Discover Top Posts Tagged with #finance capital

the arcane metaphysics of financial bubbles...

By Sam Marcy (originally published in July 1989)

Whenever the bourgeoisie is in a crisis, they will let nine people, unelected, appointed for life, decide the most critical issues concerning life in the United States. ...

Our job is not only to condemn the Supreme Court’s decision but to know why and how this came about and how this decision of the judicial branch of the government relates to the Congress and to the presidency. We must see it in relation to the three branches of the capitalist government and know to what extent the masses of the people, the workers, all of the oppressed, can express themselves within the framework of that government. ...

You see, from the time of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to the present day there has been a gradual democratization of the political process. The franchise used to be denied to the Native people, to Black people, to women, to the youth. But over years of struggle the franchise has been won.

However, alongside this bourgeois democratization of the political process, there has been a simultaneous social and economic process which is superior in strength. That is the process of the concentration of power in undemocratic bodies. It comes from the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a ruling class which holds the power and distributes it in areas most conducive to them. So it’s not an accident that power should ultimately be exercised by the Supreme Court. That’s most reliable to them, most conservative, responsive only to those who have appointed them.

#RBG #Supreme Court #capitalism #ruling class #liberalism #constitution #democracy #imperialism #finance capital #voting rights #Marxism #Sam Marcy #Struggle La Lucha

#the guardian #managerial classes #socialism #David Graeber #finance capital

I have to say that reforms of the financial sphere are nowhere near as easy as is sometimes argued. If you believe that money and finance are somehow epiphenomenal- of secondary importance to the real action of production, or bizarre malignancies that have somehow arisen on the economic body over the years- then the path of action is a lot clearer. But I've spent a lot of time arguing that this isn't the case. While finance is expensive and wasteful, profit always takes the form of money, capital years to be liquid and easily mobilized, and financial instruments are the means by which ownership and control are organized. If Negri is right, and he is, that money has the face of the boss, then taking on money means taking on the boss. It would be much easier if the populists and Proudhonists were right in arguing that money and credit are kept artificially scarce, and the generous provision of both would make life profoundly easier for most of us. But Marx's critique of Proudhon, like that in the Grundrisse, should chasten every financial reformer. Marx argued that changes in the instrument of circulation alone do not address the relations of production and distribution, because these relations are embedded in the very notion of money. The need for money makes workers work and capitalists compete; it's not some quantity that comes from outside the economic system, but from deep within it. To be meaningful, any attack on the money system is an attack on the prerogatives of ownership and class power. Instead of socializing capital through taxation or some other form of expropriation, loose-money dogma simply reduces to a desire for loans on easy terms. "The notion of credit gratuit, incidentally, is only a hypothetical, philistine and anxiety-ridden form of the saying: property is theft. Instead of the workers taking the capitalist's capital, the capitalists are supposed to be compelled to give it to them." Or in the case of the American populist, compelled to lend it on easy terms. While it's certainly the case that the working class is better off with a central bank that targets a 5% unemployment rate than one that targets 6%, the differences are not that fundamental.

Doug Henwood. Wall Street: How it Works

#doug henwood #finance capital #capitalism #antonio negri #marx #proudhon #marxism #autonomism

Imperialism

Imperialism is a matter of capitalist states competing for hegemony. Originally theorized by Marxists during the early twentieth century, imperialism concerns a process which began in 1871 at the earliest and 1883 at the latest. Marx never wrote about "Imperialismus," except to describe the Second Empire of Louis Napoleon (1852-1870). But there's a very good reason for this: imperialism didn't exist when Marx was alive, or had only just begun to emerge. Colonialism is distinct from imperialism, though the former has in the past formed an integral part of the latter. Pre-imperialist and even pre-capitalist empires of course existed, sometimes covering vast stretches of land. Also, imperialism was and is not specific to some hemispheric abstraction like "the West." Japan was a brutal imperialist power, as the populations of China and Korea found out firsthand during the 1930′s and 1940′s. The economic basis of imperialism, most agreed, was finance capital, which led to national monopolies of industry, the corporate state, and international cartels. On a world-historic scale, it led to competition between great powers for territories and rival "spheres of influence." Eventually, Marxists predicted that this competition would lead to inter-imperialist war, a prediction that was tragically confirmed in 1914 and then again in 1939. Most people today use it to mean any sort of militarism, or at least militarism on the part of capitalist states. This is not what Marxists meant by "imperialism," which was a specific phase of capitalism. Specifically, Lenin called it the "highest" stage of capitalism, in the sense that it brought socialists the closest to world revolution ever before in history. If before 1848 the conditions for revolution were unripe, and by 1914 fully ripe, then since 1921 or 1923 they have been overripe. In fact, by now, the fruit is rotting unplucked on the branch.

Imperialism persisted into the interwar period, and then in modified form via the two major power blocs (US/NATO and USSR/Warsaw Pact). However, the economic basis of this modified imperialist phase was slightly different, and a matter of controversy between Marxists. While I think capitalism is a global socioeconomic system, and that nowhere truly escapes its grasp, peculiarities of the Soviet state distorted the normal operation of the law of value. And even further, the great colonial empires were broken up.

Since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and Soviet Union, the multi-polar world order that was followed by the bi-polar Cold War gave way to the uni-polar post-1991 age, with the US as the global hegemon.

#imperialism #highest stage of capitalism #finance capital #capitalism #colonialism

ai optimism vs. ai pessimism

From Peter Diamandis:

1/ Abundant intelligence as infrastructure, superintelligence as a service.

“We’re not merely building faster computers, we’re now creating the substrate for a post-scarcity world, where every grand challenge will be solved.”

When Altman describes 10 gigawatts to cure cancer or provide global tutoring, he’s outlining the last era when humanity must choose between transforming one grand challenge over another. Soon, increasing compute capacity will allow us to solve ALL of our hardest problems. Intelligence transitions from scarcity to abundance, and problem solving becomes something every human can take on, enabling all of us to be entrepreneurs and Moonshot engineers.

2/ The “impossible” is becoming a capacity problem, not a capability problem. As one observer notes: “I still can’t fathom that in just 15 years we’ll have AI models capable of solving any conceivable problem, scientific, economic, medical, or creative, within minutes. The entire concept of ‘impossible’ will collapse.”

...

By 2035, every person will have access to personalized swarms of AI agents: handling research, education, health optimization, and creative work. Scientific discovery will become autonomous and continuous, with AI running millions of experiments daily. AGI tutors provide one-on-one adaptive instruction to every child in any language. This is the abundance inflection point: when exponential technologies solve humanity’s greatest challenges faster than new problems emerge. Intelligence becomes substrate: the fundamental layer upon which civilization operates.

From Cory Doctorow:

Famed sci-fi author and tech journalist Cory Doctorow has a spectacularly grim warning about the coming AI-fueled economic disaster.

Given the fact that these investments are already locked in an intricate web of finance capital, Doctorow argues that the best — and only — thing to do is the “puncture the AI bubble as soon as possible, to halt this before it progresses any further and to head off the accumulation of social and economic debt.” Popping the bubble will mean taking out the “material basis” propping it up: the myth that large language models can do our jobs. “The most important thing about AI isn’t its technical capabilities or limitations,” Doctorow concludes. “The most important thing is the investor story and the ensuing mania that has teed up an economical catastrophe that will harm hundreds of millions or even billions of people. AI isn’t going to wake up, become superintelligent and turn you into paperclips — but rich people with AI investor psychosis are almost certainly going to make you much, much poorer.”

#peter diamandis #cory doctorow #a.i.#tech industry #finance capital