Beyond Marx and Other Entries

223 Pages·2018·1.03 MB·English

by  David Gleicher

Beyond Marx and Other Entries
Studies in Critical
Social Sciences
Series Editor
David Fasenfest (Wayne State University)
Editorial Board
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (Duke University)
Chris Chase-Dunn (University of California-Riverside)
William Carroll (University of Victoria)
Raewyn Connell (University of Sydney)
Kimberlé W. Crenshaw (University of California, la, and
Columbia University)
Heidi Gottfried (Wayne State University)
Karin Gottschall (University of Bremen)
Mary Romero (Arizona State University)
Alfredo Saad-Filho (University of London)
Chizuko Ueno (University of Tokyo)
Sylvia Walby (Lancaster University)
VOLUME 112
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scss
Beyond Marx and Other Entries
By
David Gleicher
leiden | boston
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov
Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.
ISSN 1573-4234
ISBN 978-90-04-33733-6 (hardback)
ISBN 978-90-04-35250-6 (e-book)
Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Preface viii
The Summer Before the War X
1 Industrializing Capital: Classic Works of the Twentieth Century 1
Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital 1
Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation 3
Adolph Berle’s & Gardener Means’ The Modern Corporation &
Private Property 6
The Conclusion of Marcel Mauss’s The Gift 9
The Great Failure of 20th Century Economists 13
2 Corresponding Thoughts of Benjamin: Kafka, Bakhtin and the Prague
School 18
The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy 18
Shapes of Time 22
Semiotics of the Social: Karcevskij’s Principle and the Imaginary
Community 26
Keys to Kafka’s Castle, a Guideline for the Innocent Reader 31
3 On the Fringe 49
Liberal Keynesianism and Modern Money Theory (MMT) 49
The Pope and a Respected Orthodox Economist 59
Keynes and CH Douglas 61
Might This be Done? 67
4 Archaic Money 73
Barter Exchange and Gift-giving 73
Corrupt Gift-giving 79
Nexum and Mancipium 83
5 Life-needs and Money Sequences, Outside or Inside a Sealed Vessel 91
Value Reduction 91
Contemporary Banking & Finance 100
Culture of Liquidation 103
Costa Lapavitsas’ Profiting Without Production 112
Atavistic Critique 117
Maurizio Lazzarato’s Making of the Indebted Man 120
vi contents
6 Life as a Baby Boomer 125
Red Diaper Baby 125
Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf Revisited 132
Counterculture of Walter Benjamin 135
George Orwell’s 1984 139
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution 145
Evaporation of the Sixties 149
7 Financialization of the Universities 152
Nicholas Kristof on Knowledge and Deep Learning 152
A Brief History of Adelphi 157
The Edifice Complex 163
8 Identity Politics 168
Working Families Party: Is It the Moment? (May 2014) 168
Resistance on All Sides (September 2014) 171
Because I Am a Neurosurgeon 173
The Story of Rachel Dolezal 176
Thou Shalt Not Kill 179
The Clintons’ Fusion of Parties 181
Self-identification Against Democratic Socialism 186
MLK and the Clintons 192
References 199
Index 205
Acknowledgements
I’d like to dedicate this book to Annie Stauber, who for forty-five years always
got me to really think from outside the box. I miss her.
Preface
Beyond Marx and Other Entries is a truly original book. It explores deep areas
of semiotics and philosophy joined with economics, joined with anthropology,
sociology, history, political science, and Kafka’s Castle. These are communicated
by entries, based primarily on my actual blog, Looking through the Crack (http://
economics-finance-adelphi.blogspot.nl/), from 2013 to 2017.
Entering into various entries are three writers of social Totality—Walter
Benjamin, Felix Guattari, and John McMurtry—who do not fit into any single
area in its own right. This book itself does not fit into any specific area of social-
science, either, although at the same time each individual entry with some
exceptions only, is indeed within discernable social-sciences.
No other structure of a book quite compares to Beyond Marx, the closest
being perhaps simply a collection of essays, but that leaves much left out. More
accurate would be equating it to impressionist art, or the bridging of the one
and the many.
Each entry is independent; nothing in one makes an allusion to any of the
others. There are 44 of them in total. All but a few are in the range of 1,000
to 3,500 words. Readers however cannot help but to look with depth into
connections in the entries, and by themselves come into the grips of dystopian
possibilities, and the manner in which the social Totality is moving into them.
This is communicated in the book by grouping the individual entries into
8 chapters. However, the entries are never melted together; rather the book
serves up a dialogistic study, an aspect of which is a critique of economics,
one based on Benjamin’s basic assertion; that mathematics is a language
among other languages. There is no mathematics of language per se, it is only
a language.
The book at hand is a critique then of the dominant classical and neoclassical
schools of economic thought as well as that of Karl Marx. It calls for us to
finally go beyond an economics in isolation. Contemporary economists since
the fifties have been immersed in econometric modelling with more and more
complexity due to increasing digitalization. As seen in PhDs in economics for
instance—topics, for the most part, are about studying quarterly prediction of
corporate sales or prices and interest rates in the financial markets—very few
in life-needs.
Amazingly, the core understanding of the economy by these economists
date back some 300 years ago, in the eighteenth-century imagination of a
market-economy exclusively functioning sealed off from all other areas of
preface ix
social life, not to say of nature. Stepping back slightly the economy has taken
out of economics anything from other social-sciences.
In Beyond Marx it is the reverse. Dialogism is expressed through various dia-
logues that super-cedes mathematical problems with ongoing dialogues. There
is no static solution in the sense of a mathematical reduction of language that
is offered. Dialogue is ongoing as is the movement of the social Totality.
Felix Guattari succinctly captures in his important 1989 piece, The Three
Ecologies, the basis of my work:
The logic of intensities is concerned only with the movement and inten-
sity of evolutionary processes. Process strives to capture existence in the
very act of its constitution, definition and de-territorializing.
Praxes strive to scout out the potential vectors of subjectification and
singularization at each partial existential locus. They generally seek
something that runs counter to the ‘normal’ order of things, a counter-
repetition, and an insensitive given which invokes other intensities to
form new existential configurations. (p. 30)
The Summer Before the War
All on a Saturday, bright as a bell
Early and just for the ride
We took a trip cycling down to the sea,
You and your lady and I
And oh, what a summer, and oh, what a sun
Bright to the blue sky it clung
One day at Whitsun, the sea and the shore,
The summer before the war
Warm summer places where you could taste the country air
Chasing our shadows we'd fly
Down through the narrow lanes, racing the slow trains,
And the last of an age going by
And we had a good time, and we had some fun,
There was time then when we were all young,
One day at Whitsun, the sea and the shore,
The summer before the war
Young hearts and young souls, young minds to unfold,
Knowing the untold somehow
One day at Whitsun, the sea and the shore,
The summer before the war
We found a small cove by the sand and the water
The salt air was brushing your skin
With your hand in her hand there was nothing to say,
Just watch the sea rushing in
And oh, what a moment, and oh, what a day
We held it and it never slipped away
One day at Whitsun, the sea and the shore,
The summer before the war
Words & music: Hue Williams (PRS).
CD, The Wishing Well, sung by Connie Dover