Wall Street warriors

Michael Lewis, known for his insightful books on the culture and moral ecology of Wall Street, does something unusual in his new Wall Street chronicle, The Flash Boys: traces the emergence of ethics and fairness in an otherwise corrupt culture of high frequency trading.

The central figure of the book is Brad Katsuyama, who observes that the market does not work fairly for everybody as they are supposed to. Many traders have made this observation but have played along with the discrepancies primarily because their goal is to make money; what is fuzzy and is incidental to the task of making money is mostly left alone by Wall Street folks.

But Katsuyama and his ilk wear separate stripes; as Wall Street insiders they are not simply in it for the immediate financial gratification. They would like to know the big idea on which the trading culture fundamentally rests.

The big idea isn't, however, as Katsuyama finds, not an idea enshrined in the principles of fairness or justice. In his quest for the knowledge of Wall Street's underpinning, Katsuyama is joined by Ronan Ryan, a specialist in studying how electronic signals are transmitted in telecommunications, and John Schwall, who buries himself in the library obsessed with finding out the modalities of a specific kind of stock-rigging called "front running."

The trio, through pooling their interdisciplinary skills and interests, discovered that the market is severely rigged. But unlike those who would keep this knowledge a secret so as to profit from it, the three men decided to set up an alternative stock market that was immune to the kind of rigging the real stock market is vulnerable to.

What sets Katsuyama, Ryan and Schwall apart from the usual trader is their pursuit of knowledge over the acquisition of mere information; the pleasure of satisfying their curiosity triumphed the pleasure of making money. 

The fabulous thing about Capitalism, as argued by David Brooks, is that it rewards in the long run, those who pursue knowledge, or the "skull beneath the skin," as it were, over those who only would be contented to scratch the skin for whatever money they can make in the short run.

There is a moral power in which the kernel of Capitalism and the market is wrapped up, says Brooks, and those who catch on to the moral power are those who are the true champions of Capitalism.

A paradox of Capitalism

Is the rise of what Jeremy Rifkin, calls a post-market economy, an economy that has near-zero cost of production and its driving paradigm is the "Internet of Things."

I'm yet to wrap my brain around the concept of the Internet of things, but have a blurb on the book's content here:

The capitalist era is passing - not quickly, but inevitably. Rising in its wake is a new global collaborative Commons that will fundamentally transform our way of life. Ironically, capitalism's demise is not coming at the hands of hostile external forces. Rather, The Zero Marginal Cost Society argues, capitalism is a victim of its own success. Intense competition across sectors of the economy is forcing the introduction of ever newer technologies. Bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin explains that this competition is boosting productivity to its optimal point where the marginal cost of producing additional units is nearly zero, which makes the product essentially free.
In turn, profits are drying up, property ownership is becoming meaningless, and an economy based on scarcity is giving way to an economy of abundance, changing the very nature of society. Rifkin describes how hundreds of millions of people are already transferring parts of their economic lives from capitalist markets to global networked Commons.
"Prosumers" are producing their own information, entertainment, green energy, and 3-D printed products at nearly zero marginal cost, and sharing them via social media sites, rentals, redistribution clubs, bartering networks, and cooperatives. Meanwhile, students are enrolling in massive open online courses (MOOCs) that also operate at near-zero marginal cost. And young social entrepreneurs are establishing ecologically sensitive businesses, crowdsourcing capital, and even creating alternative currencies in the new sharable economy.
As a result, "exchange value" in the marketplace - long the bedrock of our economy - is increasingly being replaced by "use value" on the collaborative Commons. In this new era, identity is less bound to what one owns and more to what one shares. Cooperation replaces self-interest, access trumps ownership, and networking drubs autonomy. Rifkin concludes that while capitalism will be with us for at least the next half century, albeit in an increasingly diminished role, it will no longer be the dominant paradigm. We are, Rifkin says, entering a world beyond markets where we are learning how to live together collaboratively and sustainably in an increasingly interdependent global Commons.

Rifkins writes about the shared commons here.

Das Kapital

Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story.

Pirates of global capitalism

British filmmaker Paul Greengrass's movie, Captain Phillips, has been marked by film critics, including Manhola Darghis, as a story of "global capitalism" more than as a story of a virtuous captain attacked by villainous Somali darkies.

It's the forces of global capitalism that make outlaws out of the Somalis and the American Captain Phillips, a temporary hostage. Both are pawns in a "warfare" that's impossible to define in terms of a conventional warfare, but one can tell that the Somalis are emaciated, underfed, yet armed with stolen automatic weapons, and are interested in laying their hands on a jackpot of food that is ironically on its way to Somalia. The pirates have no affiliation with a nation; they want to seize this opportunity to pull off a heist.

The forces that bring the Somalis and Captain Phillips, who has roots in white and liberal Vermont, in the same space, need to be talked about, hints reviewer Darghis.

The bringing together of such disparate members of the global community also raises a poignant question of responsibility: In what ways, big or small, direct or indirect, are the likes of Captain Phillips responsible for the famine and war in Somalia?

I am reminded of Teju Cole's call for "constellational thinking" in order to respond to the question of responsibility. To understand Captain Phillips' role the dots in the landscape of global capitalism, of which the fugitive Somalis and the white liberal Phillips are residents, have to be connected.

The U.S. Marine rescues the ship and its crew members as we all know from the incident and Darghis says how the film ends with no David in sight, only Goliaths, meaning the muscular security men who are the keepers of the new world order.

Yet globalization had once upon a time promised the emergence of a multipolar world. The title of the film omits naming any one of the pirates as agents of the primary action, but that is to be expected; the world of Western entertainment media is largely unipolar. But Greengrass has made some room for the pirates in the movie, and humanized them somewhat.

As I understand, global capitalism has created a world of enormous economic disparities and the doors to opportunities of participation in the economy of global capitalism has gotten smaller and smaller. The Somali pirates in no way can lay hands on material resources by following the law. Captain Phillips alone makes twice the amount as a merchant navy captain, as a messenger, that is, than all of the Somalis who invade the ship taken together in a year.

Greengrass has globalized the book A Captain's Duty, in which Captain Richard Phillips gives an account of the Maersk Alabama saga.

Time after time

Anand Patwardhan and Simanthini Dhuru's 1995 documentary, A Narmada Diary, takes a fascinating look at forms of tribal resistance against mass-scale industrialization.

The object of tribal ire in the film is the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the river Narmada, a project that displaced thousands and stole traditional means of livelihood.

London's Tate Modern recently held a retrospective of Patwardhan's socially conscious films. It says the following of A Narmada Diary:

The opening and closing ‘entries’ in the Diary are symmetrical; official government documentary footage extolling the irresistible benefits of a hydro-engineered and electrified rural future (‘Speed and Technology’) is counterposed to images of the seemingly timeless harvest festival of Holi, celebrated in March 1994 at the village of Domkheri, threatened with imminent submergence by the rising headwaters of the dam. Linear, progressive, industrial time confronts cyclical, ritual, agrarian time. But in their closing reprise of the traditional ceremony, Patwardhan and co-director Simantini Dhuru let us see what we can now more fully understand: the body-painted, head-dressed adivasi dancers confront and burn their demons, singling out the newest, greatest malignity of all, the Sardar Sarovar dam itself. Their ritual dance is a configuration of actuality, of living collective experience, open to history. Resistance has been integrated, innovatively, into the everyday activity, language and rites of the people of this region – overwhelmingly adivasis, long scorned as ‘tribals’, are descendants of the pre Aryan, aboriginal inhabitants of India.

What interests me is the kernel of the film--the collision of two temporal paradigms. Truly, as the blurb above reminds us, "industrial" or technological time has, with the help of all the apparatus of capitalism and industrialization, gained immeasurable advantage over the other time, illogically defamed as anachronistic. Yet, as the tribal resistance demonstrates, time's "other" isn't unworldly at all; rather, it is infused with elements of real, day-to-day living.

Robbing the Paris Hiltons: New form of commodity fetishizm

What's common to the following movies?

1. Baz Luhrmann's, The Great Gatsby (2013)

2. Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers (2013)

3. Sophia Coppola's Bling Ring (2013)

4. Michael Bay's Pain & Gain (2013)

It's commodity fetishizm, says, film critic A.O. Scott, and many will agree with him:

Sex isn't hot anymore, lust for goods is:

The real objects of lust in contemporary cinema are not bodies but, well, objects — in particular the luxury brands that form the lingua franca of popular culture from hip-hop to reality television to the pages of Vogue.

It's just that in almost all of these movies, the commodities aren't bought, but stolen. Therein lies the thrill of the new era's commodity fetishizm: to suffer a sense of entitlement, where another's luxury goods is yours by birth right, so why not appropriate them by force?

The watches and the shirts that are at the center of the universe of capitalism

It's the Rolex.

Few can possess it, but almost everybody ought to desire one in her lifetime.

The Rolex featured recently in an episode (I watched a rerun) of the television serial The Big Bang Theory.

Bernadette, having got a job finding the magic pill for yeast infection, in the R & D department of a big pharmaceutical company, gifts a Rolex to her fiance, Howie. Howie is wonderstruck with the object yet a feeling of envy sneaks in. 

The Rolex corrupts his relation with "Bernie" momentarily with a power complex: Will Bernie now become the "man" of the family?

Switching to reality, two of the bank robbers (a pair of Dominicans from Yonkers, New York) who were involved in the biggest bank heist in human history (it was a cyber-heist), photographed themselves with piles of Rolexes after they stole their share and went on a luxury goods buying-spree in New York City.

These two under-enlightened loafers were merely using the commodity as a thing possessed, something akin in their minds to the classy female "pussy," is my guess.

When the commodity is fetishized by those who have no previous context to attach the commodity to, then it's all vulgarly phallic. But fetishized, it is.

Rolex, as I understand, is more than a watch; according to Karl Marx, it's a commodity, that transcends its use-value and acquires magical, near-theological value.

When inanimate things acquire godly powers, then they become commodities, and just as primitive societies worshipped or fetishized objects, so we, dwellers of modern, scientific, times, fetishize commodities. Yet, the act of fetishizing doesn't regress us into the status of "primitives." The more we worship objects, provided these objects are not mere barks of enchanted trees, or the aroma of monkey-brains, preserved in a jar, the more modern and properly civilized we are regarded as.

That is the precise point of Australian director Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, as film critic A.O. Scott, so finely tells us in his discussion of the rising tide of commodity fetishizm in contemporary American movies.

In the novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald was ambivalent about the erotic life of objects, which is a foundation of materialism, excess and greed. That's why Fitzgerald's Gatsby, though he had a life of material excess, is punished with an unattended funeral. Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, the salesman who pined for making it better and bigger every single day of his life, was similarly punished with a thinly attended funeral.

When nobody shows up when you're dead, then it's a sign that nobody cared for you when you were alive.

However, the ambivalence toward the material life is removed from the latest film version of Gatsby.

The Rolex-centered universe is in full panoply through the 3D machinery in Luhrmann's movie. Additionally, and more fascinatingly, the aura of the rolex spreads to shirts. Gatsby enchants both Nick Carraway and Daisy with his collection of the world's "most beautiful" shirts, so beautiful that Daisy cries upon beholding and touching and feeling them.

Sometimes, it's said that Daisy is sexually aroused by the beauty of Gatsby's shirts, and the emotions transfer over onto the collector of those shirts.

I decided to take a look at the famous "shirt scene" from an earlier Great Gatsby (starring Robert Redford as Jay), since the new Gatsby has this scene in 3D and the idea is to enable the audience "feel" the shirts as well, in full, three-dimensional splendor.

Here is the scene:

Daisy is caressing the shirts; in the new Gatsby, she bursts into tears, sobbing into the thick folds of the clothing and saying, "It makes me sad, because I haven't seen such, such beautiful shirts."

A.O. Scott writes that in the novel perhaps the reader could attribute Daisy's tears to other causes as well. And they would be right in their attribution. But in Baz Luhrmann's film, one has no reason not to take Daisy at her word:

One of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s points is that "beautiful things in abundance can produce a powerful aesthetic response, akin to the sublime. And the sublimity of stuff, of shirts and cars and Champagne flutes and everything else that money can buy, is surely what drives Baz Luhrmann's wildly extravagant adaptation of Gatsby."

Commodity fetishizm, in other words, is at the center of the film.

Joni Mitchell

"There must be more to living and a lawn to mow" is a song that can open doors to conversations about symbolic thinking: How we talk, often too uncritically, about money as the operative symbol in our lives.

Fragmenting Marx

Karl Marx, misunderstood in America, as the founder of Communism, is the bette noire of Capitalism.

Yet Marxian observations free-float everywhere in such fragmented forms that often they cannot be traced back to the originator.

The Marxian idiom, "All that is solid melts...all that is sacred is profaned...", like Mona Lisa, continues to be wrenched from its context and used to explain things that have little to do with the process of history.

Author Flannery O' Connor had said something like "in capitalism everything that rises must converge."

In his observation on the direction that the Bronx-born hip-hop has taken in recent times, Brent Staples co opts Marx via O'Connor to explain that operating within the ideology of capitalism, hip-hop has now converged with pop thereby losing its edginess.