Socialism in America

What socialism is, what Communism was, and a summary of Marx's Capital Vol. 1.

In Dependence Days

Today we celebrate trading British rule for corporate rule! What does being an American mean to you?

Ties that bind

Alexandra Popoff, Sophia Tolstoy:

The Tolstoyan agricultural colonies were notorious for various incidents, which led to their breakup. Such colonies had sprung up in the 1880s, but none lasted longer than a year: people who fled convention were a disagreeable lot. Their attempts to live and work together were doomed -- quarrels were common, and since they rejected the law, there was no way of solving their disputes. They believed in the superiority of their moral principles but could not survive as a community. Commenting on what he perceived as a failure of their movement, Aylmer Maude would remark: "Again and again attempts have been made to cure social ills by persuading people to stand aside from the main stream of human life, and to save their souls by following an isolated course; but all paths of social improvement except the common highway trodden by the common man have proved to be blind alleys." Like Maude, Sophia [Tolstoy] met many idle and inefficient "wanderers" among the Tolstoyans. She was appalled by the scandals in the Tolstoy Colonies, which were widely known. In 1891, Nikolai Karonin, a populist writer, published "The Borskaya Colony," a story about intellectuals who founded a commune with the idea of helping peasants. Instead, they brought ruin: a peasant girl was raped and later committed suicide. The fact-based account appeared in the journal Russian Thought and produced a sensation, hurtful to Tolstoy's cause.

One needn't accept every assumption here to see that there is something to holding oneself in opposition to the "main stream of human life" which does not lend itself to anything better, and frequently contributes to some things that are worse.

I often give the example of abuses I have witnessed between people with the finest political pedigrees -- far worse in the damage they do than anything I have experienced coming from a boss.

The noise made by people

Anton Chekhov, Peasants:

During the summer and winter months there were hours and days when these people appeared to live worse than cattle, and life with them was really terrible. They were coarse, dishonest, filthy, drunk, always quarreling and arguing amongst themselves, with no respect for one another and living in mutual fear and suspicion. Who maintains the pubs and makes the peasant drunk? The peasant. Who embezzles the village, school and parish funds and spends it all on drink? The peasant. Who robs his neighbor, sets fire to his house and perjures himself in court for a bottle of vodka? Who is the first to revile the peasant at district council and similar meetings? The peasant. Yes, it was terrible living with these people; nevertheless they were still human beings, suffering and weeping like other people and there was nothing in their lives which did not provide some excuse: killing work which made bodies ache all over at night, harsh winters, poor harvests, overcrowding, without any help and nowhere to find it. The richer and stronger cannot help, since they themselves are coarse, dishonest and drunk, using the same foul language. The most insignificant little clerk or official treats peasants like tramps, even talking down to elders and churchwardens, as though this is their right. And after all, could one expect help or a good example from the mercenary, greedy, dissolute, lazy people who come to the village now and then just to insult, fleece and intimidate the peasants?

While greater in absolute terms, the treachery of having someone direct your productive activity through the course of a day's employment nevertheless becomes routine. Hey, something is expected of you, something is expected of them; this is how we all get through the day. It's a betrayal, but nothing personal. This is the good business model; it preempts disruption very well, in my view.

But the betrayals that come from others subordinated by the same set of circumstances; really, these are a marvel to behold! Perhaps the bosses, by virtue of their position, enjoy the luxury; or else they observe the advantage which derives from not making things too personal. Only the idiots risk their salaries for their subordinates. But what the contemporary serf wouldn't do to brandish his rank to the rank-and-file. Yes, it is terrible working with these people; nevertheless you know what they contend with on a daily basis, and there is little in their lives which does not provide some excuse ...

Yeah, buddies

Bloomberg Businessweek:

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

"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

"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

"[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

"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

"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"

"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

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.