Get a cup of coffee while you settle down to watch this video of Nancy Fraser discussing the crisis as a joint problem of ecological, financial, and social systems. It’s admittedly wonky, but very much worth your time. Her focus is to get her audience out of the “either-or” paradigm of either pushing for more market-based approaches or treating social protection as the antidote. She also discusses the propensity in our current socio-political system to crises, to finesse the issue of domination, and to ignore the limits on the realms in which contracts can operate.
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Without having watched the video, my first thought is that the Situationists would say “Yes”.
I encourage anyone to check out the Situationists if they don’t know people like Guy Debord. They were a big influence on a lot of people back in the day. The stuff is still even more valid today.
“Bigger cages! Longer chains!” Best protest chant ever.
Where capitalism really runs afoul of commodification-all-the-way-down is in property rights. That didn’t get mentioned until the first question. Clearly capitalism practices its own destruction by this commodification just like it destroys itself by pursuing irrational productivity. At some point those who dominate, the big corporations, will have to become territorial to protect their own property. Witness the TPP. Capitalism is a giant contradiction that only survived this long because the Earth was big and the human population was relatively low. This must be what her reference to Hegel was about – at some level the rights of property owners must be protected in order to protect private property and those rights are traditionally maintained by social contract – so an economy cannot be based-all-the-way-down on contracts. Good lecture. I began to think at the end that private property is the thing which feeds a too-liberal profit motive by capitalists. Instead of property rights we should have property duties and obligations, and the whole romantic idea of “rights” should be curbed.
We Anarchists generally advocate use-based property, which includes both personal and collective property, rather than title-based property. Title requires a unitary institution to track who owns what, and enforce those titles. But everyone knows intuitively what “use” means even if it’s impossible in practice to codify rules on what constitutes “use”. If you live in it, you use it and therefore own it. If you work in a building or use a tool, you own it. Multiple people may own a thing together if they all use it, and they’ll figure out how that works. And there is no role for landlords or bosses.
I’m not sure I agree with Nancy Fraser that we “lack any such critical theory” that encompasses all three of the crisis dimensions. It’s just that the theory hasn’t been fully and systematically articulated in a single place. Elements of that theory are in Elinor Ostrom’s work on common pool resources, in Hilkka Pietilä analysis of “The Triangle of the Human Economy” and in Paul Burkett’s version of ecosocialist analysis, particularly regarding the analysis of “labour power as a common pool resource.”
Giacomo D’Alisa, and and Claudio Cattaneo, have done empirical work on “Household Work and Energy Consumption: a Degrowth Perspective” that encompasses two of the three crisis dimensions and implicates the third. I have developed the concept of labour power as a common pool resource further, particularly with regard to climate change, carbon emissions and unemployment. I am somewhat afraid that there is yet another dimension of the crisis that Fraser didn’t highlight — at least at first — and that is the dimension of the fetishism of technology and its role in masking global unequal exchange. It seems to me that we all suffer from a massive cognitive dissonance about finding a way out of this crisis that nevertheless somehow lets us get to keep “something from the past.” As the Marquis de Sade observes in Marat/Sade:
“Look… …everyone wants to keep something from the past. A souvenir of the old regime. So this man decides to keep a painting, this man keeps his mistress… …this man keeps his horse, this man keeps his garden. That man keeps his farmlands, that man keeps his house in the country… …that man keeps his factories, that man couldn’t bear to part with his shipyards. That man keeps his army… …and that one keeps his king. And so we sit here……and write into the declaration of the rights of man……the sanctity of private property.”
Great quote.
On the triple post, imagine the following scenario:
1) First comment hits trip wire
2) Revised version hits trip wire
3) Revised version passes and is published
4) Admin checks queue, sees duplicates #1 and #2
5) Has no basis to know which is right, flips a coin, and publishes #2
6) #2 and #3 are now published duplicates, so the blog looks bad.
Of course, the admins could avoid the duplicate #2 in step 5) by checking the published queue for dupes every single time they approve a comment. That would at least double the admin time for comments, which is a really bad use of admin time.*
That is why, if your comment hits a tripwire, it’s best just to wait until we check the queues.
UPDATE * Clearly showing that I’m really an insufficiently ruthless softie, I didn’t think of the other obvious solution: When dupes are encountered in queues, blow them all away.
Insufficiently ruthless? You can say that again! You can say that again!
I’m not sure I agree with Nancy Fraser that we “lack any such critical theory” that encompasses all three of the crisis dimensions. It’s just that the theory hasn’t been fully and systematically articulated in a single place. Elements of that theory are in Elinor Ostrom’s work on common pool resources, in Hilkka Pietilä analysis of “The Triangle of the Human Economy” and in Paul Burkett’s version of ecosocialist analysis, particularly regarding the analysis of “labour power as a common pool resource.”
Giacomo D’Alisa, and and Claudio Cattaneo, have done empirical work on “Household Work and Energy Consumption: a Degrowth Perspective” that encompasses two of the three crisis dimensions and implicates the third. I have developed the concept of labour power as a common pool resource further, particularly with regard to climate change, carbon emissions and unemployment. I am somewhat afraid that there is yet another dimension of the crisis that Fraser didn’t highlight — at least at first — and that is the dimension of the fetishism of technology and its role in masking global unequal exchange. It seems to me that we all suffer from a massive cognitive dissonance about finding a way out of this crisis that nevertheless somehow lets us get to keep “something from the past.” As the Marquis de Sade observes in Marat/Sade:
A crucial question is: “if labour power is not a commodity, what is it?”
Labor is (not) a Commodity
Re: A crucial question is: “if labour power is not a commodity, what is it?”
paraphrased from Marx, Capital, chapter 1, 2, and 3, paraphrased from the last 2 paragraphs in the section “2. Why a Marxist?” from: http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2013/12/10/confessions-of-an-erratic-marxist-in-the-midst-of-a-repugnant-european-crisis/
Labour is a commodity, yes.
But what is a commodity? it is a thing that satisfies a human want, need, or desire. Commodities have a inherent property, like a coin has two sides, heads and tails. On one side of a commodity is its exchange-value. The exchange-value is the price of the commodity. It is numeric and quantifiable. The other side of the commodity is its use-value, which is not numeric and can not be quantified, but it exists to the buyer or else why would the buyer obtain the commodity? (In the Visa commercials, it is the thing that is “priceless”).
Now humans produce or provide labour for the use-value that they get out of it (yes, they work for money, which is the exchange-value portion of labour, but the money is used to satisfy a human want, need, or desire). Since labour, unique amoung commodities, comes entirely from a human, it can not be reduced to price only. If you do, if you say that labour exists only for its exchange-value, its price, then the human that produces that labour is is no longer human, but a machine, and a machine has no wants, needs, or desires. And if there is no want, need, or desire, there is no capitalism because the capitalist (the money man) can not exist without there being other humans with wants, needs, and desires that need money to satisfy. Remember, if “labour” comes from a robot, it’s not labour, it is a fixed cost.
Very interesting. It seems to fit in somewhat with Keynes’ conundrum in that he saw capitalism as a ‘foul’ means to a ‘fair’ end. He saw the need for ‘money loving’ capitalists generating production but hoped this would reach an ‘end’ where people’s wants would be satisfied and they could then work less and enjoy what he considered the ‘good life’ of enjoying friends, the arts and hobbies.
There are some problems with this including work has other benefits than providing money such as provided a feeling of usefulness.
But probably a bigger problem is that our wants might not be easy to satiate especially if we try to replace personal relationships and community with material items.
Here money becomes the end rather than the means and rather than just lubricating economic transactions (orthodox thinking relative to barter) it becomes a store of value that we work for for its own value and want to accumulate.
Keynes hoped that eventually an extreme love of money would be characterized as a form of mental illness. As a young man he probably would have agreed with Alan Greenspan that markets could be self regulating but as he got older he thought this ‘money’ problem was actually pretty common and needed regulation.
Here is a good display on income inequality..
http://www.utrend.tv/v/9-out-of-10-americans-are-completely-wrong-about-this-mind-blowing-fact/
and an interesting article by Randy Wray
http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_658.pdf
“”Here’s the rub. Bank money is privately created when a bank buys an asset— which could be your mortgage IOU backed by your home, or a firm’s IOU backed by commercial real estate, or a local government’s IOU backed by prospective tax revenues. But it can also buy one of those complex sliced and diced and securitized toxic waste assets that created all the trouble since 2007. A clever and ethically challenged banker will buy completely fictitious “assets” and pay himself huge bonuses for nonexistent profits while making uncollectible “loans” to all of his deadbeat relatives.””
“”My favorite example is Minsky’s universal employer of last resort (ELR) program in which the federal government offers to pay a basic wage and benefit package (say $12 per hour plus usual benefits), and then hires all who are ready and willing to work for that compensation (Wray 1998). The “price” (labor compensation) is fixed, and the “quantity” (number employed) floats in a countercyclical manner. With ELR, we achieve full employment (as normally defined) with greater stability of wages, and as government spending on the program moves countercyclically, we also get greater stability of income (and thus of consumption and production).
Unfortunately, government usually does not recognize it operates a monopoly money, believing that it must pay “market determined” prices—whatever that might mean. Unemployment and inflation are the results of this misunderstanding.””
@ H. Alexander Ivey
That’s certainly not what I took away from Varoufakis’s essay.
It isn’t an issue of exchange-value vs. use-value. No, far from it, it is an issue of man’s material life vs. his spiritual life. It’s an issue which men have struggled with at least since the time of the ancients. And both man’s material life and his spiritual life impact upon both exchange-value and use-value.
Carroll Quigley explains in The Evolution of Civilizaitons that:
“The Classical ideology began by being mundane and ended with a dualism in which it saw the universe as an evil material world opposed to a good spiritual sphere. Western ideology believes that the material is good and the spiritual is better but that they are not opposed to each other since the material world is necessary for the achievement of the spiritual world.”
The best of the Western tradition was eminently manifest, for example, in the theology of the Rev. Martin Luther King. But the West has not always been successful in maintaining a healthy balance between man’s spiritual life and material life. The ascetic saints of the late and post-Roman worlds, as well as today’s neo-primitivists, cherish the norms of neo-Platonic dualism, believing redemption is possible only through self-sacrifice and self-flagelation. On the other extreme we find classical, and to an even greater extent, neoclassical economists. Their world is an entirely material world. As Michael Allen Gillespie explains in The Theological Origins of Modernity, the conflict between 16th-century humanism and the Reformation reflected “the contradictions that had been present in Christianity since the beginning.” “In the midtst of this conflict,” he continues, “a small group of thinkers sought a new path, abandoning both God and man as the foundation of their investigations, turning instead to the natural world.”
Marx’s thought was far more sophisticated and nuanced than most people, including avowed Marxists, give him credit for. Most people deal with Marx’s oeuvre the same way they do with any other religious or quasi-religious body of text, such as the Bible. As they sort through the snarl, they choose to believe what they want to believe, accepting whatever justifies their policies and convictions and ignoring the rest.
Varoufakis is certainly guilty of this. Unlike most Marxist thinkers, however, it is not man’s spiritual life he expunges from Marx’s thought, but his material life.
Varoufakis first develops Marx’s theme of the conflict between man’s spiritual and material lives:
”Marx had made a ‘discovery’ that must remain at the heart of any useful analysis of capitalism. It was, of course, the discovery of another binary opposition deeply within human labour. Between labour’s two quite different ‘natures’: (i) labour as a value-creating (“fire breathing”) that can never be specified or quantified in advance (and therefore impossible to commodify), and (ii) labour as a quantity (e.g. numbers of hours worked) that is for sale and comes at a price. That is what distinguishes labour from other productive inputs such as electricity: its twin, contradictory, nature. A differentiation-cum-contradiction that political economics neglected to make before Marx came along and which mainstream economics is steadfastly refusing to acknowledge today.”
From this point Varoufakis goes completely off the tracks, however, because he emphasizes that side of Marx’s thought that deals with labour’s spiritual life, while bowdlerizing that part which deals with its material life. Varoufakis does this because he believes the materiaists’ triumph is absolute. Modern life resembles the movie The Matrix, he avers, because “The inexorable efforts of capital to quantify and usurp labor” have sponsored “a society in which people are aspiring to becoming automata.” (Most Marxist thinkers do just the opposite of Varoufakis, exaggerating the material while neglecting the spiritual, the result being Marx’s thought is typically accused of being metaphysical materialism.) The result is that what we get from Varoufakis is a throwback to neo-Platonic dualism which sees “the universe as an evil material world opposed to a good spiritual sphere.”
Varoufakis’s cartoon of Marx’s thought is not unlike Nietzsche’s cartoon of Christianity. Christians, in Nietzsche’s blinkered view of Christianity, suffer from what he called the “Crucifixion complex.” They hurt and sacrifice in the here and now, dutifully carrying their cross in order to earn their ticket to salvation in some promised future paradise. And Varoufakis, in his own way, urges Greeks to do the same: sacrifice in the here and now in order to redeem themselves in some promised future paradise. For Varoufakis, this Holy Grail is “European capitalism.” It is “the Left’s historical duty” he homilizes, “to stabilize capitalism; to save European capitalism from itself and from the inane handlers of the Eurozone’s inevitable crisis.” Varoufakis wants Greeks to go out not with a bang but a whimper. This is the path of the Crucified.
from Mexico
I like your comments but I must respectfully disagree, or at least say I don’t see that Marx is being spiritual or anti-spiritual when he discusses commodities, use-value, and exchange-value. In other parts of his writing he may be so, and certainly too many of his followers and the econo-political system so-called founded on his thinking is anti-religion and anti-God.
In today’s world, I appreciate Varoufakis’ comment that reading Marx inoculates him from the propaganda spewed out by the MSM.
I do beg to differ.
The only thing that seems to qualify labor as being a commodity is that people are paid for it. If I can slap a dollar value on it, then it must be a commodity, and if it’s a commodity, then I must be able to buy/trade/sell if for profit on an open market. Or more accurately, one can buy/sell/trade some one else’s labor.
The central problem with this notion is the fact that a human being is irrevocably attached to that labor. Thus the commoditization of labor results with the de-humanization of the laborer, rendering him as nothing more than a cost to be eliminated.
I am often treated with this formula to make this point. Profits = sales – (materials + labor). Thus labor needs to be minimized in order to maximize profits. But the reverse is also true. Labor = sales – (profits + materials). Are “profits” then also commodities? We can attach a dollar value to it. Indeed, this formula suggests that profits needs to be suppressed in order to maximize the gains made by labor. It’s just as valid as arguing that labor needs to be suppressed in order to maximize profits.
You said that labor can not be reduced to price only without destroying the human that provide the labor. I agree. But this is precisely what calling it a commodity dose – reduces it to its dollar value because that is how it is treated in the accounting practices. The rights of labor are inconsequential to the primacy of extracting profits. All too frequently we see workers forced to take pay-cuts in order for the company to remain competitive, only to have the CEO’s give themselves massive pay raises – a reword for making the company more competitive.
To be in violent agreement, yes. But the point of Marx is to show that capitalism dies when labour is totally, completely, and only, thought of as a dollar bill (exchange value). Marx was saying, Varousfakis is repeating, and I am agreeing with, that 1st: commodities have two aspects – price and use to the consumer, but 2nd: labour as a commodity has price but use to the consumer AND the producer. If the producer gets no value (Marx’s use-value, not money) for his commodity, labour, then why work? Work will only produce enough money for bare living. We know at the individual and social level that “just getting by” is a life without hope. And it is the hope that drives capitalism! Without that, no middle class, no mass consumption, no mass credit (only fiat money). Then it’s back to Feudalism or some such economic and political system.
Maybe I’ve posed the question too ontologically, so to speak. “Labor” is an abstraction like “animal”, as is labor power, for that matter. There are no generic animals, only individuals of species. Yet both labor and animal are analytically fruitful abstractions. The question then is not so much “what is labor, if it is not a commodity?” as it is “what may be a more analytically (and politically) fruitful way of defining labor-power?” Inherent in that last question is the expectation that the new definition should incorporate all the useful features of the old definition while eliminating at least some of the bugs. In other words, labor power is both like and unlike a commodity.
Treating labor-power as a common-pool resource acknowledges one crucial way that labor-power is like a private good — it is subtractable — and one way that it is different — difficulty of excluding potential beneficiaries. To comprehend the latter distinction, it is essential to understand that labor-power is produced socially and not by the individuals who exercise it, which is to say no more than that the individual workers did not give birth to themselves and bring themselves up.
Paul Burkett has written that Marx viewed labor-power as a common-pool resource, although, of course, Marx didn’t use that term. I agree with Burkett but I would go further to point out an even more explicit treatment of labor-power as a common-pool resource by Thomas Hodgskin in his “Labour defended against the claims of capital.” In Marx’s notes on Hodgskin, he observes that Hodgskin had perhaps gone too far in refuting the claims of capital. My intuition would be to say that Marx was wrong in this instance and Hodgskin was right.
I do not know what sources you are getting your information from regarding grand unified social theories that explain most of the stuff going wrong with the world today, but I think you might have missed a few. Anyway, you may want to have a look at Christopher Martenson’s presentation in Madrid from a couple of years ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WBiTnBwSWc
Martenson does provide an intellectual framework with which to understand and “resolve” the current crisis. And he does tie together ecology, finance, society and politics there very well. It’s just that most people can’t handle what he has to say and don’t want to hear it.
Let me guess. “Now would be a good time to buy gold.”
It would be, but you can’t handle it, man.
only if you know there’s another (sucker?) who will deem it valuable after a system crash -or if you can exchange it for life sustaining tangibles just before a crash. as the saying goes, you can’t eat it or put it in your gas tank.
A very female view of the world today that is a struggle for me to get my head around but sounds essentially correct to by partially deaf ears.
Anyhow -you can get the sense of fictitious commodification of Dublin Castle thinking (a branch of London banking operations) in this talk from the son of a failed / weak prime minister of the Irish jurisdiction.
competitiveness of the economy is the central theme again – given the current success of scarcity operations the society must now be reduced to sustain the market mechanism.
You get the impression from this talk that the investment in Moneypoint (our only coal plant) was a bad investment just because it was not very profitable as it reduced scarcity in the early 1990s – somewhat unable to understand the role of natural utilities is not to make a profit – its the bloody industrial ecosystem.
In reality today Moneypoint coal plant is keeping the lights on after a epic dash /profits for gas in Ireland.
http://www.rds.ie/cat_webcast_detail.jsp?itemID=1099577 (see 15.00 minutes)
In this section he clearly skews the meaning of overinvestment from a owner of utilities point of view.
Not the consumer (although in 1970s /80s corporate Ireland the “state” utilities must pay external interest & therefore indirectly charging of customers to service the financial system)
In reality free banking overinvestment in non utilities in Ireland and the world caused the rise of inputs………..(in this case gas inputs)
His oratory is not exactly stirring although at least it avoids the false nationalism of the Irish free state corporate model.
“We the consumers of Ireland”
I hadn’t heard of GS’s environmental derivatives before – so by Fraser’s analysis this must be the commodification of commodification. What’s a commodity without collateral value? Is it possibly nothing at all? I really think we should start calling derivatives what they are: they have no value associated with them, they are simply a bet on the odds of a certain future. Derivatives are gambling.
Matt Taibbi mentions GS’s climate change opportunism in “The Great American Bubble Machine,” the Vampire Squid article. See BUBBLE #6 Global Warming:
“Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won’t we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe — but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues.”
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-great-american-bubble-machine-20100405?print=true
I have two reactions. One is WOW! A lot of this I have actually come up with on my own. So it’s gratifying to know that my observations have at least some academic credibility. /Horn Blowing
Second is the mass amount of what I call “Wat Wat”. You may have heard of Woo woo, the invoking of the super-natural. Wat wat is what I call the invoking of big words without elaborating on their definition. I have recently been introduced critiques of third way feminism, which has promoted my skepticism as she appears to shoehorn in dominate feminist theory such as “patriarchy” and “domination.” The first question even called her out on what is “social reproduction.” I have no idea what these terms mean, making it difficult to evaluate her ideas further.
Economics, and arguable feminism, are at least two examples of what you might call academic-mythologies, schools of academic argument that some how manage to escape critical review. Academe and science is not perfect of course. Every sound principle of science and academics has to start some where, and that starting place is normally religion. The earliest works of published geology for example were attempts to find evidence for the Global Flood described in the Bible.
I don’t think debunking free market economics is nearly as complicated as she makes it out to be.
“I don’t think debunking free market economics is nearly as complicated as she makes it out to be.” Precisely. Joseph Stiglitz is better at it than she is and has been trying to get the same message across to people for longer. Do do do look up all his speeches, especially those at LSE. Why not post some ‘live’ Stiglitz here on Naked Capitalism?
I got 32 minutes in. Maybe will try the rest later.
It’s not so much that she’s wonky as that she’s steeped in lit-crit speak, the kind that prefers a polysyllabic latinate term to a simple germanic word by 10:1. The only shibboleths I didn’t hear were “transgressive” and “heteronormative”…
I will say this: her point on Hegel wrt the problems of commodifying human relations seems right to me, and this seems to me also Wittgenstein’s point in talking about “forms of life”. There are certain forms of life, including values and rituals, that can’t be commodified or quantified, and they form the foundations of human language and society. And it seems to me that the market’s attempted reduction of (or destruction of) these forms of life, in its quest to make all human life quantifiable, erodes the basis for any human society.
(This is to repeat my criticism of the materialism of modern economics — and I also note that I’m echoing one of from Mexico’s points above.)
the answer is “yes” as long as the bottom-most commodity is a turtle.
Otherwise, the answer is “no”.
Who could argue with that?
Like MikeNY I couldn’t go the whole way with that lecture. Within that universe of academic discourse, Fraser makes a lot of sense and gets about as close to the heart of the contemporary crisis as anyone who speaks in the language she speaks. However, the ground of her discourse is one I don’t really care for–I never saw much fertility in critical theory but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work for others.
I forgot to add my little bit to the whole commodification argument–at a certain level not only labor but all human interactions can be commodified and many are. The commodification may not take place with money changing hands–the most important criteria for something being a commodity is if it is a fragment of a coherent whole like a human being. Thus sex is a commodity. But affection can also be a commodity–I read recently how some women are selling their hugs and affection. Therapists commodify conversations or healing rituals. Any service whether it’s cooking for others or spanking a naughty Wall Street executive is a commodity because we live in a society that works that way. Marriage is often commodified–I do this for you and you do that for me–it’s a little tricky but it can work that way in fact despite protestations to the contrary when the glow of romantic love fades. As we go on in the career of modernism more and more of our lives go in direction of determining the “cahs value” of everything–because we have, for a number of reasons, a need for abstraction–which I believe is a need to not confront the problem of meaning which would undermine everything. We can go on with this situation we are in as long as we continue to believe life has no meaning beyond meeting our “needs.”
The arc is usually loss of local markets, then commodification, then financialization. This process is accompanied by a de-linking of economic activity from the social purposes which it is meant to serve. Such scission is imperative for looting and the maintenance of the great and otherwise unjustifiable wealth inequality it creates. Once labor is commoditized workers can be treated with all the respect one would reserve for a lump of coal. Workers cease to exist as people and become a figure on a spreadsheet, one that the elites and rich seek to minimize (i.e. loot) as much as possible.
Saw Nancy give this talk here at my university. Her unpacking of Polanyi was an incredible thing to witness.