Anti-Racism and Democracy in Our Schools

 It’s generally conceded that Terry McAuliffe’s statement “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” was a big blunder that contributed to his defeat last week.  The context was a debate with his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, who had used his party’s playbook on Critical Race Theory and the “leftist” takeover of education.  Not surprisingly, Youngkin hammered McAuliffe with this quote in TV and web ads.

So what should McAuliffe have said instead?  Imagine a response like this: “My opponent wants our schools to take wide detours around any mention of racism in history, politics or economics.  He says this is how parents can take back control of their kids’ education.  I say exactly the opposite.  Everything we’ve seen—opinion polls, demonstrations, and local school board conversations—tells us that Virginia’s parents want to improve education on all fronts, including better informed treatment of racial inequality and ways we can end it.  They don’t want any particular ideology, but they do want schools that address racism honestly and reflect our shared desire to rise above it.”

You can change the words to your own liking, but the key point is that it is possible to be for both anti-racism and democracy in education.

So why wasn’t this the message in Virginia or in the United States overall?  One reason might be the technocratic biases of the administrative class that has predominant power within the Democratic Party.  They are for a properly managed education system insulated from the whims of the common folk who can only gum it up.  Their knee jerk reaction to a Republican call for parents to rebel against progressive directions in education is to reject parental involvement in general.

Another reason, with historical roots in the first, is that the current dogma in anti-racism is that white supremacy is in America’s “DNA” (a biologically dubious metaphor), and that all whites, knowingly or not, are implicit racists whose biggest contribution to the cause would be to step aside and keep their mouths shut.  If that’s what you think, the idea that a democratic upswell of parents, many or most white, could be a force for progress against racism is a dangerous illusion.

Is it no longer possible to even imagine a conjoining of popular power and opposition to bigotry?  If not, we’re doomed.

Infrastructure week: organs of the human brain, created by the human hand

Who owns general social knowledge? Who owns the general intellect? Alf Hornborg pointed out that without the fuel to run it, a tractor is simply a piece of sculpture. It is not even a sculpture, though, if there is no one to design it and build it and operate it, let alone to design and manufacture the tools needed to build the tractor and so on.

Marx's list of things nature does not build, "machines... locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc." is echoed in the next paragraph, "railways, canals, aqueducts, telegraphs etc." but this second time explicitly excluding of "the machinery directly active in the direct production process."

Here's what happens (sometimes) when one reads, and rereads, and rereads a passage that at first seemed a bit obscure or even incoherent: the two paragraphs (four in the collected works translation) beginning with "Nature builds no machines..." are indispensable to the theory of surplus population and surplus capital. This is the place in the third -- and customary -- fragment on machines where Marx addressed surplus population. Surplus population is a condition for this:

As the magnitude of relative surplus labour depends on the productivity of necessary labour, so does the magnitude of labour time - living as well as objectified - employed on the production of fixed capital depend on the productivity of the labour time spent in the direct production of products.

Or, another translation, from the collected works:

Just as the amount of relative surplus labour depends upon the productivity of necessary labour, so the amount of the labour time employed on the production of fixed capital—living labour time as well as objectified—depends upon the productivity of the labour time intended for the direct production of products.

Marx is drawing an analogy here between the relationship of necessary labour to surplus labour (relative surplus value) and the relationship of direct production of consumer goods to the production of fixed capital. The input for the first relationship is socially necessary labour time while the analogous input for the second is socially unnecessary labour population -- that is, a population that has been been freed from production of necessities because it is no longer necessary. 

The surplus value produced by this surplus population is not immediately realizable. It is postponed indefinitely and thus, according to Marx, creates a disproportion between the need for circulating capital and the need for fixed capital, "when sometimes too little, then again too much circulating capital is transformed into fixed capital."

And there you have it. Marx's crisis theory: the production of fixed capital is to the production of consumption goods as the production of relative surplus labour is to the production of necessary labour.

To bring the analogy back full circle to the first paragraph: the production of general social knowledge is to the production of fixed capital as the production of fixed capital is to the production of consumption goods...

Who owns the general social knowledge?

to be continued...

Disposable Time, Surplus Population, and Limitation of the Hours of Labour

On Saturday, November 13 I will be presenting, "Disposable Time, Surplus Population, and Limitation of the Hours of Labour," at the Historical Materialism conference. I will be exploring relative surplus population and the dialectic of "the superfluous and the necessary" from the perspective of three keyword-linked fragments from Marx's Grundrisse, beginning with Marx's proposition that "[t]he whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time." My presentation is a continuation of research that began with "The Ambiguity of Disposable Time: The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties at Two Hundred." The session I will be presenting in starts at 12:00 pm. U.K. time or 4:00 am PST (video will be available subsequently on YouTube). To register for this session follow this link.

 

My conference presentation condense and builds on the analysis I have presented on EconoSpeak, in my series on series of posts on socially necessary labour time, my 10,000 word manuscript reworking that material and my current series of posts on EconoSpeak on the three fragments on machines.

"Constitutional Sheriffs" and "Posse Comitatus"

 In the nid-1970s when I was finishing my PhD diss and also working for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources in its Water Quality Bureau, where I was mostly dealing with sewer systems issues, the Wisconsin branch of the Posse Comitatus was attacking and "arresting" individuals from my department who were trying to enforce limits on fishing of certain fish in certain lakes in Northern Wisconsin, some of these involving local Native American rights to fish some of these species in these lakes. 

In 1878, just after President Hayes removed most of the Union troops from the South at the end of Reconstruction, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act, which put limits on the federal government dominating local government authorities. Not sure when the Posse Comitatus movement got going, but they were there in Wisconsin in the mid-1970s, The last time this decentralized group got attention was in 2012 when some of their followers were arrested for physically attacking some people.

But, while they may still exist in some shadow form, they have been clearly replaced by an organization formed in 2011, give or take a year, the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA). This group, with links to such far right wing groups as Oath Keepers, apparently has 10% of US sheriffs as members.

A fundamental point that both the older Posse Comitatus group, and this newer CSPOA group share, drawing on an extremist interpretation of the Jim Crow 1878 act, is that Sheriffs are the highest level of legal government. The federal and state governments are illegitimate and irrelevant. So, when a Sheriff arrests a Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources officer trying to enforce state rules on how many fish can be caught in a particular lake, well, they have no authority, and the local Sheriff can arrest them, and they did, even as, unsurprisingly, courts did not support their views of such matters.

There is a sharp contrast between county Sheriffs and city police chiefs. The former are usually elected, and have an average tenure of 11 years, with some states putting no limits on their campaign financing. Jefferson Parish in Louisiana Sheriff, Harry Lee, who held his position for over 30 years, declared (according to WaPo, 11/2/21) that he was "the closest thing to being to being a king in the U.S." OTOH, police chiefs are appointed, and their average tenure is a mere 3 years.

He is now out of power, and not in jail because Donald Trump pardoned him, is Joe Arpaio, former longtime Sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona, which includes the now fifth largest city in the US, Phoenix. He was in office from 1993 to 2017. He eventually got into legal trouble for the camps he interned illegal immigrants in, widely described as being "concentration camps." Yes, these Sheriffs have great power. But then he supported Trump's old lie that Obsma was not born in the US. He still holds that view, and Trump pardoned him.

Bottom line here is that now these people are calling themselves "Constitutional Sheriffs," and some of them participated in the 1/6/21 insurrection. They view themselves as superior to both state and fedreal governments, and they increasingly support far right views of the world.

Barkley Rosser

Capital itself is the moving contradiction

 The phrase quoted in the title is probably the most well-known in the Grundrisse. It has been cited in books and journal articles at least a hundred times, an order of magnitude more frequently that the alternative translation found in the collected works, "capital itself is a contradiction-in-process," It is also a centerpiece of Moishe Postone's Time, Labor and Social Domination, where Postone quotes the sentence that contains it twice, in full: 

Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition -- question of life or death -- for the necessary.

When I read that quotation a little over 22 years ago, I was awestruck. I rushed to find a copy of the Grundrisse to savor the sentence in context and discovered a citation of The Source and Remedy at the end of Marx's paragraph. I was fortunate to live in a big city with a big university library where I could ferret out a microfilm copy of the 1821 pamphlet Marx had allegedly "rescued from its oblivion." 

Actually, as I explained in "The Ambivalence of Disposable Time," the pamphlet was rescued by the Goldsmiths’-Kress Library of Economic Literature, with a big assist from Cambridge professor Herbert Foxwell, I should add.

Postone's interpretation of the passage from the Grundrisse was riveting and I feel a bit sheepish about taking issue with it all these years later. My criticism may sound like nit-picking but hear me out. Postone had interpreted, "increase it in the superfluous form" to mean increase superfluous labour time. His interpretation is consistent with how it was translated in the collected works version. But the more ambiguous "in the superfluous form" in the Penguin translation is more consistent with Marx's original German.

Am I splitting hairs? Not really. The superfluous form leaves open the possibility that the opposite of "labour time in the necessary form" could be either superfluous labour time or superfluous not-labour time (or both simultaneously). What motivated my variant interpretation was Marx's elaboration of the contradiction of the superfluous and the necessary in what I call the first two fragments on machines on pages 397-401 and 608-610 of the Penguin edition.

My interpretation is consistent with the emphasis that Marx gave to the question of surplus population and surplus capital in those two earlier fragments, as well as in his discussions in Capital of the general law of capitalist accumulation and the internal contradictions of the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

Postone's interpretation, I believe, lends itself to a more optimistic, Utopian cast to the cataclysmic "blowing up" of the foundation of "the social individual":

Forces of production and social relations - two different sides of the development of the social individual - appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high.

To be sure, Marx insisted on the necessity of a social revolution to positively move beyond the contradictions of capitalism. But there is a darker possibility, especially in light of the first and second fragments on machines. 

Postone's student, Fabian Arzuaga explored this grim scenario in his essay, "Socially necessary superfluity: Adorno and Marx on the crises of labor and the individual" that I mentioned in an earlier post. Especially relevant is his section, "Producing 'socially unnecessary' human beings" although his whole discussion of Adorno's thesis of the "liquidation of the individual" is also horrifying in light of our contemporary malaise of cult fanaticism.

This is not to say I deny the emancipatory potential. It is only that I do not see it as following "logically" from Marx's analysis of the development of the contradictions inherent in capitalism. Not only will the revolution not be televised, it will not be endogenous.

To be continued...

GOP Does Well As Dow Jones Average Crosses Major MIlestone Of 36,000

 I am posting before the election results of Nov. 2, 2021 are fully in, but it looks that the GOP candidates will win in Virginia, where Biden beat Trump by 10 points a year ago for the statewide races, with GOP making gains in the House of Delegates that may switch its control to them, although that remains more up in the air. Also in New Jersey, where it was presumed that the Dem incumbent would easily win, the race is too close to call and he might lose.  In short, the GOP is doing very well.

Ironically, the stock market has hit new all time highs, with the Dow Jones Industrial average crossing the 36,000 milestone to reach 36,052.  This was the mark that in 1999 in a famous book by James Glassman and Kevin Hassett proclaimed would be reached within a year or so, that time being in the midst of the dot com boom that would crash the next year. So it took until now to reach it. Funny thing is that a year ago Trump forecast that if Biden won, the stock market would crash. Well it has risen, but it has not helped the Dems.  But then, we have long known that most voters really are not affected that much by it.

As it is, at least in Virginia the focus and noise has been all about rising gasoline prices, which have been rising sharply in the last two weeks.  Unemployment may be down and the stock market is high, but along with all the weird shortages, all the noise is that Biden has somehow hurt the economy because of the inflation, even though looking at month to month rares, inflation is decelerating.  Good chances by next year's election inflation will be much more clearly under control, but now in Virginia, voters do not see it.

And there is also all the hysteria about critical race theory and a high school boy who also in the last two weeks was found guilty in Northern Virginia of sexually assaulting two different girls in girls bathrooms in two different high schools while wearing a skirt. Supposedly there has been something like a switch of 39% by white women from Dems to GOP in this race from 2020.

At this point I still hope that the VA House of Delegates might still hold for the Dems, although I am not optimistic, and that Dem Murphy in New Jersey wins, maybe more likely. At least in VA, the State Senate remains in Dem control as it was not up for reelection.

Barkley Rosser

Theft of alien labour time is a miserable foundation

In the early 1980s, I was riding home from work on a bus and looked out the window at a Toyota pickup truck alongside. I was overwhelmed by the realization that I could never in my life make such an object by hand, even if I had a well-supplied metal workshop. From that perspective, how could I hope to own such an item? I did own a Volkswagen Rabbit but somehow the pickup truck made more of an impression on me at the time.

I was experiencing a severe burnout from work in those days that manifested itself in unbearable fatigue. I would sleep for two days and feel I could go into work and make it through the day. I would have to go home by 11:00 A.M. I had a "cushy" government job that was pointless and it was all too cushioned with paychecks and benefits for me to think of throwing it away and stepping out into the void.

The epiphany of the Toyota pickup convinced me that my mental health was worth more to me than the paycheck. After a hot fudge sundae quitting celebration and a week or two at the beach, my draining fatigue began to lift. 

That is how I imagine the miserable foundation that the "theft" of my labour time laid down. It hardly seemed to me that what I "produced" during forty hours behind a desk had much value worth stealing. A cynic might point out that real production takes place in the private sector and government jobs are not productive. But that is just the point. There wouldn't be bullshit jobs if there wasn't a surplus population needing to be pacified.

Forty years later, I am still living beyond my means, especially taking into account the carbon dioxide footprint that I will never be required to pay for. A miserable foundation, indeed. Many people are not interested in what Marx wrote because they can't swallow the labour theory of value. I have news for them. Marx was not a big fan of the labour theory of value. He called it a miserable foundation. 

What does the labour theory of value have to do with the price of a house in Vancouver anyway? Well, I will tell you. 

Forty years ago, somebody with a decent income or a two-earner couple with average incomes could afford to buy a house in Vancouver. Today, you can only buy a house if you already own a house. There is no "ground floor" to get in on. The reason is neo-liberal labour policy. How does the government enable business to cut real wages without cutting real wages? Asset inflation. Let's not call it asset inflation, though. Let's call it "wealth effects" and the "ownership society." 

A terrible, no good, miserable foundation.

(Hence the correctness of the theory of surplus population and surplus capital...)

Marx mentioned, "the theory of surplus population and surplus capital," parenthetically, in the Grundrisse and "surplus population and surplus capital" in his 1862-63 draft of Capital. Although it isn't certain what theory exactly he was referring to, the phrase reappears, in reverse order, in chapter 15, section 3 of volume III of Capital, "Surplus Capital alongside Surplus Population," indicating internal contradictions of the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. 

Don't you just hate it when your tendency has internal contradictions? It would perhaps clear up a lot of misunderstanding of Marx's analysis that the law (of the tendency the rate of profit to fall) resides in the rarified air of extreme abstraction. It simply sets the stage for the meat and bones of his theory, which is precisely the counteracting influences and the internal contradictions of the law, without which the whole process of capitalist production would soon collapse. Got that? Marx didn't say capitalism would soon collapse; he tried to explain why it didn't.

Contrary to received opinion, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall was not Marx's invention or discovery. Much of his discussion of the tendency elsewhere in the Grundrisse is aimed at clearing up confusions about the tendency among earlier writers such as Ricardo, Carey and Bastiat (he criticized Bastiat for assuming that the fall in the rate of profit resulted from a rise in wages). In the three fragments on machines, which I am concerned with here, Marx was almost exclusively focused on the internal contradictions and counteracting influences. Case in point: the [socially necessary labour time] "required for the production of an object is indeed reduced to a minimum, but only in order to realize a maximum of labour in the maximum number of such objects." So what is it? Reducing labour time to a minimum or realizing a maximum of labour? It's both! That's why it's a contradiction.

Nobody disputes that productivity is increased by the introduction of more machines of the latest technology. Nobody disputes that those machines cost money. Nobody disputes that the cost per unit is reduced with more mechanization. The mainstream bromide is that "technology creates more jobs than it destroys." This is no doubt true but irrelevant. 

The motive for introducing those machines is to increase the proportion of surplus labour being produced for each unit of necessary labour that has to be paid for. It is a compelling motive because higher relative surplus value is needed to offset the lower profit rate resulting from a higher ratio of constant capital to variable capital, what Marx would later call the "organic composition of capital."

It's a vicious cycle but the bottom line is that less of the total revenue must go to labour so that more is available to fund capital investment. During the boom, a relative surplus population is already latent in those workers producing surplus capital, which cannot find profitable opportunities for productive investment and thus is diverted to speculation and "credit swindles," and in workers producing an overflow of consumption goods for consumers who won't have the purchasing power to buy them when the dust settles.

None of this would be any news to Maynard Keynes, Michal Kalecki, Hyman Minsky, or Kenneth Galbraith. With the possible exception of Kalecki, they thought they had a solution to the problem. So did Marx. The reduction of necessary labour time to a minimum, in spite of capital's intention "will redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition of its emancipation." It is magical thinking akin to Keynes's pseudo-Shakespearian prattling that "we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not." Appearance may very well be deceiving but that's no assurance that foul is fair or even useful.

To be continued...

A. Liinwood Holton, Jr. RIP

 Abner Linwood Holton, Jr. has just died at age 98 at his home in Kilmarnock, Virginia, near Richmond. There is a certain irony in this as a Republican, Glenn Youngkin, is likely to be elected governor of the state in three days, and Holton was the first Republican to be elected to that position since Reconstruction, which ha managed to do in 1970.  He defeated the pro-segregation Byrd Machine that had run the Democrats and the state since the 1930s.  That machine had supported massive resistance to integrating schools in Virginia after the 1954 SCOTUS Brown vs. Board of Education ruling that mandated such integration. Holton, a supporter of Eisenhower for president in the 1950s, would end that mass resistance, implement a clean water initiative, and introduced various other essentially progressive reforms, relying on the support of more moderate Dems in the legislature to do all this.

As it was, after George McGovern ran as the Dem nominee for president in 1972 during Holton's term, the Byrd Machine would largely move into the GOP, and Holton would be succeeded by Mills Godwin as govenor, who had preceded him as a Democrat, but succeeded him as a Republican.  Holton's obituary noted that the Virginia GOP has drifted rightwards ever since he left office. 

Coming from a coal mining business family in far southwestern Virginia and a WW II veteran, Holton was a classic moderate "Mountain Valley" Republican.  His move to integrate schools would be symbolized by him personally walking one of his daughters into a majority Black school in Richmond while he was governor.  Another of his daughters, Anne, would marry current Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), who was Hillary Clinton's running mate in 2016, and Holton supported him and Clinton also. 

A poll out two days ago has Youngkin leading former Dem governor Terry McAuliffe 53-45%, and I think that Youngkin will win solidly this coming Tuesday, as I noted in a recent post here, and may also sweep the other top positions, with the GOP retaking control of the House of Delegates, while the State Senate remains in Dem control, not up for reelection right now, fortunately.  It seems that some people die at moments of their own choosing, and it may be that Holton has passed before having to see this outcome, even as he was the first GOP governor in the state for nearly a century.  But, as we all know, the Republican Party stopped being the party of Abraham Lincoln some time ago, and in this age has been taken over by RINOs accusing people like Holton of being such.  Perhaps he simply did not wish to see the triumph of a new and even worse version of this breed taking power in the state, people whom old Harry Flood Byrd would probably approve of with pleasure.

Barkley Rosser

"Lump" and "labor" are two words...

From: Tom Walker

Sent: October 27, 2021 3:49 PM

To: scott.a.wolla@stls.frb.org

Subject: Lump of labor fallacy

Dear Scott,

I just came across your article, “Examining the Lump of Labor Fallacy Using a Simple Economic Model,” from November of last year on the St. Louis Fed website. I have done quite a bit of research on this topic and I was dismayed to see the old canard of a fallacy recycled without any attention to the documentation refuting the perennial fallacy claims.

You state that “the ‘lump of labor’ fallacy is evident in many people’s thinking” but you present no evidence. Do you have any evidence? I suspect you don’t. Did you look for evidence? Or is “economic education” a matter of taking inference for evidence?

Instead of evidence, you insinuate that anyone who has “felt threatened by new technology or the entrance of new people into the labor force” believes the fallacy. In case your reader has overlooked that inference, you then make your point explicit with the statement, “[t]hese fears are rooted in a mistaken zero-sum view of the economy...”

I could eviscerate your ‘page one’ propaganda piece point-by-point but presumably you were simply making an “easy to read” version of what you had been taught and had never really thought about or questioned. Instead I am attaching two of my articles that examine the fallacy claim in historical context in hopes of furthering your economic education. I would be very interested to hear your response to the points I raise about the alleged fallacy in these publications.

Best wishes,

Tom Walker

PS: to quote FRB senior advisor Jeremy Rudd, "I leave aside the deeper concern that the primary role of mainstream economics in our society is to provide an apologetics for a criminally oppressive, unsustainable, and unjust social order"*

À la recherche du socially necessary labour temps perdu

How many Trained Marxists™ know there is no "socially necessary labour time" in the Grundrisse? I didn't. When researching the provenance of the term, I was surprised to discover that it was present in neither the Grundrisse nor Marx's Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. The latter book had a lot of approximations, though, and a pithy disclaimer about what Marx meant -- and didn't mean -- when referring to categories of social labour:

From the analysis of exchange-value it follows that the conditions of labour which creates exchange-value are social categories of labour or categories of social labour, social however not in the general sense but in the particular sense, denoting a specific type of society.

The specific type of society Marx had in mind was, of course, capitalism. The exercise of searching for terminology that wasn't there focused my attention on passages that otherwise might appear more than a bit obscure. Back in July, I identified the section titled "Necessary labour. Surplus labour. Surplus population. Surplus capital." as "the topsy-turvy concept of socially necessary labour time in embryo!"

A month later I noticed that Engels, in discussing the analytical importance of socially necessary labour time, had stated it, "already contains in embryo the whole capitalist form of production, the antagonism between capitalists and wage-workers, the industrial reserve army, crises." It's a chicken and egg question as to which embryo contains the other in embryo.

Whenever I make an earth-shattering, original discovery, I am prudently suspicious that I have only learned something I hadn't known was common knowledge in the specialized literature. It turns out that only a handful of writers have touched on the connection between Marx's category of socially necessary labour time and the fragment on surplus population and surplus capital. Fabian Arzuaga's "Socially necessary superfluity: Adorno and Marx on the crises of labor and the individual" contains the most extensive discussion of the topic. I highly recommend.

Is Virginia 2021 Election Going To Look More Like 1980, 1994, 2010 Or None Of The Above?

 In Virginia there is an election for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, and the whole House of Delgates, while the State Senate with a slight Dem majority is not up for election, is a week from today on Nov. 2, although early voting has been going on for some time.  The latest polls show a dead heat for governor between Dem Terry McAuliffe, who served previously to the current Dem governor, Ralph Northam, and "outsider GOP businessman, Glenn Youngkin, 46%-46%.  House of Delegated currently 55-45 Dem-GOP, but Dems only took majority in 2019, and it would take only six seats to switch back to switch back party control of it.  I fear the energy is on the GOP side and that as in 1980, 1994, and 2010, the GOP will do better than expected with a bigger turnout than reportedly apathetic and complacent Dems. I fear a combination of what went down in those three years, plus some new local bad stuff.  While it is not all of it, part of what is going on is a drag from declining support for Biden at the national level.

The 1980 comparison looks more like relevant to the national issues: many are now comparing Biden to Jimmy Carter, who may be "beloved" now, but got clobbered by Reagan, with the Dems unexpectedly losing the Senate, with some longstanding Dem senators losing unexpectedly, such as George McGovern of SD and Gaylord Nelson of WI, who had founded Earth Day ten years earlier. Carter had lost standing on foreign policy with the Iran hostage crisis and also on the economy with rising inflation associated with surging oil prices.  Well, Biden has taken a big hit on the messiness of the US exit from Afghanistan, even if it was the right thing to do, although he does not seem to be hurting for his failure to renew the Iran nuclear deal, which I consider to be something much worse.  And indeed inflation is up, with oil and gasoline prices a major part of it, with consumers always paying much more attention to gasoline and food prices (which are also up) than justified by the percentage of spending they take up.  But people see them and feel them, and I hear people especially complaining about gasoline prices, which have been especially shooting up just in the last couple of weeks.

Curiously in other ways the economy is looking pretty good. The unemployment rate in Virginia is down to 3.8%, with only two other periods briefly seeing lower than that, right around 2000 and just before the pandemic hit at end of 2019 beginning of 2020. People are quitting jobs to look for others, the state's budget is in surplus, the Dow Industrial stock average just hit another record high.  But somehow an inflation rate of 5% after years at 2% has the economy as Number One issue in VA, with people unhappy about it, this not helping McAuliffe at all.

The comparison with 1994 is less obvious, although one comparison regards lying about the economy by the GOP.  Newt Gingrich and crew had unanimously opposed the Clinton tax increase, and they ran on it, predicting that it would bring about a recession.  Of course there was no recession, although I have never to this day heard Gingrich or any of them admit that, or to the extent they do they claim the only reason there was no recession was because they took control of the House of Representatives in that 94 election.

As it is Youngkin ads mentioning the economy, while accurately noting the high gasoline prices and increased inflation also add false claims that the economy is losing jobs and the budget is in deficit.  They are not being seriously or effectively challenged on these false claims.

Of these three, although there are these apparent similarities between Carter and Biden, I think the 2010 election offers closer comparisons, and also involve specifically Virginia issues, although some of these could go national in 2022 or even 24, and the GOP hopes so if they bring victory next week here.  The pandemic issue is probably a wash and has slipped to third place, with the economy in second place.  It is what has moved into second place that has me bothered and worried: education.

The big issue in 2010, although there was a subtext of anti-Obama racism, was "Obamacare," the ACA. We then saw the Tea Party showing up at town hall and county board meeting and local meetings by Congressional reps engaging in disruptions and complaining about all sorts of supposedly terrible things about ACA, all of which were just plain false. One of these was the ludicrous "death panels." claim.  This was so off the wall it is not even worth discussing other than to note it is a long time since anybody has mentioned that. None of those who were yelling and screaming about that then has a word to say about it now, when indeed ACa has become quite popular as people figured it out. It was always known the pieces of it were individually popular, but putting it all together and calling it "Obamacare," well, then it was unpopular. The other big item regarding it was simply the charge that it was "socialism" or "bringing socialized medicine," which was always absurd given that it was originally a proposal that came out of GOP think tanks like the Heritage Foundation to contrast with single payer.  Indeed, it was partly because of its supposed GOP support, with Romney putting a version of it into place in MA as governor, that he pushed it. But they all opposed it, like the GOP and tax increases in '94, then lied about it, and got away with it, taking Congress that year, both houses.

So the hothouse issue being wildly misinterpreted but has the GOP troops out in full frenzy while Dems wallow in thinking that Virginia has "become a Blue state," is indeed K-12 education and local school boards, with several issues showing up there.  As in 2010 with the Tea Party we have had groups of loud and disrupting people showing up at school board meetings, in many places repeatedly, and making various demands.  In contrast to 2010, some of these people have engaged in threatening the lives of school board members and harassing them at their homes.  AG Garland has suggested the FBI should investigate these death threats, but Youngkin ads suggest this is the FBI "suppressing free speech of parents." The issues complained about have included Criticial Race Theory (not taught in the schools, but it must be banned according to Youngkin), mask mandates, although Youngkin has not pushed on that one much, and then supposed dirty books in libraries, with Youngkin having an ad showing a mom complaining about such a book that upset her daughter without naming the book (which turns out out to be Toni Morrison's Beloved), and then keeping trans students out of bathrooms.  Polls show public support for mask mandates, but the CRT matter and this trans one seem to be getting mileage with female independent voters in the suburbs, the ultimate swing voters.

It does not help that there has just been a case of a "boy" who supposedly was wearing a skirt sexually assaulting a girl in a high school bathroom in Northern Virginia, with him being found guilty just today, with him apparently having done it at another school as well. Not clear he is actually trans, but the claim is he is "gender fluid," and the GOP and Youngkin are just running hard with this one, pounding it hard in ads.

Then we also have McAuliffe blundering in their second debate and saying "I oppose parents telling schools what to teach." As it is his statement was completely reasonable and defensible in context, but the Youngkin people have taken that statement and put it into the most frequently played ads.  It has gained traction by dominating the conversation and forcing McAuliffe to run ads defending his record on education.  This is dominating the discussion, not the good record on mandates and Covid of Gov. Northam, not how Youngkin resembles Trump, or how Youngkin opposes abortion, all of which a majority of Virginians aupposedly agree with him on. But nobody is paying attention.

And Youngkin is pulling off a delicate balancing act.  Despite separating himself a bit from hardline Trumpism, such as accepting that Biden won in 2020, much to Trump's annoyance, he has managed to retain the support of the Trumpist base, who are really keen on winning after losing control here and not winning a statewide election since 2009.  They are forgiving him for his minor indiscretions and all hot for him, worked up by all these cultural issues of race and homophobia, etc.  But he has also been managing to come off as at least a semi-moderate, the outsider businessman who can appeal to moderate suburban voters around Richmond (perhaps the bottom line key) as well as in Northern Virginia, especially those independent female voters who somehow seem to be taken by this education push, even if the details of all that are as ridiculous as the Tea Party whines about ACA in 2010. So, I am worried.

Barkley Rosser

Does economic growth cause unemployment?

Usually, a question in the title of an article is a teaser and the answer is almost always "no." Not in this case. The standard argument is that economic growth is necessary to create jobs and that unemployment results from the slowing or interruption of growth.

Even advocates of degrowth or a steady-state economy assume a positive connection between growth and employment. Advocates prescribe reduction of working time as a means to mitigate job losses that would otherwise result from productivity gains.

In chapter 25 of Capital, volume one, however, Marx claimed that the same factors that spur economic growth also stimulate an expansion of the population supplying labour power and the "industrial reserve army." He proclaimed the growth of the surplus population relative to employed labour to be, "the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation."

That, of course, was just an assertion. Defenders of the conventional view argue that Marx either didn't explain a mechanism for his "absolute general law" or if he did it was either wrong or incoherent.

I don't want to pretend expertise on whether Marx's theory stands up to rigorous critique. I sort of suspect every economic theory has a crack in it. That's how the light gets in. 

What I want to do instead is suggest that there was a more compact version of Marx's surplus population argument in the Grundrisse that hasn't been refuted because it has mostly gone unnoticed.

This argument is developed in the "three fragments on machines" that I have mentioned several times, including my recent post, Wealth is leisure. Leisure, wealth. It is a macro-economic argument based largely on Dilke's in The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties with one fundamental modification: the highlighting of unemployment as both a condition and a result of capitalist accumulation.

Marx's subtle refashioning of disposable time into the precondition of the accumulation of wealth set the stage for that transformation. Marx's distinction between necessary labour and disposable time is trans-historical. It applies to all societies at all times -- not to mention the plant and animal kingdoms. Simply put, as a rule people don't automatically stop working the minute their basic needs are met.

Capitalism's distinctive contribution to that natural dynamic is to categorize the products of the additional time spent working as tribute due to the owner of the means of production. Never mind whether that is fair or just. It is a fact.

Given that the time spent working beyond what is necessary for the workers' subsistence accrues to capital, the incentive is for capital to either extend the working day or reduce the time -- or both -- required to produce the workers' subsistence.

The amount of surplus labour (disposable time) that could be produced by that method would be very limited if there was only a "certain quantity of work to be done" or a certain number of workers to do the work. Therefore it is imperative for the expansion of capital to expand the population of workers by drawing more of them into the labour force. That is, capital creates more surplus labour by creating more necessary labour and the means of subsistence for those workers (because the additional workers also need to eat, etc.).

Where does the surplus population ("which is useless until such time as capital can utilize it") come in? I will expand on this point in future posts. It is a simple concept but a difficult one to grasp. What capital does in its relentless pursuit of "the superfluous" (surplus labour, surplus value, disposable time) is invert the relationship between the necessary and the superfluous. 

In this upside down relationship, the performance and realization of surplus labour becomes a condition for the performance of necessary labour. Labour necessary for subsistence can only be performed if it produces a surplus for capital. "The relation between necessary and surplus labour, as it is posited by capital, turns into its opposite." The worker doesn't get any dinner until capital eats the dessert.

Why is that so difficult to grasp? I suspect what happens is that 'common sense' rejects what appears to be an irrational conclusion: "If everybody worked, there would be more total output and if capital simply received the same proportion of a larger output, it would have more -- right? So Marx must be wrong." 

The problem with the 'common sense' rejection of Marx's surplus population argument is the unwarranted assumption that capital would get the same proportion -- or any proportion at -- of the additional output. The 'common sense,' 'rational' objection is simply illogical. It would contradict the premise that what capital receives is the surplus above what is necessary. 

But there is still much more to be said.

No Covid-19d-19 Here Or in North Korea: Turkmenistan

Yes, Turkmenistan is among the few nations on the planet claiming to have not had a single case of Covid-19, along with the DPRK, aka "North Korea."  The October 16 Economist reports, after noting the arrest of Nurgeldi Halykov, who reported that the British ambassador got it, who was, of course, arrested:

"Social-media networks and news websites are blocked. Police surveil mobile phones that can circumvent such censorship, Turkemenistanis cannot even access Zoom."

Barkley Rosser

Wealth is leisure. Leisure, wealth.

The three quotes above are from, respectively: 1. William Godwin 2. Charles Wentworth Dilke 3. Karl Marx. There was a very pronounced influence of Godwin on Dilke and of Dilke on Marx (hence indirectly of Godwin on Marx). My research suggests that viewing Marx's work from the perspective of Dilke's major influence reveals both hidden strengths and weaknesses in Marx's critique of political economy. 

The yellowed backgrounds are the title pages of Godwin's Enquirer (1797), Dilke's Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties (1821), and a page from Marx's 1857-58 manuscripts, subsequently published as the Grundrisse. The difficulty of reading the background is my metaphor for the palimpsest of the successive generations of the text about wealth being leisure/disposable time. One of the conceptual problems we face is that the connotation of "leisure" has been drained of its original content of including -- in fact enabling -- culture, science and art.

What may not be immediately apparent in these excerpts is that Godwin and Dilke treated leisure as the fruit of industry and productivity. Marx explicitly viewed disposable time as the precondition of industrial expansion, as well as an outcome of that expansion.

In three "fragments on machines" from the Grundrisse, Marx -- or at least my idiosyncratic version of Marx -- developed both the dark side and the emancipatory potential of the expansion of disposable time. For Marx, disposable time was truly ambivalent because the compulsion of capital is not only to expand disposable time but also to convert it into surplus value alienated from its producers.

Furthermore, the creation of surplus value becomes a condition for the employment of labour. To make a living, workers must meet a 'means test' that their labour generates surplus value for the employer. This is a condition that depends on the availability of fixed capital, raw materials and markets for the product of their work -- all of which requirements workers have no control over.

Those requirements are also, provisionally, beyond the reach of the individual capitalist, who is thus compelled to actively pursue the conditions that will facilitate the creation of surplus value. The individual capitalist does this by improving productivity through technological improvement and thereby capturing a more profitable market share.

The pursuit of what Marx called relative surplus value both presupposes and perpetuates a reservoir of untapped labour power. Some of that additional labour power comes from expanding the hours of currently employed workers. This is why the average weekly hours data from the BLS can serve as an index of economic expansion. More "reserved" labour power is available from the ranks of the unemployed. 

Note the italicized word, available. It is a synonym for one of the meanings of disposable. Unemployed workers who are available for work are a source of disposable labour time -- thus a "disposable industrial reserve."

In the three fragments on machines, Marx repeatedly contrasted necessary labour time with "the superfluous." Sometimes the latter explicitly refers to superfluous labour time as a synonym for surplus labour time (producing surplus value). More often the noun is absent or ambiguous. The ambiguity, I suspect, was intentional. What is superfluous could refer to the labour time spent to create surplus value; it could refer to excess labour time resulting in overproduction; or it could refer to superfluous labour capacity, an unemployed surplus population. In actuality, it refers to all three at various stages of an industrial cycle of boom and bust.

'Superfluous' is sort of a synonym for 'disposable' but with more of a connotation of being out of control, chaotic, and potentially menacing. Disposable is more than enough. Superfluous is too much. Available is just the right amount, Goldilocks.

Readers familiar with Marx's Capital may have noticed that the analysis from the three fragments I have summarized here subsequently found homes in chapters 10 and 25 of volume one, "The Working Day" and "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation" and chapter 15 of volume three, "Internal Contradictions of the Law [of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall]." In journalism it is called "burying the lede."

The point is, however, that there is nothing "natural" or "inevitable" about the appropriation by capital of disposable time in the form of surplus value. Nor is there anything natural or inevitable in the production and use by capital of a surplus population offering disposable labour time as a lever to ensure that the supply and demand for labour is perpetually favorable to capital. 

The point is, finally, that the "antithetical existence" of disposable time in the form of surplus labour and surplus labour capacity is neither natural nor inevitable but in order to overcome the contradictions manifest in this antithesis, "the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour."

Once they have done so - and disposable time thereby ceases to have an antithetical existence - then, on one side, necessary labour time will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all.