Continuing with the theme of finance capitalism and neo-liberalism, I shall start withthis lengthy quote that says what I meant to say, but only better:

From Marx to Goldman Sachs: The Fictions of Fictitious Capital

Despite Marx’s explanation of how parasitic finance capital was in its manifestation as “usury capital,” he believed that its role as economic organizer would pave the way for a socialist organization of the economic surplus. Industrial capital would subordinate finance capital to serve its needs. No observer of his day was so pessimistic as to expect finance capitalism to overpower and dismantle industrial capitalism, engulfing economies in parasitic credit such as the world is seeing today. Believing that every mode of production was shaped by the technological, political and social needs of economies to advance, Marx expected banking and high finance to become subordinate to these dynamics, with governments accommodating forward planning and long-term investment, not asset-stripping.

Marx defined “primitive accumulation” as the seizure of land and other communally held assets by raiders and the subsequent extraction of tribute or rent. Today’s financial analogue occurs when banks create credit freely and supply it to corporate raiders for leveraged buyouts or to buy the public domain being privatized. Just as the motto of real estate investors is “rent is for paying interest,” that of corporate raiders is “profit is for paying interest.” Takeover specialists and their investment bankers pore over balance sheets to find undervalued real estate and other assets, and to see how much cash flow is being invested in long-term research and development, depreciation and modernization that can be diverted to pay out as tax-deductible interest.

Whatever is paid out as income taxes and dividends likewise can be turned into tax-deductible interest payments. The plan is to capitalize the target’s cash flow (ebitda) into payments to the bankers and bondholders who advance the credit to buy out existing shareholders (or government agencies). For industrial firms such leveraged buyouts (LBOs) are called “taking a company private,” because its stock ownership is no longer publicly available.”

Many Social Democratic and Labour parties have jumped on the bandwagon of finance capital, not recognizing the need to rescue industrial capitalism from dependence on neofeudal finance capital before the older conflict between labor and industrial capital over wage levels and working conditions can be resumed.

The article I already quoted in the first part of this rant essay sums this it up like this:

“Resolving finance capitalism’s dilemmas would require state redirection of income distribution, investment, and economic development. This would mean at least a new and stronger version of democratic socialism. Otherwise known by the S word.”

Or even Wikipedia

Finance capitalism is a term defined as the subordination of processes of production to the accumulation of money profits in afinancial system. It is characterized by the pursuit of profit from the purchase and sale of, or investment in, currencies and financial products such as bonds, stocks, futures and other derivatives. It also includes the lending of money at interest. Finance capitalism is seen by Marxists as being exploitative by supplying income to non-laborers.

Susan George, furthermore:

They have built this highly efficient ideological cadre because they understand what the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci was talking about when he developed the concept of cultural hegemony. If you can occupy peoples’ heads, their hearts and their hands will follow. I do not have time to give you details here, but believe me, the ideological and promotional work of the right has been absolutely brilliant. They have spent hundreds of millions of dollars, but the result has been worth every penny to them because they have made neo-liberalism seem as if it were the natural and normal condition of humankind. No matter how many disasters of all kinds the neo-liberal system has visibly created, no matter what financial crises it may engender, no matter how many losers and outcasts it may create, it is still made to seem inevitable, like an act of God, the only possible economic and social order available to us.

Let me stress how important it is to understand that this vast neo-liberal experiment we are all being forced to live under has been created by people with a purpose. Once you grasp this, once you understand that neo-liberalism is not a force like gravity but a totally artificial construct, you can also understand that what some people have created, other people can change. But they cannot change it without recognising the importance of ideas. I’m all for grassroots projects, but I also warn that these will collapse if the overall ideological climate is hostile to their goals.

Indeed. How many times have you heard that phrase from you friendly, social-democrat prime minister: “We have no choice”. Perfectly channeling Mrs. Thatcher.

Point is: we do have a choice. It may not the easy to see, but it is there. Why would the Potemkin-like edifice of neo-liberalism be needed if we did not?

This rant first had the title “Private equity” and began as a diatribe about the evil that is private equity. Naturally enough: my previous company was “taken private”, cost was “contained”, and it is now being prepped for “going public.” I mean, WTF: somebody “buys” a company that is quite healthy and that does make money, fires some 20% of the workforce, and wants to sell it again at a higher price? Because they have now reduced cost? Are they really thinking investors are that dumb? For one thing: this is a software company. Sure: it is probably possible to cut some head counts and make the bottom line look rosy for a while. Unfortunately, as this also means that new development is delayed or cancelled, what will happen in a couple of years when the prospective customers realize that the product is dead or dying?

But, sure, for now there is perhaps a window of opportunity where they may be able to find a buyer that does not do the required homework and instead jumps in and buys.

And just for completeness’ sake: I put the original “buy” in quotes just like so. You see: the current owners did not show up with a bag full of cash with which to buy us. They dumped the debt on the company, so going from being healthy and not having much debt, the company now has to make even more money to pay off a large debt. Does any of this make sense?

Thought not. And that was why I was inclined to write a diatribe against private equity.

But private equity is but a symptom of something else, something we could call “finance capitalism” or, even, neo-liberalism. But what is this, then?

Susan George writes in her essay A Short History of Neo-liberalism

In 1945 or 1950, if you had seriously proposed any of the ideas and policies in today’s standard neo-liberal toolkit, you would have been laughed off the stage at or sent off to the insane asylum. At least in the Western countries, at that time, everyone was a Keynesian, a social democrat or a social-Christian democrat or some shade of Marxist. The idea that the market should be allowed to make major social and political decisions; the idea that the State should voluntarily reduce its role in the economy, or that corporations should be given total freedom, that trade unions should be curbed and citizens given much less rather than more social protection — such ideas were utterly foreign to the spirit of the time. Even if someone actually agreed with these ideas, he or she would have hesitated to take such a position in public and would have had a hard time finding an audience.

So the essence of neo-liberalism is that the “market” makes major social and political decisions. And about finance capitatalism, this (from Contradictions of Finance Capitalism):

Over the last thirty years, capital has abstracted upwards, from production to finance; its sphere of operations has expanded outwards, to every nook and cranny of the globe; the speed of its movement has increased, to milliseconds; and its control has extended to include “everything.” We now live in the era of global finance capitalism.

Productive corporations compete by generating rapid increases in the price of the corporation’s stock, immediately through gimmicks and trickery, but more basically through firing workers, moving production, and raiding pension funds. Corporations heavily involved in production—automobile or steel makers, for example—have become increasingly financial in orientation, diversifying into credit, insurance, real estate, etc.

And this article continues by closing the loop:

Since the Second World War, the capitalist world has seen two main political-economic policy regimes: Keynesian democracy, predominating between 1945 and 1973 and forming the last stage of corporate industrial capitalism; and neoliberal democracy, predominating between 1980 and the present, and constituting the formative stage of financial capitalism; the years 1973–80 represent a transitional period between regimes.

And this is my point, and my argument:

“Private equity” is only one aspect of “finance capitalism”, but it does show us something right from the start: “finance capitalism” is not necessarily rational, at least not from the point of view of the individual employee, nor from the point of view of “capitalist society” in any traditional sense. It dooes no longer strive to maximize output of goods, not does it strive to expand markets. Not necessarily, at least.

As such, finance capitalism becomes a parodoxical thing, and at odds even with parts of the traditional capitalist class. It uses the neo-liberal ideology as the smokescreen that it needs to hide behind.

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.

Chicken McNuggets anyone?

On February 4, 2010, Gallup released its latest data on the public’s political attitudes. The headline read: Socialism Viewed Positively by 36% of Americans. While the poll did not attempt the daunting task of exploring what a diverse public understood socialism to mean, it nevertheless revealed an unmistakably sympathetic image of a system that had been pilloried for generations by all of capitalism’s dominant instruments of learning and information as well as by its power to suppress and slander socialist ideas and organization. (The North Star)

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade. — Charles Dickens

I don’t have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph. I have no preconceptions.

— attributed to Garry Winogrand (Wikipedia / Masters of Photography)

I thought about the Winogrand quote when I saw the Moriyama video. Moriyama comes close to saying something very similar — but, more importantly, he also says that he does not see any great, big difference between what he is doing, and what any camera-equipped tourist is doing: snapping away to see what it looks like.

That, of course, goes right for the jugular of the question that will always mar photography: But is it art?

In the days when painting was the primary visual art, we were not always in doubt like that. To paint requires some basic techniques (photography used to, as well, but those mundane barriers are thoroughly gone by now.) We cannot really use technique in a strict sense as a shibboleth: no refined brush strokes to examine, et cetera. It is not like seeing the work of the casual Sunday painter versus the work of a Dutch master, is it?

But then this:

Levine is best known for the work shown in “After Walker Evans”, her 1980 solo exhibition at the Metro Pictures Gallery. The works consist of famous Walker Evans photographs, rephotographed by Levine out of an Evans exhibition catalog, and then presented as Levine’s artwork with no manipulation of the images. The Evans photographs—made famous by his book project Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with writings by James Agee—are widely considered to be the quintessential photographic record of the rural American poor during the great depression. The Estate of Walker Evans saw it as copyright infringement, and acquired Levine’s works to prohibit their sale.

Sherrie Levine

So, Ms. Levine creates facsimiles of what we are more or less certain is art (if, indeed, Walker Evans is art in a strict sense – he was, after all, primarily a documentarist…) I shall not be the judge here.

Fine art photography is photography created in accordance with the vision of the artist as photographer. Fine art photography stands in contrast to photojournalism, which provides a visual account for news events, and commercial photography, the primary focus of which is to advertise products or services.

Fine-art photography

So what makes photography fine art is the previsualization? Although I am sure many casual photographers do that — and Evans, though being more of a photojournalist certainly also did. And some “commercial” photographers straddle this divide – think Galen Rowell.

Yet, we often feel what is what. But maybe not, or only because we are steeped in a tradition. Take away this historical knowledge, and maybe we are left with this:

A famous spoof:

Hi Garry. You caught some nice poses here. Biggest problem is I can tell the horizon isn’t straight. It doesn’t look like a hill. Man at right needs to be cropped out. Sometimes I find if I shout right before I take the picture I can get people’s attentions. If you had done so we would have been able to see more of their faces. George MacWilken

Perhaps the final acid test is this:

No, Henri did not do that (and perhaps he should have sharpened a little more, and fine-tuned his autofocus a little.)

I shall leave this can of worms out of it: what degree of digital manipulation is acceptable? Surely, for “fine art” anything goes. But for photojournalism? Is a little auto-contrast fine, but not a full HDR treatment? But what if you are Walker Evans?

For those uninitiated into its history, conceptual art can often seem like a trick — is that really a urinal in an art gallery? Is sticking yogurt caps on gallery walls really great art? Unfortunately for Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, the stars and creators of the sketch TV show Portlandia, it turns out that conceptual art can actually trap you, even outside of a gallery opening. (Hilarious Portlandia Episode Shows the Dangers of Conceptual Art)

Daido Moriyama shares some of his fascination with photography. Also, a really, really cool video.

I have a pretty good time reading Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided at the moment. She stands in that great, American tradition of non-fiction writing where the anecdotal is but a starting point and each page expands upon the merely personal and creates something general. Moving from the concrete to the abstract, if you will, even though Ehrenreich’s theoretical and ideological underpinnings are perhaps not all that clear and perhaps this is to make the book easier to swallow for the public – or perhaps that is also the limits of her own insights.

There are sudden flashes that make you go: Aha. She hints at a connection between the rise of “finance capitalism” (circa mid-70s, at least in the USA) and the wave of downsizing, rightsizing and outsourcing and what not, and the maniacal focus on the bottom line, year by year, quarter by quarter, day by day, and – at the very same time – a shift away from what suddenly seemed like old-fashioned, fact-based management towards the cult of the super-human CEO that intuitively and inexplicably just knows and makes all the right turns. Perhaps a Steve Jobs could be one of those (although I believe that there was much more to his success than charismatic personality) – and perhaps Steve Ballmer, in his incarnation as an all-dancing, all-screaming corporate clown shows that the desire to be charismatic does not make you so. Still, she also notes the sad decline of Tom Peters from “management guru” to “boxer-shorts clad weirdo”? Except, perhaps, for the fact that Peters is still revered and people still search for excellence.

I am not sure what all that means. Is it the rise of “finance capitalism” what triggers this change in attitudes towards management? And, if so, why? It is tempting – or even unavoidable – to think there must be some connection, but it is much more difficult to figure out what the causality might be, if any.

Private equity is, however, something that is intimately connected to “finance capitalism”. It is been a short span of time since the first large-scale leveraged buy-outs to our present world, where merry bands of marauding “investors” roam the streets in search of companies that they can “buy”, settle with debt, gut, and resell. And enjoy being written up as good guys that help weed out bad companies and so on and so forth. It is true, perhaps, that from a strictly Marxian POV, they do what they do as parts of a larger machinery – maybe what is called “finance capitalism”, and not with any larger personal responsibility that that of the shark that eats the swimmer. It is all in their nature. Except maybe not. Even from a POV that is favorable to capitalism as such, these actions actually do not work. Not in the long run. True: they help create a pool of labor that is willing to work for minimal wages. But these peoples’ values as consumers of goods is nil – or only as good as the credit they may have left. Probably not much. And if our ideal was some sort balanced, more egalitarian, mixed economy – private equity is, indeed, the pits.

But… nevermind. This was supposed to be about the book. What is really interesting is how Ehrenreich sees the relentless positivism, the self-help books, the personal coaches, and so on and so forth, as so much mumbo-jumbo. As we descend into the wonderful world of late capitalism, capitalism itself loses any pretenses of rationality, and becomes positively relativistic. Religion and spirituality come back to haunt us, and when we lose our jobs, due to “cost containment”, we only have ourselves to blame. And so on and so forth. Mitt Romney’s fake smile and immensely vacuous personality is perfect for this age and could have been iconic.

Except he was not elected. There seemed to be a limit, after all.

View from my office building

That is the view from the building that I report to work in every morning. Except weekends, of course. At least so far. So this is not Kansas anymore, or even Østerbro — the rather quiet and residential hood where I live, and where I also used to stroll to my office desk in about 5 minutes. I now, alas, suffer from a 15 minute commute on the train, to go right smack downtown. If my window had been on the other side of this building, I could have posted a view of the Tivoli Gardens instead. So, moved downtown.

I shall, for now, spare you all the details about why working for a company that is taken over by private equity sucks – just trust me on this one: it does. So I decided it was time for a new beginning, and a not-too-fond farewell to capitalism at its worst. For now, at least, I am at a solid, money-making, privately-held-by-the-founders (who still work here) company. Not a “cost containment” consultant in sight.

Since it was now a time for changes, I wanted to go back and revive this website. It has been a static affair for a while, but what really made me go and ring some changes was the desire for making it responsive. Since the default template of my old CMS amour, Textpattern, happens to be a responsive beast these days, I set good old Textpattern up once again. Just like the olden days. So there is a solid foundation, and I shall start tinkering to make it mine. Things could very well be a little transitory here for a while.

And that was a first post. The game is a-foot, it seems.

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