Documentaire MONSANTO : Food, Inc en Bitter Seeds

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With gripping first-hand accounts from banking insiders, regulators and politicians this film tells the story of two recent multi-billion pound trading disasters that rocked the City. It shows that some bankers are still taking reckless risks, five years after the crash that brought the world’s economy to its knees. Risk is the engine of growth but reckless risk can have catastrophic consequences, especially in volatile times like the turbulent financial world of today. The film charts the thirty-year effort to manage financial risk through mathematical modelling and shows how this can encourage some traders to behave as if they have mastered risk altogether. With Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, former JP Morgan executive Bill Winters and regulator Martin Wheatley.

Documentaire / Eurocrisis

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This particular book though is not one of these monumental Weberian treatises that Castells has produced over the last decades. Rather, it is a work of public sociology, aimed at a general audience. The choice of this topic is well in line with Castells’s interest, amplified by his loose involvement with Spanish indignidados movement in response to Spain’s economic collapse and subsequent drastic austerity measures that have devastated society.

Because social movements are always about resistance to some form of power, Castells begins the book by defining this concept, so important in sociology:

Lees hele boekbespreking van Manuel Castells on Power @ The Cranky Sociologist

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The dramatic inside story of the scandal that ripped through the banking industry in 2012 and took down a banking legend, Bob Diamond. In the first of a new three-part series, bank bosses, regulators and politicians give frank first-hand accounts of how the balance of power has finally started to shift away from the masters of the universe. Ironically, this game-changing crisis erupted over the widespread rigging of an obscure rate-setting mechanism, Libor, rather than over the tumult of the financial crash. Some say it took this latest scandal to expose a profit-at-all-costs cynicism that they believe has corrupted the heart of our banking system; all agree things need to change. Former Barclays chairman Marcus Agius, RBS boss Sir Philip Hampton, deputy governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey and Jean-Claude Trichet examine the difficult new dilemmas about what we want and need from our bankers, and whether we can trust them again.

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Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of Indebted Man

Review by Nikolay Karkov, Lebanon Valley College

Semiotext(e) has just published a wonderful short book by Maurizio Lazzarato, entitled The Making of Indebted Man. Lazzarato is a key figure in post-operaist Marxism, driven into exile in France after the state-sponsored demolition of Italian Autonomia in the 1970s, where he now resides as an independent sociologist, philosopher, and political theorist. While not as well-known in the English-speaking world as fellow travelers such as Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno and Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Lazzarato develops a highly original “vitalist” autonomist Marxism, whose attentiveness to questions of subjectivity, communication, and the media draws on the work of Gariel Tarde, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari, among others. Though various articles and book chapters have been available in translation, The Making of Indebted Man is Lazzarato’s first book-length text to be translated into English. This translation fills a major gap, by not only making accessible an insightful text by a central author of contemporary Italian Marxism, but also by adding another welcome and highly original contribution to the recent critical literature on debt from a leftist perspective.

Central to the text, which reads more like a manifesto than a footnote-heavy monograph, is an examination of the problematic of debt, or, more generally, of what Lazzarato would call the “creditor-debtor relationship.” Lazzarato reads that relationship as both an anthropological invariant (where, following Nietzsche, he suggests that the paradigm of the social lies in credit, rather than exchange or even production), and as a historically specific phenomenon (which, in his reading, defines the neoliberal condition). Still, the book’s focus is on the latter, the historical specificity of the debt and the “debt economy,” which Lazzarato examines in much detail and with impressive insight. In his view, the debt economy has recently absorbed the “new economy,” the knowledge and information economy, or what some on the left have also called “cognitive capitalism.” It is also inseparable from the production of a new subjective figure, that of the “indebted man.” Blurring the divide between workers and the unemployed, consumers and producers, and retirees and welfare recipients, the indebted man cuts a transversal subjective figure that has come to occupy “the entirety of public space.” (7–8)

The text consists of three chapters, book-ended by a short “Foreword,” “Conclusion,” and a translated “Introduction to the Italian Edition.” Chapter 1 locates debt as the very “basis of social life,” both in the broadly anthropological (indeed ontological) sense and in the historically specific sense mentioned above. For Lazzarato, the problem with the current condition is not the takeover of production (the “real” economy) by finance (the “virtual” economy”), so typical of more traditional Marxist analyses, but rather the priority of debt over both. Indeed, finance is irreducible to its speculative function, but rather plays a political role as social capital. Finance reads as debt for debtors, and as interest for creditors: “In neoliberalism, what we call ‘finance’ is indicative of the increasing force of the creditor-debtor relationship.” Viewing debt as “the archetype of social relations” means two things, for Lazzarato: (1) that the economy is founded on an asymmetry of power, rather than on commercial exchange which presupposes equality; and (2) that it is subjective, as labor becomes indistinguishable from “work on the self,” except that now it is workers who perform that work in  the service of Capital. (33)

Chapter 2 offers a genealogy of the phenomenon of debt and its subjective counterpart, the figure of the indebted man. Yet, in line with the methodological thrust of the book, Lazzarato’s genealogy draws not on empirical data, but rather on a host of highly theoretical (and often surprising) references. Accordingly, Lazzarato revisits Nietzsche’s second essay from The Genealogy of Morals on the material origins of moral concepts such as guilt, blame, and bad conscience, to argue that contemporary capitalism replicates the same logic by constructing people as capable of making promises on their future. Similarly, the text offers a provocative re-reading a lesser known text by the early Marx, “Comments on John Stuart Mill,” to discuss the logic of credit as producing an existential alienation far deeper than that on the factory floor, and there are suggestive references to William James’ concepts of “faith” and a “will to believe” and their neutralization under the temporality of the debt economy. The chapter appropriately concludes with a discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of the problematic of debt. The attractiveness of their approach lies in its non-economistic reading of the economy, as, for Deleuze and Guattari, economic production is inseparable from the production of subjectivity, while money, before being a means of exchange or payment, is first and foremost a power of command. (72)

The final and third chapter discusses the rise of the debt economy as constitutive of the neoliberal project. The ascendancy of debt, “the most deterritorialized and the most general power relation” of neoliberalism (89), profoundly alters the exercise of power. Drawing on a tripartite division most readily associated with the work of Foucault, Lazzarato claims that there are three kinds of debt that correlate to sovereign, disciplinary, and biopolitical power. He argues that the debt economy has (1) deprived the State of a key aspect, its monetary sovereignty; (2) further extended the shareholder’s control over the private enterprise, disciplinary power’s central institution; and (3) shifted the biopolitical emphasis from social rights to social debts. For Foucault, the rise of “civil society” or the “social” in the 18^th century served to mediate and alleviate the tensions between the political and the economic, between the state and the market. Today, by contrast, civil society has been displaced by logic of (social) debt, as homo debitor comes to maintain the heterogeneity of the homo juridicus and homo economicus, of sovereign debt and private debt. (126–7) This substitution allows for ever more sinister and invasive interventions in the lives of “indebted” individuals, as the increasing anti-productive side of capitalism works hand in hand with increasingly anti-democratic forms of government. (151–160)

The Making of Indebted Man has a lot to offer, especially to more theoretically-minded readers. Among its highlights is a highly original re-reading of Foucault’s 1978-79 lectures on the rise of biopolitics. For Lazzarato, Foucault’s analysis is “at once quite enlightening and misleading” (91), as his highly suggestive figure of the entrepreneur of the self, still rooted in German Ordoliberalism, has morphed into that of the “indebted man” of today. What is more, Foucault overlooked the function of finance, debt, and money in neoliberalism (90), and remained oblivious to the inherent tendency of liberalism to rule and control “as much as possible with as ‘little democracy as possible.’” (160)  Secondly and more generally, the effort to see debt and the debtor as constitutive of neoliberal governmentality promises to change the very terms of the conversation. Lazzarato’s perspective not only complicates debates among economists and sociologists, including those on the left, but tempers the rosy optimism behind concepts such as the multitude or the cognitariat, in the context of a deepening global crisis.

Still, despite its numerous insights and highly original analysis, the text is marked by several tensions. To begin with, its critical-diagnostic side is significantly stronger than its proposed alternative(s). Certainly, one could claim that a reluctance to offer blueprints of the future has been a trademark of some of the finest writing in the Marxist tradition, in an effort to not constraint the creative imagination of future generations. However, one would still want to see more than a relatively trivial call for the “cancellation of all debt” (read through Nietzsche’s appeal for a second innocence), especially in a text that identifies “debt” as the “strategic heart of the neoliberal politics.” (25) Perhaps more importantly, it remains unclear who the addressees of Lazzarato’s text are. The Making of the Indebted Man vacillates between explicit references to Europe and the United States (the “West”) and a more implicit yet no less powerful claim to universal validity, in an effort to revive the class struggle in the context of a neoliberal debt economy. (7, 161) Yet it remains unclear whether this is a key issue that (most) people need to take up seriously, or whether it is the issue for “all of us” equally and in the same way. Is a class struggle against an economy of objective and subjective debt one fundamental axis for organizing anti-capitalist resistance, or is it the axis, the “transversal point of view from which struggles might begin”? (164) If the former, it is difficult to disagree with Lazzarato. If the latter, I wonder if we do not see a reproduction of the classical refrain, so often issued to feminists, queer activists, people of color, and indigenous movements, by far more orthodox Marxisms: put your own struggles on the back-burner, we’ll take care of them after the Revolution! A short paragraph from the “Conclusion” captures that tension perfectly, as Lazzarato begins each of its four sentences with a putative “we,” called upon to counteract the effects of the debt economy. It might be four times too many…

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In markets, people ignore their individual moral standards

“Our results show that market participants violate their own moral standards,” says Prof. Falk. In a number of different experiments, several hundred subjects were confronted with the moral decision between receiving a monetary amount and killing a mouse versus saving the life of a mouse and foregoing the monetary amount. “It is important to understand what role markets and other institutions play in moral decision making. This is a question economists have to deal with,” says Prof. Szech.

“To study immoral outcomes, we studied whether people are willing to harm a third party in exchange to receiving money. Harming others in an intentional and unjustified way is typically considered unethical,” says Prof. Falk. The animals involved in the study were so-called “surplus mice”, raised in laboratories outside Germany. These mice are no longer needed for research purposes. Without the experiment, they would have all been killed. As a consequence of the study many hundreds of young mice that would otherwise all have died were saved. If a subject decided to save a mouse, the experimenters bought the animal. The saved mice are perfectly healthy and live under best possible lab conditions and medical care.

Simple bilateral markets affect moral decisions

A subgroup of subjects decided between life and money in a non-market decision context (individual condition). This condition allows for eliciting moral standards held by individuals. The condition was compared to two market conditions in which either only one buyer and one seller (bilateral market) or a larger number of buyers and sellers (multilateral market) could trade with each other. If a market offer was accepted a trade was completed, resulting in the death of a mouse. Compared to the individual condition, a significantly higher number of subjects were willing to accept the killing of a mouse in both market conditions. This is the main result of the study. Thus markets result in an erosion of moral values. “In markets, people face several mechanisms that may lower their feelings of guilt and responsibility,” explains Nora Szech. In market situations, people focus on competition and profits rather than on moral concerns. Guilt can be shared with other traders. In addition, people see that others violate moral norms as well.

“If I don’t buy or sell, someone else will.”

In addition, in markets with many buyers and sellers, subjects may justify their behavior by stressing that their impact on outcomes is negligible. “This logic is a general characteristic of markets,” says Prof. Falk. Excuses or justifications appeal to the saying, “If I don’t buy or sell now, someone else will.” For morally neutral goods, however, such effects are of minor importance. Nora Szech explains: “For goods without moral relevance, differences in decisions between the individual and the market conditions are small. The reason is simply that in such cases the need to share guilt or excuse behavior is absent.”

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Žižek’s misplaced tribute to Thatcher and his diatribe against direct democracy reveal the dangerous messianic tendencies of his “radical” philosophy.

When George Orwell first sent in his celebrated dispatches from revolutionary Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, the British socialist magazine The New Statesman infamously refused to publish them for being too critical of the Stalinist crackdown on the Trotskyist and anarchist militias. As editor Kingsley Martin put it in a letter to Orwell, “it is an unfortunate fact that any hostile criticism of the present Russian regime is liable to be taken as propaganda against socialism.” Still, Orwell, who had been embedded in the Trotskyist POUM and had fought the fascists side-by-side with many courageous anarchist comrades, remained adamant in his rejection of the authoritarian path to socialism. As he later wrote to a friend, recounting his time at the front in the egalitarian and democratically-run militia, “I have seen wonderful things and at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before.” In this respect, the ordeal with The New Statesman only helped to strengthen Orwell’s belief that “as with Christianity, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.”

Slavoj Žižek: The Worst Advertisement for Socialism?

Lees verder over Slavoj Zizek op Roarmag.org  (Discussie/Comments bij artikel zijn ook de moeite waard om te lezen)

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De maatschappij werkt als een citroenpers

Het is niet ongewoon dat psychiaters zich in het maatschappelijk debat mengen. In de jaren zestig en zeventig was er een sterke beweging van antipsychiaters die zich opwierpen tegen  traditionele opvattingen over gekte en waanzin. De Vlaamse psychiater en psychotherapeut Dirk de Wachter gaat niet zo ver dat hij medicatie voor borderliners wil afschaffen, maar hij kondigt wel het einde van de normaliteit aan.

In zijn boek Borderline Times karakteriseert De Wachter onze Westerse maatschappij als een borderline samenleving. Wim Brands citeert van de achterflap: ‘Collectief zijn we op weg naar ziekte en ongenoegen.’ Hij wil weten hoe De Wachter daarbij komt.
De Wachter geeft veel lezingen en leerde van zijn publiek dat er geen wezenlijk verschil is tussen de zogenaamde gezonden en zieken. Iedereen heeft last van relationele instabiliteit, identiteitsproblemen en affect-stoornissen.

Lees verder over Dirk de Wachter @ blog Rein Swart

We leven in borderlinetijden. In de psychiatrie is borderline vandaag met voorsprong de vaakst gestelde diagnose. Bovendien is de lijn tussen patiënten en niet-patiënten flinterdun. Zijn wij collectief op weg naar ziekte en ongenoegen?
Psychiatrie is de spiegel van de wereld waarin we leven. Dirk De Wachter schetst borderline dan ook als een maatschappelijk ziektebeeld. Eén conclusie staat als een paal boven water:

In onze westerse maatschappij zijn de symptomen van borderline niet ver te zoeken. Meer nog, ze kenmerken onze leefwereld. Wij zijn ons brein in de tijd.

Gelukkig zijn er andere, meer hoopgevende signalen met vooruitzicht op herstel. Onze wereld lijkt aan een grens te staan. Mensen verzetten zich uitdrukkelijk tegen de symptomen. Hechting, engagement, solidariteit en gemeenschapszin zijn waarden die broodnodig zijn om weerwerk te bieden tegen de huidige borderlinegesteldheid van dreigende verbrokkeling, impulsiviteit en zinloosheid.

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