Month: March 2014

This evening I showed up for my Marx in America seminar only to find two dedicated seminar members standing outside a locked building. One might think that of all times now might be a time that Tuzlans would be interested in Marx. But that would be to misunderstand the moment. If we have learned anything from the last few months, it is that our movements, however much they might be straining to break out of the chrysalis of their past, are fully contained within the conditions to which they owe their life. Unemployment, desperation, injustice do not on their own give rise to a response that leads to their undoing, their overcoming, as Marx might say. The fact that we need desperately to understand Marx, specially today, does not mean that we have either the time or the interest or the energy to do so. Marx? Today? In America? How? Why?

Nor is this necessarily an instance when, to paraphrase Adorno, the revolution lives on “because the moment to realize it was missed.” Part, perhaps the largest part, of any revolutionary moment is realizing just how it was missed, the specific ways that revolution was straining to reproduce the conditions of its own possibility and so straining as well against its own promise. Not mournfully. Not melancholically. But knowingly, recognizing the complexity of the moment.

The generation of Tuzlans who might have wanted to study Marx are the children of Tuzlans who suffered not only under war, but also under Fordism, the same Fordism that has left the lion’s share of my own generation in America dubious of anything that rings of hope or promise. That was our parent’s generation. That was the 1960s. And, as I pour over the data from the Tropes of War survey, I am struck at how similar the responses of these Bosnian and Herzegovinian temporary employees in Afghanistan and Iraq are to the responses of temporary workers who are not subjects of war and de-nationalization. Capitalism takes a hold of us even or specially when we identify its weak points; even or specially when we see what it is doing, not least to us. Tuzlans are not all that different in this respect from Berkeleyans.

Yet, whereas Berkeleyans believe that they are on top of the game — they are delivering and not receiving — Tuzlans believe that they will never be on top. Berkeleyans pour into a seminar on Marx, spilling out into the doorways, not because they are on the side of justice, but because they believe that mastering Marx’s interpretation places them in a better position to maintain their mastery of the world. They appreciate how Marx’s theories offer a more rigorous and satisfying explanation for their mastery than the Keynesian explanations offered elsewhere. And some, not many, may also see why their mastery is unsustainable.

Tuzlans may also perceive this dialectic. But they are not the masters in this story. They long for the old Keynesian days; the Fordist days, when a flat and a factory job were virtually guaranteed. And they recognize how this past is at odds with a rigorous reading of Marx. They realize that a rigorous reading of Marx is calling them to action. And that is not where they are. They are tired. They are depressed. They are without hope. And they are now stretched by commitments that they cannot possibly keep.

It is not that Capital is cynically counting on this exhaustion. Capital constitutes this exhaustion. It has constructed the very post-Fordist landscape under which compliance thrives; under which Bosnians pour eagerly, willingly into Afghanistan and Iraq but find it impossible to attend a seminar on Marx. This is the post-Fordist landscape; a landscape composed of exhausted, over-taxed, cynical, depressed workers whose schedules, outside commitments, and energy prohibit their coming to terms with the possibilities of their own moment.

Again, this is not altogether different from the post-Fordist landscape in the United States; but there students and workers see understanding Marx as a vehicle for further mastery. They want to grasp their moment not in order to liberate it, but in order to relieve it of whatever wealth it may contain.

Where Tuzla differs is that students and workers here might actually be able to do more with Marx than my Berkeley students who line up outside my office hour doors. Here there is actually the possibility of making something new. But, as Adorno has already said, the moment may already have been missed.

Last Monday we had the privilege of exploring the world of Gary Becker, one of the most mathematically skilled economists of the past century. This week we have the privilege of exploring his charming side-kick, the Boy Wonder, Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman was a good mathematician. But his real skill lay in setting out in a simplistic manner, for mathematical economists who really couldn’t have cared less, why the havoc they were wrecking across the globe was actually righteous.

Yes, simplistic; because it relied upon the conviction — which turned out to be true — that everyone or nearly everyone who registered for Professor Friedman’s famous graduate course 301 or who read the Readers Digest version was already convinced that what Milty was telling them was true. Price is the leading mechanism in all human transactions and self-regulating free markets are the best mechanisms for determining price; end of story. But that is not why they registered for 301. They registered for 301 in order to master the math that lay behind this metaphysical conviction.

The central piece of math revolves around the beauty of mathematical zero, the empty or null set. Any movement one way or the other away from zero signals a distortion. Now, of course, Alfred Marshall, whose inaugural Principles appeared in 1871, also embraced this central piece of math. An increase in transportation costs or an increase in taxes or an increase in the costs of any factor of production pushes the price that a producer can accept for a product to the right and so naturally introduces downward pressure on the volume of sales — the number of customers prepared to part with the marginally greater amount of capital for the same product or service, all other things being equal. But whereas A Marshall rolled with these shifts at the margins, identifying the ever new equalibria established whenever any factor changed, Milton Friedman, rather magically, embraced the minimizing of economic distortions to zero as the Holy Grail of economic science. Followed to its natural conclusion, this would make a world rid of human history, culture, individuality, and choice the optimal world because in it all things would actually be caeteris paribus; all things would be equal.

Last week we saw how Gary Becker equated the mathematical median with the “rational.” We will see this week how it is around this median also that “freedom” is arrayed. Freedom can be plotted around the median, however, only because and to the extent that producers may rely upon the predictability of this median holding true. I am for a price above or below the median in light of the choices buyers have made and are likely to make in the future. In von Hayek’s phrase, I plan for freedom; I do not plan for planning. When, however, some external agent introduces a factor that does not reflect consumer choice (freedom) — such as a higher tax — the increased cost of my item does not reflect either the buyers’ or the sellers’ decisions surrounding my particular product, but rather a macroeconomic shift that neither of us bargained for. The elimination of such macroeconomically induced shifts becomes the necessary ingredient for extending freedom as far as possible — making the communication between the buyer and seller the point where price is sovereignly determined.

What about monopolies? Friedman will admit that while private monopolies do tend to push prices upward, the monopolist is not free to push the price so far that the buyer cannot afford the item. Moreover, the rational monopolist must still determine where along the supply and demand lines, volume and price maximize profits. In other words, according to Friedman, even the private monopolist, because she or he is interested in maximizing return on investment, will be pushed by the principle of freedom to drop the price or increase the volume in order to maximize returns on investment. Not so a public monopoly, where maximization of utility is subordinated to some extrinsic, non-market, value — such as health or education. But, so devoted is Professor Friedman to his metaphysical center, that he will not even abandon it when it proves inadequate. Thus he can show that when good health is a sufficient public good, self-regulating market forces will drive down costs while at the same time enhancing product quality. If people are still unhealthy, it is (a) because there is insufficient demand for public health; and (b) because public health care programs have so distorted markets as to increase the value of poor health. In an undistorted, self-regulating free market, all of those who wanted health care would have health care at a cost they could afford and a quality for which they would be willing to pay.

Zero. The median. The elimination of market distortions. What does freedom look like? This is what freedom looks like. The absence of constraint. Freedom reduced to the freedom of Kant’s Transcendental Subject. Freedom, which by definition has no body and therefore offers no resistance, no drag, pushing the supply and demand curves only where they would naturally fall.

Of course, as we will see, history itself offers one of the most noxious and troublesome distortions for Friedman’s metaphysics. The radical republicanism of the framers of the US Constitution or the French Revolution? Deeply troubling. They are troubling because instead of granting the free market self-regulating powers, republican values invite the public to identify the wealth they hold in common and the ends to which they will put that wealth. Res publica, the Latin phrase translated everywhere into Republic (or its cognates) is in the US more faithfully translated simply Commonwealth, therein preserving the original sense of shared, public wealth. And, yet, so committed is Friedman to his Transcendental Subject and to its sovereignty that through sheer force of will and declaration eliminates republicanism from the historical record, proclaiming the framers nothing but advocates, like himself, of self-regulating free markets.

And, where the US Constitution or its amendments do seem to tip toward a role for the public, Friedman recommends that we simply amend the Constitution to replace the public with the private marketplace. Why? Because of zero. Because people, the public, by definition, constitute a drag on the economy; a distortion.

The numbers do not lie.