discipline posted:
the environment is giving out too easy for them to keep buying time. I know everyone has been saying this for millennia but we really ARE living in the end times yall
yeah it owns
babyfinland posted:
chinese consumer demand?
doesn't exist, consumption as a fraction of gdp in the 'guo is lower than any other state ever recorded. this is blindingly obvious to anyone who's been outside a SEZ or first tier city but most westerners haven't. the ccp went all in on fixed investment for gdp growth and they've got a massive overcapacity problem as well as a real estate bubble to deal with before they can start "rebalancing" toward consumption, which is a decades long project. there's also no way for chinese domestic consumption to get anywhere near american levels without devastating the local environment and before agriculture gives out in the south due to drought
in any case there's not going to be an transition in the world system from america-as-hegemon to china-as-hegemon, it's way more likely that we're looking at a significant discontinuity that arrighi was blind to because he didnt accoutn for the biophysical limits of the system
Tsargon posted:shennong posted:
yeah it'd be an extension and a metamorphosis of the fiat/debt regime that's kept consumer demand up over the last 30 years. the thing is there's no way to reconcile the notion that the elites have decided to bring the 1st world worker down to the level of the exploited in the global south with the idea that this is a master plan to reboot capitalism. i mean maybe if you're hayek or sth that sounds pretty good but basically anyone who isn't mentally ill recognises there's no way to maintain anything like the status quo without western consumer demand.for a very long time the American, british, and french capitalist economies were all oriented entirely along the line of producing goods for foreign markets and domestic aristocrats. its not like its impossible to have a capitalist economy without a strong domestic consumer, its only impossible to have a fordist capitalist economy.
as its the stated goal of austeritarians to tear up the old welfare state, the old fordist contract, and "open up" western economies, i dont see a need to pfah at this explanation and go ah, there must be some other reason! its the logical end-point of the 40 year project to bring down the cost of business in the west and bring up the rate of surplus value extraction.
consider all the propaganda about Rising Asian Economies and the like we've seen over the past decade, the stuff about BRICs and whatnot. when combined with the recent push to re-industrialize America through union-busting and the commencement of who knows how many Business Friendly policies, it makes sense that a broad re-alignment is going on to try and re-calibrate the west to produce and let others consume. this makes sense because 1. as we have seen the westerner as consumer is almost completely exhausted, he has been bled dry and further attempts at exploitation only led to the current depression, and 2. letting foreigners consume while domestic citizens produce stands to profit those who own domestic property (the banks and big capitalists) a great deal at the expense of others who are outside of the system, an ideal setup.
also im not arguing that there aren't some people who think this can happen, i'm saying that it's (a) highly unlikely to happen and (b) that they dont have some kind of carefully planned high modernist scheme to make it happen, they're just trying to muddle through with their ideological preconceptions (labour bad, finance good) and hope that china or someone can do a sweet flip trick and keep the whole thing afloat
shennong posted:
also im not arguing that there aren't some people who think this can happen, i'm saying that it's (a) highly unlikely to happen and (b) that they dont have some kind of carefully planned high modernist scheme to make it happen, they're just trying to muddle through with their ideological preconceptions (labour bad, finance good) and hope that china or someone can do a sweet flip trick and keep the whole thing afloat
yeah, agreed. it seems really unlikely to work, especially given that it relies on the entire west marching in lock-step into the furnance as even just one country dropping out would provide impetus to all the others to break free. but it has to be done b/c There Is No Alternative
Such periods always begin by realizing how serious the problem is. So diagnosis is the most important tactic. Diagnosing the problem mobilizes power for a solution. Otherwise, solutions will seem to come out of thin air and people won’t understand why they are needed, or even the problems that solutions are intended to cure.
on a more fundamental level:
Graeber posted:
One might say there are two orders of critical theory. The first simply serves to demonstrate that our normal way of looking at the world—or of some phenomena within it—is flawed: incomplete or mistaken, and to explain how things really work. The second, more powerful not only explains how things actually work, but does so in such a way as to account for why people did not perceive it that way to begin with.
so what doesn't look quite right? the technocrats are definitely one thing, but they haven't emerged from thin air. they're supposedly necessitated by extraordinary circumstances: an emergency, state of exception, etc. the basis of the extraordinary circumstances is an "economic crisis" with no further specification.
two liberal false dichotomies: state/market and politics/economics. it is believing in the validity of both of those dichotomies that makes the idea of "intervening" from "outside the system" comprehensible. if we pair them off into state-politics and market-economics we have two distinct "planes" consisting of different types of activities and their corresponding institutions. following Mircea Eliade, the state-politics plane is the chaotic, undifferentiated profane existence while the market-economics plane is the sacred realm of the gods.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/11/3/ec-walkout-occupy/
Supply-and-demand economics is a popular idea of how society is organized
http://ineteconomics.org/blog/inet/robin-wells-we-are-greg-mankiw%E2%80%A6-or-not
Compared to past years, instructors need to acknowledge the limits of free markets earlier in their courses. Students should understand the difference between the conceptual importance of free markets and their real world limitations. Explain that much of the current economic distress arises from markets that don’t behave competitively -- the labor and financial markets.
in reality, we have financial markets getting bailed out as governments are toppled for supposedly not adhering to their wishes:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/22/imf-credit-idUSN9E7LI01U20111122
Nov 22 (Reuters) - The International Monetary Fund on Tuesday beefed up its lending instruments and introduced a new six-month liquidity line, throwing help to countries at risk from the euro zone crisis.
The IMF's said its more flexible Precautionary and Liquidity Line (PLL) would act as "insurance against future shocks and as a short-term liquidity window to address the needs of crisis bystanders."
The new PLL would give countries with relatively good economic policies access to credit for six months, the IMF said. It could also be used under a 12- to 24-month arrangement with access up to 1,000 percent of a members' quota.
The Fund also adopted a new Rapid Financing Instrument (RFI) for countries with urgent balance of payments needs arising from so-called exogenous shocks, such as natural disasters.
"We have acted quickly, and the new tools will enable us to respond more rapidly and effectively for the benefit of the whole membership," IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said in a statement.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/22/us-banks-funding-idUSTRE7AL1LV20111122
(Reuters) - Euro zone banks' demand for central funding surged to a two-year high on Tuesday, and U.S. funds cut their lending to the bloc's banks, tightening a squeeze that looks unlikely to ease this year.
Fast-spreading sovereign debt worries have left lending markets virtually frozen and the European Central Bank as the only available funding option for many banks.
The ECB's weekly, limit-free handout of funding underscored the widespread problems, with 178 banks requesting 247 billion euros, the highest amount since mid-2009.
Just as fears about the financial health of Italy and Spain have stopped banks lending to some their peers, U.S. funds have also continued to retreat from the region, and Italian and Spanish banks have seen corporate deposits flow out to safer havens.
U.S. money market funds, which are key providers of liquidity to banks and have been pulling back from the euro zone since May, cut their exposure to European banks by a further 9 percent in October, according to ratings agency Fitch.
Bankers said there appeared little chance of wholesale funding markets reopening for euro zone banks this year, and the best that can be hoped is for a return to more normal conditions early in 2012.
"The reality is it's hard to see investors get any confidence (before the end of the year), as the sovereign crisis is out of control. Confidence has disappeared from the banks as they are a conduit for the sovereigns," a senior debt market banker said.
There are several warning signs flashing for euro zone banks' liquidity, limiting options and raising borrowing costs, leaving the European Central Bank as the only option for many of them.
"There won't be a crisis of liquidity because the ECB floodgates are open. But that's not long-term funding that banks need for sustainable planning," the banker said.
Financial markets have grown increasingly worried about banks' liquidity as the failure to get to grips with Greece's debt crisis has seen worries spread to Italy, Spain and France, raising their borrowing costs and threatening to saddle banks with losses on their sovereign debt.
"It all comes down to whether the politicians can find a fix for the euro zone. I don't think markets are going to unfreeze until we see some movement on that," said Simon Adamson, analyst at CreditSights in London, adding he doubted markets would reopen this year.
The ECB has reinstated some of its most potent crisis-fighting tools in a bid to try and calm tensions, but the moves have done little to revive wholesale funding.
European leaders will meet next week to discuss how to unblock funding, including potentially restarting state guarantee schemes to allow banks to access longer-term funding.
"conduits" indeed
discipline posted:
tsargon I didn't really understand where you were going with the whole "west produces and others consume" thing because I can't see it being profitable in any way shape or form. I don't think anyone is trying to pull the bulk of manufacturing sector out of the south. I know it sounds nutty but I think it far more likely that the west booms into this giant semi-informal economy based on drugs and guns (which, honestly, is sorta how it is at this point) lorded over by a bunch of hypercapitalists without nationalities, flags, or fear of god
50 years ago the fracking craze and all the new manufacturing plants (foreign car companies, the new boeing plant, ikea, etc.) with positions starting at 6$/H would have been impossible, but here we are. rentier capitalism cant create, it can only steal, and the American consumer has now been so thoroughly looted that theres no more growth possible there. so industrial capital, 19th century carnegie slave industrial capital instead of 20th century fordist consumer industrial capital, represents the only possible out.
the biggest market on the planet is American mortgages, the banks wont let those all fall to pot if they can help it. far better to use them as the leverage in new debt peonage schemes, the same way mortgages were used by landowners in feudal times.
Tsargon posted:
so industrial capital, 19th century carnegie slave industrial capital instead of 20th century fordist consumer industrial capital, represents the only possible out.
yeah this is what i was getting at with the neofeudalism thing. i mean if you think about the conditions necessary to recapitulate the 19th century world system even in, say, north america, you've got to get like 15-20% of the urban population out of the city and back onto the land because there isn't going to be anything for them to do in urban areas. absent land reform (which is not going to happen without overturning the existing order), there isn't going to be a sudden proliferation of 19th century style smallholder agriculture, especially given that the amount of arable land suitable for largescale monocropping is going to be declining a couple % yoy for the century. so you end up with this situation where you have to get this massive deskilled underclass out into the fields to act effectively as a new class of sharecroppers/debt serfs, and what happens to all the immigrant labour etc etc and you still end up with this incredibly brittle guaranteed-to-catastrophically-fail agricultural system
discipline posted:Tsargon posted:
the American consumer has now been so thoroughly looted that theres no more growth possible there.the first part is incorrect (48k per capita PPP is really great, they're not dry to the bone yet trust me) and the second part has nothing to do with what neoliberalism is trying to accomplish nowadays ... americans aren't being herded into sweatshops quite yet because they won't work for 60 cents an hour. they don't have the education, skills, or tolerance for it, and let's not forget that bizarre sense of entitlement. usa workers getting drafted into positions at $6 an hour is more about the pulling growth rates to a halt rather than stimulating them.
if the American consumer still had some blood in him, i dont think we would be in this depression.
discipline posted:
are you serious? that's such a big jump to make. rule of law is crumbling and drug/weapon use is at all time high worldwide. I see people just chained to their starbucks jobs for healthcare and running pills or guns on the side over americans *suppresses laughter* farming...
the orchards around my town this year started drafting white American labor at the same price per piece as they used to draft mexican labor, owing to the shortage of migrant workers and white American desperation. anecdotal evidence f.t.w.
discipline posted:
are you serious? that's such a big jump to make. rule of law is crumbling and drug/weapon use is at all time high worldwide. I see people just chained to their starbucks jobs for healthcare and running pills or guns on the side over americans *suppresses laughter* farming...
its the logical extension of the "hmm lets just crush labour and restore 19th century capitalism" plan, whether or not it happens is another matter. i mean we already have that happening w/ eg tomato production in florida but its a bunch of mexicans and black carribeans so no one cares that there are literally serfs and agricultural slaves in north america already and that sector is expanding rapidly
discipline posted:
yeah they had people hoofing it out west to pick grapes and stuff during the depression but we didn't end up with a country of dust bowl refugees working for pennies did we? hell no we KILLED HITLER
thats due to external factors tho! presumably, had hitler never attempted to crush the twin serpents of boleshevism and the british, America would* have remained a slave nation until a revolution broke out or the system exhausted itself and transitioned into something else.
AND THESE MODERN HITLERS (q-daf, a-jad, s. hussein, etc.) JUST ARENT UP TO STANDARD
MTW note: would?
discipline posted:
yeah that's what I mean about the proliferation of the informal economy, the black market, migrant labor, drug wars, human trafficking, highly addictive "medication".. that's your angle, not grapes of wrath
theres nothing informal about it, its institutionalised corporate serfdom and its spreading from exploited immigrant labour to indebted american citizens who need an income, any income to service their debt.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/tomatoes_of_wrath_20110926/
also the oklahoma dustbowl was a tiny, highly localised event with a severity that pales in comparison to the droughts that are predicted to hit the american south in 30-40 yr if ghg emissions continue apace. theres a lot to be learned from grapes of wrath in terms of what happens to climate refugees.
im working up a big post on escape agriculture and stuff so hopefully we can discuss it there. i dont mean to derail everything into ag talk but im shennong
shennong posted:discipline posted:
yeah that's what I mean about the proliferation of the informal economy, the black market, migrant labor, drug wars, human trafficking, highly addictive "medication".. that's your angle, not grapes of wraththeres nothing informal about it, its institutionalised corporate serfdom and its spreading from exploited immigrant labour to indebted american citizens who need an income, any income to service their debt.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/tomatoes_of_wrath_20110926/
also the oklahoma dustbowl was a tiny, highly localised event with a severity that pales in comparison to the droughts that are predicted to hit the american south in 30-40 yr if ghg emissions continue apace. theres a lot to be learned from grapes of wrath in terms of what happens to climate refugees.
im working up a big post on escape agriculture and stuff so hopefully we can discuss it there. i dont mean to derail everything into ag talk but im shennong
i maintain a big-ass garden, all of the maternal side of my family are farmers, and i live in a village surrounded by orchards and farms. I Love Agriculture.
discipline posted:Tsargon posted:
discipline posted:
yeah they had people hoofing it out west to pick grapes and stuff during the depression but we didn't end up with a country of dust bowl refugees working for pennies did we? hell no we KILLED HITLER
thats due to external factors tho! presumably, had hitler never attempted to crush the twin serpents of boleshevism and the british, America would* have remained a slave nation until a revolution broke out or the system exhausted itself and transitioned into something else.
AND THESE MODERN HITLERS (q-daf, a-jad, s. hussein, etc.) JUST ARENT UP TO STANDARD
MTW note: would?we went to war because of the japs, tho, not jerry! and we planted those seeds waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay before the depression (1905ish)
the end-product of the war (annihilation of the non-American industrial plant) is whats important tho, and that was itself not a product of scheming by the American bourgeoisie (or was it). had there been no ww2 the depression would have ended in either some other externally stimulated capitalist revival or a socialist / fascist revolution. these were the only two outcomes (one could even say the choice was between socialism and barbarism) and theyre the same ones we're looking at today, with the first obviously being the preference of present monied interests.
Tsargon posted:
these were the only two outcomes (one could even say the choice was between socialism and barbarism) and theyre the same ones we're looking at today, with the first obviously being the preference of present monied interests.
big difference in basic energy availability between then and now, tho
p.s. this thread is super good y'all own
discipline posted:
the problem with assuming the chinese consumer market is going anywhere soon is that wages have plummeted since 2000 in china and there are like 300 mil internal migrants who don't have jobs or access to basic social services. so maybe some day they'll have some real purchasing power to put USA and EU on their heels but right now their PPP is like a little over 8k a year compared to USA which is a little over 48k
you probably want to try to avoid the PPP if you can. a balance of payments approach is a lot better, but it has been written out of the books. wages have actually been increasing in China, but PPP would make it look like they've gone down because of the exchange rate. the yuan is strengthening vs. the dollar as they cut down on exports:
i'm not saying they're living it up or anything, especially across all of China, but there is some sort of attempt at re-balancing taking place.
shennong posted:
doesn't exist, consumption as a fraction of gdp in the 'guo is lower than any other state ever recorded. this is blindingly obvious to anyone who's been outside a SEZ or first tier city but most westerners haven't. the ccp went all in on fixed investment for gdp growth and they've got a massive overcapacity problem as well as a real estate bubble to deal with before they can start "rebalancing" toward consumption, which is a decades long project. there's also no way for chinese domestic consumption to get anywhere near american levels without devastating the local environment and before agriculture gives out in the south due to drought
that investment is largely a result of their trade surplus and the proportion between the two should adjust if that rebalancing takes place. looking at consumption as a portion of GDP can also obscure a lot of things because you can make it higher simply by maximizing expenditures without regard for costs
i'm not even optimistic on China or anything, i just get tired of the statistics rather than concrete circumstances (like conditions outside the SEZ's).
discipline posted:
dm I don't see the contradiction between the post-washington consensus stiglitz claptrap being taught in schools and banks getting bailed out/governments being taken over by technocrats, like yeah they're gonna have to acknowledge that markets need a little help every now and again covering their asses w/r/t risk & externalities so they can get those sweet awesome bailouts and keep The People from eating them for supper
it's not about market imperfections or whatever though, it's about the idea that the distinction can be made in the first place
discipline posted:tsargon I didn't really understand where you were going with the whole "west produces and others consume" thing because I can't see it being profitable in any way shape or form. I don't think anyone is trying to pull the bulk of manufacturing sector out of the south. I know it sounds nutty but I think it far more likely that the west booms into this giant semi-informal economy based on drugs and guns (which, honestly, is sorta how it is at this point) lorded over by a bunch of hypercapitalists without nationalities, flags, or fear of god
discipline posted:
I think its' important to distinguish between the capacity of yesteryear and today. like we can't say we're going back to grapes of wrath or even talk about the conditions around the first depression with that much relevance because that was before keynes and the microchip. it's like a bunch of leftists arguing about 1840s factory conditions in england when the problems are SO DIVORCED from those historical and material conditions it's insane
it's not really like that at all though, because neither microchips nor industrial keynesianism have a lot to do with the agricultural model we have in the west, the outlines of which appeared in the late 19th century and which was firmly embedded as the preferred scientific-industrial model by the early part of the 20th. the model we have requires massive and unsustainable inputs of oil in the form of fuel, fertilisers, pesticides, machinery, etc and if you think that capitalist agrobusinesses arent going to take advantage of deteriorating labour conditions to supplement inevitable shortfalls in energy and material inputs with cheap debt-ridden labour i think you've got another thing coming. no one's saying that mid 21st century agriculture is going to look like 19th century agriculture but it's going to have a lot more in common with it than high modernist mid-late 20th century agriculture
discipline posted:
haha woah I wasn't talking about agrobusiness, but it actually has been affected quite a lot by stuff like financialization of capital, WTO, etc. but yeah agreed with agriculture being taken over by the informal sector. I was looking @ numbers yesterday that said like basically all of the agriculture in india comes from informal sector ahah
oh sorry la~
pls post india thing
discipline posted:
khammy sighed as she drew her economist charts
the economist did explicitly make a joke out of purchasing power parity with its Big Mac Index 
http://bls.gov/opub/mlr/2011/03/art4full.pdf (ignore the parts that try to infer labor costs from exchange rates)
Edited by dm ()
shennong posted:Tsargon posted:
i hadnt previously made the connection that this was a sort of extraordinarily ruthless creative destruction, wherein any sort of potential loss to capital is diverted away and borne by labor, in order to dress the field for a new capitalist revival.this still doesn't make a lot of sense even under standard neoclassical doctrine because it completely eviscerates the consumer base needed to resume infinite growth. they're totally aware that demand destruction and balance sheet retrenchment will prevent anything like a revival of late 20th century capitalism, so the expected model has to be something different. maybe some kind of combination of legislated markets (eg the health care mandated insurance stuff) and vastly expanded debt offerings. that's much closer to some kind of debt peonage system than it is a capitalist revival
I don't think any one conspiracy (I'm not sure how best else to describe groups of actors working in conjunction without declaring such, but by this I just mean that and not anything necessarily more) within the ruling class is really running a significant portion of the policy show; I think they've turned the processes of buying power basically into algorithms executed by pools of human functionaries with bits and pieces of the whole program. at this point, the mathematical laws of the system have taken over and run the show, at least as far as legislatures go. there is no end-game, the crisis pushed various metastable relations already under strain from neoliberalism over the ledge, and the attendant re-distribution of wealth enabled the dynamic to be overwhelmed by one sector. so the state finds itself captured, but not directly by a central agent, but through the inputs to the million algorithms it has turned itself into all finding themselves in the hands of the classes with all the other asset wealth. money goes in, policy comes out, re-directing economic rents to the payer. in earlier stages of capitalism, industrial capital and a small number of organized petty bourgeois interest groups keep things in check by taking their own share and paying out part of the rents thereby received to labor, but rentiers managed to capture a huge share of the liquid wealth in the crisis, so now far more input from them goes into the system, and the output reflects that. austerity is just the smartest-sounding thing that governments can come up with to sell the policies they're responsible for moving now
insofar as governments are actors with volition of any sort I imagine they all think the West needs to drop wages to be economically competitive or w/e, which is really just how they formalize a sort of visceral disdain for the people they're supposed to pretend to represent
Edited by tam ()