I feel a long quotation coming on:
"But the weightlessness discourse infects even highly admirable writers like Fredric Jameson, who argues in his essay "Culture and Finance Capital" (1998) that capital has deterritorialised and dematerialised in this "globalised" era. All the weightless postindustrial nostrums are represented: "profit without production"—in fact the disappearance of production, except for "the two prodigious American industries of food and entertainment"—and "globalisation," defined as "rather a kind of cyberspace in which money and capital have reached its ultimate dematerialisation," as messages which pass instantaneously from one nodal point to another across the former globe, the former material world. Globalisation becomes a triumph of nothingness, and finance capital becomes "deterritorialised," and "like cyberspace can live on its own internal metabolism and circulate without any reference to an older type of content."
"It seems very old-fashioned to point out a few facts about this apparently weightless, placeless capital thoroughly unmoored from the real. The world money of the 19th century, gold, though quite tangible, nonetheless circulated without the imprint of any state; today's nonphysical monies need state entities like central banks and the IMF to guarantee and regulate them. Food production has been shrinking while measured as a share of GDP, and the share of household budgets devoted to food has been in a long decline. The alleged economic importance of the entertainment industries is a staple of both left and right discourse, with extravagant claims made about their rank in production and trade, but it's just not true. Motion pictures account for about 0.3% of US GDP—half as large as the primary metal industries, a quarter as large as motor vehicles. Add radio and TV and "amusement and recreation services" and you're almost up to 2%—the size of the chemical industry, but less than an eighth the contribution of manufacturing. Production hasn't disappeared from the US, much less the world in general. Despite a long manufacturing recession, there was still more than sixteen million factory workers in the US at the beginning of 2003, nearly one in eight employed workers.
"And though financial markets seem very fanciful, appearing detached not only from production but even from social relations, they are actually institutions that consolidate ownership and control among the very rich of the world (a point developed in the last chapter of this book). Much of the damage done to Southeast Asia in 1997 and 1998 and to Mexico in 1994 and 1995 was done by allegedly weightless financial flows. Closer to home, bond markets exert strict discipline on the economic policies of national and local governments, and shareholders have been exhibiting strict discipline on the companies they own. The wave of corporate downsizings in recent years—according to the head-hunting firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas, 3.9 million [layoffs] were announced by large employers between January 2001 and April 2003—is an example of the kinds of corporate policies they've been pushing on managers for the last two decades.
"Drawing on a point made by Ursula Hughs (1999), while the physical commodity—the one, in the classic definition, you can drop on your foot—may be diminishing in importance relative to services, many of those services are the commodification of activities that were once performed without the exchange of money (and much of that labour, whether paid or unpaid, is disproportionately performed by women). McDonald's replaces the home-cooked meal, commercial laundries replace in-house washing and paid child-care replaces the unpaid maternal kind. Services formerly performed by nonprofits, like education, are increasingly the realm of profit-seeking entities, from Chris Whipple's Channel One to the University of Phoenix. By focussing just on the form of the commodity—good or service—partisans of weightlessness overlook the monetised social relations behind seemingly insubstantial wares."
Doug Henwood, After the New Economy, 2003, the New Press, New York, pp.27–29
Henwood also wrote the book Wall Street which is now out of print and available as a PDF for free download. Have fun. |
