A short note for progressives on the internet

Glenn Greenwald, Inc.:

It hardly seemed possible for Israel -- after its brutal devastation of Gaza and its ongoing blockade -- to engage in more heinous and repugnant crimes.

I don't particularly care what Glenn Greenwald has to say about this. There are people who are invested in fate of the Palestinians, and most of them are Palestinian, not professional commentators whose authority comes from unrelated associations (as with Salon.com, a "law degree," or an ability to communicate well).

If Glenn Greenwald wants to be a go-to authority on everything topical because he is already in a position to do so, I don't necessarily blame him, but I don't particularly care what he has to say about issues that are beyond the realm of his own experience. No Palestinian in the world would ever make the statement that "it hardly seemed possible for Israel to engage in more heinous and repugnant crimes" when that has been the status quo for over half a century!

What this indicates to me is that reading Glenn Greenwald on the Palestinian question is, to a certain extent, a waste of my time; I could just as easily be reading the Lebanese writer, As'ad AbuKhalil, who surely has more stake in this than someone who is writing just to be relevant, pursuant to his career as a commentator. If I was really serious about the Palestinian question, I would find the English-language Palestinian writers who are actual authorities on these questions; I would not take "the scoop" from Glenn Greewald, or people like him, because what they have to say about it is meaningless absent other perspectives.

Film reviews: Whip It; Sex and the City 2

These are good movies. They are driven by strong female characters who are smart and have shit to say. Frequently, what they say is very funny; other times what they have to say is relevant. They speak from their own situations.

I can't help the fact that they are white and upper class, for example (as in the case of the entire Sex and the City series), or that their concerns are not my own. I have my own concerns. However, I have always appreciated the opportunity to see things from other perspectives; particularly perspectives that are so far removed from me that I would likely never encounter them otherwise. I have never been to a luxury hotel in Abu Dhabi, or had any concept of what they are like (even if the representations in S&TC are to some extent always caricatures); I find New York fashion fascinating, even if it is completely alien to me.

I won't say much about Whip It, because I think the film speaks for itself. Sex and the City is always where the controversy erupts.

A friend explained to me yesterday that Sex and the City is Die Hard for women. I think this is the best description I have heard. Nobody carps about Die Hard being unrealistic, or about Bruce Willis being too old. No, this gets saved up for the outlandish romps of women, which incidentally are not occupied with violence, but much more appealing pastimes, like hanging out with your friends and getting boffed. I have no objection to either of these things.

To the extent that Sex and the City swims in the ocean of commodities, well, so does everyone else in the developed world. That should be reason enough for self-reflection. It is hard to tell a story about anything without it being a story about consumption. Does it glorify it? No, we glorify it, and then we put it in our movies. I haven't put my finger on it, but something about Sex and the City bothers me less in this regard than most of the films which play at seriousness.

A final note for Sex and the City fans. This sequel is much better than the original, which seemed to suffer in its transition from television to the big screen. It works to its own logic much better, like the best of the HBO episodes.

Considering crises of consumerism

C.L.R. James, You Don't Play with Revolution:

Everything is a commodity.  My glasses are a commodity, cigarettes are commodities, tea is a commodity, the gramophone is a commodity, the tape recorder is a commodity -- everything is a commodity.  The important thing that I want you to remember in your study of Capital is Marx's insistence that the particular commodity that is important in the study of capital is the labor-power of the individual.  In all societies that are in any way developed, there is commodity production.   But that the man sells his labor, his labor-power -- a commodity -- to the capitalist, Marx says, once you begin there, the whole of capitalist society grows from that; that the labor-power of the human individual is sold as a commodity.

Like every culture, consumerism has its own language, and every time it speaks, it speaks of capital.

The language of consumerism is the language of commodities. Everything is a commodity.

For example, education is a commodity. "An education" is something you need! -- not because it opens up your understanding of the world, but because without it, it is much harder to access other commodities. "A good job" is a commodity -- one of the most important commodities -- because it increases our power in the marketplace. Everything that is real is realized in the market! And that is because the market is the realm of commodities; if we are a consumer society, then this is the first language that we speak.

Why is everything is a commodity? Why does everything aspire to become commodities?

This answer comes back to capital -- that process in which money is converted into more money through an exchange of commodities: the more commodities there are to exchange, the wider the reach of capital; the more opportunities present themselves for capital to be realized.

What you get out of any system in which an ever-increasing accumulation of wealth is premised on the exchange of commodities is a society that produces a lot of shit. Or, if you like, an abundance of crap. And you can see that very clearly, for example, if you ever walk along a harbor at sunset and observe the ducks swimming in people's trash. It brings the point home quite nicely.

Consumerism is the idea that, if you can produce something at one value, and you've got the marketing budget to convince people to buy it at some greater value, then you produce the living shit out of that thing, whatever it is -- it could be poison, or just a pointless waste of resources -- because that's how you're going to get rich. And being rich means being successful, because now you have power in the market; finally, you can buy whatever you want.

Consumerism is ironic in its own way, because the consumer is basically an afterthought. What the consumer wants isn't important; what is important is what you can convince the consumer they need. And that's something you figure out after you've got some process to produce things cheaply; you just throw money at the problem, by hiring a marketing firm.

More to come...

What is capital?

Karl Marx, Capital:

The circulation of commodities is the starting-point of capital.

Capital is not so much a thing, money, as it is a process in which money is converted into more money through an exchange of commodities. So "capitalism" is a system of capital accumulation that is based on widespread commodity production and exchange.

A commodity, for our purposes here, is any commercial product.

One can imagine a circumstance in which a person buys a commodity in order to sell it at a greater value to somebody else; this was the beginning of capitalism as it was practiced by the merchant class.

But capitalism would eventually evolve into a system that favored not merchants, who had to purchase commodities from somebody else, but the direct producers themselves.  And this happened when capital was applied to the production process itself.

Industrial capital is really what Marx concerned himself with, because it had the effect of transforming the way things are made altogether.  Prior economists speculated about the source of industrial profit, but Marx determined that the advantage to industrialists came from the fact that they circulated their money through a very special kind of commodity: what Marx calls "human labor power." 

Industrialists bought this commodity in the "labor market" only to get their money back, plus more, by applying it for so many hours to factory-style production.  Factory owners had to pay people enough so they could live from day to day, and they were constrained by other biological requirements, like the need for sleep; but to the degree that these "expenses" could be kept to a minimum, greater profit was the industrialist's reward.  And this was not a mere matter of preference, as would apply in the case of "greed," but rather a matter of necessity as one industrialist competed against all others for survival.  (Always remember that!)

It's worth noting that this is still the way profits are made in every traditional "industry," whether or not the workplace is a traditional factory -- in most cases, our workplaces are just "factories" of a different sort!

Industrial capital accumulation, which forms the basis for measuring "the real economy" in terms of "economic growth," can be distinguished from financial capital, which Marx explains is just "money into money" -- using money to create more money, by loaning it or making bets on it, and so on. 

This is another important form of capital -- in fact, really the ascendant one now that greater profits can be achieved through finance than traditional industry.  It explains a lot about why the United States doesn't "make anything" anymore; but this is really beyond the scope of our purpose here, which is to understand capital as a process in which human qualities are exchanged as commodities for the purpose of profit.

Crime doesn't pay -- but writing legislation does!

Wall Street Journal:

"Hi, I have access to Disney's (DIS) quarterly earnings report before its release on 05/03/10," the March 5 letter began. "I am willing to share this information for a fee that we can determine later."

Luckily, when it comes to ensuring an even playing field for large investors, the United States still has the regulatory wherewithal to intercept all manner of criminal intrigue.

We bring good things to strife

Financial Times:

Whatever their merits or shortcomings, these [Cannes festival] films tend to confirm Hollywood’s and the industry’s traditional anti-big business bias. There is, of course, a huge paradox in all this given that filmmakers and their stars rely on just the same uncultivated producers, financiers and sponsors they mock on the big screen.

Yes, just like there is a "huge paradox" in the fact that my grandmother resents accepting the terms of a cable contract over which she exerts zero control. She should really be thanking the cable companies, because without them, "cable" wouldn't exist!

Crises of consumerism

Economist:

[T]he fiscal crisis in Greece has shown the price that governments pay when they lose credibility in the markets.

Like every culture, consumerism has its own language, and every time it speaks, it speaks of capital.

Consumerism, having discarded its conspicuous pose, is capital in its populist form. Subsequently, consumption became life, and work its sustenance. Everything that is real is realized through the market.

The democratization of capital was the inevitable outcome of that threat posed to capital by democracy, which was met in the crucible of 20th century politics.

In the great contest between cultures, a power culture emerged which consolidated capital between two populist forms: a socialism, and a consumerism. Where socialism played to certain needs, consumerism invented them.

The totalizing impulse of capital broke free from the state, and an unfettered consumerism marked "the end of history."

History begins anew with each autonomous culture met by capital; it records no greater threat in its past.

===

In every society where a culture of consumerism prevails, the whole of life succumbs to that class of investors enlisted to further the aims of capital.

In the United States, the accumulation of capital through the health care system created a commodity so expensive that the government assumed the cost of purchasing it for everyone. This price paid to investors contributed directly to the very deficit now cited as justification for cuts to those portions of the health system not yet paying dividends. Such "entitlements," consumerism asserts, are really just commodities that the public have mistaken for rights; after all, no one is "entitled" to commodities.

The ballooning federal deficit expands upward from a landscape cratered by capital. "National security" at every level is cleared through Wall St. -- which is precisely why there is no price too great to pay for it: "freedom," after all, "isn't free"! The kind of labor arbitrage accomplished through the free mobility of capital makes tax revenue the luxury of whatever developing dictatorship can guarantee growth at 15 percent, while every other government depends on loans from the very investor class they go deeper into debt to enrich.

The same force that was once conspicuous in its consumption has since recruited us to its cause, having defeated its cultural rivals. But history begins anew with each effort at an autonomous culture.

Lost and found

I've only just discovered it, but I really like The Blog Of A Sane Person.

It's the end of the world as we know it, but we feel fine

Gerald F. Seib, Wall Street Journal:

Amid the Great Depression of the 1930s, the country moved sharply to the left politically, then stayed there.

Amid the Deep Recession of 2008, the country zigged to the left, but now seems to be zagging back to the right.

Why the difference?

"Left" and "right" in US politics describe a range of governmental approaches meant to foster economic growth, the principal concern of those groups which constitute "the economy" and subsequently dominate the government.

The right believes in limited government, which means government must be limited to what business wants; the left believes in an expanded government which can better meet business needs. In other words, they pursue the same objectives, while appealing to the electorate on different grounds.

"Shifts" between left and right typically reflect the degree of success business has in forging alliances with the public. When business is successful, governmental policy shifts right; when business is less successful, policy shifts to the left. Shifts to the right indicate that business is getting what it wants on economic policy; shifts to the left indicate a conflict between business and the public which must be mediated by the government on behalf of business.

Shifts to the left often yield benefits for the public, for the simple reason that the government can meet public needs in a way that for-profit organizations can't, pursuant to their mandate for profit. Throughout US history, groups that concerned themselves with social justice emerged from the "left" anytime the profit-motive proved itself unable to deliver.

"Amid the Great Depression of the 1930s," socialists comprised a highly organized portion of the left which sought to expand the public needs met by the government, that were otherwise not being met at all. This shift was sustained by the commitment of activists and the success of socialist initiatives, like Social Security.

Today the public is organized as consumers, not activists, and so we have seen a slow shift back to the pure prerogatives of business over several decades -- a shift back to the "right." This is what Seib means when he writes that the US is "a nation that stands center-right ideologically": the ideology of the nation is now, appropriately, back in harmony with that of its owners.

In spite of numerous, obvious, conflicts between big business and "the common good," consumerism has transposed itself onto the political arena in such a way that people don't know what to do but to occasionally vote and in the meantime orient their lives toward buying more stuff.

This is a fundamental problem that didn't exist in the 1930's, when failure in the political arena imposed unmistakable costs on people's lives. Today, those costs are obscured by the delight of buying cheap junk forever, and an abundance of 20-second amusements. Meanwhile, the world proceeds with its death pangs, and demands an appropriate response.

The truth about our food

A Tiny Revolution:

I just watched Food, Inc..

That's funny because I just watched Food, Inc..

What I want to say about it is this: The apparent diversity of food in our supermarkets is actually nothing more than a few, heavily subsidized ingredients scientifically engineered into a multitude of forms.

Most of the meat we eat comes from sick animals, whose sickness stems from fact that we force feed them the same heavily subsidized staple crops that are used to make everything else.

US agribusiness advertises job opportunities in Mexican news markets, and relies on workers who lack citizenship rights to keep their mouths shut about the conditions in which our food is produced. They also have an informal agreement with the INS to deport so many workers on a rotating basis, keeping their workforce "fresh."

Corporate food companies contract with farmers, keeping proprietary control over the entire process.

The truth about most of our food is that if you saw how it was made, you wouldn't want to eat it.

Nell at ATR writes: "[F]or people whose main concern is the health of the planet, the well-being of the animals they do consume, and the healthfulness of same: no need to give up meat entirely. Cut down, pay attention to the source, support humane and sustainable livestock raisers."

In praise of populism

Paul Krugman, New York Times:

The mood on the right may be populist, but it’s a kind of populism that’s remarkably sympathetic to big corporations.

Fair enough -- but at least it's populist, which means taking the concerns of ordinary people as your starting point, and reconciling them to whatever political program you want. That is fundamentally different than making high-minded appeals to capital in the hope of electoral gain, only to engage the recalcitrant through the force of the state.

It's worth reminding ourselves that, if "neither capital nor the state," populism is an objective. This means we have to be better at populism than those elements that are succeeding at it now -- unless, of course, we like the picture that is emerging!

The only alternative to populism is the continued state administration of social life on capital's behalf. This is what Krugman argues for, absent any political force that can displace capital -- i.e., populism -- even if he argues for it on his terms.

All about anarchism

Wall Street Journal:

Greece's anarchists are the modern incarnation of a rebel tradition, dating back to mountain brigands who fought the Ottoman Empire and World War II, when Greece had one of the biggest guerrilla movements in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Anarchists believe a free society requires abolishing the state, and they rebel against all authority and ruling power. In Greece, the leaderless network includes classical anarchists who read Russian radical thinkers such as Bakunin and Kropotkin, libertarians influenced by American counterculture, anti-authoritarians, squatters, autonomists, situationists, insurrectionists, and more. Few are pacifists. But in the past, violence was "not blind," says Panagiotis, with actions targeted at state and corporate buildings rather than innocent workers.

Anarchism is a technique that deserves to be in everybody's "skill set," because it is a great way of evaluating the relationships we observe or enter into during our sojourn here on planet Earth.

Though anarchism often comes bundled with numerous cultural preconceptions, anarchism doesn't require any particular way of dress, or propensity for "violence," or strict adherence to whatever it is other "anarchists" are preoccupied with at any given moment. Stripped of its arbitrary associations, anarchism just means skepticism toward authority.

In the same way that science may be called skepticism in the absence of evidence, anarchism is skepticism (as toward authority) in the absence of justification. In any relationship where one party claims authority over the affairs of another, anarchism merely requires that there be some justification for the claim. If there is no justification, or the justification is insufficient (in the eyes of those affected), anarchism regards the claim as illegitimate, and actively rejects it.

The motivating premise behind a skepticism toward authority is that the less people assume some position of telling other people what to do, the more people will make choices for themselves. This is important because people assume authority over each other all the time, in all kinds of ways, and in every kind of relationship. So anarchism is always concerned with the legitimacy of these relations, and it opposes them when they fail to meet whatever burden of proof establishes that they are necessary.

Every political philosophy amounts to a subset of what anarchism implies. When I write about Marxism, I am concerning myself with the authority that a system of capital accumulation imposes on everybody else; when I write about feminism I am interested in whatever forms of authority seek to impose themselves on women. I can specialize in these areas because, as a white man, I am subordinated to the authority of capital directly, while at the same time I am enjoined to participate in the kinds of authority that impose themselves on women; but I have an intimacy with women in my daily life that is immediate, whereas my reflections on other issues (like race or sexual orientation) are drawn more indirectly, and subsequently what I can "see" on these questions is more generic, and less personal. So, as a function of my own positional awareness of the world, I write with greater frequency about what I experience most, and defer to others on those things that they experience more.

Anarchism is the element which binds the urgency of divergent experiences in their confrontation with authority. When conservative relatives complain to me about the awful government, I am happy to talk to them about the awful government. There is plenty that is awful about the government, and it is a very good thing to have people concerned about it! But if what is awful about the government usually comes back to questions of industrial and financial policy, then conservatives should be invited to broaden their focus to areas that are ultimately more relevant to their concerns. Anarchism, unconstrained by arbitrary assumptions, is able to do this in a way that even US-style "libertarianism" cannot, because there is no relationship that it is afraid to question.

You will take your skepticism toward authority and apply it to those relationships that are most relevant in your life, and you will come up with your own insights and strategies on how best to pursue your own interests. Within the anarchist tradition, you will find a community of people who have always struggled to do the same, and you will find that they are not such bad company to keep after all.

Freedom fries: A portrait of innovation

Council on Foreign Relations:

QUESTIONER: I'm Gary Rosen from Commentary magazine. I'm not a French socialist, but if I were, licking my wounds this morning, I would say, "Well, we have our bureaucratic capitalism and we have 35-hour work weeks. We have all these lovely little cafes that, when you get rid of the rule about a small firm being 15 people or fewer, will be replaced by Starbucks. I have a generous pension. Why is it that I want your entrepreneurial capitalism? Why is my form of capitalism bad capitalism?

[CARL J.] SCHRAMM: Well, I was just there. And they were really nice to my children, and the food was great.

I think the answer is, you know, that is a cultural issue. That what you have described is a situation of satisfying. We're satisfied. But the externalities of what you pay for that are pretty extraordinary. Unemployment at 10 percent. That means people do live on the government.
...
How much security is the state going to provide you to prevent you from becoming creative?

If the price we must pay for a 35-hour work week, generous pensions, and a nation of small businesses is that employers may not adequately capture our "creativity" by tethering our whole existence to work, let me be the first to accept on their behalf.

Absence makes the heart grow stupider

Financial Times:

The key issue is whether it matters that women are under-represented on the boards of financial institutions.

Does it matter whether women are included in human activity? What kind of rot have people succumbed to when they can "take or leave" the participation of women? What principle have they put in its place? I'm waiting to be very impressed.

Fourier, Kropotkin

Considering the European debt crisis

BusinessWeek:

Europe's problem is that many of Greece's creditors are themselves debtors on a massive scale. If the value of their assets declines, the only way they can stay solvent is by reducing their debt, and the only way they can pay down the debt is by selling assets, which pushes their price down even further, exacerbating the problem and spreading it to other securities. It's revealing that the ultimate beneficiaries of Europe's rescue are the big banks, not the Greeks, who will barely touch any rescue money before it goes out the window to their lenders.

If you want a thumbnail sketch of what today's global economic system looks like, consider the following: Governments are in debt because investors would rather loan governments money (by purchasing bonds) than ever pay taxes on any enterprise by which they profit.

At the governmental level, this is called "staying competitive," "creating a business friendly environment"; or else it conforms to some "anti-taxes/pro-jobs" theme: it means deferring to business on whatever business wants, or else business will leave, taking "the economy" with it. And what business wants -- what business always wants -- is to maximize profit and market share for investors.

The profit drive, in turn, leads investors to take on debt in order to invest more. That is what BusinessWeek means when it says that "Greece's creditors are debtors on a massive scale." The article explains that "the big global investment banks" have increasingly used "repo financing" which "[gives] the best terms on overnight loans because there's less risk the collateral will lose value." If the banks can't fulfill the terms of the loans, they sell their assets, which, as the European example has shown, include government bonds.

As bonds lose value, governments can increase their attractiveness by promising to pay higher interest rates to investors. If investors still won't be moved, the government will lack financing to pay off debts and meet operating costs, inducing a crisis.

What's significant about the European example is that the bailout isn't aimed at Greece, which has been saddled with even greater debt, but at the class of investors who sold Greek assets in order to recover from bad bets. The bailout merely puts them in a position to return to their previous activity, with European governments being further disciplined to meet their needs -- by redirecting public money toward bigger bond yields, for example.

What this says about our global economic system is that we are all dependent on the good fortune of whimsical, unaccountable gamblers, who must at all times be enabled to make ever-increasing sums of money, lest national governments, having lost the taste for taxation, find themselves without any revenue but that which can be confiscated from the public, all productive enterprise having been consolidated beyond the reach of their will.

The oldest profession

Clive Crook, Financial Times:

The financial unravelling of the past three years has cast doubt on some certainties of orthodox economics. Central-bank independence is one. Before 2008, the idea that central banks should be shielded from politics, given an anti-inflation mandate, then left to run monetary policy as they saw fit was little doubted -- by economists, anyway. In 2010 this looks neither desirable nor even possible. Governments and central banks would rather avoid a proper discussion of this sensitive subject. But in the light of all that has happened, whether central banks should be above politics is a question that needs a fundamental rethink.

As I like to say, reality demands nothing less. But that has never stopped economists before.

Sovereign banks

Financial Times:

Thousands of Romanian trade unionists and pensioners took to the streets to protest against public sector wage and benefit cuts on Wednesday in a test of Bucharest’s resolve to pass austerity measures required by international lenders.

And here I thought the protest was a test of Bucharest's resolve to pass measures required by Romanians!

Political economy

Nouriel Roubini, BusinessWeek:

[I]nterest rates in all of the advanced economies are near zero. In the U.K., Europe, Japan, everybody can borrow at zero rates. And because of that, it's back to business as usual on Wall Street. Most financial institutions are making huge amounts of profits in proprietary trading -- borrowing at zero rates and making investments. It was just announced that in the first quarter, Goldman Sachs did not have a single day in which it lost money on trading. I worry that zero interest rates are leading to an asset bubble globally. I don't think it's going to burst for the time being, but give it two or three years.

Just one of the irrational features of our privately managed economy: we go without schools and infrastructure so that "financial institutions can make huge amounts of profits borrowing at zero rates and making investments" that bear no relation to our needs.

Wouldn't it be cool if your community could borrow from its government at zero percent and "make investments" in itself? Why is that something that only those who contribute to global asset bubbles are allowed to do?

The short answer comes from an acknowledgment of where power lies in the society: with the capacity to produce things people need. This prerogative, being private, explains the insistence of the Federal Reserve on its "independence" from "politics"; bankers run the economy.

Behind every successful woman

Wall Street Journal:

Why the lack of resources? Again, women must accept part of the responsibility. Research shows that women tend to view debt as a "bad thing" to be avoided. For expansion capital, most turn to business earnings, which usually limits growth potential. Research supports the idea that one of women's strengths is relationship building, yet women seldom focus on building relationships with bankers. Lack of relationships with bankers and limited knowledge about financial products and services explain to a great degree why more women don't seek more sophisticated forms of financial products and services.

If only I was a man of means, I could counsel women on the importance of "building relationships" with me!

Film review: It might get loud

Three wankers wank. Meanwhile, the world dies.

Democracy in America

Financial Times:

[P]rofit-seeking entities have a tendency to test the limits of their legal environments.

This one is really worth committing to memory: it will always explain a significant portion of why liberal democracies -- democracies where private control of the economy is considered a "right," aka "economic freedom" -- fail in their responsibilities as democracies. And that's because economic decisions aren't made democratically, but are happening within a "legal environment" that is itself shaped in large part by economic considerations. In any realm where "profit-seeking entities" haven't drafted the laws themselves, they wage an unremitting campaign to undermine or evade them. Meanwhile, the rest of us are at work, or are recuperating from its effects; we "participate" in public life once every couple of years.

This is not news to anyone who has ever distanced themselves sufficiently from capitalism to regard it as an object of inquiry. Socialists have understood this since the 19th century -- one of the reasons why socialism gained such prominence in the 20th, even if as a state project it failed in its responsibilities for different reasons. Nevertheless, what it understood about capitalism remains salient today, as we can see in the succession of regulatory failures and crises of capitalism that regularly confront us. There is no amount of technocratic tweaking or liberal appeals to fairness that will ever resolve the contradiction which exists when one group claims to run society in its own interests and everyone else's at the same time.

A short note about God

I don't take any particular position on God, but I do believe there is a unifying reality, or truth, that we all experience in different ways. Meaning is positional -- it depends on where you stand -- but ultimately we are looking at the same thing, even if we perceive only a small part of it.

Human belief systems develop through this combination of an "experience of the real" and positional understanding. Because people occupy a range of perspectives, we get a rich diversity of "claims to truth." Often times, such claims are legitimate when taken from a particular vantage point; and, in fact, many conflicts between belief systems stem from an inability on the part of adherents to appreciate "what is true" from any other perspective than their own.

One of the more interesting aspects of the kind of belief system that comes out of something like the Gospel message of Jesus is the association of "worldly power" with evil, developed as it was into a personification represented by the devil. As an aside, it is surely a positional bias of modern audiences that commercial secularism affords us something like "The Lord of the Rings," in fact developed out of Biblical themes, but denies the ancient world the right to do the same with the technology available to them in their day, and the creative approach this inspired, because it "isn't true" -- though truth can be found in either.

The devil operates in a sophisticated way, not by being in "opposition to truth," but by playing to our positional understanding what the truth is, and reinforcing it to the exclusion of other people's perspectives. What it always tells us is that we are right, and they are wrong. This is how evil acts to separate people from each other, and lays the foundations for "kingdoms of man" -- those realms where we worship "false idols," or, one part of the truth to the exclusion of the whole. Hierarchical power is built on relationships that, walled off from horizontal expansion, expand vertically.

Now what is interesting in the case of someone like Jesus, and most of the other prophets as well, is how the liberating experience of "God," or, ultimate truth, is something that can only happen through the synthesis of positional truth into a broader understanding of what truth is. This can only happen through our relationships with other people, because it is other people who see truth from a different perspective. The devil effectively tells us we don't need other people -- we can have things; the Gospel message is that we do need people, because without them we become prisoners to a reality that can't be shared with others.

Institutionalized, belief systems are very dangerous, and this is what people mean when they, almost invariably, say they are opposed to "organized religion." But this should always signal something to us, when people feel free to renounce a particular system of belief, because the likelihood is that this system is no longer the predominant one, on which people depend for their livelihoods, or for which spirited criticism carries real costs. Something else has taken its place, and our relationship to it deserves scrutiny.

But there's no patriarchy without a father!

Financial Times:

[G]overnment officials came to ask the villagers in Lohandiguda in Chhattisgarh state, who are mainly illiterate farmers from the Gond tribe, to relinquish their fields for the promise of cash, jobs and a better future.

For Banga Ram, the 65-year-old patriarch of a large family, the request was absurd. “What will we do with the money?” he asked. “We have to do agriculture to feed these children.” But local officials were not taking “No” for an answer.

Banga Ram was arrested. After he spent 13 days in jail, he says his sons signed away the land and accepted compensation.

Lifted out of poverty! Another success story.

And just as soon as Banga Ram ships his daughters to the far-distant urban workhouses, New York Times columnists will sing songs about their positive impact on the traditions of patriarchy in rural India. Thirteen-year-old girls like their independence, and cosmopolitan lifestyle.

iStarve

Financial Times:

Immigrant workers in the US have started sending more money back to their home countries after cutting back sharply last year, yet another sign that the global economy is showing resilience.

You see, when the economy is good, immigrants send money back to their home countries. When the economy is bad, they can't. But in neither case can immigrants afford to live in their home countries, nor could these economies persist without remittances. This tells us something about "the global economy," and what it does for humanity.

Signing the declaration of dependence

Carl J. Schramm, Foreign Affairs:

Strictly speaking, economies do not grow. It is individual firms within these economies that grow -- or shrink. The collective fate of these firms is the fate of the economy.

In any discussion of "the economy," we always have to ask ourselves what our relationship is to those "individual firms" of which it is comprised. If we aren't equal partners within these organizations, and if our work isn't contributing toward shared goals, then whether or not the economy does well isn't particularly meaningful, because it doesn't reflect our concerns in the first place.

The fact that we identify our own fate so closely with that of "the economy" owes specifically to the kind of relationship we have with its constituent parts, our employers -- that of dependency.

It is significant that a country which makes so much of its independence from an 18th century monarchy today finds the great mass of its populace signing a "declaration of dependence" on a boss who lords over them for the better part of their waking hours, and for whom the sidelining of every other obligation is required for this privilege. Such is the drawback of retaining only those notions of "freedom" that pertain to 18th century aristocrats, while abandoning any adaptation of Enlightenment principles to Shit That Actually Matters Today.

This note brought to you by Philadelphia Pale Ale.

Serviced with a smile

BusinessWeek:

Investors ... are not in a generous mood. Portugal's economy has grown less than 1 percent a year on average for the last decade. Its main advantage, cheap labor, gradually disappeared when it joined the pricey euro zone and wages kept rising. "We have seen a lot of multinational activity move away, and we have not been able to compensate," says Miguel Athayde Marques, chairman of Euronext Lisbon, the country's bourse.
...
Before adopting the euro, Portugal could devalue its currency to boost competitiveness. That option no longer exists. Instead, it has to restructure its debt, says Stuart Thomson, who helps oversee $100 billion at Ignis Asset Management in Glasgow. Debt restructuring, explains Thomson, "is the new currency devaluation in the euro zone."

Debt restructuring is the new currency devaluation in the euro zone! As the Greek example has shown, this doesn't mean rescheduling the debt or reducing the principal on the debt, or in any other way making the debt more manageable: it means servicing the debt in ways that business likes, by pushing developed nations into a "developing" model of rapid growth through popular impoverishment.

Any population with no alternative but to "just feel lucky they have a job" is a pliable, obedient one; as Americans, we already feel the impact of this model as it is applied here at home. With a variety of options available for unwinding the fallout of a Wall Street-inspired housing bubble, it has somehow become the obligation of ordinary Americans to sacrifice their libraries and school systems, among other pillars of the "commonwealth," to buy back the assets investors no longer desire!

The US may still be in a position to devalue its currency, but that doesn't make debt restructuring -- in this case, transferring debt from investors to communities -- any less the order of the day, least of all when the orders are coming from Wall Street.

The nation

Financial Times:

Consider the prerequisites for a successful [IMF] programme. First, Greeks must acquiesce in the sharp decline in living standards over the next three years. Second, after three years of the programme, Greek debt will be much greater than today’s 115 per cent of GDP. At that point, markets will have to think it plausible that Greece is on a path toward reasonable debt levels because it is able to grow fast enough and maintain the fiscal belt-tightening for some considerable time. Doubts on the part of markets on any of these scores will lead to higher costs of borrowing for Greece and put it back into the viciously self-sustaining fiscal debt dynamic in which it has found itself recently, except that the starting point in terms of debt levels will only be worse. This might well prove to be the (unlucky) 13th labour of Hercules.

If you want certain people to make sacrifices and not others, you appeal to everyone equally, knowing that only certain people ever will.

Nothing new under the sun that never sets

Carl J. Schramm, Foreign Affairs:

A doctrine of expeditionary economics, with practical guidelines for economic expansion, must begin with a clear notion of what works. Whenever the United States sends troops overseas, military planners must consider the effort in three phases: invasion, stabilization or pacification, and economic reconstruction. These are so strongly linked that the U.S. government should not engage in any significant military action until it has thought through and anticipated the requirements for stabilization or pacification and economic development.

Nor should economic development be seen as a separate task that can wait until after the others have been achieved. Although the various steps involved may compete for attention, there are also ways in which they can inform and reinforce one another. Counterinsurgency campaigns, for example, can facilitate economic growth by helping identify the entrepreneurial aspirations of certain individuals.

Expeditionary economics. And to think I've called it "foreign policy" all this time!

The drone is in the editor's chair

Cholene Espinoza, New York Times:

The new generation of drones have their merits. But flying robots, no matter how advanced, can’t measure up to the courage and commitment of a pilot who is risking her life for the sake of the mission.

Published in the city that no more than a week ago was nearly bombed in gratitude.

Why we hate them

Financial Times:

[Attempted NYC bombing suspect Faisal] Shahzad claimed he was driven to seek revenge for missile attacks by US drones that have targeted Pakistan’s border region.

Luckily for future attacks, racism casts serious doubt on this claim.

Virtual government

Marketplace:

Stephen Lewis [Monument Securities] says investors will be reassured by a decisive win for the conservatives. They have pledged to start cutting Britain's massive budget deficit immediately. Lewis says investors could be spooked by any other result. That could hit the pound and make it harder for the government to borrow. Some analysts say Britain could then become a Greek-style target for speculators.

"[F]ree capital flow creates what's sometimes called a 'virtual parliament' of global capital, which can exercise veto power over government policies that it considers irrational. That means things like labor rights, or educational programs, or health, or efforts to stimulate the economy or, in fact anything that might help people and not profits (and therefore is irrational in the technical sense)."

Noam Chomsky

Thanks to Montag

Life begins on schedule

Wall Street Journal:

[S]everal factors, including doctors' fear of litigation, a growing demand among patients for elective caesareans that aren't medically necessary and more induced labors have contributed to the growing rates of c-sections. "People will come into my office and say, 'you're not going to let me go past my due date,'" Dr. Meyer says. He says induced pregnancies are more likely to end up with a c-section than if the woman goes into labor on her own.

This omits my favorite reason why women are having more c-sections: because vaginal birth increases the risk of a doctor canceling his dinner plans!

Central bank independence

Wall Street Journal:

Sen. Bernie Sanders can seem like a character from another era with his rumpled suits and oratory about economic justice. But as anger at bankers and Wall Street runs high, Congress's only self-declared socialist is moving to center stage.

An amendment sponsored by the independent senator from Vermont to require Federal Reserve audits is gaining momentum, powered by a coalition of activists on the left and right who are taking aim at the financial establishment for its role in the economic collapse.

Mr. Sanders's amendment, which is likely to be voted on within days, is worrying White House officials, who say it would violate the central bank's independence and cripple its ability to protect the economy.
...
One of Mr. Sanders's partners in his assault on the Fed is Rep. Ron Paul (R., Texas), who led a successful charge in the House to adopt a similar provision last year.

"Yes, we have disagreements, but we both despise fascism," Mr. Paul said, half-jokingly. When governments are primarily used to serve the interests of big corporations, "that's unfair and we don't like it," he said.

The White House is correct that if Congress knew what the Federal Reserve was doing, this would violate the central bank's independence from "politics" -- which in this case means Congress.

This is "worrying" to the extent that Congress, unlike the Fed, is never fully "independent" of democracy, but slides toward it with sufficient public pressure.

Preserving central bank independence, then, only enhances its "ability to protect the economy," as the transfer of public wealth into private hands is always a deed best done behind closed doors!

Understanding the division of labor

Karl Marx, Capital:

[E]ven with regard to material production, self-sufficiency, as opposed to the division of labor, remained [the Athenian] ideal, "For with the latter there is well-being, but with the former there is independence" (Thucydides, History of the Pelopennesian War, Bk 1, para. 141).

Marx was not opposed to some kind of division of labor -- organizing work in a cooperative way between people to make it more efficient. But he was very concerned about what gets "divided."

For instance: It is one thing to cooperate with someone in order to accomplish something that can't be done alone; it is another thing entirely to "cooperate" with one person in charge and another taking orders. Either example may improve efficiency -- and our friend, the economist, loves to talk about efficiency! -- but efficiency, measured strictly in terms of output, tells us nothing of the relations which may exist between the people who contribute toward it.

Marx shared Adam Smith's reservations about a division of labor that separated people from creative control over their work, quoting him at length:

"The understandings of the greater part of men," says Adam Smith, "are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations ... has no occasion to exert his understanding ... he generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to become." After describing the stupidity of the specialized worker, [Smith] goes on: "The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind ... it corrupts even the activity of his body and renders him incapable of exerting his strength and vigor and perseverance in any other employments than that to which he has been bred."

For Marx, any economic system premised on capital accumulation presupposes a division of labor not amenable to other ends:

The possibility of an intelligent direction of production expands in one direction, because it vanishes in many others. What is lost by the specialized workers is concentrated in the capital which confronts them. It is a result of the division of labor in manufacture that the worker is brought face to face with the intellectual potentialities of the material process of production as the property of another and as a power which rules over him.

It is worth considering the ways in which, as employees, we come "face to face" with the "potentialities" of our work as the property of another and as a power which rules over us. We can work as hard as we want and never produce less pollution, less poverty, or less war; at least, not as long as our work's potential is the property of another, directed toward their needs. This is why none of the great social goods have ever come from people working harder for their employers; they come from people working harder independent of their employers, often in opposition to their employers. And this will remain the case as long as "the workplace" remains private property, dividing creators from the outcome of their work.

NAFTA

Wall Street Journal:

"The recent shooting of the deputy sheriff underscores the growing problem of violence and mayhem spilling over from the Mexican side of the border," he says. "That event, in addition to the murder of the rancher Robert Krentz about a month ago and countless other killings and violence crimes before that, serves as a constant reminder to Arizonans that their very way of life is being threatened."

Meanwhile, not having enough to eat serves as a constant reminder to Mexicans that their very way of life no longer exists for them in that country.

The guys who succeed are too big to fail

William D. Cohan, New York Times:

“The guys who succeed in this industry are the guys who say, ‘I care about the reputation of the firm,” [the former partner] continued. “I care about my reputation. I care about doing the right thing. I care about having a great firm. I care about attracting and retaining the best people. If I do all of these things and do good business, eventually I’ll be fine.’ But in this top five, there is nothing about making money. The guys for whom making money is in the top three almost always get themselves into trouble. And this is the essence of how Goldman has changed.”

Dear buddy: In your industry, each and every one of your "top five" is synonymous with "making money."

The "guys who succeed" are the ones who deploy the same extra-legal advantages as everyone else; but they succeed so well that they aren't allowed to fail -- that's what municipalities are for!

Philanthrocapitalism

Timothy Geithner and Bill Gates, Wall Street Journal:

Today, the United States, Canada, Spain, South Korea and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation are making a commitment to fight the threat of global food insecurity. Together we are launching the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, a new fund to help the world's poorest farmers grow more food and earn more than they do now so they can lift themselves out of hunger and poverty.

"Lifting millions of people out of poverty" is a popular way of saying that people denied their traditional livelihoods -- growing grain, for example -- should "grow more food and earn more than they do now" by producing something like coffee for export to affluent markets, with "private-investment" (read: agribusiness) playing the part of "benevolent" intermediary.     

Patented, high-yielding, pest-resistant, genetically-modified seeds! are just one of the mantras of this initiative, since the more poor people produce, the greater their fraction of the profits will be; the further they will be "lifted out of poverty" -- with cash on hand to purchase the very staples, now imported, that they used to produce themselves.

Unsurprisingly, the R&D and logistical expenses of these projects are to be borne by public bodies, including local governments "that are already using their own resources to invest in the most effective ways to boost crop production," with multinationals responsible for "visionary leadership" and collecting the returns.

It is worth recalling a time on this planet when communities produced their own food, suited to their own needs and "in partnership" with the local ecology.  That's not what Bill Gates is talking about.

Succeeding away from ourselves

Anne Mulcahy, BusinessWeek:

I loved every minute of being CEO. The biggest surprise is how hard it is to give it up. I would have thought I'd be running out the door once the place was in shape. I almost understand why so many successions go badly. It's really hard to give up power. You get up with a bounce in your step every day because you know you can make a difference.

I went from being "I just want to be a CEO" to understanding that I have to be an advocate for women. There's a responsibility that comes with the position. If you don't speak about the need to focus on the progress of women, who will? Maybe we've reached a degree of parity at the entry level, but we clearly don't have that in the executive ranks—or in government, for that matter.
...
I don't know yet what the word retirement means. I've always said I wouldn't be head of another public company, and I'll stick to that. I'm a one-trick pony. I've got other things I want to do. I'm chair of the board of Save the Children. I'm not looking to make any more money.

Hobbies? I have none. I used to make them up when people would put together those lists, just so I could sound more interesting. My life has been invested in this job. It's bittersweet, but I feel really fortunate.

Here is an example of today's "successful woman," whose "life has been invested" in her job. She has no hobbies -- she made them up so she could sound interesting! -- but she has other things she wants to do; for instance, charitable work, now that she's "not looking to make any more money." She feels fortunate -- but the fortune is bittersweet.

What kind of success comes to women by putting institutional preferences ahead of their own?

For liberal feminism, the question is whether women are unduly discouraged from doing so! A woman's total talents must be subsumed by her occupation, with no reserve left for herself, or she will be seen as less than a man. Women should gain equal reward in their role as servants -- but not servants to their own needs; this is the lesson that liberalism, with its "equality under the law," inevitably leaves us when laws are not written by women.

We can play at feminism by insisting on "equal rights" in the workplace, or we can make the workplace an outcome of the people who work within it. Any authentic feminism would not settle for putting women on equal terms with men in circumstances that are broadly dismissive of both, with consistently worse outcomes for women.

Playing well with others isn't work

Wall Street Journal:

We have all worked with at least one office pain in the neck, someone whose irritating and unfathomable behavior annoys co-workers and wrecks teamwork. These foibles often persist beyond reason because they are so deep-rooted, having been learned in the families of people's childhoods. Amid a growing focus on workplace quality, some managers and coaches are now using new techniques to identify the childhood origins of harmful behavior at work and then rout out those patterns through training or outright bans on bad behavior.

Rather than "identifying the childhood origins of harmful behavior" in others, I would like to propose a "new technique" of interpersonal awesomeness called "voluntary association." The way it would work is, I would grow some food in my garden and, insofar as you qualify in my mind as "a dick," I would bring it to someone else's party.

Scent of a liberal

Robert Reich, Financial Times:

If Washington knew what was good for it and the nation, it would sever its financial connections with Wall Street.

Yes: And if I knew what was good for me and my family, I would sever financial connections to my boss, who in no way reciprocates the kind of consideration we show him on a daily basis.

Why this is not a realistic course of action is best explained by the nature of the relationship, not any question of knowing what is good for us.

Gold Guns Girls

A plan for all seasons

Foreign Affairs:

Is is ironic, of course, that Walmart is embracing women's empowerment in emerging markets even as it fights the largest class-action sex-discrimination lawsuit in U.S. history.

Yes.

Homesick

Glass half-Full:

Idealistic systems for engineering a classless society are pipe dreams. Get real. Marx and Mao, though they had a few accurate analyses, have been disproven as a source for societal construction. Find something good to do and get to work so you can contribute to the commonwealth instead of sponging from it.

I think the point Marx would make is that "finding something good to do" so that you might "get to work and contribute to the commonwealth" is something that a system dedicated to capital accumulation inevitably precludes, since the purpose of production is to produce capital, not "commonwealth."

Americans are heartsick for want of purposeful work; most would jump at the chance just to pay their bills. That these opportunities are not forthcoming, however, does not owe to any dearth in American ingenuity, ambition, education, or will; but to the simple fact that the boss has denied them. Such opportunities are not for the idle American to "create," since this is a power too great but for that monopoly class of employers whose contribution to the "economy" is never less than a tautological contribution to themselves, with incidental effects for everyone else.

It happens that Marx was centrally interested in these questions, seeing in the need for creative, purposeful work a fundamental human trait. The obstacles which confront us in the full realization of this trait exist not within ourselves, but in our relationship to that class which has assumed this role for itself. For Marx, a "classless society" would mean one in which the possibilities for purposeful work would be denied to no one.

Love in the time of Somoza

Uriel Molina, OFM; Wobblies & Zapatistas:

We ourselves may not be the ones to discover our role but others may point us to it. For example, during the time of the insurrection against Somoza, we felt that we might lose, we might all be killed. One day I was talking with a man who never came to church but was a very dedicated person. I said, "Things are looking very bad. Maybe we better pull out because it looks like it is all over and we are all going to be wiped out." And the young man, William, said, "If you do that then the whole community will lose their hope, because your presence here is during the day like an open door and at night, a light."

In the time of the New Testament, Christians were called atheists. They rejected the gods of the empire and the standard religious beliefs, so they were called atheists. Now there is a new need for a kind of atheist vision where the idols need to be knocked over and the true God is to be found, because the old conception of God doesn't speak to people today. It may be time for becoming atheists with regard to ideas about God, and discovering the true God.

Let us consider for a moment our priest with the healthy instincts. The priest tells us we must become atheists about God, because God has become a lie produced by power.

God is always a lie produced by the powerful, just as "the will of God" has always concealed the material interests of that holy minority presuming to speak on its behalf. Whatever the alternative, this God is always on the scene; and it is instructive that today's Christian God finds its roots in that body given up in opposition to the God of its day, while bodies are offered in sacrifice to its modern incarnation.

Surely a priest knows his prospects when he opposes the God of power, which under Somoza meant the alliance between a military regime and his employer. For a priest to say, "Let us become atheists about God" is to risk losing the good will of both.

And so he finds himself in a place where he is likely to get killed -- standing beside his neighbors, who have begun to fight back. But now, absent the God of power, the priest perceives his role, which is to be "an open door during the day, and at night, a light." It's not something the priest needed to explain to his parish, but what his parish had to reveal to him.

This doesn't need to be a religious story in a strict sense. "God" may be important to some people, but power will find its way to the top of every value system, whether those values are "secular" or "religious." Power conceals itself within the whole, and insists on its legitimacy.

Depending on our preferences, some of us may need to be atheists about God; but others may need to be atheists about Atheism, or democrats about Democracy, feminists about Feminism, and so on. In other words, we want to be loosely acquainted with our identity as we understand it, not so strongly attached that it permits a lasting foothold for power. The temptation of power is always to impose; what we want is to begin to listen.

Full-time stupervisors

Chucklehead Ned said: "Oogah boogah boogah! You go do -- go do-gah!"

The call of the wild-eyed manager.

A long, loving look at the real

It's easy to get depressed if we're honest about what happens in the world.

And while cynicism is much better than ignorance, cynicism can signal a kind of ignorance; an inability to see good in the same moment we are honest.

Taken together, it may not be true that some things are good and other things are bad, but that everything is good; and what is bad grows out of this assumption, but not in harmony with it.

For example, the fact that our culture cannot accommodate the idea of death, and consequently fears and marginalizes its elders, who only offer themselves as the present face of our future selves, is a fine example of the good that is lost when we are too afraid to love what is real.

I see an awful lot of elderly people who are incredibly lonesome, even though many have lived incredible lives; but their kids are too busy in their obligations to others; and young people are unimpressed by any information source that lacks a touch screen. So a friend of mine who escaped the Holocaust has no audience, in spite of being very generous with her experience.

Another example might be to take the worldwide plague of rape and violence against women, which, insofar as men respected their mothers -- and respected them all the time, without betrayal -- might prove difficult to sustain. There is a natural relation which is absent in every instance of these acts by men; acts which do not reciprocate the things given to them by their mothers. Something else has intervened, but it is happening within life's framework; it does not displace it.

What I would like to get out of this is a point of encouragement. Yesterday I sat across from someone I love and had a conversation. In spite of everything else that was wrong with the world, it was enough.

Impoverished ideas

Ladypoverty says less @ Twitter.

Survivor

Gideon Rachman, Financial Times:

Wealth and privilege has made babies of us all. Of course I should be able to get anywhere in the world in 24 hours! There is always a flight out. There is no logistical problem that cannot be solved with a mixture of ingenuity and money. Yet the volcano seemed strangely indifferent to the fact that I have a large credit limit on my Visa card. Its effects are surprisingly democratic.

Recall the anxiety that was produced in the course of our nation's "health care debate," when it was suggested that people might have to "wait in line" as the government "rationed" care. It is an established principle in American life that money shortens every line; but even the poorest citizen can take pride in it while they wait!

The requirements of human survival can impose a burden on "wealth and privilege" in ways not unlike a volcano at its disruptive best. The only difference is that the volcano enjoys greater consideration.

Letters to the editor

Wall Street Journal:

I've read some discompassionate pieces in my time but your editorial "Incentives Not to Work" (April 13) tops all. There are so many of us who are deserving of a good-paying job and have worked hard to gain real qualifications, but there aren't any jobs. I didn't put myself through college (while working in various manufacturing positions) in order to be a clerk at the convenience store or a greeter at Wal-Mart. With or without that unemployment check I'm still unemployed.

Just wait and see what happens when these benefits for us are all gone and our leaders have failed to "grow jobs." Maybe they should understand that they should have grown employers -- because they could not grow jobs. Why not just send all of us indolent slackers to labor camps? We aren't even close to being the drag on the economy that plenty of half-baked programs have been. Hope it doesn't happen to you.

Craig M. Kallenbach
Rockford, Ill.


I'm not a college grad and thus have not been a high-wage earner, but there are very few jobs available in my area that pay more than $8 to $10 an hour. I have two kids still at home and another that is unemployed. I make about $10 an hour in unemployment with no taxes taken out, and am barely making ends meet. Do you really think I should just jump for that $10-an-hour job and then wind up taking home less after taxes and travel? And then, because I'll have a history of earning lower wages, my unemployment benefit will be even less should I become unemployed again. To me this sounds like a recipe for giving my house back to the bank. I don't want to be permanently unemployed. I just want to earn a decent living, and if benefits can be extended a little longer, maybe I can get back into the work force at a wage comparable to what I was earning before losing my job. I think that most of the unemployed feel the same way.

Dan Hoffman
West Branch, Iowa


Your article quotes Lawrence Summers's explanation that unemployment insurance and other social insurance programs raise the reservation wage. Were it not for these programs, desperate workers would lower their reservation wage, and this would lead them to find employment faster. As a professor of economics, I taught this to my students for years. But for the past year, having found myself unemployed, I have learned that the logic of that statement is not always correct.

When I offered my services at a lower wage to prospective employers, I was told time and again that they were not interested. They said if they paid me less than I was worth, I would be unhappy, and therefore I would be unproductive. Moreover, they were concerned that I would leave their employ as soon as a better opportunity presented itself. This shows that employers do not necessarily react to lowered reservation wages. The implication that unemployment is the fault of the unemployed for not having lowered their reservation wage is wrong.

Joelle Saad-Lessler
Brooklyn, N.Y.


While conducting a job search made difficult by factors like my age (50) and lack of experience in other industries, I have been attending college at night and taking science classes that are required for a bachelor's degree in nursing and will apply for several, one-year accelerated programs that start in early 2011. My ultimate goal is to become a self-employed nurse practitioner.

Unfortunately, in fields like the one I was in, there will be very few opportunities over the next five years. However, to say that we have no incentive to find work is hardly accurate. I made close to three times what I am receiving in unemployment benefits. You think I wouldn't take a job where I could earn twice what I am receiving in unemployment benefits? I have a mortgage payment, bills and a retirement I'd like to save for. I'd take such a job in a heartbeat.

But the jobs are not out there like they once were, and I have to re-tool. For me, unemployment benefits have made the difference between barely staying afloat and filing for bankruptcy.

Scott Matthew Smith
Lakewood, Colo.

Remembering our foolish past, anticipating a foolish future

Wall Street Journal:

The piece de resistance is a breathtaking domed chamber used as the meeting place for the [French Communist Party's] Central Committee. The cupola, looking like something out of a James Bond film, is hung with thousands of white aluminum panels that mute extraneous sound and spread light uniformly throughout. With this womb-like space, Mr. Niemeyer achieved one of the most spectacular auditoriums in all of Europe. The doors leading into the chamber are set at an angle and are pneumatically controlled.
...
The Marxist architect, awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1963 in part because of his ideology and the Pritzker Prize in 1988 despite it, deemed his building "not merely a good example of architecture, but a sign of the socialist society that is already being imposed with the force of historical necessity."

Lend enough power to any idea, what you end up with is stupidity.

Marxism vs. identity anarchism

Staughton Lynd, Wobblies & Zapatistas:

There is one other aspect to my insistence that anarchists need Marxism.  I think we need to take seriously the fact that most of humanity is in a different situation than footloose students and intellectuals, and is necessarily preoccupied with economic survival.

This was brought home to me as a graduate student in history when I took a long look at tenant farmers and artisans during the period of the American Revolution.  Most of my Left colleagues who sought to view history "from the bottom up" focused attention on the ideology of such groups.  I found otherwise.  Whether a tenant farmer was for or against the Revolution in the Hudson Valley of New York depended on the politics of his landlord: whatever the landlord supported, the tenant opposed, in the hope that if the landlord's political party was defeated the tenant might come to own his farm.  Similarly, artisans before and after the Revolutionary War favored whatever political party most effectively opposed the import of British manufactures: this meant the Sons of Liberty in 1763-1776 and Federalists including Alexander Hamilton, who wanted a national government with a strong tariff, in 1787-1788.

There was nothing ignoble about wanting to own the farm on which a tenant labored, or to preserve an artisan's livelihood in making shoes, or hats, or nails, or sails, or rope, or barrels.  But it is necessary to recognize the concern for economic survival that drove these lower class protagonists.  And Marxism appeared to do this more understandingly than does anarchism.

It's worth remembering that, for many of our tea-swilling, nativist friends, a time existed when a white, blue-collar man (and even a few unionized men of color) could raise a family on his income alone thanks to the patriarchal compact that existed between men in the factory, men in the executive suites, and men in government; all in the name of "industrial peace."

The "angry white man" that has surfaced since announced the betrayal of this compact, which has lowered the living standards of these men and their families, in their view, to a level commensurate with those at the lowest economic tier. They compete for jobs at 7-11 with Mexicans when they should be preparing to retire, as opposed to carrying on the middle-class tradition of their fathers and grandfathers, in other words. Unsurprisingly they want to "take back their country," which one can interpret as regaining their rightful place in the national hierarchy, characterized as it is by this economic component.

To simply point out that people in this situation have the wrong politics yields no insight into what might be done, and this is what Lynd hits at with his advocacy of Marxism. Anarchism, as Poumista writes, now being ascendant, is to my view increasingly an elaborate declaration of principles which seem to stand in the place of strategy, as if declaring that one is "anti-Leninist" is sufficient and all we have to do is find enough like-minded consumers of anarchist culture to hang out with to change the world.

Now, I say this because I do believe anarchism is ascendant, and the dark side of this is that it will become unreflective, in much the same way Marxism was in its day. After all, it believes in no hierarchy -- the solution is found! And yet a real world exists beyond the bounds of our beliefs and identities, and requires that we engage with it.

Dispatch from the paradise of consumption

Might people who think differently share anything in common?

Fort Lauderdale Food Not Bombs, Infoshop News:

[M]any of us did have deep and engaging conversations with Tea Partiers (they were confused. How could we be against capitalism and against the state? It didn't make any sense in their overly simplified perspective of the world, probably attained from FOX news)...

Probably so! Surely the anarchist's task is to "counter" this phenomenon, taking for granted that this is not an easy thing to do with limited resources.

In my view, this would entail not so much "counterdemonstrations" of the sort that are incomprehensible to anyone but the "anarcho"-nerd -- "I'm wearing a red & black ninja suit! Remember Catalonia!" -- but appealing to people on some basis other than shouting them down.

In an American context, this might mean dropping the "hardcore anarchist" pretense in favor of actually behaving like one in this country. It would mean constructive engagement wherever possible, not preemptive sectarianism.

The short life of art in the United States

Michele Barrett, Women's Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis:

It is immediately clear that the conditions under which men and women produce literature are materially different.  This important question has been curiously neglected by recent feminist work, and the most systematic exploration of this issue is still, fifty years after its publication, Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.  Naive as this essay undoubtedly is in some respects, it nonetheless provides us with a very useful starting point.   Woolf bases her arguments in this book and in related essays on materialist propositions.  Writing, she argues, is not "spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures": it is based on material things (health, money, the houses we live in).  These material conditions must govern the writer's "angle of vision," his or her perception of society.  They must influence the art-form chosen, the genre chosen with the form, the style, the tone, the implied reader, the representation of character.

Woolf argues that a crucial difference between men and women has lain historically in the restricted access of the latter to the means of literary production.  Their education was frequently sacrificed to that of their brothers; they lacked access to publishers and the distribution of their work; they could not earn a living by writing as men did, since (before the Married Women's Property Acts [GB]) they could not even retain their earnings if they were married.  Relative poverty and lack of access to an artistic training meant that the bourgeois woman encountered specific constraints on her creative work: Woolf suggests that one reason why women have been so prolific in literary production and almost absent from forms such as musical composition and visual art is that the latter requires greater financial resources than "the scratching of a pen" ("For ten and sixpence one can buy enough paper to write all the plays of Shakespeare...").  Less plausibly and more controversially, she argues that even the choice of literary form was affected by women's social position: they opted for the new form of the novel rather than for poetry or drama, since it required less concentration and was therefore more compatible with the inevitable interruptions of household obligations.

Consider the pressure an artist feels as she matures to abandon her art in favor of more practical pursuits. Consumerism makes consumption easy, and production not worth its while unless it generates income. This is why people are forever looking for that "angle" by which an artist can transform the "use value" of her work into an "exchange value" -- otherwise she is discouraged from pursuing her talent at all!

If she cannot sell her work, then her first obligation must be to her employer (formerly, her husband), to develop the sorts of creative abilities that he wants: making it to work on time; anticipating his needs in advance; completing "team" goals set by him; and, what must surely be the greatest creative responsibility ever bestowed upon our working girl by respectable hands, the freedom to "think outside the box" -- to innovate for his benefit.

Because the normal obligation to one's family is mediated through employment, a sense of obligation to one's self and one's interests, particularly for women, is cast as a kind of selfishness, a failure to meet one's "responsibilities," which in her dependency on employment is never anything less than a duty to her boss.

In the United States, the boss spells the death of art and creation for so many; and you might even hear people say they have no regrets. But I suspect you will hear it said with less confidence when it is said by a woman.

What The Heart is a Lonely Hunter told of her, it says about us all.

Smearing the wealth uptown

Arthur C. Brooks, Wall Street Journal:

Real fairness, as most of us see it, does not mean bringing the top down. Yes, free markets tend to produce unequal incomes. We should not be ashamed of that. On the contrary, our system is the envy of the world and should be a source of pride. Generation after generation, it has rewarded hard work and good values, education and street smarts. It has offered the world's most disadvantaged not government redistribution but a chance to earn their success.

What is interesting about this statement is that "our system" is not the envy of the world when it is applied in other nations. Our country, for various reasons owing to how it developed, happens to be extremely wealthy, and it's no secret that people like to envy anybody who is extremely wealthy. But when you apply the "free market" principle of total dependence on one's employer for one's health and well-being, with no basic rights outside this relationship, then "the world" will be the first to tell you how much this sucks, particularly when you don't enjoy the sort of extreme wealth that might let you subsist for a while on the crumbs. In other countries, you just starve, or sell members of your family into some kind of slavery. This is why the rest of the world avoids "our system" like the plague whenever they aren't compelled to accept it by force, and subsequently enjoy "government redistribution" in the form of basic services, like health care, that the average citizen would not be able to purchase on their own.  The thing to remember about a person like Arthur C. Brooks, however, is that he is not an average citizen, and what scares him most is that he would ever be expected to contribute to the welfare of anyone who was.

More scuds for Hezbollah

Wall Street Journal:

Syria has transferred long-range Scud missiles to the Lebanese Shiite militant group Hezbollah, Israeli and U.S. officials alleged, in a move that threatens to alter the Middle East's military balance and sets back a major diplomatic outreach effort to Damascus by the Obama administration.

First of all, there isn't a sane observer in the world who would argue against an "alteration of the Middle East's military balance," which routinely expresses itself in a casualty ratio of roughly 100:1 Arab to Israeli casualties. Getting that to a more even ratio, by enhancing the ability of one side to defend itself, is what I like to call a "sure-fire" recipe for peace! Otherwise, what history shows is that you can go on killing people for a long time before you'll ever see any benefit in negotiating with them!

Secondly, it's worth reviewing why there is a Lebanese Shiite militant group named Hezbollah in the first place. The short answer is that no such group appeared until the Israeli military appeared in Lebanon.

The point, as it relates to Holden Caulfield and Karl Marx

Cindy Milstein, Anarchism and Its Aspirations:

More than anyone, Karl Marx grasped the essential character of what would become a hegemonic social structure -- articulated most compellingly in his Capital (1867) as well as the earlier Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.  More than "simply" a form of economic exploitation dividing the world into a few haves and many have-nots ... capitalism's inherent grow-or-die logic would reconstitute the whole of life in its image.  It "naturalized" values like competition and the domination of humans over other humans, as if they were normal conditions of life, like breathing, and made such values increasingly hegemonic.

This logic unfolds dialectically, as Marx shows, from the commodity, or "cell-form," of capitalism: an object no longer defined by how useful it is (use value), but by its exchangeability (exchange value).  Rather than things having inherent worth in themselves, all of life becomes instrumentalized within a capitalist system.   Capitalism is necessarily compelled to commodify more and more things, material and immaterial, affective and ecological -- the whole world, if possible.  "Value" is determined by how much one has to exchange and accumulate: money, property, or especially power over others.  This buy-sell relation, as Marx explained it, ultimately becomes masked in the commodity itself.  Things-as-commodities -- from goods and human labor, to value systems and social structures -- seem to be ever-more independent of human creation.  In this way, people become alienated, estranged, or seemingly removed from a world that is actually of their own making, and that could be remade in alternate, humane ways.  As the Situationist International would later add, people become spectators rather than actors in their own lives -- lives that are increasingly controlled and deadening, if not deadly, regardless of whether one is "at work" or not.

I've often thought the point about "things not having value in themselves" was most ably mourned by your friend and mine, Holden Caulfield, when he remarked that, were he to play piano, he would play it in the goddam closet. "I wouldn't even want them to clap for me. People always clap for the wrong things." In other words, perhaps there is value in doing something for its own sake, not always as a means to something else.

For Marx, capitalism is a system of profit production through the mass manufacture and exchange of commodities. The purpose is to produce more capital, not necessarily more of any particular product. As you may have noticed, capitalism is happy to produce every sort of consumable garbage just as much as it will gladly discontinue genuinely useful items from a prior era.

Whether the commodity is an appliance, a vehicle, or some cultural product like a television show, the "use value" of a product is always a secondary consideration, subordinated to whatever production/exchange process will be most profitable. So refrigerators that last a lifetime are "updated" by models that last for several years, and reality TV shows displace almost every other kind of programming on television. Mostly disposable products from China, desired or not, flood the market because a very special commodity, human labor power, can be bought more cheaply under a populous, authoritarian regime than it can in any of these United States.

The point, again, as it relates to Holden Caulfield and Karl Marx, is that there may be value in producing a thing for its usefulness, not merely as a means to something else.

An end to the end of poverty, again

New York Times:

[Muhammad] Yunus says [microfinance] interest rates should be 10 to 15 percent above the cost of raising the money, with anything beyond a “red zone” of loan sharking. “We need to draw a line between genuine and abuse,” he said. “You will never see the situation of poor people if you look at it through the glasses of profit-making.”

In that case, one option might be to extend loans to poor people through institutions they can control, like their government. When people control something, they needn't rely on the iron law of Muhammad Yunus's recommendations. But because poor people aren't permitted to control their governments, they are invariably robbed by every salvation scheme conceived in the private sector.