Month: March 2024

In today’s NYT Business section (“City Coffers Feel Impact As Building Prices Fall,” March 19, 2024), Alan Rappeport sheds light on a central principle of critical economic theory. Surface forms of appearance — in this case office buildings — are valued not for the substances out of which they are composed — offices — but for the abstract immaterial value consumed in their composition. Expressed mathematically: MPL = ΔQ/ΔL. Building space and the revenues cities receive from building occupancy has become prohibitively efficient for cities. So efficient that it no longer produces revenue for them. In the language of critical economics, this has produced a “crisis.” The good news is that efficiencies of this sort are often incubators of innovation. Ask yourself: how else might these surface forms generate value?

In volume one of Capital Marx noted:

Circulation bursts through all the temporal, spatial and personal barriers imposed by the direct exchange of products, and it does this by splitting up the direct identity present in this case between the exchange of one’s own product and the acquisition of someone else’s into the two antithetical segments of sale and purchase. To say that these mutually independent and antithetical processes form an internal unity is to say also that their internal unity moves forward through external antitheses. These two processes lack internal independence because they complement each other. Hence, if the assertion of their external independence proceeds to a certain critical point, their unity violently makes itself felt by producing — a crisis. 

Penguin Edition, p. 209.

There is nothing in concrete, glass, and steel that naturally suits them for high end office suites. As the Pandemic taught many firms, the wood, brick, and stucco of gated community McMansions serve equally well or even better given fiber optic cables and a Zoom platform. Voila. Instant efficiency.

Socially, however, office buildings and office work “lack internal independence.” They have become dependent on one another. This means that “the assertion of their external independence proceeds to a certain critical point,” which according to Alan Rappeport they have, “their unity violently makes itself felt by producing — a crisis.”

One way to handle this crisis would be to transform these giants into low and moderate income housing and affordable shopping districts. Now there’s an idea. With the shortage of housing and all. Which would be fine if it weren’t for the revenue needed to maintain these giants, not to mention the capital lost to the investors who expected a more handsome return. Low and moderate income housing would generate spectacular efficiencies. Moreover, because the new occupants would be living in these units, it’s not likely they would pull up stakes and move on when they discover they work more efficiently remotely. They already are remote. Problem: the wrong people are benefiting from these efficiencies.

I feel confident that like all crises this one too will pass. As Marx noted in the passage sited above, “These . . . therefore imply the possibility of crises, though no more than the possibility.”

In 2013 the Russian Parliament passed a law banning what it called “propaganda of homosexuality.” It was part of a package of new laws and regulations that aimed at preventing Russia from succumbing to the widespread decadence and immorality widely tolerated by so-called western “democracies.”

The law simply made explicit the Russian Nationalist belief that the West aimed to destroy Russia by destroying the traditional family. To win support for their campaign, Russian Nationalists financed a global campaign to recruit sympathetic Christian nationalists around the globe.

“Two days after the law was passed, the parliamentary committees on the family and on foreign relations held a joint session attended by five foreign guests. Brian S. Brown, head of the National Organization for Marriage, formed a few years earlier to pass legislation against same-sex marriage in California, and French National Front activist Aymeric Chauprade were among them” (Gessen, The Future is History, 406-407). To wild applause, Chauprade addressed the gathering:

You must understand that patriots of countries the world over, those committed to protecting the independence of their nations and the foundations of our civilization, are looking to Moscow. It is with great hope that they are looking to Russia, which has taken a stand against the legalization, the public legalization of homosexuality, against the interference of nihilistic nongovernmental organizations which are manipulated by American secret services, and against the adoption of children by homosexual couples. Ladies and gentlemen, members of parliament, Russia has become the hope of the entire world. . . . Long live the European Christian civilization! Long live Russia! Long live France!

Gessen, The Future is History, 407.

To which some days later Vladimir Putin added:

Russia is facing a serious challenge to its identity. This issue has aspects of both morality and foreign policy. We can see many EuroAtlantic countries rejecting their own roots, including Christian values, which form the foundation of Western civilization. They reject their own moral foundations as well as all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even gender. They pursue policies that place large families on an equal footing with same-sex partnerships, and faith in god with satan worship. An excess of political correctness has led to the point that there is talk of registering political parties that promote pedophilia. In many European countries people are ashamed and frightened to talk about their religious affiliation. . . . And this is the model that is being aggressively forced onto the entire world. I am convinced that this is the road to degradation and primitivization, a deep demographic and moral crisis.

Gessen, The Future is History, 408-409.

Russia’s Christian Nationalists are the leading funders of the World Congress of Families, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group, but which Christian nationalists laud as a bulwark for family values.

Christian nationalists love Putin because Putin speaks their language — the language of hate, of anti-democracy, and opposition to republican values. If Republicans in Congress are having a hard time opposing Putin and Putin’s Russia it is because, at heart, they hope that Putin wins.

Think about that. Republicans want Russia to win.