commissioner.org
| Source | Tom Walker |
| Date | 05/01/14/01:47 |
| I'll just briefly name what I find compelling:
1. the use of Veblen's analysis of business power as centring on the ability to restrict production (sabotage). 2. emphasis on Marx's section on primitive accumulation, particularly emphasis on government finance for war. 3. periodization: show me a time series graph that goes up and down and up and down and I'll follow you anywhere. ;-) and a couple of things that trouble me 4. the rooting of revolution in the "original spark of free human creativity." 5. the role of "risk" in calculating differential accumulation. 6. footnote 19: employment as proxy for size. Veblen There's an important context for Veblen, which is that he raised the issue of business restriction of production at a time when business propagandists were strenuously promoting the notion that sabotage by trade unionists was a prime source of economic distress (See, e.g.: Geoff Brown, Sabotage; Richard Price, Masters, unions and men; A.G. Taylor, Labor Policies of the National Association of Manufacturers; "The Crisis in British Industry" London Times, November 18, 1901, page 10.} I would suggest that Veblen's attention to the issue and subsequent insight may have been inspired by taking a cold, hard look at the businessmen's wild claims (pot calls kettle black). There's also an intriguing spin-off from Veblen in the theory of value -- basically capitalization of present value of expected future revenues -- proposed in the 1930s by Arthur O. Dahlberg in Jobs, Machines and Capitalism. Primitive accumulation Again with regard to Marx and primitive accumulation, I want to stress context. Marx's analysis of surplus value was inspired by that developed in the anonymous 1821 pamphlet, "The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties." That is, it was inspired by the author's discussion in the first six pages of the 40-page pamphlet, which could be read as a kind of utopia "deduced from principles of political economy". The rest of the pamphlet goes on to explain why that utopia has never arrived and lays major emphasis on role of government finance for war. While it's always possible to read a utopia as "the way things should be," it is perhaps more prudent to see it as a heuristic to make the artificiality of reality (its fictitiousness) stand out more starkly. Periodization I find the cycles of stagflation and mergers intriguing both on their own merits and with possible juxtaposition with my own speculative periodization of successive "epochs" of formal, real and general subsumption of labor based on the previously unpublished "chapter six" of Capital. Are there two Nitzan-Bichlers to a Kondratieff? (not that it matters). Sparks of creativity Although no conservative or radical sociologist may have seen May 1968 coming, Situationists had already for more than a decade been modeling practices and slogans that resonated in the event. Might those practices and slogans have been more decisive had they "seen the event coming?" Perhaps. The autonomous qualities and energies of human kind may certainly be impossible to quantify, and sometimes extremely difficult to even fathom. But that doesn't mean they are patternless. Furthermore, I believe it is fundamentally mistaken to claim that Marx saw the LTV as the one basic logic through which both accumulation and political struggle could be comprehended -- although this may be the view of 'traditional Marxism'. The whole point of Postone's book is to challenge that as a misinterpretation of Marx. Risk v. uncertainty "Are there uncertainties that are not risks?" was the question that Daniel Ellsberg asked in his 1961 article on "Risk, ambiguity and the Savage axioms" (Ellsberg's doctoral dissertation on which the 1961 article was based has recently been published). As you might have guessed his answer was affirmative. The implications of this are far reaching in the modeling of decision-making, especially so if we're talking about the relationship between state power and accumulation footnote 19 How are breadth & depth not related to labor power if the equation for differential accumulation depends on employment as a proxy for size? Footnote 19 states, "we use employment here to measure the 'size' of the corporation as a power organization, not a productive unit. Whether the employees produce plenty or little is relevant only insofar as the output bears on the corporation's 'elemental power.'" It's hard for me to see how an organization would increase its power by hiring people to do nothing, so there's clearly something missing from this explanation. During the 'downsizing' craze of the 1990s, stock prices went up when corporations announced layoffs (implying, I suppose, a huge jump in "internal depth" from cost cutting) but B&N argue that the net impact of cost cutting is to "meet the average rather than beat it." I forgot to mention unemployment. N&B's discussion of the importance of unemployment to capitalist power and capital accumulation is very important. Unemployment isn't just some regretable but unavoidable side-effect of economic activity -- it's precisely what makes "employment" enslaving. In this connection, I would like to mention Virno's thesis number 4 that in the current epoch, "every qualitative difference between labor time and non-labor time falls short... It could be said that: unemployment is non-remunerated labor and labor, in turn, is remunerated unemployment." Although this may superficially sound like recycled Situationist word play, it takes on analytical force when we understand unemployment as undergirding capitalist power. Or consider the unintentional admission of the following anti-trade union diatribe from 1901 London Times: "It was hoped to 'absorb' all the unemployed in course of time... The motive of this aspiration, however, was not one of philanthropy pure and simple. When all the unemployed had been absorbed the workers would have the employers entirely at their mercy, and would be able to command such wages and such terms as they might think fit." The Sandwichman |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho