Downtown death spiral, doubting the Marshall Plan, Foucault on the mesh of power & the summer of theory

Great links, reading and images from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze

From: Artavazd Pelechian The end 1992

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The Real Estate Nightmare Unfolding in Downtown St. Louis

The office district is empty, with boarded up towers, copper thieves and failing retail—even the Panera outlet shut down. The city is desperately trying to reverse the ‘doom loop.’

The Railway Exchange Building was the heart of downtown St. Louis for a century. Every day, locals crowded into the sprawling, ornate 21-story office building to go to work, shop at the department store that filled its lower floors or dine on the famous French onion soup at its restaurant. Today, the building sits empty, with many of its windows boarded up. A fire broke out last year, which authorities suspect was the work of copper thieves. Police and firefighters send in occasional raids to search for missing people or to roust squatters. A search dog died during one of the raids last year when it fell through an open window. “It’s a very dangerous place,” said Dennis Jenkerson, the St. Louis Fire Department chief. It anchors a neighborhood with deserted sidewalks sprinkled with broken glass and tiny pieces of copper pipes left behind by scavengers. Signs suggest visitors should “park in well-lit areas.” Nearby, the city’s largest office building—the 44-story AT&T Tower, recently sold for around $3.5 million, a sliver of the $205 million it sold for in 2006. Its value has been falling for years.

Source: WSJ

How many US financial assets does China hold? No one knows better than Brad Setser

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Singapore sovereign wealth fund Temasek Eyes Rich Family Businesses in $18 Billion Europe Push

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Macroeconomic data suggest … that the fabled Marshall Plan may not actually have been the key to Europe’s Reconstruction after World War II.

This lack of net capital inflows into Europe is surprising. First, given the war’s destruction to Europe’s manufacturing base, we would have expected Europe to import large amounts of manufacturing goods primarily from the U.S., since the region likely would not have been able to manufacture enough goods needed to meet the demands of reconstruction. Second, the aid pledged to Europe in the Marshall Plan—about $13 billion, or $138 billion in 2019 dollars—combined with the financing from the IBRD would have left Europe with sufficient funding for these manufactured goods. The results would be high imports and trade deficits. But net capital flows were not negative during the 10 years following the end of the war. Together this suggests that the Marshall Plan and IBRD lending played a smaller role in European reconstruction than what has been commonly believed. Instead, Europe was primarily responsible for rebuilding its own economy.

Source: July 01, 2021  Paulina Restrepo-Echavarría Brian Reinbold St Louis Fed

China’s giant R&D push

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From We (Artavazd Peleshian, 1969) https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2017/soviet-cinema/we/

Michel Foucault, The Mesh of Power (1976) Translated by Christopher Chitty

First, what we may find in the second volume of Capital is that one power does not exist, but many powers.⁶ Powers, this means forms of domination, forms of subjugation that function locally, for example in the workshop, in the army, on a slave plantation or where there are subservient relations. These are all local and regional forms of power, which have their own mode of functioning, their own procedure and technique. All these forms of power are heterogeneous. We may not, therefore, speak of power if we wish to construct an analysis of power, but we must speak of powers and attempt to localize them in their historic and geographic specificity.

A society is not a unitary body, in which one and only one power is exercised. Society is in reality the juxtaposition, the link, the coordination and also the hierarchy of different powers that nevertheless remain in their specificity. Marx places great emphasis, for example, on the simultaneously specific and relatively autonomous – in some sense impervious – character of the de facto power the boss exercises in a workshop, compared to the juridical kind of power that exists in the rest of society. Thus, the existence of regions of power. Society is an archipelago of different powers.

Second, it appears that these powers cannot and must not simply be understood as the derivation, the consequence of some kind of overriding power that would be primary. The schema of the jurists, whether those of Grotius, Pufendorf, or Rousseau, amounts to saying: “In the beginning, there was no society, and then society appeared when a central point of sovereignty appeared to organize the social body, which then permitted a whole series of local and regional powers”; implicitly, Marx does not recognize this schema. He shows, on the contrary, how, starting from the initial and primitive existence of these small regions of power – like property, slavery, workshop, and also the army – little by little, the great State apparatuses were able to form. State unity is basically secondary in relation to these regional and specific powers; these latter come first.

Third, these specific regional powers have absolutely no ancient [primordial] function of prohibiting, preventing, saying “you must not.” The original, essential and permanent function of these local and regional powers is, in reality, being producers of the efficiency and skill of the producers of a product.

Finally, the fourth important idea: these mechanisms of power, these procedures of power, it’s necessary to regard them as techniques, which is to say as procedures that were invented, perfected, that were unceasingly developed. There is a veritable technology of power, or better still, of powers, which have their own history. Here, once again, we can easily find between the lines of the second volume of Capital an analysis, or at least the outline of an analysis, which would be the history of the technology of power, such as it was exercised in the workhouses and factories. I will therefore follow these essential indications and I will attempt, with regard to sexuality, not to conceive of power from the juridical point of view, but from the technological.

It appears to me, in fact, that if we analyze power by privileging the State apparatus, if we analyze power by regarding it as a mechanism of preservation, if we regard power as a juridical superstructure, we will basically do no more than take up the classical theme of bourgeois thought, for it essentially conceives of power as a juridical fact. To privilege the State apparatus, the function of preservation, the juridical superstructure, is, basically, to “Rousseauify” Marx. It reinscribes Marx in the bourgeois and juridical theory of power. It is not surprising that this supposedly Marxist conception of power as State apparatus, as instance of preservation, as juridical superstructure, is essentially found in European Social Democracy of the end of the 19th century, when the problem was precisely that of knowing how to make Marx work inside a juridical system, which was that of the bourgeoisie. So, what I would like to do, in taking up what can be found in the second volume of Capital, and in moving away from all that was added, rewritten afterwards on the privileges of the State apparatus, power’s function of reproduction, the characteristics of the juridical superstructure, is to attempt to see how it is possible to do a history of powers in the West, and essentially of powers inasmuch as they are invested in sexuality.

Source: Viewpoint Magazine

“Reading Foucault is a drug”

The Summer of Theory: History of a Rebellion, 1960–1990
Philipp Felsch, translated by Tony Crawford
Polity Press, $30 (cloth)

The Long Summer of Theory
directed by Irene von Alberti
Filmgalerie 451

Reviewed by Peter Gordon in the Boston Review

When Gente met another woman, Heidi Paris, his first wife Lowien left the press (though it would retain her first name). Paris, younger and more venturesome in her interests, embodied the spirit of May 1968. Like many students of the time, she found Marxism sclerotic, a rigid system that inhibited the creative powers of the libido and the arts, and it was partly under her direction that the press began to read and publish works in translation by French authors such as Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. Felsch assigns great importance to the activity of reading. Neither Gente nor Paris had the ambition to become theorists themselves; reading, they felt, was already a transformative practice. “Reading Foucault is a drug,” Paris said, “a head rush. He writes like the devil.” In 1976 she and Gente convened a reading group to make their way slowly through Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, one of the more challenging texts in the new wave of French philosophy. The task took them five years.

Source: Boston Review

Source: Avazd Pelechian – Zemlja Ljudelj aka The Land of the People (1966)

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