Andrew Kliman on David Graeber and The “Post-Work” Society

I am going to spend some time comparing the approaches of Andrew Kliman and Robert Kurz to the problem of abolishing labor. Andrew Kliman’s contribution to this discussion is “Post-Work: Zombie Social Democracy with a Human Face?” and is presented in the form of a critique of the writers, John Quiggin, Peter Frase, Chris Maisano and, in particular, David Graeber’s essay on “bullshit jobs”. While Robert Kurz’s contribution is “The Lost Honour of Labour” — a critique of orthodox Marxism’s view of labor itself, of which Kliman’s critique can be considered an example.

Briefly stated, the difference between the two labor theorists can be summarized as follows: For Andrew Kliman a reduction of hours of labor is not compatible with the capitalist mode of production. For Kliman then, only with socialism does it become possible to take advantage of technology to reduce labor for the great mass of society.  While for Robert Kurz, communism itself is not possible within the epoch of labor.  It is, from Kurz’s point of view, impossible for socialism to exist so long as the great mass of society labors.

Really, I am done with the Left

Now here is an interesting argument made to me today on twitter:

“The shutdown was not an attack on the system, it was an attack on the welfare state!”

This how the Left usually begins its defense of the fascist state: the state is bad but has parts or elements that are for the working class: “[Insert personage or group here] is not aimed at the bad parts, but is only aimed at the good part” Thus opposition to the state must also be aimed at the bad parts, or must be ignoring that [Insert personage or group here] only hates the good parts.

You can fill in [Insert personage or group here] with your preferred fascist in Washington or even in the states.

The Left will then argue, “We need [Insert favorite social welfare program here] because [Insert favorite social welfare program here] helps the working class.

[Insert favorite social welfare program here] can be any program alleged to directly or indirectly help the working class; among the candidates for [Insert favorite social welfare program here] are Head Start, WIC, food stamps, Social Security, Medicare.

Since any attempt at all to call the state into question, necessarily calls these fascist state programs into question, we must do nothing that calls the state itself into question. The Tea Party can call for an end to deficits and point to food stamps as a target to cut to balance the budget, but the Left cannot call for a balanced budget and point to the military as a target to be cut.

Why?

This is because, if pressed to reduce its deficits, the capitalists will only cut food stamps, not the military.

But, the capitalists are already cutting food stamps, you might argue. How does this help? The capitalist have already cut Social Security numerous times in the past 30 years — again, how does not balancing the budget help. In fact, workers are paying an overtly regressive payroll tax to quietly fund the military deficits — so really how the fuck does that help? So, while the fascists are busily cutting or underfunding the very social programs alleged to help the working class, while using its deficits and regressive payroll taxes to fund the military. No one can say, “Hey, the real problem is the state.”. because that helps the Tea Party or some other fascist group or personage.

The one excuse advanced by that peculiar brands of social-fascists on the Left who call themselves Marxists is this:

“The Tea Party doesn’t really want to get rid of the state.”

Really? I am completely fucking floored by this new information you guys just handed me. Imagine, GOPoseur fascists don’t “REALLY” want to get rid of their fascist state. The mind boggles. I guess next you will inform the rest of us that the Tea Party just wants to use the capitalist state to attack the working class — what an ingenious deception: They actually use the capitalist state to attack the working class.

So, if I get this right, we should not be trying to get rid of the capitalist state, because any attempt to get rid of it only helps those who are using it to attack the working class.

I give up. You win. If you consider yourself part of the Left, just stop following me — I am not interested in hearing your insane thoughts anymore. Just go the fuck away and leave me the fuck alone. I really mean this: If you consider yourself part of the Left, don’t tweet to me, don’t communicate with me.

Really, I am done with the Left.

Food stamp socialism or communism?

The whining Left suffered a mild paroxysm last night when the EBT card system failed. Suddenly they were forced to consider the possibility that their dependence on the fascist state just might lead to widespread crisis. If people are dependent on handouts from the capitalists, something as insignificant as a minor systems failure could threaten millions.

Since the EBT system is run for profit, the managers are forced to spend no more on maintaining it than they do maintaining the roads. They must in this area expend no more labor on maintenance than is socially necessary if they want to fatten their bottom line. When the system went down, thousands of families across the nation, who were lined up in queues, could not complete their purchases.

Rather than calling into  question such a fragile system of subsistence, the Left decried the Right for its direct or indirect role. Was this a result of the shutdown? Had the states in question turned off their support? It turned out that it was a “system glitch”, not an act of terrorism by the Tea Party. Still, many on the Left noted the voices on the Right for whom the failed EBT system became a point of entertainment. The Left was angered by this silly display of a lack of empathy with those having no resources but fascist state handouts.

Poverty is not a personal failure, it is as much the product of the mode of production as iPhones. This much is true with regards to the criticism the Left leveled at the Right. But it begs a question: if you know poverty is a product of the mode of production, why do you still support EBT cards? Since the mode of production is global, it is obvious that its product, poverty, is not being created in the US alone, but world-wide. EBT does not and cannot address poverty, since it is only a national system trying to address a global problem.

Are state deficits “necessary”?

The intense fear expressed in Washington and in financial markets around the world of simply balancing a fucking budget should grab your attention. It’s not like the capitalists are being asked to commit suicide as a class. So why the profound resistance to simply balancing Washington’s budget? If the state is running a deficit, it is spending more than it is directly extracting from the economy, i.e., from the total output of the capital. A balanced budget means the fascist state can spend no more than it directly extracts from the economy through taxes and other revenue.

So what is all the fuss about and how can we determine whether this deficit spending is necessary?

Thinking the Unthinkable on the Shutdown

There is a recurrent theme in this shutdown. Let’s see if you are perceptive enough to pick up on it (courtesy Zero Hedge blog):

#6 Richard Bove, VP of research at Rafferty Capital Markets: “If they seriously default on the debt, what we’re really talking about is a depression”#7 Chinese vice finance minister Zhu Guangyao: “The U.S. is clearly aware of China’s concerns about the financial stalemate [in Washington] and China’s request for the US to ensure the safety of Chinese investments.”

#8 The U.S. Treasury Department: “A default would be unprecedented and has the potential to be catastrophic: credit markets could freeze, the value of the dollar could plummet, U.S. interest rates could skyrocket, the negative spillovers could reverberate around the world, and there might be a financial crisis and recession that could echo the events of 2008 or worse”

#9 Goldman Sachs: “We estimate that the fiscal pull-back would amount to 9pc of GDP. If this were allowed to occur, it could lead to a rapid downturn in economic activity if not reversed quickly”

#10 Simon Johnson, former chief economist for the IMF: “It would be insane to default, but it’s no longer a zero-percent probability”

#11 Warren Buffett about the potential of a debt default: “It should be like nuclear bombs, basically too horrible to use”

#12 Bloomberg: “Anyone who remembers the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. little more than five years ago knows what a global financial disaster is. A U.S. government default, just weeks away if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling as it now threatens to do, will be an economic calamity like none the world has ever seen.”

If the shutdown is not ended soon and the debt ceiling raised, all hell is going to break loose. These seem to be shared assumptions of both Democrats and GOP, hence public debate (propaganda) takes place within their parameters. The crisis as a mere political event begins with the assumption that any reduction in the debt must end in default, which is predicted to unleash such calamitous events as to be unthinkable.

Is the partial shutdown of the federal government a “manufactured crisis?”

This is the charge made by some on the Left who oppose it.  Many point to the relatively small scale of the impact — estimated by a Forbes magazine writer to be less than 13% of federal expenditures. Others point to the focus of the shutdown on non-military expenditures, which must strike the programs that most closely appear to maintain the working class — which have been labeled “nonessential”. Deliberately excluded from the shutdown are the very mechanisms of state repression that capitalist class employs to maintain their rule.

According to this line of thinking, the folks in Washington really aren’t in a crisis. Rather, the shutdown is an opportunity taken to further impoverish the working class. For this section of the Left, the shutdown is a purely political event driven by ideology, not by economic laws: We have a bunch of neoliberals who have decided their particular ideology is the proper way to organize society and they want to impose this vision on society by means of the state power they control.

IT AIN’T YOUR FUCKING STATE: So stop whining about the GOP shutting Washington down!

If you look at the whole of the world market, the ruling classes of nearly every nation now is locked in deep political crisis and paralysis. The shutdown in Washington is not exceptional in this regard; it simply means that crisis has reached the core of the fascist world.

One of the things the US had going for it in its “fight against deflation”, according to Bernanke, is that it had no political crisis. His argument was that Japan was unable to implement good monetary policy to prevent deflation because it also suffered a political crisis. This turned out to be untrue, once the depression began to be fully expressed in the US, a crisis in the ruling class emerged along with it just as had been the case in Japan.

Wolff: You see communism is just like capitalism except its Christmas Eve all the time

Here is a shorter version of this DEFENCE OF MARXISM post:

The aim of communism is to make labor pleasant and more productive.

Fucking imbeciles.

In this crisis, we have the opportunity to speak to people about an entirely new world of possibilities. For some really stupid communists, this means everything would be exactly like it is now — only ‘better’.

I thought about this while watching a video by that idiot Richard Wolff. According to Wolff, there is far more overlap between capitalism and communism than most people think. According to Wolff, capitalism has planning and communism has planning; capitalism has market and communism has markets capitalism has private property and communism has private property; capitalism has state action and communism has state action.

Bernanke’s ‘Septaper’ Debacle

Why didn’t the Fed begin tapering yesterday? Matt O’Brien (twitter: @ObsoleteDogma) thinks he knows:

“The short version is it didn’t make sense. The longer version is it didn’t make sense, because the recovery is still rotten — and might get even more so.”

The cause of this rottenness is clear for O’Brien:

“The Fed won’t be willing to withdraw any stimulus until House Republicans give up their fantasy of using a government shutdown or debt default as leverage to defund Obamacare.”

This is a rather unconvincing explanation in my opinion. In 2002, Bernanke looked at Japan and asked why, if he was recommending quantitative easing if deflation struck the US,  quantitative easing didn’t work for Japan. He came up with an interesting explanation: Japan was rocked by an economic and political crisis in addition to deflation:

Part 3: Pushing On A String? – The puzzle of the composite commodity in neoclassical theory

Lump of labour fallacy: In economics, the lump of labour fallacy … is the contention that the amount of work available to labourers is fixed. It is considered a fallacy by most economists, who hold that the amount of work is not static.

–Wikipedia

In part 2 of this series, I showed why fascist state management of the mode of production is indirect, rather than direct, i.e., why the state seeks to manage the process through its control over money, rather than directly imposing its control over the process of production. This method of management perfectly expresses the way in which crises actually unfold empirically within the mode of production. The first obvious symptoms of crisis are in exchange: unsold commodities, rising unemployment, credit contraction and a fall in GDP. It follows that any attempt to end a crisis will begin with these symptoms, rather than the underlying overaccumulation of capital.

Moreover, this method of approach reflects the problem from the standpoint of capital itself, where the problem, empirically, is not overproduction, but the ‘absence of demand’ for what has already been produced. For capital, the mode of exchange operates as an impediment to the realization of the surplus value already created. By necessity, therefore, the effort of management of the mode of production is directed at overcoming what capital sees as the ‘defects’ of the mode of exchange.

However much we can ridicule the simpletons for taking the result of the process of production for its cause, this much is clear: Between 1933 and 2008, nominal GDP experienced no year over year contraction — that is 75 years of unbroken nominal growth. To give this fact a historical perspective, in the 75 years prior to 1933, the US experienced at least 20 economic dislocations of various types, including depressions and panics. There is no question that fascist state economic management, for all of its silly assumptions, has been an unparalleled success so far as bourgeois economists are concerned. For most of that period, the only contraction in nominal GDP the US experienced were engineered by Washington deliberately to slow nominal growth of money in circulation, of employment and of GDP.

By way of comparison, consider that the Soviet Union experienced about 70 years of unbroken growth employing direct management of production. For all of the success of the Soviet mode of production in this regards, however, year 71 was a motherfucker — the Soviet centralized production system collapsed and the Union quickly broke up. Success along these lines clearly does not in any way guarantee against collapse. In the Soviet Union in 1991 and in the United States in 2008, it was as though 70 years of development was suddenly expressed in a single massive movement of society.