Hudson, Michael. The Bubble and Beyond. Fictitious Capital, Debt Deflation and Global Crisis. Desden: Islet, 2012.
The problem is that credit is debt and paying debt service to bankers and bondholders (and various grades of loan sharks) leaves less income available to spend on goods and services. So debt deflation is today's major problem, not inflation.
p.4
The question is whether finance will promote economic growth and rising living standards, or create unproductive credit and use government to enforce creditor claims by imposing austerity reducing large swaths of the world population to debt peonage.
p.5
German fear that central bank credit creation is dangerously hyper-inflationary fails to recognize that all hyperinflations have resulted from balance-of-payment deficits. Never in history has hyperinflation resulted from goverments monetizing domestic spending.
p.6
Economic statistics as currently reported are fucked up because:
Interest is treated as "profit" earned by producing the bankers' product: the debt taken on by borrowers. Treating the banks' privilege of debt creation as tangible industrial investment conflates money and credit as a "factor of production," so that interest, penalties and fees appear as part of the production process, not external to it.
p.8
As financial charges rise to absorb more corporate cash flow, real estate rents and wages, debt-burdened economies find themselves priced out of world markets. International trade competition now reflects financial, insurance and real estate (FIRE) charges more than the prince of bread and other basic commodities.
p.10
The economic tragedy of our time is the decoupling of banking, the stock market and the rest of the financial sector from the funding of new capital formation.
p.66
For over a century, the neoclassical (that is, anti-classical) counter-revolution has insisted that all economic activity is productive. This philosophical approach understandibly is preferred by the most unproductive sectors, and by the recipients of what the classical economists called unearned income (or "economic rent"), wishing to claim that their wealth and revenue is as justifiably earned as all other forms.
This was not the view of the Saint-Simonians, who pointed to the extent to which wealth was inherited rather than created by its owners. I was not the view of Adam Smith, who described landlords as loving to reap where they had not sown. It was not the view of Ricardo and subsequent rent theorists who showed that rent was a "free ride," an element of price that found no counterpart in cost defrayed by the rent recipient.
If industry has not broken from the Chicago School's financial philosophy, it is because the goals of today's industrial corporations have become increasingly financial in character. Manufacturing companies are now being run by financial rather that industrial engineers. Wall Street controls "Main Street" not the other way around. It is the essence of today's "postindustrial" economy that finance capitalism has absorbed industrial capitalism and subordinated its drives for profits with a drive to obtain financial returns, including capital gains (that is, asset-price gains) from channeling credit into securities and real estate markets. Thus, contra Marx, the dynamics of finance capital have diverted from those of industrial capital to the point of stifling industrial potential and raising the specter of plunging the industrial epoch back into the ancient usury problem that nineteeth-century observers believed was becoming a thing of the past.
p.67
The reality is that bank credit today has no cost of production beyond a modest administrative overhead. Interest rates have no determinate foundation in the "real" economy's production and consumption functions, although they intrude into that system's circular flow by siphoning off debt service, late fees — and publuc bailouts when the financial system becomes too "decoupled" from the "real" economy. Such financial charges cannot be assigned to labor or other "real" costs of production. The administered prices for interest and underwriting fees are akin to economic rent, out of which the financial sector's bloated salaries and bonuses are paid. Utilitarian economics does not apply to looting.
p.125
After the Great War's aftermath derailed the path of development toward which the Progressive Era seemed to have been heading. The vested financial and property interests mounted an ideological counter-attack, and a major arena was economic theory. The new theory's political aim — its value system, price theory, monetary theory and the tax policy this theorizing implied —reflected the shift in alliances between finance capital, real estate and industry. Instead of continuing to oppose the landed interest, the 20th century's democratization of property ownership — on credit — led to a symbiosis of finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE). To the extent that finance interfaces with industry, it has been to financialize industrial companies, not to industrialize the financial system as seemed to be occurring in the late 19th century from Germany and Cental Europe to Japan. And to the extent that finance interfaces with governement, it is first of all to finance the public construction of capital infrastructure, and then to force its sell-off — at prices far below the original cost — to buyers on credit, permitting them to factor in a proliferation of financial charges into the access fees they extract from the population. The result is the opposite direction of evolution from which 19th-century economic Darwinians expected. Instead of lowering a nation's cost structure to make it more internationally competitive, fianacialization increases prices across the board.
As noted above, the definition of "free markets" has been turned upside down. Instead of freeing markets from rent-seeking, taxing groundrent and keeping major infrastructure monopolies in the public domain, economies were deregulated to "free" fianace to load industry and governement with debts, turning profits and disposable peronal income into interest charges. Taxes has been shifted off real estate and finance onto labor and industry, while the post 1980 New Enclosure movement has increasingly privatized the public domain. And to cap matters, under the slogan of "free markets" as the antithesis to "the Road to Serfdom" (defined for all practical purposes as public regulation of the FIRE sector) planning has been centralized in the financial centers, from Wall Street to the City of London, the Paris Bourse and Frankfurt.
p.199
Friday, December 11, 2015
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Emmanuel Todd — Après l'empire
Todd, Emmanuel. Après l'empire. Essai sur la décomposition du système américain. Paris: Gallimard, 2002.
Emmanuel Todd is this clever French anthropologist/demographer/historian whose main research interest is the nature and origin of family systems around the world. His expertise on this topic allows him to formulate surprising and insightful interpretations of current events in the political and economic spheres — which he does sporadically, by writing short analytical/polemical pamphlets about stuff like America's problematic engagement with the world, the disfunctional mire of the Euro, the rise of inequality in France and other liberal democracies, and middle-class France's emerging ideology of islamophobia. He is a prominent public intellectual in France, and is usually invited to talk about his ideas on television and radio, despite holding thoughtful and articulate center-left positions which one would expect should be altogether unpalatable to the by and large moronic/hysterical/neoliberal mainstream French media. One reason he is able to have a public voice in the media is that he is very far from a radical leftist and can more or less harmlessly be used as "the voice from the left"; the other is both rhetorical and anthropological: on these "debate talk shows" he has the pleasant but slightly overbearing manner that anybody who is familiar with pugilistic French-style intellectual dinner conversation will instantly recognise, as he holds court, and gently, humorously, earnestly buldozes any inopportune opposition with his abundant good-natured conversational loquaciousness.
In this book his thesis is that America's erratic, blustering foreign policy (in 2002) can be explained by the fact that far from becoming a hegemonic imperial power, America's relative power in the world is receeding dramatically, and that it is engaging in theatrical military posturing (in Afghanistan, in Irak, etc) in order to disguise the fact that it doesn't have the might required to impose it's imperium by force on the whole planet — especially in the context of the ressurgeance of Russia as a major regional military power. Todd points out that the US economy is basically unproductive: it is largely de-industrialized and relies on the toxic alchemy of stock market, debt and imports rather than on the production of real goods... explaining its massive trade defficit and dependency on the rest of the world. So far they have gotten away with it because capital from all over the world pours into the American stock market and government bonds, figuring that this is the "safest" place to put it. But America's position is fragile and it is very dependent on Europe, Japan (and now China...) — partners it doesn't have either the soft or the hard power to constrain. In fact it is treating these essential partners badly — unlike a real perenial empire, like the Roman one, which always tend, after the period of conquest, to treat the conquered rather like normal citizens — extensions of itself. Todd argues that the US in the 90s to another course, on the contary succumbing to exclusionary/racial impulses always latent in Anglo-Saxon culture to some extent. They thus fucked up their chance to be the arbiters of the post-cold war world and, because of laziness, lack of foresight and anthropological tendency to question universalism/egalitarian stance have condemned themselves to a dangerous and unstable role as a quasi-imperial power that does not have the might of it's pretentions in the twenty-first century world...
His argument has similarities to Yanis Varoufakis's idea of America as a "global minotaur" that plays the part of recycler of industrial surplus from all over the world: a universal consumer, or provider of demand in the depressed demand context of the globalized neoliberal world (where the systematically compressed wages tend to be insufficient and cannot insure the necessary consumption of the world industrial output...) But for Varoufakis this was some sort of machiavelical plan hatched in the seventies by the American central bankers to deal with the collapse of the system put in place right after the war (America recycling its surpluses and solidifying its position in the world by massively investing in Germany and Japan... By the early senventies, there are no more American surpluses.). For Todd, more plausibly, it is merely the opportunistic and haphazard contigent reactions of a not very lucid or insightful political class and economic elite.
À travers l'histoire, les formations impériales véritables on toujours présenté deux charactéristiques, liées l'une à l'autre par des rapports fonctionnels:
— l'empire naît de la contrainte militaire, et cette contrainte permet l'extraction d'un tribut qui nourrit le centre;
— le centre finit par traiter les peuples conquis comme des citoyens ordinaires et les citoyens ordinaires comme des peuple conquis. La dynamique du pouvoir mène au développement d'un égalitarisme universaliste, dont l'origine n'est pas la liberté de tous mais l'oppression de tous. Cet universalisme né du despotisme se développe en sentiment de responsabilité vis-à-vis de tous les sujets, dans un espace politique où n'existent plus de différences essentielles entre le peuple conquérant et les peuples conquis.
p.115-116
Le rapport au monde des Ango-Saxons est mouvant. Ils ont dans la tête un frontière anthropologique, qui faut défaut aux peuples universalistes et les rapproche des peuples différentialistes, mais cette frontière peut se déplacer. Dans le sens de l'extension ou du rétrécissement. Il y a nous et les autres, mais parmi les autres certains sont comme nous et d'autres différents. Parmi les différents, certains peuvent être reclassés comme semblables. Parmi les semblables, certains peuvent peuvent être reclassés comme différents. Mais, toujours, il y a une limite séparant l'humain complet de l'autre, "there is some place where you must draw the line". L'espace mental des Anglais peut être réduit au minimum, à eux-même, mais il peut s'étendre à tous les Britanniques, et il est certainement aujourd'hui en course d'extension à l'ensemble des Européens.
L'histoire des États-Unis peut être lue comme un essai sur ce thème d'une fluctuation de la limite, avec un élargissement continu du groupe central de l'indépendance à 1965, suivi d'un rétrécissement tendanciel de 1965 à nos jours.
p.152
(Irish and Italian and Jews and to some extent Asians can be included, but by defining "the unassimilable other" as Hispanics (Mexican/Indian roots) and especially Blacks, drawing the line.)
Le libre échange, on l'a vu, induit à l'échelle planétaire des difficultés de croissance et il est désormais un frein à la prospérité du monde. À court terme, il fait vivre l'Amérique selon un mécanisme franchement baroque : la déficience de la demande qu'il engendre donne aux États-Unis le rôle de "consommateur indispensable", tandis que la montée des inégalités, autre conséquence du système, permet le gonflement des profits qui alimentent ces même États-Unis en argent frais, nécessaire au financement de la consommation.
p.176
La société américaine est en revanche le produit récent d'une expérience coloniale très réussie mais non testés par le temps: elle s'est développée en trois siècles par l'importation sur un sol doté de ressources minérales immenses, très productif sur le plan agricole parce que vierge, d'une population déjà alphabétisée. L'Amérique n'a vraisemblablement pas compsi que sa réussite résulte d'un processus d'exploitation et de dépense sans contrepartie de richesses qu'elle n'avait pas créées.
La bonne compréhension qu'ont les Européens, les Japonais ou n'importe quel d'Eurasie de la nécessité d'un équilibre écologique ou d'un équilibre de la balance commerciale est le produit d'une longue histoire paysanne. Dès le Moyen Âge, Européens, Japonais, Chinois et Indiens, par exemple, ont dû lutter contre l'épuisement des sols, constater dans les faits la rareté des ressources naturelles. Aux États-Unis, une population libéré du passé a découvert une nature en apparence inépuisable. LÉconomie a cessé d'y être la discipline qui étudie l'allocation optimale des ressources rares, pour y devenir la religion d'un dynamisme qui se désintéresse de la notion d'équilibre. Le refus par les États-Unis du protocole de Kyoto, tout comme la doctrine O'Neill sur le caractère bénin du déficit commercial résultent en partie d'une tradition culturelle. L'Amérique s'est toujours développée en épuisant ses sols, en gaspillant son pétrole, en cherchant à l'extérieur les hommes dont elle avait besoin pour travailler.
p.248-249
Emmanuel Todd is this clever French anthropologist/demographer/historian whose main research interest is the nature and origin of family systems around the world. His expertise on this topic allows him to formulate surprising and insightful interpretations of current events in the political and economic spheres — which he does sporadically, by writing short analytical/polemical pamphlets about stuff like America's problematic engagement with the world, the disfunctional mire of the Euro, the rise of inequality in France and other liberal democracies, and middle-class France's emerging ideology of islamophobia. He is a prominent public intellectual in France, and is usually invited to talk about his ideas on television and radio, despite holding thoughtful and articulate center-left positions which one would expect should be altogether unpalatable to the by and large moronic/hysterical/neoliberal mainstream French media. One reason he is able to have a public voice in the media is that he is very far from a radical leftist and can more or less harmlessly be used as "the voice from the left"; the other is both rhetorical and anthropological: on these "debate talk shows" he has the pleasant but slightly overbearing manner that anybody who is familiar with pugilistic French-style intellectual dinner conversation will instantly recognise, as he holds court, and gently, humorously, earnestly buldozes any inopportune opposition with his abundant good-natured conversational loquaciousness.
In this book his thesis is that America's erratic, blustering foreign policy (in 2002) can be explained by the fact that far from becoming a hegemonic imperial power, America's relative power in the world is receeding dramatically, and that it is engaging in theatrical military posturing (in Afghanistan, in Irak, etc) in order to disguise the fact that it doesn't have the might required to impose it's imperium by force on the whole planet — especially in the context of the ressurgeance of Russia as a major regional military power. Todd points out that the US economy is basically unproductive: it is largely de-industrialized and relies on the toxic alchemy of stock market, debt and imports rather than on the production of real goods... explaining its massive trade defficit and dependency on the rest of the world. So far they have gotten away with it because capital from all over the world pours into the American stock market and government bonds, figuring that this is the "safest" place to put it. But America's position is fragile and it is very dependent on Europe, Japan (and now China...) — partners it doesn't have either the soft or the hard power to constrain. In fact it is treating these essential partners badly — unlike a real perenial empire, like the Roman one, which always tend, after the period of conquest, to treat the conquered rather like normal citizens — extensions of itself. Todd argues that the US in the 90s to another course, on the contary succumbing to exclusionary/racial impulses always latent in Anglo-Saxon culture to some extent. They thus fucked up their chance to be the arbiters of the post-cold war world and, because of laziness, lack of foresight and anthropological tendency to question universalism/egalitarian stance have condemned themselves to a dangerous and unstable role as a quasi-imperial power that does not have the might of it's pretentions in the twenty-first century world...
His argument has similarities to Yanis Varoufakis's idea of America as a "global minotaur" that plays the part of recycler of industrial surplus from all over the world: a universal consumer, or provider of demand in the depressed demand context of the globalized neoliberal world (where the systematically compressed wages tend to be insufficient and cannot insure the necessary consumption of the world industrial output...) But for Varoufakis this was some sort of machiavelical plan hatched in the seventies by the American central bankers to deal with the collapse of the system put in place right after the war (America recycling its surpluses and solidifying its position in the world by massively investing in Germany and Japan... By the early senventies, there are no more American surpluses.). For Todd, more plausibly, it is merely the opportunistic and haphazard contigent reactions of a not very lucid or insightful political class and economic elite.
À travers l'histoire, les formations impériales véritables on toujours présenté deux charactéristiques, liées l'une à l'autre par des rapports fonctionnels:
— l'empire naît de la contrainte militaire, et cette contrainte permet l'extraction d'un tribut qui nourrit le centre;
— le centre finit par traiter les peuples conquis comme des citoyens ordinaires et les citoyens ordinaires comme des peuple conquis. La dynamique du pouvoir mène au développement d'un égalitarisme universaliste, dont l'origine n'est pas la liberté de tous mais l'oppression de tous. Cet universalisme né du despotisme se développe en sentiment de responsabilité vis-à-vis de tous les sujets, dans un espace politique où n'existent plus de différences essentielles entre le peuple conquérant et les peuples conquis.
p.115-116
Le rapport au monde des Ango-Saxons est mouvant. Ils ont dans la tête un frontière anthropologique, qui faut défaut aux peuples universalistes et les rapproche des peuples différentialistes, mais cette frontière peut se déplacer. Dans le sens de l'extension ou du rétrécissement. Il y a nous et les autres, mais parmi les autres certains sont comme nous et d'autres différents. Parmi les différents, certains peuvent être reclassés comme semblables. Parmi les semblables, certains peuvent peuvent être reclassés comme différents. Mais, toujours, il y a une limite séparant l'humain complet de l'autre, "there is some place where you must draw the line". L'espace mental des Anglais peut être réduit au minimum, à eux-même, mais il peut s'étendre à tous les Britanniques, et il est certainement aujourd'hui en course d'extension à l'ensemble des Européens.
L'histoire des États-Unis peut être lue comme un essai sur ce thème d'une fluctuation de la limite, avec un élargissement continu du groupe central de l'indépendance à 1965, suivi d'un rétrécissement tendanciel de 1965 à nos jours.
p.152
(Irish and Italian and Jews and to some extent Asians can be included, but by defining "the unassimilable other" as Hispanics (Mexican/Indian roots) and especially Blacks, drawing the line.)
Le libre échange, on l'a vu, induit à l'échelle planétaire des difficultés de croissance et il est désormais un frein à la prospérité du monde. À court terme, il fait vivre l'Amérique selon un mécanisme franchement baroque : la déficience de la demande qu'il engendre donne aux États-Unis le rôle de "consommateur indispensable", tandis que la montée des inégalités, autre conséquence du système, permet le gonflement des profits qui alimentent ces même États-Unis en argent frais, nécessaire au financement de la consommation.
p.176
La société américaine est en revanche le produit récent d'une expérience coloniale très réussie mais non testés par le temps: elle s'est développée en trois siècles par l'importation sur un sol doté de ressources minérales immenses, très productif sur le plan agricole parce que vierge, d'une population déjà alphabétisée. L'Amérique n'a vraisemblablement pas compsi que sa réussite résulte d'un processus d'exploitation et de dépense sans contrepartie de richesses qu'elle n'avait pas créées.
La bonne compréhension qu'ont les Européens, les Japonais ou n'importe quel d'Eurasie de la nécessité d'un équilibre écologique ou d'un équilibre de la balance commerciale est le produit d'une longue histoire paysanne. Dès le Moyen Âge, Européens, Japonais, Chinois et Indiens, par exemple, ont dû lutter contre l'épuisement des sols, constater dans les faits la rareté des ressources naturelles. Aux États-Unis, une population libéré du passé a découvert une nature en apparence inépuisable. LÉconomie a cessé d'y être la discipline qui étudie l'allocation optimale des ressources rares, pour y devenir la religion d'un dynamisme qui se désintéresse de la notion d'équilibre. Le refus par les États-Unis du protocole de Kyoto, tout comme la doctrine O'Neill sur le caractère bénin du déficit commercial résultent en partie d'une tradition culturelle. L'Amérique s'est toujours développée en épuisant ses sols, en gaspillant son pétrole, en cherchant à l'extérieur les hommes dont elle avait besoin pour travailler.
p.248-249
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Pankaj Mishra — An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World
Mishra, Pankaj. An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World. New York: Farrar Stauss and Giroux, 2004.
There seemed something very grand about the concept of freedom, about the individual's liberation from the constraints of traditional society, and his frely chosen right to movement, occupation, speech, religious belief and property. It was why an Indian of my background could not easily challenge the idea that the modern nation state, absolute and impersonal, could be the liberator of the new individual from his old chains.
Indeed, to look at the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe was mainly to admire intellectuals like Hume, Voltaire, Diderot and Marx who had upheld the potential of the human being to master circumstances instead of being a slave to them [...]
but
Marx had ideological reasons to fear what endlessly renewed needs of the individual might lead to. He thought that "modern bourgeois society, a society that has conjured up such mighty means of production and exchange, is like the sorcerer who can no longer control the powers of the underworld that he has called up by his spells".
But even Adam Smith, the proponent of free trade, had wondered early in his life if power and wealth, "those great objects of human desire", can make one immune to "anxiety, fear, sorrow, diseases, danger and death". He considered the idea that happiness could be secured through desiring more things than one needs a deception and had eventually concluded that it is "well that nature imposes on us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind."
[...]
Smith's influential vision of human growth and competition, which had been transformed into the ideology of imperial conquest, and which still drives much of international politics, had not gone uncontested in Europe. Its greatest critic was Rousseau, who I knew only as the intellectual father of the totalitarian state. He had despaired of the lack of virtue in a society built upon unfettered pursuit of desire. For him the state was necessary precisely to regulate this emerging society of commerce and money, of envy and inequality, in which he thought individuals would be hostile strangers to each other.
pp.322-224
Trapped in its subjectivity, the self recognized each image of the world as something to be made use of or exploited. This is how it entered into a purely instrumental relationship with nature as well as with other human beings, whose subjectivity it did not acknowledge. In pursuit of its desires, it reduced everything in the world to the level of "things", which were either an aid or a hindrance to the fulfilment of desire. The occasional fulfilment of desire strengthened the belief that one was a self, distinct from others; and such a belief fixed one further into the grid of such emotions as greed, hatred and anger.
The Buddha tried to reverse this process by advocating a form of mental vigilance that undermined the individual's sense of a distinctive unchanging self with its own particular desires. To observe even temporarily the incessant play of desire and activity in the mind was to see how the self was a process rather than an unchanging substance; how it had no single identity across time; and when assumed to be unchanging could only cause suffering and frustration.
p.332
There seemed something very grand about the concept of freedom, about the individual's liberation from the constraints of traditional society, and his frely chosen right to movement, occupation, speech, religious belief and property. It was why an Indian of my background could not easily challenge the idea that the modern nation state, absolute and impersonal, could be the liberator of the new individual from his old chains.
Indeed, to look at the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe was mainly to admire intellectuals like Hume, Voltaire, Diderot and Marx who had upheld the potential of the human being to master circumstances instead of being a slave to them [...]
but
Marx had ideological reasons to fear what endlessly renewed needs of the individual might lead to. He thought that "modern bourgeois society, a society that has conjured up such mighty means of production and exchange, is like the sorcerer who can no longer control the powers of the underworld that he has called up by his spells".
But even Adam Smith, the proponent of free trade, had wondered early in his life if power and wealth, "those great objects of human desire", can make one immune to "anxiety, fear, sorrow, diseases, danger and death". He considered the idea that happiness could be secured through desiring more things than one needs a deception and had eventually concluded that it is "well that nature imposes on us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind."
[...]
Smith's influential vision of human growth and competition, which had been transformed into the ideology of imperial conquest, and which still drives much of international politics, had not gone uncontested in Europe. Its greatest critic was Rousseau, who I knew only as the intellectual father of the totalitarian state. He had despaired of the lack of virtue in a society built upon unfettered pursuit of desire. For him the state was necessary precisely to regulate this emerging society of commerce and money, of envy and inequality, in which he thought individuals would be hostile strangers to each other.
pp.322-224
Trapped in its subjectivity, the self recognized each image of the world as something to be made use of or exploited. This is how it entered into a purely instrumental relationship with nature as well as with other human beings, whose subjectivity it did not acknowledge. In pursuit of its desires, it reduced everything in the world to the level of "things", which were either an aid or a hindrance to the fulfilment of desire. The occasional fulfilment of desire strengthened the belief that one was a self, distinct from others; and such a belief fixed one further into the grid of such emotions as greed, hatred and anger.
The Buddha tried to reverse this process by advocating a form of mental vigilance that undermined the individual's sense of a distinctive unchanging self with its own particular desires. To observe even temporarily the incessant play of desire and activity in the mind was to see how the self was a process rather than an unchanging substance; how it had no single identity across time; and when assumed to be unchanging could only cause suffering and frustration.
p.332
Monday, November 16, 2015
David Graeber — Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value
Graeber, David. Toward and Antropological Theory of Value. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
The debate between Parmenides and Hericlitus is at the source of the Western philosophical tradition. For Heraclitus, everything is always in flux, in a process of becoming, whereas for Parmenides, everythings is fixed and change is really an illusion. Parmenides won the argument in the Western tradition, leading to Pythagoras (math and science) and Plato (ideal forms). And in fact science could not have been created without the parmenidean moment because things have to be in some way fixed for us to be able to understand them, to seize them with our intelligence.
p. 50
Hegel's dialectic as an attempt to integrate these two poles into a process. Marx criticises this dialectic because Hegel starts from abstract concepts instead of lived human experience.
p. 57
(The Buddha's main insight was also, that things and individuals are "aggregates" coming together and then falling apart. Perhaps he also had this intuition of an articulation between movement or process and unity, but he put it as "emptiness is form, and form is emptiness" — meaning perhaps that the self and individual things do exist at some level, at least in how we apprehend the world, but they are also always in a process of becoming that undoes them again, revealing their interconnectedness to all the other causes and conditions. But in Buddhism, enlightenment doesn't come with a logical, dialectic resolution of the emptiness/form duality, but with the lived experience of this ineffable dual nature of reality, which is neither "either, or" or "both" or "neither, nor". It is beyond reason: this paradoxical "further shore" of liberation.)
Outlining Roy Bhaskar's "critical realist" approach to ontology:
1. Realism. Bhaskar argues for a "transcendental realism": that is, rather than limiting reality to what can be observed by the senses, one must ask instead "what would have to be the case" in ordr to explain what we do experience. In particular, he seeks to explain "why are scientific experiments possible?," and also, at the same time "why are scientific experiments necessary?"
2. Potentiality. His conclusion: while our experiences are of the events in the real world, reality is not limited to what we can experience ("the empirical"), or even, to the sum total of events that can be said to have taken place ("the actual"). Rather, Bhaskar proposes a third level ("the real"). To understand it, one must also take account of "powers" — that is, define things in part in terms of their potentials or capacities. Science largely proceeds by hypothesizing what "mechanisms" must exist in order to explain such powers, and then by looking for them. The search is probably endless, because there are always deeper and more fundamental levels (i.e. from atoms to electrons, electrons to quarks, and so on), but the fact that there's no end to the pursuit does not mean reality doesn't exist; rather, it simply means one will never be able to understand it completely.
3. Freedom. Reality can be divided into emergent stratum: just as chemistry presupposes but cannot be entirely reduced to physics, so biology presupposes but cannot be reduced to chemistry, or the human sciences to biology. Each, furthermore, achieves a certain autonomy from those below; it would be impossible even to talk about human freedom were this not the case, since our actions would simply be determined by chemical or biological processes.
4. Open Systems. Another element of indeterminacy comes from the fact that real-world events occur in "open systems"; that is, there are always different sorts of mechanisms, derived from different emergent strata of realit, at play in any one of them. As a result, one can never predict precisely how any real-world event will turn out. This is why scientific experiements are necessary: experiment are ways of creating temporary "closed systems" in which the effects of all other mechanisms are, as far as possible, nullified, so that one can actually examine a single mechanism in action.
5. Tendencies. As a result, it is better not to refer to unbreakable scientific "laws" but rather to "tendencies," which interact in unpredictable ways. Of course, the higher the emergent strata one is dealing with, the less predictable things become, the involvement of human beings of course being the most unpredictable factor of all.
pp. 52-53
About Piaget's use of Gödel:
Here Piaget invokes the German mathematician Kurt Gödel, who managed to show that no logical system (such as, say, mathematics) could demonstrate its own internal consistency; in order to do so, on has to generate a more sophisticated, higher level that presumes it. Since that level will not be able to demonstrate its own principles either, one then has to go on to generate another level after that, and so on ad infinitum.
p. 61
About Lacan's mirror stage:
A similar distinction between action and consciousness is played out in Jacques Lacan's notion of the "mirror phase" in children's development (1977). Infants, he writes, are unaware of the precise boundaries between themselves and the world around them. Little more than disorganized bundles of drives and motivations, they have no coherent sense of self. In part this is because they lack any single object on which to fix one. Hence Lacan's "mirror phase," which begins when the child first comes face to face with some external image of her own self, which serves as the imaginary totality around which a sense of that self can be constructed. Nor is this a one-time event. The ego is, for Lacan, awlays an imaginary construct: in everyday life and everyday experience, one remains a conflicting multiplicity of thoughts, libidinal drives, and unconscious impulses. Acting self and imaginary unity never cease to stand opposed.
p.97
Very close to Buddhist understanding of the self. Except that for the Buddhist the imaginary unity we spontaneously create, our ego, is a hindrance to liberation, not the device with which to build up and structure one's healthy individual psyche.
About Mauss's socialism:
[...] Mauss was not trying to describe how the logic of the marketplace, with its strict distinctions between persons and things, interests and altruism, freedow and obligation, had become the common sense of modern societies. Above all, he was trying to explain the degree to which it had failed to do so; to explain why so many people — and particularly, so many of the less powerful and priviledged members of society — found its logic morally repugnant. Why for example, institutions that insisted on the strict separability of producers and their products offended against common intuitions of justice, the moral "bedrock," as he puts it, of our own — as of any — society.
p.162
All in all, Mauss' work complements Marx because it represents the other side of socialism. Marx's work consists of a brilliant and sustained critique of capitalism; but as Mauss himself observed, he carefully avoided speculating about what a more just society would be like. Mauss' instincts were quite the opposite: he was much less interested in understanding the dynamics of capitalism than in trying to understand — and create — something that might stand outside it.
p.163
Mauss was into cooperatives, grassroots stuff...
Here is a good critical review by Bruce Edmonds:
http://scive.blogspot.ca/2013/04/a-review-of-david-graebers-towards-and.html
Edmonds boils down Graber's argument to:
And here is a good synthesis by conceptual artist Sal Randolph:
Graeber’s key insight is to see the elusive relationship between values and valuable objects as one based on time. And what mediates this relationship is action. We may think of values as being part of the present, but really they are all about the future. They are potentials, templates for new action. They state in advance what we care about and how we intend to behave. Valuables, on the other hand, are values in the past tense. They represent or show the effects of actions that have already happened, actions which evoke or were based on values. We can’t literally see these values when we look at the object, instead they exist in a field of associations, a cloud of knowledge and fantasy. They are projections; histories, stories, names, things we know or imagine. As Graeber puts it: “when one recognizes value in an object, one becomes a sort of bridge across time. That is, one recognizes not only the existence of a history of past desires and intentions that have given shape to the present form of the object, but that history extends itself through one’s own desires, wishes, and intentions, newly mobilized in that very act of recognition.” Valuables have a kind of secondary agency because they are able, through the values they collect around themselves, to inspire action.
http://northeastwestsouth.net/uselessness-refusal-art-and-money-encounters-david-graebers-towards-anthropological-theory-value
I think the main point of this book is that the most important (valuable) thing that people do is to "create" other people — socialized beings. This is where the value is in a given society, because that is what people expend the most time and energy doing: creatively fashioning other people and, thereby, contributing to shape the structure of society itself.
The debate between Parmenides and Hericlitus is at the source of the Western philosophical tradition. For Heraclitus, everything is always in flux, in a process of becoming, whereas for Parmenides, everythings is fixed and change is really an illusion. Parmenides won the argument in the Western tradition, leading to Pythagoras (math and science) and Plato (ideal forms). And in fact science could not have been created without the parmenidean moment because things have to be in some way fixed for us to be able to understand them, to seize them with our intelligence.
p. 50
Hegel's dialectic as an attempt to integrate these two poles into a process. Marx criticises this dialectic because Hegel starts from abstract concepts instead of lived human experience.
p. 57
(The Buddha's main insight was also, that things and individuals are "aggregates" coming together and then falling apart. Perhaps he also had this intuition of an articulation between movement or process and unity, but he put it as "emptiness is form, and form is emptiness" — meaning perhaps that the self and individual things do exist at some level, at least in how we apprehend the world, but they are also always in a process of becoming that undoes them again, revealing their interconnectedness to all the other causes and conditions. But in Buddhism, enlightenment doesn't come with a logical, dialectic resolution of the emptiness/form duality, but with the lived experience of this ineffable dual nature of reality, which is neither "either, or" or "both" or "neither, nor". It is beyond reason: this paradoxical "further shore" of liberation.)
Outlining Roy Bhaskar's "critical realist" approach to ontology:
1. Realism. Bhaskar argues for a "transcendental realism": that is, rather than limiting reality to what can be observed by the senses, one must ask instead "what would have to be the case" in ordr to explain what we do experience. In particular, he seeks to explain "why are scientific experiments possible?," and also, at the same time "why are scientific experiments necessary?"
2. Potentiality. His conclusion: while our experiences are of the events in the real world, reality is not limited to what we can experience ("the empirical"), or even, to the sum total of events that can be said to have taken place ("the actual"). Rather, Bhaskar proposes a third level ("the real"). To understand it, one must also take account of "powers" — that is, define things in part in terms of their potentials or capacities. Science largely proceeds by hypothesizing what "mechanisms" must exist in order to explain such powers, and then by looking for them. The search is probably endless, because there are always deeper and more fundamental levels (i.e. from atoms to electrons, electrons to quarks, and so on), but the fact that there's no end to the pursuit does not mean reality doesn't exist; rather, it simply means one will never be able to understand it completely.
3. Freedom. Reality can be divided into emergent stratum: just as chemistry presupposes but cannot be entirely reduced to physics, so biology presupposes but cannot be reduced to chemistry, or the human sciences to biology. Each, furthermore, achieves a certain autonomy from those below; it would be impossible even to talk about human freedom were this not the case, since our actions would simply be determined by chemical or biological processes.
4. Open Systems. Another element of indeterminacy comes from the fact that real-world events occur in "open systems"; that is, there are always different sorts of mechanisms, derived from different emergent strata of realit, at play in any one of them. As a result, one can never predict precisely how any real-world event will turn out. This is why scientific experiements are necessary: experiment are ways of creating temporary "closed systems" in which the effects of all other mechanisms are, as far as possible, nullified, so that one can actually examine a single mechanism in action.
5. Tendencies. As a result, it is better not to refer to unbreakable scientific "laws" but rather to "tendencies," which interact in unpredictable ways. Of course, the higher the emergent strata one is dealing with, the less predictable things become, the involvement of human beings of course being the most unpredictable factor of all.
pp. 52-53
About Piaget's use of Gödel:
Here Piaget invokes the German mathematician Kurt Gödel, who managed to show that no logical system (such as, say, mathematics) could demonstrate its own internal consistency; in order to do so, on has to generate a more sophisticated, higher level that presumes it. Since that level will not be able to demonstrate its own principles either, one then has to go on to generate another level after that, and so on ad infinitum.
p. 61
About Lacan's mirror stage:
A similar distinction between action and consciousness is played out in Jacques Lacan's notion of the "mirror phase" in children's development (1977). Infants, he writes, are unaware of the precise boundaries between themselves and the world around them. Little more than disorganized bundles of drives and motivations, they have no coherent sense of self. In part this is because they lack any single object on which to fix one. Hence Lacan's "mirror phase," which begins when the child first comes face to face with some external image of her own self, which serves as the imaginary totality around which a sense of that self can be constructed. Nor is this a one-time event. The ego is, for Lacan, awlays an imaginary construct: in everyday life and everyday experience, one remains a conflicting multiplicity of thoughts, libidinal drives, and unconscious impulses. Acting self and imaginary unity never cease to stand opposed.
p.97
Very close to Buddhist understanding of the self. Except that for the Buddhist the imaginary unity we spontaneously create, our ego, is a hindrance to liberation, not the device with which to build up and structure one's healthy individual psyche.
About Mauss's socialism:
[...] Mauss was not trying to describe how the logic of the marketplace, with its strict distinctions between persons and things, interests and altruism, freedow and obligation, had become the common sense of modern societies. Above all, he was trying to explain the degree to which it had failed to do so; to explain why so many people — and particularly, so many of the less powerful and priviledged members of society — found its logic morally repugnant. Why for example, institutions that insisted on the strict separability of producers and their products offended against common intuitions of justice, the moral "bedrock," as he puts it, of our own — as of any — society.
p.162
All in all, Mauss' work complements Marx because it represents the other side of socialism. Marx's work consists of a brilliant and sustained critique of capitalism; but as Mauss himself observed, he carefully avoided speculating about what a more just society would be like. Mauss' instincts were quite the opposite: he was much less interested in understanding the dynamics of capitalism than in trying to understand — and create — something that might stand outside it.
p.163
Mauss was into cooperatives, grassroots stuff...
Here is a good critical review by Bruce Edmonds:
http://scive.blogspot.ca/2013/04/a-review-of-david-graebers-towards-and.html
Edmonds boils down Graber's argument to:
- The most important 'product' of most societies are the people it produces
- Individuals' important actions mostly aim at producing their social structures
- It is the actions of individuals that are the key rather than any products
- Value is a socially developed way of comparing important actions
- Sometimes action is fetishised into objects
- Each society achieves this in different ways which change over time
And here is a good synthesis by conceptual artist Sal Randolph:
Graeber’s key insight is to see the elusive relationship between values and valuable objects as one based on time. And what mediates this relationship is action. We may think of values as being part of the present, but really they are all about the future. They are potentials, templates for new action. They state in advance what we care about and how we intend to behave. Valuables, on the other hand, are values in the past tense. They represent or show the effects of actions that have already happened, actions which evoke or were based on values. We can’t literally see these values when we look at the object, instead they exist in a field of associations, a cloud of knowledge and fantasy. They are projections; histories, stories, names, things we know or imagine. As Graeber puts it: “when one recognizes value in an object, one becomes a sort of bridge across time. That is, one recognizes not only the existence of a history of past desires and intentions that have given shape to the present form of the object, but that history extends itself through one’s own desires, wishes, and intentions, newly mobilized in that very act of recognition.” Valuables have a kind of secondary agency because they are able, through the values they collect around themselves, to inspire action.
http://northeastwestsouth.net/uselessness-refusal-art-and-money-encounters-david-graebers-towards-anthropological-theory-value
I think the main point of this book is that the most important (valuable) thing that people do is to "create" other people — socialized beings. This is where the value is in a given society, because that is what people expend the most time and energy doing: creatively fashioning other people and, thereby, contributing to shape the structure of society itself.
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