"Jehu—rightfully—points out that capitalism persists through state intervention. But here we have a problem. If capital(ism) requires the state in order to perpetuate itself, then capital is no longer self-moving. If its operations require an external force to act as a motive cause, then it no longer exhibits the Subject position that Marx and classical political economy bestowed upon it."
Point taken. This is an incorrect formulation of the problem. I should have begun as Engels did that "the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production..." Later, it renders this same bourgeoisie superfluous. But, despite this, capital remains the subject of history, not the state. I have been lazy in this regard and deserve the spanking you delivered.
Hello Jehu! I don't think this post was a spanking, or at least I didn't intend it that way. More wanted to draw more attention to the work you're doing and my agreement with, but also highlight our theoretical diverge on the nature of contemporary capitalism or maybe what we could call 'the political economy of barbarism'.
This Engels quote is a great one and poses a pretty big challenge to my own position, I'll definitely concede that. A tentative reply:
When Engels describes the modern state as the mechanism through which bourgeois civilization utilize to "support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production", it happens in the context of a lengthy discussion of the rise of trusts, which are intrinsically highly-socialized entities and methods of production woven together with the increasing importance of banking capital. Capitalism here comes to rely more and more on the state, externalizing first the necessities of infrastructure development (Engels naming railways, telegraph systems, etc). Intensifying crisis requires the state to step in further, maybe nationalizing industry, organizing mass pools of labor—I think of here, and I imagine you would agree? of the bizarre relations of capital and class that characterized the New Deal. But the key word here is "external"—the "external conditions of" capital.
Post-1971 I think we have a qualitatively different situation. The sort of work described by Engels continues to expand, ballooning in the ways you have described, but we also have the increasing centrality of monetary policy, the role of the central bank, swap lines, modifications of the money supply, all manner of esoteric and shrouded devices and tools, that make possible for capital to even circulate at all (and, by extension, act as thought it were self-moving in the way a Subject would). It seems to me that this falls under an "internal condition" versus an external one. Kind of weird, we could also bifurcate this along the divide between monetary and fiscal policy.
Seen from this point of view, Trump's challenge to Fed autonomy is incredibly interesting and provocative. I agree with you that the bourgeoisie has become superfluous, but we could also take Trump as the ultimate expression of that class. By attempting to subordinate the Fed to executive power, this could be seen as that class attempting to reappropriate a lever of the state that they have lost. But this could also crash the system. History's last irony?
Very nice concise statement of your thesis. Been thinking too about the fact that Vance et al seem to be challenging their own conditions, his whole talk of "cheap labour as a drug" comes to mind. Will the system really survive the withdrawal effects?
It's a really good question! I was thinking a bit more after this post how many of Trump's policies aim themselves at a sort of attempted restoration of classical capitalism. We have, on the one hand, the bid to exert wider political control over the Fed. At the most immediate level this is a battle over interest rates: because of inflationary pressures, the Fed is recalcitrant about rate cuts, while Trump wants to cut them to bring back easy money policies. At a higher level this is a class struggle: we can conceptualize the Fed (and the expanded Metacartel apparatus) as being aligned with the managerial or new class, while Trump represents the interests of the capitalist class. This is a fundamental class contradiction governing our present moment, I think.
Supposing Trump wins out, the Fed's autonomy is curbed (and the new class loses an important position of power), and lower interest rates are pushed through, the likely result with be compounding inflation. It seems likely that we'll have a recession before the year is out, and so with that combination we might be facing a stagflationary crisis.
On the other hand, we have the tariff policy. Clearly this plays into inflation fears and is governing a lot of the Fed's decisions right now, but the ultimate long-range goal of tariffs is to generate growth internal the United States at the expense of the world system it has created. In an ideal situation, that internal growth would 1) absorb the excess capital sloshing around, driving down inflation, and 2) could potentially absorb the excess labor population from the cutting-down of the US government. This feeds back into Jehu's argument, albeit in a slightly different way from his ultimate conclusion: we could see the reconversion of superfluous labor back into productive labor, thus something that approaches an image of classical capitalism.
The irony is that this—which of course is all speculative—is still an affair of state management, reflecting the dire situation of the capitalist system itself. There's also Jehu's own suggestion, which is that there simply isn't the ability within the system to absorb the totality of the masses of superfluous labor. Expelling them from the government etc, instead of restoring capital, would collapse it further.
The points you raise are very prescient and my response has become a bit long, will try to make it into a blogpost later maybe, but here it is anway:
I think seeing it as a contradiction between the industrial capitalists and the financial capitalists/new class is on point. I think the cracking down on undocumented migrant labour is also tied into this, as to me the unaccountable or occulted character of undocumented labour ties it in a mirrorlike fashion to the Metacartel. It works very well as stagnatory class warfare, as the classical levers of class struggle, namely strikes and legal restrictions to workplace exploitation and labourtime, are disabled, as it's impossible for an undocumented migrant to strike or advocate in legal/political battles for reduction of worktime/exploitation, as any resistance they show will get them deported. At the same time this works, as Vance has said weirdly enough, as a crutch for capital to keep the profit rate up by exploiting labour more than is in principle possible in its national environment, thus allowing it to skirt the necessity of automation and increasing the organic composition of capital. The same holds of course for off-shore labour. But now with the heady cocktail of tariffs and stronger border control Trump is essentially cutting off the lifeline of short-term profitability for much if not all of American industry.
In this respect I find this headline highly interesting: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/25/business/florida-child-labor-laws/index.html , as it shows that industry is already panicking, for repealing child labour laws is an on its face very unpopular and dangerous measure. My hope is that this renationalization for capital will open up new avenues for class struggle, as while putting pressure on capital in its financialized and globalized form was nigh impossible, now it might be possible again by agitating for such direct and simple things as laws against child labour. Yet this might also mean that there is still enough industry to soak up the workers thrown out of the government? Still these will be able to demand higher wages, better conditions and lower working hours now that capital can't simply route around their demands by going global or importing undocumented migrant labourers.
Now on if Trump is bringing back classical capitalism, I do think that this tracks the antagonism between Silicon Valley capitalists and the consortium of Washington PMC's and Wall Street, yet there is the problem that Silicon Valley seems to be more a bizarre simulation of capitalism than capitalism proper. Silicon Valley grew out of an astounding amount of subsidies from the DoD, thus is wholly incorporated in the state, while at the same time being financed mainly by financial capital managed by these large PMC consortiums. As I see it it is an industry spawned out of and for the New Class, where even the industry it engages in can barely be called industry, and is probably better seen as supplying what might be called the means of management than the means of production or consumption. If we take the form of the "means of production" of the New Class to be the spreadsheet - one must remember that the primary institutions holding the great army of PMC's are accounting firms like the Big Four - than we can see that ultimately Silicon Valley is just engaged with the perfecting of the tools of the New Class, as most if not all of tech (as a tech worker myself) boils down to spreadsheets and functions over spreadsheets, with AI as the greatest spreadsheet recombiner of all. Silicon Valley has historically just been engaged in devicing the tools of management and control, aimed both at the population in the sense of surveillance, and at finance and industry, to control cashflows, factories and supply chains in a more and more automatic fashion through the leveraging and directing of flows of information. It might be that the birth and growth of the New Class can be seen as resulting from the new technical basis of control that the advent of computation and communication has brought about.
What might be the case is then that we are now seeing this simulation of a capitalist class birthed out of the New Class becoming aware of the antagonism it has to its own conditions and trying to assert itself as a class separate from the New Class, hailing back to classical capitalism to give itself form over against the New Class. Interestingly it is the SV capitalist who is the closest to classical industry who's been able to assert himself as having a class character distinct from the PMC the most, namely Elon Musk and his (highly subsidised) car and space firms, which do at least seem to produce commodities in the classical sense, instead of a Google or a Facebook that float mostly on attention and advertisement. Now what's more, it seems that only when Silicon Valley has entered into the production of actual industry, namely the defense industry, with all the new drone VC's popping up, has it been able to find a real industrial technical basis, instead of just a managerial technical basis, and thus only now that the war-industry has landed in Silicon Valley was it able to start to fully oppose the New Class. But here comes the kicker of course, as the only industrial basis Silicon Valley is engaged in now completely subservient to the goals and aims of the state, for the defense industry differs in that sense from other types of industry, in that it produces commodities not for the general market but for markets wholly subsumed in the geopolitical machinations of the state. Probably, as you also say, this new "revolution" of the SV capitalists will turn out to be a deeper ingratiation in state control, but with the state taking on a different character. My own intuitive prediction is that contrary to the defeat of the New Class we are seeing now the actual coming into its own of the new class, as it can now reconstitute the state in its own image, as a fully occulted and networked state (what my mate CF calls the Network state: https://creationist.substack.com/p/the-hermetic-anti-state-and-the-invisible), where even the state itself doesn't know anymore what it's goals are and who its subsidiaries are, for all of actions will be taken through privatized SV startups, ultimately subsuming the legacy institutions like the CIA, NSA and possibly the DoD into decentralized SV companies, a state we de facto already live in, as most of the surveillance is not done by the NSA itself by done by the likes of Google, FB and Palantir, ultimately only feeding their output to the NSA.
In hindsight it seems all too obvious, but when Curtis Yarvin talked about the patchwork state where the leader is the CEO, this not a restoration of monarchy, but the managerial class (with as its ideal type the CEO) coming into its own, using the garb and speech of the Glorious Revolution, in the same manner described by Marx of the Bonapartists putting on a play of the french revolution in his 18th Brumaire. One problem I always had with Yarvin's idea of patchwork was that it never made sense how the central Non-Agression Principle could work without there being larger confederations of patchwork states enforcing this principle, giving again a supra national order that he hoped to be rid of, but now I see that all this time the idea of the patchwork state presupposed the occulted supranational Metacartel, enforcing the patchwork, but keeping itself hidden from view, for ultimately it's not the people of these states that are the primary shareholders, but financial class that are the main shareholders, with this patchwork stateform being the ultimate means for financial control. If I'm honest, I think we are only now scratching the surface of the rationalization of the state, and greater horrors may still be to come.
I'm not leaving this hanging, I definitely want to come back and reply to what you've so eloquently put forth here! I just need to think on your comments for a little bit.
I think maintaining commitment to (in the end) idealist modes of expression might lead to confusion and dead end. Things clear up better if you just consider that capitalism and 'Capital' was a historical contingency and only one mode (novel and not a-historic to be sure) of class power and class domination among others. 'Capital' is not autonomous or a 'Subject'. It is an indirect (mediated) method of control over the labor power by networks of *living people*. The ruling networks are not, after all, after 'surplus value' generated via profit ('capitalism') necessarily, they are after money (or 'exchange value') and assets, as Emmanuel rightly points out. The ruling classes do not really have any commitment to 'capitalism' if there are better ways of accumulation.
Terrific, I also recommend Michael Roberts blog, the discussions on comments there are top notch.
Hell yeah.. we are heading to Barbarism using the classic marxist term, which ultimately is, using psychoanalysis (or psychobabble 😁) the death-drive of the madhouse revealing itself, the irrationality and contradictions on the open. The absence of praxis and the IMMATURITY to make a life worth living, this is also the fetishism of commodity, capital reproducing itself, this flying dutch. etc etc
Making weapons of war and also mind war, worse than the former perhaps. I can't stop having nightmares those days, it's not nice.
Terrific last image.
"They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."
Your analysis makes so much sense. Do you see Metacartel theory having any resonance with Jodi Dean's Neofeudalism thesis? Are you familiar with that? The service sector is so large now and there is a serfdom aspect to the classes below the managers. I wonder if there's a kind of manorial-like nature of cartels. Just food for thought. Thanks for your amazing posts!
I am a little familiar with it! I think that there are definitely resonants there though I think we’re approaching it from different angles. Dean is arriving at neofeudalism/neofeudalizing processes through analyzing the effects of large-scale tech platforms and the ballooning of the service sector, while the Metacartel is more concerned with the structural unity of the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and so-called private sector asset management entities. There’s a pretty good relationship between the two: Dean looks at how under neofeudalizing processes, the individual is fragmented and separated in ways even more profound than classical capitalism, forced through what is effectively extra-economic coercion into dependency on massive firms that enjoy monopolistic power (which is to say, they annihilate alternatives and have deconstructed the sorts of competitive forces that markets are supposed to generate). I’m not sure if Dean ever speaks to Baran and Sweezy’s analysis of what monopolistic capitalism looks like, but instead of the rampant innovation that monopoly’s defenders claim it can bring, monopoly capital is a highly stagnant economic order, where the centralized firm absorbs more profits than it can ever actually discharge through investment into the ‘real economy’. Monopoly capital slows itself down, which I think fits nicely with her overall picture (especially since historical feudalism saw the funneling of mass profits upwards, accompanied by broad economic deterioration).
Metacartel theory meanwhile looks more at how those mass entities sustain themselves and maybe more importantly how these economic relations have become increasingly socialized (which isn’t to say political, because even while the economy is state-managed this is operating beyond democratic procedure). So I think both can be made to work in tandem, it’s just that they are operating at different levels, but maybe putting the two into dialogue could yield some pretty provocative fruits.
"Jehu—rightfully—points out that capitalism persists through state intervention. But here we have a problem. If capital(ism) requires the state in order to perpetuate itself, then capital is no longer self-moving. If its operations require an external force to act as a motive cause, then it no longer exhibits the Subject position that Marx and classical political economy bestowed upon it."
Point taken. This is an incorrect formulation of the problem. I should have begun as Engels did that "the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production..." Later, it renders this same bourgeoisie superfluous. But, despite this, capital remains the subject of history, not the state. I have been lazy in this regard and deserve the spanking you delivered.
Hello Jehu! I don't think this post was a spanking, or at least I didn't intend it that way. More wanted to draw more attention to the work you're doing and my agreement with, but also highlight our theoretical diverge on the nature of contemporary capitalism or maybe what we could call 'the political economy of barbarism'.
This Engels quote is a great one and poses a pretty big challenge to my own position, I'll definitely concede that. A tentative reply:
When Engels describes the modern state as the mechanism through which bourgeois civilization utilize to "support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production", it happens in the context of a lengthy discussion of the rise of trusts, which are intrinsically highly-socialized entities and methods of production woven together with the increasing importance of banking capital. Capitalism here comes to rely more and more on the state, externalizing first the necessities of infrastructure development (Engels naming railways, telegraph systems, etc). Intensifying crisis requires the state to step in further, maybe nationalizing industry, organizing mass pools of labor—I think of here, and I imagine you would agree? of the bizarre relations of capital and class that characterized the New Deal. But the key word here is "external"—the "external conditions of" capital.
Post-1971 I think we have a qualitatively different situation. The sort of work described by Engels continues to expand, ballooning in the ways you have described, but we also have the increasing centrality of monetary policy, the role of the central bank, swap lines, modifications of the money supply, all manner of esoteric and shrouded devices and tools, that make possible for capital to even circulate at all (and, by extension, act as thought it were self-moving in the way a Subject would). It seems to me that this falls under an "internal condition" versus an external one. Kind of weird, we could also bifurcate this along the divide between monetary and fiscal policy.
Seen from this point of view, Trump's challenge to Fed autonomy is incredibly interesting and provocative. I agree with you that the bourgeoisie has become superfluous, but we could also take Trump as the ultimate expression of that class. By attempting to subordinate the Fed to executive power, this could be seen as that class attempting to reappropriate a lever of the state that they have lost. But this could also crash the system. History's last irony?
This is fascinating. Just so I can catch up, whose or what definition of the Bourgeoisie are you using?
Ownership of big capital?
Or a historical one based more on culture ect.
Just the classic Marxist definition! Social class that owns the means of production as their private property.
Very nice concise statement of your thesis. Been thinking too about the fact that Vance et al seem to be challenging their own conditions, his whole talk of "cheap labour as a drug" comes to mind. Will the system really survive the withdrawal effects?
It's a really good question! I was thinking a bit more after this post how many of Trump's policies aim themselves at a sort of attempted restoration of classical capitalism. We have, on the one hand, the bid to exert wider political control over the Fed. At the most immediate level this is a battle over interest rates: because of inflationary pressures, the Fed is recalcitrant about rate cuts, while Trump wants to cut them to bring back easy money policies. At a higher level this is a class struggle: we can conceptualize the Fed (and the expanded Metacartel apparatus) as being aligned with the managerial or new class, while Trump represents the interests of the capitalist class. This is a fundamental class contradiction governing our present moment, I think.
Supposing Trump wins out, the Fed's autonomy is curbed (and the new class loses an important position of power), and lower interest rates are pushed through, the likely result with be compounding inflation. It seems likely that we'll have a recession before the year is out, and so with that combination we might be facing a stagflationary crisis.
On the other hand, we have the tariff policy. Clearly this plays into inflation fears and is governing a lot of the Fed's decisions right now, but the ultimate long-range goal of tariffs is to generate growth internal the United States at the expense of the world system it has created. In an ideal situation, that internal growth would 1) absorb the excess capital sloshing around, driving down inflation, and 2) could potentially absorb the excess labor population from the cutting-down of the US government. This feeds back into Jehu's argument, albeit in a slightly different way from his ultimate conclusion: we could see the reconversion of superfluous labor back into productive labor, thus something that approaches an image of classical capitalism.
The irony is that this—which of course is all speculative—is still an affair of state management, reflecting the dire situation of the capitalist system itself. There's also Jehu's own suggestion, which is that there simply isn't the ability within the system to absorb the totality of the masses of superfluous labor. Expelling them from the government etc, instead of restoring capital, would collapse it further.
What will happen? Time will tell...
The points you raise are very prescient and my response has become a bit long, will try to make it into a blogpost later maybe, but here it is anway:
I think seeing it as a contradiction between the industrial capitalists and the financial capitalists/new class is on point. I think the cracking down on undocumented migrant labour is also tied into this, as to me the unaccountable or occulted character of undocumented labour ties it in a mirrorlike fashion to the Metacartel. It works very well as stagnatory class warfare, as the classical levers of class struggle, namely strikes and legal restrictions to workplace exploitation and labourtime, are disabled, as it's impossible for an undocumented migrant to strike or advocate in legal/political battles for reduction of worktime/exploitation, as any resistance they show will get them deported. At the same time this works, as Vance has said weirdly enough, as a crutch for capital to keep the profit rate up by exploiting labour more than is in principle possible in its national environment, thus allowing it to skirt the necessity of automation and increasing the organic composition of capital. The same holds of course for off-shore labour. But now with the heady cocktail of tariffs and stronger border control Trump is essentially cutting off the lifeline of short-term profitability for much if not all of American industry.
In this respect I find this headline highly interesting: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/25/business/florida-child-labor-laws/index.html , as it shows that industry is already panicking, for repealing child labour laws is an on its face very unpopular and dangerous measure. My hope is that this renationalization for capital will open up new avenues for class struggle, as while putting pressure on capital in its financialized and globalized form was nigh impossible, now it might be possible again by agitating for such direct and simple things as laws against child labour. Yet this might also mean that there is still enough industry to soak up the workers thrown out of the government? Still these will be able to demand higher wages, better conditions and lower working hours now that capital can't simply route around their demands by going global or importing undocumented migrant labourers.
Now on if Trump is bringing back classical capitalism, I do think that this tracks the antagonism between Silicon Valley capitalists and the consortium of Washington PMC's and Wall Street, yet there is the problem that Silicon Valley seems to be more a bizarre simulation of capitalism than capitalism proper. Silicon Valley grew out of an astounding amount of subsidies from the DoD, thus is wholly incorporated in the state, while at the same time being financed mainly by financial capital managed by these large PMC consortiums. As I see it it is an industry spawned out of and for the New Class, where even the industry it engages in can barely be called industry, and is probably better seen as supplying what might be called the means of management than the means of production or consumption. If we take the form of the "means of production" of the New Class to be the spreadsheet - one must remember that the primary institutions holding the great army of PMC's are accounting firms like the Big Four - than we can see that ultimately Silicon Valley is just engaged with the perfecting of the tools of the New Class, as most if not all of tech (as a tech worker myself) boils down to spreadsheets and functions over spreadsheets, with AI as the greatest spreadsheet recombiner of all. Silicon Valley has historically just been engaged in devicing the tools of management and control, aimed both at the population in the sense of surveillance, and at finance and industry, to control cashflows, factories and supply chains in a more and more automatic fashion through the leveraging and directing of flows of information. It might be that the birth and growth of the New Class can be seen as resulting from the new technical basis of control that the advent of computation and communication has brought about.
What might be the case is then that we are now seeing this simulation of a capitalist class birthed out of the New Class becoming aware of the antagonism it has to its own conditions and trying to assert itself as a class separate from the New Class, hailing back to classical capitalism to give itself form over against the New Class. Interestingly it is the SV capitalist who is the closest to classical industry who's been able to assert himself as having a class character distinct from the PMC the most, namely Elon Musk and his (highly subsidised) car and space firms, which do at least seem to produce commodities in the classical sense, instead of a Google or a Facebook that float mostly on attention and advertisement. Now what's more, it seems that only when Silicon Valley has entered into the production of actual industry, namely the defense industry, with all the new drone VC's popping up, has it been able to find a real industrial technical basis, instead of just a managerial technical basis, and thus only now that the war-industry has landed in Silicon Valley was it able to start to fully oppose the New Class. But here comes the kicker of course, as the only industrial basis Silicon Valley is engaged in now completely subservient to the goals and aims of the state, for the defense industry differs in that sense from other types of industry, in that it produces commodities not for the general market but for markets wholly subsumed in the geopolitical machinations of the state. Probably, as you also say, this new "revolution" of the SV capitalists will turn out to be a deeper ingratiation in state control, but with the state taking on a different character. My own intuitive prediction is that contrary to the defeat of the New Class we are seeing now the actual coming into its own of the new class, as it can now reconstitute the state in its own image, as a fully occulted and networked state (what my mate CF calls the Network state: https://creationist.substack.com/p/the-hermetic-anti-state-and-the-invisible), where even the state itself doesn't know anymore what it's goals are and who its subsidiaries are, for all of actions will be taken through privatized SV startups, ultimately subsuming the legacy institutions like the CIA, NSA and possibly the DoD into decentralized SV companies, a state we de facto already live in, as most of the surveillance is not done by the NSA itself by done by the likes of Google, FB and Palantir, ultimately only feeding their output to the NSA.
In hindsight it seems all too obvious, but when Curtis Yarvin talked about the patchwork state where the leader is the CEO, this not a restoration of monarchy, but the managerial class (with as its ideal type the CEO) coming into its own, using the garb and speech of the Glorious Revolution, in the same manner described by Marx of the Bonapartists putting on a play of the french revolution in his 18th Brumaire. One problem I always had with Yarvin's idea of patchwork was that it never made sense how the central Non-Agression Principle could work without there being larger confederations of patchwork states enforcing this principle, giving again a supra national order that he hoped to be rid of, but now I see that all this time the idea of the patchwork state presupposed the occulted supranational Metacartel, enforcing the patchwork, but keeping itself hidden from view, for ultimately it's not the people of these states that are the primary shareholders, but financial class that are the main shareholders, with this patchwork stateform being the ultimate means for financial control. If I'm honest, I think we are only now scratching the surface of the rationalization of the state, and greater horrors may still be to come.
I'm not leaving this hanging, I definitely want to come back and reply to what you've so eloquently put forth here! I just need to think on your comments for a little bit.
Could you get the Python simulation models to work?
Python is a little bit beyond me but I'm very intrigued
Im fluent in Python. If someone lets me know what the simulations are I might be interested in helping.
Jehu's deeper stuff with Python is here if you want to take a look: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pan5KQPJkxG7vylBvYS_VojCp4XplfvIebKNY1Xd55Q/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.bkau2fj75j4z
It’s always refreshing to see discussions like this. We may write something soon to add to this discourse.
I think maintaining commitment to (in the end) idealist modes of expression might lead to confusion and dead end. Things clear up better if you just consider that capitalism and 'Capital' was a historical contingency and only one mode (novel and not a-historic to be sure) of class power and class domination among others. 'Capital' is not autonomous or a 'Subject'. It is an indirect (mediated) method of control over the labor power by networks of *living people*. The ruling networks are not, after all, after 'surplus value' generated via profit ('capitalism') necessarily, they are after money (or 'exchange value') and assets, as Emmanuel rightly points out. The ruling classes do not really have any commitment to 'capitalism' if there are better ways of accumulation.
Terrific, I also recommend Michael Roberts blog, the discussions on comments there are top notch.
Hell yeah.. we are heading to Barbarism using the classic marxist term, which ultimately is, using psychoanalysis (or psychobabble 😁) the death-drive of the madhouse revealing itself, the irrationality and contradictions on the open. The absence of praxis and the IMMATURITY to make a life worth living, this is also the fetishism of commodity, capital reproducing itself, this flying dutch. etc etc
Making weapons of war and also mind war, worse than the former perhaps. I can't stop having nightmares those days, it's not nice.
Terrific last image.
"They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."
Your analysis makes so much sense. Do you see Metacartel theory having any resonance with Jodi Dean's Neofeudalism thesis? Are you familiar with that? The service sector is so large now and there is a serfdom aspect to the classes below the managers. I wonder if there's a kind of manorial-like nature of cartels. Just food for thought. Thanks for your amazing posts!
I am a little familiar with it! I think that there are definitely resonants there though I think we’re approaching it from different angles. Dean is arriving at neofeudalism/neofeudalizing processes through analyzing the effects of large-scale tech platforms and the ballooning of the service sector, while the Metacartel is more concerned with the structural unity of the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and so-called private sector asset management entities. There’s a pretty good relationship between the two: Dean looks at how under neofeudalizing processes, the individual is fragmented and separated in ways even more profound than classical capitalism, forced through what is effectively extra-economic coercion into dependency on massive firms that enjoy monopolistic power (which is to say, they annihilate alternatives and have deconstructed the sorts of competitive forces that markets are supposed to generate). I’m not sure if Dean ever speaks to Baran and Sweezy’s analysis of what monopolistic capitalism looks like, but instead of the rampant innovation that monopoly’s defenders claim it can bring, monopoly capital is a highly stagnant economic order, where the centralized firm absorbs more profits than it can ever actually discharge through investment into the ‘real economy’. Monopoly capital slows itself down, which I think fits nicely with her overall picture (especially since historical feudalism saw the funneling of mass profits upwards, accompanied by broad economic deterioration).
Metacartel theory meanwhile looks more at how those mass entities sustain themselves and maybe more importantly how these economic relations have become increasingly socialized (which isn’t to say political, because even while the economy is state-managed this is operating beyond democratic procedure). So I think both can be made to work in tandem, it’s just that they are operating at different levels, but maybe putting the two into dialogue could yield some pretty provocative fruits.