by Achim Szepanski Lyotard writes that capital is a pseudo-organism that is not even able to formulate a discourse that establishes its own truth, since it has no metaphysics to explain and justify its existence. The statement made by the Invisible Committee that we live in a world without justification has been true since capital became the dominant mode of production. Nowhere has there been a “That’s why I’m here” since. Capital finds a tricky way out, says Lyotard, saying, “I suggest you axiomatics, which means nothing but choosing a sense. That’s one of the reasons why people vote at the political level. Ultimately, this kind of semiotics only works if everyone agrees. Capital and the state then make sure of this from time to time by force as well, mostly the belief of its inmates that this is the case is enough. The axiom is an operative statement that does not require any proof or derivation from other statements. Axiomatics is a system of axiomatic propositions. Capital operates with the permanent addition or subtraction of operative statements that concern purely functional elements and relations and remain essentially unspecified, so that the choice of an axiom with regard to economics means that important technical terms remain undefined, since the attempt to define all terms leads to an endless regression. Axiomatics, as an operative method that does not require any justification or proof, attempts to create stable systems by adding or subtracting hypotheses, norms, commands or other axioms, which can be managed with unspecified elements and relations within the framework of functionalization. Axioms do not offer any surfaces or clues for exegesis, interpretation or comment, they surround the nihilism of capital. All this can only go well as long as the productive forces grow. But if the productive forces turn into destructive forces, then capital transforms from nihilistic operator to suicidal fascist. And this phase begins now. It remains a question of probability whether dwindling natural resources such as water, food and energy, climate change, biodiversity reduction, stratospheric ozone depletion, ocean acidification, extreme weather conditions, precarious drinking water supplies, chemical pollution and changes in soil conditions will lead to the destruction of humanity’s livelihoods. The probability is high, as can be seen from the climate researchers’ models, which are based on empirical studies. These models, moreover, are not based on axioms. This corresponds to the existence of a huge surplus population on the globe, which is highly unlikely to be able to put capital into wage labour and thus into variable capital. This part of the proletariat therefore no longer needs to free itself from its chains, it is set as potential freedom. It has nothing to lose and can effortlessly smash all conditions in which man is a subjugated and humiliated being. The pre-eminence of this proletariat is the migrants, the capital and its inmates in the oases of well-being suspect this and cover the world with forced labour and extermination camps the size of whole countries. Once again, capital is backward, reinforcing its fascist potency and mitigating its suicidal tendency. But as with the fascists, suicide will prevail. Nobody knows when. Moreover, capital does nothing, it is not a subject, it is a replacing state. taken from:
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NICK DYER-WITHEFORDS CYBER-PROLETARIAT. ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL, CYBERNETICS AND PROLETARIAN CLASS10/25/2019 by Achim Szepanski Cybernetics and ClassWhy speak of a global proletariat in the context of cybernetic capital? The term “cybernetics” has two meanings. The first is the school of thought that developed its theories for the British and American military in the 1930s through experiments in radar technology, ballistics and the construction of nuclear weapons. Secondly, he will talk about the development of computer systems. In cybernetics, machines are no longer understood as thermal power machines that generate energy through the consumption of fuel, but as entities that are regulated by the control of information. The concept of the feedback loop, which allows the machine to measure and correct the effects of its own activities on the environment, is crucial for this. Furthermore, within the framework of cybernetics, the concept of information is transformed, which generally no longer refers to knowledge but to activity. According to Rosh Ashby, even the pattern-complementing brain is not a thinking machine, but an actively computing machine that processes information. MANIAC may not have been the first computer, but he was the first computer to make use of the Random Access Memory, which contains both data and instructions, and thus makes the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that make things obsolete. Finally, cybernetics split into two separate and at the same time interrelated domains – automation and networks. Automation includes robots and other autonomous technologies and Artificial Intelligence (Wiener, von Neumann). In network theory, Claude Shannon’s book A Mathematical Theory of Communication, published in 1949, was decisive, in which information was defined in purely quantitative terms. (Dyer-Witheford 2015: Section 3; Kindle Edition) Dyer-Witheford agrees with the author collective Tiqqun that the behavior of humans and machines in the cybernetic hypothesis is controlled by machine-programmed and reprogrammed feedback loops, and in the final analysis this implies a political hypothesis, although the cybernetic reference to control and governance contains too narrow a concept to comprehensively guarantee the informatic regulation of biological, economic and technical entities. It is therefore a question of who or what governs the processes of production, circulation and financialization in the age of intelligent machines. And Dyer-Witheford’s answer to this is correctly: capital. So the term “cybernetics” implies the meaning of command and control and this makes it useful for the analysis of capital in terms of both technology and class. Usually, the Marxist definition of class refers to the division of the members of an economy according to their position on the means of production and in the relations of production: A distinction is made between capitalists, intermediate fluid strata or middle classes and the proletariat. The stratum of the capitalists dominates all other classes. However, in sociology today, right up to the left-academic strata, the concept of the class is rejected, relativized or even replaced by the categories of gender and race, or it is claimed, for example, that we all belong to the middle class. The concept of the class is thus fundamentally criticized as reductionist, whereas Nick Dyer-Whiteford in his paper Cyber-Proletariat insists on the validity of Marxist class theory, inasmuch as for him the economic system, inseparably linked to civil war, continues to impose the abovementioned abstract reductions and distributions on the classes, adding that currently in most parts of the world the class struggle is conducted almost exclusively from above or by the capitalists. (Ibid.: Section 1) The ideology that the socio-economy cannot be characterized by class relations but by a series of individual projects is essential for the capitalist class and its representatives (also at the universities), indeed it is even one of its weapons in the class struggle. For Dyer-Whiteford it is also clear that class relations today have shifted in comparison to Marx’s times, but they have by no means disappeared, but have only become much more complex and have strengthened their economic and political impact on a global scale. The class has become more real, extended, differentiated, branched and interwoven – precisely because the brutal binary algorithm between classes continues to exist. (Ibid.) What could be more visible, explains Dyer-Whiteford, than the difference between the living conditions of a banker being with his Superyacht and those of the immigrant who wanders the world without papers, between the Facebook billionaire and the worker in a fast food chain where he works for a miserable wage. Referring to a famous Marx quote (“Capital is deceased labor that lives only vampirically by sucking in living labor and the more it sucks in, the more it lives”). MEW 23: 247) Dyer-Whiteford writes that the class relationship is a vampire relationship based on the transfer of energy, consciousness and time from one section of the species to another by extracting added value. Digitalization has only aggravated those class-relevant processes of industrial capital that are characterized by rationalization, redundancy and standardization. Feminist authors have analyzed these processes in their further complexification, insofar as the integration of women into digitized work processes on the one hand dissolves patriarchal patterns, but on the other hand women are mostly employed at lower wages than those of male colleagues. With his approach to cybernetic capital, Dyer-Whiteford constantly addresses the differences in post-operationist theory currents. Authors such as Panzieri and Alquati pointed out early on that computerized automation serves to control a new generation of informational workers who would be pulverized as a political class in a multitude of micro-decisions, with capital reproducing itself only more smoothly through digital technologies, while Negri/Hardt still maintain that with the multitude that emphasizes the progressive communicative and a number of libertarian affective dimensions of network production in immaterial labor, a new revolutionary movement is emerging from below. At the latest after the financial crisis of 2008, however, it became clear that especially young, immaterial workers did not find themselves on the streets in digitalized work processes, but in masses without jobs and without social perspectives. Even various network communities were still affected by the austerity policies of austerity, and the concept of immaterial labor appeared only as a reflex of the dot.com boom, which had collapsed much earlier. The “General Intellect”, often affirmatively quoted by post-operaist authors such as Negri/Hardt, is still being automated today, with journalists being replaced by new aggregators, translators by translation machines, lawyers by machines searching for precedents, photographers by photo bots, and brokers by swarming artificial intelligences. An interpretation of the General Intellect based on this can no longer invoke the emphasis of immaterial labor, but takes note of the explosive proletarization and reproletarization of a large part of the world’s population, whereby the ever-increasing surplus population is no longer even needed by capital today for the shabbiest production processes. The Concept of the ProletariatMarxists often use the concept of the proletariat synonymously with the concept of the working class, whose members, according to Marx, are free in two senses – free from ownership of the means of production and free to sell or rent their labor for a wage, and consequently they are completely deprived of decisive and effective control over the production process (the means of production and labor), also as regards its allocative and operational conditions, whereby the workers are related to other persons as well as separated by market relations. It is precisely these conditions that make the working class or the proletariat in Marxism a revolutionary force. The English collective “Endnotes” has now again pointed out that Marx spoke of the proletarian as a wage worker who produces and valorizes capital, but who can always also be thrown onto the street if he becomes superfluous for the production of surplus value. This means that, for the proletarian, the wage labour relationship does not necessarily have to be updated. While the concept of the working class encompasses all regular wage workers with binding contracts, the proletariat also includes the idle workers and the poor and superfluous. (Today, on the global level of capitalism, much of the proletariat is unemployed.) The proletariat thus includes not only relatively well-paid electronic assembly-line workers, but also unemployed peasants who have been expropriated, and the layers expelled by cybernetic automation, or what is commonly called the “precariat. (Cf. Standing 2015) In this context, Dyer-Witheford refers the concept of cyberiat to the studies of George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici, whose analyses of primitive accumulation in the global South and of women’s work in factories and homework show that network capital today needs both the cyborg and the slave. With Karl-Heinz Roth, Dyer-Witheford proceeds from a “proletarian multiverse,” ranging from diverse paid and unpaid labor to slave labor and work in shadow economies that may well be connected to digital networks. Dyer-Whiteford does not understand this processual fragmentation, which also includes categories such as race and gender, in the context of the interaction of given categorizations, but as reciprocal determinations. The intensification of exploitation caused by cybernetic automation is based precisely on the work of women and non-European populations. With regard to the composition of the proletarian class and the cycles of class struggle (with their reference to cybernetics), Dyer-Witheford refers to the theorists of communization who, in their analyses of global capital relations, identify a heightened antagonism between the reproductive needs of capital and those of the proletariat. Furthermore, he repeatedly mentions Marx’s concept of the surplus population reactivated by the English collective “Endnotes”. A further stage in the production of the world market was the continuation of automation, which would be unthinkable without the comprehensive use of information technologies, whereby in this phase new jobs were created on the one hand, and superfluous and unemployed people were expelled from production on a massive scale on the other. This “moving contradiction” manifests itself today in the integration of the global population into the networked supply chains and fluid production systems that keep work available for capital on a global level and make it superfluous with the intensification of automation and algorithmic software. Digital capital has created a planetary working class that works itself out of its jobs by creating comprehensive systems of robots and networks, networked robots and robotized networks for which the human element is a variable surplus (based on algorithms, invisible software operations). (Dyer-Witheford 2015: Section 1) Robots were first introduced into automotive and steel production and mechanical engineering, but sales were also high early in the pharmaceutical, food and electronics industries. In addition to industrial robots, there is now an increase in service robots in certain centres of global production that do not operate fully automatically, but rather assist human users. The cybernetic capital vortexDyer-Whiteford is particularly concerned with the recomposition of the global proletariat in its relationship to cybernetics, with the global proletariat trapped in a cybernetic capital vortex. Dyer-Witheford thinks the dynamics of capitalism, let’s say capital and capital accumulation, like a vortex, a tornado or whirlwind based on a tripartite process: Production, circulation and financialization. (Ibid: Section 2) Two factors are important for the dynamics of these economic processes: the organic composition of capital, in short the rate between constant and variable capital, and the composition of the working class/proletariat, the latter being the relation between the technical conditions of labor and the forms of political organization that may emerge from them. Today it is easy to understand how capital, in the course of enforcing its technological innovation shocks since the 1970s, has weakened the politically well-organized working class and at the same time opened up new resources of cheap labor at the global level, while greatly increasing the speed and turnaround time of capital cycles. In presenting the term “capital vortex,” Dyer-Witheford refers to a quote from Marx/Engels in the Communist Manifesto, where they speak of global capital accumulation as an uninterrupted anxiety that would dissolve all fixed and frozen relations and melt away in the air anything solid. What Nick Land describes in this context as “Cyclone” is what Dyer-Witheford calls “Vortex”. In scientific discourse, vortex refers to the movement of a mass of particles rotating at a certain speed around a common centre. (ibid.) The vortices do not only move within horizontal circles, but often also take vertical dimensions – e.g. upward suction of tornadoes. In nature, the ubiquitous phenomenon of the vortex was often adopted in Marxist literature; one thinks of Benjamin’s Storm, which blows from paradise, or of the adoption of certain metaphors from metereology by the American guerrilla group “Weathermen,” but the bourgeois economist Jospeh Schumpeter also used metaphors from metereology when he wrote about large irregular currents in the course of creative destruction. Most recently, David Harvey spoke of the possibility of mapping the movements of capital in the various places on the planet, in terms of urbanization and the unequal geographical design of space on Earth in the context of the time-space compressions of capital (destruction of space by time, or accelerated movement of capital through space). Analogous to metereology and its satellite images, we would then see a whirling chaos in which high-pressure and low-pressure areas alternate and are supplemented by islands of storms, tornadoes, and hurricanes. In this chaos, however, patterns can also be recognized that point to long-term changes in capital accumulation, but are geographically unequally distributed; one thinks of the swirling high-pressure areas of accelerated capital accumulation since the 1980s in parts of Asia, the west coast of the USA, London, Bavaria, etc., and of the low-pressure areas above the old industrial centers, Detroit, Sheffield, and the Ruhr. (Harvey 2011: 151 f.) In contrast to the constancy of the laws of flow dynamics in metereology, the accumulation of capital is confronted with expanding variations. To characterize the dynamics of financial crises, the term “turbulence” appears again and again; one speaks of money capital flows that rotate in the financial markets in vortex-like systems. In the 1990s, it was Benoit Mandelbrot who regarded storms and earthquakes as open systems and, following this, examined the financial markets for their fluctuations – mathematically, it seems to be demonstrable that we are dealing here with similar weather phenomena with fractal scaling, discontinuities and interruptions, with regular movements on micro- and large swings at macro-level, up to destructive cascades, after which the former chairman of the FED Alan Greenspan even named a book: The Age of Turbulence. Whether vortex or turbulence (where the term turbulence in physical fluid mechanics refers to the state of gases and liquids with statistically unordered paths of particles), all these terms are used after the chaos or turbulence theory of physics in knowledge discourses on the exchange system to describe the so-called flow dynamics of financial market transactions. These terms serve to describe the so-called molecular short-term fluctuations of algorithmic securities trading on the stock exchange, whereby gigantic amounts of data are processed purely by machine, while financial mathematicians and physicists feverishly investigate the statistical affinities of volatility leaps – modulations of interest rates, foreign exchange and security prices – and historical forms of volcanic eruptions, hurricanes or sandstorms by tracing certain data back to the 17th century and feeding them into high-performance mainframes. CapitalCapital is a value that expands by itself, money that generates more money, or as David Harvey writes in his book Deciphering the Riddle of Capital: “Capital is not a thing, but a process in which money is constantly sent on the search for more money. (Harvey 2014: 45) It is of course also a thing (fixed capital), as Harvey later writes in his book Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, but only secondarily. According to Dyer-Withford, the vortex of capital, which always requires growth and profit, revolves around the world in three essential areas: production, circulation and financialization. Production is the funnel of the storm, circulation is the moving rotation, and financialization is the crashing turbulence. (Dyer-Witheford 2015: Section 2; Kindle Edition) The core of the vortex is surplus production. Circulation includes the worker, whose labor is bought by capital, and the worker as consumer. Once the circulation cycle is complete, capitalist goods in potency as surplus values created in production are updated in the sale. Horizontal and vertical vectors of production and circulation form the fundamental dynamics of the value vortex. However, the moving force field remains always unstable. Strictly profit-oriented production tends to put pressure on wages, while in circulation low wages limit consumption. At the same time, machinic intensification reduces the quantity of living labor in the production process, thus disrupting the basic transfer of energy. Dyer-Witheford sees credit- and debt-driven financialization, which transforms production and circulation and leads directly from money to extra money, as a decisive factor in the attempt to regulate these instabilities. Dyer-Witheford presents the machine capital vortex with the well-known Marx formula: G- W- A/P – W-G, whereby the part A/P – W concerns the production, W-G the circulation and G-G` the financialization. In this process, the vortex of capital transforms work into technological crystallization. Like many Marxists, Dyer-Witheford sees the attractor of the capital vortex, around which market prices fluctuate probabilistically, in the socially necessary, abstract working time and the corresponding compensatory movements (production of the general average profit rate). Both the competition between companies and the political pressure of workers on wages mean that companies reduce the cost of labour by replacing human labour with machines. Marx’s moving contradiction now is that the capital vortex not only mobilizes labor, but also eliminates it, not in a balanced process, but in a spiral movement that leads to ever stronger processes of automation. Dyer-Witheford’s description of the law of the tendential case of the general profit rate follows the texts of Guglielmo Carchedi. (ibid.) We have discussed the Marxist discussion about the law in detail using the texts of Georgios Stamatis and Michael Heinrich in Capitalization Vol. 1 and also on NON. Dyer-Witheford speaks here, in the course of the renewed incorporation of the vortex metaphor, of a self-resolving process that emerges within the circulatory flows of storms. He refers to Manuel DeLanda’s portrayal of the dynamics of a tornado, in which rising draughts of air, air carrying water vapour, are confronted at a certain altitude with colder temperatures, whereby the water vapour condenses or freezes to ice in a phase of transition into rain. The heat released increases the speed of the air masses for a certain phase, but the rising air masses are saturated with larger drops of water and ice crystals until their weight reaches a tipping point and begins to fall as hail or rain, taking the energy from the storm and possibly destroying it. Dyer-Witheford tries here to illustrate the tendencies and counter-trends that influence the fall of the profit rate within the accumulation of capital – processes that can definitely lead to the calcification of capital, i.e. a too high commitment of fixed capital and finally to the collapse of “a cathdetral of mechanical automation”. (ibid.) These processes take place in cyclic patterns, whereby wars and crises repeatedly devalue capital, the prerequisite for a new cycle of technological innovation to take place. Similar to Heinrich, Dyer-Witheford sees the future development of the profit rate as uncertain, citing a number of trends that counteract the fall in the profit rate, such as cheap labour and slaves in the colonies (see Jason W. Moores billige 4), the cheapening of machines and raw materials, the intensification of labour and various forms of financialisation or credit. If automation reduces the price of goods, this may also be the case for machines. This would lead to an increase in the technical composition of the capital (more machines in relation to the labour force), but a reduction in the organic composition of the capital. (The organic composition of capital refers to the interdependence of the technical composition and the value composition of capital c/v, insofar as the latter reflects the former, taking into account respective price/value changes of c and v). The profit rate, in turn, can be defined as a relation of relations, namely the relation between the value-added rate and the organic composition of capital, and its case articulates the dominant technological development in capitalism.) More casually, Dyer-Witheford mentions the Marxist debate about the law of the falling profitrate. The authors of the study, such as Kliman and Roberts, ascribe central importance to the law for the outbreak of the crisis to the law. On the other hand, authors such as Heinrich and Milios place the law in a more complex context, whereby the financialization qua credits, fictitious capital and derivatives can certainly slow down the fall of the profit rate. Finally, Dyer-Witheford states that the question of the fall in the profit rate is a problem for capital, which capitalists, managers and state representatives in particular have to deal with. For the proletariat, it is less a question of the organic composition of capital and the fall of the profit rate than of the composition of the class, whose struggles can also have an influence on the fall or rise of the profit rate, which Dyer-Whiteford then calls the “rate of struggle”. The composition of the global proletariatIn the capitalist vortex, the human working material is divided into layers that are internally fragmented and furrowed and move in relation to one another. The concept of the proletarian class therefore absolutely requires an analysis of the power relations that relate the class to capital, but also divide it internally. Here, Dyer-Witheford again falls back on DeLanda’s account of the dynamics of the tornado, in which he writes that atmospheric layers from which the storms emanate must be understood in terms of capacities, tendencies and emergent characteristics that often interact with each other with random consequences. Class is a force. In his text, Dyer-Witheford is particularly interested in the relation between proletarian class and cybernetics, in terms of their influence on the cycles of class struggle and the related composition of the global proletarian class. The capitalist class and its representatives are the owners of the great machine systems, of fixed and circulating capital. The proletariat, which has no access to the means of production, must rent out and produce its labor for wages, organized in machine collectives, machine systems from which it in turn is eliminated. Between the capitalists and prolets, as capital accumulation increases, we find intermediate layers – managers, technicians and scientists – who construct, design and observe the machines, and also train those who have to work on the machines. Within the proletariat itself, there are various factions – contractually and welfare-state wage workers, precarious and chronically underemployed, impoverished and unpaid women in the reproductive sphere. Dyer-Witheford is concerned with processes of separation and interaction between these different strata, with the class struggle also determining the fluctuations and frictions at the borders of the respective strata. (Ibid.) The movement of the capital vortex constantly changes the layers of which it itself is composed. Thus, not only capital, but also the human labor force has a composition. In this context, some authors of operaism distinguish between technical and political elements of class composition. While the technical composition remains related to the organization of the class by capital (division of labor, management practices and the standardized use of machines, but also family and communal relations), the political composition affects the capacity of the working class to fight for its own desires, inclinations and interests – individual and collective actions of refusal, resistance and partial appropriation of surplus value. In the cycles of struggle, both the composition of the capitalist class and the class of the proletariat change. According to the Italian theorist Raniero Panzieri, the increase in the organic composition of capital is not only based on the process of technological progress, but is always to be understood as the result of a shock offensive of capital in order finally to decompose the composition of the proletariat in terms of its political power. Just think of how the resistance of the qualified mass workers was broken by Taylorism and the assembly lines in Fordism, but also led again to a new technical composition of the class with which there was the possibility of stopping the assembly lines; there is a relationship between the cycles of struggle and the circulation of capital; one thinks of interruptions of transport, logistics and infrastructure, of disturbances that, according to the operaists, spread to production to the entire social factory of life. The criticism of operaism in turn points out that the subject position of the workers was initially determined by capital, so that tactics of spontaneous resistance always remained rudimentary. With regard to the critique of operaism, Dyer-Witheford refers to the group Theory Communiste (TC), which discusses the “mistakes” of the proletariat in the context of the reciprocal relationship between capital and the proletariat, a relation that is not only to be understood as antagonistic, but in which the two poles are integrated within a single system. And this integration has intensified in the history of capitalism, not only through the politics of trade unions, social democratic and communist parties, and the politics of the welfare state, but also through the various self-government projects, state planning, and class self-management. Since the neoliberal offensive of capital, characterized by the privatization of public institutions, rapid technological shocks and logistical globalization, any reformist project has become impossible. This statement today is directed above all against negriism and its naïve attitudes toward the revolutionary potential of the multitude, with endless divisions and fragmentation of the proletarian class and its struggles rather than a spontaneously unified multitude in the face of current class struggles. The trick of Dyer-Witheford is now to understand the contradictory tendencies in the struggles as a single process in which the proletariat is part of capital, just as it fights against capital. Cybernetics, logistics and global supply chainsThe intensification of the machinic element in the capital vortex is often a result of economic crises and wars; the development of computers and digital networks within the framework of the US national security state (after World War II and during the Cold War) is a result of military research. Later, the computer was sold to commercial companies that used it as a weapon in automation, and even later, as the processing power of computers continued to rise and prices fell, successive generations of computers were brought from the consumer goods industry to the markets, PCs, laptops, smartphones, etc. The computer was also used as a weapon in automation. Dyer-Witheford again investigates the consequences of this cybernetic revolution in the areas of production, circulation and financialisation. In production, cybernetics is an important factor that stands for the intensification of automation (the transformation of work processes in relation to fixed capital), numerically controlled machines, industrial robots and systematized chains of computer-controlled flexible productions, accompanied by new forms of workplace organization and management control, not only in factories but also in offices. In the circulation (the one that takes place out of production), cybernetic automation takes place through the network of networks, the Internet, in the phases of the realization of the commodity qua advertising and marketing, both of which now run through PCs, from the primitive forms of e-advertising qua pop-ups and commercial portals to the social networks in which the free work of users takes place, whose data is sold and evaluated by the consumer industry. Algorithmized data is codified and exploited via the Internet. In the circulation (the one that leads into production) in which the purchase of machines, raw materials and labor is organized, networks for the production of global supply chains are today absolutely necessary in order to connect the geographically separated but functionally related production sites and business operations with each other. Capital, which has become extremely mobile, constantly analyses local cost differences in terms of production and circulation in order to exploit every possible profit difference. The geographical mapping of the planet by capital tends on the one hand to exploit economies of scale through the aggregation of several companies in one place, thus achieving higher profits, and on the other hand to organise ever deeper decentralisation, the relocation of companies and outsourcing made possible by global logistical chains. Finally, technological innovation, obstacles in space, intensity of economies of scale and differentiations in the process of capital accumulation determine possible developments. (Cf. Harvey 2011: 162) The infrastructures of the telecommunications industries, modularized interfaces, barcodes and Instruments based on RFID technologies have enabled a logistical revolution in recent decades, allowing capital to capture and use labour resources on a global scale. This is an aspect of cybernetics that, instead of replacing labour at the global level, expands labour at its scale, with labour use usually taking place at the lowest possible wages. The fixed costs of the industrial investment can also be limited by other factors: Machines produce machines that perform their operations at higher speeds, machines that suck in cheap labor, and machines that replace living labor – Ballards Crystal World, a vortex of robots and networks, robotized networks, and networked robots. (ibid.) However, to create this vortex, we need area-wide and comprehensive cybernetic systems and networks. Marx already knew that technological innovation would make individual machines cheaper, but at the same time it would be necessary to develop systems of machines whose overall prices could rise enormously. Industrial computerization actually went in this direction – starting with the use of a few robots in production through full computerization of factories and offices to satellite-networked production, logistics and various point-of-sale platforms. This has led to an enormous increase in the cost of using new technologies for companies. While there has been a regular reduction in the cost of chips, there has also been an increase in the cost of the systems needed to manufacture the chips. Chip manufacturing companies have become larger and more automated. In 1966 a new factory cost $14 million, in 1995 $1.5 trillion and today the price is $6 trillion. (ibid.: Section 4) The cybernetic revolution divided companies into different sectors. Today, many production processes run largely on a microscopic scale for which human perception is inadequate. Only robots are capable of adequate perception. However, human labour is not enough, as technicians and engineers must be present during production stoppages and disturbances in order to remedy them as quickly as possible. Updating the software alone can generate immense costs that compensate for the cost-saving effects of Moore’s law, so that the organic composition of the capital can increase again. To some extent, this can be compensated by tapping new sources of poorly paid labor at the end of electronically coordinated supply chains, outsourcing production to low-wage countries, and activating unpaid digital labor. George Caffetzis, in his “Law of the Growing Dispersion of the Organic Composition of Capital”, assumes that any increase in composition through the use of new technologies leads to the emergence of industrial areas in which the composition decreases again. (ibid.: Section 2) There is always a transfer of value, for example from the production of Iphones at Foxconn in China to Apple’s dream factories in Silicon Valley, where only a few people are employed. In the cybernetic capital vortex, in the highly developed industrialized countries, living labor is replaced by automation, and at the same time new sources of cheap labor are absorbed, especially in Asia and Africa, while the resulting effects on production and consumption are to be compensated by financialization qua debt and speculation. Machines and proletarian classWith regard to the composition of the proletarian class, it can be said that the cybernetic revolution destroyed the factory as the basis of the Fordist mass worker, reduced the labor force through automation in the metropolises (with jobs increasingly being shifted from industrial production to services and technical work), and geographically localized and expanded it more strongly in the former peripheries, which in turn became possible only through the comprehensive containerization of transport and digital logistics. In this context, Dyer-Witheford examines the rise and fall of the industrial mass worker through the Detroit automobile industry, where the mass worker was initially able to celebrate great successes in earning higher wages, social benefits and raising living standards, which eventually became exemplary for the entire working class in the United States. In the period after 1949, the automobile became a symbol of personal freedom and prosperity in the U.S.; it was the commodity in a nexus that linked property, highway networks, suburban home ownership, and the consumption of oil. In the 1950s, General Motors was the largest industrial manufacturing company in the world, generating 3% of U.S. GDP alone. Marxist Ramin Ramtin defines the machine from three essential elements: Power transmission, transformation of motion and control of direction With regard to capitalization, Dyer-Witheford mentions Randy Martin’s studies on the financialization of everyday life. (Dyer-Witheford 2015: Section 2) We have already analysed the comprehensive significance of information and telecommunications technologies for the financial industry elsewhere. We have also discussed the relationship between digital technologies and financialisation elsewhere. It should only be said here that one of the main influences for the high level of automation came from the derivatives markets themselves. These were closely linked to logistics from the outset, for example in that various forms of futures were developed to hedge the uncertainties of foreign investments, especially currency fluctuations. The mathematical models based on risk production are now largely computerised in high-frequency trading. In this context, Dyer-Witheford refers to Brian/Rafferty as meta-goods or derivatives that remain the strongest product of circulation (and less of labour), i.e. never leave the cycle from money to extra money. The global value of cybernetic industries (communication services, computers and the environment, communication goods, semiconductors, etc.) has risen from 800.349 million dollars in 1980 to 28 trillion dollars in 2010. (ibid: section 2) The distribution of the effects of cybernetics within the capital vortex – automation in production, networks in circulation, and algorithms in finance – is of course only half the truth, insofar as production itself is a circulation process that requires networks; circulation contains production processes of companies in marketing and logistics; and finally, companies are decentrally regulated by financial capital, whose modes of operation are based on algorithmic production, through the financial markets. (The universal communicator of all these processes today is the smartphone. Its sales are boosted by feedback loops in which successful circulation produces effects that only accelerate circulation: A popular smartphone attracts app developers who create app libraries that motivate consumers to buy even more of that model. The power clearly lies with platform providers like Apple, who also control the distribution channels for apps. Apple is collecting a kind of technological pension. In this context, the “app economy” is worth mentioning; the number of workers working in software applications in the USA in 2012 is estimated at 500,000. App production is often seen as another form of automation, and this cybernetic design process, which often involves networked crowdsourcing (Apple), is also affected by the reduction in labour costs. ibid.: Section 9) The cybernetic transformation of capital accumulation entails complex effects on the organic composition of capital. The cybernetic restructuring of automation and the development of electronic networks in recent decades has been much faster than previous technological revolutions. The analysis of the digital speed of computers is based on the Moore´sche law, according to which the performance of computers doubles every 18 months at a given price. The success of the law is based, among other things, on the semiconductor industry, which succeeded in combining cybernetic technologies (microscopic operations with high quantities of toxic chemicals) in global centers with cheap labor in the peripheries, which were also released from production processes with more intensive automation. In addition, a law formulated by John Metcalfe is being applied, stating that a network grows with the number of squares of nodes, a principle that requires investment in wired and wireless connections. (ibid.: Section 2) With the reduction of the cost of the elementary element of cybernetics, the microchip, a reduction in the cost of machinery has been set in motion, which, in the event of an increase in the technical composition of capital, does not necessarily lead to a corresponding increase in the organic composition of capital, but rather can it remain constant or even fall, with the result that the law of the falling rate of profit is invalidated. nd speed. (ibid.: section 3) In the early industrial machines, these three elements were still directly related to each other and to a single task. In addition, the machines were quite inflexible in practice. The machines functioned as parts of the relative value-added production and the workers had to obey their rhythm at all costs. Their rigidity, however, also limited the reign of the dead over living labor. In the late 19th century, electric motors separated the power sources of machines from their movement. One machine could have several motors, or several machines could be driven by one motor. Although this machine development disqualified large parts of the human labor force, it required the development of a skilled labor force cadre to monitor the machine systems. This kind of mechanical automation was still based on the combination of man and machine, and from a political point of view, the mass worker could also stop the machines. The cybernetic feedback loop revolutionized the moment of machine control in particular. If a machine has sensors to measure and correct its own performance and its own data, i.e. to recursively adapt the input to the output, it largely replaces the human function of control, which was still essential in industrial systems. The feedback loops give the cybernetic machine qualities that were previously attributed to human work: Flexibility, adaptability, primitive learning and self-control. Automation separates the movement of the machine from the human body. And networks do the same in terms of communication by generating signals that circulate independently of human language and writing and become subject to technological modulation and reconfiguration (telephone). Research concentrated on networks refers not only to self-reproducing robots (von Neumann), but also to machine-humans hybridity, which culminates in the concept of Haraway’s cyborg. The Toyota system and its effectsDyer-Witheford presents all these insights in order to explain the difference between the Fordist enterprise that generated the mass worker and the Toyota system. (Also in the US, the industrial sector was computerized at that time, particularly to reduce labor costs through the automation of steel factories, the invention of CAD/CAM design, and digital logistics management that enabled outsourcing in the textile and electronics industries.) Dyer-Witheford summarizes the essential elements of toyotism as follows (ibid.: Section 2): 1) The reduction of manpower through the use of cybernetic machines that know when to stop their operations. The prototype of this development was a self-activating weaving machine used in the textile industry, which was based on the feedback loop and incorporated human working capacities into its rhythm. The workers could now operate several machines at the same time. 2) The redefinition of the worker, who now not only had to obey, but was regarded as an active participant in production, for example through the possibility of changing the speeds of the machines (Kaizen system), which, however, did not serve to slow down the machines in principle, but to create more effective adaptations of the worker to the machine. Comprehensive teamwork was set up, with tasks no longer tied to fixed times. 3) The reduction of the inventory by outsourcing suppliers, for which the development of electronic networks was absolutely necessary, insofar as these made it possible to deliver the necessary parts for the manufacture of a product on demand (just-in-time). The fixed and circulating capital tied to the factory was thus significantly reduced. 4) Production was adapted more precisely to the requirements of demand and consumption by increasing the number of models and accessories, so that production proved to be much more heterogeneous and adaptive than in Fordism. The adaptation to demand required the exact, frequency-calculated use of tools and machines, the flexible adaptation of production and the establishment of flexible working conditions. Taiichi Ohno, vice president of Toyota in office in the 1970s, summarized this development in the term “autonomization”, servomechanical automation. The worker was understood as a part of the feedback loop of the machine, as a sensory element in a purposeful process that served to understand the biological and mechanical components of the machine. While robots were most intensively used in the automotive industry from the 1980s onwards, global capitalist production at the same time required the construction of complex logistical infrastructures that depended entirely on cybernetic systems. While public attention to the Internet grew only slowly, the most intensive applications of cybernetic systems outside the military sphere were clearly evident in companies and on the stock market. Automotive companies were at the forefront of this development in the 1980s, when General Motors began planning a new car series (Saturn) – embedded in a stream of resources including raw materials and outsourced components, coordinated by satellite-based computers. Even though the model was not successful, it formed the basis for the first comprehensive supply management system that connected suppliers, factories and customers across the board. (ibid.: Section 3) The just-in-time logic of toyotism has been significantly intensified by the integration of fluctuating information flows (related to inventory capacities and markets) into databases and networks. Often the suppliers settled near the main production sites, but this was not always necessary due to the progressive development of logistics and containerization. However, it required a global system of direct investment, trade agreements and the development of cybernetic networks, especially to facilitate access to areas with high resources of cheap labour, such as Mexico, Southeast Asia, China and India. In 2005, the automotive industry worldwide produced about 87 million cars, buses and trucks, a clear indication that the capital vortex is by no means weightless, immaterial or clean; on the contrary, it increases the production of products made of metal and plastic, driven by fossil raw materials circulating around the planet. (ibid.) Today, even the software production of capital is permeated by the methods of Taylorism, Fordism and Toyotism at the same time. In a classical disqualification process, structured programming techniques (Object Oriated Programming) broke the writing of software into modules or into relatively simple step-by-step tasks. Executives transfer modules and tasks to programmers who work on them more or less simultaneously, while they are observed by team colleagues in regular control excursions that compare, check and uncover irregularities. This is a programming proletariat that does not hack, but often tries to mask its proletarian status by signs of hacking. The work of the programming proletariat, on the other hand, cannot be imagined without a series of other types of work. In the industrial processes of computer production one finds the jobs of semiconductor production in clean white spaces, the jobs of circuit boards, printers and cables in less clean spaces, sometimes at home, and the jobs of poorly paid service workers. In Silicon Valley, there were about 65,000 electronic assembly workers in 2000, 40,000 non-assembly workers, and 200,000 service providers, the latter often women and migrants. (ibid: section 4) Flexible working conditions are the order of the day, but the real killer for workers worldwide is the toxic waste that comes from manufacturing semiconductors. Accelerated computer production multiplies the use of toxic chemicals, reduces workers’ time to regenerate, and at the same time reduces companies’ attempts to stop toxic production. Global production also makes it impossible to imagine the Silicon Valley dream factory without production sites in Bangalore, Delhi, Puna and Hyderabad, where, for example, service workers in the computer industry earn $30 a month, work 12 hours a day or more without any job security, and live in tents or slums near the Cybertowers. The triadic pattern of lucrative high-tech capital, professional informational work and exhaustive, low-paid work is replicating itself today on a global scale. Global supply chainsIn this context, Dyer-Witheford examines the global supply chains with which today’s large companies organize their goods production worldwide, i.e. arrange each element geographically in such a way that labor costs are optimized, access to raw materials is effectively regulated, and optimal proximity to markets is ensured in order to expand the logistic chains into integrated, continuous sequences. From the 1980's onwards, these supply chains were to a large extent responsible for the technical composition of the global proletariat, especially in the second and third world. From a technological point of view, these chains go back to cybernetics. In the course of increasing computer power, higher transmission capacity and more powerful software, telecommunications became cheaper and cheaper, so that it made sense to separate the factories geographically and reassemble them on a global level. It was relatively easy for the large industrial nations to combine high-tech technologies in their own countries with cheap wage labor in the countries of the peripheries. Transport routes from globally dispersed suppliers to the main company were effectively managed through modular production processes and standardized interfaces between suppliers, customers and headquarters. Data traffic has been improved through standards such as Electronic Data Exchange (EDI) formats. These logistical supply chains not only changed the composition of the global proletariat, they also created the Internet of Things. A crucial moment of this development was the introduction of the barcode by IBM in the 1970s; the first step of a logistical revolution in which transport and communication were later accelerated and optimized through detailed cybernetic tracking, inventory control and screen-based systems. As logistics chains grew in length and complexity, they generated their own sector of capital production (Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Epicor, etc.). (ibid.) The aim was to tap into the cheapest resources of labour, produce goods at the lowest cost and move them at the maximum speed from production to sale, develop new transport routes and resolve current and future organisational problems as quickly as possible. Walmart is the classic example of a gigantic supply chain that combines logistics with just-in-time production. In 2005, the data centers connected to Walmart tracked approximately 680 million different products per week; barcode scanners and precise computer systems identified more than 20 million customer transactions per day and stored this information. (ibid.: Section 5) The satellite communication linked the respective business centers directly to the central computer system and from there back to the suppliers, in order to guarantee the automatic ordering process as smoothly as possible. Finally, the RFID system was introduced. (Dyer-Witheford speaks here of a second economy that has emerged alongside the physical economy, which develops silently, invisibly, networked and almost autonomously, even simultaneously and in constant reconfigurations.) The most radical changes in logistics, however, took place at the end of the globalized chains, where the deindustrialization of the North as a reason and effect on rural depopulation in the South traff, to set in motion a new wave of primitive accumulation. In Asia, Latin America, and Africa, migrants flocked masses to metropolises and their informational economies, or to the North and its service sectors, or to special export zones in Mexico, the Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and especially China. China also became the epicenter of workers unrest. At the same time, North American workers migrated heavily into the circulation sphere, where Walmart replaced the automobile group General Motors as the most employment-intensive company in the USA. Here, the combination of a low-paid workforce (including in the supplier industry), low prices and high profits temporarily unleashed a strong pull for the dynamism of the entire US industry. The InternetAfter Dyer-Witheford has extensively examined the class composition of the global proletariat in the current computer industry, he is concerned with new de- and recompositions of this class in and around the Internet, focusing on the circulatory flows of the cybernetic vortex in the Internet. The added value here is produced/realized not only through the extraction of often unpaid labor, but also through acceleration and technological innovation, among other things by increasing the turnaround times of capital. In the 21st century, the Internet became a huge sales machine. If logistic supply chains are the dirty little secret of the digital revolution, today the Internet is the pretty face of an exploding communication for consumer purposes, qua streaming advertising, consumer tracking and increasing the sale of goods. The gold rush on the Internet involved many agents from the beginning: The computer sector, which produced software and hardware, telecommunications companies and cable producers, retail and B-2-B companies, media companies and the entire entertainment industry. Venture capital invested enormous amounts of money early in the high-risk sectors. The share prices of dotcom companies were not based on performance, but on expectations. With Christian Fuchs, Dyer-Witheford assumes that Web 2.0 capital is characterized by platforms that extract the added value from users’ free work, either as the production of passive raw material processed by search engine crawlers, or as the active creation of users in social media. (ibid.: section 5) At the same time, the corporations use open source software to collect, connect and evaluate user data, i.e. to create patterns and clusters to massively accumulate data capital. This free work, however, is only one form of a multitude of works in the shadow economy that function in addition to wage labour. It is the cheap labour force, of which Jason w. Moore, who have always been constitutive for the history of capitalization and proletarization. For the class composition of the global proletariat, free work in Web 2.0 has the following consequences: a) limited expansion of techno-scientific workers in Web 2.0, b) mobilization of prosumer content by extending an unpaid digital working day, c) subversions to old-school media workers, d) development of a digital microbusiness in niche markets, e) intensification of the circulation of goods, and f) autocommodification of one’s own person in promotion and reputation management (qua optimization of profile). (ibid.) Every Facebook posting creates the extraction of added value, albeit parasitically, using the user’s fear of social exclusion to promote the circulation of capital. There is definitely a connection between the Facebook users and the cheap workers at Foxconn, insofar as the former are dependent on the cheap goods (computers) from China, and thus the computer produced in China is a prerequisite for the Facebook activity of the user, who in turn delivers free work on Facebook and incorporates a specific subjectivation form of capital. The global proletariat and the zonesDyer-Witheford really examines in depth the composition of the global proletariat (in its relationship to cybernetics), which he with Karl-Heinz Roth calls a “multi-layered multiverse” (ibid.: Section 7) composed of those classes that have to sell, disenfranchise, or rent their labor to capital in order to secure their reproduction, and the surplus population, which itself remains denied the sale of labor. The portrait of cybernetic proletarianization encompasses the world-historical exodus of the agrarian populations, with automation and biotechnologies continuing to strongly disintegrate peasant cultures; surplus populations in the informal sector; and massive subsistence farming, with logistics facilitating the transfer of industrial labor from the northwest of the world to Asia; there is the development of a diffuse service sector due to wage labour in reproduction and circulation; there is the mobilization of women for paid and unpaid work and the escalation of unemployment, underemployment and unpaid or insecure work. What set all these movements in motion was the differentiation in wage development in the wake of the new global “regulation” of capital, which included the separation between the old capitalist centers and the peripheries – thus creating new opportunities to rent cheap labor and buy cheap land and advance the development of previously unprotected ecospheres. The worldwide outsourcing and offshoring of large companies is setting a dynamic in motion in which even some logistical destinations of the former peripheries finally reached a critical mass of industrialization, so that they could compete with the old centers of capital accumulation in Europe and the USA, think of some cities from the BRICS states. Theory Communiste (TC) speaks today of three zones on the capitalist world market: 1) The hyperzones of capital with high functional performances in the area of the labor markets and the places of production (finance, technology and research). 2) Secondary zones with intermediate industries and technologies (logistics and communication). 3) Crisis zones of informational industries with low-paid work or zones where no work is done at all. (ibid.) While the production of capital is unified throughout the zones, this is by no means true of the reproduction of labor. In the first zone, highly paid wage labor meets with private risk insurance and those jobs in which certain aspects of Fordism are preserved while other workers struggle with precarious conditions. In the second zone, precarious, low-paid labor is the norm, mixed with islands of contract-paid labor, migration, and the lack of coverage for social risks. In the third zone, the survival of the proletariat depends on humanitarian aid, illegal trade and Mafia structures, on agriculture, but also on small communities. This must be understood as a volatile and porous process, permeated by the constant migration of the proletariat and the restructuring of capital. For example, when wages rose in China’s industrial enterprises, Chinese capital migrated to Southeast Asia and Afirka for the first time. In these zonal arrangements, the proletarian class is fragmented and fractalized, the former insofar as the conditions of social reproduction can vary greatly from one zone to the next, fractal insofar as the fundamental relations between capital, intermediate strata and proletariat manifest themselves in self-similar patterns in all zones, albeit in different scales and mixtures. From 1980 to 2010, the body of planetary labor has increased from 1.2 billion to 3 billion people. This was by no means solely a consequence of global population growth, but a consequence of the deepening of global capital accumulation and markets. Without the use of cybernetic technologies, the systematic global organization of labour, its flexibility and granularity, its production and circulation would not have been possible. In the future, however, capital accumulation will revolve less around the reproduction of the labor force than around the reproduction of cybernetic systems. The combination of globalization and cybernetics has revealed two tendencies in the dynamics of the capital vortex: On the one hand, the capture of the global population through supply chains and mobile production, which keeps labor available to capital at a planetary level, and on the other, the drive towards automation, software robots and networks, which keep labor redundant and create a surplus population useless to capital. This “moving contradiction” creates jobs, however it destroys them – by no means in a balanced process, but in a spiral movement that leads to an ever more intense machinization of capital. The high volume of labor sucked into the cybernetic capital vortex simultaneously creates directly or indirectly the labor-saving systems – industrial robots, automatic transport machines, computer assembly, and algorithmic trading. The workers who extract rare earths, lay cables, construct mobile phone masts and are responsible for the technical operation of the machines produce a world of automatic semiconductor factories, robotized assembly lines, data centers and goods supplied by drones, and finally algorithmized finance. A period of high absorption of human labor by capital is followed by a period of accelerated labor output, with which the new levels of automation in production and circulation – combined with cybernetic financialization – increasingly separate capital from the proletariat. In principle, capital can do without the production of consumer goods; enterprises can produce profit by producing means of production for other enterprises. The precarious labor force as a mere remainder would then be nothing more than a component of fixed capital. However, this is not without crises. (With regard to the foresight of future crises in the Capital Vortex, Dyer-Witheford concentrates on the areas of employment, opposition, ecology and entity. All trends in the global economy point to a growing inequality of income and wealth as well as a rising surplus population. Metereological supercomputers and satellite stations are now recording rising CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. The problem of antagonism is related to the rising number of wars, while the problem of the entity is to leave the management of companies to semi-autonomous automated systems. ibid.: Section 10) Dyer-Witheford summarises what is today called the global labour market in the following trends (ibid.: Section 7): 1) The end of the global rural population through the development of urban bias and the introduction of monocultures, through the use of automatic harvesting machines and genetically modified seeds from the agribusiness, as well as through partly violent land seizures for industrial production. In 1980, agricultural production was still responsible for 50% of the world’s work, in 2010 it was only 35%. 2) Migration. Today there are about 200 000 million migrants worldwide, some are seasonal workers, others nomadize permanently. Nevertheless, these movements are entirely aligned with the flows of capital; the borders of the countries are not open, but rather the migrants are scanned there with the latest technologies; the workers are regulated according to various differentiations (paid/unpaid, qualified/non-qualified, permanent/temporary). 3) Labour nomads. Not all participants in the proletariat, which today numbers around 3 billion, are paid for their work or are poorly paid. About half of the proletariat is engaged in activities that, if at all, only secure subsistence, and this ranges from rural work to seemingly independent work. Regional differences must be taken into account here. Even in the metropolises of capital, self-employment often implies nothing more than fragile web-based activities in micro-enterprises or nominally independent and contract-based work that remains fully integrated into global supply chains or franchises; these are activities that are well described by self-exploitation and/or forms of mega-proletarization. In the global South, this often means street labour, day labour, begging and cheap advertising. 4) The existence of a neo-industrial proletariat. Contrary to the incantations of many theorists of the information society, industrial labor on a global scale has not declined significantly. On the contrary, industrial output has tripled in the last 4 decades, from $2.58 trillion to $8.93 trillion in a period when the world population has not even doubled. This is far from a weightless, airy or immaterial economy, notes Dyer-Witheford. (The economic significance of these figures, however, needs to be examined in more detail. Lohoff/Trenkle refer in this context to the material parameter of labour productivity. (Lohoff/Trenkle 20129 They argue that for the relevant expenditure of living labor, which materializes in the total value mass at a certain point in time, not absolute hours worked, but socially average, abstract working time is decisive. If five jobs in China could be replaced by a single job in the USA, then in the global context only this one job with its relevant productivity would be included in the socially valid, global value mass. In fact, empirical studies would then have to examine the differences in productivity in certain industries in the USA and China (which Lohoff/Trenkle actually also locate in the ratio 5-1). However, when it comes to the problem raised by Lohoff/Trenkle of the melting of the living mass of value in the age of micro-electronics, it is precisely not only material but also price categories that need to be examined – the organic composition of capital, profit rates, the relationship between interest rate and profit rate. Thus, the lower labour productivity in companies in China compared to the USA can be compensated to a certain extent by lower wages (rising value-added rates), and this is to be set in relation to average profit rates and productivity differences on a national and international scale, whereby ultimately price and no material indicators count.) Indeed, while much of industrial labour has been outsourced from the US and Europe, significant parts of industrial labour have survived in the former peripheries, but at much lower wages, often without unions and in largely deregulated forms. This work, however, is essential for the infrastructures of capital. Just think of the countless cable installations and the construction of huge data centres that send data into the clouds. 6) The multiplication of work and the increase in services, the latter an amorphous category that includes activities as diverse as highly complicated accounting, consulting, doormen and the work of security forces and work in fastood chains. Many works (advertising, marketing, entertainment, retail and communication) take place in the circulation sphere, i.e. in finance, sex work and healthcare. The feminisation of work on the inclusion of more and more women in paid employment, with differences in length and pay persisting to the detriment of women worldwide. 7) The existence of new education factories, which today accept aspirants from all classes, who are constantly promised higher mobility towards better jobs. To sum it up: Although the so-called cybernetic capital has increased the pool of workers from which it can draw on on a global scale, it has at the same time created an army of labour nomads for whom even the Marxist term of the reserve army does not apply, insofar as larger parts of these nomads can never again be integrated into capital-oriented production processes. In the words of Mike Davis, they form the “Surplus Humanity. In 2011, as the class struggles flared up again worldwide, the full extent of the new class composition of the proletariat became apparent: the new strata of the Surplus population, the youth reproletarianized in the education factories as graduate students without a job, the neo-industrial proletariat in factories like Foxconn, and the myriads of precarious, low-paid workers in the squares from Cairo to New York. Think of the problem of the middle class working in particular in the areas of machine design and the training of workers tied to the new machines and occupying a leading place in the wage hierarchy. Cybernetics has both recreated and destroyed such strata. It seems inappropriate to divide global employment into three sectors – agriculture, industry and services – and possibly enlarge it to include the information sector, inasmuch as it is hard to imagine a job today that is not in any way linked to digitisation. There is an increase in the number of workers strongly linked to cybernetic systems, programmers, software engineers, network experts, web designers, system administrators in all possible sectors (finance, entertainment, marketing and administration) and workers in the new creative industries. The growth of digitally based work is often associated with the middle class and its well-paid wages and high status, but here too this narrative can be challenged by globalization, think of the “rise” of relatively low-paid programmers in India. A large number of works related to networks are standardized, precarious, disorderly and poorly paid. Nevertheless, the growth of cybernetic capital has created a new middle class that is mainly taking over supervisory tasks and technological responsibilities for capital, think of the team leaders, project coordinators and consultants who make up the management apparatus of capital that has been reconstructed at a molecular level in the course of globalization. Financial capital and ChimericaDyer-Witheford addresses the problem that the reduction or stagnation of wage costs, which has been made possible by automation and outsourcing, among other things, naturally raises the question of who should buy the products that flow out of the global supply chains, a problem that has been increasingly answered in the USA since the 1980s with the granting of consumer loans. Of course, one can increase demand by increasing the number of workers in the face of falling or stagnating real wages, as has been the case in China, or by increasing luxury consumption and building up strata with considerable purchasing power, as has happened in the USA, and by increasing the number of actors responsible for the realisation of goods in advance (brokers, trade capital, immovables, etc.), and also by weakening direct producers in comparison with large trade capitalists such as Aldi, Apple or Wal-Mart. However, this does not solve either the realization problem or the problem of over-accumulation. The latter can be postponed by excessive prices and fees, higher taxes and a radical austerity policy, but this does not eliminate overproduction and the lack of profitable investment opportunities and thus the overaccumulation of capital. In the context of the over-accumulation of capital, the rising costs of technological investments in complex cybernetic systems and infrastructures are a factor that has probably partly compensated for the tendencies based on cybernetics that counteract the fall in the profit rate. And the real estate sector shows what can happen when banks lend money to the construction sector and consumers are granted mortgages to buy terraced houses built by construction companies. In this context, financial capital is a very important juggler to overcome the crises or to compensate (and not only their perpetrators). Financial capital, which today is equipped with the best integrated cybernetic systems, operates constantly in a field of uncertainty that also causes cyclical turbulence, with the life benefits newly gained by parts of the proletariat evaporating in a matter of seconds. Using what Dyer-Witheford calls “Chimerica,” he analyzes the movements of rural migrants to the urban terminals of low-wage digital device production (China), which consumers in the U.S. are using as a basis for popular use of the Internet, which is increasingly being transformed into a platform for selling goods. The more it became impossible to survive in China’s rural areas, the more migrants flocked to the cities and became cheap wage slaves; the stronger consumer credit growth in the US, the stronger economic growth there. These two trends were complementary. While the U.S. was dealing with non-reproduction as excessive credit, the ordinary Chinese were saving to secure hospital visits, housing or their precarious existence in general. If China can be understood as the new workshop of global capital, the USA as the global shopping mall. Part of the rising consumer spending in the USA consisted of the luxury consumption of the capitalists and the new software engineers in Silicon Valley, but the North American proletariat was also able to increase its consumer spending, especially since women were integrated into production at mostly low wages and consumer lending rose sharply so that consumers could buy cheap goods from China in particular. The thesis of many Marxists, adopted by Dyer-Witheford, that finance in its various forms, from loans to fictitious capital to derivatives, has in part only postponed the problems of the lack of effective demand and low investment, needs its own discussion. Here are just a few remarks. Factors such as profitability, size, globalisation, mobility, speed, homogenisation and degree of interconnectedness are decisive in determining the hegemony or determination of financial capital more precisely. In addition, there are specific ways in which the capital economy functions, such as decentralised supervision on the markets, which is extremely important for the circulation of money capital, and useful ways in which money capital seeking profitable investments can be distributed. In his book The Puzzle of Capital Deciphering, David Harvey points to the effective distribution of excess money capital (while reducing transaction costs) by financial capital in the 1980s, both in the US and internationally, which succeeded in directing capital flows into regions and areas where comparatively high profit rates were to be expected. (Harvey 2014: 39) Of course, these factors also include the highest possible returns, the state safeguarding of bank profits in the event of crises (bank rescue), the strong action potential of financial capital in the context of national and international competition, which Bichler/Nitzan defined in essence as the power of companies to beat other companies (Bichler/Nitzan 2009), the strength of capital power, the existence of largely uncontrolled shadow bank systems and the high network intensity of financial capital. In the financial industry there is still the dominance of shareholder value, above-average returns on capital, bonuses and extremely high salaries for management, as well as the socialisation of losses and the increasing integration of wage earners into the financial markets. While the centralisation of private money capital continued to increase after the financial crisis of 2008, the shadow banking system remained untouched. The share of financial sector profits in total corporate profits in the US rose from 15% in 1970 to around 40% in 2005.1 (cf. Bischoff 2014: 54/Harvey 2014: 57) The rhizomatically networked areas of financial capital, whose conglomerates consist of major banks, investment banks, hedge funds, rating agencies and private speculators, are today permanently opening up strategic fields for global intervention, in part independently of the location of the financial capital intervention agency. And even multinational companies (of all sectors) that maintain large financial departments are to be understood as forms of financial capital, taking into account the divergence between their book and stock market values. Lohoff/Trenkle speak in their book The great devaluation from a structural shift in the dynamics of capital accumulation since the 1980s to fictitious capital or from an “accumulation of capital without value utilization” which, however, at some point also reaches its limits. (Lohoff/Trenkle 2012: 256 f.) The anticipation of future value was initiated by the sale of fictitious capital in the form of property titles (shares, bonds, derivatives, etc.) representing a certain sum of money and the claim to multiplication. (Ibid.:124 f.) With this kind of financialization a further mobilization of the production of industrial goods took place. The use of fictitious (bonds, shares) and speculative capital financed investments in the industrial sector and infrastructure measures with a view to future exploitation. David Harvey repeatedly points out that much of the real estate investment is related to the production of fictitious capital (global real estate speculation). (Harvey 2015: 32ff.) Progressive urbanization and its immediate real estate boom depend on the widespread use of new financial instruments that provide huge amounts of credit. In addition, prior to the 2008 financial crises in the US, local mortgages were pooled and securitized to sell to investors on a global scale (CDOs). It has also required the development of new financial firms active in secondary markets to spread, diversify and regulate the risks associated with the real estate boom. In addition, a significant part of public and private consumption today takes the form of borrowing, which is itself part of the production of fictitious capital. For Lohoff/Trenkle, from the 1980s at the latest the financial capital is the engine for the expansion of global goods production, which has been taking place since the 1960s at a high level of productivity and progressive process automation. The authors speak of “induced value production” (Lohoff/ Trenkle 2012: 147 f.) or of “inverse capital”, because value production is not based on the extraction of added value through the use of labor, but is driven by the growing accumulation of fictitious capital; indeed, today the entire worldwide production of value is induced by fictitious capital. For without the fictitious capital, the functioning capital (the capital invested in the “real economy”) would have had to enter into a growing cycle of mass devaluation. Lohoff/Trenkle have also attempted to empirically substantiate their theses. First they point to the known figures. In 2010, the Global Wealth Report put financial assets (excluding derivatives) at 231 trillion dollars, four times the current global GDP. Between 1998 and 2008, the total volume of derivatives grew from 72 to 673 trillion dollars – twelve times the global GDP. Lohoff/Trenkle find an important indicator pointing to the hegemony of financial capital in the economic relations between the USA and China, which are commonly referred to as “Chimerica”. The steadily growing trade and current account deficit in the USA since the 1980s (higher imports of goods and services than exports), which was financed by the inflow of capital from abroad, corresponds to a surplus in the capital account (increase in capital imports). The US has increasingly imported goods, especially from China, while its financial markets have increasingly sold securities and derivatives to foreign investors (fictitious/speculative capital). Industrial products from China, but of course also from other export-oriented countries (such as Germany), were sold to the USA, while all kinds of securities were bought in the USA at the same time. Chinese private investors and Chinese sovereign wealth funds also invested their profits in the US capital markets, especially until the 2008 financial crisis, i.e. they bought “produced” securities and derivatives in the US, especially since the end of the 1990s, at a time when China once again made a big leap forward in its economic growth rates. China has also pushed ahead with financialisation in its own markets; total debt (government, financial, industrial and private sectors) has risen from 153 percent of GDP in 2008 to 282 percent today, with capital flowing primarily into the construction industry and infrastructure expansion.(ibid.) A second important indicator for the hegemonic influence of financial capital on the “real economy” is Lohoff/Trenkle in the increasing allocation of consumer funds.in the US since the 1980s. The increasing domestic consumption of consumer goods and real estate was financed by consumer loans and mortgages. This is important because private consumption plus spending on private real estate accounts for around 75 percent of GDP in the USA and is thus the most important factor for the economic development of the economy. For Lohoff/Trenkle, credit-financed consumption also points to induced value production, because the purchasing power qua money does not come from past goods production that was realised on the markets, but rather represents an anticipation of future value. In the USA, this applies not only to predominantly imported consumer goods, but also to the domestic construction sector and a whole range of services. Perspectives of the strugglesAutonomous worker theory has linked the circulation and realization of capital to the circulation of the struggles of the global proletariat. Dyer-Witheford speaks here of cascades of struggles that are less smooth than circulations, more chaotic and contradictory. These cascades do not necessarily connect parts of a working class, as was the case, for example, during the time of the mass laborer, but run through new proletarianizations that remain fragmented, segmented and fractalized. Dyer-Witheford mentions three forms of struggle: Riots of the Excluded, mass occupations of public places, and workplace conflicts, in which these struggles may overlap or combine, but may also separate again. This is what makes up a cascade of struggles. Dyer-Witheford analyzes these cascades very concretely on the basis of the class struggles at Foxconn in China, the Occupy movement, and the occupations of squares in Cairo or Istanbul, whereby we are dealing here with inverted cascades, perhaps fountains that do not flow from above like the cascade, but ascend as struggles, but at the same time remain further integrated into unequal dynamics that include segmented subjectivities, limited horizons, and fractional capacities of the class, so that the common politically articulated horizon was hardly present in the struggles of 2011 either. (Dyer-Witheford 2015: Section 10) Although Dyer-Witheford admits that these struggles would not have been possible without the use of cybernetic tools and techniques, in particular the Internet, he also argues that cybernetics has probably been the most friendly technology yet for capital in its internal history, be it the destruction of space by time, be it ubiquitous surveillance or be it the creation of the global proletariat. Although the proletarian movement must use these tools (spot-covering, but not binding; viral, but monitoring; fast, but fleeting) to relativize them at the same time, that is, one must be against what one uses. And this leads to the question of whether the proletariat can also be against capital. Yes, says Dyer-Witheford, but only if it is against itself, in so far as it is today constantly further segmented by the operations of logistics, the Internet markets and the algorithms of financial capital and thus included in the system. Finally, Dyer-Witheford addresses the problem of proletarian organization and the need to build a “human front” that permeates all proletarianized and reproletarianized populations, including the precarious middle classes. He mentions two moments with regard to the term “front”: from a metereological point of view, the current in the vortex, which has the power to make it collapse; with regard to the moment of militancy, Dyer-Witheford refers to some remarks by Ernst Bloch, in which he speaks of the front as a line (into the future) marked by militant optimism that should be turned against the banal belief in automatic progress. Dyer-Witheford sums up the counter-movement against fate and pure negation (war, death statics of capital, fear and barbarism) with the following indicators or orientations: 1) Capital today, more than ever, is concerned with the reproduction of its fixed share compared to its variable share. On the other hand, a social body of the communis is to be developed on the planet. 2) In order to overcome the blessing of the proletarian classes, their competition with each other, it is necessary to have an organization that overlaps this segmentation, that creates alliances between the working, the unemployed and the precarious classes by taking over certain responsibilities of social reproduction without wanting to renounce the state social network, and at the same time creates new forms of self-administration.The boundaries between riots, wage battles, squatting and hacker activities must be overcome by a new form of class organization that coordinates them. 3) Networks. In this context, Dyer-Witheford mentions multiple multiplying movements that learn from each other in struggle, develop new objects and coordinate their operations towards a common goal that can be gradual. For the reasons discussed above, these processes can never be based solely on cyber-activities, so they need to be complemented by slower, local and plan-oriented processes. 4) Planning for transitions to communism, where the organizations in the transitions must be mobile, mobile and multiplied and constantly in discussion with the social movements. Dyer-Witheford refers to Karl Heinz Roth’s suggestion of combining trade union forms of organization and social movements for short-term goals, an anti-cyclical Keynesianism driven beyond its own borders, workers’ control in newly built enterprises, progressive taxation of capital, and massive redistribution of wealth. In addition, the radical reduction of working hours, radical democratisation and local and regional socialisation of companies and institutions must be considered. Another chapter would be to write about Dyer-Witheford’s powerful descriptions of the social struggles of the last twenty years, to which neither the anarchists nor the accelerationists have made significant contributions. LiteratureBichler, Shimshon/Nitzan, Jonathan (2009): Capital as Power. A Study of order and creoder. Florence. Bischoff, Joachim (2014): Financial-driven capitalism. Emergence – Crisis – Development Trends. Hamburg. Dyer-Witheford, Nick (2015): Cyber-Proletariat. Global Labour in the Digital Vortex. London. Harvey, David (2004): The Geography of the “New” Imperialism: Accumulation through Expropriation. In: Christian Zeller (Ed.): The Global Economy of Expropriation. Münster. 183-215.
Lohoff, Ernst (2014): Accumulation of capital without accumulation of value. The fetish character of capital market goods and its secret. In: Krisis 1/2014. www.krisis.org/2014/kapitalakkumulation-ohne-wertakkumulation Lohoff, Ernst/ Trenkle, Norbert (2012): The great devaluation. Why speculation and public debt are not the cause of the crisis. Münster. taken from: by Achim Szepanski The fact that struggles for reproductive conditions or circulation struggles are increasing again worldwide at the moment is no coincidence. In France in particular, they are increasing in intensity from week to week with the Yellow West. The shifts are easy to understand there, the radicalism of the Riots, the interventions they allow the left, the heterogeneity of the fighters, the increase in civil war, the possibility of intensifying social struggles and the involvement of migrants, the crisis of the state, which is becoming increasingly fascinated, all this points to the urgency of destitution of the existing system. We first discuss the current imperialist world order and then the question of the struggles in France. If one looks at the cartography of the globe from the point of view of the capitalist mode of production, then not only the networked structures in the world economy exist, but also a still hierarchical hierarchy of states among themselves. First, there are the non-industrialized countries, in which the multinational companies are excessively exploiting natural resources, energy and labour, which is linked to the destruction of traditional methods of production and production units. Some of these countries suffer from relative poverty, others even have to accept processes of absolute impoverishment, while all these countries have low or even negative GDP growth. There is still a sector of non-capitalist production that should not be underestimated (cf. Sanyal: 2014), and not only in agricultural production. At the same time, however, farmers who have hitherto practiced non-capitalist methods of agricultural production are forced to migrate to the cities. As workers there they receive low wages and struggle with miserable working conditions. Imperialist land seizures lead to a new form of legalization inasmuch as they configure a spatial order of divisions, i.e. establish a new system of borders and disjunctions, namely as a distinction between inside and outside in the spaces of the peripheries themselves. Finally, the capital and the states of the West systematically drive the countries of the global South to increase above all the output of their agricultural products and raw materials for export, so that especially the agricultural sectors in Africa and West Asia are characterized by subsistence farming on the one hand and the cultivation of cash corps for export on the other. The countries remain completely dependent on the world market. At the same time, Western countries protect their own agricultural sectors, erect trade barriers and increase their farmers’ income through subsidies, which in turn limits the demand for food from the global South and further worsens their terms of trade. The mechanisms of unequal trade are further reinforced under the global imperialism of multinational corporations. This is followed on the scale by the partially industrialized countries, where mainly cheap consumer goods or intermediate goods are produced and simple technologies are used. Some of these countries are attempting to set in motion more intensive capital accumulation by breaking some of the rules of neoliberal globalization and working with the means of protectionism, dumping prices and currency manipulation to slowly close the gaps to the centers. This is hardly ever the case. The neo-mercantilist policies of the western states are forcing the southern states to dismantle their trade barriers and loosen their environmental and social policies. The fact that struggles for reproductive conditions or circulation struggles are increasing again worldwide at the moment is no coincidence. In France in particular, they are increasing in intensity from week to week with the Yellow West. The shifts are easy to understand there, the radicalism of the Riots, the interventions they allow the left, the heterogeneity of the fighters, the increase in civil war, the possibility of intensifying social struggles and the involvement of migrants, the crisis of the state, which is becoming increasingly fascinated, all this points to the urgency of destitution of the existing system. We first discuss the current imperialist world order and then the question of the struggles in France. If one looks at the cartography of the globe from the point of view of the capitalist mode of production, then not only the networked structures in the world economy exist, but also a still hierarchical hierarchy of states among themselves. First, there are the non-industrialized countries, in which the multinational companies are excessively exploiting natural resources, energy and labour, which is linked to the destruction of traditional methods of production and production units. Some of these countries suffer from relative poverty, others even have to accept processes of absolute impoverishment, while all these countries have low or even negative GDP growth. There is still a sector of non-capitalist production that should not be underestimated (cf. Sanyal: 2014), and not only in agricultural production. At the same time, however, farmers who have hitherto practiced non-capitalist methods of agricultural production are forced to migrate to the cities. As workers there they receive low wages and struggle with miserable working conditions. Imperialist land seizures lead to a new form of legalization inasmuch as they configure a spatial order of divisions, i.e. establish a new system of borders and disjunctions, namely as a distinction between inside and outside in the spaces of the peripheries themselves. Finally, the capital and the states of the West systematically drive the countries of the global South to increase above all the output of their agricultural products and raw materials for export, so that especially the agricultural sectors in Africa and West Asia are characterized by subsistence farming on the one hand and the cultivation of cash corps for export on the other. The countries remain completely dependent on the world market. At the same time, Western countries protect their own agricultural sectors, erect trade barriers and increase their farmers’ income through subsidies, which in turn limits the demand for food from the global South and further worsens their terms of trade. The mechanisms of unequal trade are further reinforced under the global imperialism of multinational corporations. This is followed on the scale by the partially industrialized countries, where mainly cheap consumer goods or intermediate goods are produced and simple technologies are used. Some of these countries are attempting to set in motion more intensive capital accumulation by breaking some of the rules of neoliberal globalization and working with the means of protectionism, dumping prices and currency manipulation to slowly close the gaps to the centers. This is hardly ever the case. The neo-mercantilist policies of the western states are forcing the southern states to dismantle their trade barriers and loosen their environmental and social policies. In the highly industrialized countries of the West, the financial industry, the powerful distribution groups and the technologically most advanced and productive production facilities are localized. These countries today are mostly in a phase of economic stagnation and growing unemployment, accompanied by higher tax burdens for workers and employees and cuts in state social benefits, while the incomes and wealth of rich sections of the population continue to rise drastically. The emerging countries, especially China, but also other countries in East Asia and the BRICS countries now enjoy significant trade balance advantages, while most of the capitalist core countries – with the exception of Japan and Germany – have current account deficits, especially the USA with the largest deficit. These processes generate new contrasts at the global level, even in the imperial centers themselves. In some emerging markets, low wages, low corporate taxation and weak environmental policies may allow internal economic growth to move forward. In the highly industrialized countries of the West, the financial industry, the powerful distribution groups and the technologically most advanced and productive production facilities are localized. These countries today are mostly in a phase of economic stagnation and growing unemployment, accompanied by higher tax burdens for workers and employees and cuts in state social benefits, while the incomes and wealth of rich sections of the population continue to rise drastically. The emerging countries, especially China, but also other countries in East Asia and the BRICS countries now enjoy significant trade balance advantages, while most of the capitalist core countries – with the exception of Japan and Germany – have current account deficits, especially the USA with the largest deficit. These processes generate new contrasts at the global level, even in the imperial centers themselves. In some emerging markets, low wages, low corporate taxation and weak environmental policies may allow internal economic growth to move forward. In the years from 1997 to 2010, nominal wages rose in China, but so did prices. The increase in wages was lower than the increase in productivity, so labour costs remained relatively low. This also continues to encourage foreign direct investment, which brings capital, machinery, organizational and technical know-how to the country, stimulating further productivity growth. Capital movements and the banking system remain under strict state control so that monetary policy can support industrial policy. The undervaluation of the yuan has set in motion a cycle that supports the high growth rates of the Chinese economy because favorable exchange rates promote exports. Thus, the trade balances show a surplus that generally allows national governments in emerging countries a certain autonomy in monetary and fiscal policy, which they in turn use to compensate for the negative effects of international economic crises on their own countries. However, it must be added that while China has massively boosted exports, it has also massively imported – raw materials from the South and technology from the West. The enormous amount of domestic investment as a driver of growth in the Chinese national economy should not be underestimated. China and other emerging markets have suffered less from the effects of the financial crisis since 2008, as their governments have been able to compensate for falling commodity exports with expansive fiscal policies and a boost to domestic demand. Thus, in those emerging economies that ride the wave of international capital movements, the state can continue to play the role of collective capitalist relatively effectively if it manages industrial development and continues to stabilize social peace by sucking in external resources or direct investment. (Screpanti 2014: 100ff.) The industrial and commodity sector today, even in export-oriented countries, is structurally dependent on the dynamics of fictitious and speculative capital, where, as a result of derivatives and other new financial products, yields are still higher than real profit rates, interest rates and growth rates, despite the interest rate cuts by central banks. This is obviously also the case in China, which in recent decades has bought up large numbers of financial stocks, mainly from the USA, with the proceeds from the worldwide export of its goods. Following the 2008 crash, the Chinese government also began to compensate for the lack of fictitious and speculative capital from abroad by creating the same forms of capital domestically, especially as a result of the creation of credit by state-controlled banks, as a result of which China’s internal indebtedness has risen sharply and now represents a global crisis risk. In the countries of the West, globalization has often enough intensified the economic depression in recent years, with public resources dwindling to be able, for example, to smoothly secure social peace in the future. Today, the capitalist core countries are confronted with an increasing influx of goods from the emerging markets and, at least as far as trade in goods is concerned, are in intense competition with them. Many of their national companies are responding with offshoring, outsourcing and foreign investment strategies. (ibid.: 122) This has a recessive effect on their own national economies, while the budget budgets of states often tend to be in deficit, which in turn drastically limits the scope for an expansive economic policy by governments and leads to an ever stricter austerity policy. Thus, the dominant macroeconomic policy remains focused on the continuation of austerity policy, fiscal consolidation and regressive taxation, which favors especially the wealthy who can grant loans and speculate on the financial markets. However, austerity policy should not be seen only as a fiscal response to the 2008 financial crisis, but as a general policy strategy of expanding the debt economy, with which large parts of the population now generate surplus financial capital through their daily cash flows (loans), through interest payments and through the mechanism of securitisation of loans, which allows debt to be treated in a differentiated way as a source of profit. Austerity policy is a class-specific “put option” that discriminates against the socially vulnerable sections of the population and also has racist and gender-specific connotations possesses. One of the biggest redistributive measures in history, after the 2008 financial crisis, rescued the major private banks by the states of the capitalist core countries, forced the austerity policy even harsher on the populations. Ultimately, it was the US and China that cobbled together the ways out of the 2008 financial crisis: on the one hand, the US government and the Fed, which pumped trillions of dollars into European commercial banks and central banks through monetary policy agreements; on the other, China, through its state-led economic management, provided enormous domestic investment while retaining the worthless dollar assets and not flooding the markets with them. It is easy to see how the lack of private demand from households, but also from companies, in recent years has been compensated by the central banks by activating the monetary pumps, which, although they have been successful in avoiding further financial crashes to date, have by no means freed the economies from the recession, companies from bankruptcies and workers from wage stagnation and unemployment, but have only promoted asset inflation in the financial markets. So the 2008 financial crisis did not lead to a total collapse, even though it caused the sharpest decline in industrial investment and production since the 1930s. The financial sector itself was saved by the state bailout and massive injections of credit and money. Overall, the capitalist sector was to be supported by interest rates close to or equal to zero, in some cases even negative interest rates, a central bank policy known as “quantitative easing”. In the capitalist core countries, average economic growth (real GDP growth) has not exceeded two percent since the 2008 crash, and growth rates have also fallen in the emerging markets, while debt in all sectors and inflation in financial asset prices have continued to grow worldwide. From this point of view, the governments of the capitalist core countries are in a quite ambivalent relationship with the multinationals. Although most core country governments continue to propagate globalisation to meet the demand of national and multinational companies, they must also try to counter the depressive effects of globalisation on their economies. In order to escape this dilemma, the US and Germany in particular have adopted certain policy strategies based on a specific alliance between the national capitalist class and the state. Germany continues to seek to take advantage of globalization by pursuing outdated neo-mercantilist policies (consisting not only of massive export successes, but also of suppressed imports). One of the most important weapons remains the maintenance of low relative wage levels (wages are low relative to productivity) and restrictive monetary and fiscal policies, so that domestic effective demand and GDP growth tend to stagnate while domestic production continues to be driven by exports. But once the German export engine starts to stutter, right-wing populist movements will undoubtedly gain further ground. On economic issues, the right AfD could become interesting for some factions of German capital even if the current government fails to maintain a world-market-oriented policy against the US government around Trump and they seek political allies who pursue pronounced protectionist and bilateral economic policies. The ability of the US to perform its function of global governance has been further limited by certain restructurings in world markets and the related depressive effects on its economy. Since the 1970s, the U.S. state has attempted to promote the growth of its own economy by using expansionary monetary policy to promote speculative investment and accelerate deindustrialization in its own country. (Cf. Norfield 2016) This type of accumulation of US capital was definitely a catalyst that also enabled the economic expansion of China, India, Russia and Brazil. With its balance of payments deficit, the US stimulated exports and thus growth in emerging markets, while at the same time providing domestic financial capital with further opportunities for an unchecked flow of money capital to support the expansion of global trade and the accumulation of money capital and reserves in the rest of the world. After the end of the Bretton Woods agreement, the US forced its deficits to rise by making its own markets function like a vacuum cleaner that absorbed enormous net exports from Germany, Japan and China. The deficits were financed by foreign monetary capital, about seventy percent of the profits of European, Japanese and Chinese net exporters flowed into the places and channels of the US financial industry in search of higher profits. Thus, the US absorbed a large share of industrial goods from the rest of the world, while the US financial system spent large loans on US consumers, whose wages stagnated as a result of what increased the US profit rate and made Wall Street even more lucrative for foreign capital. In addition, direct investment in US companies was steered and the purchase of US government bonds encouraged, thus financing the US budget deficit. This was only possible through major re-regulations of the international financial system, which integrated Europe’s financial centers in particular, and also managed to add two billion workers from the former Soviet Union, China and India to the global proletariat from the 1990s onwards, who produced the new output of goods that carried trade flows towards the U.S. It was the Reagan government that, from 1981, exploited the dollar’s position as world money, supported the dynamics of the financial markets, and transformed the U.S. with its high-interest policy into a reservoir of global money capital seeking investment opportunities. Although the permanent inflow of foreign money capital promoted the US economy, the high level of interest rates placed a heavy burden on US industry for a certain period of time and, in addition, the upturn in the dollar that accompanied the inflow of foreign money capital reduced the international competitiveness of industrial companies. (Cf. Shaikh 2016) It should therefore be borne in mind that the decline in jobs in the US industrial sectors was not the result of fixed commercial transactions, as Trump now wants the public to know, but is above all attributable to the strategies of American capital to reduce labour costs by introducing new technologies and continuing to create zones of cheap labour in the global South. In addition, US financial capital itself exported ever larger masses of fictitious and speculative capital and promoted foreign direct investment. The interests of the US financial industry in this process are evident, because as long as the dollar remains the international reserve and reserve currency, both the export and import of capital generate strong profits. In addition, the various debt processes enable the country to continue to consume more than it produces. And as long as US GDP rises as a result of consumption, military spending can also rise. Meanwhile, one problem remains: how can the US increase domestic demand (and investment) while the tendency for multinationals to outsource production continues? A strong financial system and consumer credit have allowed private consumption to be promoted first (while wage levels have fallen), so the solution should be economic growth related to debt production. The debt of the US as a whole consists of the private debt of households (including that of part of the working class that was able to buy houses and consumer goods) and businesses, plus the public debt plus the foreign debt (countries that invest in US assets the dollar balances they obtain through their net exports). The Fed’s expansive monetary policy promoted all these debt processes, causing more and more high indebtedness. It should again be noted that most foreign assets held by the US are denominated in foreign currency and 95 percent of liabilities are denominated in dollars. Now, if the dollar is devalued, the value of US assets rises without the value of liabilities rising. This requires an automatic transfer of wealth from the rest of the world to the US. Europe enjoys a similar advantage. Despite the massive balance of payments deficits, US capital has been able to permanently export money abroad due to the strong financial industry. US capital exports rose from almost zero in 1970 to 600 billion dollars in 1987 and to ten trillion dollars a year, before falling sharply after the crash in 2008 and rising again to five trillion dollars in 2010. US capital thus has a number of possibilities to extract profits from the rest of the world and thus at least cushion the problem of the fall in the profit rates of US companies. Trump’s current protectionist trade wars are attempts to solve the US crisis (while domestic growth rates are currently rising), attacking mainly countries like China and Germany, both of which have high trade surpluses. Such strategies, which are composed of threats, higher tariffs and trade wars, are intended to stabilize the US dollar as a strong global reserve currency, while at the same time the US Federal Reserve is slowly raising key interest rates and thus making foreign investments in the US more attractive, especially those of global financial capital. Investors are indeed currently withdrawing billions of dollars of money from emerging markets, which will continue to weigh on the currencies of these countries. Reshoring, the relocation of production facilities back to the US, has increased in recent years due to rising wages in China and other Asian countries even without protectionist intervention. The cost advantages for multinationals that they achieve through operations in their global networks are shrinking. Protectionist policies are not aimed at comprehensive de-globalization, but at re-globalization based on specific capital fractions and requiring the construction of new corridors and channels at the global level. But here, too, the dollar must be reiterated as the world’s leading trade currency, with 80% of dollar-denominated imports never touching US territory. Investors need dollar certificates to hedge their currency risks and they need safe dollar bonds, as safe assets are essential to hedge the purchase of goods and services in the future. Financial capital is a more important force than commonly assumed, as evidenced by the fact that global US dollar liquidity, measured in bank loans to non-banks, has grown by more than 90% since 2008, while global trade has grown by less than 20%. The share of dollar-denominated FX swaps and forwards denominated in dollars exceeds the dollar’s share of world trade by 50%. Financial firms currently hold swaps and forwards worth $23 trillion. Investments in profitable financial assets are far ahead of investments in non-financial companies, so that the fall in the profit rate in these companies should also be put into perspective as a cause of the crisis. It is well known that after the financial crisis of 2008 the US banks were no longer able to use the two deficits of the US, the foreign trade and the budget deficit, to generate demand within the US and thus promote the net exports of the rest of the world. The result was an increase in debt. Global debt, including the financial sector, has grown to 247 trillion dollars today, about 250 percent of global GDP. In the years from 2014 to 2017 alone, debt grew by 13 percent. Those debts that could possibly herald an imminent credit crisis, if you look at the US, are likely to be not only those of households or the state that implements comprehensive austerity measures in the social sector, but also, and above all, those of private companies. The Fed is now trying to reduce the credit excess it helped to initiate by raising key interest rates and returning to normality, but this will increase the costs of servicing loans for US companies and limit the possibilities for further credit financing. The average leverage of US companies (the ratio of debt to income) has risen from a factor of 3.4 to 4.1 over the past ten years, with many companies having to repay large amounts of their bond receivables totalling 41 trillion dollars at mostly higher interest rates over the next two years, which could put some companies at the end of their financial capacity. (Cf. Roberts 2018) Bond creditors will try to get out of their positions in order to avoid a shortage of buyers who are still willing to get in. However, it must be added that most of these outstanding payments of 41 trillion dollars are not due solely to private companies. Indeed, the Fed holds $17 trillion of this debt, and the bonds issued by non-financial companies amount to only $6.2 trillion in outstanding debt. the economic situation does not look very relaxed, because one third of all multinational companies today have five dollars in debt on a dollar’s income, which makes them vulnerable to any drop in profits or rise in interest rates. And one in five companies has debt service obligations that exceed current cash flow. Large companies have used the cheap interest and debt to take cash off their balance sheets and hand it over to their shareholders in the form of dividends and share buybacks. About a third of the shares are bought back with borrowed money, leading to record levels of corporate debt, not only in absolute terms, but also in relation to profits, assets and overall economic output. Part of the corporate debt of recent years has again come from commercial bank loans, which have quickly been packaged, divided and sold to potent investors in collateralized loan obligations (CLOs). But pension funds and insurance companies also bought in because they expected high returns. Bank Wells Fargo estimates that a record $150 billion will be spent on CLOs in 2018, with market analysts registering a decline in the quality of CLOs, similar to subprime lending in 2007. Today, the economic boom is not driven by innovation or productivity growth, but by financial engineering, which produces debt by issuing promises of payment and shifts general wealth further towards the representatives of financial capital. It appears that the global economy is swimming in debt, not only in those of companies, but also in those of households, states and investors, at a time when interest rates are beginning to rise. The capital flows of non-financial US companies, which are used to finance investments on a global scale, have fallen. According to the latest UNCTAD report, global foreign direct investment flows (FDI) fell by 23 percent in 2017. (Unctad 2017) Multinational companies are reducing their international investments partly to reduce the risks of future trade wars, which have increased as a result of Trump’s protectionist measures, but also because of possible credit crises in the more vulnerable emerging economies. Overall, the profitability of foreign direct investment has fallen, and when corporate profit rates generally fall, investors continue to reduce their investments in production and increasingly turn to speculation with financial instruments such as derivatives. Here, too, however, we are faced with a downward trend on a global level, as total financial capital flows currently account for only 75 percent of sales in 2007. So the global financial sector itself is not quite prospering at the same level as before the 2008 financial crisis. Nevertheless, the ten largest US banks are making profits in 2018 as they did in 2007, a total of around $30 billion per quarter. At the same time, certain multinationals in the world’s leading economies continue to swim in money. The Apple company, for example, sits on about 250 billion US dollars in ready-to-use cash, but does not find any profitable investment opportunities. After this only very sketchy description of some of the trends that can be observed in the world economy today, we now come to some conclusions regarding the effects of globalization on the economies of the centers: 1) Consumption is declining due to a decline in employment and a reduction in real wages. 2) Industrial investment is stagnating due to competition with emerging countries and the consistent offshoring and outsourcing of large national companies, which are now becoming multinationals. 3) Public spending is being reduced both structurally and as a result of competition between countries. 4) Productivity is stagnating because, above all, the financial system is self-referential. 5) Exports are not growing sufficiently because international competition with emerging markets is losing ground, so that industrial profit rates continue to fall. (Cf. Screpanti 2014: 127ff.) The new form of imperialism is based on an implicit pact between the financial capital of the leading countries and the economies of the emerging markets. While the latter gain access to the commodity markets in the West and receive a flood of direct investment from large multinationals, the former have concluded agreements (TRIPS, Gatt, GATS) to protect patents and proprietary rights. But also at a global level the aim is to create markets for services and to open up foreign markets for the company’s own controls. The emerging countries were able to exploit the competitive costs of wages, they produce mainly low-tech consumer goods with imported technologies, then export them to the capitalist core countries and mercilessly fight the weaker firms there. But in the meantime they are also increasingly investing in research, which, however, still relies mainly on creative imitation and adaptation, but is also intended to promote innovations that help to reduce the technological gap compared with the high-tech core countries. In key industries such as robotics, the IT sector, aerospace and maritime engineering, renewable energies and electromobility, China aims to catch up technologically with Western core countries by 2035. In addition, Chinese companies have increased labour productivity while keeping labour costs low. We are now seeing the emergence of hypercapitalized centers in the emerging economies and peripheries, while “Third World zones” are emerging in the metropolises of the North, and the wage shares and working conditions of workers are deteriorating there. And the representatives of capital, unimpressed, continue to propagate a beyond of borders by presenting themselves as the sole engine of global growth. In recent decades, a new global proletariat has emerged that on the one hand tends to homogenize in terms of political deconstitution and the reduction of wages, but on the other is spatially and socially fragmented in terms of the legal forms of the exact wage level and the distribution of production sites. This shows above all, as a sub-proletariat to be added, the surplus population that has emerged above all in the global South, which can no longer be used as variable capital and which falls completely out of the wage labor relations (but is partly reintegrated into the money cycles through microcredit). These complex processes of economic, political and social change at the global level lead to the fusion of two fundamental antagonisms: Because today neither free trade nor the mercantilist and protectionist policies currently implemented by parts of the ruling classes can even begin to solve the economic problems, the contrasts between capital and labor as well as between periphery and centers will increase in intensity. Today, internal and external colonization pervades all territories worldwide, the West has its South (through HartzIV, migrants, the unemployed and the poor), and the South has its West (through zones of high-tech production and comprador elites). The relocation of industrial production from the West to the South there leads on the one hand to an increase in the wage-dependent proletariat, and on the other to the growth of a surplus population that is pushing into the cities but has no direct access to capitalist production and wages and therefore has to take care of access to goods in the informal sectors of the economy, which, beyond formal working conditions at low wages, with slave labour, part-time jobs and illegal activities, tries somehow to secure its reproduction or vegetates in the slums before it in order to survive. Groups such as Endnotes and Kosmoprolet (Endnotes 2018; Kosmoprolet 2016) at this point refer to Marx’s law of capitalist accumulation, according to which an industrial reserve arm permanently moves at the margins of the official labor market. Marx describes the relative overpopulation purely functionally as the “industrial reserve army” that capital needs to regulate the labor market; the general law of capitalist accumulation is that of a (virtual) tendency and it is at the same time to be understood cyclically, that is, it always remains related to fluctuations in employment. (Marx 1975: 640ff.) At the same time, Marx assumes a long-term trend towards relative growth of the industrial reserve army – measured by the total working population. However, if the reserve army grows in the long term, it can hardly retain the character of a reserve army in the long run. And we find this development in the current situation at the global level, in which even parts of the population in the metropolises can no longer be productively absorbed into capitalist production processes during economic upswings. With an increasing working population at the global level, it seems that the population working for wages, the reserve army and the surplus population can grow at the same time. This “moving contradiction” manifests itself on the one hand in the integration of part, the second is the intensification of automation and robotization, which in turn make the proletariat superfluous at the global level. At the global level, Chinese growth rates and, contrary to the trend toward technologization and cybernetization, a labor-intensive production would already be needed to absorb the huge global surplus population. But this cannot be assumed. The masses of unemployed, the totally detached, the day labourers and the Asian and African migrant workers used under proto-industrial conditions, the post-colonial army of slaves, the old and the sick, but also the superfluous young, those of an educational system, which focuses primarily on the daily evaluation of everyone by everyone, are trained for jobs that will not exist in the future – all in all this is the global lumpenproletariat that vegetates below the official working system on the thin line between bare survival and total liquidation. And this surplus population, when it moves on the streets and articulates politically, is directly confronted with the state and its police. (Cf. Clover 2016; Clover 2018; Szepanski 2018b) Although it has long since assumed enormous quantitative proportions, the surplus population in the sense of Deleuze and Guattari remains a minority that is nothing more than a proletarian mass. But it is only in so far as it is directly confronted with the institutional, legal and police structures of the national state. Separated both from the social determination that constitutes the proletariat and from a strictly economic determination as variable capital that characterizes the working class, the minority as proletarianized mass always refers to processes of state socialization through which the state penetrates the institutional and social structures of the capitalist formations. Furthermore, the minority could be described as internal differentiation in the processes of proletarization itself, between those from whom all social power is withdrawn through its integration into the system of wage labor, and those who can at best still be partially reintegrated into the economy (and the form of state). Thus, the minoritarian struggles, which are political in origin, cannot simply be equated with the economic struggles of the workers against capital, because it is directly the state that segments its minorities as relative surplus populations (in addition to the strategies of capital) with regard to the minoritarian struggles. To a certain extent, minorities remain involved in the processes of economic and social expropriation, and this in conjunction with diverse combinations of their destruction and territorial survival, which is why they can maintain a certain degree of autonomy in their codes, through which the state can recognize them as subsets. taken from: By John Milios The current financial crisis of capitalism is without precedent in the post-war period. Regarding the crisis, recent heterodox literature is dominated by a single and persistent argument. The argument is that globalization and financial liberalization should be approached as a process in which the financial elites and financial intermediaries, i.e. contemporary rentiers in the Keynesian terminology, have a leading role in working out the details of the neoliberal form of capitalism.1 read here John Milios National Technical University of Athens, [email protected] Dimitris P. Sotiropoulos The Open University Business School, UK, [email protected] taken from: by Achim Szepanski In a text from 1973, which appeared in the course book, the sociologist Manfred Clemenz has introduced the concept of structural state fascism, the author assumes that there are no fundamental functional differences between the forms of parliamentary democracy and the fascist states of exception, but just only phenomenological changes are noted, which could take drastic forms and even fractures. This question has definitely shifted. In fact, with regard to the present processes of state fascization, this is not really a new form of government, but also not merely phenomena, the sum of which then constitutes state fascism. The notion of state fascization, which emphasizes the procedural moment from the outset, implies a cyclical or situational change in governance, a shift and finally rearrangement of state apparatuses and governance / forms of governance that have not yet been finalized, so that, on the one hand, the ordinary capital state On the other hand, it is not decided whether the process of fascization will actually lead to a fascist state of exemption. The "institutional preventive dispositif" (Poulantzas 1978: 192), which characterized Poulantzas's authoritarian etatism in the 1980s, has become so supple and at the same time intensively incorporated into state and non-state apparatuses and institutions and has become a fundamental dispositive (alongside the official state of parliamentary democracy) that not only speaks more of an osmosis between the preventive dispositive and the official state, as Poulantzas does, but the temporary dominance of one. The creeping fascization process characterized by the preventive logic, which is completely new in its structure and does not correspond to any previous historical period of statehood. Due to a specific encoded crisis scenario (counter-terrorism) and especially because of the hegemonic inscription of the preventive logic, the security state today takes political and legal measures that permanently change the apparatus of the normal capitalist state and transform its rule of law, without having to deny it itself. The coming fascism, which must be quoted as "fascism", may today take on the form that was still in demand in the 1970s. It should also be noted, however, that the notion of fascism often breaks in just where monstrosities, exceptions and fractures are to be addressed, but for which concepts are still missing. But when the concept of fascism is completely omitted in the struggles for theories and discourses, then no discursively empty space is created long ago. So we are in a difficult terrain. The notion of structural state fascization, which we are using for the time being, is based on historical assumptions that did not exist in the 1970s. Of particular note are the transforming and intensifying exploitation crises of capital, the implementation of neoliberal measures and projects such as financialization, deregulation, austerity, privatization and the global fragmentation of production processes. The resulting effects are now globally equivalent to an ecological and social catastrophe program: More and more people in the periphery are forced to vegetate in the slums of large cities or in failed states. We assume that this crisis development will continue to increase in frequency and intensity, and consequently also the social polarization in the metropolises, but at the same time a return to the national-social state compromise of Fordism, d. H. a historic special period characterized by systemic competition, class compromise, corporatism and Keynesian economic policy, today no longer seems possible. For the reasons mentioned above, the regulation of social fragmentation is increasingly being solved by the police instead of by material gratification. As the state abolishes social benefits, it must repressively upgrade: austerity and authoritarianism go together. Or, to put it another way, the market and strong state are mutually exclusive in neoliberal doctrine but not in practice. That does not contradict itself at all. State and capitalNow, before going into the details of fascization, let's start with the state in general. As an important component of the modern sovereign nation state, international law generally considers territory, state power and population. In the materialistic theory tradition, Nicos Poulantzas, following Louis Althusser, regarded the state as "the material and specific condensation of a relation of forces, which is a class relationship," as a complex field in which various organizations, apparatuses and institutions, among them the most assertive ruling class, acting at national and regional levels. In this sense, the state is neither an autonomous subject nor a pure tool of the ruling class (as in vulgar Marxism), but not as a purely neutral instance, as in bourgeois theories, but, and more so today, specifically within a balance of power or a field as a reliable organizer and guarantor of the conditions of exploitation and reproduction of the capital. Precisely as a state of capital, which can hardly rule against capital, because it depends on its functioning and its as smooth as possible accumulation, and for that very reason has to translate the reproduction of capital into political form. It also supports the accumulation of capital, for example, by compensating low wages with social programs, by absorbing and financing so-called externalities (such as the repair of environmental damage) and by providing certain infrastructures, especially private ones, and finally the security intensified by the reinforcement of the police. By means of austerity policy and the redistribution of social wealth, today he aggressively pursues the class struggle in favor of capital and at the same time establishes certain functional conditions for capital utilization. Although the state primarily emphasizes the political interests of the ruling classes, it is no mere executive organ of capital but has relative autonomy relative to the economy. In long agonizing processes of concentration, which emanates from military power and taxation, the state appropriates exactly the resulting capital of physical violence, that is, the process of concentration is at the same time a process of separation (expropriating the people from power and thought); The state monopoly on power, which, however, can not do without the appropriation of symbolic capital by the state, is therefore based on historical expropriations. The state was spawned, so to speak, in a long coup that establishes once and for all that there is a single legitimate and dominant point of view that sets the standard for all other views. State authority has a latent and an open aspect. The state and the power can usually be content with latent violence, that is, the open power is kept in reserve. Anyone who constantly resorts to military means is not, according to Machiavelli, at the height of the concept of absolute politics. Bourdieu speaks in his lectures on the state of an organized and legitimate gang of criminals, extorting protection money, as it may know from Chicago, i.e it does not differ so much from the state. Bourdieu sums up: 1. The state is a blackmail gang, but not only. 2. He is a legitimate blackmailer gang. 3. A legitimate blackmail gang in the symbolic sense. Bourdieu sees the emergence of the state as a process of integration and homogenization, acting as a productive objectifying agency: "The state is closely linked to objectification and all objectification techniques: it treats social facts as things, people as things - he is a Durkheimian long before Durkheim. "(Ibid .: 377) Unification and integration can not be separated from expropriation insofar as knowledge and competences based on local values and measures are now devalued. Universalization goes hand in hand with the concentration of universality. This transition also marks the transformation from the local market to the national market, whether economic or symbolic. Exactly the latter level is an effect of the power connected with the institution of the state, and this effect consists in a naturalization, a doxa, based on relatively arbitrary premises made at the time of the creation of the state. The state can then play with the so-is-it-effect, an extremely violent action of the state that is imposed on the population and which it has to accept without any ifs or buts. So the state always closes the space of possibilities, especially that of resistance. Historically, in addition to violence, the state concentrates and monopolizes the symbolic power that defines a legitimate culture through the production and canonization of certain social classifications, thereby expropriating the population from its own deviant forms. His legitimizing role includes his role as a mediator / mediator between companies and workers, as a producer of labor rights and a social safety net. It also includes the monopolization of language, which is governed by state mechanisms and institutions such as law, the school and the university as the official language. At the same time, this is accompanied by a process of universalization in which professional civil servants have the prerogative of the universal just by monopolizing it. This process of appropriation takes place as a concentration, setting and unification with which the local, the regional and the scattered are placed under a universal standard. At the same time, every individual within a territory receives a state identity, is thus constructed as a citizen and quantified and classified by means of state statistics. Bourdieu writes: "The construction of the state as a relatively autonomous field, exercising a power that brings about the centralization of physical violence and symbolic violence, and thus constitutes a struggle, is inextricably linked to the construction of a unified social space. which is its territory. "These processes of unification are those of language, measures, discourses, and speech. The state sector also includes educational institutions, media, apparatuses and institutions that initiate and operate ideological adaptation as well as objectifying and quantifying mechanisms of counting, statistics and classification, which have hegemonic validity in various social fields and for the population are also common sense, by constructing everyday life as a normal state, a daily life, to which one can trust apparently without further ado. After all, the social metric that the state stages, and which today ends in omnimetry, the obsession to quantify everything, is always tied to the constellation, periodicity and intensity of class struggles. Permanent Government and Deep StateIn the normal case, in which the population is fully integrated into the capitalist system, states react in short-term crisis processes with reforms and corresponding rhetoric, with the building up of crisis reserves in all areas as well as with economic intervention and political as well as military measures wherever the exploitation and the free flow of goods and capital within the value chain. For several years, in times of overlapping crisis processes, profound changes have taken place in the institutional structure, although this can maintain its facade to the outside. Starting with the parties: they are no longer the interest groups of different classes and represent them in parliament, but they are transformed into professional electoral associations for the self-replicating executive. Agamben calls this pure government action. The political parties are thus changing in their structure and function. The party leaders no longer sit in government because they are the representatives of their parties in parliament, but sit at the head of their parties because they are in government. In addition to the parties, the influence of informal bodies, private corporate lobbyists, non-elected supranational institutions and executive bodies, the strategic network of the state, of which the bloc is in power, has been transformed in recent years. This executes certain policy options through extralegal organs, practices, and transactions, which is discussed in terms such as "deep state" and "permanent government". Considering that the administrative staff is independent of any change of government anyway, this is a dense network of government personnel, bureaucracy, secret services, the military, the informal organization of capital, multinational corporations, and the financial industry. This is under the political-economic dominance of the latter and the military protection of the armed formations. This is interesting inasmuch as on the one hand the financial capital transforms the state into a corporate form, whereby the respective balance of power between the state and the state must be taken into account (for example, the state itself is an economic actor, which as an issuer of government bonds to the government). On the other hand, the police in a broader sense plays a stronger role in the state apparatuses. It can be assumed that the financial capital and the large multinational companies through intensive lobbying and the mode of action markets, the states to follow the conditions of capital and to comply with their interests. Today, one could speak of global governance without sovereignty, but not without states. In this context, state fascization means that the state not only reacts to crises and conflicts but anticipates them and therefore follows a preventive logic, in particular by pursuing permanent and proactive crisis management both internally and externally. Prevention is initially a time scheme; something should be done before an adverse event occurs, assuming that future indicators can predict future undesirable conditions and events, that these predicted undesirable developments are unlikely to occur without the appropriate countermeasures, and thus promise the greatest possible risk minimization as early as possible. Prevention does not want to create, it wants to prevent. And you can never prevent enough and never early enough. All prevention attempts to prevent potential damage in the future, regardless of the strategy chosen. At its core, prevention means working on the virtual: it aims to direct becoming in its eventuality in order to avoid impending dangers. Future events that have not yet happened will have an undeniable presence in the present. Here we are dealing with a permanent securitization that constantly tracks down threat situations and risk factors in order to legitimize preventive action, and this is then enforced and can even extend to the liquidation of alleged people's pests or class enemies. The logic of prevention is that of anticipated cleansing. In any case, prevention requires comprehensive data collection and processing (statistics and probability calculus) in order to both constitute and control the population and to translate uncertainties of any kind into a probable risk, in order to finally establish the security state. The various predictions construct the future precisely through the management of the subjects, which are themselves classified in risk categories. At this point overlap the financial system, more precisely, the credit economy, and preventive policialisation; just by marking the subjects as potential risks, one constantly produces new risk subjects in the present. Ultimately, everything can become a risk, which deviates from the given setpoint values or, to be more precise, what can be identified as the sign of such deviations. Thus, prevention itself becomes the engine of a repressive normalism, which also begins to pathologize any kind of deviations. Normalistic control mechanisms geared to the future are now beginning to override the laws and the existing normative regulations. Today, Big Data and other technologies allow the control and granularization of normality fields and norm values that can ever change. Who wants to prevent, must never stop controlling. Thus, prevention is not only about risk avoidance, but also about detailed risk management, which is both catastrophic and probabilistic. It follows, on the one hand, that one always starts from the worst possible and relies on the dispositive of fear, and, on the other hand, that a reversal of the burden of proof is necessary when making the risk. It is not the risk that has to be proven but that none exists. Precisely in the wake of terrorism, so-called precautionary principles have been introduced, starting from the worst case scenarios and imagining all sorts of threats. The activism of prevention, so to speak, generates what it wants to combat, following a logic of a policy in the subjunctive. And when it comes to avoiding the worst, then almost everything is allowed. The prevention regime thus always revolves around the problem of the State's state of emergency, which is now being put on a permanent basis. The right is at least partially suspended or constantly rewritten to avert alleged political events that could destroy the existing legal system. In the name of exceptionalism, the exceptional state claims the rule of life and death and radicalizes the mechanisms of disciplinary and post-disciplinary control. The anticipated catastrophe becomes the vehicle of protofascist security policies emanating from the state itself. (However, one can no longer think of the exceptional / security state solely in relation to the law because it is now the constitutive principle of governmentality.) While the juridical void may be unthinkable to the law, it is not a practice of power that is the law. It is not only the exception state, but the war machine of capital for which the security state is an apparatus or dispositive. State and war now became components of capital, entailing radical transformations of their functions and relations.) Agamben has pointed out that for a long time now, reasons of security (raisons de sécurité) have taken the place of what used to be called the raison d'état. For Agamben stand thus a series of tendencies that result in the exceptional state, which is understood by him as a governmental technology, which lurks at the core of liberal democracy already the abolition of law. The first is to establish new relationships in the population, which consist of constant monitoring - hence the focus on institutions that allow complete control of individuals' electronic and communication data. "The demand for transparency, in its exaggerated and ultimately totalitarian form, means that each and every one of us legitimately needs to be permanently reviewed, observed, classified and evaluated in all aspects of life." At the same time, public participation in political life is becoming more and more important Participation in opinion polls reduced in the run-up to elections. This tendency is all the more disturbing for Agamben, as it has already been cast in theoretical form by Nazi jurists: they have defined the people as a politically impotent element whose protection the state must guarantee. Depoliticizing citizens can only mobilize them from their passivity by fearing a foreign enemy. A further tendency is an introduction to a state in which terrorism and security state enter into a symbiotic relationship: Thus, in the descriptions of terrorist crimes on factual security in the legal sense increasingly renounced. The tendency of constant transformationThus, the novel structural state fascization does not arise exclusively as a reaction to social development trends and crisis processes but anticipates the coming economic, social and political crises and conflict potentials, which is also clearly stated in corresponding official statements. For this purpose, the state is developing a number of techniques, such as new control and monitoring instruments that record, accumulate and evaluate data, techniques for further quantification and surveying of the population and of such police and military nature. The transformation of the ordinary capital state into a fascist state. Today, therefore, this does not necessarily result from a spectacular break, but from the creeping but steadily driven accumulation, consolidation, and intensification of fascist measures. Above all, this includes the comprehensive militarization and access extension of the police within the framework of an ever-expanding security state, while limiting fundamental rights. Above all, the repressive apparatus always receives additional technical means, legal possibilities, and executive powers. Other measures include the amalgamation of the police and the military, as well as the police and intelligence services [(and also civilian and armed authorities); building on this the nationwide surveillance, [data collection and storage by the state services; and the increasing integration of the mass media into the ideological state apparatus, the criminalization of poverty while reducing the level of reproduction of the subaltern population, the cooperation of "security authorities" with domestic fascist and terrorist networks (and such militias abroad), and an increasingly aggressive and belligerent one future foreign policy. Evident is the tightening of laws, regulations, and directives up to the establishment of a fine criminal law and legally anchored access rights far in advance of concrete offenses - up to the preventive detention. On the other hand, however, the executive has been steadily advancing and anticipating this development: for example, the Pentagon and the CIA have been investigating torture for decades, and the so-called "white torture" and other methods were extensively tested extensively as early as the 1970s, while the torture ban still exists. Since 2001, there has been an exorbitant increase in extrajudicial executions abroad in the United States, mostly through drone strikes, but also by special forces, which are not preceded by any legal proceedings. When an unlawful practice becomes known, it usually does not result in their attitudes, but in their subsequent legalization or tacit acceptance. The boundaries of war, police operation and covert activity are becoming increasingly blurred. It comes to a legislative, and where this is not yet enforceable, operational erosion of the protective rights of the population towards the state while maintaining the formal-democratic superstructure. State fascization and Open fascismHere we follow the Marxist understanding of fascism as a form of bourgeois rule, in a sense its extreme form. In fascism, an external, strictly hierarchical organization gains dominance over the state apparatus and merges with it, whereby the economic system, which has fallen into crisis, is maintained and forcibly secured on a new level. The war machine is implanted in the state as a performative organizing principle, that is, the fascist state passes as an active system for the practice of open terror against the population, or their resistant and oppositional parts, over what it mobilizes other parts of the population. Fascism is also the harshest form of social exclusion. Propagandistically, the conceptions of the national community, of racism and of nationalism are brought into play against liberalism as a fundamental ideology. Fascism thus marks the transition from apparent peace to open war, it is the qualitative intensification and expansion of the counterrevolution and the class struggle that the ruling classes are constantly leading. At the same time, the masses are always mobilized as well. And if the masses are constituted as a nation, then this is a specific process that George Mosse has accurately described in his book One People, One Reich, One Leader. For Mosse, National Socialism is merely the borderline case of democracy, pushing the indoctrination of homogeneous collective ideas that are always observable in democracies to the extreme. The preaching of power is then akin to the irrationalism of a fascist mass policy, which in a sense makes a unity that exists only on paper palpable. The general will is presented as a collective emotion. The Nazis have extended the process of constructing a unity of emotion to a whole people and pushed it to the utmost of annihilation. It is a rapid increase in tendencies that can be found in certain democratic processes and ceremonies. Deleuze and Guattari have sharply criticized democracy in all their collaborations, usually calling them the cousin of totalitarianism. The nation now coalesces into the imaginary incarnation of the people, a national self-representation based on what unites the people: language, history, homeland, blood, etc. In contrast, today's state fascization is not carried out mainly by a conspiracy between fascist organizations and the state, but rather a structural and sequential transformation of the political system and its apparatuses driven by the state itself. State fascization is thus not characterized by brown uniforms in the street scene and the takeover of the ministries by right-wing groups, but a tendency which is prepared and promoted in the ministries and apparatuses themselves. Modern mass movementMoreover, the structural state fascization also receives a new mass movement and social base of unimaginable proportions: its mass movement is the device connected to technical devices, permanently data-generating and self-mutually evaluating, as judged by government and commercial agencies, observed. verified and classified population. In the context of governmentality, which Foucault has so vividly described, the digitization of capitalist production processes has evolved comprehensive hegemonic quantification arrangements that serve as means of measuring, assessing, and comparing to processes of growth and outbidding in terms of profitability, efficiency, and transparency in all possible areas and lead to omnipresent quantification. Today, these structural processes (ranking, rating, scoring, screening, casting, etc.) are met with highly isolated dividends, [...] while still simulating individuality, but precisely in this context, their active willingness to allocate data to the world Participation in quantification procedures and in general to demonstrate voluntary technical participation. Such participatory procedures not only foster the quantification mechanism but constantly intensify its effects, which not only consist in quantification itself and in numerical comparison but at the same time intensify the competition between the valued and valuers. On the one hand, the population is subjected to massive adjustment constraints and increasingly employed in the periods outside wage labor, on the other hand, it creates the basis for its own exploration, even doing free labor for capital. Quantification is part of an expansive capitalization and economization for the development of areas that have so far been deprived of the imperatives of capital exploitation. For the apparatuses, the data collected on this basis, which become commodities, i.e commodified and thus monetarily exploitable, also offer the possibility of improving the algorithmic procedures that are today means of hierarchizing information and individually influencing each individual. In addition to full biometric coverage, the repressive authorities are also interested in finding out as much as possible about each individual in order to eliminate any anonymity and predict future action on the basis of their data pool and be able to eliminate resistance at an early stage. That is, big data, whose technical basis is permanent monitoring, is equally significant for state and capital today. World market and state governanceIt is easy to see that as neo-liberal strategies are implemented, the state, in its role as a guarantor of social peace, is being increasingly restricted between classes, while the various modes of social police functioning are being intensified step by step, not only by the social police the repressive state organs are executed, but also requires new task forces, control techniques and governmental arts, which include civil society institutions, institutionally supported social technologies and a variety of evaluation mechanisms. You have to register, govern and freeze the population, but you also have to constantly mobilize them (racism). All in all, the state must increasingly ensure the control of the labor markets, the workforce, and the population more closely by the police. Why is that? As we have briefly outlined, the present world imperialist system is constantly generating shifting friction between the imperialist nation-states, the financial system, and the multinationals. Today, the state in the capitalist core countries increasingly has to fulfill its role as social police, because globalization, at least in these countries, favors the stagnation of economic growth and thus weakens the possibility of pacifying the class conflict over the welfare state But social policing can only function effectively if, as a national collective (ideal) capitalist, it supports as much as possible the maintenance of economic internal growth. However, imperial globalization is increasingly eroding the conditions that allow the state to function both as social police (caring and repressive at the same time) and as a national, idealistic total capitalist. Governments can not completely abandon their role as a national, idealized total capitalist, and they must seek to drive economic growth by all possible means, so as not to jeopardize the social cohesion of the capitalist social formation. But today there are a number of limitations. By continuing to execute the processes of liberalization and international competition, multinational and financial capital tends to exacerbate the economic depression of the real economy and impoverish populations, even in developed countries, and at least tend to reoccur in social conflicts so that today, for reasons of prevention and cybernetization alone, states must act more as social police. Although it should be assumed that the neoliberal strategies of labor flexibilization, creative work propaganda and libertarian singularization of cultural policies, especially among the middle classes, should be consistent with soft control systems, self-technologies and governance policies through social networks, mutual monitoring in the citizen factories This is not the case with psychologization and physiotherapy, urbanization and the event industry. Although these soft phenomena, techniques, and practices have not disappeared, quite the contrary, they are increasingly being overlaid by the mechanisms of social police. We use the notion of police as Foucault in a broad sense, as a repressive administrative system whose control systems penetrate deeply into the working and lifestyles of the population, as specific governance that does not, however, extend the state by expanding the privatized power system. and governmental techniques become increasingly meaningless or make him part of a network of governing bodies, as is the case with Foucault. The fact that many institutions and institutions of the state (schools, universities, hospitals, etc.) now function as private enterprises not only points to the weakening of the political autonomy of the state, but also requires a more intensive implementation of social police in the social field, moreover Governments can no longer pursue expansive fiscal policies, for example, to guarantee full employment or to maintain the welfare state at a level acceptable to the population. Governments can only respond to workfare policies in the domestic markets, which means that the state functions as a government social police are gaining immense importance. In the long phase of neo-liberal restructuring since the 1980s, the welfare state has gradually been replaced by the workfare state, i. a new political model of the ruling classes that transformed old social policies and subordinated them to the goal of making labor turnover in labor markets more flexible and restrictive, absorbing the decline in industrial employment through a low-wage service sector, and incomes redistribute in favor of profits and to the detriment of wages. The neoliberal austerity policy is a strategy to reduce the costs of businesses, in particular by reducing labor costs, increasing profits per unit of labor and thus increasing profit rates; it is accompanied by an economy of financialization (and institutional change) which increases the mobility of capital as well as the power of financial capital, managers and shareholders, while cutting social rights and wages to broad sections of the population even in metropolitan areas, a part of the population falls out of the official labor markets and has to be considered part of the global surplus population. Significantly, the ECB's policy in the case of Greece has shown that for states that temporarily lack sufficient liquidity to service the holders of their government bonds, the drastic reduction of the welfare state is a necessary condition for their financial solvency. Greece is a laboratory in which the neoliberal experiment clearly shows itself, namely as the political governance of the civil civil war, which is fed by the debt crisis, accompanied by an alleged humanitarian regime of refugee control. The contradiction that now exists at the global level between the freedom of movement of the promises of payment and the flows of money and the limited and regulated mobility of population flows requires, precisely in view of the latter, effective and efficient apparatus of control and regulation (differentiated migration policies) which is currently underway The specific reorganization of the state apparatuses may well have a fascist tendency, while the neo-fascisms, underpinned by right-wing populism, could in the last resort escape the control of the state and capital, since the state and capital are relative in the fields of civil war open to change. Especially the strategies of total economic war, which are currently being enforced with the means of financialization, leave the governments of many countries no other option than to comply with the structural adjustments, and these also include cold strategies that the IMF has pursued since the 1970s, especially in crisis countries , see Greece, implemented. Today, global financial accumulation is accompanied by a continuum of bloody and bloodless civil wars spreading from Europe to Turkey, the Middle East and Afghanistan. One can observe constant frictions and friction in the efforts of the state reorganization because the state must continue to function in its functions of the social police and weakened in that of the ideological total capitalist if in particular, the service for the multinational and financial enterprises is to be served. Conversely, multinational corporations need big powers to survive in world markets. A leading imperialist state, beyond its national policy, must be able to fulfill three functions of global governance (for the multinationals and the world economy as a whole): global sheriff, global banker, and driver of capital accumulation. These three functions are still dominated by the US today, albeit to an increasingly lesser extent. The leading imperialist state must perform the function of a global sheriff, which requires enormous military power (the US military budget is $ 716 billion in 2018), in particular to discipline those countries that are globalized and, ultimately, the US Try to resist US dominance and not easily open their markets to multinational capital. The second function is the role of the global banker, who owns and must use the entire arsenal of financial instruments, such as the implementation of a reserve currency, which serves as a reserve and reserve currency around the globe, including to ensure the maintenance of international payments and foreign reserves. The third function concerns the function of a driver of national and international capital accumulation and of economic growth: since capital accumulation, especially in emerging countries, but also in countries such as Germany and Japan, continues to be accelerated by exports, a strong economy must exist on the world market which can absorb huge amounts of imports and even grow by increasing their imports. So far, this has been the case with the United States, which has financed this procedure by expanding private and public debt. The size of GDP and its weight in world markets has allowed the US to implement expansive monetary and fiscal policies, which have been barely limited by external limits on world markets. The US can still finance its own trade deficit today because the dollar is the leading and reserve international currency. Under these conditions, the expansionary monetary policy of the US leads to the creation of aggregate demand for its own people and the rest of the world. The possibility of an almost limitless expansion of the Fed's supply of money also allows it to spend the necessary military expenditures to continue to play the role of global sheriff. Finally, the implementation of these three functions serves, above all, to satisfy the interests of multinational capital. Therefore, one should speak here of globalized governance without sovereignty, whereby the power potentials of the imperialist states, especially the United States, by no means dissolve into nothingness. The relationship between the state and capital today leads to friction between the geopolitical ambitions of states and the economic interests of multinational capital. Thus, the geopolitical ambitions of the major powers generate inter-state rivalries, while multinational corporations need a pacification of state rivalries, the smoothest possible regular performance of the three functions of governance, and the use of the economic and military power of the major imperialist states to keep the world markets open and in particular to discipline peripheral countries. The dominance of multinational corporations partly realizes the capitalist utopia of a minimal state, which by no means implies its absence, but merely reduces the potency of the state to the national idealistic capitalist, while at the same time supporting the operations of the large multinational corporations and finance by means of intensification of role of the local social policeman. The aggressive strategies of capital and its representatives today include influencing politicians through lobbying and monetary support and control of the parties. This happens most intensively in the developed countries, where important parts of the organization of multinational companies are located. There are often close personal connections between the government staff and the representatives of the companies. In the US, this interconnectedness has progressed so much that many observers speak of the dominance of the capital representative over the leading state personnel. In peripheral countries, where multinational companies have outsourced parts of their manufacturing facilities, there are two main ways to exert political pressure on governments, with the first strategy being driven by negotiations, especially when it comes to foreign investment and technology transfer and the second strategy is simply threatening to withdraw investments. Many of these countries are still largely cut off from industrial production and therefore are simply hungry for capital. Insofar as these countries compete fiercely for foreign investment and even lack the financial resources to invest, they are particularly likely to be dominated by the multinationals to which they must offer favorable access to their domestic markets: low wages, legalization of Super-exploitation, environmental policies to externalize the cost of air pollution and favorable tax conditions. Where capital accumulation is threatened as such, as was the case after the 2008 crisis, the governments of the core countries have no alternative but to recuperate the accumulation of capital by all possible means, otherwise they themselves operate In the epoch of fictional and speculative capital, this means nothing more than the massive support of the financial system and at the same time the promotion of austerity policies. The leftist idea of a revival of the Keynesian regulatory and welfare state is now without foundation. While it is true that in countries that are still among the few winners of the crisis, such as Germany, some social standards and even enforce individual welfare state reforms (minimum wage), but their punctual character and their very limited effect point to a comprehensive reformist Program of the Left today no basis exists anymore. And since the causes for this are to be found in the historical dynamics and the crisis logic of capital itself on a global level, this basis cannot be renewed by any attempt to strengthen national sovereignty. In general, it can be said that the state can achieve capital primarily through money, which always implies a delay, so that the state can never operate in the real-time of capital and can not catch up with it, such as Keynesian policies in politics which, in order to remedy the problem of accumulation, should lead to an increase in the aggregated demand, also find their limit under this aspect. In the phase of the dominance of financial capital, in which the dynamics of monetary capital flows shifted to the financial markets in the absence of adequate rates of profit in the real economy, not only the state and politics have largely become dependent variables of financial capital but also parts of the financial capital industrial capital. While the fictive and speculative capital invested in the financial system circulates around the globe in a matter of seconds, industrial locations, despite transnational production structures, digitized logistics chains and flexible supply networks, cannot be shifted in real time or, to put it another way, while accumulation of the Since the world market has become an immediate environment for financial capital, which can be traversed in nanoseconds, parts of the industrial capital and the middle capital remain limited to the national territory, despite the principle of exportability. This type of reduction also affects the state and politics in their actions and accessibility, which are largely confined to national territory and therefore in a structural position of dependence on multinational capital and finance. It is true that the state is by no means determined by capital in all its decision-making powers, and just as long as capital accumulates at a certain level and at the same time promotes overall economic growth in one country, it still possesses action capacities. The international financial system under the dominance of the US financial industry controls today the globalized production, the transnational division of labor (global production networks) and also state policies, which in relation to the latter leads to new demarcations, restructurings and interactions of political activities, while the finance itself any effective regulation escapes even at the level of domestic markets. But the global uncertainty, which is capped by financial capital, is creating the conditions and the need for the security governance of the present capitalist states. With every sign of exhaustion of the economic system, instability appears as a permanent phenomenon to which one reacts with the militarization/technologization of the state apparatus. All of the state's reconstructions and reorganizations are now economically and financially over-shaped, but conversely, the management of money capital still requires centralized institutions that can make efficient decisions to repair unstable situations. The social impact of neoliberalism, in the context of its self-fulfilling prophecy of calculating and monetizing the risks, is to maintain and at the same time control a situation of general insecurity by maximizing population-wide strategies of creating fear and insecurity at the same time as the economic conditions of certain parts of the population continue to worsen (as a punishment of inadequate treatment of risks). It is about a new governance of civil warfare, which is led by constant security campaigns against allegedly sweating from all pore uncertainty, the old sovereignty of the state is not restored, but a state of flexibilized biopolitics and social police is created Although soft forms of social peace are still being created (urban politics, cultural institutions, care places, etc.), these are accompanied by warlike thanatotic policies in which the population still functions as an object of biopolitics only insofar as it does not adhere to the logic of cybernated capital repressive policies of the state, so that there is no longer any difference between the time of peace and that of war. This type of peaceful war is fractal, i. The war reproduces itself indefinitely and always with the same model, but under different modalities and at different levels of reality. The relative loss of nation-state sovereignty, its subordination to the economic and financial policies of big capital, the reduction of parliaments to law-enforcement agencies, and new forms of governance have intensified in their interpenetration and multifaceted aspects since the 1970s; the legal-political model of the state and its Keynesian policies no longer allowed it after the global crisis of 1973 to cushion or even steer economic crisis processes, so that the neoliberal strategies of capital, which also reconfigure the modalities of the organization, the government and the administration of states implied that they did not come from nothing. It should be remembered that the Keynesian-inspired economic policy interventions were not based on the sovereignty of the nation-states from the outset but could be relatively sovereign enforced only due to the based on industrial mass work and mass consumption Fordism. translated by Dejan Stojkovski taken from: by Achim Szepanski Many of the catchy testimonies of critical sociologists, ranging from Richard Sennett to Elena Esposito, are that the future is always some distance from the present, protected from the here and now and not as an economic resource in the world Present in the markets should be traded. The economic use of the future in the present, which is often referred to as de-futurization, destroys the future as an open potential and as a space for possibilities. The constant reference to the future also brings forth a present that on the one hand is cut off from any narrative potential and on the other hand can no longer offer any form of security. However, there are also sociologists, such as Helga Nowotny, who oppose that the excessive orientation towards the future, which is thought to be separate from the present, does not destroy the present, but rather creates an unending present and a loss of time horizons. With Bifo Berardi she assumes that the current loss of the borders between past, present and future is not a normative, but a socio-economic question. Lisa Adkins surprisingly draws attention to the sociological writings of Pierre Bourdieu in her book Time of Money to limit the Problem of Time, which assumes that the future is not characterized by possibilities that may or may not occur, and that are distinguished by a distance from the present, but rather that the future is always present in the here and now, although this is not experienced. Adkins refers to the illustration of this thesis on the football game in which an upcoming game situation is not easily possible, but is already present in the configuration of the game in the now. However, the inscription of the future into immediate presence is not simply given in and through practice, but is constituted in the relationship between habitus and the world. The social fields are only recognizable and permanent in their logic if there are agents who operate in them with their pre-reflexive dispositions and habits. These dispositions contain routines and habits that sustain the present, but also practical anticipations of the future, insofar as these are already inscribed as an objective potential or trace in the immediately given. Thus, the present economic field indicates a calculable future, because the agents in it operate with their routines, insofar as they constitute a basis for practical anticipations. For Bourdieu, however, this experience does not imply the rational calculus of neoclassical risk management because the practical anticipations of the future require more unconscious and collective habits and structures that can always overthrow the rational agent out of line. For Bourdieu, practice is not something that takes place in time, but it (like events) generates time, practice is temporalization. In industrial capitalism, and here it is not Bourdieu but Thompson, according to Adkins, that abstract working time was the unity upon which exchange was based, and therefore time was money. The rates of profit were related to the speed of production, and economic events were measured in units of time, that is, in abstract, quantitative, homogeneous, and reversible units of time. As a form of time, the time is exogenous to the practices and events, it is an external measurement of events defined as production rates, profit rates, working day times, etc. The economic events did not produce time, but took place in time. At this point Bourdieu misses specific characteristics of exogenous time, all-indications of which at the analysis of today's financial system again become interesting as far as the current financial practices refer to diffusion of hegemonial time, to a form of time, to events and Time to run away in a river. In order to clarify her thesis, Adkins first points to a specific financial instrument, namely the curve of US government bond yields, which implies a relation between interest rates and the various maturities of the bonds. The curve is a benchmark for the future value of other forms of debt, such as mortgages, so it is considered a barometer for general economic developments and perspectives, yes, the collective access to the markets to the future. Their triumphal procession must be understood in the context of the end of Keynesianism and a series of new infrastructural measures in the 1970s that set in motion an expansive dynamic of lending and debt economics. Consider, for example, the promotion of financial expansion by the Fed, floating of the US dollar and interest rates, insurance of loans, the yielding capacity of new financial instruments, the division of the population into creditworthy and non-creditworthy groups, the replacement permanent wage contracts through contingent employment, income volatility, the emergence of new financial instruments / derivatives and new financial institutions. The expansion of the capacity of companies, households and governments to shoulder their credit debts requires a set of institutional arrangements. After the financial crisis of 2008, these infrastructures of the financial system were further expanded. Floating interest rates and the US dollar has renewed the relationship between time and money, more precisely between time and the profit outlook on government bonds. Time now becomes itself part of the new financial instruments and their operations and thus an event in itself. And digitized calculation today offers the possibility to calculate the relations between future time points in time. It generates new profit opportunities with regard to the calculation of temporal relationships, thus increasing the profitability of financial securities and other financial instruments. This also indicates a transformation of the materiality of the collateral and derivatives. Insofar as discrete economic objects can be connected in time and measured over time, and thus new profit potentials can be created, the securities can be understood as a continuum of moments. The floating of prices and the volatility seen in trading practices today require the trading of temporalized securities that are not temporal in nature but are themselves temporal forms and therefore can be capitalized. Time itself now becomes the object of innovation and imagination and this is condensed into the statement that money is time. For Adkins, this is not about the commodification of the future, but about the transformation of time itself. In the derivatives markets, the financial objects themselves are now mutating into forms of time, indeed the time of these objects is constituted by the techniques and practices of financial markets, practices , which open the time of derivatives for innovative strategies for the creation of profits. Derivatives have their own time profiles, counterparts and futures that are open to their constant recalibration. Derivatives and collateral are themselves to be understood as forms of the time. In the second chapter of her book, Adkins discusses austerity policy as a political strategy that expands and expands the debt economy and, as a result, raises the productivity of populations to generate added value through the movements and flows of money. Specifically, this means cutting government spending at the expense of low-income populations and those who have no access to financial assets. The austerity policy thus includes a class-specific put option, which now affects the majority of populations, even in capitalist core countries, and which is also to be extended to questions of gender and race. This policy does not just favor the rich and the financial elites, but especially those who have or have access to the financial markets and assets on a large scale, be it mortgage contracts, loans and derivatives that are being traded on the financial markets. To understand this, Adkins comes back to the problem of the expansion of the financial system since the 1970s, which a) exploded financial institutions and instruments, b) is not employment-intensive, and c) is increasingly integrated into the daily lives of the populations becomes. Not only banks, hedge funds, and financial elites operate in the financial fields to gain speculative gains in asset trading, but increasingly the middle class and low-income layers in their everyday lives. Thus, everyday life must be designed and configured as a space for financial investment. Speculative rationality is now moving into everyday financial life. And so money is also transformed as a mediator or as a means of exchanging goods and as a measure of value, by itself as a specific commodity (capital as a commodity) is interchangeable with itself and generated in its specific movement financial surplus, for example in the form of insurance of credit debt. Income streams resulting from consumer credit, mortgages and other debts (and the contracts between households and the financial institutions that insure them) "link" households to operations in global financial markets. Now, when money itself acts as a commodity, at that point it loses its function as a measure of value and as a general equivalent, transforming itself into value, having new capacities and attributes, think of the transformation and consolidation of credit and bonds into the attributes prices and interest rates, whereby these attributes can be bundled into a multitude of variations and then traded, the possibilities of which are at least virtually endless. In the conceptual definition of derivatives Adkins remains confused when she writes, for example, that money here has taken on the characteristics of capital and capital that of money. At the same time she writes of money as capital as a specific commodity of capital. It therefore brings the terms commodity, money and capital into play without specifying a definition. But that should not interest us here, because we have dealt with the problem in detail elsewhere. We define derivatives as speculative capital, as opposed to John Milios (specific commodity) and Bryan / Rafferty (money). Adkins writes that derivatives are setting things in motion and that this should be seen in relation to consumer credit and mortgage contracts. And even flows of income stemming from other aspects of everyday life, such as student loans, bills for mobile phones, household bills for water and electricity, etc., would be fed into the new financial instruments as inputs and thus even unsuspecting households with their small incomes would be over certain chains are now dependent on derivatives trading in global financial markets. Randy Martin has described this as the financialization of everyday life. In doing so, the various forms of day to day credit are broken down to a few attributes with new financial instruments such as CDOs (securitization, bundling different types of loans) and then traded in a variety of combinations on the financial markets. This type of indebtedness through everyday loans is in a special relationship to the wage, which is increasingly contingent in its various forms and defies the standardizations won by the unions. The wage work itself becomes uncertain, sporadic and unpredictable. In addition, real wages have stagnated in the last thirty years. Thus, many households can only secure their reproduction by increasing the debt. Under conditions of temporary and temporary employment contracts, austerity policies and stagnant wages, low and middle income households simply need to increase their debts today, thereby helping to expand and multiply the extraction of a surplus generated by money and finance. Increasing personal debt and dependence on specific financial risks is only a partial aspect of the financial regime of accumulation; moreover, households today are increasingly dependent on women's incomes and wages, no matter how volatile or precarious these incomes are. Women are increasingly being forced into and integrated into the post-Ford labor market, whether as wage labor in the area of social welfare and care services, or even precariously paid work in the home. A new institutionalized model of adult work has replaced the old Fordist model of the family; the former is a model in which all adults should be tied to work and employment, or at least integrated into the constant search for new employment opportunities. For example, women are subject to multiple burdens - short-term employment or wage labor, housework and child rearing - and, when low wages require indebtedness, even generate a small investment in household and social reproduction. It was through these mechanisms that the family was re-invented and reorganized in post-Fordism, with a new staging of self-responsibility and the associated link to the financial system. While in Fordism the heterosexual family functioned as a place of male labor and consumer demand reproduction (plus welfare contributions), in post-Fordism the family transforms into a self sufficient economic unit and / or an area of investment when the family to reproduce through private debts and operate through a set of economic responsibilities tied to the financial markets. Thus, even the family becomes a small business, as women redefine social reproduction as a kind of enterprise becomes imperative of employment be subjected. For post-Fordism, the feminization of survival is essential. And often enough, women's wages act as a sort of "leveraging" and "speculation" to gain access to insured forms of credit with banks and other lending institutions, to ensure the daily lives of households, especially with regard to financing benefits, previously taken over by the state or the capitalists. Wages are thus moved by serving as the basis for access to loans and mortgages for which regular payments have to be made. Wages, according to Adkins, are not to be understood here as a means for the exchange of goods, but rather as a commodity or as a form of money which is a value in itself. Again, we find the mixing of money, goods and capital at Adkins. At least it can be said that wages correlate with debt and can also generate a small capital x with the purchase of securities. Workers and employees now have to speculate themselves, albeit to a very limited extent, on their everyday money in order to get things moving. Not only are households increasingly dependent on women's wages, but also on what these wages can set in terms of borrowing potential. Households are thus literally driven into neoliberal risk production, and today this also applies to low and middle income households. This will make households dependent in a specifically asymmetric way on the fluctuations in the financial markets. Housing, Regeneration, Education and Health - areas of social reproduction for which the welfare state had contributed in Fordism are now becoming financialized, with households taking additional risks in securing their social reproduction through borrowing. A new topology of linking the population to the financial risk is thereby created. When it comes to justice issues, it is no longer just about focusing on the redistribution of income, but also about the distribution of financial risks. The period of contractually settled debts of households and persons as well as the insured debt needs to be analyzed in detail in order to understand the integration of the population into the debt economy and the expansion of the potential of the population to be able to carry out a positive risk management. Again, this requires an understanding of the logic of speculation as a specific historical mode of accumulation and social organization. On the one hand it concerns the quantitative increase of the private debts in the capitalist core countries, on the other hand the future income streams, which result from the contractually regulated debts, and their connection to current accumulation strategies of the capital, ie to the productivity of the debts regarding the generation of surplus via money and finance. Potent lenders such as banks are now incorporating a structural balance of power, especially when it comes to their position within household debt crises, which as borrowers often have no choice but to go into debt. If Marx has labeled the workers wage slaves, debt must be understood as an asymmetrical relation in which the small debtors are debt slaves. Usually, the time dimension of debt is based on borrowers' promise to make future payments, thus closing the door to an open future for borrowers who no longer have the ability to tap into the potential of time. Against the idea that debts are a destruction of time, the destruction of the possibilities in the present and the future, Adkins wants to point out that the debt is now more of a generative moment in time. This shifts the logic of debt repayment to the logic of possible payments, and the movement of payment dates and deadlines, which corresponds to a logic of probability, shifts to a logic of the possible. This logic binds the indebted subject to a time when the past, present and future are no longer in a fixed relation to one another; rather, time is now open to any kind of revision. This form of time Adkins calls 'speculative time'; it is tied to the logic of money and finance, and in particular to the process of loan securitization (CDO), which has created new ways of extracting profits for financial capital, including the capitalization of household income streams , The mass debt inherent in a new order of time, in which the productivity of the population in terms of the generation of surplus value - from the streams of everyday money - to be maximized. This reorganization of the social requires specific modes of practice, with the architecture of debts again requiring specific temporal rhythms, sequences, patterns, and sensations. Debts, therefore, contain a temporal relation defined by time: they require a promise to pay at a time that has not yet been reached, that is, in the future, and that is the deferral of the present in favor of a contractually regulated future is known even before she enters. In terms of time, debt operates with a double movement: the promise to pay includes postponement and anticipation. It can be assumed that the economic survival of the majority of the population in the capitalist core countries today depends on the debt economy. Lazzarato noted a few years ago that increasingly larger parts of life are sucked into the debt economy, so that financial risks and financial costs ultimately end up throughout life. Against Lazzarato, however, Adkins argues that debts have a complexity that can not be reduced to the loss of (open) time and appropriation, that is, a dated time of repayments that a punctured and uniform subject demands, a subject that sanctions avoids repayments on time. The calendar time is external to the actions and is not affected by contexts, so it is not variable, although it has a massive effect on the contexts. According to Adkins and Frederici, the disciplinary action according to the time is strongly geared towards the female subject in the home and requires the connection to the time. It involves operating with temporal patterns and schedules, but this does not refer to any emptying or the conclusion of time, but to a temporal universe characterized by rhythms and breaks in the flow of uniformity. This changes once again with the financialization of debt or the existence of the calculus of securitized debt (consumer loans and mortgages). Securitization is the process of accumulating, bundling, and turning contractually secured debt into liquid assets that can be traded on the financial markets. Not only has this created new opportunities in the creation of the surplus for financial capital, it has also increased the possibilities of realizing returns hidden in mortgages and consumer credit. Thus, the "everyday" loans are drawn into the capital markets. And it also transforms the payment deadlines and plans of debt, which are now no longer uniform, regular and sequential but flexible, variable and adaptable. Repayment schedules can now be stretched, slowed, accelerated, reorganized and reset. Both the variable payment rooms for repayment and the calculation of the lending are not focused on a future end point, at which the debt is then finally repaid, but on the current and potential service of debt, i.e towards possible, future payments instead of repayments. Thus, loans, mortgages and other debts are subject to permanent adaptation and are also filled with options so that, for example, a period of high interest payments may be followed by exemption of payments for a particular period. Even long-term credit is no longer tied solely to the indexation of future and probable wage payments (based on known wages in the present); instead, wages and incomes are more related to potential and opportunities for future debt servicing. Instead of proceeding from the calculation of the probable projected by the present into the future, the calculus of the insured debts refers to the calculation of possible futures. The future does not unfold from a known present; rather, the present is rehabilitated by coming futures that may or may not come. At the same time, resources are transferred from the future to the present, from futures that have not yet occurred or will never occur. The statistical calculation of probability is replaced by the algorithmic ordering of the possible, from which new practices should be set in motion. Rouvory and Stiegler, in the context of the analysis of a new form of algorithmic governance and a post-current reality, have pointed out very early that today it is no longer a matter of calculating probability, but of considering in advance what probability is flees and thus makes possible the excess of the possible. The state also uses the new methods and techniques to model the possible, for example by means of software, risk management, biometric procedures and private consulting. These techniques allow for a new form of algorithmic governance and power that focuses on potential futures and acts through preemptive action. One now reads traces that lead from possible futures to the present. Debt productivity is based not only on the accumulation of profits that are just related to debt, especially interest paid in fixed blocks of future time, but in the accumulation of profits generated by trading debt in the future time itself works; constitutive are: contractually fixed income streams, their gains and losses on debts, and the "bets" on those gains and losses, that is, breaking down the credits on a few attributes and then bundling, pricing and trading those attributes within that through the risk rated tranches. This experimental treatment of debt is now itself a source of profit. Profits result in financial capital, including from derivatives trading, debt restructuring and auctions with loans, CDOs and CDS. The time accompanying these financial operations is speculative, at least it has a speculative component. Adkins again refers to Bryan and Rafferty, authors who refer to derivatives as a form of money. But if derivatives must be realized in money, then they themselves are not money, but at best speculative capital or a specific commodity, that of money as capital. In any case, these financial instruments have liquidity and the potential for transfer that is not tied to the ownership of an underlying asset to which the derivative relates. In the same breath Adkins speaks again of the commodity properties of derivatives, even capital. Anyway, at any rate, she agrees that derivatives are not fictitious capital, but, as we would say, speculative capital that is material and real. Speculative time is a time when the past, present and future are not in a pre-determined relation or linearity, but are processed in a continuum of movement, transformation and unfolding. The future can not only access the present, but also the past. The present and its relations to the past and future can again be subjected to a permanent reset within an action. Past and present can be pushed into the future and future and present in the past. The rivers of these non-chronological pasts, counterparts and futures, including their resettling and reorganization, and even their suspension, can easily serve to increase profits. The time of the insured debts and profits insists in a non-chronological and indeterminate movement of speculative time. At this time, and especially in the context of their economic productivity, accumulation must be done through debt (the changing schedules of debt of persons and households that can be delayed, accelerated and reorganized). The calendar-oriented time of repayment is now added to the calendar time of payment, which binds the subject to the non-determinate time of speculation. During this time, financial activities are mobilized and intensified; It is a time when past, present and future are in a continuous flow of revision. The financialized subject no longer whines about the emptiness of time, the loss of the future or the temporal orientation, but this subject is always ready to happily attack the re-calibrations of past, present and future plus their relations and stages among themselves. And this subject has not too little, but too much time, that of the event and the non-chronological flow of time. The time of the insured debt inscribes into the present the speculative time. This does not include a practice of temporalization, as Bourdieu still assumes, but a practice of speculation that seeks to maximize the capacity of the population to make possible payments across entire lifeworlds. For the process of securitization involves rewriting the social life of the populations, which is now integrated into the financial system and its risk production: the creditworthiness of sections of the population is added to the extended logic of paying for the possible. Adkins has been following the transformations in the financial system since the 1970s in the development of new financial instruments, the securitization of loans in particular, austerity policies, and the integration of the population into the financial circuits. From this she draws further conclusions: According to Bretton Woods, the financial markets have changed the relationship between time and money, and have set in motion a radical temporalization of securitization, whose profit opportunities are just in time. The policy of austerity will expand the debt economy, increase the productivity of the population in terms of generating surplus via the movements and flows of money. With regard to long-term financing strategies, the "everyday money" has been integrated into the financial circuits. Loans are becoming more and more necessary for parts of the population in order to survive economically. This leads to a restructuring of the class relations and the social total, to the everyday financial practices that are infected by speculative mechanisms. In particular, the reduction of wages drives households into debt economics, where they have to speculate on their reduced incomes. If both wage labor and the reproduction of life become increasingly precarious, then many workers and employees run the risk of slipping into sub-proletarian areas. The main role of wage labor, which takes place in productive production processes, is waning in the western core countries. This increases the proportion of those who have to do without regular pay in the context of precarious work. But for Adkins, even today, most wages have the same rationality as the new forms of financial instruments. Stagnation and the reduction of real wages are a characteristic of the post-Fordist era. Adkins quotes David Harvey as suggesting that the stagnation of real wages is the result of the dissolution of the social pact in Fordism, that is, a continuing attack on the organizations of the labor movement and a period of consolidation of the power of capital. However, in financialized post-Fordism, wages are characterized not only by their stagnation but also by their volatility and insecurity. The crisis of social reproduction is exacerbated by the dismantling of the welfare state (health, care, education, housing, etc.). These factors, combined with stagnating real wages, have widened the gap between real disposable income and what is needed for life. For the insecure wages today even the zero-hour contracts are exemplary, which no longer specify a specific working time and wage level and require a permanent willingness to work. Consider also the many forms of non-tariff treaties. At the same time, household debt service has increased: mortgages, loans and student loans have taken the form of insured loans, contracted debt transformed into assets by specific financial instruments and traded on the financial markets. Thus, the productivity of contracted debts becomes central to the process of accumulation via insured debt. The creation of the indebted consumer now serves as a »solution« for stagnating wages and has changed the wage employment relationship itself. Debt is also continuously measured and its rise is confirmed empirically today by rising income-debt ratios, with more focus on rising debt than on wages. Under the conditions of expanding debt, workers are being exploited not only by the wage-labor relationship, but also by their attachment to banks and other financial institutions via credit. If workers and employees have to borrow because of their usually too low wages (to secure their social reproduction), then they are, so to speak, trading their wages to gain access to money that can set something in motion, that is, they relate to qualities of money that is not yet available, but can release untapped potential. In the tendency, now even the worker can become a small investor subject who has access to assets (eg, insurance). Like derivatives from the underlying assets, wages can be separated to some extent from the labor force to serve as the basis for indebtedness excesses. To answer that, a new left-wing speculative policy must be envisaged that also looks into the rights and conditions of employees who need to use money to move money. translated by Dejan Stojkovski taken from: by Achim Szepanski The purchase and sale of money capital, be it in the form of shares, securities or derivatives, is carried out on so-called money or capital markets. It is important, however, not to overstate the concept of the market as a concrete universal, but rather to describe this type of structural-social space as a distribution of distributions, as a variety of different mechanisms of distribution, some of which are in their pricing systems converge, but in other price movements they are completely discontinuous and different. We will always presuppose this when using the term "market". If the money capital is self-setting, at the latest then it must be traded in very specific distribution networks; this trade, in contrast to that of industry's standard commodities, would be understood as a process of capitalizing money itself, making it seemingly possible from the outset, the differential accumulation of that particular form of money-capital from the recovery processes in industrial production to a certain degree or disconnect completely. If an owner of money capital lends a certain amount of money after making an assessment of the so-called risk that evaluates the debtor's ability or inability to pay, credit money arises just as the contract is concluded, and this money turns out to be a form of duplication capitalist wealth. In fact, over the event of the credit relation a sum of money (with the potential of more) has doubled for a given interval, because on the one hand the borrowed sum, when used by the borrower to expand production processes, can set in motion new capital metamorphoses, on the other hand the lender can also regard his money capital as future surplus production, since, as finally fixed in the credit agreement, he can expect the repayment of the agreed loan amount plus its interest on the money loaned. What the time-indexing law has here is the temporary separation of the capitalist potency inherent in money capital from property, by lending the power of self-augmentation of capital for a particular period (and, at best, by another, without the creditor suffering damage himself, on the contrary, he himself can achieve a surplus of interest), whereby the money capital, which can, but need not, be the fruit of industrially organized exploitation, into the time-indexed, real power of disposal, passes into the possession of the borrower. Both the credit relationship and the issuance of stocks or bonds are accompanied by a duplication of money capital, the implications of which, as Lohoff / Trenkle emphasize in their book The Great Devaluation, have mostly been hidden in the traditional Marxist discussion. (Lohoff / Trenkle 2012: 121ff.) The lent money not only turns into the hands of the debtor in capital, as far as he acts as an acting or industrial capitalist but also on the part of the creditor capital is created, because it receives or substantiated for the lending of the money a legally codified claim to retransfer of a higher sum borrowed money, and thus this lent sum has, at least for a certain period, namely until the liquidation of the loan agreement, a double existence. (Ibid .: 128ff.) Something very strange actually happens: Because of the pure existence of the loan itself, the initial capital gains a double existence, because it is on the one hand in the real disposal of the borrower, but at the same time holds the lender a very special reflection of his Starting capital in his hands, fictional capital. Marx writes: "With the development of interest-bearing capital and the credit system, all capital appears to be doubling and tripling in places by the different ways in which the same capital or even the same claim for debt appears in different hands under different forms." - MEW 25: 488 ). But here it is not just a bill, but a real claim to at least doubled future value and this at once represents abstract capitalist wealth. We also find a doubling in trading with fictitious capital. This happens, for example, quite specifically when a property owner buys property titles such as stocks, bonds or securities, purely for the purpose of making more out of his money. Contrary to the purchase of standard manufactured goods for either consumption or industrial use, the purchase of a title of ownership implies the specific use of the secondary use value of the money capital, ie. h., the buyer of the title of property uses the secondary or the meta-use value of his money sold in order to generate future returns, while the seller of the share, bond, etc. by no means excluded from the capitalization of the money, as in the sale For example, ordinary issuers of equities or bonds have real money for the sale of the title to them. (Lohoff / Trenkle 2012: 131f.). The sellers of the securities now find themselves able to apply this new money capital themselves as a cash-strapped demand by hiring labor and buying machinery, raw materials, supplies, etc. for the expansion of production, while at the same time buyers of property titles in the money markets act so-called fictitious capital. In addition to the amount of money received by the issuer, the so-called notional capital of the purchaser of the bonds or shares occurs. This type of business relationship by no means merely provides for the mere transfer of already existing money capital because it: a) in the concrete disposal of a company as intensional negative value - capital - forms the basis for further profitable production processes, and b) the buyer the share or bond with the aim of obtaining a surplus in the financial markets. If a borrower turns not to a private person who could act as the owner of the money, but to a bank where he already holds a deposit of € 50,000, then there will be two if there is a loan agreement between the borrower and the bank property titles: the repayment claim of the private individual as a debtor to the bank and the repayment claim of the bank against the private individual as debtor. A direct loan between a private lender and the private borrower would have been written on the recording surface of the full capital body only as of the capital of € 50,000, while have been recorded by the intermediary appearance of a bank € 100,000. If more money capitalists now slip between the creditor and the debtor and thus insist on the credit relationship in iterative chainings with scheduled delivery deadlines and potentially constantly changing addresses (of claims), then an increase of the initial capital is created at each intermediate link. (Ibid .: 134) The multiplication of the fictitious capital or the title of second-order property is, of course, never identical with the productivity or increase of the material wealth, but which in the first place does not really matter in capitalism, because In the full capital corpus - and this with an all-pervasive, obsessive performativity - one first of all records the functions, parameters, variables, and configurations of the capital flows that constitute the continuous abstract wealth, and on that the creation of fictitious capital is direct and indirect Influence. However, the creation of fictitious capital, at least in terms of the form of credit money, does not lead to a doubling of initial capital, since the doubling eventually lapses as soon as the creditor's claim against the debtor ceases, either through the final realization of the creditor's monetary claims by the creditor-debtor or through his elimination from the credit chain, eg. B. by bankruptcy. In the case of the realization of the loan, the debtor repays the original amount of the loan plus interest, whereas in the case of devaluation the debtor proves insolvent and the creditor, therefore, has to write off his claims. (In the case of a stock corporation, the doubling of the money capital lasts as long as the company exists or until it repurchases the shares.) That this type of doubling by the creation of specific property titles represents only a limited increase in the money capital does not mean that it is here The level of money capital as a total complexion is something like a zero-sum game, which may simply be exhausted in the redistribution of existing funds. As long as a title (securities, shares, bonds, etc.) flows and is encoded in the distribution channels and networks, as long as it is neither 100% realized nor devalued, it increases its potential use as so-called productive capital just the same virtual wealth of a fictional capital and this as writing, whereby writing here always implies real wealth. According to Marx, capital is a so-called fictitious capital (we shall return to this provision), but as far as its function for total capital is concerned, its usefulness in terms of its usability differs from the so-called productive one Capital based on processes of production and exploitation in the »real economy« may nevertheless be the fictitious capital and again used to fuel the production of standard goods in industrial production. Even the state is able to provide "productive" financing of infrastructure, armaments and social benefits with government bonds, just as it can do so with tax revenues. Now, if more money transactions are constantly being linked to an existing series of transactions, or if the transactions are being transformed into securitized claims, the process of replicating cash flows in the form of quasi-postal procedures continues with the type of doubling of capital described above, so that with each new chain link a new fictitious capital arises. (See Lenger 2010: 196f./Lohoff/Trenkle 2012: 134f.) The integration of various money capitalists in the concatenation of money and payment flows, all of which include the relationship creditor-debtor, leads at least temporarily to the additive increase in the initial capital; money capital functions as a self-referential relation in these processes/streams whose code is profit / non-profit. Both current and code each have their own materiality - while the electricity is based on electricity, the code is stored as a script on hard drives, a script that also owns a virtualization, not with their coding, which today rather under the If the word "cyber" or "digitality" is to be understood, the circuit updating / virtualization (of the value) has always affected capitalist money or even credit money, because it can at least potentially and without regard to its digitization as securitize debt and then make its way through quasi-postal systems (Lenger) go, without that at certain points necessarily an addressee would be responsible, which breaks even in any financial crisis orbit. In this context, the fetish character of monetary capital u. a. in that money capital appears as a mere property of a thing, as a number or a script, or, in other words, the reciprocal relation of current and code appears purely as the rule of the code, or, to turn it again. The processes of the interaction between current and code produce new properties that appear purely as those of things /script/numbers (which they are, but not primarily). The digitization of money cannot, therefore, be equated with virtualization (which can theoretically also be analogous); on the contrary, virtualization defies any superficial fetishization, if one understands fictional capital not only as quantities but as vectors of the capital movements circulating current-virtual (and instantaneous) to at least potentially multiply to infinity. Although virtual circulation with its features of magnitude, flow, and code remains inscribed as a continuously updating variation in the digital processes (which process with discrete units readable as numbers), it is by no means equated with the latter the Z. Arthur Kroker, for example, who consequently sees capitalism disappearing into the simulation space of digital technologies. (See Kroker 2004) As a pure vector of circulation, fictitious / speculative capital means, and a rate constantly fluctuating in magnitude and direction (scalar magnitudes or differential vectors) and deterritorialization, and it is not surprising that the highly-paid research teams in finance work with scaling laws and power distributions to describe, for example, the volatility of prices and prices of securities to the analysis of abnormal probabilities and extreme events, but with less focus on factors such as profit maximization or asset optimization than on the fluid integration of all essential elements (including the actors) in money flows within and in networks, by the computer statistical Time series can be calculated in which, for example, the actors should behave analogously to the movement of securities prices and stock indices. There is no question that credit is broadening the competition between capitalist companies with each other, which is far from affecting, as we will see, the division of profits into entrepreneurial profit and interest, and thus the division into functioning and interest-bearing capital. The borrower, when acting as the embodiment of the performing capital, has to direct his investments and projects per se to the future, which, however, the lenders finance only after an accurate analysis and evaluation of the profitability implied by these investments. And this procedure also means that in the future, the borrower treats returns and profits that are already available, and thus, within the loan relationship, payment entitlements and promises actually mutate into capitalized means of payment on both sides: Compared to a precisely fixed interval in advance, the debtor already has a sum of money to help him realize his business in the future, while the creditor arranges receivables which he already calculates as growing financial wealth (during the task assigned to him or her remains to generate additional money under conditions that have signed the two actants of the lending business as a fixed fact.) And finally, the quality of the debt always depends on the possibility of insolvency, because it appears non-stop that the risk is realized for the lender in a form that the borrower can not repay the borrowed money, so the careful examination of the Financial status of the borrower by the lender as well as the provision of collateral by the borrower today are the non plus ultra of the credited ability to work. translated by Dejan Stojkovski taken from: by Achim Szepanski The 9/11 event gave the governments of the leading countries the unexpected opportunity to place security as an absolute priority of their policies. Increasing inequality in income and wealth distribution, the dismantling of the welfare state and the increasing dependence of households on loans have been drowned out by the security campaigns of the states, while at the same time there has been some softening in the consolidation of budgets, because more of them are in the institutions national security should be invested. This had to be followed by further cuts in the welfare state and further easing of households' access to credit. As mortgage lending increased to some low-income earners, the growth of bad debts inevitably increased. The so-called privatized Keynesianism by increasing the issuance of consumer credit led on the one hand to the fact that these loans were fed into the processes of securitization and the creation of synthetic derivatives (CDO), on the other hand, resources were freed up for the development of the security state. This expansion was then not only due to the need for an anti-terrorist war, but also to the so-called refugee problem, which was quickly accompanied by the militarization of the external borders and the tightening of asylum laws in Europe and the United States. Whereas, before the financial crisis, the projects of the governments of the leading countries were even more geared to supporting certain sections of the population in their quest to increase the value of their human capital, thus, after the financial crisis, the austerity policy intensified and the state turned on a massive scare against refugees. As a result of shareholder pressure and emerging globalization, large companies began to outsource parts of their activities as early as the 1980s (through subcontracts, temporary employment contracts, and foreign direct investment), but there was also an internal reorganization of companies. The company has been replaced by a modular organization that contains relatively autonomous components concentrated around projects with a limited period of time and is now giving birth to a precariat whose members have access to fixed-term jobs, with no prospect of social improvement. However, on the part of those affected, they quickly realized that flexibility and availability should become the basic conditions for further dreary employment.) Feher comes at the end of the book a little more detail on the Share Economy and the fighting on their fronts to speak. In contrast to the classical liberals, who see the market as a neutral space where traders and customers freely execute their transactions, the reality is different, because the digital interfaces that are today called platforms control and monitor the work all at once new labor market and set the number of service providers. The drivers Uber allows to pick up passengers are under strict control and are forced to follow the platforms' algorithms. The routes they take are dictated by the GPS, while their efficiency, availability, and interaction with the passengers is the subject of constant assessments that determine how, when and where the driver is used. The drivers do not act as employees but as private contractors. Far from offering an alternative to precarious work, platform service providers commute between conditions of wage labor and the risk of self-employment, as well as depriving the platforms of any social security contributions. For many theorists, the big platforms are nothing but interconnected commercial contracts between a "principal authority" that can sign contracts on behalf of the company and a multiplicity of agents that value the company's capital. The platforms thus multiply partnerships based on purely commercial encounters and offering services without regulated employment contracts. (However, a number of companies in various industries are still unable to produce without employing hired workers.) Providers of services using platform offerings are affected by the repression of wage labor, but also by those with their accompanying guarantees. Thus, they seem to represent the epitome of neoliberal subjects. Ultimately, however, they are not dependent on their own work, but on their involvement in a network of connections, meaning that the exploitation of their labor resources and their risk management depend on the credit that they must necessarily accumulate. Promoting their self-marketing skills requires constant positive feedback from customers, which are reflected in scores, likes, friends, and followers, and tweaking those ratings is the first thing to do. The accumulation of "reputational capital", which must necessarily include an efficient credit score, serves to gain the trust of banks and insurance companies. The sustainability of service providers' operations depends much more on sponsor approval than on the entrepreneurial ethos or human capital claimed by neoliberal ideologues. On their web pages, where providers and customers can connect, the platforms assign their users a specific set of continuously valued assets, which they must combine, move and manage as part of their "reputational capital". Some theoreticians in the management of "reputational capital" already see a major resource that the actors have to manage and cultivate in order to ascend or simply survive. Everyone will eventually have to run a Facebook hyper page that lists various referrals from friends, mentors, lenders, sponsors, customers, and service providers. These open, algorithmically designed portfolios, according to Feher, make it possible to express a person's attractiveness and trustworthiness, determine their reputational value, and thus demonstrate their ability to perform a task, line of credit, or partnership. The private asset managers must now speculate on their own "reputational capital" or follow the speculation of others on it. For the Resistance, this means combining the social safeguards still enjoyed by wage laborers with the autonomy that users of platforms possess to develop new win-win strategies. Therefore, in the precarious battles, it is not enough simply to demand the status and safeguards of wage laborers, but to try to take over existing platforms or to found new ones in order to introduce new rules and games. In counter-speculation files, the conditions of valorization of assets and credit allocation (by governments) must be fundamentally changed. The early trade union movement has often argued that, because of the validity of the law on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the struggle for higher wages implies a moment beyond the safeguarding of the workers' costs of reproduction. And if Uber & Co's service providers go to court to acknowledge their activities as pay-based employment, the strategic concern is not primarily to sue for the status of wage-laborer, but the collapse. These brands and platforms, whose model is to attract independent contractors and generate returns from them. The battles of contingent platform workers are still in their infancy. The new neo-liberal strategies, which rely on the integration of debtors into the financial circuits, allow increasingly nationality, race and flexibility to be considered as criteria for evaluation, thus opening the door to a new populism. The propaganda of the free movement of goods and capital, and to a conscience moment also of the people, which allegedly leads to a peaceful international community, assumed that it comes to hybridization of knowledge and skills to the successful competition under the observation of investors. Meanwhile, the governments propagandize no longer fear a world without borders. Instead, allegedly, border controls are being tightened daily due to terrorism and unbridled flows of refugees, economic patriotism is ramping up, and local people are being asked to recognize their national identity as a valuable part of their human capital. Without even the slightest effort to regulate monetary capital movements, governments are attempting to ignore the popularity of their policies (due to governance, which is mainly concerned with the stock market value of companies and thus an asset that markets can speculate on) by appealing to the fear of "migratory invasions" and increasingly to the restoration of trade protectionism. Governments' efforts to increase the per capita value of a nation's human capital serve to create governance that satisfies the interests of financial investors, who are concerned only with the usability of their assets. The own territory must be woven by the governments into a financially-friendly climate, in order to be able to spend government bonds for a not too high interest rate, and for that very reason also the austerity policy must be continued necessarily. At the same time, the productivity of their own populations must be mobilized by increasing flexibility, skills and availability, criteria that make a population financially attractive. translate by Dejan Stojkovski taken from: by Achim Szepanski In the mid-1970s, Fordism, which consisted of class compromise, full employment, rising social security, and higher educational opportunities for youth from the working class, reached its limit, and now also women, migrants, and guest workers were more heavily involved in labor markets. At the same time, investors took advantage of the new financial opportunities made possible by the liberalization of currency trading, the liberalization of oil prices and the development of new derivative financial instruments. Conservative governments, Thatcher and Reagan, chose new priorities: the fight against inflation became more important than ensuring full employment, and supply policy was more important than Keynesian demand stimuli, which led to a stagnation of real wages and the gradual dismantling of the welfare state. Instead of tax increases or the printing of money, which serves to guarantee state financing, the system of state indebtedness has been forced and the private debt has been "democratized". Debt became the new social-economic engine to set economic growth in motion, which in turn meant debt was now more tied to the fluctuations of the financial markets. Although the concept of self-responsibility has been preached ever more massively, it has become relatively clear to borrowers that the new concepts do not lead to financial independence, but rather generate potentially infinite dependence on the financial markets.Borrowers should no longer escape the spiral of debt in the future, but rather constantly create a kind of trust through their risk management with the lenders, so that they could again borrow. Supposedly, this was a win-win situation in so far as the consumer wishes of the many were fulfilled and at the same time the portfolios of the lenders were filled to their satisfaction. But as the latest financial crisis of 2008 showed, neither the promise to borrowers to at least finance the lifestyle of the middle classes through credit, nor the profit expectations of the lenders were fulfilled to their full satisfaction. If credit functions as a new engine of capital accumulation and a social control and disciplining mechanism, then new forms of resistance need to be considered, with union struggles being able to be linked with debtors sharing common interests and, at the same time, the Submission to the strategies of the lenders to delegitimize. However, indebtedness can not be understood by the subaltern as a weapon, as long as they regard debt as a moral problem. In addition, debt should not be reduced solely to the asymmetric relationship between the lender and the borrower; in addition, the triangular relation between lenders, governments who finance their budgets through loans and citizens, After the financial crisis of 2008, it quickly became clear that there was a symmetrical inversion of the »roles«: taxpayers became lenders for systemically insolvent creditors. The austerity measures that hit the population finally made them the lender of last resort. However, the financial institutions immediately went on the offensive and spread their fear of the bad conditions of the accounts of their rescuers in their departments.And since that also affected the states, governments had nothing better to do than dramatically reduce resources for social programs and services. By making fiscal consolidation its main task for ensuring confidence in the financial markets, governments have not only shifted the transfer of funds to the rescue of the financial system, but made the taxpayer to a third player who should take over the refinancing of the banking system in the event of a crisis for all eternity. For the taxpayers themselves, this meant borrowing on the basis of cuts in social benefits, and precisely for those who were just saved by them. So, after the crisis, you quickly went back to the "normal" relationship between creditors and debtors. The speculative attacks on financial investors from 2010 onwards, especially against countries in southern Europe, gave rise to new messages: austerity policy should no longer be a temporary cure stemming from exceptional circumstances; rather, it should be a constant of the state Government policy. In doing so, the social state is directly linked to the form of the debt-state. And if social debt is related to financial debt, then it depends on which debt governments give priority, and governments' answers to that are clear, because legality over financial investors is always paramount. The various roles that citizens play in their credit - borrowers, lenders of last resort, social borrowers - should, according to Feher, become the subject of political appropriation by activists. As borrowers, activists should be concerned about non-fulfillment or transformation of their payments, as lenders of last resort they must engage in state debt policy and, as social borrowers, they can attack the policy that places their priority on financial investors and at the same time rely on a restructuring of the welfare state, are the illegitimate beneficiaries of the financial resources of the hard-working taxpayers. Conversely, neo-liberal policies assume that union members, some public officials, and above all the unemployed, are the illegitimate beneficiaries of the financial resources of the hard-working taxpayers. The neo-liberals are waging war for a new form of equality by attacking those who allegedly plunder ordinary taxpayers when they claim social rights. At the same time, they began early to empower citizens who were deprived of their social rights and services to lead a life without secure jobs and state benefits on their own responsibility. The task of the neo-liberal governments was to help citizens to help themselves. The denunciation of the unemployed went so far as to equate them with alcoholics and drug addicts who are unable to live a decent and orderly life. In Germany, this led consistently to the Hartz IV laws introduced by the Greens and the SPD, advocating the needy that they should be proud to no longer be dependent on state social benefits while being placed in precarious, underpaid or jobs which lay far below their qualifications. At the same time, they mobilized the unemployed and led them into state exercise and training programs that are often barely surpassed in meaninglessness, and prescribed working people's lifelong learning program. Even those who were totally deprived were told that they were capable of accepting the so-called self-enhancement, if they only had the necessary flexibility and willingness to work, i.e. beyond a substantial portfolio of knowledge and skills, they should agree to work as long as possible in conditions of maximum insecurity and for low pay, and that would encourage the necessary respect for one's own and recognition by others. In particular, social democratic governments in the 1990s, under the label of creativity and ownership, supported the transformation of large parts of the population into debtors who, through the credit card system and easier access to credit, were allowed to integrate into the financial system and surplus In order to create a reasonably "normal" life, not only the potential for employment but also one's own solvency had to be taken into account. Whether it was a short-term job, a mortgage loan, or taking part in any start-up initiative, it was about creating a new "investees" that worked around the clock, trusting and crediting for Investors and companies, that is, constantly looking for new projects. Therefore, he differs from the typical wage worker in Fordism, who lived from long-term employment contracts and state social benefits, but also from the original self-responsible entrepreneur of small capital x. If the investees are responsible for increasing their attractiveness in the markets themselves and are constantly testing their employment capacity and solvency, then governments must strive to invest in the education and training of their citizens, at least to repay their loans In addition, they should also be trained for future payment. At the same time, unemployment insurance must be transformed in such a way that the recipients of social benefits are permanently driven into return-to-work programs and made fit for credit. Social democratic governments in the 2000's need not only reduce capital and corporate taxes, deregulate labor markets and safeguard intellectual property rights, they also need to be financially attractive in order to make state territory attractive to financial investors Estimate the value (the credit potential) of one's own population. All of this applies to territories that are political areas and have been composed of terra and terror since Roman legal principles. translated by Dejan Stojkovski taken from: by Achim Szepanski The restructuring of the taxing state towards the debt state has two consequences: On the one hand, institutional investors (pension funds, insurance companies and hedge funds) are always anxious to keep their investments safe in their investments such as government bonds, on the other hand allow the money flushed into the public purse funds certain governments to maintain state services, even though citizens were warned as early as the '90's that the welfare state was no longer sustainable and needed to be transformed. The combination of a growing government loan and a simultaneous reduction in taxes quickly led to growing deficits in government budgets during this period, which in turn worried lenders. The governments had no choice to use an increasing share of their debt repayment budgets, which further limited social services. As the growing deficits also increased interest rates on government bonds, an additional way had to be found to at least slow down this process. This was to encourage households to follow states in debt policy and to finance ever larger parts of the cost of reproduction by borrowing. Citizens should, as far as possible, go into debt themselves. Facilitating the conditions for private borrowing has thus become a means of keeping taxes low, Even the financial crisis did not significantly change these states' policies. In addition, massive state deficit spending saved the banking system and deported costs to the populations by increasing austerity measures while still encouraging private debt. While government bond issuance should compensate for declining tax revenues, consumer credit has been used to limit the growth of the government deficit. Wolfgang Streeck speaks at this point of the transformation of the debt state in the consolidation state, but the consolidation is so far hardly successful, so that future generations can not be easily freed from the systems of debt. The bailouts of the big banks confirmed this once again. The "too big to fail" policy continues to focus on private investors, leading to three trends: lowering capital and corporate taxes, disrupting social programs and public services and making labor markets more flexible. The governments of the developed countries still prefer one policy of increasing the economic attractiveness of their territories, which operates under the heading of compulsory property, whereby private lenders can buy and sell government bonds in the secondary markets at any time, so that the pressure on governments, in contrast to the selective pressure that voters all four years of participating in the elections are a continuous one. While opinion polls are always oriented towards the next elections in their polls, investors' "moods" are the object of permanent evaluation, or to be more precise, permanent anticipation. The slightest sign of market skepticism can affect the capacity of governments to issue more government bonds and thus also limit the resources of politicians to be re-elected. But because voters cannot be completely ignored, politicians - living caskets - point to the exorbitant costs of applying to social programs, refugees and public infrastructures, and ignore the question of falling taxes on capital and deregulation of markets, The advocates of a left-wing policy, which rely on the restoration of democracy and national and state sovereignty, point in this context again and again that the growing xenophobia is a result of deregulated financial markets, globalization and not least the un-elected supranational bureaucracies, The citizens would feel powerless and abandoned to the state, and in order to reduce the xenophobic mood among the citizens, it would be necessary for particular to restore state sovereignty and control over households and budgets. This kind of propaganda for a sovereign nation-state has always had difficulties to set itself apart from right-wing populist positions, the free flow of goods, capital, but especially from migrants to their countries. Since their phobia of foreigners is more coherent than left-wing populism, which desperately seeks to separate between xenophobia and protectionism directed against parasitic financial capital, ethnocultural nationalists can far more effectively enforce their border-closure policy. But because voters can not be completely ignored, politicians - living caskets - point to the exorbitant costs of applying to social programs, refugees and public infrastructures, and ignore the question of falling taxes on capital and deregulation of markets , The advocates of a left-wing policy, which rely on the restoration of democracy and national and state sovereignty, point in this context again and again that the growing xenophobia is a result of deregulated financial markets, globalization and not least the un-elected supranational bureaucracies. The citizens would feel powerless and abandoned to the state, and in order to reduce the xenophobic mood among the citizens, it would be necessary in particular to restore state sovereignty and control over households and budgets. This kind of propaganda for a sovereign nation-state has always had difficulties to set itself apart from right-wing populist positions, the free flow of goods, capital, but especially from migrants to their countries. Since their phobia of foreigners is more coherent than left-wing populism, which desperately seeks to separate between xenophobia and protectionism directed against parasitic financial capital, ethno-cultural nationalists can far more effectively enforce their border-closure policy. Wagenknecht and Co. are trying to counter this by saying that stricter border controls are in the interests of local workers and employees, as this would prevent the influx of cheap labor, while at the same time referencing capitalist globalization as a source of refugee flows. However, this argument reinforces the impulsive policies of the rightists, who are quite capable of accepting criticism of imperialism for its protectionist and isolationist perspectives. However, protectionist ambitions are repeatedly disappointed, as the financial investors who trade government bonds are themselves exempting the efforts of newly elected governments to regulate capital flows and strengthen the control of credit institutions. anticipate and speculate on the prices of government bonds, yes, even countries can drift into ruin. Governments elected to restore state sovereignty are being penalized by the financial markets and, in the end, are themselves strengthening restrictive measures against the people. An alternative to this rather helpless policy is to challenge the pre-emptive power of financial capital and its crediting strategies by attempting to occupy the functions and timelines of the financial markets themselves. To do so, one must break with a policy that seeks to create a safe haven in the state against the attacks of financial capital by relying on well-tried policies such as elections, demonstrations and similar actions. At this point, Feher points to movements such as 15-M and Occupy, who wanted to give their exit a vote with their occupations of public spaces, but also of banks, although for various reasons, these movements were doomed to failure. Interesting in this context is the debt strikes that have emerged from the Occupy movement, initiatives by Rolling Jubilee and Debt Collectivein 2012 and 2014 were set in motion. Above all, these campaigns involved massive student borrowing through borrowing, with activities related to financial assistance and the elimination of individual debt and the mobilization of a larger number of indebted students to initiate political activity conduct. The student loans track a larger proportion of students today for the rest of their lives. In contrast to companies, students in the US can not declare themselves personally insolvent. The student loans whose repayment is uncertain (here mentioning the future precarious employment as well as the devaluation of the university degrees), They are bundled into loans and securitized and are rather poor investments in the eyes of the portfolio holders. Crowdfunding was the reason why the above initiatives tried to generate funds to buy these declining collateral. These were then burned in a symbolic act. translated by Dejan Stojkovski taken from: |
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November 2019
Economy |