Fire and spark

Image: Gonzalo Mendiola
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By DYLAN RILEY*

One of the small dialectical pleasures still accessible to unincorporated intelligences is to observe, at this moment, how much capitalists hate capitalism, with all its inviolable laws and contradictions.

Throughout the 2010s, Larry Summers repeatedly insisted that the laws of technological progress had neutralized the problem of overinvestment. As his supposed inspiration, he cited Hansen's idea that companies were burdened with enormous fixed investments, unable to dispose of their assets, and thus, in the long run, mired in the morass of stagnation.

Now, as Larry Summers’s fairy tale went, smartphones, apps, Zoom calls, and office space rented by the hour had changed that equation so that a law practice could be run from one’s basement. In this perfect and paradoxical inversion of Hansen’s original formula, the secular stagnation of the contemporary period was due to the fact that starting a business was so easy and required so little capital. Capital wasn’t tied up; it had simply become unnecessary.

Oh, how a few years can make a difference. When DeepSeek wiped $600 billion off Nvidia’s market capitalization, it sent a signal that the AI ​​giants—all those data centers and chips they’d acquired at great cost—were in danger of losing their value. If only Silicon Valley’s lords had read Albert Aftalion, who compared the pace of investment to people piling logs on a fire in a cold room until, suddenly, they turn the room into a sweltering sauna. The only solution? Run for the exits—that is, reduce their investments and defend the value of what they already have.

But no, they had never encountered, or understood, or if they did then forgotten, the Frenchman’s metaphor. And so they simply resorted to xenophobia. The Chinese, they insisted, could not possibly be as “creative” as the Californians. Their technology was bogus; their tests were fraudulent; they had been favored by their government, whose propaganda they helped to disseminate. (Presumably they hoped no one would probe too deeply into their own compromised position on this score.)

One of the small dialectical pleasures still accessible to unincorporated intelligences is to observe, at this moment, how much the capitalists hate capitalism, with all its inviolable laws and contradictions. And so, in yet another demonstration of the non-linearity of relevance, we return once again to Mr. Ulyanov, with his talk about the higher stages and the transmutation of the economic struggle into a directly political struggle; we await the spark, dear comrade, we await the spark!

*Dylan Riley is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Author, among other books, of Microverses: Observations from a Shattered Present (To).

Translation: Julio Tude d'Avila.

Originally posted on the blog Sidecar, New Left Review.


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