The power of dreams is they make explicit what are usually only vaguely felt or unconscious currents; but they don’t do so by turning them into ordinary thought. They stay elusive and multifaceted. Writing can do this too.

You lay next to me, pillows on the floor, I gaze at the curve of your waist, your legs disappearing into the distance. We’re both exhausted from days and days of walking and walking. Thirsty, not only for water. I touch your shoulder. The closer I get to you, the larger you appear, the more I know of you, the more there is to know, the more the unknowability of you bursts forth, the ultimate mysteriousness of you. Yet it’s in that very unbridgeable gap that love is possible. Love isn’t possessing the other, it’s in relation to the fundamentally unknowable other, an unknowability which includes ourselves. We cannot possess ourselves, any more than we can possess someone else. But we can be present, intensely, with each other, at every moment, beyond all moments.

Who are you? You sleep in the sky, and I dream of you, and suddenly you laugh and I roll towards you and remember.

I breathe in the rain, the dirt on the sidewalks and pavement, the rumble in the depths of the hollow streets. New York is always awake, yet it’s a still, quiet place, at the same time; with all the cacophony. I can hear the silence in the noise, the noise is silence itself. Everything is always already stopped, the motion itself, already.

I wrote this to you:

…there are two ways to think… either running on and on and on… Or… stopping to go deeper and deeper into it, to let yourself seep into it, permeate it and let it permeate you, until you’re thoroughly in it and it is in you, you are it, and then you let it breathe and live through you until suddenly it comes bursting forth as brilliant light.

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What saddens me about recent attempts to rehabilitate Marx’s thesis of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall as a story about the historical inevitability of the collapse of capitalism is that it sidetracks a large number of otherwise smart people into what is essentially an intellectual dead end. This isn’t to say everything Marx wrote or said is wrong; there are lots of interesting insights in there, but the large-scale historical model has a clear flaw: if Marx were correct, it would mean that, over the long term, capitalists would ultimately tend to spend more and more each year, in money terms, on production equipment. That’s ultimately what it boils down to. There’s no reason why this would occur as a kind of inexorable historical inevitability: the entire thesis is confused by the fact, I think, that Marx is speaking in terms of “living labor” and “dead labor” as though “profit” were simply “living labor” / “dead labor” and dead labor just increases inexorably over time while living labor remains constant. But as I argued in my last post, this doesn’t make sense. Dead labor cannot accumulate indefinitely (Marx did understand this, of course, but he didn’t think it through far enough), living labor is actually changed in a nonlinear fashion by production equipment, and finally in any situation there’s going to be an optimal value for the amount you invest in production equipment in any given year, and this optimal value is not going to asymptotically, historically, approach 100% of your expenses for reasons which should be obvious, even if it does go up over the course of an economic cycle. Yet, many very smart people seem to be attempting to rehabilitate Marx on this score.

But, of course, the converse: libertarian Ayn Rand thinking, is also on the rise, and I’ve discussed in the past why that’s wrongheaded as well. I was writing an email to my cousin, an economist in DC, about this — we’ve sometimes had good-natured discussions about this because I tend left and he tends more towards economic libertarianism, but neither of us are doctrinaire about either. I realized that the central problem with both perspectives can be summed up in terms of limits of computation.

Let’s look at one of Marx’s initial hypotheses, that there will be a phase in which everything is centrally planned. I hate to invoke a right-wing hero here, but the essential argument of Friedrich Hayek against this is, I believe, correct: that central planning cannot work efficiently, even if totally benevolent, because of information processing bottlenecks. Intuitively, it is obvious that you cannot effectively centrally plan because the amount of information the planners must process efficiently is far too great; planned economies inevitably break down in inefficiency and poor resource allocation. I won’t go into the details here because they ought to be pretty obvious. In brief, the problem is in a planned economy there’s an attempt to refocus all economic “computation” if you will (decision-making) to the high-level (planners).

But the problem with unrestricted free markets is also a computational problem. What happens with unregulated free markets is they tend towards instability, mispricing of risk, and they don’t price long-term environmental depletion, as I’ve argued before. But why? In theory, one might argue that markets could, in theory, price in long-term risk and really “should” — but they don’t do very well at this in practice. Bubbles and crashes happen, environmental degradation occurs leading to collapse in some cases, and so on. I think there’s considerable evidence that the deregulation from the 80’s on led to a re-destabilization of the markets, where we started to see wilder swings in the markets a la the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Read the rest of this entry »

Edited from a personal communication with Nick Srnicek, in which I’m discussing, in high-level terms, my technical critique of Marx’s principle of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (I should note that my arguments are similar to Okishio’s, with further thoughts from theory of computation):

Let’s take the steady-state case. What if a capitalist spent on new machinery only exactly as much as the old machinery depreciated? I.e., let’s assume a commodity which has been produced for a long time, and further assume no innovation whatsoever; new machinery is exactly as productive as old machinery. And let’s say, for whatever reason, that there’s an optimal *amount* of such machinery, any more of which would result in no increase in productivity. In such a case a capitalist could rationally choose to invest only precisely the amount he needed to maintain and replace aging machinery, i.e., the depreciation value, and if wages stayed constant, the rate of profit would tend towards an equilibrium over time. There’s no necessity I can see in such a scenario for any declining rate of profit, whatever.

Marx seems to assume that the rate of expenditure on constant capital will always rise, because it’s the only way to increase profit. Yet he says that for this very reason, the rate of profit should fall. To me, this doesn’t really make any sense. If purchasing new machinery doesn’t increase profit, then why purchase it? It would be irrational.

Now, I’m here eliding over the difference between price and value, but ultimately if there is to be a crisis of declining profit, it would have to show up at some point in prices, so for now I’m going to talk initially about prices (monetary expenditures).

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the capitalist actually spends more money per year on fixed capital than the depreciation of the old equipment. So, every year, as Marx outlines, the amount of fixed capital the capitalist owns grows in value, as the “stored value” in the machines gets used up more slowly than the amount of new expenditures every year. Meanwhile, let’s say the amount he spends on labor stays more or less the same.

Where is the surplus value? Marx seems to argue that the surplus value must remain fixed in this scenario; the value in the commodity being produced is being contributed by labor-time, plus the amount contributed by the depreciation of the fixed capital. It’s like there’s this huge pile of value stored up in the fixed capital, and a tiny bit of additional value, proportionally smaller and smaller, contributed by labor.

But there’s something obviously wrong with this picture. Read the rest of this entry »

I dreamt I was in a strange situation, difficult, like war or something, and I was talking with Susan and decided to make an analogy to the Talking Heads song “Life During Wartime.” I started to say, “it’s like that song…” but then I realized I only remembered the last two cities in the line I wanted to quote… “Heard about Detroit? Heard about Pittsburgh P.A.” … but I wanted to remember the first city in the list because that was cooler sounding. I Googled the lyrics… but the site came up with the part of the lyrics blacked out. I kept trying it on my phone and then my laptop but it just kept stalling and not working. Finally, I dreamt I woke up, and I thought, “Oh, the internet doesn’t work in dreams…” I tried it again but it STILL didn’t work! I realized I was STILL dreaming so I forced myself to really wake up, and Googled it… the answer was ”Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit? Heard about Pittsburgh P.A…”

I would have thought that perhaps somewhere in my unconscious memory there would have been a fragment of knowing the answer was “Houston” but even using an internet search in my dream, I couldn’t call it up. I think this dream was my unconscious telling me there are limits even to unconscious knowledge, and while I believe in hunches I shouldn’t rely too much on them; sometimes you just have to wake up and find an answer out in the world.

There’s been an ad for a new show (Awake) about a guy who goes to sleep to wake up in a parallel reality, and vice-versa, and he’s not sure which reality is actually real. I have a bit of that same feeling returning to my home in Oakland; all the familiar smells and sights and sounds of “my” neighborhood, my cats, my apartment… it feels like returning home, which it is. But at the same time, I have my place in New York, and when I come back there it also feels like I’m returning home. Which one is the “real” home? Going back and forth at least once or twice a month, it’s hard to know for certain. What I do know for certain is I feel drawn to both places, there are things I want to do in both places and people I want to see and be with in both places. In either place, friends and family lament the fact that I’m often gone from “home” — where do my real loyalties lie? For now, in both places. It will take time to settle out.

I’m in London to talk with my friend Jenny Doussan about her remarkable PhD thesis on Agamben and Brentano, which relates to a lot of things I’ve been thinking about recently; it touches upon themes which have fascinated me for decades. It has been a bit surreal being here, as well: I was updating her about the #ows protests (she’s been ensconced in finishing her thesis and thus hasn’t been as plugged into recent events), and of course just as I was telling her there are protests at the London Stock Exchange, as if on cue, the newscaster started talking about it on the radio. I hope to stop by the protest sometime while I’m here, although my primary focus is going to be on conversations with Jenny.

Due to the magic of credit card rewards points, I’m staying in by far the nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed in in London, the Novotel London Greenwich, which I chose primarily because it’s reasonably close to Jenny’s place in Deptford. My room is actually almost normal-sized by American standards, even though it’s the most affordable room type in the place. It’s a bit funny, however, because, despite the fact that it’s quite spacious, it still sports many of the same features present in the super-cramped closets that you find at most budget London hotels; as though the fact that hotels often have to radically conserve space has set up a “standard” which hotel designers follow even if they have the space to do it differently. There are some tiny closets for hanging your clothing, but no dresser drawers at all. The bathroom has one of those microscopic London sinks (even smaller than this one) next to the toilet, even though, inexplicably, it also has a normal-sized sink. There’s a towel rack placed on the other side of the toilet from the bath/shower/sink, making it quite difficult to access and forcing you to step near the toilet when you’re trying to reach one of the towels (not exactly the most hygenic feeling), something that would make sense if the bathroom were too tiny to allow a more convenient arrangement, but in this case, completely unnecessary, given the spaciousness of the room.

Kim Davis wrote me an email asking I write a longer post about #occupywallstreet aka #ows, since I’ve been tweeting about it for a while. I’ve actually mostly been just retweeting other people’s tweets, since I was in the Bay Area until a few days ago; and I’m leaving for London today, so my first in-person visit to the protest/occupation was last night.

I arrived in the early evening with a friend who had been to the protest a number of times already; we wandered about the park, which was quite crowded and well-organized; there was a food area, many bags of garbage neatly stacked, people cleaning the park obsessively, many people standing in small groups talking or trying to squeeze past each other, a table where the anarchists were passing out guidebooks, and it was for the most part relatively calm. I stayed for the entire General Assembly meeting, to get a feel for the process. It was, at times, rather excruciating to have to wait for every sentence fragment to be repeated by the group, but overall I came away quite impressed with the thoughtfulness, organization, and deliberation of those gathered there.

It opened with a long explanation of the process, the hand signals we were supposed to use, and the fact that this night (prior to a feared cleanup and eviction which was not to come to pass) required some urgency. Bloomberg had told the protesters they had to vacate the park temporarily to allow the owners to clean it; the protesters, in a little-reported move, responded by obsessively cleaning the park themselves. Many of the announcements during the meeting related to the cleanup or to temporarily removing stuff the protesters had been using for safekeeping during the cleanup. In addition there were brief reports from the various working groups, ranging from legal to “direct action” to Internet… but what I found most interesting was the debate at the end of the GA regarding the drum circles, which, as my friend pointed out, gave one a feeling a bit like observing an ancient Greek debating assembly.

The discussion opened with a report from a representative of a working group responsible for liaising with the larger community (in this case, as represented by the Manhattan Community Board). He started by telling a brief story about how strongly Scott Stringer, the Manhattan Borough President, supported the movement, and how intensely he had defended #ows’s right to assembly and free speech to the press. This was a relatively clever rhetorical move on his part, I thought, because he clearly wanted the crowd to be positively disposed towards their proposal… which he phrased as a compromise, or a request, which was, basically, that really loud drumming (drum circles) be confined to two hours between the hours of 11am and 5pm. A number of people raised concerns, questions, and issues, at which point he pointed out that this wasn’t a “they” trying to oppress the protesters, but rather people who so strongly supported the movement that they were going to come out and sit in solidarity with the protesters at 5am to resist the eviction by the owners. I thought it was a brilliant move on his part to hold that information until later in the debate, to help turn the tide.

Finally, before the vote, there were two “blocks” — i.e., people who felt so strongly about the issue they were willing to block consensus. A couple of the drummers felt that the drumming helped draw people to the park and the hours should be longer than 2 hours — more like 4, or that the window should be extended to include evening hours. The community board liaison countered that the drummers could bring the issue up again at a later Assembly, and reminded them that individual, intimate drumming performances would always be allowed. The drummers persisted in their block, so they moved to “modified consensus” rules at this point — which means that the community could override the consensus with a 90% vote, which occurred.

I had several observations about this: first, I was impressed with the rhetorical skills of the participants. I was also impressed with the willingness of the assembly to work with elected officials (who repaid their trust later on, as Bloomberg later said a big reason the eviction was called off was due to a flood of calls from elected officials to the park owners). The “modified consensus” process seemed to be well-thought-out and ultimately effective. I was a little concerned about what seemed to me to be a bit of a cultural/ethnic divide, however, in the debate about the drum circles — which is one of my general concerns about activism in the US in general (see below) — the two drummers who attempted to block consensus and some of the other people voting “no” were African-American, and, as is common in many activist crowds, most of the people there were white. Overall, however, the portrayal of some in the media of the movement as being rather disorganized, unfocused, etc., was belied by the reality of the thoughtfulness of the rhetoric, the willingness to cooperate with the local community, and the careful organization of the working group reports and cleanup announcements throughout the meeting.

I have to admit my initial feelings about #ows had been ambivalent; I had been happy, of course, that someone was finally protesting the terrible inequities in our current economic system. However, I often feel that activism in the US tends to be rather insular; culturally and even somewhat ethnically insufficiently diverse, disdainful of the need to talk with people of good will of differing views: lacking in sufficient outreach to the very communities progressives hope to help. There can be a bit of an echo chamber feeling, in my mind, where activists talk mostly to each other rather than to the community at large, and too many seem to come from a similar cultural niche; these are people devoted to inclusion who often seem not to include enough people among those we all hope to help (working class people, minorities, and so on). However, there’s no question that this time, for once, a progressive protest in the US has finally really gained the attention of the nation and the world, perhaps for the first time in decades. Adbusters was right, after all: public, physical protest, carefully positioned, can make a significant difference in the public dialogue.

Today I was walking down the street in Manhattan. Everything feels so vivid, constantly, so large, open, vast. But the other thing which is acutely present for me as I walk down the street is the suffering, the pain and difficulty, the anger, even as, at the same time, there’s a sense of such tremendous… power and beauty? Through it all, I started to wonder, what is the point of me feeling this? I mean, in some sense, yes, there isn’t anything particularly special about the position “I” seemed to be in at that moment, though it feels vast and present, it’s also rife with error and not in any way fundamentally different from anyone or anything else around me (not that the others are in any fundamental sense separate from me). But there’s still this issue — what’s the point of “me”, to the extent that is meaningful to refer to, looking from this vantage point, so to speak, when all around me is such suffering? Suffering in the midst of radical okayness, even so, still suffering.

Every person I passed seemed to shout at me their condition, their situation, so to speak (not that “their condition” actually means something all that well-defined…) and so I started to contemplate this. The tremendous sense of responsibility, a desire to try to work with this odd situation, this strangely okay yet at the same time suffering- and error-filled “situation”.

After a while I started to think, well, this is sort of hubris, it’s not as though I don’t still have much to work on for myself, but the whole “project” of working on my own practice seemed a bit odd. It’s clearly possible for humans to live in this radically, radically different manner, vastly more open and present and engaging with much more of the present being-ness than we usually consciously engage with. Yet at the same time, what’s the implication of that? It seems to be the primary implication is at the same time everything opens up in this vast way, one is also hugely aware of the suffering as well (although “suffering” isn’t really as problematic as it seems, it’s still a serious matter). It just seems to me all my “projects” really ought to be contextualized in this larger situation of the whole world and suffering and pain, so even as I continue to work on my own errors and issues, the problem of how to work with this larger context is still always vividly present.

It is beginning to feel as though part of my larger self includes a vast net which catches the beauty and the pain of the world all at once. It’s excruciatingly, even painfully beautiful and powerful and vast and wise and sad and lovely and breathing and tired and vivid and tragic and satisfying and nourishing and dirty and depraved and cruel and compassionate and light, light, light. The net drags on, gossamer-like, invisible, without weight, trawling up all this and feeding it through my body/energy/mind which isn’t separate from any of it.