Teabonics

It's hard to think of a context in which liberals would make fun of poor people on the basis that they can't spell. But god forbid that poor person is also ignorant!

Command and control

Land and People:

Syria was able to build a low debt, high foreign reserve economy under a "command-type" economy, which mitigated the impacts of the financial crash. But now, they have to introduce neo-liberal economy in order for the new plutocracy to empty the coffers and to destroy the productive sectors, agriculture and industry.

China, on the other hand, wants to develop the productive sectors of its economy while retaining some measure of control. This forms the centerpiece complaint of US capital in its ongoing trade dispute with China, as reported in a feature article by BusinessWeek:

A Jan. 26 letter to the White House from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Software Alliance, and more than a dozen other groups representing hundreds of multinationals such as Microsoft, Boeing, Motorola, Caterpillar, and United Technologies, warned of "systematic efforts by China to develop policies that build their domestic enterprises at the expense of U.S. firms."

Or yesterday's Financial Times:

[M]any US industries complain that they face significant non-tariff barriers to trade”, the report said. “These barriers include, for example, regulations that set high thresholds for entry into service sectors such as banking, insurance and telecommunications . . . and the use of questionable sanitary and phytosanitary measures to control import volumes.”

As an aside, it's worth noting that the World Trade Organization defines "sanitary and phytosanitary measures" as "ensuring that your country’s consumers are being supplied with food that is safe to eat" -- which from the perspective of US exporters is doubtless used against them, since few such standards apply here.

Stripped of its technical language, the US-China trade dispute is a power struggle between US capital and a foreign government not yet subordinated to its needs. Daniel Ikenson of the Cato Institute, writing in today's Wall Street Journal, underscores the point that "trade" is a misnomer which describes the overseas operations of US companies, so that a tariff on "Chinese imports" would in fact penalize US firms:

Consider how many fewer iPods Apple would sell; how many fewer jobs iPod production, distribution and sales would support; how much lower Apple's profits and research and development expenditures would be; how much smaller the markets for music and video downloads, car accessories, jogging accessories, and docking stations would be; and how many fewer jobs those industries would support. Multiply that by the hundreds of other devices and gadgets, computers and Blu-Rays, and other products designed in the U.S. and assembled in China from components made in the U.S. and elsewhere.

As the US-China trade debate heats up, it's worth keeping some of these considerations in mind. Moreover, it's instructive to consider how little ordinary Americans or Chinese factor into the overall equation, except as political afterthoughts.

The most affordable benefits are no benefits at all

Wall Street Journal:

The rise in public-sector benefits has attracted the ire of citizens like Paul Nelson, a semi-retired investor in Upper Saddle River, N.J. Mr. Nelson, 59 years old, has a son at Northern Highlands Regional High School, where the principal says the school may have to cut teachers and increase class size. "Most public employees have retirement and health-care plans that private-sector employees can only dream of," says Mr. Nelson.

This is true insofar as "having retirement and health-care plans" implies anticipating future needs and, in fact, meeting them. Admittedly, this costs money -- just like any benefit plan which delivers "benefits" to participants, rather than reneging under one pretense or another.

Perhaps private-sector employees "can only dream of" knowing, more or less, where they will stand when they retire -- or, as recent history would have it, whether they will retire at all. But that is hardly a standard worth emulating.

Western liberal values

Financial Times:

According to Inderjit Singh Jaijee, a Chandigarh-based human-rights activist and former state legislator, up to 40,000 farmers have taken their lives in the past 20 years. Many of their families are left destitute, receiving no state support.

“We’ve been projecting this problem of rural suicide since 1988, but there’s been no response from the government -- even to accept the fact of suicide,” said Mr Jaijee.

If only the Indian government, the banks, developers, etc. did a better job educating the newly landless on the point that violence is never the answer!

Discretionary income

Wall Street Journal:

[S]hortly after the bill's passage last week, insurers contended the law didn't require them to accept sick children until 2014.

The insurance industry's lobby, America's Health Insurance Plans, said the law meant only that they needed to cover treatments for sick children who already were customers.

You see, from the private insurer's perspective, covering treatments for sick children who are already customers requires a law.

The empire strikes back

Wall Street Journal:

"They are simply beasts," [Russian President Dmitry Medvedev] said of those who organized the attacks. "We will find and destroy them all."

Because anything less would be uncivilized!

A moveable sandwich

Justin Fox, Financial Times:

It can no longer be argued with a straight face that markets will, on their own, arrive at something close to an economically optimal result -- a belief that helped drive deregulation over the past few decades. Yet it is not as if anyone else would do a better job than markets at setting prices and allocating capital. They would probably do worse.

In that case, it's doubly important that we never try!

Just imagine if someone came up with "a good idea" that addressed material needs in a rational way. Like, if people didn't have enough food, you could give them some. In other words, food that was originally in one location -- for example, behind a wall, or "down the street" -- could be moved nearer to one hungry person's stomach -- deposited into their hands, for example.

This wouldn't be accomplished through a market mechanism so much as on the basis that hungry people exist, food exists -- and you are trying to bridge that physical boundary between the two. In this respect, it is not unlike the "astronaut" and "space" in the engineering challenges it poses to the best of human minds.

In the longer term, you might try to set up some kind of "system" in which people grow their own food, and then eat the very same food after the fact, so they aren't always dependent on somebody else for this kind of "eating technology." Eating, widely regarded as the best remedy for not eating, would then become accepted as something everyone does on a daily basis.

Naturally, if someone came up with an idea that sophisticated, they would probably fare badly. For one thing, they might want for lack of an exchange system primed on the preferences of those with plenty of food, who might say unkind things, or be otherwise unsupportive. "When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist," in the words of just such a soul, who left the CSR luncheon with hurt feelings.

Most important, however, is the lesson that in trying we sometimes fail, whereas in failing, and failing on a daily basis, it becomes normal not to try. And that is what we must keep doing as best we can, if we never want to come up with a good idea.

Tonight's specials

Financial Times:

“Everything they put on the table helps the banks disproportionately compared with homeowners,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic & Policy Research, a left-leaning think-tank. “Because the Federal Housing Administration will be guaranteeing these loans, when they go bad it’s the taxpayer out of that money, not the banks.”

Everything they put on the table helps the banks, the insurance companies, the employers, and so on, disproportionately compared with the homeowners, patients, employees, etc.  This they call "reform": bribing the powerful in order to induce marginal improvements for the weak.  Of course, when so little consideration is given to human welfare in the first place, small improvements can have enormous effects -- as when one is employed vs. unemployed, for example; or has health insurance vs. none, a roof over their head, etc.   

But the metaphor of the table is very useful.  Let us remember that what is put on the table is always a function of whatever interests are at the table in the first place.  If ordinary people spend most of their days chasing after the aspirations of their employers first, and families second; or otherwise fail in the task of distinguishing between the two, then they are not at the table of national deliberation at all.  Other interests have assumed this role, because it has been made available, and they can afford to be there.

Eventually, Americans will have to recognize the injury that is done when our best energies are directed toward ends that, in the bigger picture, have never been our own.  Always remember Nietzche: if we give away that amount of reason, earnestness, will, self-mastery, which constitute our real selves, for one thing, we don't have it for another.  Naturally, many comforts are lost in pursuit of this truth; but what we give away for comfort we don't have for other things.  These are not easy questions.

Returning to our metaphor of the table.  There is an excellent quote which if you have followed this blog long enough you may recognize, and which I first learned from a corporate manager quoted in the Financial Times: If you don't have a seat at the table, you'll end up on the menu.

This means us: The spectacle of the steeping tea

It's probably worth saying a word about the right-wing response to liberal health reform, which has been animated, and which has produced even greater animations.

Tea-baggery in the United States is to my mind a popular expression of discontent that is sanctioned and directed by capital (and just for clarity, by "capital" I mean the class interests of those large investors and executive managers who control the productive wealth of the country, as well as that bureaucratic caste in their cultural and political employ -- politicians, editors, etc.).

This popular discontent is sanctioned to the degree it can be dovetailed into capital's perennial fear that "big government" will be used for any purpose other than its own -- e.g., the welfare of the general population.

The class conflict between capital and, say, those rural communities who have seen their manufacturing jobs evaporate is obscured in a direct appeal by capital to the population that big government is trampling on everybody's rights. Ordinary people know their rights are being trampled, and capital supplies a slick PR spectacle to illustrate how, in Jeffersonian terms, big government is doing it.

Capital then plays the spectacle back to liberal audiences, highlighting the unwashed and uninformed qualities of the tea-baggers themselves. The prejudices of the aspiring professional are played against those of the beleaguered hourly; this sums up the civil strife implicit in our two-party politics nicely, while the differences between elites are smoothed over in the service of capital.

In consideration of all things Tea & Bag™, it is worth remembering which portion of the spectacle is meant to appeal to our own prejudices, and to weigh our judgments not solely against how the spectacle is received by others.

This white man's burden

Max Boot, Wall Street Journal:

[W]hat happens if the U.S. switches spending from defense to social welfare? Who will protect what used to be known as the "Free World"? Who will police the sea lanes, stop the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, combat terrorism, respond to genocide and other unconscionable human rights violations, and deter rogue states from aggression? Those are all responsibilities currently performed by America.

I won't presume to speak for the world, but I suspect that if you asked it, quite a lot of what is described here as an American responsibility might be counterposed as an international responsibility.

However, as is customary in the human bogarting of power, those closest to a monopoly will dispute that anyone else is up to the task, while everyone else will resent them for it, eliciting hostility where with greater cooperation there might have been none -- not to mention editorials detailing the noble obligations of power in concentrate.

The upshot is that we manage to spend huge sums of money on servicing this delicate state of affairs for the mutual benefit of none!

The propriety of the spectacle

Guardian UK:

[L]ook more closely and you'll find that the man identified in the report as Britain's third most influential "pro-Islamic" blogger is actually an atheist based in the United States.

Isn't it funny when you watch a movie like The Bourne Identity and the intelligence services are depicted as menacingly competent, outfitted with technologies that Apple hasn't even come out with yet?

A friend tells me that many of the "CSI"s, as well as something called an "Anderson Cooper 360," utilize many of these same unexplained innovations in their regular broadcasts.

Thanks to The Angry Arab News Service

Social Security and You: Friends Till the End

New York Times:

Now that landmark legislation overhauling the health insurance system is about to become law, addressing Social Security’s solvency could well become the next big thing for President Obama and Congressional Democrats.

I like to think of Social Security as being solvent until 2044. I pick this date randomly, based on nothing more than what the Congressional Budget Office expects.

Anybody concerned about the solvency of Social Security after this date, when it will still pay out three-quarters of projected benefits, has one of two choices: 1) divert money to Social Security anytime between now and 2044; 2) accept that Social Security is doomed and there is nothing anybody can do about it except raise the retirement age and slash benefits.

Granted, if your government is spending lots of money in other areas, it may be hard to find money to support a program like Social Security. But there is probably money somewhere. Can you think of something that the United States is spending a lot of money on these days that is more important to you than your quality of life after a lifetime of work? Just think if your government stopped doing something really expensive and used that money to make your retirement even nicer, earlier, or both! That might make good fiscal sense, from your point of view.

Gross domestic products

Financial Times:

One of the more remarkable facts about recent history is that, for all the exuberance of stock and property markets, the last seven years were a rather thin time for the American economy.

From the trough of the 2002 recession – as measured by the National Bureau of Economic Research – to that in 2009, real US gross domestic product grew on average only 1.7 per cent a year. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta calculates that only straight after the second world war, when the economy shrank in real terms, has growth been weaker in any trough-to-trough period since 1933.

Remember when times were good and you could maintain your standard of living by playing the introductory APR of one credit card off another? Those were the days!

Health reform

Health reform, as I am reading it, consolidates the political power of the for-profit health industry by forcing everyone to buy their product, designed as it is for the purposes of profit, not care. So there is a real problem with the product, which always wants to cut corners on people's needs in order to direct resources away from care.

The legislation we are looking at does nothing to address this fundamentally, so we are still faced with an extremely expensive system that will surely dedicate its new, nationally mandated revenue stream toward fighting whatever proponents think is "the next step" on the path of reform, having achieved their "foothold." The government will now guarantee the market of the very lobby which obstructs meaningful health care reform; it is hard to see this as a stepping stone to anything but a much bigger fight.

From the perspective of the most vulnerable, the uninsured, there is a moral imperative to getting people on some kind of insurance, one way or the other. But that hardly makes one excited to see women's rights and other serious political considerations go right out the window.

We, the large institutional investors and our corporate clients

John C. Bogle, BusinessWeek:

[O]ur corporations are no longer controlled by "persons" (i.e., individual shareholders). Some 70% of the shares of big publicly held corporations are held by "agents" -- the institutional investors who manage our mutual funds, pension funds, insurance and trust companies, and endowment funds.

These agents -- who together hold working control of Corporate America -- have all too often failed to honor their responsibilities of corporate stewardship, and they actively vote their proxies far too rarely. The record, as far as I know, is bereft of a single proxy proposal submitted by a mutual fund or pension fund investor in opposition to a corporation's management. The temptation for agents to take advantage of their agency position for their own benefit is too great. Large institutional investors, for instance, routinely manage the retirement plans and thrift plan portfolios of the very corporations whose shares they own. As the saying goes: "There are only two types of clients we do not want to offend: actual and potential."

Most institutional money managers today are owned by giant U.S. and global financial conglomerates with their own shareholders. Of America's 40 largest, 23 are owned by conglomerates, 8 are publicly held, and only 9 remain privately owned.

Whoever said class power can't be completely convoluted without being entirely straightforward?

Every landmark, a trademark

Rob Long, Wall Street Journal:

[T]hat's the problem with public art: It's almost always a nuisance. Your idea of a challenging and provocative sculpture is my idea of a rusty slab of metal. You want to eat lunch on a sunny day on a plaza that I want to fill with tiny, dwarf-like replicas of Marshal Tito. The problem with public space is that it's public, and if there's one thing the public won't easily accept, it's when someone -- usually the government, or some nonprofit -- sticks some art somewhere irritating, i.e., somewhere not in a museum.

Oh, yes: when it comes to sticking something irritating in my public space, the first culprit that comes to my mind is the power-hungry art curator.

American beauty

6th or 7th:

In our society, when it snows...what do we do? Do we take it as a sign that we should slow down and appreciate that something beautiful has happened? Of course not. We don't even take the time to play in it and enjoy it. We immediately coat it in salt and chemicals to turn it into a sludgy, disgusting brown slush, and plow it to the sides of the road (without regard to whether this blocks walking routes), to enable ourselves to risk our lives by going out in it in our cars and rushing off to our jobs. Most of my coworkers react with puzzled horror when I say I like snow. You have to clean it off your car, they say, and then you have to drive in it to get to work. Yes, I say, but it's beautiful.

Wholly dependent on employment for life, we are intolerant when life intrudes on our relationship with employers. Whether it comes in the form of precipitation, commuters, colleagues, the intransigence of a child, the death of a friend, or a summons to serve on a jury of our peers; everything authentic about being alive is regarded with scorn or alarm, because this is how our bosses see it. In the words of Proudhon, we are watchful for their prejudices even more than their orders.

Capital, as Marx points out, is money in motion. When money stops moving -- whether by snow or by strike -- that civilization premised on its accumulation falls to pieces. The obstruction becomes an obsession, both for the beneficiaries of capital as for their dependents.

Where no man has gone before without a packed lunch

Financial Times:

Just as the 19th-century American pioneers believed it was their “manifest destiny” to push west to the Pacific Ocean, Nasa was founded partly on the faith that human destiny calls us to move beyond Earth, first to the moon and then into the solar system and eventually through the galaxy.

I have faith that my human destiny calls me to move beyond Earth -- first to the moon, then into the solar system, and eventually through the galaxy; but whether or not I will ever have enough vacation days to fulfill my destiny is the subject of some doubt.

The global factory

John Bolton, Wall Street Journal:

... Obama is different. He is our first post-American president. He looks beyond American exceptionalism and believes that our role on the world stage should be merely one nation among many.

That our role on the world stage should be merely one nation among many, after all, is an attitude best suited to our employers.

The wages of sin is breadth

Thomas Frank, Wall Street Journal:

Back in January, for instance, [the Texas State Board of Education] struck the author of "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" from a list of people for third-graders to study because it got him confused with the similarly named author of "Ethical Marxism," a book that, according to board member Pat Hardy, makes "very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system."

Priceless.

More special interests

Financial Times:

The criticism ... strikes at the heart of his presidency, raising the question of whether a White House that has vowed to make bold changes will be able to accomplish such change while lawmakers on Capitol Hill rely on corporations, unions and other special interests to finance their election campaigns.

Corporations, unions, indigenous peoples, the air we breathe, and so on -- every one of them a "special interest."

Example: Those special interests really muck up the legislative process, boy!

Reasons of state

Financial Times:

Combating the disaffection that has fuelled the Taliban’s resurgence in Kandahar will be one of the west’s hardest tasks. “You have to get people to believe that government by crypto-warlord syndicate is not necessarily inevitable or permanent,” the US official said.

In nation building, as in life, knowing what you stand for is much better than thinking you know what you stand for, if only for reasons of knowing.

Greece

New York Times:

[I]t is still difficult to explain to outsiders why the Greek government has identified at least 580 job categories deemed to be hazardous enough to merit retiring early — at age 50 for women and 55 for men.

Greeks retire too early -- and Americans retire too early, too! Whatever age you are currently eligible to retire at, you should really start thinking about why it is unreasonable. If you need an expert with a chart to help explain this to you, that is no problem.

In a democracy, the retirement age of a society, or for particular categories of workers, is something that the society would figure out; it is an expenditure to be weighed against all other expenditures, in this way evaluated on the basis of importance.

However, the New York Times would like to emphasize that this doesn't take into account the feelings of "outsiders" -- those helpful folks who provide financing for your long-term goals, you know, because "they got the cash." It just happens that when you can't pay back your good friends in finance, their preferences become very important! Suddenly, your friends have a lot of advice to give with regard to how you run your life, and how it might not meet their expectations. Far be it from good friends to contrive just such a scenario with their own interests in mind!

A sane society might recognize the conflict of interest between the power-aspirations of a money-lending class and the public welfare -- doubtless the inspiration behind Jefferson's warning that banks are "more dangerous to liberty than standing armies." It is a very good question why matters of public finance should remain within the private sphere at all, even if this is beyond the scope of any one nation to resolve.

Capital ideas

Financial Times:

Since Mr Bajnai’s technocratic government took power last April, Hungary has abolished the so-called 13-month pension and from 2012 the retirement age will start rising from 62 to 65. Pensions have been indexed to inflation with increases conditional on strong economic growth. The state has also cut child support benefits for stay-at-home parents, abolished an interest-rate subsidy for home buyers and tightened criteria for other benefits.
...
[T]hese efforts have been geared towards incentivising Hungarians to rejoin the workforce.

Anytime there's money to be made from employing people at a lesser cost than the value of what they produce, how quickly do independent notions like "parenting" and "retirement" become interwoven with "the need to work."

Special interests

Wall Street Journal:

Some of the largest U.S. business groups announced a multimillion-dollar television advertising campaign aimed at defeating the Democrats' pending health-care legislation, as both backers and opponents of the initiative sought to target wavering lawmakers in what is expected to be the final phase of the legislative process.

The business coalition, Employers for a Healthy Economy, said it would run between $4 million and $10 million of ads targeting the districts of several dozen Democratic lawmakers, carrying the message that the bill would cause job losses. The ads are being funded by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other trade associations that represent a broad swath of industry.

...

Several big labor unions and progressive organizations are running $70,000 in TV ads in Washington through an organization called Health Care for America Now. The ads tell Congress to "listen to us, not the insurance companies. Pass health-care reform now."

A notable custom in the business-run society is to chalk democratic dysfunction up to the prevalence of "special interests" in politics. This category includes not only those interests which own and control the productive wealth of society, but also those concerns which have developed in direct response to this monopoly power, and whose financing springs forth only from its crumbs. Thus we bear witness to the perennial construction "Corporations, unions..." as it is used in actual sentences by actual human beings who actually believe it has some meaning.

Good morning spider

My Marxist feminist dialectic brings all the boys to the yard 2

Like the relations between all people, the relations between men and women are social relations: they have at their core a creative process which governs their possibilities. Circumstances which are friendly to the development of these creative abilities are likely to yield a diversity of outcomes, but surely offer the best hope in securing that kind fellowship between men and women which seems "naturally" inspired, if broadly elusive among contemporary social relations. Conversely, we can expect that circumstances which are hostile to the creative impulse between people will produce a corresponding hostility within their relations, as they inhibit that creative impulse required to overcome social problems in a collaborative way.

As related in the previous post, the tendency toward subservience and dehumanization in the act of creating (i.e., production) has wide-ranging implications within a totalizing system. Furthermore, the fact that "freedom" is only really experienced in the acts of consumption and exchange will naturally lend psychological reinforcement to these acts as compared to others. In other words, within a consumer society, power is experienced as autonomy in the marketplace, and slavery within production. Let us remember that this is not lost on the human psyche as it engages other realms of experience.

Power obviously enters into the human sexual experience in profound ways, with sexuality being one of the sharpest fault lines existing between (in this case, heterosexual) men and women. Introducing patriarchy into our analysis colors in the location of men and women within the productive/consumptive hierarchy -- in other words, men and women assume different degrees of authority both as producers and consumers, with men enjoying distributive advantages overall. These advantages are evident both within production and within the marketplace, as men are overrepresented as bosses, and commodities are often designed by men for consumption by both men and women (or just men).

In a "dictatorship of production" largely run by men for their needs, which is additionally ever-expanding into new realms of human experience, the commodification of female sexuality is plain to see, not only in the strict sense of pornography, but in the pornographic forms in which women, presented as "finished products," are distributed within the mainstream. This "consumer-oriented" approach to women is very deeply held by men, reinforced by that personal liberty which is the exclusive domain of market relations, and which men do not experience anywhere else. That creative capacity which men naturally possess remains unreferenced; it is not used at work, and it is not applicable in the market. It lies undeveloped to a significant degree.

It is important to emphasize the extent to which the creative impotence which men experience through a subjugated work experience is mutually reinforced by the power-urge men experience as consumers, where their creative abilities don't apply. The very social relation which men most desire but struggle to navigate has been commodified into an object which must now compete with others of its kind for mens' approval. Men have been transformed through market relations from objects of production into gods which the female-sexual-commodity is designed to serve. Suffice it to say, after a long day at work, this must be "nice!"

This regularly contributes to a sort of two-facedness amongst men in their personal relationships with women. This can manifest itself as the maintenance of one "face" amongst their girlfriends -- deferential, considerate, etc. -- while revealing a very different face, the face of consumption and exchange, which is shared between men in relation to women. Alternately, men will attempt to keep their relations to women-as-commodities a secret from everyone, not admitting any relation to pornography, for example, despite the fact that they can be more "invested" in this mode of sexuality than they are with the women in their lives. As a point of practicality, it is always easier to consume commodities than it is to create social relations, which under capitalism are mediated by commodities, and therefore frustrated, at each turn.

Investigating the relations between men and women from the point at which Marxism and feminism converge is useful because it suggests that the obstacles to a genuine fellowship basically implicate us all, and so make it that much harder to browbeat men in a simplistic, moralizing way. Men should go much further in listening to women, which is at least one creative act most people can summon for lack of anything else, not to mention the most basic kind of courtesy. However, what men are up against is all around them, constructed by their kind and set in motion, but not always with their consent or even full understanding of what is happening to them or how it affects their relations with others. Needless to say, women can unwittingly play into their own subjugation as well.

Patriarchal consumer culture effectively exploits the vulnerabilities of the male sex drive, which is visual and immediate, and plays them against the kind of subjugation which men frequently experience at work, and the creative impotence they experience generally within social relations as they are shaped by capitalism. It makes relating to women as objects easy, and heightens the reward in a way that many of us, as men, have never experienced in an analogous, self-directed way.

My Marxist feminist dialectic brings all the boys to the yard 1

Last week we discussed how every commodity, or "product," is the outcome of a process which is completed before it enters the marketplace. It is, in other words, a "finished product," with no dynamic social role to play except as an object of consumption, or an object of exchange. For Marx, its social characteristics are that of "congealed labor": whatever creative process went into making the commodity is now embedded within the object, and beyond our reach as consumers, except at the abstract level of value.

One of the big points Marx wants to make about capitalism is that it is a totalizing system. In other words, insofar as capital is accumulated in certain ways, a system based on capital accumulation will want to pursue these means endlessly, into every corner of human experience. Whatever is not already "commodified" -- reduced to an object of consumption or exchange -- will come under assault by the unfolding logic of that process by which capital is produced.

Because one of the characteristics of capitalism is a "dictatorship within production," to use my unwieldy description, the people who make things generally don't have much control, either over "the making" or over the finished product they have made. As you may have observed in your everyday experience, this can make "work" one of the more unpleasant experiences in life. Whatever else work may be -- challenging, rewarding, etc. -- it is mostly something you don't have a lot of control over one way or the other.

This changes when we enter the marketplace, and take on the role of consumers. Divorced from the act of creation, we are now invited into acts of consumption and exchange. As Guy Debord points out in The Society of the Spectacle, this is hugely significant at the level of psychology: we have spent our working day disempowered and tread upon; suddenly, we are given the power to make our own choices and to value our own judgment within the world of commodities.

The implications of this are especially thought-provoking when we consider just how far consumer culture has been assimilated into "culture." Last week I brought up consumer culture in its "political" form: we look at politics not as a social process of interacting with and influencing other people, but as a marketplace of competing commodities which we consume as an expression of our savvy judgment or as a reflection of our "values." Consider also nationalism and patriotism, which are often expressed as "finished products" which you either accept or reject, rather than as social processes which people contribute to; "if you are going to criticize this country, go live somewhere else," etc.

The issue I wanted to focus on today, however, relates to the conflict between men and women as it is informed by the sexual commodification of women.

Part 2

US politics from a Marxist perspective

From a Marxist perspective, liberalism and conservatism are categories that contain different class interests. If we want to understand US politics from a class perspective, then we have to begin by identifying these horizontal divisions, concealed as they are behind official appeals to "right" and "left."

Seeking to incorporate disparate class interests, liberalism and conservatism reflect both popular and elite concerns. In their popular expressions, liberalism argues that the government should do what its citizens want, while conservatism argues that the government shouldn't do what its citizens don't want. Taken strictly from the popular vantage point, it is easy to see that what is proposed as an intractable conflict is really just a restatement of the same principle: the government should conform to the expectations of its citizens.

The elite concerns embedded within the liberal/conservative paradigm are mutually reinforcing in the same way. A liberalism beholden to capital will use "big government" to further the aims and purposes of capital, as we have seen in the case of financial bailout, for example. Elite conservatism will then complete the circle by screaming "socialism" and demanding that "big government" be drastically reduced in all areas not subordinated to capital. In this way, the parties seek to present themselves in opposition, when in fact they argue two sides of the same position: the government must service the needs of capital, irrespective of other considerations.

For these reasons, it may be helpful to approach liberal and conservative categories not as coherent antagonists, but rather as incoherent categories best understood through the lens of class conflict. The upshot is that we cannot fully understand "liberal" and "conservative" appeals independent of their class implications. In other words, we cannot take for granted that these terms mean any one thing if we accept that they are comprised intrinsically of competing elements.

Someone else's retirement is yours to plan

Financial Times:

The White House on Friday announced plans to help protect workers' retirement savings accounts, which have been severely hit during the financial crisis, by imposing new regulations on the financial advice given to employees.

The regulations, unveiled by vice-president Joe Biden as part of the annual report of his middle class taskforce, are aimed at preventing conflicts of interest when employees consult financial advisers on their 401(k) and individual retirement account (IRA) plans.

The new rules would require retirement investment advisers and money managers to either base their advice on computer models that have been certified as independent, or they would prohibit them from suggesting workers to invest in funds with which they are affiliated or from which they receive commissions.

Personally, I'd love to "prevent conflicts of interest" when it comes to investing my retirement savings in the stock market. One big conflict I would like to prevent, for example, concerns depositing my retirement savings into what is by the standards of recent history a very bad place to deposit it, unless you are a very altruistic person, content to make your finances available for someone else to "retire" with.

But like so many important life decisions, I am left with no viable alternative, and so must remain grateful for my economic freedoms.

Partners in prosperity

Foreign Affairs:

In 2008, Goldman Sachs launched one of the private sector's most ambitious initiatives: a $100 million commitment to provide 10,000 women in emerging economies, such as India and Nigeria, with a business education. The firm is not motivated by altruism alone: when Goldman's CEO and chair, Lloyd Blankfein, speaks about the program, he never fails to mention that the company's own research has shown that educating women leads to greater labor-force participation, higher productivity, and higher returns on investment. Put simply, directing resources to women is good for business.

"[T]he combination of female education and pervasive wage discrimination can create a pool of well-skilled but inexpensive female labor. In itself, this may lead to more investment in industries dominated by female labor. Higher returns to industries that fed on female-intensive light manufacturing played a role in the rapid growth rates seen in Southeast Asia."

-- Goldman Sachs, Global Economics Paper No: 164

Soundtrack to a successful career

Special thanks to TheBaronette

Institutional intelligence

Financial Times:

[T]he same dynamic is taking place at every level. Each middle manager is a fresh obstacle to the flow of truth up a hierarchy of wastebaskets.

As I like to say, anytime one jackass makes the decisions for an entire organization, what could possibly go wrong?

Certain things are illuminated

Every commodity is the result of a process which ends for our consideration. As consumers, we are educated with a view toward the "finished product," and away from the process which created it.

The consumer approach is often misapplied in areas of process, including social relationships. Not seeing what he wants, the "political consumer" insists he must go to that place where people share his point of view. Looking upward, he sees it illuminated.

An anatomy of power

Always remember that "right" and "left" are horizontal appeals to a hemisphere that is necessarily vertical. This explains their political utility.

Much like the human body, the lower orders of the social organism may be arranged on a straight line to coincide with the higher; still, the foot will always be closer to foot than it is to the shoulder.

Fortunate sons

Being a man is like being beautiful: you get credit without ever having applied yourself, and the details are usually worked out by somebody else.

Thanks to Elizabitchez

Introducing the spectacular Sarah Palin

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle:

The spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification.  As a part of society, it is that sector where all attention, all consciousness, converges.

In its simplest sense, the "spectacle" might be described as the industrial production of information under capitalism. Like any industrial production of this sort, it assumes particular social implications of the Marxist variety -- a dictatorship within production, an ever-expanding scope of production, and the centralization of all production -- which alienate people both from the work they perform and from each other. When the commodity produced is information, however, reality itself is something we experience as it has been manufactured, only to be reinforced by our social manner of experiencing it.

"Populism" has entered the language of our of day, understood as a popular reaction against "elites." The class character of the language is appropriate, particularly in light of the portion of the US working class from which it is presently derived. For 30 years now, those workers closest to industrial production have experienced an unrelenting assault by capital which has put them in direct competition with the most desperate subjects of the so-called developing world. US workers, unable to approximate the lack of rights or the scale of impoverishment, have been punished by losing industrial capacity to their more "competitive" rivals. Whole communities have been upended, and it is safe to say that an entire way of life for these workers has been summarily destroyed. Capital has explained it as a way to reproduce itself for the benefit of a retooled, information-based economy; but it already has its eyes trained on new victims within the IT and professional-based sectors. "Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks,” in the words of Marx.

Sarah Palin has emerged from the wreckage carrying the banner of "populist" revolt. The "emergence" of Palin is instructive in itself: At the forefront of a movement against elites, the movement endeavors to enshrine "one of its own" in the very apparatus of elitism they claim to despise as the root of all their problems: big government. Within the tea party movement, class conflict informs this contradiction, as the working class elements are solicited by capital to endorse "populism" in its commodity form. Alienated from a genuine populism of self-directed action, the tea partiers consume populism as it is manufactured nationally; and distributed to them in their homes, cars, and workplaces.

Liberals, who live at a greater distance from the front lines of industrial destruction, have watched the regression of "blue-collar" social life as an uninterrupted series of spectacles produced for their benefit, as it also happens to be produced by their kind. Liberalism, which favors the ascendancy of an educated, technocratic elite, possesses no language of populism, for it has turned its back on the working classes in order to assume elite status through a renewed alliance with capital. What this has yielded for liberalism's social mission is plain to see in the administration of Barack Obama, which is more likely to suspend the tax-supported stipends on which many Americans depend than it is to ever suspend its murderous and self-defeating "national security" efforts abroad -- though the budgetary implications are clear. Still, the distributional advantages which liberals enjoy within the working class have enabled them to forestall the wholesale destruction of their lifestyle; though with the ongoing transfer of wealth from workers to capital, the process is certainly off and running.

The identification of the working class with competing elite groups divides and conquers any possibility of an authentic American populism emerging in the near future. Alienated from each other, we are all the more susceptible to "uniting" around "that sector where all attention, all consciousness, converges." We can believe in "change" just so long as there is a public relations extravaganza which supports our impressions of it, and so long as those impressions are corroborated by others experiencing it at the same time. We believe in it insofar as it is a product, not of our own activity, but of accumulated capital pursuing its own ends.

Notes from the spectacle

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle:

The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.

Something that's good to appreciate about the market economy, as Marx would say, is that it amounts to a dictatorship within the realm of production. Anybody who's ever had a boss understands what this means.

The same can be said for anybody who's never owned a solar-powered car.  Wouldn't you like to own a solar-powered car?  That's too bad, because the consumer isn't in a position to decide what gets made; the consumer is only in a position to consume what gets made.  And, as anyone who has ever contemplated a telephone, internet, or cable bill can tell you, even the terms of consumption are set in accordance to the whims of the producer.  After all, what are you going to do?  Attempt to live without something over which a particular industry exerts a complete monopoly?  Why, that just wouldn't be modern -- post- or otherwise!

You, the individual consumer, have no power except to ratify those choices already made within production.  In the vernacular of our day, this is called freedom; and, in fact, the principle can be seen hard at work in our political system as well.  No doubt Karl Marx is laughing very hard about it -- but don't get sore, there's more!

Just as we are forced to choose between commodities not of our choosing, that which has become commodified is also a heady trip when you get to thinking about it.  Guy Debord, that bastard Frenchman who wrote like an ass, wrote lyrically about what happens when reality itself is transformed into a commodity, which we must take on somebody else's terms if we want to experience it -- not to mention remain connected to that community of consumers who now make up the modern world.  In this case we are talking about mass media as it informs consumer culture more generally.

I have a younger colleague at one of my jobs.  When I am able to speak authoritatively on some matter of commercial urgency -- the release of a new movie or electronic product -- we enjoy a warm working relationship.  The rest of our time, however, is comprised mostly of crickets and tumbleweeds.  It is a sad testament to the fact that we don't consume enough of the same things with the same enthusiasm, for it is only in consuming things that one exercises that degree of individuality to which others can relate.

Divorced from its commercial utility, individuality does not translate well.  In fact, it is often met with silence and a horrified expression.  Anything which lacks its own promotional budget cannot be communicated intelligibly without enormous effort, because nobody enjoys a preexisting familiarity with it.  As Guy Debord would say, our social relationships are mediated by the Spectacle:  we can talk to each other about Haiti as long as it is made real by the TV.  The rest of the time Haiti does not exist, so we can't talk about it.  And that's because nobody will have anything to say about Haiti unless it is on the TV.  If you had something to say about Haiti before it was on the TV, then you are a very odd bird, indeed, because nobody else shared that experience.  Nobody knew it could exist, or why it should.

More to say on this.

Take this job and comprehend it

Ladypoverty's sidebar portal to all things refreshed informs us that David Harvey has published A Companion to Marx's Capital, Vol 1, which just might make for some of the best work-related reading since the internet.

Naxanalysis

Financial Times:

The Naxalites feed on deprivation and the marginalisation of India’s forest-dwelling tribal people. They are canny at identifying local grievances. Well over three quarters of India’s 660,000 villages, for example, are not connected to a road and many have no drinking water, power, school or clinic. A new focus is on mining companies that extract rather than create local wealth, often at ruinous environmental cost.
...
The original Naxalite problem in West Bengal was largely resolved by (communist-led) land reform.

Little wonder that India's rural population is now considered the state's greatest security threat, what with their "canny" knack for "identifying local grievances" by, you know, experiencing them.

Farmland is for investors

Financial Times:

[Indian] security forces are slowly pushing into Maoist-held areas to battle the rebels, though local human rights groups accuse them of slaughtering innocent civilians then branding them as Naxal rebels.

Something tells me that when it comes to living within the sights of Indian developers, there is no such thing as an innocent civilian!

Fresh insights from the 19th century

Paul Craig Roberts, How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds/CounterPunch:

If Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin were alive today, they would be leading contenders for the Nobel Prize in economics.

Marx predicted the growing misery of working people, and Lenin foresaw the subordination of the production of goods to financial capital’s accumulation of profits based on the purchase and sale of paper instruments. Their predictions are far superior to the “risk models” for which the Nobel Prize has been given and are closer to the money than the predictions of Federal Reserve chairmen, US Treasury secretaries, and Nobel economists, such as Paul Krugman, who believe that more credit and more debt are the solution to the economic crisis.

While this may not be not something you often hear from former associate editors of The Wall Street Journal or Reagan administration treasury officials, occasionally we do find specimens near the top who, because they have a basic idea of what is going on, are only a few short analytical steps away from reaching the obvious conclusions.

What's remarkable to me is how those who have thought most deeply about contemporary economics are so successfully excluded from social awareness that every time someone hits upon some 150-year-old insight, it is as if we have reinvented the wheel. Last night I listened to a breathless NPR interview with an author who drew on "50 years of research" to support the view that people have an innate need for meaningful, creative work and that modern jobs are more or less at odds with this impulse -- so treating people like human beings might be a very good thing for productivity!

Classy repartee

Wall Street Journal:

"The fundamental aspect of globalization is urbanization, which is spreading everywhere. There isn't a single country in the world that isn't getting more and more urbanized, even the ones that are already quite urbanized, like this one and America," [Stephen Green, chairman and former CEO of HSBC] says. "Last year was the year when we crossed the point where more than half the world's population is in big cities. By 2050 it will be 80% of people who live in cities."

This is called a "Churchillian defense of markets" by the Journal. Do you know what a Churchillian defense of markets is? It is when you take Winston Churchill's quip about democracy being the worst form of government except for every other kind that's been tried, but attribute the undemocratic character of markets to "democracy." This then becomes your classiest rejoinder in any debate with humanity.

Vote for your class

Every political movement not explicitly based in class will have a class character which deserves to be understood. This is often true of movements which appeal to class, like the US labor federations, or political parties which claim to represent the working class, like the socialist and communist parties of many countries. Whatever their pretensions, the "communist governments" of the world are easily reducible to class; often in ways that are much more straightforward than their capitalist counterparts: you are either a member of the ruling party class or you are not.

What all of these examples share in common is the pursuit of state power as a political goal. Because the modern nation-state is a hierarchy which protects and reproduces ruling class power, the working class cannot help but to enter this arena at a disadvantage, if only because the vehicle for doing so -- the political party -- is always comprised of different classes. In the context of class conflict, this means party policy will always be set in accordance to the desires of the advantaged class.

This unholy alliance between working people and their rulers within competing political hierarchies, better known as electoral politics, is perhaps the most unexamined religious tendency within the United States today. Liberalism has facilitated the biggest wealth transfer from communities to the financial sector in US history, all while escalating imperial war aims and delivering zero to a population which lives, and regularly dies, with no right to medical care in the world's richest nation. Conservatism, meanwhile, has blossomed into an incoherent reaction to its own innate incoherency, trying as it might to reconcile a "free-market" of government contracts with Jeffersonian claptrap about less government and individual liberty.

In keeping with this tradition, a full year has been lost in empty speculation on why Obama has done this or hasn't done that, what he does or doesn't need to do now, and all manner of ludicrous counsel which willfully ignores the class character of virtually every adviser who staffs the White House. There is no reason to believe we can't expect seven more years of it.

The working class has one option to further its interests, and it is not in finding common cause with the ownership caste of the country, but in reconciling the differences within itself and striking at the economic heart of its enemy -- in the workplace and within communities -- where all class power is fundamentally derived.

See also BroadSnark

Blogroll

Of note on the blogroll: Machete 408, Poumista

Planning your day

Tough love

New York Times:

Q. What’s your view of fear as a management tool?

A. Fear is the best motivator.

Q. Are you a tyrant?

A. I’m sure many people would view me as difficult. If I ask you to do something and you say, “Geez, I don’t have enough time to do that.” Well, maybe I don’t have enough time to sign your check this week.

I love these guys who think they can just tell the truth about a situation without any imagination for how its unwilling participants might respond. Yes: threaten their livelihood. That always leads to predictable outcomes!

Taking on new responsibilities

Full size

Officer Friendly's guide to class conflict

Santa Fe Reporter:

“Inequality breeds conflict, and conflict breeds wasted resources,” [economist Samuel Bowles] says.

[I]n a very unequal society, the people at the top have to spend a lot of time and energy keeping the lower classes obedient and productive.

Inequality leads to an excess of what Bowles calls “guard labor.” In a 2007 paper on the subject, he and co-author Arjun Jayadev, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, make an astonishing claim: Roughly 1 in 4 Americans is employed to keep fellow citizens in line and protect private wealth from would-be Robin Hoods.

The job descriptions of guard labor range from “imposing work discipline” -- think of the corporate IT spies who keep desk jockeys from slacking off online -- to enforcing laws, like the officers in the Santa Fe Police Department paddy wagon parked outside of Walmart.

I find the easiest way to judge the inequality of a community is to note how its law enforcement personnel are dressed and equipped, among other tendencies.

If police look like they stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting, this suggests that they have nothing to fear but blacks and the errant white ne'er-do-well.

On the other hand, if cops begin to take on the appearance of storm troopers, requiring military-style armor and weaponry because "the criminals have become more sophisticated" this tells you something about the declining status of the white working class majority from which cops are recruited.

As inequality becomes more equal, greater ubiquity of force is required to protect the gains of the rich. This is what leads the police of many societies to take on the appearance of their army, or for the army to take on this role themselves.

Thanks to BLCKDGRD and The Angry Arab News Service

Jobs!

Something that is cool about having a job in the United States is that it brings you that much closer to having something to eat in the evenings. As a point of personal pride, this is something that I have aspired to for most of my adult life. Having a job helped make it happen -- I have to admit it. However, something that is cool about having two jobs in the United States is that you are pretty much set financially, unless you have reproduced into more than one person. As George Bush once said, isn't it great to live in a country where you can have three jobs?

Something that sucks about having a job in the United States is that you have go to it. This is probably the number one pet peeve of people with jobs. On top of that, there are many responsibilities which are placed on you with the expectation that you will care about them. Why anyone believes you will care about them is a very funny thing to discover, particularly if you don't care about them so passionately that you forget what they are. I have seen this happen so many times it makes me proud to be an American -- normally I am not a very patriotic person -- because the reason is always that you don't have any choice. Not having any choice is a very good reason to care about something, and this logic forms the basis of our very economy.

The Olympigs are here!

Women Wobblies organize first Starbucks in right-to-work state

Liberté Locke, Industrial Worker:

It was exactly one week before Christmas, which is Starbucks' busiest time of year. More importantly, the store manager, Lindsay Karsh, had declared it Partner (Employee) Appreciation Day. In past years, Partner Appreciation Day was when the manager would use company money to purchase pizza for all the workers as a sort of holiday gift right before Christmas. This year, on top of cutting hours, delaying raises, forcing baristas to work with H1N1 ("swine flu") [symptoms], and disrespecting workers, [Karsh] decided to save the store money and make the day a potluck. [The] workers -- who are struggling to survive and are making just above minimum wage -- were forced to buy their own food in order to participate.

Strangely enough, these women didn't act on their "freedom" to pursue another employer in the middle of a recession. Maybe they weren't the ones who deserved to be inconvenienced, after all!

Consider their example.

A note about class

The Existence Machine:

Many of us —- perhaps the majority of us who are relatively privileged enough to be salaried professionals —- are even constrained from describing our own situation as a form of slavery, so completely have we internalized these ideological biases, so narrowly have we defined freedom for ourselves. Yet how free do we really feel?

Probably one of the greatest misconceptions when it comes to Marx relates to the way he understands class and everything which proceeds from it: class conflict; class struggle; and the goal of a classless society.

Most of this misunderstanding owes to the prevailing use of "class" as a comparative measure of income within the liberal democracies: There are "upper," "middle," and "lower" classes.

For Marx, this conception of class as a specific location in an income hierarchy has little usefulness because, in contrast with economic liberalism, "having lots of money" is not the defining measure of human freedom. Human freedom means having control over your life.

The reason why "having money" is the loftiest goal in capitalism is precisely because capitalism doesn't offer anything else, and that is the point Marx is getting at when he frames his notion of class. For Marx, class is a relationship to those things required to have control over one's life -- and you either have possession of these things or you don't. This is what Marx meant by the "haves" and the "have-nots"; in his view, the history of human society is best understood in terms of the conflict between them.

What is useful about the Marxist understanding of class is that it is principally concerned with power, not outcomes. If we accept the liberal definition of class, then, as above, being a "salaried professional" imparts "privilege." Needless to say, this is true in some ways. But Marx would merely point out that what is given can just as easily be taken away, and that makes one a slave to circumstances; not to mention the whims of an employing (read: possessing) class.

How we roll

BusinessWeek:

Jetting off to Europe isn't exactly Genevieve Repsher's style. As a single mom earning $9 an hour in the cafeteria at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., "I struggle to pay my bills," she says.

As a single mom earning $9 an hour in the cafeteria at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., being able to pay her bills isn't exactly Genevieve Repsher's "style."

Freedom isn't free

Wall Street Journal:

At a swearing-in ceremony marking the start of his second four-year term, Mr. Bernanke said the central bank's independence serves important public objectives.

"Critically, it allows the Federal Open Market Committee to make monetary policy in the longer-term economic interests of the American people, rather than in the service of short-term political imperatives," the Fed chief said.

Because "short-term political imperatives" might include knowing what the Fed is doing -- for example, through an accounting practice known as "an audit" -- the Federal Open Market Committee must strike down this threat to the "interests of the American people" with the sword of "independence" and the hammer of forgetting everything that has transpired in the past 15 months.

Earning the right to live

Michael Barone, Wall Street Journal:

Why has the politics of economic redistribution had such limited success in America? One reason is that Americans, unlike Western Europeans, tend to believe that there is a connection between effort and reward and that people can work their way up economically. If people do something to earn their benefits, like paying Social Security taxes, that's fine. But giving money to those who have not in some way earned it is a no-no.

I've always enjoyed business narratives that ascribe the average American's inferior working experience to some intrinsic preference -- as if the fact that we don't enjoy as much vacation time or paid parental leave can best be explained by our "national values," not merely the values of our employers as they are administered nationally.

Equality under the maw

New York Times:

Critics argue that the presence of gay service members makes the military less unified and effective. There is strong evidence that this is not so, including the experiences of nations, such as Canada and Britain, where gays serve openly. A policy of driving out good and talented people -- including ones with much-needed skills in Arabic, Farsi, and other languages -- makes the military less effective.

Insofar as we have institutions, it would be a very nice gesture if they didn't discriminate.

Having said that, it might be a welcome change if we began to discriminate -- at least insofar as we have institutions.

Friends to the rescue

From each according to their ability

Raymond A. Joseph, Wall Street Journal:

Imagine what it would be like if, in a flash, all the centers of political and economic power, as well as the security apparatus of Washington, D.C., were completely flattened: no White House or Capitol Hill, no F.B.I. headquarters, and certainly no banks or restaurants. That's what happened in Haiti. The earthquake epicenter was a mere 10 miles away from the national seat of power.

Yes, imagine what it would like if, in a flash, all the centers of political and economic power, not to mention the "security apparatus" which sustains them, were completely flattened. Imagine what it would be like if there were no centers of political and economic power; if power was diffused.

Odds are we'd still have restaurants and credit unions. But remember how people from all walks of life behaved in the aftermath of 9/11 or Katrina -- or, in this case, Haiti -- by doing whatever they could to help people in need?

Now imagine if that were happening all the time, not just in the moments when the "centers of political and economic power" are knocked off balance.

Between friends

Financial Times:

[A]s the United Nations announced it would take decades for Haiti to recover from the massive January 12 earthquake and other natural disasters, there is a growing debate as to whether long-term prosperity will only come by giving up the pretence of independence.

Doesn't everyone deserve a little honesty between friends?