#Political economy

[momxijinping]

Malthusianism/Ecofascism and the International Monetary Fund/World Bank

[excerpted from my copy of Michael Hudson's Super-Imperialism, 2nd edition, section II chapter 7]

[michael hudson then describes the Partners in Development (1969) program and its ill-suitedness to the actual task at hand & the necessity to reform the agricultural production to support high-value-added production, which the program ignores]

[racefortheironthrone]

If management finds a way to automate jobs during a strike, is that scabbing?

Peripherally.

The automation itself is more part of the general category of management strategies to restructure workflow and production methods in order to reduce the need for, and thus the power of, labor. This dates back to the origins of Taylorism itself in the 1890s as an effort to “steal the brains from underneath the cap of labor” and through to the emergence of Human Relations and Industrial Psychology in the early 20th century as a means to better control workers. So I think you could see in as essentially equivalent to classic speed-up and stretch-out efforts to maintain production at as low a cost as possible during a strike, and thus break the union.

However, the dirty truth of automation is that there is no clean way to fully substitute machinery for labor. Due to the inherent limitations of technology at any stage of development, you need labor to repair and maintain and monitor automated systems, you need labor to install and operate the machines, you need labor to design and program and manufacture the machines. (This is one reason why the job-killing predictions around automation often fall flat, because the supposedly superior new technology often requires a significant increase in human labor to service the new technology when it breaks. For example, this is why automation in fast food has proven to be so difficult and partial than expected: it turns out that self-checkout machines are actually very expensive to operate in terms of skilled manpower.) And to the extent that a given automation contract or project is being undertaken during a strike in order to break that strike, that’s absolutely scabbing.

[canadianabroadvery]

Finance giants like Fidelity and Schwab are pushing “donor-advised funds” that enable the ultrawealthy to funnel cash to far-right extremist groups anonymously under the guise of charitable giving. Project 2025 has benefited enormously.

[loneberry]

September 11, 1973: On the 50th Anniversary of the Coup in Chile 

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the coup d’état in Chile, when a fascist junta led by dictator Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende. For those of us who are on the left, the story should be familiar by now: Allende had charted a ‘Chilean way to socialism' ("La vía chilena al socialismo") quite distinct from the Soviet Union and communist China, a peaceful path to socialism that was fundamentally anti-authoritarian, combining worker power with respect for civil liberties, freedom of the press, and a principled commitment to democratic process. For leftists who had become disillusioned with the Soviet drift into authoritarianism, Chile was a bright spot on an otherwise gloomy Cold War map.

What happened in Chile was one of the darkest chapters in the history of US interventionism. In August 1970, Henry Kissinger, who was then Nixon’s national security adviser, commissioned a study on the consequences of a possible Allende victory in the upcoming Chilean presidential election. Kissinger, Nixon, and the CIA—all under the spell of Cold War derangement syndrome—determined the US should pursue a policy of blocking the ascent of Allende, lest a socialist Chile generate a “domino effect” in the region. 

When Allende won the presidency, the US did everything in their power to destroy his government: they meddled in Chilean elections, leveraged their control of the international financial system to destroy the economy of Chile (which they also did through an economic boycott), and sowed social chaos through sponsoring terrorism and a shutdown of the transportation sector, bringing the country to the brink of civil war. Particularly infuriating to the Americans was Allende’s nationalization of the copper mining industry, which was around 70% of Chile’s economy at the time and was controlled by US mining companies like Anaconda, Kennecott and the Cerro Corporation. When the CIA’s campaign of sabotage failed to destroy the socialist experiment in Chile, they resorted to assisting general Augusto Pinochet's plot to overthrow the democratically elected government. What followed was a gruesome campaign of repression against workers, leftists, poets, activists, students, and ordinary Chileans—stadiums were turned into concentration camps where supporters of Allende’s Popular Unity government were tortured and murdered. During Pinochet’s 17-year reign of terror, 3,200 people were executed and 40,000 people were detained, tortured, or disappeared, 1,469 of whom remain unaccounted for. Chile was then used as a laboratory for neoliberal economic policies, where the Chicago boys and their ilk tested out their terrible ideas on a population forced to live under a military dictatorship.

It shatters my heart, thinking about this history. I feel a personal attachment to Chile, not only because my partner is Chilean (his father left during the dictatorship), but because I’ve always considered Chile to be a world capital of poetry and anti-authoritarian leftism. The filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky asks, “In how many countries does a real poetic atmosphere exist? Without a doubt, ancient China was a land of poetry. But I think, in the 1950s in Chile, we lived poetically like in no other country in the world.” (Poetry left China long ago — oh how I wish I’d been around to witness the poetic flowering of the Tang era!) Chile has one of the greatest literary traditions of the twentieth century, producing such giants as Bolaño and Neruda, and more recently, Cecilia Vicuña and Raúl Zurita, among others. 

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the coup, the Harvard Film Archive has been  screening Patricio Guzmán’s magisterial trilogy, The Battle of Chile, along with a program of Chilean cinema. I watched part I and II the last two nights and will watch part III tonight. It’s no secret that I am a huge fan of Guzmán’s work, and even quoted his beautiful film Nostalgia for the Light in the conclusion of my book Carceral Capitalism, when I wrote about the Chilean political prisoners who studied astronomy while incarcerated in the Atacama Desert. Bless Patricio Guzmán. This man has devoted his life and filmmaking career to the excavation of the Chilean soul. 

Parts I and II utterly destroyed me. I left the theater last night shaken to my core, my face covered in tears. 

The films are all the more remarkable when you consider it was made by a scrappy team of six people using film stock provided by the great documentarian Chris Marker. After the coup, four of the filmmakers were arrested. The footage was smuggled out of Chile and the exiled filmmakers completed the films in Cuba. Sadly, in 1974, the Pinochet regime disappeared cameraman Jorge Müller Silva, who is assumed dead. 

It’s one thing to know the macro-story of what happened in Chile and quite another to see the view from the ground: the footage of the upswell of support for radical transformation, the marches, the street battles, the internal debates on the left about how to stop the fascist creep, the descent into chaos, the face of the military officer as he aims his pistol at the Argentine cameraman Leonard Hendrickson during the failed putsch of June 1973 (an ominous prelude to the September coup), the audio recordings of Allende on the morning of September 11, the bombing of Palacio de La Moneda—the military is closing in. Allende is dead. The crumbling edifice of the presidential palace becomes the rubble of revolutionary dreams—the bombs, a dirge for what was never even given a chance to live.

[econsociology]

A Marxist Critique of Liberalism: On Capitalism and Individual Freedom -- Prabhat Patnaik looks at the notion of “freedom” in the context of the integrated political and economic framework that we have come to call “liberalism.”

[redsolon]

Amazing video from ChemicalMind compiling interview clips from Gabriel Rockhill. His talks relate back directly to this article showing what an embarrassment the Frankfurt School was:

While watching it I kept feeling like I'd heard of this guy. Then I realized he wrote this absolute banger totally eviscerating Zizek:

[gravalicious]

Source: Ashley D. Farmer - Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (2017: 24)

“I was a slave. I was part of the “paper bag brigade,” waiting patiently in front of Woolworth’s on 170th St., between Jerome and Walton Aves., for someone to “buy” me for an hour or two, or, if I were lucky, for a day. That is the Bronx Slave Market, where Negro women wait, in rain or shine, in bitter cold or under broiling sun, to be hired by local housewives looking for bargains in human labor. It has its counterparts in Brighton Beach, Brownsville and other areas of the city. Born in the last depression, the Slave Markets are products of poverty and desperation. They grow as employment falls. Today they are growing. They arose after the 1939 [sic] crash when thousands of Negro women, who before then had a “corner” on household jobs because they were discriminated against in other employment, found themselves among the army of the unemployed. Either the employer was forced to do her own household chores or she fired the Negro worker to make way for a white worker who had been let out of less menial employment. The Negro domestic had no place to turn. She took to the streets in search of employment – and the Slave Markets were born.” - Marvel Cooke - “I Was Part of the Bronx Slave Market” [The Daily Compass, January 8th, 1950]

[fanthropologists]

Fanthropologists Episode 17: Conventions & Political Economy

Happy anniversary! A year ago we uploaded our first episode, and over a year ago we sat in the hallway of a convention center considering conventions and political economy. In this episode you'll find discussions of conventions as spaces for people on the margins, gender dynamics in conventions, and the sound of a trash truck!

Listen to the episode here!

Next episode: October 6th

[toastyslayingbutter]

A fantastic look into Afrofuturism and our legal regime.

[momxijinping]

Max Ajl - Palestine's Great Flood, Parts I and II

[racefortheironthrone]

What do you think about the labor theory of value?

Oh, this is going to get a lot of orthodox Marxists mad at me...

Contrary to Marx's whole thing about socialism being a scientific, materialist analysis rather than an ideology mom, I think the labor theory of value only makes sense as a normative claim, rather than an empirical one. Labor has an inarguable moral claim to the wealth it creates, certainly one that is superior to the claims of capital, although one could quibble in a Georgist sort of way about the role that the community at large (as opposed to the direct producers) play in creating value.

But as a matter of empirical fact, labor is merely one source of value, arguably the largest source of value, but it is not the only source of value and it takes very little legal pad brainstorming to come up with a bunch of sources of value that have nothing to do with labor. Many of the best minds of Marxist economists of many generations were driven mad by futile attempts to square this circle, to no avail.

This is why I am so ardently a believer in revisionism in the spirit of Eduard Bernstein. If socialism is to be "scientific," a big part of that has to come from treating the sacred texts as something that has to be constantly questioned and put through rigorous experimental tests, rather than holy writ. Marx and Engels were not saints nor prophets - they were two 19th century dudes trying their best with the ideas they had to hand, and they made tons of mistakes and got stuff wrong all the time, and socialism will only prosper from admitting that.

[unapologeticmelancholy]

[loneberry]

—Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene: Toward the Idea of Degrowth Communism

See “solastalgia”, a term coined by an Australian philosopher to “describe the existential melancholy induced by environmental change.”

Apparently geologists will soon vote on whether to accept the claim that we are in the geological epoch known as the Anthropocene.

“The AWG [Anthropocene Working Group] will present a proposal to make the Anthropocene official to the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy later this summer. If the subcommission’s members agree with a 60% majority, the proposal will then pass on to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which will also have to vote and agree with a 60% majority for the proposal to move onward for ratification.” What will be the outcome of the vote?

[econsociology]

10 Economic Sociology books for students and the general public.✨Take a look, dive into, share!

[aeshnacyanea2000]

A man sits in some museum somewhere and writes a harmless book about political economy and suddenly thousands of people who haven’t even read it are dying because the ones who did haven’t got the joke.

-- Terry Pratchett - The Last Continent

[emptyanddark]

"Instead of imagining a world without work that will never come to pass, we should examine the ways historical struggles posited an alternative relationship to work and liberation, where control over the labor process leads to greater control over other social processes, and where the ends of work are human enrichment rather than abstract productivity. furthermore, these struggles point toward the only vehicle for a liberation from capitalism: the composition of a militant struggling class that attacks capital in all its manifold domination, including the technological".

Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right About Why You Hate Your Job by Gavin Mueller