Horner's Corner

Greg Philo has a solution, and it’s popular:

The total personal wealth in the UK is £9,000bn, a sum that dwarfs the national debt. It is mostly concentrated at the top, so the richest 10% own £4,000bn, with an average per household of £4m. The bottom half of our society own just 9%. The wealthiest hold the bulk of their money in property or pensions, and some in financial assets and objects such antiques and paintings.A one-off tax of just 20% on the wealth of this group would pay the national debt and dramatically reduce the deficit, since interest payments on the debt are a large part of government spending. So that is what should be done. This tax of 20%, graduated so the very richest paid the most, would raise £800bn. A major positive for this scheme is that the tax would not have to be immediately paid. The richest 10% have only to assume liability for their small part of the debt. They can pay a low rate of interest on it and if they wish make it a charge on their property when they die. It would be akin to a student loan for the rich.

The tax would be extremely popular. We commissioned a YouGov poll of over 2,000 people to test attitudes. There was very strong support, with 74% of the population approving 44% strongly approving. Only 10% did not approve, and agreement was spread right through social groups, with those of the highest income being slightly more supportive than the lower. The strongest support came from those over the age of 55, with 77% in favour 47% strongly. This is an extraordinary result given that there has been no public discussion of this proposal and that the very negative consequences of the alternatives are only just beginning to emerge.

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Here’s a link to the lecture:

 

Living in the End times: Zizek @ the LSE

 

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The government and the press say we are in the grip of a debt crisis caused by the ‘bloated’ public sector. Here, Red Pepper debunks the myths used to push cuts to jobs and public services

MYTH: Government debt is the highest it’s ever been

The UK’s government debt is at around 70 per cent of GDP (the total amount of goods and services produced in one year). That is certainly high, but it is far from unprecedented.

Government debt never fell below 100 per cent of GDP between 1920 and 1960. It is only in the past decade or so that it has become normal to think of government debt being stable at around 40 per cent of GDP.

It is worth noting that government debt reached 250 per cent of GDP around the end of the second world war, as the result of a ‘once in a generation’ economic and political crisis. It is certainly arguable that we are now living through a similarly momentous crisis.

MYTH: The UK’s debt crisis is one of the worst in the world

Just as the current level of government debt is not unprecedented historically, neither is it substantially higher than that of other countries.

IMF data (IMF World Economic Outlook Database, April 2010) shows the UK has the lowest government debt as a proportion of GDP among the G7 countries (the US, Canada, Germany, Britain, Japan, Italy and France).

Much has been made by Cameron and Osborne of Gordon Brown’s ‘imprudent borrowing record’. They say that before the spending to stabilise the financial system, public debt was high.

But again, IMF comparisons of the level of public debt prior to 2007 showed the UK in a much better position than many comparable countries, such as France, Canada, the US and even Germany, the home of fiscal rectitude.

MYTH: Government debt is ‘unsustainable’

The sustainability of government debt is not just dictated by its size, but by its make up. We have already seen that government debt is at a comparable level to other similarly sized economies. Where the UK is in a much stronger position, however, is in the nature of its debt.

While countries such as Greece tend to owe money to external financiers, the vast majority of UK debt – about 70 to 80 per cent – is held within the country.

And the UK’s debt is not so short term. Countries such as Greece, Ireland and Portugal have average debt maturity rates of between six to eight years, but UK government debt stands out among international comparisons as being much longer term at well over 12 years on average.

This means that the UK has to ask the financial markets to refinance its debts much less frequently, making it less vulnerable to short-term speculative pressures and much more able to continue to finance its debts on a sustainable basis.

MYTH: The government shouldn’t get into debt, just as your own household shouldn’t

This overlooks the fact that, for the past 30 years, governments have positively encouraged households to get into debt.

In fact, it can be prudent for households to take on debt – particularly if they are borrowing to pay for something (a house or educational qualification) that might reasonably be expected to improve the household’s income and well being in the long run.

In just the same way it is often sensible for governments to take on debt to pay for investments (such as housing or transport infrastructure) that will make the economy work better and so pay for themselves over the longer term.

But the public economy is also different from the household economy. What might make sense for a household could, for the government, deepen a recession. When times are hard households tend to tighten their belts – reducing their spending and borrowing. But if everyone does this at the same time, the effect is counterproductive: total demand for goods and services falls, which makes it harder for businesses and individuals to generate an income, and everyone ends up worse off.

This is exactly what is happening now, which is why it is essential for the government to compensate for households’ reluctance to spend and invest.

MYTH: Public spending got ‘out of control’ under Labour

It is true that the Labour government gradually raised public spending in the early part of the decade, but it was from what were historically very low levels.

Levels of public spending are now about the same as they were in the early 1990s, at the time of the last economic crisis. This is because spending always rises during a recession as a result of welfare spending on unemployment.

In fact, levels of public spending as a proportion of GDP were much lower for most of the 2000s than they were than at any point since the 1960s.

Where Labour did spend more in the years after 2000, it was necessary to repair the visible effects of long-term under-investment. Who can forget schools and hospitals with buckets in the corner to catch the leaks, or grim city centre landscapes with crowds of homeless people sleeping rough?

Labour’s increased spending also addressed workforce shortages in schools and the NHS, where more staff were needed to raise educational standards and care for an ageing population.

Rather than cutting such spending, the crisis could be an opportunity to build the infrastructure of a more energy-efficient, green economy. That would prepare us for the longer-term structural barriers to growth presented by climate change and the depletion of natural resources.

MYTH: The UK has a big public sector compared to other countries

Public spending in the UK is lower as a proportion of the economy than in the likes of France, Italy, Austria and Belgium, as well as the Scandinavian countries (OECD World Factbook 2010).

And spending on core areas such as health and education remains comparable or low in relation to other OECD (broadly speaking, ‘rich’) countries.

For example, the UK spent just 8.4 per cent of its GDP on health in 2007, roughly half that spent in the United States (once the large private sector is taken into account) and well behind Germany, France and most other west European nations.

On education, the UK again spends less per pupil than most comparable OECD countries.

The UK is not profligate in public spending and does not have an oversized public sector compared to similar countries.

MYTH: Spending on the public sector is ‘crowding out’ private sector growth

It is argued that public spending comes at the expense of overall growth, because potential investment is being re-directed into taxation to fund an ‘unproductive’ public sector. But in fact investment in public infrastructure and services is essential to private sector productivity, and so is no less critical to future growth than private sector investment.

Furthermore, the UK is not a highly taxed economy. The OECD’s comparative figures on taxation as a proportion of overall economic output show the UK way down the list, only just above the average.

It is sometimes suggested that taxes hit the private sector in such a way as to discourage job growth. Again, though, the data shows the UK to have very low levels of taxation per job: far lower than the OECD average.

The second way in which the public sector might be said to be crowding out private sector growth is by taking workers it needs, but this would only really be the case where the labour market was operating close to full employment.

With the unemployment rate at about 8 per cent, this is clearly not the case. and in many areas of public provision – from child protection, to education and training, to care for the elderly – there is a pressing need for more, not fewer, public service workers.

Finally, some argue that public investment ‘crowds out’ private investment, because government borrowing pushes up interest rates and inflation. But there is no evidence that this is currently a problem – real interest rates are low, and the economy is still operating well below its potential output, which means there is lots of room for non-inflationary public sector expansion.

In fact, in current circumstances, public spending is more likely to stimulate private sector investment by maintaining levels of demand and preventing a deeper collapse of economic activity.

MYTH: Public sector workers are overpaid

It is true that very recently average wages in the public sector have moved marginally above those in the private sector. This is mainly because privatisation has pushed many low-paid jobs out to the private sector.

The trend is not that public sector wages have risen sharply, but that private sector wages have fallen – a characteristic of the economic crisis. If we take a longer view, since the 1990s average public sector pay has not seen significantly more growth than the public sector.

And when private sector wages are split up to consider different sector and occupational patterns, a rather different picture emerges. Wage rates differ widely, with the average pulled down by very low wage sectors such as distribution, retail and hospitality.

What the data shows, therefore, is not that public sector workers are overpaid, but that some private sector workers are severely underpaid.

MYTH: The financial crisis was caused by a lack of money in circulation

This one is true to some extent, but it requires careful explanation. The system of finance capitalism pursued in the UK and US since the 1970s has continuously recycled economic surpluses away from the poor toward the rich. In both countries, the share of economic output taken up by wages (as opposed to profit) has fallen, and inequality has risen. The very affluent have got wealthier, at the expense of the rest of the population. In 2007/08 the richest tenth of the population had more than 30 per cent of total income (‘Income Inequalities’, poverty.org.uk).

In the post-war period, part of the role of the state was to redistribute economic surpluses to the wider population so that they could keep spending on goods and services. This was seen as so important precisely because large inequalities had been identified as one cause of the 1929 stock market crash and the subsequent depression.

For a while, the problem that rising inequality presented for growth was overcome by the use of credit and the super-exploitation of workers in the developing world, which allowed consumers to keep buying cheap products. This is one of the factors that fed the debt crisis.

So, yes, there is not enough money in circulation – but this is precisely because it has been captured by the super-rich.

MYTH: Cutting public spending will help us avoid economic disaster

A range of economists, from Larry Elliott of the Guardian to Nobel prize winning professors like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, are warning that making cuts now raises the very real possibility of undermining the fragile economic recovery.

As every first year economics student knows, there are four main components of economic growth: (1) exports; (2) investment; (3) household spending; and (4) government spending.

Over the past two years, governments around the world have stepped in to bridge the gap in the first three by providing debt-financed public sector stimulus packages. There is precious little evidence that the private sector or households are ready or able to step up their activity to fill the gap, or that exports will increase in a world where our major trading partners are also reining in spending.

As such, any austerity programme may prematurely remove the foundations of the recovery and lead to a return to recession – a ‘double dip’. This would be disastrous, not just for growth, but in turn for tax receipts and the capacity of the state to reduce the deficit and government debt.

How will that help to stabilise the world economy? How will it deal with the frequent, persistent and cumulative financial crises that are endemic to it, or overcome the pressing resource and environmental constraints that are so clear for all to see?

The economic crisis was a golden opportunity to move toward a more economically, socially and environmentally sustainable national and international economic system. For a while all countries were so concerned about the whole system that there was at least a chance to overcome narrow self-interest and look toward a more co-operative and sustainable future.

We are about to squander a once-in-a-generation opportunity for progressive change – unless, that is, we organise and campaign for an alternative.

MYTH: There is no alternative to cuts

The beginnings of an alternative have already been discussed. For example, Unison’s alternative budget (‘We can afford a fairer society’, Unison Alternative Budget 2010) suggests that almost £4.7 billion could be raised each year from introducing a 50 per cent tax rate on incomes over £100,000.

About £5 billion could be raised every year from a tax on vacant housing; £25 billion a year could be raised by closing tax loopholes; and the IPPR think-tank has estimated that a ‘Robin Hood tax’ on financial transactions could raise another £20 billion a year (T Dolphin, Financial Sector Taxes, IPPR 2010).

All these taxation measures would be ‘progressive’ in the sense that they would divert wealth from the rich to the poor, in contrast to measures such as the government’s VAT increase, which hits the poor hardest.

In addition, some of these ideas might have behavioural advantages: they could work against destabilising speculative financial flows, or lead to fewer empty houses.

Similarly, we could look at spending that really should be cut. For example, while estimates of the true costs of replacing the Trident nuclear weapon system vary widely, they tend always to come in above £80 billion over 25 years.

Getting rid of the cost of the war in Afghanistan, massive consultancy fees on private finance deals and contractors’ profits in privatised public services would also make a difference.

We could also decide to manage the deficit and public spending in a long-term manner, targeting social issues such as inequality, under-investment in education and child poverty, and strongly regulating international financiers, banks, hedge funds and the like.

All of these are political choices.

We don’t have to live in a world where unemployment co-exists with a long-hours culture in which workers are so stressed that mental health problems are on the rise.

We don’t have to live in a world where bankers gamble millions across the world in elaborate financial casinos at the same time as 1.4 billion people live on less than $1.25 a day.

We don’t have to live in a world where there is no limit to how much of our collective economic output goes to the rich, yet others do not have enough to eat.

It is worth remembering that after the last crisis of this scale and significance, and with public debt something like three and a half times the size it is today, we established the NHS, created the welfare state, put in place comprehensive education and built a vast number of public housing estates.

History tells us that there is more than one way out of an economic crisis.

Download our pdf version of this article to distribute far and wide …

Footnote

Thanks to Dr Alex Nunn of Leeds Metropolitan University and the Transpennine Working Group of the Conference of

Reproduced with permission from the excellent Red Pepper: Countering the cuts myths – Red Pepper.

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The proposed cuts are the result of political decisions: they aren’t necessary or inevitable. Read The Great Tax Parachute here on why tax, not cuts, is the way forward.

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Pierre Bourdieu said, perhaps not as famously as one would wish, that “public opinion” is an “artifact, pure and simple, the function of which is to dissemble that the state of opinion at any given moment is a system of forces and tensions and that nothing is more inadequate for representing the state of opinion than a percentage”. In particular, he charged that the manufacturers of public opinion in fact produce what they supposedly report: a consensus on what the problems are, what the appropriate questions are, how they should be framed, and so on. With that in mind, I give you this recent ABC/Washington post poll, which tells us that American class self-identification is roughly as follows: 39% say they are working class or worse off, 45% middle class, and 18% upper-middle class or better off. And where the poll does an important part of its work is in this question:

“Necessary elements” of a middle-class life

Being able to…

Own your own home – 80%

Save for the future – 78

Afford things you’d like to have – 77

Afford vacation travel – 71

Buy a new car – 67

This is a very leading question, and a considerable amount of thought must have gone into it, at least in its original formulation (I don’t know how long the question has been asked for, in this form). In a previous post, I mentioned research on American ‘class consciousness’ by Vanneman and Cannon, which pointed out that research on the American class structure was heavily shaped by the activities of the state in that field. In the post-WWII period, the US government funded and drove research which sought to create an understanding of class as status, based on certain patterns of consumption, income and education, rather than an antagonistic relationship centred on production. In that bowdlerised sociology, class is like a continuous ladder of prestige and status, which one might ascend or descend, rather than a conflict built into social relations.

It doesn’t actually matter if it was the state or private capital who decisively formulated these conventions, but the poll question cited above is undoubtedly shaped by them. Decades of thought – or doctrine – are embedded in this simple query. It assumes that there is such a thing as a “middle class life”, that it would have as its essential characteristics certain consumption patterns, and that the only real disagreement is over how important each element of consumption is. What’s interesting about these results is that many respondents appear to have defied the implicit bias in the poll, and defined themselves as, say, working class when their income would give them a reasonable chance of access to all of the “necessary elements” of a “middle class life”. The responses would suggest that there are layers of motivation and interest informing the interpretation of the questions, and thus the answers. Even with that, the poll did its job in that, like thousands of other polls framed in much the same way, it obtained a middle class majority.

“It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it” – George Carlin,

via LENIN’S TOMB.

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“If you like to think of America as The Greatest Country on Earth, and you’d rather not examine its claim to that title too closely, The Spirit Level will not be your favorite new book. On nearly every one of its 250-plus pages, a stark, unflattering graph shows the USA topping the charts among developed countries for some social ailment: drug use, obesity, violence, mental illness, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy. But authors Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, a pair of British social scientists, have another, more enlightening point to make. With striking consistency, they say, the severity of social decay in different countries reflects a key difference among them: not the number of poor people or the depth of their poverty, but the size of the gap between the poorest and the richest. (Boston Globe)

via It’s money that matters « Follow Me Here….

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Why Are We Afraid to Tax the Super-Rich?

Here’s an American view on the current tax ‘n’ cuts issue:

We are told that we’re already living well beyond our means we’ve got to cut back on government programs at all levels. Meanwhile, the super-rich are still having a ball.

Our nation is already deeply in debt. How can we possibly afford to invest in our infrastructure, renewable energy, health care, our schools — and create the millions of jobs that our unemployed desperately need?

We are told that we’re already living well beyond our means — that entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security will bankrupt us. Forget the solar panels, the smaller classes and the new jobs — we’ve got to cut back on government programs at all levels.

Meanwhile, the super-rich are still having a ball. In his annual shareholder letter, mega-investor Warren Buffett wrote, “We’ve put a lot of money to work during the chaos of the last two years. When it’s raining gold, reach for a bucket, not a thimble.” And Forbes Magazine adds, “Many plutocrats did just that. Indeed, last year’s wealth wasteland has become a billionaire bonanza. Most of the richest people on the planet have seen their fortunes soar in the past year.”

More via Why Are We Afraid to Tax the Super-Rich? | | AlterNet.

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The Next Financial Crisis is in Public Services

This incisive article is from the excellent Le Monde Diplomatique – the best source for news and comment you can get. I urge you to read and subscribe to this precious exception to the dismal world of international news media -available in paper and electronic versions.

Austerity is not the only way to make up for massive government debt and lack of revenue following self‑induced disasters in private finance. There are fairer ways to balance the books

by Frédéric Lordon

Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine” – her idea that natural and man-made disasters have been used as pretexts to impose free market policies on countries whose people would normally reject them – didn’t convince completely until recently. “Disaster capitalism” did apply in some cases, especially in southern hemisphere and transition economies. But it was not as universally valid as Klein believed, and the establishment of neoliberalism in developed economies was more a calculated implementation of a systematic and far-reaching agenda. But now Klein may see her analysis confirmed, and spectacularly, by events at the heart of developed capitalism.

Read more: via How do we get 
out of here? – Le Monde diplomatique – English edition.

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Fast Tube by Casper">The Spirit Level is a very powerful document. NB there is a link to the Equality Trust on this blog (on the right, in the list)

Fast Tube by Casper">watch?v=jsEZr3s1aBA]

The Spirit Level

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The contours of a new Cold War are thus appearing on the horizon – and, this time, it will be literally a conflict fought in very cold conditions. On August 2 2007, a Russian team planted a titanium capsule with a Russian flag under the ice caps of the North Pole. This assertion of the Russian claim to the Arctic region was done neither for scientific reasons nor as a political-propagandistic bravado. Its true goal was to secure for Russia the vast energy riches of the Arctic: according to today’s estimates, up to one quarter of the world’s untapped oil and gas sources may lie under the Arctic Ocean. Russia’s claims are, predictably, opposed by four other countries whose territory borders on the Arctic region: USA, Canada, Norway and Denmark (through its sovereignty over Greenland).

While it is difficult to estimate the soundness of these predictions, one thing is sure: an extraordinary social and psychological change is taking place right in front of our eyes – the impossible is becoming possible. An event first experienced as impossible but not real (the prospect of a forthcoming catastrophe which, however probable we know it is, we do not believe it will effectively occur and thus dismiss it as impossible) becomes real but no longer impossible (once the catastrophe occurs, it is “renormalized,” perceived as part of the normal run of things, as always-already having been possible). The gap which makes these paradoxes possible is the one between knowledge and belief: we know the (ecological) catastrophe is possible, probable even, yet we do not believe it will really happen.

And is this not what is happening today, right in front of our eyes? A decade ago, the public debate on torture or the participation of the Neo-Fascist parties in a West European democratic government was dismissed as an ethical catastrophe which is impossible, which “really cannot happen”; once it happened, we immediately got accustomed to it, accepting it as obvious… Or, recall the infamous siege of Sarajevo from 1992 till 1995: the fact that a »normal« European city of half a million inhabitants will be encircled, starved, regularly bombed, its citizens terrorized by sniper fire, etc., and that this will go on for 3 years, would have been considered unimaginable before 1992 – it would have been extremely easy for the Western powers to break the siege and open a small safe corridor to the city. When the siege began, even the citizens of Sarajevo thought this is a short-term event, trying to send their children to safety »for a week or two, till this mess is over. “And then, very fast, the siege was “normalized…”

This same direct passage from impossibility to normalization is clearly discernible in how state powers and big capital relate to ecological threats like the ice meltdown on the poles. The very same politicians and managers who, till recently, dismissed the fears of global warming as apocalyptic scare-mongering of ex-Communists, or at least as premature conclusions based on insufficient evidence, assuring us that there is no reason for panic, that, basically, things will go on as usual, are now all of a sudden treating global warming as a simple fact, as part of the way things are “going on as usual”… In July 2008, CNN was repeatedly showing a report “The Greening of Greenland,” celebrating the new opportunities that the melting of ice offers to Greenlanders – they can already grow vegetables in the open land, etc. The obscenity of this report is not only that it focuses on the minor benefit of a global catastrophe; to add insult to injury, it plays on the double meaning of “green” in our public speech (“green” for vegetation; “green” for ecological concerns), so that the fact that more vegetation can grow on the Greenland soil because of the global warming is associated with the rising of ecological awareness… Are such phenomena not yet another example of how right Naomi Klein was when, in her Shock Doctrine, she described the way global capitalism exploits catastrophes (wars, political crises, natural disasters) to get rid of the “old” social constraints and impose its agenda on the slate cleared by the catastrophe? Perhaps, the forthcoming ecological disasters, far from undermining capitalism, will serve as its greatest boost.

What gets lost in this shift is the proper sense of what is going on, with all the unexpected traps the catastrophe hides. For example, one of the unpleasant paradoxes of our predicament is that the very attempts to counteract other ecological threats may contribute to the warming of the poles: the ozone hole helps shield the interior of the Antarctic from global warming, so if it will be healed, the Antarctic could quickly catch up with the warming of the rest of the Earth.

One thing at least is sure. In the last decades, it was fashionable to talk about the predominant role of “intellectual labor” in our postindustrial societies – however, materiality is now reasserting itself with a vengeance in all its aspects, from the forthcoming struggle for scarce resources (food, water, energy, minerals, food…) to environmental pollution.

So while we should definitely exploit the opportunities opened up by global warming, we should never forget that we are dealing with a tremendous social and natural catastrophe, and that these opportunities are the by-products of this catastrophe which we should fight with all our means. In adopting a “balanced view,” we act like those who plead for a more “balanced view” on Hitler: true, he killed millions in the camps, but he also abolished unemployment and inflation, built highways, made trains run on time… This new constellation provides the starting point for Dipesh Chakrabarty’s elaboration of the historico-philosophical consequences of the global warming, the main being the collapse of the distinction between human and natural histories:

“For it is no longer a question simply of man having an interactive relation with nature. This humans have always had /…/ Now it is being claimed that humans are a force of nature in the geological sense.”) (”The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry, Winter 2009)

That is to say, the fact that “humans – thanks to our numbers, the burning of fossil fuel, and other related activities – have become a geological agent on the planet”(209), means that they are able to affect the very balance of life on Earth, so that – “in itself” with the industrial revolution of 1750, “for itself” with global warming – a new geological era began, baptized by some scientists as “Anthropocene.” The way humankind is forced to perceive itself in these new conditions is as a species, as one of the species of life on earth. When the young Marx designated humanity as a “species being /Gattungswesen/,” he means something quite different: that, in contrast to animal species, only humans are a “species being,” i.e., a being which actively relates to itself as a species and is thus “universal” not only in itself, but also for itself. This universality first appears in its alienated-perverted form with capitalism, which connects and unites all of humanity within the same world market; with modern social and scientific development, we are no longer just a mere species among others or yet another natural condition. For the first time in the entire human history, we, humans, collectively constitute ourselves and are aware of it, so that we are also responsible for ourselves: the mode of our survival depends on the maturity of our collective reason… However, the scientists who talk about the Anthropocene ”are saying something quite the contrary. They argue that because humans constitute a particular kind of species they can, in the process of dominating other species, acquire the status of a geologic force. Humans, in other words, have become a natural condition, at lest today.”(214) The standard Marxist counter-argument is here that this shift from Pleistocene to the Anthropocene is entirely due to the explosive development of capitalism and its global impact – and this confronts us with the key question: how are we to think the link between the social history of the Capital and the much larger geologic changes of the conditions for life on the Earth?

“If the industrial way of life was what got us into this crisis, then the question is, why think in terms of species, surely a category that belongs to a much longer history? Why could not the narrative of capitalism – and hence its critique – be sufficient as a framework for interrogating the history of climate change and understanding its consequences? It seems true that the crisis of climate change has been necessitated by the high-energy-consuming model of society that capitalist industrialization has created and promoted, but the current crisis has brought into view certain other conditions for the existence of life in the human form that have no intrinsic connection to the logics of capitalist, nationalist, or socialist identities. They are connected rather to the history of life on this planet, the way different life-forms connect to one another, and the way the mass extinction of one species could spell danger for another. /…/ In other words, whatever our socioeconomic and technological choices, whatever the rights we wish to celebrate as our freedom, we cannot afford to destabilize conditions (such as the temperature zone in which the planet exists) that work like boundary parameters of human existence. These parameters are independent of capitalism or socialism. They have been stable for much longer than the histories of these institutions and have allowed human beings to become the dominant species on earth. Unfortunately, we have now ourselves become a geological agent disturbing these parametric conditions needed for our own existence.” (217-218)

In contrast to nuclear war which would have been the result of a conscious decision of a particular agent, climate change “is an unintended consequence of human action and shows, only through scientific analysis, the effects of our actions as a species.” (221) This threat to the very existence of humanity creates a new sense of “we” which truly encompasses all of humanity: “Climate change, refracted through global capital, will no doubt accentuate the logic of inequality that runs through the rule of capital; some people will no doubt gain temporarily at the expense of others. But the whole crisis cannot be reduced to a story of capitalism. Unlike in the crises of capitalism, there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged (witness the drought in Australia or recent fires in the wealthy neighborhoods of California).” (221) The most appropriate name for this emerging universal subject may be species: “Species may indeed be the name of a placeholder for an emergent, new universal history of humans that flashes up in the moment of the danger that is climate change.” (221) The problem is that this universal is not a Hegelian one, which arises dialectically out of the movement of history and subsumes-mediates all particularities: it “escapes our capacity to experience the world” (222), so it can only give rise to a “negative universal history” (222), not the Hegelian world history as the gradual immanent self-deployment of freedom.

With the idea of humans as species, the universality of the humankind falls back into the particularity of an animal species: phenomena like global warming make us aware that, with all the universality of our theoretical and practical activity, we are at a certain basic level just another living species on the planet Earth. Our survival depends on certain natural parameters which we automatically take for granted. The lesson of the global warming is that the freedom of the humankind was possible only against the background of the stable natural parameters of the life on earth (temperature, the composition of the air, sufficient water and energy supply, etc.): humans can “do what they want” only insofar as they remain marginal enough, so that they don’t seriously perturb the parameters of the life on earth. The limitation of our freedom that becomes palpable with global warming is the paradoxical outcome of the very exponential growth of our freedom and power, i.e., of our growing ability to transform nature around us up to destabilizing the very basic geological parameters of the life on earth. “Nature” thereby literally becomes a socio-historical category, but not in the exalted young Lukacs sense (the content of what is for us (counts for us as) “nature” is always overdetermined by a historically-specified social totality which structures the transcendental horizon of our understanding of nature). It becomes a socio-historical category in the much more radical and literal (ontic) sense of something that is nit just a stable background of human activity, but is affected by it in its very basic components. What is thereby undermined is the basic distinction between nature and human history: nature blindly follows its course, it just has to be explained, while human history has to be understood. Even if its global course is out of control and functions as a Fate which goes against the wishes of most of the people, this “Fate” is the result of the complex interaction of many individual and collective projects and acts based upon certain understanding of what our world is – in history, we confront the result of our own endeavors.

Chakrabarty seems to miss here the full scope of the properly dialectical relationship between the basic geological parameters of the life on earth and the socio-economic dynamic of human development. Of course, the natural parameters of our environment are “independent of capitalism or socialism” – they are a threat to all of us, independently of economic development, political system, etc. However, the fact that their stability was threatened by the dynamic of global capitalism nonetheless has a stronger implication than the one allowed by Chakrabarty: in a way, we have to admit that the Whole is contained by its Part, i.e., that the fate of the Whole (life on earth) hinges on what goes on in what is formally one of its parts (socio-economic mode of production of one of the species on earth). This is why we have to accept the paradox that, in the relation between the universal antagonism (the threatened parameters of the conditions for life on earth) and the particular antagonism (the deadlock of capitalism), the key struggle is the particular one: one can solve the universal problem (of the survival of the human species) only by first resolving the particular deadlock of the capitalist mode of production. In other words, the common-sense reasoning which tells us that, independently of our class position or of our political orientation, we all will have to tackle the ecological crisis if we are to survive, is deeply misleading: the key of the ecological crisis does not reside in ecology as such.

Perhaps, the key to this limitation is Chakrabarty’s simplified notion of the Hegelian dialectics. That is to say, is the idea of a “negative universal history” really anti-Hegelian? Is, on the contrary, the idea that a multiplicity (of humans) totalized (brought together) through a negative external limit (a threat) not Hegelian par excellence? Even more, is not for Hegel every universality ultimately a “negative” one, in the precise sense that it has to appear as such, in its opposition (“negative relationship”) to its own particular-determinate content – recall Hegel’s theory of war. Hegel may appear to celebrate the prosaic character of life in a well-organized modern state where the heroic disturbances are overcome in the tranquillity of private rights and the security of the satisfaction of needs: private property is guaranteed, sexuality is restricted to marriage, future is safe… In this organic order, universality and particular interests appear reconciled: the “infinite right” of subjective singularity is given its due, individuals no longer experience the objective state order as a foreign power intruding onto their rights, they recognize in it the substance and frame of their very freedom. Gerard Lebrun asks here the fateful question: “Can the sentiment of the Universal be dissociated from this appeasement?” The answer is clear: yes, and this is why war is necessary – in war, universality reasserts its right against and over the concrete-organic appeasement in the prosaic social life. Is thus the necessity of war not the ultimate proof that, for Hegel, every social reconciliation is doomed to fail, that no organic social order can effectively contain the force of abstract-universal negativity? This is why social life is condemned to the “spurious infinity” of the eternal oscillation between stable civic life and wartime perturbations.

In other words, Chakrabarty’s dismissal of the Hegelian universality would only hold if we were to reduce what Hegel calls “concrete universality” to the organic-corporate model of a universal order within which every particular moment plays its determinate role, contributing to the wealth of the All. If, however, we bear in mind that the Hegelian “concrete universality” designates a universal which enters into a dialectical tension with its own particular content, i.e., that every universality can only assert (posit) itself “as such” in a negative way, then the idea of nature as not only the self-evident stable background of human activity, but as the unity of the invisible background of and apocalyptic threat to the human species, appears profoundly Hegelian.

From lacan.com

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Fast Tube by Casper">Robinhood tax

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This was originally published in the truly excellent Left Business Observer:

Move your money…

Few pieces in the 23-year history of LBO have attracted as much hostile correspondence as “Web of nonsense” in #119. It was a critique of the mode of thought, almost foundational to a brand of populism on both the left and the right, “that sees the problems of capitalism—like the polarization of rich and poor and the system’s vulnerability to periodic crises—as primarily financial in origin.” While this tendency has a long history, and pervades a lot of the pseudo-radical tradition in the U.S., it always achieves special prominence at the time of financial crises.

To reprise for a moment before taking on a fresh eruption of the syndrome: capitalism is a system organized around money. Almost nothing is undertaken in the realm of production for reasons other than the accumulation of money. As the money accumulates, something must be done with it, which is why financial wealth expands over time. But even though that financial wealth often seems to inhabit a world of its own, it is ultimately connected to what Wall Street calls the “real” sector. For example, all the mortgage securities that caused the recent mischief were ultimately connected to one of the most basic needs of all, shelter. There is no way to separate neatly the monetary from the real. The social problem emanating from the securitization of mortgages isn’t only the increasingly baroque development of financial assets but also the commodification of the house and its transformation into a speculative asset. Which is why populist financial reforms can’t take you very far: they address symptoms, not pathogens.

Read More:via …and it’s still money.

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The historical geography of capitalist development is at a key inflexion point in which the geographical configurations of power are rapidly shifting at the very moment when the temporal dynamic is facing very serious constraints. Three percent compound growth (generally considered the minimum satisfactory growth rate for a healthy capitalist economy) is becoming less and less feasible to sustain without resort to all manner of fictions (such as those that have characterized asset markets and financial affairs over the last two decades). There are good reasons to believe that there is no alternative to a new global order of governance that will eventually have to manage the transition to a zero growth economy. If that is to be done in an equitable way, then there is no alternative to socialism or communism. Since the late 1990s, the World Social Forum became the center for articulating the theme “another world is possible.” It must now take up the task of defining how another socialism or communism is possible and how the transition to these alternatives are to be accomplished. The current crisis offers a window of opportunity to reflect on what might be involved.

Read more via David Harvey: Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition | fírgoa.

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The American-led mission in Port-au-Prince, Peter Hallward writes, has put military stability before humanitarian needs in a painful echo of Haiti’s past.

One week after the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, it’s now clear that the initial phase of the US-led relief operation has conformed to the three fundamental tendencies that have shaped the more general course of the island’s recent history. It has adopted military priorities and strategies. It has sidelined Haiti’s government and ignored the needs of the majority of its people. And it has proceeded in ways that reinforce the already harrowing gap between rich and poor. These three tendencies aren’t just connected, they are mutually reinforcing – and they look likely to continue to govern the imminent reconstruction effort unless determined political action is taken to avoid them.

Read more: via Securing disaster: The US repeats past mistakes in Haiti – The National Newspaper.

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The response by some commenters to Peter Hallward’s essential piece on Haiti shows once again why The Guardian’s Comment Is Free is so often one of the most depressing sites on the net. In a swamp of middle mass complacency like CiF, you’d expect the howls of “Half-witted pseudo-marxist gibberish”, but what of the staggering: “You can’t bring history into this.” Then there’s the crushingly predictable: “Are you absolutely sure that this is a good time to be scoring political points?” This liberal commonplace needs to be completely overturned. What is the implication here? That to confront the real, long-term causes of why so many died is somehow not “respecting” them? Needless to say, the idea that politics should be suspended in the face of suffering is the very hallmark of contemporary ideology. Now is not the time for political discussion, we’ll look at the long-term causes later …. But, since Band Aid this “emergency” temporality has become a permanent state of affairs, allowing neoliberalism to further strengthen its hegemony under the cloak of “post-politics”.

Of course some even claim that the concept of “neoliberalism” itself is “gibberish” spouted by only by “half-witted Marxists”. What this kind of claim establishes is the depressing reach and power that capitalist realism has over large areas of the British middle class. The real capitalist realists are not those working in neoliberal think tanks, who know full well that neoliberalism is a political project that has to be ruthlessly, continually enforced, but those who deny the existence of neoliberalism itself; they are the liberal dupes who, in the name of a “realism” that routinely ignores facts and evidence while pretending to appeal to them, propagate a “commonsense” which takes place inside the reality system instantiated by neoliberalism.

One irony of this squeamishness about “bringing politics” into situations of mass human suffering, of course, is that, as Naomi Klein consummately demonstrated in The Shock Doctrine, the neoliberal project has depended on its ability to rapidly helicopter into just these situations and exploit them. It is ready to do so again. Witness, for instance, the initial pronouncements of the Heritage Foundation – the text was subsequently changed, but here is what it originally said:

Amidst the Suffering, Crisis in Haiti Offers Opportunities to the U.S.

In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region…

While on the ground in Haiti, the U.S. military can also interrupt the nightly flights of cocaine to Haiti and the Dominican Republic from the Venezuelan coast and counter the ongoing efforts of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to destabilize the island of Hispaniola. This U.S. military presence, which should also include a large contingent of U.S. Coast Guard assets, can also prevent any large-scale movement by Haitians to take to the sea in rickety watercraft to try to enter the U.S. illegally.

Meanwhile, the U.S. must be prepared to insist that the Haiti government work closely with the U.S. to insure that corruption does not infect the humanitarian assistance flowing to Haiti. Long-term reforms for Haitian democracy and its economy are also badly overdue.

Needless to say, I’m not of course suggesting that people shouldn’t give to humanitarian relief. As one of the most perspicuous CiF commenters – thank goodness, there are some – notes, it is those who object to politics being mentioned who are imposing a stupid binary. Contributing to humanitarian aid, which we all must do – and I’m told that this is one of the best charities – in no way precludes a political explanation. Conversely, renouncing the political (or restricting it to where it “properly belongs”) doesn’t mean that it will go away – it just means that, with the unwitting assistance of the CiF general anti-intellect, the powerful and wealthy will continue to impose a politics that serves their interests.

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via k-punk.

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