Good Evening Friends,

As I say, my starting point for the reflections in this blog is: Man is the desire to become God - as Jean-Paul Sartre informed us. I think we're quite right to invoke "God," due to the literally astronomical sums of money handeled by global financial and investor sector.

You may have heard that the U.S. government committed 23.7 trillion dollars to reconstitute the American finance sector. And remember when I told you how, by 1995 trading volume on global financial transactions had come to over a trillion dollars a day?

Did you know that a trillion, the quantity of one trillion is one hundred times the age of the universe (1)?

Let me just very, very briefly pick up the thread from yesterday. In the 1980s there was a pop group, a sibling act called The Jets, and one of their greatest hits was a tune called Rocket 2 U. The song is about a young man whose girlfriend has taken to treating him like her guy Friday. It seems she is constantly calling him up, asking him to come over and tend to various utilitarian matters: her pipes in her kitchen sink might be clogged up; her car won't start; the cabinet door creaks; her cat is stuck up a tree, and so forth.

In other words, the young lady in question, is treating the protagonist of this story like an instrument, a tool. She is objectifying him. The young man singing the song is pleading with her to understand that he is not her handyman, but one thing he can do is "Rocket 2 U, baby."

I was saying yesterday that globalization, always started by leading world economic powers, creates this very dynamic. What we call globalization is a way of a leading world economic power to say to the rest of the world: "You grow it for us. You make it for us. You fix it for us. You do all the mundane little things that we, in our serene majesty, simply cannot be bothered with. We'll do the thinking, planning the global order." Remember the connection we made to rich individuals and their addiction to services, paying to have people tend to them in every conceivable way - which is a mark of social status far more so, these days, than the clothes you wear of the gadgets in your utility belt.

This is why I said that capitalism actually undermines international relations in a subtle way. The New Money/Old Money dynamic is always at work to drive the system away from production. We talked about this, but basically the world's bourgeoisie come to a point when they treat productive capacity like a hot potato. Remember the game "hot potato?"

Oh, and I wanted to mention this. What do we hear concerning countries of the developing world, with respect to the global order? They want a "seat at the table." What is this "table?" It is the proverbial and real conference table around which sits the most important countries plan the galactic order for the next few years. This evoked desire to have a "seat at the table" is an expression of the desire to graduate from the perceived status of objectified handyman to global thinker on par with the other important powers. I suppose they need to become "knowledge-based" societies as quickly as possible.

Friends, isn't global warming also a factor? One can see how the idea of anthropocentric climate change might also give an impetus to deindustrialize - which is what the capitalist ruling class want to do anyway (2). If we are warming the planet through burning fossil fuels and by our methods of production in general, why then, we just have to cut back dramatically on nasty factories and such.

We might note, here, that Naomi Klein identified another form of offshoring. She wrote:

"For some corporations a plant closure is still a straightforward decision to move the same facility to a cheaper locale. But for others - particularly those with strong brand identities like Levi Strauss and Hanes - layoffs are only the most visible manifestation of a much more fundamental shift: one that is less about where to produce than how. Unlike the factories that hop from one place to another, these factories will never rematerialize - Mid-flight, they morph into something else entirely: "orders" to be placed with a contractor, who - may well turn over those orders to as many as ten subcontractors, who - particularly in the garmet sector - may in turn pass a portion of the subcontracts on to a network of home workers who will complete the jobs in basements and living rooms" (Klein, Naomi. NoLogo. Picador. New York, 2000, 2002. p.201).

Note this, friends, and note this very carefully. First, in this way, multinational corporation x seems to have completely relieved itself of its "carbon footprint." Second, this highly diffuse and dispersed, yet controlled production network seems to come as close as the laws of physics will allow, to the effect of the products they want to sell, appearing out of the air, by magic (a fantasy no doubt many such "green" CEOs indulge in, for Man is the Desire to Become God, as I may have mentioned once or twice).

This is an amazing thing when you think about it. I'm being quite serious. Consider it, a factory disappears from the face of the Earth, and yet its production activity continues - the very factory that disappeared. What does this remind you of?

It reminds me of an amputee who intially claims to be able to still feel his missing limb.

Just a disgusting, but I hope, amusing sidenote from the world of literature. In Clive Barker's novel, The Great and Secret Show, the psychopathic antihero encountered an old man who was an amputee. The man claimed to be able to feel the missing limb, years after he lost it. Not only that but he said that he could still jerk off with it, the "ghost" limb. He did so in demonstration for our protagonist.

Anyway, back to the factory. This might be what Slavoj Zizek calls the reality of the virtual (you should see this seven part video of this title, The Reality of the Virtual, on YouTube). The idea is that things that are not fully actualized in the physical world, nevertheless, having efficacious impact in the real world, and indeed, something must be virtual to be effective in the real world. And so on and so forth. Watch the video, it's fascinating.

In any event, global warming is a concern of the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie, not the conservative wing, broadly speaking. Despite their rhetorical and doctrinal differences on the subject, this does not alter their behavior as a class. The tendency is always to turn away from production.

Remember, "Instead of seeking to restore the older manufacturing industries or build the new technological sector, Washington authorities steadily protected and advanced banking and finance, providing rescues from perils, insolvencies, and crises hitherto regarded as being hazards of the marketplace. The continual eminence of both the treasury and the Federal Reserve furnished a central continuity between the eighties and nineties and the Republican Bush and Democratic Clinton eras. Finance was in a bipartisan catbird's seat" (Phillips, Kevin. Wealth and Democracy. p.97).

As you know, the Bush and Obama administrations rushed to rescue the financial institutions and let the auto corporations go bust. I understand they have staggered out of Chapter 11, reorganized, made public pronouncements about how they're going to make better cars, recommit to excellence and customer satisfaction, yada, yada, yada.

Some people might point to this as proof that bourgeoisie class solidarity is not operative. They'll say its not about class at all. Other people talk about how there's been a morphing of who the ruling class is - it's all about finance, legal services, and information services, and the like. I think the research we've looked at suggests that the ruling class morphs what they do but pretty much the same people stay on top.

Finance is a process not a thing or a specific group of the bourgeoisie. Industrialists, as well as bankers, practice the dark arts of finance. General Motors has GMAC, a bank or something.

General Electric sold off its consumer appliance division to emphasize huge profits of its General Electric Credit Corporation, and by 2000 GE credit banks were as far afield as the Czech Republic. Ford Motor Corporation came to rely on enormous profits from its subsidiary, Ford Credit Corporation, which was heavily involved in global hedging (Wealth and Democracy, p.143).

Now, suppose the federal government forced the Ford Motor Company into liquidation, never to be a viable organization again. Tough luck for the workers, of course. But the Ford Credit Corporation seems, to me, like an escape hatch for the executive layer. You see, elite class solidarity is still operative.

1) I heard Istvan Meszaros say that in a talk he gave called Marx and the Credit Crunch part one. He said he had asked an astrophysicist friend of his, how to put the huge numbers involving the bailout in perspective. That the quantity of one trillion is one hundred times the age of the universe, is the answer he said he was given. On YouTube.

2) The natural tendency is away from production, once enough of it is established upon which the economic elite can build their complexes of financial speculation. This is thoroughly "bipartisan." Just because "conservatives" or Republicans, on the whole, do not subscribe to global warming, this does not mean that they are, even theoretically, in favor of more domestic production. The Republican "side of the aisle," as you know, are much more interested in drilling for oil and nuclear energy, and so forth - energy not things or production necessarily. But Oil is a commodity and much investment is built upon it as a commodity (commodities trading, which is surely engaged in by brokers who are both Democrats and Republicans); but liberals still feel compelled to decry our "growing dependence on foreign oil," and so forth.

Here, we begin to learn of another operative dynamic, in which the bourgeoisie feel compelled to condemn something while at the same time benefitting dramatically from it. This principle seems to be operative in terms of undocumented Mexican workers, Iran and nuclear weapons, as well as fossil fuels. I my talk about this another time, but this is related to what Slavoj Zizek calls the "chocolate laxative" effect, or what we might think of as a splitting of the Self.

Chocolate laxative refers to the way capitalists spend the first half of the day "grabbing" all the money they can (Remember Don Corleone who said, "A lawyer can steal more money with a briefcase than a thousand men with guns and masks"), and the last half giving part of it away - charity. This is part of the logic of capitalism today, says Zizek. This is they way in which capitalism tries to redeem itself.

Chocolate - and I never knew this - is apparently identified with constipation. A laxative, well... Anyway with chocolate laxative we have something which is the antidote to itself. We are not talking about hypocrisy or insincerity at all. But I'll go into that another time.

Anyway, getting to the subject of this footnote, I want to just cite Kevin Phillips again. He identified four great engines that spurred economic growth starting in 1982, when Reagan was president (Wealth and Democracy, pp.91-92).

1) Military spending

2) Corporate investment, which was favored by the 1981 tax law. A lot of this money went into computers, but far more of it went into new office buildings and construction.

3) Debt: governments, corporations, and indivduals borrowed as never before.

4) Financial activities: mergers, leveraged buyouts, dealmaking, and steady growth of bank and investment sector employment.

Furthermore, much of the money made in this way was spent on luxury consumption or "held liquid for trading in assets rather than being invested in capital equipment for production," (Wealth and Democracy, p.92).

wingedcentaur