2430 – Capital B series about Berlin (Arte 2024)

Capital B – Who Owns Berlin is probably the best documentary about a city any city out there, in a league all of its own with Los Angeles Plays Itself.

What happened to one of the biggest cities in continental Europe? A city that had incredible opportunities, cheap basically free spaces for grabs, and immense swaths that were opened up after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Berlin was probably the biggest story in subcultural history. This documentary by Arte Channel in 5 parts explains it all step by step. Yet saying this we cannot forget that after the Wall, there were winners and losers of the reunification, and sadly the losers (in economic terms, in job and academic positions, and cultural management positions) – were the people of former East Germany or DDR who today are being swiped off their feet by populist rhetoric and vote for the extreme right-wing AfD demagogues (altough there have been huge protests against AfD recently against right-wing extremism and for democracy).

Important to mention here that the institution (Treuhand), the pop-up trust company seated in Berlin that regulated and controlled the restructuring from a planned to a market economy did this almost overnight, without much accountability or democratic supervision. Its task was certainly immense to privatize 8,000 formerly nationally-owned enterprises. Modernizing thousands of enterprises and closing down thousands of others, from gigantic combines comprising a staff of umpteen thousand up to small family enterprises – and it ended with complete humiliation for East Germans, even if some say there were some benefits.

I think the story in Berlin is even starker, for most Berliners, and for most that have been living to see the explosion in subcultural spaces, clubs, and underground venues – it all came with a huge cost, they all were just acting like a magnet for the real estate mafia. Real estate – and space (to use Jameson’s suggestive quote from below) one might say is at the center of today’s capitalism. It was involved in the sub-prime crisis in the US that spread throughout the whole world, and certainly in land grabs around the world as well as ‘zoning’ of special economic zones, duty-free areas, and offshore tax-free heavens.

To narrow it down to a city – Berlin, the German capital allows us to see this process of capital accumulation, rent extraction, and speculative markets. It is a very sad documentary, particularly harrowing for all those who went through 30 years of gentrification and speculative luxury housing investments. Sadly the 5 part documentary is only available in French and German, there are no English subs, but I sincerely think someone who cares about the history of this city should do it, especially considering how many EN-speaking inhabitants live in this city.

There is interviews with key figures of the underground but also mayors, investors, politicians etc. The documentary offers a unique range of voices and key figures who were deeply and personally involved in shaping this city and transforming it into what it has become today. This is also the story of techno music and its entry into German electronic music. It is about the translation of a metronomic abstract heavy beat arriving in Berlin from Detroit Motor City via the UK and Belgium and one of the first musical styles to unite both East and West. Techno pioneers from East and West Berlin started setting the night on fire. It is really important to see how the members of the initially small rave culture tribe started scouting for a location, and how they ended up finding TRESOR by chance, that incredible space initially situated on Leipziger Straße and cleaning it and there is incredible VHS footage of that moment in 1991. Subculture had its summer of anarchy, an incredible mix of utopia and frenetic living, but the power elites of the city started asserting their pressure – and it all ended with fierce police raids, street battles, and forced evacuations.

The Fall

One should understand that this is a battle to the teeth, in the middle of the 1990s the West Berlin old-money elites got their interests served by mayor Eberhard Diepge – and started exercising their stranglehold over the city. Klaus-Rüdiger Landowsky one of the most powerful figures in Germany and together with Diepge want to transform Berlin from an industrial hub into a financial capital of the world on par with London and Frankfurt. It all ends with the biggest banking scandal in Germany and the arrival of a new younger mayor ready to use the power vacuum: Klaus Wowereit. Districts such as Kreuzberg and Wedding with a big migrant population are being transformed into virtual ghetto’s without opportunities, high unemployment rates and lack of funding. Savas Yurderi aka Kool Sava becames one of the most well-known rappers in Germany and he’s speaking with the voice of that place.

Poor but Sexy (was the mayor Klaus Wowereit motto for the city)

The City as Prey

This is the final decade where clubs get closed, everyone is kicked out and most of the underground places get shut down. It is the march of uberization, digitial nomadism and finacial speculation.

2416 – Financial Empire w/ Daniela Gabor and Ndongo Samba Sylla (Jacobin Radio 2023)

“Olúfẹmi Táíwò guest hosts an interview with Daniela Gabor and Ndongo Samba Sylla on how financial power has shaped the global economic order under capitalism from colonialism through Bretton Woods, the Washington Consensus, and today’s Wall Street Consensus. 

Read Daniela’s work: people.uwe.ac.uk/Person/DanielaGabor

Read Ndongo’s work: rosalux.de/en/profile/es_detail/N8SVHTS8SA/ndongo-samba-sylla?cHash=ccf0c8d371bde0fecbac8337bbc6f832

Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig“

Here is 2h of the most intense and informative talk I got to listen to recently. I totally recommend both of them to follow in TW/X – if you are still on that platform. We had some previous posts on economy and political economy and inflation, but this one is truly essential for everyone interested in how global financial institutions came to exist and how the dollarisation of the world after WWII came to dominate our lives. It is also a very good introduction into two important theories that have lost the battle in the market of ideas – but are increasingly resuscitated in order to make sense of the rising unequal exchanges, dependencies, and monetary imperialisms that structure the Global North/Global South axis in capitalism: Dependency theory and World-systems theory. What is important is that both of them (one from Eastern Europe and the other from Equatorial Africa) advocate for a new global economic system where the Global South is at its center (the so-called “Bandung Woods” named after the Afro-Asian or Asian-African Bandung Conference in 1955 Bandung, Indonesia) to replace the Washington (or now Wall Street) Consensus.

Most of what I am saying here tries to approximate what the two eminent (imho opinion) macroeconomists and monetary sovereignty experts spell out. I am going to quote in full Gabriela Gabor (who happens to be a Romanian born) from the written version of the interview (available here).

DANIELA GABOR:

The Washington Consensus is in a sense a marker of who makes the rules in the global economic system, and that was Washington. Its intellectual father was John Williamson. He was quite reluctant to recognize himself as an intellectual father, because very quickly, the Washington Consensus was dubbed as a neoliberal consensus. I think it’s best described as a holy trinity of economic policies that were prescribed to countries, particularly in Latin America. This was a “what’s-happening-in-our-backyard” type of arrangement for the United States.

The three pillars of the Washington Consensus were economic stabilization, privatization, and liberalization [my emphasis). Economic stabilization basically meant the central banks have to target inflation and to keep prices stable; privatization meant trying to reduce the footprint of the developmental state in the economy by preventing the state from allocating capital or getting involved in production through state-owned companies or enterprises; and liberalization of international trade meant removing trade barriers, but also liberalization of prices domestically by not using price controls and removing subsidies as much as possible.

This is interpreted as an attempt to change the balance between the state and the market. Of course the states vs. markets framework is a crude description because the state had to construct certain markets. But it is true that the Washington Consensus was a policy paradigm and a political project to kill off the developmental state. In the 1950s and ’60s, the developmental state, under what we describe now as heterodox economic ideas, attempted to design a national development strategy in a context of  deteriorating terms of trade.

For developing nations, the question was, how do we make sure that we will get paid better for our exports than what we have to pay for our inputs? That typically meant industrial upgrading. That typically meant having a good industrial policy. It typically meant having some form of financial repression, which subordinated the domestic banking system to the needs of the industrial policy. It meant some form of a social contract with domestic capital and also with foreign capital, but mostly domestic capital, to make sure that domestic capital worked together with the state for industrial policy purposes.

The Washington Consensus is basically a political project to dismantle this developmental state and instead to bring in the market as the mechanism to allocate resources. The state doesn’t disappear of course. But what we know is that the state that is useful for citizens in a sense disappears because you have an increasing removal of the state from the provision of public goods, one way or another, under the idea that the market can do things better than the state.

In the postwar era, you have the Bretton Woods institutions that are pushing this Washington Consensus all over the world. Wherever the IMF or the World Bank go, they leave a trail of structural adjustment programs. You have the IMF pushing for stability and particular forms of monetary and fiscal austerity under the Washington Consensus. There is an increasing recognition toward the end of the 1990s that this has meant a lost decade for Latin American countries, that it produced a lot of poverty across African countries that were forced to adopt them. Of course there are certain domestic political constituencies that preferred the Washington Consensus rules simply because they align well with the aims of right-wing politics.

By the early 2000s, Bretton Woods institutions become a bit more unwilling to promote the more radical elements of the Washington Consensus. This leads to what is called now the Post–Washington Consensus, which is a recognition that there are market failures. The idea is that if there are market failures, then of course the state is necessary. So you don’t have the resurrection of the developmental state, but you have the resurrection of the state as a regulator that tries to correct market failures but doesn’t allocate capital or doesn’t interfere with market signals. It corrects the signals if those have gone wrong one way or another.

In some ways we still have that now, because all discussions about carbon prices, for example, have to do with how to achieve the low-carbon transition; they rest on the idea that the state doesn’t need to do a lot more than just correct the failure of the market to price the climate crisis.

NDONGO SAMBA SYLLA (who has written a book on the history of CFA – Africa’s last colonial currency):

I am from the generation whose parents suffered the consequences of the IMF and World Bank austerity policies. You could see concrete impacts because many people were fired from their jobs, for example, because one of the ways to implement these structural adjustment policies was for the state to clean up its own budget. That means limiting its spending, and one way to limit the spending is to cut health expenditures and education expenditures and also to get rid of some civil servants.

Reduced state budgets also meant less investment and less open-door immigration policies. That has been the impact. That’s why if you look at the development trajectory of Africa and compare that to Asia, you would see that the most significant difference came after the 1980s. This is because Asian countries were not subject to IMF and World Bank policies in the 1980s and 2000s.

Some countries, for example, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Niger — their real GDP per capita in, say, 2015 was lower than their best level of real GDP per capita before implementing the IMF and World Bank’s policies.

That’s a clear indicator of the failure of these kinds of policies. But their primary aim was to prevent the emergence of the developmental state. There are many things people say about Africa, but the first two decades were developmental decades, despite all the shortcomings and despite the many proxy wars. But the leaders were really committed to creating some development, and you can see that in the work by the African economist Thandika Mkandawire.

On that final note, what is the Wall Street Consensus? (paper by Gabriela Gabor here)

he Wall Street Consensus (WSC) is an elaborate effort to reorganize development interventions around selling development finance to the market. The Billions to Trillions agenda, the World Bank ‘Maximizing Finance for Development’ or the G20 ‘Infrastructure as an Asset Class’ all call on international development institutions and governments of poor countries to ‘escort capital’ – the trillions of institutional investors – into ‘investable development bonds’, preferably in local currency. For this, the 10 WSC commandments aim to simultaneously reorganize local financial systems around bond market-based finance and forge the de-risking state. The state derisks bond finance for institutional investors by extending guarantees and subsidies to cover (i) demand risks attached to user-fees for (PPP) infrastructure, (ii) political risk attached to policies such as nationalization, higher minimum wages and climate regulation, (iii) climate risks that may become part of regulatory frameworks as material credit risks and (iv) bond market (liquidity) risks that complicate foreign investors’ exit from development assets. The WSC narrows the scope for a green developmental state that could design a just transition to low- carbon economies.

2396

Hacking the Networks of Power: How We Became Energy Parasites Counting the Rays of the Sun

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Solarpunk as Pharmakon: Building a New World out of the Ruins of an Old One

2394 – Solar Politics by Oxana Timofeeva (2022)

This book is a philosophical essay on the sun. It draws on Georges Bataille’s theories of the solar economy and solar violence and demonstrates their relevance to a world affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change.

The sun, which, since Antiquity, has played an essential role in our utopian imaginations, is the ultimate source of energy, both productive and destructive. According to Georges Bataille, its infinite generosity can be taken as the model for human societies, which suggests an alternative to the capitalist economy with its infinite expansion, colonization, and disastrous consequences on the cosmic scale.

Taking a step from solar economy to solar politics, Timofeeva locates the grounds for it in solidarity with nature, treated neither as a master nor as a slave, but as a comrade.

Table of contents :
Cover
Series List
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Two Suns and the City
1 Two Kinds of Violence
2 General Economy
3 Restrictive Violence of Capital
Conclusion: The Sun Is a Comrade
Notes

2370 – The Secretive World of Germany’s Super Rich (ZDF report 2023)

Full report (in German) here: https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/zdfzeit/zdfzeit-die-geheime-welt-der-superreichen-100.html?at_medium=Social%20Media&at_campaign=YouTube&at_specific=ZDFheute (available online till 12.12.2028)

Like any other successful capitalist society, Germany sports some of the highest inequality rates in the world (according to the Gini Inequality researchers Julia Friedrichs and Jochen Breyer have also made a documentary for the German ZDF channel – sadly it is not yet available on English translation, but I felt it was important to post about it here to complete the last series of dedicated posts. Currently, as of 2023, Germany has 237 billionaires (China has 969 and US has 691 resident billionaires). This is a really insightful look into the special tax counseling the rich get. A majority of the secretive richie rich refused to be interviewed but a few accepted – so Jochen Breyer goes on their private jets and yachts to get their opinion on several key issues. So even if the others seem especially camera shy, we still get to meet Hans-Peter Wild (majority holder in Wild Flavors – maker of Capri Sun and leading manufacturer of so-called natural flavors for the food industry) and one of the richest people in Switzerland (he left Germany long ago for the Swiss tax and banking heaven). Billionaires are also a highly volatile transnational bunch, so in order to satisfy their tax phobia, states or rather their governments are constantly lowering taxation and establishing special Economic Zones beyond the purview of democratic regulatory means of control.
They also exert incredible influence on policy for a so-called social market state that prides itself on its social welfare programs and democratic values.

I herby have to acknowledge the ever-informative newsletter by economics historian Adam Tooze Chartbook 254 on world macroeconomics. His recently titled Crazy Rich Germans .. . and the hypocrisy of the “social market economy” was just epic, and below is a telling extract for you to chew on.
By the way, Adam Tooze is also the foremost expert on the economy of the Third Reich with such key books as “Statistics and the German state 1900-1945: The making of modern economic knowledge” (2001) and “Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi economy” (2006).

“When it comes to monitoring elite wealth, the sources are much scarcer. Forbes magazine counted 117 individual German billionaires in 2023. But since large wealth is organized in family holdings, it is more meaningful, as Germany’s Manager Magazine does, to count billion-euro “fortunes” (Vermoegen). The Magazine in 2023 counted 226 such fortunes. The list, however, is clearly incomplete. And the magazine has acknowledged that it has been subject to behind-the-scenes legal pressure to omit several notable families.

We know this startling fact thanks to a new surge of public interest in inequality in Germany. German activists are beginning to flex their muscles and unlock the power of expose and muck-raking. Websites like ungleichheit.info do a great job telling the dramatic story of inequality.”

The two richest German families own more wealth than the bottom half of the German population.

The distribution and gender of Germany’s super-rich is also telling. We are talking here about white, manly, and predominantly West German. Statistics and data analytics are always important, even if hard to come by for us mere mortals amongst so much noise – but ZDFs researchers and investigators made it easy just scroll down on the https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/wirtschaft/superreiche-vermoegen-deutschland-100.html?at_medium=Social%20Media&at_campaign=YouTube&at_specific=ZDFheute to the map provided and click to find out where the top 25 Germany’s richest actually live.

And if the data is to be believed, by the 2010s German wealth-holding was more concentrated than in any other European society (!!). In terms of the gini coefficient (Gini ratio= a measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent income inequality, the wealth inequality, or the consumption inequality), Germany is closer to the US (wealth gini 0.81-0.86), than other European countries like France and Italy who have a gini closer to ex-socialist countries like Czech Republic or Poland.

2274 – Adam Tooze: American Power in the Long 20th Century (lecture 2019)

“In 2002 Tooze was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for Modern History for his first book, Statistics and the German State, 1900–1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge.^{[citation needed]} He first came to prominence for his economic study of the Third Reich, The Wages of Destruction, which was one of the winners of the 2006 Wolfson History Prize,^[15] and a broad-based history of the First World War with The Deluge, published in 2014. He then widened his scope to study the financial crash of 2008 and its economic and geopolitical consequences with Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, published in 2018, for which he won the 2019 Lionel Gelber Prize.^[16]

Tooze writes for numerous publications, including the Financial Times,^[17] London Review of Books,^[18] New Left Review,^[19] The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian,^[20] Foreign Policy,^[21] and Die Zeit.^[22] Since 2022 he sits on the board of the ZOE Institute for Future-fit economies.^[23]” (wiki)

More by Adam Tooze on London Review of Books: https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/adam-tooze

From the YT page: The history of American power, as it is commonly written, is a weighty subject, a matter of military and economic heft, of ‘throw-weight’, of resource mobilisation and material culture, of ‘boots on the ground’. In his lecture, Adam Tooze examines an alternative, counterintuitive vision of America, as a power defying gravity. This image gives us a less materialistic, more fantastical and more unstable vision of America’s role in the world.

By subscribing as a non-payed member to Adam Tooze Chartbook substack (I urge the one who can afford it to do it!) – I felt I entered some of deep end-hole of the “Matrix”, a place where stats and economic pieces of news meet policy making and even arts. He is one of the most active internationally (planetarily) “connected” people I know (and I do not mind using this over abused word when it matches). From the current Ukraine War to the so-colled New Cold War, from the Inflation Reduction Act to de-carbonization policies – this is a place to get your information. He is also not one of these usual pundits or experts – isolated and somehow affiliated to an ominous think tank, but a historian specialized on the war economy of Germany and one with a solid Keynsian background. At the same time he is a self confessed liberal Keynesian and not afraid to admit it. He also reads a lot, and follows a LOT of empirical evidence from just about everywhere. He’s also used to track down Marxist takes on the energy crisis – on the instrumentalization of the energy crisis by the fossil fuel industries (in what he calls a “Kaleckian moment” – Kalecki being this Polish left wing Keynesian that anticipated the resistance of the business lobby in thw face of government initiatives for full employment). He’s also challenging a lot of basic assumption – regarding China or the US at this crucial moment. What I like about his approach os the dynamic feeling – almost procesual caracter that is deeply informed but does not give in to settled fact or lazy thinking.

Here is the time to forget all what you thought you knew. We take the American century as being an inevitable outcome, an accomplished fact, from the closure of the West, its golden spike – also called The Last Spike toward the middle of the 19th c – to the disappearance of its native first nations (they are still around and still resisting oppression & depredation!). Well, here is a crash course into why the US as a great power of the 20th c or winner of the Cold War was more of a funambulist act. This is an important lecture to watch to follow because it makes all this triumph, inevitability and causal efficacy of the US as something manufactured, or at best an ad-hoc momentary or emergency issue. Stay with Tooze till the end and u will not regret it. Beside the summary of several other intersting books he quotes (such as Irresistble Empire or Fear Itself), he aims at starts revising (it is a revisionist history in this sense) some of the most cherished notions about America’s place in the world. As one question from the public aptly observed – it is “a great man history” take, and this feels a bit regressive to focus on a central banker, and a US central banker at that (Timothy Franz Geithner), but Geithner is somehow less known than Rubin, Alan Greenspan or Larry Summers. The financial history books of the late 20th feels they somehow missed how Geithner has “defied gravity” or why he put it in these terms. Globalization did not start with the late 40s after-war institutions highlighted by the extrordinary biographic book on the life of Maynard Keyenes (the so-called Washington Consensus at the Bretton Woods Conference) in earnest – but only in the 1990s. What he makes clear is that the Cold War was very nearly becoming hot during the 1980s and the war games of the Able Archer 1983 NATO exercise. There are longer histories here than the complacent aberration of the Trump event might suggest – and Tooze speaks about how the Marshall Plan, the Bretton Woods and the New Deal was built on a very peculiar coalition: Northern liberals, progressives, labor and the Solid South. Even the very notion of Manifest Destiny makes things less settled or anchored in reality or certitude. That is precisely the vote that has shifted to the Republicans. He has for lack of a better word – a dialectical view on the US, and he is more interested not in the Global New Order or the 800 US military bases around the world but in the new generation of ordering efforts by the US ruling elites. An order that somehow flies in the sense of common sense or even the gravitational pull of such players like China (who in one mentioned graph is supposed to have poured more concrete btw 2010 and 2013 than the whole of the US in the 20th c!).

2234 – Soviet Cybernetics and the Promise of Big Computer Socialism (podcast 2023)

Soviet Cybernetics and the Promise of Big Computer Socialism

“Amelia, Djamil, Christian, and Rudy join for a discussion on the history of Soviet Cybernetics and the use of computers for socialist planning. We discuss the origins of Cybernetics, its role as a reform movement in the sciences, and why cybernetics became attractive to the Soviet academy in the 50s, before moving to the biographies and projects of Anatoly Kitov and Viktor Glushkov. We reflect on the failures of OGAS, and what could have been done better, as well as its positive legacy and finish by discussing the ways in which cybernetics was kept alive until the collapse of the USSR and the remaining possibilities for computerized planning.”

References:
B. Peters – How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet
L. Graham –Science, Philosophy and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union
S. Gerontovich –InterNyet: Why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network
S. Gerontovich – From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics
O. V. Kitova & V. A. Kitov – Anatoly Kitov and Victor Glushkov: Pioneers of Russian Digital Economy and Informatics
V. Pikhorovich –Glushkov and His Ideas: Cybernetics of the Future
Y. Revich –The Story of How the USSR Did Not Need the Pioneer of Cybernetics
D. West –Cybernetics for the command economy: Foregrounding entropy in late Soviet planning 

I will not comment on this since it speaks for itself – it is one of the most interesting and stimulating discussions I have listened to lately. It touches on a variety of topics from a variety of perspectives without closing down this huge discussion. Instead of basically labeling it as failed or as just empty words (from Cyberspeak to Newspeak), it is important to see where cybernetic thinking left traces and how it moved away from its initial lofty goals. Should be listened to together with the podcast on Allende’s Cybersyn experiment. I have been also recently going back over my small collection of cybernetics and system theory book because I considered them to be a missing link in this history.