Of Braudel, Boeing and asset-stripping: crucial tools for understanding what’s going on.

Items discussed

• Doctorow, C. 2024. We may not know what’s in the box: but we can tell if it’s been damaged in transit. March 25
• Tkacik, M. 2024. Suicide Mission. The American Prospect, March 28
• Davies, W. 2024. Anti-market.  London Review of Books, vol 46, no 7

These three articles will, separately and especially together, really help you understand what is going on in the world.

Cory Doctorw (novelist, thinker, essayist etc) came up with the term enshittification to describe the process (and underlying dynamic) of everything turning to shit.  Basically, once an entity (a state, a corporation, set of corporations), is able to free itself from meaningful constraints on its behaviour (via insulating policymaking and parties from scrutiny, outside influence from below etc), or has achieved lock-in, (e.g. via monopoly or oligopoly) then the fun starts – those in the organisation can ignore the nominal purpose they are ‘there’ for and work on enriching and empowering themselves.

Thus, we are living both in the Anthropocene, but also the Enshittocene (FT, paywalled)..

Robert Michels sorta kinda nailed this with his “who says organise says tyranny”, and then there’s that great insight from Carl Rogers. Rogers was talking to a guy who had been hired to raise productivity in a company that had various factories all producing the same stuff.

He told me that while the experimental plants continue to do extremely well, and he feels pride in the work he has done with them, he regards his work with the corporation as a failure. The top management, though appreciative of the increased profits and good morale of the experimental plants, has not moved to follow this model in their other plants, even though it appears evident that overall profits would be increased.

“Why not?” I inquired.

His answer was most thought provoking: “When managers from other plants look closely at what we are doing, they gradually realize how much of their power they would have to give away, to share with their employees.  And they are not willing to give up that power.” When I stated that it appeared that power over people was even more important than profits- which are supposed to be the all-important goal in industry- he agreed.

[see here]

I urge you to read the black boxes piece – it is vintage Doctorow – rich with insight, and thinking of the strongest opposing argument (steelmanning instead of strawmanning) and dealing with that preemptively.  

One of the examples Doctorow uses is the travails of Boeing. And there is an astonishing new article about this, based on the experience of a whistle-blower who was found dead (suicide? suicided?) recently.  Hair-raising, and enough to get you understanding where people are coming from when they say “If it’s Boeing, I’m not going.”

Finally, there’s William Davies’ review of  Brett Christophers’; new book “The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism won’t save the planet.”  Davies, as you’d expect, has a lot of extremely useful stuff to say about the stalled/failing energy transition and the reasons (blame Maggie and Ronnie, sorta, but more the Mont Pelerin crowd and the Chicago Boys).  But for my purposes (explained below) the opening paragraphs are crucial.

The​ words ‘market’ and ‘capitalism’ are frequently used as if they were synonymous. Especially where someone is defending the ‘free market’, it is generally understood that they are also making an argument for ‘capitalism’. Yet the two terms can also denote very different sets of institutions and logics. According to the taxonomy developed by the economic historian Fernand Braudel, they may even be opposed to each other.

In Braudel’s analogy, long phases of economic history are layered one on top of another like the storeys of a house. At the bottom is ‘material life’, an opaque world of basic consumption, production and reproduction. Above this sits ‘economic life’, the world of markets, in which people encounter one another as equals in relations of exchange, but also as potential competitors. Markets are characterised by transparency: prices are public, and all relevant activity is visible to everyone. And because of competition, profits are minimal, little more than a ‘wage’ for the seller. Sitting on top of ‘economic life’ is ‘capitalism’. This, as Braudel sees it, is the zone of the ‘antimarket’: a world of opacity, monopoly, concentration of power and wealth, and the kinds of exceptional profit that can be achieved only by escaping the norms of ‘economic life’. Market traders engage with one another at a designated time and place, abiding by shared rules (think of a town square on market day); capitalists exploit their unrivalled control over time and space in order to impose their rules on everyone else (think of Wall Street). Buyers and sellers on eBay are participating in a market; eBay Inc. is participating in capitalism. Capitalism, in Braudel’s words, is ‘where the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates’.

On this account, ‘economic life’ was already established in early modern societies, but ‘capitalism’ triumphed late, becoming fully dominant only in the 19th century, once it had conscripted the state as its ally. A range of legal, financial and managerial constructs emerged to protect capitalists – and their profits – from the kinds of equality and competition that continued to constrain the petite bourgeoisie and local traders. ‘Intellectual property’, limited liability, a ‘lender of last resort’, colonial expansion and new techniques of disciplining the working class created conditions apt for extraction and exploitation, not mere exchange. The moral and political virtues of markets, as they had appeared to the likes of Adam Smith, were overwhelmed in the capitalist era of Rockefeller and Ford.

Dunno about you, but I learnt a helluva a lot reading those paragraphs. Beautifully put.

Bringing the three together

What ties the three together?  They’re about asset stripping, and looting the past and the future and calling it ‘rational’ (because, for a few people, it does indeed seem rational).  They are about how small groups of people with poisonous and short-sighted greed are able to rely on false assumptions, long-standing reputations built on effectiveness and competence (which may not always be ‘efficient’) and (deliberately cultivated) confusion over terminology. All to be able to pillage and plunder and fill pockets.

As per that Doonesbury collection “The Pension Fund was just sitting there.”

Could you think of a less fit ideology and set of “elite” practices for figuring out how to cope with the shit-storms that are already here for most species and many many humans on this planet, storms that are only going to grow in intensity? I can’t.