Debtocracy

A brilliant documentary about the dictatorship of financial markets:


Debtocracy International Version by BitsnBytes

Ad 5. or Against the enclosure of the commons

Enclosure of the commons is a term that refers to the historical process through which common property was appropriated by a few individuals and transformed into the modern form of private property. Marx has referred to the process as primitive accumulation of capital and his historical overview is remarkably precise given the limited sources at his disposal. The process was carried out with varying degrees of violence but always ruthlessly since it gradually robbed the rural population of its means of subsistence. It was also a process that enabled the capitalist mode of production to take root in the first place since it created a sufficient degree of concentration of property in the hands of few and forced many into subservience to capital either as labourers in manufactures and later factories (what Marx has called real subsumption under capital) or as individual producers indirectly subordinated to capitalists (what Marx has called formal subsumption under capital). Even as early capitalism flourished in Britain the living standard of a large part of the working class declined: the wages, even when and where they were relatively high, could not make up for the theft of common land that used to provide people with means of subsistence. Modern apologists of capitalism often forget that capitalism did not take root simply because of its supreme efficiency - although, to be fair, the efficiency of organising labour in manufactures and factories was an important factor in the decline of earlier modes of production - but needed violence and coercion to force people into factories and prevent workers from organising politically.

Once a legal framework for securing private property was firmly established capitalism no longer needed such brutal measures to ensure that products of social labour were privately appropriated, yet that did not motivate the ruling classes to become too faithful followers of the laissez-faire principle. They don't shy away from government intervention whenever it helps them to appropriate surplus profit and that is why the enclosure of the commons has been repeated many times over. Today it is an ongoing process institutionalised in the form of intellectual property rights. Knowledge, which is produced and can be produced only collectively, is being turned into private property, an unlimited resources is being made scarce to enable appropriation of surplus profits. Unlike industrial production, where the appropriation of surplus value by the capitalist needs but a legal guarantee of private property, appropriation of surplus value of cognitive production demands constant state intervention: it must grant patents and trademarks and it must constantly increase the scope of intellectual property (whether broadening it to include for example biological organisms, increasing its duration or forcing it on "developing" countries through the WTO).

The amount of state intervention needed to create and uphold the private character of cognitive production suggests that a central paradox of capitalism (collectively produced value being privately appropriated) is being manifested in its purest form. Asserting that creation of intellectual property rights has gone too far and is therefore hampering development, as for example Henry and Stieglitz or Lawrence Lessig do, misses this fundamental point. We are not dealing with the question of finding the right degree of property "protection" but with a paradox that can not be resolved under capitalism. Far from being the solution to the problems of capitalism, cognitive production is the point where capitalism is most frail. Political struggles for the right to infringe upon copyright (the best know example is perhaps the Swedish pirate party) are about far more than downloading music and movies, they are at the core of anticapitalist struggles today.

Crash course on Maxism

Peter Thompson is currently writing a nice set of articles for the Guardian, offering insight into some central tenants of Marxism and controversies surrounding it. Check them out:
1. Religion, the right answer to the wrong question;
2. How Marxism came to dominate socialist thinking;
3. Men make their own history;
4. "Workers of the world, unite!";

Ad 2. Universal basic income

Universal basic income is an income unconditionally granted to all individuals (for info on the universal basic income you can check out the Basic Income Earth Network). The concept has been gaining prominence among scholars and politicians and has already been introduced in a limited form in some countries. The best thing about it is that it reduces the power of coercion of the labour market by taking away its threat of death by hunger. As Rev. Townshend remarked, the legal imposition of work “gives too much trouble, requires too much violence and makes too much noise. Hunger, on the contrary, is not only a pressure which is peaceful, silent and incessant, but as it is the most natural motive for work and industry, it also provokes to the most powerful efforts.” (quoted in Paul Lafargue's The Right to be Lazy) An income not conditional upon work takes into consideration the fact that the valorization on a market is an imperfect mechanism of judging the social merit of labour at best, an utterly flawed one at worst. Together with a reduction of working hours it can lead to a significant increase in the independence of individuals from markets and can enable them to immediately begin building alternative modes of production, modes that are not based on ruthless exploitation, where supply responds to demand an not vice versa, where individuals are not alienated from the products of labour and from each other.

Ad 1. Drastic reduction of working hours in the private sector.

There are a number of reasons. First of all, labour productivity per hour worked in the developed world has been steadily increasing throughout the twentieth century. The rise in productivity only between the years 1990 and 2008 has been roughly 26% in Denmark, 25% in France, 16% in Italy, 58% in Finland, 45% in Sweden, and 41% in Norway (source: Eurostat, percentage points were calculated for all countries where data for both years is available). Throughout this time there has been no reduction in working hours and wages have failed to keep pace with GDP growth. Secondly, a reduction of working hours does not necessarily translate into an equivalent reduction of productivity. We can assume that employees are able to maintain a level of productivity for say four hours that they could not maintain for eight. Thirdly, we can expect a reduction of living costs and a reduced dependency on markets for the procurement of everyday goods and services like childcare, home repairs and food. All in all this means that we would be facing not only a significant increase in the quality of life, but also a partial emancipation from the labour market, which would open up space for further political actions.

Contribution to a new communist manifesto

The new planetary vulgate has reached an unprecedented level of vulgarity. A long time has passed since Hegel has developed a philosophical system that remains to this day the most magnificent apology of a status quo - any status quo - ever devised. Since then we have witnessed a tremendous development of productive forces accompanied by an even greater degradation of consciousness. Contemporary neoliberal defenders of capitalism are incapable of even the most basic cognitive achievements. The likes of Parsons, Friedman and Hayek were still able to formulate a theoretical defense of capitalism, flawed and contradictory as their attempts were. In their footsteps followed Alan Greenspan, a pathetic figure in every respect. The place of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, truly formidable foes in their time, is today occupied by imbeciles and village idiots: George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolas Sarkozy. It seems that among the ruling classes there is not a single individual whose cognitive abilities have developed past the stage of a seven year old child.

Contemporary ideology is a reflection of this development. It has regressed to an incoherent mass of slogans, force fed to us through the propaganda machine that monopoly media have become. Their lies are so thinly veiled, their deceptions so obvious that one wonders whether they even care about being believed. Citizens are being threatened with the wrath of international financial markets lest they agree to the dismantling of the welfare state,  "flexibilisation" of the labour market and an utterly vicious privatisation of public infrastructure and services. Politicians and their technocrats want to make us believe that the same international financial markets who have triggered the contemporary crisis and who are currently creating a new bubble by speculating on food are capable of solving our problems. They are willing to leave us at the mercy of private credit rating agencies who were giving top marks to even the most irresponsible financial speculators on the eve of the financial meltdown. To save the sheep from getting lost in the woods politicians want to entrust them to wolves. The remedies they propose are no better than the people chosen to administer them. The current crisis is a typical crisis of overproduction: it was not caused by bad credit, bad credit proliferated because demand could not keep up with supply. It is blatantly obvious that measures which decrease the buying power of households can do nothing but lead to an even more devastating crisis. Far from being able to formulate a critique of political economy, the academic lackeys of the global bourgeoisie are unable even to achieve a limited technocratic understanding of capitalism and its laws. As they recite their litanies the public debt of Greece is rising, completely untroubled by the brutal austerity measures imposed on its people.

Two things follow from this. First of all it has become obvious that the ruling classes have lost their ability to rule. Today the power of the global bourgeoisie is greater than ever. They have brought states to their knees through threats of capital flight and vengeance of international financial markets. The concentration of global wealth is unprecedented in human history. The productive forces they control have developed to an awe inspiring level. Yet for all its power the bourgeoisie is incapable to keep at least half of the world population safe from poverty. For all its liberalism it is unable to stem the tide of new racism and authoritarianism in the "developed" world. For all its ingenuity it must muster all its strength just to keep capitalism afloat. Their impotence is increasing proportionally to their power. Man has walked on the moon. From the distance he should have been able to see one thing clearly: something is fundamentally wrong with a system that is able to send a man to the moon yet unable to allow the poor to feed themselves.

Secondly, critique is not the weapon we must use in our fight against the bourgeoisie. Their myths do not need demystification, they are so improbable that living experience of the masses refutes them every day. They are immune to demystification because they are not based on reasoning but on the ceaseless howling of the all-pervasive propaganda machinery. We do not need new theory. Partly because the world has failed to progress in any substantive way since Marx wrote his Capital, partly because our collective capability to formulate theory is in ruin (universities have long since fallen prey to the neoliberal offensive). In fact, the university has never been a place where a blueprint of a better world could have been sketched out. The university is hermetically sealed of from any emancipatory social praxis, the very praxis that is constitutive for critical theory. The Communist manifesto was written in 1848, at a time when the working classes of Britain were largely subdued. Preceding it were six decades of struggles and defeats, of smashing machinery, joining the middle classes in their fight for suffrage, of strikes and mass rallies, each fight contributing to the collective learning process. The Communist manifesto was written by the working classes of Britain, written in blood on the streets among charging cavalry and cannon fire, written in sweat to the rhythm of pounding machinery.

What we need first of all is a political gesture, what is today perhaps THE political gesture. It has been performed by citizens all over the world, from Paris to London, from Rome to Zagreb, from Egypt to Wisconsin. There and elsewhere the words: "We will not pay for your crisis!" have become flesh. What we need is a radical break with the past - for, as we know, the crisis to be paid for is not a crisis of capitalism, it is the crisis that is capitalism - a resolute decision that whatever the world looks like tomorrow, it will look nothing like it does today or as it did yesterday. This decision is not utopian. What is utopian is the belief that a total social disaster can be avoided within the parameters of the current system. We know that their ways do not work and we know that an attempt to reinstate the crumbling welfare state with its oppressing eight hour work day and rotten social compromises is as senseless as it is futile. We do not have a plan for what comes after capitalism, but we do not have it precisely because under capitalism we are being denied the freedom needed to formulate it. Only a gesture of total refusal will open up this space of freedom.We must refuse the criterion of fiscal stability, for unless we do we are accepting the fact that democracy has effectively been undermined by international financial capital. We must refuse the imperative of creating new jobs. We do not need new jobs, we need a fair distribution of socially produced goods. We do not need higher wages, we must demand that coercion in the form of wage labour is abolished. Only then will the window of possibility be opened for a free society to rise from the rubble of capitalism as once the commune did from the rubble of Paris.

To the radicalism of mainstream politics we must oppose a most moderate position: that nobody should go hungry, that the products of social labour should be fairly distributed, that welfare and sustainability should be the benchmarks of development, that labour should allow for personal growth of individuals and their need to contribute meaningfully to society, that forms of political organization are legitimate only insofar as they allow for every individual to be fully empowered but most of all that there is no valid criterion for political decisions save that of lasting happiness for all. The only reforms we can accept are those that contribute to these goals. Total refusal of capitalism does not mean calling for violent revolution or demanding the immediate destruction of capitalism. It means that we resolutely refuse to take a single step in the direction of strengthening or preserving the capitalist mode of production. It means that we carve out the space needed for an emancipatory praxis to emerge in embryo before it can become universal. We must first create the space of freedom that allowed the revolts of 68 to flourish before we can complete what they have begun.

Here is a provisional list of some realistic immediate measures that could loosen the stranglehold of capitalism:
1. Drastic reduction of working hours in the private sector.
2. Universal basic income.
3. A tax on financial transactions that would discourage short-term speculation (Tobin tax or a variation thereof).
4. Creation of public credit rating agencies, instituting measures that would enable them to fully substitute private agencies
5. Radical reduction in the scope and duration of intellectual property rights and a complete amnesty for infringements by countries below a specified GDP level.
6. Legalisation of the theft of food for personal consumption.
7. Legalisation of squatting in all buildings that have not been used for a specified time period.
8. A complete ban on private contributions to political parties and candidates.
9. Strengthening the power of the European Parliament in relation to the European Commission.
10. Abolishment of tuition fees and full inclusion of students and the academic proletariat in the decision making bodies of universities.

The list is not completely thought out, some of the suggested measures might turn out to be unreasonable, some crucial measures were probably omitted, but that is beside the point. The scope of public debate has been narrowed to the point where we are almost unable to seriously discuss anything but the specifics of the ways in which capitalism might be saved at all costs. We will refuse to play that game. Until the terms of debate change radically we will continue to protest, we will continue to occupy stores, banks and universities, we will go on strike, we will march together and we will not cease until the ruling classes concede to us the freedom needed to abolish classes altogether.