pavel sebastian's List: capitalism

• Mai mult decât atât, însăși renunțarea la armata națională și dezvoltarea unei armate pe bază de profesioniști și voluntari a contribuit la autonomizarea sferei militare în raport cu restul populației și a mecanismelor democratice prin care aceasta se poate exprima. Militarii recrutați fac o muncă privată pe banii statului în baza unor contracte. Moartea pe front devine astfel un fel de accident la locul de muncă care eventual poate înlăcrima opinia publică prin intermediul televizorului, dar nu poate genera cu adevărat o mișcare socială împotriva războiului și a prezenței trupelor românești pe front. Astfel, nemaifiind supusă controlului popular, armată capătă o forță specială în interiorul statului, exercitată prin intermediul unor instituții speciale și nedemocratice precum CSAT, dar și printr-o poziție privilegiată a militarilor în raport cu alți bugetari și cetățeni.[i] Cu o asemenea autonomie este normal ca la rândul lor elitele militare să exercite presiune pentru continuarea misiunilor și a intervențiilor, deci a războiului, tocmai pentru că ar asigura perpetuarea poziției lor privilegiate.

• The solidary economy includes economic organizations such as cooperatives, associations of small producers, local or regional economies characterized by degrees of cooperation between businesses, local money initiatives, community initiatives for the delivery of services, and the like. In general, the solidary economy is characterized by economic units owned by their workers (or small businesses), where the goal is the reproduction of life rather than the accumulation of capital (Singer 2011). Solidary economies often emerge as defensive reactions of people excluded from the labor market, but they can also become engines of growth for localities or regions. The development of such an economy can achieve important goals of the left:

   

  a. Solidary economic activities create employment, offering options to people who are not incorporated into the formal circuits of accumulation or reintegrating into economic life people who have been displaced by the “creative destruction” of the market;
   b. Solidary economic activities can consolidate the social life of localities and regions. As solidary economic units do not leave in search of higher profits, they can be the anchor of stable communities;
   c. Solidary economic activities can also operate as economic stabilizers. Since solidary economic units do not fire people in times of economic downturns, they can sustain economic demand at the local level. If the solidary economy is large enough, it can have a stabilizer effect at the national level on Keynes’ aggregate demand.
• The presence of a structural, though historically and geographically changing marginal mass should force the left to rethink its strategy and vision towards work. The politics of protecting formal work should be still pursued in those areas of the global economy where the demand for labor is rising and there are shortages in the labor supply. These politics should also be sharply defended in those parts of the global economy where workers have achieved good working conditions. But the left needs to develop a politics for the structural marginal mass, and one way to do so is through the promotion of the solidary economy.
• As José Nun pointed out, capitalism tends to historically produce a marginal mass of unemployable people (2000). Nun developed this idea from Marx’s concept of relative surplus population. He argues that Marxists have identified this concept with that of the reserve army of labor, that is, a segment of the population that is not employed but that can be incorporated in the production process at moments of increased demand. Nun agrees that this can be the case in parts of the world at specific historical moments, but he adds that capitalism also regularly creates a large population that is not employable and therefore not part of the process of capital accumulation. He calls this unemployed and unemployable population the ‘marginal mass.’

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• Democraţia modernă nu reprezintă  nici de departe „puterea poporului”, ci aduce mai degrabă cu versiunea schumpeteriană a unei competiţii între diferitele grupuri de elite, care funcţionează după un model apropiat celui al pieţelor, iar voinţa cetăţenilor constituie un element marginal în acest mecanism.
• Această tendinţă a fost agravată în ultimele decenii, în care binele comun a fost asimilat cu interesul economic, pornindu-se de la premisa că există legităţi economice care, datorită caracterului lor obiectiv, prevalează asupra drepturilor cetăţenilor, care reprezintă nevoi subiective.

• Ceea ce scrie sociologul Pierre Bourdieu despre „cele două pieţe ale bunurilor simbolice” este valabil şi pentru cunoaşterea academică: aşa cum artele se produc pentru o piaţă largă, a succesului comercial, şi pentru una restrînsă, a validării artistice de către artiştii înşişi, tot aşa cunoaşterea are nevoie, înafara unei utilităţi sociale, de o autovalidare. Universitatea antreprenorială, în tendinţa de a cuceri piaţa comercială a educaţiei, ucide însă piaţa producătorilor autonomi.
• Strategia pe termen lung constă în a considera munca intelectuală o creaţie autonomă, fiind respectată ca atare. Este trecerea de la un knowledge worker la un creative thinker (gînditor creativ)

• Această industrie a „consumului de consum”, mai degrabă decât să te plaseze în vacuitatea unei lipse romantice de sens, te programează pavlovian în a extrage sensul doar în măsura în care poți să-l integrezi pe piață, doar în măsura în care sensul însuși poate deveni o piață. În mod paradoxal, această unică posibilitate de extragere a sensului se dovedește mai nihilistă și în același timp mai totală (chiar totalitaristă) decât orice colaps al valorilor.
• Capul hidos de hydră al consumerismului se arată nu conform viziunilor clasice ale lui Simmel (banii pun oamenii în posesia unei libertăți cu care nu știu ce să facă) sau Marx (banii te pun doar în posesia unor medieri nesfârșite… poți cumpăra patul, dar nu somnul), ci consumerismul (în viziunea lui Dodd) se oferă ca „plin de semnificații, ca expresie a unei forme de viață devenită gargantuescă într-o lume îndopată de industria mass-media”.

• Perhaps socialism was not an alternative to capitalism, but its heir. It will inherit the earth not by dispossessing the rich of their property, but by providing motives and incentives for behavior that are unconnected with the further accumulation of wealth.

• Hence the need for a more synthetic approach, in which everything systematic about a given whole is modeled as a historically emergent result of local interactions.
• In this discipline, we tend to uncritically assume systematicity, as when one talks of the "capitalist system", instead of showing exactly how such systematic properties of the whole emerge from concrete historical processes. Worse yet, we then tend to reify such unaccounted-for systematicity, ascribing all kinds of causal powers to capitalism, to the extent that a clever writer can make it seem as if anything at all (from nonlinear dynamics itself to postmodernism or cyberculture) is the product of late capitalism. This basic mistake, which is, I believe, a major obstacle to a correct understanding of the nature of economic power, is partly the result of the purely top-down, analytical style that has dominated economic modeling from the eighteenth century. Both macroeconomics, which begins at the top with concepts like gross national product, as well as microeconomics, in which a system of preferences guides individual choice, are purely analytical in approach. Neither the properties of a national economy nor the ranked preferences of consumers are shown to emerge from historical dynamics.

• • a very good point indeed. the relation between the free market and centralized and decentralized decision-making.
• Indeed, the term "market" needs to be used with care because it has been greatly abused over the last century by theorists on the left and the right. As Simon remarks, the term does not refer to the world of corporations, whether monopolies or oligopolies, since in these commercial institutions decision-making is highly centralized, and prices are set by command.
• as historian Fernand Braudel has made it clear, it is only in markets in the first sense that we have any idea of what the dynamics of price formation are. In other words, it is only in peasant and small town markets that decentralized decision-making leads to prices setting themselves up in a way that we can understand.
• In any other type of market economists simply assume that supply and demand connect to each other in a functional way, but they do not give us any specific dynamics through which this connection is effected.
• Moreover, unlike the idealized version of markets guided by an "invisible hand" to achieve an optimal allocation of resources, real markets are not in any sense optimal. Indeed, like most decentralized, self-organized structures, they are only viable, and since they are not hierarchical they have no goals, and grow and develop mostly by drift.
• Herbert Simonis distinction between command hierarchies and decentralized markets may turn out to be a special case of a more general dichotomy. In the view of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, this more abstract classes, which they call strata and self-consistent aggregates (or trees and rhizomes), are defined not so much by the locus of control, as by the nature of the elements that are connected together. Strata are composed of homogenous elements, whereas self-consistent aggregates, or to use the term I prefer, meshworks, articulate heterogeneous elements as such.
• the dichotomy between hierarchies and markets, or more generally, between strata and meshworks, should be understood in purely relative terms. In the first place, in reality it is hard to find pure cases of these two structures
• Moreover, hierarchies give rise to meshworks and meshworks to hierarchies
• in the absence of a super-hierarchy to coordinate their interactions, the whole set of institutions will tend to form a meshwork of hierarchies, articulated mostly through local and temporary links.
• • deleuze and guattari's "abstract machine" is an instantiation of a mechanism in physical or natural events.
• Thus, a double operation, a "double articulation" gets us from structures at one scale to structures at another scale. Deleuze and Guattari call these two operations "content" and "expression" , and warn us against confusing them with the old philosophical distinction between "substances" and "forms". The reason is that each one of the two articulations involves substances and forms: sedimentation is not just about accumulating pebbles (substance) but also about sorting them into uniform layers (form); while consolidation not only effects new architectonic couplings between pebbles (form) but also yields a new entity, a sedimentary rock (substance)
• for instance, members of a group who have acquired preferential access to some roles begin to acquire the power to control further access to them, and within these dominant groups criteria for sorting the rest of society into sub-groups begin to crystallize. "It is from such crystallization of differential evaluation criteria and status positions that some specific manifestations of stratification and status differences -such as segregating the life-styles of different strata, the process of mobility between them, the steepness of the stratificational hierarchies, some types of stratum consciousness, as well as the degree and intensity of strata conflict- develops in different societies."
• a second operation is necessary beyond the mere sorting of people into ranks for social classes or castes to become a separate entity: the informal sorting criteria need to be given a theological interpretation and a legal definition, and the elites need to become the guardians and bearers of the newly institutionalized tradition, that is, the legitimizers of change and delineators of the limits of innovation. In short, to transform a loose accumulation of traditional roles (and criteria of access to those roles) into a social class, the latter needs to become consolidated via theological and legal codification.
• "autocatalytic loop", a closed chain of chemical processes involving not only self-stimulation but also self-maintenance, that is, interconnecting a series of mutually-stimulating pairs into a structure which reproduces as a whole
• Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, pioneers in the study of autocatalytic loops (e.g. their theory of "autopoeisis") mention two general characteristics of these closed circuits: they are dynamical systems which endogenously generate their own stable states (called "attractors" or "eigenstates"), and they grow and evolve by drift. .
• • growth by drift, may be explained as follows: in the simplest autocalytic loops there are only two reactions, each producing a catalyst for the other. But once this basic two-node network establishes itself, new nodes may insert themselves into the mesh as long as they do not jeopardize its internal consistency.
• The surrounding environment, as source of raw materials, certainly constraints the growth of the meshwork but more in a proscriptive way (what not to do) than in a prescriptive one (what to do).
• First, a set of heterogeneous elements is brought together via an articulation of superpositions , that is, an interconnection of diverse but overlapping elements. (In the case of autocatalytic loops, the nodes in the circuit are joined to each other by their functional complementarities ). Second, a special class of operators, or intercallary elements, is needed to effect this interlock via local connections. (In our case, this is the role played by catalysts, inserting themselves between two other chemical substances to facilitate their interaction). Finally, the interlocked heterogeneities must be capable of endogenously generating stable patterns of behavior (for example, patterns at regular temporal or spatial intervals.) {12} Is it possible to find instances of these three elements in all different spheres of reality?
• And much as strata are defined as an articulation of homogenous elements (and do not involve more specific features of hierarchies such as having a chain of command), so self-consistent aggregates are defined by their articulation of heterogeneous elements and do not necessarily involve other, less general, features (such as growth by drift or internal autonomy).
• I have already mentioned that markets may be considered examples of cultural meshworks. In many cultures weekly markets have traditionally been the meeting place for people with heterogeneous needs and offers. Matching complementary demands (that is, interlocking these people together by their needs and offers) is an operation which is performed automatically by the price mechanism. (Prices transmit not only information about the relative monetary value of different products, but also incentive to buy and sell). All that is needed for this automatic mechanism to work is that prices drop in the face of an excess supply and that quantities produced and offered decline when prices are lowered.
• his conception of very specific abstract machines governing a variety of structure-generating processes not only blurs the distinction between the natural and the artificial, but also that between the living and the inert. It indeed points towards a new form of materialist philosophy in which raw matter-energy through a variety of self-organizing processes and an intense power of morphogenesis, generates all the structures that surround us.
• This conception of very specific abstract machines governing a variety of structure-generating processes not only blurs the distinction between the natural and the artificial, but also that between the living and the inert. It indeed points towards a new form of materialist philosophy in which raw matter-energy through a variety of self-organizing processes and an intense power of morphogenesis, generates all the structures that surround us.
• If the hierarchical components of the mix dominate over the meshwork ones we may speak of a highly stratified  structure, while the opposite combination will be referred to as one with a low degree of stratification.
• Finally, since according to this way of viewing things what truly defines the real world are neither uniform strata nor variable meshworks but the unformed and unstructured morphogenetic flows from which these two derive, it will also be useful to have a label to refer to this special state of matter-energy-information, to this flowing reality animated from within by self-organizing processes constituting a veritable non-organic life : the Body without Organs (BwO):
• the BwO is that glacial reality where the alluvions, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism -and also a signification and a subject- occur.

  • the body without organs is the instantiation of the "abstract machine". it is the organic before being biology, not yet a strata, not yet a meshwork, but the possibility of their inception. it's not about metaphysics, but about a neo-materialism that acknowledge the incompletness of reality. not to be seen as a "defect" or incongruence with the main drives of matter-energy-information interlocking, the incompletness of reality is a temporal folding in the products of history. reality in itself is without a hierarchy, that's why it seems to us so heterogenous and unstable.
• ince it is ultimately the intensity of each parameter that determines the kind of dynamic involved, and hence, the character of the structures that are generated.
• BwO is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still, the Bwo is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass... It is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space to a given degree -to the degree corresponding to the intensities produced. It is nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity, intensity=0 ... Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero.

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• In its blind rush to accumulate in order to compete with other capitals, capitalism sows the seeds of overproduction, unemployment and economic crisis. For Marx, this was a central part of the system. Crises were not the result of bad choices by managers but "momentary, violent solutions for the existing contradictions".
• Marx had noted how the recurrence of crises within the system would have the effect of concentrating more and more capital into fewer and fewer hands, as failed companies were gobbled up by more successful ones in an effort to restore profit.
• Recognising the link between the state and capitalism is crucial to understanding the system. To hold to the idea that states are a relic of a bygone age and not intrinsic to capitalism is to ignore its actual development as a part of a global system in which states have played a defining role, from the emergence of markets through to the massive nationalisations and bailouts of the current crisis.
• The binding together of the state and its domestic capitals compels the state bureaucracy to act as an agent of capital accumulation.
• • this must be investigated. but it seems to me more of a fallacy to blame the fall of Ussr because they had to compete with Usa  at a warfare level
• Tony Cliff, that the Soviet Union and its satellites were state capitalist - driven to accumulate in order to compete militarily on a global scale.
• In turn, this global military competition saw the state channel enormous amounts of capital into arms spending.
• Mike Kidron, rigorously analysed how this spending was able to slow the rate of accumulation and thus counteract the tendency towards crisis during the so-called "Golden Age of Capitalism" from the late 1940s through to the early 1970s.
• The failure of profit rates to recover to the levels enjoyed during the long boom in capitalism, itself the result of massive arms spending, meant that capital flowed into the financial sector, creating a virtuous circle: lending created demand; demand created more commodities, the proceeds of which went back into lending.

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• A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference.
• To discover the various uses of things is the work of history.^[3] So also is the establishment of socially-recognized standards of measure for the quantities of these useful objects. The diversity of these measures has its origin partly in the diverse nature of the objects to be measured, partly in convention.

  • the objects, the commodities have a intrinsic social and historical usefulness. capitalism is the system of their movement, not of their creation (at least then).
• The utility of a thing makes it a use value.

  • there are 2 types of values in a commodity: use value and exchange value. these two were first theorized by David Ricardo
• This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities.
• Use values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value.
• Exchange value, at first sight, presents itself as a quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort,^[6] a relation constantly changing with time and place. Hence exchange value appears to be something accidental and purely relative, and consequently an intrinsic value, i.e., an exchange value that is inseparably connected with, inherent in commodities, seems a contradiction in terms.
• the valid exchange values of a given commodity express something equal; secondly, exchange value, generally, is only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it.

  • exchange value is a "mode of expression". there is nonetheless "something" that equates all commodities to a certain degree of equality in the transaction process. this means that their qualities do not count in the exchange process, but their quantitative features. but this is not a valid argument for today's capitalism. technology realized the "micro-quantitative", through which an objects quantity is counted in the "less pounds" category. the smaller and lighter it is (and with more use values - functions, the more expensive it is) the more expensive it gets. How much value is there now in a hundred pounds of wheat and a few cellphones (no more than 1 kilo)? an asymmetry of quantitative value (decreased quantity, increased quality) is what defines today's markets.
• As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value.

  • so, in the process of exchange, only the exchange value is the only one taken into account? can you really separate these two values in the everyday buying of commodities?
  Add Sticky Note
• Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.
• All that these things now tell us is, that human labour power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them. When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are – Values.
• Therefore, the common substance that manifests itself in the exchange value of commodities, whenever they are exchanged, is their value. The progress of our investigation will show that exchange value is the only form in which the value of commodities can manifest itself or be expressed.
• A use value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it.
• How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? Plainly, by the quantity of the value-creating substance, the labour, contained in the article. The quantity of labour, however, is measured by its duration, and labour time in its turn finds its standard in weeks, days, and hours.

  • this is where Marx is announcing his investigation of capitalism as a time constructing system.
• The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time.
• The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value.

  • technology as time logistics.
• • LABOUR
• Commodities, therefore, in which equal quantities of labour are embodied, or which can be produced in the same time, have the same value. The value of one commodity is to the value of any other, as the labour time necessary for the production of the one is to that necessary for the production of the other. “As values, all commodities are only definite masses of congealed labour time.
• The value of a commodity would therefore remain constant, if the labour time required for its production also remained constant. But the latter changes with every variation in the productiveness of labour. This productiveness is determined by various circumstances, amongst others, by the average amount of skill of the workmen, the state of science, and the degree of its practical application, the social organisation of production, the extent and capabilities of the means of production, and by physical conditions.

  • the socially necessary amount of time for production is a variable in time and dependent on the socially necessary modes of production and socially necessary types of commodities.
• • we should investigate how the definition of labour has modified over time. to read Hannah Arendt's "The Human Condition".
• In general, the greater the productiveness of labour, the less is the labour time required for the production of an article, the less is the amount of labour crystallised in that article, and the less is its value; and vice versâ, the less the productiveness of labour, the greater is the labour time required for the production of an article, and the greater is its value. The value of a commodity, therefore, varies directly as the quantity, and inversely as the productiveness, of the labour incorporated in it.
• A thing can be a use value, without having value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, &c. A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity.
• To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange
• Lastly nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value.

  • refutation of the metaphysical interpretation of value.
• The labour, whose utility is thus represented by the value in use of its product, or which manifests itself by making its product a use value, we call useful labour.
• • social division of labour
• social division of labour. This division of labour is a necessary condition for the production of commodities, but it does not follow, conversely, that the production of commodities is a necessary condition for the division of labour.
• In the use value of each commodity there is contained useful labour, i.e., productive activity of a definite kind and exercised with a definite aim. Use values cannot confront each other as commodities, unless the useful labour embodied in them is qualitatively different in each of them.
• this qualitative difference between the useful forms of labour that are carried on independently of individual producers, each on their own account, develops into a complex system, a social division of labour.
• So far therefore as labour is a creator of use value, is useful labour, it is a necessary condition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of the human race; it is an eternal nature-imposed necessity, without which there can be no material exchanges between man and Nature, and therefore no life.
• • simple labour power, i.e., of the labour power which, on an average, apart from any special development, exists in the organism of every ordinary individual.
• • "Skilled labour" counts only as simple labour intensified, or rather, as multiplied simple labour, a given quantity of skilled being considered equal to a greater quantity of simple labour. 
• The different proportions in which different sorts of labour are reduced to unskilled labour as their standard, are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers, and, consequently, appear to be fixed by custom.

  • it is not custom who establish the unskilled labour as a standard. it is the social process of innovation who constantly rethink the margins within the market subsist.
• the labour contained in a commodity counts only qualitatively, with reference to value it counts only quantitatively, and must first be reduced to human labour pure and simple.
• • is the improvement of production technics and mechanisms a social necessity ( with regards to demography, innovation, politics)  or a direction of interested capital?
• An increase in the quantity of use values is an increase of material wealth.
• Nevertheless, an increased quantity of material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value. This antagonistic movement has its origin in the twofold character of labour.
• The same change in productive power, which increases the fruitfulness of labour, and, in consequence, the quantity of use values produced by that labour, will diminish the total value of this increased quantity of use values, provided such change shorten the total labour time necessary for their production; and vice versâ.
• commodities, only because they are something twofold, both objects of utility, and, at the same time, depositories of value.
• They manifest themselves therefore as commodities, or have the form of commodities, only in so far as they have two forms, a physical or natural form, and a value form.
• value of commodities has a purely social reality, and that they acquire this reality only in so far as they are expressions or embodiments of one identical social substance, viz., human labour, it follows as a matter of course, that value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity
• • he calls them accidental form of value because it does not represent the capitalist types of value production, but because such a value form is the basic value existing in any kind of exchange.
• • the relative value can only be expressed into another type of commodity, under the form of an equivalent-product/money

  • relative and equivalent value form. the former plays an active part and is mostly the value of prime materials. the latter has a passive part and expresses the end-product of production from prime materials.
• The relative form and the equivalent form are two intimately connected, mutually dependent and inseparable elements of the expression of value; but, at the same time, are mutually exclusive, antagonistic extremes
• They are allotted respectively to the two different commodities brought into relation by that expression
• That second commodity is not the one whose value is expressed. Its function is merely to serve as the material in which the value of the first commodity is expressed.
• A single commodity cannot, therefore, simultaneously assume, in the same expression of value, both forms. The very polarity of these forms makes them mutually exclusive.
• Human labour power in motion, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value. It becomes value only in its congealed state, when embodied in the form of some object
• The relative value of commodity A, i.e., its value expressed in commodity B, rises and falls directly as the value of A, the value of B being supposed constant.
• Hence, if the value of commodity A remain constant, its relative value expressed in commodity B rises and falls inversely as the value of B.

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