[Henriksson]

A read an interesting blog post today that discusses crisis and collapse from an economical perspective, a summary of a discussion that has been going on in Swedish blogs. I've roughly translated it in case anyone is interested, especially as it pertains to Greer's expression of a "Long Decline".

The title, like the picture above, is taken from the documentary film Der Banker (2014). Rainer Voss, who was one of Germany's top investment bankers before he retired, tells us about the growth of the financial market in Germany and Europe since the 1990s. With the slow decay Voss refers to the increasingly widespread poverty in Spain as a result of the crisis. But the tendency to decline applies to the entire Eurozone and Europe:

It's such amounts in motion. With them you can attack whole countries. You start with the least: Greece - and look how the entity EU reacts and behaves. It creates a certain ... It knocks a bit on the ice, so to speak. Then you take on the next major country: Portugal. The ice gets more cracks. There are people who have an interest in the euro crashing. There is a huge profit potential in it. And there are certainly also those who have a political interest in it. What you would do then, to take a bad example, is that you are looking for the weakest spot, knocking there and then bursting everything so to speak, from the inside out.
(...)
What can you expect next?
-France! They really have huge economic problems. And they do not implement the necessary structural reforms. I'm no tax enemy, but they have a crazy tax policy. I think France will become a problem.
-And then?
-Then It's over. "Game Over." Therefore you are fighting desperately with Spain and Italy. It has become a chain: Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy ... and France. If France end up in that situation it is about impossible amounts. Then you have to come up with something really good. It will eventually collapse - either financially or socially. But I do not believe for a moment that it ends well.

The issue of crisis policy and decline in financial capitalism, has been discussed before on the blog. Last spring, the post "Crisis Awareness and Future Expectations" generated a short but interesting debate between historian Rasmus Fleischer, signed, and Motarbetarkollektivet at large, which I partly wish to recapitulate.

Fleischer is rightly puzzled by the contradictory reasoning of permanent crisis and the parallel rejection of that we are in the final crisis in the post "Is Permanent Stagnation Same As Final Crisis ?":

Where is the anti-eschatological impulse to dismiss the idea of ​​an end coming from? I think: if capitalism is moving towards a permanent state of crisis, this means that we do not find ourselves in the beginning or middle of its historical era, but somewhere in the end (...)

Maybe it's a matter of taste whether one chooses to speak of "the final crisis". I myself am right hesitant, precisely because the crisis concept is so ambiguous. First, it refers always to a supposed normality, that can be thought of in very different ways. Not only can the crisis concept be used in very different levels of time. On the one hand, capitalism has been in crisis since the 1970s, on the other hand, the European economy had time for a series of abrupt shifts between crisis and recovery just since 2008. It is almost impossible to understand what someone means by "final crisis".

With that said, I feel that Konflyktlinjer and Motarbetaren are on the right track when they discuss the terms of an escalating stagnation that leads into a permanent, creeping crisis of capitalism - rather than a drastic collapse. Although the mere thought of stunted growth is drastic for enough capital and, by extension, for all the planet's inhabitants, since we all live in a de facto dependence on money and goods continuing to circulate. Just such a thing as our future pensions is based on the hope that the stock market will let the money grow ...

I came with a brief retrospective oriented response to his blog:

I agree with your comments about a certain ambivalence in the post. But I think it can be good with a certain ambivalence when it comes to major civilizational issues - for perhaps we are living already in the effects of the end of capitalism? Perhaps the question should be: When did capital collapse? Later eventual historians will perhaps argue that we, in the early 2000s, already inhabited the ruins of capital. We get used to most things, so maybe we just want to not acknowledge the fact, but rather pretend that almost nothing has happened and to live in fiction?

There's also a pedagogical problem of crisis discussions when the notion of a previous golden age and the impending fall is an ancient European figure of thought.

I also expressed myself a little lax when I stated that it was naive to think that it is a final crisis, because I actually believe that capitalism is in a permanent state of crisis and that we are already falling. That I expressed myself the way I did was because the final crisis, as you point out, can be interpreted as a short and unambiguous catastrophic process - a form of crash - when in fact it is a question of a protracted , contradictory and violent decomposition.

[...]

When I wrote the answer above, I had the historian Peter Englund's article "When did Rome fall? When did we fall?" in mind. Englund reflects about civilizational downfall after reading historian Edward Gibbons classic works of The Decline And Fall of the Roman Empire which came in six volumes (1776-1788):

The image we have of the Roman empire - and empires overall - are unfortunately more dictated by the garish history telling of the 1800s Hollywood style blockbuster movies in CinemaScope, than the historical reality. There should be smoke on the chaotic streets, where toga-dressed people swarm crisscrossing through collapsing galleries, while broad-bearded barbarians decapitate man and beast.

This is not what happened in 476, of course. It was probably very few people who really noticed that the Roman Empire "fell" in that year. When reading Gibbon, it is striking in what large extent the people of Rome sought to live as usual. It is "business as usual". This became even more evident after the Gothic chieftain Theodric took both the power and the life of the old Odoacer: in the city the titles and offices are the same as before, there exists the processions and the distribution of bread and meat, the same music, pantomime and gladiatorial games as before . Maybe just a little more moth-eaten, and every year a tiny bit smaller and weaker than the previous one. But who cares?

With great conviction people inhabit their ruins and their memories. For the dating of 476 is undoubtedly correct. That we can see in hindsight. A decisive turn happens. It's just that it takes so long before people want to admit the fact, they rather remain living in fiction.

The year 476 is usually stated as the year in which the Roman Empire definitively fell.

The discussion that we live in a civilization decay can certainly seem absurd for anyone who does not think or discuss the current situation with the premise that global finance capital is in a permanent crisis, without any solution in sight. But those who think this is just another cyclist-cyclical crisis and that everything will soon return to some kind of conventional normality, will most likely have to wait in vain. And meanwhile the cuts and austerity measures and increased indebtedness will continue.

On a very general and civilizational level the crisis ultimately comes down to that capitalism historically was an industrial revolution in an agrarian society, which is why capitalism can thus be said to be synonymous with industrialization. But when capitalism since the 1970s has evolved away from the less profitable industrial commodity production's real economy, to financial capitalism's speculative economy, it has been a transition without economic viability and stability. We are therefore forced to live on borrowed, and hence indebted time, in anticipation of increased growth which the so-called fictitious capital, buying and selling can not generate. All that stock robots, and others in the business, can generate are speculative bubbles in stocks, real estate or bonds which, when they burst, must be replaced with new, even larger bubbles.

For it is, as I understand it, only profit-driven human commodity that, in crass terms, is productive for capital. Both financial speculation on the expected profits and tax-funded products- and services are as such unproductive in a strictly capitalist sense (see, for example, the philosopher Paul Mattick (Jr.)'s Business As Usual. The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism, 2011).

And since we live in an increasingly finance-driven capitalism, there is therefore a limit to how prolonged and stretched the debt chain can be before global capital has realized all its expected future value. But it is as I said matter of a slow, contradictory and protracted decline.

One of humanity's most onerous circumstances and unifying experiences are thus becoming debt. The state debt has grown enormously in the world since the 1930s - Sweden's national debt is relatively low at around 40% of GDP - but the Swedish households have never been so indebted that they are now (as a share of disposable income per year). In Europe, only the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway have larger private debt. [...]

Fleischer, [...] claims that the credit-based society that has emerged since the 1970s and 1980s is characterized by a combination of growing indebtedness, unemployment at a constant high level and economic growth at a lower level than before, which also depends on the ever-increasing indebtedness .


He points out that there are no obvious answers to how such an indebted economy works in the long term:

Nobody knows, those who say they know lie, because they only guess. The only thing we know is that there are risks inherent in such a system. Every credit ratio is an attempt to try to predict the future. Credit is from the Latin credo: it is about faith. And what happens then at a discrediting: if doubts begin to spread on the ability to pay? Debt levels we live with today is more than a purely economic system. It will be dangerous for the system to even imagine a different future than with economic growth. Each time money is lent, someone says that we believe that there will be more money in the future. What all economic operators mutually confirm through expansion of credit, it's this that we believe in continued growth.

In this way, Fleischer argues that the space is minimized in the way the future can be imagined, because the future overarching political goal therefore must be continued economic growth.

[...]

[Pops]

My first thought at your title is that at one point we built things too last but then over time we began to "engineer" them better, meaning they cost less initially and of course price is always a major factor in selection. Of course stuff engineered to be cheaper many times wind up being a poor deal in the long run, but for the most part we no longer pay much attention to the long run. So 100 year old infrastructure that had a 100 year lifespan and 30 year old infrastructure with a 30 year expected lifespan are now crumbling at an equal rate.

But the post doesn't seem to be about that so much. More about the end game of the financial economy?

Seems to me it is hard to distinguish between bias and objective observation when looking at the macro. My knee-jerk is that as financialization has developed into a larger and larger portion of the economy, it is perfectly logical for infrastructure to lose out in relative importance. After all, in the financial economy the only product is profit, no tedious dwelling on tangible results, services, and certainly not anything material — with all its messy liabilities, regulations, markets, distribution, etc.

But back to the short run thinking. Piketty pointed out that the value of money didn't change much from around 1700 thru 1900. Then the wars came along and Britton and the US especially, but everyone else as well, changed over to fiat paper money. Now I have long railed about the advantages of floating money but I gotta tell you, Piketty changed my mind somewhat, it is tough when the preacher you think really has a clue starts to assail your "other" beliefs. LOL

The thought strikes me that after industrialization and the advent of "serial engineering" (the engineering solution needed to fix the problems created by the last engineered solution) the thing that has added to the crumbling and short term thinking is falling value of money. Since money will be worth less in the future, there is an adverse incentive to sink more than is absolutely necessary today.

Here is a great RL example, a relative was told he needed a valve job, that is a heart valve. The doc said he had 2 options, the one that might last him 20-30 years or longer and the one that surely would need replacement within 10. Relative asked the doc which one he would pick and the doc said I'd go with the short term, you never know what they will come up with in 10 years.

[autonomous]

Planned obsolescence comes to mind. There are many products or goods that could last a very long time but are engineered to fail or become obsolete after a specific period of use. Sometimes this coincides with the elapse of a warranty period, other times it seems to happen when a new model comes out, the Apple mobile platform being a notorious example of this.

Since a lot of embodied energy goes into endlessly reproducing products with built in planned obsolescence as well as recycling or disposal of the byproduct, there is much potential for energy and resource savings here.

It would be better to put great effort into figuring out how to build things that last as long as possible, particularly those that are critical to infrastructure - the electric grid, highways, railways, etc. Of course, the concept of building to last runs counter to many objectives in capitalist production cycles.

[Pops]

I don't know auto. The term planned obsolescence has more to do with marketing "new and improved" than engineering. Some guy came up with the term off the cuff as a hook for a talk to a bunch of ad men about selling into mature markets. In a mature market where product penetration has reached saturation, manufacturers want to do something to drive sales, pushing the coolness factor of the latest/greatest bell/whistle perpetuates sales in a market that otherwise would be stagnant.

Add in the tendency for consumers to opt for the lower price in most instances, even when saving a fraction of the price can lower the useful life of a product significantly and you can see the problem isn't really a big conspiracy to make things break the day after the warranty expires, just to give the customer what they want — Newer & Cheaper — and to make a sale.

BTW, I read that the new iOS will come in a stripped down version to be backwards compatible with older hardware, not real old but maybe 4s?

In the same vien I agree with you. I'm hoping we are nearing the end or at least the plateau of desktop bloatware. I've been working on Macs since the early 90's and every couple of years early on I had to upgrade machines because of OS and App bloat and root level changes that made me unable to access new version of my working files. This last machine lasted 7 years Wow!

[Newfie]

One of the things I like about sailing is I can read a 100 year old book and find relevant parts.

Danas "Two Years Before the Mast" is an excellent example.

I've spent most of my career working on decrepit railroads, one way or the other. You could do a lot with 1930's technology we think is pretty curtin egg today. Sooooo much hype and BS.

As to the financial stuff of the OP. Waaaay over my head. However, my gut tells me all the global economy smoke and mirrors is just that, smoke and mirrors.

[Newfie]

Here is another story about coming collapse from our homepage.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... g-collapse