"What are those people complaining about? We have a good life!"

EuroBankPutz Draghi and Frau Merkel share a Moment

Shame on Europe for betraying Greece -- William Wall for the UK Guardian

Yes, shame on "Europe," indeed. But in this case, "Europe" has a face. There are people behind those private snickers and guffaws and those masks of indifference at the plight of The Peripheral Peoples.

Let them "rise up!" We care not, neither do we tremble. The People? Piffle. We have a good life! We're Europeans! Let them -- "The People" ick -- be satisfied with our leavings! Not that we'll leave them anything in the end... HawHawHawHaw! Cretins!"

And so it goes.

Europe's Shame with regard to Greece in particular and The Periphery in general is that if Europe's Rulership would do this to its Lesser Countries and their... ahem... Peoples, they'll do it to their own. Cheerfully, consciously, and with extreme malice aforethought.

The whole situation is strangely Stalinesque, but at least Stalin could display flashes of charm from time to time. And the Old Soviet Union actually did have 5 Year Plans, and actually did set forth in struggle for the advancement of the working classes. These people, the Rulership of Europe, have neither charm nor grace, nor even the least flicker of decency in their quest to fill the insatiable maw of The Banks. No long-term objective is discernible whatever. It's merely a matter of shoveling the ruins of The Periphery into the Gaping Maw -- right now. It's about nothing else at all.

In America, of course, there's no thought, no mention of the People at all in the media. The story is solely about governments and banks and the horserace. To the extent there even are "people" involved, they are recognized solely as "rioters" looting and burning with abandon in Athens, which obviously proves they deserve what they get. And what they are to get is fewer scraps from their Master's table, and a much heavier burden to carry to get to the castle where the table scraps might -- or might not -- be forthcoming.

Take it or leave it. No, you can't leave it. You will take it. You don't have any choice! HawHawHaw! Suckers!

All Europeans, even the most rigidly spiteful and temporarily comfortable Germans, should recognize this sort of Rulership as utterly illegitimate. No explanation is necessary. By their deeds we shall know them, and their deeds serve no one. Only The Maw. The Gaping Maw of Sacred Finance; and to that Maw the Rulers will sacrifice literally everything and dismiss the outcries of the suffering People as merely Some Noise Outside the Gates.

They fear not, neither do they doubt their own wisdom and glory as they stumble forward on their Path of Doom.

For that is what it is, the Path they have chosen. The Bourbons and the Romanovs, if they were asked if they could speak, might be able to supply some advice and counsel, but as we see, they are not being asked, nor could they speak if they were. Why should they bother with the self-important clowns running Europe and Russia today in any case? After all Frau Merkel and the other Leaders of Europe's Sacred Core are the Elected Representatives of the People don't you see, and the various Ministries and August Bodies that are demanding and implementing the Requirements and Reforms and extracting everything of value they can find in the target countries are all the product of democratic principles and debate and perfectly proper procedural practices. These things are settled. What's done is done.

Yet the Path the EuroRulers have chosen is the Path of their Doom. At some point, it will not be possible to turn back. They are close to that point now, but if they see the looming abyss, more likely they will try to forge a new path to their chosen destination rather than turn back toward something like sanity.

What's striking to witness from the outside is how much the Rulership seem to be relishing the task of destruction and plunder and the misery and despair they leave in their wake. They say they "deplore" the riots and property destruction in Athens, but clearly they do not; in fact, I suspect they love the scenes of the immolation of Athens and the running street battles in Thessaloniki. Entertainment on an otherwise dreary day.

Hmmm. What will the rioters come up with next? I really wish they'd try something new next time... I swear I shall perish from ennui if I see yet another firebomb consume yet another of those cute little policeman. Can't they think of anything else? Tiresome!

This bizarre nonsense, indeed complete madness at the top, has gone beyond the Class Struggle of the past; we're now in uncharted territories. The old answers to such blind cruelty and exploitation won't do, and the new ones haven't been formulated yet.

Word of the Day: Purgatory

Say a little prayer. Couldn't hurt, eh?

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NOTE: This post has been slightly (but repeatedly) edited for clarity, bumbling syntax, typos, and the usual misbegottenness that comes with the territory... If you've seen slight alterations pop up and then change, it was the author attempting to clean up some of the messiness in the original post. -- Ché. Carry on.

Richard Wolff Explains It All to the Sweet People of Occupy Marin

January 7, 2012:



For those of you who don't know much about California's political, economic, and social geography, you might miss some of the frequently delightful ironies of Wolff's talk on this fine, sunny January afternoon in San Rafael, CA.

Marin County (big, slow-loading pdf; be warned) is just north of San Francisco on the opposite side of the Golden Gate Bridge. It's hilly country, and remarkably rural still. At one time it was mostly ranches and resort communities like Tiburon and Sausalito, and much of the spirit of ranching and resorts continues among the couple of hundred thousand who live in Marin County today.

For many years, Marin County was home to some of the wealthiest people in California -- as it still is -- and people who lived in San Francisco aspired to one day be able to afford to live in Marin. The per capita income in Marin County in 2007 was the highest in the Bay Area and in fact it was the highest in California. Marin County is the country seat of California's "1%". Keep that in mind while listening to Wolff's talk and you will see what I mean about the ironies of his observations. Does he know where he is? OMG. "11 shares of GM that your grandmother left you?" "Working people?" "Wages?" Hello?!!

It's a lovely area, relatively unspoiled, "like California used to be," and its people are fiercely protective of its natural beauty and the legacy of its rural past.

The thing about Marin is that despite the overall wealth of its inhabitants, it's politically and socially far more (academically) leftist than practically any place else in California. Make no mistake, this is the leftism of the elites and the bourgeoisie, not the gritty and radical working class leftism of the East Bay, centered in Oakland. The people of Marin do not, how you say, engage in The Class Struggle.

They are, however, great supporters of those who do! Bless their hearts.

Wrapup on the Summer

Karl Marx sliding puzzle game » sliding block puzzles

Of course, it isn't over yet, but I think we've got the picture: there hasn't been a summer this tumultuous since the 1970's, and there are signs that civil unrest (as well as a number of civil wars still raging) will easily continue into the fall and through the wintertime into next year.

People are refusing, in their multitudes, to sit down and shut up while their lives are being turned upside down (that is, when they don't lose their lives), and what little they've had is being sucked up into the maw of Matt Taibbi's Vampire Squid that actually rules us.

Dylan Ratigan's "Extractive" Rant the other day incoherently encapsulates the fright and the frustration so many middle level "left-behinds" feel.



"Extractive" has become the new "Uncertainty." Extracting wealth is the current economic principle at the Top, "takings" as it were. I suppose "looting" would be an understatement for what The Gods Who Walk Among Us® are doing to the rest of us -- and to one another.

So when we see young people looting stores for cell phones and sneakers in Britain, burning down their neighborhoods in the process, what we're seeing is a minor-league street-side version of what the Highest of the High and the Mighty have been up to for quite a while now, on a titanic scale, globally, "extracting" -- or shall we say "looting" -- all the wealth that they can pillage from entire nations, one by one and in batches, while we look on in horror, just as Decent Brits looked on in horror at the riots and the wilding young in the streets.

Some of them even made the connection between behavio[u]r at the Top of the Heap and what the Young were doing in the streets. Some of the young were even able to make that connection. "It's all the same, man, innit?" The "takings" might be on a different scale -- and what is looted is certainly different -- but the destruction and despair left in the wake of the pillage, the fear and dread injected into the hearts of individuals and communities (and entire nations), the sense of widespread powerlessness and the inability or unwillingness of Authority to intervene appropriately on behalf of the People, all are the same.

In the United States, despite protest demonstrations in numbers we haven't seen in quite a long time, nothing like The UK Riots have yet emerged. They might, and because they might, many people are on edge. But in the United States the Austerity Program is still being debated in the marble halls of our Government Palaces, only so much of it has yet been instituted, and in most cases, the immediate effects have been mitigated through various means in order to keep the People calm in the face of what is to be done to them. So far, it has mostly worked.

In the meantime, though, the Highest of the High and the Mighty have been busy sucking out every bit of wealth they can find in an "extractive" frenzy the like of which I don't think we have ever seen. We see it in the Wall Street gyrations, where every Up and every Down provides yet more profit opportunities, we see it in massive commodity price run ups due to speculation, we see it in endless wage cuts and price increases, constantly high unemployment, ridiculous and ravenous bank policies, endless foreclosures and plans to essentially give the homes away to investors "if they promise to rent them out," and on and on and on and on.

There is no attempt to hide any of it, nor really is there any effort to sugar-coat it. It is what it is. We are being robbed blind, right out in the open, with the full on and very active complicity of Our Public Servants, who only seem capable of serving their constituents at the feed trough and not the Public at all.

We've watched this go on for years, and I for one am fed up with it. And yet, so far, the only popular unrest over what's been happening has focused either on protesting political actions by captive governments (the Austerity fetish in Europe, for example, or the mass protests in Wisconsin and elsewhere), or in Riots -- which aren't so much popular as they are focused expressions of rage and opportunism.

And all of a sudden, Marxist theory -- and actual Marxists (!) -- are being trotted out to explain what's going on. Well of course! Marx was right. Yes! His trenchant analysis of Capitalism is as true today as it was 150 years ago, and we are living through yet another of the inevitable Crises of Capitalism that are basically built in to the economic system and cannot be entirely escaped from so long as the system is in place. (Not that any other System known to man doesn't have its own set of built-in crises.)

"We're all Marxists now!" Well, in an inverted sense, yes, even the Kochs are Marxists. They and their ilk know that Marx was right and they are all about taking advantage of both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Capitalist system. And they know how to squeeze its teats on behalf of themselves.

And it is hugely frustrating for so many of us in the Lesser 99% to know full well what is wrong and what to do about it and to see just the opposite being enacted by Our Rulers, repeating and compounding the same mistakes over and over, making things worse for the many, better and better for the few, and expressing such amazement that this is happening.


Being right too soon doesn't do you any good at all.
http://libcom.org/library/1844-manuscripts-karl-marx

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At least there have only been a few sharks and missing white women in the news this summer. So there is that.

David Harvey Explains It All For You

"There are certain political forces that are actually in accord with Marxists: they don't want the Crisis [of capital/finance] to go away..." David Harvey


David Harvey: Emancipation from What and from Whom?, 19th May 2011, Subversive film festival, Zagreb, Croatia

Part the First:


Part the Second:


More David Harvey:

Reading Marx's Capital With David Harvey

Even Nouriel Roubini Agrees -- Marx Was Right About Capitalism

[Via dKos poster goinsouth]



Actually, even the Kochs agree.

Perpend: From Marxists.org -- the "Crisis of Capitalism"

Crisis of Capitalism

The word “crisis”, used in reference to the economic system, may be in connection with (i) a conjunctural crisis, (ii) the cyclical crisis or “business cycle”, or (iii) the historic crisis of capitalism.

A conjunctural crisis can only be discussed in connection with the specific conditions involved in the given case, and generalisation is impossible. For example, such crises can be caused by defeat in war, or by being overtaken economically by a rival power, or as a result of a weak or incompetent government, or as a result of the loss of the natural conditions for production, such as where the environment has been destroyed by industry.

It is, however, particularly the cyclical and historical crises of capitalism which have absorbed the attention of Marx and other revolutionaries over a long period of time, and have been the subject of important theoretical debate down the years.

In the opening chapters of Capital Marx explains why cyclical crises are characteristic of capitalism:

“If the interval in time between the two complementary phases of the complete metamorphosis of a commodity become too great, if the split between the sale and the purchase become too pronounced, the intimate connection between them, their oneness, asserts itself by producing - a crisis. The antithesis, use-value and value; the contradictions that private labour is bound to manifest itself as direct social labour, that a particularised concrete kind of labour has to pass for abstract human labour; the contradiction between the personification of objects and the representation of persons by things; all these antitheses and contradictions, which are immanent in commodities, assert themselves, and develop their modes of motion, in the antithetical phases of the metamorphosis of a commodity. These modes therefore imply the possibility, and no more than the possibility, of crises. The conversion of this mere possibility into a reality is the result of a long series of relations ..” [Capital, Volume I, Chapter 3]

and in one of the last fragments of Volume III:

“... production relations are converted into entities and rendered independent in relation to the agents of production, ... the interrelations, due to the world-market, its conjunctures, movements of market-prices, periods of credit, industrial and commercial cycles, alternations of prosperity and crisis, appear to them as overwhelming natural laws that irresistibly enforce their will over them, and confront them as blind necessity. ...” [Capital, Volume III, Chapter 48]

It is also said that capitalism is in permanent crisis, as capitalism is constantly transforming the labour process and revolutionising the relations of production, driven by the unresolvable contradiction between capital and labour. Or, to put it another way, capitalism is unsustainable development by its very nature.

crisis of capitalism, cyclical

The cyclical crisis of capitalism, or “business cycle” is the oscillation between boom and slump, between inflation and recession, which runs through the capitalist economy roughly every ten years.

The business cycle arises from the “distance” that opens up between the production and the consumption of a commodity, bridged by debt, and the huge mass of fictitious capital which builds up on the basis of the credit system. As this mass of paper value and speculative capital grows, the system becomes more and more unstable, the recession more devastating. Tweeking the interest rates and money supply to stave of this crisis is like driving a Formula One racing car; the central bankers of the capitalist powers are very skilled at the art, but the task of avoiding a crash gets harder and harder and fictitious capital circulates around the world in greater and greater masses.

crisis of capitalism, historic

The historic crisis of capitalism is the tendency, played out over decades and centuries, for life under capitalism to become more and more untenable, and for the social forces opposing capitalism to gradually build up.

One of the central concerns of Marx, in his study of the capitalist mode of production, was to identify and understand its inner contradictions, the source of the historic crisis which would eventually create conditions for its overthrow and replacement by a more humane and rational system of production. Marx did not come to a definitive answer on this question, and nor could he, for the answer to this question must be the work of all of humanity, not one person. Nevertheless, the search for the essential contradictions within the capitalist mode of production is a theme underlying all of Marx’s work, and he identified a number of contradictions and distinct visions of the historic crisis of capitalism.

These include: (i) the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, (ii) the concentration of capital, (iii) the growth of the proletariat; given the falling rate of profit, an historic crisis may be manifested as (iv) a crisis of realisation (underconsumption); Lenin added to these (v) war and revolution (imperialism), and in the post World War Two period, by extension of Marx’s analysis of the cyclical crisis of capitalism, we should add (vi) a catastrophic collapse of credit.

(i) the tendency of the rate of profit to fall

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is a theory put forward by Marx to the effect that the rate of profit enjoyed by capitalists will get smaller and smaller over time. This is because capitalists use more and more developed materials and machinery in their production as the labour process becomes more and more socialised over time, and use smaller and smaller amounts of wage-labour per unit output. Thus, the “value added” is necessarily smaller in each stage of the process of production, since it is only labour-power which adds value, not machinery or materials.

(ii) the concentration of capital (or elimination of small capital)

The concentration of capital is the historical tendency for capital to be gravitate into fewer and fewer hands, or as the saying goes – “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”.

Left to itself, this process would bring about a situation where a handful of immensely rich capitalists would find themselves contronted by a vast mass of proletarians with nothing in between. Consequently, capitalists governments have long had “anti-trust” laws to protect capitalism from itself. Likewise, the US, Japan and Europe use tariffs and subsidies to protect small farmers even though cheaper food could be imported from overseas.

(iii) the growth of the proletariat

As capitalism grows, not only are there more and more workers, but the workers are increasingly involved in organising and managing every aspect of social life; increasingly, the capitalists and their hangers-on are redundant, and there is nothing to stop the workers taking over.

After the Roman Empire collapsed, it took centuries for the feudal system to establish itself in Europe and regain what had been lost in the collapse of the Roman Empire, because slave society did not generate any class capable of overthrowing the old system and rebuilding society anew. Capitalism however, not only creates the proletariat, but organises and educates the proletariat for the task of destroying capitalism itself.

This conception of the crisis of capitalism is most clearly expressed in the Communist Manifesto:

“We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

“Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.

“A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past, the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

“The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

“But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons - the modern working class - the proletarians.

“In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed - a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.” [Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1]

and Marx and Engels conclude:

“The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labour. Wage labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” [Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1]

As a result of the conditions of postmodern capitalism, every worker today is as much as organiser of production as a producer as such. Never has capital been as unnecessary as it is today.

The Marxist perspective should be contrasted with conception of capitalism as a system which necessarily leads simply to universal immiseration and pauperism, with growing unemployment as a result of mechanisation and automation. As most clearly expressed in the Communist Manifesto, Marx saw capitalism as a system which would revolutionise the world, and foremost among its achievements was the creation of the proletariat: “its own grave-diggers”.

“The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.” [Engels, Principles of Communism]

(iv) crisis of realisation “stagflation”

“Contradiction in the capitalist mode of production: the labourers as buyers of commodities are important for the market. But as sellers of their own commodity – labour-power – capitalist society tends to keep them down to the minimum price.

“Further contradiction: the periods in which capitalist production exerts all its forces regularly turn out to be periods of over-production, because production potentials can never be utilised to such an extent that more value may not only be produced but also realised; but the sale of commodities, the realisation of commodity-capital and thus of surplus-value, is limited, not by the consumer requirements of society in general, but by the consumer requirements of a society in which the vast majority are always poor and must always remain poor.” [Capital, Volume II, Chapter 16]

(v) imperialism – epoch of wars and revolution

Imperialism is the specific stage in the development of capitalism beginning roughly from the beginning of the 20th century, characterised by the dominance of finance capital over industrial capital and by inter-imperialist wars over markets, sources of raw materials and cheap labour.

In Marx’s day, capitalism was still in its phase of expansion, spreading from Europe to the rest of the world, conquering new markets and finding new sources of raw materials and cheap labour. Although large cartels had grown up and banks grown to significant proportions, industry was still the dominant sector of capital.

By the turn of the century, there was no more room for expansion for any capitalist in search of new markets or resources, except at the expense of competing colonial powers. In those days, colonialists jealously guarded their exclusive right to exploitation of their own colonies, and the exhaustion of new opportunities meant war between the imperialist powers and every time the balance of power changed for one or another reason, a new war would have to be launched for a redivision of the markets.

The new epoch which opened up under these conditions is called Imperialism. See Lenin’s Imperialism – the latest stage of development of capitalism for the first comprehensive analysis of the nature of imperialism. As an epoch of wars and revolution, imperialism now expresses a new form of the crisis of capitalism:– “Mutually Assured Destruction”.

Many people argue that sometime in the last few decades a new phase in the development of capitalism – beyond Imperialism – has begun; the fact that there is only one dominant imperialist power, the collapse of the USSR, the rise of communications and information technology, the services sector and “knowledge work” are cited as the basis for such theories.

(vi) catastrophic collapse of credit

A catastrophic collapse of credit is an event, like the Wall Street Crash of 1929, when a tidal wave of bankruptcies sweeps across the world, throwing millions out of work and paralysing production.

The post-War boom from 1945 – 1968 was the longest boom in history, and was based on the accumulation of vast amounts of fictitious capital. This accumulation of fictitious capital now continues on a greater scale than ever before with 98% of financial transactions on the world market not including any actual good or service.

Many people believe that the kind of analysis Marx makes of the cyclic crisis of capitalism, just as it led to the Great Depression of 1929-39, could lead to another catastrophic collapse, and that such a crisis would be of such a scope that it would take on the character of an historic crisis and stimulate not just a New Deal, but provide the social impetus for the overthrow of capitalism and reconstruction on the basis of new social relations of production.

Well, surprise, surprise.