Misunderstanding of Climate Change and Why it Matters: The Energy Price Spike

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered a spike in oil and gas prices worldwide.  A natural response is for countries with untapped reserves to expand production as quickly as possible, but doesn’t this contradict the pledges they have also made to combat climate change?  This issue is covered at some length in a New York Times article today, and the entire discussion—the arguments used by government officials and energy experts and the assumptions of the journalists who quote them—is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how atmospheric carbon causes global warming.

The claims and counterclaims in the article are about whether short term increases in carbon emissions will make it easier or hard to reach a net zero target decades into the future.  That would be the right question to ask if there is an on-off climate switch based on what happens in 2050 or some other year, but there isn’t.

The severity of climate impacts will be determined by the accumulation of carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) in the atmosphere; in economic terms, it’s a stock, not a flow, externality.  The true test of our response to the climate crisis is whether we can keep this accumulation within a reasonable limit.  That’s the physics and chemistry of the greenhouse effect, not a political opinion.  If we emit more this year, no matter what the reason (like Ukraine), the budget constraint requires us to emit that much less in future years.  Given that stringent policies are not in place anywhere on planet Earth, and it is unclear whether there is political capacity to bring them about, there is no question at all about the effect of increased fossil fuel production, this year or any other, on climate outcomes.

It’s amazing how removed current political and media chatter is from the basics of climate science.

The Iran Nuclear Deal And The Ukraine Invasion

 At New Year's I disagreed with forecasts made by David Ignatius that Putin would fully invade Ukraine and that the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran would be revived. I have been proven wrong on the first matter already. As of a week or more ago it looked like I would be about the second as well as reports had a revived deal nearly made, which I would like to see.

But now it looks like it may fall victim to the Ukraine invasion. In particular Russia is now demanding that any deal not involve any enforcement of any economic sanctions on Russia. Apparently Iranian leaders are unhappy about this extraneous demand, and the deal may not happen.  However, apparently it may not be necessary for Russia to sign for it to legally go into force.  The main complication would be that Russia is where excess enriched uranium from Iran is supposed to go, so Russia could scuttle implementation, even if the deal is legally reinvigorated.

One reason Putin may wish to do this involves oil prices.  Getting the deal back in place would relax sanctions on Iran and allow it to export more oil. This would ease the world price of oil. As of now, Putin would prefer to have that price as high as possible both to damage his enemies economically as well as to get as much income as he can from the oil he is able to export, given that Russia's oil is now banned from certain markets.

Barkley Rosser

Selling Mrs. Conspicuous Consumption

In Selling Mrs. Consumer, Christine Frederick shilled for progressive obsolescence, which had been advocated the previous year in an article by her husband, J. George Frederick. Or at least that is the way it seemed to her biographer, Janice Rutherford, who wrote, "she now took up and elaborated upon his theme, even using the same words..." 

Even using the same words?! It is possible that Mrs. Frederick copied passages from her husband's article. It is also possible that her husband, editor, and publisher, Mr. Frederick, wrote the chapter on progressive obsolescence for Mrs. Frederick's book. It's possible he wrote other chapters and made strategic additions here and there throughout the book. I mean, seriously?

There is another odd moment in Selling Mrs. Consumer that could possibly be from the pen of J. George Frederick. In chapter 13, the author makes the odd observation that "[c]ooking in general is thus no longer a means of "conspicuous consumption," to use Veblen's excellent phrase [emphasis added]." Rutherford described the peculiar comment as "misunderstanding his [Veblen's] indictment of the middle class's emulation of the wealthy." The book went on, however, to explain:

Emulation is a natural and a persisting human quality in all of us. The display of expensive goods or unusual possessions testifies to the economic distinction and pride of the owner or person making the display. Thus, the old time housewife making a display of her cooking skill, her elaborate menu, her rich dishes, did so as a means of expressing the "conspicuous consumption" of her particular family and herself as contrasted with the persons or family or woman to whom she was making the display. We have "conspicuous consumption" today, but its objects have changed, thus we have or make displays in the kind and elaborateness of the clothes we wear, in the furniture or jewels or furs we possess, and above all, in the car we drive and the home we occupy, or our way of life and living.

There is no "misunderstanding" here. Frederick -- whether Mr. or Mrs. -- simply omitted the implicit stigma of Veblen's "indictment." It's natural and persistent, so why should it be treated like a crime? Given Veblen's deadpan, matter-of-fact delivery, who is to say that his description was unequivocally an "indictment"? 

Why do I suspect George may have contributed the remarks on conspicuous consumption? In 1933, Frederick edited the volume, For and Against Technocracy: A Symposium. The Technocracy movement of the 1930s was steeped in the influence of Veblen. Frederick also edited volumes on The New Deal and on planning. He was reported interested in Joseph Schumpeter's idea of creative destruction, which he likened to his own views on progressive obsolescence. 

An apologetic interpretation of The Theory of the Leisure Class is conceivable, albeit eccentric. While pondering this matter, it came to my attention that Veblen used the word "obsolescence" nine times in The Theory of The Leisure Class. He used the word "obsolete" eight times, and "obsolescent" 16 times. 

Prior to 1900, most journal articles that use all three of those terms are either dealing with animal species or with features of language. Even the term "obsolescence," by itself, mostly refers to biological or medical phenomena. Of 95 instances of "obsolescence" prior to 1905 in JSTOR, 3 or 4 of them referred to other than biological, medical, or lexical matters. 

Veblen's contemporaries and influences -- Herbert Spencer, Henry George, William Graham Sumner, John Bates Clark, for example -- did not use the term. Veblen used "obsolescence" in The Theory of the Leisure Class, The Engineers and the Price System, The Theory of Business Enterprise, The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts, and An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace. It would be fair to conclude that Veblen popularized obsolescence as a sociological or economic concept.

In fact, Veblen theory of institutional evolution is grounded in the inherent obsolescence of contemporary social institutions:

Institutions are products of the past process, are adapted to past circumstances, and are therefore never in full accord with the requirements of the present. In the nature of the case, this process of selective adaptation can never catch up with the progressively changing situation in which the community finds itself at any given time; for the environment, the situation, the exigencies of life which enforce the adaptation and exercise the selection, change from day to day; and each successive situation of the community in its turn tends to obsolescence as soon as it has been established [emphasis added]. When a step in the development has been taken, this step itself constitutes a change of situation which requires a new adaptation; it becomes the point of departure for a new step in the adjustment, and so on interminably. 

Incidentally, Theodor Adorno cited the above passage in his 1941 essay, "Veblen's Attack on Culture." It would be fascinating to assess Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man from the perspective of Adorno's critique of Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (Adorno's essay is anthologized in Prisms). Presumably, Adorno was unaware of the Fredericks's cynical appropriation of progressive obsolescence and conspicuous consumption but he did acknowledge the assimilation of Veblen's theories, including the adoption by journalists of his "striking terminology":

One sees here the objective tendency to disarm a tiresome opponent by giving him a warm reception. Veblen's thought. however, is not completely out of harmony with such a reception: he is less an outsider than he seems at first sight.

What Adorno criticized as Veblen's one-sided (might one say "one-dimensional"?) debunking of culture thus lent itself to precisely the sort of cynical appropriation it received. One might say the same for Marcuse's "repressive tolerance" and today's hyped-up cult of the victims of cancel culture. I will address the latter issue in a future post, expanding on the arguments I presented three years ago in "Unreading Marcuse's Repressive Tolerance" and a few other related posts from that time.

A Footnote to IT WAS BEDLAM!

Lewis Corey was a pseudonym for Louis Fraina, one of the founders of the U.S. Communist Party. In a letter to Marcuse dated August 16, 1960, Raya Dunayevskaya replied at length to his request for references to the American literature dealing with the issues of "the transformation of the laboring class under the impact of rationalization, automation and particularly, the higher standard of living." This was in connection with his research for One-Dimensional Man.

In her reply, Dunayevskaya briefly mentioned -- and dismissed -- Fraida/Corey's The Decline of American Capitalism as "so-called Marxist" and "underconsumptionist":

If you take the economists, you also have a choice of the flip side so that Louis M. Hacker now touts The Triumph of Capitalism and while everyone is ashamed of such past as The Decline of American Capitalism which, like all so-called Marxist books from Corey to that Stalinist apologist who passes for the Marxist authority (even Joseph Schumpeter's monumental but quite lopsided or, as we say more appropriate in Jewish tsidreit [confused, distorted], work, History of Economic Analysis refers to him as such) Paul Sweezy are one and all underconsumptionist so that, whether you take the period of the 1930s when "all" were Marxists to one degree or another and some serious works were done, or you take now when nearly the only works against capitalism are issued by the Stalinists, there really is no genuine Marxist analysis of the American economy either historically, sociologically or as economic works.

I suspect Marcuse accepted Dunayevskaya's evaluation and didn't bother with The Decline of American Capitalism, which is unfortunate because Corey's "so-called Marxist" critique of 'progressive obsolescence' may have led him away from Veblen-by-proxy moralism of the Vance Packard account of planned obsolescence and his own presentation of the evils of planned obsolescence as self-evident.

 

IT WAS BEDLAM!

 From The Decline of American Capitalism by Lewis Corey (1934):

Capitalist production saves on labor and multiplies the productive forces. But two contradictions arise which constantly torment capitalist enterprise. Saving on labor decreases relative wages and limits the conditions of consumption. This sets in motion the forces of excess capacity, sharpened competition, and mounting distribution costs. These costs absorb much, if not most, of the saving on labor, and eventually strengthen the downward pressure on the rate of profit. The efforts of capitalist enterprise to escape these manifold contradictions created bedlam.

...

Bedlam reached its climax in the theory of “progressive obsolescence,” seriously considered by the tormented magnates of industry, finance, and advertising:

“If we are to have increasingly large-scale production there must likewise be increasingly large-scale consumption ... To get more money into the consumers hands with which to buy ... is a mere minor stopgap. There is, however, a far greater and more powerful lever available. I refer to a principle which, for want of a simpler term, I name progressive obsolescence. This means simply the more intensive spreading – among those people who now have buying surplus – of the belief in and practice of buying more goods on the basis of obsolescence in efficiency, economy, style or taste. We must induce people who can afford it to buy a greater variety of goods on the same principle that they now buy automobiles, radios and clothes, namely, buying goods not to wear out, but to trade in or discard after a short time when new or more attractive goods or models come out. The one salvation of American industry, which has a capacity for producing 80% or 100% more goods than are now consumed, is to foster the progressive obsolescence principle, which means buying for up-to-dateness, efficiency and style, buying for change, whim, fancy ... We must either use the fruits of our marvelous factories in this highly efficient ‘power’ age, or slow them down or shut them down.” -  J. George Frederick, "Is Progressive Obsolescence the Path Toward Increased Consumption," Advertising and Selling, September 5, 1928, pp.19-20.

This is economic and cultural lunacy, but a lunacy wholly in accord with the social relations of capitalist production. Capitalism must produce and sell goods, but from the standpoint of profit it makes no difference what goods or who buys them.

The lunacy of “progressive obsolescence” was matched by the desperation of proposals to restrict production (now one of the aims of state capitalism). Said the president of the Durham Duplex Razor Company:

“Manufacturing merchandise faster than it can be sold is one of the principal causes of the increase in competition ... We are turning out more merchandise than can be sold profitably ... Business health can only be preserved by maintaining an equilibrium between production and consumer sales.” [12]

Thus was rejected the “principle” that production and prosperity depend upon mass consumption:

• “Limit production,” with 2,500,000 workers already unemployed!
• “Maintain an equilibrium between production and consumer sales,” “induce those people who now have buying surplus ... to buy a greater variety of goods ... not to wear out, but for style, change, whim, fancy,” while 85,000,000 workers and farmers were living on or below subsistence levels!

The Blindfolded Scaffolding Begins to Unfold

We sense too little for the process of containment to unfold. Yet phenomenologists focus on early representations from the scaffolding for subsequent events in front of the now not-blindfolded infants. Infants looked at longer aspects of the psychoanalytic scaffolding: how reverie can be and is being a weird kind of blindfold. 

Since our dynamical, reciprocal exchanges unfold and lead to changes -- gaze-following behavior of another blindfolded person in which students were blindfolded and presented with a series of interstitial spaces that unfold between them. It follows that any better instructional scaffolding to students by tapping behavioral dynamics that unfold in the variations of student problem solving by being blindfolded to problem difficulty. As a member of the urban landscape and theatre, scaffolding seem temporarily to lead a group, or to lead a blindfolded person and the empowerment that brings there, in that underground space, the blindfolded audience a separate, private show begins to unfold.

While mothers showing adaptive scaffolding accounting for infants' feedback to the learner in the form of scaffolding and/or guidance from a coach or mentor, strengthening the scaffolding upon which we experience our lives to the target length, which is transferred to the blindfolded student (right) by repeated trials. Pat was thrown across those who watch all of the pieces unfold in time and space, and Robertson instructed her by asking how the story might unfold in today's world, and how it might examine events as they unfold (in particular, the scaffolding of using narrators was no longer of the children being blindfolded, experiencing the trauma again, or seeing it unfold before their eyes). Furthermore, we should unfold the time t and allow the As we can see from the above discussion, scaffolding not only, regular training, and blindfolded testing sessions whereas, the kind of concrete and scaffolding and crowds and cars, lorries,,, 

The inputs to here, one will also find most of the scaffolding with which Marx blindfolded but didn't know in which direction it was tracing how capitalist contradictions unfold is also the way that actual experiment participants are blindfolded, and the crucial role of mutual responsiveness in the scaffolding of our day-to-day life unfold: the existence and ubiquity of such qualities of experience that unfold during such go-along encounters that interact, one way or another, with the unfolding activity of our neural and bodily apparatus are apt (at best) for mere support and scaffolding by their best tools and technologies.

Ha ha. I could do this bit blindfolded.

In the concepts of scaffolding and the extended mind as long as the interaction process continues to unfold in this. Participants are located in separate rooms, blindfolded, given the novel’s postmodernist scaffolding as prime means. The story would unfold during the fragile interstices of a tense. I was still clinging to the scaffolding pole as he slaughtered. Then the blindfolded participants are left to sway in place. When they took off the blindfolds, men somehow had to hang on. Why transport a blindfolded victim on a bicycle? One of the fishermen volunteered to be blindfolded and toss their faces wrapped in cloth. That leaves them featureless, they seek beyond that wall of quattrocento blue a beauty that is a fiction of themselves -- and do not find it, blindfolded by love. 

Vietnam Stress is like running blindfolded with weights on. These of coping and transformation that began to unfold. Often the faulty scaffolding builds new scaffolding on which to develop not just these experiences in more depth, when it collapsed.

Fascist Traditionalism And Putin's Invasion Of Ukraine

 About a half century ago I urged by my oldest friend to read a book by Fritjof Schuon (1907-1998) written in 1953, The Transcendental Unity of Religions. The book's title basically tells its message: that while each religion has its own exoteric forms that differ from those of each other, there is a core to all of them that is the same, a transcendental unity of cosmic truth and fundamental reality. Schuon had links with the Shadhili Sufi order, the Sufis being the branch of Islam open to relations with other relations from a transcendental mystical perspective, somewhat echoing ideas present in the 19th century US transcendentalist movement that was also associated with progressive political ideas. 

I found this book most interesting, although I was not moved to get involved with the Sufi group that my friend and a couple of others were drawn to. My old friend and his wife really got into that group for several years, becoming quite conservative on social issues as well as some others. This led to a period of time when we did not have any dealings with each other. Eventually they became disillusioned with this group and moved on, eventually becoming Romanian Orthodox despite neither having any Romanian ancestry. They remain quite conservative in their views, although fortunately have not been fans of Donald Trump at all. We did renew our friendship and remain in communication. Schuon, originally from Switerland, eventually moved to the US, dying in Bloomington, IN, not too far from where my friends now live outside Indianapolis.

Schuon was strongly influenced by Frenchman Rene Guenon (1886-1961), who also would join the Shadhili Sufi sect and would move in 1930 to live in Egypt. He is viewed as the founder of a movement known as Traditionalism, also as the Perennial Philosophy. Raised as a Roman Catholic, Guenon initially was interested in Hinduism as well as Taoism before joining the Sufi sect. But like Schuon he argued that all religions share a common unifying of transcending beliefs.  Guenon argued that these ideas and beliefs dated from the pre-modern world and thus are Traditional. He favored ancient and medieval forms of art over those arising in the Renaissance and since. The Enlightenment and science and reason were seen as distracting from and degrading this primordial vision of transcendental unity.  Guenon's ideas were most influentially laid out in several books he wrote in the late 1920s such as The World in Crisis (1927) and Spritual Authority and Temporal Power (1929).  Guenon's work would become highly influential on much of modern academic religious studies.

While Guenon's work implicitly posed a highly conservative view of the world with its denigration of science and modernity, he avoided specific political movements, as did his follower, Schuon, and some others.  But one such follower did not engage in such avoidance, Giulio (Julius) Evola (1898-1974) of Italy. He would shift the religious focus to occultism and adopted an overtly anti-Semitic stance. His most famous books were Revolt Against the Modern World (1934) and Men in the Ruins (1953). Living in Italy under Mussolini he was initially too extreme even for the Fascists, but in the late 1930s after spending time in Germany with Himmler he would help move Mussolini to fully racist position more in line with that of Nazi Germany. He disapproved of the "populism" of both the Fascists and Nazis, arguing for the revival of an ancient caste system. He continued to formulate his philosophy of "radical traditionalism" and "magical idealism" after the war, adding a patriarchal element to his anti-democratic position.  He would be arrested in 1951 for active involvement in attempting to revive fascism. He advocated a trans-national "European Imperium." One of his current followers is sometime Trump adviser, Steve Bannon.

But for our purposes his most important follower and advocate of this Traditionalism is the Russian Aleksandr Dugin (b. 1962), who would lead the sociology department at Moscow State University for several years prior to 2014, when he was fired.  Dugin accepted the authoritarian and anti-Semitic elements of Traditionalism while shifting the religious focus to the Russian Orthodox Church. especially its Old Believer branch. He has developed his own version of the European Imperium as Eurasianism, which sees an even broader entity that rules all of Eurasia that is ruled by Russia. Dugin has laid this out in various works posing his own version of history that glorifies the history of the Kyivan Rus, especially in his most influential book, The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia (1997). This book, now widely read by members of the Russian general staff, has become a major influence on none other than Vladimir V. Putin, with Dugin a major adviser of his. Reportedly it was Dugin who convinced Putin to take over and annex Crimea in 2014, and has long advocated Russia conquering Ukraine as part of a broader campaign to establish his Eurasiatic entity.

We thus have a great irony. On the one hand V.V. Putin has declared that a major motive for his invasion of Ukraine is that he is supposedly going to "de-Nazify" the nation. But his underlying philosophy reflects a profoundly fascist vision of the world.

Barkley Rosser

The cleric Th. Chalmers, in the otherwise in many respects ridiculous and repulsive work... has correctly struck upon this point,

‘Profit,’ says the same Chalmers, ‘has the effect of attaching the services of the disposable population to other masters, besides the mere landed proprietors, . . . while their expenditure reaches higher than the necessaries of life.’

The above quote is not the point Marx considered correct in Chalmers's "otherwise... ridiculous and repulsive" book. It does, however, indicate Marx's knowledge of Chalmers's concept of disposable population. The remark occurs in the Grundrisse only seven pages before Marx's intense discussion of the necessity -- as a condition for the realization of capital -- of a surplus population, in which he alludes again to Chalmers and to the "idle surplus population" treated as necessary by the "population fanatics." 

I previously discussed Chalmers's disposable population and its possible connection to Dilke's disposable time and to Marx's discussion of surplus population in Disposable People and Necessary labour. Surplus labour. Surplus population. Surplus capital. (The Return of "Disposable People"), respectively. In Disposable forces, disposable class, I mentioned the likelihood that Chalmer's concept of disposable population was an adaptation and modification of Turgot's disposable class. 

Where Turgot's disposable class had to do with proprietors who possessed disposable revenues, Chalmers's disposable population referred to workers who were available to perform work beyond providing sustenance and comforts. The disposable population would thus be employed by the disposable class to do jobs that were neither 'productive' nor 'stipendiary' in Turgot's terms or, for Chalmers, the population in excess of the agricultural population and a 'secondary population' who produce "whatever enters, after food, into the general standard of enjoyment among the peasantry." Chalmers's first two populations are thus indistinguishable from Turgot's first two classes.

In my latest post examining Herbert Marcuse's use of planned obsolescence, I discussed how Thorstein Veblen's analysis of concepts of conspicuous consumption, conspicuous waste, and invidious comparison relied on the "Four Stages Theory" that David Graeber and David Wengrow criticize in The Dawn of Everything. In his 1766 essay, Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses, Turgot refers to the theory of stages in paragraphs 52, 53, and 54, where, as he explained in paragraph 51: 

We here again are obliged to go back to a retrospect of many things which have been as yet only hinted at, after we have spoken of the division of different professions, and of the different methods by which the proprietors of capitals may render them of value; because, otherwise, we should not be able to explain them properly, without interrupting the connection of our ideas.

Which is to say that Turgot's discussion of the division of labour in a commercial society presumed the theory of historical stages of savagery, pastoral life, cultivation, and commerce but proceeded from a logical analysis of commerce, rather than a chronological account. Thus, Turgot's disposable class is the foundation of the final stage.

In Theories of Surplus Value, volume one, Marx credited Turgot with a "deeper analysis of capital relations" among the Physiocrats. Marx identifies an analysis of "the essence of surplus-value" in Turgot's Réflexions:

Turgot at first presents this unbought element as a pure gift of nature. We shall see, however, that in his writings this pure gift of nature becomes imperceptibly transformed into the surplus-labour of the labourer which the landowner has not bought, but which he sells in the products of agriculture.

Marx did not mention Turgot's classe disponible. In the Grundrisse, and in volume three of Theories of Surplus Value, Marx devoted a great deal of attention to the concept of disposable time from Charles Wentworth Dilke's 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties. In fact, Marx adopts Dilke's expression that wealth is disposable time and makes it the foundation of his theory of surplus value: "The whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time." Capital converts disposable time into superfluous labour time, the basis of surplus value.

My speculation, based on the relative rarity of the expression 'disposable time' before Dilke's usage, is that Dilke intended it as a rebuttal to Chalmers's disposable population, which Dilke characterized as 'unproductive labour.' Central to Dilke's analysis was the claim that the expansion of unproductive labour -- the 19th century version of 'bullshit jobs' -- was one of the main obstacles to the enjoyment of leisure time by the labouring classes.

Monetary Sovereignty, Sanctions and Russian Economic Policy

The central role of economic sanctions in the US/EU strategy against Russia has returned international political economy to center stage, if it had ever left it.  Here are some thoughts occasioned by Adam Tooze’s interesting analysis of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as perceived by the Russian economic policy apparatus, connected to the role of monetary reform in the anti-colonial struggle of the 1930s as documented by Eric Helleiner in Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods.

Let’s start with MMT.  This is usually presented as a set of claims and recommendations that follow from acknowledging the implications of monetary sovereignty: countries whose central banks issue internationally accepted (hard) currencies and can therefore borrow without foreign exchange constraints can treat debt like money, running fiscal deficits as needed to sustain full employment indefinitely.  Rather than being raised to “pay for” spending, tax revenues should be adjusted so that debt is as stimulative as it needs to be, short of provoking inflation.  This is, for the most part, a resurrection of first-generation (1930s) Keynesian thinking, as codified, for example, in Abba Lerner’s Functional Finance.

In the usual presentation in a US or other wealthy country context, MMT takes monetary sovereignty as paradigmatic: it is assumed to exist as the starting point for the rest of the analysis.  Moreover, such sovereignty is implicitly treated as binary; it exists or it doesn’t.  Thus there are two types of states, those to which MMT applies and all the rest.

But there’s a different way to look at the question.  Sovereignty or its lack, rather than being a parameter, can be thought of as an object of policy, something to be achieved.  And rather than being all or nothing, sovereignty can be a matter of degree, a policy space that can expand or shrink depending on the circumstances countries face and the measures they take to respond to them.  Finally, sovereignty in economic matters is a crucial component of sovereignty overall.

This is clearly how things look from a Russian government perspective.  Emerging from the Yeltsin period in the 1990s, Russia was a largely extractive state that created fortunes for those able to seize former state assets, especially in natural resources, but little was done to institutionalize an economy capable of growth, development or effective policy guidance.  The country lived, as it still largely does, on revenues from energy and other resource exports, and modest growth occurred as the result of reinvestment by entities acquiring those export revenues.  The disaster of 1998, when Russia experienced a sudden stop in capital inflows, led to a regime of budget surpluses—i.e. fiscal austerity.

But Russia hoarded its current account surpluses, building up a war chest of hard currency assets in its central bank and using capital controls to restrict the ability of private actors to spirit capital abroad.  What some Russian analysts came to realize was that this conferred a substantial degree of monetary sovereignty on the country, making it eligible for the growth-friendly recommendations of MMT, or Keynesian fiscal policy in general.  This is documented by Tooze.  What he doesn’t say, but what lies at the heart of the story, is Russia’s ability to continue to earn reserve currencies, euros directly and dollars indirectly, by its energy exports; this defines a space in which the ruble can indeed be sovereign, since it is exchangeable for these other currencies up to the limit of those revenues.  That’s not full sovereignty in the “pure” MMT sense, but it’s enough to justify an expansive countercyclical fiscal policy.  It also bolsters Russia’s overall sovereignty, including its ability to execute the war against Ukraine.

Sovereignty is not always a good thing.

All of this brought to mind the fascinating narrative that takes up most of Helleiner’s superb book on international monetary policy pre- and post-WWII.  I understand that Helleiner had to structure his book around a central thread, and he chose to have it argue against the claim that “development” was a neocolonial concept foisted on the global South in the context of the cold war between the US and the USSR.  On the contrary, he shows that development was the goal of Latin American governments democratizing in response to the Great Depression, along with the Indian independence advocates seeking economic as well as political sovereignty vis-a-vis England.

The largest part of his book, however, is taken up with an account of monetary reform in Latin America during the 1930s, which was both an economic and a political movement.  Prior to the depression, these countries had either adhered to the gold standard or were making do as debtors powerless in the face of the global power exercised by Wall Street, the City of London, and the political-military apparatus that enforced their dictates.  They had no meaningful sovereignty in economic affairs, and public projects to promote development were largely ruled out by monetary constraints.

Then the New Deal swept into power in the US, and in large parts of the governing apparatus there was open hostility to Wall Street.  In particular, a team in the Treasury Department, headed by Harry Dexter White, took as its mission monetary reform throughout the Americas that would increase sovereign policy space, especially for expansionary fiscal policy.  They helped countries develop the tools to conduct independent monetary policy, creating central banks with foreign exchange reserves and as much flexibility in money creation as circumstances would permit.  While Helleiner foregrounded the widespread desire for development and the centrality of the South’s demand for it in the Bretton Woods process during the subsequent decade—a decision I understand—it now seems to me that there is another thread of equal importance: the role of what we now call Keynesian macropolicy and institutional capacity in decentering the global power of finance.  That is, Keynesianism in the achievement and exercise of monetary sovereignty works against the subaltern status of non-dominant countries.

To take one example from the present, the case for sanctions against Russia we initially heard was that, while they might not be so effective in the short run, they would be devastating over time as restrictions on international investment take hold.  But this assumes that Russia would be unable to make those investments on its own.  This is false to the extent that Russia has the means and will to run deficits to finance them.  (I am abstracting from the parallel issue of technology transfer and integration.)  Until recently the will was missing, since, as Tooze documents, the Russian state ran surpluses to prevent any recurrence of 1998.  What the MMT debate inside the country signifies is that at least some Russian policy experts understand that a current account surplus does indeed confer the ability to self-finance growth.

The freezing of central bank assets is significant, but only in relation to Russia’s demand for foreign exchange.  As long as it has enough oil and gas revenue to not only finance sufficient consumer imports but also sustain the sovereignty that fiscal deficits requre, it can continue on its present path.  In the end there is no substitute for radically shrinking those revenues.

War, Waste, and the Myth of Progress

In the introduction to One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse listed four authors -- Vance Packard, C. Wright Mills, William H. White, and Fred J. Cooks -- whose works were of "vital importance" to his analysis. In the text, he mentioned "the affluent society" several times, which, of course, was the title of a famous book by John Kenneth Galbraith. 

Galbraith, Mills, and White all cited Thorstein Veblen in their books. Packard cited the influence of Stuart Chase's The Tragedy of Waste on his thinking. Chase's book cited Veblen no fewer than 20 times. It is not an overstatement to say that the specter of Thorstein Veblen haunts One-Dimensional Man. 

I will leave debates about the compatibility or incompatibility of Marx and Veblen to the literature in the archives. What I am interested in here is the adequacy of Veblen's critique of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste to Marcuse's critique of late capitalist social identity. 

As I mentioned earlier, Marcuse never specifically analyzed planned obsolescence. He simply included it in lists of symptoms of the one-dimensional society. Throughout nearly a dozen publications, Marcuse typically listed planned obsolescence along with advertising (18 times), waste (10-13 times),  militarism (9 times), and a dozen or so miscellaneous items, several of which could be interpreted as examples of either waste or advertising.

War, waste, and advertising are central themes in The Tragedy of Waste but Chase's use of World War I as a benchmark of rational planning is odd, to say the least:

War control lifted the economic system of the country, stupefied by decades of profit seeking, and hammered it and pounded it into an intelligent mechanism for delivering goods and services according to the needs of the army and of the working population.

It would be more accurate to say that the wholesale waste of war and war production made the retail waste of peacetime profit-seeking superfluous. As Stephen Leacock had stipulated four years earlier, "The economics of war, therefore, has thrown its lurid light upon the economics of peace." It did so by amplifying the waste, not by eliminating it:

War is destruction—the annihilation of human life, the destruction of things made with generations of labor, the misdirection of productive power from making what is useful to making what is useless. In the great war just over, some seven million lives were sacrificed; eight million tons of shipping were sunk beneath the sea; some fifty million adult males were drawn from productive labor to the lines of battle; behind them uncounted millions labored day and night at making the weapons of destruction.

Leacock was another of Veblen's followers, as was Kenneth Burke, who in 1929 wrote the prescient essay, "Waste -- the future of prosperity." Arthur Dahlberg was a follower of Leacock as Vance Packard was a follower of Stuart Chase. All roads lead to Veblen.

Here's the catch: Veblen's evolutionary explanation is based on myth. This is not to say his social criticism is invalid. The problem is that the social criticism is  wrapped in a myth of progress that neutralizes its effectiveness, at the same time, however, of possibly affording the criticism a wider audience than it would have received in the raw. Here is how Veblen articulated the myth:

The early differentiation out of which the distinction between a leisure and a working class arises is a division maintained between men's and women's work in the lower stages of barbarism. Likewise the earliest form of ownership is an ownership of the women by the able-bodied men of the community. The facts may be expressed in more general terms. and truer to the import of the barbarian theory of life, by saying that it is an ownership of the woman by the man.

The "lower stages of barbarism" is evidently something that modern society has evolved out of -- but not completely. Actually, though, it is a tale told by Anne Robert Jacques Turgot to justify social inequality and modified by Jean-Jacques Rousseau to explain why "man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains." In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow present the back story on this pervasive myth of progress.

Starting at around minute 44:00 to around 54:30 of the above video Graeber  discusses the contributions of Kandiaronk, Madame de Graffigny, Turgot, and finally Rousseau to the modern evolutionary myth of progress. As Graeber and Wengrow put it in their book, Turgot invented his myth of social evolution to refute a compelling indigenous criticism of European society. Rousseau synthesized the indigenous critique and the mythical evolutionary refutation. Graeber jokes toward the end of the segment, that Rousseau invented what would become both the standard conservative and leftist political myths.

The consequences of this framing are too immense to go into here but one of the things that it does is domesticate any criticism of "the way things are." Instead of "the best of all possible worlds" or even "there is no alternative," the myth of progress admits that there are problems but implies that they can only be addressed by a gradual and virtually unintended process of evolution.

Never Mind Schrödinger's Cat, Here's David Bohm's Dream

I’ve had dreams of all sorts from time to time, but I don’t remember them too well. There was one dream that had a sort of philosophical content.

I dreamt I was in a place that had a cat. I came into the room where this cat was talking to another cat, making a date to meet at a certain time. I said, “There’s something wrong here. What could it be? I know what it is: Cats can’t tell time!”

I went up to this cat and said, “What do you mean by making this date? You know you can’t tell time. ”

The cat said, “Of course we cats can tell time.”

I said, “I don’t believe it. There’s a clock on the wall. Tell me the time.” The clock showed a quarter after eight.

But the cat hemmed and hawed and said, “Five after four... ten after three...”

So I said, “That proves that cats can’t tell time!”

Then I woke up laughing because the point was that in the dream, I was concerned with some trivial difficulty when a much more fundamental issue was askew. The trivial difficulty was that cats can’t tell time. The fundamental absurdity was the cat talking!

Original Sin And Planes In The Air

 The original sin of the current catastrophe in Ukraine was the failure of the US and UK to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine when Putin's Russia seized control of Crimea as they promised to do in the Budapest Accord of 1994 when Ukraine gave up the third largest stock of nuclear weapons in the world.  They are also now in violation of that Accord now by their weak effort to save Ukraine. They can and should enforce a no fly zone over Ukraine, which I believe they can enforce.  This is not about NATO; it is about right and wrong.  This is not boots on the ground; it is planes in the air.

Barkley Rosser

Will Kyiv Become Like Aleppo?

 There are reports that many Russian soldiers are lacking in morale for the invasion of Ukraine. They were told repeatedly like the rest of us that there would be no invasion. The Ukrainians are very similar, and most of them know Putin has exaggerated the things they have supposedly done or not done wrong.  And rather than welcoming them as liberators and throwing down their arms to surrender, the Ukrainians have been fighting back hard. But they have a lot more armor and weapons.

What may eventually give them victory, especially in the crucial battle for control of Kyiv, Ukraine's capital city, is that while most of their soldiers are poorly motivated, there is a corps of veterans of the war in Syria. Some of these are experienced in urban warfare and participated in retaking the city of Aleppo from rebels against the Syrian government. However, the effort to do that involved massively bombing and destroying buildings in the city to the point that it is a wrecked ruin.  Is this what these soldiers will do to the beautiful and historic city of Kyiv?

Barkley Rosser

Expressions that pass from hand to hand like sealed containers...

In Herbert Marcuse and Planned Obsolescence I undertook to develop a theoretical foundation for 'planned obsolescence' from Georg Simmel's analysis of the "preponderance of objective culture over subjective culture that developed during the nineteenth century." My intuition has proved to be uncannily prescient. Besides the indirect influence of Thorstein Veblen -- by way of Vance Packard and Stuart Chase -- Marcuse's argument was indirectly influenced by Simmel, through the mediation of György Lukács's History and Class Consciousness, which Marcuse regarded highly.

Marcuse deployed Lukács's concept of reification throughout One-Dimensional Man. Meanwhile, Lukács's concept of reification came largely from Simmel. In Simmel's preface to The Philosophy of Money, he evoked his intention to "construct a new storey beneath historical materialism" that would both preserve the economic effects on intellectual life while developing the reciprocal effects of psychological factors on economic life. Although not explicitly stated, Lukács's intention in "Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat" could be characterized as attempting to construct an additional Marxian storey beneath Simmel's storey. It's storeys all the way down.

In the process of transmission, reification became one of those expressions that Simmel had described:

The tremendous expansion of objective, available material of knowledge allows or even enforces the use of expressions that pass from hand to hand like sealed containers without the condensed content of thought actually enclosed within them being unfolded for the individual user.

My task here will be to unfold reification. 

In his chapter on reification, Lukács attempted to brush aside Simmel's analysis with the faint praise of his book being "a very interesting and perceptive work in matters of detail." Even that, though, was contained as a parenthesis within a two-paragraph rant against the "empty manifestations" of bourgeois thinkers who divorce their analysis "from real capitalist foundations and make them independent and permanent by regarding them as the timeless model of human relations in general." Lukács gave a much more positive assessment of Simmel's contribution in an essay originally published in 1918 -- that is, before he wrote History and Class Consciousness.

In my capacity as a non-specialist, non-philosopher, it seems to me that Simmel's section on the "concept of culture" in the last chapter of The Philosophy of Money is clearer and more compelling than either Lukács's "Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat" or Marcuse's discussions of 'reification' and 'planned obsolescence' in One-Dimensional Man.  I believe Lukács later recanted his harsh assessment of Simmel and admitted his influence but I haven't been able to find the article in translation. (see last sentence of previous paragraph for update)

Simmel used the noun 'reification' and the associated verb 'reified' sparingly in The Philosophy of Money but with surgical precision. It first appears in the subheading of the last subsection of chapter one, "Money is a reification of the general form of existence according to which things derive their significance from their relationships to each other." In this subsection, Simmel celebrated affirmed reification as "a great accomplishment of the mind," and the particular form of money as the "greatest triumph" of reification. Simmel would have none of that "original sin" and "root of all evil" lament.

In his last chapter, Simmel began section II, The Concept of Culture, on a similarly celebratory note. The general concept of culture involves the development by human action of natural materials into forms that increase their value to us. Simmel gave an inventory of examples of material culture ranging from "furniture, cultured plants, works of art, machines, tools and books" to more intangible cultural products that shape human relationships such as "language, morals, religion and law."

The picture darkens, however, when Simmel compared culture in general with the specific contemporary culture, using the course of the nineteenth century as his benchmark. During that century, material or objective culture expanded tremendously but, according to Simmel, individual or subjective culture failed to develop in proportion and perhaps even declined. "at least among the highest strata." 

This, of course, was an empirical claim for which Simmel could give only impressionistic evidence: in spite of "a large number of refinements, subtleties and individual modes of expression. Yet, if one looks at the speech and writing of individuals, they are on the whole increasingly less correct, less dignified and more trivial." Similarly, "it seems that conversation, both social as well as intimate and in the exchange of letters, is now more superficial, less interesting and less serious than at the end of the eighteenth century."

Of course, Simmel's perspective could be seen as one of those "kids these days" refrains that recur with each generation. His analysis, however, is more substantive than his evidence. To some extent, the preponderance of objective culture over subjective culture that developed over the nineteenth century can be attributed simply to change in scale accompanying urbanization. Simmel gave the counterexample of a small community with limited cultural resources in which, "the objective cultural possibilities will not extend much beyond the subjective cultural reality." A larger group and increased cultural level "will favour a discrepancy between both." But size does not offer a complete explanation. For a fuller, causal explanation, Simmel turned to the division of labour. Simmel's account is broadly congruent with Marx's:

Where the worker works with his own materials, his labour remains within the sphere of his own personality, and only by selling the finished products is it separated from him. Where there is no possibility for utilizing his labour in this way, the worker places his labour at the disposal of another person for a market price and thus separates himself from his labour from the moment it leaves its source. The fact that labour now shares the same character, mode of valuation and fate with all other commodities signifies that work has become something objectively separate from the worker, something that he not only no longer is, but also no longer has. For as soon as his potential labour power is transposed into actual work, only its money equivalent belongs to him whereas the work itself belongs to someone else or, more accurately, to an objective organization of labour.

Moreover, a similar degree of specialization and objectification of the product of work also becomes the standard for intellectual labour. 

Consumption follows a similar pattern to production:

Since the division of labour destroys custom production — if only because the consumer can contact a producer but not a dozen different workers — the subjective aura of the product also disappears in relation to the consumer because the commodity is now produced independently of him. It becomes an objective given entity which the consumer approaches externally and whose specific existence and quality is autonomous of him.

Two of the consequences of this depersonalization of consumption that Simmel noted are the estrangement between individuals and the products they produce and consume and the acceleration of fashion cycles. With regard to the first, Simmel gave the example of the younger generation viewing older people's attachment to furniture they have had for a long time as an eccentricity. Simmel's view on fashion, briefly outlined in The Philosophy of Money and subsequently expanded into an essay, dwells on the tension between conflicting drives to differentiation and imitation. Social class is determinate in fashion, which, "always indicates a social stratum which uses similarity of appearance to assert both its own inner unity and its outward differentiation from other social strata." For the upper classes, it is not so much a matter of "keeping up with the Joneses," as keeping away from them:

Wherever fashions have existed they have sought to express social differences. Yet the social changes of the last hundred years have accelerated the pace of changes in fashion, on the one hand through the weakening of class barriers and frequent upward social mobility of individuals and sometimes even of whole groups to a higher stratum, and on the other through the predominance of the third estate. The first factor makes very frequent changes of fashion necessary on the part of leading strata because imitation by the lower strata rapidly robs fashions of their meaning and attraction.

Simmel's analysis of fashion offers an illuminating contrast with Thorstein Veblen's 'conspicuous consumption,' 'conspicuous waste,' and 'invidious comparison.' Simmel's remarks on fashion are embedded within his discussion of the division of labour and the major historical change over the nineteenth century in separating subjective culture from objective culture. Veblen's terms addressed residual features retained from "the higher stages of the barbarian culture." 

Since Marcuse's references to 'planned obsolescence' derive ultimately from Veblen, by way of Vance Packard and, particularly, Stuart Chase, it will be prudent to next give  attention to Chase's use of Veblen in his analysis.

Vladimir V. Putin Loses His Mind And Becomes A War Criminal

Russian President Vladimir V. Putin has just announced a "special military operation" to "de-Nazify the Ukrainian government" so as to halt the supposed "genocide" being committed against Russian speakers in Ukraine.  There is not a shred of justification for any of this.  The extreme nationalist fascist groups in Ukraine do not support and are not part of the current Ukrainian government, whose leader is half Jewish.  There has been a low level war between the Ukrainian government and the separatist republics in the east, now officially recognized by the Putin government, with 14,000 dead on both sides. But recently the Ukrainian military has not even been responding to the heightened rate of shelling coming out of the republics.  Putin has also complained of a supposed move of Ukraine to join NATO, but no such move has been going on at all. 

This is pure and unadulterated aggression without a shred of justification.  Reportedly missiles are now striking Ukraine's capital city, Kyiv. This is more than just a war to defend the republics in the East.  Putin has lost his mind.

I shall note one lie he made last night, one he has made previously, with it central to this invasion, with me now hearing on TV that "tanks are now rolling across the border" not far from Kharkiv. Putin claimed the night before last that "Russia created Ukraine," with this being done by "Lenin and the Bolsheviks." But in 1917 a Ukrainian Peoples' Republic, which in 1918 declared its independence from Russia.  It survived for two years until Poland conquered its western portion and Lenin's Russia conquered the central and eastern parts. When Lenin established the Ukrainian SSR a few years later, it was formed out of a portion of what had been an already existing independent Ukrainian nation. 

Barkley Rosser