A nettime exchange between Brian Holmes and Keith Hart
Brian Holmes:
On 05/05/2012 01:56 PM, Nicholas Knouf wrote:
How does one take a principled stand against the repugnant policies of the Koch Bros., while also holding out the possibility that their philanthropic actions just_might_ cause some positive change in the world?
I reckon it’s close to impossible.
The reason why is that by continuing to admire, in whatever way, the oligarchs of your country or any other, and by refusing to condemn them and the people who support them, one sits on the fence and thereby encourages everyone else to do exactly the same. How to oppose the oligarchy without frankly opposing them? How to be part of and against the ruling class? Continue reading ‘Why I say the things I say’ »
The World Economic Forum’sGlobal Competitiveness Report 2011-2012 identifies twelve “pillars” of sustainable national competitiveness: institutions; infrastructure; macroeconomic environment; health and primary education; higher education and training; goods market efficiency; labour market efficiency; financial market development; technological readiness; market size; business sophistication; and innovation. 142 countries are then ranked according to relevant variables in a Global Competitiveness Index. South Africa comes number 50 overall in this table, but then the BRICs are not much different: China 26, Brazil 53, India 56 and Russia 66. The top ten is dominated by European countries, with Switzerland (the source of the report) number 1.
The global economic crisis is not merely financial, a moment in the historical cycle of credit and debt. The removal of political controls over money in recent decades has led to a situation where politics is still mainly national, but the money circuit is global and lawless. Events since 2008 should be seen as the collapse of “national capitalism”, the money system that the world lived by in the twentieth century. This has been unravelling since the US dollar went off gold in 1971 and money derivatives were invented the following year. The idea of central bank money or legal tender is tenacious despite this development. As the need for international cooperation intensifies, the disconnect between economy and political institutions undermines effective solutions. The crisis of the eurozone in 2011-2012 may be understood best as a Sophoclean tragedy in which good intentions cannot remedy the consequences of past mistakes.
2011/12 is the political consequence of the financial crisis of 2007/8. There is still a tendency to see the crisis in economic rather than political terms. In this respect, neoliberalism’s detractors often reproduce the free market ideology they claim to oppose. The euro is by no means the only symptom of this crisis, but it may well be seen in retrospect as the decisive nail in the coffin of the world economy today. One way of approaching our moment in history is to ask not what is beginning, but what is ending. This is not straightforward.
As a partial antidote to the daily news, I find it useful to attempt a historical periodization of the last two centuries or more, mainly to indicate that the present rupture in history opens up the prospect of several decades of turbulence.
1776-1815 An age of war and revolutions
1815-1848 The industrial revolution
1848-1873 Origins of national capitalism
1873-1914 First age of financial globalization
1914-1945 The second thirty years war
1945-1979 Les trente glorieuses of social democracy
Edited transcription of an improvised talk for a seminar, “Social movements and the solidarity economy”, organized by Jean-Louis Laville and Geoffrey Pleyers, EHESS, Paris, 2 February 2012.
I was asked to report on the project I am involved in which has the same name as The Human Economy book; but, given this course’s focus on social movements, I decided that I should try to insert the perspective on economy I have developed into contemporary political processes and events. I have been writing, editing and researching about alternative approaches to the economy for a long time and blogging about politics more recently, but never the two together. In the last year, as a result of the North African revolutions and then the Occupy movement, I have come to see that the economic and political arguments have to be brought much closer together. Taking our lead from this moment in world history, we need to ask how the work that Jean-Louis and I have long been engaged in – on human economy, économie solidaire, social economy – needs to be modified in order to lend support to what has become a serious political movement at the global level. Continue reading ‘The human economy in a revolutionary moment: political aspects of the economic crisis’ »
By the Language of Unity Working Group, Occupy Austin, USA
“What we call a poem is mostly what is not there on the page.” -Harold Bloom
I can not speak for the global Occupy movement, but I think we here in
the US have done a poor job of representing ourselves. We are not
professional media spinners, and it is unfair to judge this movement
by what is shown on the television news stations. Even those
sympathetic to our cause, such as the John Stewart Show or the Colbert
Report, while often painting Occupy Wall Street in favorable light,
have been unable to avoid widespread misconceptions.
Please allow me a few words to attempt a more clear painting of what
Occupy is and is not.
First, our movement is radically inclusive. There are many supporters
from the right, center and left of the political spectrum. We have
many Tea Party-ers who are unhappy with how that movement has
developed. We have many Ron Paul supporters who do not believe he has
been treated fairly by the Republican party. We have Veterans
concerned about healthcare, and Green party supporters concerned about
environmental issues and genetically-modified foods. And yes, there
are some students, hippies, and anarchists; some homeless people
looking for a handout, and soccer moms looking for a cause. Continue reading ‘What Occupy Is and Is Not’ »
The first Goody lecture given at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany on 1st June 2011. The lecture is available from the Institute in a handsome print version. I am grateful to Chris Hann for the chance to reflect here on the debt I owe to my teacher.
Part One Jack Goody’s Vision
In a short preface to Production and Reproduction, the first in his series of comparisons between Africa and Eurasia, Jack Goody (1976:ix-x) tells us that ethnography, the aspiration to write about another culture studied intensively through fieldwork, never defined his intellectual horizons. His subject has always been historical comparison and beyond that “the development of human culture”. He deliberately sets himself at odds with his greatest contemporary, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962), as being uninterested in binary oppositions between the modern and the primitive. Rather he places himself as an actor in a historical period, coming of age in the Second World War, encountering the Eastern Mediterranean, escaping from a prison camp into the mountains of Abruzzo, entering Africa at the decisive moment of its anti-colonial revolution and in its epicentre, Ghana. With European empires collapsing everywhere, he rejects the eurocentric idea that the West is special, looking instead for forms of knowledge that are more truly universal, better suited to the new world society launched by the war. Continue reading ‘Jack Goody’s Vision of World History and African Development Today’ »
Thanks to Patrice Riemens. Steve Keen is a heterodox Australian economist whose Debunking Economics has just been reissued. He is a follower of Hyman Minsky and now argues for private debt to be radically reduced and government money expanded in its place. There are interesting parallels with David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 years, the main difference being that Keen understands what’s going on now a lot better. The two are complementary and it comes out in Keen’s support from the Occupy movement (BBC interview, 24 minutes).
A letter to Ed Philips on nettime in the thread, Debt Campaign Launch, 10th December 2011.
Well, Ed, that was worth waiting for, as Brian said. It may seem churlish, after your generous remarks, to harp on the one point of apparent difference between us, but I do so because, while I share many of your views on monopoly capitalism and bureaucracy, I believe that sharpening our historical vision and conceptual apparatus to grasp the changing composition and strategies of capital is important.
I start from the idea that we are going through the early stages of a world revolution as profound and far-reaching for humanity as the invention of agriculture. I also reject any linear evolutionary model of human history, which means that a shift as major as this calls into question the relationship between many modern revolutions of the last half-millennium whose legacies remain with us in an unstable mixture. So you are right to point out that many of the elements of today existed 150 years and vice versa. Making comparisons between periods involves judgment, not clearcut contrasting definitions or the idea that there is nothing new under the sun. Continue reading ‘On profit and rent in the history of capitalism’ »
We all began by talking about a financial crisis and now we fear an unprecedented global economic crisis. At the centre of the second, but initially not of the first, lies the potential collapse of the euro as a regional single currency and rival to the dollar as a world currency. The link between these two moments, 2007-8 and 2011-12, is the persisting idea that we are facing the failure of specific financial institutions in the context of a boom/bust cycle of credit and debt. By taking a broader view of money than its current identification with finance, I aim to historicise the present crisis by placing it within a long-term narrative of social development, in the process offering a new explanation for our economic problems. As the economic crisis deepens, it is increasingly seen as a result of political failure, in sharp contrast to what came before, when politics was viewed as a hindrance to or mere consequence of markets. The euro is by no means the only symptom of this crisis, but it may well be seen in retrospect as the decisive nail in the coffin of the world economy today.Continue reading ‘The euro crisis seen as an episode in the history of money’ »
The two great memory banks are language and money. Exchange of meanings through language and of objects through money are now converging in a single network of communication, the internet.
We must learn how to use this digital revolution to advance the human conversation about a better world. Our political task is to make a world society fit for all humanity.
