Commodity Fetish a Definition

I like to find short sharp clear (humorous) definitions of Marx's ideas to share with my readers. This is another one: Commodity Fetish. LOL this ones got that JimBobbySez kinda of style....

One of the most charming witticisms of Marx is the term "commodity fetishism". "Fetishism" spoofed Hegel, who had concocted a famous lengthy, crackpot, faux-learned justification for racialised subjection, imperialism and slavery in the Philosophy of History founded on the infantile, primitive nature of neeeegrows as evidenced by their relations to fetishes. Fetish=degradation. To Hegel's mystical ecstasy of yerupeen triumph over fetishes and fetishists, Marx replied; And who are you, my fine fellow, to sneer at fetishes? At least those guys utilise their fetishes and create them in moderation. Your fetishes proliferate like fungus, lord it over you like gods; you grovel before them in every minute of life.

I came across it after coming across a critique of Hegel's view of Africa showing the author knew where of he spoke.

Hegel’s Europe (Spirit) Hegel’s Africa (Nature)

For Hegel, Africans fail at achieving substantial notions of the universal. Hegel
says that, “in Negro life the characteristic point is the fact that consciousness has not yet
attained to the realization of any substantial objective existence—as for example, God, or
Law—in which the interest of man’s volition is involved and in which he realizes his
own being.”xxiv African religion is, for Hegel, actually magic and fetishism. Law is
nothing but unruly despotic control. African social organization is the slavery of Africans
by each other, resulting in cannibalism, violence, and chaos in the interior of Africa.
Specifically, in Africa, Hegel finds “the most reckless inhumanity and disgusting
barbarism” be displayed by the people of the continent.

In reference to the African, according to Hegel, “we must put aside all thought of
reverence and morality—all that we call feeling—if we would rightly comprehend him;
there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character.”xxvi For
Hegel, a sense of humanity, as cultivated from a conception of the universal, is lacking in
Africans. The African lacks the ability to see beyond himself, in the humanity of another,
or in the necessity of the community. The African tries to organize socially, but fails.
Hegel says, “the political bond can therefore not possess such a character as that free laws
should unite the community.”xxvii They try to express themselves religiously, but exist in
fetishism. Hegel refers to Africans as believers in “sorcery” in which they have no “idea
of a God, or a moral faith.”

For Hegel, it is impossible for the African to actualize concepts of religion, law,
or society due to their own sensuousness. Hegel manipulates the ways in which the text
displays the manner in which the African character expresses itself in terms of religion,
law, and social organization.”xxix For Bernasconi, “An examination of Hegel’s sources
shows that they were more accurate than he was and that he cannot be so readily excused
for using them as he did.”xxx Myth creation and African esoticization occur in Hegel.
Hegel is constructing an archetype of what and where the unhistorical would be in Space
and History. As the archetype of the unhistorical, Bernasconi says that in Hegel, “Africa
served as a null-point or base-point.”

Why would Hegel proceed to have these declarative statements about a people
that he claims he does not understand? Hegel says that Africa is unknown only to proceed
in explaining the intricacies of its identity. Is this a problem of inherent duplicity? Hegel
makes the African an incomprehensible element to compliment the comprehensible. In
Hegel, “awakening consciousness takes its rise surrounded by natural influences alone,
and every development of it is the reflection of Spirit back upon itself in opposition to the
immediate, unreflected character of mere nature. Nature is therefore one element in this
antithetic abstracting process.”

The development of Spirit out of Nature requires Nature to antithetically reflect
Spirit’s identity and see this reflection, and movement away, as an antithesis in all aspects
to its stagnated self. For this reason, Hegel must construct Africa as an incomprehensible,
irrational, unreasoned, and unhistorical entity. Hence, Europe blossoms historically out of
Africa as an opposite posed specifically for Europe’s ascension. This incomprehensibility
forces Africa to remain outside the realm of logical, historical development. The African
has no hopes of cohabiting the same conceptual space as the rest of humanity. They fail
to rise out of Nature for they lack the mechanism of the threshold and antithesis that they
exist as for Europe, against which this rising can occur. Rising above the threshold is
impossible when a culture is that threshold. Africa does not have the capability of rising
because this rising has to occur over and against Africa.

And here are a couple of more definitions of Commodity Fetish

A commodity, for Marx, is an object which is
1.) the product of human, creative labor, that is, human labor manifested in an object and 2.) an object of human labor which is put in relation to other objects of human labor, that is, it is an object which is circulated.

If you sat down and build a bird-house for yourself, you have produced an object, but not a commodity. If you sit down and build a bird-house and sell it to someone else, you have produced both an object and a commodity. Marx's central argument here is that the world of commodities, of objects which circulate in an economy, takes on a life of its own. When you go to the store and see a bird-house for sale on a shelf, you see only the object, not the labor that went into it.

The commodity seems to you to have magically appeared on the shelf for you consumption. That sense that commodities have a life of their own, that they magically appear for people to purchase or exchange, is what Marx means by the fetishism of commodities.

The Reality behind Commodity Fetishism

After having clarified Marx’s methodological point of departure I shall now carefully discuss his laying out of what the "mystical character", the "metaphysical subtleties", "the sensory supernatural character” and the "theological manners" of the commodity specifically consist in.

The term fetish or to fetishize which originally derives from religious discourse means to invest something with powers it does not intrinsically possess. But while the religious fetish, if my picture of the world is not totally mistaken, does not through an act of being thought about or believed in acquire powers which previously were foreign to it, the situation is different in the case of the kind of fetish Marx is concerned with. ( The commodity fetish is being realized, not created by the minds of the individual actors and thus needs to be sharply distinguished from allusions to hallucinations, false illusions and the like. The kind of fetishism Marx is describing, can neither be understood as a mere individual misrepresentation nor as an abstract phenomenon of social consciousness. It has to be seen in light of the society as a whole. Fetishism is not merely an ideological category. While ideology in Marx understanding of it as "necessary false consciousness" is not confined to capitalist societies, but is closely linked to all societies that are divided into classes, the notion of commodity fetishism is a historical distinct phenomenon of capitalism. Marx goes as far as claiming that commodity fetishism is inseparably linked to Capitalist modes of production. He writes:

[In capitalist societies] it is o­nly the definite social relationships of men themselves, which in their eyes takes o­n the phantasmagorial form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world, the products of the human mind appear as independent beings endowed with life, as entering into independent relations both with o­ne another and the human race. The same way are in the world of commodities the products of men’s hands. This I call the fetishism which is attached to the products of labor, as soon as they are produced as commodities, and which therefore is inseparable from the production of commodities.

And a more sinister meaning of it as an aspect of Gothic Capitalism.

The Ends of the Body--Commodity Fetishism and the Global Traffic in Organs
SAIS Review - Volume 22, Number 1, Winter-Spring 2002, pp. 61-80

Amidst the neoliberal readjustments of the new global economy, there has been a rapid growth of "medical tourism" for transplant surgery and other advanced biomedical and surgical procedures. A grotesque niche market for sold organs, tissues, and other body parts has exacerbated older divisions between North and South, haves and have-nots, organ donors and organ recipients. Indeed, a kind of medical apartheid has also emerged that has separated the world into two populations--organ givers and organ receivers. Over the past 30 years, organ transplantation--especially kidney transplantation--has become a common procedure in hospitals and clinics throughout the world. The spread of transplant technologies has created a global scarcity of viable organs. At the same time the spirit of a triumphant global and "democratic" capitalism has released a voracious appetite for "fresh" bodies from which organs can be procured. The confluence in the flows of immigrant workers and itinerant kidney sellers who fall prey to sophisticated but unscrupulous transnational organ brokers is a subtext in the recent history of globalization. Today's organ procurement transactions are a blend of altruism and commerce; of science and superstition; of gifting, barter, and theft; and of voluntarism and coercion. International Organ Markets, Bioethics, and Social Justice The problem with markets is that they reduce everything--including human beings, their labor, and their reproductive capacity--to the status of commodities that can be bought, sold, traded, and stolen.

But not to anticipate, we will content ourselves with yet another
example relating to the commodity-form. Could commodities themselves
speak, they would say: Our use-value may be a thing that interests men.
It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as
objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it.
In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values. Now listen
how those commodities speak through the mouth of the economist. "Value"
(i.e., exchange-value) "is a property of things, riches" (i.e., use-
value) "of man. Value, in this sense, necessarily implies exchanges,
riches do not."(35) "Riches" (use-value) "are the attribute of men,
value is the attribute of commodities. A man or a community is rich, a
pearl or a diamond is valuable... A pearl or a diamond is valuable" as a
pearl or a diamond.(36) So far no chemist has ever discovered
exchange-value either in a pearl or a diamond. The economic discoverers
of this chemical element, who by-the-by lay special claim to critical
acumen, find however that the use-value of objects belongs to them
independently of their material properties, while their value, on the
other hand, forms a part of them as objects. What confirms them in this
view, is the peculiar circumstance that the use-value of objects is
realised without exchange, by means of a direct relation between the
objects and man, while, on the other hand, their value is realised only
by exchange, that is, by means of a social process. Who fails here to
call to mind our good friend, Dogberry, who informs neighbour Seacoal,
that, "To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but reading and
writing comes by Nature."


The Fetish Speaks — 
Fredy Perlman's graphic rendition of Karl Marx's "Commodity Fetishism"

Rather, fetishism or animism is a set of ritual practices, stances, and attunements to the world, constituting the way we participate in capitalist existence. Commodities actually are alive: more alive, perhaps, than we ourselves are. They “appear,” or stand forth, or “shine” (the word Marx uses is scheinen) as autonomous beings. Commodities don’t just “believe” for us; much more, they usurp our day-to-day lives, and act pragmatically in our place. The “naive” consumer, who sees commodities as animate beings, endowed with magical properties, is therefore not mystified or deluded. He or she is accurately perceiving the way that capitalism works, how it endows material things with an inner life. Under the reign of commodities, we live — as William Burroughs said we did — in a “magical universe.”

And so, our encounter with commodities and brands is an affective experience, before it is a cognitive one. It’s not belief that is at stake here, but attraction and revulsion, euphoria and disgust, a warm sense of belonging, nostalgia, panic, and loss….

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use value, commodity, labour, labor, Marx, commodity fetish, labour theory of value, social-factory, proletariat, capital, capitalism, profit, Hegel, Africa

The 1965 Watts Riot (Situationist International)

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The 1965 Watts Riot (Situationist International)

B U R E A U   O F   P U B L I C   S E C R E T S

The Decline and Fall of the
Spectacle-Commodity Economy

August 13-16, 1965, the blacks of Los Angeles revolted. An incident between traffic police and pedestrians developed into two days of spontaneous riots. Despite increasing reinforcements, the forces of order were unable to regain control of the streets. By the third day the blacks had armed themselves by looting accessible gun stores, enabling them to fire even on police helicopters. It took thousands of police and soldiers, including an entire infantry division supported by tanks, to confine the riot to the Watts area, and several more days of street fighting to finally bring it under control. Stores were massively plundered and many were burned. Official sources listed 32 dead (including 27 blacks), more than 800 wounded and 3000 arrests.
Reactions from all sides were most revealing: a revolutionary event, by bringing existing problems into the open, provokes its opponents into an inhabitual lucidity. Police Chief William Parker, for example, rejected all the major black organizations’ offers of mediation, correctly asserting: “These rioters don’t have any leaders.” Since the blacks no longer had any leaders, it was the moment of truth for both sides. What did one of those unemployed leaders, NAACP general secretary Roy Wilkins, have to say? He declared that the riot “should be put down with all necessary force.” And Los Angeles Cardinal McIntyre, who protested loudly, did not protest against the violence of the repression, which one might have supposed the most tactful policy at a time when the Roman Church is modernizing its image; he denounced “this premeditated revolt against the rights of one’s neighbor and against respect for law and order,” calling on Catholics to oppose the looting and “this violence without any apparent justification.” And all those who went so far as to recognize the “apparent justifications” of the rage of the Los Angeles blacks (but never the real ones), all the ideologists and “spokesmen” of the vacuous international Left, deplored the irresponsibility, the disorder, the looting (especially the fact that arms and alcohol were the first targets) and the 2000 fires with which the blacks lit up their battle and their ball. But who has defended the Los Angeles rioters in the terms they deserve?
We will. Let the economists fret over the $27 million lost, and the city planners sigh over one of their most beautiful supermarkets gone up in smoke, and McIntyre blubber over his slain deputy sheriff. Let the sociologists bemoan the absurdity and intoxication of this rebellion. The role of a revolutionary publication is not only to justify the Los Angeles insurgents, but to help elucidate their perspectives, to explain theoretically the truth for which such practical action expresses the search.
In Algiers in July 1965, following Boumédienne’s coup d’état, the situationists issued an Address to the Algerians and to revolutionaries all over the world which interpreted conditions in Algeria and the rest of the world as a whole. Among other examples we mentioned the movement of the American blacks, stating that if it could “assert itself incisively” it would unmask the contradictions of the most advanced capitalist system. Five weeks later this incisiveness was in the streets. Modern theoretical criticism of modern society and criticism in acts of the same society already coexist; still separated but both advancing toward the same realities, both talking about the same thing. These two critiques are mutually explanatory, and neither can be understood without the other. Our theory of “survival” and of “the spectacle” is illuminated and verified by these actions which are so incomprehensible to American false consciousness. One day these actions will in turn be illuminated by this theory.
Until the Watts explosion, black civil rights demonstrations had been kept by their leaders within the limits of a legal system that tolerates the most appalling violence on the part of the police and the racists — as in last March’s march on Montgomery, Alabama. Even after the latter scandal, a discreet agreement between the federal government, Governor Wallace and Martin Luther King led the Selma marchers on March 10 to stand back at the first police warning, in dignity and prayer. The confrontation expected by the demonstrators was reduced to a mere spectacle of a potential confrontation. In that moment nonviolence reached the pitiful limit of its courage: first you expose yourself to the enemy’s blows, then you push your moral nobility to the point of sparing him the trouble of using any more force. But the main point is that the civil rights movement only addressed legal problems by legal means. It is logical to make legal appeals regarding legal questions. What is irrational is to appeal legally against a blatant illegality as if it was a mere oversight that would be corrected if pointed out. It is obvious that the crude and glaring illegality from which blacks still suffer in many American states has its roots in a socioeconomic contradiction that is not within the scope of existing laws, and that no future judicial law will be able to get rid of this contradiction in the face of the more fundamental laws of this society. What American blacks are really daring to demand is the right to really live, and in the final analysis this requires nothing less than the total subversion of this society. This becomes increasingly evident as blacks in their everyday lives find themselves forced to use increasingly subversive methods. The issue is no longer the condition of American blacks, but the condition of America, which merely happens to find its first expression among the blacks. The Watts riot was not a racial conflict: the rioters left alone the whites who were in their path, attacking only the white policemen, while on the other hand black solidarity did not extend to black store-owners or even to black car-drivers. Martin Luther King himself had to admit that the revolt went beyond the limits of his specialty. Speaking in Paris last October, he said: “This was not a race riot. It was a class riot.”
The Los Angeles rebellion was a rebellion against the commodity, against the world of the commodity in which worker-consumers are hierarchically subordinated to commodity standards. Like the young delinquents of all the advanced countries, but more radically because they are part of a class without a future, a sector of the proletariat unable to believe in any significant chance of integration or promotion, the Los Angeles blacks take modern capitalist propaganda, its publicity of abundance, literally. They want to possess now all the objects shown and abstractly accessible, because they want to use them. In this way they are challenging their exchange-value, the commodity reality which molds them and marshals them to its own ends, and which has preselected everything. Through theft and gift they rediscover a use that immediately refutes the oppressive rationality of the commodity, revealing its relations and even its production to be arbitrary and unnecessary. The looting of the Watts district was the most direct realization of the distorted principle: “To each according to their false needs” — needs determined and produced by the economic system which the very act of looting rejects. But once the vaunted abundance is taken at face value and directly seized, instead of being eternally pursued in the rat-race of alienated labor and increasing unmet social needs, real desires begin to be expressed in festive celebration, in playful self-assertion, in the potlatch of destruction. People who destroy commodities show their human superiority over commodities. They stop submitting to the arbitrary forms that distortedly reflect their real needs. The flames of Watts consummated the system of consumption. The theft of large refrigerators by people with no electricity, or with their electricity cut off, is the best image of the lie of affluence transformed into a truth in play. Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and alteration, whatever particular form it may take. Only when it is paid for with money is it respected as an admirable fetish, as a symbol of status within the world of survival.
Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence. What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job is to ensure that a given product of human labor remains a commodity, with the magical property of having to be paid for, instead of becoming a mere refrigerator or rifle — a passive, inanimate object, subject to anyone who comes along to make use of it. In rejecting the humiliation of being subject to police, the blacks are at the same time rejecting the humiliation of being subject to commodities. The Watts youth, having no future in market terms, grasped another quality of the present, and that quality was so incontestable and irresistible that it drew in the whole population — women, children, and even sociologists who happened to be on the scene. Bobbi Hollon, a young black sociologist of the neighborhood, had this to say to the Herald Tribune in October: “Before, people were ashamed to say they came from Watts. They’d mumble it. Now they say it with pride. Boys who used to go around with their shirts open to the waist, and who’d have cut you to pieces in half a second, showed up here every morning at seven o’clock to organize the distribution of food. Of course, it’s no use pretending that food wasn’t looted. . . . All that Christian blah has been used too long against blacks. These people could loot for ten years and they wouldn’t get back half the money those stores have stolen from them over all these years. . . . Me, I’m only a little black girl.” Bobbi Hollon, who has sworn never to wash off the blood that splashed on her sandals during the rioting, adds: “Now the whole world is watching Watts.”
How do people make history under conditions designed to dissuade them from intervening in it? Los Angeles blacks are better paid than any others in the United States, but they are also the most separated from the California superopulence that is flaunted all around them. Hollywood, the pole of the global spectacle, is right next door. They are promised that, with patience, they will join in America’s prosperity, but they come to see that this prosperity is not a fixed state but an endless ladder. The higher they climb, the farther they get from the top, because they start off disadvantaged, because they are less qualified and thus more numerous among the unemployed, and finally because the hierarchy that crushes them is not based on economic buying power alone: they are also treated as inherently inferior in every area of daily life by the customs and prejudices of a society in which all human power is based on buying power. Just as the human riches of the American blacks are despised and treated as criminal, monetary riches will never make them completely acceptable in America’s alienated society: individual wealth will only make a rich nigger because blacks as a whole must represent poverty in a society of hierarchized wealth. Every witness noted the cry proclaiming the global significance of the uprising: “This is a black revolution and we want the world to know it!” Freedom Now is the password of all the revolutions of history, but now for the first time the problem is not to overcome scarcity, but to master material abundance according to new principles. Mastering abundance is not just changing the way it is shared out, but totally reorienting it. This is the first step of a vast, all-embracing struggle.
The blacks are not alone in their struggle, because a new proletarian consciousness (the consciousness that they are not at all the masters of their own activities, of their own lives) is developing in America among strata which in their rejection of modern capitalism resemble the blacks. It was, in fact, the first phase of the black struggle which happened to be the signal for the more general movement of contestation that is now spreading. In December 1964 the students of Berkeley, harassed for their participation in the civil rights movement, initiated a strike⁽¹⁾ challenging the functioning of California’s “multiversity” and ultimately calling into question the entire American social system in which they are being programmed to play such a passive role. The spectacle promptly responded with exposés of widespread student drinking, drug use and sexual immorality — the same activities for which blacks have long been reproached. This generation of students has gone on to invent a new form of struggle against the dominant spectacle, the teach-in, a form taken up October 20 in Great Britain at the University of Edinburgh during the Rhodesian crisis. This obviously primitive and imperfect form represents the stage at which people refuse to confine their discussion of problems within academic limits or fixed time periods; the stage when they strive to pursue issues to their ultimate consequences and are thus led to practical activity. The same month tens of thousands of anti-Vietnam war demonstrators appeared in the streets of Berkeley and New York, their cries echoing those of the Watts rioters: “Get out of our district and out of Vietnam!” Becoming more radical, many of the whites are finally going outside the law: “courses” are given on how to hoodwink army recruiting boards (Le Monde, 19 October 1965) and draft cards are burned in front of television cameras. In the affluent society disgust is being expressed for this affluence and for its price. The spectacle is being spat on by an advanced sector whose autonomous activity denies its values. The classical proletariat, to the very extent to which it had been provisionally integrated into the capitalist system, had itself failed to integrate the blacks (several Los Angeles unions refused blacks until 1959); now the blacks are the rallying point for all those who refuse the logic of this integration into capitalism, which is all that the promise of racial integration amounts to. Comfort will never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market, what in fact the market specifically eliminates. The level attained by the technology of the most privileged becomes an insult, and one more easily grasped and resented than is that most fundamental insult: reification. The Los Angeles rebellion is the first in history to justify itself with the argument that there was no air conditioning during a heat wave.
The American blacks have their own particular spectacle, their own black newspapers, magazines and stars, and if they are rejecting it in disgust as a fraud and as an expression of their humiliation, it is because they see it as a minority spectacle, a mere appendage of a general spectacle. Recognizing that their own spectacle of desirable consumption is a colony of the white one enables them to see more quickly through the falsehood of the whole economic-cultural spectacle. By wanting to participate really and immediately in the affluence that is the official value of every American, they are really demanding the egalitarian actualization of the American spectacle of everyday life — they are demanding that the half-heavenly, half-earthly values of the spectacle be put to the test. But it is in the nature of the spectacle that it cannot be actualized either immediately or equally, not even for the whites. (The blacks in fact function as a perfect spectacular object-lesson: the threat of falling into such wretchedness spurs others on in the rat-race.) In taking the capitalist spectacle at its face value, the blacks are already rejecting the spectacle itself. The spectacle is a drug for slaves. It is designed not to be taken literally, but to be followed from just out of reach; when this separation is eliminated, the hoax is revealed. In the United States today the whites are enslaved to the commodity while the blacks are negating it. The blacks are asking for more than the whites — this is the core of a problem that has no solution except the dissolution of the white social system. This is why those whites who want to escape their own slavery must first of all rally to the black revolt — not, obviously, in racial solidarity, but in a joint global rejection of the commodity and of the state. The economic and psychological distance between blacks and whites enables blacks to see white consumers for what they are, and their justified contempt for whites develops into a contempt for passive consumers in general. The whites who reject this role have no chance unless they link their struggle more and more to that of the blacks, uncovering its most fundamental implications and supporting them all the way. If, with the radicalization of the struggle, such a convergence is not achieved, black nationalist tendencies will be reinforced, leading to the futile interethnic antagonism so characteristic of the old society. Mutual slaughter is the other possible outcome of the present situation, once resignation is no longer viable.
The attempts to build a separatist or pro-African black nationalism are dreams giving no answer to the real oppression. The American blacks have no fatherland. They are in their own country and they are alienated. So are the rest of the population, but the blacks are aware of it. In this sense they are not the most backward sector of American society, but the most advanced. They are the negation at work, “the bad side that makes history by provoking struggles” (The Poverty of Philosophy). Africa has no special monopoly on that.
The American blacks are a product of modern industry, just like electronics or advertising or the cyclotron. And they embody its contradictions. They are the people whom the spectacle paradise must simultaneously integrate and reject, with the result that the antagonism between the spectacle and human activity is totally revealed through them. The spectacle is universal, it pervades the globe just as the commodity does. But since the world of the commodity is based on class conflict, the commodity itself is hierarchical. The necessity for the commodity (and hence for the spectacle, whose role is to inform the commodity world) to be both universal and hierarchical leads to a universal hierarchization. But because this hierarchization must remain unavowed, it is expressed in the form of unavowable, because irrational, hierarchical value judgments in a world of irrational rationalization. It is this hierarchization that creates racisms everywhere. The British Labour government has come to the point of restricting nonwhite immigration, while the industrially advanced countries of Europe are once again becoming racist as they import their subproletariat from the Mediterranean area, developing a colonial exploitation within their own borders. And if Russia continues to be anti-Semitic it is because it continues to be a hierarchical society in which labor must be bought and sold as a commodity. The commodity is constantly extending its domain and engendering new forms of hierarchy, whether between labor leader and worker or between two car-owners with artificially distinguished models. This is the original flaw in commodity rationality, the sickness of bourgeois reason, a sickness which has been inherited by the bureaucratic class. But the repulsive absurdity of certain hierarchies, and the fact that the entire commodity world is directed blindly and automatically to their protection, leads people to see — the moment they engage in a negating practice — that every hierarchy is absurd.
The rational world produced by the Industrial Revolution has rationally liberated individuals from their local and national limitations and linked them on a global scale; but it irrationally separates them once again, in accordance with a hidden logic that finds its expression in insane ideas and grotesque values. Estranged from their own world, people are everywhere surrounded by strangers. The barbarians are no longer at the ends of the earth, they are among the general population, made into barbarians by their forced participation in the worldwide system of hierarchical consumption. The veneer of humanism that camouflages all this is inhuman, it is the negation of human activities and desires; it is the humanism of the commodity, the solicitous care of the parasitical commodity for its human host. For those who reduce people to objects, objects seem to acquire human qualities and truly human manifestations appear as unconscious “animal behavior.” Thus the chief humanist of Los Angeles, William Parker, could say: “They started acting like a bunch of monkeys in a zoo.”
When California authorities declared a “state of insurrection,” the insurance companies recalled that they do not cover risks at that level — they guarantee nothing beyond survival. The American blacks can rest assured that as long as they keep quiet they will in most cases be allowed to survive. Capitalism has become sufficiently concentrated and interlinked with the state to distribute “welfare” to the poorest. But by the very fact that they lag behind in the advance of socially organized survival, the blacks pose the problems of life; what they are really demanding is not to survive but to live. The blacks have nothing of their own to insure; their mission is to destroy all previous forms of private insurance and security. They appear as what they really are: the irreconcilable enemies, not of the great majority of Americans, but of the alienated way of life of the entire modern society. The most industrially advanced country only shows us the road that will be followed everywhere unless the system is overthrown.
Certain black nationalist extremists, to show why they can accept nothing less than a separate nation, have argued that even if American society someday concedes total civil and economic equality, it will never, on a personal level, come around to accepting interracial marriage. That is why this American society itself must disappear — in America and everywhere else in the world. The end of all racial prejudice, like the end of so many other prejudices related to sexual inhibitions, can only lie beyond “marriage” itself, that is, beyond the bourgeois family (which has largely fallen apart among American blacks) — the bourgeois family which prevails as much in Russia as in the United States, both as a model of hierarchical relations and as a structure for a stable inheritance of power (whether in the form of money or of social-bureaucratic status). It is now often said that American youth, after thirty years of silence, are rising again as a force of contestation, and that the black revolt is their Spanish Civil War. This time their “Lincoln Brigades” must understand the full significance of the struggle in which they are engaging and totally support its universal aspects. The Watts “excesses” are no more a political error in the black revolt than the POUM’s May 1937 armed resistance in Barcelona was a betrayal of the anti-Franco war.⁽²⁾ A revolt against the spectacle — even if limited to a single district such as Watts — calls everything into question because it is a human protest against a dehumanized life, a protest of real individuals against their separation from a community that could fulfill their true human and social nature and transcend the spectacle.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL
December 1965

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[TRANSLATOR’S NOTES]

1. The “Free Speech Movement.” See David Lance Goines’s The Free Speech Movement.

2. Lincoln Brigades: Americans volunteers who went to Spain to fight against Franco during the Spanish civil war (1936-1939). POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista): Spanish revolutionary Marxist organization, allied with the anarchists in opposing the machinations of the Stalinists within the anti-Franco camp. It was largely destroyed by the Stalinists in May 1937 through a series of repressions, arrests and assassinations.
     The concluding sentence (“A revolt against the spectacle . . .”) is a détournement from Marx: “A social revolution involves the standpoint of the whole — even if it takes place in only one factory district — because it is a human protest against a dehumanized life, because it proceeds from the standpoint of the single actual individual, because the community against whose separation from himself the individual is reacting is the true community of man, true human nature” (Critical Notes on “The King of Prussia and Social Reform,” 1844).

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“Le déclin et la chute de l’économie spectaculaire-marchande” was immediately translated into English and circulated in England and the United States in December 1965. The French version was reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #10 (Paris, March 1966). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

B U R E A U   O F   P U B L I C   S E C R E T S

Three Postscripts to the Previous Issue

It seems to us that the insurrections of the blacks in Newark and Detroit have indisputably confirmed our 1965 analysis of the Watts riot [The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy]. In particular, the participation of numerous whites in the looting demonstrates that in its deepest sense Watts really was “a revolt against the commodity,” an elemental reaction to the world of “commodity abundance.” On the other hand, the danger represented by the leadership that is trying to constitute itself above the movement is now taking more definite shape: the Newark Conference has adopted the essential features of the Black Muslim program of black capitalism. Stokely Carmichael and the other “Black Power” stars are walking the tightrope between the vague and undefined extremism necessary to establish themselves at the head of the black masses (Mao, Castro, power to the blacks and we don’t even have to say what we’re going to do about the 9/10 of the population who are white) and the actual unavowed paltry reformism of a black “third party,” which would auction off its swing vote in the American political marketplace and which would eventually create, in the person of Carmichael and his colleagues, an “elite” like those that emerged out of the other American minorities (Poles, Italians, etc.), an elite that has so far never developed among the blacks.

* * *

In Algeria, too, Boumédienne has unfortunately proved the correctness of our analysis of his regime [The Class Struggles in Algeria]. Self-management there is now completely dead. We have no doubt we will eventually see it return under more favorable conditions. But for the moment no revolutionary network has succeeded in forming on the basis of the offensive resistance of the self-managed sector; and our own direct efforts toward this goal have been extremely inadequate.

* * *

Daniel Guérin wrote to us to say that our note about him [The Algeria of Daniel Guérin, Libertarian] was unfair and that he wanted to explain himself. We met him. He had to admit that we gave a correct account of his analysis of Algeria, which is at the opposite pole from ours. He complained only of having been presented as a sort of agent of Ben Bella. We stated that our note in no way suggests such an idea. Guérin explained his admiration for Ben Bella by psychological arguments whose sincerity we don’t question: He had found Ben Bella very likable, particularly after thirty years of disappointments with his other militant anticolonialist North African friends, who have generally ended up becoming government officials. Ben Bella remained a man of the people, that was his good side. He became President of the Republic, that was his failing. Guérin already found Ben Bella’s Algeria “miraculous” and reproached us for demanding a succession of additional miracles. We replied that such a succession was precisely our conception of revolution, and that any single “miracle” that remains miraculous (i.e. isolated and exceptional) will quickly disappear. We proposed to Guérin that he publish a text in response to our article; but he considered that his oral explanation was sufficient.

SITUATIONIST INTERNATIONAL
1967

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“Six additifs au précédent numéro” appeared in Internationale Situationniste #11 (Paris, October 1967). These three, translated by Ken Knabb, are from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.

It's the Labour Theory of Value, stupid

In Libertarian Dialectics and in other comments I have made on my blogs I have challenged what I call the price, distribution, production economic model of the Austrian School of Economics, Von Mises and Hayek, and their heirs at the Chicago School of Economics, Friedman et al. It is also called neo-classical economics, what could also be called liberal economics.

This is why I refer to the majority of right wing Libertarians, as liberaltarians, those who embrace the supply side economics of these schools. These characters are masques of capitalism as Marx once described their subjective function.

They reject out of hand the Labour Theory of Value, based on a flawed critique of Capital by the Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Austrian Minister of Finance, 1889-1904, professor and leader, along with Carl Menger and Friedrich von Weiser, of the Austrian school of economists. Böhm-Bawerk, had a special interest in the theory of capital and interest. Author of several books, including his 1896 work, Karl Marx and the Close of His System, a classic attack on Marxist economics.

The German Marxist economist Rudolf Hilferding, challenged the Austrian school’s dismissal of Capital and of Marx, in his critique of Böhm-Bawerk, In his preface to his critique Hilferding writes:

“The publication of the third volume of Capital has made hardly any impression upon bourgeois economic science. We have seen nothing of the "jubilant hue and cry" anticipated by Sombart. [1] No struggle of intellects has taken place; there was no contest in majorem scientiae gloriam. For in the theoretical field bourgeois economics no longer engages in blithe and joyous fights. As spokesman for the bourgeoisie, it enters the lists only where the bourgeoisie has practical interests to defend. In the economico-political struggles of the day it faithfully reflects the conflict of interests of the dominant cliques, but it shuns the attempt to consider the totality of social relationships, for it rightly feels that any such consideration would be incompatible with its continued existence as bourgeois economics.

The only exception is the psychological school of political economy. The adherents of this school resemble the classical economists and the Marxists in that they endeavor to apprehend economic phenomena from a unitary outlook. Opposing Marxism with a circumscribed theory, their criticism is systematic in character, and their critical attitude is forced upon them because they have started from totally different premises. As early as 1884, in his Capital and Interest, Böhm-Bawerk joined issue with the first volume of Capital, and soon after the publication of the third volume of that work he issued a detailed criticism the substance of which was reproduced in the second edition of his Capital and Interest [German edition 1900]. [2] He believes he has proved the untenability of economic Marxism, and confidently announces that "the beginning of the end of the labor theory of value" has been inaugurated by the publication of the third volume of Capital.”

Hilferding refers to the Austrian School as the ‘psychological” school, which is the correct appellation for the heirs of Böhm-Bawerk; Von Mises, Hayek, Freidman, Rothbard, Rand etc. By merging Randism with Austrian Economics, the Libertarian Right moved beyond Benjamin Tucker, who had accepted the Labour Theory of Value, as had Kropotkin in their Proudhonist fashion. While paying lip service to Tucker as an American Anarchist and father of American Libertarianism, they reject his acceptance of the Labour Theory of Value and instead embrace the anti-Prussian State Socialism straw dog of the Austrian School of Economics.

Ayn Rand’s so called “Objectivism” is NOT, it is subjectivism and her work in philosophy is subjectivist psychology, as Von Mises is in economics. They and their followers embrace the Böhm-Bawerk dismissal of the Labour Theory of Value. As Hilferding says in his chapter on the Austrian Schools Subjectivist Outlook:

“The phenomenon of variations in the price of production has shown us that the phenomena of capitalist society can never be understood if the commodity or capital be considered in isolation. It is the social relationship which these occupy, and changes in that relationship, which control and elucidate the movements of individual capitals, themselves no more than portions of the total social capital. But the representative of the psychological school of political economy fails to see this social nexus, and he therefore necessarily misunderstands a theory which definitely aims at disclosing the social determinism of economic phenomena, a theory whose starting point therefore is society and not the individual. In apprehending and expounding this theory he is ever influenced by his own individualistic mentality, and he thus arrives at contradictions which he ascribes to the theory, while they are in truth ascribable solely to his interpretations of the theory.

This confusion may be traced in all the stages of Böhm-Bawerk's polemic. Even the fundamental concept of the Marxist system, the concept of value-creating labor, is apprehended in a purely subjective manner. To him "labor" is identical with "trouble" or "effort" ["Mühe"].To make this individual feeling of distaste the cause of value naturally leads us to see in value a purely psychological fact, and to deduce the value of commodities from our evaluation of the labor they have cost. As is well known, this is the foundation which Adam Smith adopts for his theory of value, for he is ever inclined to abandon the objective standpoint for a subjective. Smith writes: "Equal quantities of labor must at all times and places be of equal value to the laborer. In his ordinary state of health, strength, and spirits; in the ordinary degree of his skill and dexterity, he must always lay down the same portion of his ease, his liberty, and his happiness." [1] If labor regarded as "trouble" be the basis of our personal estimate of value, then the "value of the labor" is a constituent, or a "determinant" as Böhm-Bawerk puts it, of the value of commodities. But it need not be the only one, for a number of other factors which influence the subjective estimates made by individuals take their places beside labor and have an equal right to be regarded as determinants of value. If, therefore, we identify the value of commodities with the personal estimate of the value of these commodities made by this or that individual, it seems quite arbitrary to select labor as the sole basis for such an estimate.

From the subjectivist standpoint, therefore, the standpoint from which Böhm-Bawerk levels his criticism, the labor theory of value appears untenable from the very outset. And it is because he adopts this standpoint that Böhm-Bawerk is unable to perceive that Marx's concept of labor is totally opposed to his own. Already in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Marx had emphasized his opposition to Adam Smith's subjectivist outlook by writing "[Smith] fails to see the objective equalization of different kinds of labor which the social process forcibly carries out, mistaking it for the subjective equality of the labors of individuals." [2] In truth, Marx is entirely unconcerned with the individual motivation of the estimate of value. In capitalist society it would be absurd to make "trouble" the measure of value, for speaking generally the owners of the products have taken no trouble at all, whereas the trouble has been taken by those who have produced but do not own them. With Marx, in fact, every individual relationship is excluded from the conception of value-creating labor; labor is regarded, not as something which arouses feelings of pleasure or its opposite, but as an objective magnitude, inherent in the commodities, and determined by the degree of development of social productivity. Whereas for Böhm-Bawerk, labor seems merely one of the determinants in personal estimates of value, in Marx's view labor is the basis and connective tissue of human society, and in Marx's view the degree of productivity of labor and the method of organization of labor determine the character of social life. Since labor, viewed in its social function as the total labor of society of which each individual labor forms merely an aliquot part, is made the principle of value, economic phenomena are subordinated to objective laws independent of the individual will and controlled by social relationships. Beneath the husk of economic categories we discover social relationships, relationships of production, wherein commodities play the part of intermediaries, the social relationships being reproduced by these intermediate processes, or undergoing a gradual transformation until they demand a new type of inter-mediation.

Thus the law of value becomes a law of motion for a definite type of social organization based upon the production of commodities, for in the last resort all change in social structure can be referred to changes in the relationships of production, that is to say to changes in the evolution of productive power and in the organization of [productive] labor. We are thereby led, in the most striking contrast to the outlook of the psychological school, to regard political economy as a part of sociology, and sociology itself as a historical science. Böhm-Bawerk has never become aware of this contrast of outlooks. The question whether the "subjectivist method" or the "objectivist method" is the sound method in economics he decides in a controversy with Sombart by saying that each method must supplement the other—whereas in truth we are not concerned at all with two different methods, but with contrasted and mutually exclusive outlooks upon the whole of social life. Thus it happens that Böhm-Bawerk, unfailingly carrying on the controversy from his subjectivist and psychological standpoint, discovers contradictions in the Marxist theory which seem to him to be contradictions solely because of his own subjectivist interpretation of the theory.”

It is this subjectivity, misrepresented as being classical liberal invidualism that underlies the Right Wing Libertarians economic reason de’ etre of reducing capitalism to the economics of prices/distribution/production. It is also their misinterpretation of the market place of capitalism that makes them idealize some sort of laissez-faire utopia without the state. They fail to understand that there is a difference between government and the state.

The state is the judiciary and military power of the old aristocracy adapted by capitalism for its own functioning. Governance, government, is the function of associations of producers and always has been. Even Kropotkin realized this with his analysis of the State, and saw the free association of producers existing in the city state economies independent of any particular feudalist state; in fact it was their crushing that led to the creation of the modern capitalist state. But these associations still governed the market place, by workers control.

“On the other hand the State has also been confused with Government. Since there can be no State without government, it has sometimes been said that what one must aim at is the absence of government and not the abolition of the State. However, it seems to me that State and government are two concepts of a different order. The State idea means something quite different from the idea of government. It not only includes the existence of a power situated above society, but also of a territorial concentration as well as the concentration in the hands of a few of many functions in the life of societies. It implies some new relationships between members of society which did not exist before the formation of the State. A whole mechanism of legislation and of policing has to be developed in order to subject some classes to the domination of others.” The State: Its Historic Role, Peter Kropotkin

Under modern capitalism right wing libertarian “psychological economics” ends up not with a nation of “hewers of wood and drawers of water”, one which produces, but a nation of Fuller brush Salesmen, multilevel marketers and pyramid ponzi schemers. That is the ultimate ideal of supply side economics which sees America evolving into service/distributive based capitalism.

Who is John Galt? Who Cares!

He is not the Scottish author, rather he is a character in the Ayn Rand Novel Atlas Shrugged who declares Rand’s idealist principles of individualism within modern capitalism:
JOHN GALT'S OATH
”The world will change when you are ready to pronounce this oath:
I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man,
nor ask another man to live for the sake of mine.”

The Austrian School of ‘psychological’ subjectivist economics, or the ‘what’s in it for me’ school of political economy, deliberately obfusticates the differences between themselves and the Marxist school of political economy, because they have thrown out the Labour Theory of Value, while caring only about the arithmetic of distribution, the supply and demand of the current existing capitalist system. Even in their most radical form of the free marketers or anarcho-capitalists like Bryan Caplan, they still view the world through the eyes of Ayn Rand and her capitalist heroes in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

In her work The Fountainhead, which was also made into a movie, her capitalist hero is an architect who builds a monument to himself and escapes society by hiding from it. This is Rand’s individualist politics, the cruel but beautiful isolation of the individual. By embracing capitalisms alienation Rand makes this alienation her banner of individualism. It’s lonely at the top is the sine que non of this ideology.

Toohey's values are totally wrong, from Rand's point of view, but his analysis is almost always correct. "Every loneliness is a pinnacle," he says, like a true Randian individualist [277], and he is one of the few people able to recognize Roark's lonely genius for what it is. Toohey analyzes, in Randian fashion, the indebtedness of the many to the genius of the few, and the inspiration given to the collectivist spirit by the envy that results from that indebtedness [281-82].

The Literary Achievement of The Fountainhead By Stephen Cox

In the end, despite their protests to the contrary, the so called anarcho-capitalists heroes are Enron, WorldCom, and Martha Stewart, while their ideal of themselves is the freebooter pirate like Robert Anton Wilson’s caricature of them; Hagbard Celine in his Illuminatus Trilogy.

In order to avoid seriously confronting their differences with Marxism, Böhm-Bawerk and all his followers since have set up the straw dog of State Socialism, as their definition of Socialism, in particular Bismarck’s Prussian State Socialism which they were familiar with. Even after the successful Bolshevik revolution they still define socialism as any form of state intervention in the economy. In this case they failed to historically understand that Keynesianism was the natural outcome of Fordist capitalisms changing nature once confronted with workers revolution. In their steady state economics of capitalism workers revolution plays no part. They can only define capitalism as a market place separate from the state while capitalism has moved into an epoch of State Capitalism as Marxist Humanist Raya Dunavevskaya describes it.

Overall with few exceptions, such as Murray Rothbard, the Libertarian Right and its Austrian and Randian allies care not one wit for class struggle, since to them it can only lead to state socialism. And here is the rub, to be a radical subjectivist you must understand that the subjects of capitalism are the workers who produce it. As Marx said, both the workers and the capitalists are the subjects and objects of capitalism.

Production does not simply produce man as a commodity, the human commodity, man in the role of commodity; it produces him in keeping with this role as a mentally and physically dehumanized being. — Immorality, deformity, and dulling of the workers and the capitalists. — Its product is the self-conscious and self-acting commodity ... the human commodity.

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

Capitalism is a system, one that goes beyond its subjects, which is why it must be overcome since the result of its existence is alienation of the subjects who create it through the commodity fetishism it demands of us not as subjects but as ‘consumers’.

The Libertarian Right, the Austrian School and the Randites philosophical economics are restricted to understanding the subject as commodity fetish, they can never go beyond this. In effect their economics and the economics of the commodity fetish is well captured in the phrase; “Those with the most toys wins.”

As I.I. Rubin the Russian Economist writes in his introduction to Essays on Marx's Theory of Value

There is a tight conceptual relationship between Marx's economic theory and his sociological theory, the theory of historical materialism. Years ago Hilferding pointed out that the theory of historical materialism and the labor theory of value have the same starting point, specifically labor as the basic element of human society, an element whose development ultimately determines the entire development of society.[1]

The working activity of people is constantly in a process of change, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, and in different historical periods it has a different character. The process of change and development of the working activity of people involves changes of two types: first, there are changes in means of production and technical methods by which man affects nature, in other words, there are changes in society's productive forces; secondly, corresponding to these changes there are changes in the entire pattern of production relations among people, the participants in the social process of production. Economic formations or types of economy (for example, ancient slave economy, feudal, or capitalist economy) differ according to the character of the production relations among people. Theoretical political economy deals with a definite social-economic formation, specifically with commodity-capitalist economy.

The capitalist economy represents a union of the material-technological process and its social forms, i.e. the totality of production relations among people. The concrete activities of people in the material-technical production process presuppose concrete production relations among them, and vice versa. The ultimate goal of science is to understand the capitalist economy as a whole, as a specific system of productive forces and production relations among people. But to approach this ultimate goal, science must first of all separate, by means of abstraction, two different aspects of the capitalist economy: the technical and the social-economic, the material-technical process of production and its social form, the material productive forces and the social production relations. Each of these two aspects of the economic process is the subject of a separate science. The science of social engineering-still in embryonic state-must make the subject of its analysis the productive forces of society as they interact with the production relations. On the other hand, theoretical political economy deals with production relations specific to the capitalist economy as they interact with the productive forces of society. Each of these two sciences, dealing only with one aspect of the whole process of production, presupposes the presence of the other aspect of the production process in the form of an assumption which underlies its research. In other words, even though political economy deals with production relations, it always presupposes their unbreakable connection with the material-technical process of production, and in its research assumes a concrete stage and process of change of the material-productive forces.

Marx's theory of historical materialism and his economic theory revolve around one and the same basic problem: the relationship between productive forces and production relations. The subject of both sciences is the same: the changes of production relations which depend on the development of productive forces. The adjustment of production relations to changes of productive forces-a process which takes the form of increasing contradictions between the production relations and the productive forces, and the form of social cataclysms caused by these contradictions-is the basic theme of the theory of historical materialism.[2] By applying this general methodological approach to commodity-capitalist society we obtain Marx's economic theory. This theory analyzes the production relations of capitalist society, the process of their change as caused by changes of productive forces, and the growth of contradictions which are generally expressed in crises.

Political economy does not analyze the material-technical aspect of the capitalist process of production, but its social form, i.e., the totality of production relations which make up the "economic structure" of capitalism. Production technology (or productive forces) is included in the field of research of Marx's economic theory only as an assumption, as a starting point, which is taken into consideration only in so far as it is indispensable for the explanation of the genuine subject of our analysis, namely production relations. Marx's consistently applied distinction between the material-technical process of production and its social forms puts in our hands the key for understanding his economic system. This distinction at the same time defines the method of political economy as a social and historical science. In the variegated and diversified chaos of economic life which represents a combination of social relations and technical methods, this distinction also directs our attention precisely to those social relations among people in the process of production, to those production relations, for which the production technology serves as an assumption or basis. Political economy is not a science of the relations of things to things, as was thought by vulgar economists, nor of the relations of people to things, as was asserted by the theory of marginal utility, but of the relations of people to people in the process of production.

Political economy, which deals with the production 'relations among people in the commodity-capitalist society, presupposes a concrete social form of economy, a concrete economic formation of society. We cannot correctly understand a single statement in Marx's Capital if we overlook the fact that we are dealing with events which take place in a particular society. "In the study of economic categories, as in the case of every historical and social science, it must be borne in mind that as in reality so in our mind the subject, in this case modern bourgeois society, is given and that the categories are therefore but forms of expression, manifestations of existence, and frequently but one-sided aspects of this subject, this definite society." ". . .In the employment of the theoretical method [of Political Economy], the subject, society, must constantly be kept in mind as the premise from which we start." [3] Starting from a concrete sociological assumption, namely from the concrete social structure of an economy, Political Economy must first of all give us the characteristics of this social form of economy and the production relations which are specific to it. Marx gives us these general characteristics in his "theory of commodity fetishism," which could more accurately be called a general theory of production relations of the commodity capitalist economy.

Between these two Libertarianisms, there can never be a rapprochement, as those on the right reject the Labour Theory of Value and those of us on the Left (including some mutualists and some free-marketeers) accept the Labour Theory of Value.

Compared to the Labour Theory of Value, all other economics are simply the arithmetic of the market and the calculations of supply and demand distribution of currently existing capitalism. They offer no historical understanding of how we got here or where we are going, they only offer us the steady state of capitalism as it is, as it was, as it ever will be.

This is the contradiction of the free trade argument, since no trade in goods is truly free, each nation of producers restricts access to trade in its own capitalist interests, but in a world of commodity producers (off shore overseas, out of sight out of mind) and a world of commodity consumers (North Americans) then Free Trade is the right wing liberaltarian ideal. With that in mind all we can look forward to sweat shops in space ala Outland, with the lone sheriff being the Randian hero, if John Galt liberaltarians get their way.

The real Libertarian calls for smashing capitalism and its State. For ending the market domination of society and for the free association of producers.

Insurance Woes and Whines

Insurance firms feel profit pinch
Industry giants blame roiling markets, high loonie for dampening fourth-quarter earnings and outlook

Sez the headline. But the reality is that it has less to do with the loonie, and more about their investments in the U.S. including of course their exposure to the sub-prime credit mess. Ah the joys of global capitalism. The reason that banks want to merge of course is to compete for positions in the global financial markets, that is the U.S. market. And this is what happens when they do.....

Manulife is Canada's largest insurer. Approximately 64 per cent of its earnings are generated in the United States and Asia. Smaller rival Sun Life faces a similar predicament with about 52 per cent of its earnings originating from the U.S., U.K. and Asia.

For the October-December quarter, Sun Life reported earnings of $555 million or 97 cents per share. That compared with net income of $545 million or 94 cents per share for the same period in 2006. "This quarter was also marked by significant market turbulence," McKenney said.

Chief executive Donald Stewart said that volatility would likely affect the industry's outlook in the near term. Echoing those sentiments, Manulife CEO Dominic D'Alessandro suggested that "unsettled markets" would likely affect wealth businesses.

Sun Life also disclosed it has $84 million in direct exposure and $961 million in indirect exposure to monoline bond insurers. Those companies, which provide insurance against default in securitized debt, have become a source of worry because certain firms have had their credit ratings downgraded.

Chief investment officer Jim Anderson said Sun Life's direct exposure to monolines is with two insurers that are "AAA rated with a stable outlook." Its indirect exposure is to insurers with "investment grade" ratings, adding most of its exposure is in the U.K.

Insurance companies used to be the most risk adverse and conservative of financial institutions. However with the shift to globalization of the marketplace in the eighties and nineties from production to FIRE (financial services, insurance, real estate,) this all changed. A renewed financial market dominated the market, as it once had prior to WWI, the result of this financial exuberance, and shift from investment in production to investment in investment instruments bailed out New York and London from their Reagan/Thatcher excesses and declines. In doing so insurance companies as well as the banks and other financial businesses exposed themselves to the dangers of the balloon and bust market. Chickens, home, roost.

Just as people meet and authorize someone from among their own number to take specific action on their behalf, so commodities must meet to authorize a single commodity to confer full or partial citizenship in the world of commodities. The act of exchange is the occasion for such a meeting of commodities. The social activity of commodities on the market is to capitalist society what collective intelligence is to a socialist society. The consciousness of the bourgeois world is concentrated in the market report. It is only after the successful completion of the exchange that the individual can have any insight into the process as a whole, or any guarantee that his product has satisfied a social need, as well as the incentive to begin his production anew. The object which is thus authorized by the common action of commodities to express the value of all other commodities is – money. The authority of this particular commodity develops along with the development of the exchange of commodities.

Finance Capital, Hilferding 1910

SEE:

Lenin Was Right

Petro Dollars Bail Out The CITI

Bank Smack Down

U.S. Economy Entering Twilight Zone

Lenin's State Monopoly Capitalism

40 Years Later; The Society of the Spectacle

Commodity Fetish a Definition

State Capitalism in the USSR

Plutocrats Rule

The Right To Be Greedy

Social Credit And Western Canadian Radicalism

It's the Labour Theory of Value, stupid

China: The Truimph of State Capitalism

Deconstructing Hayek

Social Insecurity- The Phony Pension Crisis


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