Economics in the 21st Century

Money. It's a wildly theorized phenomena. It makes trade across commodities and spaces possible. For some theorists, it is merely the grease in the economic wheels. For others, it is a strange phenomena that is both tradeable and facilitates trade. Historically, it arose organically out of pure necessity, but allows those with the power and means to accumulate large quantities. For centuries it was or represented precious metals, but during the late 20th century it became a commodity that arose spontaneously in response to demand. The shift from fixed currencies (like gold) to floating currencies exchanged internationally created a commodity (money) that embodied no labor, basically the trade of a commodity strictly based on the collective belief that it was valuable. While this may not seem important on an everyday level, money still buys groceries and gas, on larger scales the effect is signficant and under theorized.

Let's back up to the idea of embodied labor. As labor produces it produces value in the commodity being produced. That commodity is said to contain dead labor - it embodies the work done by laborers. With fixed currency like gold, the gold embodies that dead labor as it is mined, shipped, and shaped. In contrast, floating currencies embody no labor and only gain their value through the market, in which they are compared to other currencies. The value of our money is only valuable in comparison with the value of other currencies. So, how is this value established?

The value of currency is established based on the perceived productivity or consumptive ability of the nation which that currency represents. Or, more accurately, currency is valued based on the belief in the future productivity or consumptive ability of the respective nation. In other words, the value of a currency is related to that of the credit rating of the country that currency represents. Now, how is money produced spontaneously?

On the nation-state level, money is produced when treasury departments or central banks seek to spur economic growth through stimulus, or printing money. Central banks or treasury use national credit ratings to sell national debt to other nation-states and investors and use those sells to print more money. Basically, they borrow money from one nation to print money in their nation. Money is also printed through consumer and business loans. When an individual or group applies for a loan, they apply against their credit rating and receive an amount deemed appropriate to that credit rating. The money is then created and given to the borrower. Of central importance, is the function of the credit rating in the post-modern economy.

As shown previously, fixed moneys embody dead labor, while floating moneys do not. Floating moneys embody the value of future labor or unborn labor, the ability to produce commodities in the future and thereby repay the created money. Instead of in late capitalism, where money greased the wheels of production, post-modern capitalism prints money as a strategy to open possibilities for the future expansion of capitalist production. The function of opening these possibilities was primarily accomplished by primitive accumulation, or accumulation by force (de-unionization; creation of private property through enclosure of lands, etc). The act of creating money now serves as the primary form of primitive accumulation in post-modern capitalism and labor no longer sells its labor, it borrows its future through its credit rating.

Debt-money ensures that capital has no limit to its expansion and ensures the indentured servitude of the multitude of the world's workers.

Racial Protocol Redux

A post racial world is more dangerous than previously thought. The necessities of equality, though possibly more faux than fact, produce the subjectivities which such an equality sought to undermine. Or, the discipline of formal white supremacy morphed into the rigidities of racial protocol upiquitous in the cultural milieu. White, black, and brown are the subjectivities produced by globality's protocols broached by divided humanisms which celebrates not the individual, but the (stratified) individuals, the three stooges of essentialisms.

To live post-racially, would be to violate all the protocols at the same time. To be Eminem, not live black, not live white, live fight, to butcher Mr. Mathers' melodic meter. To split the difference, the space between, an intersubjectivity producing racially unfiltered information, to break from globalities underlying logic of control, and to, finally, question race's usefulness as a principle.

To be post racial is to question affirmative action, minority-specific research programs and projects, and runs straight through the notion that color-blindness is an illusion. To study those intersubjective moments of non-race, would produce unfamiliar subject positions, unraced, and would guide policy away from the racial tools which have gotten us to the point that being post racial is possible.

Post racial may be positively irresponsible. Blacks trail whites in almost every major social and economic category, and the fervor for the new black face on the white throne is fascinating but not fundamentally fecund for the fostering of favorable racial relations. If post racial is coming, it need bring more than better unstructured social interaction; in need bring equality. Until more changes than my neighbors manerisms or mine toward him/her, post racial can be found alongside Oz, Neverland, or other places of positive fantasy.

The Obama Effect

On the 100th day of the Obama presidency, CBS News release a poll sampling how people felt about race relations in the Obama era, which can be found here. Across the board, race relations have improved, and, though, people of color are still behind whites in almost every major statistical category from homeownership to graduation rates, everyone generally thinks the situation has improved. For me, this provokes profound questions.

Understandably, Obama's election was historic, but couldn't race relations have been improved without the election of a president? The material conditions are the same, but the social walls seem to be crumbling. Why is it, that after electing a black president, that both whites and blacks suddenly feel able to communicate with each other?

In American culture, the President is us, he (as they have always been) is the king, the representative, the symbol. Collectively, we live vicariously through the head of state, and when we feel like he is not us, we scream, yell, bitch, and moan that he is evil, fascist, communist, Hitler and Stalin. We do this because the king's body is literally a microcosm of the collective body, and we spend our time screaming about the king, when in fact, our loyalty to said king matters little, much like the loyalty of peasants to their kings and queens. We live in a democratically elected monarchy in which the worship of the king dictates much, too much, of our everyday lived experience.

I'm thrilled at recent developments, but they never required Presidential Approval, they only required abandoning the fear of the other and being-in-common with neighbors, friends, and co-workers. We live through electronic media, we live through what we see on TV and the New York Times, but we don't live in community, even now, and there can be no president elected who will teach us this - in fact, it is antithesis. The racial walls are crumbling, socially, now we must build the community bonds to keep them from being re-erected.

Master Narrative

Academia often goes in cycles, empiricism and reductionism, semiotics vs. structuralism, idealist vs. materialist, etc. In the late 1960s, authors such as Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and others began critiquing the structuralist foundations of philosophy. From Marxism to bougeouis economics to positivist sociology, these theorists argued that instead of modeling reality, these deterministic strains of thought structured reality, thereby limiting the strains of possibility and creating normative visions of human life. Ultimately, their critique was on any form of so called master narratives as normative and oppressive (though it must be noted that to say there is no master narrative is also a master narrative or sorts).

However, recently, spurned by the recent dire events precipitated by the Bush administration and its overt desire for Empire, the master narrative has returned in the form of a sort of less structural neo-Marxism which basically added post modern theory to a broad Marxist structure. The results have been fruitfull, particularly authors David Harvey and Massimo DeAngelis. However, I find the structure to still be somewhat limited as it privileges economic life over other realms, and continues to draw the ire of feminist and cultural theorist, correctly in my view.

Feminist and cultural theorists often construct straw men to deconstruct - such as the proverbial "white" and "man," and others deconstruct the notion of modernity, white supremacy, and patriarchy - the latter three being more intellectually and philosophically sound since their focus is more systematic and less polemic. Of note are Donna Haraway and Arturo Escobar in their thought concerning the latter. Academia remains divided between the two camps with little hope of reconciliation except through the return of the master narrative.

It has recently occured to me that capital as an economic system, white supremacy, modernity, and patriarchy stem from one philosophical axiom - humanism. Humanism is the philosophical development which elevates the individual to the organizing structure of society, and subsequently defines what the individual contains. The individual is the construct of human as containing specific exclusionary rights which stem from an inherent rationality independent of ruling organizations, not a small development in the face of the King and Church, dominant institutions of power of the day. However, as the individual went from a revolutionary rallying cry to institutional ideology, the idea of rationality had to be defined in ways that would reproduce and solidify the power of the new ruling elite. Using natural science, itself a development of humanism depending on rational observation of the individual by those on the "outside," the ruling elited defined rationality in such a way as white, male, and capitalist became the avatar for rationality. Indeed, liberal democracy emerged as a foil for divine right, but voting was reserved for landed, white men, those who were rational by scientific "right."

The answer for a grand narrative that could both unify radical thinkers and actually strike at the heart of oppressive conditions is a narrative that broadly critiques humanistic thinking and the individual. As the post-humanist authors that I am reading suggest, the foil to a philosophical construct of the individual is the construct of an individual.