Archive for the 'Lifelines' Category
Thursday, May 27th, 2010
And Now a Word FOR Our NON-Sponsor
TCT does not accept advertising, and never will.
Nevertheless, John Sayles is so awesome and his forthcoming movie is sure to be so roastingly, epically good, I have to take time from our core endeavor — exposing corporate capitalist cultural engineering — to mention it.
Originally titled Baryo, the film, now called Amigo, is Sayles’ historical dramatization of the first* large-scale act of U.S. overseas military imperialism: the invasion and occupation of the Philippines.
I can all but guarantee you that this film is going to rock your socks all the way to the toes. Just as Matewan is far and away the best labor film ever made by an American, I expect this will be the best anti-imperialist movie to emerge from our culture. Sayles is that talented and well-informed.
And, most of all, the facts of the matter are that profound and worthy of recall.
I’m beside myself with anticipation!
*The first domestic act was King Philip’s War. The first overseas act of military conquest was the seizure and annexation of Hawai’i, but that was small, in terms of actual combat.
Monday, April 19th, 2010
Regular Bag of the Month
“The people of the United States are in a sense becoming a nation on a tiger. They must learn to consume more and more or, they are warned, their magnificent economic machine may turn and devour them.” — Vance Packard, The Waste Makers (1960)
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
Good News: Olympics in Trouble
According to Advertising Age, NBC-Universal, the media mega-conglomerate subsidiary of General Electric, will lose money broadcasting the upcoming Winter Olympics. Apparently, this will be the first time money has not been made on an Olympics.
Here’s hoping it’s the beginning of the end for this hateful proto-fascist mix of fake sports and nationalist mind-conditioning…
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009
Wolff/Resnick v. Baran/Sweezy
Reader Justin asked about the work of Richard Wolff and Stephen Resnick, who make some arguments that “run directly counter to the arguments about monopoly that you have advanced in your book. So my question is, what do you make of Resnick and Wolff’s thesis?”
As Justin notes, Wolff and Resnick argue that:
Monopoly power, when achieved, does not necessarily contribute to an expanding economy, nor to a stagnating one. Our value examples show the many ways that monopolies can and do contribute to a variety of different economic conditions: more competition and less competition; more and less technical innovation; inflationary spirals; depressed real wages and consumption spending; unevenly developing depart¬ments; simultaneously falling real wage and rising subsumed class incomes; and so on.
By way of background, Wolff and Resnick are living economics professors. Baran and Sweezy are deceased economists and authors of Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, which I judge to have been the single most powerful (though extremely outdated in a few spots) work of social science in the 20th century.
Before saying a few things about this comparison, I would mention that Richard Wolff is close to Monthly Review, the magazine founded by Paul M. Sweezy in 1949, so the conflict here isn’t huge.
Nonetheless, Wolff and Resnick do claim to be correcting and improving upon Monopoly Capital.
I don’t buy it.
First of all, Wolff and Resnick begin by making a false distinction. “Monopoly power, when achieved, does not necessarily contribute to an expanding economy, nor to a stagnating one,” they write, implying that Baran and Sweezy thought that monopoly power does have automatic and necessary results. That, of course, is untrue. Baran and Sweezy repeatedly argue in Monopoly Capital that monopoly capitalism tends toward economic stagnation. But they also explain in detail how various things like military spending, the expansion of “the sales effort” (i.e., marketing), and new, epoch-making inventions can and do arise and lead to boom periods. In other words, Baran and Sweezy don’t disagree with Wolff and Resnick’s observation that monopoly power can lead to a variety of contingent outcomes.
None of that, of course, means that the tendency toward economic stagnation isn’t real. It’s quite real, as we know all too well at the present moment. It just isn’t automatic. So, Wolff and Resnick’s first premise is an error, and that’s usually a rather poor way to start a supposedly new and important social science analysis.
To my eye, Wolff and Resnick also do something that Baran and Sweezy rejected: Wolff and Resnick think that “Marxian value theory,” if perfected, could explain how the whole world works via a series of mathematical “economic” equations.
Baran and Sweezy held no such illusions. They saw what Marx said about the theory of economic value as an important and realistic way of tracking relationships between workers and business owners. But they took what Marx said about value as neither a means of calculating the whole of reality nor even the last word on the topic of economic categories. In fact, one of their prime arguments was that the triumph of corporate capitalism rendered much of what Marx had done with value formulas (most of which lies in the unfinished second and third volumes of Das Kapital) outdated. Wolff and Resnick, in contrast, seem to take “what Marx said” about value theory as somehow the innermost core of Marxism.
What is and isn’t essential to Marxism is, of course, a topic we could study for months. Suffice it for now to say that I find Baran and Sweezy’s emphasis on power and history and institutional structures rather than Marx’s cryptic (and unpublished-by-Marx) value formulas to be not only far more effective as a framework for understanding how the world works, but also far closer than Wolff and Resnick’s jumbled neo-orthodoxy to the essential core of Marx’s way of thinking.
And certainly neither Wolff nor Resnick, nor the both of them together, have ever produced a piece of work that comes within a country mile of matching the realism and revelatory power of Monopoly Capital.
By the way, if you’re interested, I think Chapter 8 of this book provides the single best explanation of what’s central and what’s peripheral in the work of Karl Marx.
I also don’t think Baran and Sweezy are perfect, either. For one thing, I believe they adopted the concept of “monopoly capitalism” out of an irrational desire to boost Lenin, who used the term, as a social theorist. But Baran and Sweezy then have to turn around and devote pages of their book to explaining that “monopoly” (rule by one) isn’t really the norm of the corporate capitalist order. Oligopoly, rule by a few, is.
Personally, I much prefer the term “corporate capitalism” to “monopoly capitalism.” It’s more descriptive of the core of the problem, requires no special pleading, and is quickly understood by people who encounter it. And I also see no point in trying to keep V.I. Lenin at the core of what the left is trying to do. Fuck that guy, in fact. He probably wasn’t as bad as Stalin, but neither was he anything like a democrat. He also loved and imposed Taylorism.
If we’ve learned anything from the failure of Socialism 1.0, it is that democracy is neither a toy nor a mere bourgeois trick. In fact, its extension and improvement is the whole idea of Socialism 2.0. If we are to have any chance at using that to save our sacred, sorry asses from onrushing capitalist eco-tastrophe, we can’t afford any more “vanguard” jive and Stalinist dead-ends. As Gandhi and MLK showed, the means are not separable from the ends.
Monday, December 7th, 2009
Questions From the Consumer Trap Community?
I’m never sure this blog matters. Sometimes, I think the lack of comments is a sign that I’m pissing up a rope, or high on my own fumes, or something akin to that.
Sometimes, I fancy that it might only be a sign of how unfamiliar my/our angle of vision is.
Other times, I think it might be that I simply don’t ask y’all directly to give it both barrels. Or maybe…Or maybe…
But the truth is that, if you read this blog and care about the issues it addresses, you might as well propose topics, ask challenging questions, or even send things you want me to post under your byline. It ain’t rocket science, after all. It’s just watching reality.
Having said that, do you people have questions you’d like to investigate and have us elaborate/debate here?
Remember: There are no bad questions!
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
As the Democrats Stab Your Back…
– Steffie Woolhandler, M.D.
