Against the Man: Lady Power and Contemporary Hip Hop

"Yankin" by Lady has all the traits of a Top 40 hip hop song: a thundering beat, a repetitive and slightly grating chorus, and lyrics celebrating sexual prowess. The song was even featured in the final episode of the TV show Girls. But why has it been noticeably absent from the commercial music scene?

"Yankin" is, for some, a jarring portrayal of a world of female sexual dominance. It is an articulation of of female power that challenges the commercial music establishment, which for the most part is oriented towards the masculine gaze. And because commercial music is mediated largely by men, it is necessarily cleansed of all elements, even implicit subversion and social critique, deemed offensive by the sinister controllers of cultural hegemony. "Yankin" has been banished to the far reaches of internet obscurity not because of the graphic nature of its content, but because of its subversive nature. 

Next to "Up!" by LoveRance feat. 50 Cent, which has garnered major mainstream radio play for several months, "Yankin" seems tempered and nearly nuanced. LoveRance and 50 Cent's song, which even when censored reads like the script of an NC-17 rated movie, recounts episodes of cunnilingus and intercourse and features a chorus only of the words: "I beat the pussy up up up up up up." The two male rappers detail their sexual conquests, with LoveRance rapping "watch that back, make that ass clap/make the pussy squirt, yeah I gotta stroke" and ending the first verse with the couplet, "put it on my tongue, fill me on up/put it in the gut, tear the pussy up." The two male rappers are allowed to freely describe their sexual encounters, objectifying and subjugating women in the process. Indeed, the commercial music industry has deemed it appropriate for men to air their affinity for tearing and beating women's genitals. 

"Yankin" is an articulation of female power that

challenges the ideology of the commercial music establishment.

In "Yankin," Lady turns the tables. Men rather than women - the traditional sex-objects in hip hop and commercial music - are objectified, sexualized, and subjugated. Lady defies the demand that female rappers acquiesce to male subjugation. Her fluency in the language of sexual domination makes her uniquely "unfeminine," particularly when compared to other female artists like Beyonce and Nicki Minaj. 

Lady's male counterpart is not demanding or controlling; she is. You might say she wears the pants in the paradigmatic relationship. From the first hearing of the song's refrain, Lady makes it clear that she is the dominant sexual power. Her male partner is forced to submit to her, as she declares "my pussy be yankin, got this nigga feelin' hypnotized." In an emulation of typically male sexual bravado, Lady boasts about her sexual stamina, "look like you tired, I suggest you pop a pill or two/you gotta keep up, when I make this thing do what it do." Indeed her power over her partner is so great that she suggests he may be utterly unprepared, "you think you want it but you don't really want none." Like male rappers, Lady is concerned with being pleasured as much as she is concerned with being an adequate pleasure-er. She makes clear her sexual demands, "I see that magnum rapper, nigga that's the perfect size," while at the same time she brags about her ability to deliver maximum pleasure: "I hope you strapped for this incredible ride/look at my hips they got a hell of a grind/I started slow so you can relax your mind/Cause once I finish, you gonna be out of yo mind." Unlike her female counterparts, specifically Nicki Minaj and Beyonce, she does not require male validation, "you ain't gotta tell me, I know this pussy be yankin'." She is acutely aware of her own sexual power. 

Neither Nicki Minaj nor Beyonce, two of hip hop's leading women, challenges commercial music's gendered status quo the way Lady does. Nicki Minaj asserts her dominance not over men but over other women; she is concerned with being the best woman in the service of men and not with being serviced by men. In her song, "Shitted on 'Em," Nicki Minaj proudly announces "All these bitches is my sons." Bitches, being a gendered term, refers to Minaj's female rivals. Like a mother over her children, Minaj claims superiority over other women. Later in the first verse of the song, she raps, "if I had a dick I would pull it out and piss on 'em." She not only claims to be better than other women but also concedes that only if she were a man could she truly claim power over women. This lyrical thread can be seen in Minaj's other works. In her verse on Big Sean's Dance (Ass) Remix, Minaj is again interested solely dominating other women. "Wobbledy, wobble, wo-wo-wobble, wobbin," she begins, "Ass so fat, all these bitches' pussies is throbbin'/bad bitches I'm your leader." There's no ambiguity there; Minaj stakes her claim as leader of women. And yet, conspicuously absent is any attempt to assert some kind of power over men. 

Beyonce, who as the respectable female ambassador of hip hop to the rest of the world is tame compared to Minaj and Lady, articulates an idea of female empowerment albeit within the framework of a male-dominated society. Indeed, Beyonce's Run the World (Girls) transmutes the genuinely subversive kernel of female power into a sanitized and benign kind of platitude. Of course, we know girls don't run the world. Women represent only 19.3% of national
legislative seats across the entire world. The Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), which maintains a

Beyonce's song is purged of gender politics. The chained men in Lady's
video are replaced by seemingly random animals in Beyonce's.

database of worldwide female representation, ranks the United States 69th worldwide.

By claiming, erroneously, that girls run the world, Beyonce supports and legitimates the unjust and unequal status quo. Despite all her posturing and declarations of female strength, Beyonce is an apologist for male-dominated society. In Girls (Who Run the World), she sings "to other men that respect what I do/please accept my shine." Still desiring male validation and acceptance, Beyonce doesn't truly want a society run by women, nor does she want real gender parity. Instead, Beyonce is satisfied with sexism with a human face, so to speak. Girls (Run the World), like most of Beyonce's ouvre, promotes the nominally empowering, apolitical message. But implicit in the lyrics is an acceptance, and even reinforcement, of the sexist status quo.

Lady is the most daring female rapper in the world because she appropriates the male language of sexual domination and promotes a vision of a female dominated society. But by using the same images and words as male rappers do, she is pushed to the margins of contemporary popular culture. It's time for the mediators of culture - radio hosts, MCs, and even artists themselves - to promote a genuinely powerful female rapper who is willing to confront our misogynistic society on it's own terms. Influential DJs, like Funkmaster Flex, Cipha Sounds, and Peter Rosenberg should take the lead and give Lady the respect and air-time she deserves. 

On the Importance of Jill Stein

This past week, I watched my Facebook newsfeed fill up with links iSideWith.com, an app that provides a presidential election quiz. After completing the quiz, Facebook users can post links announcing the candidate they side with. Surprisingly neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney were the most common results posted. Instead, it was Jill Stein, candidate of the Green Party, whose face was all over my newsfeed. It seemed everyone, from committed communists to disillusioned liberals, had found Jill Stein's platform at least nominally compatible with their views. While normally I would be suspicious of a candidate attracting such a breadth of sympathizers, the trend of the election quiz's results has given me hope that there may finally be a genuine Left alternative to Barack Obama. Assuming the app continues to gain popularity, and assuming more and more disillusioned liberals find they have more in common with Jill Stein than with Barack Obama, Jill Stein could stand a significant chance of making a noticeable political impact.

Moreover, as national media attention has focused away from Occupy, Jill Stein's open endorsement and participation in Occupy's struggles could bring attention back to the movement. Occupy was criticized constantly in the mainstream press for lacking a leader and, later, for failing to transition from direct action to legislative action. Though many involved with Occupy reject legislative avenues and view the idea of an "Occupy candidate" as antithetical to the movement's commitment to horizontalism, Jill Stein could be the voice of the movement's reformist tendencies and the link between the movement's activists and the rest of the public. Her platform - A Green New Deal - translates many of the grievances voiced by the Occupy movement into concrete policy proposals. Stein calls for "an immediate halt to all foreclosures and evictions"and has vowed to create "a federal bank with local branches to take over homes with distressed mortgage and either restructure the mortgages to federal levels...or...rent homes to the occupants." Her Full Employment Program is designed to "create 16 million jobs through a community-based direct employment initiative that will be nationally funded, locally controlled, and democratically protected against conflicts of interest and pay-to-play influence peddling." The aforementioned proposals address the concerns of Occupy. Both activists and the media should look to Stein's candidacy as a crystallization of an Occupy electoral platform.

The very idea of an electoral platform for the Occupy movement undoubtedly upsets a lot of people involved with the movement. And that is fine. Occupy participants who are committed to effectuating social justice outside of the legislative or mainstream political framework will be able to continue their radical activism regardless of whether Stein is on the ballot. But for Occupy participants who have grown weary of having no concrete platform, Jill Stein's candidacy is a chance to finally engage in the electoral process under an unabashedly left-wing banner.

Occupy's skeptics of organization and hierarchy, despite their disagreements with Stein's proposals, should nonetheless pay attention to Stein's rhetoric and the values espoused by the Green Party. Decentralization and local control have long been Green Party pillars, in contrast with the platforms of other left-wing parties. While not horizontalist, Stein and the Green Party share many of the more radical Occupiers' values. And that is a good thing. Stein's presidential campaign puts a pragmatic spin and concrete platform behind a set of criticisms and ideas that have been derided in the press as vague or idealistic and ignored by many. It would be a mistake for the Left to disregard her candidacy, especially when faced with the false choice between to servants of corporate interests and the wealthy.

Lifeguards and the Logic of the Shared Responsibility Payment

In a widely reported incident last week, a Florida lifeguard was fired for rescuing a man who had been swimming in an "unprotected" part of a beach. The Right has been quick to portray the incident as an example of the nefariousness of regulation and intrusive laws. Corey Robin notes, "Jonah Goldberg uses it as an opportunity to rail against liability law and union regulations. Even though no unions were involved and the major culprit here, it seems, is the privatization of public services." One could even argue Mr. Lopez's firing has to do with the nature of contracts and restrictions on conduct in the workplace (for more on this issue check out this post at Crooked Timber). 

Contrary to Goldberg's laments about the "the legal regime in this country that's creating a headwind against basic human decency," the sorry case of a lifeguard fired for saving someone's life illustrates the logic of the shared responsibility payment.

A person who chooses to go without insurance is like a person who chooses to swim in the "unprotected" part of the beach. In theory, both do so at their own risk. The swimmer makes a choice to disregard the signs alerting beachgoers to swim at their own risk just as someone makes a choice to disregard the risk of getting sick while uninsured. And yet, if something happens to either person, someone must perform a rescue. For some, like members of the crowd at a GOP debate who yelled "let him die" in response to a question about healthcare for the uninsured, letting someone needlessly die isn't a problem. But for those who care about others, and even, I suspect, for Mr. Goldberg, there is a moral obligation to save the drowning swimmer and the sick uninsured. 

Saving the drowning swimmer in the "unprotected" area requires that the lifeguard leave his post and at the same time put the beachgoers in the formerly protected area at risk, unattended. Likewise, providing care to the sick uninsured requires that resources and personnel be allocated from somewhere else to care for the uninsured patient. In both instances, the people who ignore the risks associated with their behaviors expect and require society to foot the bill for their rescue. The shared responsibility payment acknowledges the societal cost incurred by the uninsured's risky behavior, and requires that the uninsured pay for the care he will receive, should he fall ill. Extending this logic to the case of the lifeguard, a shared responsibility payment made by the risky swimmer to the lifeguarding company would have provide the necessary resources (e.g. another lifeguard, an extra buoy) to eliminate an instance when a lifeguard would have to leave his post to rescue a risk-taking swimmer. 

The shared responsibility payment is a natural outgrowth of a market-oriented society. Places that were once public, like beaches, are privatized and under corporate control. Goods and services that would otherwise be guaranteed to any member of a polity, like healthcare, are now sold with little regard for basic human need. In a capitalist economy, the value of which the Right and people like Mr. Goldberg incessantly praise, everything can be commoditized. The shared responsibility payment represents a full embrace of the idea that healthcare is a commodity; to a receive a service, even one that is lifesaving, absolutely necessary and entirely non-volitional, costs money. The Right's discomfort with this idea suggests either that they are less comfortable with the increasing commodification of all aspects of daily life than they pretend to be, or that they really would prefer to let the sick uninsured die and the risk-taking swimmer drown.

Quotes of the Day - July 2, 2012

I've graduated from high school. The summer has started. This can only mean one thing: more time to read. My first book of the summer is The Vital Center, by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. I'm a bit more than halfway through, and I'm enjoying it. Schlesinger has an immense command of history, and incorporates useful tidbits of his knowledge into his analysis of the political problems of the 1950s. The book, though, is very much a product of its time. Many of the anxieties - related to mass media, the rise of consumerism, the first taste of a post-industrial age, etc. - that surfaced in the 1950s (the book was first published in 1949) have either been addressed or have disappeared. Still, more than fifty years after its publication, The Vital Center has a number of valuable insights for the political observer today.

The first chapter, entitled "Politics in an Age of Anxiety," begins with a description of man's current situation. 

Western man in the middle of the twentieth century is tense, uncertain, adrift. We look upon our epoch as a time of troubles, an age of anxiety. The grounds of our civilization of our certitude, are breaking up under our feet, and familiar ideas and institutions vanish as we reach them, like shadows in the falling dusk. Most of the world has reconciled itself to this half-light, to the reign of insecurity. Even those peoples who hastily traded their insecurities for a mirage of security are finding themselves no better than the rest. Only the United States still has buffers between itself and the anxieties of our age: buffers of time, of distance, of natural wealth, of national ingenuity, of a stubborn tradition of hope.

Fifty years later, globalization has erased the buffers. The United States entered the age of anxiety years ago. Times has caught up with the country. Its industrial production has waned. Its distance from the rest of the world has been minimized by technology. Even the United States's vast natural wealth has begun to seem limited. Ingenuity is left to entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, who are idolized and hailed as job-creators despite their lack of civic contribution. Hope faded after 9/11 and the War on Terror. It grew fainter still after the financial crisis.

Despite these changes, Schlesinger's analysis of modern life can be adapted for post-industrial life.

The velocity of life has entered into a new phase. With it has come the imperative need for a social structure to contain that velocity - a social structure within which the individual can still achieve some measure of self-fulfillment.

Now, with our increasingly atomized existences despite our instantaneous interconnectivity, we express a similar need. What do we do with our time? How do we related to technology and the internet? Isolated and stuck behind screens, what can we do create some kind of meaning? (Of course, the question of whether being stuck behind screens actually isolates us is still up for debate: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-irl-fetish/)

The industrial corporation - the hallmark of Fordist production - is now an artifact.

It gave the new impersonality an institutional embodiment; a corporation as the saying went, had neither a body to be kicked nor a soul to be damned. "Corporations will do what individuals would not dare to do," the richest man in Boston wrote with candor a century ago.

But now, even though corporations are people, impersonality remains.

The impersonality of the new economic system meant, in brief, that no one had to feel a direct responsibility for the obvious and terrible costs in human suffering.

The economic system isn't new anymore. And in 2008, we may have had a taste of its demise. However, before systemic change occurs, things can only get worse.

As organization became more elaborate and comprehensive, it became increasingly the instrumentality through which moral man could indulge his natural weakness for immoral deeds. 

Schlesinger writes at the beginning of the time during which the American capitalist began to adopt the humanitarian guise. Describes the birth of neoliberalism:

The modern American capitalist as a result has come to share many values with the American liberal: beliefs in personal integrity, political freedom and equality of opportunity. This process is reflected in the general support for the Marshall Plan, in the establishment of liberal business organizations like the Committee on Economic Development, in the proposals of some of the more forward looking Republican politicians.

The modern capitalist shares the values of the American liberal because conventional liberal values have turned out to be effective weapons in the arsenal of capitalist exploitation. Today, arguments for market liberalization and decreased regulation are often colored by liberal language and talk of freedom. Cuts to social services are reframed by capitalists as issues of liberty, not in the interests of those who stand to suffer from the cuts but of those who stand to profit from the suffering of others.


Schlesinger was a Democrat, but much of his book is devoted to challenging the Left. His insight and criticism of progressives has hints of radicalism.

Too often the Doughface really does not want power or responsibility. For him the most subtle sensations of the perfect syllogism, the lost cause, the permanent minority, where he can be safe from the exacting job of trying to work out wise policies in an imperfect world.

This critique isn't new, but it did surface again recently when it appeared SYRIZA in Greece was could win a general election. For many Leftists, and even liberals and progressives, there is no plan for what happens once the election is won or the party is in power. At protests there is always a slew of statements announcing opposition to this policy and or that idea. Rarely is there a constructive platform put forward for what a progressive future might look like.

But that maybe progressives don't actually want the future for which they claim to fight. Schlesinger argues that progressives treat politics as just an intellectual game.

Because politics is for the Doughface a means of accommodating himself to a world he does not like but does not really want to change, he can find ample gratification in words.

Perhaps, this is beginning to change. Intellectuals, like Corey Robin and even the editors of N+1, have challenged the Left to surrender their privilege and take radical action: http://coreyrobin.com/2012/06/07/a-challenge-to-the-left/, http://nplusonemag.com/death-by-degrees.
It remains to be seen if Leftist heed the call to action.

Quotes of the Day - June 5, 2012: Notes on Gershom Gorenberg's The Unmaking of Israel

I've been reading The Unmaking of Israel off and on for a few weeks now, but I've decided to sit down and give it a close reading. Since I will spending a gap year in Israel, I have a bit more motivation fully immerse myself in texts about Israel and Zionism. This is also the first book that I'm reading on Kindle and trying to take notes on, so this might be a bit more fragmented than other posts.

Gorenberg notes the chasm between the internal and external perceptions of Zionism. From outside, and increasingly from inside:

The most concise criticism is that Israel is an "ethnocracy," as Israeli political geographer Oren Yiftachel argues in his book 2006 book of that name. (5)

However:

Zionism, understood from within, is the national liberation movement of the Jews. (6)

And yet, does Zionism as a national liberation movement make it any less of an exclusionary and ethnocentric ideology? If Zionism is simply another kind of nationalism, then does it encompass, as many argue it does, all of the unsavory and illiberal facets of nationalism: ideas of ethnic supremacy, nativism, and racism?

But there is another problem with the idea that Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jews: the majority of the world's Jews do not recognize themselves as members of a distinct nation. While many like to look to Israel as evidence of Zionism's success, the presence of a mere six million Jews living in the state of Israel suggests otherwise. More than half of the world's Jewish population lives outside of the Jewish state. They have no desire to be part of the national liberation movement. Israel, then, is worse than just an ethnocracy; it is an ideological failure. The modern state of Israel is not the fulfillment of the Zionist dream but it's failure.

Though the parliamentary anti-capitalist left in Israel is long dead, it's nice to see things kernels of resistance like this:

By then, both of the Communist newspapers had published editorials denouncing Ben-Gurion and Eban of "trafficking in the blood" of young Israelis to satisfy their American masters. (32).

I would love to see an argument like the one above made again. After all, American Jews bear none of the sacrifices Israeli Jews bear in protecting the Zionist dream. American Jews give a few dollars, Israeli Jews give their lives. AIPAC, ZOA, and other American Zionist organizations, by setting policy agendas and taking hawkish positions, are responsible for the deaths of Israeli soldiers in unjust and unnecessary wars. For all their rhetoric about their love for Israel, American Jews seem to equate the lives of Israelis with dollars and cents.

No matter how many books are written and films are made, American Jews have trouble understanding the trauma of the Nakbka for Palestinians. Jews have trouble facing the realities of the war for independence:

In some places, Jewish commanders expelled Arabs from conquered villages. In many ore, panic led to mass flight, especially after Irgun and Lehi fighters perpetrated a massacre in the village of Deir Yassin outside Jerusalem. (48)

Afterward as the fighting continued, cases of the IDF expelling Arabs grew more and more common. The decision to prevent return was the turning point transforming what began in the chaos of war into a choice. (29). 

Capitalist Education, or It's June and I'm Still in School

Sir Ken Robinson, PhD, likes to think of himself as "an internationally recognized leader in the development of education, creativity, and innovation." Like others who fancy themselves thought leaders on the issue of education, Robinson argues that the way education systems in post-industrial countries extract information from students is flawed. "Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip mine the earth: for a particular commodity," he said in a recent TED Talk. For Robinson, the method is the problem: tinker with the "extraction" process to accomodate different people with different kinds of skills - like the student he mentions in his talk, who can't sit still in class but turns out to be a world class dancer - and the education system will be better. To much applause Robinson declares, "creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status." And yet, while Robinson calls for a radical re-imagining of the education model, his analogy - of the mind as a mine - preserves essential function of education in a capitalist economy: commoditization.

Students are not laborers. Nothing is produced at school; if anything, students are consumers. However, public education is responsible for transforming students into laborers. The commoditizing function of public education turns students into vessels of labor-power. This necessitates the authoritarian nature of the education system. If the process of commoditization is stopped, then the gears of capitalism grind to a halt. Disobedience, non-conformity, and disruptive behavior, therefore, all threaten the successful functioning of productive processes.

The problem with the education system is not the specificity of the "mining" process.  Anyone who has been in a school recently knows that the problem with the education system is not the specificity of the "extraction" process. The problem is the notion of "extraction" itself.

Fukuyama in the Factory: The End of Work and the End of History

Over at Jacobin, Peter Frase and Seth Ackerman have been debating anti-work politics and post-productivism. In "Stop Digging: The Case Against Jobs", Frase argues that the left ought to challenge the "historically perpetuated" view that treats "wage labor as though it is a unique source of dignity and worth." "As long as the left remains fixated on more wage labor as the solution to our problems," he writes, "we'll always be vulnerable to the argument that the socially beneficial changes we want will 'kill jobs.'" For Frase, "socialism should be about freeing people from wage labor, rather than imprisoning them in lives of useless toil." To do this, he calls on the left to agitate for more radical measures and "move away from tightly linking jobs and income." He proposes, as a kind of solution to massive unemployment, a guaranteed minimum income.

However, fellow Jacobin writer Seth Ackerman finds fault in Frase's reasoning. In "The Work of Anti-Work"Ackerman writes, "I'm left cold by the suggestion...that it would be better to transform the 12.5 million Americans forced out of work by the recession into a quasi-permanent class of idle citizens." The problem, according to Ackerman, is that this would create "classes of arbitrarily idled citizens, supported by their fellow citizens...it strikes me as presumptuous to assume that most unemployed would want this." "The more general - in fact, almost universal feeling," Ackerman states, "is that it's problematic when some are poor and others rich, or when some spend their lives working while others are at leisure." A guaranteed minimum income would, therefore, neither lead to full employment nor eliminate class resentment.

The End of Embodied Labor?
All this hypothesizing about the economic landscape of the future reminded me of Francis Fukuyama and "The End of History." In a NY Times article entitled "After Neoconservativsm," Fukuyama writes, "The End of History" "presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism." "The Neoconservative position," he lamented, "was... Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will." Fukuyama's lament, I think, can also be applied the the views of Frase and Ackerman (minus the value judgement Fukuyama implies with "Leninist"). A legislative agenda aimed towards transcending productivism or a plan to create a guaranteed minimum income are attempts to deal with an unclear economic eventuality - a "post-productivst" future - that could very well be a historical inevitability. The left, then, should focus not on forestalling history, but on preparing for its end.

Both Frase and Ackerman ignore the fact that a "post-productivist" future looks increasingly possible, especially in light of austerity measures. However, this "post-productivist" future will not be the result of a more generous welfare state. Trends in financialization, workplace automation, population aging, and precariousness all pressage the end of embodied labor. Even now, in the short term, efficiency gains and technological improvements have rendered human labor increasingly superfluous. This means that for all the agitation about separating jobs from income, post-industrial societies may be left without the option to do so. Jobs may become scarce enough that income must be stripped from its association with employment.

It is an interesting thought experiment to view the current struggles against austerity measures as the first stages in "of a long-term process of social evolution" that terminates in a society without, or with significantly limited, human labor. Part of the pain of austerity measures, aside from the proletarianization of the salaried middle class, is the recognition that, to a greater extent than many would like to admit, humans are not needed for many productive tasks in the post-industrial economy. During the recession, when many firms fired workers to improve their bottom lines and combat the drop-off in consumer consumption, it became clear (in certain industries) that a reduction in the size of the workforce did not lead to a decrease in productivity. In the era of austerity, governments have come to the same realization.

The seeds of an economy run by robots and made by robots have already been planted. In the finance sector, algorithmic trading is in the process of eliminating the need for people on the stock market floor. In the manufacturing sector, human workers have long since been replaced by automated machines. Slowly but surely, man is creating technology that makes himself superfluous to the processes of production. And naturally, this dramatically changes the relations of production. If capital no longer needs labor, then what is labor to do?

May Day Reflections - One Week Later

Union Square was packed. Aging Maoists, reformist liberals, and the occasional steampunk-looking person stood shoulder to shoulder under a sun that had grown progressively warmer as the day wore on. Tom Morello's atrociously banal "Worldwide Rebel Song"" rang out from the speakers placed around the park. We had marched there from Bryant Park, starting on the sidewalk and then gradually taking the street. We had streamed down the avenue as police on their scooters tried desperately to corral us at each intersection. The air in the square was triumphant but apprehensive. It felt like we had finally done it. Thousands were assembled in Union Square. We had effectively shut down a major boulevard in the busiest city on Earth.

As Tom Morello's final chords echoed around one last time, I left the park to survey the surrounding streets. Were more people coming? Where were all the street cleaners, garbage men, and bus drivers who should have already joined us? A taxi whizzed past, probably carrying some wealthy European tourist. More cars drove by. People entered and exited luxury shops. Kids just out of school exercised their civic imperative to consume. Just two blocks away from Union Square, business carried on as if nothing was happening. Yet somehow, sympathetic writers (see the Nation's Allison Kilkenny's post-May Day article and Natasha Lennard's pre-May Day article) have been reluctant to recognize the May 1 General Strike for what it was - like many recent Occupy actions, a disappointment. 

Firstly, May Day was disappointing because it wasn't really a strike. Sure, lots of students, young members of the creative class, and veterans of the anti-war movement were there. But the unions didn't join the march until later in the afternoon. Transit workers, teacehers, sanitation workers all worked on the day of the General Strike. Indeed, the May 1 General Strike action would not have been possible had there been an actual strike. Many of the activists who arrived at Bryant Park via subways or buses would not have been able to do so had there been a strike. The students from New Jersey, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens would not have been able to make it either. The supreme irony of the May 1 General Strike is that no action would have been possible if the city's workers had actually refused to work.

The second disappointment has to do with tactics. And there's been a lot of writing about the NYPD presence and the brutal tactics it employed against protestors. The NYPD learned from last fall - it wanted nothing to do with the mass arrests that marked the early days of the Occupy movement. Instead of the spectacle of arrests, like the Brooklyn Bridge in October, the NYPD adopted a subtler and more brutal strategy. But what is disappointing is that the effectiveness of this strategy - "snatch and grab"- is not due to the sheer power in numbers of the police. Rather, the Occupy movement has made it easier, and this was the case on May Day, for police to apprehend activists and disrupt marches by using the "snatch and grab" strategy.

"Snatch and grab" as crowd control is successful chiefly because it disrupts the flow of a march. When thousands of pople are flowing down a street, the best way to effectively impede their motion is not some kind of colossal barricade but rather some kind of threatening distraction. When the police pull a young woman out of a crowd and throw her down on the pavement - as has happened countless times - the attention of the march is diverted. Movement halts and confusion takes over. What just happened? Who was that? And of course there is the concomitant attempt to make an un-arrest, which diverts the attention of the marchers even further. The answer to this police behavior is not to become callously indifferent to the abuse of our comrades; instead, we must find a way to make "snatch-and grab" ineffective, if not impossible. 

Police fire on protesters blocking an intersection

I am not a seasoned protester or professional activist by any means; I am a high school student from New Jersey. But I was there on May Day, and I witnessed the disappointment. I was weaned on the legend (and I say legend because I was five years old in 1999) of the protests at the WTO conference in  Seattle. It is almost impossible to compare Occupy to the global justice movement of the 90s and the coalition of groups that came together in Seattle in 1999. And even so, Seattle has already been dissected, analyzed, and fetishized. But there is one image from the grainy youtube clips of Seattle of which I am reminded nearly every time I think about Occupy: protesters blocking an intersection, forcing the police to open fire with rubber bullets and tear gas. The protests in Seattle prevented the conference from happening. It blocked the WTO delegates from entering the meetings. To do this, activists took over intersections, blockaded roads, and halted the flow of traffic. In most cases, these tactics have been absent from the Occupy protests. Though unpermitted marches have become a hallmark of sorts of the Occupy movement, they create only minor disruptions and occur almost randomly. There is no specified goal or target (and I'm not taking about demands here). The unpermitted marches simply end up leading several hundred people down New York City sidewalks.

The Occupy movement, at its core, is about putting an end to business as usual for Wall Street - putting an end to the unquestioned reign of the "1%" over the "99%." Occupy, then, is about disruptions - so is the General Strike. The purpose of both is to stop the flow of capital. But this is hard to do when marches simply rush through the streets or sidewalks. disrupting little and certainly not halting the flow of anything.

The unpermitted march inhabits a strange place on the spectrum of public protest. It is not a state-sanctioned event, so the police remain antagonists instead of facilitators - but it is not an act of civil disobedience. In most cases, walking with a group down a sidewalk is not illegal, but it is still moderately disruptive and it irritates police. Occupy has often been reluctant to use flat out civil disobedience - such as public sit downs and blockades of city streets- out of fear of directly violating the law and the sensibilities of mainstream Americans. Occupy's strategy, instead, has been to tread the line of legality in the hope that a violent police response will win the movement sympathizers. But this strategy has not worked. Those the movement hoped to win over simply react to the roving sidewalk protests as a nuisance. "Shut up and stop crowding the sidewalk" is a common response. If the public is not receptive to timid attempts to remain within the bounds of the law, then the law must be broken.

If we're going to get arrested anyway - snatched and grabbed off the street into a paddy-wagon - then let's get arrested the right way! What better method of clotting the arteries of capitalism is there than to sit our asses down in the middle of a Times Square intersection with 5,000 of our closest friends? The cops will need to do more than "snatch and grab" to get rid of us. And we can be sure the amount of time that would be enough to turn those clogged arteries into a stroke. But to successfully induce a cardiac arrest, we need more people in the street; as long as the number of protesters remain in the thousands, the media will continue to ignore them.

Quotes of the Day - April 25, 2012

I haven't found a lot of time to post or even read recently because of college visits and general craziness at school. But, now that things have calmed down a bit, I should have more time to read and write. A few weeks ago - during spring break when I actually had time to read - I picked up a copy of Illuminations, the collection of essays by Walter Benjamin. I finished it last night. There are tons of passages and quotes I want to highlight and discuss.

In the introduction, Hannah Arendt discuss what life was like for the bourgeois German Jews of Benjamin's time.

"It was the walk of a flaneur, and it was so striking because, like the dandy and the snob, the flaneur had his home in the nineteenth century, an age of security in which children of upper-middle-class families were assured of an income without having to work, so that they had no reason to hurry" (22).

It's remarkable that this way of life, which was extinguished during the Holocaust, has been reborn in the United States. With gap years and unpaid internship opportunities, the lives of today's child-flaneurs in Ameriac are remarkably similar to the lives of their European antecedents. The above passage could be a description of the lives of  today's privileged "Upper West Side Jews."

Arendt's writing in the introduction is amazing. Her analysis of Benjamin rivals his analysis of Kafka and Baudelaire. In part three of her introduction, she discusses Benjamin's relationship to modernity. His discontent with the state of modern technological life mirrors, I think, the Left's dissatisfaction with the commodification of the digital realm.

"This discovery of the modern function of quotations, according to Benjamin, who exemplified it by Karl Kraus, was born out of despair - not the despair of a past that refuses 'to throw its light on the future' and lets the human mind 'wander in darkness' as in Tocqueville, but out of the despair of the present and the desire to destroy it; hence, their power is 'not the strength to preserve but to cleanse, to tear out of context, to destroy'" (39).

For Benjamin, quotations are a way of challenging modernity's flow. His discomfort with the present and his dedication to history reminds me of current debates about the role of social media and digital communication. The loudest voices of opposition to the ever-accelerating train of digital progress comes surprisingly from the Left. It is almost as if the Left has adopted the mantle once held by Conservatives, who worried that TV would destroy the family and life as we know it. The Left, similarly, worries today that the Internet and it's corporate controllers threaten everything from the future of human interaction to the conception of what is real and what is not.

Quotations, though, serve another purpose in Benjamin's work.

"In this form of 'thought fragments,' quotations have the double task of interrupting the flow of the presentation with 'transcendent force" (Schriften I,142-43) and at the same time of concentrating within themselves that which is presented. As to their weight in Benjamin'swritings, quotations are comparable only to the very dissimilar Biblical citations which so often replace the immanent consistency of argumentation in medieval treatises" (39).

This passage made me think immediately about the method of Talmudic scholarship and commentary, which uses quotation as means of discussing religious rules and codes of conduct. Just as Rabbi Gamliel or Rabbi Yochanan interact within a text to create a coherent (not always, though) discussion, Benjamin's quotations - even those from disparate sources - link together in a cogent statement.

Arendt argues that collection, rather than being a consumerist habit, is actually opposed to the capitalist mode of production.

"As Benjamin was probably the first to emphasize, collecting is the passion of children, for whom things are not yet commodities and are not valued according to their usefuless, and it is also the hobby of the rich, who own enough not to need anything useful and hence can afford to make 'the transfiguration of objects' (Schriften I, 416) their business" (42).

Yes, collecting may be a signifier of wealth, but it involves the removal of objects from the productive sphere, hence the use of "transfiguration." Politicized, to collect is to disrupt the productive forces of the economic order.

"Like the revolutionary, the collector 'dreams his way nto only into a remote or bygone world, but at the same time into a better one in which, to be sure, people are not provided with what they need any more than they are in the everyday world, but in which things are liberated from the drudgery of usefulness' (Schriften I, 416)" (42).

I like the passage because it provides us with an alternative and nuanced method of critiquing capitalism. Privation, while certainly a crucial aspect of capitalism, is not what is most oppressive. There can be justice even without immense material comfort. Instead, Arendth and Benjamin argue, the truly oppressive force of capitalism is the commodification of the human being or the oppression of productivity. The requirement to work and be useful alienates, just as deprivation and lack of ownership do.*


Towards the end of the introduction, Arendt returns to the place of quotations in Benjamin's work.

"From the Goethe essay on, quotations are at the center of every work of Benjamin's. This veryf act distinguishes his writings from scholarly works of all kinds in which it is the function of quotations to verify and document opinions, wherfore they can safely be relegated to the Notes. This is just out of the question in Benjamin. When he was working on his study of German tragedy, he boasted a collection of 'over 600 quotations very systematically and clearly arranged' (Briefe I, 339); like the later notebooks, this collection wa not an accumulation of excerpts intended to faciliate the writing of the study but constituted the main work, with the writing as something secondary" (47).

In a way, this is how I've come to think of this blog. As modestly as I can put this, like Benjamin I seek to select quotations and present them as the main work. One of the goals of this blog is to assemble a collection of quotations, not to create some larger work, but for the sake of highlighting and quoting passages themselves. Benjmain's emphasis on quotations is a source of inspiration.

***

In "Unpacking My Library," Benjamin explains why people write:

"Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like" (61).

Recently, through social media and technology, objects have been elevated to extensions of the self. The kind of shoes you buy or the tablet computer you own are taken to say something about you as a person; the line at which object ends and personality begins has become increasingly blurred. It is almost as if from beyond the grave Benjamin asks us to take a step back.

"Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting" (67).

Facebook, iPads, and Blackberrys are not extensions of the self but places in which the self takes refuge, or through which the self is transmitted.

In "The Task of the Translator", Benjamin reveals that the work of art is not just a philosophical statement but also a document of historical testimony. Comprehension of the philosophical is contingent upon comprehension of the accompanying history.

"The philosopher's task consists in comprehending all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history. And ineded, is not the continued life of works of art far easier to recognize than the continued life of animal species? The history of the great works of art tells us about their antecendets, their realization in the age of the artist, their potentially eternal afterlife in suceeding generations" (71).

Autenticity and translation nearly always go hand in hand. Readers want to be sure that the translation they are reading matches the original intentions of the author. This obsession with faitfulness to the original, Benjamin argues, ignores the fact that the context in which works are translated are not static environments.

"The obvious tendency of a writer's literary style may in time wither away, only to give rise to immanent tendencies in the literary creation. What sounded fresh once may sound hackneyed later; what was once current may someday sound quaint. To seek the essence of such changes, as well as the equally constant changes in meaning, in the subjectivity of posterity rather than in the very life of language and its works, would mean - even allowing for the crudest psychologism - to confuse the root cause of a thing with its essence" (73). 

"For just as the tenor and the significance o the great wokrs of literature undergo a complete transofmoration over the centuries, the mother tongue of the translator is transformed as well" (73).

Sometimes in Benjamin's work, his statements will morph into aphorisms. This happens several times in "The Storyteller", most notably here:

"Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom" (87).

"There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis" (91).

"A proverb, one mught say, is a ryin which stands on thesite of an old story and in which a moral twines about a happening like ivy around a wall" (108).

Benjamin's essay on Kafka is my favorite essay in Illuminations. Kafka is one of the authors to whom I feel a strangely personal connection. As a child, my father used to read me Kafka's stories before I went to sleep. (What kid's father reads him "A Country Doctor" at bedtime?!) Now, as a young adult, Kafka has become part of religious ritual; my secular observance of Yom Kippur entails reading The Trial in its entirety between Kol Nidre and Neila the next day. Visiting his house and grave when I was in the Czech Republic are some of my fondest travel memories.

Benjamin identifies generational conflict in Kafka's writing.

"In the same way the fathers in Kafka's strange families batten on their sons, lying on top of them like gian parasites. They not only prey ipon their strength, but gnaw away at the sons' right to exist. The fathers punish, but they are at the same time the accusers, The sin of which they accusetheir sons seems to be akind of original sin. The definition of it which Kafka has given applies to the sons more than to anyone else: 'Original sin, the old injustice committed by man, consists in the complaint unceasingly made by man that he has been the victim of an injustice, the victim of original sin.' But who is accused this inherited sin - the sin of having prduced an heir - if not the father by theson? Accordingly the son would be the sinner. But one must not conlcude from Kafka's defintion that the accusation is sinful because it is false" (114). 

Kafka's Jewishness is always a matter of debate. Benjamin, who connects with Kafka on more than just Jewishness, pays special attention to the role of the law - Biblical and administrative -in Kafka's work.

"In Kafka the written law is contained in books, but these are secret; by basing itself off them the prehistoric world exerts its rule all the more ruthlessly" (115).

The law is often construed as a distinctly Jewish preoccupation. Judaism is a religion of laws that are codified in texts and then debated for centuries. Religious law, called halakha, is contained in both the Pentateuch and the Mishna. The debates are found in the Gemara. But there is also another component to the Jewish religious tradition. In contrast with the "scientific" halakah is the the narrative and even mystical aggadah - parables and stories which reveal aspects of the tradition. In Kafka, Benjamin identifies the written or formalized law - halakha - as oppressive. He identifies Kafka with aggadah.

"His gestures of terror are given scope by the marvelous margin which the catastrophe will not grant us. But his experience was baed soley on the tradition to which Kafka surrendered; there was no far-sightedness or 'prophetic vision.' Kafka listened to tradition, and he who listens hard does not see" (143).

"The things that want to be caught as they rush by are not meant for anyone's ears. This implies a state of affairs which negatively characterizes Kafka's work with graet precision....Kafka's work presents a sickness of tradition. Wisdom has sometimes been defined as the epic side of truth. Such definition stamps wisdom as inherent in tradition; it is truth in its haggadic consistency" (143). 

"The Work of Art in Mechanical Reproduction", one of Benjamin's most widely cited essays, encourages the reader to think about art in the context of productive society in a way that I have never seen before. First, Benjamin applies Marx to art in the capitalist mode of producition:

"The result was that one could expect not only to exploit the proleatariat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism itself" (217).  

The contradictions of capitalism are manifest in capitalist art. This is because, as Paul Valery explains, art functions like a utility.

' "Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign' " (219).  

Again, Benjamin's statements work well as aphorisms.

"The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thorougly alive and extremely changeable" (223).

"For the first time in world histlry, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasticial depdence on ritual" (224).

"To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility" (224).

"The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology" (233).

The era of the blog has made everyone with a computer is an expert. TV watchers, music-listeners, book-readers - everyone can be a cultural critic. While this has been hailed as a new phenomenon, Benjamin predicted it decaes before.

"Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character...At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process, even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship" (232).

For Benjamin, there is a reactionary and a progressive reaction of the masses towards art.

"Mechanical reproduction of art chagnes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visuala nd emotional enjoyment with the orietnation ofthe expert" (234).

There is also a specific way of interacting with art.

"Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated asfollows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into his work of arat the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction. The laws of its reception are most instructive" (239).

A lot of (digital) ink has been spilled about the New Aesthetic recently. One of the more memorable essays spoke about the need to formulate an accompanying politics. Benjamin provides important insight into what constitutes fascist aesthetics and what constitutes emancipatory aesthetics.

"Facisms attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure  which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascisms sees its salvation in giving these masses nto their right, but instead a chanceto express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property" (241).

Like neoliberalism, fascist aesthetics allows for "self-expression," as long as it doesn't threaten the status quo of property relations.

"War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system." 

"Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today's technical resources while mainntaining the property system" (241).

An aesthetics that does not oppose war will be instrumentalized as a weapon.

"To the latter, the aesthetics of today's war appears as follows: If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utlization, and this is found in war." 

"Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of 'human material,' the claims to which society is denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; insttad of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfae the aura is aboloshed in a new way" (242).

The final essay in the collection is "Theses on the Philosophy of History." While the content is fascinating, Benjamin feels a bit out of his element. Most of what he writes is not groundbreaking; much of it has been said before, by Marxists who preceded him. Benjamin relies more heavily on aphoristic expressions, and the essay is less coherent a whole.

 "Empathy with the victor inevitably benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment...There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another" (256).

The most interesting parts of Benjamin's writing are the parts where he discusses the traits of fascist art and fascist history. Everywhere, in all disciplines and aspects of life, the specter of fascism lurks. Most often, this secret fascism manifests itself in the form of permanent crisis or state of emergency.

"The 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping within this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve in the struggle against fascism" (257).

Benjamin notes that there exists a reactionary class consciousness. This kind of class consciousness acknowledges the struggle between labor and capital, but is fixated on the exploitation of the past rather than the emancipatory potential of the future.

"Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the workign class the role of the redeemer of future generations in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren" (260).

As a likely history major in college, I love the advice Benjamin gives in "Theses on the Philosophy of History." Benjamin provides the tools to answer the question: what kind of historian do you want to be?

"Historicism gives the 'eternal' image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to other to be drained by the whore called 'once upon a time in historicism's bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history" (262).

________________________________________________________________________________

*Last week I sat in on a seminar at the university I will be attending next year. In it, the students were discussing "A Theory of Wrongful Exploitation" by Mikhail Valdman. During the seminar, I was instantly reminded of the above critique of capitalism - that the very idea of labor is itself wronfully exploitive. In capitalism, there is no reasonable alternative to working; starvation is the only other option. Furthermore, in capitalist production, workers do not obtain the full value of their labor; value is extracted by employer, bosses, and etc. One could even argue that in this era of executive bonues that amount to tens of millions of dollars, these bosses benefit excessively from the extraction of value from their employees. Lastly, the fact that employees cannot reasonably choose an alternative to employment - the only alternative is starvation - is used by employers and bosses to force workers to accept the aforementioned unfavorable terms. The whole of capitalist production, then, is wrongfully exploitive.

Quotes of the Day - April 11, 2012: On Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People

I picked up Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People over six months ago in a book store in the Neve Tzedek neighborhood of Tel Aviv, but I finallynsat down today to give it a close reading. I have not read the book in Hebrew, nor could I attempt to do so. But from what I can tell, the English translation is great. The prose is quick and pointed. It manages to maintain its polemical intensity up until the afterword.

The controversy surrounding this book is quite overblown, and most of the book is actually unnecessary. Sand could have easily presented his political platform for the future of Israel, revealed in the last chapter and in the afterword, without the preceding four chapters devoted to debunking the myth of Jewish "peoplehood." That he reveals the idea of the Jewish people to be a complete construction is irrelevant to his policy prescriptions. Nonetheless, the are a number of passages worth noting that I think summarize Sand's argument and point out its flaws.

At the beginning of the book, Sand's argument is based on the following claims; there was a real Judean kingdom, but most Jews are not actually descendants of those Judeans.

"The documents from el-Amarna, dating from the fourteenth century BCE, indicate that already there were two small city-states in the highlands of Canaan - Shechem and Jerusalem - and the Merneptah stela shows that an entity named Israel existed in northern Canaan at the end of the thirteenth century BCE" (121). 

One of the points Sand makes is that the Arab fellahin who inhabited Mandatory Palestine alongside the Jewish settlers are closer ethnically/genealogically to the Judeans than the Jews who claim to be the "children of Israel." Since the expulsion never happened, Sand argues, the "real" Jews are the Palestinians and the Jews in the Diaspora are actually the progenies of proselytized pagans.

This finding is largely irrelevant to the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The political significance of Sand's book is the claim that Israel is an ethnocracy, as it protects rights for an ethnos rather than a demos. That the ethnos is a historical/political construction, he argues, makes things even worse. In reality, the historical legitimacy of the ethnos served by the Israeli government does not matter. An ethnocracy, whether founded on fact or fabricated pseudohistory, is still fundamentally illiberal. The political solution to such an illiberal state- universalism, egalitarianism, and multiculturalism - does not change.

"The central myths about the primeval origin of a marvelous nation that emerged from the desert, conquered a spacious land and bult a glorious kingdom were a boon for rising Jewish nationalism and Zionist colonization. For a century they provided textual fuel of canonical quality that energized a complex politics of identity and territorial expansion demanding self-justification and considerable sacrifice" (122).

My first blog post ever stressed the importance of semantics in framing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is sloppy scholarship to call the Jewish settlers colonists, as they were not acting on the behalf of a colonial power. There was no greater Jewish motherland that benefited economically from early Jewish settlement in Mandatory Palestine; early Jewish settlers were not establishing a colony on behalf of another, already existing entity. Waves of settlement should be viewed as migrations - a natural part of human history - or as refugee crises - caused by pogroms in Eastern Europe and later the Holocaust.

To challenge the idea of a Jewish ethnos, Sand makes the point that there was no forced expulsion of the Jews from Judea. But, he does not deny that there was some kind of dispersal. To back up his claims, he references Simon Dubnow (known for his support of Jewish Autonomism as opposed to Zionism).

"Simon Dubnow also makes no mention of deportation. Moreover, unlike Graetz, the Russian-Jewish historian avoids associating the destruction of Jerusalem with a forced exile. He follows the literary examples of Josephus and Graetz in describing the fall in shocking and dramatic terms. Thousands of captives are carried away to the ends of the empire, leaving Judea thinly populated. A similar description follows the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt: a great number of captives are sold into slavery, and an equal number of rebels become fugitives. But Dubnow does not create a meta-image of the Jewish people going into exile after the destruction of the Temple, and it is clear to readers that the people was not forcibly uprooted from its country" (138).

This strikes me as a somewhat silly distinction. "The people was not forcibly removed from its country," but instead it left after its capital city was destroyed. Leaving a destroyed homeland as a refugee, slave, or fugitive may not technically fall under the category of expulsion, but it certainly is a tragic national event. Moreover, recognition of this dispersal casts doubt onto Sand's hypothesis that the expulsion never happened and that the real Jews never left and became Palestinians.

"Emperor Hadrian's decrees had, of course, expropriated lands in the second century, but the arrival of the Muslims greatly accelerated the process and eventually led to the emigration of the Jews and "the creation of a new national majority in the country. Until that time, the Jews had constituted the majority of the population, and Hebrew was still the dominant language. The arrival of the new settler-conquerors altered the country's cultural morphology and put an end to the presence of the Jewish people in its land" (141).

Land has traded hands throughout history. Populations have migrated and morphed into new groups. While generally history is important to a nation, this back and forth about the true inhabitants of what is now Israel/Palestine adds nothing to our understanding contemporary politics in the region.

"It is true that there was no deliberate policy of expulsion, but that does not mean that exile was undertaken voluntarily - God forbid. Dinur was worried that if it were accepted that the Jews left their country of their own volition, it would undermined their renewed claim to it in modern times" (141). 

Sand's real gripe is with Zionist historiography, not historical reality. While most nations attempt to portray their primeval founders as bold, strong, and heroic, Zionists are obsessed with victimhood. Eternal Jewish victimhood, not historical conquests or ethnic supremacy (or at least until recently) entitles the Jews to a state. Sand rightfully points out that the Zionist preoccupation with victimhood has warped the depiction of the Jews as a collective. The dispersal may have been volitional. It may have been motivated by the desire to proselytize. Admitting this, though, does not necessarily undermine the idea of a unique Jewish collectivity.

Sand is at his most insightful when discussing historiographical methods. One of the challenges of reading ancient documents, he notes, is that religion, tribe, and people were until recently inexact and often fluid terms.

"Henceforth, the Edomite people would be seen as an integral part of the Jewish people. At that time, joining the religion of another group was regarded as joining its people - its cult community. But it was only the progress of monotheism that made the attachment to faith as important as the traditional association with origin. This was the begininning of the slide from what we might call Judeanity - a cultural-linguistic-geographic entity - toward Judaism, a term denoting a broader kind of religion-civilization" (158).

In a book filled with ridiculous phrases, the above passage is one of the most absurd. The mingling of religious, ethnic, and cultural groups was not a phenomenon unique to the Jews. The Gauls, Goths, Teutons, and so on cannot be considered to be any more ethnically homogenous than the Jews. Furthermore, the idea of Judaism as a "religion-civilization" is not controversial, nor does it undermine the idea of Jews as a people. In fact, Mordecai Kaplan, father of the Reconstructionist movement, wrote a book called Judaism as a Civilization.

Throughout the book, Sand routinely refers to instances when Jews married members of other "tribes", or when entire tribes adopted Judaism and began to marry other Jews. This, he argues, suggests that there is no Jewish ethnos.

"The converted Jews of Edomite origin intermarried with the Judeans and gave Hebrew names to their children, some of whom would play important roles in the history of the Judean kingdom. Not only Herod came from among them; some of the disciples of the strict Rabbi Shammai and he most extreme Zealots in the great revolt were also of Edomite descent" (158).

Contrary to what Sand suggests, this intermarriage does not imply the notion of Jewish peoplehood is entirely factitious. Indeed, by noting intermarriage, rather than conversion and continued ethnic distinction, Sand inadvertently furthers the idea that there exists a common Jewish DNA. Even if descended from an Edomite mother and a Jewish father, a person still possesses Jewish heritage.

In the chapter entitled "Realms of Silence" Sand claims to reveal aspects of Jewish history that have been intentionally shrouded or forgotten by Zionist historiography. But in doing so, he frequently contradicts himself.

"Proselytizing Jews were driven from the arena of rival monotheisms, Christianity or Islam to the lands of paganism" (220).

Presumably, the "arena" is modern day Israel/Palestine. The contradiction lies in the statement that the proselytizing Jews were driven out. "Driven" implies a forced or non-volitional movement. Yet "proselytizing" is an intensely volitional action. It appears that Sand cannot choose the narrative he wants to present. Is world Jewry the result of active proselytization? Or, as, Sand seems to suggest, does a somewhat non-volitional "dispersal" explain the scatterings of the Jews?

"The uncomfortable explanation was that Jewish men had come from the Near East unattached and were forced to take local wives, whom they undoubtedly converted to Judaism in the proper manner" (277).

Uncomfortable? If the wives are converted "in the proper manner," this is a non-issue. Sand argues that this contradicts the Halakhic definition of a Jew based on matrilineal descent, because the mothers are not ethnically Jewish. Yet, again, Sand's purportedly earth-shattering claims are rather mundane. The above passage proves Jewish ethnic continuity. It may not have been done in a way that satisfies contemporary Jewry or Halakhic definitions, but even Sand, I think, would be hard pressed to deny that his above statement actually supports the notion of an ethnically-based Jewish people.

The real value of Sand's work is the final chapter, "Distinction," and the afterword. In these two sections, Sand offers an astute critique of contemporary Zionism.

"A national consciousness is primarily the wish to live in an independent political entity. It wants its subjects to live and be educated by a homogeneous national culture. That was the essence of Zionism at its inception, and so it remained for most of its history until recent times" (303).

The crisis of Zionism has nothing to do with disaffected liberal Jews or even the settlements. Instead, the crisis of Zionism, and perhaps the failure of Zionism, is the fact that the majority of Jews continue to reside outside the Jewish state. A country that was created to offer a collective national culture for Jews has been turned down by the vast majority of American Jewry; most American Jews continue to call themselves Zionists despite their conscious refusal to take part in the Jewish national consciousness. To assuage their guilt, they visit Israel as if it were an ethno-religious amusement park. They throw checks and change at various organizations like the JNF of AIPAC. These Jews believe they should have a say in Israeli policy. They agitate for sanctions and war with Iran, knowing that their children will not be endangered at all by a conflagration in the Middle East. The real crisis of Zionism is that American Jews are comfortable parting with merely their money while forcing Israelis to part with their sons and daughters.

Quotes of the Day - April 4, 2012

I'm still reading David Rieff's A Bed for the Night, but I'm nearly done. I've changed my mind about the book a bit. I think he makes a lot of great points about the problems of intervention today. Like I did when I read Power and the Idealists, I found myself dog-earring page after page. There are a number of noteworthy statements that I want to highlight.

Rieff argues that since humanitarianism has been used as a pretext for Western military intervention for the past twenty years, the word not only has lost its meaning but also now connotes some kind of neocolonialism with a human face.

"The prestige of the humanitarian movement and the humanitarian ideal has meant that almost everything became susceptible to being described as a humanitarian emergency, a humanitarian dilemma, or, with increasing frequency, as an occasion for humanitarian intervention. If this is not quite the same as saying 'Take up the White Man's Burden,' it is equally categorical and unself-conscious [my emphasis]. This time, the battle cry seems to be, 'Take up the humanitarian's burden,' with that fictitious entity 'the international community taking the place of the nineteenth-century colonial power."

This passage comes in the midst of a discussion of the way abolitionists used humanitarianism to expand colonial influence:

"It is haunted by the difficulties of getting right the new global architecture it calls for. But the possbility that the 'right of intervention' might be the modern versino of Kipling's 'white man's burden' does not resonate with most human rights activists, just as many ninetheenth-centruy abolitionists were untroubled by the notion that abolitionism went hand in hand with European domination."

I think Rieff is spot on, but it makes me ask a question that cannot be answered: is the motivation of state humanitarianism always mercenery?

Rieff then goes on to discuss what I think can be called the "Kristof Effect", which is best illustrated in this article, "Be Aware: Nick Kristof's Anti-Politics". Essentially, Rieff argues that the new faith in humanitariasm obviates our duty to actually alter the status quo - that is, oppression, genocide, famine and exploitation - since people are told about the problems and then informed that someone is addressing them or that they are impossible to address.

"The actual practice of humanitarianism is not at the center of any new international order but at its margin, and that by elevating humanitarianism in the way that it has been elevated, we delude ourselves into thinking the answer to the world's horror lies within our grasp, when the fact is that it does not."

Of course, the "Kristof Effect" is a bit more sinister. Believing that we have the answer to the world's horror when we do not is dangerous because it allows us to believe that things can be changed without out altering our current way of life or without recognizing our role in the exploitation and starvation we find so appauling. The belief that things can be fixed now obfuscates the fact that we are part of the problem that should be fixed. He again demonstrates this:

"Humanitarianism - indeed [Ignatieff's] entire revolution of moral concern - is also this modern conscience given an alibi - a way of feeling better about those parts of the world without some seemingly redemptive effort, to which no decent person, once informed could possibly be reconciled. Far from being a story of unparalleled engagement, might not the real significance of the revolution of moral concern be that the modern conscience is thereby allowed to delegate its guild and its anxiety to the designated consciences of the world of relief, development, and human rights [my emphasis]?"

Rieff also takes on Tom Friedman directly, noting that for all their differences Communists and neoliberals share a fault in their tendency to believe in the historical inevitability of their respective utopias.

"Utopias are moral fables. Some, like Communism, have been drenched in the fantasy of revolutionary violence as the midwife of the radiant future. Others have promised paradise on the cheap. Think of The New York Times's Thomas Friedman, whose immensely influential but intellecutally vacant and provincial notions about globalization were all the rage at the end of the 1990s. Friedman seems to think that globalization - by which he means Americanization - is both inevitable and the only road to prosperity, and will therefore take place whether anyone wants it to or not."

To my unsophisticated eyes, it initially appears that Rieff spends much of his time criticizing NGOs for taking sidse on the one hand and lamenting the NGOs' inability to distinguish between victims and perpetrators of injustice on the other. His true critique is much more nuanced. Western powers, he argues, use the moral credentials of NGOs to legitimize withholding aid or engaging in military intervention.

"At best, the false morality play that this engendered was one that presented wicked warlords and innocent victims, and conveyed the impression that the actions of those warlords were stopping well-intended humanitarians from helping. In the case of a Rwanda, the result was far worse, for the availability of the humanitairan alibi actually allowed the great powers, above all the United States, to prevaricate until it was too late for military intervention to succeed. As Brauman put it, the presence of the humanitairans, 'far from representing a bulwark against evil, was in fact one of its appendages.' And he added pointed that 'the social and political role of humanitarian aid was simply to stage-manage goodwill, to organize the spectacle of compassion."

Rieff quotes Odysseus Boudouris, the president of MSF-Greece, who deftly describes the end of humanitarianism.

"As Bourdouris said, quite correctly, 'the instrument' - humanitarianism - 'had ceased being used in the service of the idea.' Instead, 'the idea had become the pretext for [the deployment] of the instrument."

If it wasn't enough to describe the end of humanitarianism's moral legitimacy, Rieff also describes how neoliberalism threw humanitarian groups into crisis:

"For all the NGOs' supposed new spirit of self-criticism, the same old result kept getting produced every time a crisis erupted for which massive funding from donors and massive opportunities for fund-raising from the public presented temselves. In the increasingly business-oriented cultures of U.S. relief groups, this was being referred to as the need for acquiring a substantial 'market share' of each humanitarian crisis."

And of couse, once the act of saving lives is viewed as an opportunity to increase market share, the humanitarian idea is dead.

Quotes of the Day - April 1, 2012

I was cleaning my room this weekend and I stumbled upon a huge pile of articles I must have printed out in some strange journal article frenzy. So I decided to read them all. Since I'm still slogging through A Bed for the Night, I thought I would pick out some noteworthy passages from the articles and discuss them here. Most of the articles below describe aspects of Postfordist life.

The first article entitled "The State of Families, Class and Culture" is by Arlie Hochschild, a professor emerita of sociology at UC Berkeley. In it she describes "a profound shift in the American family, one that bears the deep footprints of a disappearing economic sector and a transformed culture," and argues that "these days, the best gauge of social class is years in school." Hochschild repeats the liberal shibboleth of education as an anti-poverty measure.

"In 1970, a female high school dropout had a 17 percent chance of becoming a single mother (versus 2 percent for a woman with a bachelor's degree). By 2007, her chances had jumped to a whopping 49 percent (versus 7 percent for the B.A. holder). Nearly all new mothers with graduate training, but only half of high school dropout mothers, are married." 

Clearly the socioeconomic divide is also an educational divide. In the new "knowledge economy", the college degree is a signifier of knowledge possession, whether or not the skills learned at college are needed for the job. Those lacking complete educational credentials therefore lose out in the job market. Naturally, the Right applauds this kind of shift in class composition. For them, this represents a shift towards meritocracy. Yet, the meritocratic ideal of a workforce dominated by the best and brightest doesn't actually exist. Access to education is uneven; there is no such thing as equal access to opportunity. And, naturally, inequality of access leads to inequality of outcomes.

Hochschild turns to economist Richard Wolff to explain the change in class composition and ends up discussing the feminization of labor that has taken place since the 1970s.

"For a century before 1970 most American companies paid wages that slowly rose decade by decade, so that a male worker could feel better off than his dada and trust that his son would be better off than he was. But by the 1970s, the deal was off; corporate profits continued to rise while worker's real wages stagnated...the blue-collar family became the shock absorber of the broken deal."

To make matters worse, she argues, "over the last 30 years, companies and government have offloaded risk onto the shoulders of individuals." The best example of this is the bailout of the banks during the financial crisis. The above passage also reveals the predatory impulses of neoliberal economists. Socialized benefits are considered unsustainable and an unacceptable expansion of government, but the socialization of risk and the burden for the financial crisis is considered laudatory.

Hochschild also offers a spot-on critique of the common conservative trope that "liberals and feminists knocked family values from the safety of their intact middle-class mariages, Douthat and Salam believe, while precarious blue-collar families spiraled downward into divorce, poverty, and school failure. Family values help prevent that spiral, they argue. Culture counts." One of the great political ironies, and something that isn't pointed out enough, is that the most consistently conservative states have some of the highest poverty, divorce, and teenage pregnancy rates. These are the same "value voters" courted by social conservatives who hide an ideology of rapacious capitalism under a veneer of old-time family values. Liberal academics are responsible for the collapse of middle America: free market fundamentalism is. The steady decline of blue-collar America isn't due to the papers written by tweed-wearing academics; it's due to the consistent efforts by the Right to commercialize and commodify every aspect of life.

As a follow up to Hochschild's article, I read "Global Feminization Through Flexible Labor: A Theme Revisited" by Guy Standing. The whole paper is really awesome and filled with quotable lines, so I'm only going to choose a few to expand upon.

The process of the feminization of labor is as follows:

"After generations of efforts to integrate women into regular wage labor as equals, the convergence that was the essence of the original hypothesis has been toward the type of employment and labor force participation patterns associated with women. Thera era of flexibility is also an era of more generalized insecurity and precariousness, in which many more men as well as women have been pushed into precarious forms of labor."

For an in-depth and very relevant discussion of precarious labor, watch this video of the Left Forum panel sponsored by Verso and Dissent, The New Dangerous Class: Perspectives on Organizing Precarious Labor.

Factors shaping the feminization of labor include:

"labor rights in industrialized countries increasingly perceived as costs of production to be avoided in the interest of enhancing or maintaining 'national competitiveness.' 

"cost considerations of alternatives have become more significant determinants of allocations and divisions of labor.

"There has been a crystallization of a global economic strategy, under the banner of 'structural adjustment,' 'shock therapy' and other supply-side economic policies. This strategy has been associated with radical changes in labor market relations, involving erosion of protective and pro-collective labor regulations, decentralization of wage determination, erosion of employment security and a trend to market regulation rather than statutory regulation of the labor market."

"There has been growing privatization of social security, whereby more workers have to depend on their own contributions and entitlements."

 In the interest of greater "flexibility," firms have eliminated programs and benefits that once provided steady employment to American workers. This feminization of labor is essentially the "precariat-ization" of the entire workforce.

"Growing market flexibility and diverse forms of insecurity have encouraged greater female labor force participation and employment."

However, instead of women taking salaried positions with full benefits and pensions - the kind of positions once exclusive to men - more women are employed in general and more men are employed in the kind of precarious and flexible (read: temporary and lacking in benefits) labor that was once reserved for women.

The paper was written in 1999. More than ten years later, the shift he describes has fully occurred.

 "The concept of regular, full-time wage labor as the growing type of employment has been giving way to a more diverse patter, characterized by 'informalization' of employment through more outworking, contract labor, casual labor, part-time labor, homework and other forms of labor unprotected by labor regulations." 

"The types of employment and labor force involvement traditionally associated with women - insecure, low-paid, irregular, etc. - have been spreading relative to the type of employment traditionally associated with men - regular, unionized, stable, manual or craft-based etc."

The financial crisis completed the transition from stable employment to precarious employment as the dominant type of labor. Austerity measures, mass layoffs, and a concerted effort to limit the political power of organized labor have facilitated the transition.

The challenge for the Left is to address this new normal of precariousness and informalization in the face of the hegemonic "knowledge economy," which is fueled not by the physical labor but by cognitive labor. The perceived ephemeral nature of cognitive labor necessitates flexibility. In-demand skills change by the minute. Firms must be able to adjust to these changes by altering the cognitive composition of their workforces or risk facing a loss of market share and potential revenue.

Paola Virno, in "General Intellect," explains we can understand the nature of production in the "knowledge economy" or Postfordism. "Marx's 'Fragment on Machines', a section of the Grundrisse, is a crucial text for the analysis and definition of the Postfordist mode of production." Virno uses this section of the Grundrisse to describe the economic paradigm we live in now:

"Here Marx defends what can hardly be called a 'Marxian' thesis. He claims that, due to its autonomy from it, abstract knowledge - primarily not yet of a scientific nature - is in the process of becoming no less than the main force of production and will soon relegate the repetitious labor of the assembly line to the fringes."

"Marx uses an attractive metaphor to refer to the knowledge that make up the epicentre of social production and preordain all areas of life: general intellect."

Virno, like Hochschild, describes what is essentially the commodification of human beings through the commodification of their cognitive power.

"Given the tendency for knowledge to become predominant, labour-time becomes a 'miserable foundation': the worker 'steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. 

This process of commodification gives rise to the "flexible" model of employment.

"Disposable time, a potential wealth, is manifested as poverty: forced redundancy, early retirement, structural unemployment and the proliferation of hierarchies."  

If the value of a commodity is determined by the labour time embodied in it, then disposable time must constitute a loss of potential value. Yet, as Virno describes, "the so-called law of value is regarded by Marx as the architrave of modern social relations, yet it crumbles in the face of the development of capitalism."

Some claim flexibility represents emancipatory potential. Virno disagrees.

"[T]he individual who has changed as a result of a large amount of free time, cultural consumption and a sort of 'power to enjoy.' Most of us will recognize that the Postfordist labouring process actually takes advantage in its way of this very transformation albeit depriving it of all emancipatory qualities. What is learned, carried out and consumed in the time outside of labor is then utilised in the production of commodities, becomes a part of the use value of labour power and is computed as profitable resource."

It is important to note the differences between the industrial capitalism that still exists in the developing world and the cognitive capitalism that exists in post-industrial societies.

"Whilst the traditional process of production was based on the technical division of tasks (the person making the pinhead did not produce its body etc.), the labouring action of the general intellect presupposes the common participation to the 'life of the mind', the preliminary sharing of generic communicative and cognitive skills."

"The effect of putting intellect and language, i.e. what is common, to work, renders the impersonal technical division of labor spurious, but also induces a viscid personalisation of subjectification. The inescapable relationship with the presence of an other entailed by the sharing of the intellect manifests itself as the universal establishment of personal dependency." 

 The general intellect is something common, unowned by any individual or particular entity. However, postfordism is characterized by attempts to privatize the general intellect - to use the generic communicative and cognitive skills of some and extract value. Christian Marazzi describes this in "The Privatization of the General Intellect."

"[T]he implementation of the principles of post-fordist flexible production in the field of education, with the privatization of the costs of education (increase in tuition fees, and additional costs for specialization) and the deregulation required by the industries of the private sector (just-in-time education and competition between university centers involved in both education and research). From now on, education can only rhyme with casualization."

The very nature of the knowledge-based economy demands the proletarianization of knowledge-producers.

"The economic colonization of the field of education has set in motion a new cycle of struggles for the right to education - struggles in which the flexibility/precariousness of educational curricula also affects researchers faced with diminished public budgets and the corporatization of knowledge production."

Fights over grant funding, minimal salaries, and expensive healthcare now characterize the precarious lives of many professional academics. Naturally, this should lead to a radicalization of academia and reenergize the student movement. However, student mobilizations will necessary be very different from the mobilizations of '68.

"The point is then to understand the extent to which the education-research-finance nexus may define a confrontational terrain living up to the current transformations of the productive system a the global level."

Marazzi seems to hint that part of why postfordism is exploitive is that many refuse to recognize cognitive labor as labor.

"Innovative knowledge is something that has to be produced and that, as a result, has to be remunerated. In other words one as to consider the technological progress generated by the production of knowledge as a cost. This is what emerges from theoretical developments in the micro-economic analysis of growth factors. Theories of endogenous growth have made it possible to break from the neoclassical idea of a free-floating innovative knowledge situated outside the field of human action, as if it were something whispered to Robinson by his parrot, for free at that."

Marazzi puts forth a policy proposal to address the privatization of the general intellect, but he does not suggest any steps toward communization. The postfordist mode of production isn't destroyed, it is simply made more humane.

"It is this contradiction between the valorization of knowledge and  the devalorization of the workforce that explains the current  cleavage of the labor market between a “working class aristocracy” on  the one hand and a “flexible proletariat” on the other. It is therefore necessary to redefine the nature of the Welfare State by combining flexibility and social safety nets (“flexicurity”) in order to successfully address the processes of financial globalization, but also by developing a Learnfare State, a state, that is, where support for education/professional retraining operates as a guarantee of basic income and redistributes social wealth."

All of the above articles and quotations are terribly negative. Privatization is this huge, inescapable demon that has pauperized us all, turning people into mere commodities. In "The Common in Communism", Michael Hardt presents with a ray of light at the end of the very dark postfordist tunnel. To get there, "we need to explore...neither the private property of capitalism nor the public property of socialism bu the common in communism."

He first presents his own take on today's conditions:

"The triumph of movable over immobile property corresponds to the victory of profit over rent as the dominant mode of expropriation. In the collection of rent, the capitalist is deemed to be relatively external to the process of the production of value, merely extracting value produced by other means. The generation of profit, in contrast, requires the engagement of the capitalist in the production process, imposing forms of cooperation, disciplinary regimes, etc."

In immaterial capitalism, industry must "informalize":

"Knowledge, code, and images are becoming ever more important throughout the traditional sectors of production, and the production of affects and care is becoming increasingly essential in the valorization process."   

The general intellect, because it originates as something that is common, is both the source of postfordism's strength and postfordism's potential destroyer.

"Ideas, images, knowledges, code, languages, and even affects can be privatized and controlled as property, but it is more difficult to police ownership because they are so easily shared or reproduced. There is a constant pressure for such goods to escape the boundaries of property and become common."

This is because the above-mentioned goods are of the general intellect; they are naturally common.

"If you have an idea, sharing it with me does not reduce its utility to you, but usually increases it. In fact, in order to realize their maximum productivity, ideas, images, and affects must be common and shared. When they are privatized their productivity reduces dramatically- and I would add, making the common into public property, that is, subjecting it to state control or management, similarly reduces productivity."

Contrary to the common American liberal impulse, state management is not the answer to postfordism.

"Neoliberalism has been defined by the battle of private property not only against public property but also and perhaps more importantly by the common."

"Here is an emerging contradiction internal to capital: the more the common is corralled as property, the more its productivity is reduced; and yet expansion of the common undermines the relations of property in a fundamental way."

The emergence of the general intellect and attempts to privatize it sets the stage of an explosive situation:

"the biopolitical process is not limited to the reproduction of capital as a social relation but also presents the potential for an autonomous process that could destroy capitalism and create something entirely new...biopolitical production, particularly in the way it exceeds the bounds of capitalist relations and constantly refers to the common, grants labor increasing autonomy and provides the tools or weapons that could be wielded in a project of liberation."

"The increasing centrality of the common in capitalist production - the production of ideas, affects, social relations, and forms of life - are emerging the conditions and weapons for a communist project."

"That capitalist production increasingly relies on the common and that the autonomy of the common is the essence of communism - indicates that the conditions and weapons of a communist project are available today more than ever. Now to us the task of organizing it."

Unfortunately, there are significant obstacles on the road to organizing the future communist project. The chief obstacle is the inability of the Left to offer a complete and cogent Marxian critique of financialization in a way that is comprehensible to a non-academic audience. The tools of finance - securtitization, commoditization - are the chief means by which the general intellect is privatized. Cognitive labor and finance are inextricably linked; both are types of immaterial and mobile labor that make postfordism possible. Cognitive labor is the base of the postfordist cake on which the icing of finance is placed. A complete cake, and therefore a complete understanding of postfordist conditions, requires a complete understanding of financial tools and engineering. As elite universities train students in operations research and financial engineering, the Left must respond with an army of Marxian financial engineers equipped with the tools to preserve the autonomy of the common.