Forum Replies Created
-
Replies
-
The history, practice and effects of the legal fiction of corporate personhood might be worth researching. Also political donations from the early days right up to the SuperPacs. And, the rising practice of think tanks and lobby groups writing legislation for legislatures. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was formed in 1973, 48 years ago. That’s about at the time of the early rise of neoliberalism.
ALEC Type: Tax-exempt non-profit organization. Legal status 501(c)(3). Revenue (2017) $10,352,239 Expenses (2017) $10,237,195. Formerly called Conservative Caucus of State Legislators.
If you want to look at how power is embedded in the Democratic Party and The Council on Foreign Relations and how this goes right back to the “Boston Brahmins” look at the Monthly Review Online for “The Council on Foreign Relations, the Biden Team, and Key Policy Outcomes – Climate and China” by Laurence H. Shoup.
But how you “follow the money” and “plot the differentials” in the CasP-ian method I do not know. My analyses seem to be informed only by broad Marxian considerations, undisciplined speculative philosophy, some readings of history and general outrage at the current system: not because I have suffered in political economy or class terms (I haven’t) but because squeezing vulnerable people for more and more just seems so unnecessary. There would be plenty for everyone if equitably shared: enough for need, just not enough for greed.
Scot Griffin,
You say “only capitalists are “citizens” of the State of Capital and everyone else in the political economy exists to be consumed by the State of Capital.” Precisely. That is what we are trending towards. Indeed, we are just about there. I only wish I had formulated it so well myself. I think you also previously wrote that the entire (Western neoliberal capitalist) political economy is now a “company town”. Our society is now their company town. Again, an extremely apt analogy. Of course, Mumford’s “megamachine” is also an apt analogy. It draws everything into itself in a totalising and hierarchical control system fashion. Nietzsche criticised (the old?) philosophy (including I guess social philosophy) as follows;
“What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which became poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage seem to (become) a notion fixed, canonic, and binding; truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors which have become powerless to affect the senses; coins which have their obverse effaced and now are no longer of account as coins but merely as metal.”
We might appear to be falling afoul of Nietzsche’s criticism, employing “megamachines” and “company towns” as metaphors, analogies, metonyms. I think the difference is in whether the analogy is apt, radical and critical and points to the deeper truth as opposed to the received canonic “truths” or rather the illusions that the system promotes about itself. Company towns historically were and are today where they still exist are a sub-unit of the modern, capitalist mega-machine, thus partaking of the general “autocatalytical sprawl” nature of the entire megamachine where every module bears a “mandelbrot” or fractal relation to the whole: repeating the whole in minutiae and adding to the extension of the whole maintining the same structural manner of extension by sprawl of modules. Ulf Martin and Jonathan Nitzan can express these autocatalytical sprawl concepts better than I.
Capitalism has “sacrifice zones” and “sacrifice populations”. This is not to say it is the first empire to do this but it is doing in a more totalising fashion, engulfing the entire globe, including its domestic populations (who now are also colonised in a sense) and in a manner in which the pseudo-rational and the virtual parasitise on the real and in the process destroy it.
“A sacrifice zone or sacrifice area (often termed a national sacrifice zone or national sacrifice area) is a geographic area that has been permanently impaired by heavy environmental alterations or economic disinvestment, often through locally unwanted land use (LULU). These zones most commonly exist in low-income and minority communities.[1] Commentators including Chris Hedges, Joe Sacco, and Stephen Lerner have argued that corporate business practices contribute to producing sacrifice zones.” – Wikipedia.
Late stage capitalism is now re-introducing the consumption of sacrifice populations into its domestic population. Workers were consumed in early industrial capitalism (at home and abroad) but the bourgeoise, petty bourgeoise and even the “aristocracy of labor” (skilled labor which could be accommodated with good wages because of colonial exploitation) had been exempt. That exemption has now been effectively rescinded except for the very rich. The rest of the population (or the weaker segments thereof) are to be consumed by unleashing (accidently or sort of accidently on purpose) a consuming, continually mutating pandemic. The wedge used is the hagiographical depiction of the petty bourgeoise. People who own such “essential” businesses as coffee shops, pubs, clubs, restaurants and bars must be permitted to trade no matter what and spread dangerous new variants of the pandemic into the population. The baby boomer generation set up this system or voted continually for those who did. Now that ageing generation is to be consumed by the system they enabled. It is very ironic. Of course, things are worse in the third world.
The refusal to eradicate the virus and to promote what has turned into leaky vaccine endless pandemic indicated and indicates the refusal to;
(a) Suspend the circuits of capital which suit the plutocrats no matter what else is happening;
(b) consider anything but immediate profits;
(c) consider the human, social and medical concerns of the vulnerable population (which is very large).
The neoliberal system is sacrificing everything now, climate, environment, other earth systems and the entire non-rich and the not perfectly immune-able population of the globe. To those who felt society was about community and cooperation the spectacle is bizarre.
Scot Griffin,
I agree. I have written, on other blogs if not here, of “my” thesis that modern capitalism has dual circuits of capital, to some considerable extent. There is the worker-consumer circuit and that part of productive business which uses productive workers and supplies consumers (while in a sense parasitising on the whole process by exploiting workers and consumers both). There is also the debt-asset circuit which functions mainly to create debt money for the purchase of assets and the concomitant process of generating asset inflation (relative to wages and the consumer items workers buy on a weekly to annual basis). The cross-over is perhaps fairly limited (though I have no data on this). The circuits are kept mainly separate and the two different sets of inflation are able to be kept apart and “differentialed”, as a verb. Q.E. (Quantitative Easing) is perfect to run this set up. It’s a brilliant scheme. The innovators of it have stolen a march, and many billions, on everyone else.
One could, I am guessing, construct a hydraulic model of this. The hydraulic model would use the analogy of thermohaline currents and boundaries (since we are talking of stocks and flows of a quantity). Every water molecule is created equal (apart from rare exceptions like heavy water). However, bodies and flows of water can involve internal currents and layers which remain somewhat discrete and maintain somewhat discrete boundaries because (in water’s case) of thermal, saline and other gradients.
Note: Cheesy video removed. The popularised “science” of the “two oceans” may be junk science. Best to avoid that analogy. But the thermohaline currents analogy seems fine, if speculative, to me.
The thing is this. How can bodies and/or flows of dollars be different for purposes of flow and mixing? The thermohaline analogy is not transferrable simplistically. Dollars are notional, not real and they don’t in theory have real gradients of any substance or quantity/quality “inhered” or dissolved in them (what one might call a field of values and/or vectors and/or tensors). I can’t do any of that kind of maths by the way. But if we look at money we can see it is constructed differently depending on amounts (the quanta sizes). There is often a minimum quantity of money (and/or of purchased item) which is permitted in trades and staking and thus conditions the “play” of the “game”. There can be “permissible quantity” gradients across the economy. Wholesale and retail show this on the commodity and goods side. In gambling and in investment there are often minimum money stakes or even minimum wealth conditions to permit you to enter the “game”. If one does not have a liquid million dollars for example or an equally acceptable asset to stake one cannot enter a “game” where the minimum stake or investment is one million dollars. Flows and circuits may be kept discrete, albeit with small leaks and osmoses, by “stake” size.
Though ordinary consumers dispose of billions and even trillions of dollars collectively, they do not typically make individual purchases over a “mere” million dollars except perhaps rarely in buying a house. Some of their monies are aggregated in funds like retirement funds but this aggregation already changes the game, as it were. The funds no longer make consumer purchases, at least in the short to mid term, but make aggregated asset purchases managed by the funds’ managers. The funds are out of the consumer circuit for a long time, typically a generation, like 20 0r 30 years minimum. A lot can happen in a generation. Assets can be inflated, funds embezzled, governments rise and fall, some nations default, others be destroyed and global pandemics begin. The conditions where the funds are released (if they are still existent and are released) are very different and time removed from the earlier times of consumer activity at investment time. This time gradient matters I believe but how it might matter is beyond me, I admit, except in this kind of undisciplined mental speculation.
But I think overall, we can see perhaps how the circuits or flows can be kept separate and asset inflation proceed apace while not causing consumer inflation, except perhaps of luxury goods. Billionaires don’t give a damn about the price of champagne or anything except perhaps a super yacht which will cause a mere single-billion billionaire to wince but a deca- or centi-billionaire to snap it up for the conspicuous consumption value.
I like CasP theory not for its technical detail (sorry, some of its mechanics are as dry as dust to me) [1] but for its larger insights as applied to real political economy. I have written the text below to counter bowdlerized MMT – Modern Monetary Theory (as presented by some lay acolytes of MMT) on other sites. Am I on track or off track with respect to CasP?
I don’t agree with the people who say asset inflation doesn’t matter. It does matter, as does almost all inflation. However, before people misconstrue me, there are many things which can matter and inflation is just one of them. In all cases, what matters is relativities – sizes of differences and changes in sizes of differences.
Inflation is not an absolute phenomenon, it is a relative phenomenon. Another way of saying this is that inflation differentials matter. If the things that I spend my wage or pension on inflate at 5% per annum and my wage or pension inflates at 5% per annum, then I am fine now if I was fine before. Real inflation of my typical basket of goods measured against my income is zero in this case.
The co-developer of Capital as Power theory writes:
“Inflation is the average rate of change of individual money prices. In this narrow sense, Milton Friedman’s claim that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon is correct. But underlying the average rate of inflation, individual prices change at different rates. And in this broader sense, inflation is always and everywhere a re-distributional phenomenon.” – Jonathan Nitzan.
The key concept here is “Inflation is always and everywhere a re-distributional phenomenon”. If my typical basket of purchases of good and services inflates at 5% per annum but my wage is limited to 2% per annum wage rises (this sort of thing has been typical in the neoliberal era) then I am poorer every year in the real resources, real good and services that I can purchase.
If the typical house in Australia cost 3.5 times the median annual gross wage in 1980 and now costs 7 times the median annual gross wage in 2021, then all else being equal, it is much harder for the average or median worker to buy a house these days. Now, it is true that all else is not necessarily equal. The interest rates are certainly much lower currently. Even so, the current situation presents young people with new problems and risks for domicile acquisition and household formation. Saving the minimum deposit for the house becomes much harder, delaying house acquisition. A loan becomes a higher risk proposition in some senses, in that the ability to repay the loan depends heavily on the very low interest regime being maintained. Empirically, the acquisition of dwellings by young people has dropped and household formation rates have also dropped. These are real negative economic and social outcomes.
To return to the point about differential inflation, Jonathan Nitzan states “Inflation has no true magnitude to start with.” What he means is that there is no objective, true or absolute measure of overall or aggregated inflation. To believe so is to believe in a constructed fallacy of classical economics (my words there). The problem is that inflation is measured in the numeraire (the dollar in our case) which itself has a sliding (expanding and contracting) value both against other currencies and against all goods and services priced in it. The measurement instrument is itself not a constant standard. An aggregated inflation rate involves an aggregation of unlike goods and services AND the aggregating of them in a common (and fictitious) dimension.
When science proceeds, it aggregates items in a common real dimension. It may aggregate them by mass, for example, or by one of the other real dimensions given in the SI table (International System of Units). (See Blair Fix, another CasP practitioner for details on this.) Economics and economic activities do not have this kind of “luxury of objectivity” (except perhaps at the level of quantity surveying). Economics is “condemned” (in part) to operate at the level of “aggregated subjective evaluation and valuation”. That is what prices are. We could also call “aggregated subjective evaluation and valuation” rank dependent expected utility (RDEU). That is what modern micro-economists call it. Certain macro economists do not place much or any store in microeconomics. Steve Keen is one. I suspect Bill Mitchell (MMT) may be another but I am not sure.
I think such macro-economic and Keynesian thinkers (but not post- or neo- Keynesian) are correct in placing little to no store in RDEU (or in Utils or SNALTs) as theories of supposedly objective or quasi-objective value. A “theorem” or at least heuristic derivable from that position of scepticism about such value theories is that the idea of aggregated inflation and its use in macroeconomics is one which should be applied with great care.
Aggregated or averaged inflation values tell us little to nothing about relative or differential inflations in detail in the system and this is a situation where the devil very much is in the detail. Asset inflation (as inflation of asset values relative to average or median income) can be a very dangerous phenomenon leading to the impoverishment, indigence and even homelessness of not only the unemployed but also of lower waged workers plus also leading to the shrinking of the middle class.
High asset inflation, relative to unemployed and worker incomes, also permits the holders of assets to become differentially richer and, if the process continues long enough and to its logical conclusion, to become the holders of almost ALL assets in the economy with workers reduced to being perennial renters feeding the incomes and wealth of the slumlords and rentiers.
Thus, in summary, I do not agree at all that asset inflation (relative to median incomes) does not count. It is an extremely dangerous process by which the middle class and working class are impoverished and dispossessed and it will lead to, is leading to, extreme inequality, extreme economic inefficiency and probably the necessity for revolution if social democracy is not permitted or able to set matters right.
Note 1 – I probably don’t have the intellectual discipline to knuckle down to that level of technical detail but I appreciate the technical part of the theory is very important. Empirical proofs rest on it.
Pieter de Beer,
I am really sorry your full reply was lost. I would have read it with great interest. I WILL read it with great interest when it is recovered/redone. The listed points (facets) look very much to the point about what is happening. I will start with the text/data loss issue and then talk about some of your points briefly.
I have had similar text/data losses while blogging – lots of data, lots of links, lots of exposition. I understand the frustration. There’s something about being hot on the trail of an important topic that makes us forget to do back ups. I have learned to stop when I feel I have already written quite a lot in a blog window. I go back, highlight and copy it, so at least it is on the “clipboard” in memory. Then I open my word processor and a document I keep for such purposes, paste it in there and save. It’s just a few window flips. Also, in some blogs, the lost text can be recovered by just using the browser back arrow to go back from the attempted post to the draft window. Often, the text is still there in the draft window. Even if you closed the window tab you can get the window tab back on many browsers with the correct command. I’ve even had crashes due to power outages, lost huge screeds of text and later when rebooting and re-opening windows for the word processor and the blog site, found that recovered windows come up with all my text. Some modern proprietary operating systems (naming no names) are now automatically backing up in background, all the time seemingly. That can mean the full text is still somewhere on the hard drive, in temp files I guess. One just has to find them, maybe. Best to go looking early, not late of course.
Re your five points, I will start by talking about points 1 and 5. Of course, I don’t know what you were looking at in those points but they are my first interest along with the interplay between them.
We notice the general disinterest, even the strong opposition, of capitalists to public preventative measures, especially NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) and lock-downs. Their interest is only in pharmaceutical prevention or amelioration. There is relatively little money to be made in many forms of NPI and physical distance prevention. Masks are low tech (read low profits) and people staying distanced spend no money at all doing that and may even spend less money overall. Indeed, there are often money losses in prevention. People isolate, businesses lose workers, draw less customers and even shut down.
The cordon sanitaire, once a staple of epidemic control, and still used sensibly for a while by some capitalist countries like Australia, has been declared (essentially) inconsistent with capitalism. The cordon sanitaire (isolation, lock-downs) has been cast, in populist terms, as something other than the population willingly protecting itself, complying with democratic directives for public safety from its elected government and doing so out of both enlightened self-interest and community concern. Instead such measures are cast as anti-freedom interventions by “socialists” or suchlike. It turns out that one should not interfere with important capitalist and consumer freedoms, like the freedom to make money while people die preventable deaths or the freedom of the robust to behave and consume in ways which spread the epidemic to the more vulnerable. “My freedoms don’t end where your feelings begin,” is the standard saw of the libertarian right. Never mind that any idiosyncratic construction of personal freedom (a form of solipsistic selfishness and license) is itself entirely based on feelings of self-righteousness and self-entitlement.
Essentially, public health measures which do not permit corporations to make huge profits are declared out of bounds, precisely because they are inconsistent with dominant capital interests. The trouble with cordons, aside from obstructing the profits of dominant capital, is that they can be implemented directly by the people, not just by government edicts and security forces. They can be a people power phenomenon. In formal politics, a cordon sanitaire is the refusal to cooperate with certain political parties. But a union picket line is a direct action cordon. A rent strike is also a kind of cordon (between poor people’s money for necessities and the slumlord’s claim for rents). Overall , the people must be kept atomistically selfish, mutually antagonistic in detail. Coalescence around cooperative goals is anathema to capital.
The strategy to stay completely open (for the circuits of money, capital and manipulated workers and consumers) and to rely almost entirely on vaccination is a strategy which takes no cognizance of the powers and subtleties of the phenomenon of evolution. SARS_Cov_2 as an RNA virus can mutate relatively rapidly compared to many other pathogens (but not compared to some other RNA viruses as coronaviruses actually have a proofing capacity to reduce mistakes or mutations). SARS_Cov_2 as seen in Omicron also appears to have to have devloped a splicing capacity to splice sections of at least two variants infecting the one person. Overall, as a zoonotic virus newly infecting humans, SARS_Cov_2 now represents an instance of punctuated equilibrium evolution where evolution of the new pathogen (in this case) is extraordinarily rapid.
The continued assumption of the public and the élites is that the virus is a (nearly) stationary target. It’s actually a rapidly evolving and moving target. To rely only on or mainly on vaccination is to condemn ourselves to always ceding the initiative to the virus. It makes the move each time (evolution to a new, confoundingly dangerous variant) and then we play catch-up trying to make a variant specific booster, taking at least four months to get that variant booster into public arms. Only prevention, suppression and eradication can wrest the initiative back from the virus, reducing and then preventing mutation by reducing and then preventing replication.
The public and the elites (not the virologists and epidemiologists) have profoundly misunderstood the nature of coronaviruses in general and SARS_Cov_2 in particular. Lasting and complete immunity was never going to occur due to the nature of the virus. It’s a characteristic of the genus that immunity wanes relatively rapidly in the face of viral mutation and the the loss of “immune memory”. Vaccinations were never going to be anything but “leaky”, permitting reinfection albeit usually with lessened symptoms and danger. Why were these realities denied from the outset and the public fed with a set of myths about these issues? Your five facets certainly can support an analysis going to the heart of those issues. I will write more shortly when I get time.
I’ll see how many of those movies I can find on N. and S. Are there any services which might show other interesting cinema? Let’s say the films of Ingmar Bergman and Sergie Bondarchuk as examples.
Some preliminary thoughts.
1. I strongly agree that monetary policy can be and is used for sabotage. As can fiscal policy.
2. “The alternative view is the notion of pervasive rationing (Muellbauer and Portes, 1978; Werner, 2005), which implies the dominance of quantities over prices (Werner, 2005).”
Wow! Who-da thunk it? Real stuff counts and is the ultimate limiting or enabling factor as the case may be! My sarcasm here is towards classical economics of course.
! Update on my above sarcastic point. I shoulda read the whole paper first. Turns out that economic “quantities” in the first instance can mean, for example, “quantity of credit creation”. But in the second instance it is then effectively stated that constraining formal quantities can and does induce resource constraints: that low economic quantities can induce real resource constraints, endogenously of course. Fair enough, but I blithely took “quantities” to mean “quantities of real stuff” (real resources). This illustrates my ongoing problem with economics and its terminology. I detest the use of terms without qualifiers. In a discipline which mixes the formal and the real with such cavalier abandon [1] I would like to see terminology like “formal quantities” and “real quantities”. A personal foible or a reasonable plea to always distinguish the formal and the real?
3. The modern monetary system is used by the oligarchic elites, more and more in the neoliberal era, to give money to themselves and keep it away from poor people who need money for essential purchases. The current system is very clear. Much money creation is done by debt-creation by the private banks when all money creation (as necessary) could be done by the government as fiat money creation.
Cheap money, as low or zero interest money, greatly benefits the rich. Large corporations can borrow billions at zero interest currently but bank credit card debt still sees consumers charged at about 12% to 20% per annum (in Australia anyway). There is not one interest rate but many interest rates and the spread is greatly in favour of the already rich.
4. It is interesting to try to put together two claims from Warner and Lee:
(a) “economic growth determines interest rate levels is supported in 8 out of 8 cases”; and
(b) “the dominance of quantities over prices”.
This might be seen to imply that the oligarchs cannot unilaterally set interest rates to zero but instead that this is controlled by resource shortages causing economic stagnation. (My point modified as per my update above.) But there are two kinds of resource shortages. One is the genuine shortage (shortage of real supply) and the other is the artificially imposed resource shortage (withholding of supply by business or formal quantity shortages by macro policy). There are many examples of artificially imposed resource shortages including cartel examples like OPEC. Withholding supply stagnates the economy enabling low interest rates to be implemented by big business.
5. Workers and the middle class are weakened by low interest rates in a number of ways. Low interest loans are offset by increases in real estate prices for example. Saving for a home becomes impossible for workers and the lower middle class. If interest on savings is zero or less in real terms (now I have fallen into the formal/real terminology trap of nominal/real for a formal value) and the price of housing increases by say 5% per annum, a worker can never catch the inflating deposit number by making savings from wages after all essential expenses. This is the situation now. Rich people and companies buy up the housing and apartment stock and become rentiers. Just a small example.
These are just preliminary thoughts as I say.
The other concern I have is that our entire system depends on growth. Growth is basically now no longer possible, at least not quantitative growth. Some qualitative and/or “hedonic” growth may still be possible but really I doubt even that. The climate system is close to collapse. Hence, so is our entire global economy. Without a steady state sustainable economic system it will be the “end of history” but not in the way Fukuyama meant it.
Note 1. Now that I think of it, it is this issue which can give me unease in CasP theory. That is to say, I have a knee-jerk reaction to dismiss or at least be suspicious of any quantification of the notional followed by an assertion that it can tell us something real. CasP’s method is to work in this manner at times but in specific ways. An example is with differentials like differential profits. The ratios can tell us something real. Something similar happens with SI derived units like the radian which is a ratio, albeit it is a ratio of two real measures (in SI units m/m with the hypotenuse intersecting the circumference line). The idea that a ratio (or a function too perhaps) of two notional quantities can tell me something real is quite difficult for me. I can see it in specific instances presented to me but as a general principle I really struggle with it. Does the fact that the notional quantities are algorithmically performative (in the sense that Cherizola uses the term “performative”) with real results mean ipso facto that the ratio can tell us something objectively real? Is this the way I should think about ratios of the notional in CasP? I mean if it helps me and its not technically wrong?
Scot,
I have read “Capital as Power: Towards a Study of Order and Creorder” once. Once is not enough of course. I “crash” read it on the computer screen. I don’t mean speed reading but reading fast, not taking notes and skipping some graphs and graph explanations. And I am a person who usually likes graphs. But reading a long text on computer screen is very uncomfortable, I find. I absorb stuff better from real books in an arm chair or at a study table. But one is still very lucky to have access to the pdf of course.
The two quotes you give, I agree with completely. The fundamental thesis of CasP I also agree with completely and I find it entirely empirically supportable. There is one aspect of CasP I have sort of “instinctive” reservations about but unless and until I can enunciate my unease clearly I wonder whether I should prefigure it or not. It is this unease which causes me to jump precipitously to question or criticise when I suspect J.N. or CasP theory of veering too close to scientism or its own dogma. It has turned out on each specific occasion I have been completely wrong. J.N. has answered my questions in a way which clearly illustrates a scientific approach and no trace of being scientistic.
It’s almost as if I am hard science literalist and I have in a prejudicial fashion thrown out the entire social sciences from my thinking, probably precisely because conventional economics is so atrocious and so obviously ideological. It has given the whole school of social sciences a bad name in my mind, along with the often obviously ideological Political Science. I have been interested in hard science and philosophy and nothing in between other than literature and cinema (but then considerations of aesthetics belong to philosophy). I tend to think there are only two subjects. It’s a kind of motto of mine. “There are only two disciplines. Physics and philosophy. Every other subject is a derivative or an amalgam.” The derivative extensions of physics, namely chemistry and biology are still acceptable to me because I can look at them in an entirely physical and physics light.
Physics and philosophy is an interesting dualism for someone who claims to be a monist. But I find it consistent because human perceptions (impressions) and understandings, I hold, are based entirely on modelling and modelling only. Modelling processes can be be conceived as operating wholly in the monistic system, the single system of sub-systems. Our modelling in turn is based entirely on physical processes and information transfers as a patterns via and through physical media. The human visual system (from eyes to visual cortex) is a perfect example and the modern computer hardware and software analogues to vision which we have developed now enable us to conceptualize quite clearly that our view of a room (as a sighted person) is a HUD (head up display) in our visual cortex. I had already begun to philosophise about vision (as a sensory modelling system) when a set of retinal tears forced me into a series of eye surgeries, if I wanted to save the sight in my left eye. My experiences before and after the surgeries and even in the conscious “twilight” anaesthesia period of eye surgery foregrounded very clearly to me that the vision system is a combination hardware-software or physical-logical system and brought forward further experiential details how it does its modelling. Of course, if I had studied what my eye surgeon had studied I would already have had this understanding.
To bring it back to modelling, I hold as I said that human perceptions (impressions) and understandings are based entirely on modelling and modelling only. That’s a fundamental tenet of my developing empirical philosophy at this point. Thus, there are only more complete and less complete models and only models accurate enough for some purpose or not accurate enough for some purpose. Finally, in the set of models not accurate enough for some purpose are those which possess no homomorphic congruences at all (homomorphic congruence being my touchstone for modelling validity as per the correspondence theory of truth) with reality. These are illusions and delusions. In the monist purview, models are perforce a subset of reality and only contain a modelled subset of the relevant relations in reality. Hence, models are always incomplete.
But certain extensive false models are special in the sense that they are shared and given group or social credence. We can fit in this space the myths and ideologies you are I are talking about (and CasP is talking about). We consider that it is fairly clear to us that all, or least major aspects of, classical economics is/are myths and ideologies without an objective scientific basis for their claimed “truths”. Nevertheless, these models tell compelling stories and give compelling visions and hopes to people and people live by them just as they live by religions. The empirically false system (false with respect to at least some more fundamental facts) creates a new extensive empirical reality as a social reality and with its generated real relations, many a of which are built on original or more fundamental falsehoods. The social-fictive (a word I probably have borrowed from social science) becomes its own reality and self-validates, generally with circular logic.
It is this capability of persons and societies to erect social-fictive superstructures over and above an objective base (they still draw things including matter and energy from a real base) that becomes very difficult to deal with theoretically in one important sense. How do I inoculate my own theorising from its own propensity to develop a personal-fictive superstructure? I can get pretentious and call my personal foolish fictions speculative philosophy. This does not save a person’s case. The next step is to seek empirical corroboration; clear enough in the hard sciences at least where one is not dealing with too many emergent complex system phenomena. What is then happening extensively and in a feedback manner gets difficult to analyse. Attribution of causes also gets extremely difficult. And so much the more difficult do things become when socially shared illusions and delusions create new concrete relations. The next step is to seek consensus observations. A game of “Do you see what I see?” also sometimes called an echo chamber. We seek like-minded people who will validate our theories, measurements and perceptions, we start suffering from confirmation bias and so on, if we are not very careful.
If we see and name the myths of classical economics, as we in this blog tend to do, we rely not just on in-group consensus but on objective, scientific observations. That is good and valid so far as it can be taken. But what if our methods partially involve measurement of or in the social-fictive dimensions we seek to theorise? At one level this is not fraught. “Measurement of” is not a problem in one sense. We can measure how many people in a population believe in a standard statement that essentially says markets work and value things correctly and efficiently. CasP seems to move at times into “measurements in” social-fictive dimensions. It does this as J.N. has explained to me a couple of times by saying (if I get it now) that “capital is power” (yes I get that), that it “instantiates power rather measures value” (yes I get that too and I hope my way of expressing it is correct). Thus it is valid to take money as the measure of that power because it instantiates and operatively (performatively) implements it.
But then some theorising moves on to talking of “hype” and another recent concept, the word for which eludes me right now, and these start to feel to me like more purely speculative notions. J.N. has explained to me a couple of times their objective basis in his theory and I seem to get it with J.N..’s words in front of me. But a day later the explanation and justification elude me again, in my head. If one cannot understand concepts well enough for recall and paraphrase, it’s a rather clear sign one hasn’t grasped them properly.
Naturally, I don’t want to put people to the trouble of explaining such things over and over again to me. That is the particular level I need to work on. I will try going back to the articles you suggest and to the main monograph and re-reading the later chapters which I perhaps did read to quickly. If I can’t organize my thoughts, I can’t give an attempted refutation. I very doubt I am going to refute any part of CasP. More likely, it might result in more elaborated explanations for persons like me who have particular blind-spots to particular ideas.
Thank you JMC. However, a bit of self-objectivity requires that I recognise that there’s something about the CasP approach (as social science method) which I just don’t get yet. If I could read several key sociology or social science texts it would help. The autodidact approach has its limitations of course but I find immersive reading of key original thinkers helps a lot. (Or at least I believe it does.) One begins to absorb the way of thinking and more of an instinct for applying the same methods. Learning to write in the same technical terms helps too. Who should I start with? Durkheim and Weber? Which texts? Also, which recent texts?
My reading has been over-directed at a small subset of philosophy. Hence my habit of going a long way off on speculative and irrelevant tangents. I think I am questioning the fundamental assumptions of an approach but often all I am doing is going too far down the rabbit hole of Pyrrhonism.
Jonathan,
Thank you for your reply. Your points are clear. And I find myself agreeing with every one as it is presented. To be self-critical, my mode of thinking seems to be bedevilled by a peculiar or idiosyncratic gap: many gaps in fact. Specifically, I had some hard sciences training and some humanities schooling but my glaring gap is the social sciences. Even my philosophical studies, if I can call them that, have been autodidact and confined to the British Empiricists and the American Pragmatists and thus I have scarcely gone beyond the 19th C. I have paid most attention to Berkeley, Hume and Peirce (and Marx). I put no store in Peirce’s Triadism. I invert Berkeley’s monist idealism to “existentist” monism, though for everyday pragmatic purposes I can be regarded as no different from a materialist or physicalist (of the monist variety).
In trying to grapple with what was wrong (and frankly infuriating) with conventional economics and even parts of Marxism which did not add up to me (classical economics in toto in other words), I hurdled the social sciences, or rather stepped blindly over their whole ground knowing nothing about them, and attempted to go back to (my self-developed) ontological first principles for empiricism. Then I have tried to work out again from those first principles as it were, to try make sense of what I call “hybrid” or “amalgam” disciplines like “economics” or classical political economy . I call them hybrids or amalgams because they attempt to mix the real and formal, or the descriptive and prescriptive if you will, without an adequate ontological base analysis. That is to say their taxonomy of fundamental ontological objects (fundamental to the disciple) is confused: completely wrong in fact with prescriptive objects treated as descriptive objects, with descriptive and prescriptive mixed indiscriminately and so on. That has been my basic diagnosis to date.
My unfinished 60,000 word autodidactic ontological thesis (but not the other 60,000 words of false starts, notes and speculations) seems to make some sense (to me) but results in a dog’s breakfast as soon as I try to work back to apply it to anything, like real world political economy. Jesus Cherizola’s paper does something of the type of thing I would have hoped to be able to do from my ontological first principles, albeit he did it much better than I could ever hope to do. But I completely fail to “reverse engineer” the appropriate social sciences and CasP approaches from my purely theoretical or “pure reason” ontological approach. You have permission to laugh. I am laughing at the naivety of my own attempts at this point.
What I am saying here is that when I qualitatively and logically-deductively run, as it were, CasP and CasP papers through my ontological schema, CasP “passes” the test of being congruent with my partly developed ontology. (One should really say my ontological schema appears to pass having a empirical discipline monograph run through it.) CasP not only passes but also illuminates my approach and allows me to expand upon it. When I attempt to qualitatively and logically-deductively run conventional economics and even some parts of Marxism through my ontological schema, they simply do not pass the test. But as I say, I cannot “engineer upwards” from my more or less pure reason approach. This should be no surprise to me. Now, I don’t know why I thought I could do it.
I’m not going to study formally again. That ship has sailed for me. But what should I start reading to overcome my learning gap with respect to the social sciences (and modern philosophy for that matter). It’s easy to sense the solid foundation behind CasP and behind your answers but what should I read to get a proper handle on it? I guess I need to read some foundational texts and modern texts. Where do I start and where do I read up to? Can you recommend say five or six texts, any size, all original authors (in English, translations available if necessary) and not surveys unless you regard a given survey as belonging in such a small foundational group of texts. I will have to go away and read these. I simply don’t seem to have the foundation to write anything useful on this forum. Also, I completely misconstrue your succinct one sentence answers and keep pushing you to paragraph sized answers. I don’t want to continue being so obtuse.
Scot, I like your metaphor far better than mine (about the Ouija board). “The “market” of today’s political economy is essentially a company store in a company town, and its consumers are actually being consumed.” Well put. It has both objective and aesthetic truth to it. It certainly captures how I have felt for my entire adult life living under capitalism.
As I mention in another post (a reply to the Pharmaceuticals topic), I have not read Braudel. Relying on a Wikipedia precis is obviously fraught with pitfalls. I took the statement, “the state in capitalist countries has served as a guarantor of monopolists rather than a protector of competition”, to indicate, at least in itself, a non-splitting of economics from politics. However, I haven’t read Braudel and relying on a brief, ambiguous Wikipedia entry is not something I am prepared to hang my hat on.
“Science cannot tolerate logical contradictions.” – Jonathan Nitzan. The wave-particle theory of light, as an example, might give us pause. It seems the more (nearly) correct statement would be that it is formal logic which cannot tolerate logical contradictions. I refer here to the Law of noncontradiction as an axiom of logic. To simply assume that the law of non-contradiction applies to all real phenomena in the entire real cosmos, could be a significant mistake. It is not provable that the law, or rather axiom, of non-contradiction always applies in reality. Indeed, there are probably enough hints in fields from quantum mechanics to cosmology to suggest other possibilities. On the other hand, the law of non-contradiction appears to apply often enough and consistently enough for it to be taken as an axiom within the logical, mathematical and scientific reasonings which permit us to deal scientifically, pragmatically, consistently and accurately with some aspects of meso or human-scale real phenomena.
At the same time, I would make at least one exception to my last sentence above. The behaviours of human beings might well cause one to question the Law of noncontradiction. Humans appear to be consistently self-contradictory. If irrationality or self-contradiction exist in humans then by extension the systems humans build will contain self-contradictory elements. As heterodox political economists, we indeed do tend to reject the notion of humans as rational agents, as the rational calculators that conventional economics postulates for the foundations of microeconomics.
This problem with humans, with conceptualizing what humans and their systems are, in total, can perhaps be looked at through the lens of causation. Bottom-up causation of the mechanistic and deterministic variety appears to exist above the quantum scale and up to but not including the emergent behaviours of complex and intelligent organisms. This is the delimited realm of phenomena which support the assertion that the Law of noncontradiction is a dependable scientific principle in addition to being an axiom of logic. However, the emergent behaviours of complex intelligent organisms (at least) appear to confound us. Bottom-up causation no longer appears to be the only form of causation. We can note the appearance or apparent appearance of top-down causation.
If the appearance of top-down causation is mere appearance then all our arguments are baseless and fruitless. We are mere fully-determined beings, constrained to “strut and fret like idiots”. In that case, consciousness itself as self-aware and self-reflective consciousness is clearly real as it is a self-proving identity. I self-consciously reflect therefore I am (self-consciously reflecting). That is Descartes’ formula. However, the feeling of free-will and choice would perforce be an illusion. Taking evolution as fact, one would then be led to deduce that there was and is an evolutionary reason for the evolution of the illusion of free-will. Very possibly, an intelligent, self-reflecting fully-determined being would be in a kind of continuous agony; an awareness of internal and complete compulsion and imprisonment, without an evolved illusion of free will and choice. A being in that continuous existential agony would scarcely be seeking further life and reproduction of life. The co-evolution of the free-will illusion with intelligence and self-reflection would be necessary.
If however, top-down causation is real too, then we would be forced to another view of free-will so-called. The best we could do, without putting a ghost in the machine, would be to look at quantum indeterminism as the source of indeterminate, unpredictable and contradictory behaviours, that is aside from looking at the contradictions of social programming and biological programming which is also clearly another arena of internal (psychological) contradiction and external (social) confliction and conflict. The thinking and research program, of some neurologists, is that there are some brain-cell structures which are of a scale that quantum effects in the brain might be possible. This would move the issue of “free-will” from complex, emergent but still fully determined behaviours (as per chaos theory) to an arena of indeterminately emergent behaviours which permit the self-illusion of free will to be affectively achieved as internal qualia.
What has all this to do with political economy and CasP? In my view, it has to do with unexamined a prioris. Science cannot tolerate logical contradictions? I would say rather that logic cannot tolerate logical contradictions and deterministic science cannot tolerate logical contradictions, and correctly so in each case. Science embracing indeterminism may perforce be required to accept certain contradictions. Does CasP position itself in a fully deterministic world as its presumed purview? I am not sure.
I will be honest. I struggle with every system of thought almost precisely at the point where I feel it is becoming doctrinaire in some fashion in some particular. CasP is a very useful model of political economy. I think CasP’s refutation of the classical thesis of economic value is ground-breaking and I have said this before. It is a major advance. It resolves the “value controversy”, as I call it, by abolishing it. It is correct to abolish it. The thesis of objectively quantifiable, comparable and aggregable economic value in and between economic objects is completely unsustainable. There are many aspects of the CasP model which I consider are homomorphically congruent with reality (my touchstone of propositional truth is homomorphic correspondence of the statement or model with some aspect(s) of reality). However, when I encounter statements like “Science cannot tolerate logical contradictions,” I become concerned. I am not entirely sure what is meant. Does it mean CasP is pure science and cannot tolerate contradictions?
How then does CasP deal with human and human system contradictions such as irrationality? Does it mean CasP limits its field of investigation and is not attempting to resolve such contradictions? CasP proves classical value theories untenable. I certainly agree with that. That people still believe in (the majority believe in) classical value theories of one form or another (utils, snalts or fancier modern variants) remains an extensive fact. How do we deal with this fact?
I hope I can indicate my unease at the bald statement “Science cannot tolerate logical contradictions.”, without appearing contrarian or disrespectful.
In a new and off-the-cuff post I talk briefly about David Harvey’s chat about markets in a short Youtube video of his. That led me to this.
“Braudel argued that capitalists have typically been monopolists and not, as is usually assumed, entrepreneurs operating in competitive markets. He argued that capitalists did not specialize and did not use free markets, thus diverging from both liberal (Adam Smith) and Marxian interpretations. In Braudel’s view, the state in capitalist countries has served as a guarantor of monopolists rather than a protector of competition, as it is usually portrayed. He asserted that capitalists have had power and cunning on their side as they have arrayed themselves against the majority of the population.” – Wikipedia.
It seems Braudel makes a lot of sense. (I have not read his works, I admit.) “The state in capitalist countries has served as a guarantor of monopolists rather than a protector of competition.” This certainly resonates today. It sums up the entire case at the top end (monopoly end) of the “market”. This has been true at least since the early days of the East India Company. It is interesting to note that the American Flag (stars and stripes design) is derived from the East India Company ensign (the stripes). A “Freudian semiotician” would argue that the plagiarism is no accident. He wouldn’t even need to be Freudian really. The idea of a business monopoly over a “new” continent must surely have come from the existing idea and reality of a business monopoly over an old continent. The American Whigs or oligarchs now doubt saw themselves as the New World Company, essentially. The royal prerogative to the New World monopoly simply had to be done away with first by the declaration of the independence of the oligarchs. The US remains true its origins in the Braudelian sense as the state continues to serve as guarantor for the monopolists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_the_East_India_Company
What we see today is pretty much the total protection of the top monopolists by the state. Sometimes an oligarch goes too far (somehow), upsets the government-oligarchy cartel and gets disciplined or at least questioned. Jack Ma in China and Mark Zuckerberg in the US. Of course, Zuckerberg is in a triopoly situation (so far as I can tell) and that leaves one vulnerable to two-on-one on lobbying.
A feature of modern capitalism (It’s a feature not a bug!) is that poor people who get a dollar must have it stripped back off them. But rich people and businesses who get billions for nothing are permitted to keep it. Crony capitalism is flagrantly obvious now. In Australia we had the “Robodebt” welfare imbroglio.
“The Robodebt scheme, formally Online Compliance Intervention (OCI), was an unlawful method of automated debt assessment and recovery employed by Services Australia as part of its Centrelink (welfare) payment compliance program.” – Wikipedia.
Welfare recipients and their advocates had to fight tooth and nail to have incorrectly calculated welfare debts overturned.
Now we have had the Jobkeeper overpayments imbroglio. The employers got billions to keep workers on the payroll when they were locked down at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, quite a lot of businesses made more money, not less, during the lock-down. They failed to show losses (a condition of the Jobkeeper scheme) but the government has turned a blind eye and not demanded repayment. Thirteen billion dollars are involved. Australia is a small economy, smaller than Canada’s. This is a lot of free money to business. This is how modern capitalism works. You get granted a monopoly or you get lots of free money.. if you are a business. This is how it works. It’s no mystery. Nothing to do with markets at all.
Dear YuriDl,
I am not qualified to answer your question. While I remember and understand some concepts from the CasP book by Bichler and Nitzan, I do not remember and understand all the concepts from that book. Breadth and depth is one of those concepts I would have to re-read about and even then I might not make the correct interpretation, nor answer your question correctly. I may try to re-read the chapter in question and hazard a (poorly) educated guess at the answer to your question but you could not take my answer as definitive. An answer from one of the lead theorists of CasP would be much better and more reliable.
From my perspective (Marxian autonomist, a bit Veblenian), I would simply note that neoliberal capitalism looks entirely reactive to me. It has its ideology and its rituals of capital which it won’t change for nature or humans other than for humans owning and managing dominant capital. When it generates a crisis by its modes of production, it then seeks to ignore the crisis where it can (forcing nature and non-rich humans to accept the negative externalities) or it seeks to band-aid the crisis while concomitantly making money (especially as differential profits) out of the crisis. It attempts to monetize crises during the band-aiding process.
So, while capitalism is interested is high “valued-added” processes, so-called, and really high differential profit process, like copyrighted vaccines, it is not interested in early disease circumvention measures (like preventing novel zoonoses emergences and their initial pandemic spread) nor in making vaccines cheap or free for the third world, nor in relatively cheap preventative health measures like masks, distancing and other NPIs (non pharmaceutical interventions).
Neither the good of nature as a balanced biosphere and ecological system, nor the good of most humans are taken into account in the calculations and commands of capitalism. Whether that causes a change in the breadth-depth space, using those terms in the CasP manner, maybe we could wait for an expert answer or else assay our own attempt following their schema. Might take me a few days and I would prefer an expert answer, not least because I am somewhat lazy at times. 😉
I refer to the prediction.
“Prediction: if the current U.S. government delivers on its promise to curtail the might of the country’s largest corporations, it will face the wrath of the most powerful megamachine the world has ever seen.”
An interesting prediction and one I agree with. However, how can we forget China? Firstly, China is now the largest manufacturing country in the world with about 30% of global manufacturing capacity. The USA is second with about 15%. China is equal to two USAs on that measure. Secondly, China is the largest economy in the world on PPP measures. Such measures, PPP adjusted or not, may be dubious. That is why we should pay more attention to the production of real stuff, like the first measure above and other basic measures like the production of steel, concrete and even miles, or kilometres, of fast train track built per year. In all such measures, China already dwarfs the USA in production, as it does in population too. If we want to look at the future of capitalism, we must look at China. Is it possible to do the above stats and graphs for China or is it too difficult to get reliable data? China is opaque, perhaps by design.
China unleashed capitalism internally. My theory is that it was an intentional strategy with a pre-conceived endgame. China saw the Soviet Union excluded from the world system, broken up and then Russia was readmitted (late in the day) to be gutted by neoliberal “reforms”. China was determined to avoid this fate. Most Favored Nation (MFN) status was granted to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) by the USA in 1979. It was thought that China would liberalise with liberalisation driven by capitalism, free markets and free trade. Whether this was really believed or the policy was driven by pure US dominant capital greed is worth pondering. In their arrogance, the US believed they could never be surpassed so granting China MFN was not considered any kind of risk.
The plan of China, in my opinion, was to use capitalism to defeat capitalism. Part one of the plan was to use access to Western markets, to Western capital and to the world system of capital, resources and markets in general to develop into the largest and most technologically advanced economy in the world. This goal is largely achieved. Marxists, whose analysis of capitalism is excellent in many respects, understood how the capitalist system would respond. That is to say, the transfer of manufacture to China was predictable when the bait was cheap labor and the transfer would be effected by the capitalist endogenous force of global labor arbitrage.
China has now largely completely this project, becoming the largest economy in the world with the greatest proportion of global manufactures of any nation. It also has now a developed seaboard and an under-developed interior. Capitalists were unleashed into and in China but now is the time to rein them in according to the CCP plan. We see Xi Jinping taking these steps to re-establish authoritarian communist control over the Chinese capitalists and corporations. We can rephrase Jonathan’s prediction as a question in relation to China.
“If the current Chinese government delivers on its promise to curtail the might of the country’s largest corporations, will it face the wrath of the most powerful megamachine the world has ever seen?”
This question would refer to both the capitalist megamachine as it is in China, and the global capitalist megamachine outside China which is still in total much larger than China with 70% of the global manufacturing capacity being still outside China and the finance control loci being more outside China than inside China. The capitalist megamachine component as it exists in China is almost, as it were, now a capitalist megamachine fifth-column in China with respect to the goal of Xi Jinping to apparently shift back to, not socialism, but to state capitalism rather than corporate capitalism. China at this stage can probably export goods to its interior rather than depending on external markets as much. Whether it can continue to draw in world resources might be the limiting issue. This would especially be the case if the rest of the world system, led to it or forced to it by the USA, implemented an incrementally tightening strategic blockade of China. To do it all at once would start WW3. I am not advocating any courses of action here, simply outlining realpolitik possibilities.
Can CasP analyse China in the manner applied to the USA? Is the data available and reliable? If possible, we need to see what is happening in the world’s largest and still rising economy. The contest between state capitalism and corporate capitalism seems to be the coming reality, all in a world which has nearly hit the limits to real growth (as opposed to nominal growth in supposedly inflation adjusted, inflation-chained, dollars.)
