ladypoverty

Yeah, buddies

2012-01-20T13:48:00.000-05:00

A businesswoman who can maintain her poise in a strip club will prove to be a team player. Try not to appear shocked by your surroundings, even if it's your first time. If you don't mind getting a lap dance, it will endear you to your male colleagues, though the endearment may not be reciprocal.

If you're unable to tolerate the teeming male sexuality, chat up the strippers. They may well appreciate the female companionship. To thank them for their time, either purchase them a drink or buy a man in your party a lap dance.

The businesswoman who can maintain her poise in a strip club may very well prove herself a team player, but one wonders about the goals.

Free time: Marx and individualism

2011-11-14T13:52:00.001-05:00

"The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labor time so as to posit surplus labor, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labor of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them."¹

"[Capital] is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labor time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone's time for their own development." 708

"[R]eal wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labor time, but rather disposable time." 708

"Free time -- which is both idle time and time for higher activity -- has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject." 712

Grundrisse

Note: Capital, through technical development (automation, etc.), reduces to a minimum that portion of the day which we work for ourselves, in order to maximize that portion in which we work, uncompensated, for others (the for-profit employer). That portion in which we work for ourselves -- for our own subsistence or "reproduction," so that we may from our employer's perspective return to work the next day, week, and so on; or, from our own view, in order to live -- Marx calls "necessary labor time." The idea here is that if capitalism's development drives down, by means of technological advance, that portion of the day that people need to work in order to meet their own needs, then it is simultaneously creating the possibility that people would stop working, uncompensated, for others, for the "surplus" portion of their working time. This time, in turn, would become their own: "Free time -- which is both idle time and time for higher activity … transform[s] its possessor into a different subject … [who] then enters into the direct production process as this different subject."

Dialectics

2011-11-09T19:11:00.000-05:00

"The dialectical mode of thinking, at least as I construe it, precludes closure of the argument at any particular point. The intriguing configurations of internal and external contradiction … force the argument to spin onwards and outwards to all manner of new terrain. The opening of new questions to be answered, new paths for enquiry to take, provokes simultaneously the re-evaluation of basic concepts -- such as value -- and the perpetual re-casting of the conceptual apparatus used to describe the world. Perhaps the most extraordinary insight to be gained from a careful study of Marx is the intricate fluidity of thought, the perpetual creation of new openings within the corpus of his writings. Strange, then, that bourgeois philosophers frequently depict Marxist science as a closed system, not amenable to the verification procedures with which they seek to close out their own hypotheses into universal and unchallengeable truths. Strange, also, that many Marxists convert deeply held and passionately felt commitments into doctrinaire dogmatism, as closed to new openings as traditional bourgeois modes of thought, when Marx's own work totally belies such closure."

David Harvey, The Limits to Capital

Malthus and overpopulation

2011-11-08T13:18:00.000-05:00

"[Malthus] … relates a specific quantity of people to a specific quantity of necessaries. Ricardo immediately and correctly confronted him with the fact that the quantity of grain available is completely irrelevant to the worker if he has no employment; that it is therefore the means of employment and not subsistence which put him into the category of surplus population.
…
The invention of surplus laborers, i.e. of propertyless people who work, belongs to the period of capital. The beggars who fastened themselves to the monasteries and helped them eat up their surplus product are in the same class as the feudal retainers, and this shows that the surplus produce could not be eaten up by the small number of its owners. It is only another form of the retainers of old, or of the menial servants of today. The overpopulation e.g. among hunting peoples, which shows itself in the warfare between the tribes, proves not that the earth could not support their small numbers, but rather that the condition of their reproduction required a great amount of territory for few people."

Grundrisse

Most Americans support Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-30T15:16:00.000-05:00

"Last week a poll by the National Journal found that 59 per cent [of Americans] either fully or strongly agreed with the “aims” of [Occupy Wall Street]. An even larger share backed a 5 per cent tax surcharge on millionaires – something proposed by Mr Obama. It has become common to hear that the richest 400 Americans have more wealth than the bottom 150m. It is also true."

Edward Luce, Financial Times

A brief guide to contemporary economics

2011-10-29T12:48:00.000-05:00

"Market capitalism creates inherent difficulties. The two most obvious are macroeconomic instability and extremes of inequality. The tendency of a market-oriented financial system to run away with itself has, again, been demonstrated on a large scale. On the free market right people argue that if only we went back to the gold standard or ended fractional reserve banking, all would be well. I question such claims. Instability is inherent in the game of betting on the future. Humans seem prone to self-fulfilling waves of optimism and pessimism. Ways of mitigating the extent and the consequences of such instability always need to be found.

It is impossible to define an acceptable level of inequality. Any inequality is corrosive if those with wealth are believed to have rigged the game rather than won in honest competition. As inequality rises, the sense that we are equal as citizens weakens. In the end, democracy is sold to the highest bidder. That has happened often before in the history of republics. Peaceful protest is the right of free people. More important, it is a way to bring issues to our attention. The left does not know how to replace the market. But pro-marketeers still need to take the protests seriously. All is not well."

Martin Wolf, Financial Times

"The future of work"

2011-10-26T13:19:00.000-05:00

"What about the people who do not command any kind of premium in the marketplace? One strategy could be to find a high-flyer and stick close. Even if joining their posse is out of reach, there are still horses to be fed and watered. The time-poor new rich are generating demand for household staff, and this sort of work can be very well paid. A private secretary and general factotum can earn up to $150,000 a year nowadays. Salaries for standard butlers range from $60,000 to $125,000 and a head butler can make as much as $250,000, according to the website of the Butler Bureau."

The Economist

Spending within your means

2011-10-20T14:17:00.000-05:00

"Hence still today the demand for industriousness and also for saving, self-denial, is made not upon the capitalists but on the workers, and namely by the capitalists. Society today makes the paradoxical demand that he for whom the object of exchange is subsistence should deny himself, not he for whom it is wealth."

Karl Marx, Grundrisse
Winter, 1857

Occupy Philly

2011-10-12T11:29:00.000-05:00

It's True in Philadelphia, Too: A Film for All Youse Articulate Activist Types. from Dog, Pig, and Wise Horse on Vimeo.

PSA from my mom

2011-08-30T20:24:00.000-05:00

Going away for a while. When I come back I hope you will be fully prepared to discuss Season 1 of the Jersey Shore.

Also: My mom really wants me to tell you not to hold your cell phone directly against your skull or gonads. It's microwave radiation, after all. See the related book, Disconnect -- but beware the verb which fashionably becomes a noun.

Marx and communism

2011-08-26T13:36:00.001-05:00

Samuel Brittan, Financial Times:

Marx has suffered not only from sycophants, but from critics who identify him with the Stalin dictatorship or even the regime of Mao Zedong. It is, of course, absurd to blame Marx, who lived from 1818 to 1883, for the crimes committed decades after his death. Indeed, the great man himself once said: “Whatever else I am, I am not a Marxist.” Many serious analysts have written on what Marx meant or should have meant. I am not one of their number and my main excuse for giving my own highly selective take is that I have neither demonised nor worshipped the man.

The aspect of Marx that originally intrigued me was his division of history after the end of the Dark Ages -- feudalism, capitalism, socialism and communism. By socialism Marx meant something like an extreme version of the British Labour party’s former clause four, which envisaged public ownership of all the means of production, distribution and exchange. But communism did not have anything like its later meaning. It was a utopia in which a short working day would provide all society’s needs and people would be free to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and discuss philosophy in the evening”. The vision of such a society kept in the Marxist fold some idealists who might otherwise have bolted.

The basic idea here is that industrialization lets you produce a lot. If production were oriented toward meeting people's needs rather than turning out ever-increasing amounts of disposable junk for profit, people could work relatively little while living in abundance. That's theoretical communism, as Marx envisioned it.

To his credit, Brittan gets a lot of this right. He mixes up the issue of "return on capital" with Marx's concern that the employer/employee relation is based on dependency: the employer extracts profit through an unequal power relation. For Marx, profit isn't wrong because you charge more than the cost of production; it is wrong when you appropriate for yourself (the employer) a value that has been created by others (the employees).

Anyway, see what you think.

Libya and the left

2011-08-25T14:28:00.002-05:00

US citizens have a relationship to their government which obligates them to oppose its crimes against themselves and others. Because this is an uncontroversial principle amongst the radical left, it is usually assumed to be part of a shared outlook.

While the US radical left inherits this relationship to its own government, it also has the potential to develop relationships with other popular or principled groups beyond what is implied through domestic resistance alone. We show support and solidarity for others fighting different fights, or the same fight in different places.

Regarding Libya, most of us are fine on the first point, rhetorically anyway, since that's what we are already doing, most of the time. We point out what's criminal about US foreign policy, for example, a lot. Good!

It's worth bearing in mind that what is criminal about US foreign policy is our responsibility, primarily. Libya is an example where a popular rebellion seeking to remove a dictator solicited international assistance to down the dictator's air force and other heavy military infrastructure. In the current geopolitical context, "international assistance" effectively means NATO, and NATO means the US. US interests are not Libyan interests. But none of this is the Libyans' fault, anymore than it was necessarily their fault that they needed assistance in the first place.

It's remarkable to me that portions of the US left get this backwards -- that because the rebellion required assistance, the rebels are compromised for having received the only available kind. Why weren't other kinds available? Why does the only kind available look so grim? We might look at ourselves -- at our relationship with our own government -- and not the people facing the tanks.

So on my second point, when it comes to showing solidarity toward people who not only don't control the global order but are sacrificing a lot more than most of us to change it, it's worth putting our responsibilities in perspective when compared to theirs.

Radicalism and reform

2011-08-19T16:06:00.001-05:00

Anarchism has always made the point, correctly, that states exist to defend a minority of wealth and privilege against the majority of the community. They don't exist to provide necessary services to the majority: they only do this when the majority compels them, or when failure to do so imposes a cost that is unacceptably high. If you just tune out and let a government do its thing, like most of us do when we are preoccupied with trying to survive, you see lots more government for the rich and much "less government" for everybody else. That's happening right now, in fact.

When people understand this -- that government "represents" them only when it has no choice -- they are in a better position to influence their government -- and in the past they have. The achievements, like Social Security, unemployment benefits, and any other number of rights and freedoms, are at the same time 1) very important to people and 2) not bound to the point about the nature of government in any particular way. You might support them for the simple reason that no non-state substitutions yet exist to address those problems.

There are radical reasons for supporting moderate reforms when the proposed alternative is not yet plausible, as is the case when vulnerable populations, encompassing both majority and minority groups, retain more confidence in government solutions than non-government proposals. That most Americans associate "no government" with free-market capitalism or gang rule, instead of highly-organized societies liberated from coercive rule, is an indication that we have a lot more work to do before the point that governments defend the rich can be of greater immediacy than what is daily required to survive.

The grapes of laughs

2011-08-18T15:59:00.002-05:00

The New York Times wants to know how much an apple would cost if farm workers had rights like other Americans. Might it unduly discourage US consumers from eating their fruits and veggies? Could the industry even survive? And doesn't it insult hardworking immigrant workers to suggest that their rights aren't good enough already -- that they need to live up to our lofty standards? Join the informed debate -- only at nytimes.com.

Capital concerns

2011-08-16T12:38:00.000-05:00

Gautam Malkani, Financial Times:

Another much-discussed difference was the role of consumerism. In place of the traditionally anti-capitalist stance of previous youth counter-cultures came reports of rioters in low-end fashion retailers, engaged in the new practice of “trying before you loot”. This form of extreme consumerism meant that, by the end of the week, the biggest bogeyman was our culture of rampant materialism and instant gratification. In a consumer society, identities are constructed from owning things. But the widespread sense of self-entitlement revealed by the riots also betrays a broader fetishism of objects. Some of Britain’s urban centres are so atomised that it is now easier to connect with things than with people. Likewise, digitally reduced attention spans have also contributed to a culture of superficial “bling”.

You see, rampant materialism and instant gratification don't normally betray a broader fetishism of objects. If you spend your money on electronics products instead of nutritious foods, that's healthy. If you have new rims but no roof -- no problem! Only you know what is best for you. Treat yourself. You've earned it.

But how to explain the behavior of those whose self-entitlement has eclipsed the most pressing needs of others: the need for profit amongst the profiteers? Capital has its own line of cultural criticism, and it has delivered a verdict: There is something very wrong with society, indeed!

Indignities of labor

2011-08-11T15:27:00.002-05:00

Economist:

The movement [Joe] Hill lived and died for has proved less durable. As Mr Adler recalls, the Wobblies flourished for a brief, electrifying moment at the dawn of the 20th century, when industrial capital was new, raw and brutal. At the time the IWW’s vision of a new worker-controlled order seemed “if not on the verge of becoming reality, not preposterous either”.

And yet the fundamental relationships have not changed. Americans, for example, have yet to achieve the same "rights and freedoms" in the workplace that they revere everywhere else -- freedom of speech, freedom of association, the right to privacy, elected representation, etc. -- and this in the very space where they spend the bulk of their lives! To step into the private workplace is to surrender one's rights on a daily basis; surrendering them all the more, the more hours one works. The paradox must be regarded as natural in the context of capitalist "government by the people": the governors are not the people, and the people spend precious little of their time governing; rather, they are working, and with no access to the rights by which they regard themselves American.

Concomitant to questions of rights and freedoms, however, there are perceptions of dignity, and it is only by obscuring the relationship between classes that US culture has arrived at a place where dignity becomes more a question of fitting in than acting human. Not bearing the stamp of social exclusion is significant: to be a "team member" is qualitatively different than being "illegal," even if neither means being free. To be singled-out for a special abuse within its broader application is what most people notice and respond to best, as opposed to general lack of freedom in "the way things are."

In the early industrial period, the working classes understood themselves as occupying this role of social inferiority. They weren't yet consumers or title-inflated quasi-professionals. Because household wealth was not contrived through debt, they had fewer illusions about how far their actual wealth could take them. Wherever they lacked the means, they went without. They understood their "place" as assigned by class.

Today there are many more avenues for American poor and working people to "keep up appearances" via consumer credit than in the earlier periods attended by labor radicalism. You can own an Escalade, and nobody has to know your social standing based on the clothes you wear. Orwell writes about being shamed for not having money to buy a loaf of bread: the whole neighborhood might know he was a pauper, and treat him that way.¹ But in the US today, even if you dress like a bum you might be a wealthy person; the implications under consumerism just aren't as obvious.

When communities detect they are being singled-out, they often flare up, and this comes back to questions of dignity, though not always freedom. Dignity relates to how one is seen, and whether one's place warrants respect. One's place needn't be a place of equality of power with others -- what freedom means -- it could be an "honorable" position of servitude: being seen as a "human being," even if human beings aren't free.

It's much easier to organize into accepted standards than to organize beyond them. When workers of the 1910s saw their rich neighbors enjoying "the good things in life" they saw things they wanted for themselves that they couldn't obtain by any other means than fighting. When workers today see things they want for themselves, they become indebted to rich people to have them. They don't have to go without in the eyes of others, but the price they pay is their freedom, and there is nothing dignified about that.

1. Orwell, writing in the same general period, but from Europe; Down and Out in Paris and London.

My own private John Carpenter soundtrack

2011-08-08T20:14:00.000-05:00

A socialist case against "small government"

2011-08-02T17:02:00.004-05:00

Economist:

Once upon a time the American right led the world when it came to rethinking government; now it is an intellectual pygmy. The House Republicans could not even get their budget sums right, so the vote had to be delayed. A desire to curb Leviathan is admirable, but the tea-partiers live in a fantasy world in which the deficit can be reduced without any tax increases: even Mr Obama’s attempts to remove loopholes in the tax code drive the zealots into paroxysms of outrage.

Because the Republican Party’s electoral strategy amounts to identifying the US government as “large” on one hand, while positioning themselves as “opposed” on the other, there is something irresistible about watching when they succeed at big government.

“Big government” is actually redundant. To the extent that we have government in the world today, it is going to be big -- and grow bigger. We can debate what kind of big government it will be -- what it does and where it does more of it -- but it’s not going to become smaller. No government limits its size or tempers its ambitions, insofar as a potential remains. Republican administrations are proof enough of this in and of themselves.

To advocate smaller government is in fact to pursue a course identical to every politician: to reduce or eliminate the programs you don’t like while expanding the ones you do. It is in this way that governments grow larger over time, not smaller, irrespective of ideology.

One of the advantages of a socialist perspective is that it presumes this to be the case: it does not pretend that big government becomes smaller by putting individuals philosophically opposed to big government on its payroll. Consequently, it assumes that how the government expands, who it helps and who it hurts, is the meaningful question, insofar as governments in their current form exist.

Since long before the time of Karl Marx, socialists have thought seriously about the possibilities for getting rid of government altogether, since the whole business about making it smaller is truly utopian. Even Marx conceived the evolution of socialism as culminating in communism, which he defined as a stateless society. That is certainly ideal, since it implies some kind of "self-government" which encompasses social and economic pursuits. But presently we are a long way from it -- and in the meantime government continues to expand.

The wrangling over a debt deal in Washington this week revolved not around questions of big or small government, but which parts of an ever-expanding government deserve to be curbed. In fact, it is the same debate that has gone on ever since the US government got into the business of fielding concerns incidental to business -- like public health, for example. Cuts invariably fall on those least able to influence their government: people who are either too poor, too busy working, or too few in number to make an impact politically. Since most of us fall into one or more of these categories, the cuts fall on people like you and me.

The Tea Partiers are an interesting case of ordinary people organized by much wealthier people around this idea that government is too big; it is too “socialist.” Again, socialism as a tradition was never meant to describe “big government.” Socialists presumed modern governments were big; they distinguished themselves by insisting that government work more actively on behalf of working people and the poor, since every government already works actively on behalf of the rich. (The last point is universally true, and forms the animating inspiration behind “government” in the first place.)

A good question to ask when government becomes smaller is “Have my burdens become larger?” This might include a rise in the retirement age, a hike in public transit fares, or the now prevalent expectation amongst young people that Social Security will someday cease to exist. These are all examples of areas where the US government, which is indeed big, has in the past made life easier for ordinary people rather than making it more onerous.

Tea Party claims notwithstanding, we can rest assured that big government will carry on unabated; and by one means or another it will always assist the rich. The only question is whether you can honestly count yourself in that category.

Kissing the joy as it flies

2011-07-27T19:38:00.000-05:00

When you experience something beautiful there is often a kind of high that accompanies it; and like any high it is hard to sustain intensely. Consider Blake:

He who bends himself to a joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise

To “kiss the joy as it flies” is an important idea. Joy is always flying; you don’t know where it will show up. To anticipate where you will encounter joy -- being in the same place at the same time where you experienced it before -- guarantees nothing. The impulse is to control the relationship, because we want to contain the high. We bend ourselves to our own idea of what we must do to remain joyful, only to end up miserable instead.

If you pursue the things that are most meaningful to you in life, I think you can live with a kind of joy. But how you are has to become a bigger part of who you are. You see, many of us come to our ideas about identity as though it is a received space that we occupy. To some extent this is true: we exist in the world in a particular way, and the world acts on us accordingly. There are always injustices attendant to this. We develop an awareness of them, and get very preoccupied with how others are toward us. Often we’re correct in our judgment that things aren’t fair.

But if we depart from identity at the point where we meet ourselves, we never begin to ask, “OK, how am I in response?” It’s a totally different question. How others are toward us is not the same question as how we are toward them; we have a totally different measure of control over each, respectively. We don’t control how other people are toward us; what we control is how we are within the relationship. The latter can influence the former, that’s all. Strategically, it’s very important to know where you exert control.

If you imagine yourself and another person in a prison cell, of course it’s meaningful to acknowledge, “We’re in a prison cell.” But that doesn’t mean you’re the same person. How you are will demonstrate who you are in that context. Surely there are people who won’t get past the fact that they are in a prison cell, because they believe there can be no joy or beauty there. Before these can be fulfilled, conditions have to change. We all have our prison cells, of one sort or another, and you see this reaction all the time. Recognizing the obvious wrong -- what is happening to us -- is usually as far as we get.

But now we recall Tolstoy:

Happiness does not depend on outward things
but on the way we see them

The whole scenario changes if prison is part of our objective. As with many imprisoned people, this might stem from the choice to live a principled life. In other words, if we aspire to live a principled life, we may accept that "prisons" of one sort or another -- "roads less traveled" -- will be part of it, and to a degree greater than someone who “bends” in order to avoid imprisonment. If we are already at peace with this reality, our energy isn’t used up by it. Our energy is available for other uses, like creating the conditions necessary to walk out of our cell. There can be great meaning in that pursuit, if only we begin.

"Kissing the joy as it flies" means embracing the things you don't control without forgetting your capacity, after all, to kiss. There is joy in developing our own capacities, even if this isn't easy; there is beauty in developing as a person, even though this comes with age. These things are available to us, regardless of what is not. We don't control all outcomes, but we can push toward the ones we desire; and it is through the mastery of our own abilities in different contexts that invites the highest grounds for joy.

Dividing lines

2011-07-21T19:40:00.000-05:00

From every corner you hear the refrain, "I am this way, they are that way -- and they're wrong." It's very common amongst working people, who have a terrific view of the stupidity of institutions, but who can also miss the relationship between personal and class advantage.

It's important to underline the ways "they're wrong" -- for example, having work organized like dictatorship. But if that's wrong, you want to empathize with the victims. These organizations create lots of victims, directly or indirectly. This month I have been hanging out with a model employee who is recovering from triple bypass. His efforts were always praised at the staff meetings he hated to attend.

It's important to see what's wrong with the bigger picture, but there's also a built-in temptation as humans to say "they're wrong" for no other reason than that it feels good. It has an addictive quality to it, and I think you see it online -- for example, in blogs -- in full force. You fill up every space where you might otherwise ask, “What is right?”

Perhaps it is useful to think about the kinds of people you like to relate with in real life, and decide whether they are the type who never tire in explaining what is wrong about everybody and everything else; who, in fact, take their energy from it. I can think of several off the top of my head, and they are among the least compelling people I know.

This is significant if our goal is to persuade, not the "staunch, diminishing minority," but working people at the point of their concerns. Working people have a range of concerns, and if reaffirming those which attend a "politics of the working class" can succeed, I find you have to get past the many fleeting preoccupations generated by a technologically-advanced consumer culture. You have to be fluent in these things in order to get beyond them -- which is why I always hit a wall when it comes to sports, for example; but why it has been to my advantage to know video games and the other “trifling” elements of urban consumption.

Within the concept of the working class, you don’t have me over here, you over there, and this heavy distinction between the two. You have “us” -- and “we” are behaving a certain way. There is a responsibility for “our” behavior. Either we are consolidating an awareness of ourselves as totally dependent on somebody else to live well; or we aren’t doing this, for reasons that include drawing too fine a distinction between each other.

Sex muskets

2011-07-12T15:19:00.000-05:00

I am called out for not "knowing" who Johnny Rotten is. I say, "I don't know lots of things." It's an appeal to knowledge: you want them to know who you are by considering the borders of what you're not. And I will tell you one thing. When I am playing music, I am not thinking about Johnnys Rotten, Shelf-stable, or otherwise.

Surround sounds 2

2011-07-11T14:51:00.000-05:00

I am very moved by the Lady Gaga song dedicated to her father, Razzi.

Open letter to a dude

2011-07-06T13:27:00.000-05:00

Dear dude,

If you must expectorate all over the sidewalk, you will leave me no choice but to characterize you as the type of person who expectorates all over the sidewalk.

Consider yourself warned,

He Who Swallows Much Mucus

Independence Day

2011-07-01T14:34:00.000-05:00

I heartily endorse this event and/or product.

Scowl

2011-06-30T17:51:00.000-05:00

I've seen the best memes of my generation destroyed by gladness.

Save yourselves

2011-06-29T11:55:00.000-05:00

If management suspects you of arriving to the job sober, for God's sake don't let on that you're also dependable.

Surround sounds

2011-06-28T12:01:00.000-05:00

I'm left to conclude that when people come into the city asking, "How do you stand all the noise and excitement?" it just means they'd rather experience it via home theater system in the suburbs.

Week in review

2011-06-24T11:48:00.000-05:00

Correspondence with the proprietor at It's Just A Ride helped me arrive at my new summer's resolution: Less time on the internet, more time playing music; more time listening to others, less time listening to myself. This week I took a decent stab in that direction. In keeping with a discussion at Back Towards The Locus, the first single will be entitled "My own private John Carpenter soundtrack."

What the Tee Vee taught still teaches.

MikeB shared this with me and asked if I might share it with you.

I couldn't be happier to see Ethan and the Baronette back in action at 6th or 7th -- but shouldn't it be 7th or 8th?

The good news: I spotted another person wearing Crocs in Philadelphia. The bad news: She was between 12th and 13th on Sansom, sleeping on the sidewalk. Crocs have street cred.

We're talking about practice

2011-06-22T14:26:00.002-05:00

Even if the political project is not easily resolved, it should be easily understood: to live the way you want without denying anyone else the same.

The first part, living how you want, is something you can start thinking about and working towards right now. For example, you can try to do more of the things you enjoy, and fewer of the things you hate. It's helpful to understand that society penalizes people for doing what they enjoy, at least insofar as this fails to make other people money. With most of us already scraping by, greater penalties can add up to a decision to accept more of what you hate. You have to develop a strategy to get around this problem, one way or the other -- and preferably before you are dead.

The second part of the political project ultimately comes down to hearing what other people want, encouraging them to take the first steps for themselves, and then figuring out how best to play a supporting role. Most of us have a good idea of what we are up against, how hard it is to break out of assigned routine. If you really understand it, you will see why others need your support, first and foremost, and your "politics" as an aside, if at all. If your politics manifest themselves as support and encouragement for those who suffer unjustly at the hands of the many or the few, then the odds are you don't spend a lot of time talking "politics" in the first place, and are well placed to reach a broader working class audience.

Song ideas

2011-06-20T12:09:00.000-05:00

The most interesting thing about playing the guitar is when certain things change while others remain the same. For me, that is a more natural movement than playing a note-by-note scale or slamming out power chords. Of course, either of these can be integrated into a song and accomplish the same thing; but I don't understand when musicians take an instrument out of its case and play something that is more physical than musical. I guess I understand if they are warming up. But why not warm up to an idea? A song is ultimately more idea than physical act.

I think of human relationships in a similar way: as solos or power chords, they are just caricatures. But if you look at the whole thing, there is repetition, harmony, tension, change; even within great movement there are elements that don't change at all, or very little. To have the instrument in your hands, there is too much attention paid to what must change as compared to what will remain the same. For my part, I've never wanted to play without those elements, or without appreciating how they work, because it's not what I want to listen to.

Building socialism

2011-06-16T12:50:00.000-05:00

In order to "draw the line between the monopolists and the people," in the words of E.P. Thompson, it's never enough to merely hate the monopolists. You also have to love the people. You love the people, not because they think like you, but because they hurt like you.

Behind the iron hurtin'

2011-06-15T04:42:00.000-05:00

Did the fall of the IOZian Union contribute to the proliferation of weapons of ass destruction?

Good news for me and you and everyone we know

2011-06-14T11:44:00.000-05:00

While there are many epic conflicts happening in the world today, odds are they aren't between you and that anonymous driver/customer service rep/internet forum poster.

Between us

2011-06-10T13:15:00.000-05:00

The more social an event becomes, typically the more commercial. You can go to a party and expect certain patterns of conversation which may be traced back to purchases or modes of purchasing power. Even politics in the way it is discussed can have more to do with how we receive information as a product -- whether it is delivered by Twitter or The New York Times -- than any initiative we might undertake in response.

Given the choice I am less concerned by what is frivolous about normal social intercourse than what is earth-shakingly important. Things that are deeply important to me are actually very difficult to articulate in social settings, because there is little in the way of a shared language for it. We have language for power, and language for commerce; but not because we established them ourselves. We just receive them from the same, shared source -- making me wary of the "urgency" that always attends things nobody knows nearly enough about.

It follows from this that in large groups of people you can sometimes feel the most alone. Conversely, it is in quieter settings that you may have the best opportunity to consolidate some sense of who you are. This for me has always been the paradox of being in relationships with other people, since it is something I can't do without orienting myself away from them at the same time.

When success all looks the same

2011-06-09T13:43:00.000-05:00

American individualism begins with the idea that either you are "somebody" or you are "nobody"; and it ends with whatever kind of conformity ensures the best outcome.

OMFG! Best friend at work just totally clock-blocked me

2011-06-08T12:59:00.002-05:00

WTF! So to summarize it's a gorgeous afternoon and all I'm thinking since I started my shift is when will hell recede enough to start my 30-minute hands-washing/trash-disposing/ grounds-meandering countdown to electronically verifying that I worked today when this dude I totally thought was my wingman starts having a stroke about some assignment that implicates us only in the most liberal interpretation of work responsibilities -- like, if you take everything the boss says literally.

Come on, man. I'm not trying to hear that, I told him. Emancipate yourself from mental slavery; I'm trying to get the hell out of here.

What followed was one of the most singularly stunning feats of clock-blocking I have ever seen. From what depths of depravity my colleague was seized by the compulsion to work as instructed I am helpless to say. But sure as shit just as soon as the boss reappeared, poking his nose into our business and asking whether "everything" was done, this South Philly fluffernutter tells him NO, there are still some things WE have to do. Global warming might be open to interpretation in this dude's view, even some Bible verses -- but do you think we might interpret my humble contributions here completed before I-95 turns into Circle-jerk de Soiree? Apparently not, since it's obvious SOMEONE doesn't know how to take one for the team.

Of course, this raises a bigger question about just who we have become as Americans, when our best work friends reveal themselves to be inveterate clock-blockers anytime they find themselves handling a live grenade. I mean, whatever happened to the ethic of our ancestors, who knew well enough to ask, "Who gives a fuck?" long before the work whistle blew -- granting them that much more "me" time before the mine caved-in, or tree collapsed? Proper work-life balance begins at home, in front of the television, with the painkiller of your choice. But we will never fully enjoy the fruits of what we haven't earned until we start failing to finish what we never hoped to begin.

Virasana (Hero's pose)

2011-06-07T10:17:00.000-05:00

Your life is the terrifying space between purchases.

Girls wear less clothing in summer, colleague reports

2011-06-02T14:30:00.001-05:00

In what really could have developed into a conversation about anything else, a co-worker today argued that girls wear fewer articles of clothing in warm weather, and felt confident enough in this claim to prosecute an open-ended commentary on the phenomenon and its implications.

"It's cos they can't stand the heat!" he said.

The basic argument went as follows: If you think of clothing as something that covers the skin; and skin, or at least its "underneath part," clocks in around 98.6 degrees; then as the ambient temperature of Philadelphia rises, so too does the willingness of "females" to discard needless accoutrements, like "bras" and "drawers," because they are "already so hot on the inside."

This in turn informed the speaker's preference for warm-to-hot weather because -- unlike some of his Muslim neighbors -- he'd rather observe for himself what clothing might otherwise conceal.

"I don't care what they say about global warming. Give me the heat!" he editorialized.

Whether or not the conversation, an elaborate restatement of something I had clearly taken for granted, can be counted as a constructive use of time is a question best weighed against the total amount of time wasted at work while considering it.

Remembering IOZ

2011-06-01T12:43:00.000-05:00

I wanted to say something about the retirement of IOZ. I don't remember how I first came across this blog, but it was enormously influential for me, probably around the time I was considering coming back from my own blogging break. It would ultimately become influential in two different ways: first, as something to emulate; second, as something to try not to emulate. IOZ exemplified whatever it was he was doing, almost all the time, which made it easy to admire what he did, but a tough act to follow.

I was never part of the IOZ comment community, which was fascinating in itself. I felt it was both smarter and meaner -- not an uncommon combination -- than anything I could swing, so the few times I did post, I tried being as sincere as possible just to test the limits. Once I finally got around to watching The Big Lebowski, many things made sense to me for the very first time.

IOZ was always a major benefactor of this blog, and the fact that there is an audience here today is really thanks to him. OK, so maybe it's a bunch of extra-intellectual gay dudes, but I love them and I am very lucky that they have liked me in return. It has meant an enormous amount for me personally to be embraced by the wider IOZ community, and I've tried to support unlinked-to bloggers ever since I overcame that hurdle myself.

In spite of the many wonderful and humorous things IOZ produced on a regular basis, what I find myself thinking about most is what he wrote for his brother at the time of his sudden and unexpected death, entitled "Powerlessness," which I hope the author will not mind me referencing here. The ability to write smartly does not equal the ability to write honestly or with vulnerability, and my personal preference is to remember IOZ, whatever else you thought of him, as someone who possessed the capacity to do both.

I like girls

2011-05-31T11:41:00.002-05:00

Ever since I first became a heterosexual, I have always liked girls. I don't mean in the normal American way, where you pretty much hate them. How did "liking girls" turn into this pitched hostility toward them? If you don't "like girls" -- if you don't like them by virtue of your sexuality -- then you are free to actually like them. Which makes me gay, in a way, except for the sex part.

Somehow or another the sexual ideas I got about women led me to liking them comprehensively, not just in the restricted sense -- although when you are in different phases of your life this latter sense can take on a kind of primacy. Once your testosterone drops off a cliff, you can wisely observe that there is more to life than sex.

I'm very interested in parlaying the natural tendency of most boys to "like girls" into actually liking them. A lot of the reason I feel I can "get away" with being feminist comes down to the idea that, yes, I like girls. If you like girls, you care about them on some level. Well, that's true -- maybe it shouldn't be a big deal, but it's true. The "feminism" simply comes in as an acknowledgment of social injustice that women face.

There are many mornings I get up before dawn and hear radio broadcasts about missing women in Philadelphia and Camden, or unidentified bodies discovered in parks and parking lots which once belonged to women. I think it was only last summer or fall that there was somebody called the Kensington strangler; before that, of course, the Center City rapist. I know these were men who "liked girls" in the only sense that makes sense for most of us; now I hope we can agree on the inadequacy of its meaning.

Oh, as if the free movement of capital were not enough...

2011-05-27T16:37:00.000-05:00

Today I am oppressed by the heat.

Revolutionary roads

2011-05-26T13:10:00.000-05:00

Che Guevara once said that the revolutionary must be guided by a deep and abiding love for humanity, though after three days in Bolivia he confessed that is nothing compared to a half-decent map. To be sure, the revolutionary life is hard, and all the more so without a portion of the proceeds. Far too often, one counts their deep and abiding love for humanity as their greatest asset, and only on one hand.

This raises an important question. Is the status quo really so bad? The answer will depend on who you ask and whether they brush their teeth with dedication. If your morning commute smells of hastily digested Indian food, that is another thing altogether. Once soda gets into the keyboard, there is no turning back.

A great anarchist propagandist once explained that all it takes for good people to act is the realization that their back is against the wall. This is especially true if the good people requested outdoor seating. What motivates each of us to be our brother's keeper will vary by individual, but it is sometimes best to keep him outside during football season.

Scary person wants to know how my day is going

2011-05-25T12:28:00.001-05:00

In an alarming departure from my usual revolutionary routine, another person approached me this morning in what appeared to be a sincere attempt to discover how my day was going.

"Hey, buddy," he said at first.

Like so many interpersonal close-calls, it all began by making eye contact. My defensive strategy, nodding in robust agreement, proved inadequate even when combined with enthusiastic wheezing.

How this individual knew I was concealing something, when 99% of the population takes a grimace at face value, suggests a degree of tenacity amongst people who want to know how your day is going that I failed to account for previously.

The development could have far-reaching implications for my daily commute, including in this case my morning constitutional, when revolutionary spirit is best cultivated by thinking up clever ripostes for use in online forums.

Nocturnal revisions

2011-05-24T13:28:00.000-05:00

Not sleeping well. Dreamt I was an entrepreneur with a line of hydrant-shaped greeting cards for dogs called RSVPee-Pees that wasn't feminist enough for all the bitches. When it comes to going to the bathroom, you can forget that gender is a canine construct. But I should have known that lady dogs aren't going to buy good stationery just to turn around and pee on it, since the trait holds good in humans as well. I finally enjoyed modest success in partnership with Spencer Gifts, marketing to the lowest common dog denominator, which as it turned out included several members of the local Chamber of Commerce -- though this did little to curtail poops on my stoop.

There is still hope the world will end while we are still alive

2011-05-23T12:15:00.001-05:00

I'll be the first to say I was pissed when the world neglected to end last Saturday night. Even though the sky got dark and the wind picked up, in retrospect it was a bad idea to keep ordering drinks just to postpone the check. This speaks to the bigger question of gas prices, and how as a society we expect me to be able to afford a bill like that -- I mean, seriously, people.

There's something to be said for a well-timed end of the world, but why a guy like Harold Camping should get bent out of shape about it is what I don't understand. The man sounds as though he already has one foot in the grave, and to look at him, the rest of his body, too. I wish old people could be more patient about letting their world come to an end, rather than insisting everyone else's must as well.

The actual end of the world is likely to be of primary interest to history buffs like myself, who will finally be able to conclude, "Yep, that sucked," in a definitive way, while transitioning into more positive activities, like not existing. It's the best chance we have of seeing meaningful change in our political system -- or a Phillies-Mets game without a riot. No doubt many things will be changed when the world comes to an end, including my shorts.

While we needn't lose hope that the world will end while we are still alive, we mustn't be so self-centered about it. Humankind has practically guaranteed its own destruction -- and if not for ourselves, then for our children, and our children's children. Let us think of the end of the world, if not as a gift to ourselves, then as the legacy we bestow upon our progeny, the fruit of all our toils!

Other people pose biggest obstacle to the dissemination of my views

2011-05-20T15:12:00.002-05:00

For too long have I labored before this 17-inch screen with its "cathode rays" so that the world might bear witness to the sagacity of my long-held views and deepest convictions. No matter what the hardship, no matter what the odds, I have steadfastly maintained my beliefs in the face of all evidence to the contrary. As if this weren't proof enough of their veracity, I have also broadcast them at every available opportunity, so that all might reap the benefits of my unique and unsolicited perspective. But no matter how hard I persist, I simply cannot shake the feeling that other people pose the single biggest obstacle to the dissemination and wide-spread acceptance of my views.

The first inkling I had of the great disservice other people might, no doubt in spite of themselves, be doing to the wider social promotion of my views was discovered in the course of an ordinary dialogue with my peers. Someone had raised the issue of gas prices in connection with the recent be-deading of Osama bin Laden. While I hastily summarized the last half-century of US foreign policy in response, our group changed direction as deftly as a school of fish toward the speculative bra-size of a passing colleague. Rather than endorsing the validity of my views, these people, who may be identified via physical and spacial demarcation as not me, scarcely bothered to listen. But because my views do not already comprise the very basis for their own, I fear that other people have yet to credit me appropriately nor proselytize anyone else on my behalf.

As already suggested, this pattern repeats itself online, where, in spite of my noblest efforts, people who routinely are not me do not do enough to make my private expectations of them a reality. By the same token, however, people who are me, like myself, find ourselves with no recourse but to shoulder this burden alone. Not only is this unfair, it doesn't work. No social movement based on collective action will ever succeed until everyone does the work that one person repeatedly insists everyone must do.

In order to ameliorate the harm caused by the failure of others to embrace my outlook and unerringly champion its appeal, the least that other people could do is stop being so damn effective at communicating their own. When a co-worker explained that the Tea Party acronym stood for "Taxed Enough Already," I thoroughly confused myself on a much better point about dialectical materialism in response.

"You talk like a professor," my companion said. "Do you like having a socialist for president?"

Now how the hell do you expect me to respond to a predictable conservative talking point like that? You see, it is futile -- and that is why everyone must begin with the same set of assumptions as mine if you people ever expect my views to be very persuasive, or celebrated in the manner that I speak for all of us in saying that they must.

Exhaust fumes are something that I breathe a lot of, and the shit is beginning to get on my nervous system

2011-05-18T15:13:00.004-05:00

Exhaust fumes, whether administered at home or on the job, are something I am pretty sure I breathe a lot of. And while it's true that I have never been a finicky breather, I must nevertheless say that the shit is really beginning to get on my nervous system.

The main way that exhaust fumes really started getting on my nervous system was by a) the industrial revolution and b) being born into the same atmosphere 200 years later. Had I been born 200 years earlier, I would be telling you that syphilis is something that I've contracted a lot of. But that would make me even older than Nietzsche -- the original old school playa, yo.

If it weren't for the fact that exhaust fumes, and all the shit that is in them, are really beginning to get on my nervous system, I probably wouldn't care very much -- but the regrettable likelihood is that those fuckers most assuredly are. It doesn't help that the shit is totally toxic to 100% of aerobic organisms. I prefer to think of myself as a more sedentary-type of organism, but as luck would have it this is not the sense in which Yahoo! Answers defines their terms.

Of course, I can understand why the setting of fire to buried, dead organisms as a means of motive power might appeal to whatever jerkoff enjoys a monopoly on exhuming dead organisms. I understand the entrepreneurial spirit -- I really do. However, the last time I checked, modern innovation really hadn't done anything to address my principal concern, which has to do with exhaust fumes, how much I am breathing them, and how that shit is beginning to get on my goddamn nervous system.

Maybe I am biased by the knowledge that, whereas the Nazis called them "death trucks," the contemporary consumer sees in the same distribution model "a great time to put on The Little Mermaid." It could be that moving things from one end of the planet to the other, when they could instead be moved from one side of town to another -- all while riding the fleeting, viscous corpse of our ancestors -- makes heaps of good sense. But I just can't help but believe that I am breathing in a lot of the detritus, and that, moreover, the shit is beginning to get on my nervous system.

Good friend still prefers Cosmo to reading this blog, despite its revolutionary potential

2011-05-17T13:39:00.001-05:00

A very good friend has confirmed that she still prefers Cosmopolitan magazine to reading this blog, even in spite of the likely role it will play in the event of a peasant- and/or proletarian-based revolution in the Northeastern United States.

"No, I like your blog -- I really do," my friend stated.

Earlier that day, a link to a feature article at cosmopolitan.com appeared as a wall post in my friend's profile on Facebook. "Cosmo is so bad it's good!" was the accompanying text.

Notably absent, however, was any like-minded enthusiasm for this blog, despite what in recent weeks can only be described as the mind-boggling obviousness of its revolutionary potential.

"I mean, how many fucking times does a guy have to quote Karl Marx to be taken seriously around here?" I asked myself not for the first time.

Just how the philosophical and political legacy bequeathed by bearded, 19th-century misogynists has failed to keep pace with the international magazine's "Guy Confessions" and "Cosmo Gyno" sections is a question which remains unresolved in my mind -- and minds much like mine.

"Last week I literally spent 14 hours debating with someone in a comment thread about anarcho-syndicalism, and I wrote this great post about it, and my sister didn't even share it with all her Facebook friends," says another revolutionary internet blogger.

"If the average person can't come home from work and appreciate the fruits of what I've been arguing about online all day, we're going to be stuck with the tyrannical reign of a much more popular commercial media forever."

My bus driver is not doing enough to affirm my faith in the common man

2011-05-16T11:20:00.006-05:00

Needless to say, I've been using public transportation ever since I first got interested in the common man. And, rest assured, most bus drivers uphold every romantic preconception I have for the public transit operator. But let's face it. Ever since my last bus driver retired, his replacement hasn't done jack shit to uphold my philosophical faith in the common man.

If you're anything like me, you may not feel especially communistical at the ass-crack of dawn, when you're freezing your nuts off waiting for the bus to go to work. That's why I always appreciated the curb-side manner of bus operator Ignatius Sizemore, who on arrival would always ask, "Hey, buddy. How's it hanging?" By this I always assumed he meant the low-hanging fruit of the means of production, to which I would respond, "Ripe and juicy, my fellow wage slave," for a collective chuckle. But this new guy. I tell you it would kill him just to say hello.

Now I appreciate that not everyone of proletarian stock must necessarily be a people person, but deep-fried Jesus -- this guy just sucks. Not only does he not deign to chit-chat, Mario Andretti over here likes to accelerate from 0-60 just as soon as you're inside the passenger doors. I'm all like, "What the hell, comrade?" But do you think he cares? Granted, I am not some elderly person trying to manage a week's worth of groceries. I won't expire from the experience. But does that mean I want to touch those overhead rails where the common man deposits his upper-respiratory surplus? And how about trying to read Marx's Capital on the land-based equivalent of a fishing trawler in the middle of the open ocean? You would think for humanity's sake this joker would at least want to accommodate that.

One area where my bus driver consistently applies himself is in the thorough examination of each and every female posterior which crosses his path. He has even been known to shake his head and exclaim, "Damn," in his deepest contemplations. But wouldn't it be better if this exploited soul put all that thoughtfulness toward a worldwide worker's revolution? I can assure you that, if he did, it would help reaffirm my faith in the common man -- the same philosophical faith in the common man, we must recall, which I have come to hold so dear. But I have to tell you, as things stand now, I just don't know what to think when it comes to having faith in the common man.

Let me conclude by reiterating the point that there are times when I really wish I could be better reassured in my aforementioned faith in the common man. My previous bus driver, Ignatius Sizemore of the Walmart City/Old Industrial Highway line, did a bang-up job when it came to that. But this new guy is just an unmitigated have-faith-in-the-common-man disaster, from which I have yet to recover.

The spectre of communism still haunts me, after all these years

2011-05-13T12:48:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I feel like I've been waiting forever for the new communism to come out. That's going to be the one where everyone gets free medical care and an education, but you can still buy the things you want. I don't know a lot about it, frankly. Humanity hasn't set a release date.

The old communism had some problems. I once wrote a post called "What's bad about a good idea" that gets into the whole difficulty. The basic theme was that you get a very good idea -- like, people shouldn't starve, or something -- and then you pummel the crap out of everybody that gets in the way, er, your way. Of course, making sure everyone can eat is a very nice thing to do, and capitalism doesn't make it easy. But somehow niceness doesn't always hold up in the single-minded pursuit of niceness. More often than not, we're dicks to the people around us, while striking a generous pose toward things that carry no cost.

I've always thought Christianity and communism were kindred spirits in this regard. The Christian ethic, for example, is one of the most powerful ideas in human history. It's extremely popular, as an idea. Christianity as an institution -- yeah, not so much. The two are related in an important way, with the lasting relevance of one providing the moral cover for the other. But the Christian ethic survives either way, just like the need to address needless human suffering. Neither go away, ever -- at least not until they become a more normal part of who we are.

The destination of a dick

2011-05-12T07:10:00.002-05:00

For some, this will be a repost of something Blogger ate two weeks ago. -- JRB

The guys from the Jersey Shore bring back memories of junior high school, when watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and lifting weights inevitably led to homosexual conversations with your buddies about heterosexual sex. Straight guys can get very gay with you, in fact, if you let them tell you all about the plans they have for their dicks; the epic adventures and classic confrontations that their dicks will take up -- the whole detailed dick itinerary. It can be quite exhaustive, taking into account many contingent factors that most dicks are unlikely to run into in the daily life of a dick.

I'm not going to pretend that a lot of the intellectual heft wielded by the boys of the Jersey Shore isn't devoted to charting the surest path to victory for their dicks. But I also won't pretend that this is unusual for many of the men I know, even at grandfather age. The Jersey Shore just happens to document this very well, and I suppose it can't come as much of a surprise that audiences are simultaneously horrified and enthralled by that truth.

Of course, it doesn't help that this is being attributed to a socioeconomic conception of class -- that this is how "guidos" behave, rather than "straight men" of all income levels, when the only meaningful difference is that salaried professionals wouldn't announce it on national TV. I can admire the honesty of a Pauly D or Situation far more than the supposed respectability of an Eliot Spitzer, who, whatever he wants to do with whomever, nevertheless betrayed the ones closest to him. I have yet to observe anything of that sort from our self-proclaimed sexual conquistadors, who for their honesty are condemned at the same time that the respectability of a Spitzer is restored.

Things bring us together

2011-05-11T13:50:00.000-05:00

Because there's really nothing entertaining about me, on a given day, after any o'clock AM, the whole PM side of things can look pretty grim if you just, like, experience it and shit. That is why I prefer "a measure of something fermented," to quote from BusinessWeek's editorial on the fundamental human needs which a bin Laden-style Islamic caliphate could never supply. True that, my resource-extracting betters! If the planet must submit the scope of its biodiversity to a single organizing idea, might it at least be one in which alcohol is free to fulfill its exalted role? Even the communists had that much figured out: for them, banning God was more realistic.

In my household this only resolves half the problem, however, owing to an aversion shown by my partner to my choice of fine, high-quality, excellent and affordable boxed wine. And since Socratic dialogue over dinner only excels when both parties are trashed, perhaps it was only a matter of time before one or another mode of televised entertainment was regarded as a plausible means to "laugh at the same time" -- as someone once explained humor to me -- well into the evening hours.

Remembering your life

2011-05-10T11:54:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been thinking about the general, so-called "dominant" culture as something of a disaster for interpersonal relations. It reflects many different kinds of inequality; many different kinds of "dominance." Whatever isn't dominant is less valued. For example, a lot of the self-expression we see in forums like Facebook are links to corporate material, because that gets far more social promotion than personal self-expression. Personal self-expression is less valued in and of itself; and this in turn leaves fewer opportunities within daily life in which to pursue it, to develop it as a craft. While there is certainly a value placed on personal self-expression once it reaches certain degree of sophistication, the problem for most of us has to do with getting to that point.

When personal self-expression takes a back seat to deciding whether "you" are a PC or a Mac, and relationships are formed around this basis, the end result is that we don't learn very much about each other, because we aren't referencing anything significant about ourselves. In my experience, this is just a fundamental problem of being in today's world: you can have a conversation with a total stranger yet already know the broad outlines of what they are going to say, because we're all saying the same things all of the time, whether induced by the news cycle or the rote repetition of the working day -- or by our responses to them. One reason why I've always appreciated funerals, and the "interruption" of death itself, is that it clarifies what is fundamentally important to people like a thunderbolt. No bullshit stands in the face of death -- how many things can be credited with that? The interposition of mortality into a dead routine becomes a reminder of life itself.

Social authority

2011-05-06T12:28:00.000-05:00

At one level, you can watch how the cast of the Jersey Shore interact with each other. In what ways do they try to tell each other what to do? That's interesting to observe in any group of people. Anarchists always want to anticipate that, because within human relations it is pretty much inevitable. But what you want to evaluate is the claim to authority. Someone might tell someone else to clean the kitchen because it's their turn and a dirty kitchen affects everyone. Or someone might tell someone else to clean the kitchen because they are "the boss" and they decide what goes. Different people in the apartment might be "cool" with either or both scenarios. It can get complicated, but the point is that you want to think these things through in terms of who is primarily impacted and what their feelings are about it, while at the same time endorsing less hierarchical alternatives wherever "boss" roles are popularly entrenched -- as is often the case for sake of "efficiency."

Telling other people what to do takes a lot of different forms; it can easily spill over into telling people how to feel or what to think. One of the customary slights between women in the show is to call each other "fat," for example. "Fat" is something that takes on special vehemence in a patriarchal society when it is directed at women, so my partner and I were disappointed to see how readily women used it against each other. It's a very bad strategy, because society tries to tell every woman how she should feel about herself according to society's standards. In other words, when women try to use this as a weapon, there is nothing to stop anyone else from attacking them by the same means. It would be better to reject it as a weapon altogether -- to reject the legitimacy of any social authority that would try to tell women how to measure their self-worth, except on their own terms.

The conflicts between women on the show, like so much of the individual behavior we observe, can't be judged meaningfully until we place it in the larger context of social authority. These women didn't individually come up with the notion that calling each other fat could be strategically useful in a given context; they took the reference from what society is telling them all the time. So if you want to lament how immature Angelina or Snooki can be, you have to lament how immature mainstream society already is, since that's where they're getting it from. The same goes for all the awful things the boys get into, which we will discuss shortly. Their behavior may be their own, but the responsibility for this type of behavior is something that everybody shares insofar as we participate in the general culture.

Thug life

2011-05-05T14:59:00.004-05:00

Even where professionalization filters some anti-social tendencies out, it's only doing so for the purpose of capital accumulation. There is a utility in having people behave decently toward one another, at least while they are at work, because it minimizes disruption. Maybe your job is not all about profit in a direct way, but our overall economy is, and that impacts everything -- including how you get your funding, no matter what you do.

The other point we have made is that we as individuals may endorse professional norms for our own reasons, if only because we believe people should behave decently toward one another in any context. Within the social life of the United States, that doesn't happen with as much organized consistency anywhere as it does within professional structures, where there is a cost associated with non-compliance. The problem in most confrontations outside of work is that people don't perceive any comparable cost -- for example, to the social whole -- and so look to maximize personal advantage in every encounter: we race other drivers, ignore the homeless, harass service-sector workers, anonymously bully others online, and so on. Even as a boss, our capacity to act any way we like is restricted at work; whatever abuse we dole out must be codified in a way that puts our employer's interests first.

When we talk about poor and working class cultures, on one hand we observe relative independence from what is coercive about professional culture. If we begin from the anarchist idea that "all authority is wrong unless it can prove that it isn't wrong" -- i.e. that it isn't, in fact, authority but one or another mode of responsibility -- this is something we should support. We should want to support people who reject capitalist professionalism for the specific reason that it tries to tell people what to do, or how to think about themselves, for a purpose that excludes their own welfare.

At the same time, autonomous social culture must be constituted to transcend what is decent about capitalist professionalism; which is to say, it will include some of the same elements: specifically, those which people regard as worthwhile irrespective of whether these also prove useful to power at a given moment. Every social instinct inherited from our more communal past has atrophied under the assault of contemporary industrial culture, conditioned as we have become to a war of each against all. But we find in working class non-compliance an autonomy without the organized consistency which could sustain the kind of values that go well beyond the forced decency of indecent relations.

Thugs in the club

2011-05-04T12:16:00.000-05:00

Funny you should mention it, US foreign policy is a lot like the boys who go clubbing on the Jersey Shore. Both begin with the premise that everyone wants their magic wand all up in their business, because that's the only way that magic can happen. They court anybody and everybody who is "DTF" -- down to feel the magic -- and talk up anyone who might be. When things backfire, it's the person, not the premise, that has been wrong all along. For example, the CIA thought Osama bin Laden was totally DTF and, so long as this pretense was maintained, "really hot." It was only after the Cold War that he was rebuffed for being a grenade grundle chode. To which bin Laden was observed to retort: "Don't hate the player, hate the game."

Go! for the throat

2011-05-03T10:48:00.000-05:00

Given the choice between Navy Seal intrigues and my more customary preoccupations, I choose red wine.

"USA" is what I chant when I get out of bed every morning.

Dual-use technologies

2011-04-29T16:47:00.000-05:00

There's a lot of anti-social stuff in mainstream US culture that gets perpetuated because US society isn't organized for the benefit, but rather at the expense, of people. All the ways that people are encouraged to look up or down at each other on the basis of every conceivable criteria are truly a hot mess to behold.

The point I was getting at last week is that professionalization, by elevating individuals to important positions of influence and authority, has to filter some of this junk out if the overarching purpose of capital accumulation is going to be fulfilled. Capital accumulation is too important to have every board meeting conclude with someone screaming, "Fuck you, asshole," as would be customary when the same person negotiates over a parking spot.

Professionalism as an ethos is appealed to constantly in a business-run society, and some of us internalize what is decent about it without any external incentives. When I go to work, there is a point of pride about doing something well, not being a lazy bastard, and not ripping off my employer that can have meaning for me even if I see in employment itself a monumental fraud. As colleagues have expressed it, this is something that is important in how we regard ourselves, and how our work ethic impacts other people who are stuck in the same situation. I've known many lazy bastards whose laziness hurt their co-workers far more than it did the owning classes; they are not inspiring examples of resistance, in my view.

In this sense, professionalism can be seen to have different meanings and applications, including those which arise out of contradictory positions. The worker and the employer can have competing reasons to endorse different parts of the same phenomenon: for the employer, hierarchy and control; for the worker, integrity and cooperation. I think this is probably coming close to the logic of a dialectic; which is to say, we want to understand the meaning of something from the vantage point of what are often opposing perspectives, not fall into the trap of regarding it only from one side, or one side at a time.

We've got a utopian situation here

2011-04-28T14:35:00.000-05:00

The Jersey Shore has a sort of communal set-up, so let's think of it as a utopian communist experiment. Like any utopian political project, all material considerations are provided for, and conflict resolution usually amounts to one or another participant bellowing, "Bring it on, bitch!," in the way that only the most committed idealist can supply. There are communal living spaces, a communal copulation corner, and, as US custom would have it, the communal Cadillac Escalade. Marx called the earliest human societies "primitive communism," but even they were sophisticated enough not to endorse petroleum-powered entertainment systems, preferring what we would today call "running." Don't plume where you eat is an important lesson for contemporary utopians.

I'd rather live communally with Jenni "Jwoww" than someone like myself. It's not the fake breasts. It's that there's less pretense about other things that I actually care about. It's like if you put two people in a room who both had a lot of pretense about their breasts, there would be this competitive pressure to be all about the breasts. So when it comes to someone like myself, who operates with too much pretense along the lines of what he is about, don't put me in a room with another person like that, because we will see through each other and bicker about foolish things nobody else cares about. The easiest way to identify two pretentious people is when they bicker at length about things nobody else cares about.

It's also good from a dialectical perspective to experience life not as sameness but as difference and contrast. Personally, I don't like to use the word "dialectical" because I'm not sure I understand what it means. But I get the point about having different tendencies come together as a synthesis. In other words, you can listen to someone like Noam Chomsky talk, and that's interesting. On the other hand, if you put Noam Chomsky in the communal hot tub with Ronnie and The Situation, you'd get a lot more information than you ever could by just letting one dude talk. Now that I think of it, this is why the Q&A portion of any Chomsky-type lecture is always the most interesting, at least for me. There are more Situations in the audience than there are in Chomsky's brain.

I guess the whole point of this is to say that if you are one way, don't try to surround yourself with a bunch of people who are the same way, as if more meaningful differences won't surface naturally. It is tempting to believe that how we identify, our pretenses about ourselves, provide us with the information we need to distinguish between allies and adversaries at first glance, just because we look for a "match" in others. No wonder this formula so often fails, when all we are doing is comparing pretenses! What we believe about ourselves and what other people believe about themselves will never reveal anything like that which is discovered through the work of real relationships.

Just sayin'

2011-04-27T18:15:00.000-05:00

The prospect of paying $15 for catering at the retirement party of a much-celebrated colleague has inspired an upswell of resistance amongst the rank-and-file in my department. $15 -- and no drinks? Could this be Pennsylvania's Egypt?

It's worth noting that the, ahem, woman who thought to organize the whole thing and pay the up-front costs has since had her motives called into question by the very co-workers she won't go to lunch or dinner with -- no matter how many times they ask! What is she getting out of these so-called catering expenses that couldn't, in point of fact, be put toward an open bar? What volume of slander can be sustained about her in the meantime?

This is why guys have to be on point about feminism, if they want to be on point about anything.

Status update

2011-04-26T16:19:00.000-05:00

Pretty good extended holiday weekend. Believed myself to have great revolutionary potential in nearly every encounter, but was thwarted by a familial preference for sporting events and the sensation of not feeling awkward. The good news is that Petite Sirah is like a revolution in the mouth -- at one point I think I experienced communism in the corner. Also: Saw first episode ever of Dancing with the Stars. Jimminy Christmas, man. The revolution needs a whole new party planner. This concludes my weekend report from the front lines of hearts and minds.

The professional

2011-04-22T15:26:00.001-05:00

Professionalization, we have noted, is a kind of socialization in which powers and privileges are received in exchange for meeting a given profession's standards and norms. How we judge this process depends on how we feel about the ultimate ends that such professions serve. Lawyers, for example, make their own contribution toward what is both "good" and "bad" about society; in evaluating the legal profession as a whole, one can draw certain conclusions about its social impact. But the standards by which any profession comports itself evolve out of the goals it pursues under particular circumstances. Every profession wants to succeed, and this implies an economic motive. Under conditions of advanced inequality, we can expect a profession's goals, and the underlying socialization it promotes, to be oriented accordingly.

The goals of the professions, in other words, are informed by the broadest goals of the society. The broad economic goal of capitalism is economic growth, or what Marx calls capital accumulation. The professions are shaped by this -- and any of you who are professionals can speak to this more eloquently than I. Whatever the nominal, socially-accepted goal of your profession might be, it competes with money considerations all the time. This happens so regularly that well-meaning professionals are disheartened to think that their career is more obligated to profit than to people.

Anytime socialization becomes subordinated to a specific goal, the "right" and "wrong" that people learn is an ethics only as it relates to achieving that particular goal. If you are a doctor, it's "wrong" to spend an hour with a patient, even if you want to advise them better, because it's "right" by institutional requirements to do seven more evaluations in the same amount of time. Being a doctor, in this case, means withholding patient care in order to maximize economic efficiency -- the broad goal of the for-profit health industry.

The purpose of professionalization within the context of US society, then, is to produce a culture within the professions which serves their broad goals as informed by that society. This culture may have components that we would endorse in any context, and that might be lacking in the general socialization of the population at large. Let's consider here the relationship between feminism and US professional culture.

There is a very good reason why major US corporations have come to implement certain feminist initiatives as policy within their ranks. That this has anything to do with a consistent advocacy for the interests of women is laid bare by their refusal to consider other important requests all the time. But in the face of legal action or needless disruption within the workplace, many firms have come to embrace "zero tolerance" sexual harassment policies which women broadly endorse. And this in turn informs the professional culture of corporations.

But lawsuits and workplace disruption which arise in response to hostile behavior are placed by for-profit institutions in the same category as other feminist goals, like equal pay or paid maternity leave: they are expenses to be avoided. In the case of sexual harassment, the interests of women and the interest of corporations coincide insofar as women have made it too costly for employers to ignore their demands. A corporation may institute sexual harassment and cultural sensitivity trainings as a result, but this is because it speaks the language of profits, not feminism.

Nevertheless, this "feminism by decree" contributes to the liberal contours of professional culture in the US in a way that the general population, not similarly socialized, frequently lacks. Even if a don't-gape-at-your-coworker's-breasts-because-you-might-lose-your-job approach has its limits, US professionalism is credited as having accomplished something within its domain that US culture in general has yet to achieve. The point to remember here is why it has done this -- not merely that it has -- so that we might anticipate the boundaries of its benevolence.

I am Pauly D

2011-04-21T14:52:00.000-05:00

When it comes to "just being themselves," the cast of the Jersey Shore appeal to this above all. Part of this relates to the show's overall concept, which amounts to the merchandising of "lower class" ethnic personalities; specifically, those whose self-regard is "out of line" with their social standing. But the cast are plausibly genuine in many ways, and I think any good reality television producer would want it this way. Edited spontaneity from their stars is just an easier prospect than elaborate coaching or other forms of micromanagement. Naturally, we have already taken into account the unnatural environment in which the cast are expected to live, and considerable, if unseen, interference run by the crew in order to achieve broad outcomes.

The individual personalities within the cast are no different than many people I know; in an important sense they are no different than me. Of course, I am also different in many ways -- but not in any sense that I consider important. I don't care if people want to spend their time working out or getting tan; is that better or worse than how I spend my time? If the argument is that these people are petty and self-absorbed and spiteful -- I am all of these things, too! As hard as I try, it's very difficult to find an angle where the "notorious" cast of the Jersey Shore are intrinsically more awful than me or anyone else I know, especially when we accord differences in behavior to divergent experiences, opportunities, and privileges -- i.e. to advantages which US society hardly supplies in an even-handed way!

The cultural attributes of the cast are of course meant to be signifiers of a "lower class" that we should regard as important. We're supposed to be able to sum up the worth of an individual just by looking at how they dress or hearing how they talk. This is deeply ingrained in us, and, from the vantage point of power, its utility stems from the disincentive it provides anytime we feel tempted to meaningfully relate to another human being.

Whatever conflicts transpire between the cast members themselves or between themselves and others, the first thing I take from the whole experience is an awareness that the Jersey Shore is trying very hard to tell me what to think about individuals on the basis that they fall into established social categories that I never found compelling in the first place.

Kamurshol

2011-04-20T14:47:00.000-05:00

N.W.A., "Kamurshol":

You have witnessed, you have heard
So we're gonna take time out for a commercial break

Last week commenter biggayslut asked: Is it fair to say you also like Jersey Shore for some of the reasons that its intended audience likes it?

I don't know that I'm not part of the Jersey Shore's intended audience; I'm probably close to whatever age range marketers hope to reach through that show. Do I like it for the same reasons other people do? Why, isn't it just like someone who goes by the handle "biggayslut" to be awake to the possibilities!

In a similar vein, commenter Todd S. hints at a newfound "temptation" to watch the show, which he resists valiantly. Let me just reassure everyone who is concerned about the corrupting tendencies of the Jersey Shore by offering my own foolproof method of inoculating oneself against its dangers.

First, fill an oversized brandy snifter to the brim with your favorite boxed red wine. A snifter is the kind of thing you procure from the "stemware" division of Crate & Barrel. As for boxed wine, Bota Box Shiraz is how I roll at present. Don't worry about the fucking bouquet -- you can smell that later. Just fill'er up.

It goes without saying that anytime my brandy snifter is engaged we are having a bonafide occasion. And do you know what that means in my household? Looking your best! Because, let's face it, looking your best means feeling your best. If you spend a lot of time in capitalistic society, this is important, because capitalism can get you down.

Inside the domicile, a dude of my sensibilities has two options for footwear, depending on the season. One are the L.L. Bean slippers that my mom gives me every year for Christmas. I don't know what animal they are made out of, or what quantity of congealed, dead human labor resides within. Sometimes you're just too busy writing a kick-ass anticapitalism blog to take the time to find out, you dig?

The other option are what I regard as my finest dress shoes: Mexican-made Crocs with the leather sown right into the plastic. If you've ever lived in my urban area and regularly worn Crocs around you quickly find that few other souls do -- which I believe is proof of something.

The last necessary item of apparel I should mention are the Grinch-themed pajama bottoms that my mother-in-law got me too many years ago; she really needs to think about getting me a replacement pair, because now when the cats claw my gonads there just isn't enough material to make it worthwhile. Anyway, the Grinch-theme is what I like to call "ironic," because I'm not actually anything like the Grinch, even if he is kind of lanky. Not that I've ever really sorted out what "ironic" means, though.

Finally, if you're going to watch something like the Jersey Shore, I find I require somebody else to be present in the room. Luckily, I have a partner who will often perform this role, even if she thinks the show is "horrible" and insists I stop writing about it. This is where looking your best comes into play, because if it weren't for that, one's powers of persuasion might be critically impaired. All the more so when your companion will not be taken in by boxed red wine.

As an anarchist, I can't in good conscience tell you what to watch or what to think any more than I should tell you what to wear or what to drink. What's important in your case is what you watch and think and wear and drink for your own reasons. I can't possibly know what those are -- you have to tell me. As I like to say, you really have to start fucking shit up in your own way.

Nevertheless, I have shared with you my own patented method of not being corrupted by any individual object of mass consumption. Follow this method precisely and you are sure to remain emancipated from the worst excesses of modern living!

The seductive threat of just being yourself

2011-04-19T15:56:00.001-05:00

Much excitement is derived from the Jersey Shore's ghetto-style assault on professional culture in the US. For starters, professionalism is a mandatory form of socialization insofar as anyone hopes to meaningfully "succeed" in US society; it affords the only kind of social status and power made available to the working classes: a respectably elevated position within the social hierarchy; or, power over others.

Many people resent this whether they are professionals or not. From a very young age we are taught what we need to do if we want to have any kind of respectable life, and by and large this entails conforming not to our own standards of right and wrong but to somebody else's. Somebody else, after all, has in their possession what we need to live respectably, and we have to get this through them. We do not learn that we can be respectable by "just being ourselves" in a comprehensive way.

The appeal of the Jersey Shore comes precisely from the notion that the cast members are "just being themselves" in spite of the fact that this often exceeds the scope set by the idealized norms of professionalization. No one in their right mind is supposed to "just be themselves" if this is likely to antagonize a potential employer. US audiences understand this implicitly, owing to the experience of class in their lives: if they behaved like someone on the Jersey Shore, or merely like "themselves," they could lose their social standing altogether. Any population so dependent on external sources of legitimation is subsequently enthralled by apparent examples of individuals who don't give a damn.

That's so ghetto!

2011-04-18T08:30:00.000-05:00

As a commodity, the Jersey Shore is controversial because it is seen as promoting a kind of ethnic "ghetto culture." Within US society, ghetto culture stands in contradistinction to professionalization. Professionalization is a form of socialization in which power and privilege are received in exchange for conforming to the established norms of a professional authority. Historically, such possibilities have been closed off to certain groups, like African-Americans, because of racism. The "ghetto" concept has since referred to any enforced alienation from mainstream society; it is now commonly embraced within popular culture as a rejection of society's official terms, ostensibly in response. Hence, ghetto culture.

Ghetto culture's popularity has predictably led, within a capitalist context, to the commercialization and industrial reproduction of its various forms, for the enrichment of the same professional trade groups it claims to oppose. A lot has been said about this, and I'm not going to pursue it further here, since we can expect nothing less from capitalism. The salient point is that ghetto culture, especially when reproduced on an industrial scale, regularly frustrates and undermines the hegemony of professional culture within US society, in important and not infrequently comical ways.

Things come between us

2011-04-15T14:13:00.003-05:00

First let's talk about category 3, which refers to the relationship between ourselves and commodities as they are produced under capitalism.

In the United States, capitalism has developed to the point where everyone is a "consumer": everyone is identified as a potential buyer of something which contributes to capital accumulation. Even if you can't afford health insurance, or a cell phone, the government will purchase these for you, so that no one is denied their right to contribute to capital accumulation in these spheres. As Marx writes, the purpose of capitalist production is not producing what people need, but rather the production of surplus-value, or profit, for the owners of productive wealth. Marx located the source of such profit within the industrial process itself, where people are compensated for one part of their working time, while uncompensated for the rest. Because this happens within production, capitalism has every incentive to produce lots of things -- and as many people as possible to buy them -- quite irrespective of the particular needs which are met: Those needs best met will be whichever best meet the need for profit.

Once this becomes the status quo, a big part of how we understand ourselves culturally stems from distinctions arising out of the different commodities we "consume."* We are implicated in consuming some things, like food and other necessities, if we want to live; and even more things the more we want to participate in mainstream social life, since few social experiences are left which don't also serve as a mode of commercial transaction. We are always buying something -- so how we understand each other comes in large part from the meanings attached to the things we buy.

As a commodity, the Jersey Shore imparts its own cultural stamp on the audiences who watch it. That this is so has been made clear to me in the high emotions everyone I know brings to any discussion of it. Even the people who like it are sort of embarrassed by the fact; and the people who don't like it really don't like it, seeing in it something sinister.

Within the predominantly professional circle of my friends and family, this all makes sense, since watching the Jersey Shore does not communicate what they would prefer to communicate about themselves via the things they consume. Watching the Jersey Shore might be the TV equivalent of shopping at Wal-Mart -- it's bad!

But the cultural baggage of universal commodification goes both ways. If you try to read a book like Marx's Capital as a route to understanding between yourself and other working people, inevitably you are pegged as the consumer of a particular kind of commodity. This tells other people everything they need to know about you: namely, that you are either extremely smart for "consuming" philosophy; or that you are a poseur who is working really hard to be seen this way!**

Consequently, people seeing me the way they do are doubly eager to declare their position on something like the Jersey Shore; for example, because their expectation of someone who reads a lot is that I wouldn't be interested in commodities that don't promote this, or which appear to go against it. So let me just reassure everyone that, much like my good friend Marx, I am indeed very interested in commodities of every sort, and much for the same reasons: because my relationships with other people are so profoundly shaped by them, and because for my purposes I have no choice but to engage.

* Network television shows aren't strictly something we buy, but for simplicity's sake I will treat them as though they are; people relate to something like the Jersey Shore as they do any other commodity, by "consuming" or not consuming it depending on their preferences.

** A friend once assured me that while she regarded me as the first type, anyone else she saw reading Capital in public must surely be the second.

Happily begin by knowing nothing

2011-04-13T15:01:00.000-05:00

Our maps may be used as transparencies to be superimposed on the things we see. This is helpful anytime we are in a situation that we don't know a lot about. For instance, I don't know anything significant about reality television. I rarely see television -- except as it has recently been configured to Netflix through the Wii. Now I see more television, but I don't know anything special about it, nor am I particularly invested in it one way or the other. If you have a strong opinion about it, that's great. I am only regarding it to the extent that I am engaged with it at present -- with a developed understanding of my own commitments, and without any particular technical understanding of, say, reality television in general.

Anyway, right now Netflix lets you watch Season 2 of the Jersey Shore instantly. So that's what I'm considering. As stated earlier, my main concern in general is people trying to tell other people what to do without any good reason for it -- whatever name you want to call that. I credit anarchism in my case, for better or worse, because this is what I take from it on a practical level. Nevertheless, this remains the operative concept which informs my overarching map -- Marxism's narrower focus, on the other hand, is how the capitalist mode of production "tells people what to do" without asking anybody's preference on many important subjects; the Marxist map is concerned with one example of "people trying to tell others what to do" insofar as propertied classes have more power than the dispossessed under capitalism.

When it comes to some people trying to tell others what to do, there are three categories I am concerned with in the case of something like the Jersey Shore:

1) The relationships between cast members and other individuals appearing on the show

2) The relationship between 1) and the production crew

3) The relationship between myself and others as an audience and the Jersey Shore as a commercial product we "consume"

These are the places I am primarily interested in looking at. With a little luck I hope to get started soon!

Socialist social skills

2011-04-11T11:00:00.001-05:00

A continuing conversation with Jaded Sixteen of Oi With The Poodles Already.

JRB: One of the groups you've flagged for abusive behavior at your blog are people identifying themselves as Marxist. Part of what ladypoverty has tried to do lately is to read Marx's Capital as a critique of economic authority under capitalism (in other words, it is this sort of critique; we are simply trying to understand it), and this has attracted a certain audience interested in Marx. "Marxism" as a revolutionary doctrine hasn't really been discussed; and the thrust of this blog is anarchist: in principle, it is concerned with all forms of authority. You seem to be encountering some very dogmatic types, and they don't seem interested in authority as it manifests itself in abundant ways. Could you talk about this as you have experienced it; and also, talk about your encounters with others of the radical male left, including those identifying as anarchist?

JS: I don't think these people are particularly dogmatic, they seem pretty open to ideas of over-throwing any form of authority -- I assume this is why they even lurk on my blog -- their problem with me stems from the fact that I 'reject' Marx -- and if some anonymous dude from half way across the world makes such a claim, then it must be entirely true, no? -- and LE GASP think Marx is colonial and thus as postcolonial subjects of the 'ex'-Empire we can't apply Marxism to our policies.

I've pointed out that nowhere have I ever said, "Marx is a colonial douche! Let's all burn Das Kapital now and dance forever around the bonfire"*, rather just suggested that we need other modes of Marxism, namely the routes suggested by Gramsci, Spivak (when talking of postcolonial theory) and maybe Amartaya Sen and Arundhati Roy (when speaking of democracies and economics). And of course, me being a dusty lady factors in this equation too, so basically the e-mails and/or comments that I get are along the lines of, "Shut up you bleedy Indian mouth!! Marx isn't terrible!! You are blinded by hatred and racism!" and I have now concluded that when *these* people read my blog, all they see is this:

Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Kill Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Marx Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Now Blah Blah.

And now I don't give a single fuck as to what they write or what they want. It all goes straight to the spam bin and spares me a migraine.

*This is a quote from an e-mail. No, this is not a joke.

Realities, television

2011-04-08T12:34:00.000-05:00

A lot is made of the fact that reality television isn't sufficiently real: The circumstances people are put in are contrived to produce particular effects; and how facts are presented is left to the discretion of unseen professionals who manipulate things further. What is true about relations and circumstances as experienced is not honored so much as appearances. But this is why I think of reality television as an excellent metaphor for life in consumer societies, where appearances register a higher value than truth; and where our daily experiences revolve mechanically, often in line with somebody else's script. Reality TV is perhaps the most transparent example of what is done to us all the time -- maybe that's why it bugs us!

Snooki and me

2011-04-07T13:18:00.000-05:00

If you go into an experience like watching the Jersey Shore having already mapped out your social commitments, then I think you can't help but approach the people involved in a sympathetic way. This necessarily includes not only the cast and whoever else works on the show, but also the audiences who watch it -- including yourself and whoever else you might watch it with.

For me, the fundamental social concern always comes back to instances where someone is trying to tell someone else what to do. Historically speaking, this is supremely dangerous; and so anarchism has evolved as a politics which places the burden of proof on whomever makes such claims. Sometimes this burden can be met, but since legitimation can only come from whomever is primarily affected, justification must be demonstrated to them. If the burden can't be met, the claim is illegitimate by assumption -- to be ignored, resisted or overcome as need be.

My starting point for the Jersey Shore is Season 2, which for whatever reason is set in Miami. This along with many other details isn't important; for now I'm only interested in what's in front of me.

First and foremost are the people in my life and the circumstances they are in. As one of my closest relations said to me, when she comes home from work the Jersey Shore is just the caliber of programming she wants to see. She is saying something about herself, something about the show, but perhaps most significantly something about her job. If you've ever had a job, you know that it can include large doses of other people trying to tell you what to do. This is important, especially in light of how it impacts the rest of our lives.

Secondly, there is the cast of the Jersey Shore, who like the rest of us would rather do anything more interesting for a living than simply take orders from somebody else. And yet, as we will see, our friends don't exactly escape this fate, even if their work is "more interesting" than what they might have encountered otherwise. It nevertheless carries its own costs. Our Marxist map is helpful for understanding how economic forces push us toward certain options -- like the single-minded pursuit of fame -- when in general we feel like we don't have many. So I want to signal my sympathy toward the cast from the very beginning, for these reasons.

Into the social network

2011-04-06T12:44:00.000-05:00

It used to be that people came together around the fire. Now they come together around the television.

Our social commitments often bring us together with people in front of the television. This can be a wonderful thing as long as we keep our social commitments first. It would be a terrible thing if we let a technology alienate us from others on the basis that we need it more than them; or, at the other extreme, insofar as we stand too stridently apart from those who "need" it at all. A commitment to other people implies sometimes going where other people want to take you, if only because you are interested in them, whatever your feelings about the place they are taking you. The most socially committed people will be the ones best prepared to go anywhere, in observance of their commitments.

Things, people, and ideas

2011-04-05T12:39:00.000-05:00

Swim in the sea of commodities because this is where you will find the people.

If you can talk to others about things, at the very least you aren't gossiping with them about people. And if your Marxism map is drawn well, for example, it's not hard to connect what is popular about things to a more constructive discussion about what is important to people. In any case, it's always important to move conversation away from what we like or don't like about people or things, toward the relevant relationship between the two. It's at this point that we begin to talk about ideas.

Talking about ideas isn't something that we get a lot of practice at in advanced consumer societies, however. Ideas in themselves become "things" which we regard in our role as consumers. What is normally a process becomes a commodity, or finished product. This idea is "awesome," that one is "stupid." The consumer is always casting an up or down vote, rather than seeing possibilities where perhaps no one else does; or the limitations of something that only works in one context.

If you've ever seen a group of people assembled together to "discuss anarchism," more often than not what you've encountered is a narrow subset of consumers who might as well be "fans" of any other kind of commodity. As long as it is conceived as a "thing," not a process, anarchism is just something else to adorn oneself with and fret about, rather than a map by which to know the world. You will know the former by the pointless acrimony that ensues; the latter by the impulse to always want to learn more, in whatever context.

Knowing when Guinness is good for you

2011-03-31T12:58:00.004-05:00

Because I would like to think of today as our day of departure, I'm about to do something that I don't normally allow myself while writing: I'm going to prepare myself a pint of Guinness. Here it goes.

Truly a thing of beauty. I regard it with all my senses, because this is an important moment for me; and I hope for you, too. I appreciate that most of you don't start drinking at noon. But remember to do this for yourself when you get done with work. For now, you will have to experience the effects as they play themselves out in my writing.

The Guinness I am drinking can be looked at in a variety of ways. Let us begin where Marx begins, with his concept of the commodity; or, commercial product.

Now to me, Guinness is just a kick-ass commodity. There is no getting around the fact that it fulfills a particular use-value: it's a good beer. Humanity has for a very long time produced beer, and my every aspiration for humanity in the future is that it will never stop doing so. In this respect, I allow myself to thoroughly enjoy a commodity like Guinness, when the occasion arises.

The capitalist way of producing a commodity like Guinness brings with it certain implications, however. The most general implication is that people with no independent way of living sought out employment with Guinness Inc. (or whoever) because they had no choice but to work for somebody else. This in itself doesn't let us draw any hard conclusions about how Guinness workers regard their relationship with their employer. It could be that, overall, they are cool with it. But it is significant in itself. And the reason it is significant is that the most general implication of capitalism is that people are told they shouldn't have any independent way to survive, and have to rely on somebody else in order to do so. When you actually think about it -- dude, that's crazy!

So here we have a situation where the very process of making something awesome, like Guinness, is premised on one relatively small part of society (employers) telling the overwhelming majority of people (workers) that they exist to work for them. Here I want to share with you what the German syndicalist (labor anarchist) Rudolf Rocker had to say about that happy crappy:

The portentous development of our present economic system, leading to a mighty accumulation of social wealth in the hands of privileged minorities and to a continuous impoverishment of the great masses of the people, prepared the way for the present political and social reaction. and befriended it in every way. It sacrificed the general interest of human society to the private interest of individuals, and thus systematically undermined the relationship between man and man. People forgot that industry is not an end in itself, but should only be a means to ensure to man his material subsistence and to make accessible to him the blessings of a higher intellectual culture. Where industry is everything and man is nothing begins the realm of a ruthless economic despotism whose workings are no less disastrous than those of any political despotism. The two mutually augment one another, and they are fed from the same source.

What Rocker is talking about here is no different than when you turn on the news and all you hear amounts to a running obsession with the health of the economy, oddly detached from anything that you care about in your day-to-day life. Obviously, we get the sense that we don't benefit when the economy is bad; but how much do our prospects improve when the economy is doing great? Basically, you just feel lucky if you have a job, because that's what everyone keeps telling you.

So you see, as much as I unreservedly enjoy this Guinness, there's a much bigger story going on around it, of which it forms one part. In fact, there is potentially quite a lot at stake, in human and environmental terms, anytime people are conditioned to unquestioningly accept the things that they are told by others; or, what's worse, to embrace this as a way of life.

I want you to think about this -- but not if it means ruining your drink, or anybody else's drink. Above all else, I want you to enjoy that. The thinking will come when the time is right. Cheers.

Introducing a continuing series on the things I am for, and how they relate to the things I am against

2011-03-30T13:44:00.000-05:00

The first thing I want to say about all of this is that I do not have a crush on Snooki. I say this first, and foremost, for my partner's benefit; but also for your own. And the reason for this, you see, is that by merely invoking The Snooks, she has already come between us. To know her is to confront a kind of social power.

There are a few things you should know about before we get started. The path ahead of us will not be easy, so I'm going to use a couple different maps. I've adapted these maps as they relate to my own experiences. Let me briefly say something about them here.

The first map that I want to bring up in this context is a map called anarchism. Anarchism is the idea that all authority is wrong unless it can prove that it isn't wrong. Authority is when somebody tells you what to do. In other words, nobody should ever tell you what to do unless they can justify it -- to you. If they can't do this, anarchists will challenge the claim until they do.

The second map I'm going to use is a map called Marxism. To me, Marxism is concerned with how people make the things they need in order to survive. For many of us today, this happens within a context which Marx called the capitalist mode of production; or, the capitalist way of producing what we need to survive. Marx was particularly focused on this way of producing things; and he looked at it in a way that fits nicely with anarchism: the capitalist way of making things often "tells us what to do" in ways that other approaches might not. Marxism fits into the broader project of anarchism because it focuses on a particular form of authority.

The third general map that I want to talk about is feminism. Feminism also fits into anarchism's broad goals insofar as it challenges anything that tries to tell women what to do. Sometimes it's men that try to tell women what to do; at other times institutions; still yet, it can be other women. Feminism challenges any form of authority which tries to tell women what to do.

What we see coming out of these maps is the general principle laid out by anarchism, which is expressed within specific relationships. If someone tries to tell you what to do because you are gay or because of the color of your skin or any other reason, to challenge this would constitute a specific struggle while at the same time satisfy anarchism's general rule. When human beings try to tell animals or the environment "what to do," that fits in as well, if a little differently. The important point is that we all have to draw maps which come out of our own experiences and interests; anarchism encourages us to learn from each other as we do.

I was hoping to return to our theme of the Jersey Shore, but this is probably enough to think about for one day. We will reconvene tomorrow. Until then, if you want to have fun then do something!

Being in the world

2011-03-28T14:44:00.001-05:00

Sparklehorse with The Flaming Lips, "Go":

To understand and be understood is to be free

One area of anarchist theory that I've never seen developed relates to how we live our lives in advanced consumer societies while at the same time practicing anarchism. To use my own life as an example, what does it mean to be an anarchist and work for a major corporation? Can anarchism apply when shopping at Whole Foods? Where does anarchism enter into our love for commercial music? In other words, what does it mean to be anarchist and, at the same time, just be yourself?

If we accept the premise that advanced consumerism leaves few spaces in which to escape either the authority which confronts us at work or the authority imposed by the market, then most people aren't going to be able to stand outside of these experiences, as anarchists might have in the past. I know I sure as hell don't. And yet somehow this blog has become a space where -- I don't know. I think last week's hijinks have helped me to understand that this blog has become a little too disconnected from the way that I think about anarchism in my everyday life. So maybe it would be good to start writing about that!

On intervention

2011-03-24T04:23:00.000-05:00

Any intervention in another's affairs requires a very high burden of proof to show that it can be justified. All evidence in favor needs to be evaluated as to whether it can meet this burden. Without meeting this burden intervention can be assumed to be wrong.

The anarchist position as I understand it is never non-intervention as an absolute principle, but that intervention is wrong without adequate justification; particularly, as it relates to the preferences of the affected parties.

The fact is, as much as we do not like Western power in principle, in practice there are many instances where we solicit it for what we think is right, because there is no alternative. Naturally, we seek out these alternatives if we can. But it is hypocritical to foreclose the same options to others when in our daily lives as Westerners we pursue them all the time.

Methods and ideologies

2011-03-23T13:58:00.000-05:00

The enthusiasm for yesterday's post is warmly received! Yet for all the discussion about Libya, I can't help but feel dismayed by what was in fact said about Libya, which wasn't much. As indicated already, I don't find generic discussions of Western foreign policy to be sufficient for my interests, nor do I believe they should ever act as a substitute for trying to understand a situation from the perspective of those primarily affected. To the degree that I use such a critique, it is one part of a broader equation, not the only part.

This in turn points to my method for evaluating the legitimacy of authority in a particular situation, which might best be described as something like a non-ideological anarchism. For our purposes here, I will only reiterate that it's really not important what your view is in a situation that primarily impacts other people. It's important what their view is, and what their preferences are under the circumstances as they experience them. So if you aren't part of that situation, but want to have some relevant relation to those within it, you have to try to establish a consensual connection that acknowledges reality on both sides. As far as I am concerned, if you don't want that, you won't do it.

The main reason why I am uninterested in imposing an ideological template on every situation that comes along is that it provides no incentive to even try to understand what is happening from anyone's perspective but my own -- i.e. to understand the situation. What I believe is an uncomfortable fact for many of the left is that if they let other people express their preferences, it is unlikely that they will fit neatly into their preconceived world view. And what we find in such cases is that this prompts not renewed engagement, but anxiety and condemnation.

Needless to say, I have my interests and there's never any expectation on my part that they should be yours. If you want, you are welcome to engage them in your own way, with all that genuine engagement entails.

More Libya

2011-03-22T14:05:00.000-05:00

I would encourage the Western-based left-o-sphere to take a greater interest in the feelings of Libyans when deciding whether outside intervention is warranted in a conflict that impacts them daily.

Clearly there is some evidence of support for Western intervention amongst those doing the fighting against the Qaddafi regime. It's true that this evidence may not in itself justify the Western attacks, because we don't know whether it is representative of what the larger community wants. It could be that the community is merely caught in between, as is frequently the case in these scenarios.

Any use of force has to be justified vis-a-vis the preferences of the affected community; in the context of this fast-moving civil conflict, we should be trying all the more to understand what those are, since military force is already being used against Libyans by their own government. What Western bombs will add to the situation is a very, very good question; but ultimately it is not one for Westerners alone to answer.

Civil war in Libya

2011-03-21T11:25:00.002-05:00

Wall Street Journal:

Islamist and secular alike, Libyan rebels express their gratitude for the Western airstrikes, drawing a sharp distinction between the campaign against Col. Gadhafi and the American entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan. A handful of today's Libyan revolutionaries fought American troops in those conflicts.

"When America occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, it spread corruption and killed innocents," said Rafat Bakar, a revolutionary activist in the city of Baida. "A Western intervention in Libya would help us get rid of the tyrant and of injustice."

The Libyan situation is complicated so I don't share a straightforward view of what is happening there, even if Western involvement can be reduced to self-interest, as usual. The only immediate questions that interest me are whether the rebellion would have been crushed without intervention, whether the rebels enjoy greater popular legitimacy than the regime, and what the likely outcome for civilians would be with or without Western involvement.

Leaving the country to be reconquered by Qaddafi would not have been good for Libyans -- I think that much can be said for sure. In light of the regime's advances on rebel cities in recent weeks, I'm not sorry to see it newly discouraged by Western support on the rebel side, even if this poses a new set of problems in the longer term.

We are obligated to each other, not the demands of power

2011-03-18T14:21:00.000-05:00

Inside Higher Ed:

[Q]uoting Marxist theory should be seen ... not as an endorsement of all things Marx. "I see it as one lens through which we can observe and look at the world we are trying to understand," especially with regard to issues of social class. "I'm not saying it's the only way or the best way, but it's a way, and those theories do have something to offer," he said.

For example, all this week I have been thinking about how, in the face of one social catastrophe after another, my daily routine remains the same: Get up, go to work, come home, do what I need to do to repeat it all over again tomorrow -- none of which is directed in any way toward addressing what is happening to people in Japan or Libya or Ivory Coast; or for that matter, in my own neighborhood. So much personal commitment going toward somebody else's priorities, so markedly different than my own, because the basis of my livelihood is spelled out in their terms. As it stands now, society would collapse if everyone decided to take a month off to do what is right, obligating ourselves to others on the basis of need, not power. Subsequently, it is never done -- and so we watch as things get worse.

Thanks to Beth E.

The greatest president

2011-03-17T17:41:00.001-05:00

Economist:

Businessmen have long complained that these onerous labour laws, together with high payroll taxes, put them off hiring and push them to pay under the table when they do. When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former union leader, became Brazil’s president in 2003, they hoped he would be better placed than his predecessors to persuade workers that looser rules would be better for them.

Note the logic here -- that by electing a labor candidate to the office of president, you don't produce an administration which represents workers, but one that is "better placed" to advocate on behalf of business in the eyes of workers. What changes from one president to the next is not the interests they represent -- this remains more or less constant -- but the audiences they best persuade.

Early on, Obama was similarly embraced as a popular figure who business hoped would sell their concerns to a skeptical public. Since then, both his popularity and his credibility amongst business-types has declined. Less able to persuade, he is less useful to business, who in turn cast doubt on his economic priorities, and by doing so make him less popular. Duly scolded, you will note the president's newest attempts at "reconciliation" with business.

The key to a celebrated presidency in societies like ours is to basically do what business wants while remaining a reasonably popular and unifying figure. Though less true at the time of his incumbency, this explains a lot of Ronald Reagan's revival in the time since: he did whatever business wanted, and so has been rewarded with great popularity and "leadership" in hindsight. Clinton is also notable in this regard.

A life without parties

2011-03-16T16:20:00.000-05:00

BusinessWeek:

"I'm sorry that they will lose some money that they'll have to contribute, and I'm sorry for what they might lose through the loss of collective bargaining, but I doubt that any of these government employees will not be able to make the mortgage, not be able to buy groceries, not be able to put fuel in the car or clothes on their backs, and our family has had to face those things," she went on, her voice rising. "So I find it hard to be sympathetic, and to continue to pay for people who are the haves when the rest of us are the have-nots."

The political arguments in Wisconsin pit people like this woman against government employees who are one step closer to becoming like this woman. We see that no resolution will come from taking one side versus the other, the political right vs. the political left, insofar as such positions will only protect narrow constituencies within the social whole. Even if there is good reason to reject her analysis, there is no reason not to take her side as someone whose objective requirements for living are under assault -- and, by doing so, advance our own.

Success, suffering, and happiness

2011-03-15T13:46:00.000-05:00

Wall Street Journal:

[S]ymptoms of depression, paranoia and psychopathology have increased among generations of American college students from 1938 to 2007, according to a statistical review published in 2010 in Clinical Psychology Review. Researchers at San Diego State University who conducted the analysis pointed to increasing cultural emphasis in the U.S. on materialism and status, which emphasize hedonic happiness, and decreasing attention to community and meaning in life, as possible explanations.

Amid great inequality there will always be penalties if you just try to be yourself. That is hard, but it's okay. There is a kind of suffering that is necessary for personal growth, and it's important to be able to identify that and accept it. For example, if you suffer for something you strongly believe in, as a reflection of who you are, yes, you will suffer, but you will also know who you are. When the suffering subsides, you will still have this knowledge of yourself -- a possession that will not expire.

On the other hand, we bear a much greater penalty when we try to avoid all suffering, by pursuing only the repeated, short-term happiness that is promoted by consumerism; or the concomitant status that comes from "choosing instead to measure up to the standards of others." Unfortunately, much of school is geared to this status-model, where what we produce need only satisfy the teacher's criteria for approval, irrespective of whether it relates in any way to our own.

If you read the article you will see that they are basically counterposing the advent of consumerism with "community and meaning in life" -- i.e. some other social system altogether, certainly if we believe that everyone should partake in it. We don't have anything like that yet, but we do have enormous psychological suffering amongst even very well-off people, whose burden is no doubt compounded by every social indicator which insists they are successful and doing everything right!

Hot commodities

2011-03-14T18:44:00.001-05:00

Wall Street Journal:

Mr. [Mitch] Singer [a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group] said he doesn't think the accident in Japan will derail the U.S. nuclear boom. In fact, he said the explosion should reassure Americans that their own plants will be prepared for any emergency, because the industry will disseminate lessons learned in Japan around the globe, helping other reactors shore up their defenses against even devastating natural disasters, like the quake and the tsunami that followed.

Because if the history of nuclear power shows anything, it's that any publicity is good publicity!

Playing Nintendo's game

2011-03-14T12:24:00.002-05:00

I hope by now we have established that when you read Volume 1 of Capital, we are talking about what happens to you at work; when we talk about something like Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, we are talking about what is experienced outside of work, generally speaking. Naturally there is is an important relation between these two realms, between production and consumption.

Last week I said that, for me anyway, many things are clarified when introduced to the crucible of work. It is easy to talk to people about what is happening to them. I am a patient person, and my method is only to supplement conclusions people have already drawn by filling them out with what I know. This way we accompany each other, with whatever primary experience or theoretical knowledge that we have. This opportunity presents itself regularly.

On the other hand, you might say that many more things are obscured when exposed to the light of the Spectacle. "Spectacle" is a very good name for it: it is a spectacle! The problem for, say, Nintendo is the same for social justice; as the company's president put it, you are competing "with anything that demands people's attention and energy." Within a consumer society, that means anything and everything!

In my experience, this means waiting much longer for opportunities to add anything to the conversation that could act as affirmation for people in difficult circumstances. Consumerism does a very good job of overcoming our long-term concerns with successive, short-term distractions. You have to account for this: everyone wants to talk about their brand new whatever it is, but almost nobody is happy. Yet that short-term high can be repeated indefinitely, for decades, in fact. There are often only short intervals when people can really have each other's attention in a meaningful way. A lot of times I find that even in conversations that are ostensibly heartfelt, there is a preference to console and retreat than to proceed through places of uncertainty, perhaps because we haven't developed those skills.

So operating within the spectacular is, for me, like undertaking guerrilla warfare where you hardly ever do anything. You have to wait long periods, accompanying people the best you can. The internet can be helpful in composing a piece like this, for example, and certainly lends to it the potential to reach a broad audience; nevertheless there remains the question of competing with anything that demands people's attention and energy. It may be that this is the most important consideration for anyone trying to produce on behalf of social justice: to invest in whatever you think is most deserving of people's limited attention and energy, because there is no moving forward without their consideration.

The crucible

2011-03-11T14:05:00.002-05:00

We can think of class as an experience that brings us all together. Whenever I talk to people on the bus or at work, men and women of different colors, increasing I find that everyone is very eager to talk about class. "There is a working class and a ruling class: One makes the rules while the other does the work." This is instantly recognizable to anyone whose existence revolves around work; all the more for those who have been doing it longest, having never attended university or graduated high school.

At least in reference to work, I find that people really want to pursue this commonality, to know what it is that we share. There really isn't any preoccupation with how we are different. The work experience is just so total: I'm talking to people who work two or three part time jobs, all day and all night, who literally do their sleeping on the weekends, if they want consecutive hours of it. It's certainly not the case that we experience this reality in the same way, but the fact remains that the vast majority of us are experiencing it, and suffer tremendously as a result.

My strongest bonds with people on the bus or at work has come from these conversations, which acknowledge what is happening to us. I wonder if many of the internal conflicts between those concerned about social justice couldn't be helped by anchoring them in the contemporary work experience, where their significance will grow or recede in direct proportion to their practicality. Those that remain in a given situation will be the ones to address. Perhaps a lot of interpersonal inaction could be dispensed with by introducing it to the crucible of work!

Identity politics

2011-03-10T15:11:00.003-05:00

S.J. McGrath, Heidegger:

Insofar as we fail to stand in authentic comportment to our possibilities, choosing instead to measure up to the standards of others, we do not authentically exist.

Capital isn't strictly how Marx defined it in Volume 1, however -- that authority which confronts you at work, which alienates you from that process. Seen from the capitalist's perspective, it is also a circulatory process which transforms money into production (which means paying for you and your tools, etc.) out of which emerges the commodity, or commercial product (or service). Marx called this cycle "industrial capital": money capital is transformed into productive capital which is in turn transformed with a surplus into commodity capital; when the commodity is sold, it can once again be realized in money capital form, and begin its circuit anew. So capital can take different forms, all contributing to this process, when looked at in this way. This is the subject of Volume 2.

What the Spectacle represents is capital once it permeates society as whole: the advent of consumerism, which recruits everyone into the spirit of producing, consuming and investing. You still have the conspicuous consumption of the rich, now assisted by the conspicuous consumption of the poor. As we said yesterday, whether at work or at home, you always have an idea of what you are supposed to be doing, and if you think about it long enough it becomes clear that it usually has to do with contributing in one way or another to the production of surplus-value, or profit, for somebody.

Naturally this imposes rigid constraints at work. But as a younger colleague once confessed, he didn't like having time off from work because it made him "want to spend money." Nothing at work or in your living room or on the interstate is going to reinforce your feelings about any other value than what Marx called exchange-value, except in cases when they can be bundled together. You can pay someone to uphold your ideals, for example, as with many non-profit organizations, but at the same time find yourself consistently discouraged from living them.

All of this has particular import as it relates to our sense of time. I hope a short example will suffice. Most of us can hardly bear the thought of having to get up in the morning to go to work. It just sucks. Because we have no enthusiasm for the project, some of us will remain home until the last minute, putting us in a position where we now have to rush to work. Once we begin our commute however, we only prioritize our obligation to our employer. All other obligations -- to that homeless dude over there, or to whomever might still be in that smoking car in the center lane (true story) -- go right out the window. All of our social exchanges between home and work are heavily discounted, because we don't get anything out of them that we need in the same way that we do with our boss -- who we hate. And so it is that the same fools who show such tolerance for the boss erupt into a furor at the slightest misunderstanding in the street -- a process that repeats itself daily.

Insofar as we choose to measure up only to the standards of others, we foreclose the possibility of knowing ourselves in an authentic way. We won't know ourselves. One of the best reasons for regarding yourself and others sympathetically, and accommodating them the best you can, is that everything dominant in the society is working full-time against that, and you are all that is left.

Capital and the Spectacle

2011-03-09T15:00:00.003-05:00

In Capital's first volume, Marx defined capital as a social relation that is mediated by things. In this case, Marx was looking at what happens when you go to work everyday, and his point was that only a part of your day is spent producing the value that you receive in your paycheck. Another part of your day is uncompensated, and this "surplus-value" is appropriated by your employer. If your employer can turn around and sell "his" products, that surplus-value will become profit -- for him.

When you read Capital you will see that Marx goes into all kinds of different scenarios where the uncompensated part of the day is this or that much in comparison with the part you get paid for. It depends, for instance, on whether technology is assisting very much in production (in which case the uncompensated time can be very great), or whether employee resistance has reduced the total hours of a working day (in which case the uncompensated time might be less). In reality, you have many things happening simultaneously: increased productivity through technology is often relied on to offset other factors -- the main reason why businesses are always hollering about technological innovation.

For Marx the whole scheme was pinned together, in a fundamental way, by the fact that your boss owns, as his exclusive right, everything needed to make stuff; while you on the other hand are hard pressed to even grow your own vegetables. In a meaningful sense, you are propertyless, making you highly amenable to your employer's outlook on life: his schedule, his pay -- his terms. Just to reflect for a moment on the amount of nonsense you went through in your educational formation so that you might best appeal to his preferences tells you something about the relationship -- one that is mediated by things.

In the 20th century, Guy Debord, a thinker working in the Marxist tradition came up with this whole idea about something he called the "Spectacle." The Spectacle was, in his words, a social relationship mediated by images. What the hell does that mean? I'll be the first to say that I'm not entirely sure. At one level, you can talk about TV and the mass media. So when all the headlines converge around one particular issue, you'll notice that everyone is talking about that one thing. If the headlines don't reference that one thing, people are less likely to offer an opinion about it, because you have to think about it and you might be wrong. But if a position on something is being trumpeted nationwide, you can just say: "Yeah, that!" and get along with almost anybody. Or you can take one of the two sides that usually reflect elite opinion, and get along with certain people. As Debord wrote: "Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear."

The whole thing stems from the fact that in contemporary society there isn't any formal space to think on your own terms. You're either at work taking orders, or you're at home watching commercials. You hear what professional opinion makers have to say about something one way or the other. You aren't encouraged to have a view of your own, certainly not if it departs from the industrially manufactured view.

The Spectacle is the experience of only knowing your life as it is marketed to you by consumerism. "Branding" plays into this directly: the purchase of "lifestyles." Even our "work lifestyles" have been sold back to us as black comedy in films like Office Space and shows like The Office and Party Down. But you aren't going to get a breakdown of what is happening to you at work in a way that helps you respond, or helps you help others. In popular culture, work is just this futile endeavor we all have to endure, with no explanation as to why this must be so.

Poumly

2011-03-09T12:04:00.001-05:00

journeymanblog:

I am, in no particular order: a socialist, a biker and a martial artist. I struggle with the contradictions of being a Marxist trapped in the body of a small businessman working in the graphic arts sector.

Thanks as usual to Poumista.

Always more than a woman's day

2011-03-08T15:18:00.000-05:00

Because I can't think of any ongoing activity in life that will suffice in the absence of women, today I add online yacktivism to the group. I simply can't invest myself in smart discussion that doesn't include women, because I don't trust it.

I'm not a prolific commenter to begin with, so what this means at ladypoverty -- well, we will see what it means. I hope it will serve as confirmation for what many already feel, and bring renewed vigilance to approaching shared problems as equals.

A trip to the mall

2011-03-07T19:26:00.005-05:00

In the same way that marriage has become culturally bound to the state, our lives in late capitalist societies are materially implicated in consumerism. How we react to this is complicated: we might bemoan materialism but love the new Snooki Minaj track. At least I do -- are you kidding? Yet how could capital be more concentrated, and artistry more controlled? All I know is, in the new society, there damn well better be auto-tune -- and, of course, Snooki.

Earlier today I took a stroll through the King of Prussia Mall. Commodities -- by which I mean commercial products and not raw materials or whatever in the stock markety sense -- on exhibit in a zoo! From a strictly Marxist perspective, you could get very bent out of shape about the whole thing. But that's not always what's called for in a social setting where people are very excited to satisfy their material needs, myself included. The fact is, I needed new pants. And do you know what? There they were, neatly folded, just like the old boy Tommy Friedman is always crowing about.

My suggestion to you is: Don't get bent out of shape! But at the same time: Don't forget about what has transpired. Remember! Rest assured that a time will come when you can put those memories and that understanding to use in a way that does not alienate you from what has become the social life, but secures affirmation to others when they invariably come away empty. Every principle you care about is best deployed in the service of other's needs; it should never approach them as condemnation. Mao said: Swim in the sea of the people. I say: Swim in the sea of commodities, because this is where you will find the people.

I want to make an analogy about your feelings when you think about injustice in the world. Some members of my extended family have something in their fireplace that they call an "insert." It's something that goes in your fireplace, presumably, but more noticeably forms a full glass and metal enclosure in the front. By means of this device, you can control the airflow to the fire.

This is the important part. When the airflow is turned to the minimum, that fire will last who knows how many times longer than it would if exposed to the direct environment. I've heard the fire will last all day or all night. Conversely, when you dial up the heat, it's hot as fuck. It will heat the better portion of your home. It's crazy.

Your passion about the things you care about is like that. If you let it get direct exposure to every goddamnable thing that comes along -- yeah, it's going to flare up; but it will only be a matter of time before you burn out. You know what I mean by this, many of you, I am sure. So create an enclosure, and let that fire burn indefinitely; and, moreover, grant yourself the ability to choose when you are going to let it run hot or let it go unnoticed by everyone else but you. Never let circumstances dictate how you dispense with your own energy -- or for that matter any antagonist. They will try, but this must always remain your choice. And you will make these choices based on what is required by the people in your life, intimate or afar, in solidarity with their struggles.

Commonweal

2011-03-04T14:17:00.000-05:00

Wall Street Journal:

Less than a quarter of Americans support making significant cuts to Social Security or Medicare to tackle the country's mounting deficit, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, illustrating the challenge facing lawmakers who want voter buy-in to alter entitlement programs.

In the poll, Americans across all age groups and ideologies said by large margins that it was "unacceptable" to make significant cuts in entitlement programs in order to reduce the federal deficit. Even tea party supporters, by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, declared significant cuts to Social Security "unacceptable."

Yet for all the effort put into dividing them politically, and all the significance attached to that divide, there is consensus within the working class -- and it stems from economics.

The morality of power

2011-03-03T16:02:00.002-05:00

Robert Kaplan, Financial Times:

The moral differences between one dictator and another are as vast as those between dictators and democrats. There is such a thing as a benevolent dictator –- and we should not turn our back on all those that remain.

Vision, perceived legitimacy, the existence of a social contract and the ability to make society more institutionally complex –- and thus ready for more freedom –- are the distinguishing characteristics of good dictators.
...
This legitimacy [of dictators] depends on a social contract that treats the population as citizens rather than subjects, and has as its primary goal the economic and social advancement of society.

Once we accept power as an established principle, the political "dictator" really isn't that different from a CEO or your garden-variety household patriarch. The issue is no longer what they are -- one who rules -- but rather what they do; and, moreover, whether or not we agree with the outcome. This explains how the author can glide effortlessly into performance-style appraisals of people who regularly use the army to make their societies "ready for more freedom," by his standard.

Furthermore, the distinction between the "citizen" of the republic and the "subject" of autocracy is a lot like the difference between the "team member" of today versus the "worker" of yesteryear: a status in name only. The material concern in any hierarchy is always one's proximity to the bottom.

Love and tactics

2011-03-02T13:56:00.003-05:00

David B. Rivkin Jr., Lee A. Casey; Wall Street Journal:

Marriage is unlike any other governmental benefit. License to marry carries with it far more than mere permission, as in obtaining a license to drive or practice a profession. The reason that gay-rights supporters are so determined to achieve equal status for same-sex unions, and the reason that so many others vigorously oppose that recognition, is that marriage is an affirmative statement of societal approval.

Congress took account of this fact in enacting DOMA [the Defense of Marriage Act], and of the fact that large majorities of Americans still oppose recognition of same-sex marriages. Significantly, most Americans do not oppose some other form of legal recognition for same-sex couples that isn't called marriage.

"Civil unions. Because you're not a person -- you're a gay!"

Marriage is an example of a social practice that has become so thoroughly conflated with the state that it is difficult -- even for people who love each other bunches -- to imagine undertaking the endeavor without making it "official" in the eyes of virtually everyone.

In the present context, to deny one group of people this "affirmative statement of societal approval" which has become culturally bound to the state can be interpreted in turn as an affirmative statement of societal disapproval as regards those individuals in particular.

Of course, there is always the argument to be made that what is elemental about "marriage" does not spring forth from the blessing of a loveless bureaucracy, but is rather whatever two people and their immediate community can sustain by the force of their own creative design. But this does not mitigate the injustice at the point where it presently resides: within a society that, for now anyway, cannot imagine "marriage" developing toward its most fruitful maturity in the absence of a state.

Feed the world!

2011-03-01T16:18:00.000-05:00

Economist:

In his 1981 essay, “Poverty and Famines”, Amartya Sen, an Indian economist, argued that the 1943 Bengal famine, in which 3m people died, was not caused by any exceptional fall in the harvest and pointed out that food was still being exported from the state while millions perished. He concluded that the main reason for famines is not a shortage of basic food. Other factors -- wages, distribution, even democracy -- matter more.

Yet The Economist isn't interested in other factors. Instead it wants to talk exclusively and at length about what are called "agricultural yields" -- how much can be produced at a given cost, within a given acreage; in other words, the efficiency of agricultural output.

And while I am no expert, the impression I get from this article is that The Economist, rather than confronting the fundamental problem of profit in production, would merely prefer that agricultural yields, by the entrepreneurial magic of state-sponsored biotechnological chicanery, increase by a million percent!, so that "farmers" -- corporate agribusiness -- can finally produce commodities at so minimal an expense to themselves that they can feasibly sell them to people living on less than a dollar a day and still make a profit.

Failing that, all bets are off.

The state

2011-02-28T11:00:00.003-05:00

Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in Nationalism and Culture:

All great periods of culture are periods of political decline. Whatever is great in a cultural sense is non-political, is even anti-political.

We can think of "the state," or the government, as politicians and their institutions; a professional class of "governors" who do the work of creating and enforcing the rules by which everyone else is expected to live. This is odd when you think about; why would one group within society be invested with the power to do this?

When I was growing up, the rationale given was that having professionals do the "political work" of society freed everyone else to "live their lives," so to speak. But we often notice that when people are obligated to act in a "political" capacity -- for example, to attend jury duty -- they are quick to defend the many obligations they have to their employer, unaccustomed as they are to deny these for any other purpose. "Living our lives" has come to take on a particular meaning in this respect!

Nietzsche puts "culture" in opposition to "politics" because where the former embodies the free creation of norms between people, the latter mandates them by force. What is "political" could be negotiated between people on their own terms; but without a specialized group "entrusted" with a monopoly of violence, such endeavors would merely be social, not political. This is what Nietzsche means when he says, "Whatever is great in a cultural sense is non-political, is even anti-political": the best things to come from human relations come freely, without one group presuming to set the terms for all others -- i.e. without power as an established principle; without "government" as an institution separate and distinct from the work of our everyday lives.

Anarchism has long recognized that what best makes a society democratic is not the "democratic credentials" of its ruling class -- not one political party that "better represents the people" than the rest -- but an end to the artificial machinery of "politics" altogether.

We can imagine life without government as entailing not the abolition of everything that government does -- like running schools or installing traffic lights -- but rather that the work of our everyday lives would change to include the many things that are now entrusted to permanent bureaucrats. But how can we take on extra responsibilities when we are already overworked as it is? The answer is: the structure of our work lives has to change. Our time would be devoted to producing what we want and need: part of the day would be devoted to the kind of economic work we do now, only its purpose would not be the enrichment of our bosses but the improvement of our communities; and the other part of the day would be comprised of relating to each other about what we want and how best to go about it. Such activity would then have the chance to develop as cultural practices amongst society as a whole.

We see that in a community of free individuals, what is "political" is superfluous; institutionalized power is only necessary when you want to preserve the rights of some against the needs of others. This is another important thing to know about the state: it has always attended the division of society into distinct and hostile classes. This is why anarchists have always identified the state as a necessary instrument of class rule.

It is important to reiterate the fact that what the state is shouldn't be conflated in every instance with what the state does. The fact that the state administers certain social programs or upholds certain laws is not proof that people wouldn't prefer similar services or "rules of the community" in a stateless society. The point is, it has to be determined what people want, and in some ways the state prevents this; but in other ways, people have forced the state to recognize what they want. So we mustn't confuse everything the state does with the underlying purpose for which it exists. Something that Marxists have been good to emphasize is the fact that the state is an important site of class conflict; for anarchists, the impulse to "smash the state" must take care not deny the importance of some things the state does which would need to be performed by communities in its absence.

Living to work

2011-02-25T14:58:00.002-05:00

New York Times:

Richard Freeman, an economist at Harvard, said he saw the hostility toward unions as a sign of decay in society. Some working-class people see so few possibilities for their lives that it is eroding the aspirational nature that has long been typical of Americans.

“It shows a hopelessness,” he said. “It used to be, ‘You have something I don’t have; I’ll go to my employer to get it, too. Now I don’t see any chance of getting it. I don’t want to be the lowest one on the totem pole, so I don’t want you to have it either.’ ”

An intrinsic feature of capitalism, compensating people for the work they do imposes costs on the profits necessary to sustain economic growth. In other words, your salary, benefits, and ability to retire; not to mention whatever communal goods like roads and bridges, schools and libraries -- these things will always exist in a state of potential conflict with the kind of concentrated wealth accumulation required by capitalism.

This is what we mean by class conflict: you would like to be compensated for your work by some standard appropriate to the productive capacity of your society; but your employer sees in your compensation an obstacle to their success. Accordingly, either you are persuaded by various means to accept their point of view, or you struggle to advance your own.

The standards by which any society regards itself are elastic. In the early industrial period, people (including children) regularly worked 16 hour days; by the mid-20th century, that standard was cut in half -- and yet people were compensated better. Those elements within US society that understood how this transpired sensibly proposed "a 4-hour day with no cut in pay." They did this by advocating the production of things that people needed as opposed to the production of wealth for an owning minority.

Today we are witnessing a slide back toward the living standards preferred not by the average person but by those interests engaged in wealth maximization for themselves. After all, if we agree that a decent salary, health benefits, and a retirement you can live on -- like those presently retained only by unionized, public sector workers -- are "overly generous," what are we spending more and more of our lives working for, really?

The right to marry

2011-02-24T14:34:00.001-05:00

Wall Street Journal:

One of the cases that prompted the [Obama administration's Defense of Marriage Act] shift was filed by Edith Windsor, who sued after the federal government refused to recognize her 2007 marriage to her partner, Thea Spyer. After Ms. Spyer's death, Ms. Windsor faced a $350,000 estate tax on her inheritance from her partner, a tax she wouldn't have incurred had her marriage been recognized by the federal government.

Because US history is to a large degree the story of very wealthy people asserting their rights as a group -- leaving everyone else to play catch up -- any attempt to discriminate against groups that include very wealthy people are often frustrated until that group can be reconstituted along class lines.

In the case of gay marriage, the stigma attached to homosexuality has until only recently proven itself superior to the appeals of upper class gays to take their rightful place amongst their wealthy counterparts -- to marry whomever they want.

If US history is any guide, we can expect that what is likely gained by all gays in the realm of marriage will not translate so well to other spheres, like health services, which can be delineated much more easily by the criteria of class. In other words, in the case of marriage, it will be hard to deny to poor people this right that is increasingly seen as inalienable for the rich -- but others will remain out of reach.

About unions

2011-02-23T14:07:00.006-05:00

A union is nothing more than the coordinated resistance of employees against employer rule. For example, if your boss tells you to do something unsafe, and one or more of your coworkers is willing to stand by you in your refusal to obey, whatever this may entail, that is a union. That is how unions began, and it is fundamentally what makes unions important.

Whether or not your challenge to the boss's authority has been preapproved by your employer's representatives in government is a whole other consideration. But it is worth mentioning that this what 90% of the discussion about "unions" amounts to in the United States. By this criteria, a "union" and its activities are legitimated and regulated by politicians, who in turn decide what kind of resistance will be tolerated by law. In a class society, we can imagine a scenario where politicians, influenced by the economic monopoly held by employers, end up restricting most of the types of activity that give employees and their communities real strength in the face of employers. Long story short, this explains a lot about why mainstream unions are deficient: in a word, they suck. But that has more to do with the profound disadvantage they sustain just as soon as they gain "legitimate" status in an employer-run society than it does with some special failing amongst labor leaders (i.e. the two happen in succession).

Most US unions are run on the employer-sanctioned "business union" model, which basically turns unions into businesses themselves. These unions serve as legal representation in relations between employers and employees. Employees pay dues, and the business union provides the "service" of talking to your boss when you have a problem, or negotiating what is called a "collective bargaining agreement" -- a contract which spells out raises and work rules, and so on, for a given period of time. Basically, you pay money, and your union representatives "represent" you.

In contrast to business unionism, there is something called solidarity unionism. Solidarity unionism is a model which seeks to advance the interests of all employees as a class. We know that when we talk about "class," we are talking about a very inclusive concept: the "working class" is everyone compelled by economic necessity to work for anybody else. Solidarity unionism sees unions as an outgrowth of community concerns which happen to find their expression in the workplace. In other words, unlike business or what is called "craft" unionism, solidarity unionism is opposed to the narrow pursuit of economic advantage for certain parts of the workforce vs. others. Traditionally, this orientation has worked to bring the conditions of the poorest and most vulnerable up to the standards of others in the labor market, while at the same time demanding an end to "wage slavery" altogether.

Because solidarity unionism is informed by a class perspective, it understands that the role of government in very unequal societies is to defend the wealth of the haves against the needs of the have nots. We see this playing out in particular splendor as of late: the bankers who wrecked the economy keep their contractually stipulated bonuses, while their political servants wail that school teachers are bankrupting the nation! Limited government, predictably, has meant limiting governmental utility for the working class, while at the same time increasing governmental aid to the nation's owners. For this reason, solidarity unions are reluctant to be drawn into legal contracts with employers, since a union's real strength lies not in governmental mediation, but in the original spirit of what unions are all about.