I like Jarvis Cocker's plan to incorporate lectures into his gigs.

Oxbridge lecturers will doubtless be watching these gigs carefully, waiting to see if the lecture-disco format takes off.

Well, I may not be an Oxbridge lecturer, but I could probably do with more music in my classes. When teaching Adorno I once played some selections from Swing Tanzen Verboten!, a collection of Nazi swing music from WWII. Fearing the mystical transformative properties of the tunes, one of my students asked me if he could hold me personally responsible if he became a fascist. But of course, dear boy.

Of late I have been trying to which areas of philosophy I really, definitely don't want to teach, so that when asked I can resolutely say 'no, not my area!'. So far I have determined two: logic/calculus and ethics. I really, really hate teaching ethics. Kant's categorical imperative, fine, but talking about ickle bitty foetuses with undergraduates - horrible. If ethics means anything it's only as a branch of politics. A very tiny branch, too fragile to hold even the smallest of birds. Perhaps, in retrospect, I wasn't the best person to be appointed to the Ethics committee...but who else was going to approve the participant observation burlesque project!

Jacques-Alain Miller interviewed about recent events.

But if you are really rich, you are rather "unanalysable," because you cannot pay, you cannot yield anything significant: the analysis slips over you like water on the feathers of a duck.

Virilio was interviewed in le Monde recently. A translation is here.

GC/MG
Do you, like some people do, believe that capitalism is nearing its end?

PV:
I rather believe that the end is nearing capitalism.

Is it really still easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism?

'We sat opposite on the Met line. You had just lost your job. I tried to cheer you up. Would love to try again with less people around - Anon'

A message in the 'Love' section of thelondonpaper, last Friday.

For the second time this week, I go to a conference about Marx and the economic crisis. The first – with Meszaros, Harman and Richard Brenner – is full of repetitious statements of fact, but not much on what to do next. The trouble is, we know how bad things are, we know which banks have collapsed, how much money the bail-out was, the crisis in the housing markets, oil prices, etc. It's no bad thing to be reminded of such details, of course, but it's not like we haven't spent the past few weeks reading this stuff, obsessively...but where do we go from here? Some solutions were proposed, far more interestingly at the 'Marxism and the Economic Crisis' conference at UCL organised by ISJ than at the earlier 'Marx and the Credit Crunch' Conway Hall meeting, and I've tried to detail them below. The following summaries are simply my notes from the Saturday conference, and as such are not very beautiful, lack polish of any kind and are rather fragmentary. Nevertheless, some of you might find them interesting. Obviously I might have gotten some things the wrong way round, so don't take this as the final word of any of these speakers. I found Alan Freeman's talk the most appealing overall in lots of ways, which probably makes me a strange kind of Keynesian-Communist, but there you have it. I always did like the New Deal acronyms, and really like the idea of building a bridge or some such large public project. Mmm, collectivish.



Session One: The Depth of the Crisis

Chris Harman

How much has changed since 14 months ago, and six weeks ago. Some say just a mistake in the financial system – the short-selling 'spivs' of the Daily Mail. Financial system needs control but capitalism is essentially alright. Excess necessary to keep the US economy (thus rest of the world) going. Decoupling – detach the US economy from the world economy. Smith and Ricardo – needs more profit to keep going. If you're small vampire you need a little bit of blood, if you're a big capitalist you need a great deal of blood. Falling rate of profit, comes back again and again. Capitalism gets bloated, consumption or investment. Downward trend. How to maintain it? Growth of gvt expenditure or worker consumption. Wages in continual decline, capitalism cannot sustain itself. Spiral of debt. Lend money you don't have to people who can't pay you back. Three major bubbles in past 30 years. early 1990s, early 2000s, now. States step in. Biggest nationalization in history. Deleverage: during the high point of the bubble now cannot be turned into value, let them be wiped out (Lehman Bros), but cannot allow avalanche effect to get too out of hand. But worst is yet to come.



How deep is the crisis? We don't really know. 20 major states 2000 major corporations, need chaos theory! But similarities with 1929-31. Rate of profit fell 1900-1914. 1920s looks like prosperity but workers' wages held back. Workforce didn't grow. Slump started in productive industry in 1927, brief recovery before stock exchange crash. Domino effect, which could well be happening now. State intervention much quicker this time round. Vast handouts, bailing out the US car industry. If it is more serious than 1929, then it is because of the scale of it, e.g., Iceland bailing out banks with sums larger than the GNP. Three potential solutions: slash workers' living standards; allow small banks to go bust; or allow massive inflation. Even if things go the best way, they have to recuperate paper profits, more state intervention likely. Crisis looms.

Alan Freeman, Marx, Keynes and the Crash

In 1929, many understood capitalism by reading Marx. Now the number of people who do that are smaller than the number of Marxists. Marxist economists have been effected by the same disease that effects other economists, the self-suppressiveness of economics. People frightened of being outed as merely heterodox. Conformity within economics – why they failed to collectively predict what is now happening. Reaching now from Keynes – 'we are all Keynesians now', but you'd have to be really dumb and seeking early retirement NOT to be a Keynesian now! Imagine if all the bridges fell down, and all the cars and trains stopped, would the engineers still have their jobs? And yet we trust the economists! Trust yourself more than the economists and more than the Marxist economists! We need to read and understand Marx for ourselves. Many of the best Keynesians currently have a better analysis than the Marxists.

What are the really fundamental questions we need to be asking, as pluralists?

1. Can we fix the crash by fixing the crunch?
2. Is recession inevitable? (Freeman says yes).
3. What explains the crisis? Political economy is when people wonder why they don't have any money.
4. Can the G8 create a new Bretton Woods?

All one question: Did the financial crisis bring down the 'real economy' – or did the 'real economy' cause the financial crisis?

If you think the crisis is caused by the banks you will think the solution is to fix the banking system. If you do not accept that there is a 'real' crisis of capitalism you are less likely to grasp how serious are the problems facing the world. Get the schadenfreude out of the way, incidentally, the poor will suffer most.

Russian debates: can capitalism heal itself after a long period of downturn? Kondratiev says yes, it's endogenous. Trotsky said no. Condition for reconstructing the falling rate of profit is a political one. Need huge global reorganization of states – this is usually war, a violent a dangerous solution. We must hope this is not the case but it has happened four times already in history.

The 'real' problem behind the crash.

US begins 1945 dominating all sources of superprofit – technical, commercial and financial. Trade surplus, world currency and banker, world military policeman and bailiff.

Undermined by two processes endemic to capitalism: long-term decline of the rate of profit effecting the whole world; 'imperialists without an empire' (Germany, Japan) as specialists in technical superprofit and outcompeted it (hence trade deficit). Compensated by hyperextension of all 'custodian' functions – financialisation, 'globalisation' and militarism. But this eroded its competitiveness, and has led to an ungovernable world. The 'irrational exuberance' of the financial economy – bears no relation to the real economy.

US is like a kid running, turning round to punch the other runners, ensuring it always wins. It has been 'squeezing the world' and squeezing the poor. Every time it gets a problem it launches a political initiative in order to postpone the day of reckoning. The third world took the hit from liberalisation.

What kind of new world order will the crash produce? Some sobering thoughts.

Beginning of the end for US hegemony, but remember that the beginning of the end for UK imperialism came with the Indian mutiny, but hung on for a hundred years. May be similar for US, beginning of the end could take a very long time. When the invisible hand of the market fails, the visible hand of the state steps in. What happens next depends on us. We have more influence than we did say five years ago.

Not all state interventions are left-wing. Neither 1929 nor 1873 (the last crises on this scale) led to any socialist revolution. Capitalist solutions have always been violent and barbaric (imperialism, fascism, war). Our most important need is understanding.



Mass unemployment, fascism and war: the preconditions for a new capitalist order. Capital stocks have to be lowered through negative accumulation of value – this is the function of depression. Capitalists need political safety for long-term investment, requiring a political re-organisation of system of states – this is the function of war. Capitalists require EITHER a major reduction in the rate of surplus value (the 1929 solution) – this was the function of fascism. OR a major source of superprofit from elsewhere (the 1873 solution) – this was the function of imperialism.

[I have picked out only some of the questions, as some were simply mad, or annoying]

Questions: Callinicos. Background of long period of stagnation. Kondratiev's long waves don't work, we would have expected upward turn in 1990s, but we have moved into much more serious economic crisis. Brezenski in 1931, as the individual units of capitalism grows, harder to wipe out value to restore the rate of profit. The rescues of the current moment, a bastardised Keynsianism are going to make things worse as they won't get rid of value. We need to look at mechanisms for the gap between rich and poor on global scale – not just superprofits – 2/3rds of foreign direct investment goes to the west, capitalism has in fact deserted the poorer parts of the world, not over-exploited them.

Some bloke: what about oil?

Some other bloke: what about imperialism?

Yet another bloke: what about houses?



CH: paper value of houses has risen and fallen. Someone has created value somewhere in the system. Read Volume 3 of Capital! Imperialism – it's not that they lack the will, they have squeezed the world to the utmost but squeezing other countries is not going to solve the falling rate of profit. Advanced capitalist powers clash, but it is unsustainable. We live in a very unstable world.

AF: Does Keynesianism provide a way out of the crisis of capitalism? We are not yet on the edge of a socialist revolution. Will the gvt sell off the banks once they have been stabilised? If massive unproductive state spending carries on, will it 'save' capitalism? WWII didn't exactly work out. State spending is absolutely necessary, but what kind? How do we stop the capitalists making money out of it? War allows you to run down the stock of capital, pumps value out of the private sector to the state sector. Stagnation: we don't have enough data. We need world numbers. We all need to look at the data. Trade: if the raw materials the the west were priced at their value we would have to pay twenty times as much. Imperialism imposes a structure that stops people breaking out of it. Once the US leave the Middle East, they'll probably go back into Latin America. We need to stop them.

Session Two: Finance and the Crisis

Robin Blackburn

Two angles on the crisis. Robert Brenner in 1998 – fundamental blockage, a failure of profitability in US manufacture. Also work on pension funds, more activist work on RB's part. Trying to make sense of what was happening in pubic and private pension fund arrangements. Transitional demands which would go up against the limits of capitalism towards new forms of collectivism. Aging society (RB's own books: Banking on Death, Age Shock). Interviewed people from big investment banks, who wrongly figured he had influence. Sub-prime assets seemed to be not just some minor aspect of the financial landscape, but were treated like gold dust. Banks had convinced themselves that the mortgage-bundles of CDOs were going to make them huge profits.



Starting point of the problem are global imbalances, the deficits of the US, the growth of China and other Asian producers. Workers in the US stopped saving – figures are at 0, some are 'dis-saving'. Chinese workers are on the whole saving (c. 30-40%). This creates the low cost of capital, alongside various forms of privatisation and deregulation. It would have been possible and healthier if Chinese workers had been better paid, and if there had been more collective projects. There has been a throwing of fictitious capital which creates these asset bubbles – hi-tech and housing, in particular. Household debt and financial institutions create giant debt. Crisis is a crisis of financialisation. US economy has depended on the 'consumer of last resort', but this 'patriotic duty' (cf. after 9/11) is not sustainable as a long-term strategy.



What was securitisation? Not all mechanisms of finance are treacherous, and we shouldn't think that only the 'real' economy matters. Finance capital has its own reality. At the same time the money economy and the real economy both partake in a larger capitalist logic. Finance doesn't create value but it does allow value to be created, and thus stimulates the real economy. 'Fictitious capital' has real effects. The bundles of bad debt had to be believed in for a while – the incomprehensibility of their details was a real part of the risks people took with them. Some were too sensible to take them, however, especially some pensions companies.

The shadow banking economy (or 'grey capitalism') attempts to evade controls, and buying up securitised mortgages is part of this - based on receiving money at some future date. Worldcom and Enron practiced off-balance sheet capitalism, and it didn't stop there (although perhaps it should have). The people monitoring the process had a direct state in perpetuating it. A completely non-market capitalism is not a viable proposition. OTC transactions meant that debts were passed on rather than sold. This is finance built on a house of cards. States that wanted to relate to the world market with a degree of autonomy balanced their national debts with their national assets, so some were careful. Recognition of vulnerability of the Anglo-American model of finance.



What are the sort of demands that socialist should make? Minimal and transitional demands. Programme to help out all those suffering from foreclosure is a start. Makes good financial and moral sense (though this is not anti-capitalist as such). Public enterprise could be part of a progressive package, but what is really interesting is the possibility of nationalisation of the banks and the big insurance funds, and possible democratisation of forms at the top. We could do what the Norwegians did and go for full-scale nationalization. In Bolivia, Chile and Argentina we are seen demands for nationalisation of banks and pension funds. We need an international board of derivatives. We need at a global level for proposals for taxing capital. We need financial transaction tax and a levy on shareholding of all major corporations. But aren't we trying to get rid of capitalism? What we are getting towards are publicly responsible democratic forms of financial governance. US corporations are today begging for bail-out money. This crisis is radical indeed; we need to match it with similarly radical practical solutions.

Jacob Middleton

Transformation of the banking system. Why is it an exceptional crisis? Neo-liberalism of the past thirty years is good at producing financial crises, saving and loans crisis of mid-1980s, European exchange-rate mechanism in early 1990s, hedge-fund crises, etc. System has been able to prevent black holes so far with bail-outs. This time it is different, this is a crisis of the key banks. Banks coordinate investment decisions, they are like the central nervous system of the body of capitalism. Why has this happened? Two reasons. Transformation of role of banks and decline in rate of profit in the real economy. New technology from the late 70s onwards made the kind of financial products banks could sell expanded massively. Banks could speed up and automate a lot of their processes. Deregulation of the financial system is part of the neo-liberalism of the banking system. Increased competition on credit system themselves – previously heavily regulated. 1950 in the US, 65% of assets were under the management of banks, by 1995 32% of financial assets were held by banks. There are other ways of holding money. New financial institutions suddenly expanded.



Corporations don't have to go to the bank for loans any longer. Banks then try to exploit financial markets by getting involved in things like derivatives, for example. This is the shadow banking system. 1983, US banking system had 23% derivatives. By 1995, 392% was held as derivatives. Banks used to take savings in and give loans out, but has become unregulated and peripheral activities – hedge funds, etc. This doesn't alone explain expansion of finance capital. Pressure on profit rates in real economy makes financial economy look very exciting for investors. But eventually all this electronic pieces of paper do have to have their claims renewed. This is what happened with sub-prime. Real claims cannot be met. The real economy is weak this creates a financial bubble which then creates more problems in the real economy. Not enough to clean up or regulate the financial markets.

What next? The banks that are still making profits are left alone. We can't just nationalise failing banks, they should all be under democratic control. We couldn't have said this even three weeks ago! The shareholder executive was set up in 2003 to manage public sector asserts, which is all about shareholder values, not wider goals. There is a contradiction in nationalising things as it currently stands – we need to run them for public good.

Comments

RB: Crisis of financialised form of capitalism is very intimate – houses, jobs, future. The baby bond, student loan teaches you the 'disciplines' of capitalism. You become a two-legged profit and credit centre. Families are encouraged to think of themselves as a business, Businesses are supposed to be interested in new financial products – GM make nothing selling cars, they make money selling you the credit to buy the cars. UK and Euro banks are still holding much toxic waste which has yet to be admitted. Countries like Bolivia may well be showing us the way in terms of national control of banks – ultimately workers should have control of the banks, but state capitalist control will likely have to precede this move. This is the challenge. We are just at the beginning – we need global slogans and global solutions.



JM: Capitalism puts a premium on stupidity. Stupidity can be put to good use – risks are pushed to the limit until it all collapses. Real exposure – massive link between debt and exposure. UK is in a particularly bad way.

Session Three: Political Implications of the Crisis

Alex Callinicos

Geopolitical implications of the crisis. Marxist theory of imperialism can help us here. after 9/11 it was almost a cliché to say that it had ended the period of the post-Cold war era. But actually it came to an end in 2008. The 'global concert of powers' (Perry Anderson) has been shattered by financial crash but also the war in Georgia in August this year. How do we measure the geopolitical consequences? Does the crash mark the end of US hegemony? Others argue that it is a mistake to exaggerate the economic significance of the financial crisis, and that the US is not undermined by it. This is wrong.



US attempt to reinstate and entrench its global hegemony against the long downturn (Brenner), role of the dollar, deregulation, etc. Has attempted to extend system of alliances, expansion of NATO, alliance with Japan, nuclear pact with India. Divide and rule strategies designed to maintain its dominance. Comparative military advantage to further entrench – this project is massively in trouble, the mess of Iraq, and 2008 has made things much worse. Georgia showed Russia asserting its regional power. Leverage over natural gas and other parts of Europe. Pitting EU members against themselves.



Financial crash also does massive symbolic damage to the US. Complex lending arrangements with East Asia reveal weakness of US position. The US gvt has to borrow more. Will have to ask for more from East Asia – oil sheiks are not such a safe bet any more. The most secure currency at the moment might be the yen, which tells us how things have shifted. What is impact of crisis on other powers? The EU is responding in a shambolic way. The EU cannot behave like a single centre of power, their capitalisms compete. Russia and India have been severely hit by the crisis, Brazil is vulnerable. Iran and Venezuela are also in a vulnerable position because of halving of the oil price.

Discussion of China is surrounded by bullshit. i.e. the idea that the Chinese consumer will take over from the American consumer. China has 5.9% global income, the US has 25% of global income. The wealth is much greater in the US still. Chinese growth although high is very unstable – will perhaps produce a slump not just a slowdown. China is also vulnerable to its neighbours turning on it. The US will continue to be the most significant part of the financial system for a long time to come. Recipe for greater instability. No one else can yet assume the position of the US. And we shouldn't think that China taking over will be better for the left! There has been political radicalisation on two points: against neo-liberalism and against the war on terror. These precede the economic problems. We need to close the gap between political and economic resistance.



Peter Gowan

Shifting power relations within the credit system itself. Massive deleveraging of the big banks hasn't yet begun. They have only got state funding. The new grand centres of capital accumulation are shifting elsewhere. How do we maintain dominance? Through credit relations! All commercial activities contain credit relationships. We make lots of money for ourselves. Banks are very reluctant to do what the Japanese had to do in the 1990s.

It is the end of the post-Cold War period, people are for the first time are going to be open to discussions of alternative systems. Banking and financial systems are far too important to leave in private hands. The banking system in China is steered by the state. Importance of long-term credit – we think there's a division between economics and politics, but international credit relations are relations between states and states, and private institutions and states. What is banking about? Credit/debt relations! Two contradictory patterns geoeconomically. The source of the long-term credit that the US banks in the 70s were using was the petro-dollar, massive impact on Latin America, etc.



Since c. 2000, many countries have been able to sell to China. The present crisis will throw many of the countries of the south back into the grip of creditors. There will be more than one centre of creditors – not just the Atlantic institutions. East Asia and US credit-debt relations – this relationship is not just about credit-debt, it is also about US dollar dominance. East Asians are ready to accept dollars - would be catastrophic if this dollar dominance ended. US tries to being the dollar down to pay off their debts, East Asia resists. To revive US industrial strength, in the 80s, it hit labourers hard. How to increase growth? You do it with consumer-led booms! But it has been hammered and has very little income. Answer – square the circle with debt. The scale of this is massive.

East Asia is not going to challenge US power in the global power in any significant degree at the moment or challenge the dominance of the dollar. The Chinese do not want to take the steps to do that. Japan will build up its different model of finance, but will not move centre-stage. The Chinese will keep their system closed for now and concentrate on industrial development.

Weeks begin with the Presocratics and end with Sartre, with a concept-heavy tour through the history of Metaphysics in the middle (last week Quine and Kant; this week Heidegger and Universals, next week Necessity), great blocks of teaching, travelling, preparation. I've become something of a generalist; a genericist, teaching anything that anyone wants at any time. Someone jokes I should get a scooter and a pager and teach emergency philosophy, seeing as I'm constantly running around teaching as if on call anyway. Never enough time between travel, classes, five minutes late here, miscalculating the distance between buildings, forgetting to answer emails I tell myself I'll answer in the morning, but there's not enough time before I have to leave for the station again. The Dr tells me the sharp pain in my side might be something to do with my gallbladder; quit the drinking, get a hospital appointment, wait the weeks until I get a scan, try and catch up on some sleep. I dream of horrible rubbery undead things, like Ron Mueck's heads or those sculptures that look like plastic but are actually brass that everyone seemed to be making a few years ago. I wake up to autumn mornings that seem already too mediated, visually colonised by the autumns of New England, not this crappy version of England, where there's never enough room and never enough time, and conversations with friends and colleagues are always too brittle and stark with gaps unfilled in between the last time I asked you about how it was going and how was your relationship with thingy and what you were working on now, and how I always forget, and how I should really read some of your stuff sometime, and I bet we'd have lots in common if only I had a chance to understand your project properly.

I come home and realise that I still haven't really finished that article I promised three weeks ago, and I can't bear the emails that arrive asking where it is, and when am I going to do it? We go to a political meeting in a beautiful old hall that seems so anachronistic alongside the chrome and aggression of the rest of the city, and our pleasant surprise at the number of people there quickly turns to real irritation that these things are so predictably monopolised by the same old bastards who clear the room in their bid to out-do one another in their dungeons and dragons geo-politics in which the gentle orks of the working class go and do battle in far-off lands in exchange for the amulet of exchange-value. We go and eat some fish in one of the few remaining old cafes, and we talk about the New Piccadilly and J says that he saw one of the waiters who used to work there working in an Indian restaurant nearby and how we should go there and say hello, and I wonder if it is the same guy I once gave a bar of chocolate to in a fit of silliness, and I think now perhaps he probably doesn't even like chocolate.

And I think about how I want to get rid of all my things, and how I used to want to live in a nunnery although without the religious bit, just because then I wouldn't have to pay council tax or worry about bills or have very many possessions at all, and I think about how happy I am that I have no money, and no house, and no mortgage, and no car, and no addictions that cost me more than I make and that I don't even mind paying rent or spending all my money on other people, and how I really want to have a static bank balance that is always at zero, and then I think how pathological this is but then I remember that someone said there isn't a normal attitude to money, or to sex, or perhaps to time as well, I don't know, and I think whoever said this was probably on to something. And then I think of my student who is trying to combine eliminative materialism with Heidegger's criticisms of technology, and I wonder how I would do it if I had to and I can't think how it would be possible, but it is interesting nevertheless.

I think about all the many things I have lost in the past six years, and how I could do with losing even more, that I could get rid of all of the things I took pictures of because I don't need them any more, and I remember that time when my bag got taken and all it had were my fifty or so photos I had of myself from my childhood that I had been showing a friend on a boring Sunday afternoon and how it was funny that there was nothing else in the bag, but all these photos that I didn't have the negatives for that would be worth nothing to anyone, and that strange feeling of unhappiness and relief that you get when you finally lose things that you had worried about losing for some time. And I wonder what the guy did with all those photos, and his disgust at finding nothing worth stealing, and where they went, mouldering on a rubbish dump somewhere. And I think, good, fuck them.

Continuing the recent micro-series of key left thinkers on the current financial crisis, ICR has translated (no help from me, my Italian fa schifo) Mario Tronti's recent piece from il manifesto, Italy's leading independent communist daily.

Very timely!

[Hot off the keyboard, a quick translation of Badiou's piece from yesterday's Le Monde. Translation by myself and ICR.

UPDATE: Badiou actually originally wrote this as a longer piece (which is here). We have added in the extra sections/noted changes in bold. As you can see, the original is quite a bit longer and includes a discussion of housing. Badiou on mortgages! Who'd have thought it?]

Of Which Real is this Crisis the Spectacle? Alain Badiou, Le Monde, 17/10/08.

As it is presented to us, the planetary financial crisis resembles one of those bad films concocted by that factory for the production of pre-packaged blockbusters that today we call the "cinema". Nothing is missing, the spectacle of mounting disaster, the feeling of being suspended from enormous puppet-strings, the exoticism of the identical – the Bourse of Jakarta placed under the same spectacular rubric as New York, the diagonal from Moscow to Sao Paulo, everywhere the same fire ravaging the same banks – not to mention terrifying plotlines: it is impossible to avert Black Friday, everything is collapsing, everything will collapse...



But hope abides. In the foreground, wild-eyed and focussed, like in a disaster movie, we see the small gang of the powerful – Sarkozy, Paulson, Merkel, Brown, Trichet and others – trying to extinguish the monetary flames, stuffing tens of billions into the central Hole. We will have time later to wonder (the saga will surely continue) where these billions come from, given that for some years, at the least demand from the poor, the same characters responded by turning their pockets inside out, saying they hadn't a cent. For the time being, it doesn't matter. "Save the banks!" This noble, humanist and democratic cry surges forth from the mouths of every journalist and politician. Save them at any price! It's worth pointing this out, since the price is not insignificant.

I have to confess: given the numbers that are being bandied about, whose meaning, like almost everyone else, I am incapable of representing to myself (what exactly is one thousand four hundred billion euros?), I too am confident. I put my full trust in our firemen. All together, I am sure, I can feel it, they will succeed. The banks will be even greater than before, while some of the smaller or medium-sized ones, having only been able to survive through the benevolence of states, will be sold to the bigger ones for a pittance. The collapse of capitalism? You must be kidding. Who wants it, after all? Who even knows what it would mean? Let's save the banks, I tell you, and the rest will follow. For the film's immediate protagonists – the rich, their servants, their parasites, those who envy them and those who acclaim them – a happy ending, perhaps a slightly melancholy one, is inevitable, bearing in mind the current state of the world, and the kinds of politics that take place within it.



Let us turn instead to the spectators of this show, the dumbstruck crowd who - vaguely unsettled, understanding little, totally disconnected from any active engagement in the situation - hears, like a far-off noise, the mort* of the cornered banks. This crowd can only guess at the exhausting weekends of our heroic small team of heads of government. It sees, passing before it, numbers as enormous as they are obscure, automatically comparing them to its own resources, or even, for a very considerable part of humanity, to the pure and simple non-resource which is the bitter and courageous basis of its very life. That's where the real is, and we will only be able to access it if we turn away from the screen of the spectacle in order to consider the invisible mass of those for whom this disaster movie, its saccharine ending included (Sarkozy kisses Merkel, and the whole world weeps for joy), was only ever a shadow-play.



In these past few weeks we have heard a lot about the "real economy" (the production and circulation of goods) and the – how should we call it? unreal? – economy which is the source of all evils, in that its agents had become "irresponsible", "irrational" and "predatory" – fuelling, first rapaciously, then in a panic, the now formless mass of stocks, securities and currencies. This distinction is obviously absurd, and is generally immediately contradicted, when, by way of an opposite metaphor, financial circulation and speculation are presented as the 'circulatory system' of capitalism. Are heart and blood perhaps subtracted from the living reality of a body? Is a financial stroke indifferent to the health of the economy as a whole? As we know, financial capitalism has always – which is to say for the past five centuries – been a major, central component of capitalism in general. As for the owners and managers of this system, by definition they are only "responsible" for profits, their "rationality" is to be measured by their earnings, and it is not just that they are predators, but that they have to be.

Accordingly, we do not find anything more "real" in the engine-room of capitalist production than on its commercial decks or in its speculative cabins. The last two in any case corrupt the first: in their crushing majority, the objects produced by this type of machinery – being aimed solely at profit, and at the derivative speculations which form the fastest and most considerable part of this profit – are ugly, cumbersome, inconvenient, useless, and it is necessary to spend billions to persuade people otherwise. This presupposes that people be transformed into spoiled children, eternal adolescents, whose existence merely consists in changing toys.

The return to the real cannot be a movement leading from bad "irrational" speculation back to healthy production. It is the return to the immediate and reflective life of all those who inhabit this world. It is from that vantage-point that one can observe capitalism without flinching, including the disaster movie that it is currently inflicting upon us. The real is not this movie, but its audience.



So what do we see, if we turn things around in this way? We see, and this is what it means to see, simple things that we've known for a long time: capitalism is nothing but robbery, irrational in its essence and devastating in its development. Its few short decades of savagely unequal prosperity have always been at the cost of crises in which astronomical quantities of value disappear, bloody punitive expeditions into every zone that capitalism judges either strategically important or threatening, and world wars that brought it back to health.

Here lies the didactic force in looking at this crisis-film. Faced with the life of the people watching it, do we still dare to pride ourselves in a system which delegates the organisation of collective life to the basest of drives – greed, rivalry, unthinking selfishness? Can we sing the praises of a "democracy" whose leaders do the bidding of private financial appropriation with such impunity that they would shock Marx himself, who nevertheless already defined governments, a hundred and sixty years ago, as "the agents of capital"? The ordinary citizen must ‘understand’ that it is impossible to make up the shortfall in social security, but that it is imperative to stuff untold billions into the banks’ financial hole? We must sombrely accept that no one imagines any longer that it’s possible to nationalise a factory hounded by competition, a factory employing thousands of workers, but that it is obvious to do so for a bank made penniless by speculation?

In this business, the real is to be found on the hither side of the crisis. For where does this entire financial phantasmagoria come from? Simply from the fact that, by dangling miraculous credits before their eyes, people devoid of the means to afford them were browbeaten into buying flashy houses. These people’s IOUs were then sold on, mixing them, as one does with sophisticated drugs, with financial securities whose composition was rendered as scientific as it is opaque by battalions of mathematicians. All of this then circulated, from sale to sale, its value increasing, in ever more distant banks. Yes, the material measure for this circulation was to be found in the houses. But it was enough for the real estate market to go bust and, as this measure became less valuable and the creditors demanded more, for the buyers to be less and less able to pay their debts. And when finally they couldn’t pay them at all, the drug injected into the financial securities poisoned them all: they were no longer worth anything. But this only seems to be a zero-sum game: the speculator loses his wager and the buyers their homes, from which they are politely evicted. But the real of this zero-sum game is as always on the side of the collective, of ordinary life: in the end, everything stems from the fact that there exist millions of people whose wages, or absence thereof, means that they are absolutely unable to house themselves. The real essence of the financial crisis is a housing crisis. And those who can’t find a home are by no means the bankers. It is always necessary to go back to ordinary existence.




The only thing that we can hope for in this affair is that this didactic power may be found in the lessons drawn from this grim drama by people, and not by the bankers, the governments who serve them, and the newspapers who serve these governments. This return to the real has two related aspects. The first is clearly political. As the film has shown, the "democratic" fetish is merely the zealous servant of the banks. Its real name, its technical name, as I have argued for some time, is capitalist-parliamentarianism. It is advisable, as several political experiments have begun to do in the past twenty years, to organise a politics of a different nature.



Such a politics is, and no doubt will be for a long time, at a great distance from state power, but no matter. It begins level with the real, through the practical alliance between those who are most immediately available to invent such a politics: the newly-arrived proletarians from Africa and elsewhere, and the intellectuals who have inherited the political battles of the last few decades. This alliance will grow on the basis of what it will be capable of doing, point by point. It will not entertain any kind of organic relationship with the existing parties and with the electoral and institutional system that keeps them alive. It will invent the new discipline of those who have nothing, their political capacity, the new idea of what their victory will look like.

The second aspect is ideological. We must overthrow the old verdict according to which ours would be the time of "the end of ideologies". Today we can clearly see that the only reality of this supposed end lies in the slogan "save the banks". Nothing is more important than recovering the passion of ideas and countering the world such as it is with a general hypothesis, the anticipated certainty of an entirely different state of affairs. To the nefarious spectacle of capitalism, we oppose the real of peoples, of the existence of all in the proper movement of ideas. The theme of an emancipation of humanity has lost none of its power. Undoubtedly, the word "communism", which for a long time served to name this power, has been debased and prostituted.



But today, its disappearance only benefits the advocates of order, the feverish actors of the disaster movie. But we will resuscitate communism, in its new-found clarity. This clarity is also its oldest virtue, as when Marx said of communism that it "breaks in the most radical fashion with traditional ideas" and that it will bring forth "an association in which the free development of each is the precondition for the free development of all".

Total break with capitalist-parliamentarianism, the invention of a politics on a level with the popular real, sovereignty of the idea: it's all there, everything we need to turn away from the film of the crisis and to give ourselves over to the fusion between live thought and organised action (everything we need to turn away from the film of the crisis and rise up).

*In French: hallali. In English, the nearest equivalent is 'mort', the note sounded on a hunting horn to announce the death of a deer.

4 grand a doodle? Not this year, sonny boys!

The fact that even Frieze is in trouble makes it very clear that the ideal but real delusions of the art market are coming to some sort of end. Oh no! How awful. Perhaps now we can stop pretending that 'the creative industries' + debt are any kind of way to run an economy.

That Sarah Palin piece I wrote recently got put on FlowTV, with new pictures and everything. I mean, perhaps in the light of everything, the claim that she is 'absolutely, limitlessly terrifying' might be a bit wide of the mark, especially as she could only really do some damage if this man gets in:



I'm sorry, I know you've all seen that picture a million times already, but there's something so repetitiously funny about it, I just had to see it again. It almost makes me like him, in some sad, broken way.

Tuesday October 21st
7pm Conway Hall, Red Lion Square
Marx and the credit crunch

Istvan Meszaros, author of Beyond Capital
Chris Harman, editor, International Socialism journal
Richard Brenner, author of The Credit Crunch - a Marxist Analysis

A global credit crunch. Banks collapsing. Prices soaring. Recession looming. Conventional economic theory appears to have no coherent explanation. Government stumps up hundreds of billions to rescue the bankers - and demands that working people's pay be held down and spending cut on public services.

At this meeting, three Marxist writers examine the roots of this great crisis in the nature of capital itself. Tracing the current crisis to its origins, they show how workers can resist paying the price for a crisis they never made, and set out the case for systemic change.

For further information please contact Andrew Burgin: 07939 242229

I recently wrote a review of Virno's Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation for Mute.

I like Mute a lot: good people, good events, good articles.

Although my voice is still rather squeaky, and sometimes people ask me for i.d. when I try to buy wine, today is my thirtieth birthday. I must spend it running seminars on Kant and then giving a lecture on Being, but that seems only appropriate. The tree outside my window is properly autumnal, and tATu is on the stereo. Thirty years ago the Winter of Discontent saw my parents struggling to get some sleep as they looked after their slightly unwell baby; thirty years later, everything has gone wrong again, only much worse this time around - best worst - horrah for such cycles of desolation and destruction! And happy birthday to me; did we ever think we would make it so far?

This image of the 'March on the City' Protest on Friday accompanied this article in yesterday's Financial Times. The article is entitled 'Capital falls out of love with the City', and far from being the usual 'look at these crazy lefties', the photo is captioned 'Sympathy in short supply: protesters at the Bank of England yesterday said they wouldn't 'bail out the bankers', who have fallen out of favour'. 'Fallen out of favour is very funny', as if last week we'd all been sending them roses, but the most interesting part of the way in which the FT have used this picture is the way in which they link (legitimately, of course, but very surprisingly) the concerns of other city workers, and random interviewees, to the concerns of the protest:

Even on the streets of the City, sympathy was in short supply. Gary Williams, who works for a software company, blamed "a massive bonus culture in a deregulated industry".

"They aren't working for the common good," he said. "They're working purely for their own ends."

I take the appearance of this picture, and its legitimation by the article, as a sign of opportunity, of how much widespread discontent there is with the system as a whole, and how we could capture this in future weeks and months. The picture also features, on a blog note, a certain person who is neither sitting down nor being a bloody tragedy (on the lower right edge). Probably the only time he'll ever be in the FT, but who knows at this point. If we manage to take over the BBC, we could probably manage the rest of the fourth estate, woah ha ha ha.

The THE (that is still sounding wrong) ran a piece about, ahem, academics who blog.

'Some even blog anonymously' they say, shocked at the very idea. As an 'anonymous philosophy lecturer' I apparently said that I do it 'for relaxation and as a sort of strange complement to my work' (it was a phone interview, so I have no way of proving it). That sounds probably about right, although the chances of me doing anything 'relaxing' are about as likely as my body at given time not exhibiting a single bruise. Slowly clawing my way back into some sort of sleep after days of wretched, anxious wakefulness, I dream of mushrooms and giant underground marbles, as if the radix of my cortex was covered in mud and I needed to root hog or die to discover it (yeah, I know that last bit doesn't make any sense, I'm still asleep a bit). Searching for the truffles of my unconscious! Dirtier than the dirtiest of human dreams!

Anyway, erm, the blogademics thing. Some mild arse is spoken:

'Peter Smith, a senior lecturer in philosophy at Cambridge and author of the blog "Logic Matters", as being a "lopsided conversation over virtual coffee".'

That is such a senior lecturer in philosophy at Cambridge thing to say, twee and slightly arrogant at the same time, but also silly, as if bloggers and blog-readers weren't all the time tweaked on real coffee as they sit by their sickly screens. Although perhaps I am just cross because I've not had a cup of coffee in two days, in a desperate bid to finally get some sleep. AARGH! It's horrible. Tea is to coffee what a cocktail sausage is to a hog roast. Blogs aren't conversations, either, they're the demented scratchings of malcontents incapable of dealing with the word without messianic levels of linguistic mediation. I mean, dur.

This Smith fellow also says "I've certainly heard other senior academics express contempt for it - that bloggers are like adolescent girls scrawling in their diaries - but I suspect they are merely ignorant of the level of content on serious academic blogs,"

But if blogs are good, they are good for precisely this reason! I mean, come on, what would you rather read? A 15-year-old girl's intimate secrets, or some boring-arse disquisition on funding opportunities for interdisciplinary work?

Others in the article are just meretricious:

'Derek Morrison, associate head of e-learning at the Higher Education Academy, "The simple rule for everyone should be 'don't affect the share price', no matter what technology you are using," he comments.'

Henceforth I will beat a spoon against a rock repeatedly until the share price of all universities reaches zero, before chucking my laptop down a ravine. I'm going back to bed.

I apologise for my non-attendance at yesterdays classical philosophy lecture, and seminar. I had to take my dog to an emergancy vets appointment, because during the night she had got into the fridge and eaten 2 1/2 boxes of grapes (aka dog poison).

It's been a tough week, comrades! And not just for Iceland (and do they really own 'Iceland' the chain frozen-food store? Perhaps they can make some money from that before we invade them looking for money they owe us, or hold Bjork for ransom, or something).

Went to the March on the City for a bit earlier (oh, you know, hanging around the Bank of England looking a bit surly before the police get cross). Couldn't get too involved as our crew are all in various tiny pieces of one kind or another (including myself, after one too many disappointing encounters with unfriendly objects like escalators and other large, hulking inert things. Bastards).

You will be pleased to know I have thinking a lot about loss lately, and nothingness, and about having nothing and things like that. When I finally get some non-tainted sleep I will return to this!

Cheers all for attending the apocalypse kf yesterday - apologies for slightly, ahem, undermining the ending of the Herzog short by, erm, giving it away and, erm, for the minor technical fault during the early bit of Threads. Still as the glazed sky descended on a bleak dreary Sunday, I hope that the true horror of our nuclear future did not escape you (though I did worry about that little kid that was hanging around at various points, trying to catch a glimpse of the screen). Watching Threads this time round, I was struck by the brilliance of the minor details and the timing of the cuts - the way the instructions to wrap bodies in polythene or paper switches to the corpse-shaped hand-delivered milk bottles as one of the last signs of civil order; the way the printed sheet with potential war-bunker operatives contains an added hand-written 's' on the end of 'Homelessness Officer', the way Jimmy's book of birds appears quite so many times, the heart-rending scene in which the Ruth's grandmother says 'I feel so ashamed...like a little baby' as her body inevitably gives into radiation sickness.

This kind person wrote a very interesting piece about the changes in our understanding of nuclear warfare after the screening, and Carl wrote a really fucking good piece on Threads for the paper-thing (ha! I hope you all enjoyed the this-is-what-all-magazines-would-look-like-after-the-world-had-ended style of it). Owen will put the rest of the pieces up on the kf site shortly because I am too tired after five hours of talking about Parmenides, and have no time before preparing for tomorrow's Metaphysics class. Perhaps I should take a cue from one of my more evangelical students who decided he didn't like the Presocratics because they don't talk about spirit very much. Fair enough, I say, fair enough.

Currently waging a war against administration as the University have decided to ban students from accessing online resources until their fees are paid. One of my current courses has 120 students and is run entirely via 'e-learning' (whatever the hell that is). Basically, we can't use paper hand-outs, and all resources are on the intranet. Mmmm, lovely. However, given that a fair proportion of students are unable to pay their fees because their local authority has a backlog of loan payments, this means large sections of the class can't access the materials, or the exercises they are supposed to complete each week. It's as if the 'old-fashioned' lecturer with photocopies were to have intimate financial knowledge of their students and, on this basis, refuse to give copies to people in their class. It's immoral, and stupid, and cataclysmically time-consuming as I seek to find a way to get the oh-so-supposedly-bleeding-edge-of-technology materials to oh-so-old-skool-boringly-anxious students who are being punished for something that isn't their fault. It's like a surveillance camera crossed with a mean, judgemental aunt. And I hate that sort of thing.

'La Soufrière' (Werner Herzog, 1976)
'Threads' (written by Barry Hines/directed by Mick Jackson, 1984)

We will be here tomorrow:

The Wenlock Building
50-60 Wharf Road, N1 7RN

We will screen:
October 5th
roughly 2-5pm
£2

Due to apocalyptic timing/organisation, the magazine was cut and pasted (literally) by me. It resembles a copy of Just Seventeen, if Just Seventeen had been put together by a girl who had spent her childhood locked in a cupboard.

A nice little subversive isotype.

I think this kind of dark stick-bending is really very effective.

- My second year students, who have collectively decided to be the most engaged Philosophy class in the history of pedagogy. They make preparation a sheer, exciting endeavour, rather than the anxious, hasty mess it can (sometimes) be.

- My new first year mature student who, after a decade of selling expensive luggage to rich folk in Harrods, gave up her job to study Philosophy after seeing Chomsky on television late one night talking about human nature.

Numbers are up dramatically on last year, despite (or perhaps because of) the current economic climate. I wonder whether a certain kind of vocational despair (study business? What for?) increases the intake for 'useless' subjects like my own. Burdened by loan repayments for decades to come, you might as well take the opportunity to read books you actually want to know something about, and study subjects that quicken the pulse rather than merely please your parents or some future business big other.

Working on student reception for a short time while the secretary mercifully escaped to the toilet after a six hour stint, students would buy their £1.50 module readers with 5ps and less, in a high state of generalised penury and anxiety. Students of mine don't appear on the register as the university fails to include them for failure to pay their fees. They wonder whether they should be there. I assure them they should be, and that we can sort something for reading by getting groups to share books, and photocopying all the secondary material. Whatever the real effects of the economic crisis are and will be, I can already see the sacrifices students will be forced to make, are making, as they struggle to fit jobs around lectures, reading around complicated living arrangements, paying for childcare, rent, food. If a single one of my students is forced to quit their course for financial reasons, I will personally blow up the Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills.