Save the Greeks from their Saviors!

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[February 22, 2012. Translation into English by Anastazia Golemi.] At a time when one Greek youth is unemployed. Where 25,000 homeless wander the streets of Athens. Where 30% of the population has fallen under the poverty line and where millions of families are forced to place their children in the care of someone else in order for them not to die of hunger or cold, where refugees and the new poor compete for trashcans at the public dump, the “saviors” of Greece, under the pretext that “Greece is not trying hard enough”, impose a new aid plan that doubles the lethal administered dose. A plan that abolishes the right to work and reduces the poor to the most extreme misery, at the same time as it makes the middle class disappear.

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The Crisis, Occupy, and other Oddities in the Autumn of Capital

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All over the world, events are keeping up with the pace of a crisis, the end of which was just recently cheerfully proclaimed by people who thought ludicrous amounts of sovereign debt to be the recipe for an economic miracle. By racking up debt to their ears, governments worldwide were able to contain the so-called financial crisis; but then, the rating agencies presented them a bill that they promptly passed on to wage workers. The whole maneuver did not lead to recovery but to an even more menacing state budget crisis, the handling of which through uncompromising austerity measures has aroused anger. Resistance is mounting. We are at the threshold of a social crisis. Those who feel the effects of the governments’ austerity programs in their everyday life are starting to realize ever more clearly that these are not temporarily painful, yet necessary sacrifices. They are becoming aware of the fact that the drastic cuts will not only last for years or even decades, but that their own future is becoming ever bleaker. We are probably at the start of a new era: Ever since society was brought back down to the earth of cold hard economic facts, the culturalist carnival of differences has come to an end. Society’s colorful superstructure has scaled off to reveal, in Orthodox Marxist terms, the drab, universal base. And the crisis has achieved what activists striving to link struggles have been incapable of for decades: millions have taken to the streets simultaneously with the same purpose. All they’re left with is an ever more precarious survival under the reigning conditions. For them, it’s all or nothing.

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Marx Myths and Legends

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During the last ten years Marxism has come to occupy a substantial position within American academia. This is especially true in economics where, until recently, discussion of Marx and the Marxist tradition was largely confined to courses in the history of economic thought and in the economic history of the Soviet Union. The rise of an academic Marxism has been due, I would argue, to two forces. First, the struggles of students within the context of the social upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s carved out time and space within which politically active students could study Marxism as apart of radical economics, insurgent sociology, and so on. Second, university administrators and the business interests they generally represent have been surprisingly tolerant of the expansion of Marxist studies. This reaction to student demands is not simply a case of the “repressive tolerance” Marcuse described so vividly. The current tolerance is due, more importantly, to the need of business for new ideas during the present period of economic and social crisis. There is a long history of the capitalist appropriation of Marxist ideas which should lend credence to this suggestion. Moreover, the numerous attempts in recent years in the business press and in professional economic journals to give space to radical ideas and to evaluate current Marxist economic research demonstrates the on-going interest of business and its ideologues in the possibility of appropriating something new from Marx. Nowhere has this tolerance been more obvious than in the area of Marxist research on the theory of economic crisis." This willingness on the part of business to appropriate Marxist ideas and to use them for its own purposes has been largely ignored by Marxists working on the theory of crisis. They have, time and again, formulated their theories in ways that facilitate such appropriation. Yet this is not necessary. There is a way to read Marx and to develop Marxist theory that does not lend itself to this kind of appropriation. In this essay I do two things. First, through a series of examples, I illustrate how, in the history of Marxist work on the theory of crisis, many have forgotten the revolutionary content of Marx’s own work and thus left themselves open to the dangers of capitalist appropriation. Second, I suggest an alternative approach to the study and elaboration of Marx’s analysis of crisis that makes its political and revolutionary content explicit and thus more immune to appropriation.

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Abstraction, Universality, And Money

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The aim of this paper is to exhibit the logic of money in its relation to its analytical preconditions in commodity exchange. The key constitutive moment is that of practical abstraction which is made actual in money. This is why money is the King of commodities. At the end I contrast the logical analysis of money with a standard account I call ‘mythodology’. I also defend my position, against a critic who accuses me of a petitio principii, by elucidating the figure of ‘positing the presupposition’.

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Feminism, Finance and the Future of #Occupy

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Federici reflects on the #Occupy movements, their precedents and their potentials

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Marx’s Theory of Crisis

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With every boom the apologists for capitalism claim that the tendency to crisis that has plagued the capitalist system since its very beginnings has finally been overcome. When the boom breaks, economists fall over one another to provide particularistic explanations of the crash. The crisis of the early nineteen nineties was the result of the incautious lending of the nineteen eighties. The crisis of the early nineteen eighties was the result of excessive state spending in the late nineteen seventies. The crisis of the mid nineteen seventies was the result of the oil price hike and the inflationary financing of the Vietnam war … the crisis of the nineteen thirties was the result of inappropriate banking policies … … . Every crisis has a different cause, all of which boil down to human failure, none of which are attributed to the capitalist system itself. And yet crises have recurred periodically for the past two hundred years.

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Marx’s Theory of Crisis As A Theory Of Class Struggle

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Theories of crisis have always been intensely political. Different views of capitalist development and breakdown have always shaped, and been shaped by, political strategies. In the early and mid-1970s the onset of a crisis of Keynesian policy, and hence theory, brought on by an international cycle of working class struggle, led to a widespread preoccupation with "crisis theory" in both capitalist and anti-capitalist circles. While capitalist theorists struggled to find ways to restore control and accumulation, the Left gloated and said, once again, that it was all inevitable and dusted off a variety of old theories to prove it. This essay was written as the first chapter of a book intended as an intervention in the debates of those times.

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The Labor Theory of Value and the Strategic Nature of Alienation

Περίληψη

In order to avoid reifying Marx's social theory, it is important to focus on the social relations that Marx's analytical categories denote. By focusing on value formation as the process of reproducing social control, the imposition of alienation takes on a richer meaning. Not only is alienation a process of human degradation, it is also a strategic instrument in the valorization process.

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Value form and class struggle: a critique of the autonomist theory of value.

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At the beginning of the 1970S, the reigning 'Ricardian' consensus within Marxist value theory started to fall apart. Upon its demise, new currents emerged that confronted the old orthodoxy, and attempted to unmask its Ricardian foundations through a reconsideration of the analysis of the commodity form contained in Capital. This reappraisal of Marx's value theory eventually led to an energetic rejection of the 'technological' paradigm that had dominated orthodox Marxism until the 1970s. (1) A renewed emphasis on the historical specificity of capitalist social forms (starting with the value form itself) progressively came to be shared by an increasing number of authors. However, beyond this common ground, reaction to the old Ricardian-Marxist orthodoxy has been very varied, and has resulted in the emergence of a great diversity of perspectives on the determinations of value as a social form.

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Abstract Labour: Against its Nature and On its Time

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During the last decade there have been a number of critical studies on abstract labour. Apart from three articles in Capital & Class by de Angelis (1995), Arthur (2001), and Kicillof and Starosta (2007), notable contributions have come from Heinrich (1999), Kay (1999), Kicillof and Starosta (2008), Postone (1996), Saad-Fhilo (2002), Starosta (2008), and Vincent (1991). These works reject Ricardian inspired approaches to value according to which value is labour embodied in commodities. Instead of analysing value magnitudes, the transformation of value into prices, and the allocation of resources to socially necessary branches of production, the works examine value as a specific social form of wealth. Generally speaking, the former partakes in a substantialist approach to value, and the latter in a social and monetary approach.[1] Examination of value as a specific social form entails reassessment of abstract labour as the substance of value.

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