is actually the deep motivating dynamic of the form of society we call capitalism.

For those interested in the question of value and how it relates to concrete politics, we post the link below. It is a transcript of a panel discussion on that topic that was recently held at the 2013 Platypus International Convention in Chicago, and in which one of the writers from Permanent Crisis participated. It provides a schematic take on some of the underlying theoretical premises of this blog, and of the politics that it is trying, however fitfully, to articulate. If that sounds edifying to you, read on!

http://platypus1917.org/2013/05/01/marx-and-wertkritik/

Dynamic stagnation: The most dangerous game

The crisis of neoliberalism has seemingly reached an impasse. On the one hand, predictions of another global economic collapse have repeatedly been proved wrong. Every month or two, a new danger threatens to bring everything crashing down—the US government debt-limit debacle, Italian borrowing rates, the Greek elections, Spanish borrowing rates, the slumping Chinese real estate bubble, a seemingly endless series of huge banking scandals, the botched Cyprus bailout, Italian elections. Every time, the danger passes.

Yet every month also brings predictions that the next round of indicators will finally register a real turnaround in the course of the global economy, or that the next central bank intervention will get the economy going again. The real estate market has recovered! The stock market is surging! Spanish bond rates are down! China is growing! Abenomics is a success!

If the left won't go global, it can’t win

I want first to rescue Callicles’s very valuable observation from the obscurity of the comments section:

[T]he experience of previous generations has shown that labor organizing repeatedly suffers from failures to update targets and strategy as the nature of the economy changes. So worker organizing becomes anachronistic and (as a result) stagnant. The flip side is that there can be transformational bursts of activity when the right target comes into view. When the UAW made the jump from plant-by-plant organizing to taking on the giant of GM in its entirety, at the national level, this was such a moment. Capital was coming to operate as a nationwide system, and needed to be confronted at that level. 

My thought is that, today, we can't make a dent in class forces in our country because class forces can no longer be confronted on the national level; taking on something like the Walmart global supply chain would then be analogous to taking on GM as a whole.

To this I would only add that the legislative and regulatory framework that provides the terrain for labor politics should be included as well. In other words, an effective progressive agenda would have to move to the global level both to directly confront corporations and to change the global rules that corporations play by.

As Callicles implies, there are some very strong and instructive parallels between the situation in which the left now finds itself and that which prevailed in the early days of the Great Depression in the United States. During the prosperous years of the Roaring Twenties, progressives had been left disoriented and demoralized by the failure of “the masses” to mobilize against the elite. The stock market crash of 1929 and deepening economic crisis after a brief false recovery opened up new possibilities both within the political elite—parts of which slowly began to question the old laissez faire doctrines—and within the population as whole, whose hopes of a prosperous future were brutally revealed to be as bankrupt as the financial system.

Vision and Strategy in Globalized Supply Chains: The Case of Walmart

Following Deckard’s response to Occupy.com, this is the second in a series of posts to be featured on Permanent Crisis offering an in-depth examination of the possibilities for a new, internationally-oriented left politics. It is prompted by the conviction that some kind of internationalist stance must again become available on the left if the idea of a post-capitalist society is to cease to seem a mere chimera, and instead to once again appear as a live option to the multitudes currently being crushed beneath the weight of a global regime of austerity. It is also prompted by the sense that any purportedly radical politics, if it is to live up to its name, must realize that its defeat is already sealed so long as it ultimately remains limited, in its theory and practice, to the horizon of the nation-state. The unprecedented global reach and international mobility of capital in the post-Fordist era demands the formulation of a similarly global vision on the left that is rooted in the historical reality of the current moment, most notably in the protracted social devastation unfolding in the form of the general crisis of neoliberal capitalism.

Neoliberalism is a road to climate apocalypse

The threat of climate change looms in the background of any sensible discussion of humanity's future (see some handy summaries of the outlook here and here). The grim message is this: if progressive political forces fail to deal with this problem, then nothing else we achieve will matter very much for very long.

By 2100, this is what an exceptionally good growing season could look like in the Midwest

It is absolutely imperative that we deal with climate change. It is therefore also imperative that we overcome neoliberalism. This is because the actions we need to take in order to put the brakes on climate change are incompatible with neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is therefore a road to climate apocalypse.

What form should our movement take?

My friend and comrade Ed Sutton poses an interesting perspective from which to think about a global progressive movement in his article for Occupy.com. The movement isn’t coming, it’s right in front of us, he argues. If only we’d open our eyes we could see it. Although I differ in my analysis of the reasons behind the Occupy movement’s ostensible fall from prominence in the media, I think that the perspective he suggests is well worth further exploration and debate. As I take it, the central question animating Ed’s reflections on the squatting movement in Europe is, succinctly put, what form should our movement take? Through what social practices can we realize the potential for overcoming the social tensions—between plenty and want, between love for one’s neighbors and hate for strangers—exploding into popular consciousness in this moment of upheaval?

Bob Dylan's factory

Bob Dylan Lays Off 2,000 Workers From Songwriting Factory


Of course, it's hilarious to think of Bob Dylan as a factory owner and manager of a songwriting brand. But I think that here humor plays its highest role of teasing out the doubts that quietly rot beneath cherished articles of faith, and by exposing and examining these doubts we can enjoy a nice insight into popular music as a commodity. The music industry is now facing a crisis that is here ironically related to deindustrialization, but the humor points to very real anxieties about contradictions within the economy—contradictions that have relevance far beyond the music industry. But to begin, I will just address the first layer of irony, of Bob Dylan as a sober manager and his music as the product of an assembly line.

Music has the potential to be an exemplary commodity for the very reason that the form in which it appears in society, that is in the market, obscures the actual terms of its production. The word commodity carries with it a sense of sterility or at least banality, and through common usage connotes items like gold and oil that are extracted from the earth or crops like corn that grow from it. Commodities are impersonal and mass produced, quite the opposite of the deeply meaningful songs produced by an artist like Bob Dylan. Yet there is no Bob Dylan without the record company that promotes, assembles, distributes, and markets his songs.

Towers of speculation

The construction of the world’s first one-kilometer building took a step forward last week with the announcement of a project manager. If completed, the Burj al Mamlakah (Kingdom Tower) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, would stand 170 meters taller than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, currently the tallest building in the world by a wide margin. If you stood New York’s Chrysler Building on top of Chicago’s Sears Tower (aka Wesley Willis Tower), you would still have to add the tallest building in Boston, the Hancock Tower, to reach the planned height of the Burj al Mamlakah. If you put Shanghai’s second-tallest building, Jinmao Tower 金茂大厦, on top of the city’s tallest building, the World Financial Center 环球金融中心, it would still fall about 90 meters short of the Mamlakah.

The explosion in supertall buildings seems to have barely taken a breather after the global financial crisis. While there were casualties in Dubai, Moscow, and Chicago, others have quickly stepped into the void. What will be the world’s second-tallest building (640 meters), Digital Media City Landmark Building 디지털 미디어 시티 랜드마크 빌딩, is being built in Seoul with an expected completion date in 2015. But the Ping’an International Finance Center 平安国际金融中心, under construction in Shenzhen, will almost immediately eclipse it at 660 meters. The following year Seoul will reclaim the number two position with the Dream Tower 드림 타워 (665 meters). Meanwhile, proposed buildings in Baku and Kuwait would both be taller than even the Burj al Mamlakah. World One Mumbai (442 meters) will be almost 200 meters taller than India’s current tallest building; the Shard in London (310 meters) last year became the tallest building in the European Union; and Moscow’s Mercury City Tower/Меркурий Сити Тауэр (339 meters) will this year become the tallest completed building in Russia.

As if we needed any more evidence, the meteoric revival of the skyscraper boom signals that the agents of neoliberalism have changed nothing after their first brush with death. Skyscrapers are one of the most concrete expressions of the abstract movements animating a speculative society. They map the motion of capital spiraling upward into thin air, seemingly unmoored from all physical constraints. They represent the extreme inequalities of a society animated by speculation, as the ultra-rich escape from the debased masses milling about in the sprawl or the slums, into the rarefied precincts of their towers: the corporate office suites, the requisite luxury hotels, the extravagant restaurants and bars “in the sky”. The soaring verticality of the buildings mirrors the assent of the winners in this society over the losers, or the skyrocketing fortunes of the speculators.

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.