An Interview with Moishe Postone

by Martin Thomas, published in »Solidarity« 3/166, 4  February, 2010

Moishe Postone is a Marxist academic based at the University of Chicago. As well as writing extensively on Marx’s political economy, he has also been central to the development of theories of “left anti-semitism”, which look at ways in which positions taken by left groups, particularly on Israel/Palestine, can feed into, or be based on, hostility to Jews. Martin Thomas spoke to him.

Q. To many people on the left today, anti-semitism seems to be just another form of racism, undesirable but for now fairly marginal, and prominent in discussion only because the Israeli government uses charges of anti-semitism to deflect the criticisms it faces. You argue, however, that anti-semitism is different from other forms of racism, and it is not marginal today. Why?

A. It is true that the Israeli government uses the charge of anti-semitism to shield it from criticisms. But that doesn’t mean that anti-semitism itself isn’t a serious problem.

The way in which anti-semitism is distinguished, and should be distinguished, from racism, has to do with the sort of imaginary of power, attributed to the Jews, Zionism, and Israel, which is at the heart of anti-semitism. The Jews are seen as constituting an immensely powerful, abstract, intangible global form of power that dominates the world. There is nothing similar to this idea at the heart of other forms of racism. Racism rarely, to the best of my knowledge, constitutes a whole system that seeks to explain the world. anti-semitism is a primitive critique of the world, of capitalist modernity. The reason I regard it as being particularly dangerous for the left is precisely because anti-semitism has a pseudo-emancipatory dimension that other forms of racism rarely have.

Q. How much do you think anti-semitism today is tied up with attitudes to Israel? It seems to us that a strand in the attitudesof some left-wing forces towards Israel has anti-semitic implications. That is the strand which desires not just criticism and change of Israeli government policy towards the Palestinians, but the abolition of Israel as such, and a world where all other nation states would exist but not Israel. From that viewpoint, to be a Jew, to feel some common identity with other Jews and thus usually with the Jews of Israel, is to be a “Zionist”, and that is as abhorrent as being a racist.

A. A lot has to be disaggregated here. There is a kind of fatal convergence of a number of historical currents in the contemporary form of anti-Zionism.

One, the origins of which aren’t necessarily anti-semitic, has its roots in struggles among members of the Jewish intelligentsia in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. A majority of Jewish intellectuals – including secularised intellectuals ?– felt that some form of collective identity was part and parcel of the Jewish experience. This identity became increasingly defined as national given the breakdown of earlier, imperial forms of collectivity – that is, as the old empires, the Hapsburg, the Romanov, and the Prussian empires, unravelled. The Jews in Eastern Europe — as opposed to the Jews in Western Europe — largely viewed themselves as a collectivity, not simply as a religion.

There were various forms of this Jewish national self-expression. Zionism was one. There were others, like Jewish cultural autonomists, and the Bund, an autonomous socialist movement of Jewish workers, which was much larger than any of the other movements, and which split off from the Russian Social Democratic party in the first years of the 20th century.

On the other hand there were Jews, many of them members of Communist parties, who viewed any expression of Jewish identity as anathema to their own notions of what I would call abstract Enlightenment notions of humanity. For example, Trotsky, in an earlier phase, referred to the Bund as “sea-sick Zionists”. Note that the critique of Zionism here had nothing to do with Palestine or the situation of the Palestinians, since the Bund was focused entirely on autonomy within the Russian empire and rejected Zionism. Rather, Trotsky’s equation of the Bund and Zionism implied a rejection of any form of Jewish communal self-identification. Trotsky, I think, changed his mind later on, but that attitude was fairly typical. Communist organisations tended to be very strongly opposed to Jewish nationalism of any sort, whether cultural nationalism, political nationalism, or Zionism. This is one strand of anti-Zionism. It is not necessarily anti-semitic, but rejects Jewish collective self-identification in the name of abstract universalism. Yet, frequently, this form of anti-Zionism is inconsistent – it is willing to accord national self-determination to most peoples, but not to Jews. It is at this point that what presents itself as abstractly universal becomes ideological. Moreover, the meaning of such abstract universalism itself changes with historical context. After the Holocaust and the establishment of the state of Israel, this abstract universalism serves to veil the history of Jews in Europe. This fulfils a very useful, historically “cleansing” dual function: the violence historically perpetrated by Europeans on Jews is erased; at the same time the horrors of European colonialism now become attributed to the Jews. In this case, the abstract universalism expressed by many anti-Zionists today becomes an ideology of legitimation that helps constitute a form of amnesia regarding the long history of European actions, policies and ideologies toward the Jews, while essentially continuing that history. The Jews have once again become the singular object of European indignation. The solidarity most Jews feel toward other Jews, including in Israel – however understandable following the Holocaust – is now decried. This form of anti-Zionism has become one of the bases for a programme to eradicate actually existing Jewish self-determination. It converges with some forms of Arab nationalism – now coded as singularly progressive.
Another strand of left anti-Zionism – this time deeply anti-semitic – was introduced by the Soviet Union, particularly in the show trials in Eastern Europe after World War Two. This was particularly dramatic in the case of the Slansky trial, when most of the members of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party were tried and then shot. All of the charges against them were classically anti-semitic charges: they were rootless, they were cosmopolitan, and they were part of a general global conspiracy. Because the Soviet Union could not officially use the language of anti-semitism, they began to use the word “Zionist” to mean exactly what anti-Semites mean when they speak of Jews.
These Czechoslovak CP leaders, who had nothing to do with Zionism — most of them were Spanish Civil War veterans — were shot as Zionists.

This strand of anti-semitic anti-Zionism was imported into the Middle East during the Cold War, in part by the intelligence services of countries like East Germany. A form of anti-semitism was introduced into the Middle East that was “legitimate” for the Left, and was called anti-Zionism.

Its origins had nothing to do with a movement against Israeli settlement. Of course, the Arab population of Palestine reacted negatively to Jewish immigration and resisted it. That’s very understandable. That in itself is certainly not anti-semitic. But these strands of anti-Zionism converged historically.

As for the third strand, there has been a change in the last ten years or so, starting with the Palestinian movement itself, with regard to the existence of Israel. For years most Palestinian organizations refused to accept the existence of Israel. In 1988, however, the PLO decided that it would accept the existence of Israel. The second intifada, which begun in 2000, was politically very different from the first intifada, and entailed a reversal of that decision.

I regard that as having been a fundamental political mistake, and I think it is remarkable and unfortunate that the Left has gotten caught up in it and, increasingly, is calling for the abolition of Israel. However, today in the Middle East there are roughly as many Jews as there are Palestinians. Any strategy based on analogies to situations like Algeria or South Africa simply won’t work, on demographic as well as political and historical grounds.

Why is it that people don’t see what the situation is today, and try to see if there is akind of resolution to what is essentially a national conflict that could free up progressive politics? To subsume the conflict under the rubric of colonialism misrecognizes the situation. Unlike those who have subsumed progressive politics under the national struggle, I think that so long as the struggle is focused on the existence of Israel and the existence of Palestine, progressive struggles are undermined. People who regard the struggle against the existence of Israel as progressive are taking something reactionary and regarding it as progressive.

In the past decade there has been a concerted campaign by some Palestinians, carried into the West by the left, to put the existence of Israel back on the table. Among other things, this has the effect of strengthening the right in Israel.
Between 1967 and 2000, the left in Israel had always argued that what the Palestinians wanted was self-determination, and that the right-wing notion that they wanted to eradicate Israel was a fantasy. Unfortunately that fantasy was shown in 2000 not to be a fantasy, which has strengthened the right immeasurably in its attempts to prevent the coming into being of a Palestinian state. The Israeli right and the Palestinian right are reinforcing each other, and the left in the West is supporting what I regard as the Palestinian right, the ultra-nationalists and the Islamists.

The idea that every nation other than the Jews should be allowed self-determination does come back to the Soviet Union. One has only to read Stalin on the nationalities question.

Q. The other odd thing about some current left-wing attitudes to Israel is the projection onto Israel of huge and mysterious power. For example, it is often taken as axiomatic that Israel is the dominant power in the Middle East, and it is often argued that Israel has huge power in the ruling circles of the USA and Britain.

A. Israel is far from being as powerful as charged. Yet you have people like my present and former colleagues at the University of Chicago, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, strongly supported by circles in the UK, who argue that the only thing driving American policy in the Middle East is Israel, as mediated by the Jewish lobby. They make this sweeping charge in the absence of any serious attempt to analyze American policy in the Middle East since 1945, which certainly cannot adequately be understood as Israel-driven. So, for example, they completely ignore American policy toward Iran for the past 75 years. The real pillars of American policy in the Middle East after World War Two were Saudi Arabia and Iran. That has changed in recent decades, and the Americans aren’t sure how to deal with that and secure the Gulf for their purposes. Yet you had a book written by these two academics claiming that American policy in the Middle East was primarily driven by the Jewish lobby without bothering to seriously analyze Great Power policies in the Middle East in the 20th century.

I’ve argued elsewhere that this sort of argument is anti-semitic. This has nothing to do with the personal attitudes of the people involved, but the sort of enormous global power it accords the Jews (as, in this case, the puppet-masters of the good-natured, slow-witted, giant, Uncle Sam) is typical for modern anti-semitic thought.

More generally that ideology represents what I call a fetishised form of anti-capitalism. That is, the mysterious power of capital, which is intangible, global, and which churns up nations and areas and people’s lives, is attributed to the Jews. The abstract domination of capitalism is personified as the Jews. Anti-semitism is a revolt against global capital, misrecognized as the Jews. This approach might also help explain the spread of anti-semitism in the Middle East in the past two decades. I don’t think it is a sufficient explanation only to point to the suffering of the Palestinians. Economically, the Middle East has declined precipitously in the past three decades. Only sub-Saharan Africa has fared worse. And this has occurred at a time when other countries and regions, thought of as part of the Third World fifty years ago, are developing rapidly. I think that anti-semitism in the Middle East today is an expression not only of the Israel-Palestine conflict, but also of a heightened general sense of helplessness in the light of these global developments.

On the German right a century ago, the global domination of capital used to be considered that of the Jews and Britain. Now the Left sees it as the domination of Israel and the United States. The thought pattern is the same.
We now have a form of anti-semitism that seems to be progressive and “anti-imperialist;” which is a real danger for the left.

Racism is rarely a danger for the left. The left has to be careful not to be racist, but it isn’t an ongoing danger because racism doesn’t have the apparent emancipatory dimension of anti-semitism.

Q. The identification of global capitalist power with the Jews and Britain goes back before the Nazis to sections of the British left at the time of the Boer war — when they condemned as a “Jewish war” — and to the Populist movement in the USA in the late 19th century.

A. Yes, and it’s coming back in the United States now. The so-called “tea parties”, the so-called right-wing grass-roots fury about the financial crisis, have definite anti-semitic overtones.

Q. You have argued that the USSR and similar systems were not forms of emancipation from capitalism, but state-centred forms of capitalism. It follows that the general attitude on the left of siding with the USSR — sometimes very critically — against the USA was self-destructive. You have indicated parallels between the sort of anti-imperialism today which sides with political Islam as the counter-power to the USA, and the old Cold War. What do you think are the common features of those two political polarisations? And the differences?

A. The differences are that the older form of anti-Americanism was tied to promoting Communist revolution in Vietnam, Cuba, etc. Whatever one may have thought of it at the time, or may regard it retrospectively, its own self-understanding was that it promoted an emancipatory project. The United States was sharply criticized not only because it is the United States and a great power, but also because it was hindering the emergence of a more progressive social order. That was the self-understanding of many who were in solidarity with Vietnam or with Cuba.

Today, I doubt that even the people who proclaim “We are all Hezbollah” or “We are all Hamas” would say that those movements represent an emancipatory social order. At best what is involved is an Orientalist reification of the Arabs and/or Muslims as the Other, whereby the Other, this time, is affirmed. It is yet another indication of historical helplessness on the part of the left, the inability to come up with any imaginary of what a post-capitalist future might look like. Not having any vision of a post-capitalist future, many have substituted a reified notion of “resistance” for any conception of transformation. Anything that “resists” the United States becomes regarded positively. I regard this as an extremely questionable form of thought.

Even in the previous period — when solidarity with Vietnam, Cuba, etc. predominated — I think the division of the globe into two camps had very negative consequences for the left. The left too often found itself in the position of being the mirror image of Western nationalists.

Many on the left became nationalists of the other side. Most of them — there were some significant exceptions — were extremely apologetic about what was going on in Communist countries. Their critical gaze was blunted. Instead of developing a form of internationalism that was critical of all existing relations, the left became supporters of one side in another version of the Great Game.

This had disastrous effects on the left’s critical faculties — and not only in the case of Communists. It’s absurd that Michel Foucault went to Iran and regarded the revolution of the mullahs as having some progressive dimensions.

One thing that made the two-camp vision seductive is that Communists in the West tended to be very progressive people — very brave people, often — who suffered for their attempts to, in their minds, create a more humane and progressive and perhaps even socialist society. Those people were completely instrumentalised; but, because of the double character of Communism, it was very difficult for some people to see that. The segments of the Social Democratic left who opposed those Communists and saw how they were being manipulated themselves became ideologues of Cold War liberalism.

I don’t think the left should have been on either side of that divide. But I also think the situation for the left is worse today.

Norbert Trenkle

Parts of the left are attributing the current global economic crisis to political causes. Neoliberalism, so the argument goes, with its total deregulation of markets and particularly the radical increases in freedom accorded to the financial markets, has failed. Now, they claim, we are approaching an era of regulation and control by the state, and our task is to influence the forms it will take. The central demand is for the rolling-back of the influence of finance capital and a strengthening of the real economy, which in turn should itself be reformed both ecologically and socially. Whether or not this will succeed is treated primarily as a question of the balance of social power and of political mobilisation.

However, this analysis overlooks the fundamental character of the global crisis. Even if it was precipitated by a financial market crash, its causes are to be found somewhere else entirely. The prodigious inflation in the financial markets over the last 30 years was not caused by wilful or incorrect political decisions, but is the expression of a structural crisis of the valorisation of capital, a crisis that began with the end of the post-war Fordist boom. Through the fundamental reorganisation of conditions of labour and production in the course of the third industrial revolution (automisation, flexibilisation and precarisation of labour, transnational chains of value-creation, etc.), there was a massive rationalisation of labour in the central capitalist sectors. This substantially undermined the foundation of the valorisation of capital, which consists in the continually increasing exploitation of labour-power. This in turn led to the diversion of more and more capital into the financial markets: capital could no longer find sufficient opportunities for valorisation in the ‘real economy’, and a gigantic bubble of unsecured ‘fictitious capital’ (Marx) was inflated. Without this diversion, which allowed the crisis of capital-accumulation to be postponed, the global economy would have collapsed long ago. The cost of this diversion, however, was the building-up of ever more potential for crisis. It is thus no wonder that the crash came: what rather needs explanation is that it could be so protracted.

This was only possible because at the state level and beyond, policy has been primarily directed towards sustaining the dynamics of the financial markets, and has thus reacted to the onset of every crisis (those in Mexico, Asia, Russia, that of the New Economy) in the same way: with the creation of additional credit, to induce the inflation of a new bubble. The pattern of these reactions is evidence that the structural cause of the crisis-process lies beyond the reach of politics, for it is a result of a fundamental contradiction in the historical internal dynamics of capitalism, itself a prerequisite of all conscious action. Capitalism creates immense forces of production and potential for riches which in and of themselves would enable a good life for everyone (really, for everyone). These riches are however not compatible with the narrow- minded aim of exploiting living labour, because they render more and more labour superfluous. They thus
lapse into becoming the propellant of a fundamental process of crisis, which undermines not only the foundations of the valorisation of capital, but also the network of social reproduction that depends on it, along with the natural foundations of life. The inflation of the financial markets is not the cause of the crisis, but one of its symptoms. It shows that capitalist accumulation can only function precariously as an appendage to fictional capital.

In this context the actual content of the much-evoked ‘return of the state’ becomes clear. Despite all the lip-service paid to ‘regulation’ and the return to the real economy, supporting the financial markets and inflating a new bubble of speculation and credit will continue to remain at the centre of every policy of crisis-administration. Even left-wing social democrats, trade unionists and ATTAC-representatives are bound to demand that the banks be saved. The only differences lie in the detail – that is to say, whether or not they should be nationalised, and who should bear the cost. This last question is however already resolved: the costs are so huge that they can only be covered by massive public borrowing. Everything else (‘tax the rich’, salary-cuts for managers, bankers’ private liability etc.) is merely symbolic. There is fundamentally nothing to be said against taking money away from the rich, bankers and employers in order
to distribute it to claimants (as if it would ever happen), but the function that these demands fulfil in political debate is regressive, because they serve only to brand scapegoats and to diffuse moral outrage, thus masking the true dimensions of the crisis.

Alone the massive public borrowing to save the financial system suggests – even if it succeeds in precariously delaying the process of crisis with a violent surge of money – that in the next years many aspects of social reproduction will be cut back because they are no longer deemed ‘financially viable’. But the sums needed to repay the amassed debts will never be saved through restrictive policies of austerity. It is therefore not in any real sense the case that the mass of waged, precarised and unemployed workers will have to pay them back. It is these workers, however, who will feel the effects of the ‘bailouts’ most acutely, because the debt will serve as a brutal restriction on every future politics, no matter for which party or tendency. For while there will be limits to future public borrowing, the burden of interest-payments will grow massively. The consequences are obvious: politics will in the first instance concentrate on the maintenance of ‘functions relevant to the system’, and these are, in addition to the financial markets, the remaining cores and ‘clusters’ of productive valorisation of capital, along with the infrastructure and personnel that they require. General infrastructure, social welfare, public healthcare will be dismantled further, wages and pensions decreased (through cuts and as a result of inflation), and the number of precarised and ‘superfluous’ people will continue to grow. Administration of the crisis, for them, means soup kitchens, authoritarian discipline and exclusion. Even political parties that come to power with promises of ‘social and environmental reforms’ will follow this logic of the political crisis-administration.

The current debate about reforms is a farce, because it suggests a perspective for which the material foundations are no longer present. During the boom-periods of capitalism, and particularly in the times of the Fordist post-war boom, a relative improvement in living- and living-conditions – was possible within the framework of capitalism, because the growth-dynamics of the movement of valorisation brought about pressure to integrate increasing numbers of people into the system of commodity-production and labour- exploitation. Since more and more have been rendered ‘superfluous’ from the point-of-view of capital, the function of ‘politics of reform’ is being reduced to the organisation and facilitation of the increasing social and regional fragmentation of society. This tendency will become more prominent in the further development of the crisis. A new perspective towards social emancipation can only be formulated in the consistent opposition to the dismantling politics of crisis-administration: through the consistent attempt to make the standpoints of material riches and of the satisfaction of sensual needs apply to everybody. This is as true for struggles over wages and labour as it is for those which aim at the direct, collective appropriation of social resources (means of production, housing, cultural and social spaces etc.). As long as riches can only be thought in the value- and commodity-form and access to material riches appears possible only via the detour of money, the restrictions and insanities of this form will in the end continue to be presupposed and accepted. It is in this way that large-scale shut-downs of production-facilities in which useful and sensible things (such as good food) are made appears ‘unavoidable’, while at the same time there are bitter struggles to continue and expand the production of cars, although their climate- destroying effects have been widely-known for a long time. This blocks the only way out of the destructive course of commodity-society, a process that starts in our heads, and proceeds, as if as a matter of course, in our actions. Our task is to break through this blockade.

Translated by Josh Robinson (Principia Dialectica)

On the underlying causes of the current financial crisis.

Norbert Trenkle
translated by Josh Robinson

[In 2005, Franz Müntefering, at the time chairman of the German Social Democratic Party, made articulated a ‘critique of capitalism’ according to which the blame for the increased economic instability and precarisation of twenty-first-century capitalism lies with ‘greedy speculators’, whom he described as locusts. This prompted a wide-ranging debate on the German left as to the appropriateness of this and other images that replace analysis of the structural logic of capitalism with moral condemnation of individual agents within this logic. In conjunction with hostility towards finance capital, this personification of structural relationships resonates with the long tradition of what August Bebel termed the ‘socialism of fools’, culminating in the ‘critique of capitalism’ advanced by the NSDAP and the contemporary far-right. This essay, written during the early stages of development of the current financial crisis in May 2008, is a contribution to the analysis of the nature of the relationship between the current over-inflation of the financial markets and the dynamics of globalised capitalism, and of its consequences for trade unions and social movements. – JR]

The causes of the current crisis in the international financial markets, which is threatening to develop into a genuine global market crisis, have been attributed by almost all commentators and economic experts to the uninhibited freedom granted to speculation, particularly in the USA. The principal agents of this speculation are generally held to be the banks and investment-funds, but also the governments and central banks (particularly the US government and federal reserve) which have enabled and supported this development. Those who have for years seen the causes of every economic and social fissure – mass unemployment, pressure on wages, increased local competition and the tearing down of social security – in the fact that speculation has been set free and become an end in itself, and who see regulation and control of the financial markets as the key to solving these problems, now feel that their views have been confirmed.

On a superficial level, it could indeed appear that the financial markets constitute the original cause of the increasing economic pressure on society as a whole. Who could deny that the markets have taken on historically unprecedented levels of significance and have a stronger influence than ever on economic development? Does that not itself almost amount to blaming them primarily for social misery? It is not simply because they reflect surface-appearances that polemics against hedge funds, private equity funds and other players of the financial markets (particularly those that use ideologically incendiary images such as ‘locusts’ and ‘blood-suckers’)¹ find such strong resonance in the public sphere. More than that, they can find support in the widespread preconception that finance capital, banks and ‘speculators’ are responsible for most of the evils of capitalism, because they supposedly extract their profit at the expense of ‘honest labour’ and of ‘productive entrepreneurship’, without themselves lifting a finger. Thus the frequent denouncements of the ‘insatiable greed’ of speculators who are supposedly in search of ‘excessive rates of return’, as if capitalist production were not by its very nature based on the maximisation of profit, as if it didn’t already stop at nothing in pursuit of this aim.

This is clearly no critique of capitalism: it is at best a nostalgic look back at the post-war regulation of capitalism by a social state, in a world that was still ‘in order’. Worse still, it opens the door for delusional antisemitic projections, at the core of which is the division of capital into a (concrete) ‘creative capital’ and an (abstract) ‘grasping capital’, in which ‘the speculators’ are identified with ‘the Jews’, who reputedly pull the strings behind the scenes of global economics and politics. This dangerous ideological combination has in recent years been identified and criticised many times – I thus don’t treat it in further detail here.² I shall instead concentrate on evidence for the claim that these one-sided attacks on finance capital also turn the cause-effect relationships of the functional logic of capitalism on their head, which blocks the way not only for an analysis of the ongoing crisis, but also for an adequate opposition to the unreasonable social and political demands that are bound up with it.

The long-term repercussions of the crisis of Fordism

A glance at history shows that the development of large-scale speculative and credit-bubbles has never been the cause of capitalist crises; rather, it has always been simply a consequence and stage in the development of the crisis-process, the causes of which can always be traced back to stagnation in the valorisation of capital in the real economy. This is no less true for the current financial crisis and for the long period of speculation that preceded it, even if there are certain characteristics that distinguish it from previous crises.

It is generally recognised that it was in the mid-1970s that the financial markets first began to grow rapidly and become independent. This was not, as is often asserted now, caused by any deliberate political decision or by the influence of neo-liberal think-tanks and powerful economic interest-groups, but by the fact that the long post-war boom fell into a structural crisis, as Fordism ran up against its limits. The exhaustion of organisational and administrative reserves of productivity of standardised mass-production brought about increased pressure on rates of profit, while at the same time labour had successfully struggled for increases in wages and social services, and the capital-costs of financing general public infrastructure continued to rise. Then, when the OPEC countries raised oil-prices gently – which caused the costs of the excessive exploitation of fossil energy-reserves to rocket – the self-supporting thrust of post-war growth came to an end. There was no increased investment in the means of production, factories, buildings etc., because these could no longer produce sufficient profit; a significant proportion of capital was thus ‘set free’ and found no profitable investment.

But since capital is by its nature self-valorising value – that is, since the only purpose to capitalist production consists in making more money out of money (which is the source of capitalism’s compulsion to perpetual quantitative growth without regard for human needs or natural limits) – such a stagnation in the process of valorisation is synonymous with a crisis. More precisely: with a crisis of over-accumulation, or, to put it in the vocabulary of contemporary macro-economics, with a crisis of over-investment. A proportion of capital becomes excessive (measured according to its own abstract rationality as an end in itself) and is therefore threatened by devalorisation. And when this devalorisation happens, it is not constrained to the collapse of individual companies and banks (as is the case in the normal functioning of capitalism) but reverberates, mediated through and strengthened by negative multiplying effects – through the entire economy and society.

Precisely this danger threatened in the mid-1970s – as was predicted by many (not only left-wing) economists.³ But why didn’t it happen? Why did the great world-economic crisis fail to break through? One fundamental reason was that a substantial proportion of the superfluous capital that could no longer be invested in the real economy was diverted into the financial markets, where it was then invested primarily in government bonds, but also increasingly in stock- and security-speculation. This diversion into the financial sphere, seen on its own, is a perfectly normal stage of progression of every crisis of the valorisation of capital. Marx had already analysed it in relation to the crisis of 1857, and coined for it the term ‘fictitious capital’. Credit and speculation capital is fictitious because it only apparently serves as capital. For it yields high interest-rates and speculative gains it for its owner in the relative absence of real valorisation takes place, which always presupposes that abstract labour is spent on the production of commodities and services and that a proportion of it is siphoned off as surplus value. But the ‘returns’ that fictitious capital ‘yields’ stem from other sources, whether taxes and new credits (in the case of exponentially growing national debt), bets on the future (in the case of speculative gains) or the selling off of social substance (in the case of privatisation).

This is most obvious in the case of increasing national debt: the state borrows money in order to flush it straight back into circulation. From the point of view of the creditor, this money appears as capital, because it ‘yields’ interest. But it fact it is long-since spent, and therefore exists as ‘value’ only in the form of receipts (government bonds). But personal loans and mortgages function according to the same principle: the debtor borrows money to to buy houses, cars or other consumer goods; although the money is long-since spent, it appears to the creditor as capital that has been profitably invested. Admittedly, from the creditors’ perspective, this relationship doesn’t matter at all. Credit and speculation seem to them no less ‘real’ opportunities for investment, as long as the sources of money continue to gush.

However, the growth of fictitious capital not only provides an alternative choice for investors, but also constitutes, when viewed on the macroeconomic level, a deferral of the outbreak of crisis. For the turn to the financial markets prevents the devalorisation of superfluous capital only temporarily, and at the same time also creates increased purchasing power through various mechanisms, which in turn increases the demand for commodities and services and thus keeps the real economy running, or even stimulates it. In the case of increases in public borrowing this mechanism functions immediately, and has become a central instrument of economic policy. Regardless of whether the state spends the borrowed money on building roads, buying fighter planes or social transfer payments, it always flows straight back into consumer circulation and stimulates further economic activity. As the latest property boom in the USA has shown, personal loans and mortgages carry out precisely the same macroeconomic function, the only difference being that the debtors are private individuals. To a certain degree, profits from the financial market also flow back into the real economy, whether through money spent on fixtures and furnishings for banks, funds and other institutional players of the financial markets (from the fleet of company cars, via the computers, to the prestigious office-buildings), or through the fact that employees and investors finance their own consumption through yields from interest and speculation. Fictitious capital is to this extent anything but a dead weight that burdens the real economy and prevents it from functioning properly. Quite the opposite: it enables the temporary prolongation of capitalist business as usual.

In no great capitalist crisis so far has this means of deferring the crisis lasted long. A short period of speculative overheating has been followed by a large crash, in which the built-up potential for crisis discharged with huge impact, destroying in a single stroke a substantial proportion of economic and social structures. The historical particularity of the crises of Fordism consists in the fact that such a huge devalorisation of the speculation and credit amassed in the aftermath of the crisis has not yet taken place. But this should by no means be taken to mean that the principles of the logic of capitalist valorisation and function have been disproved, as has repeatedly been asserted. Only the immensely long duration of the deferral is historically unique: mediated through the mechanisms of fictitious capital, it is structurally no different from previous crises, and must therefore sooner or later discharge into a surge of devalorisation. To this long duration corresponds the correspondingly gigantic inflation of the speculation and credit bubbles. If it is the case that today – as it says in almost every newspaper – about 97% of all international transactions serve purely speculative ends, this is no evidence of economic ‘malfunction’ or even for the ‘greed’ of insatiable speculators, but simply shows the extent to which the deferral of the crisis has grown, and thus also the huge potential for crisis that has been built up.

The particularities of the long deferral of the crisis

Seen politically, it was the growing liberalisation of the transnational financial markets and the final delinking of money from gold (the US dollar leaving the gold standard in 1971 was the beginning of the end of the system of regulated exchange-rates), that made it possible to prolong the deferral of the crisis for such a long time in the first place. For it was only in this way that the global money supply could grow to an extent unimaginable in previous crises, during which the gold standard and nationally regulated financial markets set limits to monetary expansion. The decision to tear down these limits was not a wilful political act that can be attributed to the influence of particular powerful interest groups.⁴ Rather, it was a consequence of economic development in the 1950s and 60s, which dug away little by little at the foundations of the Bretton Woods system. As the undisputed economic supremacy of the USA withered away to the extent that it could only cover the costs of its political and military position of global power through increased public borrowing (the costs of the Vietnam war played a major part in this), fixed exchange-rates and the pegging of western currencies to US gold-reserves could no longer be maintained. This was the point at which the prerequisites for a huge increase in the money supply – with the active participation of governments, central banks and the IMF – were first present. Since the 1970s – and above all since the 1980s – huge amounts of unsecured liquidity have been pumped into the markets, either through the direct route of public borrowing or through ‘cheap money’ policies, which were always introduced whenever the markets looked a little shaky. The USA played a central role in this process, for its global power enabled it to borrow in its own currency without having to fear devaluation, since the dollar functioned as a de facto world currency (a role that is currently being questioned). But the fiscal and monetary policies of other western states have also made a significant contribution to the permanent inflation of the global bubble of fictitious capital in order to defer the onset of the crisis ever further.

There is a further important historical particularity to the long cycle of finance-capital since the 1970s. Namely, that it not only represented a deferral of the crisis of Fordism, but it also interfered with the mighty surge in productive capacity that was the third industrial revolution. Under the conditions of a ‘normal’ crisis of overaccumulation, a fundamental transformation of production towards the foundations of information and communication technologies would only have been able to establish itself, if at all, after a period of deep global depression in which the post-war economic structures had been reduced to rubble and ashes. However, the long postponement of the crisis by means of fictitious capital made it possible to restrict this destructive work primarily to the global south and the former eastern bloc. The structures of Fordism were also ruined in western cities, but this was part of a longer process, during the course of which pressure on the conditions of labour and on social systems was steadily growing, and the structures of production were undergoing fundamental transformation. This process unfolded differently in each country depending on its position on the global market and in competition, but the trend was the same everywhere: industrial sectors were radically rationalised with the help of micro-electronic applications, and slowly reduced to their hyper-productive cores, while each aspect of production that could not (yet) be made economically profitable by automation was outsourced to countries or sectors in which wages are lower.

Since the so-called service sector at once both gained increasing significance and absorbed a substantial proportion of the labour-power that was no longer required by industry, it was possible to interpret the situation, if superficially, as if capitalism had simply gone through a further structural change, a process which could essentially be characterised by the replacement of the dominant industrial sector with that of services and ‘knowledge-production’, and at the same time the globalisation of economic relations. Correspondingly, most observers and economic experts where united in the view that capitalism, at least in the urban west, had managed to overcome the crisis of the 1970s and 80s (keyword: ‘crisis of labour society’), if at the price of increased precarisation of the conditions of life and labour for large sections of the population, which, depending on the commentator’s political position, were either treated as unavoidable or denounced as the unnecessary result of neoliberal policies. But from all positions the diagnosis of a fundamental process of crisis seemed absurd and fallacious. ‘Just look how vivacious capitalism is’ was heard from all quarters – whether rejoicing, critical or resigned – with reference to the gushing profits even during the last few years.
The current crisis of the financial market shows relatively unmistakably that this assessment was fundamentally false. And not because speculation destroys the real, sustainable economic structure (just as in the current controversy the ‘locusts’ are always blamed), but because the structure that has emerged in the last twenty-five to thirty years was never the cause of a self-supporting boom of capital accumulation. Quite the reverse: it was only viable at all because it was (and still is) continually serviced by the flows of fictitious capital. A self-supporting boom would presuppose that whenever growth were checked, more labour-power would be exploited in the production of commodities up to the required level, for this is the only way to ensure that the amount of added value can increase and the cycle ‘money – commodities – more money’ perpetually be preserved. From the perspective of demand, this would mean that at at every stage of development, enough labour-income would have to be generated to sell the commodities produced during the previous stage. Precisely this condition is absent under the conditions of the third industrial revolution. The rationalisation enabled by new information and communication technologies is ploughing up all sectors of the economy with such immense speed that more labour-power is always being rendered superfluous than can be put to use by the ensuing growth. This means that the process of valorisation not only has to cut away at the demand on which it depends in order to liquidate the produced value on the market, but also, more fundamentally, that it permanently undermines its very own foundations.⁵ To this extent the micro-electronic revolution in production is a sort of permanent crisis of over-accumulation: that is, it always produces an excess of capital that can no longer be valorised, which must in turn be diverted into the sphere of fictitious capital, and thus constitutes an essential contribution to the exponential growth of the financial bubble.

Crisis? What crisis?

Against this diagnosis it is often claimed that in the last decades millions of new jobs have been created in countries that were previously peripheral to the world economy, particularly in East and Southeast Asia, and that the basis for the production of value has therefore grown rather than shrunk. But this argument ignores two fundamental factors. Firstly, the great majority of industrial labour in the relevant countries is carried out at a very low level of productivity and thus produces very small amounts of value, measured against the standard of the automated and completely rationalised factories on the global market. For from the standpoint of value-production, it is not so much that the level of value produced is defined by the mere number of hours worked as that the amount of value of a commodity is defined by the relevant level of social productivity.⁶ And since in the core sectors of global production this level has been rising consistently, the value of the unproductive labour in the outsourced elements of production falls just as consistently. This means that outsourcing is only economically profitable as long as yet lower wages and worse working conditions can always be found.⁷ And this in turn is the reason why the current drive towards rationalisation has not led to general reductions in labour-time and a good life for all (indeed, it has not even created the opportunity for a relative improvement of living conditions within capitalist society), but rather to large-scale social impoverishment.

But secondly, the boom in China, India and the other ‘emerging markets’ is by no means sustainable, but is itself thoroughly dependent on the global generation of money by credit and speculation. It is widely recognised that the entire economic structure of these countries is oriented towards mass export, primarily to the USA and EU, which in turn largely finance their imports with income from finance and credit capital. Paradigmatic for such relationships is the Pacific deficit-circulation between the USA and East Asia, which since the Reagan-administration has become the central motor driving world economic activity. Its functional mechanism is fundamentally very simple: a permanently growing trade deficit is covered by (also permanently growing) imports of finance capital, which, partly via the direct route of credit-financed government expenditure (‘twin deficit’), partly via the detour that is the private finance system, is flushed back into consumer circulation. But since most of the money flows from the Asian countries (currently primarily Japan, but increasingly China), which invest their sales revenue in the US finance sector or build up their currency reserves in US dollars, they in fact finance these exports themselves. In the Reagan-era it was burgeoning public borrowing that functioned as a motor for consumption, while share and bond speculation became more significant later – during the so-called ‘new economy’ many private investors financed a proportion of their consumption from the huge price-rises on the ‘new market’. And in the last few years the emphasis has finally moved to property speculation.

However, this cycle can only function as long as the US dollar enjoys the necessary trust to sustain the flow of fresh finance capital necessary to cover the permanent deficit. It is a mark of the current financial crises that this trust is to a great extent crumbling (a sign for this is the falling dollar). Should the US government and the Federal Reserve fail to reverse this trend, the pacific deficit-cycle will come to a halt, which would have approximately the same effect on the world economy as the likely Gulf Stream shutdown on the global climate. It is nothing other than lazy anti-Americanism when more and more voices in Europe respond to the current prognosis by condemning the US with moral outrage for having ‘lived at the expense of the rest of the world’ by financing their ‘unproductive consumption’ on credit,⁸ and also now for tipping the world economy into crisis. This reproduces once more the ideological split between ‘parasitic’ credit capital and honest productive capital – anti-American ideological models are in Europe always at the very least an indication of a dangerous proximity to antisemitic constructs – and what’s more, it turns the actual relationship right on its head. For on the one hand, European countries have profited to a great extent from credit-financed demand from the US: German industry in particular would have been in a sorry state for a long time were it not for the huge volume of exports across the Atlantic. On the other hand, when compared to GDP, national debt in Europe is on a par with that of the US, and it is not as if speculation is unheard of: in recent years there has been a huge speculative property boom, particularly in southern Europe, which is also collapsing right now. And in any case, the global capitalist economy as a whole is surviving on a drip of fictitious capital because it can no longer be sustained by the real economy.

It is thus completely absurd for commentators in every newspaper from left to right to accuse the US central bank of having stimulated property speculation with its policy of low interest rates, and therefore of responsibility for the current financial crisis. The Fed’s actions after the crash of the New Economy were simply to prevent a landslide on the financial markets. The Fed also deferred the onset of the crisis by seven or eight years and then enabled the much talked-of upturn, which all politicians claim as their own. Anyone who insists on using moral categories in this situation ought to be thankful to the Fed and the US government for allowing the world economy such an orderly pause for breath through their expansive monetary policy. But thankfulness is here no more helpful than moral condemnation. It is much more important to understand that the causes of the crisis of the financial markets lie not in speculation, but in a much more fundamental structural crisis of capitalist reproduction. This insight has far-reaching consequences for social conflict in the near future.

Further deferral of the crisis…

It is not possible to offer a definite prognosis as to the future course of the crisis. At the moment it is not clear if the united forces of the central banks and governments would be able once again to defer the megacrash of the financial markets and its destructive consequences for the entire world. Should they succeed, it would only be through the inflation of another financial bubble. That would be in open mockery of those who see the solution to the problem in regulation of the financial markets. For this demand has been taken up from all sides, including by former neoliberal hardliners, who argue along the lines of ‘what do I care about what I said yesterday?’ But in practice, the state’s intervention will result in the exact opposite: it will essentially act to limit the direct damages that result from the collapse of the property bubble. It is significant that even the social-democrat populist Oskar Lafontaine is arguing that the state should prevent failing banks from going under, because he knows that a collapse of the banking system would have disastrous consequences for society as a whole.⁹ Of course, he conscientiously tacks on the demand for better control of the banks and financial markets. But that is a mere rhetorical flourish, for bad credit given now can under current conditions only be repaid – if at all – through future gains on the financial markets. It makes no difference whether the players of the market are states or individuals, for both are equally subject to the requirement to invest ‘their’ capital profitably, and under conditions of over-accumulation that means investing only in the spheres of credit and speculation, because there is only very limited scope for the valorisation of capital within the real economy.¹⁰ It doesn’t matter whether we recognise this fact or not: the point is proved in practice. It is for this reason that governments and central banks have no choice beyond the reopening of the monetary floodgates. The US government and the Fed are already steering this course.¹¹

Of course, political action is always restricted by the fact that it cannot call into question the functional logic of capitalism itself. Politics is by its nature restricted to the administration of public affairs within this logic. However, the available political room for manoeuvre changes over the course of history. It is shaped and restricted by the limits of what is possible at any historically specific moment, which itself depend on the blind dynamic of the development of capitalism. Within these limits, political decisions and courses are not determined, but result from the interplay of different factors, such as relationships of social and international power, or relative strength in competition on the global market; but the frame defined by the limits is beyond the reach of politics. This is just as true for Fordism, today so often romanticised. Despite the relatively high potential for regulation during this period, politics could no more be said to have created the Fordist boom as such, than it could have prevented its end. However, it was able to influence the boom’s internal course to a certain degree, and to use the scope available for distribution to build up an extensive social infrastructure. The period of crisis-capitalist globalisation presents a mirror-image of this. Politics cannot substantively transform fictitious capital into flesh, because the constant inflation of the credit- and speculation-bubble is a precondition for the precarious deferral of the crisis, and thus determines the limits of political action. Politics is to this extent compelled to do everything to guarantee the existence of this precondition for as long as possible, and beyond monetary measures, its recources include increased predation of ‘public goods’, which are thrown into the fire of private valorisation in order to keep the capitalist machine running.¹²

But putting a stop to the crisis-dynamic of capitalism itself would be beyond the possible reach of politics, whose interventions instead contribute to the constant reproduction at an ever higher level of the contradictions that lie at the heart of the crisis-process. While the amount of fictitious capital that must be protected from devalorisation grows exponentially (as a glance at the growth of of the financial markets shows), the pressure on society and the large majority of the population, forced to sell themselves under ever more precarious conditions, grows with every stage of the deferral of the crisis. Correspondingly, the social costs of further postponement of the great crash will be considerable. On the one hand, we can count on a proper economic slump, which in contrast to the current ‘upturn’ will certainly hit rock bottom. On the other hand, increases in the money supply will probably lead to further acceleration of inflation, and with it to further decreases in the already shrinking mass purchasing-power. And finally, the next wave of speculation will likely be in raw materials, food and agrofuels, and will therefore have catastrophic consequences for large sections of the global population. The horrendous rises in food-prices in the last two years can to a great extent be attributed to the fact that more and more institutional investors have placed their capital in commodity futures. If this trend continues, the unavoidable result will be a price-explosion, increasing world hunger many times over.

And even then the increased volume of fictitious capital would not be the direct cause of the catastrophe, but would rather function (as is already is in the current wave of privatisation) as the drive-belt and transmission of the crisis-process and of its inherent tendency toward exclusion and precarisation. There is therefore a considerable danger that the resentment that this causes will be directed only against the imagined enemy of ‘greedy’ finance capital, onto whom the blame for the entire misery will be shifted. It remains all the more important to take a stance against this inverted ‘critique of capitalism’ that leaves a way open for antisemitism. But this presupposes not only the necessary ideology-critique, but also a well-grounded analysis of the crisis that removes the ground from beneath the inverted perception of the capitalist cause-and-effect relationships. This is not to claim that speculation and the financial markets should be placed beyond critique, but to argue that they must always be analysed as aspects of a fundamental crisis of capitalism – and it is this process as a whole that will result in the wide-ranging destruction of the foundations of social and natural life.

This critique must also be directed against the partly nostalgic, partly populist plans for a return to a Keynesian politics of growth and regulation. Even the proponents of these plans know that under the current conditions there is simply no scope for their implementation. Evidence for this is provided whenever ‘left-wing’ parties come to power, and then carry out quite the opposite of their promised programme; this is no less true for the SPD-Left Party coalition in the Berlin city government as it is for the former ‘centre-left coalition’ in Italy or broadly speaking for the Lula-government in Brazil. Insanely enough, it is not the case that the electorate is simply credulous and is ‘deceived’, but rather, that in the absence of any better prospects it wants to believe that a return to the Keynesian post-war social state is still possible, even though it is at another level thoroughly aware that this cannot happen. That is at the heart of the schizophrenic mood in Germany where there is both broad support for classical social-democratic demands (universal minimum wage, no rail-privatisation etc.) and at the same time high levels of affection for the Merkel-government. What is problematic about this mood is that in its oscillation between unrealisable wishes and uncritical acceptance of the structural logic of capitalism it is deeply susceptible to the danger of identifying scapegoats, whether hedge-funds, the US government, large corporations or – in its final delusional ramification – ‘the Jews’.

It might sound paradoxical, but the point at which the last thing one wants to give oneself up to ‘realpolitik’ and its credo of practical constraint is precisely when clearly naming the limits of politics in the current period of crisis becomes more necessary than ever. Not in order to acknowledge the validity of these limits, but as a necessary process of orientation for social movements and the parts of the trade union movement that are opposed to the systematic predation of the social state, the progressive intrusion of monetary value into all aspects of life, increasing precarisation and the state-control and -repression that are associated with them. If they commit themselves to illusory political perspectives and immerse themselves in party politics, the result is nothing other than their neutralisation.¹³ If, on the other hand, they concentrate on uniting their struggles across the divisions between between special-interest campaigns, isolated living-conditions and fragmented identities, they could succeed in reversing the trend away from solidarity that has been driven forward by the pressure of the crisis, and in forming an oppositional social power that stands opposed to the neoliberal politics of demolition and exclusion, and that at the same time brings the defeat of the logic of capital back into the realm of the possible.

… or global economic crisis?

Should attempts once more to defer the crisis fail, there threatens a global economic crisis of formidable proportion, in which the crisis-potential that has been built up over thirty years will be released. The immediate consequences will be the collapse of a great many businesses and banks, probably along with a huge rise in inflation. It doesn’t take much to imagine the destructive consequences of such stagflation on public finances, social services and the living conditions of the great majority of the population. It is highly likely that under these conditions the ideology of a national-populist crisis-administration – as has been advocated for a long time, and not only from the right wing of the political spectrum – will grow in popularity. When the journalist Jürgen Elsässer (currently at Neues Deutschland, the newspaper of the former ruling party of the DDR) calls for a ‘national popular front’ against globalised capital and particularly against finance capital (that he locates, quelle surprise, predominantly in the USA), it still sounds perhaps somewhat overexcited. But it represents a tendency that amounts to an aggressive, nationalist shutting-off from the outside, and authoritarian internal discipline in conjunction with the mobilisation of antisemitic hatred. Given the complex relationships of transnational economic interdependence, it is hardly possible to imagine a return to the largely isolated nation-state, even merely in administration of the crisis. More likely is the disintegration of the world economy into continental blocs, a scenario that is already being played through in think tanks and in the corridors of power. The visible fall of the US dollar and its ensuing loss of its function as a global country could be a strong driving mechanism in this direction.¹⁴

Such a possible scenario does not present any hope for a solution to the crisis, in any genuine sense of the world, but only for a form of administration of the state of emergency. That is to say, any sudden instance of devalorisation would in no way have the character of a ‘purifying crisis’ in which the foundations for a new self-supporting surge of accumulation could be created through the sweeping away of surplus capacity and bad credit. For this would not eliminate the actual cause of the crisis, the displacement of living labour power through the relocation of productive capacity from immediate production onto the level of the general social complex of knowledge, and the ensuing destabilisation of the production of value. Furthermore, all production would have to take place at the level of productivity attained through the new information and communication technologies, or be measured against this level, while the race for increased productivity would continue. At lower levels of value-production, a state of permanent over-accumulation would be immediately re-established, and with it the compulsion for the renewed pumping up of fictitious capital. The contradictions of the current crisis-process would be reproduced under substantially worse economic and social conditions. The decisive question will then be whether a transnational movement of emancipation can succeed in developing out of the resistance against the gravity of the crisis-process, a movement that can take an understanding of the social situation beyond the capitalist logic of valorisation towards a practical programme.

1 On the booklet produced by ver.di mentioned in the introduction, ‘Finanzkapitalismus – Geldgier in Reinkultur’ [‘Finance Capitalism – Unadulterated Greed’] cf. Lothar Galow-Bergemann: ‘Gegen Börsenungeziefer’ [‘Against Vermin of the Stock Exchange’] (Streifzüge 42) and the critique of the Finance Capital Working Group of ver.di Stuttgart, online at http://www.labournet.de/diskussion/gewerkschaft/real/insekten.html.
2 Cf. Norbert Trenkle, ‘Entsorgung nach Art des Hauses’ [‘Waste-Disposal à la maison], Streifzüge 32 (2004), online at http://www.krisis.org/2005/entsorgung-nach-art-des-hauses
3 Cf. the in part very good analyses in Elmar Altvater, Volkhard Brandes and Jochen Reiche, eds, Handbuch 4. Inflation – Akkumulation – Krise II, (Frankfurt/Main 1976).
4 A grotesque caricature of the idea that the abandoning of the gold standard was a wilful decision can be found in Jürgen Elsässer’s work: ‘In 1971 US president Richard Nixon announced the end of the gold standard for the dollar in a hush-hush operation. Since then the economic foundation of capitalism has been in gradual decay’, in Solidarität – Sozialistische Zeitung, Nr. 57 (4.5.2007).
5 From economic statistics it is well-known that much higher rates of growth in GDP are needed to create further jobs today than was the case in the 1970s. However, the statistical overview paints a rosy picture, because it adds all jobs together, without asking whether they contribute to the production of value (of course, economics disqualifies such a question from the start). For the majority of services and for the ‘production of knowledge’, this question must be answered in the negative (c.f. the article by Samol, Lohoff and Meretz in krisis 31). The growth of the service sector cannot therefore compensate for the exceptional melting-away of labour and value.
6 It should be remembered that Marx already points to this relationship in the first volume of Capital: ‘It might seem that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour expended to produce it, it would be the more valuable the more unskilful and lazy the worker who produced it, because he would need more time to complete the article. However, the labour that forms the substance of value is equal human labour, the expenditure of identical human labour-power. The total labour-power of society, which is manifested in the values of the world of commodities, counts here one homogeneous mass of human labour-power, although composed of innumerable individual units of labour power. [...] The introduction of power-looms into England, for example, probably reduced by a half the labour required to convert a given quantity of yarn into woven fabric. In order to do this, the English hand-loom weaver in fact needed the same amount of labour-time as before; but the product of his individual hour of labour now only represented half an hour of social labour, and consequently fell to one half its former value.’ Capital, transl. Ben Fowkes, vol 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) p. 129.
7 C.f. Norbert Trenkle, ‘Es rettet euch kein Billiglohn’ [‘Low wages won’t save you’], in Kurz, Lohoff, Trenkle, eds, Feierabend! Elf Attacken gegen die Arbeit [Knock off! Eleven Attacks on Work] (Hamburg 1999), online at http://www.krisis.org/1999/es-rettet-euch-kein-billiglohn.
8 Elmar Altvater writes: ‘US citizens can afford a higher level of consumption, ‘the American way of life’, although they are so highly indebted. [...] However, this is only possibly because of high savings-ratios in other regions, which allow the USA and its citizens to get carried away. The financial markets must therefore function in such a way that the world’s savings are flushed into the USA.’ Elmar Altvater, Das Ende des Kapitalismus – so wie wir ihn kennen [The End of Capitalism as We Know It] (Münster 2005), p. 135.
9 Lafontaine ironically offered Josef Ackermann membership of the German Left Party because of his support for government intervention into the banking system because of the finance crisis (Netzeitung, 20.3.2008). This only shows that when it comes to the administration of the crisis, all the political parties are singing from the same hymnsheet.
10 It is thus ridiculous to condemn banks for their losses in property speculation. They have only done what everyone expects of them in a boom: invested ‘their’ money as profitably as possible. If they hadn’t, the same ‘experts’ who are now shouting ‘scandal’ because of the high losses would certinla have criticised them for ‘false excessive caution’.
11 Here, however, there is a conflict of interest between the US and the EU on the horizon, which might well accelerate the crisis-dynamic. Whereas the USA is characteristically beating down interest rates, and has issued with lightning-speed a state-run economic programme worth around $150bn, the European governments and the European Central Bank are focused on combating inflation, and are refusing to cut interest rates further. The in many ways ridiculous claim results that the crisis is basically taking place in the USA, while the European economy is stable, as if they weren’t closely interconnected. It could lead to further falls in the US dollar, at which point the USA would lose its function as consumption-motor of the world economy. The connection that the ECB and EU-governments have tried to repress would then assert itself violently.
12 On the analysis of this mechanism cf. Ernst Lohoff, ‘Out of Area – Out of Control’ Streifzüge 31 and 32 (2004), online at http://www.krisis.org/2004/out-of-area-out-of-control-1.
13 For example, large sections of the Italian anti-globalisation movement and social forums have allowed themselves to be integrated into Rifondazione Comunista and have thus been compelled at least indirectly to support the Prodi-government. This has to a great extent lost them their capacity to mobilise, and they are now standing before a political scrapheap…
14 Economists are even seriously discussing a return to the gold-standard, which would result in the complete devaluation of the dollar-debts that have built up over the last decades: ‘When nothing else works and no one wants weak dollars any more, America takes a step forward and pegs its currency to the gold-reserves in Fort Knox. The rest of the world, which has financed the US debt through the purchase of US-bonds, keeps an eye on the screen.’ Wirtschaftswoche 18.2.2008, p. 134.

Maria Wölflingseder

The new magic formula against poverty, unemployment and all other grievous dislocations is: “Invest in Social Capital. Enjoy immediate profit, the personal surplus value of voluntary activity. You, dear entrepreneur, create social and ecological surplus value.” Sociology has discovered “social capital” as a wonder cure.

People with an intact social network, many friends (and at least nine persons whom they can call in the night) and active charitably, with a high income and a secure job are optimistic and happier in all situations in life than others. This is analogously true for societies. Those regions in which persons live with high social capital are on a successful economic and political course. Social capital has dangerously disappeared in the last years and decades. Still through a stimulated “social capital research,” every citizen should be animated to re-appropriate this “quickly renewable resource.” Social capital is the trendy word for voluntary activity, “social competence” and “social engagement.” If these are lacking, the costs of the welfare system explode. Every individual and the communities should take responsibility – instead of delegating the problems to the “system” and worry about ecological and social concerns. This is urged by Agenda 21 and by groups that consume fair trade products and eco-electricity or propagate the coolness of public transportation. Obviously the macro-plane must be included. In the whole economy, there should be more cooperation and less competition, more sustainability and less conventional monetary striving for gain.

In his extolled work “New Values for the Economy. An Alternative to Communism and Capitalism,” the leading thinker in the cause of capital reification Christian Felber, co-founder of Attac Austria, celebrates how easily the economy can be turned to the better. With its sky-blue book cover, the book follows his earlier bestseller “50 Proposals for a Just World.” “While most of the proposals are positive, they all encounter a common obstacle: the profit-interest of powerful corporations.” Still this contradiction can be removed. The legislators (!) only need to give other goals to private businesses, rewarding them for their public interest instead of their profit making. Then the “hocus pocus” of the growth pressure in the economy would be unnecessary because one business would no longer have to realize a higher profit than the others or devour one another. The annihilation competition would be extinguished. Capital would change from an end to a good means.

Even the World Bank is calculating wealth no longer only in GDP but increasingly including social criteria. In remote Bhutan, the absolutist-Buddhist kingdom, new happy democratic times appear. The sociologist, cultural anthropologist and extraordinary university professor Andreas Obrecht explored the cultural, social and economic effects of the electrification of this backward country carried out with Austrian development cooperation. In his radio feature (2008), he reported how the remote village population – that hardly came in contact with money – first learned to rightly value their work. To pay for the furnished electricity, they have to objectify themselves from now on in paid labor. This circumstance is registered pointblank as a success by our researchers. Obrecht emphasizes how the “gross social happiness” begins to multiply. Like many others, he also speaks of spirituality in this connection. Sometimes it is of Buddhist origin but always involves solidarity with a greater whole arising through the new value community. Investment should be in social capital, which includes spirituality, and not in short-term pleasure.

Can all these positively applied terms from the capitalist economy be imagined “garnished with religion”? Don’t alarm bells ring for critics? Seeing the connection and effects of capitalist conditions and questioning its foundations is manifestly such a great taboo that no costs and efforts are spared in bending capitalism, stylizing it as colorful and flavoring it to be tasty so it can be presented as a humanized, ecological and tamed alternative. All this recalls the esoteric movement. It also positively remodels everything unbearable and grievous. For example, the oppression and discrimination of the woman should be annulled by means of spiritual eco-feminism by describing the feminine as outdated and the rescuer. All this very superficial criticism is obviously fruitless… “One cannot solve problems with the way of thinking that created the problems.” Without this helpful discovery formulated by Albert Einstein, nothing will change for the better.

(Abridged translation by Marc Batko, published at miami.indymedia.org)

Why the collapsing of the financial bubble is not the fault of “greedy bankers” and why there can be no going back to a social welfare capitalism

A new version of the “stab in the back” legend of the 1920s and ‘30s is making the rounds: “our” economy has supposedly fallen victim to the limitless greed of a handful of bankers and speculators. Gorged on the cheap money of the U.S. Federal Reserve and backed up by irresponsible politicians, these greedy bankers have–so the legend goes–brought the world to the edge of the abyss, while honest people are made to play the fools.

Nothing could be more contrary to fact nor, given its demagogic and even anti-Semitic propensity, as dangerously irrational as this notion–now being broadcast across the entire spectrum of public opinion. It stands things on their heads. The cause for the current misery is not to be sought in the huge over-valuation of financial markets; the latter was itself not a cause but an effect, a mechanism aimed at avoiding the real, underlying crisis with which capitalist society has been confronted ever since the 1970s. That was when the post-WWII boom, and the long and self-sustaining period of growth made possible by the generalization of industrial production methods and their expansion into new sectors such as auto-making, came to an end. Mass production of commodities in the 1950s and 1960s required additional masses of labor-power–labor-power thereby in a position to attract the flow of wages and means of subsistence that in turn enabled it to go on mass-producing such commodities. Since then, however, widespread rationalization of the core, world market-oriented sectors of production has displaced ever greater quantities of labor-power through processes of automation, thus destroying the basis for this “Fordist” mechanism and with it the precondition for any renewed tendency towards prosperity in the real economy. Capitalist crisis in its classical form gives way to an even more fundamental crisis in which the viability of labor itself comes to the fore.

De-valorized labor power –“superfluous” human beings?

The real insanity of the capitalist mode of production is expressed in the contradiction between the enormous advance in productivity brought about by the “microelectronic revolution” and the fact that that advance has not even come close to guaranteeing the possibility of a good life for all. On the contrary: work itself has been intensified, its tempo accelerated and the pressure to produce ramped up even more. Across the world, more and more people must sell their labor-power under the worst possible conditions because, as measured against the standard set by the current level of productivity worldwide, that labor-power is increasingly de-valorized.

But it is also a contradiction of capitalism that, in the process of becoming ‘too productive,’ it wrenches its own foundations out from under its feet. For a society that rests on the exploitation of human labor-power collides with its own structural limits as it renders this labor-power, to an ever-greater degree, superfluous. For over thirty years, the dynamic of the world economy has only been sustained thanks to the inflation of a speculative and credit bubble – what Marx termed “fictional capital.” Capital is diverted into the financial markets because the real economy no longer offers adequate investment possibilities. States go into debt to maintain their budgets and more and more people finance their own consumption, directly or indirectly, at the credit pump. In this way finance turned into the “basic industry” of the world market and the motor of capitalist growth. The “real economy” now so suddenly prized is not forced into submission by finance. On the contrary: it could only flourish as the latter’s appendage. The “Chinese economic miracle” and Germany’s so-called world-class export economy would never have been possible except for the gigantic, global recycling of debt that has been going on for more than twenty years, with the USA at the center of it all.

Crisis management and stagflation

Such methods of postponing an eventual collapse have now reached their limit. There is no reason to be overjoyed about this. The effects will be dramatic in the extreme. For the combined potential for economic crisis and de-valorization that has been building up over the last thirty years is now exploding violently into the here and now. Politics in the accepted sense may be able to influence the tempo and the trajectory of this process. But it is inherently incapable of stopping what has, in truth, become unstoppable. Either the rescue packages themselves, already topping the trillions, will go up in smoke, and the crisis will break through into the “real economy” with catastrophic results. Or they will catch hold of the runaway train one more time with the result being an exorbitant increase in national debt, followed by another, still more gigantic collapse in the near future. The return of “stagflation”—galloping inflation combined with a simultaneous recession—is already looming, and at much higher levels than in the 1970s.

The last decades have already seen massive downward pressure on wages, a descent into ever more precarious working conditions and the privatization of large parts of the public sector. The present crisis means that, to a degree previously undreamt of, ever-greater numbers of human beings will simply be declared “superfluous.” The much-invoked “new role of the state” has not the slightest chance of recreating a 1960s style social welfare capitalism, with full employment and a rising standard of living. What it portends, rather, is the organization and administering of racist and nationalist policies of social exclusion. The return of “regulation” and “state capitalism” is at this point conceivable only as an authoritarian and repressive form of crisis management.

The world is too wealthy for capitalism

The present financial crisis marks a turning point in the epoch of fictional capital and with it a new stage in the underlying crisis of capitalism already discernable in the 1970s. This is not just the crisis of a specifically “Anglo-Saxon system” of “neoliberalism,” as is widely affirmed amidst the current emotional outburst of European anti-Americanism–an outburst in which, however faint as yet, the echoes of anti-Semitism are unmistakable. What is clearly apparent now, rather, is that the world is and has long been too rich in relation to the stinginess of the capitalist mode of production—and that society will break apart, unravel and sink into a morass of poverty, violence and irrationalism if we do not succeed in overcoming that mode of production.

It is not the “speculators” and the financial markets that are the problem, but the utter absurdity of a society that produces wealth only as a waste product of the valorization of capital, whether as a real or a fictional process. The return to a seemingly stable capitalism, kept standing by the onslaught of massive armies of labor, is neither possible nor anything worth striving for.

Whatever sacrifices now being demanded of us in order to perpetuate the (self)destructive dynamic of this senseless mode of production and the capitalist way of life count only as an obscene mockery of the good and decent existence long since within reach in a society beyond commodity production, beyond money and beyond the state. With the present crisis the question of the system itself is finally being posed. It is time that we answered it.

Please distribute this text as widely as possible. Downloadable as a .PDF file at: www.krisis.org

Printed by: Förderverein Krisis e.V.
Postfach 81 02 69, 90247 Nürnberg

deutsche Version

www.stateofnature.org

Andreas Exner, Christian Lauk & Konstantin Kulterer

“If there is a lack of appropriate analysis of environmental processes and societal relations to nature because they don’t fit into the wishful thinking of ‘eternal capitalism,’ dangerous ways of ideologically processing the crisis can gain momentum.”

Rising prices for food are increasing hunger, a global recession is waiting in the wings, and at the same time, energy is getting more and more expensive. Within only a few years, the terrain has changed dramatically for left movements. Nonetheless, many people are still holding on to well-known formulas. Unfortunately, they don’t fit the new circumstances.

1. The Age of Peaks

Rising oil prices are debated in very contradictory ways. Some claim that OPEC’s market power is the main source of sky-rocketing energy prices; others criticize the role of speculation or blame oil companies, demand in developing countries, or the war in Iraq.

Studies indicating that rising fuel prices could already be a consequence of peak oil, the maximum rate of oil production, go almost unnoticed. The Energy Watch Group dates peak oil back to 2006; others place it in the coming years. In fact, the crisis isn’t going to wait until the last drop of oil is being pumped out of a Saudi oil field, but begins when the rate of oil production starts to decline and neither the existing demand nor, for that matter, a growing one, can be met. After the peak, oil production will be cut back each year at a rate of two or more percent.

The IEA’s message that the global economy is headed for a “supply crunch” has also gone nearly unnoticed. Similar tones are heard from the company Total, which claims that oil production is becoming more difficult all the time. Even EU energy commissioner, Andris Piebalgs, has warned about peak oil. Nothing like this enters the common debate on climate change or registers within mainstream eco-movements. One might wonder about this, since high oil prices were seen as the magic bullet for ecological transformation. Is it possible that even the Greens have secretly based their aspirations on black gold?

Be that as it may, peak oil is only part of the problem. The Energy Watch Group places global peak gas and peak coal in 2025. In Europe, as well as the US, definitive regional peak gas will come earlier. In any case, other fossil fuels will become more expensive when demand is transferred to them, all the more so because the effort necessary to produce gas and coal will increase.

Fossil fuels make up about 80% of worldwide energy use. The lion’s share of renewable resource use is in the traditional use of firewood in the global South. Gas and oil are also the main raw materials for chemical industries. Synthetics, pharmaceuticals, and pesticides are produced from crude oil, and nitrogen-fertilizer manufacturing requires gas (or coal) as well.

Thus we not only have an energy problem, but we also need to reorganize our material flows. Consider the need for synthetic fiber in the textile industry and you can imagine how much of the earth’s surface will be grazed by sheep or covered with cotton or hemp in order to replace oil with biological raw materials. The more surface is needed for material use, the less remains for food production. This dilemma becomes even more dramatic as climate change reduces productivity in agriculture and nutrient fertilizer becomes increasingly scarce after peak gas is reached.

The upshot: as soon as the “underground forests” of fossil materials grow thin, only surface expansion will remain to make up our material and energy needs. But the world is round and expansion of the energy and material consumption of the few will cost the lives of many, especially if fossil fuels are to be replaced by biomass.

2. From Accumulation to Depreciation

Besides oil, the prices of many kinds of metals are also rising, and the renewable energy system needs a lot of them. Small wonder, then, that the number of newly installed wind-power plants in Germany is declining and that increasing raw-material prices are also hampering the expansion of solar power. To understand why so many activists and theoreticians on the left are fixated on growth, consider a simple fact: the ostensible ecological transformation of capitalism is only possible if it includes profit and growth. It is, however, a mistake to assume that capital will switch to renewable resources on its own as soon as fossil fuel prices rise. The reality is not so: with rising fuel prices all prices rise. Renewable resources won’t become attractive by themselves, and in a global recession, the financial means for green investments will disappear as well. Ecological reconstruction will be left in nothing but half-finished ruins.

If we are to proceed in our reality check, we also have to see that the whole system of energy distribution and use is adapted to fossil fuels: pipelines, oil tankers, all possible motor engines, and simple heating installations. Reconstructing energy provision will not be enough. Massive reconstruction of all of our technologies and infrastructure is required. Of course, as long as capitalist relations of production exist, this rebuilding is only possible if there are real and expected profits. This basic fact constrains state budgets and green government policies as well.

Apart from the bottleneck of capitalist valorization, there exists also a material transition problem: if too-small quantities of fossil resources are invested for constructing renewable material and energy systems over too long a time span, they will, at some point, no longer be sufficient to produce materials and energy in amounts comparable to today. By contrast, scarcity will intensify and growth will slow down if too many fossil (and mineral) resources are directed toward ecological restructuring in too short a time.

Fordism has not only shifted its contradictions towards its periphery, but even into the future. In the 20th Century, intense social struggles led to a specific mode of conflict management that consisted of polluting nature in accordance with growth. This productivist social contract between capitalists and the working class came at cost to the natural resources necessary for survival. Now it is coming back to haunt us, in the form of climate change et al., in the centers of the capitalist world-system as resources become scarce. At this point social struggles rise again.

As a result, the perspectives of those who bet on a new accumulation regime, in the wake of the fossil-fuel regime, will grow scarce. It is not only clear that the internal contradictions of capitalism have no potential for liberation, but it is precisely this contradictory dynamic that resulted in the increased appropriation of nature. Moreover, it is also clear that capitalist-bourgeois society is not suited for its self-transformation in a Hegelian sense of “Selbstaufhebung,” but for its self-destruction. Accumulation of capital is also the accumulation of waste and the depletion of natural resources. The empirical data are unambiguous in this regard. It has to be just as clear: an absolute reduction of consumption, emissions, and waste production is impossible as long as capital accumulates.

When the value of fossil (and metallic) raw materials increases because the extraction continuously grows more expensive and brings in smaller returns on investments, the value of societal capital is likewise affected. The value of the means of production increases, including equipment for the extremely capital-intensive and increasingly energy-intensive oil sector while the value of labor power increases as long as the commodified standard of living remains fairly constant. Under this assumption, the amount of time expended on social reproduction increases causing unpaid labor time to be reduced. Consequently the rate of surplus value falls, being nothing other than the relationship between unpaid to paid labor time. Likewise, the degree of value composition of capital, i.e. the relation of dead to (paid) living labor ” a relation expressed by capital intensity in terms of prices ” will probably increase. But even if we suppose the degree of value composition remains stable, the profit rate will inevitably fall.

The only solution would be to extend labor time, to enhance labor intensity and reduce the standard of living considerably in terms of commodities – provided that the surplus value rate then increases faster than the degree of value composition. However, this 19th-Century accumulation strategy risks everything in the face of social upheaval, and, most of all, it cannot valorize the fossil-driven capital at its existing scale.

Unlike previous crises, this ecological crisis of capital is not paving the way for a new phase of accumulation because it is not just destroying abstract economic value as expressed by money, but also the use value of the affected assets in particular. Destruction of value, as is the normal case in a capitalist crisis, leaves use values – infrastructure, machinery, commodities etc. – mostly untouched. Hence it improves the conditions for surviving capitals to accumulate.

Even if there is a new upswing in a particular region or sector, resource peaks will limit it. Any restricted upswing would also occur on a reduced level of output. Instead of a new regime of accumulation, there comes a global regime of depreciation. Seen from the perspective of capital, the best case would be an “accumulation in retreat,” functionalizing the rest of the world from the metropolitan bastions in order to change the resource basis in the form of oil and biomass imperialism, thus “financing” energetically the resource-intensive transition to renewable resources on an industrial scale in the global North.

3. Fetishizing the Crisis

Because the left is still a modernization movement, it has, if anything, a harder time focusing on the age of peaks than the ruling classes. Capitalist relations of production are essentially secondary for the safeguarding of domination. Only access to resources and to people’s living time must be guaranteed and their exploitation sufficiently legitimized.

So we must avoid watching out for a new regime of accumulation that will never come, because in doing this, we lose precious time to adapt to the new situation while the ruling class will use it for a fundamental restructuring. The other danger is that, in misinterpreting the current developments, the left gives space to ideologies fetishizing the ecological crisis. If there is a lack of appropriate analysis of environmental processes and societal relations to nature because they don’t fit into the wishful thinking of “eternal capitalism,” dangerous ways of ideologically processing the crisis can gain momentum. Such crisis reactions can easily be used to legitimize repression, resource wars, and annihilation of human life.

We all know that according to the dominant perspective, which is by no means the perspective of the dominant classes alone but also that of the dominated, the level of investment and consumption of the global North can never be the cause of misery. It is much easier to blame the Chinese or even overpopulation. A new fetishism is already visible, one that does not recognize the crisis of societal relationships with nature as such, but declares a part of society as part of the realm of nature. In the age of peaks racism and sexism might overtake anti-Semitism as the classic crisis ideology in the capitalist metropoles.

4. Socio-ecological Condensations

Despite the fact that climate change and peak oil are just two sides of the same mode of consumption and production, those two debates are, for the most part, strictly separated. When they do converge, a rationing discourse emerges. The cap-and-share approach of FEASTA (The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability), for instance, aims at regulation that grants all individuals, without any conditions, the same portion of emission rights (with a declining rate each year). The Irish government is already interested in this approach. David Fleming’s concept of Tradable Energy Quotas has been discussed by British politicians.

FEASTA proposes an egalitarian solution to the problem of energy shortages and the reduction of greenhouse emissions that amounts to a de facto socialization of businesses’ fossil resource inputs. In contrast to FEASTA, David Fleming plans to endow the state apparatus, as well as private business, with a total of 60% of fossil rations and emission rights a priori – a portion that the state and business would, however, have to purchase by auction. Approaches like Richard Heinberg’s Oil Depletion Protocol explicitly propose to ignore issues of social domination in the face of the crisis. The social and ecological questions congeal in the form of a new terrain of social struggles, comprising options for emancipation as well as many traps.

The age of peaks is changing the material-ecological conditions fundamentally, irreversibly and without precedent. The left, which has grown up with fossil resources, must adapt to these conditions as quickly as possible. This must also lead to a reconsideration of perspectives, strategies, and models of emancipation. Do “progress” or “liberation” from a supposed “realm of necessities” still make sense?

It is doubtful. As a left perspective in the age of peaks, reduction is on the agenda instead of growth. Infrastructures and social relations, which expanded during the 20th Century based on continuously expanding fossil resources, are literally made of desert sand. It is time to get rid of this dead weight.

What will sound unreasonably demanding to many is, to the contrary, a historical opportunity. Not only does it force us to do “what we always wanted to do,” i.e. live better instead of producing more, work less and drastically reduce fossil fuel consumption; but it also creates a real and very rare possibility: The structures of social domination must fundamentally reorganize themselves, and so become vulnerable. From there, they can continue in a new social form with a stationary “economy” on a renewable basis, or we can abolish them altogether.

Translation: Joe Keady

This article published in: Freitag 13, 3/30/2007

The wildest threatening scenarios are often nothing but hallucinated analogies. Whoever accepts everything as a supposedly lesser evil will justify evil and monstrosities.

Franz Schandl

The 20th century was the bloodiest century in the history of humanity. The 21st century could break this record. The arsenals are full or can be full at any time. We live in times of insecurity of the worldwide political system. That is realistic though it may sound cynical. As everybody knows, growth in all areas is a principle of capital accumulation. A black scenario is unfolding today in the Middle East where suffering and brutality constantly increase.

That the West can do anything is not questioned any more. Whether it should do what it can do is discussed. Only the opportuneness of the moment for military interventions (with and without a UN mandate) is usually interesting. That this arrogance hardly attracts attention speaks volumes. The matter-of-factness with which the Occident acts out of human rights- and economic-superiority – literally subverts, intervenes and bombs – shows the overbearing nature of this policy. The error striking with Ahmadinedschad is not striking with local exponents. To Chirac, Teheran’s nuclear bomb direction is not a problem.

The fundamentalism of the white man and his democratic values reaches into the left…

After Saddam Hussein, Mahmud Ahmadinedschad is now unmasked as a national socialist. Instead of thinking in a more complex way, the facts of the case are slandered as trivialization and appeasement, anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. The parallels click into place and the tickets are issued. Real dangers are not discussed but rather the wildest threatening scenarios that are often nothing but hallucinated analogies outside all real power relations. Subjunctives are rated highly and easily defeat every indicative. What is reality against a projection? It could be and therefore!

Ahmadinedschad is one who consistently applies a conventional political logic. Ahmadinedschad claims for himself what was self-evident for others for centuries. Nuclear power and nuclear bombs as technologies are important parts of the capitalist system. No fears of cultural contact exist. Who is astonished that times are past when nuclear technology was regarded as un-Islamic?

Caution is commanded regarding nervous headlines. One only needs to remember Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. These weapons could have existed but did not exist. Lies were repeated with full conviction.

The propagandistic pattern recalled the Cold War. After 1945, the Third Reich and the “evil empire,” the former Soviet Union, were equated by means of the insidious totalitarian formula. Nazi comparisons are again on the agenda. While Israel’s policy is compared with the Nazis in an incredible way, every Muslim is stylized as a Hitler.

An incredible lack of comprehension grows rampantly. This is manifest when one does not know who is a friend or an enemy. The de-historicized and exported Nazis serve as an alibi for diverse madnesses. To avert greater harm, this city has to be bombed, this land boycotted and this system blackmailed. So the argument goes. Reasons are found or invented if necessary. This regressive calculus is in a boom season. What can a prophylactic war against Iran accomplish other than an extensive fire? Is that the goal? Whoever accepts everything as a supposedly lesser evil will justify evil and monstrosities. Partisanship in the announced clash of cultures is practiced capitulation.

The alternative “transposition” means taking a standpoint beyond the planes of conflict amid the amplified dangers. This must not be confused with equidistance or ignorance and does not exclude concrete solidarity with victims. This solidarity is in effect for afflicted individuals, the ones who suffer in conflicts, not nations, collectives or states. Transposition does not mean either party or neutrality. It does not try to settle in the given coordinate system but emphasizes the destructiveness of confrontations. It is the ideal negation of conflict that leads to a real negation. It poses its questions and does not merely reply to questions. It rolls up banners and does not hoist flags. In short, weaken all the fronts! Come out of the trenches!

Whether transposition will prevail can certainly be doubted. If it does not succeed, the left faces an historical disaster. It will marginalize itself because it cannot set anything independent against the global barbarization. In the metropolises where we live, this means: no flank protection for the Occidental powers and no aiding and abetting war-mongerers. The debates finally move from a denunciatory to an argumentative plane. “This is wrong because” replaces “You are a… “

http://www.canalc2.tv/video.asp?idVideo=7033&voir=oui

new version June 2006

Neil Larsen, University of California, Davis

I.

“The whole is the untrue.”¹ This phrase, one of the signatures of Adorno’s most unmistakable work, Minima Moralia, points to an irony that perhaps not even its author could have discerned. Notwithstanding the truth of its bitter rebuke to the Hegelian dialectic as apology for capitalist modernity, as a philosophical dictum in its own right it would itself have to be judged false, fatal to any aspiration to dialectical thought. To that much, of course, Adorno testifies, both in practice–for neither Minima Moralia nor any other of his works reflect any doubt that critical theory, as part of its own conceptual movement, must strive for the totalization of its object– but also in theory: one need look no further than to Minima Moralia itself than to have this confirmed: “Dialectical thought opposes reification in the…sense that it refuses to affirm individual things in their isolation and separateness: it designates isolation as precisely a product of the universal.”² A refusal to isolate means a commitment to totalize, albeit a non-Hegelian one. The alternative would be to succumb to the reified consciousness of the object in its sheer immediacy. The “whole” may be the “untrue,” but that does not make the part the truth. Both become false, at least from the immediate standpoint of “wrong life” reflected, consciously and without apology, by Minima Moralia.

The less conscious, perhaps inadvertent irony in these words, however, is how true they become in relation to Adorno’s own formal mode of self-presentation-that is, as a reflection on the relationship of his thinking to the language and style in which it is conveyed. With only a few exceptions, this is a language that, outwardly at least, resists its own mediation by any formal standard of systematicity or argumentative blueprint. Any reader of Adorno, from the newcomer to the initiate and academic exegete, experiences this, for example, in the great difficulty one has in summarizing-and also at times in retaining-his arguments. As I can confirm from my own experience in teaching Adorno’s works and assigning my students to produce such summaries, this can seem to be a virtually impossible task. The end result is often little more than a list of citations, almost always a sampling of Adorno’s aphoristic and dialectically tensed sentences. Consider for example-taking Horkheimer’s co-authorship as moot in this regard–the chapter on the Culture Industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment. How is one to outline or condense the logic of its argument as a whole? One can attempt a gloss, or look up one of the reasonably good ones already published, but sooner or later, if the text itself is followed closely, the conclusion seems inevitable that this logic, though everywhere in force, does not so much develop by stages as it reiterates itself continuously and in shifting empirical and polemical contexts. From its opening statement-”Culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio and magazines form a system.”³ -the “whole” is, in essence, already expounded, and, although someone not immediately persuaded by it might in the end succumb to the sheer thrust-almost a kind of fury-of its will to truth and to its sociological sweep, nothing in Dialectic of Enlightenment that follows can be said to take on the burden of proving it, or any other in the series of emphatic, unrelentingly indicative-mood sentences that follow it and that, in effect, make up the entire text of chapter and work themselves. Here, as, to one degree or another throughout Adorno’s corpus, the “untruth” of the “whole” can only be eluded through constant exertions to wrestle the latter into virtually every lexical predication. That Adorno’s thinking at any given point in its development and formal presentation forms a coherent, exquisitely reflective and mediated whole, supple and adaptive, is in no way contradicted by this. But the movement of thought through language is at the same time an inward, condensing movement of language within itself, a movement toward what is, for the logical organization of Adornian critical prose, a fusion of dialectics and style at the level of such language’s smallest moving part: the sentence or short, aphoristic sequence of sentences. So, for instance, a sentence taken almost at random: “There is laughter because there is nothing to laugh about.” (112) Or another: “What is offered [in photographic images] is not Italy but evidence that it exists.” (119) Or again: “The consumer becomes the ideology of the amusement industry, whose institutions he or she cannot escape.” (128) The last of these sentences, somewhat more theoretically explicit, is probably a better choice than the former for the would-be précis of “The Culture Industry,” but the essay’s claim to truth, and its corresponding power of conviction, seems to weigh equally in each of them. All such sentences or dicta appear to elaborate, in an iterative or serial structure, on a logic that is virtually identical and whole in each of them.

No one, of course, was more aware of this than Adorno himself, and one can find reflections on this form of presentation throughout his writings⁴. But nowhere is the latter more poignantly evoked than in one of the centerpieces of Notes to Literature, “The Essay as Form.”⁵ What Adorno observes there-essayistically-of the essay,-e.g., that it “allows for the consciousness of nonidentity, without expressing it directly”; that it “is radical in its non-radicalism, in refraining from any reduction to principle, in its accentuation of the partial against the total, in its fragmentary character” (9)- not only provides the elements for a general theory of the essay-form but is as good an account as any of what Adorno’s readers should, ideally, experience if form remains true to its intention.

But such reflections on what amounts to Adorno’s fundamental formal principle, the node at which style and theoretical aim merge in what we might refer to schematically here as Adorno’s dialectical minimalism, are not the end of the story. Even if Adorno is right about the cognitive and critical powers of the “methodically unmethodical” (“The Esssay as Form,” 13) -and, as could be argued, his dialectical minimalism has succeeded, probably beyond Adorno’s wildest dreams, in generalizing itself as a kind of (ironically) popular-cultural voice of critical-theoretical authenticity, a voice that no one striving for such authenticity, including the author of these lines, can resist trying to imitate-there remain the questions both of the deeper, historico-genetic origin of such language and of what might be its own ideological limitation, its own possible moment of “untruth.” At the very least we are faced with a theoretical and formal paradox staring back at us from virtually every page of Adorno’s work as a critical theorist: namely, why has the “whole” become the “untrue” for the formal, expressive tendency of a thinking that, in relation to any given object, knows-and ultimately reflects this knowledge in its own content and movement-just the opposite? This is the question I want to discuss, however speculatively, in these pages.

II.

One way to attempt to illuminate this paradox is to consider how Adorno’s dialectical minimalism compares to the inevitable model for all modern, critical-dialectical prose, namely the language of Marx, and above all that of Capital. Even if, philosophically and, in a sense, philologically speaking, the most visible debt of the Adornian dialectic is to Hegel, Adorno’s re-thinking of the form of critical theory in relation to totality and system is unquestionably mediated by Adorno’s own positive theoretical relationship to Marx, however problematic this relationship and however reluctant he seems to have been to address it explicitly. Consider, in this light, one of Marx’s most distinctive and enigmatically dialectical mots from the concluding, fourth section (on the “fetishism of commodities”) of the first chapter of Capital I: “Value, therefore, does not have its description branded on its forehead. It rather transforms every product of labor into a social hieroglyphic.”⁶ This two-sentence sequence contains the dialectical chiasmus or inversion typical of Marx as a dialectical stylist: the objective, reified surface of the capitalist social formation appears as something self-evident, as transparent. The value-form is socially tacit, its own logic apparently already given in universal social practice. But it is just this apparent self-evidence, this objective transparency, which conceals the essence, the fundamental synthetic principle of capitalist society. The value-form is a fetish-form, not because it is mysterious (a “hieroglyphic”) per se, but because it exists in a relationship of mutual determination with an objective social nexus that itself turns its products into fetishes and its own social “bearers” into fetish-worshippers. The truth of the value-form is hidden in its own transparent self-evidence, both practically and theoretically. To decipher value one first must understand how value converts the social totality itself into a cipher.

Adorno, more than most Marxists of his day-and thanks, clearly, to being as much the student of Hegel as was Marx himself-knew how to read Capital, and, down to the sentence level, could reproduce the same dialectical, logico-stylistic movement evident there, often in the same inverted or chiasmic form. Thus the Culture Industry, as theorized in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, does not dominate its consumers by hectoring or lulling them into subservience. It dominates them precisely by making them free to consume its products, that is, by virtue of already having taken on a social objectivity existing “behind the backs” of consumers who, say, even when switching off the television, continue to reproduce the essence of its “message” in their own heads. The Culture Industry, like value, represents the outward, objective form of what the subjects of the dominant, reifying social relation already are qua subjects.

But the position of Marx’s dictum within the whole that is Capital is in no way arbitrary. Marx could not have opened the chapter on the commodity with it because the truth that it condenses, here in a quasi-aphoristic style, about the object of Marx’s critique-the value-form-must already have been shown by means of the rigorously theoretical argument that precedes the concluding, fourth section of the chapter on the commodity. The objective transparency of value in its form of appearance has already been proven by Marx to disclose, within its own immanent terms, its mysterious, fetishized essence. That the value-relation self-evidently exists and just as self-evidently rests on an equation of qualitatively different kinds of labor and use-values serves as the unshakeable premise here from which it follows that value must appear as a paradoxically “social substance” residing in commodities as their seemingly material, thing-like property. And that result, judged by the same standard of self-evidence furnished by the value-relation itself, must be deemed false. The classical political-economic theory of Smith and Ricardo succumbs to the commodity-fetish, convicting itself, ultimately, on its own, immanent terms. The incomparable critical force of Marx’s chiasmic dictum on the value-form and of his mode of presentation generally in Capital rests on this proof, and the remainder of Capital proceeds to extrapolate from it and to build a theoretical system on its rigorous foundation.

Not so the dialectical sentences of “The Culture Industry.” In Adorno’s defense, it must doubtless be acknowledged that his own thinking also, even if only implicitly, strives consistently to follow through on this theoretically rigorous point of departure, or at least to keep its radical truth constantly in view. Moreover, insofar as the objects of Adornian critique are cultural or ideological in form, the standards of proof themselves become considerably more difficult to meet, far more complexly mediated. But that should not, in principle, have prevented Adorno-much less prevent his contemporary readers and students-from attempting to hold critical theory and immanent critique to this same, rigorous standard. The abjuring of systems and “false” wholes, whether in the name of the “individual” or the “non-identical,” may begin to look like little more than theoretical abdications in light of the systematic, logical standard set by Capital. Yet, already in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno appears to require of his readers that they somehow learn to overcome the expectation that the logical articulations and truth-claims of immanent critique could meet such standards of proof. Ironically, given what is on one level its profound philosophical rigor, nothing in Adorno’s thinking is proven-unless, that is, one is willing or able to share Adorno’s evident suspicions that anything not already reified and turned into a piece of “positive” knowledge could be proven, or that proof could count any longer as anything more than the perpetual, emphatic disclosure of the object’s sheer negativity. The movement of what would be the proof for Adorno, if one were (or perhaps when one is) possible, appears to coil itself within the dialectical springs of style and language themselves, in the intuitive hope, if not faith, that the critically-theorized object in its own worldly course will shine through the words themselves when the moment is right. But in the meantime, a possible moment of self-apology has to be acknowledged in Adorno: for surely it is not the essay, as Adorno (self-referentially) describes it in “The Essay as Form,” that constitutes the “critical form par excellence” (18). The form of Capital-a form regarding which one might indeed speculate (to what genre does Capital belong?) but which is certainly not that of the essay-sets this standard, and sets aside and humbles any claims lodged on behalf of a “methodically unmethodical” flux of quasi-Nietzschean aphorisms, however dialectically-charged and true such sentences may be, in their particularity, to their Marxian point of origin.

Marx, it will be useful to recall, reflects on the methodological question of the whole in a widely-read section of the introduction to the Grundrisse subtitled “The Method of Political Economy.”⁷ There he acknowledges the seemingly more obvious method of “beginning with the real and concrete”-in economics, population-and then moving “analytically towards ever more simple concepts (e.g., class, exchange, division of labor) from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until [arriving] at the simplest determinations.” (100) This method he contrasts to the inverse, less spontaneous one of beginning with such simple determinations-with abstract concepts-and ascending from these back to the level of the concrete whole: “Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second the abstract determination leads towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought.” (101) The latter is, according to Marx, “obviously the scientifically correct method.” (ibid.) Although one should stipulate here that, on this plane of generality, the “scientifically correct method” is still that of the classical political-economic systems (Smith and Ricardo primarily) which Marx takes as his own immanent object of critique, it is also clear that, formally, Capital too adheres to this method too by starting with the commodity, or value-form and deriving from it the structured sequence of theoretical categories (e.g., exchange, money, capital, surplus-value, etc.) that lead, theoretically, to the “concrete totality” that is the capitalist mode of production itself. Marx diverges-critically-from classical political economy by insisting on the historical, specifically bourgeois origin of the conceptual abstractions themselves. (Grundrisse, 105) While retaining their abstraction, however, their systematic inter-relation or structure in the methodological context of Capital is itself made possible by a historically evolved whole-a concrete totality-whose own structure and “laws of motion” Capital’s theoretical structure, in a sense, now comes to embody directly, i.e., to which it now becomes immanent. The simple determinations or conceptual abstractions work as abstractions without succumbing, as they do in classical political-economy, to their own reified, naturalized form because they have become, in Capital, historically-grounded moments of a totality that is not abstract. Thus the proof that value, in its social form of appearance, conceals the social whole that generates it is, on one level, a (theoretically) simple matter of showing that this whole is historical, that it has not always been and will, necessarily, become other than what it is. Capital’s “mode of presentation” (its Darstellungsweise in the terms of Marx’s postface to the second edition of Capital I) does not coincide with its “mode of investigation” (Forschungsweise) because only the former can reflect the immanent motion of the historical whole and set forth the theoretical system within which a rigorous proof of this historicity-a proof that does not revert to the reified, tautological form of classical political economy-is possible.⁸

Considered from precisely this vantage point, Adorno’s dialectical minimalism, his idiosyncratically dialectical dissidence in relation to the logic of the system and to rigorous theoretical method, at least on the level of his own Darstellungsweise, betrays neither a reversion to the naïve empiricism governed by the “chaotic concrete” nor a Hegelian-idealist equation of the whole with the concept itself. It bespeaks rather an adherence to the method of Capital in which, paradoxically, what should be the concrete, historical whole has itself undergone a kind of collapse back into abstraction. It is as if the “concrete totality” immanent to and thus mediating the theoretical abstraction and systematicity of Capital had inexplicably lost its historical source of motion and come to a halt. Concepts, in Adorno, retain their dialectical, non-reified form-thus evading their “bad” abstraction in, say, the theoretical poverties of positivism-but seem to resist their own methodological deployment on the level of a theoretical system. This is because the only concrete totality that could possibly ground a “totality in thought” already appears, to Adorno, to have falsified its own historical concept. Method itself, without ceasing to be sensed as necessary, grinds to a stop. There is no mediated, logical way to arrive at a whole that no longer, as in Capital, situates itself in thought as both the premise and the result of theoretical reasoning because this whole now confronts theory as a “bad” abstraction, as a given, as soon as its concept is invoked.

Thus the “whole,’”in this case, turns out to be “untrue” in still another sense-as the historical totality that, harkening back to but simultaneously annulling its methodological basis in Capital, mediates the conceptual abstractions of theory and method, only here with the apparent risk of stripping them of their truth. Mediation seems to turn back on itself, resulting in the paradoxical need for a dialectical immediacy. Faced, that is, with such a monolithically “false” whole it follows that only a dialectic that never for a moment turned its back on it, that denounced it and its absolute positivity incessantly, a dialectic that had bound itself–like Odysseus before the Sirens–to its own immediate surface as form, could hope to survive.

III.

The problem is that even if the thought positing it could somehow manage to preserve its own dialectical consistency and configuration, such a whole would not itself be dialectical and would work just as incessantly to annul the dialectical movement of its own immanent, critical reflection. This is, in effect, the argument advanced by Moishe Postone in Time, Labor and Social Dominationagainst Horkheimer’s “critical pessimism,’ but it would appear to apply with equal force to Adorno⁹. Observing the key influence of Friedrich Pollock’s theory of state capitalism on Horkheimer’s thinking, Postone notes a “theoretical turn taken [by the Frankfurt School] in the 1930s, wherein postliberal capitalism came to be conceived as a completely administered, integrated, one-dimensional society, one that no longer gives rise to any immanent possibility of social emancipation.” (84-85) This is a charge often made by “orthodox” Marxists and “revolutionary” theory generally against Critical Theory, and Adorno in particular-one recalls Lukács’s famous quip about Adorno having taken up residence in the “Grand Hotel Abyss”-but what lends particular force to Postone’s argument is its careful demonstration that Horkheimer’s was not merely a conjunctural but a “necessary pessimism” concerning the “immanent possibility that capitalism could be superseded.”(86) This paradoxically immanent historical necessity, ascribed by Horkheimer not to historical change and internal crisis but to stagnation and paralysis, is clearly a model for the paradoxically “orthodox” but apocalyptic embrace of the dialectical methodology of Capital evident in Adorno’s thinking. Postone likewise attributes such “critical pessimism” not to a deviation (as per Critical Theory’s “revolutionary” detractors) but to an unquestioned, uncritical adherence to “traditional Marxism” and especially to the latter’s identification of the revolutionary, critical standpoint with that of the proletariat, or ‘labor.’ Postone’s general critique of the latter position is too elaborate and far-reaching to summarize here, but its gist is that labor, no less than the commodity or value, is an abstract social form inseparable from capital and hence one whose crisis is subsumed within the crisis of capitalism as a whole. The counter-posing of “labor” to capital as if the former represented a positive, spontaneous, and necessary pathway to social emancipation fails to grasp a theoretical result worked out in Capital: that the abstracting of “labor” from the general form of purposive social activity already conforms to the logic, constitutive of capitalism, that counts as “productive” only activity that produces value. Take away the value-abstraction, however, and the logic of isolating “labor” from social praxis and reproduction falls with it. The concrete labor that produces use-value can, in capitalism, only serve as the vehicle or embodiment of the abstract labor productive of exchange-value – or, simply, of value. Making “labor” the revolutionary subject thus only reproduces the Ricardian standpoint that directly counter-poses the relations of production to those of distribution, reasoning, effectively, as if value, in its subjective, active form could somehow negate itself merely by abolishing its own form as a given, objective result. Thus the danger clearly arises that, in the wake of a conjunctural, political defeat of the proletariat as the representative of “labor,” a “pessimistic” theory might interpret this crisis as merely the eclipse of the subjective factor, leaving the objective side of “labor”-value-and the neo-Ricardian distortion of Capital firmly in place. This is the apocalyptic, “negative” re-affirmation of “traditional Marxism” that Postone attributes to Horkheimer:

We have seen that Horkheimer’s theory of knowledge had been based upon the assumption that social constitution is a function of “labor,” which in capitalism is fragmented and hindered from fully unfolding by the relations of production. He now begins to consider the contradictions of capitalism to have been no more than the motor of a repressive development, which he expresses categorially with his statement that “the self-movement of the concept of the commodity leads to the concept of state capitalism just as for Hegel the certainty of sense data leads to absolute knowledge.” Horkheimer has thus come to the conclusion that a Hegelian dialectic, in which the contradictions of the categories lead to the self-unfolded realization of the Subject as totality (rather than to the abolition of the totality), could only result in the affirmation of the existing order. Yet he does not formulate his position in a way that would go beyond the limits of that order, for example, in terms of Marx’s critique of Hegel and of Ricardo. Instead, Horkheimer reverses his earlier position: “labor” and the totality, which earlier had been the standpoint of critique, now become the grounds of oppression and unfreedom. (113-114)

Adorno was, to be sure, a more subtle thinker than Horkheimer, as apt to question the latter’s increasingly liberal positions on late capitalism as he was to share Horkheimer’s generally pessimistic view of the possibility of social emancipation. But the underlying connection between such pessimism and an ironic adherence to a traditional Marxist privileging of “labor” detected in Horkheimer by Postone has the potential to explain certain basic problems in Adorno’s thought as well. That an inverted, apocalyptical, but still implicitly labor-centered Marxism likewise suffuses and delimits the theoretical content of Dialectic of Enlightenment has, in fact, been argued recently and in detail by the German critical theorist Norbert Trenkle¹⁰. While acknowledging the path-breaking contribution of Horkheimer and Adorno to setting in motion a radical critique of Enlightenment, Trenkle-along with Robert Kurz, Ernst Lohoff and Roswitha Scholz one of the leading representatives of the critical school known as Wertkritik in German-speaking, left-wing circles-finds in the text of Dialectic of Enlightenment itself “the document of a critique always partially recanted out of fear of itself. Its argumentative movement is at least in part one that does not base itself in the dialectic of the thing itself but that is derived in opposition to it.”¹¹ This authentic, but, for Adorno and Horkheimer, displaced “dialectic of the thing itself” Trenkle argues to reside in “a fully determinate social relation, constituted by commodity and value-form.”¹² Although Adorno and Horkheimer clearly grasp and allow for this inner, dialectical connection of Enlightenment to value-form (to that extent showing their unmistakable debt, shared by virtually all Frankfurt School Critical Theory, to Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness) they reduce it in turn to a far more generalized, abstract, and anthropologized “abortive separation from Nature” (“misslungene Ablösung von der Natur”, 47) lying, apparently, at the threshold of primordial societalization. But by the very fact of this “reverse-projection” (“Rückprojektion”, 46) of the value-abstraction-an abstraction from all qualitative content, issuing in what for Kant becomes the pure, ahistorical formalism of Reason itself-back to the origins, so to speak, of “species-being,” Dialectic of Enlightenment reproduces the ideology of bourgeois Enlightenment itself, as the standpoint that (like the classical political-economic systems critiqued in Capital) regards all previous history as merely the incomplete working-out of itself, i.e., of the value-abstraction and its rationalist, philosophical sublimation. What distinguishes the teleology underlying Dialectic of Enlightenment from its bourgeois Enlightenment variant is not, finally, any substantive critical-theoretical break but the former’s “turn to resignation” (“resignative Wendung”):

What is described is no longer the glorious triumphal march of progress but the gloomy tread of fatality. Liberation from domination is never more than a flickering possibility, rendered groundless and no longer, in any case, the end-point of history. As correct and important as the critique of the idea of progress clearly is [in Dialectic of Enlightenment], it remains caught up in this idea itself. Insofar as it merely rejects the optimism of the idea of progress (the supposed necessity of liberation), it reproduces the historico-philosophical construct that forms its basis.¹³

Trenkle traces the same “negative” Enlightenment-teleology, the same tendency to recoil from the full, historical implications of a crisis of capitalist modernity only imperfectly glimpsed, to Adorno’s later works as well, specifically to Negative Dialectics. (See Trenkle, pp. 51-65) Here he criticizes Adorno’s attempt to “rescue” Kantian ethics as well as his ambiguous stance vis as vis the exchange abstraction: an abstraction accurately grasped (following Alfred Sohn-Rethel) as the underlying, social-form basis of “identity thinking” but simultaneously and paradoxically posited in a utopianized, purportedly reciprocal and non-capitalist form, freed from the fetters of surplus-value extraction, as if a kind of Kantian “ethics” of exchange could point beyond its own social and historical determination.

But Trenkle’s fundamental critical insight here-in effect, that Adorno can disclose the crisis of capitalist modernity as a crisis of the modern subject-form (and to that extent initiate a fundamental break with a “traditional Marxist” reduction of critical standpoint to class standpoint) only at the cost of a de-historicizing, abstract-universalization of this crisis itself-could, I think, be developed still further and help to unravel the more troubling aspects of Adorno’s aesthetics. This is the subject for a study of its own, exceeding the immediate limits of this essay. But its argument would run as follows: Adornian aesthetic theory can be considered to rest on a paradoxically dual conception of formal abstraction as a negative principle both qua mimesis (i.e., formal abstraction as the true, negative rendering of the “positive” reifications of late capitalism) and qua emancipation (the modern, abstract work of art as itself the only remaining historical line of flight or negative standpoint from which to oppose or resist said reificaiton). Following Postone, Trenkle and Wertkritik, one might see in this duality yet another working out of the logic of “critical pessimism”: that artistic form is inexorably driven to comprehend the equally inexorable tendency of the value-abstraction to negate, even to the point of self-annihilation, all social content, aesthetic included, follows from the historical specificity of capitalist crisis itself. But that such a mimetic negativity should double as a kind of social transcendental, that the aesthetic should, in some mysterious way, step in to redeem a lost social negativity, removes us once again to a plane of abstraction outside the historical specificity of the crisis of value-form. The abstract work of art suddenly takes up a position with respect to the value-abstraction essentially congruent with that of “labor” in traditional Marxism: as the “subjective” negation of an object that, as part of this same, pseudo-dialectical movement, expels from its own theoretical consciousness any and all principles of immanent negativity or contradiction. That “labor” falls away and the abstract work of art steps in to take its place thereby furnishes the “real abstraction” of value with a kind of historical alibi in the face of its real, and terminal, historical crisis.

IV.

But if, theoretically-that is, on the level of system-Adorno fails to integrate the real, concrete totality and scope of capital’s historical crisis into his thinking, it could, I think, be argued that he anticipates the virtual implications of such a crisis when his thinking takes as its objects the cultural, aesthetic, and ethical particularities of his own historical moment. Might it not be that when Adorno looks back at the “false” whole through its parts-when it is conceptually and formally the parts that mediate the whole-the tendency to historical abstraction in his thinking begins to be reversed? At least, might this not be so when the “parts,” as they almost invariably do, take on the form of immediacy of culture, the ethical and, especially, the aesthetic itself? Such might be a hypothetical conclusion to the above, sketched here only in rough outline.

This is a possibility intriguingly suggested by, among other things, the fact that Adorno’s least explicitly systematic work, the work that most closely adheres to the Benjaminian organizing principle of constellation-Minima Moralia-is also his most richly historicized. The inward, self-condensing movement of Adorno’s thought-form, at its apogee in Minima Moralia but detectable everywhere in his opus, would thus be provisionally explained by the fact that, when experienced through and at the level of its cultural particularities and immediacies, the fully historical truth of late-capitalist crisis, its reality as an absolute internal limit, no longer appears strictly as something that must (but cannot) be proven theoretically. On the level of culture and “wrong life” it is the objective immediacies of crisis that, so to speak, have already taken upon themselves the “burden of proof,” and the task of the critic then limits itself to assessing such truth-claims on their own, immanent terms. Adorno’s “minimalist” and stylized dialectic might then be understood as the form that, because it imitates the accidental, fragmentary form of its objects, permits him to render the historical truth of crisis to which such objects point without needing to have already worked out its theoretical critique-in advance, so to speak, of having formulated its concept. The movement towards totality, towards dialectical mediation and synthesis, a movement that takes place for Adorno within sentences as much or more than it does between them, could be seen, in this sense, as a direct way of giving provisionally conceptual shape to the historical mediation of aesthetic, cultural and ethical immediacies that do not yet, for him, add up to a historical whole. Such sentences might thus be said to constitute an idiom of crisis in lieu but also in anticipation of the rigorously theoretical formulation of what would be the latter’s theoretical concept.

But what then, might explain in turn the anticipatory, idiomatic reflection of a terminal crisis of capital that perhaps only now, in the wake of the demise of Fordism and of the advent of capital’s “third” (microelectronic) industrial revolution, becomes a possible object of theorization? From the critical standpoint worked out by contemporary critical theorists such as Postone and Trenkle-from the standpoint of the historical unity-in-crisis of capital and labor-the answer I propose here points us again to the ironic fact that, in the “minimalist” Adorno, it is, above all, the aesthetic object, not the political or economic (or philosophical) one, through and in relation to which his thinking seems to take on its richest, most concrete historical mediacy. Adorno would thus be understood as equipped, in essence, to think the crisis of capital immanently through the form of the aesthetic even while failing, in the end, to do so in the direct, systematic categories of philosophy and theory tout court. But this, surely, would reflect equally what is, for Adorno, the intuitive understanding of the aesthetic as what is directly negated not merely by the “false” whole of the Culture Industry’ or by bourgeois “Enlightenment” but by the value-abstraction itself. The social logic of the value-relation, of the “real,” fetishized abstraction of the commodity form, is, inexorably, to annihilate all aesthetic content and experience. (The same, perhaps, might be said as well of the negativity of ethical content in relation to the value-abstraction-such at least would appear to be an unspoken but absolute premise of Minima Moralia.) The more explicitly philosophical categories of Adorno’s thinking-such as “negative dialectics”-remain far more ambiguous and historically impoverished in this sense, erecting themselves in a negative relation not to the value-abstraction itself but to categories-such as “Enlightenment” or “identity”-that eventually, because of their own “bad” abstraction, find their way back, as Trenkle has observed, into Adorno’s philosophical standpoint itself. One should be careful to add here that the more explicitly philosophical claims of Adorno’s aesthetic theory, above all the argument that artistic abstraction (e.g., “serious music” in the essay on jazz) somehow exempts itself from the reifying, essentially nihilistic logic of the value-abstraction, suffer the same historical impoverishment. But when engaged by and situated within the mediate space of aesthetic, cultural and ethical objects in their particularity, Adorno guides himself unerringly by the historical truth that these objects themselves also, unconsciously, sense: that the terminal crisis of the society governed by the abstract “labor” and the logic of “self-valorizing value”, and the historical possibility of its negation, are all that now warrants their existence.

Notes

¹ My translation. The German original reads: “Das Ganze ist das Unwahre.” (Frankurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969) p.57. In a foonote to his translation of Minima Moralia (London: NLB, 1974, p.50) E.F.N. Jephcott notes Adorno’s inversion of Hegel’s dictum from The Phenomenology of Mind, “Das Wahre ist das Ganze,” but, curiously, opts for the word “false” rather than “untrue.”

² Minima Moralia, p. 71. These are the opening lines of fragment 45 (“‘How sickly seem all growing things’”), which, together, with 44 (“For Post-Socratics”) and 46 (“On the morality of thinking”) are this work’s most sustained reflection on dialectics. Similar language can be found throughout Adorno’s works, but the following passage from “Why Still Philosophy” (1962)-no less para-logical in its way than the earlier aphorism it qualifies-seems especially pertinent in this regard: Traditional philosophy’s claim to totality, culminating in the thesis that the real is rational, is indistinguishable from apologetics. But this thesis has become absurd. A philosophy that would still set itself up as total, as a system, would become a delusional system. Yet if philosophy renounces the claim to totality and no longer claims to develop out of itself the whole that should be the truth, then it comes into conflict with its entire tradition. (my emphasis; Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 7.))

³ Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) p. 94.

⁴ See, for example, the concluding paragraph of the “Dedication” in Minima Moralia, p. 18.

⁵ Notes to Literature, Vol. One trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) pp. 3-23.

⁶ Trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1990) p. 167.

⁷ Trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguing Books, 1993) pp. 100-108.

⁸ See Capital Vol. One, p. 102.

⁹ Time. Labor, and Social Domination: a Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

¹⁰ See “Gebrochene Negativität: Anmerkungen zu Adornos und Horkheimers Aufklärungskritik,” Krisis: Beitrage zur Kritik der Warengesellschaft #25 (2002) pp. 39-65.

¹¹ My translation. German original: “das Dokument einer Kritik, die sich immer wieder partiell zurücknimmt, weil sie vor sich selbst erschrickt. Ihre argumentative Bewegung ist wenigstens teilweise eine, die nicht in der Dialektik der Sache liegt, sondern sich dieser entgegenstemmt.” (39)

¹² My translation. German original: “eine ganz bestimmte, von Ware und Werte konstituierte gesellschaftliche Verhältnisse.” (47)

¹³ My translation. German original: Nicht mehr der glorreiche Siegesmarsch des Fortschritts wird beschrieben, sondern der düstere Gang des Verhängnisses. Befreiung von Herrschaft ist allenfalls noch eine aufblitzende Möglichkeit, die nicht mehr begründet werden kann, auf jeden Fall aber nicht mehr notwendiger Endpunkt der Geschichte. So richtig und wichtig die Kritik des Fortschrittsdenkens auch ist, sie bleibt doch in ihm befangen. Indem sie bloss seinen Optimismus (die angebliche Notwendigkeit der Befreiung) verwirft, reproduziert sie negative das ihm Zugrunde liegende geschichtsphilosophische Konstrukt…. (46)

Interview with Moishe Postone by Salih Selcuk

Pubished in YARIM, Istanbul, Feb. 2005

1. You reformulate the basic categories of Marx’s critique of political economy. According to you: where does Marxism reveal to be nowadays unsufficient, when it comes to explain capitalist society?

2. “Labor” seems to be the basic category that constitutes capitalist life, as you by the way claim it. Can one formulate today an intelligent critique of capitalism without criticizing labor?

My reformulation of the central categories of Marx’s critique of political economy was influenced in part by the massive global historical transformations since 1973. Retrospectively, from the vantage point of the early 21^st century, we can see more clearly that capitalism has existed in a number of different historical configurations – for example, 19^th century liberal capitalism, 20^th century state-centric “Fordist” capitalism and, now, neo-liberal global capitalism. This indicates that capitalism’s history cannot be adequately grasped as a linear development. It also, more importantly, indicates very strongly that capitalism’s most basic features cannot be identified completely with any of its more specific historical configurations.

I attempted, through a close reading of the most fundamental categories of Marx’s critique of political economy, to grasp the most basic features of capitalism – those that characterize the core of the social formation through its various historical configurations. On that basis I argued that traditional Marxism took basic features of liberal capitalism – the market and private ownership of the means of production – to be the most fundamental features of capitalism in general. Relatedly, it regarded the category of labor as the standpoint from which capitalism was criticized. Capitalism became identified with the bourgeoisie; socialism with the proletariat.

According to my interpretation, however, far from being the standpoint of the critique of capitalism, labor in capitalism constitutes the central object of Marx’s critique and is at the heart of Marx’s core categories of commodity and capital. I argued that, at the heart of the social formation is a historically specific form of social mediation constituted by labor – namely, value. This form of mediation (which is also a form of wealth) is at the same time a historically specific form of domination that can be expressed through, but is not identical with, class domination. It is abstract, without any specific locus, and is also temporally dynamic. This form of domination, which appears as external necessity, rather than as social, generates both the mode of producing in capitalism as well as its intrinsically dynamic character. It is, of course, impossible to even begin to go into the complexity of the issues involved, but several important implications are that industrial production, which historically comes into being under capitalism, does not represent the foundation of socialism, but is intrinsically capitalist; that the problem with growth in capitalism is not only that it is crisis-ridden, but that its very form of growth itself is problematic; that the existence of the bourgeois class is not the ultimate defining feature of capitalism and that state capitalism (briefly described by Marx as early as 1844) can and has existed; finally, that the proletariat is the class whose existence defines capitalism , and that the overcoming of capitalism involves the abolition, not the glorification, of proletarian labor.

Traditional Marxism had already become anachronistic in a variety of ways in the 20^th century. It was unable to provide a fundamental critique of the forms of state capitalism referred to as “actually existing socialism.” Moreover, its understanding of emancipation appeared increasingly anachronistic, viewed from the constituted aspirations, needs, and motivating impulses that became expressed in the last third of 20^th century by the so-called “new social movements.” Whereas traditional Marxism tended to affirm proletarian labor and, hence, the structure of labor that developed historically, as a dimension of capital’s development, the new social movements expressed a critique of that structure of labor, if at times in an underdeveloped and inchoate form. I argue that Marx’s analysis is one that points beyond the existing structure of labor.

3. According to you, the collapse of socialism is not the end of an alternative project, but the end of fordism. How and when has fordism gone over its limits?

4. Capitalism is more and more loosing it’s focus on the State and can’t therefore only be thought of in terms of national state. How is it possible – under these circumstances – to formulate an emancipatory prospective?

Viewed retrospectively, it seems increasingly clear that Soviet communism did not, in any meaningful sense, represent an overcoming of capitalism (i.e. socialism). This is the case not only because, as many have noted before, of the non-democratic and oppressive character of the regime, but also because the rise, apogee, and decline of the Soviet Union follows the historical trajectory of the rise, apogee, and decline of state-centric Fordist capitalism. This suggests that the Soviet Union should be understood as one variation of state-centric capitalism during the Fordist epoch, a variation whose specific form was intrinsically related to its attempt to create national (in this case, state-owned) capital on the basis of a rapid and brutal form of what Marx called “primitive accumulation.” A project of the constitution of capital on a national level cannot, on any level, be equated with a project for the overcoming of capital. One result of the history of the ideology of socialism in one country is that the Marxian critique of capitalism which is at its very core historical and, therefore, temporal, was replaced by a worldview which was at its core spatial (the idea of the socialist and capitalist “camps”) — an ideology that ironically represented an extension of the 19^th century “Great Game.”

The limits of the state-centric Fordist configuration of capitalism were revealed by the crisis of the early 1970s, which led to a dismantling of that configuration (although there are differing interpretations of the underlying bases of that crisis). Eventually a new, neo-liberal global configuration of capitalism emerged. It is noteworthy in this regard that the rapid decline of the Soviet Union began in the 1970s and not in the 1980s, that is, not as a result of Afghanistan or of the intensified arms race with the US. The Soviet form of state-centrism proved too rigid to adjust to the crisis of the 1970s. On the other hand, Deng’s policies in China could be interpreted as expressing an insight that the age of state-centrism was over (at least for now).

The collapse of the Soviet Union in no way signals the end of the socialist project – in the sense of a fundamental critique of capitalism that points to the realization of the emancipatory potential that capitalism has both historically generated and, yet, also constrained and undermined. And, yet, it has made manifest a great deal of disorientation. This disorientation expresses, in part, the negative historical effects of Marxism-Leninism on the socialist imaginary. It also expresses, in part, the difficulties of formulating a socialist critique in a post-statist epoch that, on the one hand, while critical of the market and private ownership of the means of production, is not focused most fundamentally on such bourgeois relations. And yet working toward such a critique – which would also entail recovering a notion of internationalism that is not simply an ideological formulation of an essentially nationalist worldview (defending the “socialist camp”) – is absolutely crucial. It is crucial because capitalism is truly global and cannot be adequately understood as colonialism, that is, as the imposition of western values and institutions on other parts of the world. Capitalism may have contingently arisen in the West, but it fundamentally transformed the West, Justas it is transforming the rest of the world. The only theory that provides an adequate foundation for a rigorous critical theory of global capitalism is that first articulated by Marx. The critical theories that were so apparently powerful in the 1970s and 1980s, such as post-structuralism, are helpless in the face of global capitalism. Failure to build on the intellectual legacy of Marx by formulating a post-traditional critical theory of capitalism leaves the field of critique over to extremely reactionary and dangerous forms of “anti-capitalism” and “anti-imperialism” that are no more emancipatory than fascist “anti-capitalism” and “anti-imperialism” had been in the first half of the 20^th century.