Commentary on Political Economy

Friday 7 October 2011

The Misery of Jobs and the Patience of Job - An Introduction to the Meaning of "Entrepreneurial Capitalism"

As we have seen in this series of posts on under-consumption and over-production theories, these two explanations for capitalist crisis amount really to a single theory claiming that the unemployment of resources (“labour” and “capacity utilisation”) is due to insufficient demand from low wages and consumption! Now, it does not take a genius like Steve Jobs – though it does test the patience of Job! – to realise that this cannot be the case because the exclusive aim of capitalism is….to reduce wages to zero if at all possible! –And this is something that God-forsaken (literally, when you think about dying at 56 when you command social resources “measurable” in the billions of dollars) Steve Jobs – a capitalist “captain of industry”, a despicable enemy, a sower of misery and myths, even more in death than when alive, now that the bourgeoisie can revive the myth of “the entrepreneur” (we will discuss this in connection with Schumpeter’s thesis of “the obsolescence of the entrepreneurial function” later – this is something that beasts like Jobs (yes, the man whose company successfully sold us the iPod!!!)  whose corporation sucked on the blood of poor workers in China, in the millions (Foxcomm alone employs 800,000 people!), knew very well.
If there were any value in underconsumption theories, then the solution to a capitalist crisis would be quite simple: increase wages! But we know that this is not the way out or still less forward for capital. The “way forward” for capital is to command more living labour – because that is the way in which this deleterious, monstrous and destructive social system “works”! And so the real source of the “crisis” must be located in the sharp decline of “profitability” across the globe. Here is the Lex Column on this point:
Rather than risks from the financial system, markets are unsettled by the fear that emerging market growth can no longer be taken for granted. As London’s Absolute Strategy Research points out, the August sell-off coincided with ISM supply manager surveys from three of the four Bric nations coming in below 50, indicating contraction. As emerging markets are raising interest rates to combat inflation (perhaps exacerbated by US monetary policy), this should be no surprise. Sell-offs in industrial metals also demonstrate uncertainty about Chinese demand. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/3/cd7b50ba-eb47-11e0-9a41-00144feab49a.html#axzz1Z198vxOL (Lex Column)
But there is yet another source of “crisis” that, although not a “sufficient condition” of capitalism, is nevertheless a “necessary” one: - inter-capitalist rivalry. We must be very careful not to confuse this with “competition”! The notion of “competition” in that execrable discipline of falsehood and lies called “economic science” (we will take a look at it through Nietzsche’s keen eyes soon) is “sold” or “marketed” to us (just like Jobs’s useless MacBook on which I am typing – a piece of shit worthy of that excrementitious larva that just died in his own vomit!) as the real foundation of “wealth” in the capitalist market system! The idea (which we have reviewed in our pieces on Hayek and “the division of information” and on the German Freiburg School and on Adam Smith – just search thus site) is that “wealth” is a by-product of “exchange” which leads to “the division of labour” and therefore to “higher productivity”! As we saw in our pieces on Adam Smith, he was utterly and despicably wrong because it is not “exchange” that enables or engenders “the division of labour” and because there is no such thing as “labour” that can be “divided”!
In reality, it is the necessary existence of “social labour” (biologically necessary for being humans) that makes “exchange” at all possible (!) and what is “divided” is not “labour” as if it were a “measurable and quantifiable” entity, but rather the “tasks” of our living labour in what is necessarily “social labour”! Those who understand this will hold in their hands the “solution” to the European and global crisis of capitalism – to which we will return in our next intervention.  Cheers.

1 comment:

  1. Wow, I don't think I ever saw so many quotation marks in a single post! I'm still optimistic though, that eventually I can find the perfect jobs Manila for me.

    ReplyDelete