Metacartel II: Capitalist Axiomatics

Or, the chaining of onshore and offshore money markets in the symmetry of occult finance

It has been a very long time since I’ve put up a subscribers-only post, so I figured that it’s probably been time to do that (also, something of a small update: I originally planned to terminate the paid section and unlock all posts at the end of the year, but I think I’m not gonna do that after all—I should probably have many more of these in near future).

This particular post, which was intended as a follow-up to my original Metacartel post, has languished in the drafts folder since March of this year. There’s a lot of reasons I didn’t publish it then: first off, it’s pretty boring, and second, I’m not entirely sure that the protracted analysis of interest rates and all that stuff is theoretically sound. I dunno, I need to revisit it. The same could be said for the information on Eurodollars, which really pivots about on the standard history of the offshore currency’s development. There’s some more sophisticated work that has been done on Eurodollars and other downstream forces, like the petrodollar, that has taken place in the interim. A lot will have to be reworked in light of that research.

I still think that ‘French theory’ was a somewhat muddled and arcane response to the economic crises of the early 1970s (it’s ironic that Deleuze and Guattari, meditating on those great shocks, wrote that “capitalism works by breaking down”, which is true, but this may well have been the moment that capital quit working in a fundamental way). It follows, by extension, that key explanatory mechanisms that they deploy—capitalist axiomatics, models of realization, etc—thus emerge on that basis, and become inseparable from it. That gives these mechanisms great value, but I’m not sure if they should constitute the analytic language as such.