Roads to Nowhere – Capital’s Plan A

Posted on March 4, 2014 by withsobersenses

Australia will be quite different in a few years’ time…
-Tony Abbott(2013)

The tendency is a general schema that takes as its starting point an analysis of the elements that make up a given historical situations. On the basis of that analysis, it defines a method, an orientation, a direction for mass political action (Negri, 2005, p. 27)

What does it mean to think in the conjuncture?(Althusser, 2000, p. 18)

(I have been working on this post for many months now. It has been slow going as I have only been able to commit small amounts of time to research and writing as some pretty major – and excellent – developments in my life have distracted me from my computer: namely the birth of my son who is without a doubt the major focus of my time and energy. I have been eking this piece out in half-an-hour lunch breaks at work and this I think has added to its troubled narrative. Also since becoming a father my ability to successfully construct long sentences has diminished. Perhaps this change will be seen as ‘punchy’ rather than moronic…. I also think since so much of the research of this piece has involved stepping on the terrain of dominant mainstream thought and summarising it that some of the radical elements of the critique of political economy have become muted.
Readers will probably find this piece fairly dry, structurally incoherent, and laborious but I hope useful and I intend to use it as background for more work here and political interventions published at The Word From Struggle Street.
As usual there remain far too many typos for me to be happy about but I wish to get this out in a timely matter.)

Continue reading →

‘Addressing these challenges requires ambition’: The G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meeting

Posted on February 25, 2014 by withsobersenses

Originally posted on The Word From Struggle Street:

…money only has one face, that of the boss.

(Negri, 1991, p. 23)

Over the last few days a number of important meetings of the G20 have been held in Sydney. The main meetings have been the Finance and Central Bank Deputies meeting #2 (20th to 22nd February) and the Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors meeting (22nd to 23 Feb) but there has also been a joint round table between the B20( the Business 20) and G20 on Infrastructure and the launch of an OECD report Going for Growth as well as we can assume countless photo-ops, corridor conversations and long lunches – noticeably Christine Lagarde from the IMF is in town. All this should emphasize to us how the Leaders Forum is only one element in what seems to be a now year round series of events, meetings and discussion that work to constitute the…

View original 2,641 more words

Contradictions of Accumulation in Australia

Posted on August 7, 2013 by withsobersenses

Edited 25/2/14
In December 2013 I received criticism via twitter from ‪@redlizthompson‬‬ and ‪@Mitropoulos_A‬‬ for my participation in Historical Materialism Australasia 2013. Readers should obviously read this criticism directly if interested but to summarize it runs as follows: since I participated in the conference which was subject to a withdrawal due to the presence of speakers from Solidarity an organization whose National Committee had recently released an internal statement supporting the Socialist Workers Party UK’s cover-up of rape and sexualized violence then I either directly supported the behavior of the SWP/Solidarity or at least my public quietism on the question meant that in practice I supported it whatever my actual thoughts. The absence of a public statement critiquing the SWP/Solidarity effectively meant public support.

Also I was criticized for having friendships and political collaborations with then current members of Solidarity.

I am in two minds about this assertion about the necessity for a public statement. On one hand I find it odd. The vast majority of my political thoughts and opinions are developed with and shared within a very small network of close comrades and friends. The idea of making some general statement to some kind of public seems weird at best. My written work that does exist on the internet is most often an attempt to follow a very specific project or intervene in specific debates largely focused on Qld. In the past I certainly commented on everything and anything but I have tried to reign in this practice as I slowly realized I was often commenting on things I knew little about.

However supporters of the call to withdraw from HM have pointed out that public silence on questions of sexualized violence reproduces the split between public and private that is so bound up as part of the gender relations of the society we live in. That’s a hard point to argue against and I can’t.

Also when I posted the original post bellow I referenced the HM debated but made no statement of my thoughts. This I think was a mistake as the post itself is a public artifact and I should have taken the time to clarify my position on the issues. I don’t believe however that such a need to address the public applies to other HM participants on a whole.
So my thoughts:

• The behavior of the SWP was appalling. It is more evidence for that decades old feminist argument that Left organizations not only continue the patterns of violence and inequality around gender which is part of broader society but organizational cultures often entrench power-relations that facilitate abuse. The following ‘crisis’ is more evidence of the need for feminism to be an integral part of any revolutionary project.
• The statement of Solidarity was horrible and shows how loyalty to a political brand can be so destructive and pathetic
• I don’t and didn’t agree with the withdrawal– It seemed off-target. If the problem was Solidarity why not call for a boycott of working with them in all forums until certain criteria were met? Why call for a boycott of conference in which they were participants but no other spaces they work in? On the basis of these objects I didn’t participate in the boycott.
• Finally I expressed my critique of Solidarity’s statement to my friends and comrades that were at the time members. I didn’t make my friendship with them conditional on them doing anything about what I said. Nor should I have.

Below is the (edited) text of the paper I presented at Historical Materialism Australasia. This year’s conference happened in the context of a serious disagreement around sexual violence prompted in part by the SWP crisis. You can find some material on this here and here.
The below paper is fairly limited and suffers from conceptual and structural problems. However in the spirit of With Sober Senses I am happy to make it available as it functions both as a marker of the progress of my research and also as a fairly functional summary of my work so far.
In the discussion three major issues came out for me, and I thank those who contributed.
1. So far I still conceive of the public service/ state provision of reproduction as being too separate from capital accumulation proper. They are deeply and complexly intermeshed on the molecular and molar level.
2. More work is needed to further investigated how capital ‘thinks’ on the level of society
3. This kind of research needs to be careful that it doesn’t collapse into being a Marxian plan for a better capitalism – there is a tendency to do just that.

For capital there is no problem: restructuring of the system is the condition for the stabilization of the regime, and vice-versa…The interests of the proletariat, are quite the opposite. The proletariat aims at a critical seizure of the nexus between stabilization and restructuring, in order then to attack it.(Negri, 2005, p. 232)

So what I want to do here is fairly simple: I want to trace out what I think are some of the major barriers of capital accumulation in Australia in our present conjuncture and I will do so with a pretty broad brush – apologies to the details and the devils they may contain. I do so because I think these barriers are some of the deep fault-lines of class antagonism in Australia. This will be a summary of the research I have been doing over the first half of this year for the blog With Sober Senses.

Continue reading →

Incomes, Inequality and Class Composition – ( still a bit drafty)

Posted on July 7, 2013 by withsobersenses

Firstly I would like to apologise to those of you who read my blog for the long time it has been since my last post. It is a difficulty finding time to even read systematically at the moment let alone write. I don’t mean this as just a simple whinge –because I think that it is symptomatic of one of the problems afflicting the possibility of class organising right now – we need the time in our lives to think about what is happening to time in our lives. More broadly, unlike perhaps workers in much of Europe who face the impact of rising unemployment, workers in Australia labour under a condition of too much labour – at least at the moment (though of course any amount of wage-labour is really too much wage-labour). It is too early to tell if the proposed closure of the Ford plant and the entry into voluntary administration of Swann Services are anomalies and growth will continue or signs that winter is coming (since I have written this lines the first time it was become far more clear that with the decline of the rate of growth of industrial production in China that the mining boom, which has underscored growth in Australia for 20 years, is ending). Marx quotes the Congress of the International Working Men’s Association ‘ We declare that the limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive…’(Marx 1990, 415). Now I don’t know if the IWMA was thinking about having the time to write and discuss but perhaps they were. I must admit that I am not sure how an effort like this blog actually fits into the process of class recomposition because I am not sure what the role of ‘ideas’ really has in the messy processes of struggle. I am sure that it has some role but what that is I am confused about (and welcome comments and debate.) But if the attempts to theorise the world we live do play some part in the self-emancipation of the class then it is clear that the lack of time we have to engage in this activity (snatched between moments of work, time with those we love, socialising and resting, acts of political militancy) is contributing to just how outgunned we are in relation to capital. Reading The Poorer Nations (Prashad 2012) I am struck by the huge size and financial capacity of the intellectual apparatus capital has to think, theorise and popularise its understand of the world. Even in Australia it is a struggle to find the time to read the reports that come out of the Productivity Commission, the various business groups and economic think tanks let along attempt to think them through and write about them. (Thus my outrage that the Qld government wasn’t going to release the 1000 page Queensland Commission of Audit quickly turns to dread when they decide to – ‘oh my god I have to read a 1000 page report!’)
Continue reading →

Posted on March 19, 2013 by withsobersenses

withsobersenses:

In my last post I mentioned the need for militant research and workers inquiry. Here is a great example carried out by Common People at the recent strike at the University of Sydney

Originally posted on The Golden Barley School:

These videos contain images and interviews from the picket lines at a recent strike at the University of Sydney.

Our approach here is to generate more conversation between workers across areas of the university, to trace where our common experiences lie and contribute to a collective understanding of the effects that our working conditions have on our lives.

Part I is about conditions at work, part II is an extension of this, with focus on casualisation and the future of the sector.

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a4ckb3X3Zs

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WwaIilRLGo

View original

Podcast of ‘Australia: The Lucky Country? Capitalism and its Discontents’from the Brisbane Free University

Posted on February 7, 2013 by withsobersenses

In mid-December 2012 I spoke as part of a panel entitled ‘Australia: The Lucky Country? Capitalism and its Discontents’ along with Kristen Lyons as part of the Brisbane Free University. A podcast can be found here. It was a great night and BFU is a wonderful initiative.

No Jobs and No Workers? – Strange Contradictions of Capital Accumulation in Australia

Posted on February 1, 2013 by withsobersenses

The core hypothesis that I have proposed, and seek to test, is that Australia is in a condition of ‘precarious prosperity’: that the solid level of economic growth driven by the mining boom faces increasingly unsure conditions due the various impacts of the continuing global crisis of capitalism. In this situation two national barriers to capital accumulation have become especially important: the shortage of labour-power and the difficulties the state faces in funding social reproduction. (This must be grasped within an understanding of both the ecological crisis we inhabit and the possibility of a radically different and better society that arises from the everyday struggles of everyday people.) I have argued that much of the action of the state in recent years has been attempts to address these conditions, and that the ‘front-lines’ of struggle match these ‘fault-lines’ of capital accumulation. In short the response of capital to these barriers is to intensify work – paid and unpaid.

This hypothesis has a temporal dimension: the future of the boom, and thus the dynamics of capital accumulation in Australia, is uncertain, and due to the speed capital moves at it could change any time – and thus we would have to rethink our condition. Perhaps I fall in the trap of making predictions. I am about trying to grasp the ‘tendency’ of the unfolding logics of capital(Negri, 1991). These predictions, like all predictions, are probably wrong. But they are also necessary attempts to map, think and strategize. They need to be constantly revised.

It is with that in mind, that I want to think through two seemingly contradictory pieces of information which have appeared in the popular presses about capital accumulation in Australia: that there has been a rise in unemployment and that there is a skills shortage. The first refers to how different capitalist firms are structuring their businesses to navigate the current economic conditions, the second to the problems on the level of society in ensuring the reproduction of labour-power with the competencies and willingness capital desires (which can then also be understood as the product of a diffuse resistance by workers to be reduced to nothing but labour-power for capital.)

Continue reading →

Welfare Changes and the Critique of Political Economy – Thoughts arising from, and a response to, ‘How the poor are shunted into deeper poverty just for political capital’ by John Passant.

Posted on January 10, 2013 by withsobersenses

They all turned their papers over and drew more squares. When Kollberg was ready, he looked at Martin Beck and said, ‘The trouble with you, Martin, is just that you’ve got the wrong job. At the wrong time. In the wrong part of the world. In the wrong system.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Roughly,’ said Kollberg. ‘My turn to start? Then I say X – X as in Marx.’

(Sjöwall and Wahlöö, 2007: 323-324)

Principles and Particulars

There’s allus two sides to every question

and recognisin’ the principles be easy

whilst understandin’ particular particulars

and takin’ appropriate steps

calls for much collective wisdom.

(Sharp, 2010: 75)

Welfare in Australia has been going through substantial and profound changes. These changes have produced little if any public debate – until very recently when the changes to the provision of the single parent payment generated more than a ripple in the press and a flurry of noise from the commentariat. In this context John Passant, a prolific socialist blogger at En Passant and a member of Socialist Alternative, which is if not the largest socialist group in Australia then probably the one with the largest public profile, had a column published in The Age entitled How the poor are shunted into deeper poverty just for political capital. The publication of explicitly far-left views in a major newspaper is a rare thing indeed and unsurprisingly it circulated widely on Facebook. I am very critical of Socialist Alternative for both its formal politics and its mode of operation. However Passant writes in a fairly friendly manner and seems to be seriously attempting to express a critique of capitalism in a way that is accessible and connects with as many people as possible. Now this seems sensible enough – as a real movement to transform society must be popular and thus those who hope to aide in its construction would require the ability to communicate the radical critique of that society as coherently and clearly as possible (and equally important, and most often forgotten, also require the ability to listen and to learn). But often such an approach becomes an excuse for poor politics and fairly shallow assumptions about the intellectual capacity of the audience and the processes of radical education: i.e. the assumption that the masses are just too dumb for the real thing and aren’t interested in anything challenging or difficult. The terrible state of activist Marxism in Australia is in part due to this idea that Marx’s work is just too hard for people so we better give them something light and we can read Marx later….and this later never happens. Strangely this not reading of Marx leads to his deification. Rather than Capital and the Grundrisse being working books they become theological texts. Now let’s be clear, Marx is only important to the emancipatory project as his work pioneered the critique of capitalism, and it is this critique (whoever it comes from and under what ever name ) which can help us understand and change our society. The problem with Passant’s piece is that rather than understanding these changes as being in relation to the structural dynamics of capital accumulation he argues that they are due to bad ideas – something call ‘neoliberalism’. And behind this there seems to be a great confusion about what capitalism actually is and how it works and more importantly what the struggle to overcome it consists of.

Continue reading →

A New Start? Welfare Changes And the Labour-Power Shortage

Posted on January 3, 2013 by withsobersenses

As some readers might be aware on 1^st of January substantial changes to the single parent payment took place. The main change is that when their children turn eight parents receiving the single parent payment will be shifted to Newstart (the standard form of welfare for those considered unemployed) – this will mean both a $110 a week reduction in their payment and that they will be subject to the usual pressures, routines and requirements of jobseekers (dole diaries, endless appointments with job agencies and all that).[i] These changes are just part of a broader transformation of how welfare works in Australia; changes that include the expansion of welfare quarantining, increased disciplinary processes applied to the unemployed and increased requirements for those on other forms of welfare, such as parenting or disability payments, to enter into the job market. There has been some considerable media attention after Families Minister Jenny Macklin answered a question saying that that she could live on the $35 a day Newstart provides and then later the transcription of this press conference changed her answer to ‘inaudible’.[ii]

Continue reading →

With Sober Senses

Fault Lines of Capital Accumulation & Front Lines of Class Struggle

‘Addressing these challenges requires ambition’: The G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors Meeting

Contradictions of Accumulation in Australia

Follow “With Sober Senses”