{"id":314,"date":"2008-10-01T00:00:03","date_gmt":"2008-10-01T05:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=314"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:59:11","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:59:11","slug":"finance-capital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=314","title":{"rendered":"Finance capital"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why financial capitalism is no more “fictitious” than any other kind<\/h2>\n

Chris Cutrone<\/h2>\n

The following was distributed as a flyer [PDF]<\/a> at the occupation protests that began in September 2011.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

WITH THE PRESENT FINANCIAL MELT-DOWN in the U.S. throwing the global economy into question, many on the \u201cLeft\u201d are wondering again about the nature of capitalism. While many will be tempted to jump on the bandwagon of the \u201cbailout\u201d being floated by the Bush administration and the Congressional Democrats (including Obama), others will protest the \u201cbailing out\u201d of Wall Street.<\/p>\n

The rhetoric of \u201cWall Street vs. Main Street,\u201d between \u201chardworking America\u201d and the \u201cfinancial fat cats,\u201d however, belies a more fundamental truth: the two are indissolubly linked and are in fact two sides of the same coin of capitalism.<\/p>\n

It would be no less reactionary \u2014 that is, conservative of capitalism \u2014 to try to oppose \u201cproductive\u201d industrial manufacturing or service sector capitalism to \u201cparasitic\u201d financial capitalism.<\/p>\n

As Georg Luk\u00e1cs pointed out in his seminal essay \u201cReification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat\u201d (1923), following Marx\u2019s critique of \u201calienation\u201d (in Das Kapital<\/em>, 1867) (and echoing the at-the-time yet-to-be discovered writings by Marx such as the 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts<\/em> and the Grundrisse<\/em>, 1858), modern society structured by the dynamic domination of capital gives rise to \u201cnecessary forms of appearance\u201d that are symptomatic of capital.<\/p>\n

These reified \u201cforms of appearance\u201d include not only forms of \u201cexchange\u201d such as monetary and financial systems, but also, more fundamentally, forms of wage labor and concrete forms of production, which are just as much a part of capital\u2019s reproduction as a social system as are any conventions of exchange.<\/p>\n

This means that one cannot oppose one side of capital to another, one cannot side with \u201cproductive labor\u201d against \u201cparasitic capital\u201d without being one-sided and falling into a trap of advocating and participating in the reproduction of capital at a deeper level. Luk\u00e1cs recognized, following Marx, that capital as not merely a form of \u201ceconomics\u201d but a social system of (re)production.<\/p>\n

But most varieties of \u201cMarxism\u201d have missed this very crucial point, and so take Marx to mean rather the opposite, that industrial production embodies what is true and good about capital, while exchange and money represents what is false and bad about it. Such pseudo-\u201dMarxism\u201d has falsely (and conservatively) vilified the supposedly \u201cfictitious\u201d nature of \u201cfinance capital.\u201d<\/p>\n

Following Marx, Luk\u00e1cs, through his concept of \u201creification,\u201d sought to deepen the critical recognition of the social-historical problem of capital, to recognize that modern society as structured and dominated by capital exhibits specific symptoms of this domination. Such symptoms are the attempts by human beings individually and collectively to master, control and adjudicate the effects of the social dynamism that capital sets in motion.<\/p>\n

However, in Marx\u2019s phrase (from the 1848 Manifesto of the Communist Party<\/em>), the dynamic of capital ensures that \u201call that is solid melts into air.\u201d The modern society of capital is one in which all concrete ways of life, social organization and production, are subject to revolutionization through a cycle of \u201ccreative destruction.\u201d But Marx did not simply bemoan this dynamism of capital that ends up making transient all human endeavors, mocking their futility.<\/p>\n

Rather, Marx recognized this dynamism as an \u201calienated\u201d form of social freedom. The creative destruction engendered by capital is the way capital reproduces its social logic, but it also gives rise to transformations of concrete ways of social life the world has never before seen, engendering new possibilities for humanity \u2014 the past 200 years of capitalism have seen more, and more profound changes, globally, than previous millennia saw. Unfortunately, the reproduction of capital also means undermining such new human potentialities (for instance, new forms of gender and sexual relations) as soon as they are brought onto the ever-shifting horizon of possibility.<\/p>\n

With the current financial collapse, the temptation will be to retreat to what many on the pseudo-\u201dLeft\u201d have long advocated, a \u201cnew New Deal\u201d of Keynesian Fordist and welfare-state social-security reforms. The temptation on the \u201cLeft\u201d (as well as the Right) will be to see what some have called \u201csaving capitalism from itself\u201d as \u201cprogress.\u201d But such attempts to master the dynamics of capital will not only fail to achieve their aims, but will also entail unexpected further consequences and problems no less potentially destructive for humanity than so-called \u201cfree-market\u201d practices of capitalism.<\/p>\n

If the neo-Keynesians as well as others, such as the more radical \u201csocialists\u201d on the \u201cLeft\u201d are mistaken in their hopes for reformist solutions to the problems of capital, it is not least because they don\u2019t recognize capitalism as a (alienated) form of (increasing the scope of) freedom. Rather, their nemeses among the \u201cneo-liberals\u201d such as Milton Friedman (in the 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom<\/em>) and Friedrich Hayek (in his 1943 book The Road to Serfdom<\/em>) have given expression to this liberal dimension of capital, which they opposed to what they took to be the worse authoritarianism of (nationalist) socialism.<\/p>\n

Opposed to this have been thinkers such as Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation<\/em>, 1944) and John Kenneth Galbraith (The Affluent Society<\/em>, 1958, which warned of the effects of private-sector capital outstripping the public sector). Polanyi, for instance, complained that capitalism commodified three things that supposedly cannot be commodities, labor, land and money itself. In such a one-sided opposition to capital, Polanyi neglected to realize that what makes modern society what it is, what distinguishes modern capitalism from earlier pre-modern forms of capital, is that it precisely entails subjecting these supposedly not \u201ccommodifiable\u201d things to the commodity form. Modern capital is precisely about the radical revolutionizing of how we relate to forms of social intercourse, labor, and nature.<\/p>\n

So no one should be fooled into thinking that supposedly better forms of politically managing (e.g., under the Democrats) the social investment in, and thus preserving the \u201cvalue\u201d and promoting the improvement of material production, infrastructure, or forms of knowledge represents any kind of sure \u201cprogress.\u201d \u2014 No one should mistake for even a moment that such efforts will not be a windfall and lining the pockets of the capitalists (on \u201cMain Street\u201d) through upward income-redistribution schemes any less than \u201cbailing out\u201d Wall Street will be.<\/p>\n

The presently bemoaned deregulation of financial institutions that occurred under Bill Clinton in the 1990s was not meant (merely) to enrich the rich further, but to open the way for new forms of economic and social relations, both locally and globally. Such \u201cneo-liberal\u201d reforms were meant to overcome, in Milton Friedman\u2019s phrase, the \u201ctyranny of the status quo\u201d \u2014 a sentiment any emancipatory Left ought not to regard with excessive cynicism. For the neo-liberals found a hearing not only among the wealthy, but also among many left out of the prior Keynesian\/Fordist arrangements \u2014 see, for instance, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus\u2019s social activist work in \u201cmicrofinance\u201d in Bangladesh.<\/p>\n

A Marxian approach to the problem of capital, as Luk\u00e1cs warned with his concept of \u201creification,\u201d recognizes that \u201clabor\u201d and its forms of \u201cproduction\u201d are no less \u201creified\u201d and \u201cideological\u201d in their practices under capital, no less \u201cunreal\u201d and subject to de-realization, with destructive social consequences, than are the forms of \u201cexchange,\u201d monetization and finance.<\/p>\n

An authentically Marxian Left should take no side in the present debates over the merits and pitfalls of the \u201cbailout\u201d of the financial system. One can and should critique this, of course, but nonetheless remain aware that this is no simple matter of opposing it. This side of revolutionary emancipation beyond capital, a Marxian politics would demand to better finance capital no less than to support labor. Finance capital is no less legitimate if also no less symptomatic of capital than any other phenomenon of modern life. So it deserves not to be vilified or denounced but understood as a way humanity has tried authentically to cope with the creative destruction of capital in modern social life. | \u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n

Originally published in <\/em>The Platypus Review<\/strong> #7 (October 2008).<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why financial capitalism is no more “fictitious” than any other kind Chris Cutrone The following was distributed as a flyer [PDF] at the occupation protests that began in September 2011. WITH THE PRESENT FINANCIAL MELT-DOWN in the U.S. throwing the global economy into question, many on the \u201cLeft\u201d are wondering again about the nature of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12,19,16,23,15,6],"class_list":["post-314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-12","tag-lukacs","tag-marxism","tag-neoliberalism","tag-obama-era","tag-the-platypus-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=314"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3244,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314\/revisions\/3244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}