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Sneak Peak
Coming soon in Šum: YAMAL EVENTS REPORT 2071
Vortex Notes (3)
The Guardian discovers—and reports on as ineptly as possible—the Pine Twitter underground and the wider eco-right cyber-sprawl:
In social media and the more secretive spaces of the online far right, eco-fascists are proselytising for genocidal solutions to environmental problems.
On Twitter, the “pine tree gang”, which journalist Jake Hanrahan describes as “less a cohesive movement than a loosely connected online subculture”, have been promoting ideas that blend a sense of impending environmental catastrophe with themes taken from white nationalism.
This subculture – which so far appears to be small in number – is frequently drawn to a so-called “terror wave” aesthetic, which elevates images of terrorist insurgency; promotes a specific, martial fashion imagery; and fantasies about armed conflict in the wake of environmental and social collapse.
Terror wave forums and threads are full of men in balaclavas, brandishing high-powered weaponry, wearing various combinations of tactical gear, combat uniforms and cheap athleisure wear. Images from the 1990s-era conflicts in the Balkans seem to have a particular appeal.
On Twitter, Nick Land, with reference to a line from the article concerning a desire for “accelerating the end of industrial civilisation”, jokes that “Even the decelerationists are accelerationists”.
For a far more interesting take on this tendency—one that makes the leap from the digital subcultural production to meatspace turbulence—Magda Siebert’s essay from July of last year, “Linkola, Montana”, is worth revisiting.
Alien Rhythms
Given the apparent mass diffusion of belief in UFOs—especially among the wealthy and the tech-savvy—these words from Jacques Vallee, penned in 1977, appear as staggeringly relevant:
Time and again in the history of civilizations, there arises some wonderful untruth around which magnificent energy crystallizes, and great deeds are done. Such a time has come again. It has become very important for large numbers of people to expect visitors from outer space.
As I was discussing Uri Geller’s abilities with British scholar Gordon Creighton, driving through the midst of London in the winter of 1973 – a winter plagued by strikes and the energy crisis – Creighton gave me a definition of myth that clarified the confusion of many approaches to the contemporary problems of UFOs. ‘People mistakenly believe,’ he said, ‘that a myth is an untruth. But myth is not that. A myth is that which is TRUER THAN TRUTH.’
It may not be true that flying saucers represent visits from outer space. But if large enough numbers believe it, then in some sense it will become truer than true , long enough for certain things to change irreversibly.
Some of the best informed sources of gossip in Washing- ton are convinced that UFOs will be increasingly prominent in coming years. There are persistent rumors that highly placed officials in the U.S. government have long had evidence that another form of intelligence was contacting us. The stage is set for another UMMO. A former aerospace engineer turned UFO lecturer even believes that at the occasion of the Bicentennial the government will announce that there is life on Mars, and that a meeting between U.S. representatives and extraterrestrials is imminent!
These people are going down an interesting path, one that Puharich has already traveled with enthusiasm. He predicts a mass landing. Ten years ago such statements would not have been taken seriously. But today they are eagerly listened to, evoking fear or passion in their audi- ences; tomorrow some higher officials may join the ranks of the believers. The UMMO affair, the case of AFFA, and the predictions of Mrs Keech (of When Prophecy Fails) have involved sincere people, holding responsible positions. Slowly a climate has been created in which a much larger number now participate in the myth-making. The belief is reinforced by successive waves of sightings. Skepticism is eroded. The cases are giving more and more evidence of the reality of the UFOs – but this evidence is so constructed as to elude classical analysis by scientists. Perhaps the UFOs are not behaving according to our laws of causality. Perhaps their time flows differently from ours. Perhaps their logic is a meta-logic.
[Given the mention of Uri Geller, we could not pass up the chance to draw attention to this Vortex Note-worthy reporting from The Jewish Chronicle: “Uri Geller: I’ll Use Telepathy to Stop Brexit”.]
Going Stag
In the comments to yesterday’s post, DMF posted an interesting, albeit short article published yesterday by Yanis Varoufakis on the topic—appropriately enough—of stagnation. The bulk of piece deals with what Varoufakis considers to be the myth of the single, floating, real (that is, one adjusted for inflation) interest rate, that concept so central to what we might describe as ‘neoliberal governmentality’ (though I must add that, as time goes on, I find the term ‘neoliberal’ and the politico-economic histories associated with it to be suspect). Such a thing cannot exist, he argues, for if it did capitalism would never stagnate – unless a meddling government or self-seeking trade union damaged its dazzling machinery”. Varoufakis then proceeds to lay out three reasons for why this is not true:
- The ‘real interest rate’—what Varoufakis calls the “magic number”—does not exist.
- Even if it did exist, there is no rational mechanism that would drive things towards that convergence point.
- Capitalism has a relative tendency that sees the market “usurp[ed]… via the strengthening of what John Kenneth Galbraith called the cartel-like managerial technostructure'”.
A key pivot for Varoufakis is that capitalism’s absolute tendency is not towards a roaming equilibrium, but towards stagnation. It is the universal law of development, occulted by the rhetoric of the free marketeers and the complexity of the global financial markets. He correctly notes that investment is lagging, and that insofar as firms are doing something with their cash reserves, it is mergers and acquisition and financial instruments that rule the day. We thus encounter a forking path:
…capitalism has only one natural tendency: stagnation. Like all tendencies, it is possible to overcome by means of stimuli. One is exuberant financialization, which produces tremendous medium-term growth at the expense of long-term heartache. The other is the more sustainable tonic injected and managed by a surplus-recycling political mechanism, such as during the WWII-era economy or its postwar extension, the Bretton Woods system. But at a time when politics is as broken as financialization, the world has never needed a post-capitalist vision more. Perhaps the greatest contribution of the automation that currently adds to our stagnation woes will be to inspire such a vision.
There are several points, all of which are in need of further elucidation, I would like to make:
- The positioning of stagnation as the absolute tendency, as opposed to a relative tendency, is a dubious maneuver. Similarly, the implications, as far as governmental policy is concerned, for stagnation to be posed as the absolute is that the need for stimulation becomes ubiquitous and diffused across the whole of developmental history writ large. This too is dubious, and runs roughshod over the highly bounded character, historically speaking, of such forms of state management.
- A proper analysis of the role of stimulation must unfold alongside the proper positioning of the state—which, after all, is the bourgeois state—not as some transcendent figure standing in some Archimedean point outside the capitalist mode of production, but as fully enmeshed within the matrices of that mode’s historical epoch.
- The analysis of state managerialism, of which fiscal stimulus is just one tool, needs to look the interrelationship between the paradigm-shifting productive technologies, uneven socio-economic development relative to those technologies, and the moment of institutional recomposition. Similarly, we would do well to head the avenue of approach staked out by the Regulation School, in which the content of managerial forms—which really alludes to the formal and informal coordination (or lack thereof) of increasingly sophisticated specialization—is bound to changes in the way that relative surplus value is realized.
- The Galbraithian technostructure is best understood through the lenses of the program advanced in point no. 3, and thus its operations tend not to prevent capitalism’s slippage into stagnation from an exogenous position, but one that is endogenous.
- There is an implicit identification of capitalism with the market in Varoufakis’s essay. This can be challenged, not only on Marxist grounds, but on Braudelian one as well: capitalism understood via the unity of anti-markets (which, for Braudel, is really what capitalism is about) and markets— or, more properly, the capture and subsequent redeployment of markets forces by anti-market entities.
Also relevant: Adam Tooze’s excellent reflections on Bretton Woods, and why calls for a ‘New Bretton Woods’ are profoundly missing the point.
The Kurz Gradient
I recently came across a translation of a debate, held in 2012, between a handful of excellent Marxian economists and theorists—Michael Heinrich, Robert Kurz, Thomas Ebermann and Joseph Voegel. Of particular interest (to me, at least) is the dispute that occurs between Heinrich and Kurz over the current phase of capitalist development and its implications for potential future trajectories (or lack thereof). Generally I find Kurz’s project to be more fascinating and relevant than Heinrich’s, but in this case it was clear that the latter bested the former. For Kurz, the capitalist mode of development is currently in a terminal phase, with catastrophic collapse being the existential threat that is rapidly become an actuality. To put it simply: with the end of Fordism, a structural decoupling of finance capital from the physical conditions of production (from investments in infrastructure and productive forms to the circulation of non-financial instrument commodities) occurred, engendering a situation in which a ballooning mass of wealth is produced without recourse to labor and the production of value. While the detachment of financial from industrial production is a recurrent factor in the cyclical development of the capitalist system (signalling, as Arrighi and other world-systems theorists have shown, the interchange between ‘systemic cycles of accumulation’, which plays out in the transfer of power between global hegemons), for Kurz this simply cannot occur at the present stage. Even China, ostensibly the next great zone of productive growth—not to mention the country likely to serve as the next ‘capitol of capital’—is not free from this, having resorted to building ghost cities and the like to keep GDP afloat. He continues:
Something is happening now at the level of “normal” capitalist reproduction on a large scale that previously only happened in wartime economies: direct financing through the money presses. Up ’til now, that has not been transformed into real demand at a large scale; rather, it has merely absorbed bad loans. But that solves nothing. They’re still there. If the economic cycle dips, then the states and the world economy have no other option than to finance real demand by turning on the presses. That is the inflationary potential. In Great Britain, there’s already five percent inflation. In the eurozone and the USA three percent, in China six percent. The politicians will probably regard inflation policies as the lesser evil. But that would devalue money, the end in itself.
For Heinrich, however, this gloomy outlook is less than warranted:
I think you’re too oriented towards Fordism and post-war Wirtschaftswunder capitalism. And you correctly say there’s no starting point for something like that occuring again the near future – a long the lines of: “we have a structural crisis, but soon everything will take off again, like in the 50s and 60s.” I agree with you up to that point.
But then you draw the conclusion: if there is no possibility for something like that occuring, then capitalism is about to collapse. But Fordism and the “economic miracle” of the fifties and sixties were not the peak of capitalism, but rather an exceptional situation historically, the economic and political preconditions of which can be exactly stated. Accumulation will continue to proceed, even if bumpily. Even if all these financial claims are devalued, that doesn’t destroy a single factory. Maybe this or that enterprise will go bankrupt, but then it will be bought cheaply by a competitor and will continue to produce. With regard to your argument that production processes are set in motion that owe their existence to deficit flows, I can only say: so what? Then some creditor will go bankrupt. That doesn’t mean that everything will collapse.
Heinrich, alluding to the massive acceleration of industrial production and wealth in the Pacific and Southeast Asian regions of the globe, points out that capitalism is expanding. For Kurz, however, this growth, if it is occurring at all, is at best untenable and erected upon exceedingly shaky foundations:
But on what foundation? And here we come back to the deficit flows: on what foundation has Chinese economic growth occurred? Solely upon the basis of the Pacific deficit flow; without this, there would have been no industrialization of China. That means, it has feet of clay.
to which Heinrich offers the following fatal blow, which ends the debate (or at the part of the debate that has been translated into English and published):
But that’s always the case. That is in fact the same old, same old. How were the railroads constructed in the 19th Century? On the basis of an enormous credit and stock market swindle. With your argumentation, the collapse of capitalism would have already had to have come at the end of the 19th Century, since enormous infrastructure projects only came about on the basis of deficit flows. Immense processes of redistribution occurred. Small savers lost their savings, because they bought railroad shares at the wrong time. So there were enormous losses, but ultimately capitalism was pushed along by the deficit flows of the 19th Century. It seems to me that something very similar is happening right now in China.
Part of the problem with Heinrich’s treatment of Marx is that he swamps the various tendencies or laws that Marx poses into states of indeterminacy, most importantly that of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. In a 2013 essay for Monthly Review on the topic of crisis theory, he argued because Marx determined that countervailing factors would push re-inflate the ratio of constant capital to variable—and thus reverse, however temporarily, the falling rate of profit—the so-called law could not be treated as a law as such. This should be no surprise, even to theorists who accept the existence of the falling rate of profit (and I am, of course, including myself in this category); after all, there is a clear distinction to be had between laws and tendencies. For Heinrich, however, the ultimate conclusions that this tendency ultimately calls forth is an erroneous proposition: insofar as the tendency exists, it always stands to be beaten back (for a roundtable discussion on Heinrich’s interpretation of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and crisis theory more general—as well as a response by Heinrich—see here). It is this opposition that stands at the root of Heinrich’s critique of Kurz in the above: if the objective tendencies do not exist, then the claims we base upon them fall away.
Kurz, on the other hand, remains committed to the theory of objective tendencies, and further offers an analysis of capitalism unfolding in stages. Fordism was one such stage, and what came after (post-Fordism or however else one might describe it) is another; these are splayed out across the oscillations of the rate of profit. The other benefit that Kurz has over Heinrich is the careful attention paid to the industrial basis that underpins growth and which serves as the attractor for investment capital. When speaking of the contemporary, he noted the distinction the high industrial capitalism of Fordism and the more contemporary regime organized around “micro-electronic” commodities and systems, and the way in which this shift (which corresponds precisely to the subsumption of Fordist capitalism by post-Fordism) has triggered not only a quantitative, but qualitative transformation in the nature of production.
In a 2010 interview on the topic of crisis theory, Kurz elaborated on how this epochal shift plugged into the greater arrangement of tendencies and counter-tendencies identified by Marx:
…productivity never increases value, but always diminishes it, as Marx demonstrated in the first volume of Capital. Anyone who claims the contrary confuses the social level with the level of the economy of each entrepreneur, or the totality of capital with individual capital. The individual capital that first increases its own productivity in isolation from its competitors achieves an advantage over its competition. It can offer its individual products at a cheaper price, and thus succeeds in selling more commodities and, precisely for that very reason, realizes for itself a greater part of the social mass of value. What appears from the point of view of the economy of the individual entrepreneur as growing profits and therefore as a growing “creation of value” leads socially, however, to the diminution of value, and indeed to the detriment of the other individual capitals. If the productivity gains are generalized, the innovating individual capital loses its advantage over the competition. This by no means, however, represents a return to zero or to a previous starting point. To the contrary, the increased productivity now becomes the new general standard. An hour of labor, as the basic unit of abstract labor, is always the same, since it cannot by any means have different “levels”. The new, higher standard of productivity, however, causes fewer of these always-equal hours of abstract labor to be necessary for an increasing mass of products. If capital is devalued and destroyed in the crisis, the already-attained level of productivity nevertheless remains, because it is inscribed in the totality of knowledge and know-how. We have to be clear about this: capitalism cannot go back from the level of microelectronics to the level of the steam engine. A new increase of value is becoming ever more difficult in the face of increasingly higher levels of productivity and, consequently, with an always diminishing substance of abstract labor. In the past, the constant reduction of value was only relative. With the increase of the standards of productivity, the individual product can represent ever less abstract labor and, therefore, ever less value.
Elsewhere, he suggests that part of the ongoing crisis arises from the contradiction between the actual possibilities latent in micro-electronics and the capitalist context in which they are being deployed: “[m]icroelectronic productive forces… have made a high potential of productivity utilizable on a small scale, but also remains imprisoned within the categories of commercial rationality”. This corresponds precisely to the what Postone and others have identified as the primary contradiction of capitalism—the increasing capacity for the producing immense volumes of material wealth and the simultaneous collapse of value imparted to the individual units that make up this mass.
Kurz’s model of the contemporary epoch is thus one characterized by a dual-faced crisis. On the one hand, there is the situation, the one anticipated by Marx, in which the capitalist mode of production is shaken apart by its own feverish drive to maximizing mechanical efficiency, bringing into play waves of overproduction and crisis. On the other hand, however, is this question of financialization, in which a tension between the direction of technological development (towards miniaturization) and the infrastructure of the world-capitalist system (still largely framed by that of the Fordist era) gives rise a situation in which the primary means of accumulation. M-C-M’ is short-circuited into M-M’—
As global finance evacuates the territory and begins to exchange, by itself, in an orbital, virtual dimension the city is abolished as a commercial centre.
—and the whole system begins to swing out of joint with itself. With anything short of a revolution that not only anti-political, but also anti-economic, Kurz sees an apocalypse (albeit one that unfolds in slow-motion) rising up on our horizon:
A collapse would mean that everything that can no longer actually be financed will be brought to a standstill. And we’re already experiencing that, but up ’til now the shock has been absorbed. Now, if in the dimension reached thus far a crash occurs, then things will come to a standstill in the real sphere of reproduction. Starting with the state sectors of infrastructure, healthcare, education all the way to industrial production and private services, everything.
And thus we return to Heinrich’s critique of Kurz, but with a bit more clarity. When it comes to the question of China, Heinrich is undoubtedly correct: the financial flows fueling the country’s industrial growth replicates a pattern that stretches back across the past five hundred. As alluded to earlier, Arrighi’s model of ‘systemic cycles of accumulation’ is instructive here. For Arrighi, these cycles are something like the M-C-M’ loop blown up to a macro-scale level and used to explain the transition of between hegemonic powers. By cleaving M-C and C-M into two very distinct but unified phases, he poses two phases to the cycle: the first, corresponding to M-C, is the industrial mobilization of industrial mobilization and the circulation of physical commodities, while the second, C-M, is the detachment of finance capital from this material substrate. There are two paths at this point: the recursion into an auto-amplification of financial growth (via M-M’), or the searching for greater returns elsewhere. Understood as a geopolitical process as much as a techno-industrial one, the first part of the cycle constitutes the acceleration of industrial power attached to a rising hegemonic state, with the second being its peak and ‘autumnal’ (as Braudel might say) phase. At this point, the ‘searching’ character of finance capital begins to engender the new wave of expansion elsewhere, within a new hegemony.
This is, of course, separate from Kurz’s issue, which is the problem of deficit spending—but the issue is exactly that these deficits must be contextualized within this wider shift of trans-territorial supremacy. And indeed, while China has kept certain limits on foreign direct investment (limits which, in the face of the US-China trade war, are slackening), it has been a vital aspect of China’s growth. None of this is to say that the dawning of a ‘Chinese century’ is guaranteed; as Arrighi says, “[a]ll previous hegemonic transitions were characterized by long periods of systemic chaos”, with highly variable outcomes—but at this stage, it seems highly likely (particularly as evidenced by the simmering tensions radiating from the United States, which itself in undeniable decline).
Setting this aside, another issue arises when considering Kurz’s argument and how it aligns with that of Marx. The entire line tracking into the increasing efficiency of ‘microelectronic’ production follows along the structure of the argument concerning the rising organic composition of capital—with one key exception. Kurz’s outlook was, at the end of the day, stagnationist, if not catastrophist (though by acknowledging the increasing efficiency of technology it cannot be classed as a decadence theory in the mode of the I.C.C., among others). For Marx, this was not the case. It was accelerative, compressive, and dynamic, with the modes of retrogradation—manifesting as overproduction—being annihilated by sharp, repetitive and increasing crises. The picture that is being offered here instead, where everything things shutdown one by one, does not correspond to this diagram, and likewise, neither does this vision of industrial disjointedness (which resembles more than anything the structure of historical development offered by Lewis Mumford and its more recent resurrection by Kevin Carson, of which much more will be said soon enough). If there is validity to this vision of stagnation, then we must consider a capitalism that, in the West at least, no longer corresponds to that tendential structure offered by Marx in Capital. It would mean that something else is going on.
Vortex Notes (2)
via the Outline:
A new book by D.W. Pasulka — professor and chair of the department of philosophy and religion at the University of North Carolina Wilmington — American Cosmic: UFOs Religion, and Technology, focuses not on grassroots investigative societies or marginal cults, but on UFO believers in the halls of power.
Her narrative begins on a drive through the hills with pioneering computer scientist, venture capitalist, and ufologist Jacques Vallee. “Silicon Valley is full of secrets,” he tells her. It ends in the Vatican Secret Archives (alas, not because the Ultimate Clue lies steganographically hidden in a Templar codex).
[..]
If media experiences of the UFO account were limited to a few blockbusters, it’s hard to see how it could have the effects Pasulka claims. But the advent of micro-media platforms like YouTube and the rise of faux-documentarian investigations in the style of the History channel have compounded the Hollywood effect by orders of magnitude. Any scammer with a camera or hustler with an eye for the weird can simulate strange lights and speeding objects, or cut together unsourced footage glossed with their own theories. And they do, in spades, to the endless dismay of serious investigators.
All religions depend in some way on technology: The relationship between the Protestant reformation and the Gutenberg printing press is a historical cliché. American Cosmic argues that for an alien religion to succeed, the screen is not merely an incidental component. It is both the organizing structure that defines the content of the religion, and the point of contact between believers and their object of worship: It is the synagogue, the madrasa, the tabernacle, the church.
There is, however, another way that the UFO religion may be a religion of technology. More than one person has pointed out that alien accounts have some odd similarities with older fairy folklore: the strange lights, the miniature people, the domestic disturbances, the appearances and disappearances.
Related:
Other Paths
Diffractions Collective has published a great interview with the mysterious Gruppo di Nun (including Claudio and Rhettt of Goth/Ins [in]fame[y]). The interview is worth reading full, but here are a few particularly juicy cuts:
From a political point of view, we were motivated by the realization that the right has often used, and still uses, magical tools in order to obtain consensus and shape its ideology. We refer, in particular, to the use of meme magic by the alt-right in recent years, and the recurring reference to authors such as Julius Evola by increasingly influential fascist thinkers, like Steve Bannon and Aleksandr Dugin. We believe that this resurgence of magic in right-wing environments calls for a radically anti-fascist demonological guerrilla, based on a foundational shake-up of the principles of the Right-Hand Path magical tradition.
[…]
…we wish to leave twentieth century magic behind, and propose a new millennial – and millenarian – magic, that, instead of barricading itself inside the boundaries of human consciousness, reaches beyond the human through all means available. Because of this, our magic has been widely inspired by scientific thought as a divinatory tool that can allow us to reach into the inhuman depths of matter, both theoretically, particularly through Boltzmann’s statistical thermodynamics, and experimentally, by rediscovering the experience of the chemical laboratory as a new form of anti-human alchemy.
[…]
We do not wish to substitute a hierarchy for another, but to build circles without centers, that explode towards the outside instead of reaching for convergence.
[…]
This view of the cosmos as an equilibrium of polarities is rooted in our cultural substratum to the point where it is perceived as natural and, therefore, sacred and immutable. We believe, instead, that this notion of equilibrium conveys a clear political agenda, and that, far from being a perfect theory of everything, it contains arbitrary – and even absurd – assumptions. The absurdity of circular cosmology is, put simply, that it relies on perpetual motion, and thus denies the evidence of time as a material drive towards disintegration.
[…]
Finitude, transgression, excess and imperfection are essentially demonical: they belong to the realm of un-being and becoming. In this sense, there is some sort of demonical presence even in the simplest of actions, such as deciding the position of a door: when is it too far to the right or too the left, too high or too low? This is an aesthetic judgment, devoid of obvious causal links and ratio (measure)or, perhaps, completely devoid of them (an example taken from Wittgenstein’s Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics). So, the refutation of the validity of the economic principle does not make us merely arbitrary: to be revealed is the arbitrariness of the world itself, its groundlessness and the similarities it presents with games (in regard to its construction by humans but also to its self-construction’s faculty aka Nature). In the frame of speculative materialism this is the core principle of Hyperchaos, led by a principle of unreason.
[…]
The barbarian is a revolutionary catastrophe incarnate, which stems from the catastrophe of modernity, that accelerationism diagrams so well, but does not perfectly coincide with it.
[…]
In my opinion, this obsession with time and recent (or even highly hypothetical) technologies you found in accelerationist circles is part of a right-wing (or right-hand path) hegemony: all eyes on the West, “Look at us, we are the future!”. This is a strident contradiction: why universalize time and relative cultural traits (unifying them into an Order or a Unit) while proclaiming to be some kind of “multitude” or fragmentary assemblage? This ethnocentric fallacy is absent in the CCRU Writings, so it should be dated at least to the second wave of accelerationism (the one who spawned L/Acc and R/Acc).
DI Research Zone 22 