Tag Archive for 'Capitalism'

Indian students, structural racism and service industry work

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Mark
1 month, 4 weeks ago
in Australiana, Economics, Education, Industrial Relations, International, Politics and Sociology
. 132 Comments

One of the debates we should no doubt be having about the spate of violent and racist attacks on Indian students in this country is around the conditions of service work in the less salubrious bits of the service industries (not that conditions of work in the more salubrious bits are all that fabulous).

If, as we discussed on the previous thread, it is the case that students or recent immigrants working in servos, 24 hour convenience stores, cleaning jobs, taxi driving and so forth are more at risk of assault and abuse, then it follows that working conditions in the night time economy are part of the problem. It’s well accepted, for instance, that highly skilled shift workers such as nurses can obtain, through the industrial system, protections from dangerous journeys to and from work; for instance, well lit and surveilled routes to car parks, security, cab fares home. Similarly, workers in occupations where abuse and threats of or actual violence are likely to be a frequent risk, such as in emergency rooms and Centrelink, also have established protocols and risk management measures (including quick access to police) in place to safeguard their right to work in an environment free of danger and harrassment. Such protections are at the cost of the employer.

There seems no reason, in justice or fairness, why less skilled workers should not be entitled to the same protections.

Continue reading ‘Indian students, structural racism and service industry work’

The Tobin Tax and the GFC

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Mark
2 months ago
in Economics, Elections, International, Markets, Politics and USA
. 3 Comments

In a recent post, I observed that the momentum for systemic reform and coordinated international regulation of the financial sector, pursued through the G20 in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, appeared to have stalled. In that context, it was interesting to read an interview in yesterday’s Financial Review with Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the IMF, where he observed that there was a need for some sort of revenue raising for a fund to draw on for future stabilisation measures.

He didn’t explicitly refer to a Tobin Tax, but I suspect that’s what he had in mind, and it’s something that has popped up higher on the agenda over 2008 and 2009. So it’s worthwhile to point to a comprehensive article by John Langmore in Inside Story on just that measure.

From my point of view, one key advantage of a tax on cross border financial transactions would be its contribution to transparency and thus the ability of states (and others) more easily to grasp what’s occurring in the ’shadow banking’ sector. Whether or not future bank bailouts are politically feasible is another question entirely. I suspect that might be political suicide in the USA, no matter how dire another financial shock.

And, incidentally, when the Democrats inevitably lose Senate seats in November, it will become more or less impossible for anything of any size to pass the US Congress.

Rebranding capitalism

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Mark
2 months ago
in Economics, Language, Markets and Politics
. 46 Comments

There’s an interesting link in a recent post by John Quiggin; discussion among folks he terms market liberals about eschewing the term ‘capitalism’. I can well remember when it came back into fashion as a descriptor beloved of triumphalist neo-liberals, and I think Quiggin is spot on with these observations:

It seems pretty clear that these developments are related to the global financial crisis and related events. The adoption as a badge of pride by Forbes magazine and others of the previously pejorative term “capitalism” was one of the most extreme manifestations of market liberal triumphalism in the 1990s. But, in the wake of the crisis, “capitalism” is a much more problematic term. It works well enough as a generic term covering all advanced economies in which private capital plays a leading role, but one that is, as we have seen, ultimately dependent on government action for sustainability. We can then say that the relatively unregulated, finance-dominated form of capitalism that has held sway for the last 30 years is being supplanted by a different form in which the role of government as ultimate risk manager is more direct and obvious. But this has little rhetorical value for market liberals.

The politics of climate change, the impossibility of conservatism, and the role of the imaginary

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Mark
2 months, 1 week ago
in Activism, Apocalypse, Authoritarianism, Climate change, Disasters, Economics, Energy, Environment, History, International, Politics, Religion, Sociology and Technology
. 146 Comments

One of the accusations frequently made by climate change deniers or ’skeptics’ against those who would like to see concerted action taken to ameliorate the impacts of anthropogenic global warming is that of being somehow apocalyptic. A related charge is that climate change activism is somehow a screen or cover for an unstated political agenda.

Futile as the attempt to deny and disavow the fact that a process of climate change is occurring, and that human actors are causal agents, it’s nevertheless the case that this discourse is not without its effects in the world. So it’s worth analysing this phenomenon.

There is no doubt that apocalyptic politics are in style.

Writing in his recent First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, Slavoj Žižek diagnoses the range of contemporary apocalyptic politics. He quotes Ed Ayres:

We are being confronted by something so completely outside our collective experience that we don’t really see it, even when the evidence is overwhelming. For us, that “something” is a blitz of enormous biological and physical alterations in the world that has been sustaining us.

Žižek argues that “the dominant ideology is mobilising mechanisms of dissimulation and self-deception which include a will to ignorance”, and cites Ayres again to characterise this effect:

A general pattern of behaviour among threatened human societies is to become more blinkered, rather than more focused on the crisis, as they fail.

Continue reading ‘The politics of climate change, the impossibility of conservatism, and the role of the imaginary’

Living capitalism freely

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by
Mark
5 months ago
in Authoritarianism, Culture, International, Life, Markets, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology
. 52 Comments

Steven Shaviro, who blogs at The Pinocchio Theory, has written an excellent piece on the Global Financial Crisis. Shaviro captures how capitalism is lived – and how it produces a demeanour of fatalism. He emphasises the way in which the economy constructs itself as natural, and in so doing, acts as something which is quite inimical to the freedom it is supposed to foster.

There are some juicy quotes from Hayek in Shaviro’s piece. The market, Hayek wrote, subjects “man” [sic] to “the bitter necessity of submitting himself to rules he does not like in order to maintain himself against competing groups.” We are “force[d] to be free”, according to Hayek.

Shaviro’s is the sort of critique of neo-liberalism Kevin Rudd would never write.

It makes clear the deep continuity between the project of neo-liberals such as Hayek and the Enlightenment urge to control and discipline – to remake new humans who are ‘rational’, and thus ‘free’. It would be interesting to compare the sorts of dispositions and attitudes which underlie this logic of governmentality with those of Soviet Marxism.

The real question here is the one of our relation, as individuals, to the economy as a whole — or to the so-called “free market.” We are told that the market is made of individuals just like us. We are told that it consists in nothing more, and nothing less, than the summation of billions of decisions made by billions of autonomous individuals, each of us making choices for ourselves. And yet, we actually experience the market as a vast, ineluctable force. It feels like something entirely alien to us, over which we have no power, and from which there can be no appeal. This is why economic catastrophe is something invisible, impalpable: it affects every aspect of our lives, yet we are unable to “see” it in itself, to discern it as an actual force, behind its all-too-evident effects.

Continue reading ‘Living capitalism freely’

Left futures

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Mark
5 months, 2 weeks ago
in Activism, Culture, Economics, Ethics, International, Markets, Media, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology
. 58 Comments

As a conclusion to his series provoked by The Australian’s “What’s Left” op/ed fest, Guy Rundle has proposed a positive vision of the future from the left. [For my previous LP posts on this theme, see here.]

I’ll post the whole piece over the fold (with permission), but I want to zero in on this point and add a few of my own thoughts:

Clearly many of us have assumed too much in focusing on critical accounts of the contemporary world, and not enough of alternative visions…

Read that together with another observation:

Would a transformed post-capitalist economic and social system abolish money, markets and property? Of course not. These things pre-date capitalism and will continue after it. Capitalism is the system and the era when these things dominate not only the way we produce our lives, but also the way in which we think about ourselves and our world.

It’s precisely, I think, because a certain blockage to thought has now fractured with the Global Financial Crisis’ destruction of the legitimacy of ideological capital (and Slavoj Žižek may be right that this is the second ‘end of history’; the first being the implosion of Soviet Marxism), that we can begin to think a future outside the “no alternatives” terrain of both neo-liberalism and its anodyne Third way echoes. The term “social democracy”, in and of itself, doesn’t imply an economistic orientation, and it should not. What we’re actually seeing, I would argue (and more on this later), is a return of suppressed conceptions of value and values in the popular mind, which create the building blocks on which a vision of the future can be scaffolded, even if the foundation must rest on shards.

In short, and this was a theme of my doctoral thesis, what we need to do – collectively – is to revive our ability to imagine life otherwise. That works better if we allow critique its place – to render what appears natural strange – but also if we ground our thoughts of the future in what we can see around us, and orient our presents to a future hope. A certain utopian sensibility is required – but one which is open to the invention of utopias in a plural and a minor key.
Continue reading ‘Left futures’

Rundle on the recent history of the left

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Mark
5 months, 2 weeks ago
in Activism, Culture, Economics, History, International, Media, Policy, Politics and Sociology
. 38 Comments

As a sequel to my post on The Australian’s series on the left, where I highlighted Guy Rundle’s take, I’m reproducing from today’s Crikey (with permission) his longer sequel to his take beneath the fold. Meantime, the Oz series meanders on, with a contribution from David Hetherington of Per Capita, proposing “a fairer design for markets”.

Update: Quadrant piles on.

Continue reading ‘Rundle on the recent history of the left’

(Almost) a year after the end of the world

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Mark
6 months ago
in Economics, History, International, Markets, Media, Politics and Sociology
. 31 Comments

I think I’ve observed before that commemorations of anniversaries now appear to be anticipated days, or even weeks or months before the day in question falls. Whether or not this is a function of the desire to get in early and hoover up some traffic on news websites, or whether it’s a reflection of a more profound shift in the fluidity of how we note and memorialise the passing of time – anyone’s speculation. But speaking of speculation, Jeremy Gaunt at Reuters observes:

The anniversary of Lehman Brothers’ collapse on September 15 will doubtlessly bring with it vast numbers of stories about what it all meant. It was, after all, the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, a marker for the near collapse of the financial system and the trigger for government to pump trillions of dollars into economies to stave off another Great Depression.

So it might be an apposite moment to pause and reflect on how much has (and has not) changed. All the screeds about the demise of neo-liberalism, as I’ve observed on quite a number of occasions, seem to ignore the fact that the supposedly almighty markets have always relied on the government as saviour of last resort, and there’s nothing different qualitatively in the big bailout of 2008/9. Short term rhetoric and ideological point scoring aside, it’s just a fact that a capitalist system tightly interweaves the state and private actors.

It may well be, however, that there was a missed opportunity to reorient the current state of affairs globally in a more transformational fashion. But that is an opportunity the left lost, precisely because of a lack of confidence and an acceptance – at heart – of the whole “there is no alternative” mantra of neo-liberalism. Systemic alternatives, rather than Keynesian tinkering, simply weren’t on offer, and there were no social movements to mobilise for them anyway in most OECD countries.

That’s starkly illustrated in a rather nifty piece by Andy Beckett in The Guardian.

The PM and Il Santo Padre; and world capitalism

Published
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Kim
8 months ago
in Developing world, Economics, Ethics, International, Politics and Religion
. 19 Comments

If Kevin Rudd wanted to impress Pope Benedict with his support for Blessed Mary MacKillop’s canonisation, he might have picked the wrong topic. In the lead up to the G20 meeting, the Pontiff had other things on his mind – justice and the world economy, for instance. His third encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, was deliberately timed to be released just in advance of the meeting of world leaders in L’Aquila. An excerpt:

The global market has stimulated first and foremost, on the part of rich countries, a search for areas in which to outsource production at low cost with a view to reducing the prices of many goods, increasing purchasing power and thus accelerating the rate of development in terms of greater availability of consumer goods for the domestic market. Consequently, the market has prompted new forms of competition between States as they seek to attract foreign businesses to set up production centres, by means of a variety of instruments, including favourable fiscal regimes and deregulation of the labour market. These processes have led to a downsizing of social security systems as the price to be paid for seeking greater competitive advantage in the global market, with consequent grave danger for the rights of workers, for fundamental human rights and for the solidarity associated with the traditional forms of the social State. Systems of social security can lose the capacity to carry out their task, both in emerging countries and in those that were among the earliest to develop, as well as in poor countries. Here budgetary policies, with cuts in social spending often made under pressure from international financial institutions, can leave citizens powerless in the face of old and new risks; such powerlessness is increased by the lack of effective protection on the part of workers’ associations.

Elsewhere: Analysis at Salon and The National Catholic Reporter (and Rich Heffern on the consonance between the document and the Green vision), full text of the encyclical here.

Weightless capitalism

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Mark
8 months, 4 weeks ago
in Blogging, Consumerism, Culture, Ethics, Media, Politics, Sociology and The Web
. 17 Comments

For quite some time, it’s been becoming easier to conceive of the commodity as something immaterial – a social relation – and indeed of economic value as a social construct. Indicative of the accentuation of such trends – and this is one of the truths of the “knowledge economy” – is the phenomenon of “weightless capitalism”, something discussed suggestively by Nathan Jurgenson at Sociology Compass. Taking Facebook as an example, and utilising Zygmunt Bauman’s theme of liquidity as his own compass, Jurgenson argues that the ‘prosumer’ increasingly eschews the accumulation of stuff and instead values a largely symbolic and lighter form of exchange. The sting in the tail or the tale, and this is applicable far beyond the domain of social media, is that we – the ‘content creators’ – are the unremunerated producers of value for the very media which we use as forms of expression and creativity.

To cut a long story short, there is a real sense in which the concept of the ‘prosumer’ gestures towards a hypostasised economic (and social) relation as well as a blurring of borders between consumption and production of content and knowledge.

Elsewhere: SocProf at The Global Sociology Blog.

Richard Pratt and the great and the good

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Kim
10 months, 2 weeks ago
in Ethics, Law, Markets, Media, Melbourne, Politics and Sociology
. 76 Comments

Richard Pratt has passed away. As we saw with Kerry Packer, an enormous media effort has gone into memorialising him. Typically, billionnaires, tycoons and magnates are lauded for their contributions as philanthropists. There seems to be a slight reluctance to engage directly in the worship of wealth.

I find it quite remarkable that Pratt’s recent legal problems are described (and this is one of the more restrained descriptions) as a “blemish”. Pratt was charged with perjury. The issue will never be decided in court, but one does wonder about the contrast with the treatment of Marcus Einfeld, who was convicted of the same offence.

I am not defending Einfeld, or seeking to cast aspersions on Pratt, but I do think it’s quite remarkable that business tycoons are lionised even in the face of alleged misdeeds. With Packer, there was some sort of (failed) attempt to mobilise a sense that he was a popular hero. But with both gentlemen, I think that what we are seeing is the sort of personality type the pollies and the media idolise, not any sort of icon for the rest of us. The pilgrimages to Pratt’s deathbead at Raheen might also be contrasted with those to the obsequies of a previous owner of that house, Archbishop Daniel Mannix.

The personal attacks on Graeme Samuel also strike me as jarring. Obviously there’s an undertone of intra-Jewish community politics, but I think it’s very revealing that the political, business and media classes are so concerned to defend someone who piled up so much money and was accused of stuffing over consumers with his supposed competitors. I don’t think the so-called ideology of the free market has much purchase in Australia at all – lip service, at best, is paid to competition and consumer protection while the dirigiste classes engage in mutual celebration.

Fictitious capital and the first recession of the services economy

Published
by
Mark
11 months, 1 week ago
in Culture, Developing world, Economics, Immigration, Industrial Relations, International, Markets, Poverty, Security and Sociology
. 46 Comments

Karl Marx’ concept of ‘fictitious capital’ has enjoyed something of a revival recently – in the context of explaining the Global Financial Crisis. It’s interesting to observe [h/t Richard Metzger at Boing Boing] that Marx doesn’t appear to have invented the term – the phrase was used by Thomas Jefferson and the concept goes back to Ricardo and Adam Smith, and beyond them to earlier writers in the Eighteenth Century. There’s a bit of a message in that. Observers such as David Harvey argued quite some time ago – contrary to all the hype that was around in the 90s about the ‘new economy’ – that the increased and increasingly ubiquitous role of financial capital was what was distinctive about globalisation. More broadly, following the French historian Fernand Braudel and some of his epigones in world systems theory, we can conclude that markets predate capitalism. In tracing the history of capitalism, Giovanni Arrighi argues that particular accumulation regimes tend to emphasise financialisation as an accumulation strategy towards the end of their life cycle, as the limits of ‘material expansion’ are reached. There’s a recombination effect where the production of tangibles is eclipsed by the circulation of intangibles – each time opening up a new cycle of innovation across an ever larger geographical space and constructing a new ’spirit of capitalism’ which brings in its wake newly reassembled subjectivities, new political divisions and new forms of inequality.

The ‘age of neo-liberalism’, then, saw a shift of power towards finance capital and a harnessing of immaterial labour to the creation of intangible value. It saw a new logic of personality where constant change and the ability to network trumped security and the old bourgeois virtues. What’s also new about the era of globalisation is the world wide scope and reach of one economic system, and the geographical dispersion of networks of value creation – where, for instance, value can be added by design in the metropoles to products manufactured in the developing world. Within the developed world, we’ve had a bifurcated services economy – with Robert Reich’s “symbolic analysts” at the top of the tree forming a highly mobile elite and personal services provided by low skilled and often immigrant labour (mobile in a somewhat different way) or younger workers whose mobility into high end occupations is temporal. It’s been the less skilled and relatively immobile workforce in the declining ‘productive’ sectors who’ve largely been the losers in this conjuncture – a fact which explains a lot about the politics of the last couple of decades.

One way of looking at the current financial crisis is that it’s the first major recession to hit the developed world since the value creation switch was flicked from the production of things to the creation of intangibles. If one takes a Schumpeterian view, the “creative destruction” now occurring should lead to the emergence of a new frontier of value creation. Continue reading ‘Fictitious capital and the first recession of the services economy’

Kevin Rudd, Gordon Brown, Adam Smith and free markets

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Mark
11 months, 2 weeks ago
in China, Economics, Europe, History, International, Markets, Philosophy, Politics, Sociology and USA
. 95 Comments

As Kevin Rudd joined Gordon Brown in decrying “the false god” of “unfettered free markets” in London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, Janet Albrechtsen got her apoplexy in early, lamenting the fact that Kevin Rudd doesn’t read Hayek (apparently Ayaan Hirsi Ali has offered to tutor the Prime Minister in the guru of “economics and the rule of law”).

Albrechtsen tied herself in a series of knots trying to find the “gotcha” moment in Rudd’s ideological discourse. In point of fact, it’s quite possible to reconcile fiscal conservatism with being a social democrat, but the Hayek worshippers seem stuck in an age when there was supposedly a slippery slope between any view that markets are social institutions and socialism itself.

Here, it’s perhaps interesting that Gordon Brown chose to invoke Adam Smith on several occasions, a thinker to whom the authors of Hayekian dribble pay only occasional and meaningless obeisance:

Now, let me put markets in context. They can create unrivalled widening of choices and chances, harnessing self-interest to produce results transcending self-interest. When they work, they will fulfil the promise of Adam Smith that individual gain leads to collective gain, that even when people are pursuing private interests and private wishes they can nevertheless deliver public good.

But as we are discovering to our considerable cost, the problem is that, without transparent rules to guide them, free markets can reduce all relationships to transactions, all motivations to self-interest; as Jonathan Sacks has said, they can reduce all sense of value to consumer choice, all sense of worth to a price tag. So, unbridled and untrammelled, they can become the enemy of the good society.

And we can now see also that markets cannot self-regulate, but they can self-destruct and, again, if untrammelled and unbridled, they can become not just the enemy of the good society; they can become the enemy of the good economy. Markets are in the public interest but they are not synonymous with it.

Gordon Brown, a former university lecturer with a History PhD from Edinburgh, perhaps has a better claim to public intellectual status than Kevin Rudd. His whole speech is worth a read, and the full text is here (as is Rudd’s). Continue reading ‘Kevin Rudd, Gordon Brown, Adam Smith and free markets’

“The Tyranny of the Now”

Published
by
Kim
11 months, 3 weeks ago
in Culture, Economics, Media, Sociology and USA
. 7 Comments

With Kevin Rudd in Washington meeting Barack Obama, and the new Geithner Plan seemingly hostage to the insta-reaction of the markets, punditocracy and economists alike, it’s worth pausing to cast an eye over an argument by Ian Leslie in The Guardian:

In an attempt to capture the experience of living in the age of mass media, the cultural critic Frederic Jameson talked of being trapped in a “perpetual present”. Bombarded with endless information, images from the past and dreams of the future, we live each day as if it’s our first and our last.

Jameson’s diagnosis may be hyperbolic, but those who followed 2008 election will have at least an inkling of what he was getting at. During the primaries and the general election, it was difficult to discern the underlying state of the race from the media coverage, because all that seemed to matter was WHAT’S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW.

Almost every day, a new story would tear through the media ecosphere, gathering velocity and heat as it went, dominating the chatter on the web and on TV and radio. Hillary didn’t tip a waitress! Obama said something about lipstick on a pig! SARAH FRICKIN’ PALIN! Within hours of any “incident”, headlines blared, pundits pronounced, bloggers unloaded, campaigns sniped and counter-sniped. Each media node would feed off every other node, creating what scientists call “positive feedback”, the most familiar example of which is what you get when you move a live microphone too close the speaker: an ear-splitting noise.

Leslie argues that, actually, not much happened in the US general election campaign. I think that’s right – there are probably only a few events which could be pinpointed that actually shifted the dynamics and momentum of the thing. Leslie concentrates on the “media ecosphere”. But I wonder if what we’re seeing here is not also “fast capitalism” – the speeding up of the circulation of money, the value cycle, and the short termism that drives both share markets (often very short term indeed – as with short selling) and all the craziness that led to the bust of the boom. Maybe this phenomenon is the underlying cause of the crisis. Since Leslie invokes Fredric Jameson, one might well surmise or propose that the contemporary mediasphere reflects the “cultural logic of late capitalism”. If that’s the case, what is to be done? Take a deep breath and a longer view? That’s in essence the Keynesian road. But is it enough?

G20 Summit: A new Bretton Woods?

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by
Mark
1 year, 3 months ago
in Economics, International, Media, Sociology and USA
. 60 Comments

The G20 Summit has come and gone, and if today’s coverage in the Australian press is any indication, the most important of the tea leaves to be read is whether George W. Bush snubbed Kevin Rudd over the “Kirribilli leak”. Yep, a non-story that has burbled along for weeks, now diverted into intra-press gallery trading of accusations and a tedious talking point for the opposition – that’s the most important aspect of the events in Washington according to our “quality” media. As far as I can work out, if Bush is indeed upset that his ignorance of the function and nature of the G20 was revealed to the world, that just confirms what a lot of folks have always known about W – that’s he’s at best unengaged, at worst ignorant. But I suppose our fearless journos aren’t allowed to draw that conclusion lest a global diplomatic crisis add to our woes from the global financial crisis!

But, anyway, the lame duck President made his ritual obeisance to the virtues of American leadership and the glories of the free market. One imagines there’s some personal and political imperative there, but the reality of his governance is better disclosed in the fate of the TARP funds which Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was given by Congress – it appears that crony capitalism and socialism for the rich is the name of the game according to American blogs such as naked capitalism, Obsidian Wings, firedoglake and naked capitalism again.

But Bush will soon be fading into history, and Barack Obama sensibly declined to act at the summit without executive authority, so what emerged from the G20 is more in the nature of a directions statement for the way forward, as The Big Picture foresaw:

Hopefully, a long term agenda for regulatory cooperation and communication can be set with the next meeting’s agenda decided upon. Far better to talk then not, but no real decisions will come out of this meeting. There will be gnashing of teeth and venting of rage at the mess that excess securitization has created, and the international regulation of and accounting for such derivatives will probably be a focus.

Planet Money looks at what transpired, and links to the text of the communique here. Continue reading ‘G20 Summit: A new Bretton Woods?’