The cynical narrativization of the crisis by the banks and their helpers in government speaks to a larger issue—the issue of the native temporality, or temporalities, of capitalism. While capitalism advertises itself as affiliated sudden change, unexpected novelty, and revolutionary change, in actual fact it works always and everywhere to flatten whatever forms of time that it can. It attempts, at every turn, to transform qualititative change into quantitative accumuation, differential turbulence into a concretized status-quo. In fact, recent economic developments point toward the secret trajectory (and capitalist use-value) of neo-liberalism. While for many years it was possible to think of the emergence of the liberal center-left as a hybirdization of social democratic politics in service of a cynical (and cynically capitalized) power grab against the strong right of the Thatcher and Reagan era, the last year or so has shown what the relatively strong state of the the third way was actually for – collusion with and the buttressing of corporations, the nullifcation of risk. Along with risk, of course, disappears the temporality of risk – that is to say time itself, in any form more open than inevitable progression of the same. Catastrophe itself is ransomed off by state funds.

Click the link above to read the entire post, it’s certainly worth it.

Contingency is as it were the inner blind spot of bourgeois consciousness, or of the existential experience of capitalism. In the twin forms of chance and of “crisis” or “catastrophe,” it marks the moment at which events that are meaningful socially or historically turn incomprehensible, absurd, or meaningless faces to individuals, who can henceforth only ratify their bewilderment with the name of “accident” or of well-nigh “natural” convulsion and upheaval. That in bourgeois science these “irrationals” or unthinkables become themselves the object of new forms of scientific inquiry and specialization—in probability theory and statistics, for example, or in crisis theory or catastrophe theory—is perhaps a rather different development from the second feature of Lukács’s analysis, which designates the blind spot of the system itself, and the incapacity to grasp totality as a meaningful whole.

Well, now I’m tempted to read Studies in European Realism (lest we remind our readers, not of the object-oriented variety).

So I think that, I’m very traditional basically, that German idealism, the metaphysics of German idealism, still offers the best conceptual tools to deal with the crisis we are approaching. Because, as Hegel knew, philosophy and crisis are always connected. All philosophy, it’s clear, Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, even Plato. Plato—you cannot imagine Plato without the political crisis of Greece. No wonder that Plato’s representative book is The Republic which typically, although you have all of Plato’s ontology there, the metaphor of the cave and so on, but nonetheless all this emerges to answer which kind of political order do we need.

I like this because not only does it conform to some of my own ideas about the intersection between history and philosophy, but Zizek also manages to tie together issues relating to the overlap between politics and ontology in a brief but clever way. Another good example: the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake.

All of these inventors envisaged machines, theories and societies that never before existed. And that’s why for all the positive, even admirable steps Obama’s America seems poised to take, the aspirations still seem too small, too unimaginative, too confined by old parameters and old conceptions of how things have always worked.

Consider the Wall Street bailouts. By simply giving banks trillions of dollars with no strings attached, our government theorizes that the problem is not the financial system, but a momentary cash drought that can be solved by temporary recapitalization. These bailouts do not aspire to change the whole industry into one dominated by many small institutions rather than a few big ones. They also don’t reach for “a tightly regulated banking system, which made finance a staid, even boring business,” as Paul Krugman said we once had — they envision the same get-rich-quick casino that generated huge profits and huge losses.

Via @HicSaltus.

The recession of the ’80s transformed the working class into the working poor, as manufacturing jobs fled to the third world, forcing American workers into the low-paying service and retail sector. The current recession is knocking the working poor down another notch — from low-wage employment and inadequate housing toward erratic employment and no housing at all. Comfortable people have long imagined that American poverty is far more luxurious than the third world variety, but the difference is rapidly narrowing.

Maybe “the economy,” as depicted on CNBC, will revive again, restoring the kinds of jobs that sustained the working poor, however inadequately, before the recession. Chances are, though, that they still won’t pay enough to live on, at least not at any level of safety and dignity. In fact, hourly wage growth, which had been running at about 4 percent a year, has undergone what the Economic Policy Institute calls a “dramatic collapse” in the last six months alone. In good times and grim ones, the misery at the bottom just keeps piling up, like a bad debt that will eventually come due.

In review:

• People watched too many stupid videos on youtube.
• This allowed the forces of evil to destroy our economy.
• When we tried to stop them using our google cannons, we got LOST IN LINKS and it got worse and everything turned into suck.
• If you use Bing, you can completely ignore this reality and enter a new one, one where people sit in front of giant white boards and wear knee braces and children are kinda cute and Hey Look, a muscle car!

Also, there’s the obvious Hitler analogy.

• Harold Bloom writes in the New York Times about Ralph Waldo Emerson and the notion of “self-reliance” during hard economic times. (Via Ads Without Products.)
• Steve Shaviro discusses Marx’s crisis theory in relation to Fredric Jameson’s ostensible “pessimism” about the necessity of a future crisis (written prior to 2008).

Both are worth checking out.

In 1968, Alexandre Kojeve, then one of the chief planners for the European Common Market working the French Ministry of Economic Affairs, was asked what the students in the streets of Paris should do. Kojeve’s answer was “learn Greek.” It is only in recent years through Giorgio Agamben’s work that we’ve come to understand what Kojeve meant.

While I don’t claim to be nearly as smart or clever as Kojeve, it would be my suggestion, given the current financial crisis, to return to the classics of political economy.

I don’t really know much about political economy, but I do happen to be reading Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Mill, and Marx at the moment, and just from that I think this is good advice. Check out the link for recommendations on specific texts. (Note: None of them are in ancient Greek!)

Saving capitalism from the capitalists - the language of gambling, of speculation, of irresponsible and reckless individuals - it’s all over the coverage. There are historical resonances here too - framings that were once used to push through the reforms of the welfare state. I’m also interested, though, in this specific distinction between “capitalism” and “capitalists” - this is a distinction that was, I think, quite important in Marx’s work: individuals as bearers of economic roles - individuals as beneficiaries and as more or less wilful and abhorrent exploiters of social circumstances - but capitalism itself having an ontological status that is in some meaningful sense externalised in relation to those individuals whose actions nevertheless perform the reproduction of capital. For Marx - and I’ll try to write more on this in the future - this externalisation opens up some important options for critique and transformation, while at the same time, and within current circumstances, operating as a form of domination of the collective consequences of social action over the actors. The passage above treats the externalised entity capitalism as distinct from its imprudent bearers - and this entity also becomes an ideal that must be preserved, at the expense of those bearers if needed. The capitalists can go - capitalism, no. The bearers are more contingent that the process they bear - the process is taken to carry, not simply hard force, but a distinctively normative power.

“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”

Check out Karyn Strickler’s and Robin Varghese’s comments on this.

Financial-market wise guys, who had been seized with fear, are suddenly drunk with hope. They are rallying explosively because they think they have successfully stampeded Washington into accepting the Wall Street Journal solution to the crisis: dump it all on the taxpayers. That is the meaning of the massive bailout Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson has shopped around Congress. It would relieve the major banks and investment firms of their mountainous rotten assets and make the public swallow their losses—many hundreds of billions, maybe much more. What’s not to like if you are a financial titan threatened with extinction?

If Wall Street gets away with this, it will represent an historic swindle of the American public—all sugar for the villains, lasting pain and damage for the victims. My advice to Washington politicians: Stop, take a deep breath and examine what you are being told to do by so-called “responsible opinion.” If this deal succeeds, I predict it will become a transforming event in American politics—exposing the deep deformities in our democracy and launching a tidal wave of righteous anger and popular rebellion. As I have been saying for several months, this crisis has the potential to bring down one or both political parties, take your choice.

(Via A Tiny Revolution.)

… The news can’t talk sensibly about this, because they can’t talk about class. They implicitly favour the capitalist purview in their focus, but they cannot directly address the issues involved. That is why no one relying on the papers and the television for enlightenment is going to have a clue what is going on…. In fact, the best explanation you are likely to end up with is that some banks made some horribly bad bets on mortgages for poor people (and, therefore, what? - poor people shouldn’t have mortgages?). To talk realistically about this crisis is to talk about what has happened to wages and profits for thirty years, the contours of class struggle and the associated political projects (socialism, social democracy, neoliberalism, etc), as well as the basic mechanism of exploitation behind that. To talk realistically about the issues raised by this crisis is also to talk about class, and particularly the impact on working class people. You can’t understand why those who gain most from the system suffer least when it fails, while those who gain least suffer most unless you at least mention the fact that there is such a thing as highly concentrated class power in the society…

Gramm orchestrated the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999 which “destroyed the Depression-era barrier to the merger of stockbrokers, banks and insurance companies.” He also pushed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act in 2000, which made legal “the mortgage swaps distancing the originator of the loan from the ultimate collector.” The Nation writes that “those two acts effectively ended significant regulation of the financial community.”

So basically, if this chart of Obama’s and McCain’s respective tax proposals hadn’t already convinced you that it’s in your best interest to vote for Obama, then McCain’s surreal ineptitude regarding the economy, as well as his cadre of buffoons, should perhaps be some food for thought.

It is undoubtedly the case that America is a nation of whiners. It is and always has been, how else do you think it came into existence? I don’t think anyone will contend otherwise, which is probably why the media has focused almost solely and unrelentingly on the “America is a nation of whiners” sound-bite from Phil Gramm’s recent diatribe. Even the blogosphere is partly to blame for this. Of course, this focus is essentially a reaction-formation designed to obscure and repress the far more ideological claim on Gramm’s part that economic failure is “psychological,” i.e. subjective.

The subjectivist theory of economics has long been a staple of neoliberal ideology, which argues, for example, that the value of a commodity, rather than being the objective cost of the labor required to produce said commodity, is in fact reflective of its marginal utility. But on the specific issue of the business cycle and economic crises, marginalist theory fails to provide an adequate explanation: instead it has to rely on its late-capitalist ideological counterpart, New Age obscurantism, which promulgates that the problems we experience, and our reality in general, are purely of our own making. And clearly the liberal rejoinder that “it has real consequences!” is not enough. It is a prototypically pathetic response, as it accepts the neoliberal framing of the debate, simply adding that subjective reality can lead to actual, concrete harm to human-beings.

There is obviously a grain of truth to the liberal argument, but the more important issue at stake is whether economic crisis is “psychological” in nature, or part in parcel of an objective process. Marx articulated the latter view in his Theories of Surplus-Value. His formulation of crisis theory, which points to an inherent tendency of capitalism to undergo crises as a result of the over-production of fixed capital, is perhaps one of his most important contributions to the critique of capitalism.¹

As Marx writes, “In the crises of the world market, the contradictions and antagonisms of bourgeois production are strikingly revealed.” To take that a step farther, crisis also reveals these very same contradictions and antagonisms within our political discourse. Here the link between Marxism and psychoanalysis becomes quite explicit: it is the goal of the analyst to confront the analysand with the contradictions inherent to her/his discourse in order to fully expose to them their relation to the unconscious truth, a truth which contradicts every discourse, including its relation to itself. The whole debacle involving Gramm points to an unconscious repression of class struggle, which is the sine qua non of the political struggle.

That is why I will be voting for Stalin come November.

1. A condensed overview of Marx’s crisis theory is available at ISR.