ONCE MORE

1.

Sometimes a picture tells a story.   Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.  Sometimes a picture is just a picture.  But this:

…is priceless.  It sums up the historical period.  It demonstrates both the economic program and the aesthetic of US capitalism (to the consternation of a portion of the bourgeoisie, which itself is another source of pleasure for Trump and the gang of vulgarians now controlling the US government). 

While that distinct sector of the bourgeoisie and its followers lament the destruction, the assault on the dignity of this beatified building where wars were/are instigated, racism protected, the poisoning of the public sanctioned, Trump wrecks on, determined to keep the wrecker in “wrecker capitalism.”

East Wing?  It’s just real estate to him. The asset is not the building.  It’s the location, location, location.   The asset needs to be revalued and that can only occur if the structures resting upon it are …devalued, and nothing devalues something better than a wrecking ball.  

And to what purpose?  A ballroom? Serving champagne and diet coke, offering-pigs-in-blankets, while the orchestra plays stripper anthems, pole dancers swing at every table, and Rush Hour 4 runs in a continuous loop in VIP rooms?  America, god bless it, is back!

Turns out, Justice Jackson (Robert H. not Ketanji Brown) was wrong.  The US Constitution is a suicide pact, tub-thumbing for an abstract freedom while capitulating to a concrete slavery; lip-synching vows to justice, and a general welfare, while private property generates acute and chronic levels of poverty that overwhelm the words solemnly spoken.

There was a chance after the Civil War to make the document something other than a record of cognitive dissonance.  It was the chance not taken with the abandonment of Radical Reconstruction, the restoration of the plantation system, and the reconciliation with the former slaveholders as opposed to protection of the former slaves.

2.

Some things you can see coming at you from a mile away—locomotive headlights and economic contraction being two of those things, if the tracks are straight.  The problem is, particularly when you’re racing one or both to a public crossing, both the headlight and the contraction always look like they are still a mile away. It looks like there’s still time to make it across until there isn’t; until they are both right on top of you. Then all you can do is take the fall.

Meanwhile in both the case of the locomotive and capital coming off the track, the wreckage, into which you now have been absorbed, grinds its way forward in a sort of daisy-chained demolition derby.

All the while, someone racing for the next crossing sees a headlight that he or she swears is at least a mile away.

You could see it coming in the forever wars in Ukraine and Palestine. 

You could see it coming with the decline in electric vehicle sales.

You could see it coming in the slowing and intermittently negative growth of world trade.

You could see it coming in spiking, and decline, of shipping costs.

You could see it coming in the globally reduced auto production.

You could see it coming with the blizzard of tariffs, reciprocal tariffs, retaliatory tariffs.

You could see it coming with the collapse of First Brands, the implosion of securitized subprime auto loans, the bankruptcy filings of Tricolor Holdings and PrimaLend Capital Partners.

You could see it coming with the private equity funds struggling to sell the assets they had stripped and “reorganized” years ago.

You could see it in the global decline of foreign direct investment.

Was capitalism running out of bigger fools, those eternal optimists who form a platform on which our financial Archimedes stand while leveraging-deleveraging? 

Not hardly.  Just look at all those sinking their money into those virtual tulips of the crypto-currency markets.

You could see all these acute moments from a mile away and you could still miss the chronic condition of capital. 

But it wouldn’t miss you. 

3.

Marx in the drafts, essays, notebooks of his critique of political economy, implicitly  and explicitly asks how is it that the political economists never engage with the forces and the processes that transform the human producers into the laborers—into a class where the only use it has for its ability to labor is its use in exchange for the value of the means of subsistence, i.e. for reproducing itself as a class that must, to survive, exchange its ability to labor for the value of the means of subsistence.

The opposite identity, the counter-party, of this free (meaning dispossessed), alienable (meaning commercially available), labor-power is the organization of the factors and materials of production as private property.  Private property is the condition of labor.

The exchange itself, labor-power for a wage, is measured, expressed, determined in and by time.  Labor-power becomes labor-time becomes the stuff of value. While it takes X hours for the class of laborers to reproduce the value of their means of feeding themselves and their dependents, to expend this necessary labor-time, the working day duration is X +Y hours, and Y, the surplus-labor time, is where the profit resides.

4.

Marx demolishes the abstractions of political economy using two methods; first through historical materialism, examining the social, peculiar, coercive, unequal relations that form the basis for “free wage labor, and secondly, through developing an immanent critique—an exposition on the limits to the expanded reproduction of capital determined by the requirements of capital accumulation themselves.

The expanded reproduction of capital means the expansion of the class relations that define the origin of value.  Accumulation is not an accumulation of things.  Value has no intrinsic “life” outside the need for expansion that can only occur through repeated and repeating absorptions, applications of wage-labor.  Consumption and its limits are secondary, derivative, dependent upon expanded reproduction, not causal.

Now our enterprising bourgeois is most concerned with what’s going out of his/her wallet and doubly so god forbid he/she is forced to use his/her own money.  He/she sees cost as the perpetual obstacle to a future so bright everyone must wear polarized sunglasses. And necessary labor-time, merely reproducing the wage, is nothing but cost.  As for the surplus   value—it comes free, part of the package, and is thus invisible in origination and realization.

So, the propertied class drives down the cost per unit of production, and that unit of measurement is, once again, time, the socially necessary time required for the reproduction of the commodities.

The returns from successful exchange of commodities are invested in labor-replacing, production, machinery that, when, engaged with labor power can produce more in the same time for less cost than before.  The inanimate component, familiarly but improperly known as capital replaces the animating component.

Yet, no matter how much the unit costs are reduced; no matter how much the output increases, no additional surplus value is generated unless the wage, the necessary labor-time/value declines as a portion of the total working day, that is to say at a rate greater than the falling unit time of production.  Increased productivity, greater output per hour generates no greater rate of surplus value.  What it does do is through the mechanism of price, through exchange, distribute the total surplus value “up” the ladder, redirecting profit to the most productive, efficient, capital intensive, enterprises.

At the same time, the expansion of the inanimate factors of production and reduction in the living factor means each successive accretion of profit tends to materialize as a smaller increment in relation to the total capital.  The portion of “new” value declines as a portion of the total value.  Massive quantities of surplus value can be, and are being extracted, yet they are dwarfed by the massive value fixed in the means and materials of production.

 This:

• Is partially offset by the redirection and reallocation of profit through price
• Is intrinsic to capital accumulation, made systemic by the very same factor describe in (1).
• The tendency then achieves a corporeality, expressing itself in acute eruptions of overproduction, overaccumulation, overspeculation, price inflation and the ensuing impairment of exchange itself.  Trade stumbles. Production falls.  Value devalues itself.
• Because the means of production are themselves constituted as values, they are attacked, liquidated, stripped.
• Because the bourgeoisie are the bourgeoisie, they have infinite variations on the only trick they know: attack the cost of labor-power
• Toward that end, money-launderers, con-men, grifters, extortionists, crypto-fascists, evangelicals are deputized.   Given official status, they start their work by attacking the most vulnerable sections of the working class: women, migrants, non-white workers.

5.

There’s no such thing as a “socialist political economy.”  Political economy is capitalist ideology.  It cannot “morph” into socialism, just as capitalism cannot morph into socialism.

True, Marx’s critique is “unfinished,” but the finishing isn’t going to be found in any missing volumes Marx “intended” to write.  The finishing point is the beginning—the class struggle. The emancipation of social labor is the transformation problem Marx leaves to us.

S. Artesian

December 5, 2025