Not Forbidden

"Whatever is not forbidden is mandatory" -- George Orwell.

I've been working at talking with students about the current financial crisis in these terms. In part, as an effort to counter the idea that somehow the fault lies with individual "greedy" capitalists and CEO's.

What the striking lack of regulation in these strange new markets trading in mortgage debt has meant is that every risk becomes not just possible, but mandatory. The competition to produce the highest rate of return possible insures that those too squeamish to pursue unforbidden risks will fall behind. This is different from individual greed. It is institutionally required greed. This line of thought has been spurred on by a recent post from Rough Theory and a reminder of this passage from Marx:

I do not by any means depict the capitalist and the landowner in rosy colours. But individuals are dealt with here only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, the bearers of particular class-relations and interests. (Preface to the First Edition, Capital, Volume I.)

Capital makes mandatory all that is not forbidden. Capitalists just carry out these mandates.

This line of explanation seems to have been somewhat successful. It has worked to tie these recent headlines back to other areas where students also tend to see individual moral failings rather than institutional requirements: sweatshop labor, greenhouse gasses, polar bears, child-labor, mountaintop removal, genetically modified food, pesticides, nuclear power, health care reform, etc. All of these areas can be discussed as a result of the imperative to maximize capital accumulation, rather than from the simple moral ignorance of individual managers and capitalists that can be remedied by forceful enough moral arguments.

The impulse seems to be to try to excuse capitalism by blaming its failures on the "imprudent bearers" of its class-relations and interests. Finding ways to move beyond these moral arguments is always difficult.

Note that this makes the current crisis very different from the Savings and Loan scandal and the Keating 5 which was garden variety forbidden fraud. Capital, though, never does very well at obeying the restrictions placed on it. In note 15 the end of Chapter 31 in Capital, Volume I, Marx reproduces this amazing quote:

With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain 10 per cent will ensure its employment anywhere; 20 per cent certain will produce eagerness; 50 per cent positive audacity; 100 per cent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; 300 per cent, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged. If turbulance and strife will bring a profit, it will freely encourage both.

This seems a salutary quote to consider this month in particular.

Meme: Passion Quilt

Read More Marx!

Philosopher's Playground tapped me for this quick and easy blog meme:

Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about.

Give your picture a short title.

Title your blog post "Meme: Passion Quilt."

Link back to this blog entry.

Include links to 5 (or more) educators.

I've been looking for an excuse to post this picture. It's from Hugo Gellert's 1934 Marx' 'Capital' in Lithographs – an early graphic novel retelling of Capital, Volume I through Art Deco prints – a marvelous artifact. Perhaps one day I'll break down and have this picture done as a tattoo.

By far the most important public service I do for my students is to make them read Capital, Volume I. I've come to find that whatever else they may be studying or thinking about, it is helped along by a liberal dose of Marx. And, evidently, some of that passion seeps into my lectures.

Now I get to inflict this meme on five unsuspecting victims, so I will tap:

1. The Doctor Isn't
2. Rough Theory
3. Professor Zero
4. Citizen of Somewhere Else (again)
   
5. A Gentleman's C (just to see what happens)

mmmm... Marx!

Rough Theory has a tasty recent post on Marx, technology, and the labor theory of value. The post begins:

I’ve read several works recently that argue that Marx’s labour theory of value, while appropriate for the period in which it was written, now needs to be updated to account for the role of technology in the production of wealth. I have no problem with the general notion that, in significant respects, Marx’s argument remains bound to the 19th century, but I can’t help but find this particular notion of what is outdated in Marx’s argument somewhat odd.

I share this sense of oddity and I'm often disturbed when I see discussions of the internet and of digital commodity production used as examples of a new mode of production that exceeds the bounds of the labor theory of value described by Marx. I touched on this recently in the exchange on The Labor Theory of Blogging arguing that blogging could be viewed as another form of unwaged labor, like housework or schoolwork, and so still functions as labor for capital.

Marx devotes the longest chapter in Capital, Volume I to the topic of "Machinery" precisely in order to explain capitalism's enthusiasm for large-scale mechanization in terms other than the highly suspect utopian notions of labor-saving devices being used to free workers from the need to toil. For Marx, machinery as used by capital is one of its most ingenious and devious strategies for extracting ever greater quantities of surplus-labor from workers. Digital machines are no different. Capital loves computers because they make workers more productive, cheapening commodities in general, and cheapening the commodity of labor-power in particular. Thus, allowing workers to donate an ever greater share of their labor time to capital for free.

That work resulting in the production of digital commodities strikes us as so different from work that produces other sorts of commodities is perhaps simply the latest version of the ability of the commodity form to dazzle us that Marx describes as the "fetishism of commodities."

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was.

Digital commodities seem even more clever than wooden tables, and evolve out of their computerized brains ideas yet more grotesque. They seem to take on a life of their own -- they move, grow, replicate, spawn, and evolve -- and so hide and obscure the human labor they embody.