more better analysis

Time for my quarterly blog post.

Found this nice line whilst rereading The Star Fraction recently. For those who haven’t read it, the J in question had previously worked the financial markets online: ‘Jordan had never realized before how vast and diverse was the invisible army of men and women whose labour was too cheap or too complicated to automate, but which made the kind of work he was familiar with possible.’

There were of course a number of other things I wanted to note, but they seemed to have slipped the tether now that I’m actually typing this. Ho hum, will try harder next time.

A link to something I wrote for the next book from the Mute crowd. Or rather, the cleaned-up version based on Ange’s editing, that I think got there too late for the deadline (so they’ll be publishing the less elegant version - sad face here). Posting it tonight is really a way of me avoiding work on something I have to (and want to) write about Luciano Ferrari Bravo …

It still could do with some work (you noticed too, huh?). Apart from anything else, reflecting on Massimo De Angelis’ work on value would help.

Now, if I can’t work out how to link to it, I guess you’ll just get the whole thing below. Let’s see what happens.

I’ve been asked to write something on the knowledge economy, immaterial labour and the law of value, ranging across Negri et al. to critics such as Caffentzis. It’s a good prod, since I’ve wanted to do this for some time - if only I wasn’t already late with another piece that still isn’t finished …

Anyhow, with any luck that sort of discussion can be herded towards an encounter with the likes of Arrighi and Silver, who see the predominance of financial expansion within the current period as one sympton of hegemonic crisis within the world system.

Thinking about world systems theory, I finally started reading a book that Ron had recommended some time ago - Orinoco flow : culture, narrative, and the political economy of information by Benjamin Keith Belton. The book begins by arguing that the ‘production and reproduction of [the] global information economy’, which Castells identifies as a post-WWII phenomenon, ‘has been a major strategy of global capital since the fifteenth century’ (p.3). This in turn conjured up some recent comments from Nate or Ange (or both?) concerning the propensity in Negri to emphasise the novelty within present day capitalism above all else - as if the practices incompletely grasped in the category of ‘affective labour’, for example, haven’t been crucial to accumulation for hundreds of years. And don’t even get me started on immaterial labour …

prol-position news #3 (see link in sidebar) carries an interview with Beverly Silver, where amongst other things she compares her work with that of the operaisti

from G. Arrighi & B. Silver (1999) Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp.272, 275, 278, 282, 286

Proposition 1 ‘The global financial expansion of the last twenty years or so is neither a new stage of world capitalism nor the harbinger of a “common hegemony of the global markets”. Rather, it is the clearest sign that we are in the midst of a hegemonic crisis. As such, the expansion can be expected to be a temporary phenomenon that will end more or less catastrophically, depending on how the crisis is handled by the declining hegemon.

Proposition 2 ‘The most important geopolitical novelty of the present hegemonic crisis is a bifurcation of military and financial capabilities that has no precedent in earlier hegemonic transitions. The bifurcation decreases the likelihood of an outbreak of war among the system’s most powerful units. But it does not reduce the chances of a deterioration of the present hegemonic crisis into a more or less long period of systemic chaos.

Proposition 3 ‘Unlike the global financial expansion, the proliferation in the number and variety of transnational business organizations and communities is a novel and probably irreversible feature of the present hegemonic crisis. It has been a major factor in the disintegration of the U.S. hegemonic order and can be expected to continue to shape ongoing systemic chance through a general, though by no means universal, disempowerment of states.

Proposition 4 ‘The disempowerment of social movements - the labor movement in particular - that has accompanied the global financial expansion of the 1980s and 1990s is largely a conjunctural phenomenon. It signals the difficulties involved in delivering on the promises of the U.S.-sponsored global New Deal. A new wave of social conflict is likely, and can be expected to reflect the greater proletarianization, increasing feminization, and changing spatial and ethnic configuration of the world’s labor forces.

Proposition 5 ‘The clash between Western and non-Western civilizations lies behind us rather than in front of us. What lies in front of us are the difficulties involved in transforming the modern world into a commonwealth of civilizations that reflects the changing balance of power between Western and non-Western civilizations, first and foremost the reemerging China-centered civilization. How drastic and painful the transformation is going to be - and, indeed, whether it will eventually result in a commonwealth rather than in the mutual destruction of the world’s civilizations - ultimately depends on two conditions. It depends, first, on how intelligently the main centers of Western civilization can adjust to a less exalted status and, second, on whether the main centers of the reemerging China-centered civilizaiton can collectively rise up to the task of providing system-level solutions to the system-level problems left behind by U.S. hegemony.’

Loren Goldner has written a couple of pieces this year that are also relevant here:

Fictitious Capital and the Transition Out of Capitalism and

China in the Contemporary World Dynamic of Accumulation and Class Struggle: A Challenge for the Radical Left

With any luck, this site will compile a list of resources concerning where ‘the present state of things’ might be heading, and what that could mean for the peculiar commodity labour-power.

I’ll start with Beverley Silver’s book Forces of Labor, which offers a world systems take on global patterns of class conflict over the past 150 years, and into the early part of this century. An excellent jump off point is the series of links compiled by Wildcat Germany - http://www.wildcat-www.de/dossiers/forcesoflabor/fol_dossier.htm - which also includes some recent writings by Giovanni Arrighi on the decline of US hegemony.

Saw the Gramsci quote (top left corner of page) in the local TV guide yesterday, so must be onto something …