[lbo-talk] Firesale of the Empire

Eric Beck ersatzdog at gmail.com
Sat Dec 19 00:18:32 PST 2009


On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 1:14 PM, Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
> It is quite likely I'm reading Harvey so that he says what I want him to
> say, that what he says confirms my sense of things.  I read all of Harvey's
> neoliberalism stuff as a variation on a theme by the Condition of
> Postmodernity argument

Maybe if I'd read CoP I'd be more likely to give Harvey the benefit of doubt here, because in his other stuff I've read, especially BHoN, he ignores these subtleties in favor of a pretty one-dimensional (not to mention molar) accounting of the last three decades.


>The problem, as I
> think everyone here agrees, is that this zeitgeist of
> dematerialization/liquidification is destructive of the production of value
> while simultaneously representing and elite parasitism relative to the
> post-War pattern of wealth distribution.

I'm not sure I do agree with this, partly because it posits some value-producing paradigm of relations we should be aspiring/returning to. This is precisely the Keynesian nostalgia that I find so objectionable about Harvey's work. But more than that, liquidification of prior capital cannot explain a lot of things about the last 30 years, most notably China. Harvey tries to account for this by describing "neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics," but this only serves to give lie to his whole project: How can you aspire to talk with any coherence about recent world-economic history and treat China as an exception/outlier to it? You can't, unless your theory is simply a notional one.

But something bothers me about this conversation. It seems to me that it starts and ends with the LTOV. I feel like I keep arguing against Harvey in the name of a pure LTOV, which is not only boring and aesthetically unappealing but also bad politically, with its obsession on productive agents vs. nonproductive agents. Maybe it's better to displace the debate from production vs. redistribution to different terrain: stock vs. flow, which would be less concerned with origins and more concerned with relations and transformations. I've disagreed a lot with Doug about the current crises and how to respond to it, but one thing I've liked is his insistence that capitalism requires flows to operate, that crisis means an actual impasse for capital because things stop moving and being productive, and lose their power to restructure society. Harvey -- who I think more or less represents the dominant left view; see Klein, Taibbi, et al. -- believes essentially the opposite, that crisis is the time when capital*ist* power of command is at its highest and that crisis is primarily the time to exploit and profit from the stock. There's probably a lot that can be said about the difference between emphasizing stock and emphasizing flow, but insisting on the importance of flows at least highlights the fragility of capitalism and insists that its survival depends on the circulation of its mechanisms; the emphasis on stock only affirms that even when those mechanisms are failing, capitalism easily holds onto, and extends, its rule. Accumulation by dispossession, then, holds that capital necessarily survives even when it is inoperative.

(Or at least that's what the insomnia and Sierra Nevadas are telling me to say.)



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