Annie, this is a good discussion and I'd be curious to read what you've
already written on these topics. Are there some articles?
> credit in
> the current system plays the role of crisis manager (i.e. securitized
> credit and the whole apparatus of financialization was deployed to
> resolve intractable crises in industrial profitability) /but can only
> play that role for so long/.
Well, I'm not so sure. Richard Duncan's whole point is that we have not
been operating with "sound money" for the last forty years. Instead,
fiat money created by the state has driven the whole vast machinery of
globalization, the cabling of the world, the industrialization of Asia,
the modernization of resource extraction in the Middle East, Latin
America and Africa -- a gigantic capital expansion all told. Elites in
the US adopted the strategy of the knowledge-based economy in the belief
that they could manage all that very profitably, and to solve the
lingering territorial problem -- that is, to provide for the consumption
of the population and to continue profiting from that consumption --
they came up with the predatory solution of bank credit. For sure, the
pyramid of credit is built on the idea that individual debtors will pay.
When they don't, with $14.5 trillion of US mortgage debt outstanding in
2008, then there is a crisis. But look what happens when people can't
pay the banks: the Fed bails out the financial system (not the
individuals), while asset prices (homes in particular) lose value and
start to look worth buying again. Meanwhile Treasury bonds are still
sold in record numbers and at very low yields, because none of the other
state-capitalist regimes wants to see what happens when the house of
cards actually falls. This has been going on since the summer of 2007
when the banking crisis started. Now that the European Central Bank has
started bailing out the Eurozone with its own freshly created fiat
money, it seems like it could go on for quite a while longer. In a
heavily industrialized world where there is a tremendous amount of
productivity -- too much, in fact -- the mobilizing and organizing power
of this illusion or "schein" called credit is very great.
All that said, we're still in a crisis. Institutions, among them the
university system, are changing before our eyes. A crisis is a period of
chaotic change where the outcome remains uncertain. There are
undoubtedly new and dramatic episodes to come. I reckon the
interstate-capital nexus will eventually find some solution that does
not involve either a return to the discipline of "sound money" (gold, in
short) or a collapse into rival blocs -- because the consequences of
*that* were made all too clear to everyone by WWII. The question is
which solution, and what kind of "new deal" for the people on the
ground? The US emerged from the crisis of the 70s through Reagan's
debt-financed military build-up, which led on to the tech boom and
financialization. That solution has been disastrous. Souldn't we push
for something much better today?
> Might it not be the
> case that we have knowledge and understanding in abundance, as the
> financialization of everyday life turns us all into organic
> intellectuals of a kind? In other words, I guess I'm saying that the
> current crisis in capitalism is happening without us having to do much
> to make it happen (i.e. it's a structural/systemic crisis) but it's also
> a moment in which capital tends not to hide its face (i.e. we actually
> do already understand this system, in much of its complexity, because it
> doesn't bother much anymore to make itself invisible--or to hide, for
> instance, it's reliance on the state, whether by "state" we mean the
> federal reserve or the cops who will come to evict you if you don't pay
> your mortgage to the bank).
I think that's right, it's what makes this period so interesting. As a
formerly middle-class person you now have to deal directly with kinds of
violence that were formerly held at a distance by prosperity. Yet the
system reacts to these crises, that's been its whole dynamic since the
1930s. The study of earlier crises shows that great efforts will always
be made to reintegrate the future middle managers. Exactly such a
process of reintegration is what led to the neoliberal social consensus
-- or hypocrisy -- which "tolerates" all kinds of horrible things. Well,
now that consensus is finally breaking down and there is critique and
unrest at every level of society. I think it's worth trying to subvert
and transform the educational system before a new formula of crisis
management is found, one that will pay relatively large numbers of
people well enough to manage a society with yet greater levels of gross
inequality, including unequal exposure to climate change. Because that's
what we're headed for if nothing is done.
Of course, transformative influences can also come from other sectors of
society, and I don't think it's really possible to become a force of
change without getting out of your own skin and engaging in both direct
action and cross-class solidarity. Yet there is a tendency for educated
people to believe that the change must come from the other classes, from
some raw revolutionary force of the dispossessed. That idea seems
dubious to me in such a complex world, where both scientific and
cultural knowledge translate so readily into power. I think that going
beyond awareness of the system's ills, and towards an actual shift in
the way society is articulated, would require taking over the existing
institutions -- the ones we work in, however precariously -- and
repurposing them. Otherwise I'm afraid there are always organizational
and technological solutions for unrest. That is, if the middle managers
who are charged with implementing those solutions can continue to
"tolerate" them.
let's not, Brian
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