Predawn philosophers' club

Before sunrise, I have walked 2 miles through the city of Philadelphia on most working days. An excitable fellow looks for me when I pass CVS, announcing to everyone, “This guy! Every day at quarter to six!” Unfortunate, I tell myself, and wave.

There are as many cats as people, this time of day. No one wants to cuddle. Actually, that is interesting. Yesterday I saw a dark skinned man escorting an anorexic blonde woman; we crossed paths. You see it occasionally. They don’t say anything to me. 

Today a guy spotted me. He made such a to-do in asking for a light that it was only afterwards that I noticed the adrenaline in my thighs. But I told him I didn’t smoke and he muttered even though I apologized: I was very sorry for not smoking.

A lady tried to sell me prescription drugs off her front porch. She asked if I like percocets. She asked if I liked jewelry. She asked me what I liked and I said I like to read a book. That satisfied her interest -- but for the next few days I worried she would be waiting for me on that unlit porch. 

People ask you for money, and most of the time I try to accommodate them. This can be complicated by the fact that I don’t usually carry cash. Ideally, I have some handy for this purpose, somewhere that is easily accessible. But when I don’t, I just tell them that I’m sorry and that I don’t have any change. Most people accept that, but it’s good to look them in the eye. I can’t imagine ignoring someone altogether. Some people say that mendicants are either drug addicts or millionaires, but the fact is you don’t know their situation and everybody has to eat sometime.

Something surprised me once; it changed the way I look at my commute. This was in winter -- not when you expect to have problems. Nobody is hanging out on the corner, for example.

These two weren’t hanging out but moving through my neighborhood, the very beginning of my walk, with a lot of commotion. Later I would think that they were probably laborers in the Italian Market based on how they were dressed, the direction they were traveling, and the hour of the day. 

They were ahead of me, going in the same direction, carrying on what I would call an angry exchange with the world. Naturally, it occurred to me to avoid them; subconsciously, I must have thought that by going toward them, I could. They cut across the street, to my side, proceeding down a small perpendicular alley.

The second one saw me, half a block away, just as he reached the mouth of the alley. He motioned for his buddy, who reappeared. For the first time they were perfectly quiet, watching. City lighting must have revealed a tall, thin person without much detail; for my part, I could see two dark shapes, the first stocky, the second tall and thin, in hoodies.

The first started what I interpreted to be a kind of routine.

“Yo, whatzup?” he said with pointed hostility.

“What’s going on?”

“You tell me.” 

“Just going to work.”

The conservation dropped out as we came into view of one another. 

“Hey! Aslaam Alaikum, my brother,” said the first, seeing that I had a large beard. “Are you Muslim?”

This was not a new question for me in my comings and goings around Philadelphia. People always asked me if I was Muslim, Amish, orthodox Jewish, and so on; and my friends and family needled me about the fact they did. I had different versions of the same basic answer, which in this case I stated simply as, “I believe in the truth.”

Unfortunately, this was taken to mean that “the truth” is I something I hold to be in opposition, or superior, to Islam. 

“Oh yeah, what’s the truth?”

“Make your own truth,” I said. 

A pause, then, “Man, you don’t believe in the truth!”

But the truth was that I was past them. The second guy urged the first to drop it. “Come on, man.”

What's a Socialist?

The New York Times asks, “What’s a Socialist?” and considers it in terms of Western political parties.¹ Socialism isn’t what it once was, says the Times; it has “largely done its job” as “the industrialized working class gets smaller and smaller.” We are all middle class now, or would like to think so, from our vantage point as the globe’s foremost consumers. 

Yet it might be instructive to ask who makes the many items we consume. Presumably somebody does. IKEA and Target must have “workers” somewhere in their supply chain, even if their floor staff and customer service representatives are happily “middle class.” Is it really true that the people who make your stuff are becoming fewer and fewer? You have to assume a pretty narrow perspective to argue that just because none of your FaceBook friends work on an assembly line, there must not be very many of them left. 

The New York Times can ask what it means to be a socialist in a system that produces less and less, consumes more and more; and it can honestly arrive at the answer, “not a whole hell of a lot.” Socialism, if it has ever meant anything, meant that the people making things have control of the processes which make them -- i.e., that workers control production. Of course, this presupposes that there is production, and this creates the whole difficulty for observers in the West, who no longer see it by looking out their windows. We are all middle class now, they tell themselves.

The fact that socialism has less political meaning in societies that no longer produce much of what they consume is not surprising: conflicts around production have been relocated -- to more repressive locales. A Socialist in France is like a Democrat in the US: both had greater relevance, vis-a-vis their stated ideals, in decades past, not because we have transcended the social concerns which informed them, but because a domestic working class could interfere with production, and in doing so shape politics. As the industrial working class gets smaller and smaller in our communities, the influence of owners, managers, and investors becomes the norm. This unchecked power, in turn, precipitates the kinds of crises we have come to know so well in recent years.