Following on Fabio's 2023 piece "Senile Economics: Bubble Ontology and the Pull of Gravity" (intro'd by):
With that headline the author and/or his editors obviously need our "Introduction to Search Engine Optimization/How to Write Clickbait That Works" tutorials. Some examples from our graduates:
- How Does the Language of Headlines Work? You Won't Believe The Answer
- Before Buying into the Idea that Fractional Reserve Banking has Some Sort of Fraudulent Roots, Listen To This Battlecry From A Supermodel
- Bloomberg: Goldman Sachs, Sex, Viagra, Tiger Woods, and Barack Obama *
Moving right along, from The Philosphical Salon, February 6....
And from Sublation Magazine, March 18, 2023, the headliner:
What does a Marx+Foucault framework look like for understanding contemporary capital crises? [1] Look no further than the work of Italian Marxist Fabio Vighi.
At the start of each essay in his ongoing project, Vighi makes clear that he wants his readers to consider what happens to a capitalist society when it no longer centrally runs on the production of profit via the exploitation of waged labor (or, the extraction of surplus value from a waged worker’s labor power). He gathers this question through a reading of “The Fragment on Machines,” an essay found in Marx’s Grundrisse. In this essay, as Michael McBride notes, Marx “seems to imply that the very act of automation transforms the framework he has established in his previous texts.” It breaks down the revolutionary subjecthood of the working class, in that – as Marx notes – it “no longer appears so much to be included within the production process.” Worth quoting Marx at length here:[T]he human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself…As soon as labor in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labor time ceases and must cease to be its measure. Capitalism thus works toward its own dissolution as the form dominating production….[T]he general reduction of necessary labor of society to a minimum, which corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them. Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labor time to a minimum, while it posits labor time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth.The contradiction of capital is the push by major capitalists to reduce labor time (to reduce labor costs, to outcompete competitors) at the same time that labor is the source of surplus value/wealth. The battle to outcompete through efficiency leads to such high levels of productivity and savings, with less labor time/cost required, that capitalists are no longer able to extract as much surplus value since they’ve now put themselves in a situation where there is less human labor to exploit. Vighi agrees with the British Marxist Ted Reese that what Marx was speculating on in Grundrisse is not dissimilar to what we’re experiencing today, with automation leading to “prices trend[ing] secularly towards zero.” For a few wide-ranging examples, Reese notes:[T]he fastest supercomputer in 1975 was worth $5m ($32m in 2013 money); an iPhone 4 released in 2010 with the equivalent performance was $400. Aerospace companies producing propulsion systems in 2010 for $24m in 24 months were by 2019 3-D printing them for $2,000 in two weeks [citing A. Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Verso, 2019, p. 123]. One gigabyte of data storage fell from around $200,000 in 1980 to $0.03 in 2014. According to Rethink X, cheaply growing “unlimited” amounts of food in vats through ‘precision fermentation’ – feedstock plus gene-edited microbes (a form of automation) – will soon “sweep away the industrial dairy and meat industries”. In 2000, the cost of producing one kilogram of one type of molecule through precision fermentation cost $1million, but fell to around $100 in 2020, when it was on course to become cost-competitive with bulk animal protein ($10 per kg for casein and whey) by 2025. It is expected to be five times cheaper than traditional animal proteins by 2030.So what happens when prices such as these trend toward zero? Reese argues that an under-accumulation of labor-produced surplus value is paired with an overaccumulation of value “increasingly dependent on the efficiency of central planning both at the state level (e.g., central bank intervention) and within private enterprises; industrial monopolization (mergers & acquisitions); and state subsidies, facilities and contracts.”
Vighi takes a slightly different angle on what happens, though similarly coalescing around crises of accumulation, automation, the narrowing of necessary waged labor time, and state management:The current implosion reflects the historical exhaustion of the value-creating substance of capital; the fact that the fundamental ingredient of value itself – labor – is vanishing irreversibly while automated (technological) productivity takes off…
…Every leap in post-industrial technological innovation driven by capital, no matter how green or desirable, will cause unemployment and poverty to grow, together with the imposition of widespread repressive measures upon entire populations.Vighi’s story begins at a typical starting point for understanding the rise of the particular kind of capitalist hegemony we see today. This is, of course, the dawn of neoliberalism. He briefly points to some financial policy and business shifts in the 60s and 70s before focusing on the 80s as the real starting point, at least for established/institutionalized neoliberalism and financial capitalism, two objects of analysis he refuses to separate, a third being biopolitics, which he will introduce later in his story. [2]
But before re-telling this story, if I even have space, we seriously need to put all of Vighi’s cards on the table. It would be disingenuous to not disclose his ‘senile’ perspective up front. Vighi is a firm believer that COVID-19 lockdowns were a biopolitical strategy orchestrated by the state and elite capital. He insists that global lockdowns were paired with mass government injection of artificially produced liquidity (cash) into the economy. He insists that that the systematic, centralized injection of liquidity was required to save the rentier, financial, credit-based capitalist system from collapse:....
....MUCH MORE
Previously from Professor Vighi:
October 2021 - Money, Money, Money: "A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Systemic Collapse and Pandemic Simulation"
October 2021 - Pandexit In the Land of Unicorns: Inflation, Depression, Power and Politics (plus Sting)
January 2022 - "Red Pill or Blue Pill? Variants, Inflation, and the Controlled Demolition of Society"
The Philosophical Salon has had some of the most interesting explorations of the interplay between the torrents of both fiscal and monetary liquidity, lockdowns, and the nagging sense that something much larger than official explanations is going on. Some previous links after the jump....
From one of our favorite Marxist professors, Fabio Vighi. As noted in the introduction to June 2024's "The Enemy and the Libidinal Economy of the Apocalypse":
Professor Fabio Vighi (Critical Theory and Italian at Cardiff Uni.) can get heavy/borderline tedious but I think he's on to something. Plus, where else are you going to find sentences like:
"At the heart of this process is the reliance on the toxic fetish of the speculative bubble: trillions (quadrillions if we count derivatives) of insubstantial money orbiting above our heads at the speed of light."
There is a good chance that I will purloin "...the toxic fetish of the speculative bubble"
