Showing papers in "Historical Materialism in 2009"

Financialised Capitalism: Crisis and Financial Expropriation

Abstract: The current crisis is one outcome of the financialisation of contemporary capitalism. It arose in the USA because of the enormous expansion of mortgage-lending, including to the poorest layers of the working class. It became general because of the trading of debt by financial institutions. These phenomena are integral to financialisation. During the last three decades, large enterprises have turned to open markets to obtain finance, forcing banks to seek alternative sources of profit. One avenue has been provision of financial services to individual workers. This trend has been facilitated by the retreat of public provision from housing, pensions, education, and so on. A further avenue has been to adopt investment-banking practices in open financial markets. The extraction of financial profits directly out of personal income constitutes financial expropriation. Combined with investment-banking, it has catalysed the current gigantic crisis. More broadly, financialisation has sustained the emergence of new layers of rentiers , defined primarily through their relation to the financial system rather than ownership of loanable capital. Finally, financialisation has posed important questions regarding finance-capital and imperialism.

From Financial Crisis to World-Slump: Accumulation, Financialisation, and the Global Slowdown

Abstract: This paper assesses the current world economic crisis in terms of crucial transformations in global capitalism throughout the neoliberal period. It argues that intense social and spatial restructuring after the crises of 1973–82 produced a new wave of capitalist expansion (centred on East Asia) that began to exhaust itself in the late-1990s. Since that time, new problems of overaccumulation and declining profitability have plagued global capitalism. Interconnected with these problems are contradictions related to a mutation in the form of world-money, as a result of its complete de-linking from gold after 1971, which stimulated a fantastic growth in financial instruments and transactions, and generated a proliferation of esoteric 'fictitious capitals' whose collapse is wreaking havoc across world financial markets. The intersection between general conditions of overaccumulation and a crisis in financial structures specific to neoliberalism has now produced a deep world-slump. Inherent in this crisis is a breakdown in forms of value-measurement that is throwing up intense struggles between the capitalist value-form and popular life-values, the latter of which comprise the grounds for any real renewal of the socialist Left.

Racial Exclusion and the Political Economy of the Subprime Crisis

Abstract: This paper develops a political economic explanation of the 2007–9 US subprime crisis which focuses on one of its central causes: the transformation of racial exclusion in US mortgage-markets. Until the early 1990s, racial minorities were systematically excluded from mortgage-finance due to bank-redlining and discrimination. But, then, racial exclusion in credit-markets was transformed: racial minorities were increasingly given access to housing-credit under terms far more adverse than were offered to non-minority borrowers. This paper shows that the emergence of the subprime loan is linked, in turn, to the strategic transformation of banking in the 1980s, and to the unique global circumstances of the US macro-economy. Thus, subprime lending emerged from a combination of the long US history of racial exclusion in credit-markets, the crisis of US banking, and the position of the US within the global economy. From the viewpoint of the capitalist accumulation-process, these loans increased the depth of the financial expropriation of the working class by financial capital. The crisis in subprime lending then emerged when subprime loans with exploitative terms became more widespread and were made increasingly on an under-collateralised basis – that is, when housing-loans became not just extortionary but speculative.

'Cognitive Capitalism' and the Rat-Race: How Capital Measures Immaterial Labour in British Universities

Abstract: One hundred years ago, Frederick Taylor and the pioneers of scientific management went into battle on US factory-floors. Armed with stopwatches and clipboards, they were fighting a war over measure. A century on and capitalist production has spread far beyond the factory walls and the confines of 'national economies'. Although capitalism increasingly seems to rely on 'cognitive' and 'immaterial' forms of labour and social cooperation, the war over measure continues. Armies of economists, statisticians, management-scientists, information-specialists, accountants and others are engaged in a struggle to connect heterogeneous concrete human activities on the basis of equal quantities of human labour in the abstract – that is, to link work and capitalist value. In this paper, we discuss contemporary capital's attempt to (re)impose the 'law of value' through its measuring of immaterial labour. Using the example of higher education in the UK – a 'frontline' of capitalist development – as our case-study, we explain how measuring takes places on various 'self-similar' levels of social organisation. We suggest that such processes are both diachronic and synchronic: socially-necessary labour-times of 'immaterial doings' are emerging and being driven down at the same time as heterogeneous concrete activities are being made commensurable. Alongside more overt attacks on academic freedom, it is in this way that neoliberalism appears on campus.

On the Content of Banking in Contemporary Capitalism

Abstract: This paper considers the character and social content of banking in contemporary capitalism. Based on a survey of the operations of nine leading international banks, it documents the marked differences between contemporary banking and the traditional business of taking, making loans to enterprises, and making profits from the difference in interest-rates between them. Notably, the operations of the world's top banking organisations are shown to centre on various forms of credit to individual wage-earners and on mediating access to financial markets by corporations and, increasingly, individuals. In order to characterise the social content of such activities, the paper seeks to apply, and where necessary extend, existing Marxist analyses of banking, capital-markets, and their relationship to capitalist accumulation. This includes advancing a number of elements of a distinctive Marxist interpretation of capital-market operations to theorise financial-market mediation-relations between banks, corporations, and the mass of retail-savers. The analysis pursued helps identify the distinctive and exploitative content of the relations banks maintain with ordinary wage-earners through consumer- and mortgage-lending, as well as through the provision of pension-related saving services.

Subalternity and Language: Overcoming the Fragmentation of Common Sense

Abstract: The topics of language and subaltern social groups appear throughout Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. Although Gramsci often associates the problem of political fragmentation among subaltern groups with issues concerning language and common sense, there are only a few notes where he explicitly connects his overlapping analyses of language and subalternity. We build on the few places in the literature on Gramsci that focus on how he relates common sense to the questions of language or subalternity. By explicitly tracing out these relations, we hope to bring into relief the direct connections between subalternity and language by showing how the concepts overlap with respect to Gramsci's analyses of common sense, intellectuals, philosophy, folklore, and hegemony. We argue that, for Gramsci, fragmentation of any social group's 'common sense', worldview and language is a political detriment, impeding effective political organisation to counter exploitation but that such fragmentation cannot be overcome by the imposition of a 'rational' or 'logical' worldview. Instead, what is required is a deep engagement with the fragments that make up subaltern historical, social, economic and political conditions. In our view, Gramsci provides an alternative both to the celebration of fragmentation fashionable in liberal multiculturalism and uncritical postmodernism, as well as other attempts of overcoming it through recourse to some external, transcendental or imposed worldview. This is fully in keeping with, and further elucidates Gramsci's understanding of the importance of effective 'democratic centralism' of the leadership of the party in relation to the rank and file and the popular masses.

Capitalism as Religion: Walter Benjamin and Max Weber

Abstract: Benjamin's fragment 'Capitalism as Religion', written in 1921, was only published several decades after his death Its aim is to show that capitalism is a cultic religion, without mercy or truce, leading humanity to the 'house of despair' It is an astonishing document, directly based on Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , but – in ways akin to Ernst Bloch or Erich Fromm – transforming Weber's 'value-free' analysis into a ferocious anticapitalist argument, probably inspired by Gustav Landauer's romantic and libertarian socialism This article analyses Benjamin's fragment and explores its relationship to Weber's thesis, as well as to the tradition of romantic anticapitalism

Historical Temporalities of Capital: An Anti-Historicist Perspective

Abstract: Marx's rethinking of the combination between absolute surplus-value and relative surplus-value during the 1860s is very important in order to reconsider the co-presence of different forms of historical temporality and exploitation. Postmodernism presents a picture of a plurality of historical times in which the old lies beside the modern and the sweatshop beside the high-tech factory. Because it fails to provide an explanation of the relation between these forms, postmodernism produces a false image of an 'ahistorical' present. In this article I want to show how the combination of differentials of surplus-value works and why a representation of a plurality of historical temporalities synchronised by the temporality of socially-necessary labour is the most adequate image to comprehend it. The theoretical task is to show how the mature categorial structure of Capital not only does not need an historicist philosophy of history, but is in fact incompatible with it.

One Symptom of Originality: Race and the Management of Labour in the History of the United States

Abstract: In the labour-history of the US, the systematised management of workers is widely understood as emerging in the decades after the Civil War, as industrial production and technological innovation changed the pace, nature and organisation of work. Though modern management is seen as predating the contributions of Frederick Taylor, the technique of so-called 'scientific management' is emphasised as the particularly crucial managerial innovation to emerge from the US, prefiguring and setting the stage for Fordism. This article argues that the management of labour in the US has roots in the particularities of a society which racialised its labour-systems – slave and free – and thus made 'racial knowledge' central to managerial knowledge. Rather than transcending the limits of racial knowledge, the authors argue that scientific management relied on experts to know and develop 'the races' not only for the purpose of accumulating capital but also for the organisation of modern production through the first decades of the twentieth century. Such 'knowledge' became central to the export of managerial and engineering knowledge from the US to the world.

The Political Economy of Academic Publishing

Abstract: The digitisation of academic journals has created the technical possibility chat research can be made available to any interested party free of charge. This possibility has been undermined by the proprietary control that commercial publishers exercise over the majority of this material. The control of commercial publishers over publicly-funded research has been criticised by charitable bodies, politicians and academics themselves. While the existing critical literature on academic publishers has considerable value, it fails to link questions of control within the journal-industry to the wider restructuring of economic and social relations that has taken place over the last three decades. This article seeks to complement this literature by highlighting how broader profitability pressures and the subsequent attempts by state-managers to expand the social space for capitalist accumulation have structured the development of the journal-industry.

The Korean Developmental State: From Dirigisme to Neoliberalism

Abstract: Pirie's new book attempts a long-awaited Marxist analysis of the contemporary Korean state. It seeks to go beyond the binary opposition between neoliberal market-fundamentalism and Keynesian statism by persuasively demonstrating the indispensability of the state's role in the establishment of neoliberalism in Korea. It also provides an original and insightful analysis of the neoliberal regulation of finance in Korea. However, Pirie's central argument that the stable neoliberal regime of accumulation was established in Korea after the 1997 crisis can be questioned in view of the trend in profitability, the same empirical evidence on which his argument rests. Pirie also needs to provide a more consistent Marxist class-analysis of capitalism in Korea.

Adorno on Education or, Can Critical Self-Reflection Prevent the Next Auschwitz?

Abstract: This article presents Theodor W. Adorno's concept of education, the basis of which is critical self-reflection. It argues that a close reading of Adorno's various writings on education yields a theory of critical self-reflection that is not simply introspection but an analysis of the social totality. Beginning with Adorno's assessment of education within capitalism – which is always a critique of capitalism itself – the article moves through his concept of critical self-reflection, and concludes by reassessing his claim that an education for critical self-reflection offers the strongest barrier to the recurrence of Auschwitz.

The Fallacies of 'New Dialectics' and Value-Form Theory

Abstract: Chris Arthur's approach aims at a systematic re-ordering of Marx's categories. This article argues that his approach is actually a different ordering of different categories that are positioned within a specific theoretical whole, a Hegelian re-interpretation of Marx and especially of abstract labour, which distances itself from Marx. While the debate has focused mainly on the philosophical aspects of Arthur's work, its economic features have not been the object of a systematic analysis. Yet, a full assessment of the 'New Dialectics' should include explicitly a systematic internal critique of its economic dimensions. The aim of this article is to assess the internal consistency of the economic ramifications of the 'New Dialectics'. The focus is on the notions of abstract labour, concrete labour, and exploitation. Arthur's faithfulness to Marx, or correspondence to Marx's quotations, is not the criterion used to assess the 'New Dialectics'. Rather, the criterion is whether it (a) discovers logical inconsistencies in Capital and (b) is itself free from inconsistencies. The answer is negative in both cases.

Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2: Global Turbulence: Social Activists' and State Responses to Globalization: Globalization and Inequality: Neoliberalism's Downward Spiral: Anti-Capitalism: A Marxist Introduction

Abstract: This article reviews a cross-section of the globalisation-literature written prior to the unfolding economic crisis of 2007. It assesses the literature in terms of its apprehending of changes in capitalism and the prospects for social change that are envisioned.

The Rate of Profit and the Problem of Stagnant Investment: A Structural Analysis of Barriers to Accumulation and the Spectre of Protracted Crisis

Abstract: This paper situates the subprime crisis in the context of the performance of the American economy over the last twenty-five years. The restructuring of the US economy is briefly reviewed, followed by an examination of some of the contradictions of the neoliberal model. Particular emphasis is placed on understanding the reasons behind stagnant investment, and how the US finance-led accumulation-regime has become dependent upon, and threatened by, credit-creation delinked from the financing of fixed-capital formation. I argue that while the defeat of the remnants of the New-Deal/Civil-Rights liberal-democratic coalition has provided the political context for the bold re-assertion of the prerogatives of capitalist owners, the neoliberal model has not provided a path out of problems of stagnation and growing debt-dependency that presently plague the US (and global) economy. Further, I argue that evidence suggests that the post-1982 restoration of profitability that underpinned the relative improvement of US economic performance has peaked, and that compelling historical and theoretical reasons exist to expect that the profit-rate will decline in the coming decade. This will introduce additional stresses on the current debt-structure of the US economy, triggering a period of prolonged crisis and economic dislocation. The conclusion is that the US economy faces the spectre of a protracted crisis associated with the reassertion of the falling rate of profit.

Another kind of Gewalt: Beyond Law Re-Reading Walter Benjamin

Abstract: This article is the first in a series of discussions of the essay 'Violence' by Balibar from the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism, published in this issue of Historical Materialism. The article revisits Walter Benjamin's reflection on the concept of violence, attempting to rethink its semantics in the tension between right and justice. After examining the continuum of juridical violence in relation to the logic of the modern state, it attempts to delineate the possibility of another type of violence: a violence that is not a means in order to attain an end, but which finds in itself the criterion of its own justice. Research into this kind of violence has been a particularly urgent and complex problem in modern politics which, together with the foreclosure of justice, has rendered unthinkable qualitatively different types of Gewalt, types that lie beyond the sterile opposition between violence and non-violence. Rethinking the question of justice means that, in a conflict, however violent it might be, a non-teleological criterion is possible, starting with the extent to which some part of the struggle can be defined as just.

The Longue Durée of the French Bourgeoisie

Abstract: Beginning with Engels, Marxist historiography viewed the absolute monarchy in France as mediating between the nobility and the emergent capitalist bourgeoisie. More recent Marxist accounts stress that the absolute monarchy reflected the interests of the nobility. Revisionist Marxist historians have taken this perspective to an extreme arguing that, at the height of the Bourbon monarchy in the seventeenth century, a capitalist bourgeoisie did not exist. This paper argues that, in taking such a view, these historians have ignored the ongoing dialectical opposition between the forces of rent and profit in the early-modern period. As a result, they have severed the connection between the ancien regime and the Revolution of 1789. Despite being thrown on the defensive by the advance of rent and the crystallisation of the absolutist state, a capitalist bourgeoisie that emerged in sixteenth-century France survived and persevered during the seventeenth century. It resumed the initiative in the succeeding period of the Enlightenment.

Archaeologies of the Future: Jameson’s Utopia or Orwell’s Dystopia?

Abstract: This paper begins with the proposition that Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future (2005) is the most important theoretical contribution to utopian and science-fiction studies since Darko Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979). It argues that Jameson's derivation of 'anti-anti-Utopianism' from Sartrean anti-anti-communism will provide 'the party of Utopia' with as good a slogan as it is likely to find in the foreseeable future. It takes issue with Jameson over two key issues: his overwhelming concentration on American science-fiction, which seems strangely parochial in such a distinguished comparativist; and his understanding of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as an 'anti-Utopia' rather than a dystopia. The paper argues that, for Nineteen Eighty-Four , as for any other science-fiction novel, the key question is that identified by Jameson: not 'did it get the future right?', but rather 'did it sufficiently shock its own present as to force a meditation on the impossible?'. It concludes that Jameson fails to understand how this process works for dystopia as well as utopia, for barbarism as well as socialism.

Contradiction and Abstraction: A Reply to Finelli

Abstract: Following the publication of my book The New Dialectic and Marx's 'Capital', and the symposium on it in Historical Materialism 13.2, a critique by Roberto Finelli recently appeared: 'Abstraction versus Contradiction: Observations on Chris Arthur's The New Dialectic and Marx's “Capital”' in Historical Materialism 15.2. Finelli argues that my systematic dialectic is not taken sufficiently far, in that I retain presuppositions not posited by the capitalist totality. Here, I argue against Finelli's closed totality of wholly abstract forms, not least because it affords no realistic exit strategy. I reaffirm that the logic of contradiction is required to conceptualise the capital relation.

Revolution in Psychology: Alienation to Emancipation The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, and Politics

Abstract: This review essay analyses the proposed synthesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism, which often presents itself as a critique of the kind of utopianism associated with 'Freudo-Marxism'. In Yannis Stavrakakis's The Lacanian Left (2007) this anti-utopianism slides towards a left reformism, in which the emphasis on constitutive lack prevents any thinking of transformation. Ian Parker's Revolution in Psychology (2007) presents a bracing but reductive polemic, in which psychology and psychoanalysis seem to function as mere reflections of capitalist ideology. What goes missing in both accounts is the possibility of a re-thinking of subjectivity, both individual and collective, posed between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxism.

Economic Crisis, Henryk Grossman and the Responsibility of Socialists

Abstract: Henryk Grossman's discussion of economic crises was designed to complement his Leninist understanding of politics. For Grossman, as for Marx, the fundamental contradiction of capitalist production is between the unlimited scope for expanding the output of use-values and restrictions imposed by the framework of producing profits. The increasing weight of capitalists' outlays on dead compared to living labour, which is the only source of new value, gives rise to the system's tendency to break down and, hence, to economic crises. Deep financial crises can only be understood in the context of developments in production and particularly movements in the rate of profit. The initial widespread hostility to Grossman's development of Marxist economics can mainly be explained in terms of the logics of Social-Democratic and Stalinist politics. In contrast to dominant views on the Left today, the Marxist tradition in which Grossman stood places the construction of organisations capable of assisting the working class' conquest of political power at the heart of the responsibility of socialists. Grossman's political practice expressed his understanding of the close relationship between capitalism's breakdown tendency and the importance of building a revolutionary party.

The Syntax of Violence. Between Hegel and Marx

Abstract: This article aims to show that the theory of violence in Marx and Engels is driven by a conceptual syntax which can be found in two important chapters of Hegel's Science of Logic ('Actuality' and 'Teleology'). These categories are the timeless schemata of the appearance of historical violence in Hegel's Outlines of the Philosophy of Right . However it is possible to find in Marx's writing on violence a sort of counter-movement that cannot be inscribed in the process of the becoming-subject of substance.

Capitalists and Conquerors Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism Rage and Hope: Interviews with Peter McLaren on War, Imperialism, and Critical Pedagogy

Abstract: Through an immanent critique of Peter McLaren's recent work, the author demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of critical-revolutionary paedagogy. This review reveals internal lacks, gaps, and contradictions emerging from within the three main dimensions of McLaren's overarching manifesto including passion, reason, and revolution. Although McLaren is an important voice in linking Marxist political and cultural theory to the practice of education, his work ultimately cannot complete its own project and as such needs further development.

Apocalyptic Sublime: On the Brighton Photo-Biennial

Abstract: Based on an account of the Brighton Photo-Biennial 'Memory of Fire: The War of Images and Images of War', curated by Julian Sallabrass in late 2008, this essay considers the photographic coverage of the recent imperialist interventions in the Middle East. Taking its cue from Stallabrass's event, it reflects on the decline of documentary and photojournalism since the Vietnam War and the current attenuated politics of the media. It argues that the problem of the sublime extends beyond the current genre of 'aftermath'-photography and asks what might constitutre a more cognitively adequate politics of the image.

Our Path: Against Putschism

Abstract: At the time that I was planning this pamphlet, Germany had a Communist Party with half a million members. When I came to write it eight days later, this Communist Party was shaken to its foundations, and its very existence put in question. It may seem risky in such a serious crisis as that in which the Communist Party presently fi nds itself, to come out with such an unsparing criticism. But it needs little refl ection to conclude that this criticism is not only useful but necessary. Th e irresponsible game played with the existence of a party, with the lives and fates of its members, must be brought to an end. It has to be ended by the will of the members, given that those responsible for it still refuse to see what they have done. Th e Party must not be dragged with eyes closed into anarchism of a Bakuninist kind. And, if a Communist Party is to be built up again in Germany, then the dead of central Germany, Hamburg, the Rhineland, Baden, Silesia and Berlin, not to mention the many thousands of prisoners who have fallen victim to this Bakuninist lunacy, all demand in the face of the events of the last week: ‘Never again!’ It goes without saying that the white terror now raging must not be used as a cloak behind which those responsible can escape their political responsibility. Nor should the anger and insults now raised against me be a reason for refraining from this criticism. I address myself to the

Editorial Introduction to the Symposium on the Global Financial Crisis

Abstract: The current global economic crisis is historically unprecedented in that it began when poor groups in the United States defaulted on their mortgage-payments and spread fear of 'toxic debt' through an internationalised financial system, bringing the banking system close to collapse and highlighting the very individualised nature of contemporary financial relations. The symposium explores contemporary finance and banking practices in the context of Marxist political economy seeking to develop the notion of financialisation and arguing that banks' increasing reliance on individual households as a source of profits amounts to a form of financial expropriation or additional profit generated in the sphere of circulation.

The Ambivalence of Gewalt in Marx and Engels: On Balibar's Interpretation

Abstract: This article is a reflection on Balibar's account of the concept of Gewalt in Marx, Engels and Marxism. The German term contains both the meanings of power and violence. At the centre of the analysis is the structural link between the notion of Gewalt and the capitalist mode of production and state-form. The problem is whether Gewalt can be understood in relation to the actions of the working class. Balibar rightly refuses any sort of counter-politics of power set against the power of the state which would retain the same overall logic as the latter. However, the question is how such a critique of the ahistorical ontology of violence can interact with Marx's idea of capital as a constitutively violent entity which threatens to subordinate to itself any stance of non-violence.

Urbane Revolutionary: C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics: C.L.R. James' Critique of Modernity

Abstract: This review-essay examines two recent works of scholarship on the life and work of the late Trinidadian intellectual and activist C.L.R. James (1901–89). While recognising the respective merits of Frank Rosengarten's Urbane Revolutionary; C.L.R. James and the Struggle for a New Society (2008) and Brett St Louis's Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics: C.L.R. James' Critique of Modernity (2007) the essay argues that a critical weakness of both works is their problematic discussion of James's Marxism. This review will aim not simply to defend the central importance of Marxism for James, but will also suggest that, as much as anything, it is precisely this that gives so much of his work a rare urgency and critical relevance in the twenty-first century.