Brian Holmes on Sun, 6 Aug 2006 00:50:04 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Peace-for-War |
[Post from Ed Philips, ed@cronos.net, addressed maybe 10 days ago to me and nettime, never made it on nettime. -BH] Brian, thanks for posting another thoughtful essay to nettime: I want to start this response by saying that I agree with your assessment that we are in your words "lacking a common language to describe" the politico-economic global environment in which we are swimming as both economic and political actors. The situation is as daunting for so-called experts in individual fields of understanding as it is for the casual amateur historian on the net. I'm going to start as well by attempting to find some mutual ground before I start pulling rugs from underneath our feet. The last place that Karl Marx has any kind of broad respect outside of leftist intellectuals circles is in the field of Economics and in the history of Economic theory. Many economists even of the most baldly neo-liberal stripe will at least acknowledge Marx's contribution to the study of Capital and his readings of Smith, Ricardo, et al. So we at least have some terms form Marxian economics and from contemporary economics that we can use. On to your essay: "The essence of contemporary power is to provoke crisis and to ride it out toward profit, without revealing strategies or goals." Really. Is that so? Whose thinking or what set of thinking leads to this summary at the start? Is it Harvey or a climate shared by Harvey? Harvey has tremendous problems coming to grips with attempting to describe global capitalism and political hegemony in the new imperialism. Hardt and Negri barely achieve anything more than muddlement. This is less a condemnation of them than an appraisal of just how difficult the attempt to understand the situation is. I'm going to dispense with introductory explanation in part because I am no didact and also because I want to cut to direct discussion. Harvey and Arrighi are some of the more credible leftist political economists, and both of them offer some analytic terms and interpretive machines that are useful. Harvey may be too given over to exaggeration in his descriptions of the state of civil society within Empire coming apart at the seems, but his analysis is not without some fitness. Arrighi's long twentieth century thesis which is a kind of rethinking of Marx'x MCM formula has some fitness as well. To quote Arrighi, "financialization (the capacity of finance capital 'to take over and dominate, for a while at least, all the activities of the business world') has been the result of a recurrent overaccumulation of capital ('the accumulation of capital on a scale beyond the normal channels for investment'.) Witness the unprecedented scale of financial capital and the current need of this capital to invest in new spaces and new ventures. His work, with Braudel's help is interesting for its long view. In this long view, we are already experiencing the rise of Asian long century and the end of US hegemony. The endless accumulation of capital is itself "crisis-prone." It is not that the steersmen of the Apocalypse need provoke crisis. Certainly those steersmen who are still in the game seeking return on investment will take advantage of such crises. They move to where they can make money. In addressing the tendency of corporations to merge and attempt to benefit from consolidation and in what you have defined as a strategy of breadth, you say: "It's associated with speculative fever, as corporations double or triple in market share overnight." It is hard to understand what the above sentence is attempting to say about either financialization or investment or production of new spaces or the exploitation of new markets. The financial markets create liquidity that then must be invested elsewhere, endlessly as Arrighi says or in a never-ending cycle as Arendt said. A "depth" strategy is then mentioned in which streamlining or cost-cutting is placed together somewhat problematically with the raising of prices. The breadth and depth strategy of consolidation combined with streamlining and cost-cutting combined with competitive reduction of prices is evident in many areas of the economy. the Oil wars: I appreciate how you avoid the simple causality of naive conspiracy theory even as I see it all, including Freddy Jameson's attempts, as "a poor-man's cognitive mapping." Further skepticism may be warranted nonetheless than even you grant about a connection between the price at the pump, the disastrous Iraq quagmire and our proverbial steersmen. I'd grant that a major impetus for the naive attempt to "secure" Iraq was indeed probably the control of world markets in Oil. The proverbial steersmen are probably thinking or attempting to think in their own poor way ahead twenty or more years. And probably not in terms of short term profits, or in terms of short term economic stimulus. The current "revenge of the natural resources" and the rise in the price of natural resources may actually swing back in the next few years. The major oils are investing their ridiculous profits back into their precarious futures. The refinery industry which is in sore need of infrastructure investment is taking significant windfall, justified with the need to shore up against future risk. The revenge of the "resource commodities" can be seen as detrimental to the interests of the US and against the grain of financialization which has been accompanied by a steady decline in the value of the "resource commodities" over time. Iran and Venezuela are, for example, benefiting in the short term from the current rise in Oil prices. The attempt to impose order has engendered further disorder, and the US is spending a tremendous amount of "deficits don't matter" money along precisely the kinds of lines of both the war and the security machines which are in fact tied to what you are calling the technodollar affiliations. They are feeding into each other. There is also a tremendous amount of financial capital that is being invested in new ventures, precisely because it has to be. The so called crash of the internet bubble is a mere blip, and will probably be seen as such. The "breadth" phase is already here, with large investment in new technologies, and with the opening of new spaces. Relative failure: "It seems to me that as cultural activists, we have to consider the relative failure of the attempts to overflow the preceding breadth phase by introducing more-or-less arbitrary information and unpredictable behavior into the system." That makes sense and is a thoughtful rejoinder to those who celebrated the apparent exuberance of the 90's. Who are these steersmen?: You say: "Why did the post S-11 political-economic hijacking by the party of war, oil and engineering meet with such ineffective resistance from the other fractions of dominant capital? Was it, as Bichler and Nitzan suggest, that their prospects for further accumulation were simply exhausted, by virtue of their very success in the preceding decades? Was fear of deflation enough to make them pass the baton? Did all of dominant capital simply acquiesce in the repetition of a pattern that had characterized accumulation throughout the twentieth century? Or would it be possible, for instance, where the European Union and its separate nations are concerned, to map out which corporations and key officials came down on which sides of which dividing lines?." Both Harvey and Arrighi seem reluctant to perceive that despite the apparent protests of EU states against unilateral deployment of the unprecedented US war machine, much of the protest was on the surface and merely apparent. Despite the fact that the US is indeed footing the bill and that its coalition was Anglophone, the EU tacitly agreed to the deployment and acquiesced while appearing to protest. Much of the diplomatic brouhaha was staged for consumption by liberal polities unaccustomed to naked action. The resistance was largely staged. Arrighi makes the valid point that the US as debtor nation is dependent upon its Asian creditors and that the relative drop in the dollar was beneficial to the US and detrimental to the creditors. The current explosion of the US GDP combined with the relative drop in the dollar makes for an opportune time for Statist neocons to invest in big government as military apparatus without the need for direct monies from other nations. This is an opening to discuss internal US politics and why the dread word liberal is anathema to the neocons even as they are Statists. Their state is not the welfare state but the military state, and state of socialized risk. They are bureaucrats who are more successful as fake conservatives than their more bureaucratic sounding half-heartedly liberal counterparts on the other side of the aisle. Bush's swaggering impersonation of an individual is a much better strategy than open policy wonk talk. Bush's approval rating drop is only matched by a greater drop in the approval of the open liberals as opposed to the hidden liberals on the right. There is nothing remotely religious about these avatars of neconservatism. It is merely piety, fake religiosity, that finds in parallel in the fake statist bureaucratic mullahs in power in Iran. Their beards are props as much as the aw shucks I'm just not comfortable with big words style of Bush is. It is much more strategic in the US today to be a fake conservative than a half-hearted open liberal. Or so it would seem. More analytical mileage is to be gained it seems from realizing that the appeal to individualism and its props has long legs with the US polity. Harvey has it wrong I think when he says that Bush appealed to a need to bring a moral compass to a crumbling civil society. We are in reality I think already in the era of what you are calling "breadth" and of loosely affiliated nations or empire(s). The appearance of the US as sole actor is largely an appearance. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net