Is capitalism a market society?
Wildcat

It is a common view nowadays that acts of exchange and their logic are at the centre of capitalist society and that many social processes can be explained on the basis of exchange relations. From this viewpoint the current strategies of ‘privatisation’ and ‘neoliberalism’ become more plausible—both for followers and critics of these strategies. This notion has little to do with the reality of global accumulation of capital, but it is socially confirmed in our daily atomisation, which itself is only the flipside of a lack of open struggles and new collective relationships emerging from within them. To the isolated individual, social processes actually appear to be exchange transactions, or more precisely, it rationalises the experience of powerlessness, because the essence of exchange is just the assumption of the independence and autonomy of individualised subjects. By perceiving social relations as acts of exchange—social relations, which are essentially based on organised and institutionalised violence, exploitation and oppression—the idea of ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’ of the individual or certain social groups is rescued. For the individual the perception of social relations as being based on exchange is more than mere imagination. It is a very real experience, given that daily reproduction is mediated by markets and acts of exchange. This form of mediation seems to confirm our individual freedom—and in a certain way actually does confirm it.

Everybody is now talking about the student debt crisis, but nothing is being done about it
Occupy Student Debt

Thanks in large part to the great public amplifier of the Occupy movement, this year’s presidential contenders have been forced to embrace student loan reform as a talking point in their respective campaigns. But the debt relief being pushed by the Obama administration is a token gesture, aimed at getting some traction on the youth vote -- especially the more disillusioned or alienated student constituencies. Recent bills introduced in Congress -- Student Loan Forgiveness Act (H.R. 4170) and the Private Student Bankruptcy Fairness Act (H.R. 2028) -- have zero chance of passing in anything like their current form. Practically speaking, no reform program of any substance is on the legislative horizon, least of all one that would regulate the predatory lending practices of Wall Street banks.

The Failure of Capitalist Production
Andrew Kleiman

Monday February 6th, 2012 @ 7:00 PM:
Bluestockings Books
172 Allen St.
New York, NY 10002
212.777.6028

Andrew Kliman will discuss his just-published book, The Failure of Capitalist Production (Pluto Press 2011), and how he was frequently surprised by what he uncovered when doing the research behind it. Much conventional wisdom on the left attributes the Great Recession to free-market policies, “financialization” of the economy, and stagnant wages. Kliman himself is a leftist economist, yet the more he delved into the data, the more he came to reject such explanations. In the end, he concluded, Karl Marx’s theory of economic crisis fits the facts. The Great Recession and its persistent after-effects are the results of a half-century-long decline in profitability and the consequences of that decline––decades of weak investment, sluggish economic growth, and mounting debt problems. Kliman will also explore possible pathways out of this crisis of profitability.

The Economy of Abolition/Abolition of the Economy
Neil Gray in exchange with Marina Vishmidt
Variant

Marina Vishmidt’s article for Reartikulacija, ‘Human Capital or Toxic Asset: After the Wage’1, reflects upon, among other things, human capital exploited as investment portfolio in ‘The Big Society’; affirmation and negation as political potentialities; the fragmentation of the class relation based on waged work; financialisation and the collapse of social democracy; the politics of reproduction; and the imposition of, resistance to, and potential negation of debt. All this through the prism of the ‘communisation thesis’ which seeks to move within-and-against defensive ‘programmatic’ struggles that tend to reify (class) identities, towards everyday struggles that supersede value, exchange, market relations, and proletarian identity itself – in a constitutive rupture with its previous situation. Not just a change in the system, but a change of the system; not later on, but now. This thesis, which develops from a long-view structural perspective of post-Fordist/Keynesian conditions in the labour market, is fraught with difficulty given the seeming hegemony of neoliberalism and the evidential need for defensive strategies against market command. Yet the communisation thesis describes the problematic of the present class relation in an extremely prescient manner that takes us well beyond the rote formulas and responses of much of ‘the Left’2. The exchange below, with Marina Vishmidt and Neil Gray, aims to elaborate some potential lines of this debate with particular reference to the politics of reproduction and debt.