infrateal posted:

dm posted:
"Financial markets are skeptical that unelected technocrats will have the political clout to impose unpopular reforms, the two-year-old debt crisis risks engulfing the entire currency bloc and hurting global growth. "

it's operating purely on instinct now. contradictions heightening, etc.

what im wondering is to what extent capital acting baldly on national interests without political intermediaries, capital decoupled from the nation, can be sustained when the application of force is still so thoroughly a nationalist asset.

VERY GOOD KQUESTION IMHO

what i mean is that in the past capital has controlled the state and the state has controlled force and this is ultimately the tool which extracts value. in the current crisis, with this "technocrat" stuff especially its as if there is an attempt at stripping the administrative middleman down to a skeleton with a bludgeon, all the human functions flensed from the political with the exception of those that enable more efficient extraction. but its those other functions that make the government palatable to the governed and "politics is the art of the possible" and these skeleton dudes are not exactly artists.

further, while international financial collusion is nothing new the deterritorialization of capital has increased such that its not exactly collusion between the capitalist classes of different countries but the action of fundamentally transnational entities; so instead of american banks coordinating with italian banks there is Goldman Sachs. heres part of a kinda disjointed essay by Sakai that im getting some of this idea from:

http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/texts/mcantiwar.html

Globalization is taking a crow bar to the old capitalist class structure, that’s for sure. The relationship between big capital - world banks and transnational corporations - and their former home nations and former subject classes is splintering. The growth in the economy is in these transnational corporations, who are constantly churning and shifting economic relationships - bankrupting many smaller capitalists and farmers and entire local economies. So smaller local bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie are now trying to recapture their “abandoned” regions and neo-colonies, and are starting “anti-imperialist” campaigns and wars of morphed nationalism against global imperialism. These struggles -- which everywhere attract mass support from the dispossessed male classes -- can range politically from neo-fascist and clerical fascist to the authoritarian left, but are usually far right. These are intra-capitalist wars of local capitalist insurgencies trying to win back control of “their” nations from the Great Powers.

i dont entirely agree with the trend of reaction being overarchingly fascist (i dont think the arab spring had happened when this was written) but i do agree that its a significant component, and i thoroughly agree with the nationalist element.

so what i see is an attempt by capital to extract more directly with less civic middle management interfering and diverting profit, yet i don't see any sort of corresponding restructuring of police and military assets out of the governmental sphere. immediately before that paragraph from sakai is one criticizing negri & hardt's notion of a single transnational (Imperial) capitalist class by saying the actual situation is more like a flux of independent yet communicating fragments,

Not one unified world empire but for the next period “anarcho-capitalism” as a new order of disorder. Not one world mega-nation but many more small states, semi-autonomous areas and many, many more armies and para-military mafias

capitalism as a network of fruiting bodies on the mycetozoa of state... as capital spawns, it lingers overhead like lil Laputas, feeding on, and inflating, on the rotting earth...

now clearly theres some increase in this (eg xe) but im not sure there's been ENOUGH. it's as if they're trying to up the level of extraction past the politically possible without taking into account that it is ultimately physical, personal force that enables this and the instruments of physical force are still an organ of the civic/political apparatus they are sapping, a nationalist organ when there is a strong nationalist reaction against them. switching out the generals like they did in greece is great, but the military itself is not a general that can be switched.

In the immediate aftermath of the first OWS SF crackdown i read an article (which theres no way i can find again with wddp down sorry) talking about how disastrous it was for the city, in terms of publicity / cost / and the fact that police morale was thoroughly sapped -- the city police were augmented with other (county i think) forces which were apparently largely responsible for starting the violence, the administration distanced itself from the action, the cops were basically forced to take the repercussions of something they didnt particularly want to do in the first place.

It went on to suggest that police morale in some cities could break before the protesters do; i thought this was overly optimistic considering increasing DHS coordination and of coruse outside forces can be rotated in. But what i'm thinking is that there is an affinity between capital and the state and between the state and the actual individual agents of force, but there is no direct affinity between capital and these agents, and one of the contradictions which could be heightening is that with the withering of the state as intermediary the agents are being controlled by an interest they have no affinity for, whereas the movements they are tasked to act against have a nationalist cast to which there is a militaristic affinity.

this is a really great post and a really great point. imo the morale issue will get only worse. even with bussing and rotation schedules, it is an unavoidable fact that for every cop bustin' OWS heads that is a cop not patrolling his beat, and not doing good for his community. eventually overall crime will increase - if it hasn't already - in the affected areas. I mean, sure there are some sadists out there having a grand ole' time, but, at least as far as what law and order tells me (and that's the only tv show my hotel seems show), most cops become cops because they want to do a little bit of good in the world. I heard a story here on the news the other day about how some teenaged rape victim here in Tiny Cup Town had to wait 5 hours at a precinct to file a report on her rape because all the damn cops were staring down peaceniks at the park. and all this pretense and fancy gear has a monetary cost, too; police might be flush with overtime right now, but I wouldn't be half surprised if this extra payout wasn't even half accounted-for in ever dwindling city budgets.

however, while I think your idea of non-transitive affiliation is essentially correct, i think it may only be a transitive affliction. (GET IT? I MADE A FUNNY HAH HAH HAH - SPLINTER FROM THE TEENAGED MUTANT NINJA TURTLES MOVIE) there may indeed come a moment of critical weakness in which the police state does collapse and the people can trample capital underfoot, but, it will be a fleeting moment. and if it is not seized, capital will quickly expand to fill in the gap.

let me explain what i mean here in a really elaborate and overly complicated manner: (but also sort of gives my answer to the question you posed in your first paragraph): when i say "capital will expand", or going back to those moldy cups, a sort "corpuscal inflation," i'm talking about corporate expansion along horizontal, vertical, and, uh... depthual and massual? [1] dimensions, with dimensionality in this case relating to its control of some kind of market. corporate entities do think in terms of markets, after all, and therefore they operate in terms of markets too. in other words, if corporate consciousness is embedded in markets, then therefore a corporate body moves/grows (sort of the same thing; the better word is "integrates") in terms of markets. and, although a corporation may have a plan to grow in a particular direction in a particular way, there will be, in the same way as a slime mold, natural growth in every direction that there is freedom to move.

its easier to give a basis in terms of extremes; for "horizontal" movement and growth, recall that a horizontally-integrated (HI) monopoly is one that controls a given market by owning the whole market. you wanta da stuff, you buya da stuff from da stuff monopoly, because you ain't got no udder choice to choose. the classic example of a horizontally integrated monopoly, is of course Standard Oil with respect to fuel, while a more recent example is Microsoft w/ operating systems, particularly in the late 90s and early 00s. with a bigger market share, the horizontal integrator is able to make more money in absolute terms, and thus overwhelm the profit of its smaller competitors.

a vertically-integrated (VI) monopoly, on the other hand, is one that dominates a market by streamlining/synergizing all steps of production process, cutting out inefficiency and middle-men to the point that their competition literally can no longer compete. (the classic example here being Carneige Steel, which owned the iron mines, the coal mines, the smelter, the mills, etc. p.s. upvote this post if you understand this process because of playing dwarf fortress). (in this case, the difference in energy between a competitor and the vertical-integrator is used to increase its share in the market until takeover is complete).

in either case, once the monopoly controls the market, the price is no longer pinned to any kind of rational point (i.e. its value, in a Marxian sense, were it in a market of perfect competition), but rather "floats" at the whim of the monopolist. prices and profits become a question of power. and, you know, you can expand either direction along an axis; with VI, for instance, one can expand forward by opening up distribution centers, and/or backwards through the supply.

so, besides HI and VI, there is in fact two other ways for the corporate superstructural xenovirus to expand in its influence and power, and that's along a <-- political —-> and <-- cultural —-> axises. the depthual (DI) and massual (MI) axises. hopefully this doesn't sound too weird. governments grant and/or claim monopoly over common resources and services all teh time, for instance. whether its on the (legal) use of force, makin' sure yer drinkin' water ain't taste like shit, pickin' up your fuckin' garbage, etc, these are all forms of political monopoly. on the other end of scale, you've got patents and copyrights. but of course, one doesn't need to have a a monopoly to gain benefits from DI; you can see all kinds of companies going buck wild with it right now ever since Citizens United. you can kinda think of DI as kind of a complementary undercurrent of HI, where expanding political power can net the same effect as expanding influence in the undermarket.

in contrast, MI is essentially the dark complement of VI. it is easiest to see cultural monopolies in the form of state (or de-facto state) religions. these tended to happen naturally, of course, but in modern times we've brilliantly invented the super kewl ass technologies called "propaganda" and "marketing," which, especially amplified through mass-computing, allows a more directed form of massual integration. apple might be a good example of a cultural monopoly, or at least a semi- cultural monopoly. they may not necessarily control the majority of sales in the bougie electronics markets, but whatever they put out today is what everybody's buying and everybody else'll try to copy a year or two later. that, to me, points to significant control of an undermarket.

now my point to this is that as the state and the nation continue to rot and decay, new spaces will open free for capital to naturally expand into the gaps. in some cases, conscious efforts like XE, but in the more general case, we're going to see more institutions structured like Google, where employees eat at Google restaurants, and send their kids to Google schools, and work out at Google gyms, are treated at Google health centers, and are protected by Google security. livin' the Google life, in other words.

so........................................ if the state and the nation eventually become so brittle as to collapse completely, or perhaps remain as but a vestigial organ of a much more powerful conglomerate, what will there be left? its lookin’ to me like the corporations of today will *become* the new, smaller states and semi-autonomous areas of the future... and have their own armies and para-military mafias.

[1] what words describe movement along a z-axis and density? lemme go with depthual and massual for now, since while this isn't really a "thing," i find this line of thought necessary to describe my conspiracy theory here & these two sound the kewlest.

Edited by germanjoey (Nov. 24, 2011 05:39:12)

tam posted:
all that stuff is rent-seeking really, and I don't see centralized international structures holding together that well once capital is no longer able to naturally reproduce. the social surplus will shrink and the amount of profit left won't sustain industrial-capitalist class power against the various rentiers, who are aligned with monopolists anyway

there is the land, and the humans who work it. the humans that work get subsistence plus the level necessary to maintain whatever social relations they're in, and the rest goes to the owners, the holders of military power. that's the normal way human agricultural civilization works, and this recent nonsense where profit income is able to expand and assert its class interests against the state is a temporary blip caused by the discovery of fossil fuels and the New World, and the subsequent protracted ballooning of the surplus over hundreds of years is all that has allowed the bourgeoisie to emerge from the unending conflict between the rulers and the commons. the struggle of the peasant against the landlord is a roiling sea that never becomes still, but the world-historic ascendance of the bourgeoisie is merely the bubbles on the surface that form when some ancient beast lets out a dying fart and a column of methane bubbles floats up and out before dissipating into the atmosphere. we're going back to feudalism, one way or another

i agree that we're moving back to a form of feudalism (a form of schizo-feudalism), but it is absolutely ridiculous to assert that human civilization is still in essense agricultural. who the fuck farms anymore? if anything, you could claim that the major project of the human race over the 10000 years to get as many fucking people away from a farm as possible! this is in fact the crowning achievement of the bourgeoisie!

germanjoey posted:
i agree that we're moving back to a form of feudalism (a form of schizo-feudalism), but it is absolutely ridiculous to assert that human civilization is still in essense agricultural. who the fuck farms anymore? if anything, you could claim that the major project of the human race over the 10000 years to get as many fucking people away from a farm as possible! this is in fact the crowning achievement of the bourgeoisie!

yep and that achievement is completely transitory and oil-dependent. sedentary monocropping is the foundation of the modern corporate state in the same way that sedentary monocropping has been the foundation of every state that's ever existed. that there are many fewer people doing it and urban leftists don't have to think about it doesn't mean that it isn't the foundation of the economy

shennong posted:
yep and that achievement is completely transitory and oil-dependent. sedentary monocropping is the foundation of the modern corporate state in the same way that sedentary monocropping has been the foundation of every state that's ever existed. that there are many fewer people doing it and urban leftists don't have to think about it doesn't mean that it isn't the foundation of the economy

ok, there is a particular assumption i've seen in a number of your posts relating to agriculture, namely Ricardo's theory of rent that postulated diminishing returns to agriculture (which helped in getting the Corn Laws removed). this is incorrect, as was known to both Marx and the American protectionists.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch12.htm#s3b

...the incorrectness of the Ricardian concept that differential rent depends on the diminishing productivity of labour, on the movement from the more productive mine or land to the less productive. It is just as compatible with the reverse process and hence with the growing productivity of labour. Whether the one or the other takes place has nothing to do with the nature and existence of differential rent but is a historical question.

so yes there is agribusiness and everything, but it is tremendously inefficient. the most basic energy required for agriculture comes from that whole photosynthesis thing. on a chemical level, that was what enabled the generation of any economic surplus whatsoever to happen in the first place. the rise of Sumer and Akkad was due not to oil, but to the development of an administrative system and technology.

in that light, we can talk about "staple crops" rather than "monocropping" because of the whole increasing productivity in agriculture thing. export monocultures are a product of historical conditions leading to trade dependency.

tam posted:
it's a matter of the inevitability of agriculture returning to a labor-intensive form as the energy cost of mechanical and chemical inputs goes up, which causes long-term problems for capital in a similar way to how the Corn Laws were temporary problems for English capital in particular way back.

the labor-intensity issue is more of a division of labor thing. like if everything was reorganized in terms of a balance between agriculture and industry, it would take less labor time overall. that was where Ricardo's theory of rent came in: repealing the Corn Laws and opening England up to agricultural imports would free up more labor for industrial production to produce exports on even more beneficial terms of trade (known then and now as Free Trade).

tam posted:
if value is denominated in labor and the labor cost of food shoots through the roof, the value of the present surplus becomes unrealizable and future surpluses are significantly diminished as labor leaves other sectors to return to agriculture.

that's actually where the origin of the theory of land rent comes from because it was labor time as measured by the wage. if you go back to the Physiocrats, the reasoning is fucking hilarious. they observed that there was a wage level below which labor could not reproduce itself and concluded this represented rent paid to the land for the soil fertility with workers as sort of intermediaries.

in this case, the trick is the discrepancy between the time necessary to reproduce labor and the time necessary to reproduce capital. because soil fertility is a complete freebie (organic composition of capital), there isn't much surplus-value to extract because of the higher value composition of capital in industrial production.

tam posted:
any period of persistent falling agricultural productivity will make free labor less and less affordable to capitalists, and thus we can expect that most future factory work will be done by debt slaves, chattel slaves, and various other forms of unfree labor (possibly we'll see a return of local monopoly company scrip once Pentagon Scrip collapses?)

i think debt slavery in agriculture is more likely because industry would have to shrink if agricultural productivity fell. there's also a lot of historical precedent for it and a really thin line between renting someone a place to live on your property and them becoming part of your estate.

tam posted:
that class then fought the landowners for political dominance and eliminated various rents, which then went back into the surplus to be divided between profit and wage. the process eventually led us to our present point, where we expect that we are now staring down a long catastrophe rather than a wealth of further potential. rentier interests have re-emerged and re-organized through finance, and the unchecked result will be the re-capture of the surplus by asset rent.

this is actually a really interesting issue that hasn't been dealt with enough. landed property was certainly subdued, but never completely disappeared, it just sort of disappeared from most analysis in the twentieth century. the thing about finance is that you can just acquire land through encouraging asset bubbles since the loans cost you nothing to produce. when they pop, the borrower forfeits the property pledged as security for the loan to you without you ever having to pay for it

Edited by dm (Nov. 24, 2011 23:05:18)

Crow posted:
Also, I wonder that due to the radical tradition of the middle classes, this asymptotic shedding of the middle classes from rent alleviation and impositions of new debt conditions will spark the conditions for massive conflagration beyond the reach of the cities (ie. Favelas, exurbs, peripheral villages, slums) due to the fanning out of the former middle class, like disgraced prometheus

i think it's possible because enforcement depends on the state. that asymptotic trend also makes it more difficult for the state, media, pop culture, etc. to represent middle class subjects: http://adage.com/article/adagestat/marketing-era-redistributed-wealth/149059/

dm posted:
ok, there is a particular assumption i've seen in a number of your posts relating to agriculture, namely Ricardo's theory of rent that postulated diminishing returns to agriculture (which helped in getting the Corn Laws removed). this is incorrect, as was known to both Marx and the American protectionists.

i think you've misread me- i'm not talking about diminishing returns or the efficiency of agricultural labour. i was responding to joeys' comment that society is no longer agricultural because there are few people doing it (around 1% in north america for instance). this is achievable because energy-intensive, oil-based products have substituted for labour in agriculture. it's not possible to have an agroecology anywhere near as productive as we have in the west with as little labour as we use without the substitution of, for instance, pesticides for manual cultivation, or combine harvesters for manual harvesting and threshing. this arrangement is inherently transitory (unless you're an energy cornucopian i guess) and conceals our dependence on agriculture. i dunno, maybe i haven't understood your point though.

dm posted:
so yes there is agribusiness and everything, but it is tremendously inefficient. the most basic energy required for agriculture comes from that whole photosynthesis thing. on a chemical level, that was what enabled the generation of any economic surplus whatsoever to happen in the first place. the rise of Sumer and Akkad was due not to oil, but to the development of an administrative system and technology.

i wasn't implying that ancient states were reliant on cheap energy, but rather that the particular form of subsistence routine modern corporate states rely on is very similar in many respects and we are just as dependent on it- we are just as "agricultural" as any historical state in that respect

dm posted:
in that light, we can talk about "staple crops" rather than "monocropping" because of the whole increasing productivity in agriculture thing. export monocultures are a product of historical conditions leading to trade dependency.

this comment is pretty interesting actually because it reveals quite a bit about the way you're thinking about agriculture, i think mostly from a formal economics perspective? "sedentary monocropping" is in no way interchangeable with "staple crops" unless you're thinking about agriculture as a unit process and plants as interchangeable products destined for a market rather than a specific type of agroecology and specific organisms with specific effects on subsistence routines and social organisation. sedentary monocropping is the specific type of agroecology that states prefer because it promotes appropriation and control- even sedentary polycropping is a complete nightmare for taxation for instance. to give you another example, cassava is a staple crop whose cultivation is routinely banned by states with fugitive populations because it can be cultivated in a way that is almost totally invisible to the state and completely impossible to appropriate absent massive manpower scouring forests for individual cassava tubers. im going to have a thread about this soon so i hope you can be there and talk more about the formal economic aspects of this tsuff maybe!! i am sorry for using this thread to Build Hype by using terminology from my future thread

shennong posted:
i think you've misread me- i'm not talking about diminishing returns or the efficiency of agricultural labour. i was responding to joeys' comment that society is no longer agricultural because there are few people doing it (around 1% in north america for instance). this is achievable because energy-intensive, oil-based products have substituted for labour in agriculture. it's not possible to have an agroecology anywhere near as productive as we have in the west with as little labour as we use without the substitution of, for instance, pesticides for manual cultivation, or combine harvesters for manual harvesting and threshing. this arrangement is inherently transitory (unless you're an energy cornucopian i guess) and conceals our dependence on agriculture. i dunno, maybe i haven't understood your point though.

oh, i'm not contesting the fact that we are dependent on agriculture. the misunderstanding was probably based on labor actually being a physiological expenditure of the energy that comes from agriculture at some point and that this historically preceded all of the capital-intensive methods. moreover, the capital equipment requires raw materials and the people making it need to be fed as well. the commodity form conceals our dependence on it.

shennong posted:
this comment is pretty interesting actually because it reveals quite a bit about the way you're thinking about agriculture, i think mostly from a formal economics perspective? "sedentary monocropping" is in no way interchangeable with "staple crops" unless you're thinking about agriculture as a unit process and plants as interchangeable products destined for a market rather than a specific type of agroecology and specific organisms with specific effects on subsistence routines and social organisation. sedentary monocropping is the specific type of agroecology that states prefer because it promotes appropriation and control- even sedentary polycropping is a complete nightmare for taxation for instance. to give you another example, cassava is a staple crop whose cultivation is routinely banned by states with fugitive populations because it can be cultivated in a way that is almost totally invisible to the state and completely impossible to appropriate absent massive manpower scouring forests for individual cassava tubers. im going to have a thread about this soon so i hope you can be there and talk more about the formal economic aspects of this tsuff maybe!! i am sorry for using this thread to Build Hype by using terminology from my future thread

that's actually the perspective i thought i was hearing, which is why i misread you. looking at what economists say about Mao will give you a good idea of the mindset: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Impact_on_economy

as for your thread, the most interesting stuff is over a century old. there's Marx, but one of the American protectionists i mentioned is also really fascinating with energy (just check out the first chapter). they had a doctrine of balancing industry and agriculture so Marx used to troll them to try to make them see the light of communism.

i would be interested in that thread though because of a bunch of other stuff that's not usually regarded as "economics" as such, like those issues with taxing

dm posted:

and now they want it back:

Darcy Parmer ran into trouble soon after she started her job as a fraud analyst at Wells Fargo Bank. Her bosses, she later claimed, were upset that she was, well, finding fraud.

Parmer isn’t alone in claiming she was punished for objecting to fraud in the midst of the nation’s home-loan boom. iWatch News has identified 63 former employees at 20 financial institutions who say they were fired or demoted for reporting fraud or refusing to commit fraud. Their stories were disclosed in whistleblower claims with the U.S. Department of Labor, court documents or interviews with iWatch News.

http://www.iwatchnews.org/2011/11/22/7461/whistleblowers-ignored-punished-lenders-dozens-former-employees-say

Crow posted:
Talk about "Capitalism without procedures":

Darcy Parmer ran into trouble soon after she started her job as a fraud analyst at Wells Fargo Bank. Her bosses, she later claimed, were upset that she was, well, finding fraud.

Parmer isn’t alone in claiming she was punished for objecting to fraud in the midst of the nation’s home-loan boom. iWatch News has identified 63 former employees at 20 financial institutions who say they were fired or demoted for reporting fraud or refusing to commit fraud. Their stories were disclosed in whistleblower claims with the U.S. Department of Labor, court documents or interviews with iWatch News.

http://www.iwatchnews.org/2011/11/22/7461/whistleblowers-ignored-punished-lenders-dozens-former-employees-say

they're just ensuring the transparency of their products. you don't want to Spook The Markets or cause problems with confidence. seriously, go to http://news.google.com and search for 'spook markets' or 'confidence'

http://seekingalpha.com/article/309136-stock-market-outlook-it-all-comes-down-to-confidence

The sustainability of the banking system is all about confidence. Bank balance sheets are far from transparent. As a result, the confidence of banks to lend to other financial institutions requires a leap of faith. And if markets start to believe that a particular financial institution may be in trouble, liquidity can dry up in a flash and bankruptcy quickly follows. We have to look no further than Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, AIG and most recently MF Global to see how suddenly things come undone once confidence is lost.

________/


e: gd, it wont let me embed American Psycho

Edited by dm (Nov. 26, 2011 16:47:50)