The tea partiers are as good as you and me

WhoIsIOZ?:

[P]eople feel legitimate anger toward their government. They sense that the vague democratic ideals they have held since childhood have been traduced and betrayed. And they have.

We live in a post-manufacturing society, but this has different implications for different people.

Communities whose wealth came from manufacturing operations have had to replace that with some service-sector alternative. You're going from $30-an-hour jobs to minimum wage.

Then you have a wave of immigration from Mexico: you've got people willing to work for less than minimum wage -- people who get picked up by van services in the mornings, get robbed by their employers, and then pay a fee to the van service to bring them home.

Naturally, if you're going from some decent union job to competing with desperate immigrants for work, you're going to be pissed. Sure, you want to "take back your country," and you probably don't have good things to say about Mexicans, either. Meanwhile, you're listening to Beck and Limbaugh, because they're making sense of what is happening to you. No one else is addressing your concerns, so you tune into the people that do.

If we judge the Tea Party-types by the racism they display while bearing the brunt of the pain that comes from NAFTA and a move away from manufacturing, and put them up against all the progressively-minded people in corporate America who helped bring these things about, I don't see much of a moral distinction to get worked up about.

The only meaningful distinction comes from people who do something to challenge these trends.

All the King's men

Financial Times:

If Martin Luther King had a nightmare, it might have involved Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, the patron saints of the conservative Tea Party movement, taking over the anniversary of his historic civil rights address to attack the US’s first African-American president.

I'm pretty sure if Martin Luther King, Jr., had a nightmare, it might have something to do with what his legitimate successors aren't doing about war, poverty, and racism by occupying themselves with respectable careers.

Inequality and the problem of "equal rights"

Gail Collins, New York Times:

[I]f feminism simply means supporting equal rights and equal opportunities for women, I don’t see how a feminist can be opposed to government programs that provide poor working mothers with quality child care.

"Equal rights and equal opportunities" are in fact rather conservative concepts when viewed through the inequality of class and other relations.

"Equal rights" in this context is a political concept: it refers to one's relation to the state. To have equal rights means that the government will give all citizens equal consideration in the administration of their affairs.

A good example of this is the present fight over marriage. One side argues for equal rights, the other side against. The gay community advances a conservative position by appealing to the Constitution, their opponents push a "moral" argument by appealing to the Bible.

Similarly, "equal rights for women" means that the government gives women the same consideration it gives men: it acknowledges their right to vote, it defends their right to own property, it lets them seek restitution through the courts, etc. The state treats them equally as citizens, and affords them rights as citizens.

"Equal opportunity," on the other hand, refers to economic relations: it is the right to be considered without prejudice for a job, for example. In theory, a principle of equality of opportunity could be read expansively to mean equal access to resources; in practice, it is read narrowly as "non-discrimination" in the workplace -- a reflection of organized social power around employer preferences.

Equality of opportunity means equality vis-a-vis a particular standard of opportunity. It could be no opportunity, but as long such lack of opportunity is fairly maintained, equality of opportunity has been fulfilled.

This gets at the difficulty of using "equal rights and equal opportunities" as measure of progress within class societies: by definition, some classes have more rights and opportunities than others.

In fact, many rights only become meaningful in conjunction with a particular class position. Rich people can put rights like freedom of speech and due process to work in ways that poor people can't; men might be "most qualified" for a job insofar as they won't become pregnant; the right to vote for African-Americans hasn't translated into an unemployment rate less than 50% greater than the nation as a whole. By itself, an equality of rights doesn't tell us anything about outcomes -- what something actually means for people -- which is one of reasons why it is insufficient as a principle for addressing people's needs.

* * *

When it comes to government programs, for lack of anything else, what Gail Collins says is true enough. We need something that will address these problems, as opposed to nothing.

However, it is perfectly possible to be opposed to government programs in principle and feminist if you endorse something else -- e.g., something that is more likely to address women's concerns than a government program. It might be something designed and implemented by women, for example. "Government programs" typically aren't.

Suffice it to say that in the meantime something has to be extended to people in need -- and it deserves to be developed to a point beyond what a state agency can likely sustain: the point at which people achieve meaningful control over their lives. This is the outcome we should be working toward.

Sunday night shakes and the declining rate of profit

If you've ever had the Sunday night shakes then you know the capital-relation well. Your time is soon to become someone else's, to do with as they please! And yet it can be scarier to contemplate life without this self-discipline that has been instilled in us since youth, that sustains our reputation as dependable employees, and informs our identity otherwise. People retire and die -- that sort of thing!

Not a penny of profit can come from a production system composed entirely of machines: this is part of what Marx is saying. So you've got to keep showing up -- you can't take half the year off to do something you'd like! Technology does its part, but the real trick behind capitalism is convincing human beings to work one portion of their lives as necessary for their own subsistence, and another portion as an unpaid contribution to their employer. The two parts come together in varying proportions and are expressed superficially as a working day, a working week, a working year, and so on.

Much of the politics of class conflict revolves around how the two components of a working day fit together, i.e. how much of the day is spent working for oneself and how much is given without compensation to an employer. At first employers made people work 18-hour days, etc., in order to maximize what they could get above and beyond the cost of subsistence for their workers.

Now employers use a number of different means, including lowering the cost of subsistence (e.g. making food and other commodities cheaper for the general population -- think of how fast food sustains the American family!); increasing productivity via technology; dividing compensation between more members of the household, as with women's emergence in the workforce; or increasing the number of hours in a workweek, as from a neat 40 in most of our parents' day to whatever unholy combination is fashionable now.

One of the contradictions here is that while human beings form the portion of capital out of which profit is made possible, technological advances in production throw increasing numbers of people out of work. This leads to a scenario which Marx called "the declining rate of profit" -- the profit-bearing portion of capital grows smaller in relation to its automated forms, which are in turn maximized for the productivity gains they support. This is one phenomenon which can contribute to a generalized crisis.

That's probably enough to think about for now. Just remember the importance of self-discipline in all things, with working for others at the top of your list!

A gentleman's guide to career, romance, and nation-building

Capital, understood as a social relation, depends on the willingness of people to work and consume in a consistent, if dynamic, way. Sometimes you work harder and consume less, as in a recession; other times you work less but consume more, as when credit is available: and yet, a minimum number of your neighbors remain unemployed, reinforcing a sense of good fortune either way. Capital is not just the money or machinery available for production, but also that mass of people who choose work and consumption as the objectives that absorb their lives.

For capital, such activity must persist in the face of every other social obligation. Our president might be remotely detonating women his daughters' age in order to get at the men in their homes; somebody else's leaders might be stoking sexual violence against women as a rule; your parent may be dying, or your city. Nevertheless, the world makes getting out of bed and going to work, day in and day out, its highest calling. To anyone who asks "How could it happen?" after watching the film adaptation of any social catastrophe, the answer is always that our fidelity is not to people, but to the things that have situated themselves between us -- not the least of which we know as "careers."

Commodities come between us

It's not easy to catch onto this idea about capital being a social relation mediated by things. People on TV don't talk about it like that, and nobody else is going to reinforce this for you. You have to spend some time thinking about it, and you have to make yourself come back to the idea whenever you lose it.

Based on my own experiences, I would say that the capital-relation begins with what we choose for ourselves in school, and ends with a lifetime of walking in and out of CVS and Target stores (popular retailers in the US). Whatever career we choose, and whatever things we buy are less important than the fact that we divide our time between working and consuming in a uniform way. If you look around at just about anyone in your life you will find this commitment to work and consumption to be relatively constant, while time for other things is apportioned with greater variability, if at all.

The things that mediate our relations with other people are called commodities, and capitalism is a system based on commodity production. A commodity is just a commercial product. It's something that is made and sold, as opposed to something that is made and used, without commercial exchange.

If you want to get a good idea of what our lives are about under capitalism, just walk into a CVS and ask yourself what might be done about a homeless person soliciting customers in the parking lot. In spite of the fact that the place is stuffed with commodities of every stripe, there's nothing you can buy that will change your relation with this person in a lasting way. What can you do but deny that you have any relation to them -- even if you do give some change? Many of us learn not to acknowledge such a person at all.

A lifetime of walking in and out of CVS stores might get us the commodities we need, but it doesn't address social problems in a lasting way. If work and consumption are our primary activities, then social problems become secondary considerations. The fact that they persist becomes "evidence" that you can't do anything about them, instead of being the predictable outcome of relations that don't do anything about them. This stems from the fact that our relations with others are mediated by things that don't help us in areas of mutual concern, because they are assigned to a different purpose entirely.

Social networks

Karl Marx, Capital:

[C]apital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons which is mediated through things.

The next time you feel intimidated by someone using abstruse economic jargon to explain contemporary events, just remember that although there were probably many fascinating technical details at work behind the institution of slavery in, say, the American South, about 99% of what of anyone really needs to know about it concerns the relations between people. If you leave out the relations between people, no amount of technical exposition is going to capture what was going on in that system.

One of the most satisfying aspects of Capital, Vol. 1 comes from Marx's insistence that we look at our system in the same way. While there is no shortage of technical arguments or challenging language, one can take comfort in knowing that no matter how complex the concepts become, Marx has only proceeded thus far by first posing the same question about capitalism that any sane person would ask about slavery: what does it actually mean for the people involved?

One of the ways Marx does this is by defining capital as a social relation, not a thing. Capital, and the economic system named after it, implies particular relations between people, just as slavery implies one group of people relating to another group in a specific way. It is the relations between people which define the logic of the system, not mathematical formulae. This is frequently lost on Marxists and non-Marxists alike.

If we only understand capital as a thing, we too easily miss what really matters, because the whole conversation turns into a one-sided story about the entrepreneur, this person who takes "capital" and does all kinds of wonderful things with it, like creating wealth and jobs. That's probably 100% of what you have heard. Marx is saying: you might as well talk about all the good things the slave owner does, like provide for his family or give money to his church or allot food and shelter for his slaves, etc.; because the fact that wealth is created, or that people are recruited into the process which creates it -- these qualities don't distinguish capitalism from slave societies, or any social system that came before. So what distinguishes capitalism specifically?

The answer always comes back to what is happening between people.

An anarchist guide to relationships

BroadSnark:

[W]hen someone claims that there will be an anarchist future and it will include employer/employee relationships, I wonder what the hell kind of anarchist would agree to submit to the control of an employer. And I think back to the central conflict that made me an anarchist in the first place and wonder what kind of anarchy can exist with that kind of power imbalance. The answer, to my mind, is none.

Anarchism is a political philosophy concerned with questions of authority in any relationship. So anarchism can speak to any relationship -- between women and men, governments and citizens, employers and employees, etc. -- and ask questions about how power is distributed and whether such distribution can be justified vis-a-vis the preferences of its participants.

To describe oneself as "anarchist" can give others an idea of our general orientation toward relationships. For example, the current incarnation of this blog might be described as Marxist feminist in focus, anarchist in orientation, because it looks at particular relationships -- between capital and the individual, and women and whatever forms of authority are imposed on them -- through an anarchist approach.

Because anarchism's purpose is to detect and challenge illegitimate authority within relations such that power may be dispersed -- "thus broadening the scope of human freedom," in Chomsky's words -- anarchists naturally favor greater equality of power as opposed to less.

But it is important to remember that anarchism is first and foremost a process for evaluating relationships. If we are going to ask whether specific employer/employee relations are justified, the question must be posed to the participants in the relation. We can't approach the situation by declaring that it would be better if everyone lived in a commune. Maybe it would be better, but that is our judgment, and unless we are participating in the relation, our judgments aren't really relevant.

I often see anarchists make the mistake of judging others based on their own preconceptions of "what would be best" in situations they aren't a part of; they use "anarchism" as a yard stick by which to condemn or approve other people's choices, instead of as a methodology for determining what works best based on individual preferences within a group.

When we talk about the relationship between employers and employees, there are plenty of good reasons to want to eliminate the distinction between those who own what is necessary for survival and those who submit to their terms. But that doesn't tell us anything about how to work towards this goal. It also draws no distinction between examples which conform to what their participants want vs. those that do not. In other words, if we decide as outsiders that we want to unionize an enterprise that basically conforms to the needs and expectations of its employees on the basis that employer/employee relations exist, we are committing ourselves to a fool's errand without the consent of the affected party.

There's likely to be great diversity in the forms of economic organization that one community might choose for itself in one part of the world vs. another community in another part. A community that is resisting the expropriation of communal lands may endorse different kinds of authority structures in their resistance efforts, as with the Indian Naxalites, than unionized autoworkers might in an entirely different context. The point isn't to look for one template to be superimposed on every situation, but to ensure that the model chosen enjoys legitimacy amongst its constituencies: we don't want to embrace a Leninist model that sidelines the concerns of women in India anymore than we want to endorse a syndicalist approach which does the same thing elsewhere.

Anarchism is not a doctrine; it is a way of thinking about relationships. Thinking about relationships should inform how we engage them. We won't know how to engage a relationship until we think about the particular circumstances in which it exists. There may be situations where employer/employee relations are justified, just as there may be cases where property rights are appropriate. We won't know until we understand the concerns of the people involved.

Civilization and its discontents

Karl Marx, Capital:

The private property of the worker in his means of production is the foundation of small-scale industry, and small-scale industry is a necessary condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the worker himself. Of course, this mode of production also exists under slavery, serfdom and other situations of dependence. But it flourishes, unleashes the whole of its energy, attains its adequate classical form, only where the worker is the free proprietor of the conditions of his labour, and sets them in motion himself: where the peasant owns the land he cultivates, or the artisan owns the tool with which he is an accomplished performer.

This mode of production presupposes the fragmentation of holdings, and the dispersal of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so it also excludes co-operation, division of labour within each separate process of production, the social control and regulation of the forces of nature, and the free development of the productive forces of society. It is compatible only with a system of production and a society moving within narrow limits which are of natural origin. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, "to decree universal mediocrity."

I read this passage as saying that private property can be cool if you're Amish. There are plenty of things to say for being Amish, and Marx gets at this in his first paragraph. But what Marx is telling us is that we're not going to get Facebook and the iPhone and plenty of other things we like if we remain Amish.

Now, many people will rightly point out that modern civilization produces all kinds of awful things that Amish communities don't. The world isn't going to be destroyed because Amish people took a pass on electricity. The world could very well be destroyed because the same technological advances that begat iPhones are also producing weapons systems and genetically modified everythings.

People who believe it's simply hopeless to socially direct the work of those institutions from which something like the internet is born are going to end up taking a position against an awful lot of things that the average person likes and generally takes for granted. If they want to be persuasive, they will have to have a pretty good argument.

Marx is understood as taking a position on this by advocating communism, which is the democratic administration of all institutions, social and economic, in an advanced industrial context. I think part of this relates to his observation that many societies move past Amish-style living anyway, and once capitalist, they become violently expansionary and work perpetually to displace everything else by productive and technological advantage.

So on the one hand, this is what we have to contend with anyway, regardless of what we choose for ourselves.

On the other hand, Marx sees great possibilities in the idea that you could have things like iPhones and space exploration -- keeping the things we like -- while eliminating the socially destructive tendencies in capitalism that virtually everyone recognizes as undesirable, whether poverty, climate change, or war. I don't know if there is a primitivist argument that is analogous to this, but it seems to me that persuading people toward a saner management of what we already have by confronting what we don't like is going to be an easier sell than patiently explaining why all civilization must end.

Things to think about. Just don't take too long: the world can hardly wait!

Liberalism, power, and the state

Tony Travers, Financial Times:

The [British] government is making changes that accord with Conservative instincts -- favouring a smaller state and less top-down intervention. But there is also a willingness to try out ideas whose impacts cannot be predicted, amounting to “suck it and see” experimentation. This mix of cost-savings, reform and target-dumping disguises a more coherent underlying philosophy: the twin aims of reducing the size of government and bringing about a dramatic shift of power away from the centre.

Every government reflects the balance of domestic power. Inequality shifts that balance to favor certain groups over others. Because the natural logic of capitalism creates and sustains inequality through the ever-greater accumulation of wealth in ever-fewer hands, a government wedded to capitalism will always default to this purpose absent any demonstration of greater power by contending groups.

In this sense, what Marx called "bourgeois government" -- government by the private owners of social wealth -- can be assumed in capitalist societies as constant. The least amount of government will act to sustain capitalism, because without government, capitalism, and the property relations that it implies, cannot be sustained: the majority of people would not voluntarily submit to someone else's terms of employment if they didn't have to. Our laws are written in large part to ensure that we have to.

Liberalism evolved into a politics of "big government" out of an acknowledgment of this constant factor operating within the state. A government that "governs least" may be appropriate for a society whose economic affairs can be administered by free networks of small farmers and craftspeople, as Jefferson had hoped. But when the organization of all economic life falls to possessing minorities via "the compulsory nature of centralized authority," in Dick: Armey's words, then "less government" just means government for one part of society, and less for everyone else.

This is the sense in which liberalism came to embrace "big government" -- as a consensus policy arising from the conflict between classes. Big government added to the state's constant component a variable element: government for the rest of society.

That government for the rest of us functions as a variable phenomenon is plain to see in the various "reform" and deficit-reduction initiatives which have assumed priority-status. It is also evident in the cultural associations, for example, which have gained traction in the minds of Generations XYZ, that "Social Security won't exist when we retire," because "that's what they say." The expectation that one should retire at all is now being whittled away at by the same popular trend setters in the corporate press as well.

Contemporary liberalism should be understood as advancing a conception of domestic "rights" under capitalism. One needs a big government to do this, because "small government" is assigned to preserving property relations alone. This raises important questions about how the inequalities attending capitalism can be addressed and eventually overcome, since big government is only variably responsive the public, while its "bourgeois" directive pushes constantly to make it less so.

Tea party manifestos

Dick Armey, Matt Kibbe; Wall Street Journal:

The many branches of the tea party movement have created a virtual marketplace for new ideas, effective innovations and creative tactics. Best practices come from the ground up, around kitchen tables, from Facebook friends, at weekly book clubs, or on Twitter feeds. This is beautiful chaos -- or, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek put it, "spontaneous order."

Decentralization, not top-down hierarchy, is the best way to maximize the contributions of people and their personal knowledge. Let the leaders be the activists who have the best knowledge of local personalities and issues. In the real world, this is common sense. In Washington, D.C., this is considered radical.

The big-government crowd is drawn to the compulsory nature of centralized authority. They can't imagine an undirected social order. Someone needs to be in charge -- someone who knows better. Big government is audacious and conceited.

By definition, government is the means by which citizens are forced to do that which they would not do voluntarily. Like pay high taxes. Or redistribute tax dollars to bail out the broken, bloated pension systems of state government employees. Or purchase, by federal mandate, a government-defined health-insurance plan that is unaffordable, unnecessary or unwanted.

Yeah, dude! Everything should be like that! Let's decentralize our jobs and elect our bosses! No authority without the consent of those affected!

And if government is the means by which citizens are forced to do that which they would not do voluntarily, then surely it must be replaced by some form of voluntary association!

Under conditions of inequality, "less government" is hardly sufficient: it only ensures that the weakest citizens are forced to do that which they would not do voluntarily, while the powerful act without restriction.

A good tea partier is a consistent tea partier! Don't be a Dick like Armey! That clown has dedicated his career to "the compulsory nature of centralized authority," in standard Republican fashion -- by wielding it as a weapon of the rich. Don't let his cries of "big government" condemn any other principle than when it is half-heartedly extended as a shield for the poor!

One can always "reduce the size of government" by favoring certain groups over others. That is why you must either come to an understanding of which "group" you fall into, socially and economically, and work politically on its behalf; or stop playing the game altogether and abolish centralized authority-as-arbiter of the rights of persons once and for all!

Women first, then the world

Nancy Folbre, New York Times:

The historian Dorothy Sue Cobble, going further back in time, explains how New Deal feminists lobbied for what they called “full Social Security,” including paid maternity leave, investment in child care and early education, tax exemptions and tax credits for dependents and the recognition of women’s unpaid caregiving as part of the calculation of Social Security benefits.

To think there was a time when "Social Security" might have meant what it says!

Feminism means independence for women in all relations. Whenever women's choices reflect honest preferences, not some third-tier compromise negotiated at the heels of men and employers, the world comes that much closer to saving its own skin, and aspiring to something worthwhile.

But you have to remember that you are a feminist first!

Tolerance made easier by imposing no costs

Christopher Caldwell, Financial Times:

Including Islam within the fold of traditional western religious tolerance is not business-as-usual. It is an experiment. Our Lockean ideas of religious tolerance had their origins in the 16th century (the peace of Augsburg) and the 17th (the peace of Westphalia).

In other words, "our Lockean ideas of religious tolerance" coincided with the emergence of an institution that would displace religion at center stage in human affairs. For example, Judeo-Christian orthodoxy became a lot less important to people when industrialists began scheduling work on Sundays. Given the choice between sustenance and faith, human beings become much more flexible about faith!

The purported conflict between "Islam" and "the West" is really just a conflict between the contending forms of economic organization these terms can imply.  The same held for "communism" and "free-market enterprise" -- that is, until communism proved amenable to the latter, as in the contemporary case of China. 

Western investors are enormously "tolerant" of anything that makes them richer, just as they display the most principled objections to anything that does not.  In this way, identifying our friends and foes on the world stage is more readily accomplished than by employing any other criteria.

Everything you always wanted to know about communism but were afraid to ask

Anytime I hear some South Philly fluffernutter use the term "communist" I know I am in for a treat an order of magnitude equal to when liberal professionals spout off about "Christians."

In their global usage, the terms have a lot in common. Unless you understand the context, you don't know whether "communist" or "Christian" mean something really good in the sense of the "highest ideal," or something really bad in the sense of dogmatic and authoritarian.

Clearly, the concepts have competing interpretations. And this is one of the reasons why it drives me crazy anytime someone insists that a Christian or a communist is whatever it is they think it is. Because most of the time there are innumerable examples that run counter to their own rule, and which make their definition just one among many.

Between these ideas, communism is more interesting to pose to an American audience, because the connotations are almost universally bad. That's how you know you've got something worth talking about. As Noam Chomsky has noted, the terms "socialist" and "communist" are deployed as curse words requiring no elaboration, in spite of the fact that most people have only the vaguest idea of what they mean. Even Americans who are otherwise communist will use some other term -- any other term -- to describe themselves, because -- well, I'm sure it didn't help that people lost their careers over it in the 1950s!

The first thing most Americans think of when it comes to communism is the Soviet Union. Everybody knows the Soviet Union was not great. The Soviet government called itself communist, and the US government called the Soviet government communist. It was probably the single greatest point of consensus between the two governments during the entire Cold War, in fact. They couldn't agree on anything else, but when it came to the genuine-issue communism that was blossoming in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, both governments were pleased to promote the idea.

One can imagine why that is. In the Soviet case, communism was the justification for whatever the government was doing at any given moment; in other words, communism was a good thing, an idea that was popular amongst Russians. What was this idea, you might ask? Who cares! Russians don't know anything about their country that we can't tell them instead.

As far as the US goes, communism was an awful thing that everyone else was up to -- specifically, any government that wasn't adequately integrated into the US sphere of influence, or subordinated to its needs. At one point Champsky tracked down the national security document -- NSC 68*, I think it's called -- from the '40s or '50s where American planners defined for themselves what was wrong with "communism": It was "the idea that the government has direct responsibility for the welfare of the people."¹

Whatever communism is or is not, let us always remember that for the purposes of our government, communism is the idea that the government has direct responsibility for the welfare of its people, and this is as objectionable to "the American way of life" as anything ever conceived!

*Apparently the quote was George Kennan's and does not in fact appear in the more hardline NSC 68.

The best investment

Bertrand Russell, Free Thought and Official Propaganda:

If there is to be toleration in the world, one of the things taught in schools must be the habit of weighing evidence, and the practice of not giving full assent to propositions which there is no reason to believe true. For example, the art of reading the newspapers should be taught. The schoolmaster should select some incident which happened a good many years ago, and roused political passions in its day. He should then read to the school-children what was said by the newspapers on one side, what was said by those on the other, and some impartial account of what really happened. He should show how, from the biased account of either side, a practised reader could infer what really happened, and he should make them understand that everything in newspapers is more or less untrue. The cynical scepticism which would result from this teaching would make the children in later life immune from those appeals to idealism by which decent people are induced to further the schemes of scoundrels.

In the same way that we learn best about the limits of education when we go to school, the realities of work when we pursue careers, and the possibilities of living whenever we consciously attempt to do so; we also learn best about the world by not accepting uncritically any single account that is reported about it.

For example, seeing the amount of time I invest in following financial headlines, people unfamiliar with my politics sometimes imagine that I know a lot about investing in general. The answer is no: I don't read the financial press in order to understand finance; I read it in order to understand the financial press and the industry for which it speaks. If I wanted to understand finance, I would work in finance, or learn about working in finance from people who do.

Only in understanding another perspective can we compare it with our own, and, as our friend Bertrand suggests, infer a general picture of what the hell is going on between us. What is true for news organizations is true for our relations with anyone else. But we have to know enough about both our own lives and the experiences of others to draw an accurate comparison in each case. This means an ongoing examination of both.

Sometimes we hear about things that don't directly impact on our own lives, but impact on the lives of others; or consist of some combination of the two, expressed in varying proportions. In the case of the US occupation of Afghanistan, for example, we are talking about something that impacts Afghans primarily (it is their country), and Americans and others secondarily. Subsequently, what American commentators think is best for Afghanistan isn't really relevant, since Americans do not fall within the category of persons primarily affected by fate of that country. Their judgments should be considered secondary to those held by whatever groups in Afghanistan its population feels best suited to administering its affairs.

You will notice that this method is altogether different from that endorsed by the commercial news model. According to this model, capital-intensive news organizations employ personnel and sponsor content meant to be "authoritative" in and of themselves. In other words, their job is "the news," our job is to consume whatever version of it we like best so that we might satisfy our role as "informed citizens," by the standard common to liberal democracies.

This means that whenever something important goes down, like a presidential election or a war, we have our choice of nationally syndicated columns or editorials, etc., by which to formulate our own "informed" opinions. The content is derived from professionals so that we might enjoy thoughts of our own, because our time is absorbed in a never-ending quest to pay the bills. Professionals, on the other hand, are paid decently to advance the concerns of whoever pays them. Consequently, we spend a lot of time electing Democrats and Republicans and going to war!

I hope that when you read, listen to, or watch the news, you will not be very impressed at first; but only after you have considered the veracity of the information as it relates to your life. In all things, it is never bad to pose the question after any declaration of fact, Is it true? What is true from one perspective may not be true from another.

The news will reflect different perspectives depending on the money that finds its way into production. Sometimes these perspectives will prove compatible with your own, as on issues where advertisers (for example) and the public are agreed; other times it will seem like you are going crazy, because what is reported and what you experience -- like the "fact" that the recession ended however many months ago -- owe to the difference between perspectives. Remember that the news is not an authoritative view of anything except its own outlook as an institution.

The Matrix

The best way to understand something is to experience it. For example, if you want to understand school, go to school: you will learn all about the expectations and pretensions of official education, and the more you know about it the better you will be at navigating that particular system. This is especially important if you want to learn anything apart from what the institution instructs. Personally, I don't remember much of anything that I was taught in school, but I do remember an awful lot about school. What it communicated to me was crystal clear.

On the other hand, if you want to understand the experiences of the average American working schlep, then you'll want to do some schlepping. You're not going to get anywhere talking "discourse" in some graduate course. Why, that's just problematic! No: you have to interact with people who think maybe Obama is a cool guy to hang out with, but that a cabal of "communist negroes" (except your esteemed colleagues will prefer a different word than "negro") is pushing him to the extreme with his ultra-left "cap and trade" policies. And basically, you have to understand where these people are coming from if you want to understand them, as well as yourself, in this particular situation.

The good news is that plenty of people like you and me are already working schleps; we already have some of this understanding. And most of us are also aware that the reality of our careers can diverge precipitously from the official narrative. The problem is that too many of us feel bad about ourselves in response, rather than treating our life as an object of inquiry -- like students trying to understand their own experiences.

If we want to understand our life, we have to regard it as a legitimate object of inquiry. In other words, this shit is happening to us anyway, so what does it all mean? Why is it happening? Who benefits, if not us? Or, in what proportion do we benefit as compared with other groups? Do those groups have more control over the situation or less? We can't take for granted the fact that significant parts of our lives suck: we have to understand why that is, and what the implications are for us in the long-term.

Some years back I was too easily fatigued by the enthusiasm my younger colleagues showed for the philosophical trappings of the Matrix movies, which as you know is all about changing your perspective in order to see reality clearly. I didn't have a way to articulate the fact that the whole Matrix principle is at work all the time -- but it has nothing to do with babies hooked up to robot squids in ectoplasm, or whatever. We don't learn anything from that. But the idea that there is a superficial reality that is maintained in order to obscure the real workings of modern societies in favor of particular interests -- I tell you: you are better off reading Capital -- and working -- than watching The Matrix. Not an easy sell, I realize, but true nonetheless.

Weak ends

Summer is a time for comparing wireless data plans in each other's backyards while debating the merits of beer bottles with a rifled neck. The rest of the year it just happens in front of the HDTV!

It's the kind of thing you might expect if the world was doing great -- like we'd already figured out how to accommodate basic human needs in a way that was consistent with our values -- as if every individual mattered -- and we weren't contributing to needless suffering or the death of the planet as a society at large.

Perhaps you have never felt so alone as when you are in a group of people who only repeat what you already know, or can reasonably predict: hot buys, cool features, headlines, school-as-the-solution-to-everything-that-is-wrong-with-work, good deals, peak consumer experiences ("This sandwich/workout regimen/package deal/foreign destination was life-changing!"), etc. In other words, everything that society already promotes all the time, 24/7, without interruption, ad infinitum, forever; with human beings acting as the vector of transmission.

I've seen some scary shit at the front lines. I've seen multiple generations of a family celebrating some important life event with nothing to say to each other over catered food beyond the programs they like on TV. The eldest family members are usually already planted there -- forgotten, forgetting. Recently I read an obituary for a coworker that described her as a dedicated employee who loved her family and enjoyed bingo. This is the best sense you get of a person when their life's work is over -- unless they manage to struggle against that outcome, always offered as the default.

We have to think about the direction we are moving in. Life will move us forward regardless, but we have to choose the direction. Does it reflect what we want? Do we want to be having the same conversations over and over for the rest of our lives? Is it cool to be 70 years old with nothing to tell your grandchildren but the programs you prefer on TV -- with no advice on what they can do in the face of a dying planet?

What the tea party gets right

Financial Times:

“‘Barack Obama is a socialist, communist Marxist who wants to destroy the American economy so he can take over as dictator. Healthcare is part of that. And he wants to open up the Mexican border and turn [the US] into a Muslim nation.’”

If the people who believe this stuff can get sufficiently organized to push their representatives to the right of corporate America, what's our excuse?

You can't congratulate yourself merely for having a rational view of the world: the point is to change it.

Conservative corner

Jacob Weisberg, Financial Times:

[The] fear of overreaching government is deeply ingrained in the American psyche.

This reminds me of a discussion I have regularly with my father-in-law, who makes all the usual points about people becoming dependent on big government thanks to social welfare programs, and so on.

And the fact is, I don't disagree with conservative arguments that are framed this way. Obviously it's true that if you're receiving a check from the government in order to survive this puts you in a relation of depending on the government. The problem is that this is where conservative thought seems to dry up: there's no appreciation for the fact that relying on an employer for a check produces dependency also. It's just dependency of a different kind.

For most Americans, modern life may be summarized as falling into either or both of these dependencies -- not independence. Personally, I am all in favor of classical conceptions of independence, but until that transpires, between a nominally democratic government and some corporate hierarchy, against which of these two dependencies might we hope to strike our best "libertarian" pose? We're talking about one institution which is supposed be administered by its constituents, and another that is supposed to be managed by a tiny minority pursuing narrow self-interest (if tangentially for the benefit of all).

If a fear of "overreaching government" is deeply ingrained in the American psyche, that's because people with lots of money sponsor the national mentality. We must always remember who speaks loudest on questions of what it means to be an American: it is whoever owns the means of having their voice reproduced. The rest of us only learn about it afterward from experts who draw their salaries from the same source. This is called being informed.

Americans distrust government! Well, I don't trust government, but I'd rather it come pick up my garbage than grant me the "freedom" to pay someone who knows I don't want it accumulating in my house -- or the "freedom" for my neighbors to let it accumulate in theirs, because they can't afford such "premium service." Anytime big government supplies me with an alternative to the choices that institutions constrained by the profit-motive have to offer -- more of a whole lot less, all the time! -- that is rarely a bad thing.

Study finds working mothers have some work to do!

New York Times:

That was the sound of millions of working mothers breathing a sigh of relief, after a new study found that the decision of many mothers to work during the first year of their children’s lives is not such a bad thing after all.

The study showed that, over all, children whose mothers went back to full-time work within the first 12 months after birth performed worse on a series of cognitive tests. But there there were big exceptions: the study also found that children whose mothers improved the family income significantly, or selected high quality child care, or remained sensitive to their children did not have any cognitive setbacks when compared with children of stay-at-home mothers.

Great news, ladies! Now You Go Girl!™ and:

1) Improve that family income significantly!

or

2) Select high quality child care from a menu of attractive options!

or

3) Stash a small reserve of your best energy somewhere your boss can't find. Ensure your child still has a parent by the time you get home, not a zombie. Ha ha!

or

4) Don't breathe a sigh of relief -- you may be a bad mom!*

*NYT Disclaimer: Dads aren't moms.

The last laugh

Economist:

As the late Joan Robinson, a Cambridge economist, once wrote, “the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all”. Her quip, written in 1962, was inspired by underemployment in South-East Asia. Since then, capital has busily “exploited” workers in that region and its giant northern neighbour, much to their benefit. Now it is time for capital to invest in them.

It must be the running gag of every abusive relationship that the misery of being abused is nothing compared to the misery of not having an abuser. You know: hilarious!

Yes, the humor really shines when people have nowhere to turn. Women receive the same advice about husbands anytime they have no options available to them outside of marriage: Make the best of it, dear; that's just the way things are!

But notice how such cleverness becomes stupidity just as soon as other options arise -- precisely that moment when an abuse can no longer be summed up as "just the way things are."

Appetite for destruction

Rev. J. Townsend, quoted in Capital:

"Legal constraint" (to labour) "is attended with too much trouble, violence, and noise, ... whereas hunger is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure, but as the most natural motive to industry and labour, it calls forth the most powerful exertions."

Human beings have basic needs whose fulfillment lays the foundation for everything else they do. If a person wants to write a book, they need enough confidence to know that the energy they put toward their work isn't going to put their family in jeopardy because they aren't selling that portion of their vitality to an employer for the maximum wage on offer.

Men were then forced to work because they were slaves of others; men are now forced to work because they are the slaves of their necessities.¹

The world is still organized in a fashion which compels some people to work for others. Wherever such compulsion is unable to threaten us on the grounds of explicit starvation, it works tirelessly at broadening our conception of what our "necessities" really are, so that we feel we "can't live without" an ever-increasing number of things -- whether they are articles of convenience or the adornments of status and reputation.

Where capitalism begins by withholding the means of life from anyone disinclined to work on its behalf, the struggle between classes alters this relation over time. Anywhere capital is hemmed in by the progressive impulse of humanity toward life and freedom, it changes shape. By the 1950s, C.L.R. James contends that capital's consolidation within the organs of the state was a worldwide trend reflecting the options available to it at the time, which found their expression in the governmental models of Stalin and FDR. Since the 1970s, capital has been freed from the constraints of the national economy, so the role of the state has been pushed back, along with those compromises capital accepted in an earlier era.

What this means for the US is the convergence of increased insecurity vis-a-vis those "rights" won through struggles of the past -- the "end" of retirement, social security "reform," etc. -- with the unabated creation of "new necessities" in the form of disposable amusements requiring constant devotion. If our attentions are monopolized by chasing after our new necessities, it will be much easier to erode the long-established "necessities" of an earlier time -- the eight-hour day, to name just one of these already endangered species.

Ramparts

The circumstances in which we find ourselves may not be the outcome of who we are, but rather consist of whatever amount of compromise we have accepted within relations that we don't control.

Subsequently, many of us make the mistake of declaring "This is who I am" and attach a sense of self-worth to our success in doing it.

Men seem to suffer from this problem especially, so tightly-bound is the male identity to an occupation, whereas women are enjoined to see things from multiple roles. The retired man deflates without the identity he sustained through his association with external power; the young man drifts without direction for want of a "real" career.

Who we are as individuals must never be lost in the mire of circumstances, but advanced as a response to them. To accept something less than we would like is a choice to go on living, but to only know ourselves within its bounds is to forget the act of being alive.

Absence and presence

The best thing we can do for each other is to understand our own situation. It's not important what the situation is -- whether it is attended by x amount of "privilege" versus y degree of "hardship": everyone is in a different situation. No one will ever be in a better position to understand your own, so that's your job. The most you can ever offer anyone else is the truth as it appears to you, with the understanding that it is only a piece of the whole. It is also the most you can ever ask from another person.

Only once we know what is true about our own circumstances can we identify those points of commonality that exist in what is true about anyone else's. In this way, we look to better coordinate what we do by complementing each other.

The potential power of such self-knowledge may be deduced from the measure of determination society shows in always wanting to overcome it. Wherever we turn, there is an "expert" on hand to explain our situation to us, whether the subject is the economy, marketplace, personal finance or fulfillment. One simply cannot be "informed" without them!  It is no small coincidence that what often distinguishes the "educated consumer" from the average Joe is the extent to which such instruction is solicited uncritically: Bernie Madoff's clients can tell you a story about that!

Under the industrial conditions of its production, with all the centralizing tendencies this implies, it is often the case that the freedom to think comes in the absence of "information" altogether, in letting go of everything that is unessential to who you are.

The downloads of Dorian Gray

Ideas like "growth" and "development" mean different things depending on your perspective. For the average person, concepts like "spiritual growth" or "personal development" are often associated with the best of what human beings might pursue for themselves on an individual level. This is because what people achieve for themselves in their relationships with others ultimately forms the basis of their contribution to society as a whole.

These terms take on different meanings when we depart from the concerns of the average person and lend priority to the preferences of their rulers. Growth and development, not to mention democracy itself, meant different things to George W. Bush than they did to most of the world's peoples who experienced his interpretation first hand.

Among those subjects within the advanced consumer societies, the people of the United States know too well how the ideas of growth and development have assumed a meaning altogether peculiar when compared to the idea of full and free development for all. The necessary requirement of economic growth lords over every social possibility, from one's ability to retire to those municipal services on which most communities rely.

Just as all social development can be retraced to the sustained efforts of committed individuals, so economic growth demands the daily exertion of innumerable units of nerve, brain and brawn. Because growth in this sense predicates itself on inequality proportional to its success, most people have no choice but to submit themselves to this daily grind.

A common consequence of a life spent working for others is a life not spent developing oneself. This is true to the degree that employment points to a purpose that one cannot rightly call their own, over and above the inevitable requirements of living. Whatever can be taken from our jobs and used for the betterment our lives diminishes progressively with each unchecked advance of "growth" into the productive arena, because growth is inevitably a product made from the surrender of our lives.

Both employment and personal growth make their demands, but only one is required to live. This leaves the other an open question, to be realized at will.

Consumerism poses two obstacles to the self-development of the individual. One is employment which diverges from personal goals; the other is the market.

People who give their best energy to their employers don't have their best energy for anything else. Whatever they endure, they endure for their bosses; it is only natural that the rest of the time they are averse to pain, and structure their lives in avoidance of it. In the US, this often comes in the form of sedentary consumption.

The market plays its part by promising two things: ease of use, and personal fulfillment through commodity exchange. The market, first and foremost, demands nothing, but rather puts consumers in a position to make demands. It is little wonder that we cannot resist the appeal, and gravitate psychologically to this sphere! Secondly, it tells us we can be effortlessly happy by purchasing one thing after another, ad infinitum. We don't have to suffer at all, we only need to buy.

Nevertheless, suffering is always at our heels, no matter what we put into our heads. Our obligation to suffer at the hands of others directly informs our desire to escape suffering through the market -- in the act of consuming to make ourselves feel good.

We have already seen a generation of human beings who have lived their lives in this fashion, and their lesson should not be lost on us, so badly have they paid its price. Too many of those elders who we might normally look to for leadership have become petty and mean, small-minded and miserable; and, moreover, confused at where their life has gone and why everyone has abandoned them. Look closely, lest their fate become your own!

Notes from the underground

Whatever you choose for yourself, make sure it is something that can be sustained. If it can't be sustained through one approach, you have to try something else. The important thing is to keep at it -- otherwise you will never know what you might have become.

This is important not just for yourself, but because others will inevitably look to you for support. You can offer them much more if you've developed something of your own from the start. Otherwise you will repeat what they have heard a hundred times -- the very thing that got us into this mess in the first place.

Don't be someone who repeats what everyone else has heard a hundred times! And never surrender all of your obligations to the outside world.

Assimilate me once, shame on you

Economist:

Increasingly, the insurgency is hampering efforts to open up east India’s mineral-rich forests to business. In particular, the rebel fondness for attacking railways and roads has made it difficult for some companies to operate. Work on a $7 billion steel plant by JSW Steel, India’s third-largest steel producer, has been delayed in West Bengal, as have steel projects by Tata Steel and Essar in Chhattisgarh. In June India’s coal minister, Sriprakash Jaiswal, said the threat of Naxalite attacks was substantially curbing coal production. Land conflicts between big companies and local people have done much to boost the appeal of the Naxalites.

The popularity of the Naxalites might yet diminish if people in rebel areas got more basic amenities such as roads, water and schools.

People like to say that it's unfair to deny any country the right to develop in much the same way as the United States or any other advanced industrial nation has developed.

Interestingly enough, Hitler made this point about Germany as justification for his ambitions in Europe. The parallel he drew was to US expansion in North America and US policy toward the Native Americans.

No wonder rural Indians aren't crazy about the idea!

What the TV teaches

Americana:

At the moment I caught the show, Larry was asking what passes for a profound, introspective question in this country, “Is America still one of the greatest countries on earth?” Hugh paused, thoughtfully, leaned in slightly, and then, his leering grin turned down in an expression mock seriousness for once, simply said, “Yes.”

I once saw Larry King interview something that refers to itself as an "Anderson Cooper 360."

King asked: How do you intend to get into Haiti in the middle of this unprecedented catastrophe?

This thing emitted data about Haiti's borders and topography, the position of the sun at local time, the sensibilities of its kin ... instead of just saying: "My producer's handling all that."

Meanwhile, Sanjay Gupta haunted the streets of Port-au-Prince, auditioning victims for prime time!

It's reasons like these I want to kill myself every time I am queued in a US airport.

Struggling in an age of anxiety

We have to understand this idea of class struggle. If we don't understand it, we won't understand why we are so anxious or depressed in spite of our comparative luxury within the affluent societies. Mental health problems seem to be a much bigger problem here than among people who accept struggle as a part of their everyday lives. I think this is because on a psychological level it's much more difficult to ignore a conflict, even under "ideal" circumstances, than it is to face a conflict under great hardship.

Consumerism tells us we're free, but the reality is that we are only "free" within relations of abject dependency. We can quote from Family Guy or The Simpsons, but we can't take time off from work or plan our retirement. If we want our water to be safe to drink, not filled with whatever waste local companies gain a competitive edge by dumping in our rivers, we just have to hope someone in a position of responsibility is taking care of that. We don't feel like we're in a position to do anything about these things, so the outcome is that we spend a lot of time quoting Family Guy.

All this gets reflected in the culture, where it's "normal" to relate to one another in our assigned role as consumers, but almost inappropriate to raise some serious issue, because it's not "our job" to think about them. Deep stuff is handled by people who get paid to handle it, people who go to school for it -- and unless you have a degree in that sort of thing, it's kind of presumptuous to even bring it up. The law of exchange tells us that we don't exert effort on anything unless we're getting paid for it, because that's work. These are all expressions of class struggle as it is presently being waged.

Class struggle doesn't necessarily mean that those of us who may be exposed to toxins through our water supply are actively working to undermine the incentives that companies have for putting them there. It just means that we are necessarily in a relationship with those companies, and we are reacting in particular ways to their behavior -- in this case, potential behavior that we haven't confirmed. Because we don't feel like we're in a position to do anything, our reaction is to feel anxiety for ourselves and our families.

Now, when we extrapolate this sense of powerlessness to almost every other realm of modern life, what we get is a lot of anxiety, which people are dealing with one way or another. I'm sure you can look around in your own life and see how this plays out from one individual to the next. The narrow concerns of accumulated power are trying to shape our lives around what they want -- by increasing our obligations to them without reciprocating toward us -- and we are reacting. This is class struggle.

We see now what Marx means when he writes that the history of all societies has been the history of class struggle: that groups with competing interests are bound together in a way where an action by one produces a reaction by the other, and vice versa. This remains true whether we want to face the reality or not. If we don't face the reality, then we are just responding to it -- increasingly by attributing a chemical imbalance in our brains as the cause, rather than life as we are experiencing it.

The revolutionary role is to call attention to this reality of class struggle, so that anyone who is responding to it can formulate a more constructive response for themselves than becoming addicted to painkillers or walking into their workplace with a rifle. Such responses will vary, but we are always in a better place to react to something when we first gain an impression of what it really is.

Remembering why you are a revolutionary

Our task as revolutionaries is not to organize others but to organize ourselves.¹ In fact, discovering yourself as a revolutionary is something that happens when you try to organize yourself independently of all the forces that conspire to organize you. That is when you will see the barriers -- when who you are and what the world demands won't align. If you want to remain who you are, you simply can't accept what the world demands: you have no choice but to work towards changing it. Otherwise the compromise is you.

Yesterday I posed an example of the kinds of everyday tendencies I face based on my own situation that work to organize my behavior around principles that I don't share. In a context that is not simple, I tried to organize myself in response, to prepare myself with a defense against what I don't condone. It may not seem like a particularly exciting example, but it provided me with a sense of liberation: I don't have to worry about being ambushed with some off-color remark in the midst of a conversation that is otherwise legitimate (which is usually how it happens). In turn, this lets me engage people more unreservedly on the topics I want, rather than resenting them on some level for always harboring this threat.

This is as much a political as it is a moral act, for several reasons. The first is that we will only achieve a better world for ourselves if we sort our own shit out first. This means tolerance for each other and intolerance for what we needlessly endure. The second reason owes to the nature of what it means to "only say about others what you would say to their face" -- namely, that our energy is reserved for constructing the kinds of ideas that we would say to their face -- the only thing that can resolve a problem between two people, anyway. The amount of time and energy that we devote to complaining about others is never less than the very resources we could be using to take responsibility for ourselves in that situation.

We might note that there's nothing particularly exceptional or selfless about this, based on how we framed the problem: It's a choice between who you want to be and who someone else thinks you should be. If anything, it's selfless to forfeit who you are for someone else's benefit! This is worth thinking about in relation to the whole idea of class struggle.

A new human manifesto

In the course of everyday life, we will encounter a range of perspectives which correspond to a greater or lesser degree with our own. Within this spectrum, we can expect that some views will reinforce who we would like to become as individuals, some will be neutral, while others will draw us away from this goal.

Because society is not organized in a way that supports the full and free development of every individual, people do not often enter our lives bearing one coherent perspective in and of themselves, but are made up of competing trends which are to a certain extent what they want, and by another measure what society promotes.

An important part of the process of becoming is choosing among the many trends in motion those which we endorse. Endorsement means advocacy which is active both in preferencing what we want, but also in opposing what we don't want, as when the two trends collide.

What we are able to do at an individual level will vary depending on the nature of the relationship. Defining oneself in the face of powerful institutions is something that can usually be accomplished only in concert with others, at least if we want to influence those institutions, not just ourselves. However, defining oneself in the face of other individuals is something which permits us greater possibility when acting alone.

Individuals often serve as a vehicle for society to promote what it wants. In this case, by "society" we mean whatever groups hold domestic power, which under conditions of inequality means some subset of society. As individuals we are all solicited in this regard -- to do the work of some narrow interest, mostly exterior to our own.

For example, as a white man, I am often solicited on topics including women and "the blacks," etc., in the mostly non-professional settings in which I reside. It is a paradox that among those for whom I have great sympathy, some of the ugliest counter-trends do thrive! But because I cannot kill the messengers, respecting them for other reasons, negotiating these trends has always been hard. Mostly I have remained silent, knowing that I cannot argue persuasively to working class people in the language of Marx! In real life, nobody likes a speech.

Subsequently, that language and frustration has expressed itself here, in the hopes it might make the sort of contribution that had proved so elusive in the workplace.

But this is no longer sufficient, as my writing and my life gradually come together in a single person.

The most practical solution I can offer, should you ever face someone you love who wants you to disrespect or hate on someone for whom you share the same affection, comes in this response: "I'm sorry: I can't say or endorse anything that is said about someone that I wouldn't say to their face."

I haven't had the chance to use it yet, but those opportunities will surely come.

The parable of the guy who said vagina

IF YOU REALLY want to hear about it, I have even bigger problems than the world. One of them is this guy.

This guy, if you don't already know him, is somebody I will have to tell you about.

The first thing you should know about this guy -- something I can't emphasize enough, in fact -- is that he is a guy. Please don't let this fool you. It is a fact which warrants deep reflection.

The second thing you should know about this guy is that he is not a rich guy. Perhaps you know someone who fits this profile, who can serve to illustrate my point.

If you have ever been a guy who is not a rich guy, or known someone suspected of the same, you can probably imagine the sort of challenges this guy faces. I would like to summarize these challenges in two parts: 1) Meeting his material needs; and 2) companionship.

One of the saddest ironies of this guy may be attributed to the fact that what he shares with others in 1) is not readily translated into what he wants with regard to 2). And this is because what he shares with others in 1) are relations, whereas what he wants with regard to 2) is "vagina." Or, to better capture the depth of emotion as he relates it, "fuh-china."

Why did you interrupt me while I was talking to a fuh-china?

Somewhere on the long path to meeting his material needs, our guy took up the habit of relating to others when he has no choice, and simplifying them away when he does.

Is it harder to be consistent? A mother is not uh fuh-china alone, and neither is anyone else. But when people wear a different face for each occasion, they compensate for something else. This is especially true in the company of men.

There is a lot to say about how 2) becomes subsumed by 1) -- only to reemerge as the proverbial "ball and chain!" Yes: it's a fucked-up culture we live in, and we're all a part of it!

Which brings us to my problem. How to engage him most every day!

Remembering why you are a feminist

Feminism benefits from a clear definition of its aims, so I like to use the idea of "independence for women."

Independence for women is difficult to argue against. Anyone who argues against independence for women in explicit terms is going to look like an ass. That is one thing it has going for it: it gives us an advantage from the start.

Additionally, "independence for women" lets us introduce just as much "men vs. women" hilarity into the mix as we want, without evading the issue in principle. In reality, men are one of the groups we don't want women to be dependent on. But anybody who has tried to discuss this topic in polite company knows that the whole subject can go nuclear in short order. So confronting men on this issue, particularly when many aren't aware that it is an issue, isn't something that we are always in the mood to do. Promoting independence for women allows us to make the case for feminism without too many headaches from people who may not understand the historical case for it in the here and now.

Postulating feminism in relational terms of dependence vs. independence also lets us embrace a broader range of concerns than when we restrict feminism to the relations between men and women -- when we confine it to gender. Of course, when we are speaking about women, gender is always in play, but it is not always happening along a pure male/female binary.

For instance, although many American women succeeded in gaining independence from their husbands, they have subsequently fallen into a relation of dependency vis-a-vis employers, which is fundamentally a class relation, in addition to being informed by gender.

The challenges confronting women in the workplace cannot be resolved by advocating "equality with men" when that very rule is used by employers to penalize women -- as when they "choose" to put their careers on hold while laboring with children, while men do not. Independence for women avoids this pitfall by meeting women's needs on their own terms, not in comparison with men's.

Let us also bear in mind that it is equally feminist to support independence for women who suffer the effects of illegitimate authority in the hands of other women -- whether such authority finds expression in the role of a mother, lover, a boss, or as peers. In this respect, feminism-as-independence means unequivocal support for women as they confront all obstacles to women, not particular obstacles, as in the specific case of men.

I hope that having a clear definition of feminism that works for our own circumstances will encourage us all to embrace the idea and promote its aims.

Letter to a daughter

As long as we are alive, we live in a process of choosing who we are and what we contribute towards. If we are lucky, we will identify these things, or at least intuit their direction, earlier than later, so that we may have the benefit of time to shape their development and share in their rewards. The field of possibility is only available to us for a short time before we leave the terrain to others, so we do well to begin today that which we would put off until tomorrow!

To identify a truth within one's own nature is not to make life easier. The truth of the soul and the truths of this world are not easily reconciled, but will relate as antagonists, at least until that day when the world accommodates every individual as a value in and of herself, rather than requiring her to accommodate a thoughtless conformity in the world.

Anytime the individual is denied, certain individuals will emerge as all-important bearers of human freedom, which is never anything more than the freedom of particular persons to assert themselves at the expense of every person. To step forward on one's own behalf is the first step in a challenge to this long-standing regime, for which one does not earn external affirmation but definite penalty of a material kind.

To arm oneself against a material opponent is to become grounded in simplicity and emptiness of need. This is what the prophets discerned before us, giving the spirit -- that truth within ourselves -- the greatest freedom of operation under hostile conditions.

In setting out on your own path, you will be met by obstacles on all sides. This is the challenge of your life, which is uniquely yours to meet. It will not be easy; there will always exist the temptation to move away from yourself, toward the empty promises of external power, and external rewards. May knowing the adversaries you will face, and what you stand to lose by facing them, lend greater sweetness to everything they fail to take away.

High definitions

Now if you'll all be quiet and please pay close attention to what the Tee Vee taught.

How do paychecks make us poor?

Karl Marx, Capital:

Wages, as we have seen, imply by their very nature that the worker will always provide a certain quantity of unpaid labor. ... [A]t the best of times, an increase in wages means only a quantitative reduction in the amount of unpaid labor the worker has to supply. This reduction can never go so far as to threaten the system itself. Apart from violent conflicts over the rate of wages (and Adam Smith already showed that in such a conflict the master, by and large, remained the master) a rise in the price of labor resulting from accumulation of capital implies the following alternatives ...

Not to get all Marxist on you, but that is some crazy shit. Here we've been told our entire lives that a paycheck is a good thing, and this bastard shows up, telling us we've been robbed! The more faithful we are to chasing that cash reward for all our hard work, the more somebody else is earning money on top of the money they already have: the money and resources that make them an employer in the first place!

Now, the thing we have to understand about Capital is that Marx is writing about for-profit, private enterprise: he is writing about capitalism. However, he is approaching it as a pure theoretical model; he's saying, "This is how capitalism actually works if we let it run its course according to its own logic, and businesses don't cheat, and there's no corruption, and we give the system the benefit of the doubt -- in other words, we hold capitalism up as the ideal that it claims it is." And his point in doing this is to say: "As an ideal, capitalism means transferring value from people who have to work, to people who don't have to work because they own the process by which wealth is transferred." Among other fucked-up points he makes.

By today's standards, we might be tempted to say: Well, so what? That's the way things are: the rich get richer, the world's a mess, those-people-over-there-have-been-fighting-for-millions-of-years! But what I want so eagerly to convey to you is the fact this jackass still gave half-a-damn about Enlightenment ideals like freedom and democracy, even if we just like to take credit for them in between episodes of Jersey Shore. Marx came much later than the Founding Fathers -- and the joke he liked to make was that it's kind of hard to "declare your independence" when you're totally obligated to somebody whose whole purpose lies in suppressing you as a cost. It's almost like the opposite of actually being independent, which for Marx was what he might call "ironic." But America never likes a smart-ass so we have a hard time getting any of this in school.

Now, you might say to yourself: "Well, fuck that private-profit shit, I am going into the public sector, or to a non-profit!" The problem in this case is that capital, by its very nature, expands, and one of the places it likes to expand most is anywhere it is not. That is what is called "privatization": when public assets are sold to private interests for the purposes of profit. Capital is always pushing for this. The other side to this is that capital doesn't like to be taxed, which means it doesn't want to support teacher's pensions or fire stations or libraries or just about anything public. If people want those things they have to pay for them out of the portion of the value they receive in their paychecks after capital takes its cut. These days, that typically means accepting less and less, because people can't afford to support these things alone, and capital punishes communities that attempt to borrow money in order to do so. Borrowing money is something governments are allowed to do only when they bail out capital, not communities -- an outcome which is reflective of their comparative power.

In conclusion, I only want to tell you this: in a world of finite resources, ours is a way of production and exchange that requires constant, never-ending growth. When growth is "good," that proportion of the value we produce to which we are entitled by law may or may not cover the costs of our survival as communities, but when growth is bad -- or stalled -- all bets are off! It's hard to look at this scenario as making sense on any level, but rest assured there are at least a few people out there who are doing very well by it, all thanks to what the rest of us are willing to give up on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis!

Release date

Democracy in America is like that elderly relative in a nursing home that nobody visits because they're too busy being busy, and whose significance the kids never understood anyway.

Ghosts in the machine

Lately I have taken to looking at crosses, strangely abundant in the land of the iPod. Where the iPod takes freedom as its point of departure, the cross refers backwards, it would seem, to suffering. I'm surprised how often the cross shows up, in every kind of place -- often around a person's neck!

Suffering relates symbiotically to consumerism, which produces and reproduces it, while never acknowledging it as its motive power!

Consumerism, we might say, is labor performed under duress for reward in the market. The reward is the market, because it is only in the market where the individual experiences power. The most abused may hate his work, but insofar as it forms an access point to the market, he requests more. Buying things approaches him as the material inverse of suffering, each time promising to make it obsolete.

Suffering is a natural part of the act of life, but consumerism sells the cure for what ails ya! What once was a normal reaction to hardship is now diagnosed as abnormal. While the hardship continues, our reaction does not: this is the new "normal."

For its part, the cross -- and not only the cross, but the Buddha as well -- always references suffering. To be alive will be inevitably to suffer. This is the truth of the cross, which lent power to whomever directed their suffering in an active, conscious way.

A word about systems

Not long ago I watched a film about middle-aged white women from the US and Canada having sex with teenaged Haitian men at a beach resort in the 1970's. The film is unselfconsciously entitled "Heading South," but I have to warn you: the plot is a lot less erotic than the Netflix description would have you believe! I attribute this to the fact that our Netflix writers have an easier time identifying the sex act than the social context in which it transpires!

What's compelling about the film is the sympathy it evokes for its main characters, while pointing to the moral problems that are apparent in their relations -- in the circumstances overall. The women, who hail from different walks of life, are lonely and face the challenges of being women in their own societies; the boys have their own problems, but being paid to have sex with doting foreigners is one that ameliorates so many others; and an older man who manages the resort resigns himself to everything he identifies as wrong with his country, powerless as he feels in the face of it.

It's difficult to pin anyone in particular as driving what's wrong with this scenario. In fact, one of the challenges of the film is trying to ascertain whether there is something wrong at the individual, moral level. The underlying premise is abominable, and yet everyone gets on reasonably well; they laugh and love under the sun. The tragedy which continues is plain to see, but obscured nevertheless.

Today someone related to me the "adult vacation" they took under similar circumstances, except that the lonesome soul in question is an African-American man, and the "escort service" he retained was a 24-year-old mother of one. Legal in the country of concern, one thing revealed among others was that she really needed the money! My associate, nearing middle-age himself, and who never before traveled outside the United States, had concluded it was time for a special sojourn away from work, which to hear him tell it in his unassuming way, ended up being "pretty good" overall. For someone who has never had a lot, whatever money he had took on a social power in another country that he had never before experienced in his own. It bought him companionship, and his companion, the necessaries of life for herself and her child, which she might otherwise lack.

In the introduction to the film, our resort manager is approached by a local woman, who asks that he keep her teenaged daughter -- being "beautiful and poor ... she doesn't stand a chance." The manager refuses, and the woman, blessing him, adds: "But be warned. It's hard to tell the good masks from the bad, but everyone wears one."

A Marxist review of the Obama administration

Wall Street Journal:

For a summary of the Administration's antibusiness agenda, consult the Business Roundtable's recent 54-page compendium. But don't read it before you go to bed because you'll wake up with nightmares if you're an employer.

Our guess is that the timing of this White House campaign has a lot to do with the Roundtable's broadside, which has shaken even some of the President's media friends. When even Newsweek columnists and The Atlantic start to turn on this Administration, you know things are bad.

Another motivator must be this week's Washington Post story detailing that Wall Street and the financial industry have stopped writing as many checks to Democratic House and Senate candidates after two years of White House banker bashing. Big Labor can't pay for every TV ad, and nothing concentrates the political mind so much as the lack of campaign cash.

I don't write a lot about "politics" in the conventional sense, meaning "affairs of state," because I think the government is mostly a reflection of the balance of power within society. That means you have to get outside the conceptions which government sets for itself -- as a "constitutional republic," or whatever -- if you want to understand its behavior, in the same way that you wouldn't take somebody's opinion of themselves at face value, and expect it to yield an accurate picture of who they are. It doesn't particularly matter what a person, or a government, says about themselves, it matters what they do -- and this always occurs in a larger context which we must pay attention to if we want to make any sense of it.

One of the attractions of Marxism -- and not only Marxism of course, but that is the framework I've had the longest association with -- is that it doesn't attempt to explain things on their own terms, but in relation to other things that those terms often don't even acknowledge.

This is what is consistently hopeless about trying to understand the United States through the binary lens of liberal/conservatism, and what turns so many Americans off from "politics" altogether, because without any formal political education, people know it's bullshit. They know it's bullshit in the same way they know that someone bragging about themselves is bullshit: it's self-evident.

In fact, it takes many years of conditioning together with a considerable stake in the system (as through professionalization) to convince people that US politics is anything but bullshit. It isn't easy to beat out of people's heads the idea that just because somebody in a position of authority claims something to be true, that is more credible than if some random person on the street says it. Yet, if that person is elected or appointed to that position, their word is better than your own lived experience which contradicts it. And that makes the rest of us crazy when we think success means modeling ourselves after these types of people in power.

It's sad to see the number of people who are discouraged by the fact Obama hasn't lived up to their expectations of whatever it was they thought he was going to do as president -- all this on the basis of some flowery prose. On the other hand, the US business community, which is very well organized around its concerns, knows well enough that just because Obama says something which is "pro-business" doesn't mean he is going to deliver on it. So they spend all of their time lobbying to make sure he does! And that is the difference between the ordinary people who elected Obama on a platform of "change," and the corporate sector which manages to shape his every "reform" to their liking: one group participates in the act of governance, while the other doesn't. That remains true regardless of what some philosopher kings scribbled onto a constitution, and regardless of whether some poli-sci nerd wants remind us that "the United States is a republic, not a democracy." Technical trivia doesn't change power relations as they in fact exist, and the "rules" that are relevant are rarely the ones written down. This is why we have to get outside of the formal rules before we can understand the actual rules which operate within a society. This is something that Marx did well.

When people ask me what I think about Obama, I can only say that his administration reflects the pressures that are being exerted on it, and that those pressures aren't coming from the needs of people like you or me. Under that kind of scenario, what sort of outcome can we possibly expect?

Marxist feminist Fridays!

Wall Street Journal:

A new generation of Czech women is coming of age that is embracing femininity and sex-appeal while at the same time fighting for, and winning, more equal treatment in the realms of business and government.

"Women's political influence is growing. Why not show we are women who aren't afraid of being sexy?" says Marketa Reedova, a 42-year-old Prague city councilwoman now running for mayor who also appears in [her party's pin-up] calendar.

Because if one thing is certain, the Czech old boy's club wasn't born and raised in that briar patch!

Of course, there's another story here relating to women's official roles under the state socialism of Czechoslovakia, which proscribed the kind of woman-as-sex object that comes out so strongly in commercial media. Marketing campaigns and soap opera-style intrigues are a lot more compelling than state propaganda, so it's not surprising that you hear these stories about Eastern Bloc women pining for the very media portrayals that Western feminists object so strongly to. They were stuck with some pretty dull stuff, comparatively.

As political circumstances change, so do the kinds of behavior which are encouraged and proscribed. Appearing in a pin-up calendar under Communism might have been an act of defiance, associated with the decadent West. But now it's an expectation, because a woman's body is the go-to selling point when you don't have any other ideas -- to paraphrase something I overheard recently. Once you're linked into the capital circuit, everything revolves around exchange, not any particular idea about inherent worth, which is what the old regime used to legitimize its rule. So instead of a group of men in the politburo deciding what a woman's role should be, they're all on Wall Street, using women to drive whatever they're selling, whether its a commodity or political reform or whatever.

The point about the Czech old boy's club is that old boys aren't exactly threatened by the prospect of women taking off their clothes. This is something we have to keep in mind anytime stripping, etc., is sold as a feminist act. It may be feminist for other reasons, depending on the situation, but as a "challenge" to men, no. Even when men in power have explicit rules which prohibit such behavior in public, they will have others which apply to themselves in private. I can assure you this is as true for communists as it is for mullahs as it is for Christian conservatives! For men in positions of authority, nothing really changes from one regime to the next; the implications in this case relate more to the broader society, and how women's roles are being redefined under capitalism.