The Indomitable Neoliberals FC

Quotidian Repression in the Capitol of Capitalism

2012-01-24T10:01:00.001-07:00

Acute and suggestive, Corey Robin on analyzing despotic, tyrannical, and totalitarian power in the capitol of capitalism:

"However much coercive power the state wields–and it’s considerable—it’s not, in the end, where and how many, perhaps even most, people in the United States have historically experienced the raw end of politically repressive power. Even force and violence: just think of black slaves and their descendants, confronting slaveholders, overseers, slave catchers, Klansmen, chain gangs, and more; or women confronting the violence of their husbands and supervisors; or workers confronting the Pinkertons and other private armies of capital...

The fact is that a great deal of political repression happens in civil society, outside the state. More specifically, in the workplace...There’s a reason so much of American repression is executed not by the state but by the private sector: the government is subject to constitutional and legal restraints, however imperfect and patchy they may be. But an employer often is not. "

I love Robin's book idea: Careerism: Prolegomena to a Political Theory. I think it would likely be an incisive clearing of the goopy theoretical decks on power and hegemony.

On White Male Property owning Citizenship in the US

2012-01-24T08:41:00.002-07:00

Civic virtue as a property of propertied white men:

A number of authors argue that the 19th Century concept of US citizenship and civic virtue was grounded in being a white male property-owner -- with property-ownership construed broadly to include tool-owning tradesmen, a notion that spilled over into the racial exclusivism practiced by the US craft unions:

Political and legal theorist Aziz Rana's The Two Faces of American Freedom (2010).

Historian David Montgomery's Citizen Worker (1995).

Political scientist Rogers Smith's Civic Ideals (1999) gives a fairly broad backdrop.

Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo argues that liberalism is essentially about exclusion: the advancement of slavery, colonialism, genocide, racism and snobbery. Much of his book Liberalism, A Counter-history (2011) is focused on the United States, in both the early republican and antebellum periods. (Here is a New Left Project debate on Losurdo's thesis . Here is a review of Liberalism in Counterfire.) Jodi Dean has argued that the exclusion thesis is a red herring; the problem with capitalism is exploitation, not exclusion.

Christopher Tomlins's Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early Republic (1993) (It can complement the Orren text, see below.)

Andrew Shankman's Crucible of American Democracy (2004).

Seth Cotlar's Tom Paine's America (2011).

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On how long citizenship actually took to get to white males, cross-class, in the US:

Best book about thwarted suffrage in the US (including that of working class white males) is The Right to Vote (2000) by historian Alex Keyssar. (Hear Keyssar speaking about contemporary barriers to suffrage in the US.)

Political scientist Karen Orren's book Belated Feudalism (1991) is about the persistence in the US of feudal common law, in the form of employment law, well into the 20th century.

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Thanks to John Gulick, Corey Robin and Anthony Galluzzo.

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What's at Stake in Understanding Conservatism
From a review of Manisha Sinha's The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina:

Sinha demonstrates that "South Carolina pro-slavery thought was not the expression of Southern Republicanism, but increasingly its very negation. It was not a coincidence that secessionism was strongest in South Carolina, the only state by 1832 where presidential electors and the governor were not popularly elected, where the legislature was crudely malapportioned, and where local offices were limited by the state government. It was also not a coincidence that slaves were a majority of South Carolinians, and slaveholders nearly a majority of South Carolinian whites. And it certainly was not a coincidence that non-slaveholders were noticeably less enthusiastic for nullification, secession in 1851 and secession in 1861.

Leading Carolinians like John Caldwell Calhoun, Senator James Chesnut and the creepy, incestuous James Hammond all sneered at the Declaration of Independence. Sinha quotes one bravado warping Patrick Henry to declare "Give me Slavery or give me death." Notwithstanding the views of some historians to the contrary, the South Carolinians criticized the North less for its oppression of wage laborers than for the possiblity that those laborers could vote themselves into power. They did not condemn Lincoln as an intolerant Protestant but as a dangerous socialist and feminist. Moreover, they were not slow to raise the Nativist card against the immigrants who were bolstering the North's population.

Calhoun's idea of a concurrent majority was not a thoughtful protection of minority rights, but a way to prevent one minority, his own, from ever being outvoted. Once the Confederacy was set up, the Southern elite dispensed with political parties. South Carolina also began to dispense with competitive elections, while its ruthless elite certainly did not act sentimentally (or even decently) towards opinions on slavery.

There have been many frauds and bullies in American political life: the Nixons, the Hoovers, the McCarthys, the Tillmans and the Bilbos. But much of their malignancy was purely personal, and they never threatened the core ideals of the republic. Calhoun was different, very different. Extremely intelligent, he was also utterly principled, and absolutely ruthless in carrying out that one principle. The problem was that the principle, despite all the complications of honor and paternalism, was slavery. More so than anyone else, Calhoun was the greatest enemy of liberty and freedom the United States ever had."

If you still don't understand what's at stake, perhaps you might glance at contemporary S. Carolina and US politics, inter alia. History is a child with progeria.

Complexity

2012-01-19T15:57:00.001-07:00

Varoufakis on the neoliberal era complexity fraud, and its consequences.

The above article has something to say about rationality, that can pertain to the False Consciousness post below.

TBD here: An essay on my experiences on a late 90s National Science Foundation complexity grad student training team, consisting of ecologists and computer programmers, associated with the Santa Fe Institute. In which I engage with Varoufakis' points, by discussing what I learned about (systems) "complexity," its mathematical analysis, and its uses.

False Consciousness

2012-01-19T14:36:00.002-07:00

Marxists have a term for the moment of adhering to a political cause that, while perhaps having the critical mass to affect social relations, does not optimize your long-view interests: False consciousness.

Academic anti-Marxists will sometimes confuse the term false consciousness with a conservative concept used initially by 20th century anti-communists, the insult "Useful Idiot," which disparagement accuses a person of being too dumb to know what's right, and so being liable to be used, typically by the Left, for a wrong political cause. There are however non-trivial differences between the concepts, what they assume (about the distribution of humanity and rationality), how they function. If we avoid muddying them together, we will better understand hegemony and power.

Therefore I suggest that it is time for a full-blown historical-materialist renewal of the concept of false consciousness, written principally to this audience: North American social scientists. (Not to the conservative economists. They're too far gone with their inhuman conception of rationality.) I'm talking the sociologists. It's time to seriously, rigorously, historically, comparatively, theoretically and empirically readdress "bounded" rationalities and the historical, place-based, social, habituated, and institutionalized constraints that overdetermine which rationality paths are followed and which atrophy.

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H1: Does the contemporary denunciation of the concept of false consciousness stem from the union-lite/free neoliberal era's occlusion of the identity of conservatism?

We recognize that individuals, to varying extent, hold conflicting views, ideologies, morays, culture. However, since very, very often more than a gaggle of flaneurs are required for insight, we are interested not just in marveling at or celebrating the presence of ideological mish-mosh, but in discerning how such "pastiches" are assembled and activated.

First we start with the premise that social network-based political ideologies, such as conservatism, can be identified. For example, in his distillation of the trans-historical (since Enlightenment) pillars of conservatism, Corey Robin identifies these pillars with an eye to content validity--He reviews the conservative cannon as presented in conservative libraries and published by conservative presses (eg. The Liberty Fund), parsing out ephemeral v. consistent elements of conservative thought.

Then we consider a case study to test the hypothesis:

For example, ideological liberals etc. may be captured in a right-wing coalition because conservative coalition builders explicitly appeal to liberal identity markers (Eg. Compassion for human suffering) that do not clash with an essential conservative agenda (In other words, that are not exclusive to liberalism, though liberals may feel proprietary over them).

The case of the conservative education reform campaign's "Waiting for Superman" is instructive here. If the conservatives build their base and coalitions, as Robin says, with not just the Little King strategy but typically (loss) passion, certainly we can see the deployment of loss passion in the propaganda documentary "Waiting for Superman." The conservative campaign attaches the trauma the liberal viewer sees in the faces of the little African-American children to the idea that unions are to blame for American social disasters (racism).

Now when this passion adheres liberals and other anti-racists to the conservative campaign, are the anti-racists now conservative--that is, are they rational (or irrational) conservatives? Not necessarily. (They are invited into the conservative fold. They may or may not continue down this path to the point where they accept the fundamental pillars of conservatism, at which point they are conservatives.)

a) Do the anti-racists understand the logic and trajectory of the conservative political campaign?

b) Do the anti-racists believe that by adhering to the campaign, they can steer the conservative education reform campaign to achieve their own goals? (Resistance! Very agential!)

c) That is, does the conservatism disappear when it coheres a coalition? Does, for example, anti-racism become a stable pillar of conservatism?

a) No, and b) Perhaps, but not necessarily, and c) Nuh-uh. Usually, under such circumstances, liberals cannot transform their resistance (if it exists at all) into their home-turf antiracist goal because 1) they don't know what conservatism is, what they're dealing with. (It is pro-inequality divide-and-conquer strategy. There's a reason why conservatives are quick to identify "Useful Idiot" strategy.) 2) The structure is not favorable (as indicated by the direction of hegemony); and 3) they're not sufficiently organized to pull of that kind of collective, machiavellian political manoeuver in the face of an organized, politically-conscious conservative opposition.

Let's attend to the first question and its no, not least because it's determinative of the outcome of the second & third questions about the (Christian/manga) fantasy of resistant innocence.

The antiracist agenda does conflict with the home domain of conservatism. In coalition with a conservative campaign, liberals are acting as conservatives in this moment (which may last their whole paid adult careers, eg. Ravitch). To the extent that they lend their support to the conservative campaign, due to their belief that the conservative funded and managed campaign is compatible with antiracism, antiracists misrecognize the basis of conservatism as merely loss passion. They spend this moment, perhaps their whole lives, in false consciousness, working for a goal they cannot apprehend because they see only antiracist passion, (or Little King incentives), and/or necessary income and social relations (the risk-aversion, conflict-aversion and optimistic bias that would characterize a society in which repression was imposed primarily in the workplace). As adherents to the conservative campaign (rather than conservatives), they may flicker between false consciousness, conservatism, and liberalism. (But typically they won't be leaders of the campaign unless they understand conservatism. We have to agree that Ravitch is unusual.)

It may well be that this is possible in our epoch because we have an active political-economic (and consequently intellectual) culture of conservatism obfuscation. After all, so much surplus is at stake and being fought over.

H2: To the extent that intellectuals decry false consciousness (or muddle it together with the conservative "Useful Idiot" accusation), do they deny their culpability (perhaps as believers in the end of history and the end of historical-material existence--the end of Enlightenment conservative-liberal-radical conflict) in participating in the obfuscation of historical (including present) conservatism, its premises, its logic, and its utopia?

I would be concerned as well about the resonance, in our era, of denying the structured variability in the distribution of patchwork consciousness. Without comparing across societies, we know that the more educated people are, the more consistent their belief structure is. If you could/did compare across societies, I think it is likely that the neoliberal era has imparted an especially patchwork consciousness--on the working class. But not so much on the capitalist class. That would not simply be a flourishing of bricolage, to be celebrated. It would spark a discussion of how hegemony works.

Can a conservative campaign that adheres non-conservatives to its cause end up somewhere else, somewhere truly antiracist or otherwise liberatory, due to its contradictions unfolding? Maybe over a long time, with other favorable coincidences. Social science: N = 1 (...ergo, to be innocent of history is to fail to do social science). That's not really an excuse for valorizing and supporting obfuscation (Or is that manga innocence?), is it.

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In their article on the corporate response to fair trade, the authors Fridell, Hudson & Hudson discuss the "Lemon Problem"--the uneven distribution of information in capitalist relations--as it impacts consumers trying to make ethical decisions.

US Apartheid and Education

2012-01-19T10:15:00.002-07:00

Education in high-inequality America is an excellent case study illustrating the importance of having the capacity to distinguish conservative campaigns, and to understand their logic and social trajectory.

A popular theory holds that feeling affected when you are shown images of suffering will allow people to make ameliorative changes. Yet both images of suffering and human sentiments can be mobilized for a variety of ends that may subvert ameliorative change. Take the example of the conservative education reform campaign's strategic manipulation of antiracist sentiment, including through the conservative education reform campaign's documentary "Waiting for Superman." There is a reason that this particular education reform campaign does not, despite its compassionate--even antiracist-- articulations, reduce child trauma, education failures, social welfare failures, poverty, and education and welfare outcomes inequality. That reason lies in the logic and trajectory of conservatism.

Seven bits on the progressive perspective on US apartheid and education reform:

Two progressive views on Guggenheim's "Waiting for Superman":

"Waiting for Superman Hijacks Education Reform" (Ayers 2010).

"Waiting for Superman is a Propaganda Campaign" (Pallas 2010).

2 selections from the progressive US African-American community, courtesy of Black Agenda Report (BAR):

"Reforming Education, Destroying Communities" (BAR)

"Obama's Public Education Policy" (BAR)

Progressives and teachers favor Finland's anti-inequality, pro-teacher model of education excellence, described in "What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success" (The Atlantic 2012).

Conservative Moralism's Empirical Education Reform Failures in the US:

"Teach for America: The Hidden Curriculum of Liberal Do-gooders" (Hartman 2012).

Diane Ravitch, a former high-flying anti-union education reform crusader, saw the data and had a change of heart:

"The Data is In: Public Schools Outperform Charter Schools in the US"

Ravitch: “As I became a scholar and, you know, got into the academic world, I found myself—I don’t know. I fell into a sort of a conservative mindset about a lot of things.

…If you believed that children should study history and geography and real things, you’re conservative in the academic world, because you’re not supposed to believe in a real curriculum. I believe that it’s not conservative; it’s actually very liberal and empowering to have real knowledge… But having been castigated as a conservative for believing in having a traditional curriculum, when I went into the Bush administration, I found myself kind of getting caught up in the choice rhetoric. And so, for about ten years or so, I was advocating for charter schools. They didn’t exist, so I didn’t know how things would turn out.

…Over the years, from the period in which charters started and in which the whole Accountability movement started (And what Accountability ultimately meant, not just in the Bush administration, but in the Clinton, and now in the Obama administration, Accountability means who should be punished. If the scores don’t go up, who should be punished? Teachers. Teachers should be punished. The unions should be demonized.), I began looking at the results. When I looked at No Child Left Behind and saw, you know, we’re not really making any improvements under No Child Left Behind—the test scores have been either stagnant or made tiny improvement. Actually, the gains before No Child Left Behind on national tests were larger than since No Child Left Behind was adopted. I mean, I looked at the evidence, and I thought, all these things that I hoped would work didn’t work.

…This is the great legacy of No Child Left Behind, is that it has left us with a system of institutionalized fraud…(E)very year we get closer to 2014, the bar goes up, and the states are told, ‘If you don’t reach that bar, you’re going to be punished. Schools will be closed. They’ll be turned into charter schools.’ That’s part of the federal mandate, is that schools will be privatized if they can’t meet that impossible goal. So in order to preserve some semblance of public education, the states have been encouraged to lie.

…’The Billionaires Boys Club’ is …a new era of the foundations and their relation to education. We have never in the history of the United States had foundations with the wealth of the Gates Foundation and some of the other billionaire foundations—the Walton (WalMart) Family Foundation, The Broad Foundation. And these three foundations—Gates, Broad and Walton—are committed now to charter schools and to evaluating teachers by test scores. And that’s now the policy of the US Department of Education.

…I’m just trying to say the evidence says No Child Left Behind was a failure, and the evidence says that charter (privatized) schools are going to lead us into a swamp of—well, first of all, they’re not going to be any better, because if you look at national test scores—charter schools were first part of the national tests in 2003—they didn’t do any better than regular public schools. They were tested again in 2005, 2007, 2009. They (privatized schools) have never outperformed regular public schools.”

--Dr. Diane Ravitch,
Research Professor of Education at New York University,
Assistant Secretary of Education and counselor to Education Secretary Lamar Alexander under President George H.W. Bush and appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board under President Clinton.Interviewed on Democracy Now!
March 5, 2010.

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Thanks goes out to my colleague, sociologist Chris Powell, for pushing me to articulate what is at stake in the contemporary era, in having an historically-embedded grasp of conservatism--the reactionary drive to shore up surplus accumulating/maldistributing social orders by psuedo-speciating humanity. Recognizing conservatism doesn't require favoring one axis of oppression over others, a contentious primary concern within the neoliberal-era Left. On the contrary, an expanded literacy in and capacity to distinguish conservatism enables us to be better insectionalists. By grasping the trajectory of conservatism, we can avoid the characteristic Left problem of the neoliberal era--becoming class blind in order to see racism and/or sexism, and in the process betraying our antiracist and feminist aspirations, as in the cases of conservative US education reform, discussed above, and conservative Swedish labor market reform. Nancy Fraser's feminist call to distinguish feminist anti-authority from capitalist creative destruction also points to the problems of an incapacity to identify conservatism.

(The previous epoch is more infamous for the reverse problem of class-literate racism and sexism, which was not as uniform as is today popularly imagined. But this infamy may be an effect of the relative ease of denouncing the foibles of the dead. It may well be that some communities' more adequate understanding of conservatism could have contributed to better intersectionality in the past as well, see the discussion of the early 20th century Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party's urban-rural bridging anti-racism campaign in the link at "not" above.)

Engels on Speculation and Political Formation in the US

2012-01-19T09:28:00.000-07:00

Friedrich Engels (1892) on political-economic constraints, including speculation, on US political development:

"(W)holly different groups and interests are represented in each of the two big parties, depending on the locality, and almost each particular section of the possessing class has its representatives in each of the two parties to a very large degree, though today big industry forms the core of the Republicans on the whole, just as the big landowners of the South form that of the Democrats. The apparent haphazardness of this jumbling together is what provides the splendid soil for the corruption and the plundering of the government that flourish there so beautifully. Only when...settlement on the land becomes more and more difficult or falls prey to gouging — only then, I think, will the time come, with peaceful development, for a third party. Land is the basis of speculation, and the American speculative mania and speculative opportunity are the chief levers that hold the native-born worker in bondage to the bourgeoisie.

Only when there is a generation of native-born workers that cannot expect anything from speculation any more will we have a solid foothold in America. But, of course, who can count on peaceful development in America!"

Merci to Doug Henwood.

Corey Robin: The Political Right

2011-12-31T12:14:00.003-07:00

"What distinguishes the Right and the Left is your fundamental question about privilege and hierarchy...All the rest is commentary." a) In response to an insurgent challenge, conservatives b) defend personal forms of rule, rule as domination, where you have higher beings governing lower beings.

See Karl Mannheim, "On Conservatism." Conservatism is not the defense of hierarchies per se. It's when a hierarchal regime gets challenged, conservative action intellectuals encounter a crisis of legitimation, and go back to reformulate a new defense of the ruling system of power.

Here's Henwood's interview of Corey Robin, on the Right. Robin (See the link to his blog to the right.) demonstrates that the political Right is characterized by:

Its inherently reactionary nature
Its penchant for extremism and radicalism
Its affinity with violence
Its elitism (anti-democracy)
Its populism (masking the Right's profoundly anti-democratic commitment, mobilizing shock troops in the street)

Right Populism: Social Movement Strategy

Anti-democracy and Right populism are fused in variants of this claim: Fealty to elite interests are the only real way that hoi poloi individuals can realize their interests. Trickle down TINA.

Corey Robin: "The most successful form of right wing populism--and I trace this to the slaveholders in the United States, I think they pioneered this--You offer a significant mass constituency the opportunity to play the part of the little king. It happens in the family. It happens in the workplace." In Adams' Discourses on Davila he says (and Rousseau makes a similar claim) that "the way hierarchy works is, people are always willing to submit to someone above them, but on one very important condition: That they are able dominate someone below them. You can put up with all manner of inequalities just so long as you're not the one on the bottom rung" (Robin 2011). Experimental economists call this the Last Place Aversion.

The slaveholders recognized that if they could give almost every white man access to at least one slave, then they would have a political base. Slavers knew you had to make slaveholding a vaguely mass project, or else you're going to truncate your political base.

You can go to the Liberty Fund, which publishes all works of the right, from the 16th century Burke onward, to study the works of conservative John Caldwell Calhoun ("The Marx of the Master Class"). Calhoun wrote the American conservative strategic vision: The local is the sphere where you cultivate the Little Kings.

The slaveholder logic has become our society's anti-choice abortion politics (Every nonelite man and woman gets to be the little king of all women's bodies and lives.), as well as employers' absolute discretion over employees in workplace. In return, the patriarchal and small business bondservants support the despotic class and their high-inequality regime.

Loss Passion

In addition to the activation of Last Place Aversion, the Right appeals to non-elites because the Right is attendant to issues of loss--loss of forms of power. Robin concedes that loss is partly a tactical instrument for the Right. Forms of power come with their own cultures, morays and folkways. The loss of these specific cultures, morays and folkways are felt as pain to non-elites as well as elites.

Burke and Hobbes argued that hand-in-hand with the death of an inegalitarian order came the tragic death of beloved identity--beautiful culture, morays and folkways. It is worth looking back at the historical record and asking: Can the Left not also be attendant to loss in emancipatory reform and revolution? Or, if it is attendant to loss, is the Left co-opted by the Right?

The Enlightenment created a theory of victimology. Rousseau ("The Homer of the Loser") is recognized as the first victimology philosopher.

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People react angrily when you try to analyze the Right.

"The point here is not that ideological superstructure is crassly bolted onto the base of self-interest but that it is just not serious to try to locate the substance, much less vitality, of conservatism, or any other ideology, in metaphysical disagreement alone. If anything, metaphysical views often get forged in the heat of real battles. It is only when certain philosophical premises are challenged in a serious, even dangerous way, that they must self-consciously defend themselves" (Alex Gourevitch).

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Robin predicts the demise of the contemporary Right. There's a reason there's no ideas in the Right, they're on autopilot, because the Right is a reaction, and there's no effective, intellectual, insurgent Left. The Right can get a certain amount of mileage from the afterglow of the Left.

I disagree. I think that what the Austrians did was to recognize the left-dependency problem of reactionary politics. The Austrians sold and engineered a Right culture in the Anglo world, which was fertile for such a culture, that is explicitly alive to the importance of maintaining Right ideological momentum. How they do it is very opportunistic. They continuously manufacture a "left"--They use anyone outside materially-fundamental networks, from liberals to conservatives, as their "left" wing to passionately react against. This reactionary opportunism maintains momentum, builds hegemony, and pushes the Right ever rightward. But ultimately I do think that this strategy is political disequilibrium business; it can devolve into incoherency and crisis. It could produce a lefty coalition bloc, as seems to be the case now with OWS, that could reinvigorate the Left.

21st Century Okie

2011-12-30T05:40:00.003-07:00

I am embarking upon a writing project, chronicling our relationship to not getting paid for skilled work, and the skilled labor that does not "deserve" to be paid, within the contemporary neoliberal era.

Origins: Cultural Foundations of Free Work in the Neoliberal Era of American Decline

I started working when I was six or seven years old. Paper route, odd jobs,babysitting, then restaurant work. My mother, the descendent of a minister, believedthat children should pay their own way, especially when, to be a good familymember and champion of the improvement of humanity, their parents lived up tothe moral responsibility of bearing costly, multiple children of their Grade A geneticstock.(1) Ministers are people whose occupation renders unto them theresponsibility of coordinating the aspirations, social networking, ready-to-hand stories, and free-timeactivity of the provincial working classes, in such ways as to facilitatewealth accumulation up the socio-economic hierarchy. Their descendants oftencarry their human capital, their know-how, their drive to herd the working classin such ways as to facilitate wealth accumulation up the socio-economichierarchy. If the descendants are lawyers, they crush unions and working class solidarity movements. If the descendants are women, this drive may be funneled at their ownchildren.

In my family, and although we were raised to believe we were little white middle class geniuses (as per the Prairie Home Companion motto), work was never something associated with our election. Completely separate issues. This is not to say that work was ever optional. On the contrary, we were to be working always, because we were born with a sort of original sin of owing, originally to my parents. As my dad complained plaintively to me when I was a young teenager and still living under his roof, "You are a parasite on me." So the more hairshirt-like and nearly-unpaid the job, the better.

The main occupational aspiration my parents had for me was to be a outdoor flea market cartoonist or a Hallmark card illustrator. Admittedly, my mom's mother liked to paint, and I tend to doodle while people talk. The second occupational ambition made known to me was for me to be an airline stewardess, because my mom thought maybe she could get cheaper airfare if I was a stewardess. Consequently I went to Northwest Airlines to fill out a job application when I was 21, but I maybe undermined myself by dressing as I usually did at that time, as a club-hopping punk. Northwest Airlines did not receive irony well, it turned out. To this day, and I have a PhD, my mother will sincerely urge me to get a job bagging groceries, because she's primarily anxious that I am always paying debts.

Once I hit adulthood, I becameone of those persons that always do high-quality, high-skilled work for either free ornearly free. A lot of it. You know these people. There are four kinds, classes if you will,of people in the late Anglo monopoly capitalist world. Those who work more orless for free, skilled or dependable, responsible, back-breaking unskilledwork; those who self-market and supervise (manhandle) the “free” workers, for a modest-to-fancy wage (this class has a couple rungs) thatallows them to own a home as well as professional status as the sort of peoplewhose work merits pay; and those who go to elite schools to network and thengamble with the social wealth, in such ways as to facilitate wealthaccumulation up the socio-economic hierarchy, in the process earning millionsof dollars or Euros or petrodollars every year.

The fourth and final groupconsists of the people whose entire lives, and probably their family’s entirelives were consumed in not getting paid for work, to the extent that they areso damaged that they cannot do skilled or unskilled work in such a way thatsomeone else can extract wealth from the process. As you can see, the first andthe fourth classes are linked through wearing cause and depleted effect. The only wayto stop the slide from the first class into the fourth over time is either toget out of the first class or to marry into a higher class. Essentially, like all capitalism, neoliberalism is characterized by the presence of two staggered surplus-labor categories, differentiated not very substantially by pay or whether they are managed/manhandled, but rather by whether or not they are capable of marrying into the marketing/mgmt class as an economic crutch.

Chart 1: Class in Late Monopoly (Finance and Military-ruled)Capitalism:

Recognized Work Capacity	Paid or Unpaid
	Unpaid Class	Unpaid Class	Paid Class	Paid Class
Remits Skilled Work:	Class One (Proto-Okie)		Class Two
Work Accrues To:			(Managerial)	Class Three (Gambling Overlord)
Damaged		Class Four (Okie)

I never intended to be in the class of skilled, competent,dependable workers whose work does not deserve to be paid. I never committed tothat. In fact I recognized, even in myearly 20s, that excessive time spent in that class, given the capitalistcontext, would probably rot my ability to take care of myself and lead me intothe fourth class. I thought, I’ll work for free for now; and then I’ll get theexperience and qualifications and prove myself a reliable professional, andmake money to support myself when I am 30. I made this bargain with myself because I wastold my work didn’t deserve to be paid. I had to admit this seemed to have surface validity, as it jibed very well with my parents' anxiety about my birth and existence debt. Eventually I had to revise the bargain with myself up to age 40, because in my 30s Icontinued to be informed that my work should not be paid, and moreover now I still owedfree labor in compensation for the extruded labor and dispossession of the peasants, the children, the beleaguered aboriginal people, the gay youth, the young marketeers with one parent from Mexico, the people with divorced parents, the affronted, disabled obese, who were either with me in the first class or were already in the fourth class, and for which intervening institutionswould hold the value of my labor like a diligent bank.

And yet I recognized, even in my early 20s, that, structurally, if youreally looked at it, the value of my dependable, responsible, skilled work was being sent straight up the socio-economic hierarchy, not down it.

Parts of my free and nearly-free work enabled second-tier people, the people whose work manages/manhandles people like me, to earn money fortheir work, including work that looks, on paper, as if it is really altruistic. They figured out how to earn money doing what they love alright. Mostof the value I remitted pooled just over the base of that tier, amongst the people whose managing work wasworth pay that allowed them to buy two homes and fitted clothes and send theirkids to schools where they could network their way into the gambling class, or the value just flowed directly to the gambling class.

Staring at yet another decade of free work, I consider that it is possible that I've had to work so much for so nearly free for so long because in this system, the vast majority of us can't actually pay off the original debts we owe to our parents, society, the peasants, the aboriginal people, the African Americans, and the children, let alone the managers and gamblers who are currently, altruistically directing and keeping safe the proceeds of our free work on behalf of the dispossessed of world history and indeed all humanity. There doesn't seem to really be a debt paydown or an exit ramp into paid work. In fact, now it kind of looks suspicious... like all that stuff about debt and owing is perhaps a whole lot of misapplied bullshit, a form of predation as David Graeber might suggest, because deserving men and women who get paid for their work are not even in the same socio-ecology space, certainly not the same networks, as us more or less perpetually-unpaid working prey folk.

The Early-1990s Dawn of Okie Consciousness

Early on, I saw a sign that working responsibly,altruistically for free put you on a train bound for the damaged class. I wasdating a good-looking and narcissistic young (but older than me) Austrian-American man who wasalready technically in graduate school, pursuing an advanced degree in English. ...Although, he was in the middle of time off from that program, wherein he wasgoing to aerobics, methodically dating aerobics instructors and go-godancers and rich girls, hanging out in gay bars, and just allowing his mind to really ponder the fascinating, vastly-intellectual dimensions of human sexuality, particularly his own. He deigned to date me becausehe was in between aerobics instructors. I was dating him because he would go dancing with me and knew something about graduate school. That’s absolutely true.

Of course, I was working in dependable, skilled "unskilled" labor thatbasically didn’t pay money. The problem with that is that it is so stressful, partly because the work is so inhumane and dehumanizing, and partly because being managed is actually torture (manhandling), if you think about it, that I was ending up in the emergency hospital as my entire back seized up. That's expensive. So I had to think of a way out. I loved to read and write and think, and I waspretty good at it, although nearly untrained. Already a veteran of working forfree or nearly free, and already feeling the stress and health effects that afflictthat class, I had come up with a bold, general plan to put myself on a trainbound for the second class, where I would work…for pay.

Let me aggressively assert something that, time has proven, is mindblowing. I always--I mean from a very young age and this has never changed--knew I didn’t want to take care of children. It’s not justthat I knew that people who take care of children don’t deserve pay in the collective unconscious. Beyondthat, I have never enjoyed or been interested in children very much. Now I have one and I love him, and I like his little cousins and friends; but he's about it. It’s not that I am not altruistic. I wasraised female. But I was much more of a dog and cat person. The Kuderer test Itook in junior high indicated that I just wanted to work outdoors. I…Alright, I’lladmit it. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of my life is that even though I amfemale and without a penis or even a Y chromosome, my altruistic feeling has not been "normally" oriented towards taking care of children or the elderly or women, all the target of upright liberaland conservative women’s proper feeling. I know. For most people, thisadmission is nearly impossible to fathom, and in fact perverse and immoral. That’s mycharacter flaw here in this story. It’s now out in the open. Let's just say it hardly negates the fact that I have devoted tens of thousands of hours of free work and care for the children, the elderly, women, people of color, low income people, our gay brothers and sisters, etc., over the years.

I was 22 and I had ambitions to do work that involved payand did not involve caring for children, or really any other people, but whichwould only minimally exploit other people and nature. I thought I would go tograd school and become a professor. But I knew nothing about it; and the only people I’d ever run intowho might know something about it, my professors in college, had never told meanything about grad school. When I was finished with college and sitting on thecollege lawn with two friends the day after I’d graduated, a professor of ourscame flying out to us from the English Department building, where he hadjust discovered that no one had ever mentioned grad school to us, and he wasoutraged. But really, it was just responsible of no one to have ever mentioned goingto grad school for an advanced degree in English at the close of the twentiethcentury.

So I wanted to go to grad school, to be tested and todevelop into the sort of person who others will regard and agree, Let her do her workand let it be paid for. But to make thishappen, I didn’t want to go to grad school in English. So I dated thisnarcissistic fellow (His narcissism is not really a point of this story; it's just a descriptive place marker here.), who I really think of as Austrian, because I put thisfellow in the same category as Mises, Hayek, to a lesser degree Polanyi, andcertainly an endearing, even more eloquent version of Hitler, so I dated this Austrian to get a glimpse of grad school andthe sort of people who go to grad school. That deflating, almost-revolting glimpse is anotherstory. In the meantime, I did something (inter alia) altruistic. Purely for altruisticreasons. Something that involved child care.

The Narcissistic Austrian had a friend, who was really avery good friend of the last go-go dancer he’d dated, and this friend was myage, in her young twenties, a young, slight, though large-hipped blonde womanfrom a working class background. She was slight but large-hipped because shehad had what I regarded as the sympathizable misfortune of having gottenpregnant and producing a small child. She was a young, single mom. Surely, her life was overly constrained. She still wanted, stillneeded, to go out and party. What twenty-two year old should not enjoy such youthfulfreedom? If you can't feel empathy for someone so like yourself, what are you? I could certainly help her out a little.

At the Narcissistic Austrian’s urging, initially underrequest from the young mother, I volunteered to take care of her child whileshe went out partying. For free. I did this a few times. I am not, as I’vementioned before, crazy about children; but I’d babysat a lot in my young life,put a lot of creativity and care into it, I was very responsible and skilled atthis “unskilled” work, and no one else was paying me much for working for themeither. I wanted to be able to support this young mother’s freedom; I wanted tobe friendly and helpful to my friends’ friends.

I wanted to, until the night the young mother came back frompartying, and she pulled a wisp of blonde hair away from her big, round, bluemascara’d eyes, and she said to me, “You know who, you know who you look justlike…” I listened. What were her associations with a solidaristic, fellow youngwoman who helped her out and asked for nothing, who was a friend of a friend ofa friend? She searched in her mind futilely. “You know that famous photograph?”I listened. “Of the woman in the Great Depression, holding her fingers to herface?” She posed like the woman. “That’s you.”

I knew the Dorothea Lange photograph she was referring to,of Florence Thompson in 1936. We all do. Here is that photograph:

It probably shouldn't surprise you to know that at age 22 I actually didn’t look much like Florence Thompson circa 1936 at all, exceptthat I have brown hair and I don’t have round eyes, and I have never wornmakeup in child care work, including looking after the young blonde mother’schildren.

And there, and then, I realized that by working, altruistically, forfree, for a socio-economically marginalized person who could use the support, Ihad transformed myself, ascriptively, in I think not just the young mother's but in our society’s collective Anglo-american capitalist imagination, from a Class One Skilled Replaceable Labor-cog into a late-twentieth century Okie. Class four:unpaid class, damaged subclass.

If we think about it, I think we can all agree that it is notpossible, in the context of late monopoly capitalism, to separate altruism andexploitation-aversion from slave labor and depletion/damage...except superficially,for marketing purposes, insofar as you are in the first rung of the second,managerial class and willfully you do not notice that your altruistic workdepends on exploiting people, taking their work for free or nearly free, andfeeling, very strongly, very morally, very smugly, that the people you exploit owe this freelabor to the vulnerable downtrodden of the world, care of you. All of which leads me to the final bullet, see below.

Believe Me, This is Just the Beginning

In which I discuss what we've learned about how people with capitalist cultural capital precision-engage in logrolling networks. Hint: You can be for all intents and purposes autistic, as long as you manage to throw your tiny shards of sociability into sucking up to and marketing yourself strictly to people who can help you attain your goals.
In which we encounter the complement to ascribed leadership qualities, the crucial, 24-7 habituated marketing component of the 2^nd class manager, and in despair fail ourselves to compete with the natural, birth-to-grave, Anglo-american masters of relentless self-marketing.
In which I discuss the neoliberal era, how it's all 100% marketing and manhandling ("managing") other people and our self-image, and I discuss our experiences in corporations, academia, non-government organizations (NGOs) and government, as specific neoliberal marketing and manhandling fields.
In which I continue to be steadily channeledinto free and nearly-free labor (most of it pertaining only very tangentially, at best, to my interests, skills, experience and education) throughout three (3) decades, vignettes forthcoming. Upshot: If you have functional mammary glands, and yet you are moved by political economy, simply telling people that you are interested in political economy, repeatedly, and talking and writing about political economy, all the time, cannot possibly overcome the all-dominating empirical evidence (your boobs) that what you really do is caregiving.
In which I discuss concrete examples of how capitalism is indeed a vampire squid (Merci, Marx and Taibbi!) wrapped around our faces, sucking the life, the substantial integrity out of the laboring class, effectively damaging us, and how some of us have recognized that and struggled to assert our right to health and embodied integrity. Yet, in order to keep on exploitin', most of us willfully refuse to hear about or see the damage in front of our eyes. We just get paid to make up obeausity celebration campaigns and so forth, and we call it being civilized.
Inwhich I discuss marriage, partially as an expression of love, friendship, commitment, partnership, optimism, and confidence, and partially, as the opposite: a desperate economic diversification strategy to avoid the slide down into the damaged class aftermultiple decades of submitting free to nearly-free labor with no end in sight and mortality looming on the horizon, and conclude that strategy sort of superficially works and sort of actually doesn't these days, as was apparently also the case in the past.
In which I discuss, from vast, some might say excessive, experience, how working for second-wave feminists and other postmodern social entrepreneurs fits snugly into normative, exploited, wage slave and unwaged slave labor in the neoliberal era, thankyouNancyFraser. And how much the manhandlers in this field are psychologically dependent on not just the submission of free work, but also the performance of gratitude, which apparently "proves" that no significant exploitation has taken place.
In which I agree that in the last analysis all charitable, marketing, and managerial work that is not geared to overthrowing capitalism is predatory, because the context, capitalism, is predation.

Let's dissect and address that predation. First, let's (following Burkett) posit that Value is variably produced through social and ecological relations that capacitate humans. Through marginal demand, market price (in capitalism: socially-average labor time required to make product) is thought to capture value quantitatively.Yet, effective demand (market power) and monopoly, as well as political power, control price; advertising, coercion, and inequality control preferences; and profitable capitalist accumulation is made possible by incorrectly and not pricing nature and social and human reproduction (women’s work). Price entails predation that systematically/non-randomly and non-trivially undermines price's ability to capture value. We need to face it: Value cannot be adequately represented by market price.

We all make the value, and we do it collectively, synergistically, variably over time and space, and in ways that we are at present incapable of measuring.(2) Not just work misallocation, but commodity, population and toxin explosions, and non-therapeutic, radical Crises (cf Varoufakis), "natural" and unnatural, are the accumulated dysfunctions of the value-price incommensurability and distortions.

To restore value requires collective, substantive decision-making, including explicit decision-making about adequate surplus recycling mechanisms. But with the overgrowth of commodification and finance, our ability to engage collective, substantive decision-making has atrophied (or languished) grotesquely. In an era when this is worsening--the utopia of democracy has fallen--this, restoring or developing our collective, substantive decision making capacity is the fundamental problem of our capitalist era. It requires collective praxis expanding (not shrinking from) the Enlightenment--in other words, it requires the promotion of economic democracy. There is no way to embark upon this collective project and nimbly avoid the arrayed, overdeveloped, capitalist forces of disruption and war. But this central, unmet challenge is the big, sick elephant in our room, our societies, our Earth.

...
(1) In a separate essay, I will describe how my parents are awesome people whom I adore. But I've got another story to tell here.

(2) This doesn't mean we can't detect exploitation. We can. Persistently broken and dysfunctional social and ecological webs demonstrate exploitation. Degraded bodies and mental capacities demonstrate exploitation. We cannot allocate goods and services more efficiently than by this logic: From each according to her capacities to each according to her needs.

Urban Neoliberal Racism

2011-12-21T09:08:00.003-07:00

Paul Street's "Urban Neoliberal Racism, Mass Poverty, and the Repression of Occupy Wall Street" (2011, Black Agenda Report).

The US, the World Needs A Left Challenge

2011-12-20T20:59:00.000-07:00

History tells us that we could use a Left challenge, not just in the streets, but within the establishment as well.

How execrable, how unbearably tyrannical has the capitalist political establishment gotten?

Arabia & the West: Painful Lessons from Media History

2011-12-20T20:48:00.001-07:00

In the solid "The Arab Spring and the West: Seven Lessons from History," The Guardian's Seamus Milne reaches into the British Pathe News Video Archive to recall the oil-dependent fundamentals of West-Middle East Relations.

1) The West never gives up its drive to control the Middle East, whatever the setbacks.

2) Imperial powers can usually be relied on to delude themselves about what Arabs actually think.

3) The Big Powers are old hands at prettifying client regimes to keep the oil flowing.

4) People in the Middle East don't forget their history – even when the US and Europe (conveniently) does.

5) The West has always presented Arabs who insist on running their own affairs as fanatics.

6) Foreign military intervention in the Middle East brings death, destruction, and divide and rule.

7) Western sponsorship of Palestine's colonisation is a permanent block on normal relations with the Arab world.

Papandreou: Occupy!

2011-12-15T17:10:00.000-07:00

The deposed Greek prime minister advocates Occupy!

The Greek parliament forced Papandreou to resign from his position of Prime Minister when he suggested holding a national referendum to allow the Greek people to have a say in whether they would accept the European Union’s bailout plan which would necessitate severe austerity cuts.

Democracy Now! speaks with Papandreou about the financial crisis, the role of banks, and the importance of the growing Occupy Wall Street movement.

"The Occupy Wall Street movements ... are saying something very, very specific, that inequality, in the end, is an inequality of power, and we need to redistribute power, not just money—power—and this is, I think, the democratic challenge that we have today," Papandreou says.

The Fed v. The People

2011-12-15T16:47:00.000-07:00

This is a great blog article on a great business article on how the Fed prosecutes class war.

Animal Spirits: Elite Confidence Shaken & Social Change Recognized

2011-12-15T08:09:00.000-07:00

"In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the materials it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest. The English Established Church, e.g., will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1/39 of its income. Now-a-days atheism is culpa levis [a relatively slight sin, c.f. mortal sin], as compared with criticism of existing property relations.

Nevertheless, there is an unmistakable advance. I refer, e.g., to the Blue book published within the last few weeks: 'Correspondence with Her Majesty’s Missions Abroad, regarding Industrial Questions and Trades’ Unions.' The representatives of the English Crown in foreign countries there declare in so many words that in Germany, in France, to be brief, in all the civilised states of the European Continent, radical change in the existing relations between capital and labour is as evident and inevitable as in England. At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Mr. Wade, vice-president of the United States, declared in public meetings that, after the abolition of slavery, a radical change of the relations of capital and of property in land is next upon the order of the day.

These are signs of the times, not to be hidden by purple mantles or black cassocks. They do not signify that tomorrow a miracle will happen. They show that, within the ruling classes themselves, a foreboding is dawning, that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing."

Marx, Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I - 1867 Preface.

Economic Leadership Today: A Report from the Trenches

2011-12-09T10:27:00.001-07:00

The tiny bit of progress in elite thought on institutionalized, socially-subsidized banking failure and Western working-class economic decline: Conservative economists and policymakers are finally acknowledging inequality, and vaguely entertaining the Occupy-introduced notion that inequality might not be all they fantasized for us after all.

Unfortunately, they have no conceptual tools or will to address it. Stale, refried 1991 Robert Reich (Such as is presented by the elite economic consensus in the OECD's "Divided We Stand". Yeah, that's not a typo. Remember for capitalist conservatives, inequality is thought to create stability--by diversifying economic preferences and market niches.) aint going to do it.

I attended and wrote note notes last night at a panel on Canadian business' relationship to inequality and Occupy protest, provided by the business school for the benefit of the business community in a Canadian city.

Businessmen in the audience said they wanted to stay with the "globalization makes inequality necessary" line. They like that, know it, don't want to abandon it. Feels good.

But it's killing off your consumer market, and there can only be a few Walmarts in monopoly capitalism, replied the business profs. Can you businessmen at least think about maybe taking some of your profits and investing them in local charity works, or in Living Wages?

The progressive business profs tried to introduce the idea that inequality has costs, to human health, to human capital, and economic costs in the form of consumer market decline.

The idea that inequality has human and economic costs did not appear to register with the businessmen and business students in the audience. On the one hand, the audience managed to respond that they expect the Chinese to replace failing Americans as the consumer market to the world; on the other hand, they expect to still keep super-exploiting starvation-wages Chinese labor. Cake; eat it too. So that's the quality of plan you get from the leaders of a high-inequality regime.

The business school dean authoritatively lectured on how Canada should respond to economic inequality. He cribbed the OECD's "Divided We Stand". His takeaway OECD message? Stay the course; Occupy will fade; the problem is simply that some people just aren't techno-skilled enough--ergo Canadian businesses should engage in more in on-the-job training.

It's good to read this OECD report so you know how your elite are failing.

The business dean refused to acknowledge parasitic over-financialization's relationship to unyielding Western economic gout. Over-financialization, at the root of economic destruction and political sclerosis, is not on elites' radar as a problem.

You might be interested in knowing that the business dean and business profs said that elites are hoping on securing the continued loyalty of the top 30-40% income earners, at least within Canada, to help maintain their order. Is that you?

...Because I know 30-40%ers who are having their incomes actively suppressed right now by the neoliberal machinery in place. They've got big and growing education debt and housing debt--or they don't live middle class in significant ways/aren't bought off. Neoliberalism has a life of its own. The middle class buy-off is in decline, and that means that the discipline that the middle class enforces is slated to follow... and though they are still purportedly relying on it, this decline is off elites' radar! Good thing they're still over-"investing" in guard labor.

Their leadership is not as irreplaceable as their money leads businessmen and their technocrati to believe they are.

The Politics of Western Bank Failures

2011-12-02T17:16:00.001-07:00

"Public money and public institutions are bailing out a private banking industry that is not solving its own problems… Fundamentally this is a struggle to take a crisis caused by the business community and the governments they support and make the mass of people pay for it. That’s what austerity means. And the real test here is whether the mass of people will absorb it and accept it" --Richard D. Wolff, "The Mating of Our Dysfunctional Political-economic Systems."

This is a great interview on the repeated political failures in the wake of the failure of economic leaders.

Iceland's president Olafur R Grímsson: "The difference is that in Iceland we allowed the banks to fail. These were private banks and we didn't pump money into them in order to keep them going; the state did not shoulder the responsibility of the failed private banks." Quoted in "Iceland Exits Recession" (Dec 2011).

Pro Bloc v. Pro Monastery: On the Application of Social Movement Techniques

2011-11-21T21:21:00.001-07:00

When pundits say they don't understand what OWS is about, what that means is that OWS is a cross-(99%) stratification coalition of liberals and social democrats and the extremely marginalized and anarchists and socialists who are refusing to deny each other. That is to say, OWS is a functioning social movement bloc.

The unity of the opposing bloc of the 1% + its loyal hairy old man Teabag minions + its militarized police has probably helped to make the OWS bloc comparatively robust.

...

On the applicability of social movement techniques:
Process-oriented communication

Barbara Epstein wrote a crucial book based on her study of the late twentieth century peace movement in the Pacific Northwest, Political Protest and Cultural Revolution: Nonviolent Direct Action in the 1970s and 80s, and Paul Lichterman wrote a study examining how social movement organization practices, such as a hierarchy-less organizational structure of empowered individuals, can put off key coalition partners and snuff out mobilization. Together these studies suggest that, under some circumstances, process-orientation can be at the root of social movement organizations' ineffectiveness. The Epstein book in particular is a necessary read for people interested in social and political-economic change because it offers insight into the limits of prefigurative politics, and process-oriented communication social movement tactics--insight which corrects for the contemporary-era progressive community's a-contextual idealization of these tactics.

Some cities' Occupy movements this past fall have provided some support for the claim that perhaps the tactical innovations--including process-heavy communication techniques--can, in the context of adequate critical mass, effectively facilitate a coalition bloc. Elite concerns with predicting and managing social movement organizations are going to color how elite scholars look at social movements--for example in a too-short time frame. Perhaps the story is that it took people 40 years of practical R&D to innovate a social movement technique that can secure a bloc, but requires an adequate degree of preexisting critical mass to function as bloc glue and to ignite further mobilization.

This is to say that communicative process-orientation is a social movement technique that requires critical mass (cross-community participation) before it can be employed effectively. Without the critical mass precondition, communication process-orientation is not an effective social movement technique, see Epstein & satellite Occupy demonstrations without critical mass. Without adequate critical mass, process becomes counterproductive overkill as a social movement technique.

Without adequate preexisting critical mass, you're left with a small, rather repulsive, and ineffective assemblage of personalities that tend to get furiously frustrated in their failed efforts at micromanaging other people's communication. But perhaps such a group can be more generously regarded as a sort of small monastery--not capable of mobilizing a movement, but monks of a social movement technique or two.

I Got Your Restoration Right Here

2011-11-17T13:10:00.001-07:00

"In Italy, the key programmatic points were listed last summer in a letter (meant to remain secret!) from the European Central Bank to the Berlusconi government. To restore market 'confidence', it was necessary to proceed rapidly down the road of 'structural reforms', an expression now used as a synonym for social devastation: in other words, wage cuts, attacks on workers' rights over hiring and firing, increases in the pension age, and large-scale privatization." --Marcello Musto, discussing the replacement of elected governments with technocracies, on the occasion of the bank failures.

"Restore market confidence"--this causal explanation and imperative begs for a new, blistering Marxist critique.

Financial Economic Power = Political Stranglehold

2011-11-15T11:12:00.001-07:00

"The Crisis in the Eurozone"
by James K. Galbraith
Salon.com

...

"(T)he ECB refuses to solve the crisis at a stroke, which it could do by buying up the weak countries’ bonds and refinancing them. The argument against this is called “moral hazard,” buttressed by old-fashioned inflation fears, but the real issue is that to do so would admit loss of control by creditors over the central bank. Actions parallel to those taken by the Federal Reserve – nationalizing the entire commercial paper market, for instance – would repel the ECB, even though it does buy up sovereign bonds when it has to.

[MF: This is all a polite, econ-theoretical way of saying that the ECB is the tool of financial capital, not a manager of social or economic welfare.]

So instead the zone has gone about creating a gigantic toxic CDO called the European Financial Stability Fund, which may shortly be turned into an even more gigantic toxic CDS (like AIG, they will call it “insurance”). This may defer panic at most for a little while.

Technical solutions exist. The most-developed of these is the “Modest Proposal” of Yanis Varoufakis and Stuart Holland, widely backed by older political leaders in Europe. It would 1) convert the first 60 percent of GDP of every eurozone country’s debt to a common European bond, issued by the ECB; 2) recapitalize and Europeanize the banking system, breaking the hammerlock of national banks on national politicians; and 3) fund a New Deal-like program of investment projects through the European Investment Bank.

Variant proposals include Kunibert Raffer’s call for a sovereign insolvency regime modeled on the U.S. municipal bankruptcy statute, Thomas Palley’s proposal for a new “government banker” and Jan Toporowski’s proposal for a tax on bank balance sheets to retire excess public debt.

These are the best ideas and none of them will happen. Europe’s political classes exist these days in a vise forged by desperate bankers and angry voters, no less in Germany and France than in Greece or Italy. Discourse is sealed off from fresh ideas and political survival depends on kicking cans down roads so that the fact that this is a banking crisis does not have to be faced. The fate of the weak is at best incidental. Thus every meeting of finance ministers and prime ministers yields treacherous half-measures and legal evasions.

Political fragility also explains the fury in France and Germany when George Papandreou [the calmest man in Europe, by the way, having been born and raised in Minnesota] sought to cut the knot of his rebellious ministers, irresponsible opposition and angry public by putting the latest austerity package to a vote. God help the bankers! The move was fatal to Papandreou in short order, and Greece will now be turned over to a junta of creditors’ deputies if such can be found willing to take the job. It won’t be anyone who wants to continue to live in Greece afterward.

Greece and Ireland are being destroyed. Portugal and Spain are in limbo, and the crisis shifts to Italy – truly too big to fail – which is being put into an IMF-dictated receivership as I write. Meanwhile France struggles to delay the (inevitable) downgrade of its AAA rating by cutting every social and investment program.

If there were an easy exit from the Euro, Greece would be gone already. But Greece is not Argentina with soybeans and oil for the Chinese market, and legally exit from the Euro means leaving the European Union. It’s a choice only Germany can make. For the others, the choice is between cancer and heart attack, barring a transformation in Northern Europe that not even Socialist victories in the next round of French and German elections would bring.

[MF: Here, I would demur. This explains why Greece hasn't exited so far. But at this point, why not choose exit? Everybody proper said, following orthodox theory, that exit wouldn't work for Malaysia, Argentina, etc. as well. But it did. Considering the empirical evidence at this point in history, and adding to that game theory logic, I think exit is the only rational option now.]

So the cauldrons bubble. Debtor Europe is sliding toward social breakdown, financial panic and ultimately to emigration, once again, as the way out, for some. Yet – and here is another difference with the United States – people there have not entirely forgotten how to fight back. Marches, demonstrations, strikes and general strikes are on the rise. We are at the point where political structures offer no hope, and the baton stands to pass, quite soon, to the hand of resistance. It may not be capable of much – but we shall see."

.....

There remains a popular or perhaps professional conservative economist's insistence that the cause of economic crisis in Europe is immoral Greek consumer and political behaviour. That might be an opportune, EZ, resonant, discursive tactic if you're a Greek with a meso-political axe to grind or a conservative economist clinging to the wire monkey mother of your dogma.

As someone who was hounded by bankers and real estate agents to buy a house in the US at the peak of the bubble (and of course I was! I was even given a whole book by the realtor explaining in simple terms that if I bought a home, I could be part of the Infinite Pyramid Scheme (TM) and someone would without fail buy that home from me for an even-more inflated price.), when I had just graduated from my PhD program with grotesque mounds of student debt, I know good and well that moralistic arguments about the consumer root of economic crises are full-on undiluted bullshit, toxic CDOs, if you will.

To still buy those toxic funds, you would have to be completely autistic; hallucinating nothingness in the face of mass marketing, highly-unequal social status and institutionally-flogged hegemony; utterly blind to the global quality of the economy; and abjectly deaf to the extreme variations in money-borrowing and -lending power. You would have to be a conservative economist, or the slave of some such defunct economist).

Debt + No Class Compromise > Delay > Asset Liquidation

If you get your rocks off by pursing your lips sourly and pointing fingers at more-or-less hapless pawns, here’s a link to Greg Palast’s observation of one of the proximate causes of Greek economic crisis. The conservatives had to borrow from financial capital in order to temporarily prop up the pretense that the financial capitalist’s order works, and the conservatives can operate it. The order, one of primitive accumulation, doesn’t, cannot work for most societies and people and environments. So what were conservatives supposed to do? Admit that, and lead the socialist revolution? THAT WAS NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN. Did I even have to caps-lock that? No. Conservatives' only (pro-system) choice was debt-to-delay. So that is not a choice.

Now, should any working class person ever elect a liberal, let alone a conservative, to represent her in the political sphere? No. Absolutely not. Because that debt-to-delay non-choice is exactly what you get from them. Fetishizing the politicians' systematic corruption is kind of perverse and creepy and stunted, given it's about "catching" them doing what they are ideologically-constrained and coached to do.

Regardless of Keynesians' belief that states can deficit spend, everyone believes in debt–or money liquidity, as it’s known when we’re not being manipulatively moralistic. It’s a fundamental part of economies, as well as pious, exploitative moral economies. Debt was the key to US military-economic dominance in the latter half of the 20th century, and this constrained everyone else’s options–especially in Europe, not to even mention how the financialization/debt model was sold, was saturation-marketed as the 1-Tru (TM) path to infinite economic expansion and happyness.

But of course the underlying problem is that actually-existing financialized capital is principally a tool for primitive accumulation–appropriating, concentrating and controlling value and exchange. In other words, debt-to-delay leads inexorably to wicked public and smallholder asset liquidation and a continuous and depleting debt-to-liquidation cycle, or else one helluva social fight to force garbage investors to take the losses on their garbage investments and to clean up their investment practices.

Our elites are very diligent at reminding us about the terms of their protection racket: that if investors are forced to be prudent, they will withhold liquidity and offload the costs onto the working class and the public. However, the traditional threats have begun to mean nothing, because the primitive accumulation debt-to-liquidation cycle has resulted in withheld liquidity and economic crisis offloaded onto the working class and smallholders anyway. When there's no class compromise, the hegemonic leverage wears down quickly, leaving bare brutality.

Unless we fight to reduce its power, we cannot escape capitalist primitive accumulation and our own over-determined economic dispossession and depletion. Yet we still have a wide range of commentators declaring TINA on austerity. There are alternatives. The alternatives simply do not support financial-military global monopoly capitalism.

Thus, faced with this impassible dilemma, (much like the 20% (a low) of Americans who still somehow believe that they will be in the top 1% of wealth accumulators) paid experts somehow still desperately pretend to believe that there is a universal, moral path to wealth accumulation in a fictitious 2-D world without power, and that little Greece, if they’d just been more moral, could have followed that yellow brick road, paved by the benevolent financial system devoted to unproductive accumulation and geo-political power moves undertaken by the financial capital centers of the US (US banks own over 10% of Greek risk), England, France and Germany in the west, and oil capitalists and China eastward. The level of political- economic and geopolitical naivete required to maintain this moral handwringing and within-Greece fingerpointing is flabberghasting at this point in history.

Within the context of global monopoly capitalism, nothing could have been done for the welfare of peripheral small economies (countries) like Greece. Financial-military capital has not been and is not aligned for this. That this mal-alignment destroys capital and undermines the Greek, European or global economy is not a problem to financial-military capital--especially not when the dollar as world reserve currency automatically secures such resolute US dependability for capital. (Which is why OWS is so important to disciplining global speculation.)

Someday, the capitalist lords and retainers claim, global monopoly capital may get in the mood or accidentally do something to benefit non-elites. You just never know. It's happened (with some considerable drawbacks, including population explosion, scarcity and environmental catastrophe. But dammit some of us did get those nice SUVs for a while in some places.) In the face of their brutal solipsism and frigidity, the deity-bankers only ask for assurances that, as long as you or your politicians are worried about liquidity for your society’s survival (assuming of course that we're not interested in bothering to establish a global network of rebellion), they are entitled to the wealth your society creates into the future. This is the blackmail of late monopoly capitalism. To really paraphrase Nixon all out of recognition, perhaps we all have Stockholm Syndrome now. You give your wealth. You get a steady supply of bloody fingers, etc. in the mailbox. It all ends when you open up the envelope to find your own bloody heart muscle wrapped in a tissue.

And for what? Regardless of what happens to the body, the economy or societies or the environment, as long as they get the wealth, financial capital wins. --Perhaps we go along with it because we think the capitalists are sexy (Thanks for the beer goggles, Frank Luntz!), because even all the militarized cops can't follow all of us around in our daily rounds of assiduous obedience.

Nuclear USA

2011-11-14T21:37:00.001-07:00

Nuclear facilities in the US, courtesy Mother Jones.

Nuclear Japan:

Fukushima Diary brings us news that the Japanese government has officially admitted that irradiated food from North Japan is harmful.

Otsuka Norikazu, a Japanese TV newscaster, devoted himself to the national public campaign, “Let’s support North Japan by eating their food,” often eating radioactive food from the north in television broadcasts.

Norikazu was committed to a hospital for acute lymphatic leukemia on November 7, 2011.

Grimly proving once again: Matter over mind.

Class War with a Little Generation War on the Side

2011-11-13T21:47:00.001-07:00

According to the recent Pew Social & Demographic Trends study,

The current (generational wealth) gap is unprecedented. In 1984, the age-based wealth gap had been 10:1. By 2009, it had ballooned to 47:1.Older people today have 47 times more money than younger people; and they have 42% more wealth than their same-aged counterparts in 1984, while the younger generation has 68% less than theirs.

Someone needs to use the Pew data and write on the Silent & Boomer Generations' little cut of our era's class war. We should be able to talk about how the younger generations were sold out, without the Republicans co-opting the discussion for their anti- working class institutions (Medicare, social security) campaigns.

Sources of intergenerational (young to old) wealth transfer: housing bubble, privatized education & student loan debt, deunionization & stagnant incomes, pension funds & bank bailouts.

And that's not even talking what devastation they wrought on the environment, just to keep floating atop their magical oil geyser kingdom. With sincerest apologies to that punk Tom Brokaw, the point is not that some generations are holier or more evil than others. The point is that we need to learn how to recognize when we're selling out the future, stop ourselves from selling out the future, and formulate a real sense of wealth (cf J. Schor). In order to see class war, we need to be able to see how class warfare strategically manages (inter alia) generation divides.

Overcoming Denialism

2011-11-13T10:40:00.001-07:00

John Bellamy Foster
"Occupy Denialism: Toward Ecological & Social Revolution"
MRZine 11/11/11

All of us here today, along with countless others around the world, are currently engaged in the collective struggle to save the planet as a place of habitation for humanity and innumerable other species. The environmental movement has grown leaps and bounds in the last fifty years. But we need to recognize that despite our increasing numbers we are losing the battle, if not the war, for the future of the earth. Our worst enemy is denialism: not just the outright denial of climate-change skeptics, but also the far more dangerous denial -- often found amongst environmentalists themselves -- of capitalism's role in the accumulation of ecological catastrophe.1

Recently, climate scientists, writing in leading scientific journals, have developed a way of addressing the extreme nature of the climate crisis, focusing on irreversible change and the trillionth ton of carbon. Central to the scientific consensus on climate change today is the finding that a rise in global temperature by 2° C (3.6° F), associated with an atmospheric carbon concentration of 450 parts per million (ppm), represents a critical tipping point, irreversible in anything like human-time frames. Climate models show that if we were to reach that point feedback mechanisms would likely set in, and society would no longer be able to prevent the climate catastrophe from developing further out of our control.

Even if we were completely to cease burning fossil fuels when global average temperature had risen by 2° C, climate change and its catastrophic effects would still be present in the year 3000. In other words, avoiding an increase in global average temperatures of 2° C, 450 ppm is crucial because it constitutes a point of no return. Once we get to that point, we will no longer be able to return, even in a millennium, to the Holocene conditions under which human civilization developed over the last 12,000 years.

Many of you are aware that long-term stabilization of the climate requires that we target 350 ppm, not 450 ppm. But 450 ppm remains significant, since it represents the planetary equivalent of cutting down the last palm tree on Easter Island.2.It is here that the trillionth ton enters in. In the last couple of years, climate studies have determined that once we emit the trillionth metric ton of carbon -- counting all the carbon put into the atmosphere since 1750 -- we will have exhausted our cumulative carbon budget. This means that if we burn no more than the trillion ton of carbon we will still have a reasonable chance (though this may not in fact be much more than 50-50) of not exceeding the 2° C, 450 ppm boundary. The trillionth ton of carbon is thus viewed as an absolute cutoff.

Growing scientific evidence, however, suggests that it is essential to remain below the 2° C, 450 ppm level. Consequently, some prominent climate scientists, such as Myles Allen at the University of Oxford, have stipulated that we need to target 750 billion tons of carbon as the limit, which will give us a 75 percent chance of staying below a 2° C increase in global average temperature.

How far are we from emitting the 750 billion -- or even the trillionth -- ton? Since 1750, we have emitted 550 billion tons of carbon and the rate is accelerating. If present emission trends continue, we will reach the 750 billionth ton of carbon in 2028, that is, in sixteen years. In order to avoid emitting the 750 billionth ton by 2050 we will need to reduce our global carbon dioxide emissions by 5 percent annually. In order not to emit the trillionth ton of carbon by 2050, carbon dioxide emissions would have to drop by 2.4 percent per year. This is much greater than the 1.5 percent drop in global carbon dioxide emissions, resulting from the Great Recession in 2008-2009. The longer we wait to make the reductions the steeper the decline required.Another way of putting this is that if we burn even half of today's proven, economically accessible reserves of oil, natural gas, and coal, we will almost certainly reach/exceed the irreversible 2° C, 450 ppm, boundary. If we want a 75 percent chance of staying below a 2° C increase, we have to lock up all but a quarter of today's proven economically accessible fossil-fuel resources.3

If all of this were not enough, climate change is only one of the rifts in planetary boundaries that scientists are now pointing to: the others include ocean acidification, ozone depletion, species extinction, disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, land cover loss, freshwater shortages, (less certainly at present) aerosol loading, and chemical proliferation. Each of these has the potential of disrupting the global environmental order on catastrophic levels, and the trends for each (with the possible exception of ozone depletion) are presently a source of concern. Already we have crossed three planetary boundaries: climate change, disruption of the nitrogen cycle, and species extinction.4

Faced with such enormous environmental problems and the need for massive, urgent changes in society, our worst enemy, as I have indicated, is denialism. Here it is useful to look at what I call the "three stages of denial" with respect to the global environmental crisis.5

The first stage of denial is straightforward. It is the denial associated with Exxon-Mobil and climate skeptics -- who say either that there is no such thing as climate change or that it is not caused by human actions. Sometimes they contradict themselves and argue both at once. This of course is the inevitable response of capital, which is invariably concerned, first and foremost, with protecting its bottom line -- even at the expense of the earth itself.

The second stage of denial -- often advanced by self-designated environmentalists themselves -- is to admit that there is a problem, and even to factor in the proximate causes. Most of you are no doubt familiar with the environmental impact or IPAT formula. Environmental Impact = Population X Affluence X Technology. This is a mere truism, where the drivers of environmental impacts are concerned. It frequently leads to the notion that the solution is a simple matter of promoting sustainable population, sustainable consumption, and sustainable technology. Nevertheless, this conception doesn't actually take us very far, since we then need to explain what drives population, consumption, and technology themselves. In fact, such multiple-factor analysis is all too often used as a way of denying the underlying background condition: the capitalist treadmill of production.6

The third stage of denial has the look and feel of greater realism, but actually constitutes a more desperate and dangerous response. It admits that capitalism is the problem, but also contends that capitalism is the solution. This general approach emphasizes what is variously referred to as "sustainable capitalism," "natural capitalism," "climate capitalism," "green capitalism," etc.7 In this view we can continue down the same road of capital accumulation, mounting profits, and exponential economic growth -- while at the same time miraculously reducing our burdens on the planetary environment. It is business as usual, but with greater efficiency and greater accounting of environmental costs. No fundamental changes in social or property relations -- in the structure of production and consumption -- are required. This is the magical world view advanced by such diverse figures as Al Gore, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins, Paul Hawken, and Jonathon Porritt -- if not Thomas Friedman, Newt Gingrich, and the Breakthrough Institute, as well.

From a policy perspective, this normally divides into two streams, one state-centered and the other market-centered. Green Keynesians like to think that we can ameliorate our environmental problems (and our economic problems too) by having the state promote economic growth through the creation of green jobs. Green Schumpeterians, like Friedman, Gingrich, and the Breakthrough Institute, offer as a solution green technological innovations, supposedly a natural outgrowth of the market -- but usually seen as requiring additional subsidies to corporations to harness its full strength. Here too the promise is one of heightened economic growth on greener terms, equated simply with greater energy efficiency.

The main problem, which all of this denies, is the nature and logic of capitalism itself. Capitalism, as its name suggests, is quite simply, the system of capital. Its sole purpose is the accumulation of capital through the exploitation of human labor. It is a grow-or-die system dominated by the 1% (the capitalist class) and giant corporations. It is prone to periodic economic crises, and constant -- and today deepening -- unemployment. Capital accumulation and economic expansion occur by means of gross inequality and monopolistic competition, generating a war of all against all and a world of waste. The wider public/social/natural sphere is an object of theft -- a realm in which to dump "externalities" or impose unpaid social costs, which then fall on nature and humanity in general.

Endless capitalism requires unlimited economic growth. Economists generally consider a 3 percent average rate of economic growth over the long run as absolutely essential for the stability of the capitalist system. Yet, if we were to have a continual 3 percent rate of economic growth, world output would expand exponentially by around sixteen times in a century, 250 times in two centuries, and 4000 times in three centuries. Already we are overshooting planetary limits -- consuming resources as if we had multiple planets at our disposal, undermining the very basis of our existence.8

What then is the alternative? The answer is a cultural-power shift -- opening up the world to the creative efforts of hundreds of millions, even billions of people, and unleashing a process of sustainable human development. Today the world Occupy movement is showing the way. It is time, as Noam Chomsky contends, not simply to Occupy Wall Street but to go on to "Occupy the Future."9

As the 99%, we need to take direct action with respect to the environment: locking up the three-quarters of the proven, economically available oil, natural gas, and coal (remembering always that the poorest countries have to be allowed to develop while the richer countries need disproportionately to pay the cost); blocking the Canadian-U.S. tar sands pipeline; and imposing a carbon fee at the point of production (i.e. at the oil well, mine shaft, and point of entry) -- the funds from which would be returned immediately to the population on a per capita basis, so that those with the largest carbon footprints, predominantly the corporate rich, would be the ones that paid. (This is the proposal of U.S. climatologist James Hansen.)10

In the end we will need to go on and culturally Occupy the system itself through a long-term ecological and social revolution, opening the way to democratic planning at all levels of society from the local community on up.11

Under twenty-first century capitalism the world is being buried in commodity waste. We are compelled, simply in order to live and breathe in this society, to engage in useless and alienated labor directed at satisfying artificial wants through the production of mere "stuff," the bulk of which ends up being disposed of soon after it is purchased. This all takes places simply so that the whole process can start up again, more commodities can be generated, and more profits can be made by the 1%. As radical economist Juliet Schor says, we have lost any sense of "true wealth."12

In the United States today we spend about $1 trillion on the military each year, far more than all the rest of the world put together.13 U.S. corporations and businesses today spend more than $1 trillion on marketing annually, simply in order to persuade people to buy things that they don't want or need.14 Our very cultural apparatus is shaped so as to conform to the imperative of marketing -- not democratic communication.

If we are to save the earth, this gargantuan waste and destruction which dominates our lives needs to be brought to an end, so that we can focus on the real issues: making sure that everyone in every part of the world has enough of life's basic needs; building community; promoting substantive equality; and creating the basis for sustainable human development. Some have called this a socialism for the twenty-first century.In a 1962 speech to the National Maritime Union, Martin Luther King declared: "We are presiding over a dying order, one which has long deserved to die," and he ended his speech with the words of the great American socialist Eugene Debs: "I can see the dawn of a better humanity. The people are awakening. In due course of time they will come into their own."15

Now is the time of which Debs and King spoke, the time in which to create a new society where human beings no longer deny, but affirm, their connections to each other and to the Earth.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

Notes
1 On ecological denialism as a complex social construct see Kari Norgaard, Living With Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life(Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2011).
2 Susan Solomon, et. al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 6 (February 10, 2009): 1704-1709; Heidi Cullen, The Weather of the Future(New York: Harpers, 2010), 264-71.
3 Myles Allen, et. al., "The Exit Strategy," Nature Reports Climate Change, April 30, 2009, and "Warming Caused by Cumulative Carbon Emissions Towards the Trillionth Tonne," Nature 458 (April 20, 2009): 1163-66; Malte Meinshausen, et. al., "Greenhouse-Gas Emission Targets for Limiting Global Warming to 2° C," Nature 458 (April 30, 2009): 1158-62; TrillionthTonne.org; Catherine Brahic, "Humanity's Carbon Budget Set at One Trillion Tons," New Scientist, April 29, 2009; Cullen, The Weather of the Future, 264-71; International Economic Agency, CO2 Emissions from Fuel Combustion (Paris: IEA, 2011), 7.
4 Johan Rockström, et. al., "A Safe Operating Space for Humanity," Nature 461 (September 24, 2009): 472-75.
5 See John Bellamy Foster, "Capitalism and the Accumulation of Catastrophe," forthcoming Monthly Review63, no. 7 (December 2011): 1-17, where the three stages of denial are put in the context of an overall accumulation of catastrophe under capitalism.
6 Allan Schnaiberg introduced the treadmill of production critique in his book The Environment: From Surplus to Scarcity(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), based on earlier Marxian conceptions.
7 See Al Gore, Our Choice (New York: Rodale, 2009), 346; Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism(Boston: Little Brown, 1999); L. Hunter Lovins and Boyd Cohen, Climate Capitalism(New York: Hill and Wang, 2011); Jonathon Porritt, Capitalism: As If the World Mattered(London: Earthscan, 2007); Thomas Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008); New Gingrich, A Contract With the Earth(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); and Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, Break Through(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
8 Charles Morse, "Environment, Economics and Socialism," Monthly Review 30, no. 11 (April 1979): 15.
9 Noam Chomsky, "Occupy the Future," November 2, 2011, NationOfChange.org.
10 James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren(New York: Bloomsbury, 2009),211-20.
11 For a more developed argument on short-term, radical ecological changes and long-term revolutionary ecological change see Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster, What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 123-44.
12 Juliet Schor, True Wealth(London: Penguin, 2010).
13 For the data on military spending see John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Robert W. McChesney, "The U.S. Imperial Triangle and Military Spending," Monthly Review 60, no. 5 (October 2008): 9-13.
14 "U.S. Marketing Spending Exceeded $1 Trillion in 2005," Metrics Business and Market Intelligence, June 26, 2006, http://metrics2.com; Michael Dawson, The Consumer Trap (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 1.
15 Martin Luther King, Jr., "All Labor Has Dignity" (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 71.

The Revolution Will Not Be Pomo-icized

2011-11-09T22:53:00.000-07:00

Why Critics of Economics
Can Ill-afford the “Postmodern Turn”
Yanis Varoufakis (University of Athens and University of Sydney)
Reposted from Post-autistic Economics Review 2002 Issue 13.

The dissident’s nightmare

It is a sad irony when the activities of dissidents help shore up the establishment they set out to subvert. The point of this piece is to warn the ‘economic’ dissident: Beware the Postmodern Turn! The argument will turn on the thought that postmodern criticisms of economics serve the twin purpose of (a) releasing pent-up frustration with the profession while, at once, (b) reinforcing its ideological backbone.

Every era has a tendency surreptitiously to guide young dissidents toward a specific ‘umbrella movement’; one that ends up shaping their milieu. Existentialism, structuralism, neo-Marxism, etc. have given their place, in our era of devalued political goods, to Postmodernity and Deconstruction. Without wishing to discuss the ‘postmodern condition’ generally, I shall concentrate entirely on its likely effects on the struggle to ‘civilise’ economics. In this regard, the problem with postmodern thinking is that it stands no chance of success.

Postmodernity’s criticism of grandiose Theory may be terribly satisfying to those who adopt its grandiose pronouncements. However, the satisfaction at having lambasted all Theory is momentary and the ensuing subversion short-lived. To paraphrase Marx, the subverters will be, eventually, subverted and, tragically, the neoclassical establishment will come out stronger and better equipped to obfuscate social reality than ever before.(2) If I am right, the task of the PAE movement must be to clear the way for radical criticism that avoids the postmodern trap as resolutely as it opposes economic autism.

Dissidents or the economists’ handmaidens?

Modernity marginalised Religion, but retained religious transcendence by worshipping Theory. Economics emerged as the highest form of this secular creed and enchanted all of its practitioners; free-marketeer and protectionist, liberal and Marxist, Keynesian and monetarist. It now seems that some economists are breaking ranks; joining the ‘other’, the postmodern, side which defines itself in anti-theoretical tones that exude an atheist’s anti-religious fervour. The danger is that the legitimate anger of students (which has given rise to the PAE movement) will draw them to an apostasy without a future. For despite its considerable oeuvre, postmodern criticisms of economics are doomed to shrivel and be absorbed by mainstream economics; the predator turning into unsuspecting prey. I risk this prediction for two reasons.

First, postmodernists allow economics to parade as equally scientific as the natural sciences (albeit on the grounds that no discipline is truly scientific). They are right of course to think that all theory resembles religion, since it also seeks to give meaning to the practices and expectations of whole communities. However some theories are capable of transcending religion and approaching objectivity better than others. Nature’s habit of working independently of our beliefs about it means that the natural scientist can devise experiments which have the power disinterestedly to discard falsity and thus forge knowledge and progress. Society, on the other hand, is corrupted to the very marrow of its bones by our collective beliefs about it, and can therefore provide no objective test of social theory (the latter being part of the very web of beliefs that society is made of). Thus social theory, unlike thermodynamics, is condemned to remain untestable, and stuck in the realm of opinion. Economics valiantly attempts to extricate itself from this fate with a touching commitment to mathematics but, sadly, it only ends up as a religion with equations.

Postmodernity errs in thinking of this as the inevitable failure of all Modernist enterprises. It lambastes economists’ churlish reliance on an Outer Wall of Algebra and an Inner Wall of Statistics but overlooks their success at never even coming close to the nature and the dynamics of contemporary capitalism, thus shielding the latter from rational criticism. But such is the fate of all idealisms which give language an existence independent of the material conditions of social life and reproduction. If only postmodernist critics understood theology and mathematics a little better! Perhaps they would have recognised in economics the greatest proof that Modernity is saturated with its negation.

Which brings me to the second part of the argument: Postmodernity not only lets neoclassical economics off the hook but, more worryingly, reinforces it copiously before dissolving into it. Consider what the postmodern rejection of metanarratives means at the individual level: It means the loss of any capacity to scrutinise one’s private urges rationally on the basis of some collectively constructed notion (or metanarrative) of the Good. Stripped of those capacities, the individual fragments into a community of selves, a bundle of ordinal preferences, and ends up with no one self whose preferences those are.

In this Empire of Ordinal Preference the only possible data that social theory can go to work with are the differences in individual whims and freely-chosen identities. These data are then, courtesy of their ordinal properties, impossible to compare across persons (for this would require a metanarrative) or procure a view of capitalism as a system. Thus in a fully-fledged postmodern schema, social relations are confined to interplay, voluntarism, tolerance and exchange; society is the playground where the latter unfold; and discussions of the General Will, exploitation and developmental freedom make no sense. Does this all sound familiar?

If it does, the reason is that neoclassical economics went down that alley decades ago. The asymptotic limit of postmodern fragmentation is the neoclassical general equilibrium economic model. Both Neoclassicism and Postmodernity espouse a radical egalitarianism which is founded on the rejection of any standard or value by which either individual action or the institutions of late capitalism (e.g. the labour and capital markets) can be subjected to rational criticism. In short, whereas the problem with modernist mechanism was that its view of our world excluded value from the outset, the problem with Postmodernity is that it ends up having no view of the world and becomes easy-pickings for a similarly viewless/valueless tradition, one which bears the additional weaponry of intricate mathematics and endless econometric ‘evidence’.

For Oscar Wilde the supreme vice was shallowness. For Postmodernity it is the New Jerusalem. Its playfulness allowed it to thrive in the friendlier waters of literary and cultural studies at a time when ‘margins’ were becoming central and classical stuffiness was going out of fashion. But now postmodernists have entered shark-infested territory. Neoclassical economics, another purveyor of shallowness, threatens to bend them to its will,(3) gain strength from them and subsequently reinforce hierarchies more oppressive and totalising than those the postmodernists set out initially to dismantle.

When the IMF dictates its policies to some hapless Third World country, there is a strong whiff of the radical egalitarianism shared equally between general equilibrium and Postmodernity. The same whiff accompanies, and legitimises, the inexorable devaluation of political goods, the vulgar commodification of human bodies and values, the impossibility of conceptualising freedom-from-the-market, the depiction of Central Banks as ‘independent’ only when under the thumb of financial capital, the confusion of liberty with the freedom to exploit and to demean and, above all else, the portrayal of coercion as tâtonnement. Thus Postmodernity unwittingly blows fresh wind in the sails of neoclassicism, the undisputed champion of the deconstructed human agent. While warning us correctly that new authoritarianisms will be born when we get caught up in our own rhetoric, it offers no resistance to the current authoritarianism of neoclassical economics and, more so, the socio-economic system that it serves.

Conclusion: The dissidents’ dilemma

When a fresh wave of criticism is unleashed, it picks up along the way pre-existing discontents, hitherto bopping along hopelessly near the surface, and propels them toward the shores of exposure and respectability. Lonely dissidents suddenly find a new ‘movement’ that will have them. New hope of escaping obscurity is thus born.

In recent years many dissident voices had to adapt themselves to postmodern-speak in an attempt to be ‘included’ on the postmodern bandwagon. The PAE movement must release such voices from this obligation. Social criticism of economics must reclaim an awareness that to reject the scientific status of economics is not to reject science in general or to espouse postmodernism.

Indeed irony and ambiguity were utilised, long before Postmodernity, by thinkers eager to come to what a more confident past once knew as the truth. To re-establish irony, ambiguity and indeterminateness in the discourse of economists would be a triumph of the spirit. But it would not be a postmodern turn. For the latter has no monopoly on an appreciation of the radical indeterminacy of social processes (as Hegel would be all to eager to remind us) or the importance of not taking our selves, and our theories, too seriously. On the contrary, Postmodernity undermines itself by offering Modernity’s most awful purveyor another means of extending its dominance.

So, we have arrived at the dissident’s dilemma. The postmodern kernel within neoclassical economics forces a stark choice: Submit to homo economicus and model our messy world’s dynamic as if a series of suburban disputes between postmodern neighbours. Or, seek an historically-grounded understanding of how systematic patterns of power and economics are the joint products of the continual feedback between technological developments and evolving social formations. The difference between the two options is not theoretical; it is ideological. The postmodern turn will be chosen by pseudo-dissidents whose prime interests lie in acquiring a chic image; one that the self-effacing postmodern criticism is good at imparting. The less-fashionable option of working towards historically-grounded knowledge will appeal to the truly ‘unreasonable’ dissidents; those driven by an unbending commitment to a rational transformation of society.

Notes
1. Department of Economics, University of Athens, 8 Pesmazoglou Street, Athens 10596 and Department of Economics, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia. Email: yanisv@econ.uoa.gr
2. Recently, Routledge published a volume on the nexus of Postmodernity with economics edited by Jack Amariglio, Stephen Cullenberg, and David Ruccio (2001). The following thoughts have been extracted from my review of that book (forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Methodology)
3. Courtesy of a more sophisticated take on the same type of philosophical shallowness.
References
Cullenberg, S., J. Amariglio and D. Ruccio (2001). Postmodernity, Economics and Knoweldge, London and New York: Routledge
Varoufakis, Y. (2002). ‘Deconstructing Homo Economicus?’, Journal of Economic Methodology, forthcoming.

...

The reason why political economists see idealist postmodernism as superficial and epiphenomenal is because there's no ontological depth to idealism, see the critique in critical realism & Bhaskar. In a 2-D world of epistemological surface viewed from different points on that surface, liberation looks methodological individualist, methodological instrumentalist, and in methodologically-imposed equilibrium. But that is exactly what bondage looks like in a critical realist, historical materialist world of ontological depth.

A further note to self--explore this hypothesis:
The Kantian rejection of ontology and elevation of epistemology does not solve the problem of human reflexivity, when studying social relations.

...

Coming attraction:

Though engaging or convincing postmodernists is not germane to my life's intellectual (or otherwise) projects (I'm simply not in that social location--though I am in that geographic location.), I'll post notes on Zizek, Badiou & Agamben's niche efforts to explain leftist traditions to postmodernists. Unlike other leftists, I don't mind the Z-B-A niche. There's a real problem in the Anglosphere with superficially-liberatory postmodern misunderstandings and distortions of leftist thought that bolster the hegemony of ideological conservative economics and the adoption and diffusion of neoliberal governance. ...Just as there's the persistent problem of the neocon swerve (from a leftist base) within the Anglo-American Zionist intellectual community. Where there's network, status- and/or resource-access incentive, humans are great at rationalizing, even if it is ugly; and how they do it, how they are motivated, and the demonstrable telos of those rationalizations are of some interest.

Throwing off the Yoke: CED, currency, credit access

2011-11-08T21:48:00.000-07:00

‎"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at."

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

Establishing a local currency, together with taking over credit union boards (to gain access to credit), can provide the complement to Community Economic Development (social enterprises including cooperatives, and social enterprise networks) to fortify the working class against capital strike, blackmail and dysfunction.

Common Good Finance in Ashfield, Massachusetts.

"We need to re-democratize the monetary system, to have a set of alternatives for issuing credit outside the banking oligarchy. Alternative currencies can play a vital role in that"

Josh Ryan-Collins, the New Economics Foundation.

This Guardian article, "Currency stays close to home," reviews the successful rise of the local chiemgauer currency in Rosenheim-Traunstein, Germany. The chiemgauer was designed and operates to stimulate spending in the local economy, as well as to provide a work-around (or strategic counter to) financial capital illiquidity.

Yes! Magazine covers local currency innovations in "Dollars with Good Sense: DIY Cash."

Other promising social movement initiatives that OWS has opened up space for:

Revoke corporate personhood.

Worker occupation of enterprises.

"Long Shadows" by Josh Ritter (video by James Holland)

Note on UK cooperatives:

There are some quite big co-ops in the UK. They’re not perfect, and still run on similar lines to normal corporations. On the other hand they are far better than corporations, treat their workers better (who after all are technically the owners of some of them – others are owned in theory by shoppers) and tend to take social responsibility quite seriously. Executive pay, while still too high, is far lower than comparable private companies.

Along similar lines, Building Societies in the UK were owned by customers (so essentially non-profit) and for the most part were run fairly well. They offered a better service, better rates and were fairly conservatively run. They were famirly limited in the activities they were allowed to engage in. They were strictly a consumer financing deal (mostly houses). Most of them were force-privatised by the conservatives, but the remaining ones have mostly weathered the crisis fairly well. In comparison to their private breathren, none of whom now survive. The bank which endured the bank run in the UK, Northern Rock, was an ex building society.

W. L. Gore and Associates is perhaps an example of an interim culture existing in the US. Far far from perfect, but hints of what might be nonetheless.

Economic Value: A Sociological View

I think one of our problems right now is that we don't know how to think about value. There is an excess of hurried, automatic, breathless dismissal of Marx's classic political-economy theory of value, including by Marxists and other leftists; but I think we ought to stop for a moment, and reconsider the common-sense dismissal we've arrived at, at this point in history. It's blinding us to things we need to think about.

I think we're missing Marx's point about value, which perhaps requires a sociological perspective (and, Varoufakis, is not incompatible with theories of value that recognize entrepreneurial activity as the locus of value in an economy). Simply, economic value is a social product, created through creative, reflexive, semi-deterministic/semi-voluntaristic relational, social (human) work upon nature. Value isn't something that is made within the capitalist market, when profits are realized in the sphere of circulation. That production-circulation separation is maintained through money, so that value can be controlled by capitalists--but price and value cannot be identical. Value is a product of creative, active human relations. Price is a product of capitalist control of value.

That economic value is produced by creative, active human relations is why capitalists are always trying to privatize, to mine the public and the commons--there's value in them thar human creations.

People, even leftists, who are overly trained in marginalism and other modern conservative economics get caught up in the price calculation mode, and so sometimes fail to see that people coming together to build alternative economic institutions is creating value, and creating independence from capitalist coercion. Didn't capitalists once create institutions that afforded them independence from the feudal value system, when the contradictions of that feudal system created crisis?

Virginia, Meet Financial Capital

2011-11-07T11:50:00.000-07:00

This Guardian article shows one way (the divorce between compensation and performance) in which financial capital does not function according to conservative economic theory, with its ideologically-convenient ignorance of human reflexivity and power.

Any reporter worth his salt knows that following Goldman Sachs' trail of hell-ooze is always worth his time. Greg Palast reports on how Goldman Sachs colluded with Greece's (former) right-wing government to 1) create the image that conservatives can govern a democracy, which they patently cannot, and 2) screw the world economy and the majority of the people in that economy, for their own unchecked aggrandizement.

Palast, who is selling his book Vulture's Picnic, deserves to be quoted at length on this overview of the conservative-nursemaided primitive accumulation of Greek wealth:

"In 2002, Goldman Sachs secretly bought up €2.3 billion in Greek government debt, converted it all into yen and dollars, then immediately sold it back to Greece.Goldman took a huge loss on the trade.Is Goldman that stupid?

Goldman is stupid—like a fox. The deal was a con, with Goldman making up a phony-baloney exchange rate for the transaction. Why?

Goldman had cut a secret deal with the Greek government in power then. Their game: to conceal a massive budget deficit. Goldman's fake loss was the Greek government's fake gain.Goldman would get repayment of its “loss” from the government at loan-shark rates.The point is, through this crazy and costly legerdemain, Greece's right-wing free-market government was able to pretend its deficits never exceeded 3 percent of GDP.Cool.

Fraudulent but cool.

But flim-flam isn’t cheap these days: On top of murderous interest payments, Goldman charged the Greeks over a quarter billion dollars in fees.

When the new Socialist government of George Papandreou came into office, they opened up the books and Goldman's bats flew out.

Investors went berserk, demanding monster interest rates to lend more money to roll over this debt.Greece's panicked bondholders rushed to buy insurance against the nation going bankrupt. The price of the bond-bust insurance, called a credit default swap (or CDS), also shot through the roof. Who made a big pile selling the CDS insurance?

Goldman.And those rotting bags of CDS's sold by Goldman and others? Didn't they know they were handing their customers gold-painted turds?That's Goldman's specialty.

In 2007, at the same time banks were selling suspect CDS's and CDOs (packaged sub-prime mortgage securities), Goldman held a “net short” position against these securities. That is, Goldman was betting their financial "products" would end up in the toilet. Goldman picked up another half a billion dollars on their "net short" scam.

But, instead of cuffing Goldman's CEO Lloyd Blankfein and parading him in a cage through the streets of Athens, we have the victims of the frauds, the Greek people, blamed. Blamed and soaked for the cost of it. The "spread" on Greek bonds (the term used for the risk premium paid on Greece's corrupted debt) has now risen to — get ready for this––$14,000 per family per year."
...

December 2011 update:

The rich mouth off, concerning what assholes they are. (Hint: MIGHTY assholes.)

Law'n'Order Corrupts Absolutely

2011-11-07T11:40:00.001-07:00

Authoritarian Law'n'Order is by its very nature corrupt and corrupting. Here, law enforcement officers relate how they fabricated drug charges against innocent people, in order to meet Law'n'Order quotas.

...Once again proving that you are a bona fide idiot, if you think militarized policing and prison slavery build-up is a concession to the working class and an imposition of firm, fatherly (or feminist. whatever.) order. The working class will pay for each and every police and prison job through the nose and then through every other orifice they've got.

Iceland & Primitive Accumulation

2011-11-07T11:15:00.000-07:00

Here's Silla Sigurgeirsdottir and Robert H. Wade's Monde Diplomatique article "Iceland's Loud No." Here's a good English-language Icelandic journalist covering the transformation of private (capitalist) losses into public (working class) debt throughout Europe.

Iceland prosecutes predatory bankers, December 2011.

Iceland exits the recession, December 2011.

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From November 2011:

Deena Stryker's adaptation of the Italian article "Iceland's Ongoing Revolution" is on the alternative news, essentially arguing that Iceland's response to the transformation of private investor losses into public (cross-national and cross-generational working class plundering) debt throughout Europe is not adequately covered by the English-language press. She argues that this may be because Iceland has been striving to find alternate ways to pay off British and Dutch investors, other than working through the IMF (like Malaysia did successfully in the 1997 East Asian crash), and Icelandic people have been working to reform their political system to prevent plundering capture by global financial capital.

This is an important contribution because, first, the question for smaller-economy Western countries ultimately is: When Iceland/Greece/etc. govts are forced by global capital and larger-economy (more powerful) governments to strip wealth off their own citizens to pay off British and Dutch etc. investors, with interest, how much wealth will be transferred to the big-economy investors and their bankers?

Those investors were gambling. If it were just an economic market, they should have to absorb the risks and take the losses of their own gambling. But economics is also political, because it's about amassing and maintaining power. British and Dutch political regimes exist in capitalism to take up the sticks and guns and punitive trade strategies to make sure that there is all profit (growth) and no risk to British and Dutch investors, and by extension the bankers that served them--That the costs of Accounting-books economic "growth" are confined (inasmuch as is possible--Aye. There's the rub.) to the Icelandic, Greek, Spanish, Irish, US, British, etc. tax-paying working-class. That Accounting-books economic "growth" (AKA unregulated, state-backed investment) is a successful wealth-plundering strategy (AKA primitive accumulation). In this way big economies hope to attract capital and stay big, and smaller-economy countries hope to ride upon and not be eaten by bigger ones.

So there is the vital second question, which Ms. Stryker has tapped, of how much wealth transfer will be forced and must be conceded by various populations. This is an ongoing political fight involving: 1) the blackmail capitalist claim that the global capitalist economy cannot be restored until the wealth transfer is realized as exclusive private accumulation, 2) coercive and coerced enforcement of this transfer by governing regimes, and 3) many countries' working class populations, their range of beliefs about how political-economies can work, and their capacity to resist and fight. It is necessary for liberationists and democrats to engage those working class political-economic beliefs, as Ms. Stryker is doing by gesturing to the Icelandic differences, if nothing else to raise a reflexive working class limit on predatory financial capitalist machinations around the globe. (Well, that's the liberal ideal outcome. I can think of more ambitious outcomes.)

...

The carping about Stryker's article in Iceland's The Grapevine is about journalists' endemic quick and dirty deployment of econ stats in service of political extrapolations, in the midst of ongoing political contention in Iceland. It's nice that The Grapevine is clearing up the stats and reassuring Icelanders that le jeu n'est pas fait; but their critique is not essential to Stryker's argument. The constraints are similar; but there is a difference in the Icelandic popular political-economic imagination and strategies--a difference that, if not decisive, other working class populations need to see.

It's not helpful when, as at The Grapevine, journos confuse bank relations with investors with the state guarantees to those investors' powerful countries, and feed into conservative obfuscation of what is at stake in "bank bailouts." Moreover, you can expect The Grapevine critique to be blown out of proportion by conservatives who are on the primitive accumulation warpath. Yet I do not think The Grapevine editor is conservative. His Davidsdottir recommendation (above) is helpful; and he and his commentators are right in urging Stryker to correct the article--if not to pay respects to more precise Icelandic understanding of Icelandic political-economy stats and affairs, then to make her contribution more robust to right-wing attack.

Running Unalienated

2011-11-04T11:20:00.003-07:00

Here in "The Lost Secret of Running" is 1) a brilliant little story of how capitalism (in the form of Nike) distorts our species being (We are a long-distance running species.) and hurts us; and 2) how to run as if you had a human body. Hint: It's not how you've learned to run, which is to maximize Nike's profits. Includes a video and stills of human running technique.

It turns out, that if we run like humans, we can run far, and faster, and without pain.

Human running (with some degree of desperation)

Showing more stills of proper running technique, this blog calls 100-up running technique "Chi running". The technique's about the same.

...

In a related story of what happens to food and health when financial capital steps in, here is an article about the blog confessions of a retired General Mills exec.
Need to know how to eat as if you were a human? Check out Michael Pollan.

Neoliberal qualitative research

2011-11-02T10:57:00.001-07:00

How neoliberalism works 101, capillary dynamics unit,
or What will only be admitted to 50 years on because this is how people earn their meat:

When, supplicating to Our Dead Hero Frederick Winslow Taylor, you won't trust and pay (value) qualitative researchers to research, and instead you've efficiently confined all the research management power in legal and Human Subjects Research Ethics bureaucracies that in turn force the development of an attendant managerial class specializing in billowing human subjects and grant applications--as well as in, priest-like, enforcing dogmatic incantations ("Research is all about relationships!") in defiance of reality, then you won't have any money left over to pay researchers to develop those qualitative research relationships; and they are by definition parachuting in and grabbing interview data (slathered with a soothing slime layer of desperate blather about how it's all about the subjects, as cribbed straight out of Nescafe and Best Buy consumer marketing), which empties qualitative research of its validity, even as it keeps some people (managers) floating in middle class waters, while others must scramble together proletarianized research contracts.

Corollaries to this neoliberal capture of qualitative research:

1) It encourages one to appreciate the comparative integrity of other research methods, such as historical, documents, quantitative, etc.

2) The only people who can do valid qualitative research are unproletarianized, semi-independent researchers with ample time and access to subjects, eg. a dissertator, a professor at a liberal arts college.

3) These neoliberal qualitative research practices are consistently defended with:

a) The assertion that it is the research organization that has relationships to the research subjects, not humans. This is alienation. If it were true, it wouldn't be difficult for the researcher, a mere representative of the dear organization, to interview the subject. But parachuting is difficult, and the results have validity problems.

b) Emotional references to academic management's historical personal and professional ties to subaltern victim groups. This rhetorical strategy--in which the manager wraps herself/himself in the flag of the oppressed--is supposed to compensate for and justify the labor ethics and validity deficiencies of the neoliberal research management approach.
c) The claim that they facilitate the research training of unskilled students. That happens to a limited extent, but it's the best case scenario. Because the neoliberal system promotes managerialism, it also, conversely, propels mass proletarianization. We know that this has happened in academia. Qualitative work can be done independently, professionally and ethically by almost everyone who used qualitative research to earn a Master's degree; they were educated, trained and disciplined and evaluated for precisely this. In a top-heavy neoliberal system, legions of highly-qualified researchers are forced into deskilled research labor; and since it's deskilled labor, it doesn't pay enough to survive on; the proletarianized researchers must amass multiple research contracts that do not permit him or her the time to do pro-bono "relationship"-building work. Rather than facilitating students' training, neoliberal qualitative research practices by and large do just the opposite--they facilitate the deskilling proletarianization of highly-skilled labor.

4) Human Subjects Research Ethics protocols have metastasized malignantly, and are currently grotesquely misapplied to qualitative research to research's diminishment. In favor of creating expensive administrative overhead in academia, they ruin qualitative research validity, as well as deskill scholarly labor, to no compensatory ethical advantage. Human Subjects Ethics protocols should be imposed solely upon research in which the researcher will not have an ongoing relationship with and be accountable to the research subjects, as in for example physical science experiments, behavioral experiments, and parachute qualitative research.

...

Now, the above neoliberal qualitative research practices are not confined to feminist researchers, but feminist researchers are a significant force in their propulsion. Neoliberal qualitative researchers such as feminists do not, however, have a monopoly on sacrificing good (valid, valid assumptions, non-trivial, reliable, generalizable) research upon the alter of career survival in the context of the lack of capitalist market and state support for good research. The systematic diminishment of the validity of qualitative research in favor of imposing "efficient" neoliberal managerialism upon scholarship is the feminist social science researcher's answer to the male quant social science researcher's careerist war strategy: exclusive male professionalization, in which male social science quants aggressively, competitively define quantitative work--even and especially trivial quantitative work, and quantitative work elaborating upon untenable assumptions of ideological utility to capital--as the limits of "professional" work in the discipline, as per the conservative economics model. Both these sub-communities' (academic gangs') approaches sacrifice good research and the integrity and development of other people's scholarly work in an individualistic (although pyramid-scheme network-dependent) dog-eat-dog fight to survive neoliberalism.

...

I'm not done with the irrationality of Human Subjects Research Ethics systems that propel administrative (lawyers, managers) expansion at the expense of both good (valid) qualitative research and researcher integrity and capacity. Such systems also consume tremendous institutional and scholarly resources, a crippling distraction from academia's failure to curb or discipline the main scholarship problem of our time: trivial research based in untenable assumptions, on behalf of the highest-paying patron, as per zombie economics. In this resource misallocation, and this top-heavy institutional diminishment of the importance of evaluating research for its extra-market non-trivialness (Does this contribute to understanding: What is good living? What collective institutions contribute to its development?), Human Subjects Research Ethics institutions today also contribute to the irrelevance and overgrown legitimation function of academia.

...

Parallel testimony on how lawyers (trained in capitalist property law) ruin the role and healthy functioning of demi-capitalist (here church) institutions. Capitalism doesn't always create state legitimation crises; sometimes, through domineering colonization, it creates institutional legitimation crises. In either case, some institutions precede capital accumulation, and are not made to function by capitalist goals--even if they orthogonally support a capitalist system and capital depends on non-capitalist relations (Not all the house's beams can run the same way). It creates enough havoc that capital outsources its crises to these supporting institutions (Eg. 'Banks fail' is efficiently converted into 'welfare states fail.'); but also, as in the university, when the distinction between the goals and procedures of capitalist firms and of demi-capitalist institutions is lost under a shitload of business management (and by the red right hand of warped-Calvinist anxiety to demonstrate election via status and income inequality), the demi-capitalist institution loses its functionality, even its capacity to support capital. This is a good example of contradiction unfolding into crisis.

US Comparative Advantage for World's Elite

2011-10-27T09:15:00.003-07:00

I'm not the world's biggest fan of Brad de Long; he's a liberal, and he announces it, as when he reposts, in criticism of Occupy Seattle, Matthew Iglesias' flat claim, using an opportunistically-myopic historical viewpoint, and a decidedly non-class disaggregated viewpoint, that capitalism is a boon to the world. Hell, Iglesias even goes so far as to assert that Africa has prospered under capitalism. It seems the economist right hand of liberalism is never in touch with the on-the-ground NGO/charity/anthropology/military left hand of liberalism. According to Iglesias, the only, really--technical, issue for these econ liberals is that the global elite has lied once too often to the American middle class. ...I wonder why! Could it be that capitalism is not actually a boon to everyone, and Occupy Seattle's analysis is in fact superior? Don't say it's so!

However, I do like to keep an eye on de Long, because a liberal will post some figures and occasionally even an analysis of utility to a marxist. Here in his post "A Note on the US Comparative Advantage in the Sale of Political Risk Insurance," de Long briefly engages the problem of how the US comes by its trade deficit. He speculates that half of the trade deficit is basically the world elite's insurance policy against revolution in their own countries, and he cites statistics from China. This global elite causes the US to financialize/militarize, and thereby innocently, inadvertently gut its own middle class.

Now I think that for much of the world's elite, de Long's attribution of motivation is correct. But for a number of reasons, it's not correct with regard to the largest components of the strategy: Chinese and Indian elites. They are not buying dollars to the US's profit because they are insuring against a bad revolutionary turnout in their countries. They have another, perhaps longer-term strategy in mind, although, say Minqi Li and John Gulick, one that may be complicated by the historical decline in capitalism-fueling fossil fuels.

...

De Long also provides the EMRATIO:

Given this data, here's his Keynesian argument.

For the record, however, and in direct refutation of the romantic, churlish defenders of neoclassical economics and rabid liberals, the world would be a better place if the neoclassical economists and liberals were to some day develop humility in proportion to their achievements.

Capital Makes Capitalists Stupid

2011-10-25T08:49:00.002-07:00

Elaine Scarry on stupidity (p. 294 in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World):

Witness: Stupid capitalists (video)

Matt Tabbai accurately describes the class-divided treatment of debt, risk, failure, and criminality, and how the apparently-adolescent capitalist class' big stupid hypothesis about Occupy outrage at this corrosive disparity is that the 99% is "jusst jealousss."

Maybe it's just for the rhetorical power, but it's surprising that Tabbai fails to acknowledge that this grotesque corruption is precisely what capitalism is all about. It's time we join together with capitalists on this one dimension: recognizing capitalism for the stupid, ignoble system of alienation and rapacious exploitation that it is. Here's where we part: We can do better.

Chris Hedges on stupid priorities:

It is a capitalist nation.

Capital Likes It Dirty

2011-10-24T20:41:00.001-07:00

In Big Wind Farms Cost More than Small Ones we learn why US capital opposes renewable energy: Green technologies can't feed monopoly capital like polluting technologies can. And baby, capitalism's all about capital accumulation; and not so much about happiness after all. Good try, though, Smith et al.

...

This good article swiftly explains the US's premier agro-conservation program. Where the US farm bills once either paid farmers to blanket chemo-monocrop their land from property boundary to property boundary or--as "conservation," leave their land untended, now the program pays farmers to use ecological approaches to farming.

Paying for stewardship isn't cheap -- the government spends about $600 million on the conservation program yearly.

What this means is that to farm food sustainably is not compatible with the profit model.

Be very clear: Now we spend even more massive public money on subsidizing toxic agroindustry in North America (including direct subsidies, R&D, tax incentives, environmental remediation, addressing the health costs arising from consumption of industrial chemo sub-food, and the bureaucratic and military costs of forcing other countries' markets open to subsidized North American industrial sub-food), in large part to promote the ideological capitalist illusion that food can and should be subsumed by the profit motive.

If we can understand that ecologically-sound food production is not compatible with the profit model, we can see the path to fighting the huge, expensive public subsidies for toxic agroindustry that corrupt and reduce food--a human need and right--to 1) a source of profit and power-hoarding for toxic agrobusiness like Monsanto, and 2) a commodity weapon for destroying other countries' peoples' food production systems.

Since healthy food production isn't compatible with the profit system, we need to be and should be spending public money on subsidizing food production--for healthy food for us and for clean environments, not for Monsanto executives' power, environmental destruction, and warfare on other peoples' capacity to feed themselves.

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Looking at public subsidies to ag, the USDA does not promote healthy diets.

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Lo-till/no-till is a farming practice that only makes sense with organic agriculture, not with industrial agriculture. According to Rodale's research, the average net return for organic systems, which rely on no- or low-till practices as an important part of an overall system of pest and soil management, was $558 per acre per year. Conventional no-till corn, which by definition means planting genetically engineered crops and growing them with the assistance of chemicals, brought in just $28 per acre per year (not counting conservation subsidies, of course).

Confidence Game

2011-10-24T20:29:00.001-07:00

‎"The confidence we experience as we make a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that it is right. Confidence is a feeling, one determined mostly by the coherence of the story and by the ease with which it comes to mind, even when the evidence for the story is sparse and unreliable. An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true...(Y)ou should not take assertive and confident people at their own evaluation unless you have independent reason to believe that they know what they are talking about" Daniel Kahneman, "Don't Blink!", October 2011.

Productivity for Profits: Killing Off Quality Jobs

2011-10-24T19:45:00.003-07:00

One of the problems with overripe capitalism is that as it promotes increased productivity to enhance profits, it simply kills off both unskilled and quality jobs--obviously, without dispersing throughout society the benefits of the increased productivity (or you wouldn't increase profits--concentrated wealth).

These charts from the US Aerospace Industries show one example of capital destroying high-skill, quality work (R&D science and engineering) as it has ramped up production and profits.

This finance-led profiteering strategy--putting productivity increases on steroids and hoarding the resulting concentration of wealth--eventually results in crisis, as capital smothers to death a huge portion of its consumption base, as well as desiccates labor's skills, innovative capacity and even its social reproduction. Consequently, capital creates the conditions whereby its profiteering strategy is largely reduced to primitive accumulation.

Primitive accumulation doesn't just ravage non-elite capacities and the environment, it stifles entrepreneurial rationality. In "A Generation of CEOs Who Don't Know How to Raise (Employees') Wages," Dean Baker dryly comments on the puzzling complaint, heard occasionally on the NYTimes and from the Democrat leadership, that the economic problem in America today is that there is a skills shortage (!):

"CEOs apparently do not know how a business is supposed to respond to the inability to find qualified workers. According to standard economics, when businesses can’t fill job openings, they are supposed to offer higher wages. If these businesses offered higher wages, then they could lure away workers from their competitors. They may also be able to attract workers from other states or even other countries. If these CEOs raised wages high enough, then these workers would be willing to work for their companies.

However, they have not chosen to raise wages to the market clearing level for some reason and therefore can’t get the workers they want. Apparently, these CEOs do not know how to raise wages.

This is a problem that could be easily remedied. The government could offer short courses to CEOs and other top executives that would teach them how to raise wages and why this would be beneficial to their firms. These raise-waging instruction sessions should not be very expensive; even the thickest CEO could probably learn how to raise workers’ wages in a day or two. Most state and local governments could afford the cost, which should be easily repaid in stronger growth when employers learn how to address their skills shortage.

Companies should not have to forego expansion and workers should not have to be unemployed just because CEOs don’t how to raise wages."

Keynes: Manage Capitalists Like Domestic Animals

2011-10-24T13:32:00.001-07:00

After a tepid political response (overly accommodating to US capital's corrosive sense of entitlement) and an initial partial recovery from the early 20th century Depression, the US slumped back into economic crisis. In this 1938 letter, Keynes advised FDR on how to more emphatically direct social wealth to the working class in order to get the US out of economic collapse. (David Cay Johnston calls this the 'circulatory' understanding of money--If social wealth, like blood, is blocked from getting to the working class, money pools up and rots the system.)

In this advice, Keynes urged FDR to have the confidence to understand and manage capitalists as a species of domestic animals.

There is indication in FDR's response to Keynes that the capitalist US President understood US prosperity simply as a good in service of outcompeting communism--or at least non-Anglo-centric economies--around the globe. Again this is evidence that, for capitalists (obviously with human lifespans and thereby very time-delimited strategic horizons), economic decline is not perceived as a direct threat to their self-interest--so long as they maintain ownership of a society's accumulated wealth. That is, capitalists appear to be systematically incapable of understanding economics beyond their own relative advantage. I think that economic inequality (produced by the normal, alienating functioning of capitalism) regularly produces this solipsistic capitalist conceptual error, ensuring economic crisis.

(Thanks to Doug Henwood for posting this link.)

What Is and Is Not Social Democracy

2011-10-14T10:11:00.002-07:00

This Varoufakis political analysis applies as well to the federal-level, organized-labor-backed, social service NGO-backed liberal parties of North America.And kindly recall, North Americans, that simply sitting a bit to the left of one or even two conservative capitalist-dedicated parties, in no way qualifies a party for social democratic status in any historical-comparative empirical sense.

Social democratic historically meant, and in order to retain a sense of perspective and strategic possibility needs to continue to mean:Within capitalism, a) the parliamentary wing of b) an actual left, working class-for-itself social movement coalition that includes politicized, organized labor, pressing for, inter alia, socialism-building goals. The moment you drop part b, you are a liberal party. Possibly lefty-liberal in some fortuitous historical moments and on small geographic scales, but liberal.

A liberal party champions (usually, the immediate) interests of politically-organized capital. The peripheral concerns of the welfare of the working class and the economic and geo-strategic health of the region cannot come into stable focus for a liberal or conservative party. That's why, ironically, actual social democratic parties can manage the capitalist economy better than dedicated capitalist parties.

A social democratic party in capitalism is a party of internal tension. A social democratic party is a dialectical engine; a social democracy is a dialectical machine. The ultimate goal of social democratic parties is always their own aufhebung. The goal of a social democratic party is to work within capitalism to build the institutional and cultural conditions of socialism, see Rudolf Meidner. If that aint the goal, you've lost the tension. The bourgeoisie have successfully co-opted the party; and what you've got there is a liberal party, not a social democratic party. At that point, you're carrying the name "Social Democratic Party" for branding continuity only.

Social democratic parties differ from socialist parties in capitalism in that they are a coalition between socialists and lefty-liberals. Most social democratic parties, because they are coalitions of socialists and the lefty-liberal idealists of a kinder, gentler capitalist utopia that can never exist independently (because capitalism requires alienation and exploitation), shoulder relentless, organized capitalist pressure and undergo internal struggles over whether to turn away from the socialist horizon.

A social democratic culture then is a most peculiar balance of strategic thinking and pragmatism, sentimentalism, and egalitarianism and utopianism.

Blind Spot: The Marxist Misrecognition of Social Democracy

I am sorry to say that most Western Marxists' analysis tends to collapse the historical social democratic internal tension. Like Varoufakis, they do not differentiate social democracy from liberalism. Most Marxists see social democratic parties as homogeneously-liberal "Decepticon" organizations in service of capital, that use deceptive strategies in order to compete for, absorb, neutralize and betray working class energy. The reductive perception of social democracy as a competitive strategy to crowd out socialism is the crucial component of most Marxists' ad-hoc understanding of social democracy.

There are two obvious and curious side effects to this Marxist theoretical collapse. First, while they are periodically outraged by "social democracy," Northern Marxists also misidentify semi-peripheral and peripheral social democratic societies as socialist societies, as in the case of Latin American countries such as contemporary Venezuela. This misrecognition can contribute to analytical and strategic mistakes.

Second, in reducing their conceptualization of social democracy to homogeneous liberalism, most Western Marxists are completely uninterested in the experience, the tension of social democracy where it was most prominent and sustained, in 20th century Scandinavia. That is to say, they are completely uninterested in actually assessing social democracy. They tend to discuss (complain about) social democracy as strictly something that happens to Canada, New Zealand, the UK, or Germany... or now, as with Varoufakis, southern Europe. These are countries that in the best of cases have had an organized-labor-backed party that ceased to be social democratic in anything but name about a hundred years ago (eg. Germany). In the most far-fetched cases, the liberal parties Marxists call "social democratic" have never claimed to be social democratic, and may not even have much of a labor affiliation (Canada's NDP is a great example). All we can say, rigorously, is that these parties have working-class electoral bases and are to some degree to the left of the US Democrat Party, which is saying profoundly little indeed. It is neither surprising nor is it hypocritical when liberal parties spearhead neoliberalism.

Exactly, say the Marxists. That is why social democratic strategists have nothing to offer, they insist. Marxists believe that the only thing to be done is revolution. There is, in their view, no possible route forward in an institutional coalition with any portion of the bourgeoisie. In effect, Marxists have a priori determined that social democracy is impossible. Therefore, for Marxists, social democracy only exists in places where it doesn't. Marxists' consistent geographic and historical displacement should immediately strike us as symptomatic of an insufficiently-valid, ad-hoc analysis.

I think that there is no good (rational) reason why Marxism cannot accommodate a more valid, rigorous, empirically-embedded conceptualization of social democracy, related to but distinct from both liberalism and socialism. Marxists can start with a sober version of their recognition of the socialist strategies and goals of social democracies such as Venezuela, combined with a more sustained, empirically-observant modeling of how the incessant political power of capital tends to erode social democracy--by attacking its socialist backbone. This capitalist context is why social democratic coalition parties, while distinct from liberal parties, are vulnerable to liberal co-optation, rather than liable to reach the socialist horizon that distinguishes social democrats from liberals.

A more valid, change-sensitive (dialectical) conceptualization would in fact contribute to Marxism, obviously. First, on the issues of social democracy and socialist strategy, it would bring Marxism out of the idealist ether, and back into its theoretical home territory--historical-materialist grounding.

Additional benefits for Marxists of improving their conceptualization of social democracy:

2) Improves our understanding of historical moments of collective class compromise. Permits Marxists to recognize a broader, yet still-robust and delimited coalitional (samarbete) strategy. For example, we can better recognize that the 20th century advancement of social citizenship owed its lifeblood to the existence of a credible communist threat/alternative. This allows us to demonstrate that capitalism's non-capitalist and petite bourgeoisie adherents' capitalist utopia (eg. historically, the US in the 1950s-1960s, or alternately, a racism/sexism/heterosexism/ablism/pollution-free capitalist utopia of the postmaterialist future) is dependent upon socialism and communism as a credible threat and alternative. In other words, if you pine for a capitalist utopia, and yet you aren't among the top 1% wealth earners, you need socialism.

3) Allows better analysis of the crucial points of social democratic breakdown. Liberal Swedes still don't know that Swedish social democracy was slated to die in 1976 when their capitalists defeated Meidner's proposal to socialize profits. In their triumphal co-optation of the Social Democratic Party (SAP), they are bereft of any idea of how to analyze the purportedly "progressive" neoliberal policies today that steadily break down social democracy and class compromise, clearly reducing their co-opted SAP to impotent electoral rubble--precisely in the historical moment when the SAP utterly forgot both that it needs a socialist lodestar to exist and that its existence as an institution is not the point of its existence.

4) Stops Marxists from contributing to neoliberal obfuscation tactics that undermine organized labor and the working class.

....

Feature:
Get to Know a Non-autistic Economist:
Rudolf Meidner and his brilliant wage earner funds that could have saved the Swedish model from the dustbin of history. See also: Whyman, Philip B. 2007. "A case for Swedish wage earner funds." Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 30 (2): 227-258.

Umberto Eco's Definition of Fascism

2011-10-13T12:30:00.004-07:00

A link to Umberto Eco's definition of fascism.

Chris Hedges Smacks Down Corporate-whore Media

2011-10-13T11:50:00.000-07:00

Chris Hedges knows who he is and what he's seen; he has the steadying background to summon the strength and call down liberal corporate-whore media. Watch him, on his feet, control this interview:

CBC: Called down, smacked down, served, pwned.
If you're going to employ crude meat, do what the American and Latin American media does and at least get it fresh out of the sorority house.

Inequality, Economic Growth & Standards of Living

2011-10-12T21:27:00.001-07:00

In this 2011 PERI paper by Thompson & Leight, "Searching for the Supposed Benefits of Higher Inquality," the authors review the messy literature on the relationship between economic inequality and economic growth. They propose an alternative approach to this research stalemate.

If you are interested in charting the relationship between inequality and economic growth, urban & regional-level data is your best bet. Only in 2006 did Saez & Picketty pull together (fairly) reliable international comparative data on income inequality. See Saez's data and analysis on his Berkeley website.

The US Model of Social Exclusion

2011-10-12T20:49:00.002-07:00

Here is a link to Schmmitt & Zipperer's "Is the US A Good Model for Reducing Social Exclusion in Europe?" (2006) CEPR.

Not so much, contend the authors, analyzing social exclusion through the variables of income inequality, poverty, education, health, crime and punishment, the labor market and finally, the coup de gras, social mobility.

Should first they ignore you...

2011-10-12T10:33:00.000-07:00

"And, my friends, in this story you have a history of this entire movement. First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."

--from the General Executive Board Report and Proceedings [of The] Biennial Convention, Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 1914.

This quote is sometimes mis-attributed to Mahatma Gandhi as "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Occupy Your World

2011-10-12T07:58:00.001-07:00

Occupy movement

A Day at Occupy Wall Street. (video)

Occupy the World. (photos)

Chris Hedges and Amy Goodman on OWS (Charlie Rose Show).

The Human Amplifier technique, used in a Zizek speech to Occupy Wall Street protesters. A link to a transcript of Zizek's speech is on that webpage.

Noam Chomsky's Occupy Boston speech.

John Foster's "Why We Occupy, What We Know" OWS speech.

Here's a map of where NYC's richest 1% (financiers) live.

An historical overview of "corporate fascism" (yes, redundant)--essentially, corporate violence.

Less process-oriented, more creative protest:

Onward, liberal conservatives!

Most Americans think that Wall Street has too much power, economic inequality is too extreme, the rich should pay a higher proportion of taxes, and Wall Street executives should be held accountable, according to a recent Time magazine poll. As of mid-October, 2011, over half of Americans polled viewed OWS favorably (by contrast half that percentage of Americans approve of the Tea Party), though over half of Americans are doubtful that the social movement can disrupt capitalists' control over the political class.

Cohering a Left Bloc: Coalitions and Setting Movement Trajectories

Bruce Dixon (October 12, 2011) "From Occupying Financial Districts to Occupying the Goods in Our Hoods," Black Agenda Report (BAR):

"The student loan bubble, along with the shrinking job market has made newly poor white hipster kids mad enough to stage 24/7 street corners protests in scores of US cities, where they have connected with longtime leftist and community activist types, often older and not always white. These are helping keep them focused on the connections between the warfare and prison states and the unavailability of funding for anything else."

Dr. Cornell West's view of OWS is more favorable.

Occupy Boston's Memorandum of Solidarity with Indigenous Peoples.

Uber-Men of the People protect America from plutocracy

The social citizenship builders say, "Occupy!"

Capital sics its current police on its retired police

Social Science in a Conservative Society

2011-10-05T08:24:00.000-07:00

Here is an interesting story on the prevalence (in Canada anyway) of Machiavellian bullying.

Which spawns the story of the relationship of soc to psych.

Psych announces that it has found an interesting, dominant human trait--stuck, psych claims, in human genetic code by adaptive evolution...Because that's the hokum schtick that passes for a legitimate explanatory theory in the psych community--despite its complete and utter debunking 40 years ago by genetic biologists. This sorry ontology is perpetuated relentlessly because the community of scholars in psych, as in all worst-case physical and especially social science, has social counter-incentives to building more valid theory (a la Kuhn's model of science).

What to do about this widespread (social) problem, Psych?
Ah. Parent better, somehow!

And then Soc, allowing that the finding is pretty interesting, notices that all the alleged invariance is coming from cities in the US, Canada and England, and redoes the research in Sweden, Cuba or South India and figures out that the purported psych "trait" is the result of socialization specific to certain kinds of--for example, high-inequality--societies. Soc thereby politely suggests that to actually address this social (not genetic, not mothering) problem we actively oppose the entire scaffolding of inequality policies and institutions and replace them with a scaffolding of low-inequality policies and institutions, as per the societies with a lower incidence of the problem.

And then everybody ignores the Soc, and goes out and buys another psych mothering self-help book, to zero avail.

And then the beleaguered parents turn to the conservative snake-oil salesmen selling this enterprising gambit: Simply by ridding ourselves of public education we will rid ourselves of the demonic teachers who fail to raise our children for us correctly.

And in this way everybody stays paid, for a while, but increasingly poorly.

Why are Leftists Today Econ Illiterate?

2011-10-04T13:10:00.000-07:00

A response to Nick Srnicek's Disorder of Things blog post "Has the Left Given up on Economics." Basically, I agree with Srnicek: 1) There is too much economic illiteracy, 2) There is too little economic innovation, and 3) We need to organize.

My two cents (argued below) is that we would do well to think about the challenge strategically, keeping in focus class' impact on social networks and the legitimacy and spread of ideas.

Where have you gone Maynard Keynes? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Mrs. Robinson, Lemonheads version

It has been argued here that Marxian economics are stalled because Marxists have not done the work needed to capture the Left's imagination, which is, according to the blog author, designing post-capitalist transitionary structures and "expanding the variables" in its economic models.(*1) I might support the author of that blog in exploring these projects (Again, I'm all for the proliferation of Marxist work, including packaging old wine in lovely, new, well-written bottles.), but I can't agree that this (more writing, or adding variables and some tiny academic community's jargon du jour) is all Leftists need to become political-econ literate. (Although if thinking so motivates you to hit the keyboard, good on you!)

Leftists are political-econ illiterate because 1) outside of social democratic countries, there is no union confederation that employs prominent Marxist economists and disseminates political-economic literacy, and 2) there is no social gravitational force making political-econ literacy a normal thing. For example, there's no critical mass of political-econ literacy, and unlike earlier eras, there are no Leftist economists from capitalist backgrounds today.

The Left will readily accept the first explanation without controversy, so I will do my best to elaborate here why I think the second point matters.

The problem I see for the spread of Left political-economic literacy has partially to do with why Keynes is so influential. Keynes is influential not because he was the most imaginative lefty-liberal of the 20th century (though he was an iconoclast and brilliant), but because he was a very centrally-elite independent thinker. (And even then, Keynes' most important ideas were not implemented in policy, and they were censored in the economics discipline.) Even Marxist economist Paul Sweezy was revered and could influence government, develop his work, and support the development of Marxist economics partly because he was a super guy, and partly because he was a hegemonic elite male.

Wait. Do not go fetal on me here. This is not a love song an identity critique.

(OK, Sweezy was a dick to Schumpeter's wife in "The Future of Capitalism" 1946-47 debate, so it could be an identity critique, but it won't.)

There are no radical, square-jawed, econ-literate, white-hero elites anymore. They were methodically wiped out by a campaign organized throughout the Anglosphere by conservative economists and their funders. What we've got left are weak-jawed, middle class, econ-literate heroes,(*2) and that means that de facto they've got smaller influence networks. So small Srnicek fails (Really, we fail. I'm just being literary there, blaming it on Srnicek.) to notice a lot of them.

We have fantastic political-economic ideas right now and for a long time (including many from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, etc. that have yet to be translated into English). But their spread is actively suppressed, first by the assault on unions--which can disseminate alternative ideas about how to run society, and second by the assault on non-neoclassical economists.

For one late example, just at the moment that the neoclassical econ emperor was fully exposed as naked and bereft (post-2007), the last dean here, with the support of mobilized conservative econometricians within the department, destroyed the nonorthodox base of this "N.A. Siberia" university's holdout econ department and loaded the department up with econometricians and other economic servants of capitalist hegemony. Those marxist economists (eg. John Loxley) spent years strategizing, designing and implementing economic alternatives--including nascent social enterprise networks. They have a lot to contribute right now.

Left political-economy is not dead and it's not irrelevant. Go into an anarchist bookstore (eg. Viva Mondragon in Winnipeg), and there are shelves and shelves of contemporary and historical books describing and proposing alternative economies. They're just written by insufficiently-connected people. It's not their individual fault they're not Weber's apocryphal charismatic prince.

Moreover, there are still some of us sociologists who (semi-)self-teach political-econ, as well as great non-neoclassical economists who've been forced out of economics, to hang their shop sign in sociology, geography and business departments. The Union for Radical Political Economics, for one, is full of them. Monthly Review folks are terribly proud of their political-econ analyzing record.

The problem right now is that while decent job markets have constricted with decades of neoliberal inequality initiatives--including the campaigns to wipe out working class institutional bases such as unions and social citizenship rights, at the same time, we've been assaulted by a concerted, coordinated, funded conservative campaign to ferret the non-conservatives out of the paid-ideas market. Zombie econ and postmodernism are symptoms of that doxa chokehold, not failures we need to take responsibility for. They are the epistemologies over which elites still cast their heartening, radiant blessings.

To address the continuing political-econ literacy and innovation deficit, in and out of paid employment, knowing we have no shining elite knights to grant us courage through the long dark night, we need to be collectively committed to honing the work (that is, in a disciplined way, forgiving temporary missteps, forgoing ego indulgences, and pointing out fruitful paths), connecting to past thinkers, promoting, and celebrating the leftist political-economists who have managed to haul themselves through this hegemonic war period, rather than waiting for another Keynes.

We are not Blaine.

Elites aren't any greater minds or men than non-elite intellectuals; they make mistakes and develop too; they just have head starts and better PR--especially in a high-inequality era. It's not a deal breaker that non-elite intellectual contributions tend to have to occur later in life. But we need to make up for no PR--Because relentless exposure to oppositional framing can wear away at individuals' and communities' confidence and sense of purpose, undermining development and the adoption and diffusion of ideas.

Advancing ideas broadly is very hard to do without the grease of money and the protective social networks money forges. But as MR's John Foster reminded us (but hardly practiced) at UO, feminist successes came with promoting their own institutions and networks. Do we need another White Hope? Why not recognize the special social challenge of a movement that valorizes and champions the working class within a capitalist milieu, and strive to husband socialist political economics to the very best of our social abilities?
...
(*2) This statement is tongue-in-cheek. Signals: 1) the context: I am saying that "middle" (working)-class intellectuals contribute good econ work that can be more widely distributed if such intellectuals recognize and strategically act upon the knowledge that they are working without the facilitative social status conveyed elites; and 2) I symmetrically apply the complementary "heroes" trope in this sentence to both left elite intellectuals and left middle class intellectuals. These two constructions should be able to indicate to a good-faith reader that I am not actually critical of working class people's facial features. If this were a real publication instead of an obscure blog entry, I would probably get rid of it, but it's not and the phrasing is intended to reinforce my point that working class people are not viewed with as much credit as elites are--a social phenomenon. However, I readily concede that as rhetoric, the tongue-in-cheek phrase's ("weak chinned") castrating qualities probably outweigh its metaphorical utility.

Further clarification:

Building Credit for Non-elite Political-economic Ideas

The point I was making above is that rather than getting frustrated with leftists for leftie social movements' current lack of access to economic knowledge, we ought to recognize something sociological--that at this historical juncture there is a lack of political-economic leadership-- both a lack of union leadership (due to the decimation of unions), and a deficit of critical mass or elites engaged with left political-economics (Compared to the early 20th century. Because of the lack of legitimate communist threat/alternative.), and because of deliberate conservative organizing as well as neoliberal drift, and this means that the spread of left political-economic ideas in the contemporary era is excessively constrained. Without critical mass or the (capitalist elite) leadership that can jumpstart it, the motivation to economic literacy in the left is dampened.

We (Americans, Leftists, scholars) hate to think of ourselves as impressed with elite leadership, but it's time to face it. We're human. We're social. We respond (not necessarily happily or healthily) to social status. Frankly, we are not living in an intelligence meritocracy, and as brilliant as they are, the contemporary editors of Monthly Review don't have enough capitalist gravitas to impress even Leftists into becoming literate in political-economics. This is a social problem that can't be beat by simply doodling a bit more upon a gigantic, diverse body of elaborate theory and observation.

Yes. This is quite a conundrum for the Left. It's a strategic challenge to take seriously.

If we analyze the political-economics literacy deficit and strategize how to combat it, which I agree is important, I suggest what we need is some creative thinking about what to do about the smaller social networks, and especially-contested legitimacy accompanying good work by non-elite intellectuals.

Discourse, communication is far from simple. Intention is difficult to discern without being able to grant people a certain amount of credit; the elite sense of entitlement and elite social networks help a lot with that. Does the Left have social strategy that can compensate for a lack of elite leadership?

Obviously, we need to organize working-class unions as a long-term strategy. As well, movements such as OWS can help develop the credit needed for sowing political economic ideas and literacy.

My simple suggestion was that we ought to consider as well whether political-econ leftists could be better disciplined to support each other--to simulate the credit that people give over to elites, which allows ideas and influence to develop and spread.

A war of position is going on around us. Capitalist conservatives, their conservative managers and hegemonists, and their multiple layers of publicly-funded police are one obvious bloc opposing Left community and ideas development. As well, capitalist conservatives' ally, liberals (including North American unions, which are not by, of and for the working class) will continue to counter the non-elite credit conditions for the spread of political-economic literacy.

A bit on their back foot right now, liberals will, for one, simply lie about the content of left or Marxist political economics. Brad DeLong does this. Today he claimed that because of the labor theory of value, Marx opposed Keynesian monetary policy. Yeah, um, WTF? For two, they may (tentatively) reassert the traditional, elite-sanctioned, pomo de-valorization of political-economic literacy, which in the present case may be boiled down to, "This [Occupy movement] is trivial. Who cares how 'white Americans' (contemporary global elite code for 'working class') are faring? They're a mob of assholes. Won't someone please think of the [insert identity group]."

The liberals' Helen Lovejoy strategy

To foster the credit conditions needed to improve Left political-economic literacy, the Left needs to keep liberals on their back foot, by not engaging their opposition directly, but recognizing their identities and cultural contributions, while continuing to build and assert an inclusive working class praxis.

The Left has to take a page out of Corey Robin's analysis of conservatism, successful Occupy mobilizations, Marx's "Communist Manifesto" model, and Barbara Ehrenreich's Dancing in the Streets analysis, and create a privileged space for passion--writing with passion, speeches with passion, singing and dancing with passion--and figure out to link it to economic literacy. Most (though not all) people who live in unequal societies are mobilized with passion. The sign that our own minds have become colonized and crippled by the opposition is when we're incapable of expressing ourselves with passion. People read (masculine) passion as confidence, and we need confidence in our political economic literacy.

Have and build confidence in our capacity for solidarity. Have and build confidence in our capacity for political-economic literacy. Have and build confidence in our capacity to disrupt the system and, if not overcome it at this moment, at least modify its components.
...

(*1) The blogger appears to be a student of Alan Freeman and Radhika Desai. His post is interesting in that if you follow comments and links you will find out part of what Alan Freeman is up to intellectually, which I've personally found impossible to pry out of him in polite conversation; and you'll find out that Radhika and Alan are part of an effort to publish a series (including their own writing as well as works by Marx, Keynes, & Perry Anderson) on "The Future World of Capitalism."

"Some of my best friends are Zionists" trailer

2011-10-04T08:02:00.000-07:00

Pro-Enlightenment Jewish intellectuals talk about their experiences growing up within total Zionist hegemony, and their break from that hegemony in this 15 minute trailer from the film "Some of my best friends are Zionists".

...

The Obama regime persecutes whistleblowers. This article discusses the man who released documents to the press demonstrating Israel's efforts to whip up anti-Iranian furor in the US. The Obama regime put him in prison.

When people can't use you

2011-10-03T19:58:00.003-07:00

‎"When people can't use you, they ridicule what you represent. I was lucky that I understood that, because when one does not understand that, it is very easy to be broken and to be subdued"

--Wangari Maathai (1940-2011).

class war, nyc style

2011-10-02T08:30:00.000-07:00

From the weighty annals of class war,

On letting them eat their cake at the Wall Street protests, fall 2011.

&

The NYC Bloombergs tells us how they see it.

Bring back the guillotine.

Liberalism or Racism?

2011-09-28T09:36:00.002-07:00

On the feeble accusation that Obama's (the Dems') much-abused base is unsupportive of his capitalist policies because the Democratic base is racist, in "Why Liberals Are Lame" (Naked Capitalism):

Choice cuts:

"If anything, the fact that it took his diehards this long to figure out the Obama bait and switch is a proof of white liberal guilt, not bias...It took most people far too long to get that Obama was a phony because the presumption that a black man would be sympathetic to the fate of the downtrodden is a deeply embedded but never voiced prejudice (and this bias is exploited successfully by the right in depicting Obama as a socialist). "

"So (in a two-party system, the Dem Party's) desperate need to maintain its increasingly phony 'be nice to the rainbow coalition' branding places a huge premium on appearances. It thus uses identity politics as a cover for policy betrayals. It can motivate various groups on narrow, specific issues, opening the way for the moneyed faction to get what it wants."

"(T)raditional iconic symbols of liberalism – secular urban elitism, blackness, technocratic skill, micro-issue identity based political organizing groups – have been fully subverted in the service of banking interests. Obama is the ultimate, but not the only, piece of evidence that these symbols are now used simply to con the Democratic base out of their support and money.

...The task of moving forward will require ...(t)hose engaged in that effort ... to become skilled in dealing with these liberal McCarthyite identity smears."

...

Besides the rampant (not just by Dems), corrupt deployment of identity politics as cover for policy betrayal, the thing to bemoan is our hapless longing for a big daddy magical redeemer who will deliver us from intra-systemic conflict, and the capitalist politician's opportunistic willingness to drape himself in the robes of the Great Populist-Black Hope to tap that longing.

Obama is a lawyer; that is, he is specially trained to defend capitalist property.

In Black Obama's defense: Despite the fun populist speeches that get penned from time to time, there has never been a national political regime in the United States that has had the power, the vision, and the autonomy to adequately oppose capitalists to defend the economy.

Roosevelt made the political class look strong when foreign war + communist threat semi-disciplined the capitalist class and rescued the economy. But because in capitalism, capitalists always hold the political reins, Roosevelt's policy reforms were forged too weak to endure capitalist restoration. In contrast to Keynes' proposals, the Roosevelt regime's semi-disciplining policies were never strong nor built to last. They were just designed to rescue the economy so that American finance-and-military capitalists could dominate.

Upperclass concessions could restore the economy; but it is capitalism, so once the economy is restored, the upperclass will have more power than ever to jettison the class concessions. At the consequent economic (just post-) apex, Nixon's conservative regime then followed up with a full capital-appeasement strategy (progressively augmented by Reagan, Clinton, Bush, Obama) with a 30-year economic lifespan ending in a capitalist economic supernova.

Unalloyed capitalist incentives, social stratification and culture geared to wealth appropriation by any means necessary cannot produce a healthy, sustained economy except under exceptional, temporary circumstances. Late 20th century American political leaders took advantage of those rare circumstances. Now they are over and done, and they will not be back for a long time, and not without global working class insurrection.
Now politicians and technocrats can do nothing but support economic collapse, because the fundamental capitalist interest--wealth appropriation (Not investment, which is simply one wealth appropriation strategy, along with the various forms of primitive accumulation (If you've got sufficient social power, hedge betting on the stock market and then having the state force the public to pay your losses+ is one famous form of PrimAcc.))--is not aligned with economic health, and there is no organized global political opposition--that is, there is no global socialism. There will be continuing economic collapse.

No overblown military-financial complex, and no liberal, and no conservative can deliver us from due economic collapse under the wealth-appropriating crush of the military-financial complex, and all politicians who must labor under the capitalist yoke are de facto liberal-conservatives.

Without socialism (and unlike the iconoclast elite Keynes), no one in polite society today can intellectually or psychologically consider a critical, non-conservative political-economic analysis of Western economies. That's why Rastani's perspective was such a public scandal (It took a few minutes for the chattering classes to declare him not a member of polite society, and so irrelevant). That's why we're stuck with zombie economics, and why there will be no semi-bold policy innovations that could combine with fortuitous external events to restore the economy. That's why China can play the West, but itself is hogtied by the arc of capitalism's entropic appropriation of the environment.

The creative human labor (mental + physical) of everyone in an economy is the ultimate source of the economy in human societies. There are radical implications to this. Because they encompass both wealth appropriation and social legitimacy, capitalists are never disposed to let the radical implications see the light of day. This is a profoundly non-trivial, endemic problem that collective human agency is abjectly failing.

Governments don't rule, finance capitalists rule

2011-09-27T13:11:00.003-07:00

Reporter: What sacrifices will appease our capitalist god-kings?

Rastani: Nothing, you tool. Figure out how to make money from a downward market, because Goldman Sachs and the big funds are going to crash the economy.

Well, even though he's pimping Treasury bonds here, I think he's right about the lack of correspondence between capitalist incentives and economic health. There's no end in sight. The big finance capitalists (Goldman Sachs, the big funds) are crashing economies for fun & profit, and their politicians (Merkel, Sarkozy, Cameron) don't have any strategies other than to support them in their crashing endeavors.

...

How do you make money in an economic crash?

Rastani's trying to get you to buy Treasury bonds, because he's a trader and that's what he's betting on...so you might or might not want to do that.

A la Joe Kennedy, you could buy stores of and stock in the classic commodities of escapism:

oil, gas, cigarettes, movies, and booze.

plus video games.

Oh and here's one more compensatory economic strategy.

...

The Liberal-conservative Cleanup Committee has so far forwarded 4 cleansing approaches to the viral spread of this impolite video:

1) Pathologize the Individual / ad hominem 1: Claim that Rastani is a particularly evil man, see my response below.
2) Speculate that Rastani is a Yes Man. This hypothesis has been disconfirmed.
3) Pathologize the Individual / ad hominem 2: Claim (or insinuate) that Rastani's analysis is void because he has a pathological psychological compulsion to "seek attention."
4) Invoke Elitism / ad hominem 3: Claim that Rastani's analysis is void because he is not a member of polite society, as defined by wealth.

......

Banal Evil?: Against the Arendtian Framing of Rastani

In this case, I would temper Arendt here hard with Nietzsche (Graeber's got a great interpretation of Nietzsche in "Debt" (2011)).

I'm inclined to think it's a system dedicated to generating greed monsters (utilizing varying strategies) that's abhorrent. The question is at what moral decision-making "stage" does evil enter, and while we can compare, I don't think this is a question of quantifiable units of evil.

I'm not very disgusted by this individual's (Rastani's) strategy in this case. He socially admits that the system is not responsive to human needs, while he fails to voluntaristically reject the system. Instead of voluntaristically rejecting the system, he simply plugs and bets on Treasury bonds. He acts within an evil system. Superficially, this looks like Arendt's banal evil; below I argue it is not banal evil, but tricksterism.

It's not unambiguous heroism, but what non-confrontative (or semi-confrontative) action within an evil system is heroic? I certainly don't feel betrayed by Rastani's strategy (Which is usually prohibited and punished--certainly not for moral reasons, but for the maintenance of hegemony.)--because it stimulates others' capacity to interpret and decide, to exercise freedom. That's not evil.

If you want to compare, it's slightly less evil than the stuff we all do in this system that shuts down freedom, including all the pious, everyday TINA work we do to create the pretense, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, that the economy and the environment is not undermined by capitalist incentives, infrastructure, and culture.

Etage Moral 1: Choosing Truth or Banal Evil

I certainly feel we're not in the presence of evil when we're admitting that systemic (capitalist) incentives undermine economic and social welfare. That's a solid moral decision at the outset, and not evil like the immediate, first-stage retreat into ad hoc, opportunistic, idealistic denialism--let's call this evil the Innocence Path. This innocence can coexist with sporadic tricksterism or insurrection, but usually, as with political party people and J-Comm types, it tends to lend its agency to conscious, active evil (see stage 3 below).

Etage Moral 2: Choosing Insurrection or Tricksterism

The moral decision-making tree then forks again at a second level--to play the system as is (which as you've recognized is destructive), or to rally people to collectively overcome the evil system. Here the trader does not choose the virtuous path.

Let's weigh the evils, and consider which is properly banal evil. In terms of comparable evils, finding a niche in an exploitation order in which you opt for first-stage evil, automatically (and at times strategically) exploit thousands (to millions) of people while pretending that's not what's going on--the Innocence Path, is not less scandalous than taking a niche in which you strategically, consciously exploit thousands (to millions) of people, admitting that this is the system.

Either way, as you're acting within the evil machine, your actions are not virtuous. Banal evil, however, isn't simply non-elite evil. Crucially, committing to first-stage evil forecloses the possibility of liberation and lends itself to full-bore third-stage evil. Therefore, first-stage evil is proper banal evil.

Second stage evil, while egocentric, is not anti-social; it does not attempt to foreclose the possibility of liberation and does not abet third stage evil. It is therefore tricksterism.

Trickster

Etage Moral 3: Evil

Down the "conscious capitalist" moral decision-making path, distinctive, proper evil really enters at a third stage: Deciding to defend the evil system from the systemic change others have decided to struggle for at moral stage two. This is using the evil order to activate banal evil and suppress freedom. You recognize the order is socially inhumane, you act within its inhumanity, and you volunteer the social power you've appropriated to protect the inhumanity from change. Now we're talking evil, conscious, voluntary evil. And the Innocents are your pawns and troops in evil.

Banal evil is created by an evil system overdetermining moral choices, and it is activated by conscious evil.

...

Essentially, I think varying moral interpretations of this Rastani case illustrate pro-capitalist Judeo-Christian understandings of evil, v. 'pagan' understandings of tricksterism. As professional hegemonists, J-comm types are supposed to defend capitalism against both tricksterism and insurrection. Capitalism's reliance on hegemony creates abhorrence (My way or the highway) for tricksterism, which is anti-hegemonic but still lives (even fairly comfortably) within the system. But that doctrinaire abhorrence certainly doesn't mean that tricksterism is either greater than or even equal to the sacrosanct, everyday evils perpetuated automatically and consciously within an anti-human, anti-environmental system of rampant exploitation and exaggerated inequality.

The Importance of Guiding Ideas in Political Contestation

2011-09-19T12:23:00.000-07:00

Below is an important article that has been wiped from the internet:

Piereson, James. 2005.“Investing in the Right Ideas: How Philanthropists Helped Make Conservatism aGoverning Philosophy.” The Wall Street Journal, May 27. (Republished in The Commentator under the title "Investing in conservative ideas.")

Piereson argues (to conservative capitalists) that funding the cultivation of conservative ideas is a crucial long-term political strategy. Below he outlines how this was done in the 20th century.

Piereson 2005:

"THIS PAST fall, shortly before the presidential election in November, some 300 friends and admirers gathered at the Plaza Hotel in New York City to pay tribute to John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the two aged warhorses of 20th-century liberalism. The event, sponsored by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, was billed as a "salute to democracy." It was also an occasion to recall an era when liberalism ran at high tide in the United States--a tough-minded doctrine that stood boldly for the working man at home and against tyranny abroad. The contrast between the past and the present must have been painful to many in attendance that night: today, the decline of the faith is mirrored in the fact that there is simply no one on the Left whose influence or stature even remotely approaches that attained so many decades ago by the evening's two honorees.
    The long descent of liberalism in recent decades has, no doubt, been not just a painful but a perplexing development for those once convinced that the future would be shaped by their ideals. The rise of conservatism must seem doubly perplexing. Galbraith himself had remarked, in 1964, "These are without doubt the years of the liberal. Almost everyone so describes himself." And both he and Schlesinger had dismissed conservative thought in the most derisive terms as without intellectual substance of any kind. Today, not only has conservatism risen to prominence in the electoral sphere, but conservative thought has seized the initiative in the world of ideas as well.
    Of course, there have been attempts by liberals to account for this reversal of fortune; but few have been accurate, thoughtful, or constructive. During last year's presidential campaign, the general tone was well captured in liberal assaults on George W. Bush as a "liar" or an "idiot" for pursing precisely the sort of cause-deploying American power on behalf of liberty and democracy in the world-that liberals like Galbraith and Schlesinger once championed. Addressing the rise of conservatism, the Left resorts to explanations that stress manipulation and trickery, with corporate payoffs to politicians looming large in the story. Conservative ideas play but a minor role in the account, and are themselves generally characterized as mere stalking horses for corporate interests. A particularly sinister role is ascribed to those conservative philanthropies that have helped fund thinkers, magazines, and research institutions--on the assumption that no one would advance such self-evidently meretricious ideas unless paid to do so.
    Indeed, the Left has displayed a near-obsessive interest in conservative philanthropies. A number of websites are devoted entirely to charting the activities by major corporate polluters," as the environmental activist Robert F Kennedy, Jr., describes them in his book, Crimes Against Nature. Similarly, the journalists David Brock and Eric Alterman have devoted much energy to "exposing" the projects supported by these institutions as well as their links to other organizations and their place in the broader constellation of conservative activism. Reports by People for the American Way and the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy dwell with heavy emphasis on the supposedly nefarious strategies and tactics employed by the foundations to advance their highly dubious cause.
    Invariably, these broadsides ignore the substance of the ideas themselves, quite as if John Stuart Mill's famous characterization of conservatives as "the stupid party" were still the rule in the early 21st century. But the plain fact is that modern conservatives have been engaged with the world of ideas to a far greater extent than most modern liberals. The columnist David Brooks has observed that, asked to name influences on their thinking, most conservatives are able to list a number of books or authors, while liberals have difficulty identifying any. This lively engagement with a coherent body of ideas forms a crucial if much overlooked aspect of the rise of conservatism, and one in which conservative foundations have played a central role.
    IN THE period running from the end of World War II down to the present, conservative philanthropy has gone through at least two distinct phases, and is now entering a third. Surprising as it may seem, both earlier phases were defined by ideas rather than by narrow business or corporate interests.
    The first phase, which began in the mid-1940's and ran well into the 70's, was guided more by an interest in classical liberalism and libertarianism than in conservatism as it has been understood more recently. The main donors were the Volker Fund, the Relm and Earhart foundations, the Liberty Fund, and business leaders like Jasper Crane of DuPont, Henry Weaver of General Motors, B.E. Hutchinson of Chrysler, and the British entrepreneur Anthony Fisher. (The Earhart Foundation and the Liberty Fund live on today.) These donors had only modest sums at their disposal, giving altogether around $3 million per year as compared with the $300 million that the Ford Foundation alone allocated annually in the mid-1960's.
    There were, to be sure, important differences among these donors. The Volker Fund was generally libertarian in its approach, while the Earhart Foundation bridged the divide between classical liberalism, with its emphasis on liberty, and modern conservatism, with its emphasis on tradition and order. But the interests of all of them were, by design, intellectual and theoretical.
    The seminal influence on these funders was FA. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, published in London in 1944 and in the United States the following year. This slender volume, an articulate call to battle against socialism, turned its author, then an obscure professor at the London School of Economics, into an enduring hero among conservatives and classical liberals on both sides of the Atlantic. No other writer at the time had made the case against collectivist ideas and policies with such audacity and clarity. For this reason alone, The Road to Serfdom quickly became a reference point for those with misgivings about the expanding welfare state.
    Named in many surveys as one of the most influential books of the 20th century, The Road to Serfdom caused something of a sensation when first published, provoking reviews and comment from such leading figures as John Maynard Keynes and George Orwell, and scathing rebukes and rebuttals from scores of lesser lights. A condensed version, brought out in 1945 by Reader's Digest, reached over 2 million of the magazine's subscribers and aroused enough interest to bring Hayek to the U.S. for a national lecture tour.
    The Road to Serfdom advanced two broad themes, one negative and the other positive. The first was that socialism leads almost inevitably to tyranny and the loss of liberty in all of its forms. The second was that the antidote to socialism is to be found in the revival of classical liberalism as articulated by British-Enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith, David Hume, and Edmund Burke. The book was in some ways highly pessimistic: socialism was advancing everywhere and appeared irresistible. (As if to confirm Hayek's analysis, England's 1945 parliamentary election saw the Labor party winning on a platform that called explicitly for the nationalization of British industry, and the victorious party proceeded to make good on its promise.) At the same time, Hayek saw a way out through the revival of a tradition of thought that was in the process of being lost.
    As for present-day conservatism, in Hayek's view it suffered from a fatal weakness. Because it relied on tradition rather than principle, it could slow down or resist but never fundamentally alter the direction in which events were moving. That is why he took pains to emphasize that he himself was not a conservative at all, but rather a liberal in the Whig tradition. (A later essay of his was titled, simply, "Why I Am Not a Conservative.") This, as it happened, was one feature of Hayek's thinking that appealed in particular to Americans.
    The American polity, as Hayek understood, was originally built on the principle of liberty, and its political tradition was greatly influenced by the Whig ideals of limited government and the rule of law. As a consequence, defenders of the American tradition were themselves frequently "liberals" in the European sense. For Americans concerned about the expansion of government, the alternative to socialism and the welfare state was not conservatism but individualism.
    Another enduring contribution of The Road to Serfdom, perhaps more influential in the long run than Hayek's critique of socialism, was its emphasis on the importance of ideas in the growth of political movements. Challenging the assumptions of the historical school of thought, Hayek insisted that socialism and statism were products not of economic forces beyond anyone's control but of erroneous and destructive ideas. The Whig principles that had influenced continental thought during the 18th and 19th centuries had been displaced by German thinkers from Hegel and Marx down to Sombart and Mannheim, whose collectivist doctrines had captured the imagination of intellectuals. In another essay, "The Intellectuals and Socialism" (1949), Hayek mapped out a broad, long-term strategy for combating this challenge.
    Practical men of business, Hayek wrote, were at a decided disadvantage in the war of ideas because of their deep distrust of theoretical speculation and their "tendency to orthodoxy." Businessmen, moreover, did not understand the link between ideas and political movements, and therefore did not see the need to mount a sustained intellectual defense of their own interests. He urged his followers to learn from the success of socialism, which had originated as a construction of theorists and philosophers and only later emerged as a political movement fielding candidates for office and appealing to voters.
    "What we lack," Hayek wrote, "is a liberal Utopia, a program which seems neither a defense of things as they are nor a diluted kind of socialism, but a truly liberal radicalism … which does not confine itself to what appears today as politically possible." The positive content of such a program was necessarily vague, but it was plain that Hayek envisioned a movement operating at the level of principles and theory and aloof from electoral and legislative agendas or the immediate controversies of political life. He proposed, in other words, a true war of ideas, one that might appeal to the best and most adventuresome minds of the age but that might take a generation or more to bear fruit.
    HAYEK'S PLATFORM--theoretical, abstract, and Utopian--might seem an odd basis on which to build a philanthropic program. There was no pretense here of promoting piecemeal reforms, of helping a party or a candidate, of passing a piece of legislation, or, indeed, of producing immediate consequences of any kind. Yet the philanthropists I have mentioned responded to his call.(*)
    Hayek's writings had a more or less direct impact in Great Britain, where Anthony Fisher (with Hayek's encouragement) established the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) in London in 1955. Directed by the economist Ralph Harris, the IEA was the original free-market think tank, publishing books and pamphlets that documented the inefficiencies of socialism and state-run enterprises. True to Hayek's prediction, it would spend more than two decades advancing these ideas and gradually winning converts until a sympathetic friend, Margaret Thatcher, was elected prime minister and began to implement reforms that were much influenced by its work.
    In 1947, the Volker Fund sent a group of Americans to Switzerland for the organizing meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, founded by Hayek to promote the free market in economics and the broad ideals of classical liberalism. In conformity with Hayek's vision, Mont Pelerin functioned as an exclusively scholarly enterprise, avoiding political debate in favor of in-depth theorizing about the foundations of a free society. A short time later, Volker underwrote Hayek's appointment as professor of moral science--Adam Smith's title at the University of Edinburgh-in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and also provided funds for New York University to hire Ludwig von Mises, Hayek's Austrian mentor and friend.
    In addition to these appointments, Volker and other donors lent assistance to the "Chicago School" of economics, led by Milton Friedman and George Stigler, and to the University of Virginia's school of political economy led by James Buchanan--all three of whom would later win the Nobel Prize in economics. They supported hundreds, perhaps thousands, of graduate students, mostly in economics but also in allied fields like government and history; many later became prominent scholars in their own right. And they subsidized a few institutions, generally libertarian in outlook, including the Foundation for Economic Education, the Institute for Human Studies, and the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists, which helped circulate market-oriented ideas to professors, students, and even businessmen.
    It is difficult to recall today how radical the ideas of a Friedman or a Hayek appeared in the 1950's and 60's, when the future seemed already to point in the direction of central planning, socialism, and the welfare state. In this phase of things, the role of philanthropy was largely to maintain the vitality of a remnant of thought until it could be brought forth again as an alternative to doctrines that had failed. That the movement did not find its way into the wider world of policy and public debate was in part, as we have seen, deliberate: aiming for influence beyond the daily headlines, Hayek and his followers eschewed a strategy that might have enabled them to reach a broader audience. But, working as they were against the intellectual grain of the time, they also had little success in breaking into the world of the universities--and without gaining a foothold in the academy, there was little hope of converting the next generation of scholars. By the mid-1970's, Hayek himself had been dismissed as an extremist, even a reactionary, and the influence of the classical liberals was at a low ebb.
    IF THE work of the conservative foundations in this period attracted little attention beyond their immediate circle--Waldemar Nielsen's standard histories, The Big Foundations and The Golden Donors, do not mention them at all--the leading liberal philanthropies were, by contrast, advancing their own agenda with vigor and to general applause. These foundations--Ford and Rockefeller, along with the Carnegie Corporation--were guided by the view that social progress was to be achieved through expert knowledge and scientific research, by the expansion of government's role into new areas, and by the use of international organizations to promote cooperation among the major powers. Their funds went to well-entrenched and highly regarded institutions: universities, research centers, international organizations, and, occasionally, governmental bodies. In sum, the liberal foundations formed an integral part of the era's liberal establishment, a circumstance for which they were roundly criticized (to little effect) by both conservatives and left-wing radicals.
    A significant shift in liberal philanthropy took place after McGeorge Bundy, a former dean at Harvard and National Security Adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, was appointed president of the Ford Foundation in 1966. Sharply preferring activism to research and expertise, Bundy pioneered a strategy of "advocacy philanthropy." Soon Ford and other liberal donors were investing in a maze of activist groups promoting feminism, affirmative action, environmentalism, disarmament, and other cutting-edge causes. The Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Women's Law Fund, and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, were among the products of this initiative.
    These groups claimed to speak for and to be the legitimate representatives of their respective causes. In that capacity, they promoted ideas that led to legislation, and then sought to influence the regulatory bodies and federal courts that implemented and interpreted the laws. Thus, Ford and Bundy helped develop an institutional structure that, by means of litigation and the leverage it exercised over administrative agencies, could push its favored programs beyond any limits contemplated by the politicians who enacted them.
    A strategy designed to bring about large change by circumventing the electoral process was well suited to philanthropic institutions with links to experts and advocates. And it led indisputably to results: employment quotas for women and minority groups, the expansion of welfare, new environmental legislation, and the like. It also produced some spectacular blowouts, most notably the effort in 1968 by the Ford Foundation to decentralize the New York City public schools. Over the long run, the Bundy approach was instrumental in inventing what is by now a familiar phenomenon on the American political scene: the well-placed advocacy group nursing a grievance against American society and seeking compensation on behalf of its members.
    REINFORCING THIS trend was the fact that, simultaneously, the Democratic party was beginning to alter itself along parallel lines. Following the tumult at their 1968 convention in Chicago, the Democrats established a commission, chaired by Senator George McGovern, whose mandate was to make the nominating process more representative. Quickly captured by liberal activists, the commission pushed through new delegate-selection rules requiring the representation of women, blacks, and young people in line with their respective proportions in the population.
    The effect was to displace the elected office holders, party officials, and union leaders who had controlled Democratic conventions in the past and to replace them with activists speaking for designated groups. Under this approach, the groups that now found a home in the party began to look very much like the ones Bundy had tried to organize through the Ford Foundation. In many cases, they were the same groups.
    Finally, liberalism itself came to be recast along interest-group lines. The welfare state was redefined from a package of programs through which Americans lent assistance to the poor, the sick, and the disabled to a system through which certain defined groups could command government support as a matter of right and as compensation for past injustices. Society was cast as the guilty party, the recipients as its aggrieved victims. This sleight-of-hand in turn made it difficult for government to require the beneficiaries of its aid to adapt their behavior to the standards of middle-class life.
    As liberalism gradually absorbed the adversarial assumptions of the age, group-based claims became ever more strident and accusations of discrimination and injustice multiplied. In time, the new order would erase those large-hearted features of liberal philosophy that had made it appealing to middle-class Americans from the 1930's through the 1960's.
    These developments could not have been foreseen. They were not a consequence of broad social or economic factors or of public pressure. Rather, they were engineered by a narrow circle of activists with access to money and influence within the Democratic party. They also defied Hayek's assessment that far-reaching changes take a generation or more to be put into place. Here, an established doctrine and a political party with a proud tradition were turned upside down within just a few years.
    At the time, many observers took note of the role that charitable foundations had played in this upheaval. Inserting themselves into the political life of the nation, liberal philanthropists parlayed their ability to fund experts, research, and advocacy groups into a new potential for influence. With their inbuilt advantage over elected politicians and traditional business associations, they were a quintessential expression of what came to be known as the "new politics," a politics driven largely by ideas. This was, without question, a crucial development in our political life--and in response to it, more than a few conservatives, joined by alarmed or disillusioned liberals, began to look for a different way.
    THIS BRINGS us to the second phase of conservative philanthropy. It began to take shape in the mid-1970's through the work of a handful of donors, especially the John M. Olin and Smith Richardson foundations and, later, the Bradley Foundation. The Scaife Trusts of Pittsburgh were also involved to a certain degree.
    These funders were more self-consciously conservative than libertarian. While sympathetic to the writings of Hayek and the ideals of classical liberalism, they adopted a broader intellectual framework encompassing fields beyond economics: preeminently religion, foreign policy, and the traditional humanities. In contrast to Hayek and his followers, they were also prepared to engage the world of politics and policy and to wage the war of ideas in a direct and aggressive style.
    The foundations themselves had been endowed by successful businessmen who wished to preserve the system of private enterprise that had enabled the country to prosper. In the mid-1970's, the outlook for any such program appeared especially bleak, but the sense of swimming against the tide gave their efforts an air of invigorating urgency. And they soon discovered, within the intellectual world, a seemingly unlikely group of allies imbued with a no less urgent set of priorities.
    Just as the earlier donors had looked to Hayek for guidance, these foundations looked to the neoconservatives. Writers and editors like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Hilton Kramer, and Michael Novak had for the most part spent their formative years on the Left. Rather than by Hayek, their ideas had been influenced by George Orwell, Lionel Trilling, and Raymond Aron--intellectuals of Hayek's generation who had dwelled on the evil of totalitarianism from a moral and political standpoint. Many of them, like Hayek, traced their intellectual lineage back to the 18th-century Whigs, but in so doing they once again emphasized the moral and cultural rather than the economic dimension, typically preferring Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments to his The Wealth of Nations. In brief, they understood the moral foundations of a free society to be prior to and more important than its economic foundations.
    The neoconservatives had an added advantage: having come from the Left, they understood the thought processes of contemporary liberals and leftists. They also understood that the war of ideas had to be fought by engaging in real-world controversies, with stakes wagered on the outcome. Through their writings, and through the advice they were able to offer, they helped to orient the conservative foundations to the ongoing contest over which set of ideas would govern the nation.
    The political world that these writers saw around them in the 1970's looked much different from the one that had so troubled Hayek in London in 1944. Instead of leading us down the path to collectivism, the welfare state had produced fragmentation, group conflict, disorder, and a general loss of authority in society. In the United States, moreover, the welfare state had advanced itself not through the nationalization of industry but through incremental expansions of social programs and accretions to federal regulatory power. It was the intersection of these programs with the cultural revolution of the 1960's and 70's that gave rise, as the neoconservatives saw it, to urban crime, illegitimacy, broken families, and educational failure. The contemporary problem was thus not so much collectivism or socialism as the loss of morale and self-confidence that was in some ways characteristic of all affluent societies--a problem to which classical liberalism did not promise any obvious solution.
    In contrast to Hayekian liberalism, neoconservatism never developed a full-blown theory of government, economics, or society. (Instead of a movement, neoconservatism itself was more a "persuasion," as Kristol called it, or a "tendency," as Podhoretz described it.) Rejecting orthodoxies and abstract theories alike, the neoconservatives tended to operate in close proximity to ongoing events. Kristol, though sympathetic to Hayek, once wrote that "he too often gives the impression that he considers reality to be one immense deviation from true doctrine."
    In keeping with this stress on real-world outcomes, neoconservatives drew upon social science to assess the practical consequences of the various programs and policies that made up the modern welfare state. Documenting the disturbing consequences of initiatives that had promised to end poverty or to transform the cities, analysts like James Q. Wilson and Charles Murray demonstrated that ideas adopted with the best of intentions were making matters worse. The effect of such studies was to throw cold water on the vast expectations that had been nourished by liberal theorists and activists. As promises were scaled back, so was the momentum behind the expansion of the welfare state.
    NOT THAT the neoconservatives were against a welfare state in principle, or necessarily embraced the unfettered market as an alternative. They criticized the welfare state because it demoralized the poor and made them dependent on government, but they hardly objected to well-crafted measures to aid the unemployed. A conservative welfare state, one that encouraged work, family, and middle-class values, was something they could endorse. In foreign policy, they believed that the cold war was a vital moral and political struggle, and rejected efforts to conciliate the Soviet Union as naïve or worse. In another time, they might well have been called liberals; in the 1970's and beyond, they were most definitely conservatives.
    Like Hayek, the neoconservatives envisioned an important role for intellectuals, but they were not prepared to wait a full generation for their efforts to yield results. It was plain that liberal and leftwing intellectuals had promoted ideas and programs that were wildly out of touch with the operating assumptions of the vast majority of Americans. This opened up an opportunity. The task of conservatism, as Kristol said, was "to show the American people that they are right and the intellectuals are wrong." Over time, that is more or less what happened.
    What the neoconservatives understood was that neither the intellectuals' dislike for capitalism nor their penchant for socialism was a function of economic analysis. By the mid-1970's, the economic promise of socialism was dead; it was obvious to everyone that socialist economies could not even feed their own people. What attracted liberal intellectuals to socialism was something else: mainly, the idea of community, which they contrasted invidiously to the individualism and competition of a market society.
    Thus, as Kristol and others argued, an effective defense of capitalism required a defense of the cultural assumptions on which a commercial civilization is based. It had to be shown that free societies encouraged values far superior to anything that socialism could deliver.
    The conservative foundations followed this lead. Though they continued to fund programs in free-market economics, they also made gifts in the fields of history, philosophy, government, even art and literature. They came to consider religion, morals, and marriage to be as important as economics and markets--and closely bound up with them. The foundations strove to move into every major area of debate and controversy. They allocated funds to prominent institutions, including Ivy League universities where conservative ideas were in a decided minority, and they proved ready and willing to support magazines and journals addressing a spectrum of controversial issues.
    Such magazines, they understood, were not simply products for sale in the marketplace, as businessmen might see them, but institutions in their own right, with ongoing responsibilities, reputations to be built and preserved, and networks of authors and supporters. Above all, they were seedbeds of ideas, nurseries of new talent. Not only was their cumulative effect large, but individual articles published in any one of them could have far-reaching consequences.
    The neoconservative magazines, COMMENTARY and the Public Interest in particular, routinely published authors whose critiques of liberal ideas and policies were factual, pointed, and ruthlessly logical, and whose analyses pointed the way to everything from the welfare reform of the late 1990's to the paradigm shift in American global policy that is being carried out by the Bush administration. There were also the New Criterion, a journal of literature and the arts edited by Hilton Kramer, and the National Interest, a foreign-policy quarterly established by Kristol and edited for many years by Owen Harries.
    In bringing a different approach and emphasis to modern conservatism, the neoconservatives enlarged its appeal, made it more effective in the political world, and helped it to adapt to the challenges of the time. The advance of conservatism in recent decades owes much to them, and to their partnership with the conservative foundations.
    IN ADDITION to aiding institutions shaped by neoconservatives, the foundations supported magazines, think tanks, and research centers led by free-market economists, libertarians, religious conservatives, and even Straussian philosophers. When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, there were but a few organizations that he could look to for research and information; by the time George W. Bush was elected in 2000, there was a proliferation of such groups working actively in every area of public policy. These organizations have developed ideas and nurtured talent that over time have helped change the balance of power between liberals and conservatives in America.
    All this was accomplished with modest financial Resources--amazingly modest when compared with the spending of their liberal counterparts. In one recent year, the five leading liberal philanthropic organizations--the Ford, Rockefeller, and MacArthur foundations, the Pew Trusts, and the Carnegie Corporation--reported combined assets of $24 billion and annual expenditures of $1.2 billion. By contrast, the combined assets of the five largest conservative foundations do not exceed $1.5 billion, and their annual expenditures barely reach $100 million. Yet they were able to achieve a great deal with focus and discipline, and by allying themselves with an unusually talented generation of writers and scholars.
    THE NETWORK of publications, university programs, and research centers built from the 1970's onward will continue to wield influence in the years ahead. But, as I suggested at the outset, this phase of conservative philanthropy has now run its course--in part because it has done its work, in part because conditions have changed, and in part because some key donors are leaving the scene. In the decades ahead, new funders, now entering the field, will shape the next chapter of conservative philanthropy.
    That next phase will necessarily be different from those that have gone before. For one thing, conservative philanthropy will likely be based more on individuals than has been the case till now. The prosperity of the past few decades, along with the success of conservative groups and ideas, has created a cohort of such individuals, few with enormous wealth but many prosperous enough to make significant gifts to conservative enterprises. At the same time, some conservative foundations--Olin preeminently among them--have spent themselves or intend to spend themselves out of business in accordance with their founders' wishes, and others have begun to shift their priorities.
    The reason for this shift has to do with the fact that conservatism has become a governing philosophy, and governance leans toward the practical. This is a natural evolution in a movement that has assumed national responsibility, and that needs workable agenda items--school vouchers, personal retirement accounts, legal reform, elimination of the estate tax, and so forth--to propose and enact. In addition, various conservative donors have themselves become involved in promoting one or another specific policy, and see the passing of a piece of legislation, or the implementation of a reform, as the most tangible measure of their success.
    Does this mean that there is no longer a great need to sustain and renew the intellectual basis of conservatism? Hardly. The dynamism of American life, and the relentless competition between the political parties and among interest groups, forces every movement of ideas to test those ideas on a more or less continuous basis if it means to survive and flourish. One need only think of last fall's tribute to Galbraith and Schlesinger to be reminded of the precarious and temporary nature of intellectual influence.
    Conservatism has accomplished this process of renewal more successfully than any of its competitors in the postwar period. This has been done not through an emphasis on policy so much as through broader arguments about where we have been, where we ought to go, and what threats and obstacles stand in our way.
    "Who owns the future?" Orwell asked. It is the great question of life and the great question of politics. Few will be persuaded to embrace conservatism only on the grounds that it promotes private social-security accounts or caps on liability awards. In the end--as we saw dramatically actualized in the national furor over the fate of a woman kept alive by a feeding tube in a Florida hospital--the fight over the future is cultural, and moral. In this sense, Hayek and the neoconservatives have had it right all along: any movement, if it is to maintain or augment its influence, will need to wage an ongoing battle of ideas. To do so, conservatives, no less than liberals, will need the help of sympathetic philanthropists.
    (*) Because of their theoretical approach, these donors were not necessarily involved in some of the other key intellectual events of the period, among them the founding of National Review in 1955. In launching this magazine, which was to play so great a role in the rise of modern conservatism, William E Buckley, Jr., aimed to create a forum of ideas that would at the same time address the controversial issues of the day; he also intended it as a for-profit enterprise, legally free to support and oppose candidates for public office. Both factors made the participation of these particular donors unlikely; in addition, their commitment to classical liberalism did not fit neatly with Buckley's own economic views."

    JAMES PIERESON, here making his first appearance in COMMENTARY, taught political science at the University of Pennsylvania before joining the John M. Olin Foundation in 1981. From 1985 until 2005, when it made its final grants, he served as the foundation's executive director.

Granted as a conservative fund-raiser (as well as hegemonist), Piereson had argued before (eg. 2004) that the rich need to fund more conservative think tank activity. Still, if you can get through the unbelievable whining about how the right-wing succubi of capital can never gobble up enough dribbles from their master's er...pockets, his chronicle is an interesting argument for the place of ideas in social movement.

...

In addition to the work by Domhoff, Vogel, Useem, et al on how conservatives mobilized in the Twentieth Century United States, political scientist Radhika Desai produced an excellent study on how conservatives organized thought in the UK in her article "Second Hand Dealers in Ideas."

The Third Leg of the Anglo-American Imperium

2011-09-15T21:05:00.002-07:00

Al Jazeera story on how US anti-war and pro-Palestinian activists are targeted for political persecution by the FBI.

US Ambassador to Israel publicly assures us all that Israel's 'security' is the US' raison d'etre in the Middle East.

How Israeli govt policies have caused the surge in fundamentalist Judaism/Zionism.

Garrison America

2011-08-30T08:49:00.002-07:00

Bowles' and Jayadev's "Garrison America."

Ever wonder why Americans can't say no?

Here's your answer: 1 in 4 Americans participating in the "United States economy is now engaged in guard labor--providing security for people and property, and imposing work discipline." And that doesn't even count hegemonic policing.

On the Ultra Rich's Surveillance State.

Remember right after Katrina, when we were told over and over, by people brimming with righteousness, how black people were running amok in New Orleans like fast zombies? (Like how white parents who murder their children claim a black man did it.) Meanwhile, our right-wing militarized police heroes are actually running around gunning people down, raping and pillaging. Then the political-economic elites turned New Orleans into a neoliberal fortress. It never fucking gets old for us, does it.

Debt as Quantified + Moralistic Class War

2011-08-30T08:43:00.076-07:00

My quick Graeber 2011 review:

Unless you really haven't considered debt critically before, the chapters to focus in on are: 1 "On the Experience of Moral Confusion," 6 "Games with Sex and Death" and 7 "Honor and Degradation".

In the first chapter, Graeber exposes debt as a tactic of class warfare that imposes an asymmetrical morality upon the working class. That is to say, if you are working class and the banks encourage you to take advantage of liquidity--say, to purchase a home or privatized education--you are entering into something other than a rational contract in which you pay over time for immediate access to a large sum of money. You are entering into a faustian moral system where the capitalist lender is obliged to hide the risks and costs from the working class borrower, and the borrower must pay for not just her superficial loan, plus interest, but the financial capitalists' risks as well.

As long as they are effectively not taxed, there is no accounting of the obligations of the financial capitalists to society; but if financial capitalists lose money, the capitalist state makes the working class pick up their tab, with interest--owed to the financial capitalists. In our contemporary Western debt society, working class people have to pay not just their own private debts to capital, but also the state-socialized debts of the financial capitalists. This transfer is conceived as a sort of protection money for financial capitalists' rule, which political-economic elites and their retainers define as absolutely necessary and beneficent.

What happens--economically and politically--when financial capital transfers its risks and costs to the working class--does not have to bear the risks and costs of its own dissimulating, profit-seeking bets?

‎"If all loans, no matter how idiotic, were still retrievable--if there were no bankruptcy laws, for instance--the results would be disastrous. What reason would lenders have not to make a stupid loan?" Graeber 2011: 3.

When working class people (are forced by the state to) pay back misleading loans--such as bubble mortgages, and education loans where elite hoarding of productivity gains is hidden--they are in effect encouraging capital to pursue bad-faith lending. They are being forced to build and support kleptocracy and oligarchy.

Chapter 6 & Chapter 7 explore how debt is produced by and supports a violence that rips people out of their social context and isolates them.

"Up in our country we are human!...Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs" (from Peter Freuchen's Book of the Eskimo)

The individualizing collective action of Masters (appropriating ‘surplus’ social power): How individual autonomy is forged for some through the violent, dehumanizing isolation of others

Essentially, Masters (elites) engage in a violent kind of collective action that produces what we know as 'individualism.'

Consider that what is unique (incommensurable, unsubstitutable, ergo valuable beyond quantification and commodification) about people, a social species, is their unique location and functions in a social network, their relationships to others.

Through their relations with others, people have both a unique (social) value and deep (social) dimension to act (together, collectively, dialectically) as agents. (This is thinking about people in society like how we can think about the relationships in an ecosystem.) If you are systematically recognized as having value beyond commodification then you are seen as constitutive of the social order. In an egalitarian society, you are recognized as fully human; in an inegalitarian society, you are recognized as ambiguously human and super-human. People will support you and protect you.

"In a human economy, each person is unique, and of incomparable value, because each is a unique nexus of relations with others" (Graeber 2011: 158).

Quantification Requires Violence

"Human economies" are built to recognize people's socially-embedded value, whereas inhumane economies are built to exploit this. With collective support, Masters violently separate individuals in other collectivities (eg. women, people of color, etc.) from their social networks, imposing an interchangeable, unidimensional quality upon these Slaves.

"To make a human being an object of exchange...requires first of all ripping her from her context; that is, tearing her away from that web of relations that makes her the unique conflux of relations that she is...This requires a certain violence" (Graeber 2011: 159).

"One becomes a slave in situations where one would otherwise have died" (Graeber 2011: 169).

The isolated, dimension-less Slaves are now both dehumanized and exchangeable (commodified, made into tools, undead servants of their murderers). Their social network is severed; their only (or main) social tie and path of action is as Slaves of their Master.

So that others can maintain or elaborate their social ties, some people are sacrificed. Once people are ripped from their social context, their qualities can be reduced to quantities. Their commodity value can be calculated.

When people are exchangeable, tradable, they are subject to the logic of debt. Women given in marriage is the start. Slavery is the logical end-point (Graeber 2011: 163). Credit and debt, the quantification or tally of morality--social contribution and extraction, as established by the most powerful people in society, is born upon systematic, violent dehumanization.

It has been burglars, marauding soldiers and debt collectors who have been the first to see the world in terms of "uniform bits of currency, with no history, valuable precisely for their lack of history, because they can be accepted anywhere, no questions asked

...Any system that reduces the world to numbers can only be held in place by weapons" (Graeber 2011: 386).

Today we see Masters as Individuals, Slaves as Zombies

"The king and slave are mirror images, in that unlike normal human beings who are defined by their commitments to others, they are defined only by relations of power. They are as close to perfectly isolated, alienated beings as one can possibly become" (Graeber 2011: 209).

In our civilization, we compulsively define ourselves as master and slave because that is how we can imagine ourselves as completely isolated beings, commodities, rational actors, individuals. The lineage can be seen: Romans conceived of liberty as the brute power of use and abuse (not as the ability to form mutual relationships with others), just as the liberal philosophers bizarrely imagined the origins of society "in some collection of thirty- or forty-year-old males who seem to have sprung from the earth fully formed, then have to decide whether to kill each other or begin to swap beaver pelts" (Graeber 2011: 209-210).

Masters accrue and exchange Slaves in order to appropriate 'surplus' social power. This kind of surplus is zero-sum. With an army of Slaves beholden to act as their agents, Masters can achieve a sort of super-agency approaching autonomy. With this 'autonomy' cleared out within the complex of human society by wielding Slaves, Masters are able to function approximately as independent, utility-maximizing 'individuals' within the matrix of society. What we recognize as individuals are people whose augmented social power is violently appropriated from dehumanized people, who themselves are separated from their own social networks and forced to act as agents of the Master. Individualism as we know it in our civilization is Master-slave individualism, where the 'surplus' social power he accumulates by stripping others of their own social networks and tying them to himself allows the Master 'freedom' to act relatively autonomously from the broad collective--autonomously enough to coordinate with a small collective of Masters to determine production, distribution, infrastructure, institutions, politics, policies and culture (The Slaves execute the directives).

Clarification: Master-slave relations are rampant in our civilization. Modern debt peonage in the labor-as-commodity society enables lifelong wage slavery as well as classical slavery. Even though Master-slave individualism is not true surplus accumulation but simple zero-sum appropriation, capitalism supplies Masters with the power (social support, legitimized violence, legal monopoly over the means of production) to enslave (proletarianize, commodify labor) others. Wage earners and the unemployed are essentially lifelong indentured servants in capitalism.

"An ancient Greek would certainly have seen the distinction between a slave and an indebted wage laborer as, at best, a legalistic nicety" (Graeber 2011: 211).

Likewise, Master-slave 'individualism' (constantly secured through collective action) is necessary to the hierarchal operation of capitalism.

...

Heroic societies provide one example of how people are dehumanized to serve as debt tender. Militarized people (men) manufacture accounts of honor, and then use power to steal "surplus honor" from other men in the militaristic, macho, high-inequality cultural economy of honor and degradation larding ostensibly quantitative debt politics.

In order to enslave women (or anyone) for this "heroic" economy, women need to be stripped of their social networks and unique social location--made commensurable, quality-less, exchangeable like things. Humans must be dehumanized.

Honor and dignity thereby become men's power to protect/spare their family's dehumanized females from slavery and prostitution, by enslaving other men's women.

...

"What is a debt anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence" (Graeber 2011: 391).

"As it turns out, we don't 'all' have to pay our debts. Only some of us do" (Graeber 2011: 391).

Debt is a quantified assessment of extraction from the social order. Masters determine debt. Whatever the Masters (eg. Goldman Sachs) do is socially recognized as an invaluable contribution (credit) to the social order, and whatever the alienated Slaves (eg. single mothers) contribute to society will not be recognized as a contribution, but as an extraction, which the Masters will have quantified. In high-inequality societies, slaves' satisfaction of even their own basic human requirements are regarded as extractions from society, placing Slaves in interminable debt to the social order's creditors, Masters.

"By turning human sociality itself into debts, (militarized finance) transforms the very foundations of our being--since what else are we, ultimately, except the sum of the relations we have with others--into matters of fault, sin, and crime, and making the world into a place of iniquity that can only be overcome by completing some great cosmic transaction that will annihilate everything" (Graeber 2011: 387).

...

This debt culture can be further explored by linking it to the social epidemiology literature on the production of health-depleting chronic stress in high-inequality social relations. That is, it is easy to see how the militaristic debt culture of stealing and hoarding honor induces chronic, debilitating stress.

(This debt book isn't all fun and joy. Graeber can lay down a ladleful of anarcho/anthro- dogma overstatements--eg. "There is no such thing as societies. Life is a bowl of moral cherries!" Sigh. Hey, what about these interlocked sets of institutions, culture boy? "Property relations mean nothing! Communism = everyday sharing." Sigh.--lavishly adorned with faintly-amusing/boring anthropological cocktail party anecdotes.)

Themes from Graeber's Debt to discuss further:

1) Debt as tactic: Quantifying the social obligations of workers to owners (via debt) imbues society with moral claims about what different strata of people contribute to or take from society. Debt is the class-based violence of moralistic quantification.

"By turning human sociality itself into debts (quantified promises), (financial-military violence and coercion systems) transform the very foundations of our being--since what else are we, ultimately, except the sum of the relations we have with others--into matters of fault, sin, and crime, and making the world into a place of iniquity...

Just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe" Graeber 2011: 387.

2) The possibility of a debtor's revolt:

Problem: The class violence of debt is broadly sanctified by its moral code. That is to say, quantification via debt is a political tactic that bears a moral code supportive of exploitation.

To promote an alternative morality to debt, you need socialism, in which people are organized to recognize both unquantified working class value and class war. In other words, recognition of class war and recognition that working class people have unquantifiable value is socialism. It helps people to think and to act, to know that they're not nor have they ever been alone.

Paraphrase of Varoufakis, Halevi and Theokarakis 2011: 18:

The discipline of economics does not so much enjoy scientific victories, as it obtains political victories. In much the same way, debt is not so much about impressive achievements in quantification (accounting, or even gambling), as about impressive achievements in class war.

...

Wiesbrot's "What Everyone Should Know About the Debt Crisis."

"Iceland's Loud No (to debt)," in Le Monde Diplomatique.

Cruel & Unusual Punishment: All the Rage Again

2011-08-20T11:50:00.001-07:00

Glenn Greenwald discusses how the US government's judiciary-abetted contemporary campaign to reinstate cruel and unusual punishment reflects growing elite apprehension that the American working class needs to be harshly, emphatically repressed and intimidated--because the long beating that the oligarchy has been giving to the working men and women of America is getting much, much more viscous, institutionalized and undeniable. There is no visible light at the end of the tunnel. Elites are anxious that even Americans may use the technology of the age, and begin to resist in critical mass.

"The common thread in the (Aaron) Swartz and (Bradley) Manning persecutions -- as well as similar cases such as the two-year prison term for non-violent climate change protester Tim DeChristopher, the FBI's ongoing investigation of pro-Palestinian peace activists, and even the vindictive harassment of White House/DADT protester Dan Choi -- is the growing efforts to punish and criminalize non-violent protests, as a means of creating a climate of fear that will deter similar dissent," Greenwald points out.

"...(The US government's growing efforts) to stifle meaningful dissent of any kind -- especially civil disobedience -- through intimidation and excessive punishment, the cruel and degrading treatment of Bradley Manning, the attempted criminalization of WikiLeaks, the unprecedentedly harsh war on whistleblowers: these are all grounded in the recognition that the technology itself cannot be stopped, but making horrific examples out of those who effectively oppose powerful factions can chill others from doing so."

Elites are anxious that even stupefied Americans may break out in organized opposition. Greenwald posts a Gallup poll showing that today only 11% of Americans are satisfied at "the way things are going," and quotes David Bromwich's analysis of the Bush-Obama regime's devastating impact on American society: "A redistribution of wealth and power more than three decades in the making has now been carved into the system and given the stamp of permanence. Only a Democratic president, and only one (originally) associated in the public mind (however wrongly) with the fortunes of the poor, could have accomplished such a reversal with such sickening completeness."

Popular Uproar in the UK, Summer 2011

2011-08-12T12:42:00.009-07:00

Although all moralistic handwringing and conservative policy marketeering in response to the uprisings in the UK are class warfare, an article on the recent British popular uproar that is somewhat worth reading: Peter Osborn's "The moral decay of our society is as bad at the top." It contains a nice turn of phrase:

"Our politicians – standing sanctimoniously on their hind legs in the Commons yesterday..."

Support for Osborn's thesis? Dacher Keltner's studies of the sociopathy of the rich. Listen here for a great Henwood interview with Keltner on his research findings.

...And before you up there on your high horse get too frothy in the mouth about the horrors of looting in Britain, remember that 10 years later we found out that it was not the much-maligned African American citizenry, but rather the fascist police that went on the rampage in New Orleans. Naomi Wolff is compiling the data for the case that by and large the "rioters" in Britain may in fact similarly be police saboteurs.

The aesthetic beauty and gratification that conservative ideology supplies to its supplicants lies in conservatism's capacity for self-fulfilling prophecy--to make the world over into the horror that it already presumes needs to be punished.

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Maybe the uproar is conscious dissent. After all, disrupting Londoners left the bookstores unmolested.

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Cartoon commentary.

Breivik and Judeo-Christian terrorism

2011-07-26T13:25:00.041-07:00

In response to Brievik's Judeo-Christian fascist political terrorism--77 murdered and 96 injured when he bombed Oslo government buildings housing the Labor Party, and slaughtered Labour Party children at a multicultural summer camp,

the Jerusalem Post wrote an anxious story demanding that we prevent the right-wing atrocity from overshadowing the "Failure of Multiculturalism" in Europe. What is the Jerusalem Post on about, you ask? Good question, because it just so happens to get to the heart of the Breivik massacres.

"The Failure of Multiculturalism" in Scandinavia: International Conservative Politics

What has happened in northern Europe is that conservatives have been waging a campaign against labor, and the tool that they have been using is a spectacularly-conflicted (But who needs consistency? What you need is complete coverage!) dual politics creating a "multiculturalism crisis" out of immigrants--immigrants portrayed as both Muslim criminals and as victims of the social democratic welfare state and labor institutions. This political campaign has been raging unchecked since the 1990s. Breivik is the direct product of this conservative campaign.

The broad, intended conservative goal is to exterminate labor institutions in Scandinavia, and thus to exterminate social democracy. It's been a more difficult project there than elsewhere, though certainly not impossible. Neoliberalism has made great headway for conservatism in Scandinavia. Leave it to a Scandinavian, however, to increase effectiveness and efficiency: You can also help to extinguish the Labour Party's future by directly exterminating its youth.

The connection to neocon Israel lies in the conservative goal of promoting imperial, high-inequality, capitalist, Anglo-american-centric capitalist countries on the global political-economic stage. Scandinavia isn't China, but social democracy is an alternative political economy that has the capacity to subordinate finance capital to socio-economic welfare and occasionally controls finance capital. It is thereby a threat to the financial-military domination of the global conservative hegemon.

Norwegian teens mourn the loss of their friends.

Breivik was the product of global conservative conditioning. Not only did he target Labor Party representatives and children, Breivik wrote a 1500 page "manifesto," in which Israel is mentioned on 170 pages, Norway on 135. Breivik: "So let us fight together with Israel, with our Zionist brothers against all anti-Zionists, against all cultural Marxists/multiculturalists."

A plump and satisfied Breivik, in Izod, on the way to jail.

Studying Swedish immigration politics over the past 10 years, I have found the "failure of social democratic multiculturalism" trope to be a fundamental conservative tool in Scandinavia. There it is used to argue not just for stepped-up European harmonization with imperial Anglo-American-Israeli policy, but also for dismantling the labor protections that enable social democracy.

The conservative argument is this: "The Failure of Multiculturalism (in Scandinavia, not US/Israel-special-relationship countries) is the result of Muslim Criminality + Social Democratic institutions (eg. welfare state, labor rights). The solution to the Failure of Multiculturalism is to break down labor institutions, and to support Israel in our Clash of Civilizations." In this conservative political campaign, the problems posed by fascism (understood beyond the 20th century Jewish Holocaust) are eclipsed, by design. These politics are neocon Zionist home turf. It is no surprise that J-post is anxious that such emergent crises of fascism will slow the conservative campaign in Scandinavia.

I initially went to Sweden with the PhD advisor-driven mission of discovering what the Swedes had done to violate their immigrants and how US-Canadian immigration could provide the Swedes with a proper immigration approach. Having extensively compared, in Sweden, the US and Canada, Swedish immigration policy and outcomes with Canadian, US, and other Anglo-country policies and outcomes, I can firmly say that the long legacy of social democratic multicultural policy and program development in Sweden is, if anything, more progressive, constructive, and preferable, from both overarching immigrant and native perspectives. It's not the communist horizon, but as usual, social democracy pretty much gives you the best you are going to get out of capitalism.

Why the Failure of Multiculturalism politics now?

Graeber points out that modern racism is a class-compromise byproduct in European societies, where elites wished to resume slavery in their countries, and working men and women refused the institution. Essentially, political-economic elites resorted to promoting modern racism as a means of securing broad consent to their right to superexploit someone...elsewhere.

‎"(After the 'Dark Ages' rejection of slavery in Europe,) modern racism...had to be invented largely because Europeans continued to refuse to listen to the arguments of the intellectuals and jurists, and did not accept that anyone (in their own societies, whom) they believed to be a full and equal human being could ever justifiably be enslaved" Graeber 2011: 212.

It is worth asking to what extent intellectuals and jurists today are again trying to convince these intransigent, vulgar 'Europeans' (or Americans) to accept slavery in their own societies. Where do race and immigration politics, including carefully-managed versions of anti-racism ("Antiracism = submit to capital" or "Civilized contemporary global capitalists are antiracist/antiracism.") in Europe and the Anglosphere, coincide with the promotion of domestic debt peonage and international slavery?

Why are Scandinavians vulnerable to the conservative anti-racist/pro-racist political one-two punch? What I observed is that, hitting the wall imposed by the bourgeois takeover of social democracy, their tremendous historical social democratic capacity for problem solving stutters and stalls. Unwilling to accept that even Swedish, righteous liberalism is unable to solve the fundamental social problems of capitalism, they descend into an inability to admit that coerced human migration in capitalism is not potentially a picnic on the beach. They hysterically swear to themselves that somewhere out there is a liberal-conservative model of social inclusion that is both cheaper and can achieve more inclusion than social democratic inclusion could. There is not. What Swedes have consistently failed to acknowledge, throughout the conservative ascent era, is that immigration is extremely hard, especially for non-elites. It's hard for the "welcoming" society. It's harder for immigrants. Refugee immigration is even harder still. It does not get done in any core capitalist country easily or prettily or cheaply.

The free-market formula for purportedly "masterful" immigration (eg. Austria, Canada, the US) is an unwholesome marketing combination of outright distortions and fractional truth based in ideal, exceptional, fleeting experiences blown up by marketing spin into a bloated department store parade float, distracting children and obstructing our view. The social democracies do fundamentally-vexed immigration and social incorporation about as well as it can be done, and they have kept trying to improve, in the causative context of global imperial war and exploded societies. And in that context, human mobility and the difficult work of rigorous collective restoration are essential.

In studying the insistent Failure of Multiculturalism campaign in Sweden, I had to conclude that, regardless of what righteous, altruistic feminists and anti-racists it grafts onto its project, it is a conservative political campaign to dismantle labor institutions on the back of immigrant victimology and stigmatization. That is ugly.

It is no prettier that this immigrant-exploitative war on the working class is intimately tied to Zionist efforts to push the more reluctant, social-democratic quarters of Europe behind the oil-dependent, finance-ruled, high-inequality, bellicose and belligerent conservative imperium. Only chronic marketing victims should be surprised that such an imperial military-finance alliance both ignites the E-Z/La-Z semi-laissez faire marketing imaginary ("All the Beautiful, Cafe-latte Multicultural Utopia needs is Walmartization! Whoo-hoo!") and, on its flipside, fosters contemporary fascism.

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Doug Henwood responds: "There's a right-wing critique of soc dem that says it only works in 'homogenous' places like Sweden. Relatedly, Hayek claimed that soc dem and socialism are fundamentally nationalist, since their planning universe need national borders. But your research shows that not only is that not true, but the war on immigrants is part of a war on soc dem."

(Henwood's friend Joel Shalit keeps an eye on some contemporary national conservative movements, and also does some damage-repair for Israel within the Western Left. He doesn't have much to say about the Breivik case; but he does understand at least Israeli, British, German and Italian conservative politics, and following up on his "Actually Existing Israel" (April 2011), Henwood interviewed Joel Shalit on Israeli national identity and radical conservatism and superficially on Israel's relationship to the European right on Henwood's radio show Behind the News. In response to the Jerusalem Post article, Shalit advocates in "Breivik and the Jews" that Jews should not be trying to hide the dependency of contemporary European fascism on Jewish conservatism, but rather should confront the conservative ideas. )
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Hegemony via Confusion & Opportunistic Parochialism:

Having recently viewed a succession of music videos from the 1980s (of which this is representative), and this depiction of modern postmodernism, I think it bears iteratation: confusion is a tool of conservative hegemony.

The Anglo-american media spun the Breivik massacres in this way: "Norwegians are a lot more barbaric that they think they are. After all, they are Vikings, who once gleefully hurt the innocent villagers of Great Britain." This interpretation of the meaning of the Breivik massacres is "backed up" by Wikileaks documents in which the US State Department whines that Norway should devote its income to a bigger militarized policing apparatus.

Huh. Of course the US State Dept. desires that other countries give their money to Halliburton. Where has that been shown to reduce harm, and how does that fervent wish demonstrate that Norwegians need to convert over to a similarly repressive state? And as regards purported Norwegian sub-surface barbarity: Norwegians simply do not engage in viciousness at the volume that people in right-wing societies do, and that's because they have savvier social integration understanding and institutions (Not because they are "homogeneous", which due to inter alia mass immigration, they are not).

By any valid measure (Though my review of the literature "documenting" the failure of multiculturalism in Scandinavia shows clearly that conservatives will fuck with the measures--so let's aggregate the measures for ease of consensus.), the Scandinavian societies are approximately one billionth as violent as the Judeo-Christian Anglo-American societies. Even if Zionism is your sole measure of civilization, Scandinavians have award-winning, government-mandated, early-to-late education programs focused on the singular tragedy of the early 20th century Jewish Holocaust. They have lots of advanced initiatives designed to combat antisemitism. ...Their press is owned by fairly conservative Jewish people. The result of this vigorous socialization into Western "civilization"? When married to conservative politics, it has meticulously groomed a Christian Zionist terrorist.

Norwegians are not insulated from global civilization/hegemony, surreptitiously (yet lazily!) cultivating their genetically-cruel culture in the backwoods. That's a cockamame story. That it sells at all is dependent, in fact, on the parochialism and Halliburton investments of the Anglo-american press' audience.

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A lesbian couple heroically saved 40 children from Breivik.
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Race politics working their magic on this side of the pond:

Brad de Long ponders a Republican Bangledesh-American arguing hopefully that white American conservatives are not racist; they're just protecting good things from bad people, Virginia. De Long answers the Republican in "Why Don't Republicans Like Illegal Immigrants from Mexico?", where he argues that illegal immigrants from Mexico logically should be the posterboys for Republican ideals, and yet still Republicans hate illegal immigrants.

Here's my rejoinder to the conservative-liberal debate on conservative racism:

It is true that Republicans degrade or hate Mexican immigrants, surfacely because they are "colored" and often have an accent. Wah-wah. But inasmuch as such complaints gesture lazily towards some vaguely-natural "problem" and echo historical charges against some people by other people, it still is something of a random problem construction, as De Long points out. Why is active racism characteristic of conservative politics today?

Because racism is dehumanization and it is not random; it is a conservative "Little King" institution that allows tyrants to maintain a popular base in a high- inequality political-economy.

Racism encourages zero-sum thinking that co-opts people to a high-inequality agenda. When Republicans enjoy bonding together by actively degrading Mexican immigrants (and other people they want to perceive and remake as low status and powerless), they are sharing a symbol of their tribal project, working together to promote their own material benefit at the expense of other people. In the race-besotted US/Israel, conservatives set up this classic stratification credo, typically without any confirming evidence whatsoever: If we don't savagely degrade and super-exploit the weaker tribes, they will eat us and everyone we love.

Racism is a conservative coalition-building tactic. From a top 0.1% ruler down to their media lackeys down to a conservative convenience clerk, what these capitalist conservatives have always wanted is to privatize (someone else's) commons, and the perpetuation of cheap labor that they can exploit. So no matter whether they're trying to transfer the wealth of the dwindling US middle class into their own off-shore hoard, or whether they're suffering stagnant income and related hierarchy indignities--no matter their horrible alienation, at least they'll always share the high-inequality market and the militarized police to force someone more vulnerable to provide them all a compensatory Chemlawn yard.

And while preventing immigration historically tends to allow labor to organize and take a larger share of social wealth, creating a special class of dehumanized and legally-vulnerable laborers definitely does produce loads of cheapened labor to use and abuse-- with fun moralistic fervor!

Conservatives are an organized political group that strives to dictate to us our true value (abysmally low), and what we owe them (the sun and the moon and the stars). Paraphrasing David Graeber, conservatives seek to transform the very foundations of our being--since what else are we, ultimately, except the sum of the relations we have with others--into matters of fault, sin, and crime, and to make the world into a place of iniquity--an agonized, writhing hell that they rule, a little crowning fraternity of the damned.

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Let me give you a representative example of the framework problem I see with so much of the professional neoliberal civilizer staff, by recounting an example of pertinent antiracist history that I can say with a great deal of assurance that antiracists don't know or cannot remember--because it doesn't fit in the official multiculti Anglo settler country anti-communist plot line.A century ago, in the early 20th century, socialists in the interior, in Minnesota, worked in coalition with the Twin Cities African American community to promote and host anti-racist movie and discussion nights in rural towns. It was immensely successful anti-racism and progressive rural mobilization (Jennifer Dalton. "Making MN Liberal"). It created the conditions for such unusually progressive politics that in that era, the state even saw its forests run for ecological goals (Mark Hudson. "Wildfire."), the preservation of urban public space, the nation's strongest teacher's union, the preservation of family farms, and its workers' lives defended by the National Guard (which only happened one other time in US history--under Pinchot's PA governance.) For at least 5 generations (and, really, we know more), socialists have known--and were capable of acting upon the knowledge--that to build and maintain working class consciousness and mobilization in North America, partly we need to combat the tool of racism across geographies--combat it by engaging people's sociability. (Kind of like how today, a hundred years later, it is still socialists who work with First Nations folks to develop some of the most innovative antiracism initiatives in central Canada, such as Neechi CED initiatives.)The socialists' early and effective anti-racism efforts were eliminated by a small group of liberals who used the threat of fascism to take over the Farmer-Labor Party. Today rural Minnesota is instead organized by the far right, via churches, and rural people there are again "naturally" racist and sexist and, well, sort of feudal rural idiots, just like how we imagine they should be to sustain the rationale for our jobs as professional civilizers in a gloriously unequal--ahem! ambition-rewarding!--society. And the result is that rabid anti-inegalitarians rule unfettered throughout.That's how much we have progressively improved our anti-racism by imagining that working class consciousness and a strong anti-inequality critique is a problem because it must "subsume race," which we know because we have accumulated our tremendous liberal intellectual endowment of identity politics theory and initiatives that we somehow imagine, despite all the evidence, that conservatives cannot manage the hell out of (the combo racist and antiracist politics harnessed by conservatives in the destruction of US mass public education being but one case in point).I am always impressed every time I realize that liberals think they personally discovered anti-racism in 1968, possibly at a cocktail party in New Haven or Toronto or London--maybe in the coffee shops of Paris, and that their job is to be as boorish as humanly possible whenever Marxists suggest that This is America, land of identity politics and that North America is rich in hugely-overdeveloped identity politics theory and initiatives, which are materially-supported by universities, governments and foundations across the political spectrum, and which help political-economic elites bond globally, as a class (The ultimate multicultural camaraderie). Whereas the US is absolutely, forcibly poverty-stricken in working class consciousness and historical-materialist understanding.

This intellectual poverty and self-sabotage underlies our inability to sustain a critical mass of alternative mobilization to address our failing, persistent, zombie political-economy, or race and women's poverty-- inequality problems, or our market-besotted, energy-drunk failure to contribute to a greater, barely-initiated project of building a decent, judicious, healthy environment, society and world. I can only hope that there may be a more inspiring purpose to which professional civilizers can put their poverty-pimp race passion than to imagine that the problem is our 2000 overeducated, over-read Marxists not having encountered, understood and embraced the shitload of anti-socialist books and articles and art and conversations and shows on race that have been pumped out of our industries of global hegemony, to very little antiracist effect. It's why Martin Luther King Jr. fought to move antiracism beyond legal and regulatory rulings, even beyond politesse; and because the historical-materialist understanding of racism is so crucial, that's why King was assassinated by the state.

When liberals insist that we don't need a Marxist understanding of racism, they breathe life into racism, which is also a tool for predatory rulers.