Posts tagged capitalism
Posts tagged capitalism
Barely twenty years have passed since the collapse of actually-existing socialism and now the crisis of actually-existing capitalism, in its neoliberal version, is upon us. The shrill capitalist triumphalism of the 1990s, or the bellicose equation of capitalism with democracy that defined the ’00s ‘war on terror’, ring more than a little hollow in the frozen desert of burst financial bubbles and devalorization. The commodities that make up the capitalist way-of-life have turned malignant, exposed as hollow bearers of debt servitude that can never be paid off. The cry ‘No New Deal’ goes up as wealth is transferred in huge amounts to save the financial sector. We are prepared for yet another round of sacrifice as structural adjustment and ‘shock doctrine’ return to the center of global capitalism after extensive testing on its self-defined ‘peripheries’. Whether this is terminal crisis, entropic drift, or merely the prelude to the ‘creative destruction’ that will kick-start a new round of accumulation, is still obscure.
The capitalist economy functions through decoding and deterritorialization: it has its extreme illnesses, that is, its schizophrenics who come uncoded and become deterritorializaed to the extreme, but it also has its extreme consequences, its revolutionaries.
Setting aside the apocalyptic awakening of the neighboring San Andreas Fault, it is all too easy to envision Los Angeles reproducing itself endlessly across the desert with the assistance of pilfered water, cheap immigrant labor, Asian capital and desperate homebuyers willing to trade lifetimes on the freeway in exchange for $500,000 ‘dream homes’ in the middle of Death Valley.
Is this the world-historic victory of Capitalism that everyone is talking about?
In industrial capitalism’s past, the working class could fight against a target that was precisely identified: the boss, the entrepreneur who owned material things like the factory and the products of his employee’s labor. Today, the boss has vanished. He is fragmented into billions of financial segments, disseminated into millions of financial agents scattered all around the world. The workers themselves are part of recombinant financial capital. They are expecting future revenues from their pension fund investments. They own stock options in the enterprise exploiting their labor. They are hooked up, like a fly in a spider web: if they move, they get strangled, but if they don’t move, the spider will suck their life from them. Society may rot, fall apart, agonize. It is not going to affect the political and economic stability of capitalism. What is called economic recovery is a new round of social devastation.
So the recession is over, capitalism is recovering. Nonetheless, unemployment is rising and misery is spreading. This means that financial capitalism is autonomous from society. Capitalism doesn’t need workers: it just needs cellular fractals of labor, underpaid, precarious, depersonalised. Fragments of impersonal nervous energy, recombined by the network. The crisis is going to push forward technological change and the substitution of human labor with machines. The employment rate is not going to rise in the future, and productivity will increase. A shrinking number of workers will be forced to work overtime to produce more and more.
It must be admitted, we do not care about ‘the economy.’ Or, if we do, we find a certain thrill in watching the bankers and rulers of the world tremble as the cracks in their capitalist world appear. As the economy is collapsing, streets of major cities around the globe explode with defiance….
…the ‘elementary cell’ of capital, the commodity, contains in an embryonic way all the inner qualities and contradictions of that social category.
In criminology as in economics there is scarcely a more powerful word than ‘capital’. In the former discipline it denotes death; in the latter it has designated the ‘substance’ or the ‘stock’ of life: apparently opposite meanings. Just why the same word, ‘capital’, has come to mean both crimes punishable by death and the accumulation of wealth founded on the produce of previous (or dead) labour might be left etymologists were not the association so striking, so contradictory and so exact in expressing the theme of this book. For this book explores the relationship between, the organised death of living labour (capital punishment) and oppression of the living by dead labour (the punishment of capital).
(Source: rumagin)
More than anything else, the riots signify refusal. There is a refusal to accept the non-community the residents of the slums of London have been coaxed into accepting, the refusal to submit to daily searches, the refusal to shut up and stay out of sight, a refusal to continue pretending as if they actually own things, but most of all, a refusal to accept the identity that has been forced upon them. If these struggles fail to list concrete demands, as in Spain, Greece, California, and now in London, it’s not only a symptom of spontaneity but also an indication that people have stopped thinking that capital can somehow improve their condition. They know that in this day and age, in this conjuncture, to put forth demands is to abandon their autonomy by forcing them to speak the same language as capital. A refusal to act as a trading partner with capital, a latent intransigence: these people no longer think capital has any future left to give them.
(via rumagin)
(via dontbcruel)
I wish to trace for you, in its main lines, the history of capitalism in the past century, which can be defined as the century of capitalism. But first of all, what is capitalism? Capitalism must not be confounded with the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is quite another thing. The bourgeoisie is a mode of being which can be great or pretty, heroic of philistine.
Capitalism, on the other hand, is a specific mode of production, a mode of industrial production.
When capitalism attains its highest expression it is a mode of production for mass consumption, financed in mass through the national and international issue of joint stock capital.
Benito Mussolini - “Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions”
i think this is probably a good historically fixed definition of the mechanisation of production as a way of defining the historical functions of capitalism… rather than ahistorically positing some basic idea that “we’ve” always used the “laws” of supply and demand
Also he has some good vignettes about the intervention of the state as the basis of the economy functioning…
Privatisation and ‘militarisation’ are commonly highlighted as key features of contemporary urban life where ‘form follows fear’ (Ellin, 1997) often leading to changes in the physical form of landscapes as a result of increased perceptions of crime, terrorism or external attack, emanating from occupants in a particular area (Davis, 1992, 1998; Dillion, 1994; Archibald et al 2002; Graham, 2002; Marcuse and Kempton, 2002). As a result, a whole plethora of fortified landscape features can now be found, or are planned, in many Western cities. Such features range from the simple removal of benches and other amenities to stop the homeless living on the street to the other extreme of gated and heavily guarded residential and commercial areas (Davis, 1990; Flusty, 1994; Jones and Lowery, 1995; Dear and Flusty, 1998; Graham and Marvin, 2001).
The control of the urban fabric by the higher socio-economic groups has always been a characteristic of cities but in recent years, and especially after 9/11, this control has been increasingly asserted through an array of evermore sophisticated physical and technological measures which have the explicit aim of excluding the sections of society deemed a threat to a particular way of life. The popularity of security features expresses the privatisation of space according to the preferences of the rich and powerful, and subsequently fuels the growth of the private security industry (Sorkin, 1995; Zukin, 1995; Lees, 1998). As Flusty (1994, p. 67) noted whilst talking about the erosion of what he termed ‘spatial justice’ in Los Angeles:
Traditional public spaces are increasingly supplanted by such privately produced (although often publicly subsidised) “privately owned and administered spaces for public aggregation” such as shopping malls [and] corporate plazas… In these new post-public spaces, access is predicated upon real or apparent ability to pay
Flusty continued by indicating that such changes in the urban landscape were inherently related to economic productivity- ‘in such spaces, exclusivity is an inevitable by-product of the high levels of control necessary to ensure that irregularity, unpredictability and inefficiency do not interfere with the orderly flow of commerce’ (ibid.).
- Jon Coaffee - “Terrorism, Risk and the City: The Making of a Contemporary Urban Landscape”
in case you were wondering why i don’t blog much, this is the most exciting bit of text i’ve read in days, stuff about city planning, police tactics, etc. are REALLY FUCKING BORING most of the time and the stuff i find interesting generally requires tons of context… hopefully i’ll get through my masochistic set of insane books and onto fun stuff again soon
