Using money can be seen as a ritual in a symbolic relationship. The cash in your pocket is a promissory note, its a promise from the state to the individual. The states says, one day I will pay you back. We pass these promises around and build things, create things and employ people, all based on the idea that this promise is good. Its good of course because the state you live in is offering the security that you base the transaction on. So at the simplest level we are symbolically interacting with the state and each other via money. The symbol itself is now enough in itself and we no longer consider the notes in our pocket as promises of anything. This demonstrates that we engage in a form of simulation, or externalised , even ritualistic behaviour. In order for this ritual to work the state must have power to honour the symbol. We must feel reassured in the power behind the symbol in order to continue the ritual. From time to time this confidence can collapse and the symbol loses power. This is experienced as hyper inflation, the symbol rapidly loses power as we lose confidence in its potential worth.
Governments are therefore rightly concerned about maintaining the symbolic validity of this money. They must not print too much of it, incase we lose faith. The problem is money makes money, and marketeers want new money created in order to oil this machine. Money is the movement, the method by which real and virtual transactions happen.
As the Governments in usual times refuse to reduce the symbolic power of this lubricating substance, by printing more, the ingenious market has found new methods of creating money. It is debt.
Debt has undergone many transformations that I will describe, but it has now found a new purpose as a simulation of money. Money is already a simulation, but debt is a simulation of a simulation. And it works.
If a state can issue money as a promissory note, then the equivalent in the free market is the individual taking on debt. This creates a layer of money above the government created money. It is reasonable to say this as the government is creating a debt every time it issues a note, so an individual is creating money every time it takes on a debt.
The difference is this new money is not accessible by normal individuals, it is used to lubricate the obscure transactions of the market.
There has been great fear of unstable inflation by injecting too much cash into the bankrupt economies of the world, and now it seems there is great dismay that the opposite hasn’t happened. Where is the inflation? we need some, because this will wipe out the debt. These should be a virtuous circle. But the inflation just has not turned up.
“For 20 years the bank of Japan been trying to create inflation, it failed. The U.S. Fed has been trying for 5 years to create inflation ($85 billion per month in QE), and it failed. Maybe it’s not that easy for central banks to create inflation.” — Warren Mosler
I believe the reason is that it cannot be found is because we are looking in the wrong place. We expect cash to increase and decrease in purchasing power and in relation to debt, and we call this inflation, but we have not imagined that debt itself has become money, floating above normal money and acting exactly like money. It inflates, it deflates, and it crashes when the market loses confidence in its backers.
So this is where the inflation cycle has been hiding, in the simulation of a simulation.
As the problem of the ritual of the money was based in the confidence in the power of the state, so the new confidence of debt money or super money is based in the confidence of the individual. After this was lost in 2008 the markets looked to new backers of this made up transactionary power. this time they needed a more secure base to create money from, one with collateral and staying power, and that is the middle class, or the..
Prime debt pig.
I want to look at all the implications of this process , and also using Marx demonstrate some of the other symbolic relations that we run with, often without need, but out of habits created in the formation of this strange simulated universe.
If Capitalism could reproduce itself without people, it would. If It could reproduce itself without feeding its workers, it would, if it could reproduce itself without accommodating the sexual and intelectual needs of complex beings, this would be preferable. The great inconvenience for capitalism is the people that it is made up from.
Paraphrasing Jean Baudrillard’s ‘For a Critique of the Political Economy’, Its possible to see similarities with Hannah Arendt’s book ‘The origins of Totalitarianism’.
Arendt describes the process by which a totalitarian state must suffer from the inconvenience of being made up of humans, and that all these humans keep being born and have to be each time constrained and oppressed. Humans potential for creativity and spontaneity oppresses the state and confronts it in its desire for continuity.
‘Beginning , becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man’…’This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed every man.’ hannah Arendt
The comparison between Fascism or Stalinism and neoliberal capitalism is uncomfortable, maybe even distasteful, but ‘Totalitarianism’ describes something essential to all large complex states, and their relationship with the individuals that they are constructed from.
‘With the birth of each new human being a new beginning arise and raise its voice in the world, so the self-coercive force of logicality is mobilised lest anybody ever start thinking – which is the freest and purest of all human activities is the very opposite of the compulsory process of deduction. ‘ Hannah Arendt
Arendt is describing the necessity of generating terror in a totalitarian state. Necessary because there must be an external deductive logic from which the individual is situated. The creation of criminals becomes a mechanical process removed from logic, some are locked up so the others can define themselves as free. The ‘free’ borrow their freedom from the rules of the Totalitarian state and return it to the whole in an internalised form. Terror is seen as necessary to the process, yet this is an expensive and inefficient process. Criminals must be invented and punishments acted out, made up guards and executioners created as the counterpoint to criminals and subversives. All a material loss of self to the state.
It would be far more expedient if the state could achieve its totalitarian aims without the need for terror. In this condition of autumnal cannibalism, the totalitarian organism is in a constant war with its babies. Each one of these disruptive forces is born with destructive tendencies of independent thought and needs to learn how to internalise the external logic of its totalitarian universe.
‘…the tyranny of logicality no cogent deduction can have any power, because its chains presupposes, in the form of a premise, the beginning.’ Hannah Arendt
Totalitarianism defines itself by its terror. Capitalism by its freedom. In reality totalitarianism could never achieve the complete terror it hoped for and capitalism depends on the infringement of freedom for its reproduction. In both situations the external frame becomes the reference point from which the people develop a self-coercive force. The hypothetical frame in its totality is the consistent element that joins the types of society together psychologically.
The total in itself brings about parallels between the people living in opposing forms of society. In both states the internal is left alone, in many ways the people are self organised and homogenised, but always in reference to and created from, the external state. People confronted with a completeness of a system, develop in relation to this frame. They participate, sometimes passively and unknowingly, and sometimes actively, advocating for the system they reinforce. Sometimes they rebel, but it is impossible to reject such a total system without first incorporating that which they wish to extract themselves from. The means of rebellion are created from the material of their environment, and that being total, it is impossible for them to respond with techniques outside of a compliant mass consciousness.
The description of these two states is so similar that its difficult not to imagine Baudrillard was insinuating we also live in Arendt’s Totalitarian state.
But Capitalism differs from the idealism of the Nazis and their mutilated Kantianism, or the equally distorted Marxism of Stalin, because capitalism is not designed. Capitalism has idealists like Friedrich Hayek, but in reality it emerges naturally from a set of ungoverned principles. But just like a system based in idealism it reaches a critical mass at which point it develops Its own ‘tyranny of logicality’, from which we as individuals internalise the external logic as the premise from which we derive our own delusion of freedom.
Part of Capitalism own system of tyranny is the dialectic creation of ‘other’, namely ‘totalitiarinsm’. Free market economics sells us freedom from the terror associated with Stalin or Hitler, and all this costs us is our freedom.
Within this externalised consciousness we generate other antagonisms by which we define our own position. One of these is the belief in an external system of control that is designed to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor.
The evidence of a financial elite located in an incredibly small number of individuals generates the reasonable hypothesis of a system of design, but if we consider our own system as sympathetically parallel to Hannah Ardent’s totalitarian regimes, it is possible to see how convergent evolution of these opposing systems has created similar forms of self-coercion.
It may be comforting to believe in some place where all the rich get together and design new devious methods to exploit us, a comfort that comes from the dialectic of becoming the ‘other’. We ‘the left’ are brought into existence as a cohesive force if there exists such a thing as a cohesive right.
Sartre writes about this in ‘Being and Nothingness’, he states that the bourgeois deny the existence of class and class struggle. Even today the same bourgeois declare that these ideas of class are outdated and we live in a ‘classless society’. Those at the top do this because if the poor exist then so do the rich and therefore unfairness, iniquity and oppression has a owner, and ‘they’ dont want to be the bad ones. With this in mind It can appear counter revolutionary to deny the existence of design.
Conspiracies exist, there are conferences and organisations, schemes and mass frauds, lobby groups and shady organisations, and each in themselves are examples of design, but overall capitalism does not come about through intention. Instead through the gravitational forces of capitalism, occasionally these migratory lumps stick together in what appears from the outside to be a defined and homogenised group.
Maybe these examples can be compared to ‘saltation theory’ in evolution, the idea that evolution is driven by large dramatic changes, abrupt evolutionary change; sudden large-scale mutation, suggesting the intervention of some form of design. Rather than Darwin’s gradulisation theory in which these rare sudden leaps are due to the huge experimental and chaotic quality of evolution that occasionally will bring about sudden change due to the vastness of numbers involved and this gives statistical serendipity the appearance of design.
The link between Darwin and social politics was made first when Friedrich Engels compared Marx to Darwin, but then he also compared Das Kapital to the bible, so these comparisons may not be consistent.
Darwin always tried to keep design out of his theory, and this appears to be how to read Marx as well. Marx wants us to see communism as the evolution of capitalism that will come about through natural process, the seed of capitalism’s own destruction has always been there, inherent in the processes necessary for capitalism to succeed.
Both the theories of Marx and of Darwin have been distorted and attacked in similar ways. Critics of both have felt the need for more design than was included in the original.
When Darwin’s ‘On The Origin of Species’ was written it immediately came under attack from saltationists, people that needed to add an element of creation into a system that was so nihilistic. It is often seen that Darwin came up with this evolution by natural selection, and in doing so confronted the church and god, but this part was a common and widely accepted idea at the time, most religious people accepted evolution as part of gods work. The difference was Darwins completness, it was the absoluteness of the idea that caused so much pain. Gradulisation is the perfect lack of design. The problem for his critics was the idea of total chaotic process leading to evolution. If there was some form of design in the idea it would have caused less trouble.
Some reasonable attempts to unify saltation and gradulization have been attempted by Stephen Jay Gould and others in the 80s, but this subtlety of thought was absent when the right wing fundamentalist tried to reimpose design at the heart of science. With great intellectual dishonesty they tried to shoehorn saltation back into the process and claim evolution was an act of design, because if there is design then there is a designer. Intelligent design or creation science was a method used by right wing christian groups to undermine the teaching of science in American schools. It was tested in court, they lost, but it popped back up under a new name. The idea is to reestablish the principle that animals were created whole rather than evolving gradually.
The facts go against the idea, facts like the eye works by passing light first through the receiving panel then back.. something any engineer would be sacked for and probably not a mistake a god would make. Also life cycles of insects that lay their eggs in children eyes, suggest that if anyone designed this stuff they would be completely immoral.
The lack of intelligence and absence of morality that we witness in the godless darwinian universe can be found throughout capitalism.
Both left and right have mistakenly looked to the perfection of nature to support their beliefs. Murray Bookchin believed the harmony of nature was the best model for a perfect anarchist society, and on the other side Dawinian capitalists talks about large trees falling to create space and light for the saplings, the strongest of which, will grab the light and become the new large tree. Both sides base their ideas on the concept of harmony in nature, an idea modern ecologists have now discredited. The truth of nature is chaos and something that we should not base our civil societies or our markets on. A snapshot of nature looks nice, but when studied with the extra vector of time, a series of catastrophes are revealed, one great holocaust replacing another.
The idea of self creating systems of anarchic harmony, is acompanied by the principle of a secret lair of organising evil doers. The capitalists organise their cabals and the well organised left wing, fight in a shadowy rebellion. The presentation of these self serving capitalists as single group, in itself credits the capitalists with an unjustified aptitude for cooperation. The left are equally lacking in the ability to achieve consensus and fight with unity.
It is possible for a steering group to develop at the centre of capitalism, a financial elite that directs the traffic, but only as an emergent characteristic. This is consistent with the idea of evolution of a natural system rather than as an occurrence of organisation and discipline. It may be useful for the left to accept this form of non designed congruity and fight back with apropriately atomised resistance.
Consider how the financial elites may come into existence and embedded themselves at the heart of our democrasy without any need for design.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau describes the relation between efficiency and democracy in ‘On the Social Contract; or, Principles of Political Rights’. Although it would be an exaggeration to imagine that Rousseau predicted the current situation in 1762, he can explain some of the underlying structures of society that can be used to help understand how a financial elite can become the directing force in a democracy. A financial elite that repurposes most of the aims and needs of society to its own benefit.
In ‘the Social Contract’, Rousseau explains that a large disorganised mass is less efficient in its aims than a smaller group. Rousseau uses the example of the Prince. The Prince is the least democratic way to distribute power society can create, and his ability to act is inversely proportional to that lack of democracy. He has perfect undemocratic power to direct the course of society to his will, and therefore the things he wants to happen usually get done. At the other end of the scale is a working democracy. A fully functioning democracy should be so diverse in its aims that hardly any single direction can take form. It has been said that democracy’s inefficiency is its best defence against fascism as no one can agree on a single direction of travel.
When the natural outcome of group size are combined as they have been in the modern world, a confluence of these unequal forces occurs and the financial elite emerges as the ruling force embedded at the centre of out democratic society . In effect, their aims are easier to implement than ours.
The congruence of these opposing forces may lead to the great inequality and usurpation of democracy that we witness in the modern world, but it is unlikely that the elite is actively directing this process, or are working towards any particular moral outcome. The elite, is itself subject to the external process, and the gradualism that forms it.
In this way we can reincorporate the Darwinian process; in its true form, one in which the results of environmental conditions create all kinds of beautiful monsters, gradually, without design and as a necessary outcome of the environmental conditions.
After years of austerity and a massive increase in the wealth divide, there exists an honest attempt by the richest in society to pay more tax. They are not allowed to, and try and disperse their wealth in other ways. Maybe a few psychopaths amongst them are enjoying the situation, but I believe that for most, their intention is to do good. The Bill and Melissa Gates foundation is probably a genuine altruism, despite the conspiracy theories claiming the opposite.
Also those that are forced to do bad , like the chair of shell oil, is probably a decent person, obliged by law to look after the well being of the coorporation in the same way a person who has power of attorney over another being , must act in its best intentions of that ‘person’ even if this conflicts with their own moral agenda. The corporation is treated in law as a ‘person’ and protected in US law using the same amendment created to stop property being removed from freed slaves.
The people that are wealthy have often not really chosen this existance. Wealth is usually inherited, gained from generations of extracting excess labour value, this is then consolidated and centralised. The other way Wealth is created is in a process of pure happenstance.
Melville writes a story about a character who buys a business, its a room with a phone in it, no one rings, then after months of inaction, the phone rings off the hook. The protaganist becomes incredibly wealthy, then the phone stops ringing and he loses his fortune. At no point does he understand what he was selling. It turns out that he had cornered the market in calcium carbide (CaC2) that was used for a short while in gas lamps, but new technology made the material worthless again.
Bitcoin billionaires are the modern equivalent of melville’s millionaire. People that have happened upon a fortune and now find themselves defined as evil geniuses, yet the are the creation of circumstance and many are not evil any more than they are geniuses.
if we wish to dismiss the myths of capitalism, its important not to participate in them when trying to confront them.
We must develop theories which exclude conspiracy, reject ideas concerned with what ‘they’ are trying to achieve. Instead we should follow Marx in his darwinism.
Das Kapital describes the process. He begins with the stage of humanity most people had lived in for thousands of years. People made the things for their own house and even built their own house, or at the very least sold something they had made or grew and bought something they needed with the money. The thought of selling these objects for profit in itself, was ridiculous. Your chair was your own, you kept it all your life and fixed it when it was injured.
Thoreau tried to recreate this basic spiritual connection between the person and the object, object and the enviroment in his walden experiment. ‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately‘. It seems that for Thoreau the purpose was to roll back the development of exchange value and live again with a true relation of value with the world, and to take on the farmer ‘who’s fruits are not ripe for him until they are turned to dollars’.
Marx had identified that a person has a need to create, and the object they create has a special relation to that individual. When this process is mediated through capitalism, often the object a person makes, a chair for example is destroyed as an object of creation and recreated as an object of commerce. Something he can buy. Often it is something that the individual will never be able to buy. A man in the capitalist universe is confronted by the results of his labour, returned to him in an alienated form, his labour also undergoes a change in itself that is returned to him as part of his oppression.
Marx identifies the first stage in a constantly evolving relationship between the things people make, labour, and their time.
Tolstoy writes about this in his novel Anna Karenina, the character Dmitrievich Lëvin considers his relation to the workers. He is a gentleman farmer and he is writing a book on the nature of the worker, during a period of social reform, after the liberation of the serfs but before the revloution. He decides to stop theorising and actually go out into the fields to work alongside his employees, to go and mow with them. They make a point of working him especially hard, enjoying the opportunity to show how hard they work and how much more skilful with a scythe they are than him. Lëvin makes friends with one of these old labourers and is impressed with his efficiency and skill, combined with his grace and harmonious nature. The old man picks up beetle mid stride on the tip of his blade, examines it and returns to the job, without falling out of line. Lëvin keeps up this experiment for the a while but soon returns to his dissolute life. leaving the field he considers his former theories. He had been formulating an idea based on the specific nature of the land that was farmed, in relation to the individual nature of the labourer, but this seems irrelevant after his experence. Lëvin seems to shift his thought process towards mechanisation, and if he should adopt the steam engines as other landowners had done.
Its not easy to uncover Tolstoys intention in Lëvin’s stream of thought but it may not be a coincidence that after witnessing first hand the power the labourer has over the Landowner, his power to set a time for each task that no landowner can disprove, that perhaps the rationality of the machine becomes an inviting idea.
Marx makes the boldest statement regarding mechanisation. he claims mechanisation does not increase efficiency..at all.
I doubt he would say it today with the super farms of the US all sown and watered and harvested by programmable super machines, but in Marx time he may be correct. He may have meant many things by this claim. It may be that the time and effort to make the machines that make machines, may cancel out the end result in terms of efficiency. There was an actual zero sum gain or negative efficiency. Or Marx may have meant that all mechanisation does is extract more excess labour value from the worker. And it achieved this not simply by making the labourer work harder, but by regulating the time it took to do each job.
As mechanisation develops in ways that marx could not have predicted, it may be that this idea of Marx has been made irrelevant by time. But as with Darwin uncovering a principle that remains strong today despite developments in genetics that he could never have predicted, Marx may have uncovered a universal formula that still appears true despite the changes in society and technology that have followed.
It may be useful and relevant today to consider the exact method by which mechanisation increased excess labour value exploited from the worker. It does this not necessarily by speeding the worker up, but by regulating the time taken to do a job. Until Lëvin goes into the fields he will have to trust the worker to tell him how long a job will take, and even then he will only gain a distorted version of this time. His observation distorts the experiment. After some times this observational effect is reduced because Lëvin is so ideology driven to do this work, he continues long enough that eventually the workers fall into their usual patterns. They work hard and with great expertise early in the day but it turns out they are are also experts in rest. By midday they are eating and chatting under trees. The regular movement of the machine creates a regular movement in the human, a human yoked to a machine has each task regulated at a precise time or he falls behind like chaplin in modern times.
Time regulation therefore is the true purpose of mechanisation.
Its true that mechanisation also exploits labour in other ways, the point of usage for the machine is not the only moment of worker exploitation, the individual energy of the worker can now be divested all along the chain of production. The machine and its production is also part of the system of labour extraction. But to join these forces together with that of the end user would suggest the type of big picture thinking that Im trying to escape here. The landowner and the machine builder are usually not the same person by the time this process is up and running.
The thing that is of immediate benefit to the landowner is the regulation of time brought about through mechanisation.
Time itself becomes the underlying relation of the worker to the employer. This is why Marx then turns to considering the length of the working day. Its is incredible that no other economist, no David Ricardo or Adam Smith had ever considered this fundamental idea. The failure to consider the length of the working day almost defines how out of touch the gentleman economist was. If a worker had been writing economic tomes, I imagine this fundamental issue would have been the first consideration. Clearly no one apart from Marx was considering things from to point of view of those that actually produce the objects that economists examined in their writing.
Once the task time could be regulated then it can quantified, after this the extension of the working day and time regulation became essential parts of modern capitalism. The equivalent of the cambrian explosion had occurred, the forces of sedementory movement had provided the conditions for a revolution in ideas. And in both case what appears to be a period of great invention is in reality a dark cloud of smog and silt from which low oxygen fires can burn unopposed by radical change. These were periods of dark incubation rather than the explosion or revolution. The creatures that evolved in the Cambrian were exploiters of nutrients in a sluggish slow moving environment, pulsing under the sea and developing the basic forms later adopted and progressing on the evolutionary tree. Similarly the terrible conditions of early capitalism was a dark low oxygenated sludge in which the nutrient harvesting of labour was regulated in the monotonous churn of steam driven loom.
‘let me introduce a new particle into the microphysics of simulacra, for after the natural commodity and structural stages of value comes the fractal stage, the first of these 3 stages had a natural referent and value developed in reference to a natural use of the world, the second was founded on a general equivalence and value developed in reference to a logic of the commodity. refrent and value developed in reference to a natural use of the world’
Jean Baudrillard
Time relation between the worker and the employer can be obliquely related to what Baudrillard would have considered a natural reference to the use of the world. For Baudrillard there is no natural use of the world, all is a simulation. layers of interference between the phenomenal and and the nomenal are built up in the modern world, and our connection between self and object and object and world, all become mixed up in convoluted ways. In this way Baudrillard moved on from Marx who he would consider to be dwelling in the bourgeois concerns of labour and value.
But Marx was also writing about a simulated universe, he had extracted the symbolic value of time and this did not contradict its relation to the natural use of world, which still functions as one of the most important components of modern capitalist relations.
Workers in factories are still yoked to machines in interchanging 12 hour shifts, returning to cramped and contagious accommodation, while the working day is extended to its maximum. In the example of high end production, thousands of distinct operations move the object through the factory, each task precision timed to the millisecond. Time regulation and quantifying is still the determining factor of production. And production in its various forms still exists. The worker is a node of time, the evolution of the relation between the worker and the world is no longer directly with the use, or its exchange value, but predominantly as a portion of time. This principle of time as the disassociated node of capitalist relations is so essential to the development and the sustaining of capitalism that it even can be witnessed in systems that have evolved beyond production. Time exploitation exists as the thing in itself, serving entirely new purposes, and by doing so, demonstrates its symbolic nature.
It has been suggested that Maxwell didnt just provide the conditions for Einstein’s general relativity, but Maxwells equations already contain relativity, if you know how to find them.
Jean Baudrillard is described as moving on from Marx and reformulating the world beyond Marx’s bourgeois concepts of value, but as with Maxwell and Einstein, Baudrillard’s simulated world can be found in Marx’s theories.
Baudrillardian objects are collected laterally as part of scheme without relation to need, but as part of a symbolised fractal universe. This symbolic relation eventually leads to such absurd abstractions as consumers consuming advertising itself rather than the objects advertised.
Marx had already identified a key element of society as an abstracted concept, time itself had also undergone the fractalisation of Baudrillard and had become a symbol or sign. The purpose of time as uncovered in Das Kapital is no longer connected directly with the world of production but was now primarily yoked to the machine for the purpose of exploiting its regulatory quality.
This was the psychological theft of time from the worker, the employer was not just buying the use value of time but also extracting time as a symbolic artefact. The machine did not need to just extract more labour to be useful to the employer. The machine also established time as a quality that could be quantified as task, that could then be exploited as a knowable amount. It was this time as knowledge that was essential for capitalism, rather than time as value in itself.
The symbolic transference was one in which the worker previously owned time that could be divided into work and leisure, into one in which the employer became the new owner of the workers time, and hoarded it for its own sake.
Although this appears to be a greedy usurpation of power for its own sake, It was essential for capitalism to evolve. The symbolic time no longer represented the amount of labour that could be extracted from the worker, but the transference of psychological possession of time from worker to employer. It became the time a task took to complete and this could no longer be the decided by the worker, now that was the decision of the employer as rationally mediated through the machine.
Time is both real and unreal in these relations. For the poorest producers and the highest end manufacturers, time is exploited in excess labour value, but now alongside these groups, exist a category of non producing, time poor workers. Their time is harvested without reference to the labour extracted, but for its own symbolic value. The link with production is diminished or non existent. These are the people David Greaber is talking about in his book ‘Bullshit jobs’.
The mirror of production is consumption. Its natural acompliment, someone makes an object and someone else buys it. The consumer has evolved alongside the producer, and the symbiotic or competitive or parasitic relation is complex, and since Marx’s era the producer and consumer have undergone radical changes. From the time when the producer was the same person as the consumer, when people made their own chair, to the factory relation in which producer worked for substance wage, forced to create but only exchange for the most basic nutrient exchange, they existed to eat, not to purchase. Luxuries were produced for an elite consumer, which through greater exploitation and the natural forces of centralisation became cheaper leading eventually to the expansion of the consumer market to include the worker. Once again a relation between object and the constructor of that object had been established. Ford invented the seemingly egalitarian principle that his employees should be able to afford the end product. But again the capitalist is not acting from evil or in this case good, just necessity. The extent of Ford’s dominance and hold on the market meant that a balance had been tipped, the twin pistons of producer and the consumer could be exploited in one single stroke.
Capitalist engage in humanity husbandry. The worker begins as a simple beast of burden (production) at this stage it eats and produces. As a business grows, it outcompetes through greater labour extraction, it begins to engulf its neighbours, cannibalising their failing enterprises. This process of buying up cheep failed competitors is considered by Marx as consolidation and as this process continues we get centralisation. Eventually very few peek business exist and they become closely related to governments. At this point private enterprise is indistinguishable from government and this leads to interesting outcomes. A consumer deficit arises, more and more is being produced and the capitalist needs to find new markets. The rich demand for luxury is limited and there is a great market available if the producer must end its life as a simple producer and also become a consumer. Ford was one of the businesses that had survived the consolidation process and was able to exploit the newly created consumer worker. This tipping point makes one of the great changes in relation between the private and public. Greater consolidation leads to centralisation , and that is when governments and private companies become indistinguishable. The consumer and the worker are unified as a new subject. And as the subject evolves so does the state they make up.
The natural forces of capitalism overtake any recalcitrant philosopher objections. The ideas of Paine and Rousseau, Locke and Hobbs are swamped by this sedimentary avalanche, subjects of this new state are consumers and producers in equal measure, devices of capitalism rather than humans standing in relation to their state, they are no longer men in relation to a social contract, the only contract they have with the world is an employment contract.
The newly created consumer/producers are not equal, there is a scale of inequality.
Wage increase created by unionisation or competition for higher skilled workers, is neutralised in the market place by increased prices. This is above and beyond the nutrient bargain that Malthus describes. People are no longer working just for bread but to service their consumerism. They demand higher wages and get them, but the product also increase in price.
As the price of the product is increased in line with wage, neutralising wage increase, the returning demand for increased wage leads capitalism to expand and to exploit new markets and benefit from cheeper wages. Capitalism is international and expansive in nature. The price of labour and spending value is at different stages in different countries. Due to this imbalance the capitalist will soon understand that they can separate the consumer and the producer once more. Labour is cheep in one country and the price they sell the product for is high in the original. The original has already raised this price due to a cycle of wage increase and price rise neutralisation, but the new country has not reached this stage, there is a time lag in the process.
Under these conditions It is inevitable that production will be transplanted to places in which labour is cheap, and that consumption will remain predomonatly in the place where the product can be sold high.
A paradox arises here. If production is moved to india or other cheap labour sources, then the newly created consumer/producer/worker/subject is no longer a producer, they are just unemployed/consumer/subject. Yet they need to keep buying for the process to continue. At this point debt is issued and fake jobs invented to service the debt. The state should be considered as a co conspirator at this point, a conspiracy made necessarily due to the conditions of the idea. Not as some predetermined conspiracy between government and business, but simply out of the same external forces that govern all attached to this idea.
The state has its own methods of producing debt, the money they create is debt and more obliquely, the money they produce in the form of bonds. The state is in control of the interest rates that control all this debt. It is therefore necessary at this stage of economic history for the state and private finance to become intimate. As the state is an extension of the subjects that it is made up of, and as these subjects are now primarily situated in a relation of consumer/producers and soon to become borrowers, then the unifying of state and private enterprise is a necessary outcome.
In the 50s ordinary people were encouraged to spend on credit and also to become active participants in the stock exchange. These activities were previously reserved for the rich, but as production evolved so did the consumer and then later their relation to debt and stocks. These newly democratised processes of inventing money in the form of debt and speculation are completely abstracted from Marx’s principles of production and labour extraction. Consumers subjects of this new state have become borrowers and no longer just producers working for a wage in order to become consumers. All of these changes occurred without the need for a designer, the natural uses of the world and its forces are enough.
The change in culture associated with this economic evolution was predicted by Veblen, who went on to work out the theory of conspicuous consumption. The need for new products to reproduce this model of consumption for its own sake would change the psychology of the consumer. Now instead of buying to fulfil a need, the consumer was buying for new extraneous reasons. Advertising would also go through a revelation as psychologists were brought in to manage the psychology of a society and find new reasons based on freudian principles to encourage people to buy. This mass psychological manipulation would in turn change the consumer fundamentally. The consumer would be unaware that their subconscious desires and fears were being accessed and manipulated and they would experience new feelings of freedom that they would associate with irrational consumption. For example consumers would buy objects and upgrade products simply to outcompete their neighbours, rather than out of a need to replace them when broken or worn out. Capital Relations were changing and people experienced this ideological shift and responded, even if they were unaware of the inner transformation. Baudrillard explains how objects would spread out laterally as object signs that would exist in relation to others of the same set and not for their own sake. The relation between consumer and object, producer and wage was all breaking down in this simulated universe.
The idea of bankrupt countries printing money that is worth more as fuel than cash is part of the nightmare capitalists tell their children at night. Wheelbarrows full of newly printed banknotes going into the fire as the economy crashes. This debt money was valueless because the state that backed it was bankrupt. The promissory note, promised nothing. But the same crisis of confidence that is witnessed when bankrupt states can no longer be trusted to repay the promise on the note, also occurs when money backed by individuals is revealed as unsafe. For four decades neoliberalism has contrived to build growth primarily based on personal debt. The withdrawal of state replaced by the indivual was a fundamental principle of this experiment. As the balance tipped and the consumer rather than the state became the primary security behind debt that was used to grease a financial market, individual solvency and issues of instability at a personal level became a global concern.
In 2008 the world experience the result of newly created debt, losing credibility due to the imbalance of extending debt to the poorest in what is referred to as sub prime debt. Physicists had been brought into economics and even won noble prizes for solving the boom and bust capitalist paradigm that Marx had described. Marx had predicted a series of financial bubbles, each greater than the last as economies grew in the system he described. He also predicted a series of crashes following each bubble and each greater than the last, until one day a crash would be so deep that the economy would not rebound, at this point the government would have to intervene and that is how capitalism would evolve into communism.
When the physicist’s equation for continued growth was written, this should have marked a great contradiction to Marx, and proved him wrong once and for all. Continued steady growth would replace boom and bust. The formula was the process of packaging sub prime with prime debt and hedging against bad bets. But In this utopian equation existed a simple floor. The Sub prime debt could be extended endlessly. Poor people could buy houses at artificially inflated prices, and the bad debt would outweigh the good debt and the instability of the artifice would bring the whole thing down.
The collapse of a global economy based on sub prime individuals led to a new period of evolution in capitalist husbandry. Either through regulation or through a lesson learnt, once bitten twice shy capitalist reformed and changed their focus from sub prime to prime debt. No longer extending loans to the poor, the market that existed to grow needed new forms of stable debt, these were created around the prime debt market.
The creation of new money is one the greatest areas of capitalist exploitation. if a government consents to create new money, or rather new debt/money there is a sudden flow and a subsequent increase in market activity, traders finding ever more devious methods of exploiting the flow.
The intention of this personal debt production is to create money that can be traded against, in its own right, to do what a government does in a crisis, but in this case by using free market mechanisms. Since debt had collapsed due to mass default of an inflated market that had mixed too much poor tranches in with the good, the market now searched out the middle-class westerners to extend the debt market. It can be seen in the significant developments in economic tendencies since 2008. Student debt was increased, Phones backed by contracts became more expensive, car finance was increased, mortgages were extended to those with the capital to back them, usually from parents, the prime debt market was being extended, invented, accessed and squeezed.
Then came Covid, and a global collapse of markets. The 2020 crash was the most dramatic in history. The sudden loss of confidence can be seen as a reasonable reaction from a market facing a global pandemic, but after a week the markets recovered and have been healthy ever since. Wikipedia explains this bounce was a response to reassurance about a vaccine, but the truth is that the governments turned on the money taps. Quantitive easing was dramatically increased. Not created, but increased since this government stimulus was still in place from the 2008 package, as was all the laws and the mechanisms to use this proto communist process. Marx appears to have been proved right. And so was keynes, instead of a seesaw the economy is an elevator and it can stabilise just as well at the bottom as at the top. The economy had been bouncing along the ground since the 2008 crash, and now another shock had taken it out almost completely.
As described above, the debt a government produces and the debt individuals produce are slightly different. In terms of nations debt, there is no different between the two, but there is a different in the way they can be used. It took Covid19 to force the governments to turn on the taps, while in the years between 2008 and 2020 , the free market had found ways to create or extend new forms of prime debt. They had invented the prime debt pig.
The significant detail of the debt pig husbandry is to never call in a debt. Never slaughter the pig. Farmers understand that the pig does not produce anything, other than fertiliser. It cannot be milked, it does not produce wool, it is only exploited at the point it is made into bacon, until then it acts as a storage for wealth. So long as its healthy the pig is a symbol of the owners wealth, he can use it as collateral for other forms of wealth production.
Although personal and national debt have always existed alongside each other, the difference now was that the shocks and responses of the market had created a significant sector of the population who’s primary purpose was to act as secure wealth storage units, accessible through their personal debt.
When Veblen is referring to conspicuous consumption he is talking about a fictional relationship between the individual and the objects they buy and its based on a fictional relationship between the work they do and the money they can buy with. The relationship of an advertising executive to his cadillac is based on nothing. He produces nothing and buys the car with money he has not yet earned. The purpose of this ad agent is to buy and create wealth by keeping production rolling, he is extended this virtual relationship so long as he pays the car off eventually, with interest.
Guy Louis Debord wrote of all this in ‘The Society of the Spectacle’.
“The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.”In a consumer society, social life is not about living, but about having; the spectacle uses the image to convey what people need and must have. Consequently, social life moves further, leaving a state of “having” and proceeding into a state of “appearing”; namely the appearance of the image.”In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.”
There appears to have been an instinctual zeitgeist response to the realisation that this artificial universe was being created, and the psychological shock in the mass subconscious created a spontanious counter cultural response. Somehow people knew this was fake, all plastic and they rebelled. An attempt was made to reintroduce the authentic into the equation, but somehow aware that in a simulated universe it was impossible to respond with the authentic, parts of the populous responded instead with the irrational, the illogical and the anti bourgeois. The situationists countered this plastic universe using the surrealist and dadaist activities of agitation that had once existed only in the art world.
Compared to today these fake relations were almost part of the real world, a visceral connection could be found between the worker and what they bought. Consumers in the 60s, 70s and 80s would buy their furniture through payments, eventually ending up owning the product, the interest added to the product justified the exchange. Coin operated tvs were even created so the debt would be carefully repaid through usage. The consumer knew they were purchasing an object.
This is not the kind of debt we have today. People are actively discouraged from paying off the item, sometimes at the point the repayments are completed, the owner discovers they don’t even own the phone, they discover that they have been renting it all along. The consumer is punished for completing the transaction. The consumer who grew up in the ‘never never’ culture is mystified by this, they expect to buy the object, to be paying it off.
The young consumer knows instinctively the correct mindset of repayment of debt, nothing is owned, nothing is repaid. Objects are updated, replaced, traded in, houses moved and the whole time the debt exists as if floating. The debt is ‘like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.’ james joyce .
The new consumer understands this relationship and interacts at this symbolic level as if it has always been so, they understand this endless slipping away of ownership and they understand and accept the hypocritical nature of debt, and flout it with distain. The environment that surrounds them has created a new form of consumer, a new relation exists between subject and state and this new relation marks a distinct stage in the development of the simulated universe.
We have developed a virtual relation with the object, even more abstract than Marx’s exchange value alienation with the object, less defined than the debt laden consumer of Veblins status symbol, even more fractalized than Baudrillard’s simulated universe. Todays consumer has passed through all this to the stage of simply serving the purpose of holding a debt. Never to own, not really to pay interest, but just to hold securely the debt and never default, in essence to grow large with debt so others can borrow against you. This is a new form of debt bondage because it should, if functioning correctly, never harm the debt pig. The debt pig eats and eats and grows in debt, but is never butchered.
‘we may pretend to carry in the same direction, accelerating but in reality we are accelerating in a void because all the goals of liberation are already behind us’ Jean Baudrillard
The modern western consumer is floundering without a purpose for being, other than stacking up debt and carefully servicing the debt. They know their job does nothing, they realise that the object they hold doesn’t belong to them more does the house they live in. They know they must work to keep all this in order, to live and consume and be entertained, but they know this is all based on nothing.
So long as the consumer/subject participates correctly then they are fed and clothed and entertained, the only thing they are poor in is time. The employer desperately holds on to this time relation to the worker, despite the uselessness in terms of productivity. It should not be assumed that the employer of the unproductive worker is any less interested in increasing productivity.
Research has demonstrated that people are more productive if they are allowed to go home after their tasks are completed, and productivity is increased with shorter weeks, yet the employer in general stubbornly hangs onto the concept of payment in relation to time regulation. They expect their employees to work a set amount of hours and pay them for that.
Why are business continuing to make people time poor when it is unnecessary and even detrimental to their own business? It seems that the concept of time quantifying and extending the working day has survived all these changes in work relations, like the cast of woodlouse left behind, it serves no purpose anymore, but it was fundamental to an earlier stage of growth. It was the ectoskeleton of the invertebrate that it lived in it and needed it to survive. Now under the conditions of covid this last remnant of the production can be shed.
Due to lockdown, the symbolic relation of time will be exposed as people complete their tasks early in the day and spend the rest of time living. At this point they may ask why they are occupied in a job that produces nothing in order to pay the contract on a phone they dont own, or drive a car they will never own, parked in garage they dont own, and why is it that this job takes up more and more time when in reality it can all be done in a few hours.
This realisation may be the final liberation. They may realise that this artificial relationship only serves to quantify time in order to pay a wage at a steady and knowable rate in order to justify the repayment of debt. The purpose is therefore completely removed from production or consumption and in reality is a zombie function of a simulated universe.
After this last remnant of the artificial labour wage and use relation is lost and the liberated person discovers they are ‘accelerating in a void’ will they stop swimming and float?
Baudrillard symbolic exchange was derived from Georges Bataille’s notion of a “general economy” where expenditure, waste, sacrifice, and destruction were claimed to be more fundamental to human life than economies of production and utility. They maintain that humans “by nature” gain pleasure from such things as expenditure, waste, festivities, sacrifices, and so on, in which they are sovereign and free to expend the excesses of their energy.
Bataille thought people should learn to be aristocrats, serving no greater purpose than to expend energy like the sun without ever losing mass. To become hobbyists and dilettantes.
Even if this is correct, the ‘general economy’ is not allowed to flourish, choices are not made, but instead processes evolve and people change to reflect this. People cannot be taught by Baudrillard that they function in a simulated universe, they must experience it.
Layers of disillusionment are gradually revealed and the individual finds themselves high and dry, they discover they have no purpose and no connection with production, time and wage. If the shock of this disillusionment is too harsh, or the layers are revealed too fast, the seduction fails and as with may68, some will take to the streets, they may not even know why.
Neoliberalism can be seen as a form of totalitarianism as it seeks to obliterate the person as an individual capable of spontaneous creation and instead integrates the one into the whole. Baudrillard calls this fractalization and imagines this intrusion of the system penetrating every part of the individuals existence. Although Baudrillard may be considered the political opposite of Hannah Ardent, his description comes very close to Arendt’ s version of totalitarianism in ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Hannah Arendt describes the person/object in the totalitarian universe as an active participant who changes themselves in line with the external regime, and the self is absorbed in every way as part of the whole. The individual living in a totalitarian regime experiences his passions and desires but in a mediated way, reflected back after being absorbed in the totality. A passion that is not acted on but only comes into existence once mediated, is no longer a passion, the process immediately dislocates it from being a true passion.
Once time, as the final relation of capitalism has been exposed as an unnatural artifice, unnatural to the human condition and even unuseful to the capitalist, then there may be a disrobing of the cloak of capitalism. Spontaneity can only exist once this veil has been drawn, and this creative individuality is a messy thing. It is for this reason alone that capitalism will attempt to reestablish the time relation as fundamental and necessary.
