Sidewinder

 

1. Capitalism works by breaking down - The relation of crises to capitalism

The capitalist apologist view of the relation of crisis to capitalism
is pretty clear. Crises are seen as undesirable, pathological or
threatening to "business as usual". Crises are seen as an "external
shock", as an exception to capitalist normality, which is growth.

Some critics of capitalism also see crises in a similar light - as the
result of internal contradictions (i.e. pathology) and ultimately
threatening the continued existence of the capitalist system. Many of
the people who hold to this view (and they include both Marxists and
non-Marxists) believe that there will be a series of ever-increasingly
severe crises until "the final crisis" brings about the collapse of
capitalism itself. We call these "crisis theorists". Note the
similarity of their take on the growth/crisis relation to the
apologist one.

By contrast, those of us who reject both capitalist apologetics and
crisis theory see crises as neither external nor potentially terminal
events for capitalism. Rather crises are a full and entirely necessary
part of the capitalist system. Capitalism could not function without
crises. Every period of sustained growth within capitalism is creating
the conditions for the next crisis. But these crises are both internal
and constitutive of capital. To answer the question posed on a recent
SWP poster round our way - this is not the end of capitalism, it’s the
means of capitalism.

To use an analogy. We recognise that within wars, the majority of
participants spend the majority of their time being relatively
inactive with the major threat they face being boredom. However, these
long periods of tedium are episodically interrupted by (mostly) brief
periods of death, destruction and chaos. Yet no-one attempts to say
that these latter periods are somehow not part of the normality of war
- exceptions or breakdowns in the war process.

Having said that, we need to move from the general constitutive
relation between growth and crisis, to the particularities of the
current crisis which, in terms of recent government actions alone
(nationalisations, bailouts putting hundreds or billions or even
trillions onto the public accounts of supposedly cash-strapped
governments, etc.) is clearly of a different order (at least as far as
the West is concerned) from the last crash (2001 internet bubble) or
the proceeding ones (1997/8 crisis, 1987 crash, etc.). So we need to
look at what is specific to the current crisis.

2. The global context

2.a. The imminent collapse of the Third Supercell

I have a nascent hypothesis of global level economic supercells, still
at the intuitive rather than theoretical stage at the moment. Based on
the metaphor of the large scale weather systems that breed hurricanes
or tornadoes. I’m looking at this as contrasted to steady-state or
homoeostatic flow systems, such as convection cells for e.g.

Possibly the first* supercell in this model would be the North Atlantic
slave trade triangle. The end result of which is the (relative)
depopulation of West & Central Africa, the growth of the North
American colonies and the feeding of the industrial revolution in
England. When this supercell breaks down it leaves England as the
dominant industrial power.

The second epochal supercell is again North Atlantic. It’s the flow
set up by WW1 of repayments by Germany to France & UK, then from these
two to the US (to service debts) and then from the US back to Germany
as credit. This breaks down into the depression and then WW2 (still
heavily dependant on North Atlantic flow - both to UK & Russia). But
the entire sequence breaks down with the dominant industrial power
being the US.

The third supercell is Pacific, linking the US, Japan and, post-Nixon,
China. With the passage to neoliberalism in the US and the turn to
"socialism with chinese characteristics" in China under Deng Xiaoping,
this supercell has assumed monstrous velocity and intensity.

Whether this supercell breaks down in this crisis or the next, the
writing is on the wall, the end result is going to leave China as the
dominant industrial power.

2.b. The proletarianisation of China

The other side of this story is the big picture drawn by David Harvey
(iirc?) that we have moved from a situation of 1.5 Bn of humanity as
proletariat, mainly in the West, to one where we have 3 Bn
proletarians, the bulk of that 100% increase being in the East, mainly
the mass proletarianisation of the Chinese peasantry. Any attempt by
the West to go for a return to Keynesianism (even were such a thing
technically possible - a new gold standard? - see section on money
below) is not going to take us back to the world of unchallenged US
and European industrial dominance that the loyal British imperialist
that Keynes was, worked so hard to preserve. Let’s face it, if the
defence of western economic dominance of the globe was ever** one of
the aims of neoliberalism, then it is one of the biggest own goals in
history.

From a working class point of view, it now means that we have to
overcome the geographic, cultural, linguistic and political barriers
that separate the western working class movements from the Chinese and
other eastern ones. Well, we always said, "workers of the world,
unite", now we have to mean it for real!

3. The real subsumption of money

The other precipitating factor of the current crisis that makes it
potentially epochal rather than periodic, is a technological
revolution in money.

Money pre-dates capitalism by many centuries. At the birth of
capitalism, although the new social system completely redefines
people’s relation to money (the majority, base class is now unable to
subsist except via money), the actual form of money itself remains
unchanged (gold or silver specie, albeit increasingly represented by
paper tokens). We can call this the "formal subsumption" of
money. However as capitalism progresses, the link to pre-capitalist
forms of money becomes harder and harder to manage. With the fall of
the original Keynesian Bretton Woods system in 1971 with the US’s
suspension of gold convertibility, the final link to pre-capitalist
money is severed. The story of how the post gold standard world
generates the rise of financial derivatives to manage the volatility
created by this break is told in Bryan & Rafferty’s "Capitalism with
Derivatives" upon which I based my own efforts on the same subject.

They posit that derivatives represent a new form of money, specific to
the needs of capitalism. Similar to the concept of techology moving
from the mode of formal subsumption to real subsumption in Capital.

But whether that means anything to you or not, IMO the post-Bretton
Woods evolution of money has exposed the inadequacy of (all) our
existing understandings of what money actually is, how it proceeds.

Analytical failings aside, the current crisis involves a breakdown of
the current money system. It is partly a "system crash" in the
computer sense of the term. The new money system is, after all,
computer based. From a capitalist perspective, they have a technical
fault to fix, as well the dual-headed political crisis mentioned above.

For us, it means that we need to create a theory of money that is fit
for our purpose. After all, aside from the need to understand the
dynamics of capitalism, if our aim is the abolition of the money
system, we first need to understand what it is we’re abolishing in its
functional sense as well as its political sense. The new, really
subsumed, capitalist money is dynamic, rather than inert and
inseparable from risk and credit. That is we need a theory of value
that incorporates risk, credit and productivity dynamics through time
that doesn’t get caught in circularity, given the role of time in the
base definition.

A pretty big job for us, but I can’t see anybody else inclined to do
it. Another case of Primo’s Levi’s "If not us, then who?"***

—-

* Well, OK, probably the first, small scale cell would be the Portugal
- Madeira circuit (sugar, slaves, sailpower, etc.). Followed by the
South Atlantic slave trade that took Africans to the Portugese and
Spanish colonies in South & Central america - like i say, i’m not
really at fully thought out theory stage yet.

** Arguably, neoliberalism was so following the money (and local class
power) so blindly, that having this as a strategic aim may have
slipped their mind - hence the belated realisation by the neo-cons
that they better do something fast to have a chance at a New
American Century. The fact their main strategy was to try and
monopolise global oil reserves is, in a way, a kind of concession
that maintaining industrial dominance was already a lost battle.

*** Apparently this is Primo’s reformulation of a quote from the
Mishnah. I like the original so much, I’ll quote it here
gratuitously:

"Avot 1:
13. He [Hillel] used to say: He who increases his name [=reputation], loses his name
And one who does not add, will perish.
And one who does not learn deserves death.
And one who makes use of the crown will perish.
14. He used to say: If I an not for myself, who will be for me?
And when I am for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?"

"one who makes use of the crown will perish." Amen to that!

 

Strategies for breaking up assemblages must be based on an understanding of the different possible relationships between the components of the assemblage. To examine two different types of assemblage we will consider the chain and the starfish.

The chain is an assemblage of links. For the chain assemblage to maintain it’s integrity under stress, every single link component must not fail. The failure of any single link brings about the catastrophic failure of the entire chain assemblage.

The appropriate strategy for breaking a chain is to find it’s weakest link and concentrate your force of attack on that. Thus we say that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

The starfish is an entirely different assemblage from a chain. It is a living organism whose assemblage has been shaped by the force of evolution rather than human artificing.

Starfish have the unusual capability to regenerate legs that are severed. This goes beyond the ability of a lizard to shed its tail. Depending on the starfish they can either regrow severed limbs from a whole centre, half a centre or even just an intact fifth of a centre. A very few need even less, such as the Linckia starfish or Blue Sea Star. This remarkable creature does not need any section of centre, it can regenerate entirely from one of its constituent legs. A surviving single leg will sprout four tiny legs, in which state they are called comets, from their appearance, and will eventually regrow to its full five-limbed form.

Of course evolution has produced many wonders in the natural world that we are currently unable to reproduce with our current levels of technology - the use of turbulence by the bumble bee for flight for example. However, before we shift to the sphere of human-artificed objects, let’s take a quick detour via the ancient mystical speculations of the east.

The great Japanese scholar and translator of Zen for a western audience, D.T. Suzuki, often referred to an image from his favourite sutra, the Lankavatara Sutra. In this sutra repeated references are made to a net of jewels which Suzuki interprets as a metaphor where within each jewel are tiny reflections of all the other jewels in the net.

This being the realm of the mystical, the jewelled net is of course infinite. However, returning to the realm of the material, finite and human-made, the principle of an assemblage of differing parts which contain within themselves resonances of other parts of the assemblage has found application in the world of computer systems engineering.

Like all systems engineering, IT systems administration has to deal with the fact that all made things are limited in their performance and their working lifespan - everything fails in the end. This provides twin challenges in the realm of disk storage. How to overcome the performance limitations of I/O speeds for current disk technology and how to engineer your systems such that disk failures do not lead to the irretrievable loss of the data stored upon them? The stupid answer would be to spend more money on making disks faster and more long-lasting. This is dumb for two reasons. First to throw money at an engineering problem to try to exceed the current tolerance levels quickly becomes a case of diminishing returns in cost-benefit terms. Secondly, you’re not solving the problem, simply putting it off.

The most common solution is what’s called a RAID array, originally standing for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (the Inexpensive is now increasing replaced by Independant, as being more marketing-friendly). In this a number of disks are arranged in an array so as to appear as one virtual disk to the system. There are several different assemblages of these multiple disks which solve the twin engineering challenges of performance and recoverability in different trade-offs. They are designated by different numbers such as RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 5.

RAID 0 addresses the performance issue by setting multiple disks side-by-side and dividing a chunk of data written to the virtual disk into a number of sub-segments, as many as there are disks in the array, and writes or reads them in parallel as a "stripe". So, say we had a 4-disk RAID 0 array, we could read and write a given chunk of data in roughly one quarter of the time it would take us to read or write to a single disk.

However RAID 0 doesn’t help at all with the problem of disk failure. The loss of any disk in the array will lead to the loss of all data since the data on the remaining disks will be corrupt without the missing stripe. Worse, by multiplying the disks, you multiply the chance of a failure occuring in a given time period. RAID 0 is thus analogous to our chain assemblage.

RAID 1 is a simple solution for the problem of disk failure. You have two disks, one being the exact mirror of the other. So long as you have a separate disk controller for each disk, writing is not much slower than it would be for a single disk. Reading can be faster, because you can read in parallel from both disks, but the main advantage of RAID 1 is that when a disk dies, you still have a copy of your data. You can replace the failed disk and rebuild the mirror from the survivor.

The big disadvantages of RAID 1 is that it doesn’t give you great performance and its the most expensive way of getting failure-proofing, called redundancy in systems engineering after the most common means of achieving it (think parachutes). For every unit of storage of your virtual disk, you need the double in physical disk storage.

RAID 5 is an attempt to combine the performance gains of striping, like RAID 0, with redundancy like RAID 1. In RAID 5 a virtual disk is made up of a multiple of disks (NB not 5 disks, the RAID levels have nothing to do with the number of disks involved) which must be at least 3. Similarly to RAID 0 a chunk of data to be written to the virtual disk is divided up into chunks to be striped across the disks, in addition a parity stripe is calculated by combining all the data stripes by binary arithmatic. The data segments plus parity are then written to the RAID stripe. Which disk gets the parity stripe is taken in turn. When a disk failure occurs the missing segments of the stripes can be recalculated from the remaining data segments and the parity segment for that stripe. The failed disk can then be swapped out of the array for a new replacement and rebuilt using the same mechanism.

Clearly the performance of RAID 5 is lower than RAID 0 and the recuperation of the data from a lost drive takes more work than having a full second copy as in RAID 1. But it has redundancy for much less disk resources than mirroring (e.g. a 4 disk RAID 5 array would make 75% of physical storage available as virtual storage, as opposed to just 50% for RAID 1) and performs multiple times faster than a single physical disk due to striping. It’s a relatively cost-effective engineering compromise that is still in widespread use in the industry, even though SAN and network storage technologies are slowly making other RAID configurations (e.g. RAID 1 + 0, a.k.a RAID 10 which creates stripes of mirrored disks) and more complex dynamic solutions more common.

RAID 5 is then like our five-footed friend the starfish. The removal of a single component will not destroy either the starfish or the RAID 5 array. On another level RAID 5 takes redundancy beyond that of the starfish type - similar to RAID 1 - that can only regenerate a single pattern. RAID 5 has more of the nature a Lankavatara net of jewels. Each disk in the assemblage contains reflections of the diverse contents of all the others within in it, thanks to the parity segments (and the power of binary encoding which makes parity simple).

So what implication does this have for strategies for breaking up assemblages? Clearly if the assemblage has self-repairing features like a starfish or RAID 5 array, then the strategy of striking at the weakest link will fail entirely.

This has serious political implications depending on whether the complementary institutions of capitalist society - the state, private property, exchange and the wage - are a brittle, mutually-dependant assemblage of the chain or RAID 0 type, or a self-reinforcing, self-regenerating assemblage of the starfish or RAID 5 type.

In his "Critique of the Gotha Programme", Marx made his opinion on this question clear - to him the removal of the institution of private property meant the retention of the money and wage form as well as the state, unproblematic. Both the latter institutions, although they still had the appearance of their capitalist fore-runners, "content and form are changed" by the prohibition of private property in the means of production.

For Marx then, the relations of capitalism are a chain assemblage, where the removal of the private property link will mean that the "lower stage of communism", even though it still contains exchange, the wage and the state, will inevitably proceed to develop the forces of production to the level where distribution will be according to needs rather than contribution and the state, already become the mere "administration of things", will wither away.

In contrast the classical anarchists moved from Proudhon’s initial promotion of a society that eliminated the state while retaining both private property and exchange, to a collectivist position that put the means of production into the hands of the producers. But it was not the controversy between Bakunin and Marx which led to the initial split in the International, that developed anarchist politics, but the "Public Services" debate between the Belgian syndicalist César de Paepe, and the Italo-Swiss Bakuninists. In the course of this debate de Paepe argued that public services such as health and education should be provided at a general social level rather than exchanges between individual collectives, and should be freely provided whether the recipient was currently capable of productive work or not. For the provision of these services, members of the producers collectives would have to be prepared for deductions from their earnings to pay for it. Naturally a social body should be responsible for collecting these deductions and organising the provision of these public services, that body should be the Worker’s State, in de Paepe’s view.

De Paepe’s challenge provoked responses from Bakuninists such as the Swiss collectivist Adhémar Schwitzguébel which was as long as attacking the Worker’s State for the evils of statehood, as it was short on actually answering the public services question.

It was this inability of the collectivists to answer de Paepe’s challenge - that to abolish private property but retain exchange, necessarily implied the retention of some form of state - that pushed the classical era anarchists into re-examining the possibility of communism rather than collectivism as a possible solution to the conundrum. In the end they concluded that de Paepe was basically right - even with the abolition of private property of the means of production, to retain distribution in proportion to contribution to production, could only lead to the regeneration of the state. The relations of capitalism were not a chain, but a starfish assemblage.

So,is capitalism RAID 1 or RAID 5? It’s a question that is of prime relevance today. Despite the historical evidence of the 20th century. Namely, that abolishing private property in the means of production while retaining the state and the wage, leads to a transition not from capitalism to communism, but from feudalism to capitalism, as demonstrated by both Russia and China, there are still those today who claim that these outcomes are the results of purely contingent political factors. Further there are many who still appear to claim, along with Schwitzguébel, that there are no inherent contradictions in a new world free from both capital and state, but retaining the wage work ethic, that cannot be ignored if you try hard enough.

For libertarian communists though, the answer is clear and the lessons are that we must examine the specific inter-relations of capitalist social institutions with care and build a strategic direction that is aware of the necessity to not only fight but to break through on multiple fronts if we are to make a new world that transcends the ability of capitalist social relations to re-compose their net of coprolites.

At the beginning of the 20th Century the Austrian mathematician and
Logician Kurt Goedel put the cat amongst the philosophical pigeons by
demonstrating a formal truth that for any closed system it was
possible to determine a proposition that was undecideable by that
system - i.e. that the system could not determine the validity or
invalidity of. For the sake of argument, I call the amount of these
undecideable propositions, in proportion to the decideable ones, the
"Goedality" of a given system. In mathematics the struggle has always
be to reduce the Goedality of the mathematical system (indeed the holy
grail for several thousand years has been to eliminate it entirely -
this is why Goedel’s Incompleteness theorem came as a bit of a blow,
to put it mildly).

However outside the world of mathematics there are other systems where
the trend seems to be in the opposite direction. That is that there
are systems which people are evolving in the direction of increasing
the Goedality of the system - i.e. to increase the amount and
proportion of undecideable propositions. The extreme case is a system
where virtually all of the propositions are undecideable or there are
several equally valid results for any given determination - this is a
"hyper-goedelised" system. Why would anybody deliberately want to do
this?

Consider the benefits system. For decades people who do benefits
advice have known that the benefits legislation is overly complex and
incoherent, such that benefits staff will make a determination that a
given person is due little or no benefits - advice workers can then
use the same legislation to determine that the same person is due
substantially more. At this point the easy way out is to just dismiss
it as the incompetence of bureacracy, but I think not. Consider that
successive governments, rather than attempting to reform and simplify
the benefits system - i.e. to reduce its goedality - instead continue
to complexify it by adding more and more inconsistent rules or
axioms. One could put this down as an effect of political-bureacratic
entropy - each new political master wishes to make his or her mark
(and gain media coverage) by making new initiatives - but the evidence
suggests that there is more to it.

I propose that the continuing hyper-goedelisation of the benefits
system is a deliberate strategy by the administration. On the one hand
complicated systems increase the amount of unclaimed benefits by
people unempowered to navigate the forbidding complexity of the
system’s rules - secondly it allows the system to operate in a
"legalistic" fashion. That is to say that the state does not calculate
levels of payment due, it makes a "case" for a level of payment (as
low as possible) which then must be challenged by making a
counter-case, all of which takes time and energy.

All of which is to say that there is no point expecting the
administration in toto (individual politicians may pay some interest,
but they have less power than people suppose) to look on a proposal to
simplify, rationalise or "de-goedelise" the benefits system as a
positive one. The context of the class struggle is the hidden
rationality behind the surface irrationalities that continually
perplex and frustrate the people who judge the efficiencies of any
given sub-system purely within its own framework