There is no such thing as true capitalism, or true communism, or true anything else in a working world. A practical economic system will never equate precisely to the theoretical model, because no model has yet been conceived that can account for all the chaos of a human element and all the unpredictable eventualities of life. It's unsurprising, though, that those people who do try and reduce the boundless and most definitely irreducible problem of life to a few pages of economic modelling are now crowing meaningless arguments that we no longer meet the definition, no longer adhere to the model, and therefore are no longer of that system.
What's relevant is the underlying principles of the system, and the tenets of the economy have not changed one bit. The economy is now, exactly as it was previously, underpinned by the reduction of everything to commodity. All things have to be precisely defined in what they are, in order that they may be assigned specific value. Everything is reduced to precisely defined value-packages, and each individual element of a thing is itself reduced to component value-packages. This is exemplified nicely in the buying out of shareholders. Each individual interest in a product or service does not share in the whole of the thing, but instead has their own slice, of carefully defined parameters, which can be assigned specific value and purchased from them. It's also no coincidence that this closely mirrors the urge to reduce a person to a series of metrics, the two are intertwined; we fast approach the day when we will have to assert ownership of our own eyes, or fingerprints, lest we are expropriated of it.
The other aspect of the economy, correspondent with the commoditisation of everything, is the assignation of ownership to all things. Everything must belong, there must always be a person who holds the power to any thing – because ownership is equal to power. This is why everything need its owner, so we know who it is who can dictate how that thing is used, how we may interact with it, even what the thing is.
There was another story in the news the same say as the capitalism article. It mentioned that police-seized computers were continuing to be held to serve the interests of FACT, a private interest. As a friend indicated, this reveals the falsity in the 'freedoms' we are given by the power-holders. Expropriating his words for a moment:
What the computer fiasco shows is that, for example, the ‘right to your own private property’ is an everyday assumption masking what is actually only *permission* to keep and use what remains at all times open to the possibility of sequestration by police (acting on behalf, here, of other private corporations). Nothing you ‘own’ privately cannot be forcefully taken away from you under the reign of speculative investigative powers. [...] This is the paradigm on which the above kind of interventionism is premised: the possibility that copyright-infringing material might be found on a computer system is enough to seize hold of it indefinitely, the possibility that Iraq might house underground weapons bunkers the first Bush administration overlooked is enough to invade it and change it irrevocably, the possibility that a foreign-looking man running in the London Underground could be a suicide bomber is enough to gun him down fatally, the possibility that someone is a terrorist is enough to detain them without due legal process, render them or submit them torture, etc. In each case a state, police or corporate claim to a right (copyrights, rights to regulate arms, rights to act on suspicion, rights to suspend international law) privileges itself in order to suspend other rights, which are thus revealed to be mere permissions (permission to use media, permission to defend oneself, permission to use public transport, be foreign-looking, be protected under international laws, etc., etc.) that can at any time be withdrawn.
It is in fact the power-holders (primarily I mean the government, but there are some others in this group) who hold all the power over anything we allow to be commoditised, and that power is deferred to us only contingent on investing the power-holders with the power to withdraw it. They are, after all, the power-holders.
If you really want to argue that there is no capitalism, look to the fact that the individual is not the owner of his belongings, but is rather holding only a permitted stewardship. If we are not living under capitalism, it is because the power-holders are the owners of all commodities. The economic system we seem to labour under exists only because the power-holders grant the permissions which support it. The system is the same, but the rights it is premised on have been exchanged for provisions.
(I need a better term than power-holder. This is what is meant by sovereign power, right?)
3 comments:
You saw a nonsense article on BBC?? Get out.
Congratulations, your friend has discovered the entire premise government is based on.
'This is what is meant by sovereign power, right?'
It is the Schmittian definition of Sovereignty: 'sovereign is he who decides on the exception'. This definition, which most political theorists seem to accept as the right description, belongs to Carl Schmitt the Nazi jurist, but as a paradigm it goes back (at least) to the time of Roman law. Governmentality as such need not be founded on this principle---there is no essential reason why it is. The reasons are historical: every government has found it expedient to suspend its laws in order to apply them, to create 'grey zones' wherein it can basically operate without offering a space of discussion or legal process.
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