Loyalists: Anglo-American Anti-intellectuals

The maintenance of a close connection between the embourgifying British aristocracy and the mid-19th century men of arts and letters in Britain "was seen by the Russian Communist Dimitri Mirsky as implying that 'the intellectuals made no attempt to think independently of their class, but rather were proud of belonging to it. In short, there were no intellectuals.'...It seems broadly true that, to a far greater extent than was true in France or Germany, not to mention Russia, in Britain mid-Victorian cultural figures tended to be literary or scientific, thus strictly speaking falling outside the sort of intellectual category necessary for a truly hegemonic politics. Moreover, even as they remained closely tied to the ruling class, which was for the great majority their class of origin, they did not, like traditional intellectuals, form a separate social category with an independent institutional structure of its own." Desai 1994: 44.

Here Desai is discussing how the aristocratic-based and aristocratic-values-proliferating British Romantic literary movement quickly eviscerated the middle class Utilitarian program for universal social change. "The dominant cultural tendency became a sort of unsystematic, self-consciously untheoretical, romantic conservatism, opposed to rationalism, to grand theory, and above all to Benthamite ideas: 'For the next hundred years, every poet, novelist and philosopher knew how to do at least one thing: to refute and deride Utilitarianism.'" (Desai 1994: 42) Even today we knee-jerk dismiss Bentham's program--indeed any progressive social change vision and program--as ipso facto tyrannical (Foucauldians and anti-communists coalesce to keep this alive.), which was the Romantics' dogma. Significance:

1) Britain's bourgeois class did not produce an adequate effort at envisioning social change. You could see this as the exceptional British institutional capacity to repress revolt, or you could hypothesize: Bentham's program was in fact not worthy of pursuing--Perhaps because, with the middle class Benthamite revolutionary aspirations, there was not sufficient coalition and interchange with the working class. The convergence, in exceptional Britain, was always already between the aristocrats and the bourgeoisie. The working class and peasantry were totally shut out, except to the extent that they could be romanced by the aristocrat-dominated vision of land-based freedom.

2) As opposed to the English department consensus and the general postmodern consensus, Desai, following Anderson and Gramsci, is emphasizing that literary producers (and scientists as well--see Oppenheimer's eye-opening, frustrated efforts at becoming a public intellectual) do not have the institutional and identity independence to form a properly-independent intellectual class capable of a) co-opting some elites to the cause of revolution, and b) significantly challenging hegemony.
The relationship between the Victorian literary establishment and political-economic elites was incestuous. English reform is what the US Civil Rights Movement would have been with Kathryn Stockett ("The Help") at the helm, instead of MLK, the women bridge leaders, and Malcolm X.

Yet we have a tendency, in Anglo-american societies, to imagine, quite conservatively, that literature--not intellectual schools that break with the dominant class' interest, coalesce with the exploited class, and foster action -- is all the social imagination we need or normatively should produce. We have seen pure middle class Bentham, and didn't like it, and that's all we need to know--It's back to conservatism (freedom for a few, enthrallment for most) for us!

3) I'm sure quite shockingly, it is never the case that elite opposition to rationalism or grand theory translates into beautiful anarchy. Coleridge's conservative, Durkheimian policy suggestion for governance: A "clerisy" institution, composed of nationalist "cultivated men," "a morally and religiously sound clergy and aristocracy to serve as a cultural elite that would restore the community of England" (Coleridge).

This Explains A Lot: The Credible Threat of Capital Strike

“In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; 

but the necessity is not so immediate.” 

Adam Smith, 1776. Wealth of Nations, Book 1 Chapter 8.

Youth + Twitter + Celebrities

Social mobilization methodology used by Invisible Children.
Ingredients: Emotion-manipulable/Information-lite Youth -> Twitter -> celebrities.

Can this technique be modified for actual progressive organizations,
instead of one pushing the further militarization of colonized Africa?

US Police State

"The federal government has appropriated about $635 billion, accounting for inflation, for homeland security-related activities and equipment since the 9/11 attacks. To conclude, though, that “the police” have become increasingly militarized casts too narrow a net. The truth is that virtually the entire apparatus of government has been mobilized and militarized right down to the university campus." --Stephan Salisbury, "How to fund an American police state."

Why the Small Private Retail Business Model is Irrational, Costly and Inefficient

In this post, I explain why the small private retail business model is socially irrational, and discuss two alternatives--big box monopolies and social enterprises.

Doug Henwood's "Small is Not Beautiful."

However, keep in mind throughout this discussion:
A study of American communities with and without big box stores finds that communities with big box stores are unhealthier. This coincides with studies that find that communities are healthier and more affordable where commercial goods are within walking distance. Furthermore, Food & Water Watch points out that the way that big boxes operate ipso facto drives unsustainable economic and human-nature relationships. (See also Varoufakis' "Handmaidens" discussion in The Global Minotaur.)

Make no mistake: The point I am making here is NOT an argument in favor of Walmartization, both engine and beneficiary of today's austerity crisis. Rather I am making a Power Resources argument-- Small businesses should not be fetishized or coddled in public policy to the extent that we ignore their impact on labor conditions, because labor conditions have multifold economic, political, environmental and social reverberations. 

As a counterpoint, John Restakis pointed out in his study of Emilia Romagna, the low-inequality, full employment cooperative economy "allows small and medium firms to compete globally through the use of co-operation as an industrial strategy." But if small businesses are allowed to proliferate junk jobs, then Walmarts stand at the wings, ready to swoop in and take advantage of primed degraded labor, while offering the lower prices that degraded labor depends on.

A Robust Regional Economic Strategy, 
for Deployment Outside Global Financial Centers and Oil Kingdoms

The better model is a combination of Swedish economic development policy under Social Democratic Party rule and Emilia Romagna and Basque policy that allows cooperatives to flourish together. The upshot is that healthy, efficient, humane economic policy fosters neighborhood-based cooperatives, linked by a regional producers' and consumers' cooperative network capable of exerting aggregate buying power and issuing loans.

Social democratic Swedish policy focused on fostering economic efficiency and innovation while maximizing labor, reproductive, and environmental conditions. Whereas with cooperative networks, the Emilia Romagna and Basque regions have focused on solving Peter Evans' "Embedded Autonomy" problem-- securing a bond between state-fostered, economically-powerful organizations and local and regional economic, social, health and environmental welfare.

But as (Restakis' study implies while) I emphasize in my study of Swedish social democracy, the robustness of the alternative economy depends upon the maintenance of a socialist backbone. Rip out or chip out the socialist nervous and skeletal substructure, and you'll look up to find that capital has harvested the alternative economic institutions like a juicy, de-spined bag of well-fed organs, and all that's left is a pool of blood. That's exploitation, and that's the name of the capitalist game. So if you want a thriving economy anywhere outside the global urban centers of finance and their good ol' boy partners in the oil kingdoms, don't throw your communists into the dungeon. They are the only ones who can remember--past the blandishments, the teaser offers, the marginalist revolutions, and all the shiny, shiny marketing--what is going on in capitalism.

Two of the worst errors are to believe 1) the marketing that a political-economic strategy that works in global urban financial centers and oil kingdoms works elsewhere, or that all regions can competitively pursue the same economic strategy, and 2) that a value-accumulating strategy that creates economic dynamism at one point in history will continue to do so as the relations it exploits deplete and age (as its contradictions play out). We tend to follow common, well-advertised, well-funded patterns. We are thus limited creatures, intellectually; it is important to our flourishing to compensate by not crushing what critical intellectuals we have.

...

So why aren't small businesses the automatic answer to our environmental, health and economic problems?

Characteristic social, health and environmental costs of excessive economic dependence on small private retail businesses:

Why the small-business model is socially irrational

1. It is a ready contributor to unhealthy social inequality. The model, if all works out ideally, is to have the business owner make a middle to upper-middle class income, while the majority of people, employees, struggle by on poverty wages that keep these workers in crippling crises and so tax the community and the state.
2. The small retail business model creates political pressure to use social policy (including unemployment) as well as culture to keep people undereducated, dispossessed, disenfranchised, desperate, and vulnerable, in order to maintain a full stock of vulnerable, disposable labour at the disposal of small businessmen. 
3. Inequality creates an alienated, adversarial culture, breaking down community solidarity, reducing social and cultural capital, leading to declining capacity to innovate and deal with problems.
4. Social inequality causes chronic stress in humans, promoting chronic-stress related diseases, and taxing the health care system.
5. With increased pressure to demonstrate one's place among the elect, social inequality causes asset price inflation, and encourages speculation.
6. The model undermines necessary social goods and services funding and provision. With inequality, the affluent seek, and have the power to hoard and to withdraw from contributing to the important, public goods and services that less-affluent people cannot afford individually, such as education, health care, holidays, clean air and water, pensions and transportation, inter alia. This hoarding makes resources illiquid, and reduces investment and economic development.
7. The model mars and clutters the landscape, eats up arable land, poisons potable water and plugs up wetlands with acres of sprawling, ugly, cheap, utilitarian yet garish stripmalls, parking tarmac and miles of tar roads. Small businesses are politically coordinated by the Chamber of Commerce to feed the bankers' and developers' Growth Machine, constantly chasing and consuming cheaper land, forcing consumers and workers to drive and live ever further apart so that their incomes are increasingly consumed in transportation and other new infrastructure costs. The Growth Machine mass-murders species by consuming their habitat as well as obliterating ecological services, and it chokes political offices with graft and corrupt, Little King good ol' boys to enforce and reap the sprawl order.
8. The roads and infrastructure required to serve sprawl are expensive to build and maintain.
9. This sprawl forces environmentally-poisonous, politically-corrupting community dependence on oil industry, the automotive industry, road construction, and the military industry required to secure oil.
10. This confines people to cars and creates car culture path dependency, for example proliferating  fast food drive-in consumption, facilitating reduced leisure time standards and assaulting human health, which taxes the health care system.
11. The small private business model discourages entrepreneurial innovation. Because it is difficult to eke out a living as a small businessman, owners cleave to the tried and true: promulgating chain franchises that do not innovate in response to local needs so much as seduce and force local consumers to adapt to the procrustean bed of standardization.
12. The model saddles consumers with expensive, poor quality goods, or at best very expensive, medium-quality goods. Small private retail businesses have comparably poor supply chains, especially in regions which do not have a large enough domestic market to bring sufficient market power to trade negotiations.
13. For this reason, the small private business model funnels local income to corporate cities abroad. This is also true in the case of real estate bubble collusion by local banker-real estate agent collaborations. The beneficiaries of real estate bubbles are primarily global cities' FIRE firms.
14. Where owning confers a monopoly on entitlements, working becomes stigmatized. This fosters an alienated "lotto mentality" culture, in which people at odds with each other wait to win freedom and hope that a supernatural force shows them to be exceptional. 
15. As working becomes stigmatized and owning apotheosized, the small private business model creates path dependency--preventing the improvement of working conditions, instigating the degradation of work, building an ideology of  entitlement to exploiting other people and nature, and weighting society with the burden of an overbuilt law-and-order machine enforcing excessive economic and political inequality order.
16. In this way, the small business model creates the vulnerable, exploitable conditions for monopoly firms to move in and take over the retail landscape, as per the Walmart model.

 There are small businesses which provide exceptions to the social costs of the private small-business model, businesses which are credits to the community. Craft skills can be rationally incorporated in competitive small private businesses to social benefit. Also, even socially-irrational small private  businesses may make some contributions to the community, though these contributions may not outweigh the social costs of the business. I do not argue that there should be no small businesses.

But neither do I argue, as some do, that small private businesses' defects imply that they should be entitled to increased social support. Instead I argue that it is socially irrational, for the many reasons cited above, to pursue economic growth through an indiscriminate emphasis on promoting small private business with policy incentives. We must have a nuanced understanding of which kinds of small businesses are aggregately beneficial in particular environments (which change over time). And we need to keep in view--What are the more socially-rational economic and human development alternatives? Can we craft and deploy incentives to build an economic base that can unambiguously build up the social good, ensuring developmental working conditions, rather than entitling exploitation?

Small businesses have to be evaluated by a metric designed to weed out the above adumbrated problems.  Permits, loans, certification and credentialing, awards, support and taxation for and on small businesses need to determine whether the small business is rational to the extent that they proliferate craft skills and design ideas networks, minimize junk jobs and environmental harm, and maximize neighborhood livability and walkability. Could these goals be better served with another form of goods or services delivery (social economy co-operative, big box, state, and/or charity)? Small businesses should be housed on neighborhood corners, from residences, or in neighborhood streetside shops below a couple of layers of residential space, phasing out stripmall sprawl.

Socially-rational and Useful Businesses for Small Entrepreneurs to Develop:

• Local craftwork, art and design (eg. woodwork, ceramics, fibre arts, printing, electrician, plumbing, gardening and animal care, etc.) services, shops and guilds.
• Neighborhood pubs and cafes. These should be supported by municipal laws encouraging quality of life--local food and music production and distribution, and permitting rooftop, garden, and streetside eating and drinking, as well as dogs and people of all ages.
• Recycled household goods shops, boot camps, laundromats, nail and hair salons, car washes, book stores, pet and child care, and residential and commercial local gardening and food production services. 
• Neighborhood groceries, hardware stores, bicycle and ski shops, and copy centres. To keep costs down, job quality higher, and keep these kinds of businesses viable, these are best as co-operatives in a co-operative network, but in any case such small businesses provide a real service to neighborhoods. They should be supported by charities and government, and municipal law.

Alternatives to the many problems of the small retail business economy model

Part I: The big-box monopolies

We'll start with big box private monopolies. Consider IKEA and Target. Together, IKEA and Target could, between the two megastores, as they currently run, provide a nearly-comprehensive host of much better quality goods to an urban consumer market at a fraction of the cost currently charged by the plethora of small retail businesses selling mountains of low-quality, overpriced goods. IKEA and Target just have more powerful demand and more control over their supply chains. Further, IKEA, a transnational corporation with its roots in Sweden, has been obliquely impacted by Swedish organized labour, and so it offers better working conditions and compensation than small private retail businesses. Last, the big boxes are more compact. Without a landscape of stripmalls, big boxes could have less impact on land and resources use.

However, without competition among private firms, over time, the quality of the goods on offer will decrease and the price will increase in order to bolster profits, the sine qua non of capitalist private property (or at least in order to bolster surplus accumulation, the sine qua non of power). The quality of jobs the private monopolies offer, which especially in the case of Target is poor, will suffer further. The private monopolies will decline to pay taxes, and they'll have the credible threat (eg. "too big to fail") and economic and political power to enforce their demands. 

The community can have no control over private monopolies, which may fail to provide needed goods and services if the private monopolies decide that they can get higher profit margins by changing their business model (eg. Enron et al switching to financial speculation, thereby screwing consumers, workers, the state, and taxpayers. Or consider that their business model may not survive transportation cost increases). And the reliable local economic development spin-off potential from international big box monopolies is slim to none. At best, whatever remote chance of economic spinoff exists, it must involve very low wage labour and other very low price inputs, which requires unsustainable public subsidy.

Without submitting to the unfurling hazards of private monopoly, how can we get control over supply chains, and production, goods and services quality? Would it be possible to get those supply chains to be responsive? How can we provide goods and services, while avoiding the social costs generated by the small private business model?

Part II: Networked social enterprises

In order to address the above questions, I will specifically focus on the social enterprise form of the producer cooperative, following the EMES definition of social enterprise.
TBD

Until I finish this post, I recommend these sources for insight into social enterprises and community economic development:

Loxley, John, ed. 2007. Transforming or Reforming Capitalism: Toward a Theory of Community Economic Development. Winnipeg: Fernwood.

Loxley, John, Kathleen Sexsmith and Jim Silver, eds. 2007. Doing Community Economic Development. Winnipeg: Fernwood Press.

Restakis, John. 2010. Humanizing the Economy: Co-operatives in the Age of Capital. New Society Publishers.

EMES

The New Economics Foundation

Transition Network

We Have Never Been Modern

This Robin post reviews Karen Orren's scholarship into the persistence of feudal law in the US workplace. Right, where people spend almost all of their waking time, when not unemployed.

Orren, Karen. 1991. Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law and Liberal Development in the United States. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521422543.

Orren's "”Belated Feudalism” set off multiple explosions when it appeared in 1991, inflicting serious damage on the received wisdom of Harvard political scientist Louis Hartz. In his 1955 classic ”The Liberal Tradition in America,” still taught on many college campuses, Hartz argued that the United States was born free: Americans never knew feudalism; their country – with its Horatio Alger ethos of individual mobility, private property, free labor, and the sacred rights of contract – was modern and liberal from the start. For decades, liberals embraced Hartz’s argument as an explanation for why there was no – and could never be any – radicalism in the United States. Leftists, for their part, also accepted his account, pointing to the labor movement’s failure to create socialism as evidence of liberalism’s hegemony.

 But as Orren shows, American liberalism has never been the easy inheritance that Hartz and his complacent defenders assume. And the American labor movement may have achieved something far more difficult and profound than its leftist critics realize. Trade unions, Orren argues, made America liberal, laying slow but steady siege to an impregnable feudal fortress, prying open this ”state within a state” to collective bargaining and congressional review.

By pioneering tactics later used by the civil rights movement – sit-ins, strikes, and civil disobedience – labor unions invented the modern idea of collective action, turning every sphere of society into a legitimate arena of democratic politics."

While the US had slavery and identifiable feudal lords in the South, it maintained feudal workplaces throughout, and up through the entirety of the 20th century. Along with the continuing influence of anti-revolutionary British culture (P. Anderson), instilled via the Anglo American elite class (W. Domhoff), no wonder Southern feudal conservatism (D. Blackmon) was resonant and spread throughout the US even after the Democratic Party was modernized in the mid 20th century.

I had been aware that the contemporary torture and domestic and international repression privileges of the US Executive office were based in ancient and barbaric Anglo feudal law, but now I recognize that, considering British feudal warlords became the capitalist class, the idea flogged, that there was a legal or institutional break with feudalism in the Anglosphere, has been vastly overmarketed.

The last thing we have needed is a break from the fledgling Enlightenment movement, which set up the US as a semi-independent state locked into global economic elite rule, but would have been thereupon abandoned per the Federalist and slaver preferences, save for the unions. American unions were not radical because they were busy trying to push the US from slavery and feudal law and institutions into basic liberal law and institutions.

...Now, that argument is not going to get you very far, if viewed without historical depth. Societies and their institutions obviously don't have to try to mince their way through lukewarm liberalism. Sweden, for one, developed much more radical and effective unions starting from feudalism. Then there's Russia, the Latin American countries, etc. However, given the fact that the US was advertising itself as a modern, liberal bastion--to immigrants, to foreign allies--the early 20th century unions found political opportunity in pushing for actual liberal laws and policies within the US.

Here the thesis I will again advance is that liberal institutions as your "Left" do not create a sufficient or robust counter to conservatism--Liberalism is incapable of moving a society into even merely political democracy, let alone democracy and freedom egalitarianism.

And with the destruction of the unions and labor rights, the US has slid back down the muddy liberal bank and sunk back into the dank, suffocating morass of conservatism: Freedom for a few; slavery for most.

Here in "Birth Control McCarthyism" (referencing his book "Fear: The History of Political Idea,") Robin explains why feminists and labor have a lot of ground in common, faced with conservatives. Insofar as we lose sight of the necessity of the feminist-labor coalition, it is because we have come to have a scandalous blindspot for the horrible, deranged, rabid elephant in the Western livingroom, the ubiquitous, pervasive, legal fact of our (especially Anglosphere) societies: the totalitarian workplace.

International Women's Day 2012

Justice: "If you turn your back on me, I will still triumph. 
You have only power's name. I am power itself."

Voice/votes for women.

What it Means to Close Economic Models

In this Pilkington interview, Varoufakis elaborates his comparison of the classical political-economic perspective on social value with the marginalists' view of asocial utility. He explains why neoclassical (and Austrian?) economists have to close their models to create a methodological individualist analysis, and why that construction cannot represent economic activity, or predict economic system decline.

The Difference Between Right and Left

This "is the great divide between right and left: not that the former stands for freedom, while the latter stands for equality (or statism or whatever), but that the former stands for freedom for the few, while the latter stands for freedom for the many" (Corey Robin "When Libertarians Go to Work" 2012).

Robin discusses an example of this conservative difference ("Freedom for me and my friends. The Fuck for everyone else.")  in the recent (2012) libertarian gender politics, where we find that libertarians fighting to legally force doctors to rape women who request abortions. Libertarian sophists argue that this mandatory institutionalized rape is "regulation," equivalent to requiring businesses to follow basic worksite safety regulations--except better because women deserve it because women are dirty, bad property.

Robin provides a link to James Grimmelman's post on libertarian contract theory.

Democracy within Unions

You can't always get the prefigurative politics you want.

In "Is Democracy Good for Unions?" Steve Fraser argues that within the antipathy of capitalism, unions cannot always be democratic. Webpage includes links to responses.

...

An interesting Smithsonian article on hierarchy, feedback and decision making, The Secret Life of Bees.

Rich & Sad

The sadness of the top 2%.

Look! New York financiers feel so sad when they have to make consumption choices and America won't bomb Iran.

Sad, sad, sad.

Underrated.

Underread.

Mazzucato's The entrepreneurial state

Mazzucato's "The Entrepreneurial State," in which Mazzucato questions the neoliberal orthodoxy on public spending--that the state must be cut back to make room for entrepreneurship and innovation, to prevent the public sector ‘crowding out’ the private sector. Mazzucato argues that the neoliberal policy program draws on a belief that the private sector is dynamic, innovative and competitive, in contrast to a presumably sluggish and bureaucratic public sector.

The Entrepreneurial State challenges the "minimalist view" of economic policy. It finds that successful economies result from government doing more than just creating the right conditions for growth.

Instead, government has a key role to play in developing new technologies whose potential is not yet understood by the business community. State-funded organisations can be nimble and innovative, transforming economies forever — the algorithm behind Google was funded by a public sector National Science Foundation grant.

 This pamphlet forces the debate to go beyond the role of the state in stimulating demand, or crudely ‘picking winners’ in industrial policy. Instead, it argues for a proactive, entrepreneurial state: a state that is able to take risks and harness the best of the private sector. It imagines the state as a catalyst, sparking the initial reaction that will cause innovation to spread.

--From the abstract

...

"The Entrepreneurial State" sounds super Peter Evans-derivative (Hello? "Embedded Autonomy" isn't that old, people). It sounds a little dumber than Evans, actually, since it seems, from the abstract, not to include Evan's key observation that when a state fosters innovation, capital, being capital, will turn around and try to destroy the conditions of innovation, the state.

I think the argument has to advance. The neoliberal myth about private innovation/public stagnation is designed not to promote minimalist economic policy. There's no evidence for that. Rather, it's designed to promote primitive accumulation.