January 03, 2009
shapeliness
maps are pictures of money and the state
Even economists able in some regard to have seen the crisis with a clear eye are still largely compelled to speak of it in almost purely cyclical terms — not in the sense of some autonomous motion, but rather with the presumption of some quasi-sinoidal return. We were up and now we're down and how will we go back to up? This manifests itself in Roubini's incessant return to the question of exactly when the slump will end (perhaps this is inevitable, given that he has been cast as Nostradamus rather than Chanakya), or in Krugman's scientistic worrying of the necessary repairs (one pictures him always with a thought bubble containing not his own words but Keynes's: "we have magneto trouble").
It is tempting to assert that this waveform horizon results from being adrift on the neoclassical sea; had they their feet planted in the critique of political economy, they would see the drive of the world capital system toward terminal crisis. But this too may be a mistake, albeit one of scale rather than simplicity. The inability to think the crisis in relation to geopolitics and state power afflicts various Marxian analysts as surely as it does the doyens of the core institutions. That there will not be a recovery in the full sense is explicable only through the coordination of economic and state power, and indeed the horizon of knowability here is not that of an unforeseeable economic unfolding but the difficulty in conceiving of what form the transfer of global power away from the U.S. will take.
So, resolved: this year's study project will take that as one of its necessities. We start in general agreement with Luxemburg's insistence on the role of empire in maintaining capital expansion. We disagree only insofar as she suggests that its role is to reinsert jolts of primitive accumulation to the process, while we would suggest that in the case of global empires, it has served in ways at once more nuanced and more gross to assure the future likelihood of increase in formal and real subsumption, a future commodity realized as present money through the mechanisms of credit. That this state/economic mechanism ends as well in crisis there is no doubt; the unfolding of the crisis, and the possibility of participating in it, depends from this conception.
And so the year begins. We will be posting about matters various; in the Spring, we will also begin our project of serializing portions of the music book hereabouts, for Don and others who would prefer not to read through this tawdry politicking.
Posted by jane at January 3, 2009 10:54 AM | TrackBack